garry’s subposterous

I'd rather offend people than pander to them, and if you write about controversial topics you have to choose one or the other.

An Italian court is to decide whether four senior Google executives should face prison, over the broadcast of a video clip showing a boy with Down’s Syndrome being bullied by his classmates.

The long-running trial, which centres around a three-minute clip showing four schoolboys making fun of the teenager and hitting him over the head at their school in Turin, in 2006, is being seen as a test case for the control of content on the internet.

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Google removed the clip within 24 hours of being alerted of the upload. Prosecution lawyers argue that the broadcast still amounted to a breach of privacy and was defamatory as the company failed to adequately control content on the site. They say the Google had a "legal obligation to prevent" the video from airing in the first place.

The Google executives standing trial are David Carl Drummond, head of Google Italy's managing board; George De Los Reyes, a board member; Peter Fleitcher, in charge of privacy protection in Europe; and Arvind Desikan, head of videos for Europe.

They each face up to three years in jail and a fine if convicted.

That executives of an Internet firm could be held liable for user-generated content THAT WAS TAKEN DOWN WITHIN 24 HOURS is absurd. That people totally unrelated to the specifics of a very sad and tragic case can be sent to jail for three years is just ridiculous.

Seriously, there should be no case here. To put people behind bars for providing a free online publishing service is like bringing medical malpractice to our industry. Society doesn't need this.

Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.

They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

Very humble versions of success can lead to a wonderful life adventure.

In the twelfth century, a church in the English town of Dunmow promised a side of bacon to any married man who could swear before the congregation and God that he had not quarreled with his wife for a year and a day. A husband who could bring home the bacon was held in high esteem by the community for his forebearance.

We get a lot of questions and feedback skipping, lag, or whatever you'd like to call it). A lot of it is beyond our immediate control because it has to do with browsers, internet connections, and resources used by a user's computer, but we're always on a lookout for ways to keep lagging/stuttering to a minimum.

People of Earth, there is hope.

If you use Firefox, please check out this Lifehacker post on tweaking Firefox to minimize "jumpiness" in Youtube, which should apply to JamLegend: http://lifehacker.com/5342636/how-to-fix-annoying-youtube-jumpiness-in-firefox. Basically, Firefox saves what's going on in your browser in case there is a crash, and this activity causes interruptions when you're playing anything Flash-related (including JamLegend!). You can reset how often Firefox saves the info to minimize the lag.

This involves editing the about:config settings in your Firefox. Please read the Mozilla.org page on about:config before doing the tweak if you haven't worked with this aspect of Firefox before. Please refer to Firefox's support page if you need more help.

Try out the hack and let us know how it goes. You can always read our original blog post on stuttering with its helpful hints, or go ahead and post in the comments any other ways you've dealt with the problem.

Thanks to Andrew at JamLegend. If you haven't tried Jamlegend yet, now's an awesome time. It's a fun free guitar hero game on the web. It rocks.

I just completed a research project in which we interviewed the founders of 549 successful companies in several high-growth industries – the ones VC’s are most likely to fund. We selected companies that had made it out of the garage and were generating real revenue. Guess what? Hardly ten percent of the serial entrepreneurs took venture money in their first startups. In their subsequent launches, the proportion who took venture money went up to a quarter. In other words, three-quarters of even the most experienced entrepreneurs didn’t rely on venture capital

A classic problem in computer science is hill climbing.  Imagine you are dropped at a random spot on a hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assume it’s foggy or something).  The goal is to get to the highest hill.

Consider the simplest algorithm.  At any given moment, take a step in the direction that takes you higher.  The risk with this method is if you happen to start near the lower hill, you’ll end up at the top of that lower hill, not the top of the tallest hill.

Interesting CS analogy to one's own career.

Nick Veasey/Getty Images

Allow a laboratory mouse to run as much as it likes, and its brainpower improves. Force it to run harder than it otherwise might, and its thinking improves even more. This is the finding of an experiment led by researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan