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There are plenty of people outside Redmond who still hate Google.

Some people are upset with the recent Google-Youtube-China situation. It's obviously not entirely Google's fault, but it's not a comfortable situation.

Lots of people think that Google has serious privacy problems. Not everyone thinks these are limited to its own data collection either--sometimes Google knows too much.

Some people think Google mis-manages its Adsense platform and hurts small publishers.

And lots of people are upset about PageRank -- from those who get a zero PR for no clear reason, to sites that get dropped, to anti-hate groups that dislike it when pro-hate groups get high rankings.

I don't know if any of those are GOOD reasons to hate Google, but plenty of people DO.

That reminds me, down in the basement with the other Halloween stuff I've got a Talking Skull. Cost about $5 in a post-Halloween sale. The jaw moves when it's speaking (I wouldn't exactly call it synch'd), and voice is provided via an included microphone and cord.

Replace the mike with a cable to a computer's sound card, prerecord some messages, and away you go.

(And speaking of Billy Bass, didn't Linux Journal or maybe one of the hardware hobbyist magazines a couple of years back run an article on how to wire that up to your computer? Ah, here we go.)

"I... did not... have sexual relationships... with that woman... Ms. Lewinsky."

So much for running Linux on Bubba the Big Mouth Bass. That was my dedicated firewall too!

I was looking at the Big Mouth Billy Bass Linux page: http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/ but I don't see any mention of getting ethernet running on this . . .

Perhaps you could point me in the right direction?

Bah, I've had a music player with TruBass for ages now.

All of the voice messages a pre-programmed and simply activated by radio sensors.

As if being pre-programmed stopped anyone from hacking the Big Mouth Bass.

Of course, it's great that there is an industry for gaming and it's not trivial in economic terms. I have to question some of those counter-motivations. Why must it be a subscription service? People obviously don't trust what they can't put their hands on, so keep sending them to the store for the $50 box version. Tack on other options at $5-10 a one time pop, with the understanding that upgrades won't always be free, etc, etc. Before you know it, you too are a part of a multi-billion dollar gaming industry. Also it seems to me that a better model is to figure out how the technology can be reused between MMOG and business, even mission critical stuff. That way you get industry and goverment to carry the load while cool games are a nice spin-off. As much as it saddens me to admit, the DoD is certainly getting wise to that idea.

Oh yeah there are two other quotes I plan to post as movies on the Hacking Billy Bass website.

• Marsha, marsha, marsha! -- Jan Brady
• Hasta la vista, baby -- the Terminator

And of course I have costumes for these quotes. A Barbie scalp for the former, baby sunglasses for the latter.