Google's Street View is hardly a new thing, it's been around, showing us street level views of major cities for quite a while now. Pat even mentioned it in his blog, showing that even computer illiterate, beard having, Grudge holders have found Street View. I've used it to (virtually) walk by Disneyland, and down the Strip in Las Vegas. I've seen Times Square and (kinda) the Statue of Liberty, despite having never been to New York.

Last night, I was looking up an local address, and to my surprise when Google Maps gave me the option to go to Street View. I figured that it had to be a mistake, but I clicked on the button anyway, and got a street level view of Oceano.

Good old budget-slashing Arnie wants to cut the wages of around 200,000 state workers to minimum wage, but has run into problems with the antiquated computer system that the State's payroll system runs on.

Now, I don't care that the guy who says it can't be done because the system is too old is Democratic state Controller John Chiang, who has already opposed the pay cut on principle and and legal grounds. The politics of the matter don't interest me. What interests me is that because California has waited to update this system for so long, it will cost an estimated $177 million to do so now.

It appears that an alarming number of computer science students in the UK and US have taken to outsourcing their coursework to India.

From the article:

It's an interesting and ironic form of cheating, considering that once these students graduate, and get jobs in the IT industry, those jobs will probably be outsourced to India.

Charter Communications announced yesterday that it would suspend it's controversial plans to spy on customers. This is great news for privacy advocates everywhere, and it shows that sometimes, the customer is actually right.

During one of my regular excursions into the scary world of online news outlets the other day, I came across an article from the New York Times stating that three of the country's biggest ISPs, Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner are planning to block access to websites and newsgroups containing child pornography.

I suppose on the surface, this looks commendable enough, I mean polarized as the community of MySLOCounty is, I think we can all agree that fighting child porn is never a bad thing. Except that you know I'm about to tell you why it's a bad thing...

A recent article in Scientific American suggests that blogging is not only a valid form of self expression, but it can also provide us with significant health benefits.

It's an interesting theory, which basically centers around the idea that if you write down the things that are bothering you, you can start to feel better about them, and attempts to explain the phenomena in scientific terms.

Charter Communications has started sending out notices to customers touting an “enhanced online experience”, except that for the most part, this “enhancement” serves only to provide revenue for the company and to spy on its customers. For a more in-depth explanation of what’s going on, check out this article.

Using something called deep packet inspection, they will begin to monitor the browsing habits of customers, and serve up targeted ads based on web activity. What does that mean to you? Well, every Web page you look at can be monitored by Charter, analyzed for content, and then Charter or one of its advertising affiliates will try to sell you stuff related to those pages.