If you, like me, have ever played Quake, the original 3D first person shooter, and Infocom text-only advernture games like Zork or Hitchhiker's, you probably never even considered to combine them. These guys did! And BoingBoing told me about it.
This is a game where you actually type attack grunt with shotgun instead of mousing and hitting control keys like crazy to accomplish the same effect.
Wired seems to take it seriously. The New York Times seems to report it as actual news. Heck, the entire world seems to report this in a very serious way.
User Complaint About Existing Services Leads Google to Create Search-Based Webmail
Search is Number Two Online Activity – Email is Number One; "Heck, Yeah," Say Google Founders
What really gives the joke away is the generousity:
Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That's why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage – more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer.
Would be nice. Very nice even. But I don't believe in free giga disk space more than I believe in free lunches.
Update: On the other hand, if it was really a joke, I guess they should have let us in on it by now? These guys asked if it was a joke, and the Google spokesman insisted this was real. Who on earth came up with the idea of sending out a flippant press release on April 1st about an improbable service?
Update 2: This Google wanted ad is definately an April Fool's joke for this year. I suspect gmail is real, but that they wrote the press release like a joke to get the publicity for it twice.
Steven Den Beste ponders why Europeans loved Clinton but hates Bush. There is actually very little difference between the foreign policies of democrats and republicans.
But they also discount the fact that, as the IHT article points out, the Democrats don't have any higher regard for European opinion than the Republicans do, and are no more enchanted by the Europeans as any kind of role model. The main difference between the parties when it comes to foreign policy is that the Democrats are willing to smile and nod at the Europeans before ignoring them, whereas the Republicans are more straightforward in expressing their disdain.
A different way to put that is that the Democrats are more willing to lie; the Republicans are more likely to tell the truth. There's less real difference between them in practice than the Europeans think.
Actually, he's more right than most Europeans are willing to admit. In European politics, rhetoric is often more important than substance.
European politicians will be deeply disappointed if they believe that an election victory to Kerry will change much in what the US does. But maybe they will be happy if he just pretends to care what they think.
I earlier wrote about a Norwegian newspaper article where the clueless journalist was shocked to find that John Kerry, too, was pro-Israel. Well, d'oh!
