Nicholas here, fresh off freaking out over Shogun Rua’s loss last night. (I hate to use the word “robbed,” but Mr. Rua was 100 percent robbed last night. Later today: watching Dream 12!) I just wanted to draw your attention to a New York Times essay I just stumbled upon. It’s about the Internet, and our increased dependence upon it. It’s pretty short, so it won’t kill you to read the whole thing.

The basic thesis, nearest I can tell, is that the Internet has taken over our lives; that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Is it harmful to spend 20+ hours playing an online video game at the expense of “real life” contact, or at the expense of school or work? Yeah, probably. But, as the Internet, and computers in general, move away from a work/school-only phenomenon and converge with our lesser activities (entertainment and the like) we become susceptible to, well, losing ourselves in it. That is, “Man alive, I’m been here three hours, and all I’ve been doing is looking up old Ric Flair promos on YouTube, and then doing the related Wikipedia shuffle. I went from looking up Starrcade to the concept of sovereignty in just a few clicks! And I have articles to write, (and Dream 12 to watch)!”

Yes, the essay is a little hinky.

The question becomes how to properly allocate your time online between the pointless and the slightly less pointless. Do you download an application that kicks you offline, and keeps you there? Do you study/work from a place that has zero Internet access? Or do you embrace the fact that, well, this is how we do things from now on: working right alongside 18 tabs about the history of Nintendo and the Monday Night Wars?

Let this video serve as a cautionary tale, of what happens when a kid sees too many Batman movies, and then gets a costume to match.

It’s been about a month since I subscribed to Optimum Online Ultra, the fastest Internet service in the country—sorry, Peter. Consider this a predictable, rubbish explanation of how my Internet habits—nay, my life!—have changed as a result of having a 101 megabits-down/15 megabits-up connection.

In so many words, nothing has changed all that much. My What.cd and HDBits ratios have improved, but that’s to be expected when you’re in BitTorrent swarms with lowly Comcast and Time Warner users. Having a 101 megabits at my disposal does make it easer to grab new releases quite speedily—I can’t wait till Entourage comes out, hello ratio boost!—but that’s about it.

So it’s safe to say Optimum Online Ultra is great for heavy BitTorrent users. Plus, no bandwidth caps!

Usenet becomes dangerous with Optimum Online Ultra. “Yeah, that movie sure would be nice to add to my collection.” Four minutes later, bam!

As far as legitimate uses go, ha! YouTube, used for watching reruns of Supermarket Sweep, is still a piece of garbage. Nothing loads any faster than it did when I had regular Optimum Online. (Of course, videos play while they load, so it’s not a huge deal.) Is that because Flash for Mac OS X is 100 percent dross, constantly causing Safari (and Firefox for that matter) to crash? Maybe; I’m not a scientist. The point is, I was expecting to click a YouTube link and have the video load instantly. That simply doesn’t happen. Same thing with Hulu: it’s still dog-slow, even though it plays as its loading. Like the Cablevision tech explained to me when he installed the service, my home connection is now faster than what what Web sites can provide. Until YouTube, Hulu and whomever else upgrade their infrastructure, I’ll be waiting for video to load just like everyone else.

So yeah, unless you’re a heavy P2P user, you really won’t see much of a difference between Optimum Online Ultra and the average broadband connection.

Such is my experience.

Well, it finally happened: someone used YouTube to help deliver a baby. Yup, a man in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Cornwall, to be exact) used the video-sharing site to help deliver his wife’s fourth child, a boy named Gabriel. (A nice, biblical name!) Yes, this is a crazy world we live in.

So the guy, one Marc Stephens, a 28-year-old Royal Navy engineer (not pictured: this is John and Kate Plus 8), began his YouTube hunt at around 10:30 pm, when his wife first started noticing that, um, something’s going on here. A few minutes go by, “how to deliver a baby” later, and bam! Newfound info.

Several hours later, young Gabriel starts his escape. Stephens, armed with his YouTube knowledge, delivers the baby, then goes off to hospital to make sure all is A-Ok.

And here I use YouTube to find hidden items in video games!

Also, this story totally reminds me of a video we saw in 10th grade biology. I think it was called “The Miracle of Life,” and the baby just sorta… just sorta shoots out of there.

Skeptical hat: why not rush over to hospital as soon as your wife starts saying, “Honey, I think he’s making a break for it.”? (I should write dreadful sitcoms.)

Will the Internet run out of bandwidth? That’s the concern expressed by an upcoming study, and it could mean the end of the Internet as we know it. Uselessly slow Web sites (think: YouTube, Hulu), Internet “brownouts” (“please wait: processing request”), and general mayhem could be the norm in just a few years’ time. So let’s freak out about it.

The study, carried out by Nemertes Research, suggests that the proliferation of bandwidth-intensive Web sites (again, YouTube, Hulu, and iPlayer for you Brits) and services (BitTorrent) is wreaking havoc on the Internet’s fragile infrastructure. The implication is that, sure, the Internet can handle World Wide Web hyperlinks as the day is long, but once you have millions of people streaming and downloading video, the whole thing comes crashing down.

The recession has only made things worse. More people are home (not at work, then) either passing the time fiddling online or cruising craigslist looking for jobs.

Compare the Internet today to the Internet of only a few years ago. Did we have The Simpsons on demand in the year 2000? Nope. At best you could troll alt.tv.simpsons to find links to Web sites that had a weekly Real Media encode of that week’s episode (as I remember it). Or you could read the script on snpp.com. In fact, “The amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000.” Yikes.

(How great would it be if all this “cloud” nonsense takes off, and then you can’t access your data in a timely manner?)

In any event, call me a skeptic. I’ve read too many “the Internet is doomed!” articles to take ‘em seriously any more. Or, as they say on message boards, pics or it didn’t happen.

Yesterday’s revelation that China blocks access to YouTube should not have come as any surprise, but did you know that other countries censor the Internet in their own special ways? (Happy families are all alike!) For example, did you know that India’s Computer Emergency Response Team’s has the power to block Web sites wily nilly? Ostensibly it was set up to help eliminate terrorist-realted sites, but it has also blocked “Hindu nationalists and other radical groups on social networking sites such as Orkut.” Or, that in Argentina a search for “diego maradona” will be tampered with because of a terrible court ruling?

Yeah, so Foreign Policy compiled a list of little known Internet censors. The list includes, as mentioned, Indian and Argentina, but also France (see its draconian file-sharing laws), South Korea (it regularly blocks North Korean propaganda) and Australia (ostensibly it blocks child pornography and terror-related content, but it could well broaden). The point of the brief little round-up, I guess, was to show that Internet censorship isn’t merely something that happens Over There; nope, it happens to more familiar countries, too.

Never mind the nonsense that Americans have to put up with in the name of “protecting” this or that group or entity or institution.

Also, embedded for the hell of it, the Hand of God goal. Fact: Maradona > Pelé.

As for the huge black rectangle—get it, black, censorship, etc. We’re so deep and meaningful!

The Illuminati are real, and have removed that proto-iPhone auction from eBay. The auction had been live for a few days before Apple contacted eBay, shutting the auction down before the proto-iPhone made it “out there.” The video was also pulled from YouTube.

Apparently Apple removed a similar auction from eBay last year, so you know it’s someone’s job at Cupertino to troll eBay/blogs looking for unauthorized sales, auctions, etc.

Considering there’s very little else to talk about, here’s a video of a family absolutely killing the final obstacle course in Nickelodeon’s Double Dare.

Cute kid talking about computers. Enough said.

And if you haven’t seen the inspiration of this video, here it is. Kittens inspired by Kittens!

We met Todd late last year, and were impressed with the quality of his work. He’s essentially a one-man shop kicking ass on his product. Todd’s Twitter stream is full of his passion as he shares his successes and frustrations. Good on yer, Todd!

Can’t get enough of British Royalty for some reason? So much so that you’d not only visit their Web site, on the Internet, but you’d sift through old photos of the Queen of the Realm, through the years? Consider yourself the luckiest person(s) alive, for the Royal Family (is that a proper noun?) has re-launched its Internet Web site presence. YouTube videos, Google Maps integration, the works!

Apparently the Royal Family doesn’t have enough money for a decent host because I’m on the site right now and it is dog slow. Oh, and this error keeps popping up:

Also on the site, when you can get it to work, there’s even a job board, where you can find listings for Royal jobs. You know, Official Breakfast Fetcher of the Realm, and so on.

Here, Britain’s best export this side of the English language, Ricky Gervais dancing like a complete fool.

via Reuters

How much time do you spend online, America? [Waits for answer.] That’s funny because the average teenager spends a cool 31 hours per week online. And what does the average teen do? The usual, I guess you can say—instant message friends, surf YouTube, get homework help, view porn, etc. Just another day in Anytown, USA.

Make that Anytownshire, UK, for that’s where this data comes from. (A British research group (www.cybersentinel.co.uk) compiled the information.) It found that, on the whole, teens spend some 31 hours per week online, or, if we were to divide that evenly between the days of the week, that’s around 4.4 hours per day online. (We spend pretty much all day online at CrunchGear, from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed.)

The data breakdown isn’t exactly shocking, either: teens spend 3.5 hours a week instant messaging their friends, two hours on YouTube (two hours?), and three hours a week on homework help.

But the big number, the number that will no doubt be YELLED AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS ON ALWAYS SHOCKED ABOUT SOMETHING FOX NEWS about is the amount of time spent viewing porn. That number is one hour and forty minutes a week, on porn. That’s a heck of a lot of porn, if you consider that most porn-viewing sessions, one would think, is consumed in fits and spurts. That is, you’re not sitting there for 50 minutes at a clip watching porn, more like three-and-a-half minutes at a clip. Presumably.

Any Papists in the house? Hooray for everything, then, as the Vatican has just launched its own dedicated YouTube channel. Now you can watch Pope Benedict XVI, in all his heavenly splendor, demand that y’all leave Steve Jobs alone. Something like that.

The point of this is to “secure the Pope’s presence on the Web,” and, presumably, to spread the voice of the Roman Catholic Church into the room’s of disaffected teenagers and the cubicles bored adults the world over.

The channel will host the usual: the Pope’s speeches, audio and video messages of peace and understanding, etc. You know, Pope stuff.

Apparently there’s a debate inside the Vatican as to just how effective the YouTube channel will be in drawing people to the Church’s message, and with good reason: are people more likely to use YouTube to look up girl fights, or to find divine inspiration? (I think we all know the answer to that one: girl fights.)

But good on the Pope and his happenin’ crew for embracing the Internet. Maybe he and President Obama can post video responses to each other now.

Look, it’s Ric Flair!

via The Beeb

One can only assume that they decided they were ready for the blast of traffic that will certainly result from the huge amount of embedded high-quality videos to come. Doubtless the stream pipe has to be a lot fatter for the HQ videos, but advances in compression efficacy have ensured that doubling the image quality doesn’t double the size of the video. The downloadable version whether you’re watching HD or SD is the same — that is to say, it’s the HD version no matter what. For Obama’s inauguration, it’s 95MB, which at 21 minutes long is about 600kb/s if my rough calculations are correct, just fine for streaming.

Test it out in the player below. You have to hit play before the HQ button shows. The shaky camera is not a function of the HD, just a very cold cameraman.

Unfortunately, there’s still no button that makes the comments high quality.

Wrap your head around this one: you can play Street Fighter on YouTube. Some hard-working guy named Patrick Boivin put together a series of stop-motion Street Fighter action sequences uploaded as separate videos, all triggered by clicking various attack button hyperlinks. It’s hard to explain but it makes sense once you start playing.

Now we just need someone to remake all the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books as YouTube videos. That’d be some hot action right there.

[via ALBOTAS]

VUDU sent along a minor update that adds a little YouTube goodness to the Netflix-streaming machine. Now, if a high definition version is available, the VUDU box will display that rather than the crappy SD version. You, the user, do not have to do anything extra; well, just update your movie streaming box. That’s all. You listening, TiVo. Where is your HD YouTube update? Eh?

a muted YouTube video

It seems that YouTube is in the process of identifying clips that contain copyrighted music, and rather than simply remove the videos, the audio portion of the clip is being muted. When viewing such a clip, you’ll see this message below the video:

This video contains an audio track that has not been authorised by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.

On the one hand, this seems like a pretty decent compromise: the video is still available, and YouTube is, after all, a video site. But on the other hand, it seems like a real disservice to uploaders. I haven’t uploaded anything to YouTube in ages, so I don’t know if you get some kind of notice that your video has been muted.

It’s also unclear to me whether any use of a copyrighted song is muted, or just those uses that violate the notoriously hard-to-define “fair use”. The YouTube Copyright Tips page says only “Unfortunately we cannot make a determination whether your video qualifies as fair use.” You can’t blame them for erring on the side of caution, but it’s still kind of a bummer.

Update: a post on the YouTube blog adds a little explanation about this, indicating that uploaders can choose to swap audio tracks with ones that have already been cleared. That’s nice.

LG will be unveiling its new line of Blu-ray players at CES next week, but has announced today that its upcoming network-enabled models will feature Netflix streaming (already available on current models) along with additional streaming content from CinemaNow and YouTube.

That’s a smart move because it effectively takes the gun out of the hands of those who question why they’d buy a Blu-ray player when everything’s slowly-but-surely moving online. In this case, you get the option to play Blu-ray discs, plus HD content from Netflix, more HD content from CinemaNow, and YouTube content, which appears to be shifting to HD sooner or later.

All this, plus a ten-foot interface navigated by a familiar remote control — no Media Center PC, no Xbox 360 Extender, etc. It might just catch on with "regular" people. The question now comes down to price. If companies can aggressively price these Blu-ray players in 2009, we might see more and more of them turning up in people’s homes. I haven’t upgraded my DVD player yet because I don’t care all that much about the difference in visual quality but, hey, my DVD player doesn’t stream Netflix, CinemaNow, and YouTube.

Full press release:

LG Electronics Announces New Streaming Content Partners for Its Network Blu-ray Disc Players

LG to Offer Consumers Unparalleled Access to Streaming Entertainment from CinemaNow, YouTube and Netflix

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J., Dec. 30 /PRNewswire/ — LG Electronics today announced the expansion of network entertainment options for its Network Blu-ray Disc players through new alliances with CinemaNow and YouTube(TM).

Available on new LG Network Blu-ray Disc Players in the first half of 2009, these new services complement LG’s instant streaming from Netflix and advanced Blu-ray capabilities to deliver consumers an exceptional entertainment experience. (In 2008, LG was the world’s first manufacturer to stream movies instantly from Netflix on a Network Blu-ray Disc Player.)

CinemaNow – an innovator in digital entertainment technology, delivering high-quality movies, TV shows and videos to users through online connectivity – and YouTube – a leading online video community for people to discover, watch, and share originally created videos – will be available in LG’s 2009 line of Network Blu-ray Disc players to be unveiled next week at the 2009 International CES(R).

"As millions of U.S. consumers view and download movies or TV shows through the Internet, they are demanding easier ways to access content and more home entertainment options," said Tim Alessi, director of product development, LG Electronics USA.

"From Blu-ray to instant streaming from Netflix to CinemaNow and YouTube, LG is bridging the gap between packaged media and video-on-demand services to provide entertainment solutions for consumers’ demand for content," he said. "With these new alliances, LG continues its innovation leadership by allowing consumers easy access to multiple entertainment options in one device."

CinemaNow: Instant Streaming of Hollywood’s Latest Hits

CinemaNow has pushed the envelope of digital video distribution, becoming the first Web site to offer Pay-Per-View movies from major studios and the first broadband distributor of high definition (HD) content. Collaborating with CinemaNow will enable LG Electronics to offer consumers access to more than 14,000 titles from the major movie studios, broadcast and cable television shows, more than 250 independent film titles and music videos from all major labels. Key benefits include the capability to:

• Browse the entire CinemaNow premium content catalog, including latest Hollywood hits, Instantly stream content to enjoy on compatible devices, and Access and watch movies purchased from other CinemaNow-powered stores.

"We are extremely pleased to be providing CinemaNow premium content services to these innovative new products from LG Electronics that are helping to drive convenient consumer access to digital entertainment at home," saidMark Ely, executive vice president of strategy, Sonic Solutions (Nasdaq: SNIC), parent company of CinemaNow.

YouTube: Original Streaming Video Content

Leading the way in providing unlimited access to online content, LG’s alliance with a prolific online video community, YouTube, will allow consumers to instantly stream millions of Web videos directly from the Internet to an LG Network Blu-ray Player for viewing on their television (without a personal computer). Key benefits include:

• Unlimited access to millions of videos on topics such as current events, instructional videos for hobbies and interests, comedic and viral videos and Easy searching, thumbnail previews and multiple screen size viewing options.

Netflix: High Definition Instant Streaming

Now available to consumers as a free on-line upgrade, LG’s first Network Blu-ray Disc Player (BD300) now delivers a growing number of Netflix titles in high-definition (HD). This new access to high-definition streaming content enhances the existing standard-definition streaming service that LG and Netflix first brought to consumers in 2008.

Future LG Network Blu-ray Disc Players will also offer consumers a variety of ways to enjoy more than 12,000 choices of movies and TV episodes from Netflix. Netflix members owning these devices pay one low monthly subscription for unlimited DVD rental and unlimited streaming.

LG’s full line of Network Blu-ray Disc Players, additional new content alliances and other new products will be revealed at the LG Electronics CES press conference on Jan. 7, 2009 at the Venetian/Sands and will be on display at the 2009 International CES – Booth #8214, Central Hall, Las Vegas Convention Center.