via Joey:

Google’s solution to a “certain problem” is to have the user answer some math questions within a time limit at certain hours of the night, on Friday and Saturday.

But me, I get drunk and send inappropriate emails at all hours of the day.

Google proposes that “surely if you can do basic math problems then you have a solid command of what is and is not socially appropriate when it comes to late night email.” However, some question the initiative’s effectiveness:

Not really. Drinking seems to lower inhibitions more than it lowers other abilities such as math skills, and at least for me it never lowers my math skills enough that I would fail this.

Yeah, I had a friend in college who, when drunk, would only ever talk about two things: Thomas Aquinas’s epistemology… and his fiancee’s hymen.

Google Chrome. Google’s web browser to be released later today. In comic form. By Scott McCloud. And here are some more screenshots for good measure.

Godzilla tracking just got easier.

Google has now photographed Tokyo for Street View, which means you can now see both the Golden Turd and the next nuclear attack all in one panorama. The WHOLE city isn’t done, but you can see quite a bit.

Actually, Tokyo wasn’t the only recent unveiling Street View had. Joining the list is fellow cities Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Sidney, Perth, Melbourne, New Orleans, El Paso, Savannah, and a ton in between.

Google released Google App Engine, a “developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure” (which is a fancy way of saying your web app is hosted on their servers, using their processing power and storage). The service is a basically a competitor to Amazon Web Services, except that (in classic Google manner) it is still in beta and free. Who knows how it will go, but the first couple of days stirred up quite a bit of ire amongst developers. Long live the Googleplex!

Amazon MP3 launched today, offering over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists and over 20,000 labels.

Songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, and albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. Most of the top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, and the top 100 best-selling albums are $8.99 or less. (I always love when stores sell the good stuff for cheap, hoping that customers will stay and buy some more expensive items as well.)

Amazon MP3 opens as direct competition to the iTunes Music Store. Both offer DRM-free music (Amazon: mp3, iTunes Music Store: m4a) at 256-kbps, and have the support of major labels. Currently, Amazon MP3 offers less than half of the music selection as the iTunes Music Store (2 million songs compared to 5 million), but from looking at the Top 100 page, they have all the big names covered. Furthermore, you don’t need anything except a web browser to purchase from Amazon MP3 (a small application is needed to download whole albums, but not individual songs). The iTunes Music Store has always bugged me since it is unreachable except through iTunes.

At this rate, I am interested in seeing who takes over the internet first: Google or Amazon. I can see Amazon acquiring eBay and PayPal, and becoming the eCommerce warlord of the internet. From there, Amazon would simply need to leverage its myriad Web Services (S3, Mechanical Turk, etc.) and purchase and integrate Microsoft’s Live Search. Of course, by that time Google may have eaten the media and the internet may have been transformed into GoogleNet.

Then again, maybe our future is Googlezon.