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...electronic wallpaper is not without its problems.

For an advert to be "visible from space" it must be distinguishable and recognizable by the naked human eye from 62 miles up.

The article says approximately 65000 1 foot tiles were used, that's almost certainly a 256x256 square making 65535 tiles.

If each tile is 1ft across, then the total size is actually 256 feet (78m) squared.

The Eva advert was 697m2, and could certainly not be seen from space.

The KFC ad is 6084m2, 10x larger, but is still only vaguely unlikely to be visible with the naked eye.

To try and imagine the visibility a bit better, scale it down (78m wide & 62 miles becomes 1.4m wide at 1 mile), so paint the KFC sign on a 1.4m x 1.4m board and see if it can be recognized from 1 mile away. The scaling calculation is fairly easy, but what it can't factor in is the fact that there's 62x more atmosphere to look through when you scale back up. I'll believe it when I see it (from space).

it seems if I'm not mistaken, a lot of the great things that have come out of google have been through aquisitions of start ups with great ideas and developers.

and I'm pretty certain that is what microsoft used to be.

Neither company has shown much innvoation that is completely internal. Maybe its just bill is getting old and not seeing those aquisition opportunities as early as the young guys are?

some links:
http://boakes.org/nasa-vs-google

http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archiv es/2006/03/09/google-acquires-writely/

But then again, I'm not sure how gmail evolved, and I would say next to earth, its the best they have.

They invented the NT Trust Suite.

I'm sorry, that should have said they were "indicted in the anti-trust suit", easy mistake to make.

All humans have stereotypes and scripted responses that we use to help manage all the information we receive, so it's attractive to dismiss MS, and their products, because it makes for what appears to be an easier decision making process.

The fact is MS have been collaborating with others, and for example, through the W3C they do a lot of useful work, it's just that this is easy to lose sight of because they have become a pantomime ghoul that is fun to ridicule.

Google's blogsearch is, fundamentally, a metadata search that has the benefit of being integrated with the rest of the Google empire.

The killer feature of blogsearch is the fact that search results can be output using RSS and Atom formats (in addition to the familiar web page).

Blogsearch is a very good indicator of future improvements to Google's main search service, and provides some useful functions today.

The problem faced by Canada and/or the USA is indicative of a more general (and therefore more difficult to solve) problem.

When a telemarketer calls you from your own country, both parties are governed by the same laws, however, many of those laws are ineffective when the caller and recipient are in different countries.

With cheap telecommunications international telemarketing is becoming more common, and consumer protection is beginning to suffer.

Take, for example, the recent spate of calls that have originated in Florida, and targetted North-West Europe. Each of these European countries has a national do-not-call list, yet international telemarketers are ignoring these lists, believing themselves to be untouchable.

It's become so bad that "the Consumer Ombudsmen from the Nordic Countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland have contacted the US Federal Trade Commission and cited concerns over some international business practices" [1][2]

1. Quote Source
2. PDF Nordic Letter to the FTC

The letter itself cites concerns over both telemarketing and general internet marketing, and illustrates that once national boundaries are crossed, the temptation to increase sales (possibly by misrpresenting the goods that are being sold) may be more than some telemarketers (or telemarketing company managers) can bear.

What is needed is a global agreement on Do-Not-Call lists. Without such an agreement, national lists will be entirely irrelevant as each company conscientiously respects it's own citizens whilst mercilessly telespamming the rest of the world.

From TFA:

The iPod nano; especially for women who have very little pocket space and are much more adverse to carrying bulkier electronics in those pockets than men.

Wasn't this solved last April with the Apple iPad?

Essentially (for those non technical readers) the whole article's basis can be summed up with the following analogy: Bananas and other fruits are alternatives to Oranges, and furthermore some people are actually eating these new-fangled Bananas! What are we going to do? Everyone knows Oranges can have their pips removed using a juice extractor, but Bananas don't have pips. Don't Panic! Don't Panic!

The first version of ... x 3

Well said.

Having spent a while this morning instlling it, and generally buggering about with it, I was left with the distinct impression that this is the thin end of another GoogleWedge (TM).

In summary:

• It doesnt innovate: in either the IM or the VOIP world,
• It has fewer features than competing clients/networks

but

• It has millions of ready made users with gmail accounts.
• It has a surprisingly respectful user interface that is a joy to use.
• It has potential to be extended from day one (unlike AIM or YIM where the owners have fought to keep the protocols closed and proprietary.

There really is no reason for the sidebar to exist within Google Desktop Search, it's a separate tool and it's bundling says more for Google's rivalry with Yahoo! than MS.

Primarily GDS is an RSS reader and a plugin recepticle. Google are an Ad company that have a system for putting ads in RSS feeds. The "free and benevolent" sidebar is therefore another way for Google to get adverts onto desktops around the world.

That said, Google are playing a percentage game in fighting for the MS Desktop so their waiting game where Linux, Apple (etc) are concerned is a necessary blind-spot.

the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool.

The slashdot story mis-sells the content of the speech. For me it was just AB talking about how it would be useful to have a simple system of aggregation that goes beyond subscribing to an RSS feed.

It's not a new data model & the semantic has not failed, in fact, it's more important when considering how to work with the diverse resulting data.

Watching the shuttle seperate from the fuel tank was amazing...

Absolutely. For sheer excitement and beauty I'd put it on a par with watching the launch of the first Shuttle launch in '81. I was 9 then, and watching today I didn't feel a day older. One of the most magical moments of television ever.

They're back ... those pesky telemarketing calls, after nearly two years of peaceful, interruption-free dinners.

They never went away; during that time, they were calling Europe.

Residents in the UK, Holland, Denmark, Finland, Spain and several other countries are being targetted by telemarketers with the old "You've won a holiday" story; and their national Do Not Call registers, appear powerless to stop the calls. e.g. The UK TPS).

To make matters worse the victims often don't have a clue about the American legal system and therefore have great difficulty in getting any money back when they realise they've not won a sausage.

I know all this becuase

1. they called me in the UK, and I happened to blog it and consequently...
2. I've grown very weary of hearing from Europeans telling me they've been conned, asking me what to do and basically begging for advice that I'm not qualified to give.

So, rather than decreasing the restrictions, if the Slashdot readership has suggestions on how we can increase them so they have international effect, then many thousands of Europeans will probably want to have your babies, or at the very least promise not to phone you at dinner time to say thanks.

...can some people please think of better applications than advertising...

• "Computer, today I'd like a soothing wall colour that matches these freshly cut flowers." or,
• "Computer, it's party time, give me some garish birthday balloons and streamers." or most likely,
• "Computer, break out the pr0n."

Google has attemped a pre-emptive strike in many of their ventures by running very large scale beta services (distinctly different from beta applications).

The Google Desktop beta focuses directly on Microsoft Desktop products to the exclusion of others in a direct attempt to beat Microsoft to market.

Google are using time-to-market to their advantage. Their services may be duplicable, but their ability to roll out beta's and garner market awareness with great speed is far more difficult to ape.