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At least, for Google AU.

Now I understand your sig better.

No, TFA may be about microhoo but the anti-monopoly sentiment is aimed at resources. China recently scuttled BHP's takeover of Rio Tinto buy buying a stragic stake in Rio Tinto (after first trying to ban sales of their shares in China), the aim was to keep competition in ore prices alive down here in Oz.

Once and for all the google "do no evil" is long dead, they edited it to "You can make money without doing evil" http://www.google.com.au/corporate/tenthings.html which of course is marketdroid speak for 'you can make more by being evil' of course sneaking in the edit whilst the googlites still troll 'do no evil' is, well, evil.

There is always a difference between doing a little and doing a lot of evil. Which is worse the consumer earning a minimum wage buying at Wallmart, or Wallmart buying the products overseas where the workers are exploited with an even lower minimum wage.

By your reasoning of course people who use google search are equally supporting the suppression of freedom and democracy in China and other autocratic countries, so, I will take you advice to heart and will no longer use any google services until the stop supplying monitoring software to dictators and stop censoring people seeking democracy.

It is now becoming really obvious why google has all those lobbyists on the payroll, they wanted to ensure they could continue to invade every ones privacy, ew, proctology inc by definition.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=ODF+viewer&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

People continue to confuse identification with authentication.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=identification
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=define%3Aauthentication

Biometrics are good for identification.. they replace your "login", not your "password".

Have they fixed this? It's been around since the nv4 drivers.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=nvidia+nv4_disp+%22infinite+loop

Yes and peer-review of the standard practiced by Nature, Science, etc, will group people into those who have a deep knowlede the subject. Try this experiment, type a couple of words (eg: earth crystals) into google and then google scholar, note the different content.

Now tell me which list is more closely 'observing the real world'.

Actually, yes. According to theologian/philosopher/anthropologist Rene Girard, that is precisely what would happen.

Indeed, he cites mob killing as being instrumental in the development of human civilization in the first place.

-M

One in ten Americans are Latino.
One in Ten Americans are Blogging.
One in ten Americans are either practicing sadomasochists or have engaged in at least one sadomasochistic experience in their lifetime.
One in ten Americans are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.
One in ten Americans are reckoned to have got their first job at McDonald's.
One in ten Americans are unemployable because of draconian drug laws.
One in ten Americans are sued each year.
One in ten Americans are receiving food stamps.
One in ten Americans are without health insurance.
One in ten Americans are foreign-born.
One in ten Americans are trying to start a business at any given time.
One in ten Americans are gay.
One in ten Americans are tattooed.
One in ten Americans are vegetarian. (Probably as a result of their experiences working at McDonald's.)
One in ten Americans are currently addicted to alcohol or drugs.
One in ten Americans are behind bars.
One in ten Americans are affected with liver disease.

No wonder they don't have time for sleep!

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22One+in+Ten+Americans+Are%22+-sleep

There are no links to that page.

I agree there's no evidence they are violating the GPL. But they don't exactly appear eager to let their potential customers know that they are selling 100% open source software. I wouldn't be happy with that if I was a developer, or a customer.

Amongst the side affects of the many drugs that are prescribed, he has become overweight and now suffers from sleep apnea further complicating the depression. If anything I have learned from observation is that people suffering from depression need the support of people close to them, for the condition is like a downward spiral of physical, mental and spiritual decay. Contact, phone calls conversations, anything you can do to help unravel the root cause of the depression, like challenging the paranoid feelings all help to take power away from the disease.

For the fist time in a long time, I think I see him finally come out of it because he is starting to excercise. I don't know if the drugs helped, perhaps leveled things out and maintained the status quo. They were probably required as on several occasions I was physically attacked by him (and he is a big guy), fortunately for me (and him) I also am a big guy and have trained physical combat for most of my life. I say that because there was a strong responsibility on my part to not hurt him any more than it was required to control and disarm him. You have to realise it's not the person attacking you, it's the disease and for this reason I think that it is also can become contagious (so to speak) who do not have this capability.

I can't say whether the drugs are good or bad (just that there is a lot of them and he takes them e-v-e-r-y--d-a-y) but I do know the drugs have changed his brain chemistry forever, I often wonder if the person I grew up with is still in there, occasionally I see a glimpse. I have studied all I can about depression to learn everything I could to help him and I look forward to reading about other peoples experiences in this discussion. What I learned is that the medications are a commitment for all the people around to be aware that the critical time is when they are coming off the medication and they finally lose their apathy towards self harm, i.e they finally have enough energy to do it, signs that must be watched for if you want someone you care about to actually survive depression.

I also learned that regardless of the drugs there are two core issues that every person who suffers depression will have to face;

1) Rigorous physical excercise is that path back to mental well-being, the sooner the better and something fun and positive that helps self esteem and confidence.

2) The issues that triggered the depression will eventually have to be faced.

I hope one day it will be gone, because I don't want my family member to die from it or with it. I call it the black dog because it chases and hunts you down and occasionally I sense it coming after me, but I fight it and you have to fight it. Perhaps if people who were susceptible to depression were made to excercise it would disappear, but then the drug companies wouldn't get to sell all that expensive medication and I definitely think it is a factor in the diagnosis of this modern curse. I also think that good spinal care is a factor as I also noticed an improvement in his demeanor when this was done. Additionally I think that depression is a natural consequence to some overload of emotional stress, alas IANAP, that triggers a change to the brain chemistry.

I suspect the Metalica song Until it sleeps was written about depression as it aptly describes what is truly the modern plague of our time.

Define: giga

What they dicovered is the first scientific evidence for the theory that culture evolves. The term 'scientific proof' is an oxymoron used in earnest by commentators without a clue, but in this case neither TFA or TFS claim to have proven anything.

There are many definitions for irony, I was thinking along the lines of "the difference between how you might expect something to be and how it actually is". The fact that this is a nerd site enhances the irony.

I think they were refering to the known universe and alluding to natural lasers.

In contrast the best particle beams on the planet get a few gold atoms to near light speed, while the natural ones can easily get the planet Jupiter moving at that pace.

And you forget Clinton attacked OBL's camp with tomahawks and Bush bombed the wrong country. You also mistake me for a fan of Clinton's foriegn policy, donating $2B of attack choppers to Burma was not a good move. The biggest fear the rest the planet has is that all americans actually think like the myopic dribble that so freely flows from your keyboard.

Do you have a reference for this? I did a quick Google for activex sandbox without much luck.

The top hit is this rather dated page which says:

That was written in 1997 and maybe (most likely) they've changed things since then, but it definitely wasn't written with a sandbox in mind. Actually, most or all of the links in that search date from the late nineties.

Changing the search to "activex security" and we get a nice page on MSDN that says:

No idea when that was written or if it still applies. So, do you have any references on this subject?

Time for some anecdotal "evidence". A week or so ago I was asked to upload a large (2+ gig) debug trace file to Microsoft's tech support site, and doing that made use of an ActiveX control (I tried using Firefox with the "simple upload" option but I just got a generic and uninformative server error). Given the way in which it sat there saying "Connecting..." 99% of the time with the occasional momentary change to say it was transferring data, I'm sure this wasn't using a plain HTTP POST file upload. Which means this control was able to read the zip file on my desktop and upload it to the site.

Even more disturbing was the effect it had on my RDP session. I used 7-Zip to zip it with maximum compression and since that was gonna take a while I went home, and connected to my desktop later that night to do the upload. Set it going and started doing some other stuff and noticed my keyboard was being weird: almost every keystroke was being duplicated. I've got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and sometimes it does odd things like repeat a keystroke a bunch of times, but this was just twice and for everything. So I closed the IE window and disconnected the RDP session and re-connected -- back to normal.

Started the upload up again and sure enough, same problem. Disconnected the RDP session thinking maybe it was just a bit confused by the crappy uploader ActiveX page and logging in again would reset it. Went to reconnect, and found the keystrokes were being duplicated even on the login dialog! At that point I gave up and just left it for the weekend.

If an ActiveX control can somehow screw up key processing for the RDP login dialog, then I have a tough time believing it's actually sandboxed in any meaningful way. If you have references to the contrary, I'd love to see them.

Math is a beautiful thing. That movie was not. I was going to be a smart alec and post anonymously about how much I disliked the movie but I didn't think that'd be a very nice thing to do just so I could have a chuckle on a bad day (even though trolling seems to be an ingrained tradition here)....Instead,

There's a book I'd like to recommend to you if math in Nature is your thing.

Gravity from the Ground up.
http://www.gravityfromthegroundup.org/
http://www.gravityfromthegroundup.org/pdf/preface.pdf
http://www.gravityfromthegroundup.org/excerpts.html
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=P_T0xxhDcsIC&dq=gravity+from+the+ground+up&pg=PP1&ots=eYBnl6oBlg&sig=h6x74j7itqQs7AgsVN4kU39oaFQ&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=gravity+from+the+ground+up&btnG=Google+Search&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail

It only requires highschool math - trig and algebra, and replaces the more complex mathematics with software (that mostly uses finite difference equations in place of calculus) so you'll probably find it talks down a little if you're a mathematician. I also feel the author's a little biased in his view of history. However the physical insights into physics and physical phenomenon are incredible. (Disclaimer: I'm only on chapter 2...but I've looked at the content and this is a book I've been waiting my whole life for. I have a Masters degree in Astronomy that I've never used, but we went light on the math - about as light as this book - and we never covered Realivity in the sort of depth I wanted to)

On that subject (human computation) : http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

"Yes, that is all well and good for you, but you're sane....despite the conviction that you can detect insanity in others"

I spy an ironic strawman.

"but it took a crazy Guttenberg to get people out from under the Church's thumb."

And do you know the title of the first books that came off his presses? Dispite your conviction that Guttenberg was crazy, much of the demise of Church influence over everyday life in the west has occured during my lifetime (no, I am not 500yrs old).

"I'd like to see a source on the caveman statement"

Then do some reseach, you might find there is more to history than second millenium cathedrals and Guttenberg.

"I would argue that it is the freaks of nature that advance society, opposed to people "working together.""

So WW2 was won by the elephant man rather than an alliance of competitor states against a common enemy?

BTW: One must be very selective when dinning on dog meat. The prisoner/gaurd thing still requires the prioner/gaurd to cooperate with their own TRIBE.

my 5 seconds of researches found several onagers with slings http://images.google.com.au/images?q=onager

As a web user, I agree with Google: I'm not looking for the website which is operated by the most successful link farmer. I want relevant search results.

You're right, it's not Google's job to tell people what is morally "bad", but that's not what they do. They tell people that Google disapproves of Googlebombing because it complicates the relevance-calculation. They also adjust the algorithm to reduce or eliminate the effectiveness of Googlebombing and link farming.

Google's official webmaster guidelines use loaded language: "cloaking", "sneaky", "little or no original content", words designed to make people feel these things are evil, when they are merely technical hurdles for an algorithm.

Only recently, slashdot had an article entitled "gaming google a gateway to crime?", prompted by a Google engineer's blog entry.

So far, common wisdom is that Google only punishes for on-site misbehaviour

In fact, some of the so called misbehaviour Google warns against is trivially bogus. Take the idea that content shouldn't be duplicated, because it's hard for their robots to deal with properly.

If this was taken seriously, we'd have a brittle internet where information gets lost (forever!) each time a server gets shut down or is lost for some reason like a flood, say. We'd lose wikipedia completely if they ran out of money for their servers, because nobody would host "ethically" another copy to avoid tampering with pagerank. What a daft prospect!

Far from being "bad" behaviour, redundancy of information on the internet is an important benefit, certainly more important than making life easy for robots.

The users have spoken: They use Google because search engines which "blindly" reflect what's out there don't return useful search results. The sites are all listed, but order is important and the users like the order which is calculated by Google's algorithm.

I'm the first to admit that relevance ranking technology is both hard and fiddly. That's what makes it scientifically interesting. But I would have a lot more respect for google's engineering team if they just got on with it, rather than complaining publically about "unethical" SEOs breaking their old algorithms.

Original by kottke

Milton? Is that you?

...and I know rotaries in the Boston area where, while people have no trouble navigating them, they break every rule in the book. For example, nobody gives way to traffic in the roundabout at the rotary between Concorde Ave and Fresh Pond Parkway in Cambridge. It's fine if you just do what everyone else does, but if you attempt to actually use it properly and expect all the entering traffic from Fresh Pond Parkway to give way - you'll cause an accident.

And as a final point, the U.S. Military hardly behaves like the crips, and don't compare the two.

really? why are gang tags appearing on walls in baghdad? why are people in the army complaining about how gangs like the crips (and white supremacists) are gaining influence in the armed forces? thanks to lax recruiting. you have no idea about *any* army let alone your own. i'm not comparing the two. i am stating, with evidence, that one is literally becoming the other. and if that doesn't bother you, what do you think all those gang members are going to do when they get back home, to where you live?

again, you don't get it. modern wars aren't about numbers. the IRA never numbered more than about 2000 members and they successfully forced the british to give them most of what they wanted. there are hundreds of thousands of iraqi resistance fighters and millions of sympathisers. and everytime the us relies on technology to put force protection above accomplishing the mission (calling in air or artillery in urban areas) that number ticks up.

it's mathematics, something everyone on slashdot should understand. iraqis don't have to be monolithic, though the one thing almost all of them seem to agree on is that they want you all gone and that it's ok to kill you. keep in mind that there are 25 million iraqis. if even 10% wanted you gone and thought it was ok to kill you that's 2.5 million people. the actual number is more like 12 - 15 million people. i should also point out that iraq's population has a lot of people between 12 and 35 years of age. very , very few of them have jobs, or electricity, or running water and lots and lots of them were in the army or had some military training. in fact the only hope you guys have for mitigating the damage is that the resistance is so big. it makes it hard to operate secure cells and lets you get better intelligence. still, the numbers don't lie. you're fucked. it's just a matter of how fucked. will it be an honourable withdrawl with some face saving interim govt. that'll hang around long enough to save your blushes, or will it be helicopters on embassy roofs?

and you're right, there was an 'anbar awakening' until the us bombed the local sheiks it depended on to keep it going, and called them liars when they complained. as if they didn't have it hard enough already. look, this is how it works. you're a sheik, the americans offer you money and a grab bag of iraqi troops, many of whom work for the resistance. the resistance on the other hand know where you live and how many kids you have. which side has a convincing argument for you to join them? seriously man, you have the internet, how can you not know this stuff? you're going to lose in iraq and you won't even know why.

Uh...property lines *are* supported in Google Maps, take a look at one major city with street numbers and boundary lines.

Some locales don't have the data, but the support is already there.

It's interesting that people are starting to discuss the problems with our current definition of life. I strongly recommend that people check out Autopoiesis and Cognition by Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela. These 2 brilliant scientists put together a remarkable definition and then argue it in truly astonishing ways.

The gist of their definition is that life is any set of cyclically arranged processes that, through their enactment, create and sustain themselves - ie it has to be recursive, and a closed network, and create it self. They argue that our current 'bullet point' definition of life is flawed because there is no way of knowing when we have enough points, and that this 'listing of features' is merely a fudging that has served us until we actually come up with a proper definition. They talk at great length about organisation as opposed to physical characteristics. They even hypothesize that their definition covers things like social networks ( though they argue between themselves somewhat on this point ).

They are quoted at length by Fritjof Capra ( another true legend ) in Web of Life, and for good reason. Actually Capra's discussion of their ideas is the reason I decided to track down and by Autopoiesis and Cognition.

Anyway, this book is truly fascinating. It's written in a slightly difficult language, but it's WELL worth it. I certainly can't do their ideas justice ( particularly since I haven't read their work in a while ). Check it out for a very fresh take of the Organisation of the Living.

Sure these things happen from time to time but cops and judges are simply paid control freaks that are obstensibly hired to stop us from living in anarchy, worst case senario is something like Blackwater or the SS (best case is a fantasy world where we are all just nice to each other).

From 50yrs of life experience I know that cops make all sorts of threats but the actions you describe are not a routine occurence here in Australia. If you want to to be treated with respect then be as polite and firm with them about your rights as you expect them to be when doing their job. Of course this assumes you know your rights and are smart enough to have a lawyer back you up.

So what police state are you living in?

The simplest means to access that same contact list now requires delicately tiptoeing around unusably small buttons (built for form over function) and digging through 3 menus ostensibly designed the same way banners and popup ads are, to trick you into unintentionally selecting "extras" which will show up on your bill.

Here's another one for ya... http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html

...and here's 364,000 more http://www.google.com.au/search?q=microsoft+vaporware&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Bayesian+networks+and+decision+graphs+Fenn+rapidshare&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enAU222AU222/

I've got an ultimate steal right here for $0!

Sorry, we had had a few and were just having a quick game on the scope and some prick hit some equipment. We didn't think anybody would notice. It's all a bit embarrassing really and we don't do that sort of thing anymore. But if anyone cares Parkes won by three wickets and 34 runs.

BTW: Over the edge of the dish is out and the batsman gets the ball.

Looking at the Kardashev scale with this energy shows a class III civilisation, if it were made by a civilisation:

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=(10E33)J%2F5ms&btnG=Search&meta=

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

This energy corresponds to the stage in which the civilisation would perform colonisation of nearby energies.

I submit that the Title isn't notable enough with this google search only revealing one relevant link. As such I propose we delete this page.

Even if you think that, if it's not a bomb, why can't she be released? Why does somebody have to be held for carrying something that we thought was a bomb but turned out not to be? The situation is normal so everybody can go home, or am I missing something?

You are correct in that many projects in the west now do this sort of thing routinely (with a mixed degree of success), however it's the "damn greenies" from the 70's & 80's you should thank for this minor improvement not the minning companies who still refuse to apply similar environmental standards when operating outside of western territory.

"I've personally seen sites 8 years out from rehab that you wouldn't know were mined....If it's all so terrible, i demand you turn off your damn computer and live in a cave."

Don't take this personally I am not against minning or miners - I'm against unessacary environmental destruction and pollution, I personally lost a job and a company provided house in the early 80's because a bunch of "bush bunnies" kept chaining themselves to bulldozers, the sawmill I was working at was told it could not renew it's lease on the old growth forest when the area was turned into Errindura national park (to the NW on the map). The logs that went thru the mill when I was there were up to 14' in diameter and were individually chosen by the state forestry dept, two trucks were required to carry the two logs from cut from the trunks of these trees. The logs were put on a specialised railway trolley and fed into the "breakdown saw" - a gigaintic band saw with a 12' jaw and 6" teeth.

I for one am now glad the "eco-terrorists" won that battle. I occasionaly get the chance to go and see these awe inspiring monsters still growing nearly 30yrs later thanks to the efforts of "smelly hippies" who's "kind" are still fighting to ban mountain ash harvests altogether. I don't agree with the "live in a cave faction" but I am of the opinion that if the tree takes 350yrs to reach maturity and mature trees are the backbone of the forrest then a 300-400yr harvest cycle would seem to be the shortest we could possibly sustain for any length of time.

The city commute can not compare to walking to the sawmill thru (literally) a carpet of firetail finches feeding on the small field between the two, the view the mill was spectacular (even by skyscraper standards) it sat at the peak of a valley where all you could see in every direction was tree covered mountains. I know I can regognise the areas that have been logged around the mill over the last hundred years even though to most it looks like a large pristine forrest.

If someone were to remove one of those mountains and very carefully fill up the hole afterwards, I am sure I could pick out where the site was eight years after "re-hab".

To sum up your unoriginal and widely debunked argument: "It's not happening and even if it was it'a a GoodThing(TM)".

As for the "recent analysis of peer-reviewed climate research" that is the source for your entire post - here is what I found with a couple of clicks: The source for your source (at the bottom of your link) is this book. IANAClimatologist but I know enough about "psuedoscience for hire" to recognise the name Singer as it's unrivaled master.

"it makes me think that you haven't actually read the work."

Even though the answer is obvious I just gotta ask: have you?

"...we are far more capable of cleaning up after ourselves than anyone else. Whether we clean it up on someone else's soil is a different political matter."

That's why we need strong international treaties so that "western companies" using "western technology" for "western consumption" doesn't mean abandoning our so called "values" just because the country is politically weak and/or corrupt does not mean we have the right to disreard the health, lives and livelyhoods of an "ignorant peasant" population "over there somewhere".

Capitialisim is a GoodThing(TM) but some corporates and their political hand-puppets are simply running a sophisticated and ruthless protection racket. "Informed democracy" may be the best answer but since 9/11 I haven't seen much of that anywhere, and I have no idea what the stone age tribes in west papua would view "freedom via democracy" but they are in for a rude awakening over the next 10-20yrs as their massive and largely unexplored jungle vanishes before their eyes.

"I know this will sound overly American."

The US is the largest economy in the west so to some extent is used as a scapegoat, google for "shell nigeria" and you will find similar "crimes against humanity". IMHO: Bush & congress have taken an overly cosy relationship between bussiness and politics and turned it into an incestous one, not as bad as Putin perhaps but still people in glass houses and all that...

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=dell+8600+glitchy+ubuntu+7.04+lines&btnG=Search&meta=

I mean it wasn't like the 8600 was *the* desktop replacement to buy about 2.5 years ago,......

Ctrl-O for options (when it's not open)
Ctrl-L for load (when it's not left align)
And do you want to [Alt]-f-x exit or [Alt]-f-c close or ctrl-q quit?

Ctrl-O for options (when it's not open)
Ctrl-L for load (when it's not left align)
And do you want to [Alt]-f-x exit or [Alt]-f-c close or ctrl-q quit?

Ctrl-O for options (when it's not open)
Ctrl-L for load (when it's not left align)
And do you want to [Alt]-f-x exit or [Alt]-f-c close or ctrl-q quit?

Ctrl-O for options (when it's not open)
Ctrl-L for load (when it's not left align)
And do you want to [Alt]-f-x exit or [Alt]-f-c close or ctrl-q quit?

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=define%3Aalliteration Most sources disagree with you.

With Judo, seeing is believing: Judo wins again!

Just for anyone who cares, Mr. Egan has a discussion on rec.sf.written entitled "hating the creator" where he and a bunch of other people (charlie stoss for one) discuss how we should treat artificial life, particularly whether it's morally acceptable to use selective pressures to "evolve" these creations. The discussion goes on for many pages and like most things involving greg egan, is very thought-provoking and interesting.

http://groups.google.com.au/group/rec.arts.sf.writ ten/browse_thread/thread/db51c30169c7bc58/66d85b18 a3235b10?q=%22hating+the+creator%22&lnk=ol&

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=assembly&hl=en&m eta=
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=assistance&hl=en &meta=
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=password%20secur ity&hl=en&meta=

etc etc etc

Blanket url filtering are nothing short of frustrating and frankly, stupid.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=assembly&hl=en&m eta=
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=assistance&hl=en &meta=
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=password%20secur ity&hl=en&meta=

etc etc etc

Blanket url filtering are nothing short of frustrating and frankly, stupid.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=assembly&hl=en&m eta=
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=assistance&hl=en &meta=
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=password%20secur ity&hl=en&meta=

etc etc etc

Blanket url filtering are nothing short of frustrating and frankly, stupid.