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Check out Disturbing Search Requests where people search through their logs for interesting HTTP REFERER links from Google and submit the most disturbing. A common reaction is befuddlement from webmasters when Google returns their site in response to certain queries (such as "sweet as food delicious cheap dog fellatio").

Who hasn't typed "how to kill your wife" into a search box by now anyway? (That was a joke! Hi honey!)

http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/2006/01/29#a1423

You still get tanks from google.cn with three other spellings that don't translate to "Gate of Heavenly Peace," which is what Tiananmen is.

Um. compare that picture of Woods with an Apple logo'd hat with this picture. Stupid April 1...

Does Google have an area where real-time search queries are displayed?

Afraid not - the closest Google have is the Google zeitgeist

However - some of the other (crappier) search sites do.

The only one I can find at the moment is Metacrawler's Metaspy. God - just been watching it for a few seconds - it includes the gems:

* how to measure body fat percentage with a tape measure and scale
* thongs for 7 year olds
* ubaid alien
* uncensored olympic gymnastic photos

I also found The Disturbing Search Requests Page - gleaned from some guy's referrer logs...It includes such goodies as 'clitoris size scale' and 'vampire "breasts grow"'

*(Yes, I know there's only 900 or so bloggers on MSDN, but many host on their own site).

So before you start a narcissistic rant about how blogs are mostly narcissistic rantings, remember that this useless forum discussion takes place on a blog. That's right, slashdot is a blog.

Any man who had ever worked in a hardened missile site would have felt at home in Clavius. Here on the Moon were the same arts and hardware of underground living, and of protection against a hostile environment; but here they had been turned to the purposes of peace.

After ten thousand years, man had at last found something as exciting as war. Unfortunately, not all nations had yet realized that fact."

from Chapter 10 (Clavius Base) of "2001: A Space Odyssey"

I plead guilty to the "wannabe" charge, though. Those who can, do. Those who can't, write magazine articles.

Given that the Thai finance minister had to be rescued from his BMW with sledgehammers after his WinCE powered iDrive computer crashed, methinks I would prefer to fly on open source software.

Unfortunately this seems to be a hoax:

CNET reports that, contrary to rumours that the BMW that trapped a Thai minister inside earlier this week was "the famously glitchy BMW 745i car, and its Windows CE-powered iDrive car computer", it was, according to a spokeswoman from BMW Thailand, the 10-year old BMW 520i model that "suffered a simple electronic failure".

(from Looswire)

No it hasn't. Kottke Paul Boutin has done some digging also.

I searched Google as suggested, and I found no evidence that this blog is a hoax. I did find some rather interesting supporting material by a man who set out to determine the legitimacy of the blog, though. Blog is probably real, says Paul Boutin.

His authenticity has been questioned, however (via Boing Boing).

Your right for questioning it. I think this has occured to a lot of people.

Journalist Paul Boutin has looked into it and concludes it's probably legit. It would be fascinating if some reporter tracked down Salam (the pseudonym of the author) after the war settles.

This is in fact not even CDMA - the voice technology used by Verizon. It is a TDMA technique which uses the fact that data is NOT delay-sensitive to increase the data-rate by waiting out 'bad times'.

The second link in the post clearly states that 1xEV-DO is CDMA. Qualcomm also agrees. Traditional CDMA was standardized as IS-95 and 1xEV-DO has been standardized as IS-856 if you want to read more about the technology.

Also note that it is 2.4Mbps peak per cell sector, per cell carrier. So if you and your ten buddies are sucking down data from the same base station cell, the 2.4Mbps peak data rate is split between all of the users.

Base truth: Google needs to defend it or lose it. While a verb is not trademarkable material, Google can fight to prevent the term "Google" from becoming a verb. It doesn't matter that the verb listed differs from what "Google" is or does. If they want to remain protected, they need to defend their term.

Though this does bring up another subject, that of shafting people and basically bullying people around. Some example uses may include:

• Wow, guess [extinct company due to monopolistic and predatory business practices] sure got m1cro$0fted.
• Hey, looks like [monopolistic company] is about to pull a m1cro$0ft!
• Get that m1cro$0fting jerk off of my front lawn!

It seems obvious that the term has a multitude of uses not unlike that of f#ck.

Some sites which so beautifully illustrate the various uses of the word f#ck include:

• Site 1
• Site 2

When one thinks of all the meanings associated with f#ck and the similarities between it and the m-word, one can only wonder how long it will be before the m-word will make it into dictionaries the world over. Probably not in m1cro$0ft branded dictionaries or encyclopedias, however.

Just a couple of cents.

hmm... their palm announcements are hardly as cool as their other announcement (thanks glenn fleischman):

Sony's Wi-Fi equipped pocket Web server:
GadgetWatch identifies (and offers an English explanation of) a Wi-Fi-enabled portable fileserver! Nifty. 70,000 yen.

Boutin's Slate article has the dirt and is funny to boot.

That would be a good idea if printers came with full cartridges. But they don't.

For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

A few weeks ago, I wrote Microsoft Mac FUD, Phooey, complaining about Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit head Kevin Browne's comments on the eve of Macworld.

This is such a despicable tactic. Microsoft embraced Apple and gave them funding at the height of the antitrust investigation, as a way of sustaining the idea that there was still competition in the market. Now that Apple's back on their feet, and OS X is giving them a run for the money, they pull out of the market. This decision may end up as badly for Microsoft's Office division as Lotus' decision to skip Windows.

Hackers and "alpha geeks" push the envelope, start to use the new technology, and get more out of their systems long before ordinary users even know what's possible.

A good example that's still a bit far out, but that I'm confident is significant. I held a summit of peer-to-peer networking developers, and when we were sitting around having a beer afterwards, a young FreeNet developer said to Kevin Lenzo (who was there because of his early work on IRC infobots): "You sound familiar."

Kevin mentioned that he was the developer of festvox, an open source speech synthesis package, and that he was the source of one of the voices distributed with the package. "Oh, that's why. I listen to you all the time. I pipe IRC to festival so I can listen to it in the background when I'm coding."

Now I'll guarantee that lots of people will routinely be converting text to speech in a few years, and I know it because the hackers are already doing it. It's been possible for a long time, but now it's ripening toward the mainstream.

" ... I know several who have started using Darwin on Intel hardware as there[sic] Unix underpinnings of choice ... "

Todd Hoff writes:

I'm a Windows-only user and I plan to switch to the Mac on my next purchase because of XP's DRM approach. Using XP would be like voluntarily entering a jail cell and closing the door.

From an interface perspective, I don't find the Mac superior.

Amen to your DRM concerns. Apple has been relatively more enlightened on the subject of DRM, recognizing that most users are fundamentally honest, and unwilling to support the extreme position of fear-mongering media executives.

When industry gets handed lemons on this scale, it has no choice but to turn them into marketing. A common reckoning is that one-third of software is used illegally, but not every theft represents a lost sale. If economic theory has any claim on the real world, Microsoft's pricing should naturally gravitate toward producing an optimum amount of theft. That is, thieves who wouldn't use the product if they had to pay for it, but who might become future customers or who become part of a network of users that makes the software more valuable to legitimate buyers.
...
A sore subject at its antitrust trial, for instance, was Microsoft's practice of awarding large discounts to computer makers who bought a Windows license for every machine they shipped, whether or not Windows was actually loaded. This was supposed to be proof of monopolistic intent, but the only real competitor for Windows is a Windows bootleg. Microsoft's pricing strategy was designed to induce customers not to steal.
...
The entertainment industry is still getting used to the idea that anybody who wants to take the trouble can get its products for free. But as Microsoft has been showing for years, that's no excuse for not making bundles of money.

"For Microsoft to take the existing state of Bluetooth and embed it into XP would just be begging for trouble," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner, in Stamford, Conn. "Bluetooth interoperability is a complete disaster ... by and large, one Bluetooth device is not going to work with another Bluetooth device, because the specifications don't work. We need someone to take the lead with this thing and fix it."

Also, see Wi-Fi News: News for 8/1/2002:

Note also how casual the Bluetooth folk are about certifying interoperable: it's more like the regular meetings of Esperanto speakers arguing on the fine points of the language -- or perhaps Unitarians -- than, say, the Academie Français. That is, certification to Bluetooth is left up the individual company's testing procedures. This is unfortunate, as the Wi-Fi mark has been one of the single biggest factors in coalescing the 802.11b protocol into something that businesses and consumers can rely on. Bluetooth will sputter if interoperability certification doesn't become one of the requirements of the mark. No consumer will want to use Bluetooth if buying two or more identically marked devices doesn't offer complete intercompatibility.

I'm using an 802.11b network with 128-bit encryption, meaningless passwords (not "admin" or "router"), and the WAP will recognize only the MAC of the portable (yes, that can be spoofed, but it keeps out random strangers). Finally, the access point is in the basement, so its reception zone is mostly up, not horizontal.

There could be specific weaknesses in my brands of hardware, but that's another problem.

Am I mistaken that this provides reasonably good security?

Short answer: Yes, you are mistaken.

Longer answers: Here, here, or here.

Assuming your neighbors are clueless luddites who have to call you when their printer runs out of paper, WEP will prevent them from borrowing you Internet uplink bandwidth. Against a determined attacker, WEP, MAC filtering, and most of the other features built into modern 802.11a/b APs are ineffective.

On the other hand, you may not care.

Eg, my home machines are all secured and I do regular audits and scans. Any sensitive communication (eg, logging into a machine at work) happens over ssh and so is protected. So the only thing a script kiddie can do is watch my web traffic (which he is welcome to do), borrow my bandwidth (which would probably be noticed, and maybe try DoSing my home network (which is easy to fix).

All of the above was also true when my home network was wired. The move to 802.11b just traded a decrease in security for an increase in convenence (ah, reading /. while sitting on the deck).

As Schneier has said, security just buys you time. In the case of 802.11 (or for that matter, any wireless protocol), it takes significantly less time for the security to be breached than it would if the wired protocol was in use. If that worries you, don't use 802.11 networking, cordless phones, or cell phones, or adjust the sensitivity of your traffic to suit the medium.

Here is a link about using wireless mobile at Starbucks. Here is a Wall Street article about it, and a brief intro. Here's an article praising the idea.

Here is a link about using wireless mobile at Starbucks. Here is a Wall Street article about it, and a brief intro. Here's an article praising the idea.

This article talks about the health risks involved with WiFi.

An excerpt:

The next time someone warns you about the cell phone or Wi-Fi card or microwave oven say, honey, there's no enough energy by the time it hits me to change the temperature of water a millionth of a degree.

Essentially, you have to be ~1/10 of an inch away from the source to get any potentially harmful effects. You're probably safe...

[Dewayne] Hendricks [of the FCC] pointed out a simple case in which hams could shut down an extensive area. "Ham television is becoming more and more popular, the equipment's becoming cheaper; lots of hams like to broadcast," Hendricks said. "It's a pretty sexy application."

Hendricks said that the San Francisco Bay Area already has a number of ham TV repeaters. "A bunch of hams could deploy TV broadcasts" up to 1.5 kilowatts (kW). "We could effectively shut down 802.11 in the entire Bay Area, and it would be perfectly legal and there wouldn't be anything you could do about it." Part 15 devices like Wi-Fi radios are limited to less than 1 watt (W), and many devices use 30 to 100 milliwatts (mW). (When you start talking about radiated power output, these numbers are only starting points for calculations.)

This move, by itself, may not revolutionize wireless net in the UK, but it's certainly a step in the right direction and, perhaps, will turn out to be a critical step toward what will turn out to be a revolution.

Sites like this one show what appears to me to be a continuous stream of similar news. The announcement of publicly accessible Wireless LANs, free, public and private, is on the rise. I believe that this is a trend that will not only continue, but grow. I also believe that just a few years down the road, wireless access (esp. in metropolitan areas, of course) will be the norm, not the exception. However, I think the 'free to the public' efforts will not be the norm; they are financially unsupportable and often of questionable legality (upstream provider TOS stuff).

isn't it ironic? don't ya think?

Found Here:

"Today beej and I went back to Linux World Expo to hear Rob Malda, founder of slashdot.org, speak at the OSDN booth. I felt kinda bad for him because nobody had any real questions for him. I made some up on the spot. Is running slashdot worth the personal attacks? Have you thought about a subscription model? Those were my only two good ones. "

then you should go to their site, which was completely unmentioned in the article: wwl page

From the orignal source (http://picto.weblogger.com)

While the SETI At Home Project taps the idle CPUs of millions of personal computers, the worldwide lexicon enlists the help of internet users who are logged in, but not chatting. Think of this as distributed human computation.

"Distributed human computation"? Is that like using up all those spare brain cells you weren't using right now?

Looking to the Apple-"Quanta" aspect... I'll consider that you'd quantize this.

I think that's Heather Havrilesky, she sounds Russian? Maybe masculine. TEHEHEHE. How did I know? Google. and I know she talks about Jon Katzs sometimes. She is the famous polly@suck.com, seriously. But now that suck is gone, she went to plastic I think, (which is still wired?). But her blog is on TinyLittlePenis I AM SERIOUS. Ask brian.

I also submitted a review of this book to Slashdot a week or two ago, but mine got knocked back. My review was substantially more in-depth, but far less complimentary.

Anyway, you can read my review of Homepage Usability here.

Charles Miller

He recommends Popup Killer for you Windows people.

Ortek's MCK-91 (also called MCK-800) line is fairly good. I've been using one for about three weeks: Its a laptop-layout keyboard, featuring Fn and friends. Comes on USB and PS/2 versions, USB featuring two extra ports. Except for the Windows keys, it seems it meets most of your requirements. I like the extra space i've got on my keyboard.

It comes with extra keys, but i didn't mind running yet (know when you look to a driver cdrom and you feel it's really crappy? yes, i got that feeling).

Hm... i've got a picture on it on my weblog.

MCK-90 is reviewed here.. It's the USB version.