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2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship is Open
Fortran IV writes "Registration is open until June 15 for the 2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship, to be held Saturday, June 17, 2006—it's 25 or so mind-bending pencil-and-paper puzzles that you have 2-1/2 very short hours to solve. The USPC is a qualifying test to choose 2 members for the U.S. team at the 2006 World Puzzle Championship to be held in Borovets, Bulgaria in October. For a mild taste of the puzzles try the 2006 Practice Test (as has been noted here in the past, if you can't get the Practice Test open you should probably give the real thing a pass!) For more of a workout the real tests for 2005 and 2004 are still available."
See for yourself!
Google dumps news sites that criticize radical Islam Search engine giant Google has cut off its news relationship with a number of online news publications that include frank discussions of radical Islam - the New Media Journal becoming the latest termination, as its owner just discovered. Frank Salvato, who began the agreement with Google News last September, said he received a reply from the company's help desk indicating there had been complaints of "hate speech" on his site, as first reported by media watchdog Newsbusters.org. Newsbusters says it has observed a pattern of intolerance toward conservative sites that deal with radical Islam and terrorism. Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message March 29 informing him: "Upon recent review, we've found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News." Two weeks later, Jim Sesi's MichNews.com was cut off, with Google providing three examples of "hate speech" by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr. Newsbusters commented: "At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess." The media watchdog noted columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin wrote in February 2005 her difficulties in becoming part of Google News. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs had a similar complaint. When Google News launched its beta site in April 2002, it said its mission was to construct an unbiased news engine free of human intervention using new methods of aggregating news from sources worldwide. According to the April Nielsen/NetRatings report, 49 percent of all searches conducted in the U.S. in March 2006 were carried out on Google. Along with the dropping of conservative news providers, Google has received other complaints of liberal bias. Last June, a conservative book publisher said Google rejected his ad for a book critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton while continuing to accept anti-Bush themes. Eric Jackson, CEO of World Ahead, said his ads for "Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine" were rejected, without further explanation, due to "unacceptable content." As WND reported, 98 percent of all political donations by Google employees went to support Democrats, and as a matter of fact, Al Gore is now a senior adviser to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave the maximum legal limit of donations to Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry and to primary candidate Howard Dean. Schmidt also contributed the maximum amount to Sen. Clinton, whose role in helping her husband intimidate his female accusers is addressed in the new book. In May 2005, Google rejected an attempt by the conservative activist group RightMarch.com to run ads critical of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., while continuing to run attack ads against besieged House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. Also, Google agreed to allow the communist Chinese government to have the search engine block "objectionable" search terms such as "democracy." In addition, the company came under fire for an editorial decision to rank news articles in search results by "quality," giving preferential placement to large and predominately liberal media outlets such as CNN and the BBC over conservative news sources, even if they are more recent or pertinent. Full Article Back to Top
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
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This might get bashed, but here it goes W00T!!!Bulgaria! I am Bulgarian. It is good to know that SlashDot knows where Bulgaria is. My hat is off to you all! Cypress
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