"(An EPA/OSHA fine of sorts not limited to one nation's territory.) The trick would be to get the all of the advanced nations to agree on such a thing."
This method would be easily sidestepped by creating a third company to develop the needed resources. It could be a majority owned, "publicly traded" company, and possibly even be a shared interest between companies (i.e. Cingular.) It's business as usual, with no direct responsibility.
There could even be three or four of these corporations running the same game for a single company, allowing any future PR issues to be addressed much like the way US companies have sidestepped responsibility in the recent safety issues in China i.e. It's not us, it's our suppliers...so we've stopped using X company, and switched to Y," even though the companies are in fact identical.
Competition? I worked for http://www.enhance.com/ a while back. The sell PPC advertising on junk search engines. Not quite the same thing, and much lower click-through than Google or Overture...but a possible alternative to the newly alienated market.
The Walmart in New Orleans had a perimeter shopping cart defense mechanism...that kicked in before you reached the end of the parking lot. Since not all the wheels locked, I made a point of dragging them as far away from the store as possible.
IMHO, Aldi's cart return system has worked pretty well in KC.
More than one issue per bill? Far from uncommon, it's expected. It's called pork. It's standard practice for pushing bills through, especially through the executive branch. That's why the line-item veto briefly used by Pres. Clinton was declared unconstitutional.
For the record, National ID scared the hell out of me.
"Actually before Windows went mainstream computers had fairly small reset buttons, but with the advent of Windows came the practise of frequent resetting."
Do you really need any more reason to buy Windows than this? Thing of the innovations Windows has brought into the world through the amount of time spent patching various "features."
Like the cure for cancer, AIDS is a common banner to rally around, although 25 million people have died of AIDS since it was first recognized in 1981, while malaria causes disease in approximately 400 million people every year. (Wiki AIDS and Malaria)
Everyone has their pet projects, and each can be argued as more important than the other, but in the end technology intended for one purpose benefits other areas as well.
This excludes NASA's research, which has produced nothing of applicable scientific or medical value, except of course those neat temperature sensitive foam beds. Who really needs MRIs, CT scans, or improved biopsy techniques anyway? http://newemployee.hq.nasa.gov/html/hr/spinoff.htm
I can't say that I would "speak as an expert," and anyone who can should feel free to correct me, but as I'm leaving New Orleans in a day or so, would think that covering the bottom portions of a first floor wall with water-resistant sheet rock, aka "green board" would do wonders in the event of another flood, and possibly save you the trouble of gutting the entire house again. Of course, I'm renting in the Garden District, and don't really have to worry about flooding anyway. I presume you're looking at slightly lower elevations.
As for the network, go wireless and don't secure it. No one else does, and I haven't paid for my severe abuse of bandwidth via streaming video and torrent downloads since the day I got here.:)
While you're at it, leave the default password unchanged on your router. QoS is a wonderful tool for the above adventures.
I had a similar experience during my employment for a few shady companies in Utah (which as a Mormon, I am becoming quite ashamed of how many scams are based out of the state.)
A company who wrote poorly written content articles on topics (real estate) and sold adspace for those articles with the vague insinuation that the articles would rank "highly" on Google/Yahoo in turn driving click-through traffic to the sponsor. Nice concept, but it didn't work, and they knew it. The company wasn't too far removed the the "optimization" practices these cyber-squatters are using. In the end, they fell victim to a "contest" Yahoo hosted with some prize for the team who could place their pages highest in the natural (non-sponsored) listings. Yahoo then took the tricks each site used and removed them from their algorithm accordingly. I expect a similar adjustment in the near future, but it is, and always will be cat-and-mouse.
A second business (enhance.com) sold paid listings on "second-tier search engines" specifically excluding MSN, Yahoo and Google, but including About.com, Ask.com and anything else related to Google's Adsense/Adwords or Overture. The click rates were high, (pay some guy in India or good old fashioned bots.) Conversion and sales rates were atrocious and in the end cost more than the big boys per sale. They also failed to mention that the reason people used the smaller search engines was directly due to browser-hijacking. They back it up with studies and recommendations on their site, but fail to mention that they are 5 years old, and several of the "case studies" have completely changed.
Towards the end of my month working there, they started to move into the domain-squatting arena, justifying it by saying that a large number of searches came from "topic related domain searching" rather than traditional search engines. The also started venturing into "opt-in" mailing lists we've all come to know and love, especially since this preceded the SPAM act.
Spyware and browser hijacking is becoming less common thanks to Spybot and Adaware, but it's about time companies started to enforce their trademarks and protecting themselves from this kind of domain squatting crap, and the search engines do their part to fix it.
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Of course this is before the bill allowing cell phone users (apparently not owners) to legally unlock their phones clears the Senate.
We gave you one of those expanding foam animal gel-caps instead...oops.
"(An EPA/OSHA fine of sorts not limited to one nation's territory.) The trick would be to get the all of the advanced nations to agree on such a thing."
This method would be easily sidestepped by creating a third company to develop the needed resources. It could be a majority owned, "publicly traded" company, and possibly even be a shared interest between companies (i.e. Cingular.) It's business as usual, with no direct responsibility.
There could even be three or four of these corporations running the same game for a single company, allowing any future PR issues to be addressed much like the way US companies have sidestepped responsibility in the recent safety issues in China i.e. It's not us, it's our suppliers...so we've stopped using X company, and switched to Y," even though the companies are in fact identical.
Competition?
I worked for http://www.enhance.com/ a while back. The sell PPC advertising on junk search engines. Not quite the same thing, and much lower click-through than Google or Overture...but a possible alternative to the newly alienated market.
The Walmart in New Orleans had a perimeter shopping cart defense mechanism...that kicked in before you reached the end of the parking lot. Since not all the wheels locked, I made a point of dragging them as far away from the store as possible. IMHO, Aldi's cart return system has worked pretty well in KC.
More than one issue per bill? Far from uncommon, it's expected. It's called pork. It's standard practice for pushing bills through, especially through the executive branch. That's why the line-item veto briefly used by Pres. Clinton was declared unconstitutional.
For the record, National ID scared the hell out of me.
"Actually before Windows went mainstream computers had fairly small reset buttons, but with the advent of Windows came the practise of frequent resetting." Do you really need any more reason to buy Windows than this? Thing of the innovations Windows has brought into the world through the amount of time spent patching various "features."
Like the cure for cancer, AIDS is a common banner to rally around, although 25 million people have died of AIDS since it was first recognized in 1981, while malaria causes disease in approximately 400 million people every year. (Wiki AIDS and Malaria)
m
Everyone has their pet projects, and each can be argued as more important than the other, but in the end technology intended for one purpose benefits other areas as well.
This excludes NASA's research, which has produced nothing of applicable scientific or medical value, except of course those neat temperature sensitive foam beds. Who really needs MRIs, CT scans, or improved biopsy techniques anyway?
http://newemployee.hq.nasa.gov/html/hr/spinoff.ht
I can't say that I would "speak as an expert," and anyone who can should feel free to correct me, but as I'm leaving New Orleans in a day or so, would think that covering the bottom portions of a first floor wall with water-resistant sheet rock, aka "green board" would do wonders in the event of another flood, and possibly save you the trouble of gutting the entire house again. Of course, I'm renting in the Garden District, and don't really have to worry about flooding anyway. I presume you're looking at slightly lower elevations. As for the network, go wireless and don't secure it. No one else does, and I haven't paid for my severe abuse of bandwidth via streaming video and torrent downloads since the day I got here. :)
While you're at it, leave the default password unchanged on your router. QoS is a wonderful tool for the above adventures.
Genius becomes insanity, confidence becomes arrogance, dreams become delusions. It's all in your perspective.
I've been stuck in N'awlins for too long. They don't believe in Barbeque sauce here...just some blasphemy more consistent with flavored ketchup.
Why waste perfectly good kindling? This is KC damnit! Slap some Gate's BBQ sauce the grill and burn up a few steaks while you're at it.
I had a similar experience during my employment for a few shady companies in Utah (which as a Mormon, I am becoming quite ashamed of how many scams are based out of the state.)
.02
A company who wrote poorly written content articles on topics (real estate) and sold adspace for those articles with the vague insinuation that the articles would rank "highly" on Google/Yahoo in turn driving click-through traffic to the sponsor. Nice concept, but it didn't work, and they knew it. The company wasn't too far removed the the "optimization" practices these cyber-squatters are using. In the end, they fell victim to a "contest" Yahoo hosted with some prize for the team who could place their pages highest in the natural (non-sponsored) listings. Yahoo then took the tricks each site used and removed them from their algorithm accordingly. I expect a similar adjustment in the near future, but it is, and always will be cat-and-mouse.
A second business (enhance.com) sold paid listings on "second-tier search engines" specifically excluding MSN, Yahoo and Google, but including About.com, Ask.com and anything else related to Google's Adsense/Adwords or Overture. The click rates were high, (pay some guy in India or good old fashioned bots.) Conversion and sales rates were atrocious and in the end cost more than the big boys per sale. They also failed to mention that the reason people used the smaller search engines was directly due to browser-hijacking. They back it up with studies and recommendations on their site, but fail to mention that they are 5 years old, and several of the "case studies" have completely changed.
Towards the end of my month working there, they started to move into the domain-squatting arena, justifying it by saying that a large number of searches came from "topic related domain searching" rather than traditional search engines. The also started venturing into "opt-in" mailing lists we've all come to know and love, especially since this preceded the SPAM act.
Spyware and browser hijacking is becoming less common thanks to Spybot and Adaware, but it's about time companies started to enforce their trademarks and protecting themselves from this kind of domain squatting crap, and the search engines do their part to fix it.
Just my