You'd think this worked by charging monitored businesses. No. It works by charging viewers to report crimes.. Read the Terms of Service. It costs viewers £1 to report an event. The captured image is sent to the camera customer by phone. The recipient rates the report, but the viewer doesn't get credit back if the report was good. The only payoff is the the monthly prize of £1000. They're going to take in far more from the viewers than they pay out.
Viewers do get a credit of £3 per month they can use for reporting, so it's not totally pay to play.
Each viewer is shown four random cameras at a time. Every 20 minutes, or if they report something, they get a new set of cameras. So viewers never get to see the results of their reports.
That's a horrible Photoshop paste job. Does that head even go with that body?
There's a wry New Yorker article about Pascal Dangin, the leading photo retoucher for the New York fashion industry. The print version of that article has before and after pictures. He's much better than whomever did that botched Ralph Lauren ad.
Dangin is much more subtle. Although he's been criticized for slimming down Madonna's arm muscles.
This may be having an effect. I'm seeing a small decline in major domains being exploited by phishing scams. That monitors phishing attacks which use major domains to give themselves convincing-looking URLs.
In the year and a half we've been monitoring this, the number of sites being exploited has dropped from 174 to today's value of 37. We nag sites that have problems to tighten up their security. It's working. Ebay used to have a security hole which allowed creating URLs under "ebay.com" that redirected elsewhere. That's been fixed.
The "short URL" companies are now much more aggressive in detecting phishing and kicking off those URLs. Bugs at Yahoo and Microsoft Live have been fixed. Geocities had problems, but they're shutting down at the end of the month.
Now if Google would just kick off this phony Habbo login page implemented using Google Spreadsheets, all the biggest names would be OK. If anyone from Google is reading this, please pass that along to someone with a clue. (Yes, it's been reported via the usual "Google abuse" mechanism.)
I went over to EA for a technical talk once and "won" a raffle for a copy of EA Golf for the XBox 360. (It was more like "second prize is two copies of EA Golf".)
It's about time someone did this. People have been talking about real nanotechnology for about two decades. Most of what's now called "nanotechnology" is surface chemistry of finely divided powders, or simple self-assembling structures like carbon nanotubes. Real nanotechnology, useful mechanisms made of deliberately placed individual atoms, hasn't been happening much. A DNA reader is one of the few applications where building a very small number of devices at the atomic scale is useful. You don't need self-replicating assemblers turning out vast numbers of nanomachines. Small numbers of devices can be created, slowly, with STM-type devices.
At least readers are safe. DNA writers are going to be an issue.
It's not that hard to do high-definition monochrome TV. You just need to crank up the horizontal sweep rate and use higher-bandwidth amplifiers. Color, though, requires more holes in the shadow mask or stripes on the screen, and the alignment tolerances are tighter.
France had 819-line monochrome broadcast TV in the 1950s. But with the transition to color around 1960, Europe went to a uniform 625 lines. Kind of sad, but making special color TV tubes for France just wasn't worth the trouble.
"Edison's Conquest of Mars" - arguably the first space opera. Disintegrators, spaceships, space suits - all the usual stuff, but for the first time. Not a great read, but important historically.
"Metropolis" - the original silent, un-colorized version.
"The Shockwave Rider", by Norman Spinrad - way, way ahead of its time on "cyberspace".
The "Collier's Space Program". In the 1950s, Collier's Magazine had a series of issues proposing a space program, with beautiful illustrations. Von Braun was the technical consultant. Disney made documentaries about it. That built public support for the creation of NASA.
The FTC was totally out to lunch during the Bush years, especially on false advertising. Looks like they're back.
A few more things they have to catch up on:
Enforcement of correct price advertising. The price most prominently advertised must be the actual price at which you can buy the thing. Not the "price excluding various fees". Not the "special introductory price that goes up in 3 months".
The FTC used to be strict about that, and they need to crack down again. They'll probably also have to get after the scam of advertising a low price and tacking on huge "shipping fees", a popular scam on Amazon.
Prohibiting "up to" number advertising without equally prominent "at least" numbers. No more "High speed Internet up to 18 megabits/second". Speeds should be listed as "Speeds from 1 to 18 Megabits/second".
DHS's cyber security operation is headed by Phil Reitinger, who's from Microsoft. So DHS won't be allowed to do anything that would seriously impact Microsoft's business models. Which means nothing significant will happen.
Here's his list of priorities. You'll see the problem.
The first guy in that job, Amit Yoran, came out and said the big problem was weak security in Microsoft operating systems. He was ignored, then quit in disgust. The next guy was Cisco's lobbyist, who was not only useless, the job was downgraded during his tenure.
The listed registrant owns the domain. If you're using a "privacy service", you don't own the domain; you're just leasing it from the privacy service. Customers of RegisterFly, the domain registrar that collapsed, found this out the hard way. Many customers lost domains in that collapse.
Google considers "private registration" as a factor in determining whether a site meets their "quality guidelines". Google can't be as tough on this as they should be, though, because Google's revenue model, AdWords, requires a large number of ad-heavy sites.
Bing could be tougher; it's too soon to tell.
We take an even harder line on anonymous businesses at SiteTruth, considering them "bottom feeders".
Realistically, putting your real name and address in WHOIS info doesn't hurt you unless you're a crook. My real name and address are on all my domains, and I get maybe one phone call every two years, perhaps a letter or two a year, that seem to come from WHOIS data.
I had one threat, back in the 1990s; he's out of business and I'm still here. Any e-mail spam is being filtered out by the usual filters. If you're paranoid, get a P.O. box; that's legal.
There are engineering details to building a nuclear weapon that aren't well known. But they're not all that deeply hidden, either. A few minutes with Google gets you the basics.
A big, dumb Hiroshima-type implosion bomb made of uranium isn't that hard. Plutonium bombs are tougher to build; more compression is necessary. The later designs have reflectors, tampers, and quite a few layers. Considerable simulation is required to get the design right. Of course,
the US and the USSR designed their nuclear arsenals with computers in the 1 MIPS range; today, any laptop has enough CPU power for bomb design. Some older hydrodynamic software for this is available, in FORTRAN. Note the test cases provided, "Detonation example" and "SSTAFF warhead".
Making the components is a pain because many of the materials involved are radioactive, poisonous, flammable metals, or high explosives. Machining uranium is difficult. However, there's a convenient how-to guide, "Machining of Uranium and Uranium Alloys", written by a head machinist at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant and distributed by the U.S. Government. That guide concludes "With proper techniques and safety precautions, uranium and uranium alloys can be safely machined by most shops." Exotic techniques like robotic handling and machining in a liquid bath weren't required. They didn't even use a glove box back then.
Machining plutonium is more difficult. US plants have had troubles with that for decades, and didn't even have a facility that could do it between 1989, when Rocky Flats shut down, and 2002, when Los Alamos started up. But Iran is taking the uranium route, so they don't have to worry about that.
The explosive components have to be made very uniform, to get the uniform compression required. This was a big problem for Los Alamos in the early days, but now that everyone has plastic explosives, it's easier. There's also a problem with the explosion blowing out at the gaps between explosive blocks, but there's a simple trick to fix that. (It's classified in the US, but has leaked out from the USSR side.)
The necessity for krytron detonator switches is overrated. A krytron is a gas-filled tube device from the era of the thyatron. Basically, you need a switch for about 1000 amps at 1KV that turns on in a few nanoseconds. Conveniently, the U.S. Government distributes a design using standard IGBT semiconductors. That's 15 years old; you could probably downsize that design (10" of rack space) today.
Most of the complexity in bomb design appears as bombs are made physically smaller. Truck-bomb sized units are 1940s technology. Smaller warheads require late 1950s technology, and the US did about a hundred full-scale nuclear tests in the 1950s to get that right. Some of that can be replaced with simulation. Eventually, you have to set one off to be confident it will work.
As Ted Taylor (who designed many US bombs) once said, "Everyone (who built an atomic bomb) has succeeded on the first try."
Materials experiment - tests how materials withstand space conditions. Been there, done that with the Long Duration Exposure Facility in 1984-1990.
Capillary flow in microgravity - OK, but why?
Magnetorheologic fluids in microgravity - cute, but magnetic particle clutches were used in IBM printers back to the 1960s.
Interferometer for ambient air - may be useful, but didn't need to be developed in space.
Crystal growth - lots of crystal growth work. Crystals grown in zero G are more uniform than ones grown in 1G. But not useful enough to justify launch costs.
Bird eggs in space - zero G doesn't seem to affect development much. They didn't hatch the birds, though.
Plants in space - grew thale cress from seed to seed. Grows OK in zero G, no major changes. Seeds a little bigger. Also a dwarf-wheat-in-space project, which works OK.
Cell growth in space - some cell cultures grow well in orbit, some don't. Bubbles caught in the middle of a material are a problem.
Microbes in space - growth about the same as in 1 G. Many equipment breakdowns.
Microencapsuluation in space - making liquid-filled microballoons as part of drug production. Microencapsuluation is known, but in zero-G, some things can be microencapsulated that won't hold together long enough in 1G. Possibly useful.
Soldering in zero G - turns out to produce more flaws than in 1 G, because bubbles stay in the solder.
Active rack isolation - people moving around make things vibrate, so they had to put in a stable platform that compensated. That work would better have been done without humans around.
Human research program - why living in zero G for too long is not good for you.
Observing the earth - done far better by satellites.
"Educational activities" - NASA PR.
This is many billions of dollars worth of work, remember.
In London, they built a 12 mile long tunnel from neat the terminus out to the industrial wastelands of the east.
I know about that. It was surprising how much construction was necessary, considering the amount of rail right of way going into London.
London has about ten times the population of San Francisco. It's not clear that San Francisco can generate enough traffic to justify the connection.
There are some wealthy communities on the San Francisco peninsula bitching about having high speed rail zooming past their houses. But they don't want to pay the costs of tunneling themselves.
There's a real problem reaching San Francisco. There's no good right of way for high speed rail.
The I-5 route to Sacramento looks OK, but reaching Oakland or San Francisco looks tough.
The only existing right of way to San Francisco is two tracks wide and used for commuter rail.
There are houses up to the tracks on both sides, and much grumbling since the rail line got
an upgrade a few years ago, with over ten trains an hour and higher speeds. The idea
of stacking an elevated high speed line atop the existing commuter line has residents annoyed.
(The commuter line is at grade, with dozens of railroad crossings.)
There's a big issue in San Francisco over whether to build a train terminal "downtown".
Getting the last half mile into downtown San Francisco is very expensive. It would be
much cheaper to stop half a mile away, at the existing station. Actually, "downtown"
is migrating towards the existing train station, and most new construction is closer
to the existing station than "downtown". So this could work out OK.
The problem is paying for reporting. "News is what someone doesn't want you to know. All else is publicity". Free news has destroyed newspapers, but hasn't created a new source of revenue to pay for reporting.
If you don't pay reporters, all you get is PR, punditry, and dreck, plus an occasional video of a disaster. Unfortunately, this creates the illusion of news coverage.
Look at the top news stories on Google News right now:
"Brazilians Rejoice as Rio Is Chosen to Host Olympic Games" - basic source is a press release from the International Olympic Committee.
"Viewers react with sympathy, disgust for Letterman" - reaction to police report
"Experts hope H1N1 will spur effort on universal jab" - from a letter to Science by flu researchers.
"US immigrant population flat, Census numbers show" - from U.S. Government press release.
"Phillips' incest claim draws attention to taboo" - punditry
"Stocks fall following disappointing jobs report" - analysis of financial numbers
"Survivors of Indonesian quake found; 3000 missing" - actual reporting by an on the scene reporter
"Republicans Seize on Jobs as Proof Obama's Policies Have Failed" - punditry
"Iran Nuclear Talks Elicit Optimism, Skepticism" - punditry from Voice of America
"Calif asks feds for $4.7 billion for speedy trains" - from California governor press release
Only one of those stories comes from actual reporting, as opposed to publicity.
Google has been experimenting with ad targeting based on credit rating. ""Let's say we have an advertiser who wants to reach consumers with a high FICO score who applied for mortgages in the first quarter," Korsunsky says. "We can provide the advertiser with a list of Web sites on our Google content network that index against this segment.... "Marketers expanding into a term like 'credit card' into a campaign -- they should have their ad copy prequalify a good credit shopper," Korsunsky says. "So adding copy like 'have good credit, apply for a card today' would let marketers filter out people without good credit."
The UN already has the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union, which do for post offices, telephony, and radio roughly what ICANN does for the Internet. The ITU does a decent job, assigning country codes, negotiating the rules which interconnect phone systems across borders, and keeping radio broadcasters from conflicting. Nobody thinks about the Universal Postal Union much, but the fact that you can mail a letter to almost any country on earth didn't happen by accident.
Much of what the UN really does is to act as an umbrella organization for the dull and boring mechanics of infrastructure coordination. The diplomatic level gets all the attention, but there's necessary grunt work going on in the background.
If I want to spider a single web site, many sites have rate-limiters that kick in and will block me after a while. This would allow me to hit it from multiple machines.
The better web spiders run very slowly as seen from each site. At one time, Google only read about one page every few minutes per site. The Internet was slower then. Cuil's crawler is known to be overly aggressive, but that's a design flaw. (Too much distribution, not enough coordination.)
At SiteTruth, we never read more than 20 pages from a single site, rate limit to one new page every 2 seconds, and read no more than 3 pages in parallel. And we obey "robots.txt". We don't hide the identity of our bot; the user-agent string is "SiteTruth.com site rating system", and we list that with "Bots vs. Browsers". That seems to be enough to avoid blocking. We see some sites that are very slow, but they're very slow when seen from an ordinary browser. If sites are blocking your crawler, it must be very aggressive.
We're just looking for the name and address of the business behind the site, though, checking "About", "Help", "Contact", and other places a human would look for that info. We're not trying to suck up the site's entire content.
It's striking how far copyright is stretched in the entertainment industry. It goes way beyond "Look and Feel". You can't write a third-party "Harry Potter" book. "Quantum of Solace" has nothing but the title taken from the Ian Fleming short story. (Few people have ever read that short story, which consists of some British Brahman in a Caribbean outpost of the British Empire telling Bond a story about someone's failed marriage.) Yet copyright has been held to cover such a long reach.
As I point out occasionally, information technology is like stationary engineering, but a century later. Stationary engineering was the field to be in around 1870 or so, when factories were starting to get advanced technology like electric motors, and really big steam engines were coming into use. Young boys saw that big engine at the Centennial Exhibition in 1874 and wanted to be stationary engineers.
It impressed people at the time that the big engine needed only one guy running it, and he was usually sitting on the platform
reading a newspaper.
By 1910 or so, you just ordered motors and panelboards from General Electric, hooked the gear up according to the directions, and bought power from the local Edison company. It was a routine job, but still a growth area. There was plenty of work and the pay was good, but it wasn't cutting edge any more.
Today, there are still stationary engineers and electricians, and it's an union job. Stop by the boiler room and say hi.
It's getting kind of dated, but my main machine still runs Windows 2000, and has nothing on it that updates automatically. It's rather peaceful - very little unwanted drama.
I have the latest Firefox, the latest Open Office, the latest Python, the latest MySQL, the latest Sumatra PDF, the latest Blender, etc. - all the important stuff still runs on Windows 2000. Dreamweaver 8, Photoshop Elements, and other basic graphics tools run. Even rather exotic programs like the LTSpice circuit simulator, the AVR micro controller development system, and the Tortise SVN client work fine.
Really, Microsoft hasn't done much substantive to their OS in the last decade. Most of the stuff since then has either been cosmetic or has made things worse.
This looks like an attempt to monetize a botnet.
What, exactly, do the people running their "client" get out of this? Do they know they're sucking bandwidth, and possibly being billed for it, on behalf of someone else?
I run a web spider of sorts. And I know the people who run a big search engine. Reading the web sites isn't the bottleneck. Analyzing the results and building the database is. Outsourcing the reading part doesn't buy you much. If this just did a crawl, it would be of very limited value. That's not what it does.
What they're really doing is offering a service that lets their customers run the customer's Java code on other people's machines in the botnet. That's worrisome. There are some security limits, which might even work. Supposedly, all the Java apps can do is look at crawled pages and phone results home. Right.
This thing uses the Plura botnet."Plura® is a grid computing system. We contract with affiliates, who are owners of web pages, software, and other services, to distribute our grid computing code. We utilize the excess resources of peripheral computers that are browsing the internet when such browsing leads to a web page of one of our affiliates. That web page has imbedded code that allows the visitor to participate in the grid computing process. We also utilize embedded code in software and other services to allow such participation." Not good.
The main infection vector is apparently the Digsby chat client, which comes bundled with various crapware. The Digsby feature list does not mention that Plura is in their package.
This thing needs to be treated as hostile code by firewalls and virus scanners.
NASA, having failed at their basic job of putting stuff into space, is trying, yet again, to find another mission that doesn't actually require making a working launch system.
NASA needs a major downsizing. Closing half the "centers" would be a good start.
Back before ease of use eclipsed security, I once encountered a military system where the access terminal was surrounded by a small fence. Opening the gate in the fence forced an immediate logout.
Nobody would tolerate that today. Except, maybe, for an ATM.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd think this worked by charging monitored businesses. No. It works by charging viewers to report crimes.. Read the Terms of Service. It costs viewers £1 to report an event. The captured image is sent to the camera customer by phone. The recipient rates the report, but the viewer doesn't get credit back if the report was good. The only payoff is the the monthly prize of £1000. They're going to take in far more from the viewers than they pay out.
Viewers do get a credit of £3 per month they can use for reporting, so it's not totally pay to play.
Each viewer is shown four random cameras at a time. Every 20 minutes, or if they report something, they get a new set of cameras. So viewers never get to see the results of their reports.
That's a horrible Photoshop paste job. Does that head even go with that body?
There's a wry New Yorker article about Pascal Dangin, the leading photo retoucher for the New York fashion industry. The print version of that article has before and after pictures. He's much better than whomever did that botched Ralph Lauren ad.
Dangin is much more subtle. Although he's been criticized for slimming down Madonna's arm muscles.
This may be having an effect. I'm seeing a small decline in major domains being exploited by phishing scams. That monitors phishing attacks which use major domains to give themselves convincing-looking URLs.
In the year and a half we've been monitoring this, the number of sites being exploited has dropped from 174 to today's value of 37. We nag sites that have problems to tighten up their security. It's working. Ebay used to have a security hole which allowed creating URLs under "ebay.com" that redirected elsewhere. That's been fixed. The "short URL" companies are now much more aggressive in detecting phishing and kicking off those URLs. Bugs at Yahoo and Microsoft Live have been fixed. Geocities had problems, but they're shutting down at the end of the month.
Now if Google would just kick off this phony Habbo login page implemented using Google Spreadsheets, all the biggest names would be OK. If anyone from Google is reading this, please pass that along to someone with a clue. (Yes, it's been reported via the usual "Google abuse" mechanism.)
Those are just toys, and toys at low price points. They're too weak to do much except look around and transmit video and audio.
Now look at the PR2 Personal Robot. That has real manipulation capabiilty and can be teleoperated over WiFi. Now there's a potential problem.
I went over to EA for a technical talk once and "won" a raffle for a copy of EA Golf for the XBox 360. (It was more like "second prize is two copies of EA Golf".)
It's about time someone did this. People have been talking about real nanotechnology for about two decades. Most of what's now called "nanotechnology" is surface chemistry of finely divided powders, or simple self-assembling structures like carbon nanotubes. Real nanotechnology, useful mechanisms made of deliberately placed individual atoms, hasn't been happening much. A DNA reader is one of the few applications where building a very small number of devices at the atomic scale is useful. You don't need self-replicating assemblers turning out vast numbers of nanomachines. Small numbers of devices can be created, slowly, with STM-type devices.
At least readers are safe. DNA writers are going to be an issue.
It's not that hard to do high-definition monochrome TV. You just need to crank up the horizontal sweep rate and use higher-bandwidth amplifiers. Color, though, requires more holes in the shadow mask or stripes on the screen, and the alignment tolerances are tighter.
France had 819-line monochrome broadcast TV in the 1950s. But with the transition to color around 1960, Europe went to a uniform 625 lines. Kind of sad, but making special color TV tubes for France just wasn't worth the trouble.
Some less-known classics:
The FTC was totally out to lunch during the Bush years, especially on false advertising. Looks like they're back.
A few more things they have to catch up on:
DHS's cyber security operation is headed by Phil Reitinger, who's from Microsoft. So DHS won't be allowed to do anything that would seriously impact Microsoft's business models. Which means nothing significant will happen. Here's his list of priorities. You'll see the problem.
The first guy in that job, Amit Yoran, came out and said the big problem was weak security in Microsoft operating systems. He was ignored, then quit in disgust. The next guy was Cisco's lobbyist, who was not only useless, the job was downgraded during his tenure.
I'm not expecting much from that crowd.
Reality check:
We take an even harder line on anonymous businesses at SiteTruth, considering them "bottom feeders".
Realistically, putting your real name and address in WHOIS info doesn't hurt you unless you're a crook. My real name and address are on all my domains, and I get maybe one phone call every two years, perhaps a letter or two a year, that seem to come from WHOIS data. I had one threat, back in the 1990s; he's out of business and I'm still here. Any e-mail spam is being filtered out by the usual filters. If you're paranoid, get a P.O. box; that's legal.
There are engineering details to building a nuclear weapon that aren't well known. But they're not all that deeply hidden, either. A few minutes with Google gets you the basics.
A big, dumb Hiroshima-type implosion bomb made of uranium isn't that hard. Plutonium bombs are tougher to build; more compression is necessary. The later designs have reflectors, tampers, and quite a few layers. Considerable simulation is required to get the design right. Of course, the US and the USSR designed their nuclear arsenals with computers in the 1 MIPS range; today, any laptop has enough CPU power for bomb design. Some older hydrodynamic software for this is available, in FORTRAN. Note the test cases provided, "Detonation example" and "SSTAFF warhead".
A more modern version of that software is available from LLNL. The code was released in 1996 and was upgraded through 2005. There's a torrent available.
Making the components is a pain because many of the materials involved are radioactive, poisonous, flammable metals, or high explosives. Machining uranium is difficult. However, there's a convenient how-to guide, "Machining of Uranium and Uranium Alloys", written by a head machinist at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant and distributed by the U.S. Government. That guide concludes "With proper techniques and safety precautions, uranium and uranium alloys can be safely machined by most shops." Exotic techniques like robotic handling and machining in a liquid bath weren't required. They didn't even use a glove box back then.
Machining plutonium is more difficult. US plants have had troubles with that for decades, and didn't even have a facility that could do it between 1989, when Rocky Flats shut down, and 2002, when Los Alamos started up. But Iran is taking the uranium route, so they don't have to worry about that.
The explosive components have to be made very uniform, to get the uniform compression required. This was a big problem for Los Alamos in the early days, but now that everyone has plastic explosives, it's easier. There's also a problem with the explosion blowing out at the gaps between explosive blocks, but there's a simple trick to fix that. (It's classified in the US, but has leaked out from the USSR side.)
The necessity for krytron detonator switches is overrated. A krytron is a gas-filled tube device from the era of the thyatron. Basically, you need a switch for about 1000 amps at 1KV that turns on in a few nanoseconds. Conveniently, the U.S. Government distributes a design using standard IGBT semiconductors. That's 15 years old; you could probably downsize that design (10" of rack space) today.
Most of the complexity in bomb design appears as bombs are made physically smaller. Truck-bomb sized units are 1940s technology. Smaller warheads require late 1950s technology, and the US did about a hundred full-scale nuclear tests in the 1950s to get that right. Some of that can be replaced with simulation. Eventually, you have to set one off to be confident it will work.
As Ted Taylor (who designed many US bombs) once said, "Everyone (who built an atomic bomb) has succeeded on the first try."
Well, let's see what NASA is claiming this time.
This is many billions of dollars worth of work, remember.
In London, they built a 12 mile long tunnel from neat the terminus out to the industrial wastelands of the east.
I know about that. It was surprising how much construction was necessary, considering the amount of rail right of way going into London.
London has about ten times the population of San Francisco. It's not clear that San Francisco can generate enough traffic to justify the connection.
There are some wealthy communities on the San Francisco peninsula bitching about having high speed rail zooming past their houses. But they don't want to pay the costs of tunneling themselves.
There's a real problem reaching San Francisco. There's no good right of way for high speed rail. The I-5 route to Sacramento looks OK, but reaching Oakland or San Francisco looks tough.
The only existing right of way to San Francisco is two tracks wide and used for commuter rail. There are houses up to the tracks on both sides, and much grumbling since the rail line got an upgrade a few years ago, with over ten trains an hour and higher speeds. The idea of stacking an elevated high speed line atop the existing commuter line has residents annoyed. (The commuter line is at grade, with dozens of railroad crossings.)
There's a big issue in San Francisco over whether to build a train terminal "downtown". Getting the last half mile into downtown San Francisco is very expensive. It would be much cheaper to stop half a mile away, at the existing station. Actually, "downtown" is migrating towards the existing train station, and most new construction is closer to the existing station than "downtown". So this could work out OK.
The problem is paying for reporting. "News is what someone doesn't want you to know. All else is publicity". Free news has destroyed newspapers, but hasn't created a new source of revenue to pay for reporting.
If you don't pay reporters, all you get is PR, punditry, and dreck, plus an occasional video of a disaster. Unfortunately, this creates the illusion of news coverage. Look at the top news stories on Google News right now:
Only one of those stories comes from actual reporting, as opposed to publicity.
That's the problem.
Google has been experimenting with ad targeting based on credit rating. ""Let's say we have an advertiser who wants to reach consumers with a high FICO score who applied for mortgages in the first quarter," Korsunsky says. "We can provide the advertiser with a list of Web sites on our Google content network that index against this segment. ... "Marketers expanding into a term like 'credit card' into a campaign -- they should have their ad copy prequalify a good credit shopper," Korsunsky says. "So adding copy like 'have good credit, apply for a card today' would let marketers filter out people without good credit."
Google - now, with more evil!
The UN already has the Universal Postal Union and the International Telecommunications Union, which do for post offices, telephony, and radio roughly what ICANN does for the Internet. The ITU does a decent job, assigning country codes, negotiating the rules which interconnect phone systems across borders, and keeping radio broadcasters from conflicting. Nobody thinks about the Universal Postal Union much, but the fact that you can mail a letter to almost any country on earth didn't happen by accident.
Much of what the UN really does is to act as an umbrella organization for the dull and boring mechanics of infrastructure coordination. The diplomatic level gets all the attention, but there's necessary grunt work going on in the background.
If I want to spider a single web site, many sites have rate-limiters that kick in and will block me after a while. This would allow me to hit it from multiple machines.
The better web spiders run very slowly as seen from each site. At one time, Google only read about one page every few minutes per site. The Internet was slower then. Cuil's crawler is known to be overly aggressive, but that's a design flaw. (Too much distribution, not enough coordination.)
At SiteTruth, we never read more than 20 pages from a single site, rate limit to one new page every 2 seconds, and read no more than 3 pages in parallel. And we obey "robots.txt". We don't hide the identity of our bot; the user-agent string is "SiteTruth.com site rating system", and we list that with "Bots vs. Browsers". That seems to be enough to avoid blocking. We see some sites that are very slow, but they're very slow when seen from an ordinary browser. If sites are blocking your crawler, it must be very aggressive.
We're just looking for the name and address of the business behind the site, though, checking "About", "Help", "Contact", and other places a human would look for that info. We're not trying to suck up the site's entire content.
It's striking how far copyright is stretched in the entertainment industry. It goes way beyond "Look and Feel". You can't write a third-party "Harry Potter" book. "Quantum of Solace" has nothing but the title taken from the Ian Fleming short story. (Few people have ever read that short story, which consists of some British Brahman in a Caribbean outpost of the British Empire telling Bond a story about someone's failed marriage.) Yet copyright has been held to cover such a long reach.
As I point out occasionally, information technology is like stationary engineering, but a century later. Stationary engineering was the field to be in around 1870 or so, when factories were starting to get advanced technology like electric motors, and really big steam engines were coming into use. Young boys saw that big engine at the Centennial Exhibition in 1874 and wanted to be stationary engineers. It impressed people at the time that the big engine needed only one guy running it, and he was usually sitting on the platform reading a newspaper.
By 1910 or so, you just ordered motors and panelboards from General Electric, hooked the gear up according to the directions, and bought power from the local Edison company. It was a routine job, but still a growth area. There was plenty of work and the pay was good, but it wasn't cutting edge any more.
Today, there are still stationary engineers and electricians, and it's an union job. Stop by the boiler room and say hi.
IT is taking the same path, a century later.
It's getting kind of dated, but my main machine still runs Windows 2000, and has nothing on it that updates automatically. It's rather peaceful - very little unwanted drama.
I have the latest Firefox, the latest Open Office, the latest Python, the latest MySQL, the latest Sumatra PDF, the latest Blender, etc. - all the important stuff still runs on Windows 2000. Dreamweaver 8, Photoshop Elements, and other basic graphics tools run. Even rather exotic programs like the LTSpice circuit simulator, the AVR micro controller development system, and the Tortise SVN client work fine.
Really, Microsoft hasn't done much substantive to their OS in the last decade. Most of the stuff since then has either been cosmetic or has made things worse.
This looks like an attempt to monetize a botnet. What, exactly, do the people running their "client" get out of this? Do they know they're sucking bandwidth, and possibly being billed for it, on behalf of someone else?
I run a web spider of sorts. And I know the people who run a big search engine. Reading the web sites isn't the bottleneck. Analyzing the results and building the database is. Outsourcing the reading part doesn't buy you much. If this just did a crawl, it would be of very limited value. That's not what it does.
What they're really doing is offering a service that lets their customers run the customer's Java code on other people's machines in the botnet. That's worrisome. There are some security limits, which might even work. Supposedly, all the Java apps can do is look at crawled pages and phone results home. Right.
This thing uses the Plura botnet. "Plura® is a grid computing system. We contract with affiliates, who are owners of web pages, software, and other services, to distribute our grid computing code. We utilize the excess resources of peripheral computers that are browsing the internet when such browsing leads to a web page of one of our affiliates. That web page has imbedded code that allows the visitor to participate in the grid computing process. We also utilize embedded code in software and other services to allow such participation." Not good.
The main infection vector is apparently the Digsby chat client, which comes bundled with various crapware. The Digsby feature list does not mention that Plura is in their package.
This thing needs to be treated as hostile code by firewalls and virus scanners.
NASA, having failed at their basic job of putting stuff into space, is trying, yet again, to find another mission that doesn't actually require making a working launch system.
NASA needs a major downsizing. Closing half the "centers" would be a good start.
Back before ease of use eclipsed security, I once encountered a military system where the access terminal was surrounded by a small fence. Opening the gate in the fence forced an immediate logout.
Nobody would tolerate that today. Except, maybe, for an ATM.