I don't understand why so many people put "Free Book" on the web, but put it in an HTML page with links to the various chapters. Is it too much to ask for the convenience of a single PDF, MOBI, or EPUB I can download to an eReader? They went to the trouble of publishing on Lulu, could they take the additional step of checking the "Make my book available as a free ebook" checkbox so I could download the PDF that Lulu uses to print it?
Other than that, this sounds like something I look forward to reading, after I copy and paste each chapter into a Word Document and convert it myself. : )
I consider that an advantage. The reason I like my ereader is because it isn't backlit, but reflects light. That makes it much easier on my eyes. I program on a backlit laptop all day long, when I'm resting before bed, I don't want to be in that environment. The non-backlit screen is like reading a real book and relaxes my mind before falling asleep. If you need to read in the dark, you can get a $0.99 led booklight or install an ereader on a tablet or smart phone.
Neuromancer is not an easy read. The text is very dense. I reread it last year and, even at my education level, found I had to go back and reread many passages when I realized I had missed important bits of action (the death of an important character happens so quickly and non descriptively you have to read the passage several times to make sure it actually happened).
That being said, this book will translate magnificently to the big screen. As old as it is, it hasn't lost its futuristic feel and foresight; although, wherever megabytes of data are mentioned, they'll have to upgrade them to tera- or pentabytes. I am very much looking forward to this film, but it is still in the early stages and I've seen many promising projects like this die at later stages when the producers look at what's going on and don't get it.
Parent makes an important point. Drudge doesn't host any news. It's sole purpose is highlighting content elsewhere on the Internet. The Huffington Post generates far more traffic than Drudge (source (this is debatable, I know)), but the site doesn't drive traffic elsewhere. It will link to another site only for as long as it takes them to copy that site's content and get their own page up to keep you on the HuffPo.
I'm curious about how they measured this also. Twitter and Facebook drive traffic to lots of places not news-related. I follow hundreds of scientists of Twitter and we don't link to the news stories about research, we link directly to the research papers themselves. There's a wide variety of "news content" that involves going directly to the primary source instead of having it mistranlated by some non-specialist. Pew has a very silly and antiquated definition of news.
So I take this study as interesting trivia, and like most trivia it's not terribly informative about the importance or influence of any of these media.
This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting. If the UN had released a report claiming 50 million global warming refugees by 2010, there would be dozens of news articles on it. The supposed incriminating evidence is a Google Cache page with this map that doesn't itself say anything about refugees, but does highlight areas most susceptible to sea level rise. The "50 million climate refugees by 2010" statement is not referenced anywhere in any UN report, it's a six words on one defunct graphic that was part of a larger report on world agriculture by the UN University. This 50 million by 2010 figure comes from Dr. Bogardi at the UN University in Bonn, NOT the United Nations.
The problem with this prediction being made by any scientist is that keeping track of how many refugees there are is difficult (current estimate by the UN is 1 million a year, a figure that the Red Cross lends support to with the statement that environmental disasters are displacing more people than war now) and the causes are debatable. The epic flooding in Pakistan created 10 million refugees, Hurricane Katrina added a quarter of a million refugees, and desertification in Africa is displacing millions. Can we blame these events on Global Warming? Hurricanes and floods happen without a warming world, but a warming world increases the chances of such disasters happening.
Then there are the refugees that no one realizes. In the small coastal town where I live in North Carolina, houses have been falling into the swamp one by one for decades, but the residents blame it on people building their homes in flood zones, not realizing that sea levels in their state have risen three times the rate of rise on the rest of the Atlantic coast. People didn't build their homes in the water, the water rose 1.5 meters over the 50 years since they were built, but nobody realizes this because of landscape amnesia.
You can read all about the various estimates concerning environmental refugees on Wikipedia. It took the author of this untruth less than an hour to post their nonsense and the deniers flooded the Internet with it quickly. It took me two hours to research and write this response, because I wanted to know what I was talking about, and I will only reach a very small audience in comparison. This is why I despair when considering how science could possibly stand a chance against the overwhelming confidence ignorance brings the unscientific masses.
It is a first amendment issue because they weren't blocking all political sites, only the one they disagreed with. I work for the government, where we have pretty heavy internet filtering. One day I couldn't access the left-leaning HuffingtonPost, but the right-leaning Drudge Report was still accessible. I reported this and access was immediately granted to the Huffingtonpost again. Our internet usage is monitored, and, while we are allowed to take short breaks to surf the net, if we abuse that it gets recorded and we get in trouble.
So yes, blocking a Pro-Union website while still allowing employees to access RushLimbaugh.com is a pretty significant violation of first amendment rights. Especially when it's being done with taxpayer money on government property.
The head of our systems branch used to always say, without irony, "The applications branch can't run without systems, but without the applications branch, systems run just fine."
To which the head of apps branch would mumble, "Yeah, and without customers Apps branch would run just fine."
The dispute apparently is about unpaid taxes on retail sales in the state, and Amazon claimed $34 billion in sales last year, so it's very possible that between 2005 and 2009 the company did $2 billion in sales in the state.
It sounds like both sides aren't playing nice in this. In my state of North Carolina, Amazon has been very accommodating about paying up retail taxes from the same period (they have had a dispute with our state about maintaining customer privacy in the audit however). Amazon's dispute with Texas is that they want to see the audit that produced the final back-tax figure, which Texas has not done or has refused to produce.
The problem with a lack of net neutrality is that it takes multiple ISPs to carry the packets. So if YouTube agrees to pay for preferential treatment, they're going to have to pay every ISP in the world for it. So one ISP got their check, but the one next door didn't, so they stifle the traffic. What happens when my attempt to ping Google gets bounced out to Europe as occasionally happens?
If we don't get Net Neutrality, we will have a war between ISPs discriminating against each other's traffic, and they will beg for the government to step in to resolve disputes. Once that happens, instead of the simple single rule of Net Neutrality, we will get a patchwork of situational regulations dictated by corporations through armies of lawyers representing their best interests.
What a great idea. Then, when African American children wonder why people like themselves who have dark skin are statistically much more likely to live in poor communities, much less likely to go to college, and much more likely to end up in prison, instead of explaining that tiresome old tale about 200 years of slavery, separate but equal, and racism, we can just say, "It's a matter of personal responsibility! Sink or swim!" and go to bed with a clean conscious.
The simple fact is that these were Federal Employees, the emails were part of their job, and that means they are not subject to the right to privacy. I work for the Coast Guard as a civilian contractor, but I am regularly reminded that all the emails I write while at work are being monitored and collected, even if I'm writing my wife at home.
When you work for the Federal Government, you give up your right to privacy in the workplace. If I have to watch what I say in an email or what I post to slashdot because I know these transmissions are being read by a third party, I don't see why other Federal employees should be exempt from that unless it is a matter of national security. 95% of these diplomatic emails had no business being classified as secret and should have been publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act. It has to be transparent because we have to be able to scrutinize everything our government is doing.
This has been the most infuriating aspect of this debate for me. Every time I'm challenged by people who listen to Limbaugh on the subject of Net Neutrality, they think it's all about keeping porn off the Internet and allowing the Government to censor websites. So yes, my opponents are horribly misinformed on this issue thanks to that bombastic blowhard.
So what you're saying is that we should see a ton of Delicious clones online next Friday?
I always think it's hilarious to watch novice programmers grossly underestimate the amount of time it takes to code a robust application. The same people are wondering why it's taking so long to clean up Diaspora when they could have supposedly coded it in a weekend with some friends and a case of beer.
I'll look forward to seeing your version of Delicious online next week; any other response to this reply would simply be you "talking out of your ass."
Slide #17 is the one that really scares me. They are talking about having foreigners visiting American sites being greeted with a "You Need Our ISP to View this Site, PAY UP TO CONTINUE". I recently predicted this sort of thing would start an online trade war. They even use the word "Tariff" to describe the strategy.
This sort of dangerous nonsense is exactly why we need Net Neutrality.
This article had its ups and downs, mostly downs. From the article:
"There are other people who can write code as well as Zuckerberg — not many, but some —"
If the Time profile of Zuckerberg is acurate, then I think even he would be offended by this statement.
"Websites entreat you to log onto them using your Facebook ID — the New York Times does, and so do Myspace and YouTube."
Hmmm... So does Time. Great job on the full disclosure principle there.
"Right now the Internet is like an empty wasteland: you wander from page to page, and no one is there but you."
Right, because all World Wide Web content is produced by robots.
Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again. The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family, or a college dorm, or an office where your co-workers are also your best friends.
It'll be a wonderful land of lollypops and puppies and kittens! Privacy concerns? No worries:
"If "liking" an ad the same way you "like" a news article or a photo of your spouse seems creepy to you — it's more or less the definition of what Marx called commodity fetishism — you don't have to do it."
If you have privacy concerns, then GO BACK TO YOUR COLD LONELY INTERNET COMMIE!!!
"Zuckerberg has a talent for understanding how people work, but one urge, the urge to conceal, seems to be foreign to him. Sometimes Facebook makes it harder than it should be. It is biased in favor of sharing. That is, after all, what Facebook is for."
Facebook isn't leaking your personal information to make money, they're doing it because they genuinely misunderstand why people need to keep some things private. Why do you have a problem with this? What's wrong with you? Do you have some secret perverse sexual fetish? Are you performing criminal activities? When did you stop beating your wife?
I did like this thoughtful paragraph:
But what makes life complicated in the postmodern technocratic aquarium we're collectively building is that there actually are good reasons to want to hide things. Just because you present a different face to your co-workers and your family doesn't mean you're leading a double life. That's just normal social functioning, psychology as usual. Identity isn't a simple thing; it's complex and dynamic and fluid. It needs to flex a little, the way a skyscraper does in a high wind, and your Facebook profile isn't built to flex.
But then it goes to the other extreme of The Social Network's Gonna make you demented:
An article published earlier this year in European Psychiatry presented the case of a woman who lost her job to a Facebook addiction, and the authors suggested that it could become an actual diagnosable ailment... Facebook is supposed to build empathy, but since 2000, Americans have scored higher and higher on psychological tests designed to detect narcissism, and psychologists have suggested a link to social networking.
I do totally dig this quote, which applies to other online services as well:
Now Facebook is the bottle, and we're the genie. How small are we willing to make ourselves to fit inside?
The article was all over the place, but it does give me a more favorable opinion of Zuckerberg, a less favorable opinion of Facebook and Time, lots of concerns about adapting myself to the social network instead of it adapting to me, and now, if you'll excuse me, I must go break this comment down into 50+ tweets.
How long term? An investment you made in the stockmarket in 2000 is now worth less today. "Long term" is a nice concept to throw around, but if you're 65 and your investments are worth less than they were 10 years ago, it's no comfort to think they will be worth more 30 years from now.
Agreed. I've been wanting to see "The Red Machine" for months now because Roger Ebert gave it four stars and its about the Japanese enigma machine, but Netflix doesn't even seem to know the movie exists so it doesn't even show up in their search results.
Nowadays the "ultra rich" may be able to afford many homes and travel often. But unless they fly out of non commercial terminals, they still have to stand in the TSA line line everyone else. They can't kill anyone or have anyone killed. They can't drive drunk. No, all they have is "bigger" toys, but the POWER that comes with riches is gone - reserved by governments only.
The ultra rich don't fly commercial, they fly charter or private; therefore, they don't go through TSA. They can't legally kill or drive drunk, but they can hire armies of lawyers to reduce their sentences while poor people can't even make bail to give themselves a fighting chance. If Lindsay Lohan wasn't rich, she'd be in prison for the next 20 years like any poor person would.
Our Democratic government has the power, but the rich have the money to influence public opinion and pay for the lobbyists making $300k a year to influence our elected officials. Campaign strategists actually have formulas for how much money needs to be spent for each point of popular opinion gained.
I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I have to get back to work to pay for the car that I drive here and the underwater mortgage on the house I bought three years ago that talking-heads put on television by the wealthy assured me would never lose value.
This is an important point. Google's algorithm was fantastic for a long time, but it's way too easy to game the system now. Some of the highest-quality content on the web doesn't show up in its search results because of its stupid page-rank algorithm. I've started looking to delicious.com for quality links lately because I know humans have evaluated the content semantically and bookmarked it because it's useful and of good quality, not because some spammer posted links to it all over the web or because people linked to it because it sucked.
I saw this article earlier in the week and decided not to submit it to/. because it said the following:
But for a subset of search terms, adding a trailing comma yields a large change in results. Add a comma to a finance term, for example requesting "CSCO," rather than "CSCO". Suddenly, the prominent Google Finance links disappear.
I tried this. Without the comma, Yahoo Finance came up as the first result. With the comma, Yahoo Finance came up as the first result. If I can't reproduce your experiment's results, then I view your whole hypothesis with skepticism.
"Demon Haunted World" was an iconoclastic book for me. I bought it looking for religion-bashing, and was instead served up a healthy dose of alien abduction bashing--something I believed in during my youth. "Pale Blue Dot" is great, but I really think "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" takes the prize for his best book (Cosmic Carl seemed to think so too).
I'm probably missing something, and someone will correct me hopefully, but how will a multi-tier system work with the multiple ISPs? When I access google, sometimes the traceroute will run all the way out to Europe and back to the United States to access the site. how are all the different ISPs involved going between here and there going to manage a tiered system? Will every one of them charge google a fee, or force the connection to go around when the subscription price wasn't paid? It seems to me that this could get horribly messy very quickly and the law of unintended consequences would force the countries hosting those ISPs geographically to quickly step in, creating a regulations nightmare a million times worse than simply preserving an open network would.
I'm seeing the exact same thing. I find that Google is becoming more and more useless for academic research. I would once type in a subject and get tons of legitimate, informative sites written by people who cared about the subjectmatter (remember ThinkQuest? All those fantastic articles are still out there, they just aren't in Google's search results anymore), which I could use as a springboard into deeper research. Now I get Wikipedia as the first result and fifty pages of forums filled with people who have no idea what their talking about. There's still no algorithm for content quality.
You are correct that things have gotten off topic, and a lot of people are missing what's actually going on here; however, it's not as simple as giving purchases with titles redacted...
Amazon is being sued to pay the taxes for purchases in North Carolina, not for everyone in America. They furnished NC's Department of Revenue (DOR) a list of all sales with ASINs (Amazon's Unique Identifier for products) from 2003 - 2010. NC needs the details because different kinds of products have different sales taxes. NC's DOR demanded that Amazon also provide the Bill-To and Ship-To information, which Amazon refused to do as this would violate the First Amendment by identifying the details of what NC residents were reading, watching, and listening to.
This is where it gets hazy... The DOR offered to give the original data back in exchange for data that identified people, but not the details of what they purchased, but the original data would be kept on the DOR Secretary's computer, because they needed some of that for... I dunno, it's hazy legalese. Amazon stated that the only way they have to identify what was purchased was ASINs, which would identify the products, so no deal.
The DOR admitted that this customer-identifying data would add nothing to establishing Amazon's tax-liability, but they still wanted it. Amazon got backing by the ACLU and the Judge ruled against the DOR.
This should be case-closed, but, as a resident of North Carolina, I'll be keeping an eye on it, and will be writing an irate letter to the editor of my local paper for not covering this story. Thanks Slashdot!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why so many people put "Free Book" on the web, but put it in an HTML page with links to the various chapters. Is it too much to ask for the convenience of a single PDF, MOBI, or EPUB I can download to an eReader? They went to the trouble of publishing on Lulu, could they take the additional step of checking the "Make my book available as a free ebook" checkbox so I could download the PDF that Lulu uses to print it?
Other than that, this sounds like something I look forward to reading, after I copy and paste each chapter into a Word Document and convert it myself. : )
I consider that an advantage. The reason I like my ereader is because it isn't backlit, but reflects light. That makes it much easier on my eyes. I program on a backlit laptop all day long, when I'm resting before bed, I don't want to be in that environment. The non-backlit screen is like reading a real book and relaxes my mind before falling asleep. If you need to read in the dark, you can get a $0.99 led booklight or install an ereader on a tablet or smart phone.
Neuromancer is not an easy read. The text is very dense. I reread it last year and, even at my education level, found I had to go back and reread many passages when I realized I had missed important bits of action (the death of an important character happens so quickly and non descriptively you have to read the passage several times to make sure it actually happened).
That being said, this book will translate magnificently to the big screen. As old as it is, it hasn't lost its futuristic feel and foresight; although, wherever megabytes of data are mentioned, they'll have to upgrade them to tera- or pentabytes. I am very much looking forward to this film, but it is still in the early stages and I've seen many promising projects like this die at later stages when the producers look at what's going on and don't get it.
Parent makes an important point. Drudge doesn't host any news. It's sole purpose is highlighting content elsewhere on the Internet. The Huffington Post generates far more traffic than Drudge (source (this is debatable, I know)), but the site doesn't drive traffic elsewhere. It will link to another site only for as long as it takes them to copy that site's content and get their own page up to keep you on the HuffPo.
I'm curious about how they measured this also. Twitter and Facebook drive traffic to lots of places not news-related. I follow hundreds of scientists of Twitter and we don't link to the news stories about research, we link directly to the research papers themselves. There's a wide variety of "news content" that involves going directly to the primary source instead of having it mistranlated by some non-specialist. Pew has a very silly and antiquated definition of news.
So I take this study as interesting trivia, and like most trivia it's not terribly informative about the importance or influence of any of these media.
This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting. If the UN had released a report claiming 50 million global warming refugees by 2010, there would be dozens of news articles on it. The supposed incriminating evidence is a Google Cache page with this map that doesn't itself say anything about refugees, but does highlight areas most susceptible to sea level rise. The "50 million climate refugees by 2010" statement is not referenced anywhere in any UN report, it's a six words on one defunct graphic that was part of a larger report on world agriculture by the UN University. This 50 million by 2010 figure comes from Dr. Bogardi at the UN University in Bonn, NOT the United Nations.
The problem with this prediction being made by any scientist is that keeping track of how many refugees there are is difficult (current estimate by the UN is 1 million a year, a figure that the Red Cross lends support to with the statement that environmental disasters are displacing more people than war now) and the causes are debatable. The epic flooding in Pakistan created 10 million refugees, Hurricane Katrina added a quarter of a million refugees, and desertification in Africa is displacing millions. Can we blame these events on Global Warming? Hurricanes and floods happen without a warming world, but a warming world increases the chances of such disasters happening.
Then there are the refugees that no one realizes. In the small coastal town where I live in North Carolina, houses have been falling into the swamp one by one for decades, but the residents blame it on people building their homes in flood zones, not realizing that sea levels in their state have risen three times the rate of rise on the rest of the Atlantic coast. People didn't build their homes in the water, the water rose 1.5 meters over the 50 years since they were built, but nobody realizes this because of landscape amnesia.
You can read all about the various estimates concerning environmental refugees on Wikipedia. It took the author of this untruth less than an hour to post their nonsense and the deniers flooded the Internet with it quickly. It took me two hours to research and write this response, because I wanted to know what I was talking about, and I will only reach a very small audience in comparison. This is why I despair when considering how science could possibly stand a chance against the overwhelming confidence ignorance brings the unscientific masses.
It is a first amendment issue because they weren't blocking all political sites, only the one they disagreed with. I work for the government, where we have pretty heavy internet filtering. One day I couldn't access the left-leaning HuffingtonPost, but the right-leaning Drudge Report was still accessible. I reported this and access was immediately granted to the Huffingtonpost again. Our internet usage is monitored, and, while we are allowed to take short breaks to surf the net, if we abuse that it gets recorded and we get in trouble.
So yes, blocking a Pro-Union website while still allowing employees to access RushLimbaugh.com is a pretty significant violation of first amendment rights. Especially when it's being done with taxpayer money on government property.
The head of our systems branch used to always say, without irony, "The applications branch can't run without systems, but without the applications branch, systems run just fine."
To which the head of apps branch would mumble, "Yeah, and without customers Apps branch would run just fine."
The dispute apparently is about unpaid taxes on retail sales in the state, and Amazon claimed $34 billion in sales last year, so it's very possible that between 2005 and 2009 the company did $2 billion in sales in the state.
It sounds like both sides aren't playing nice in this. In my state of North Carolina, Amazon has been very accommodating about paying up retail taxes from the same period (they have had a dispute with our state about maintaining customer privacy in the audit however). Amazon's dispute with Texas is that they want to see the audit that produced the final back-tax figure, which Texas has not done or has refused to produce.
The problem with a lack of net neutrality is that it takes multiple ISPs to carry the packets. So if YouTube agrees to pay for preferential treatment, they're going to have to pay every ISP in the world for it. So one ISP got their check, but the one next door didn't, so they stifle the traffic. What happens when my attempt to ping Google gets bounced out to Europe as occasionally happens?
If we don't get Net Neutrality, we will have a war between ISPs discriminating against each other's traffic, and they will beg for the government to step in to resolve disputes. Once that happens, instead of the simple single rule of Net Neutrality, we will get a patchwork of situational regulations dictated by corporations through armies of lawyers representing their best interests.
What a great idea. Then, when African American children wonder why people like themselves who have dark skin are statistically much more likely to live in poor communities, much less likely to go to college, and much more likely to end up in prison, instead of explaining that tiresome old tale about 200 years of slavery, separate but equal, and racism, we can just say, "It's a matter of personal responsibility! Sink or swim!" and go to bed with a clean conscious.
Your suggestion is straight out of 1984.
The simple fact is that these were Federal Employees, the emails were part of their job, and that means they are not subject to the right to privacy. I work for the Coast Guard as a civilian contractor, but I am regularly reminded that all the emails I write while at work are being monitored and collected, even if I'm writing my wife at home.
When you work for the Federal Government, you give up your right to privacy in the workplace. If I have to watch what I say in an email or what I post to slashdot because I know these transmissions are being read by a third party, I don't see why other Federal employees should be exempt from that unless it is a matter of national security. 95% of these diplomatic emails had no business being classified as secret and should have been publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act. It has to be transparent because we have to be able to scrutinize everything our government is doing.
This has been the most infuriating aspect of this debate for me. Every time I'm challenged by people who listen to Limbaugh on the subject of Net Neutrality, they think it's all about keeping porn off the Internet and allowing the Government to censor websites. So yes, my opponents are horribly misinformed on this issue thanks to that bombastic blowhard.
So what you're saying is that we should see a ton of Delicious clones online next Friday?
I always think it's hilarious to watch novice programmers grossly underestimate the amount of time it takes to code a robust application. The same people are wondering why it's taking so long to clean up Diaspora when they could have supposedly coded it in a weekend with some friends and a case of beer.
I'll look forward to seeing your version of Delicious online next week; any other response to this reply would simply be you "talking out of your ass."
Slide #17 is the one that really scares me. They are talking about having foreigners visiting American sites being greeted with a "You Need Our ISP to View this Site, PAY UP TO CONTINUE". I recently predicted this sort of thing would start an online trade war. They even use the word "Tariff" to describe the strategy.
This sort of dangerous nonsense is exactly why we need Net Neutrality.
If the Time profile of Zuckerberg is acurate, then I think even he would be offended by this statement.
Hmmm... So does Time. Great job on the full disclosure principle there.
Right, because all World Wide Web content is produced by robots.
It'll be a wonderful land of lollypops and puppies and kittens! Privacy concerns? No worries:
If you have privacy concerns, then GO BACK TO YOUR COLD LONELY INTERNET COMMIE!!!
Facebook isn't leaking your personal information to make money, they're doing it because they genuinely misunderstand why people need to keep some things private. Why do you have a problem with this? What's wrong with you? Do you have some secret perverse sexual fetish? Are you performing criminal activities? When did you stop beating your wife?
I did like this thoughtful paragraph:
But then it goes to the other extreme of The Social Network's Gonna make you demented:
I do totally dig this quote, which applies to other online services as well:
The article was all over the place, but it does give me a more favorable opinion of Zuckerberg, a less favorable opinion of Facebook and Time, lots of concerns about adapting myself to the social network instead of it adapting to me, and now, if you'll excuse me, I must go break this comment down into 50+ tweets.
How long term? An investment you made in the stockmarket in 2000 is now worth less today. "Long term" is a nice concept to throw around, but if you're 65 and your investments are worth less than they were 10 years ago, it's no comfort to think they will be worth more 30 years from now.
Agreed. I've been wanting to see "The Red Machine" for months now because Roger Ebert gave it four stars and its about the Japanese enigma machine, but Netflix doesn't even seem to know the movie exists so it doesn't even show up in their search results.
The ultra rich don't fly commercial, they fly charter or private; therefore, they don't go through TSA. They can't legally kill or drive drunk, but they can hire armies of lawyers to reduce their sentences while poor people can't even make bail to give themselves a fighting chance. If Lindsay Lohan wasn't rich, she'd be in prison for the next 20 years like any poor person would.
Our Democratic government has the power, but the rich have the money to influence public opinion and pay for the lobbyists making $300k a year to influence our elected officials. Campaign strategists actually have formulas for how much money needs to be spent for each point of popular opinion gained.
I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I have to get back to work to pay for the car that I drive here and the underwater mortgage on the house I bought three years ago that talking-heads put on television by the wealthy assured me would never lose value.
This is an important point. Google's algorithm was fantastic for a long time, but it's way too easy to game the system now. Some of the highest-quality content on the web doesn't show up in its search results because of its stupid page-rank algorithm. I've started looking to delicious.com for quality links lately because I know humans have evaluated the content semantically and bookmarked it because it's useful and of good quality, not because some spammer posted links to it all over the web or because people linked to it because it sucked.
I saw this article earlier in the week and decided not to submit it to /. because it said the following:
I tried this. Without the comma, Yahoo Finance came up as the first result. With the comma, Yahoo Finance came up as the first result. If I can't reproduce your experiment's results, then I view your whole hypothesis with skepticism.
"Demon Haunted World" was an iconoclastic book for me. I bought it looking for religion-bashing, and was instead served up a healthy dose of alien abduction bashing--something I believed in during my youth. "Pale Blue Dot" is great, but I really think "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" takes the prize for his best book (Cosmic Carl seemed to think so too).
I'm probably missing something, and someone will correct me hopefully, but how will a multi-tier system work with the multiple ISPs? When I access google, sometimes the traceroute will run all the way out to Europe and back to the United States to access the site. how are all the different ISPs involved going between here and there going to manage a tiered system? Will every one of them charge google a fee, or force the connection to go around when the subscription price wasn't paid? It seems to me that this could get horribly messy very quickly and the law of unintended consequences would force the countries hosting those ISPs geographically to quickly step in, creating a regulations nightmare a million times worse than simply preserving an open network would.
I'm seeing the exact same thing. I find that Google is becoming more and more useless for academic research. I would once type in a subject and get tons of legitimate, informative sites written by people who cared about the subjectmatter (remember ThinkQuest? All those fantastic articles are still out there, they just aren't in Google's search results anymore), which I could use as a springboard into deeper research. Now I get Wikipedia as the first result and fifty pages of forums filled with people who have no idea what their talking about. There's still no algorithm for content quality.
You are correct that things have gotten off topic, and a lot of people are missing what's actually going on here; however, it's not as simple as giving purchases with titles redacted...
Amazon is being sued to pay the taxes for purchases in North Carolina, not for everyone in America. They furnished NC's Department of Revenue (DOR) a list of all sales with ASINs (Amazon's Unique Identifier for products) from 2003 - 2010. NC needs the details because different kinds of products have different sales taxes. NC's DOR demanded that Amazon also provide the Bill-To and Ship-To information, which Amazon refused to do as this would violate the First Amendment by identifying the details of what NC residents were reading, watching, and listening to.
This is where it gets hazy... The DOR offered to give the original data back in exchange for data that identified people, but not the details of what they purchased, but the original data would be kept on the DOR Secretary's computer, because they needed some of that for... I dunno, it's hazy legalese. Amazon stated that the only way they have to identify what was purchased was ASINs, which would identify the products, so no deal.
The DOR admitted that this customer-identifying data would add nothing to establishing Amazon's tax-liability, but they still wanted it. Amazon got backing by the ACLU and the Judge ruled against the DOR.
This should be case-closed, but, as a resident of North Carolina, I'll be keeping an eye on it, and will be writing an irate letter to the editor of my local paper for not covering this story. Thanks Slashdot!
Pardon my blog-whoring, but I've posted a short history of powers of 10 media, which goes:
Just another way to celebrate an exponentially awesome day. : )