The points are valid within a certain context, but we have to define what that context is. First, who is going to pay for the service. Second, who is going to use the service. Third how is the service actually going to be built. Fourth how is the profit going to be derived.
In the Google model, advertising pays the bill, the masses use it, the service is built on sound statistical principles, and profit is driven by focusig on making the process relatively simple and cheap. The web is crawled, links are counted, a bit of intellegence is added, and results are displayed.
Overall this method has proven useful. The problems are mainly that the pagerank has proven easy to hack. I do not believe the problem is that users look for Madonna and get the pop star by mistake. Since google is meant to be used by the masses, as it is the cheap mass searches that generate revenue, the popularity ranking is not an issue. Make no mistake, google results are ofttimes crap, but they are still usable for common searches.
The semantic web, as discussed, seems to be something different. It in fact seems to be the standard revolt of a linguist against the mathematician. The linguist say translation must be in meaning. The statistician says I can do it without understanding anything. They are both correct, but Google has shown the later can provide reasonable and cheap results. Likewise, this guy tries to compare the long tail to the iceberg. Of course, the long tail are the minority underserved, who are underserved because the lack the means or desire to pay for the service. The hidden iceberg is the majority that sinks large ships. Not someone who understands statistics, or, for that matter, is likely to make a generous profit.
What I think this guy is talking about is the specialized services that people might pay for directly, not a booming industry, as the nation provides librarians for free. A program that will take a search, and we assume that the user is competent enough to form the search using valid english, as there is no librarian to help construct the search, and know enough about the language, about the context, and about the subject matter, to return the exactly proper few results. It would then have to do this cheaply enough to drive a profit. This would in fact be a grand piece of software, but would it compete with Google or MSN or any mass search engine?
I am disappointed as even simple semantic search engines could get rid of the clutter we have on google, and if someone were willing to invest, even MS for that matter, the link farms could be a thing of the past. A lot of this, I believe, is due to the battle between the mathematicians and the linguants.
I have never noticed that godaddy is incompetent, just overly annoying with it's value added services. There was a time when GoDaddy was a great value, and in many ways still is, but shifting market forces have made other registrars, such as namecheap(not cheapnames, which appears to a godaddy shill), a equally good value without the barrage of special offers.
About the only negative thing I can say about godaddy is that I could not transfer one of my domains, it expired, and now godaddy appears to be holding it hostage for $80. Not incompetent, just extremely aggressive marketing.
Parent don't spy, they care. At some point parents must let go, but that happens in stagess. Even parent who allow sexual activity for their (pre-)teens in the house do so in hopes of limiting any damage. My limited experience indicates kids needs some boundaries, will naturally push those boundries as they need more room, but will still expect a gentle confining force to make them feel secure. Of course you are correct that if the force is overbearing, the kids will not learn to manage on their own, but from what I have seen of this technology, 13 year old children setting up dates with strangers, some who claim to be old enough to drive a car and give them a good time, a bit more caring and a bit less letting the tv/computer raise the kids is in order.
This is true, but not quite what was being discussed. One one hand, there is a verifiable need to protect the environment, conserve natural resources, and increase reliability. On the other hand, there is paranoia. Paranoia, in my mind, is a state in which the user is willing to live with a reduction in overall security to gain a perceived increase in security in a certain area.
In this case, the difficulty of a single method of stealing a car is reduced, thereby reducing the risk of being left stranded without a car. This is good. However, it can be said such difficulty merely increases the pressure to car jack. Nothing is free. It is not only bad design flaw, but a flawed system of design.
While the basic premise is valid, there a few points that should be kept in mind.
First, most military actions are guided by civilian authority, but controlled by the military. The Presidents recent admonition to the congress that it should not try to micromanage the war. Likewise, I enjoy watching how the military does not torture humans simply because the civilian authority says not to. In reality, when you send a bunch of people to kill other people, there is little that can be done to completely control the situation.
Second, it is a popular conception that the modern military works best with hand picked uber trained soldiers. This is true only because many modern conflicts have minimal casualties, at least on the American side. In a real war, where the winning side is the side that lose the most people, the metric is no longer training, but merely people willing to die. WWI central powers lost 4 million+, the 'winners' lost 5 million+. WWII the axis lost 8 million+, the 'winners' lost 12 million +. In Iraq, the US has lost several thousand, and all out might is kept a bay by the hundred of thousands untrained unwashed militia willing to die at 10 times the coalition numbers. Vietnam war the communist forces lost 600,000 people, the losers lost half that many.
And given the familiarity of 1941, I am in wonder that why the military is not blamed for the current situation. One reason why WWII was successful, and WWI was such a shambles(might as well have taken 10,000 men a day and shot them) was that in WWII the military was forced to act a a professional organization and complete the job, not just a bunch of mercenaries. There were plan. This is different from, say, Iraq, where the military does part of the job, then is not ready to complete the job in a timely manner. To be specific, WWII starts in around 1939. The US is eventually involved, and ends the war in 1945, at which time the UN is set up. In 1947 the US forms a plan to rebuild europe, which is completed by 1952. 7 years after the war ended and four year after the plan was implemented.
By contrast, we are 4 years after the end of major conflict in Iraq, and the job is still not done. Even with all the major technology, experience of hind sight, and a decisive and low costs victory, we cannot do what we did at the end of WWII.
And just because it is the day it is, let us take a moment to remember those untrained people who were willing to serve their country and give their life, with very little to no pay, to protect their family and their beliefs.
WSJ has a specific niche and a rather unique business model. It is as much as fashion statement as a news source. Yes it does have original stories, and the ever important 'how to manage your second home by buying at Wal Mart story'. But the key thing is that I have never seen a MBA who wants to taken seriously without it. Subscriptions to the journal are a cost of doing business, a deductible expense.
In any case, the pure subscription model is on it's way out. USA Today has a larger subscription base, even with free online content. The NYT subscriptions are on the rise. The journal is the only top three that is falling. Most newspapers are meeting the new generation head on and altering the business models to meet new realities. The Journal survives only the inertia, and in a generation will probably be a shell of it's past self. I can tell you that I have observed the Journal is nothing compared to what it was 20 years ago.
For those who might have been absent to animation during the 90's, there were two huge creative forces. One was Genndy Tartakovsky, the other was Garbor Csupo. Together they created the revival in children's animation, and has probably been a part of every major children's animated show. The creative drive has been incredible.
Clone Wars is certainly just another in a line of creatively disastrous attempt to monetize the dry Star Wars franchise. In spite of this, if Lucas steps away and gives Tartakovsky full rien we might end up with something that is not Star Wars, but nevertheless interesting, at least to a certain age group.
Well, it is not really private. Churches are primarily a way to shelter tax money from the government. For instance, a person that tithes 10% net, no more than 7 gross, is allowed to take that money off the taxes, and keep that money. In the end the person actually only tithes perhaps 5%, and gets to keep a fistfull of money, money that is used to buy fancy cars and sunday clothes rather than buy critical kit for the military.
So, if the museum was funded through the church scam, and cost 27 million, at an average tax rate of 20%, it cost our fighting force over 5 million dollars. Talk about not supporting our troops. Well, I guess if we pray that our god's children kill all their god's children first, it will all work out. Or even worse, 5 million for education so our kids will be smart enough to avoid the bullet, and museum, all together.
The process of observing the world and drawing a logical set of self consistent conclusions. All sciences, especially the soft sciences, have bias, or systematic error, We will tend the local world view on situations that far removed in time or space. Such errors can be corrected by future research and a more diversified group of scientists. There is no attack on faith, as faith is what we believe, not what we use when we need to model a natural process.
This museum, while attempting to provide a self consistent set of conclusions, fails to limit itself to observable and verifiable fact. In fact I feel it mocks Christianity by further limiting the power of the creator. Limiting such power has always been popular in the sinful human population that wishes to transfer power from the creator to itself. Just look at catholicism and the belief that certain religious leaders can speak for the almighty. For example, when I was growing up it was quite a popular belief that the creator put fossils and likes on earth as a test of fate. Those that continue to believe the bible even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary are those with sufficient faith to be saved. Now these sinful humans are trying to rewrite the bible and limit the power of the almighty by saying that dinosaurs existed and the grand canyon and the fossils were caused by the flood. You know, if the creator wanted a grand canyon, or fossils, or dinosaurs, or floods, or whatever, there is nothing to stop the desire becoming a reality, no matter what greedy and corrupt humans have to say.
I wonder if the future will see this museum as an artifact of a time in Christianity when the leaders were more concerned with wealth and personal power than serving the almighty. If, perhaps, someone like Martin Luther will emerge to blog 123 ways that the christian church is corrupt, and call for a post-christian movement.
What seems perverse that the signals from other cars' transmitters are not only strong enough to hear when my transmitter is off, they are strong enough to produce annoying an audible interference when my own transmitter, inside the car, is on. You'd think a transmitter two feet from the radio would totally overpower that must be at least forty feet away with two car body's worth of shielding in between, but no.
Here are a couple things I believe are relevant. You car is an electrically noisy place, especially the front of the car. This is why, I believe, most modern cars have antennas at the back of the car, away from the electrically noisy engine. The radio is at the front of the car, and encased in a metal grounded cage, most often refereed to a faraday cage. This keeps the electrically noisy engine, and other signals, out of the car. In any case, the FM transmitter has an antenna on it, the length of which is likely around 1 wave length of the 100 MHZ wave, as do all the cars around you. Each of the waves must leave the car, make it to the antenna, so that radio can decode and play the wave. It may be that there are three or more cars around you may have transmitting antennas nearly as close to your receiving antennas, especially if the transmitting antenna is laid across the dashboard rather facing toward the back.
I am the most cynical person I know, but perhaps being cynical is not the most reasonable approach. An accident is a traumatic event, and it can be argued that a compassionate society is not going to make it's chief form of entertainment watching such tragedies. It is one thing to watch a few individuals prostitute themselves for fame, as is done regularly on America's Funniest Home Videos, but quite another to flaunt other's misfortunes to the anonymous masses.
This really is a side effect of our societies obsession with filming everything that happens in the world. We are so scared that someone, somewhere, might be stealing a bag of candy or not comming to a full stop at a red light, or enoying themselves is some societal unacceptable manner, that jestison the civlized concept of privacy, trust, and independence for the uncivilized concepts of demanding papers with no probably cuase, profiling based on the clothes a person wears, and ratting out our family members. There was a time when the later were clearly confined to the facist governments, and governments for the people, and by th4e people, avoided them.
So we end up with a predictable problem. Footage that should be accessible to only a limited audience slips out to the de-facto public domain. We were such in a hurry to film every innocuous act, that we did not set up a proper legal framework to control the flow of the footage, so we use the DCMA, a blunt and largely ineffective tool, to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped.
If one believes that the highest form of art is sneaking up to a window and filming a neighbor in a compromising position, then there is no problem with this video. But I believe there are issues. For instance, a while back a school camera monitoring a middle school dance caught what appeared a pre-teen couple progressing though all manner of intimate activity including what could be interpreted as sexual congress. Though there were no incriminating physical evidence, only circumstantial, I believe it was in bad taste to release even the stills. It was pure publicity for the news stations, with no real new value.
Google dies one thing really well-provide services in exchange for ads, while managing those services and ads to profitability. Therefore, an idea that does not drive ads is not useful at all.
In this way the comparison with alta vista is extremely flawed. Alta Vista, unlike google, was primarily a search firm, and when google searches were of higher quality than Alta Vista, the fim failed. A more spt comparison would be Yahoo, which simply transformed itself itself into a portal. Indeed, google will not likely when someone provides better searches, and it will happen as google searches are starting to really be terrible, but will simply begin to emphasize other services.
Foreign Affairs had a relatively in depth write up on this, basically a one of their occasional scare pieces. Corn ethanol is no better than fossil fuel, the west is greedy because it is using a prime food source for it own greedy purposes. These are not neccesarily false statements. Of course, none of this takes into account that ethanol is just one product of the manufacturing of ethanol, or that as renewable resource, corn ethanol is nuetral to the non renewable fossil fuel. I am sure that someone will say fossil fuel is formed by abiogenic processes, and thereby might be renewable in a human time scale.
Nor does it take into account agricultural surpluses that likely still exist, and the food destruction. I have no idea what state the world is in now, but I know that even 10 years ago the issue was not food, but getting food to the poor. Nor does it take into account the corn is only one means of ethanol production, an inefficient form that in fact exist only because it is promoted by the famously independent and conservative farmers who are used to suckling at the government teat, and there are other sources, such as prairie grass, that might work just as well.
One interesting thing is that the US has a corn economy, and corn ethanol, though not perfect, is a good fit as it requires minimal effort, since we have so much corn infrastructure to begin with. As a transitional step away from fossil fuels, it is quite rational. As a effort to continue burning hydrocarbons, it is not rational. But such burning, if we are in fact concerned with the poor people that cannot even afford corn, is not justified. The death toll to get the hydrocarbons is not small. The subjugation of the Nigerian people, the deals made with the Saudi monarchy, the tens of thousands dead in Iraq. Really, how can we compare such real and present destruction with a theoretical problem that, at it's most practical level, is meant as method to help reduce the level of the comprimises we must make for energy.
One last thing. Oil is a commodity. It does not matter where the oil that one uses came from. If any oil field shuts down, even if it not an oil field that supplies the local pump, all prices increase.
Precisely, when someone pays you to do a job, you must do it and understand the limits. Fro instance, a supervisor is hired to keep the line moving, but is not authorized to beat employees that hold up the line. An unlicensed massage parlor or a strip joint is supposed to get men off, but all touching, at least by the men, is to be done outside the premises with no knowledge of the legal establishment.
It is just like the Imus thing. He has every right to stand in his Manhattan apartment and scream out the window everything he wants to say on the radio, although I suspect his coop might have something to say about it, until he goes hoarse, but on the payroll of another one lacks such freedoms. It boils down to a simple issue of what can and cannot be done, and the professional should know the difference. It is, in fact, what they are paid for.
And it is not censorship, as it would not be impossible to have a radio station that is a bit more radical. Many market have individual funded radio stations specifically for that purpose, and those that do fulfill a public need get funded. Of course, because the FCC allowed an individual to own multiple stations in the same market, and play identical content, the licenses for radio stations are few and far between, but that just means that people who want extreme radio need to get off thier duff and quit expecting corporate America to fulfill their every whim.
At some point, one has to take responsibility for one's own actions, and responsibility for one's own life. Not only that, but in times of long conflict, when our soldiers are dying on foriegn soil, it is often traditional to support those troops by making sacrifices, rather than complaining that one can't have honey and ice cream every day.
So here we are with a very predictable rise in gasoline. Do people take responsiblity for thier choices? No they complain that the government is not giving handouts. Our troops required a billion dollars a week for supplies, do we say what can we do to cut back and help, or do we just slap a sticker on out SUV and live life as normal?
By the late 80's it was well known that oil dependence was a security risk. It was also known that even though new wells might be found, they would neither be as cheap to exploit nor as secure. Forward thinking people knew that oil was a limited resource and if we did not want to pay excalating prices for that resource, prices that would be predicted by the standard capitalistic supply and demand curve, we would have to move to another supply of energy. The myth that we have not known for 20 years that oil was a non renewable and limited resource is up there with the myth that everyone is Chis Columbus' day thought the world was flat. To be clear we did not know when the oil would peak, 2000, 2010, 2020, but we knew it was coming, and research lead and design to manufacture time required that action was needed.
But the issue we have now is only partially caused by the 'high' price, and to get back on topic, the issues seems to be that despite the 'high' prices few people are cutting back on fuel use through, for example, telecommuting. Surprisingly, though the price peaked a year or so ago, The price/demand curve has only recently peaked, and there is no evidence that price is going to reduce demand as predicted by the standard capitalist models. Therefore, nothing that the government does to increase supply or decrease demand is unlikely to have a long term negative force on the price rise. It is clear by the price/demand curve that the consumer just does not seem to care about the price. Only about driving as much as they wish.
In fact, if we want a quick fix, the best way is to use a modified Nixon era type of price control. Let consumers purchase 10 gallons of gas each week at $2, and anything over at market rate. This will allow us to have cheap gas, and allow consumers to buy as much fuel as they wish.
My reply to the google deal was the purchase of the unsavory doubleclick made google a much less trustworthy operation. Google was always not absolutely trustworthy as one is never sure if the data they store is going to come back to haunt a user. BHut at least they are providing a service at only indirect costs, and users often have a choice of thier service or others service as their is no lockin. My actualy response was to go through my cookie permission file and deny permission for most of the google cookies to match the denial for all doubleclick cookies.
Now MS, the company that will sue it's customers, charge for products and then claim the products are not genuine, and write software so that every possible browser request is routed through MS first, is buying this company that I have never heard of before. My trust and state of MS cookies remains unchanged.
The wisdom of the purchase is indicated by MS falling stock price.
Right now, drivers licenses are primarily used to show that the person has earned the privilege to drive, and, unfortunately, secondarily, as a means of general identification. Most people are not terrible worried about losing their drivers license and carry it around even if they would not carry large amounts of cash, credit cards, or valuables. For instance, a person jogging down a trail will likely minimize the valuables they carry, but still carry a drivers license and an ipod. If an assault occurs, the assailant will likely be happy to take the ipod.
OTOH, if the drivers license were to be linked to actual cash, then the drivers license might be the most valuable item to steal. And because a pin number is likely required, the person is not likely to be allowed to leave. Rather, the person will be taken hostage until the bank account is cleared, thus increasing the risk of serious injury and death.
The upshot of all this is that people who before might be considered not worth attacking, as they had no valuables, would now become a prime target as they might have a drivers license with them. It seems to me that this is just another case of the desire to integrate overcoming the common sense of safety.
It is not only that people don't realize it is spam, but that people do not realize it is an image. So accidently click the image, perhaps to try to copy text, and the link is activated, the browser appears, and the system infected before anyone realizes what has happened.
The reason that image spam works is because advertising drives the web, along with people who want pretty fonts in their email, and so there are often no obvious methods to turn off image display. This is the same thing with flash. The developers have economic incentives to allow certain security risks, so those security risks are coded.
If every email client had a text only setting, images and URL allowed only from certain users, then much of this could go away. In most cases, the images would never be displayed.
At some point we have to accept spam as part of the consumer culture, and the 'free web', and realize that we are not really willing to do what it takes to make it go away.
The point of the MS announcement was to promulgate the theory that end users would either be required to pay compensatory damages to MS, or the products would no longer be allowed to exist, thus disrupting business.
I believe that this historical attack on customers has been uniquely confined to the software industry, that is until the RIAA got a hold of the business model. For example, If I buy, in good faith, an unlicensed book, The author or his or her agent does not come after me and demand triple compensation. OTOH, if I, as a business, in goo faith properly license all my software, and conduct full due diligence to insure that no unlicensed software is installed, I can still be held in great financial liability. At one time such laws were used to stem the frankly rampant use of unlicensed software, but over the past 10 years the main objective was to allow vendors to spy on customers and make sure that competitors software is not being used.
So this MS tactic is just an extension of previously United States certified monopolistic behavior. At first it was OSS was more expensive to integrate with MS software. Then it was OSS was unreliable when used with MS software. Now it is 'you have to pay MS either way, so why bother.' The funny thing is that no one is saying Zune and MS music are a dead end because of the patent disputes. No one is saying that MS users are going to have to relicense Windows due to the patent disputes. Is MS Windows and Vista going to pulled from the shelves and will every MS user have to upgrade their PC to remove the offending technology? Somehow I think that MS Will survive these patent disputes, and so will OSS.
I see one big reason why we won't have commercial supported internet television. Bandwidth. Broadcast television works because it scales well. Once a provider has secured the rights and paid for the infrastructure to broadcast a signal, the costs for additional customers are often not significant. On the other hand, for internet television each new customer required a fixed amount of bandwidth, which must be paid for. Some of that bandwidth cost might be externalized, but that will only make the fixed cost model a fractional power rather than linear function. Predicting the bandwidth needs, and paying for it, will be a problem that is likely not well understood by the broadcast network people. Even the cable people, who have to charge for the feed due to fixed physical per customer costs, are not operating under a fixed bandwidth per customer model.
Therefore any internet television will not only have to work out how to charge for the streaming media, but also how to manage costs. Recall that iTunes does not make a lot of money. Also recall the Apple does not want to do subscriptions, not, I believe, because people do not want it, but because of bandwidth costs. The predictable method of delivering content over the internet is to have the customer pay for each download, so the cost of bandwidth can be figured into each purchase. And no matter what DRM exists, once the content is on the customers machine, it is potentially a sale, even if it a subscription service.
One thing we do is assume that we understand everything as soon as we understand a little bit. At one time it was thought that if we had enough weather stations, we could predict the weather perfectly. We now know that there are extremely small perturbations that cause effects which are extremely difficult to predict. It was thought with enough pesticides and monocultures and cross fertilization we could end world hunger with few other negative side effects. We now have repeatedly seen the negative side effects of such patterns. Orange trees that were not resistant to novel pests and had to be replaced with old growth, contamination of the water supply to the point that the fish are unsuitable for regular ingestion. Red apples that are very pretty but quite horrible in every other respect.
Then we get to our assumptions about animals. It was thought that if we sequence a genome, all would be revealed. We now know that the story is very much more complex that simply saying this gene sequence does this. The orientation of the genes seems to be an issue. Genes seem to activate or not depending on the presence of other genes. The high school analysis of genetics seems quite inadequate, and the old yarns about improvement through cross pollination seems as antiquated as staying home to make sure one doesn't miss a phone call.
I don't think we are anywhere near the point where we can predict the side effects of messing with complex natural systems. We can't even predict the side effects of delivering psychotropic drugs to kids. We do so because we want our kids to be 'normal' and succeed in school and life, and then get angry when the negative side effects emerge. Of course they will be negative side effects. Nothing is free. Entropy is always increasing, and nature will have her way. I have no doubt we will engineer our children. I just hope that our courts are not tied up by the whiny parents with fantastic dreams of the perfect kid, and we approach the process to create a more holistic child, and not just to further the Aryan state.
For higher level organisms, mammals are very good at adapting. When we considered humans, we can function at range of sizes, can regulate our own temperature, and make intelligent decisions in reaction to threats. Even with no advanced knowledge, we were able to predict global patterns and plan for out needs based on those patterns. For instance, we can ration food for winter.
That does not mean that humans are good at adapting. In fact, what we are good at is adapting our environment. This subtle difference is what causes most of the problem with climate change. Humans do change the environment to fit their needs, and thereby cause side effects. Just look at london in the time of the coal economy. Simply saying that humans do not cause climate change does not change the fact that we are not a species that stands idly by and let things happen. We do actively construct a world that fits out needs.
And really, that is what most of the controversy is about. If one believes that one has the resources to buy a house wherever one wishes, in a guarded gated community, buy an SUV, and find a good job, then one can drive the SUV between the garage at home and the garage at work, and drive the kids to a private school, then climate change is not important. Someone will still manufacture the food and other stuff for you, and the house and car will still be regulated at a constant 68, so why would such a person care? However, for those of use that cannot afford such things, there is a concern.
They are the "good guys" because they no are humbled enough to have no choice but to listen to and provide what customers want, not what IBM research wants them to buy. This has come largely from the fact that customers do have a choice, and aren't forced to buy IBM, even when the IBM product is crap.
I see the open source thing as something more recent than general failure caused by the utter lack of respect for the customer. This is the lesson that all technology companies needs to learn. IBM is still evil, but they are now at least nominally trustworthy. Other technology companies do not have to suffer the meltdown. They could choose to develop products that the market needs, and compete in the open market rather than continue to develop technologies that primarily exist to stifle market innovation. Even with massive patent inventories, some degree of failure is certain for companies that do not respect customers. Not only IBM, but also, for example, ATT.
The fallacy, as no one else has the courage to point out, is this policy only applies to EMI. For that matter, I have not seen a single EMI album that I can buy without DRM at 9.99.
There is no reason to believe that other labels will charge 1.29 for DRM free music, or that the price for a full album will continue to be 9.99. It would have made much more sense to lower the price of the defective music to.89, to compete with wal mart, and continue to charge 0.99 for uninfected music. Even with a higher bit rate, there is little reason to charge more for a product that does not seem to be increasing demand.
Teaching certificates are wielded like blunt objects. For better or worse, they are considered the best way to insure the safety of children. They are not a right, but a privilege. Pretty much, there are many ways to lose a teaching certificate, and not everyone is going to get one. This can be good as it not only protects children, but keep teacher pay high by filtering out the less serious practitioners. A certificate, unlike a degree, is at the pleasure of the state.
Without taking sides, I can see in the thinking of the board. If the teacher thought underage drinking was cool at 25, then is there reason to believe that the attitude has changed now? Kids have sufficient access to alcohol without teachers supplying it.
Slashdot Mirror
In the Google model, advertising pays the bill, the masses use it, the service is built on sound statistical principles, and profit is driven by focusig on making the process relatively simple and cheap. The web is crawled, links are counted, a bit of intellegence is added, and results are displayed.
Overall this method has proven useful. The problems are mainly that the pagerank has proven easy to hack. I do not believe the problem is that users look for Madonna and get the pop star by mistake. Since google is meant to be used by the masses, as it is the cheap mass searches that generate revenue, the popularity ranking is not an issue. Make no mistake, google results are ofttimes crap, but they are still usable for common searches.
The semantic web, as discussed, seems to be something different. It in fact seems to be the standard revolt of a linguist against the mathematician. The linguist say translation must be in meaning. The statistician says I can do it without understanding anything. They are both correct, but Google has shown the later can provide reasonable and cheap results. Likewise, this guy tries to compare the long tail to the iceberg. Of course, the long tail are the minority underserved, who are underserved because the lack the means or desire to pay for the service. The hidden iceberg is the majority that sinks large ships. Not someone who understands statistics, or, for that matter, is likely to make a generous profit.
What I think this guy is talking about is the specialized services that people might pay for directly, not a booming industry, as the nation provides librarians for free. A program that will take a search, and we assume that the user is competent enough to form the search using valid english, as there is no librarian to help construct the search, and know enough about the language, about the context, and about the subject matter, to return the exactly proper few results. It would then have to do this cheaply enough to drive a profit. This would in fact be a grand piece of software, but would it compete with Google or MSN or any mass search engine?
I am disappointed as even simple semantic search engines could get rid of the clutter we have on google, and if someone were willing to invest, even MS for that matter, the link farms could be a thing of the past. A lot of this, I believe, is due to the battle between the mathematicians and the linguants.
About the only negative thing I can say about godaddy is that I could not transfer one of my domains, it expired, and now godaddy appears to be holding it hostage for $80. Not incompetent, just extremely aggressive marketing.
Parent don't spy, they care. At some point parents must let go, but that happens in stagess. Even parent who allow sexual activity for their (pre-)teens in the house do so in hopes of limiting any damage. My limited experience indicates kids needs some boundaries, will naturally push those boundries as they need more room, but will still expect a gentle confining force to make them feel secure. Of course you are correct that if the force is overbearing, the kids will not learn to manage on their own, but from what I have seen of this technology, 13 year old children setting up dates with strangers, some who claim to be old enough to drive a car and give them a good time, a bit more caring and a bit less letting the tv/computer raise the kids is in order.
In this case, the difficulty of a single method of stealing a car is reduced, thereby reducing the risk of being left stranded without a car. This is good. However, it can be said such difficulty merely increases the pressure to car jack. Nothing is free. It is not only bad design flaw, but a flawed system of design.
First, most military actions are guided by civilian authority, but controlled by the military. The Presidents recent admonition to the congress that it should not try to micromanage the war. Likewise, I enjoy watching how the military does not torture humans simply because the civilian authority says not to. In reality, when you send a bunch of people to kill other people, there is little that can be done to completely control the situation.
Second, it is a popular conception that the modern military works best with hand picked uber trained soldiers. This is true only because many modern conflicts have minimal casualties, at least on the American side. In a real war, where the winning side is the side that lose the most people, the metric is no longer training, but merely people willing to die. WWI central powers lost 4 million+, the 'winners' lost 5 million+. WWII the axis lost 8 million+, the 'winners' lost 12 million +. In Iraq, the US has lost several thousand, and all out might is kept a bay by the hundred of thousands untrained unwashed militia willing to die at 10 times the coalition numbers. Vietnam war the communist forces lost 600,000 people, the losers lost half that many.
And given the familiarity of 1941, I am in wonder that why the military is not blamed for the current situation. One reason why WWII was successful, and WWI was such a shambles(might as well have taken 10,000 men a day and shot them) was that in WWII the military was forced to act a a professional organization and complete the job, not just a bunch of mercenaries. There were plan. This is different from, say, Iraq, where the military does part of the job, then is not ready to complete the job in a timely manner. To be specific, WWII starts in around 1939. The US is eventually involved, and ends the war in 1945, at which time the UN is set up. In 1947 the US forms a plan to rebuild europe, which is completed by 1952. 7 years after the war ended and four year after the plan was implemented.
By contrast, we are 4 years after the end of major conflict in Iraq, and the job is still not done. Even with all the major technology, experience of hind sight, and a decisive and low costs victory, we cannot do what we did at the end of WWII.
And just because it is the day it is, let us take a moment to remember those untrained people who were willing to serve their country and give their life, with very little to no pay, to protect their family and their beliefs.
In any case, the pure subscription model is on it's way out. USA Today has a larger subscription base, even with free online content. The NYT subscriptions are on the rise. The journal is the only top three that is falling. Most newspapers are meeting the new generation head on and altering the business models to meet new realities. The Journal survives only the inertia, and in a generation will probably be a shell of it's past self. I can tell you that I have observed the Journal is nothing compared to what it was 20 years ago.
Clone Wars is certainly just another in a line of creatively disastrous attempt to monetize the dry Star Wars franchise. In spite of this, if Lucas steps away and gives Tartakovsky full rien we might end up with something that is not Star Wars, but nevertheless interesting, at least to a certain age group.
So, if the museum was funded through the church scam, and cost 27 million, at an average tax rate of 20%, it cost our fighting force over 5 million dollars. Talk about not supporting our troops. Well, I guess if we pray that our god's children kill all their god's children first, it will all work out. Or even worse, 5 million for education so our kids will be smart enough to avoid the bullet, and museum, all together.
This museum, while attempting to provide a self consistent set of conclusions, fails to limit itself to observable and verifiable fact. In fact I feel it mocks Christianity by further limiting the power of the creator. Limiting such power has always been popular in the sinful human population that wishes to transfer power from the creator to itself. Just look at catholicism and the belief that certain religious leaders can speak for the almighty. For example, when I was growing up it was quite a popular belief that the creator put fossils and likes on earth as a test of fate. Those that continue to believe the bible even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary are those with sufficient faith to be saved. Now these sinful humans are trying to rewrite the bible and limit the power of the almighty by saying that dinosaurs existed and the grand canyon and the fossils were caused by the flood. You know, if the creator wanted a grand canyon, or fossils, or dinosaurs, or floods, or whatever, there is nothing to stop the desire becoming a reality, no matter what greedy and corrupt humans have to say.
I wonder if the future will see this museum as an artifact of a time in Christianity when the leaders were more concerned with wealth and personal power than serving the almighty. If, perhaps, someone like Martin Luther will emerge to blog 123 ways that the christian church is corrupt, and call for a post-christian movement.
Here are a couple things I believe are relevant. You car is an electrically noisy place, especially the front of the car. This is why, I believe, most modern cars have antennas at the back of the car, away from the electrically noisy engine. The radio is at the front of the car, and encased in a metal grounded cage, most often refereed to a faraday cage. This keeps the electrically noisy engine, and other signals, out of the car. In any case, the FM transmitter has an antenna on it, the length of which is likely around 1 wave length of the 100 MHZ wave, as do all the cars around you. Each of the waves must leave the car, make it to the antenna, so that radio can decode and play the wave. It may be that there are three or more cars around you may have transmitting antennas nearly as close to your receiving antennas, especially if the transmitting antenna is laid across the dashboard rather facing toward the back.
This really is a side effect of our societies obsession with filming everything that happens in the world. We are so scared that someone, somewhere, might be stealing a bag of candy or not comming to a full stop at a red light, or enoying themselves is some societal unacceptable manner, that jestison the civlized concept of privacy, trust, and independence for the uncivilized concepts of demanding papers with no probably cuase, profiling based on the clothes a person wears, and ratting out our family members. There was a time when the later were clearly confined to the facist governments, and governments for the people, and by th4e people, avoided them.
So we end up with a predictable problem. Footage that should be accessible to only a limited audience slips out to the de-facto public domain. We were such in a hurry to film every innocuous act, that we did not set up a proper legal framework to control the flow of the footage, so we use the DCMA, a blunt and largely ineffective tool, to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped.
If one believes that the highest form of art is sneaking up to a window and filming a neighbor in a compromising position, then there is no problem with this video. But I believe there are issues. For instance, a while back a school camera monitoring a middle school dance caught what appeared a pre-teen couple progressing though all manner of intimate activity including what could be interpreted as sexual congress. Though there were no incriminating physical evidence, only circumstantial, I believe it was in bad taste to release even the stills. It was pure publicity for the news stations, with no real new value.
In this way the comparison with alta vista is extremely flawed. Alta Vista, unlike google, was primarily a search firm, and when google searches were of higher quality than Alta Vista, the fim failed. A more spt comparison would be Yahoo, which simply transformed itself itself into a portal. Indeed, google will not likely when someone provides better searches, and it will happen as google searches are starting to really be terrible, but will simply begin to emphasize other services.
Nor does it take into account agricultural surpluses that likely still exist, and the food destruction. I have no idea what state the world is in now, but I know that even 10 years ago the issue was not food, but getting food to the poor. Nor does it take into account the corn is only one means of ethanol production, an inefficient form that in fact exist only because it is promoted by the famously independent and conservative farmers who are used to suckling at the government teat, and there are other sources, such as prairie grass, that might work just as well.
One interesting thing is that the US has a corn economy, and corn ethanol, though not perfect, is a good fit as it requires minimal effort, since we have so much corn infrastructure to begin with. As a transitional step away from fossil fuels, it is quite rational. As a effort to continue burning hydrocarbons, it is not rational. But such burning, if we are in fact concerned with the poor people that cannot even afford corn, is not justified. The death toll to get the hydrocarbons is not small. The subjugation of the Nigerian people, the deals made with the Saudi monarchy, the tens of thousands dead in Iraq. Really, how can we compare such real and present destruction with a theoretical problem that, at it's most practical level, is meant as method to help reduce the level of the comprimises we must make for energy.
One last thing. Oil is a commodity. It does not matter where the oil that one uses came from. If any oil field shuts down, even if it not an oil field that supplies the local pump, all prices increase.
It is just like the Imus thing. He has every right to stand in his Manhattan apartment and scream out the window everything he wants to say on the radio, although I suspect his coop might have something to say about it, until he goes hoarse, but on the payroll of another one lacks such freedoms. It boils down to a simple issue of what can and cannot be done, and the professional should know the difference. It is, in fact, what they are paid for.
And it is not censorship, as it would not be impossible to have a radio station that is a bit more radical. Many market have individual funded radio stations specifically for that purpose, and those that do fulfill a public need get funded. Of course, because the FCC allowed an individual to own multiple stations in the same market, and play identical content, the licenses for radio stations are few and far between, but that just means that people who want extreme radio need to get off thier duff and quit expecting corporate America to fulfill their every whim.
So here we are with a very predictable rise in gasoline. Do people take responsiblity for thier choices? No they complain that the government is not giving handouts. Our troops required a billion dollars a week for supplies, do we say what can we do to cut back and help, or do we just slap a sticker on out SUV and live life as normal?
By the late 80's it was well known that oil dependence was a security risk. It was also known that even though new wells might be found, they would neither be as cheap to exploit nor as secure. Forward thinking people knew that oil was a limited resource and if we did not want to pay excalating prices for that resource, prices that would be predicted by the standard capitalistic supply and demand curve, we would have to move to another supply of energy. The myth that we have not known for 20 years that oil was a non renewable and limited resource is up there with the myth that everyone is Chis Columbus' day thought the world was flat. To be clear we did not know when the oil would peak, 2000, 2010, 2020, but we knew it was coming, and research lead and design to manufacture time required that action was needed.
But the issue we have now is only partially caused by the 'high' price, and to get back on topic, the issues seems to be that despite the 'high' prices few people are cutting back on fuel use through, for example, telecommuting. Surprisingly, though the price peaked a year or so ago, The price/demand curve has only recently peaked, and there is no evidence that price is going to reduce demand as predicted by the standard capitalist models. Therefore, nothing that the government does to increase supply or decrease demand is unlikely to have a long term negative force on the price rise. It is clear by the price/demand curve that the consumer just does not seem to care about the price. Only about driving as much as they wish.
In fact, if we want a quick fix, the best way is to use a modified Nixon era type of price control. Let consumers purchase 10 gallons of gas each week at $2, and anything over at market rate. This will allow us to have cheap gas, and allow consumers to buy as much fuel as they wish.
Now MS, the company that will sue it's customers, charge for products and then claim the products are not genuine, and write software so that every possible browser request is routed through MS first, is buying this company that I have never heard of before. My trust and state of MS cookies remains unchanged.
The wisdom of the purchase is indicated by MS falling stock price.
OTOH, if the drivers license were to be linked to actual cash, then the drivers license might be the most valuable item to steal. And because a pin number is likely required, the person is not likely to be allowed to leave. Rather, the person will be taken hostage until the bank account is cleared, thus increasing the risk of serious injury and death.
The upshot of all this is that people who before might be considered not worth attacking, as they had no valuables, would now become a prime target as they might have a drivers license with them. It seems to me that this is just another case of the desire to integrate overcoming the common sense of safety.
The reason that image spam works is because advertising drives the web, along with people who want pretty fonts in their email, and so there are often no obvious methods to turn off image display. This is the same thing with flash. The developers have economic incentives to allow certain security risks, so those security risks are coded.
If every email client had a text only setting, images and URL allowed only from certain users, then much of this could go away. In most cases, the images would never be displayed.
At some point we have to accept spam as part of the consumer culture, and the 'free web', and realize that we are not really willing to do what it takes to make it go away.
I believe that this historical attack on customers has been uniquely confined to the software industry, that is until the RIAA got a hold of the business model. For example, If I buy, in good faith, an unlicensed book, The author or his or her agent does not come after me and demand triple compensation. OTOH, if I, as a business, in goo faith properly license all my software, and conduct full due diligence to insure that no unlicensed software is installed, I can still be held in great financial liability. At one time such laws were used to stem the frankly rampant use of unlicensed software, but over the past 10 years the main objective was to allow vendors to spy on customers and make sure that competitors software is not being used.
So this MS tactic is just an extension of previously United States certified monopolistic behavior. At first it was OSS was more expensive to integrate with MS software. Then it was OSS was unreliable when used with MS software. Now it is 'you have to pay MS either way, so why bother.' The funny thing is that no one is saying Zune and MS music are a dead end because of the patent disputes. No one is saying that MS users are going to have to relicense Windows due to the patent disputes. Is MS Windows and Vista going to pulled from the shelves and will every MS user have to upgrade their PC to remove the offending technology? Somehow I think that MS Will survive these patent disputes, and so will OSS.
Therefore any internet television will not only have to work out how to charge for the streaming media, but also how to manage costs. Recall that iTunes does not make a lot of money. Also recall the Apple does not want to do subscriptions, not, I believe, because people do not want it, but because of bandwidth costs. The predictable method of delivering content over the internet is to have the customer pay for each download, so the cost of bandwidth can be figured into each purchase. And no matter what DRM exists, once the content is on the customers machine, it is potentially a sale, even if it a subscription service.
Then we get to our assumptions about animals. It was thought that if we sequence a genome, all would be revealed. We now know that the story is very much more complex that simply saying this gene sequence does this. The orientation of the genes seems to be an issue. Genes seem to activate or not depending on the presence of other genes. The high school analysis of genetics seems quite inadequate, and the old yarns about improvement through cross pollination seems as antiquated as staying home to make sure one doesn't miss a phone call.
I don't think we are anywhere near the point where we can predict the side effects of messing with complex natural systems. We can't even predict the side effects of delivering psychotropic drugs to kids. We do so because we want our kids to be 'normal' and succeed in school and life, and then get angry when the negative side effects emerge. Of course they will be negative side effects. Nothing is free. Entropy is always increasing, and nature will have her way. I have no doubt we will engineer our children. I just hope that our courts are not tied up by the whiny parents with fantastic dreams of the perfect kid, and we approach the process to create a more holistic child, and not just to further the Aryan state.
That does not mean that humans are good at adapting. In fact, what we are good at is adapting our environment. This subtle difference is what causes most of the problem with climate change. Humans do change the environment to fit their needs, and thereby cause side effects. Just look at london in the time of the coal economy. Simply saying that humans do not cause climate change does not change the fact that we are not a species that stands idly by and let things happen. We do actively construct a world that fits out needs.
And really, that is what most of the controversy is about. If one believes that one has the resources to buy a house wherever one wishes, in a guarded gated community, buy an SUV, and find a good job, then one can drive the SUV between the garage at home and the garage at work, and drive the kids to a private school, then climate change is not important. Someone will still manufacture the food and other stuff for you, and the house and car will still be regulated at a constant 68, so why would such a person care? However, for those of use that cannot afford such things, there is a concern.
I see the open source thing as something more recent than general failure caused by the utter lack of respect for the customer. This is the lesson that all technology companies needs to learn. IBM is still evil, but they are now at least nominally trustworthy. Other technology companies do not have to suffer the meltdown. They could choose to develop products that the market needs, and compete in the open market rather than continue to develop technologies that primarily exist to stifle market innovation. Even with massive patent inventories, some degree of failure is certain for companies that do not respect customers. Not only IBM, but also, for example, ATT.
There is no reason to believe that other labels will charge 1.29 for DRM free music, or that the price for a full album will continue to be 9.99. It would have made much more sense to lower the price of the defective music to .89, to compete with wal mart, and continue to charge 0.99 for uninfected music. Even with a higher bit rate, there is little reason to charge more for a product that does not seem to be increasing demand.
Without taking sides, I can see in the thinking of the board. If the teacher thought underage drinking was cool at 25, then is there reason to believe that the attitude has changed now? Kids have sufficient access to alcohol without teachers supplying it.