Yahoo and MSN are both pretty popular here. The fact that Internet usage boomed in India right along the time MS and Yahoo were getting their IM act together created network effects that ensure that few people know anyone on AOL.
Between MSN and Yahoo, though, the fact that MSN is the least ad-infested major messenger helps. (Yahoo serves ads during group chats, MSN doesn't. AOL seems to serve ads *everywhere* in AIM and ICQ.) Lots of Indians connect from behind corporate firewalls, and for a long time (v5) Yahoo seemed to be rather buggy behind firewalls. Contrary to a lot of groupthink here, XP penetration is not high so the "MS forcing Messenger down our throats" argument doesn't hold up.
[oh the shame]I have a Hotmail Plus account[/oh the shame] (Yep, I like it for the Outlook integration and Messenger alerts, besides the fact that it's been a great spam-free address since 1997). I've been on a 2GB mailbox since July. Not all Hotmail Plus accounts have been upgraded yet though.
IIRC the process of rolling the free subscribers up to 250MB will take time. If you don't mind the hassle of changing email, there's always Yahoo (or Gmail if you can snarf one).
And oh, the Inquirer article the OSViews article was based on contained very little hard facts and no sources. And nowhere does it explicitly say the 2GB is for free (of course, if they do give that to free users, more power to them).
Yup -- in fact, the i860 was codenamed the N-Ten, which is where NT got its "NT" moniker from initially. Marketing then called it "New Technology" and licensed the letters from Northern Telecom.
Yes, they use Authenticode to digitally sign their EXEs (this creates a "Digital Signatures" tab in the File Properties dialog, which you can use to verify . The problem is, it is (non-trivially) possible to spoof this dialog with one of your own (Windows apps can and do add their own property sheets). And of course, it's impossible to verify these files on non-Windows systems.
IMO they should posting MD5 or SHA1 hashes. Any MS employees reading this, please ask the Microsoft.com folk to include hash information!
>fundamentals components of.NET will be abandonned with Avalon
One word: no. WinForms will continue to be supported. Hell, GDI and GDI+ will continue to be supported. If you don't want to write Avalon apps, don't write them. But your apps will stick out as clunky old things in Longhorn the way DOS apps did under Win3.1 and Win3.1 apps did under Win95.
At that point, it becomes more cost effective to stick with mature solutions that work, not play catchup to the latest and greatest. "Look, Shinny Things" is not a better business strategy than compatibility and reuse.
Funny, because Apple has built up a billion dollar business based exactly on that proposition... If you ignore eye candy OSX is no different from Gnome 2.6:-).
IMO India's fondness for comics is nowhere near Japan's, but at a certain level Spiderman (along with Batman and Superman) are all very popular (and have tremendous name recognition if nothing else). In the early 80s the Spiderman animated series was one of the most popular shows on India's then-only national network.
Re:What's he going to swing on?
on
Spider-Man in India
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's called a "dhoti". Allegedly more Indian, although you'd be hard-pressed to find a under-40 Indian wear one outside of a religious ceremony or political gathering. Looking through the changes, they are cute. Pavitr Prabhakar makes me laugh - it sounds *forced*.
I like Spiderman, but for this to take off, Gotham Comics India better get their "localization" right - cosmetic changes like Parker -> Prabhakar are miles away from understanding what the typical (i.e., *not* English-speaking) Indian comic reader is looking for. And the Indian language audience already has lots of comic publishers (most notably Diamond) who do a far better job of creating characters that Indian language readers relate to. The (far smaller but still large) English language audience would never stand for something like this (has "cheap knockoff" written all over it) because they would rather read the originals.
(offtopic) Of late/. has been accepting a lot of story submissions that originally appeared on Boing Boing days ago so here's a tip to get the stories early: use the Boing Boing slashbox.
> Google wants to leverage its superior searching ability.
Um, searching email is not rocket science. Yahoo does it quite well, and so does Hotmail. Btw, I am an early beta tester and I wouldn't rate Gmail's search as very good: "tolkien" fails to match "tolkien's", "Silmarillon" does not result in a "Did you mean... Silmarillion" (both of these work in Google's standard web search).
Plus, the search interface is not easy for the average n00b. typing "label:label-foo -label:bar" is not terribly intuitive. It's not even consistent: whitespace in labels are encoded with hyphens but spaces in other searches are parenthesized (e.g., to:(john doe)).
To be fair, the Gmail team has always come back positively when I've reported these, I guess v1.1 of Gmail will be much better than it is now. But again, it ain't rocket science. On the other hand, Google niceties like not putting a tag-line to outgoing mail are rather nice, and so is the fast, uncluttered interface. I hope Google does a XUL/XAML client sometime - that'd rock.
Just by me closing my browser and reopening it, I look like a completely different person to that site... Does that then mean I am two completely different people visiting the site at two different times?
Which is where data mining steps in. Properly done over a long period of time (say a quarter), it can tag surfing patterns as being statistically similar. Also, if you sift through enough visitors, you will find that despite the same client address, there is enough variation in site traversal (access times, pages viewed, sequence of visits) to statistically identify unique visitors.
Sessions can be maintained purely on the server. One way would be to use session specific URL-rewriting. e.g., http://www.amazon.com/ could become: http://www.amazon.com/home/home.html/104- 8189510-5 674368
(the number would be a tracking cookie)
That in conjunction with data mining would give you some pretty interesting possibilities.
I've never really understood the paranoia about cookies. It is not very hard to do server-side, cookie-less profiling: they have your IP address and their access log. Any decent data mining solution would give them a site traversal graph for your visits. Plotting multiple site traversal graphs against time would give a pretty good idea whether one or more users were browsing their site from the same IP address. Cross-site profiling is possible by simply sharing access logs.
I don't particularly like it, but Scott McNealy had a point when he said "You have no privacy. Get over it."
Older standards like... CSS2? Or maybe forward slashes in URLs?
HTML 3.2. HTML 4.01 Transitional. (which is what I try to use for my homepage - doesn't quite validate, but works damn well in every browser I've tested so far)
Now I'm down to the big decision: redirect IE users to a page that explains the problem and offers alternatives, or just throw a 500 when they show up.
People who break the web by discriminating on the User-Agent header deserve to be shoved down a cold dark room with AOL access only. That goes for Microsoft when they pull their Opera-exclusion stunts, my bank (when they created an assfaced Internet banking "portal"), or you, when you do it for rant-central.
PS. Isn't Opera - with it's Fastforward button - the natural choice for pr0n browsers everywhere?;-)
Well, many vegetable-sellers* (the kind who have little push-carts full of vegetables) have cellphones now, so do many auto-rickshaw drivers.
Do most poor farmers have cellphones? Nope. As you pointed out, the extremes in India are astonishing. I believe this can be best explained by the fact that a lot of India is uneducated, has a feudal mindset, and believes that suffering is their destiny in life (Karma, however we use it on/., is not a joke to most Indians).
That said, there are _lot_ of vegetable sellers and autorickshaw drivers in India, and they are usually classified as LIGs (Lower Income Groups). So it's sort of heartening to see how far we've come that many of them can afford a cellphone.
Btw, a cellphone could be had for as little as INR 1500, and a pay-as-you-go card that'd last a month can be got for INR 50-200. Not for the "poorest of the poor", but the urban poor can probably afford it.
*Btw, the reason the urban poor buy cellphones is because they get better business this way. For example, people can call a veggie seller up and get veggies on demand at home. Ditto autorickshaw drivers - parents are more likely to trust their kids (to drive them to/from school) to an autorickshaw driver who is always reachable via a cellphone.
Sure! Let's shut out 75% of the web because some angle-bracket nazis think that IE's support for their bleeding edge standards is not good enough.
Why don't we start with Slashdot banning IE users? Oh wait, Slashdot's still on HTML 3.2. What about Google? Oh wait, Google home page doesn't even validate.
Maybe one of these days you will get off your high horse and realize that not everybody passionately cares about the latest web standards -- especially when there are *older* standards that continue to work just fine.
A majority of the people might have one policy view, but it could so happen that the candidate with a contrary view might get elected.
This happens in more sophisticated systems too (e.g. Bush/Gore 2000). The question is: why do the undeniably smart men who created the system allow this loophole? The answer is, because the benefits of the loophole (voice to smaller states, etc) outweighed the disadvantages.
Likewise, the winner-takes-all model has advantages: it is easy for the average Indian (who is used to shenanigans in politics otherwise) to grasp and accept; can you imagine what a fractured polity we would create if we institutionalized coalition discussions after every election by adopting a German-style proportional representation scheme?
I'm thinking you didn't read my post down to the bottom, especially where I talked about why vote-buying might matter and why there are zamindari-constituencies.
About the thin Andhra victory margins: I did not respond because this is classic conspiracy theory ranting: impossible to prove wrong.
TDP/BJP got a mere 49 seats, or 12% of the Assembly, despite the fairly okay-ish vote share. Reason? Most of the seats won by the Congress had winning margins of less than 1000 votes.
If the Congress/Telengana combine, out of power, could "buy" votes with such accuracy and across "most" of their win-seats without any serious accusations of malpractice, then they deserve to get a book contract from IDG to write a book on Rigging for Dummies;-)
As for 21st century zamindaris - *shrug* I was born in Bihar and all I can say is that people get the government they deserve. (South Bihar at least was intelligent enough to secede:-p) Even after seeing no improvement in their standard of living for 50 years, these people are still fractured along caste lines and cannot _think_ of voting out people who cause them pain (of course, inept Opposition parties also helped). End of day, democracy also means choosing your own destiny. They got what they asked for.
Actually, I did realize the grandparent poster was pointing out a systemic flaw in the classic Westminster model, but I was responding to his "...convince a dozen other candidates with the same beliefs as their opponents to run and fill up the rest of the candidate list". Practically speaking, it is not very easy to do: even in your Nalgonda example, the candidate fixated on the temple would find it difficult to 'fund' sock-puppet opponents to run on the water issue without someone raising a huge hue and cry with the election commission.
The system of single plurality (one vote, one candidate), is mathematically a very unfair, almost undemocratic way to run an election whenever there are 3 or more candidates.
Yes, it is. But there's a certain simplicity to the system that is appealing - especially in a country like India blighted by wheeling-dealing politicians. More complicated systems do not result in smoother government, IMO; they result in greater points of failure. In particular, many European systems, like Germany's proportional representation ossify the decision making process and entrench "coalition government" as an integral part of the system.
On the other hand, perhaps an American electoral college-style election, with its checks and balances, would be better suited for a large and diverse country like India, but the usual reason given against that it is too 'federal' for New Delhi's unitary worldview.
Outraged, the constituents decide that enough is enough and step into the electioneering process en masse. Each of the 400 or so people have a specific idea in mind to solve the region's water crisis; all of them agree that the only way it can be solved is to bring waters from the nearby River Krishna to the district.
Which goes to show the Nalgonda constituents did not know how to play the game well. Independent candidates have a history of winning in India, so why did they not consolidate their platform and run on an Independent ticket, making water one of their main platforms? Their political naivete is no reason to blame the Westminster model.
Election officials operating the poll booths are school teachers mostly from the neighborhood, meaning that they'd likely know you by name anyway.
Which means they could be susceptible to local influences, just like Florida. They probably aren't in large parts of India, but how do you think local chieftains threaten people with hookah-paani boycotts in North India? The perception that villagers have is that at least in some places, the ballot is not so secret after all.
The Indian EVM machine appears to use the same single plurality vote, supporting up to 16 candidates.
4 EVMs can be chained together, to support 64 candidates. I believe the Election Commission was prepared to have more on standby if there were more than 64 nominations from a constituency. In the last few General Assembly Elections there haven't been more than 34 nominations per constituency. (Nominations cost money, which one forfeits if one doesn't get enough percentage of votes.)
If someone wants to win, they'll convince a dozen other candidates with the same beliefs as their opponents to run and fill up the rest of the candidate list.
The best part about a functioning democracy is that while this sort of ballot-DDOSing is fun to talk about, the legal system ensures that in practice they're not worth doing: Candidates found guilty (after due process, of course) of messing with the poll system get debarred from contesting elections upto 5 years.
Format: All images you load must be in a.JPEG,.GIF, or.PNG format. Animated images will not be accepted.
Size: You may choose from four standard ad sizes: Banner (468 x 60), Leaderboard (728 x 90), Inline Rectangle (300 x 250), and Skyscraper (120 x 600) (see examples here). Please note that we may resize your image slightly to accommodate your destination URL and the 'Ads by Google' feedback link, which can alter the proportions of your image. If you'd like to retain your image's original proportions, you may adjust your image sizes before you upload them (learn more.)
Image content: Your images must be relevant to your advertised concepts and products. For example, an Ad Group containing keywords like 'roses,' 'tulips,' and 'carnations' would call for floral-related images. We strongly recommend that you also include some descriptive text and a call to action to reinforce your ad's message.
Please note that we will only accept family safe images. For more details about acceptable image ads content, read the Google AdWords Editorial Guidelines.
Also most Custom Software doesn't bother with any sort of licensing basically as the programmer makes the code and sends it to the customer and they pay him for his hours the code is their they can do whatever they want with it.
In quite a few countries "service tax" (or "value added tax") is charged on this sort of transaction. Both are a flat rate tax on the billed transaction. It doesn't really matter if the software you use is libre/gratis, as long as your bill amount is nonzero.
Better idea - 2 accounts in one card?
on
RFID MasterCard
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This card is not about RFID, it's about making card use in scenarios like drive-throughs easier. Also, it's currently limited to <$25 transactions currently according to the FAQ.
Assuming one likes the idea of small plastic transactions at all, I wonder if it wouldn't be a better idea to _combine_ 2 accounts in one card: one account for the higher-value mag-stripe, and an RFID account with a low credit limit that needs to be constantly replenished.
Anyway, there's no way to import my contacts yet, or my address book, or a PST file (or other mail format), or import mail from another service (that's stretching).
I got this from Gmail Support a couple days back in response to a question.
> You might be interested to hear that we > are announcing these upcoming features: > > Automatic forwarding of your email to another account > Plain HTML version of Gmail > Import/export Contacts
I guess as we move through the beta we should see quite a few other improvements.
Like: No spam. Not a single freaking message.
Like someone here already said, I'm scared to test that feature:-). Actually, I wonder if a lot of spammers are adopting a wait-and-see policy to Gmail. After all, the Spam folder of thousands of Gmail users makes for a pretty effective blacklist database for Google's Web Search.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo and MSN are both pretty popular here. The fact that Internet usage boomed in India right along the time MS and Yahoo were getting their IM act together created network effects that ensure that few people know anyone on AOL.
Between MSN and Yahoo, though, the fact that MSN is the least ad-infested major messenger helps. (Yahoo serves ads during group chats, MSN doesn't. AOL seems to serve ads *everywhere* in AIM and ICQ.) Lots of Indians connect from behind corporate firewalls, and for a long time (v5) Yahoo seemed to be rather buggy behind firewalls. Contrary to a lot of groupthink here, XP penetration is not high so the "MS forcing Messenger down our throats" argument doesn't hold up.
[oh the shame]I have a Hotmail Plus account[/oh the shame] (Yep, I like it for the Outlook integration and Messenger alerts, besides the fact that it's been a great spam-free address since 1997). I've been on a 2GB mailbox since July. Not all Hotmail Plus accounts have been upgraded yet though.
IIRC the process of rolling the free subscribers up to 250MB will take time. If you don't mind the hassle of changing email, there's always Yahoo (or Gmail if you can snarf one).
And oh, the Inquirer article the OSViews article was based on contained very little hard facts and no sources. And nowhere does it explicitly say the 2GB is for free (of course, if they do give that to free users, more power to them).
Yup -- in fact, the i860 was codenamed the N-Ten, which is where NT got its "NT" moniker from initially. Marketing then called it "New Technology" and licensed the letters from Northern Telecom.
Yes, they use Authenticode to digitally sign their EXEs (this creates a "Digital Signatures" tab in the File Properties dialog, which you can use to verify . The problem is, it is (non-trivially) possible to spoof this dialog with one of your own (Windows apps can and do add their own property sheets). And of course, it's impossible to verify these files on non-Windows systems.
IMO they should posting MD5 or SHA1 hashes. Any MS employees reading this, please ask the Microsoft.com folk to include hash information!
They are no doubt taking advantage of wage advantages described in the article.
Yes, and they are planning to add 20,000 employees in India by the end of this year.
>fundamentals components of .NET will be abandonned with Avalon
... If you ignore eye candy OSX is no different from Gnome 2.6 :-).
One word: no. WinForms will continue to be supported. Hell, GDI and GDI+ will continue to be supported. If you don't want to write Avalon apps, don't write them. But your apps will stick out as clunky old things in Longhorn the way DOS apps did under Win3.1 and Win3.1 apps did under Win95.
At that point, it becomes more cost effective to stick with mature solutions that work, not play catchup to the latest and greatest. "Look, Shinny Things" is not a better business strategy than compatibility and reuse.
Funny, because Apple has built up a billion dollar business based exactly on that proposition
>Spider Man, however, isn't popular in India.
IMO India's fondness for comics is nowhere near Japan's, but at a certain level Spiderman (along with Batman and Superman) are all very popular (and have tremendous name recognition if nothing else). In the early 80s the Spiderman animated series was one of the most popular shows on India's then-only national network.
It's called a "dhoti". Allegedly more Indian, although you'd be hard-pressed to find a under-40 Indian wear one outside of a religious ceremony or political gathering. Looking through the changes, they are cute. Pavitr Prabhakar makes me laugh - it sounds *forced*.
/. has been accepting a lot of story submissions that originally appeared on Boing Boing days ago so here's a tip to get the stories early: use the Boing Boing slashbox.
I like Spiderman, but for this to take off, Gotham Comics India better get their "localization" right - cosmetic changes like Parker -> Prabhakar are miles away from understanding what the typical (i.e., *not* English-speaking) Indian comic reader is looking for. And the Indian language audience already has lots of comic publishers (most notably Diamond) who do a far better job of creating characters that Indian language readers relate to. The (far smaller but still large) English language audience would never stand for something like this (has "cheap knockoff" written all over it) because they would rather read the originals.
(offtopic) Of late
> Google wants to leverage its superior searching ability.
Um, searching email is not rocket science. Yahoo does it quite well, and so does Hotmail. Btw, I am an early beta tester and I wouldn't rate Gmail's search as very good: "tolkien" fails to match "tolkien's", "Silmarillon" does not result in a "Did you mean... Silmarillion" (both of these work in Google's standard web search).
Plus, the search interface is not easy for the average n00b. typing "label:label-foo -label:bar" is not terribly intuitive. It's not even consistent: whitespace in labels are encoded with hyphens but spaces in other searches are parenthesized (e.g., to:(john doe)).
To be fair, the Gmail team has always come back positively when I've reported these, I guess v1.1 of Gmail will be much better than it is now. But again, it ain't rocket science. On the other hand, Google niceties like not putting a tag-line to outgoing mail are rather nice, and so is the fast, uncluttered interface. I hope Google does a XUL/XAML client sometime - that'd rock.
Just by me closing my browser and reopening it, I look like a completely different person to that site ... Does that then mean I am two completely different people visiting the site at two different times?
Which is where data mining steps in. Properly done over a long period of time (say a quarter), it can tag surfing patterns as being statistically similar. Also, if you sift through enough visitors, you will find that despite the same client address, there is enough variation in site traversal (access times, pages viewed, sequence of visits) to statistically identify unique visitors.
Sessions can be maintained purely on the server. One way would be to use session specific URL-rewriting.- 8189510-5 674368
e.g., http://www.amazon.com/ could become:
http://www.amazon.com/home/home.html/104
(the number would be a tracking cookie)
That in conjunction with data mining would give you some pretty interesting possibilities.
I've never really understood the paranoia about cookies. It is not very hard to do server-side, cookie-less profiling: they have your IP address and their access log. Any decent data mining solution would give them a site traversal graph for your visits. Plotting multiple site traversal graphs against time would give a pretty good idea whether one or more users were browsing their site from the same IP address. Cross-site profiling is possible by simply sharing access logs.
I don't particularly like it, but Scott McNealy had a point when he said "You have no privacy. Get over it."
Older standards like... CSS2? Or maybe forward slashes in URLs?
;-)
HTML 3.2. HTML 4.01 Transitional. (which is what I try to use for my homepage - doesn't quite validate, but works damn well in every browser I've tested so far)
Now I'm down to the big decision: redirect IE users to a page that explains the problem and offers alternatives, or just throw a 500 when they show up.
People who break the web by discriminating on the User-Agent header deserve to be shoved down a cold dark room with AOL access only. That goes for Microsoft when they pull their Opera-exclusion stunts, my bank (when they created an assfaced Internet banking "portal"), or you, when you do it for rant-central.
PS. Isn't Opera - with it's Fastforward button - the natural choice for pr0n browsers everywhere?
Well, many vegetable-sellers* (the kind who have little push-carts full of vegetables) have cellphones now, so do many auto-rickshaw drivers.
/., is not a joke to most Indians).
Do most poor farmers have cellphones? Nope. As you pointed out, the extremes in India are astonishing. I believe this can be best explained by the fact that a lot of India is uneducated, has a feudal mindset, and believes that suffering is their destiny in life (Karma, however we use it on
That said, there are _lot_ of vegetable sellers and autorickshaw drivers in India, and they are usually classified as LIGs (Lower Income Groups). So it's sort of heartening to see how far we've come that many of them can afford a cellphone.
Btw, a cellphone could be had for as little as INR 1500, and a pay-as-you-go card that'd last a month can be got for INR 50-200. Not for the "poorest of the poor", but the urban poor can probably afford it.
*Btw, the reason the urban poor buy cellphones is because they get better business this way. For example, people can call a veggie seller up and get veggies on demand at home. Ditto autorickshaw drivers - parents are more likely to trust their kids (to drive them to/from school) to an autorickshaw driver who is always reachable via a cellphone.
Sure! Let's shut out 75% of the web because some angle-bracket nazis think that IE's support for their bleeding edge standards is not good enough.
Why don't we start with Slashdot banning IE users? Oh wait, Slashdot's still on HTML 3.2. What about Google? Oh wait, Google home page doesn't even validate.
Maybe one of these days you will get off your high horse and realize that not everybody passionately cares about the latest web standards -- especially when there are *older* standards that continue to work just fine.
A majority of the people might have one policy view, but it could so happen that the candidate with a contrary view might get elected.
;-)
:-p) Even after seeing no improvement in their standard of living for 50 years, these people are still fractured along caste lines and cannot _think_ of voting out people who cause them pain (of course, inept Opposition parties also helped). End of day, democracy also means choosing your own destiny. They got what they asked for.
This happens in more sophisticated systems too (e.g. Bush/Gore 2000). The question is: why do the undeniably smart men who created the system allow this loophole? The answer is, because the benefits of the loophole (voice to smaller states, etc) outweighed the disadvantages.
Likewise, the winner-takes-all model has advantages: it is easy for the average Indian (who is used to shenanigans in politics otherwise) to grasp and accept; can you imagine what a fractured polity we would create if we institutionalized coalition discussions after every election by adopting a German-style proportional representation scheme?
I'm thinking you didn't read my post down to the bottom, especially where I talked about why vote-buying might matter and why there are zamindari-constituencies.
About the thin Andhra victory margins: I did not respond because this is classic conspiracy theory ranting: impossible to prove wrong.
TDP/BJP got a mere 49 seats, or 12% of the Assembly, despite the fairly okay-ish vote share. Reason? Most of the seats won by the Congress had winning margins of less than 1000 votes.
If the Congress/Telengana combine, out of power, could "buy" votes with such accuracy and across "most" of their win-seats without any serious accusations of malpractice, then they deserve to get a book contract from IDG to write a book on Rigging for Dummies
As for 21st century zamindaris - *shrug* I was born in Bihar and all I can say is that people get the government they deserve. (South Bihar at least was intelligent enough to secede
On the other hand, perhaps an American electoral college-style election, with its checks and balances, would be better suited for a large and diverse country like India, but the usual reason given against that it is too 'federal' for New Delhi's unitary worldview.Which goes to show the Nalgonda constituents did not know how to play the game well. Independent candidates have a history of winning in India, so why did they not consolidate their platform and run on an Independent ticket, making water one of their main platforms? Their political naivete is no reason to blame the Westminster model.
Election officials operating the poll booths are school teachers mostly from the neighborhood, meaning that they'd likely know you by name anyway.
Which means they could be susceptible to local influences, just like Florida. They probably aren't in large parts of India, but how do you think local chieftains threaten people with hookah-paani boycotts in North India? The perception that villagers have is that at least in some places, the ballot is not so secret after all.
The Indian EVM machine appears to use the same single plurality vote, supporting up to 16 candidates.
4 EVMs can be chained together, to support 64 candidates. I believe the Election Commission was prepared to have more on standby if there were more than 64 nominations from a constituency. In the last few General Assembly Elections there haven't been more than 34 nominations per constituency. (Nominations cost money, which one forfeits if one doesn't get enough percentage of votes.)
If someone wants to win, they'll convince a dozen other candidates with the same beliefs as their opponents to run and fill up the rest of the candidate list.
The best part about a functioning democracy is that while this sort of ballot-DDOSing is fun to talk about, the legal system ensures that in practice they're not worth doing: Candidates found guilty (after due process, of course) of messing with the poll system get debarred from contesting elections upto 5 years.
>(please, please, static images only).
.JPEG, .GIF, or .PNG format. Animated images will not be accepted.
What are the image ad requirements?
Format: All images you load must be in a
Size: You may choose from four standard ad sizes: Banner (468 x 60), Leaderboard (728 x 90), Inline Rectangle (300 x 250), and Skyscraper (120 x 600) (see examples here). Please note that we may resize your image slightly to accommodate your destination URL and the 'Ads by Google' feedback link, which can alter the proportions of your image. If you'd like to retain your image's original proportions, you may adjust your image sizes before you upload them (learn more.)
Image content: Your images must be relevant to your advertised concepts and products. For example, an Ad Group containing keywords like 'roses,' 'tulips,' and 'carnations' would call for floral-related images. We strongly recommend that you also include some descriptive text and a call to action to reinforce your ad's message.
Please note that we will only accept family safe images. For more details about acceptable image ads content, read the Google AdWords Editorial Guidelines.
18%? Wo. Here in India that's 8% and a lot of us think that's high. I feel a lot better now :)
Also most Custom Software doesn't bother with any sort of licensing basically as the programmer makes the code and sends it to the customer and they pay him for his hours the code is their they can do whatever they want with it.
In quite a few countries "service tax" (or "value added tax") is charged on this sort of transaction. Both are a flat rate tax on the billed transaction. It doesn't really matter if the software you use is libre/gratis, as long as your bill amount is nonzero.
This card is not about RFID, it's about making card use in scenarios like drive-throughs easier. Also, it's currently limited to <$25 transactions currently according to the FAQ.
Assuming one likes the idea of small plastic transactions at all, I wonder if it wouldn't be a better idea to _combine_ 2 accounts in one card: one account for the higher-value mag-stripe, and an RFID account with a low credit limit that needs to be constantly replenished.
Anyway, there's no way to import my contacts yet, or my address book, or a PST file (or other mail format), or import mail from another service (that's stretching).
:-). Actually, I wonder if a lot of spammers are adopting a wait-and-see policy to Gmail. After all, the Spam folder of thousands of Gmail users makes for a pretty effective blacklist database for Google's Web Search.
I got this from Gmail Support a couple days back in response to a question.
> You might be interested to hear that we
> are announcing these upcoming features:
>
> Automatic forwarding of your email to another account
> Plain HTML version of Gmail
> Import/export Contacts
I guess as we move through the beta we should see quite a few other improvements.
Like: No spam. Not a single freaking message.
Like someone here already said, I'm scared to test that feature
Oops, that was direct assurance, not insurance.