Every change Google makes at the moment seems to produce a reactionary story like this one. So they want to know which links people click on... so what? The data isn't even personally identifiable.
Google produces the right results with a nice clean interface. Even the ads are in unobtrusive text boxes! What more do you want? If they generate profit at the same time, more power to them.
We've been going on about how
evil all these monopolized services are, but as far as I know all those non-monopolized in the UK don't really deliver well, do
they?
I didn't offer an opinion about which was better or worse, in fact.
But my own experience with telephone, gas and electricity is that I get at least as good service for much cheaper with the new providers than with the former monopolies when they were monopolies, or with the former monopolies in their current incarnations as private companies.
Phones. Nope, free choice of suppliers on a per-call basis. Line can be BT or cable in most places.
Cable. Well, only one cable company in each place, but not a monopoly for phones (see above), TV (most channels are also on satellite), or broadband in many regions (BT provides ADSL).
Gas, Electricity. Both completely competitive. I can change supplier with 10(?) days notice.
Buses. Private companies, competitive, but tend to have monopolies except in large cities.
Trains. Sort of monopolies. Private companies awarded franchises for particular routes.
Health service. Universal free health-care, but you can pay for private care or insurance.
Post Office. Monopoly for letters under 50p.
Basically, the Post Office is the only big government-owned monopoly. We are probably the most deregulated country in the world for utilities. But then that's because we had Margaret Thatcher and the rest of you didn't!
I disagree with almost all this analysis. The problem in Florida is that the voting method is too high-tech, not too low-tech. The machines can't count valid ballots correctly because the chad wasn't always punched out fully.
In the UK, we vote with pen and paper, and they're all counted manually. The system is transparent, and so has public confidence. It only takes a few hours to count all the votes.
If you vote by computer, how can you ensure public confidence in the outcome? How can you refute allegations of 'hacking'? How can you recount if you need to?
I do agree about the need for electoral reform, but that's not likely to happen because of the difficulty of amending the Constitution. (The only change which could happen is states allocating electoral college votes in proportion to their popular votes, but even that's unlikely because states gain from being able to swing a large electoral college vote).
One other factor which I've not seen mentioned in the extensive coverage the last few days is, why are the electoral officials themselves elected? The electoral officials should be non-partisan civil servants, otherwise people won't have confidence in the impartiality of their decisions.
One other advantage of having to go to the polling station, rather than voting at home, is that voting is always done in secret, secrecy which is enforced by officials. It is then much harder for someone to bully or coerce you into voting for someone you didn't want to.
Here in the UK, we have something much more low-tech than punched cards. We vote by writing a cross next to our chosen candidate on a piece of paper, and they're counted manually.
And even though I'm a geek, I hope we don't change it. The system is simple to understand, transparent, and has public confidence. Recounts can be done when necessary. (Close constituencies are recounted several times). Oh, and we still manage to count the votes in almost all constituencies by about 5 or 6 hours after the close of polls.
On the other hand, can you imagine the conspiracy theorists if votes were done by computer? Can you imagine the complaints from people who panic whenever they encounter technology?
No, in my opinion, the Florida ballot wasn't too low-tech, it was too high-tech.
Besides, if the results came in near-instantly, we'd lose all the excitement of election night!:)
After they had given Florida to Gore they took it
back. And then they did the same thing with Bush.
You can't do that. The Western voters are influenced by what they see on the Eastern results.
In Europe, it's regarded as a basic democratic principle that no exit polls or results are published until all the polls are closed. (And in the case of European parliamentary elections, this is several days after the first countries have voted!) From this side of the Atlantic, it looks as if freedom of speech is valued more highly than fair elections in the US.
The funny thing is that (even leaving aside the fact that the UK now uses mostly metric units) what Americans call 'English' units aren't anyway. For example, UK pints contain 20 fluid ounces. And UK fluid ounces are 28.4ml not 29.6ml, and thus weigh almost exactly an ounce, unlike the American ones!
But they're not banner ads. Look at the samples. They're unobtrusive blue text boxes on the right hand edge, clearly labelled "Sponsored Links". IMO, Google has once again managed to maintain cleanness and usability, even while selling ads for specific phrases.
I think the scammers hadn't understood Google's algorithm.
The way I understand it, creating a ring of pages doesn't work. You only get a high rank if other highly ranked pages point to you.
So if you create a ring, none of your pages get high ranks, unless other good people point to one of them.
Google looks at more than the
sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves
"important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Q: Couldn't I create a series of Web pages at every site offering free space, link them to each other, and thereby create
higher rankings for myself?
A: No, that wouldn't work. The way the math is designed, you need external approval.
Calculus is certainly offered at the high school level in Ontario
Some of my university friends in Ontario told me that they wished that the high schools would stop teaching calculus, because the students arrived worse off than if they hadn't done any.:)
Oooh, a nice controversial topic. But one I thought about over the summer, which I spent at University of Wisconsin. And my conclusion was: during Grad School.
In England, our undergraduate courses are mainly three years, and they are usually just one subject. So when they graduate, our students are typically better (in their major) than in the US.
But after that, we don't have graduate school, in the American sense. We typically just do a 3 year, pure research, Ph.D., immediately after our undergraduate degree, or possibly after a further single-year masters course.
Now in grad school in the US, you have maybe two years of classes and then three years of research. This allows you to catch up -- and possibly even go ahead.
I say 'go ahead' because if you take the same courses when you're older, and when they're directed towards Ph.D. research rather than just passing undergraduate exams, you may have a better attitude towards them, and learn them more thoroughly.
By the way, there is now $1,000,000 prize available for proving that P is or is not equal to NP. Of course, this could produce more correct, well-intentioned but wrong, and nutty solutions.
However, even if patents were
numbered at the time they were submitted, there are many times more pattents applied for than are granted, as a large number patents are
silly, prior art, or just wrong.
Although
none of these prevents them being granted, of course.:)
There is NO technical reason not to allow ANY top-level domain. This would ease the "cybersquatting" issue
Not really. Everyone would try and squat on www.cocacola or whatever. And you'd have the same disputes about whether such-and-such is a universal trade mark, just moved up from the second level domain to the TLD.
So maybe the software vendors will make us sign their EULAs and send them back. Then the licences might have much more chance of standing up in court. (IANAL).
Do you know when it was passed or have any more info on it?
1996. Lots of good links at http://www.google.com/search?q=Helm s+Burton+Act (almost all anti-Act as far as I can tell). The US administration claims that it only allows people to recover stolen assets. But it seems that "stolen assets" can include almost any money which a firm country makes in Cuba.
I really do not understand how the US can dictate how a non-US company can distribute it's product.
The US has a law called the Helms-Burton Act. This received enormous publicity in Canada (which it affects most), some in the rest of the world, and next to none in the US (which is a disgrace in itself).
The act says that any company which trades with Cuba may not trade in the US. I believe that the directors can even be arrested for entering the US. So the US does consider it has the right to legislate trade between two other countries.
If Ticketmaster wanted to prevent deep linking, why didn't they just check the Referer: header instead of calling in the lawyers?
Of course they'd have to allow requests without a referrer to get through, and one can fake a referrer, but it would stop almost all deep links from a rival site, for people using a regular browser. They could even have redirected them transparently back to their home page!
Me too. But I didn't even get that far. Unpacking it in my home directory and running./netscape just gave me
./mozilla-bin: error in loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
So I tried reading the FAQ:
To download and install a copy of the Netscape 6 Preview Release 1 on your computer, go to the download page and click Netscape 6 Preview Release 1. The Netscape 6 installer will be downloaded to your computer. To run it, find the installer file and double click it.
Brilliant. Anyone got this running on Debian (potato)?
Slashdot Mirror
Google produces the right results with a nice clean interface. Even the ads are in unobtrusive text boxes! What more do you want? If they generate profit at the same time, more power to them.
And simple to express
Err, and err, and err again
But less, and less, and less.
(Piet Hein)
But my own experience with telephone, gas and electricity is that I get at least as good service for much cheaper with the new providers than with the former monopolies when they were monopolies, or with the former monopolies in their current incarnations as private companies.
- Phones. Nope, free choice of suppliers on a per-call basis. Line can be BT or cable in most places.
- Cable. Well, only one cable company in each place, but not a monopoly for phones (see above), TV (most channels are also on satellite), or broadband in many regions (BT provides ADSL).
- Gas, Electricity. Both completely competitive. I can change supplier with 10(?) days notice.
- Buses. Private companies, competitive, but tend to have monopolies except in large cities.
- Trains. Sort of monopolies. Private companies awarded franchises for particular routes.
- Health service. Universal free health-care, but you can pay for private care or insurance.
- Post Office. Monopoly for letters under 50p.
Basically, the Post Office is the only big government-owned monopoly. We are probably the most deregulated country in the world for utilities. But then that's because we had Margaret Thatcher and the rest of you didn't!I disagree with almost all this analysis. The problem in Florida is that the voting method is too high-tech, not too low-tech. The machines can't count valid ballots correctly because the chad wasn't always punched out fully.
In the UK, we vote with pen and paper, and they're all counted manually. The system is transparent, and so has public confidence. It only takes a few hours to count all the votes.
If you vote by computer, how can you ensure public confidence in the outcome? How can you refute allegations of 'hacking'? How can you recount if you need to?
I do agree about the need for electoral reform, but that's not likely to happen because of the difficulty of amending the Constitution. (The only change which could happen is states allocating electoral college votes in proportion to their popular votes, but even that's unlikely because states gain from being able to swing a large electoral college vote).
One other factor which I've not seen mentioned in the extensive coverage the last few days is, why are the electoral officials themselves elected? The electoral officials should be non-partisan civil servants, otherwise people won't have confidence in the impartiality of their decisions.
One other advantage of having to go to the polling station, rather than voting at home, is that voting is always done in secret, secrecy which is enforced by officials. It is then much harder for someone to bully or coerce you into voting for someone you didn't want to.
And even though I'm a geek, I hope we don't change it. The system is simple to understand, transparent, and has public confidence. Recounts can be done when necessary. (Close constituencies are recounted several times). Oh, and we still manage to count the votes in almost all constituencies by about 5 or 6 hours after the close of polls.
On the other hand, can you imagine the conspiracy theorists if votes were done by computer? Can you imagine the complaints from people who panic whenever they encounter technology?
No, in my opinion, the Florida ballot wasn't too low-tech, it was too high-tech.
Besides, if the results came in near-instantly, we'd lose all the excitement of election night! :)
The funny thing is that (even leaving aside the fact that the UK now uses mostly metric units) what Americans call 'English' units aren't anyway. For example, UK pints contain 20 fluid ounces. And UK fluid ounces are 28.4ml not 29.6ml, and thus weigh almost exactly an ounce, unlike the American ones!
But they're not banner ads. Look at the samples. They're unobtrusive blue text boxes on the right hand edge, clearly labelled "Sponsored Links". IMO, Google has once again managed to maintain cleanness and usability, even while selling ads for specific phrases.
From Google's page:
Or from a recent interview with the inventor:
Oooh, a nice controversial topic. But one I thought about over the summer, which I spent at University of Wisconsin. And my conclusion was: during Grad School.
In England, our undergraduate courses are mainly three years, and they are usually just one subject. So when they graduate, our students are typically better (in their major) than in the US.
But after that, we don't have graduate school, in the American sense. We typically just do a 3 year, pure research, Ph.D., immediately after our undergraduate degree, or possibly after a further single-year masters course.
Now in grad school in the US, you have maybe two years of classes and then three years of research. This allows you to catch up -- and possibly even go ahead.
I say 'go ahead' because if you take the same courses when you're older, and when they're directed towards Ph.D. research rather than just passing undergraduate exams, you may have a better attitude towards them, and learn them more thoroughly.
By the way, there is now $1,000,000 prize available for proving that P is or is not equal to NP. Of course, this could produce more correct, well-intentioned but wrong, and nutty solutions.
So maybe the software vendors will make us sign their EULAs and send them back. Then the licences might have much more chance of standing up in court. (IANAL).
The act says that any company which trades with Cuba may not trade in the US. I believe that the directors can even be arrested for entering the US. So the US does consider it has the right to legislate trade between two other countries.
If Ticketmaster wanted to prevent deep linking, why didn't they just check the Referer: header instead of calling in the lawyers?
Of course they'd have to allow requests without a referrer to get through, and one can fake a referrer, but it would stop almost all deep links from a rival site, for people using a regular browser. They could even have redirected them transparently back to their home page!