My simple gripe with C derived languages is that their complexity means I have to dedicate more of my brain to the language and less to the program. Simply, there's more to get wrong than with Pascal family languages. Oh, and I'd much rather arrays were bounds checked so that writing out crashed rather than corrupting memory, so much easier for debugging...
C's powerful - Pascal is pretty safe. Most of the time, I don't need the power so I'll take the safety.
Let's be honest, IE has a rubbish renderer, full stop. It's not just this.
Two things scream out at me. One, I can reliably set up layouts with nested tables which, under IE, display in a way which is indisputably incorrect. Two, we have a bunch of machines at work which muck about with several sites we've produced. Essentially, IE doesn't render the images right. Occasionally it doesn't render an image at all (rare but has happened, and it doesn't leave a placeholder because it doesn't realise it hasn't shown it up) until the image is clicked on or scrolled off the screen and back on. More commonly, it sticks a suprious transparency in place of white on some images, or even effectively makes the whole image slightly opaque. When there's an image background, that gets messy...
This is getting way OT so please feel free to ignore this, but my perception is that the VAG W12 engine, W8 Passat, Touareg, Phaeton, W12 Coupe, Bugatti Veyron and maybe even Bentley are a very unsubtle attempt by Ferdinand Pietch (VW Boss, sp?) to make his mark on history. Thing is, he's retiring pretty soon, and suddenly this large crop of odd but very impressive vehicles all turn up at once... Example of how unsubtle - the Veyron is currently being specified with a quad-turbo W18 8.4l (IIRC) engine outputting 987 BHP IIRC, with a projected top speed of over 250MPH - to do which you'd have to call VW to book an engineer who'd check the thing was safe, fir custom tyres and remove the limiter. You'd do your high speed run, he'd swap the tyres back and put the limiter on.
Ferdinand Pietch has my respect as an engineer regardless. He was responsible for the truly awesome Porsche 917 and nothing takes that away. But, as a boss, no. This worries me and just looks, well, silly. Strong rumour at the moment is that Berndt Piesetsrieder (ex-BMW boss, currently boss of Seat who VW own and getting promoted when FP leaves. Oh, I've almost certainly spelt that wrongly...) will gently run down the Phaeton, ignore the W12 and leave it about as relevant to VW as the Mercedes C1-11, and only build as many Veyrons as he has deposits for then quietly shut up about Bugatti.
The other thing I have to wonder about is ROI in engineering terms. Thing is, Audi have been experimenting with W format engines for years. Memory says the gorgeous Avus concept had a 3 bank W12. Memory also says that all the W engines spent massively long under development because getting inlet, exhaust and cooling working properly is a nightmare. Not convinced they wouldn't have been better pouring the energy into something more conventional, personally...
Actually, it would seem that availability is why V8s are used, and tradition is why they're available.
If I were designing a dragster from scratch, I'd stick in a V12. Six cylinders per bank gives perfect dynamic balance, more cylinders gives more power and higher revs as a rule, while consuming a little more fuel and being a bit longer. But hey, look at existing dragsters, fuel mileade and length aren't exactly limitations...
Anyway, it's nowhere near as clear-cut as you make out. Yes, a large engine can give you nice power, but a smaller, better tuned engine can give the same power and better economy. Examples (picked due to local knowledge:-):
* TVR Griffith (early 90s British convertible). 4.3l V8, 280BHP. * TVR Cerbera 4.5 (late 90s British coupe). 4.5l V8, 420BHP. * Honda S2000 (late 90s Japanese convertible). 2.0l inline 4, 237BHP. * Hyundai Coupe V6 (new model, Korean coupe). 2.6l V6, 165BHP. * Mitsubishi FTO (around for ages, Japanese coupe). 2.0l inline 4, 197BHP.
Cylinder count is far from clear-cut, either. Look at the Porshe 968 from the early-mid 90s. 3.0l inline 4. Seriously. Fast and torquey.
Don't believe in FWD? Well, I wouldn't bet the house on it, but look at what can be done with it with late 90s BTCC cars. Production derived saloon racers with 300ish BHP going through the front wheels, from 2l inline 4s. Or actually read a test for an Integra Type R (seeing as most of us can't just pop out and drive one to get first-hand data) and compare its circuit lap times with equivalent RWD material.
An RWD chassis and a large V8 will produce nice performance, yes, but a decently built inline 4 and FWD chassis will produce more performance than most can practically (and legally) use on the roads - plus can be way cheaper, because it can be built from pretty much the same bits as the cheapy little thing your parents go shopping in. They're fast, fun and accessible to many more.
Come on, let's take off some blinkers and make this wider.
Point 2. Yes, OSS will be stifled by this, but there really isn't that much business there right now. However, _all_ software and hardware companies will potentially get hit by this, as will home hobby developers. This is an industry which is, what, around 10 times the size of the movie industry, which is growing and where much significant development comes from home hobby developers...
This will destroy IT jobs in the USA full stop, which is far more scary to the politicians than taking down Red Hat et al.
No, actually - my experience was that most PalmOS applications I tried took the UI conventions established in the base applications as gospel. Notable exception was QED, without which I would have gone mad:-)
I found that the screen size constrained what the apps could do, I found that the silkscreen (as opposed to the WinCE solution) meant that on-screen keyboards were a joke. But, mostly, I found that apps looked at the bundled stuff and decided we wanted simple, small stuff with no more than a few buttons and everything on one screen (no scrolling). I _didn't_ and found it massively irritating that it felt like the constant assumption was that the Palm was a little toy which I made quick, portable notes on, not something I did real work on.
My Psion, I can do real work on - heck, I could nearly use one as my main PC. My Palm felt like it was conspiring against me doing anything serious with it for little or no reason. Irritating.
Aaaarrrrgggghhh! Save me from the PalmOS interface!
I had a Palm III as my first PDA. It was OK, small, light, ran on batteries forever.
But that interface! Basic, and forcibly so. OK, so it's quick and easy to learn. But when you want more power, it rapidly falls into the rubbish category IMO. Just look at the month view option in the calendar for an illustration. Yes, the screen is small, but it can be better on a small screen and the screen res can be higher without giving you an unacceptable PDA. The interface assumes that you're never doing anything serious, and that got irritating.
Palms make cool toys. As a simple replacement for a paper diary, I liked it. Graffiti I found slow and experimenting with Giraffe showed some basic errors in their topography software, but it's not terrible. But as soon as I wanted more than my address book, diary, calculator and a simple notepad (student then so expenses was irrelevant and e-mail, well, didn't have an IR phone then and wasn't away long enough to make it all worthwhile) it fell down. No formatted text, pretty basic databases only, no spreadsheets (seriously, I've regularly used spreadsheets on the move on my Psion). Big text documents needed a different app altogether, as did any serious power in handling them.
I'm now a very happy Psion 5mx user. Experience shows that 99% of the time I can carry that if I could carry the Palm. The screen resoltion is massive in comparison, I can still hold it in one hand and enter data in the other. I have applications I couldn't dream of on the Palm. Heck, I've written essays on it before, without problems, and just dumped them straight back on the PC when I was done, and I regularly take live notes in meetings on it. I'm not much slower typing than on my normal PC. I _do_ miss the Palm's selection of games, so tend to have a hard time walking past GBA displays:-)
Essentially, what it boils down to is that the Palm didn't do enough for me to justify £100, but a Psion does do enough for me to justify £250. Palms were just too basic.
Please, now Psion don't make them, can someone make a sensible, keyboarded palmtop that assumes you're actually going to use it and not just have a flashy toy?
Well, it's one way of making sure they get lots of samples to investigate, though I suspect a plain address on slashdot has already had some of that effect...
This is ridiculous, and the article on Reuters reads like a press release not an objective article. About what you expect because it looks like someone's just paid to have it stuck on the wire, but hey, worth remembering that.
With a pen I'm using three fingers to perform data input, with a keyboard I'm using ten. Far more efficient resource usage, and any character can be made with a simple twitch of no more than two fingers, while I line up the rest of my hand for the next characters.
I can't write anywhere near 100+WPM with any legibility, but I can type at that speed with pretty good accuracy (and I'm not exactly unusual...).
Think back to exams, and 5-10 pages of handwritten text in 2-3 hours. Major cramp problems, which I simply don't get producing way more input than that with a keyboard.
Replace joysticks? Come on guys, I've used a pen on a touchscreen as a joystick replacement before, it's woeful. Replacing eyeball tracking cameras as a data input system? Well, if anyone can come up with an example of someone who's physically capable of gripping a pen but who makes any quantity of input by this method, I'm amazed. Put simply, that claim is extraordinary enough that I demand a reference.
PDAs and phones? Well, most PDAs have touchscreens already so don't need anything this complex unless people want to input text to them by drawing on another surface, which seems to miss the point of a portable device. Phones? Cheap, commodity things with little data input that have to be rugged and survive teenagers? The pen makes them expensive and is going to get lost _really_ quickly. And who needs it, exactly? I mean, with decent predictive text we can already write at a pretty good speed for the length of input.
A pen is nice for drawing, some people like them for GUI use. Personally I like a touchpad which I can use without significantly moving my hands from the keyboard but hey, everyone's different:-)
Someone has had a bright idea and has oversold a story to Reuters, who've published it straight. No problem with that, they're a wire service not a newspaper, but this isn't a credible story. These people aren't going to take over the world and their claims are rubbish.
I knew they made computers that small (Original ZX81 came with 256B IIRC... and I definitely remember our 48KB Spectrum or the 4ish KB Vic-20) just didn't know how small they'd made IBM PCs.
OK, I've read that and I've read Seth's site. I know neither except by those sites so I'm not commenting on either personally, I'm in no position to do so.
But I'm still not quite sure what Michael achieved by taking the site down like that. That one step baffles me.
If that's the case then can I quickly renounce my UK citizenship, gain US and get elected to congress (not fussy about which house, will do the job for subsistence wages...) to be shot of the annoying little character?
Even before this (IIRC), they were getting links to their sites if you just searched for 'Scientology'. So buying the ads doesn't actually give you any new links.
Advertising xenu.net does. So what if they get more ads? Every xenu.net ad gets more information out there, even if it only comes up on 1% of searches.
Besides, wouldn't you be suspicious if the top linked page was also the only source of ads on a page?
It may well not be comfortable for them in the short term, but I would suggest that Google are potentially as powerful as any of the major media companies, if they want to be.
Let's say that Scientology started pulling this against Rupert Murdoch. Just in this country he controls the biggest selling tabloid newspaper (The Sun) and broadsheet (The Times) and the biggest ditigal TV provider (Sky) which has its own news channel (http://www.sky.com/skynews/home/) which is OK and pretty popular.
Think of the stink he'd raise and what sort of publicity it would get Scientology. They'd be buried, quickly, under a deluge of accurate information about their practices.
Scientology tactics may work very well against small or uncoordinated groups and individuals - but I wouldn't want to try them against a group with real power to get information out. On the net, that's exactly what Google is. It would be ugly for a little while, then Scientology would be hit very, very hard.
They can only win by picking their battles. None of the big boys seem to have been motivated enough to really go for them, _yet_ - because there's abig story out there but it's ugly while it starts so you've got to really want to pursue it. Google may have just been given that motivation...
I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. OK, what I've posted is optimistic, but let's hope...
Google could be made useless and given an extremely difficult life by this sort of thing if people want to be malicious. Google also seem to have a reputation for being trustworthy with their users. So...
The Scientologists seem to have decided that Google can't index those pages, right? Well, search for Operation Clambake and you still get a bunch of pages on the site. So, how about putting an apology to their users on the front page, explaining that they've had to remove many references to Operation Clambake from their database because of alleged copyright infringement, and that American law means they can't assess the validity of these claims, they have to just remove them.
This would seem to:
* Help with the trust thing * Help people understand how silly the DMCA is * Send a lot of people searching for Operation Clambake (which still works) to find out what the fuss was about...
Now, how _long_ that would work for I don't know - Scientology (I will _not_ call them a church, they're no such thing) will probably jump on them fairly soon. However, Google's a busy site and this will get people interested, so how long will it be before the news media picks up on this one?
Result? Hopefully, about as helpful for the Scientologists as when they got Slashdot to remove one of their (trade secret, I ask you... they're just worried that people will realise how mad their teachings are) holy texts and it was instead replaced by a large pile of anti-Scientology information and a big story, really nasty to them, on the front page of one of the web's busier sites.
Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash on March 27, 1968, over a year before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, or a secret TV studio if you believe the above...
Disclaimers: I'm a CS guy and a database programmer, I haven't studied physics, chemistry, anything like that in nearly 7 years.
My memory states that Venus, from the right POV, has a noticeable trail because it doesn't have any natural magnetic field so its atmosphere isn't properly contained. So, all that fog and gas is gently spilling into space.
Would that happen if Earth's fields flipped and, if so, what would be the consequences? Anyone?
Depends how you define the term 'Ice Age', really.
If the gulfstream disappears, Europe cools very noticeably, it's all that gives us our pleasant climate. Example: I'm typing this from Bedford, in the UK. Mid March, it's probably peaking at 10-12 degrees celsius on average during the day. Not wonderful but perfectly survivable without heroic measures and hey, this isn't exactly the hottest we get:-)
Now, the nearest city my Psion map can identify is Cambridge, about 30-45 mins drive away. Latitude 52.13N. Or, to put it in North American terms, just under a degree _north_ of Calgary, host of the 1988 Winter Olympics and which Yahoo! Weather doesn't reckon will clear freezing in the next week, while it's currently sitting at -16 and has a predicted low of -25. Cambridge, they're predicting to hit 13 and not drop below 6. Sorry, all temperatures in Celsius.
I know all about Continental climates, so how about St. Johns? Nice and coastal, 47.35N so some distance south of Cambridge. Currently -2, week high of 3 and low of -8.
Europe, without the gulfstream, would get substantially colder. Whether that's an ice age or not is up to you, but it would affect Europe's 300mish million people in that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you! I'm _not_ the only one, then!
My simple gripe with C derived languages is that their complexity means I have to dedicate more of my brain to the language and less to the program. Simply, there's more to get wrong than with Pascal family languages. Oh, and I'd much rather arrays were bounds checked so that writing out crashed rather than corrupting memory, so much easier for debugging...
C's powerful - Pascal is pretty safe. Most of the time, I don't need the power so I'll take the safety.
I just did, and you're missing one Karma, plus the Whoooooooooooooore should be rather shorter.
Sorry...
Let's be honest, IE has a rubbish renderer, full stop. It's not just this.
Two things scream out at me. One, I can reliably set up layouts with nested tables which, under IE, display in a way which is indisputably incorrect. Two, we have a bunch of machines at work which muck about with several sites we've produced. Essentially, IE doesn't render the images right. Occasionally it doesn't render an image at all (rare but has happened, and it doesn't leave a placeholder because it doesn't realise it hasn't shown it up) until the image is clicked on or scrolled off the screen and back on. More commonly, it sticks a suprious transparency in place of white on some images, or even effectively makes the whole image slightly opaque. When there's an image background, that gets messy...
Bottom line, it's sloppy.
*£&&%£&$£ing lameness filter!
Make that reagan.jpg and it works.
22nd December 1980, Stiff Records (apparently) released an album titled 'The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan'.
r ds / eagan.jpg
It's silent.
http://www.vinylvulture.co.uk/pages/images/reco
Some days, calling the Daily Mail journalism is stretching the point a little. I mean, they could get awards for original fiction...
I remember an episode of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue a while ago, when they were doing a round of famous resignation letters that might have been.
Jeremy Hardy: Editor of the Daily Mail, "I've been thinking."
;-)
Nice, but a touch excessive.
This is getting way OT so please feel free to ignore this, but my perception is that the VAG W12 engine, W8 Passat, Touareg, Phaeton, W12 Coupe, Bugatti Veyron and maybe even Bentley are a very unsubtle attempt by Ferdinand Pietch (VW Boss, sp?) to make his mark on history. Thing is, he's retiring pretty soon, and suddenly this large crop of odd but very impressive vehicles all turn up at once... Example of how unsubtle - the Veyron is currently being specified with a quad-turbo W18 8.4l (IIRC) engine outputting 987 BHP IIRC, with a projected top speed of over 250MPH - to do which you'd have to call VW to book an engineer who'd check the thing was safe, fir custom tyres and remove the limiter. You'd do your high speed run, he'd swap the tyres back and put the limiter on.
Ferdinand Pietch has my respect as an engineer regardless. He was responsible for the truly awesome Porsche 917 and nothing takes that away. But, as a boss, no. This worries me and just looks, well, silly. Strong rumour at the moment is that Berndt Piesetsrieder (ex-BMW boss, currently boss of Seat who VW own and getting promoted when FP leaves. Oh, I've almost certainly spelt that wrongly...) will gently run down the Phaeton, ignore the W12 and leave it about as relevant to VW as the Mercedes C1-11, and only build as many Veyrons as he has deposits for then quietly shut up about Bugatti.
The other thing I have to wonder about is ROI in engineering terms. Thing is, Audi have been experimenting with W format engines for years. Memory says the gorgeous Avus concept had a 3 bank W12. Memory also says that all the W engines spent massively long under development because getting inlet, exhaust and cooling working properly is a nightmare. Not convinced they wouldn't have been better pouring the energy into something more conventional, personally...
Llamborghini - is that the welsh sports car manufacturer?
;-)
Sorry...
Actually, it would seem that availability is why V8s are used, and tradition is why they're available.
:-) :
If I were designing a dragster from scratch, I'd stick in a V12. Six cylinders per bank gives perfect dynamic balance, more cylinders gives more power and higher revs as a rule, while consuming a little more fuel and being a bit longer. But hey, look at existing dragsters, fuel mileade and length aren't exactly limitations...
Anyway, it's nowhere near as clear-cut as you make out. Yes, a large engine can give you nice power, but a smaller, better tuned engine can give the same power and better economy. Examples (picked due to local knowledge
* TVR Griffith (early 90s British convertible). 4.3l V8, 280BHP.
* TVR Cerbera 4.5 (late 90s British coupe). 4.5l V8, 420BHP.
* Honda S2000 (late 90s Japanese convertible). 2.0l inline 4, 237BHP.
* Hyundai Coupe V6 (new model, Korean coupe). 2.6l V6, 165BHP.
* Mitsubishi FTO (around for ages, Japanese coupe). 2.0l inline 4, 197BHP.
Cylinder count is far from clear-cut, either. Look at the Porshe 968 from the early-mid 90s. 3.0l inline 4. Seriously. Fast and torquey.
Don't believe in FWD? Well, I wouldn't bet the house on it, but look at what can be done with it with late 90s BTCC cars. Production derived saloon racers with 300ish BHP going through the front wheels, from 2l inline 4s. Or actually read a test for an Integra Type R (seeing as most of us can't just pop out and drive one to get first-hand data) and compare its circuit lap times with equivalent RWD material.
An RWD chassis and a large V8 will produce nice performance, yes, but a decently built inline 4 and FWD chassis will produce more performance than most can practically (and legally) use on the roads - plus can be way cheaper, because it can be built from pretty much the same bits as the cheapy little thing your parents go shopping in. They're fast, fun and accessible to many more.
Come on, let's take off some blinkers and make this wider.
Point 2. Yes, OSS will be stifled by this, but there really isn't that much business there right now. However, _all_ software and hardware companies will potentially get hit by this, as will home hobby developers. This is an industry which is, what, around 10 times the size of the movie industry, which is growing and where much significant development comes from home hobby developers...
This will destroy IT jobs in the USA full stop, which is far more scary to the politicians than taking down Red Hat et al.
No, actually - my experience was that most PalmOS applications I tried took the UI conventions established in the base applications as gospel. Notable exception was QED, without which I would have gone mad :-)
I found that the screen size constrained what the apps could do, I found that the silkscreen (as opposed to the WinCE solution) meant that on-screen keyboards were a joke. But, mostly, I found that apps looked at the bundled stuff and decided we wanted simple, small stuff with no more than a few buttons and everything on one screen (no scrolling). I _didn't_ and found it massively irritating that it felt like the constant assumption was that the Palm was a little toy which I made quick, portable notes on, not something I did real work on.
My Psion, I can do real work on - heck, I could nearly use one as my main PC. My Palm felt like it was conspiring against me doing anything serious with it for little or no reason. Irritating.
Aaaarrrrgggghhh! Save me from the PalmOS interface!
:-)
I had a Palm III as my first PDA. It was OK, small, light, ran on batteries forever.
But that interface! Basic, and forcibly so. OK, so it's quick and easy to learn. But when you want more power, it rapidly falls into the rubbish category IMO. Just look at the month view option in the calendar for an illustration. Yes, the screen is small, but it can be better on a small screen and the screen res can be higher without giving you an unacceptable PDA. The interface assumes that you're never doing anything serious, and that got irritating.
Palms make cool toys. As a simple replacement for a paper diary, I liked it. Graffiti I found slow and experimenting with Giraffe showed some basic errors in their topography software, but it's not terrible. But as soon as I wanted more than my address book, diary, calculator and a simple notepad (student then so expenses was irrelevant and e-mail, well, didn't have an IR phone then and wasn't away long enough to make it all worthwhile) it fell down. No formatted text, pretty basic databases only, no spreadsheets (seriously, I've regularly used spreadsheets on the move on my Psion). Big text documents needed a different app altogether, as did any serious power in handling them.
I'm now a very happy Psion 5mx user. Experience shows that 99% of the time I can carry that if I could carry the Palm. The screen resoltion is massive in comparison, I can still hold it in one hand and enter data in the other. I have applications I couldn't dream of on the Palm. Heck, I've written essays on it before, without problems, and just dumped them straight back on the PC when I was done, and I regularly take live notes in meetings on it. I'm not much slower typing than on my normal PC. I _do_ miss the Palm's selection of games, so tend to have a hard time walking past GBA displays
Essentially, what it boils down to is that the Palm didn't do enough for me to justify £100, but a Psion does do enough for me to justify £250. Palms were just too basic.
Please, now Psion don't make them, can someone make a sensible, keyboarded palmtop that assumes you're actually going to use it and not just have a flashy toy?
The world is coming to an end!
There's a nanotech story on the front page of Slashdot AND HEMOS DIDN'T POST IT!
Is he off sick or something?
;-)
Well, it's one way of making sure they get lots of samples to investigate, though I suspect a plain address on slashdot has already had some of that effect...
This is ridiculous, and the article on Reuters reads like a press release not an objective article. About what you expect because it looks like someone's just paid to have it stuck on the wire, but hey, worth remembering that.
:-)
With a pen I'm using three fingers to perform data input, with a keyboard I'm using ten. Far more efficient resource usage, and any character can be made with a simple twitch of no more than two fingers, while I line up the rest of my hand for the next characters.
I can't write anywhere near 100+WPM with any legibility, but I can type at that speed with pretty good accuracy (and I'm not exactly unusual...).
Think back to exams, and 5-10 pages of handwritten text in 2-3 hours. Major cramp problems, which I simply don't get producing way more input than that with a keyboard.
Replace joysticks? Come on guys, I've used a pen on a touchscreen as a joystick replacement before, it's woeful. Replacing eyeball tracking cameras as a data input system? Well, if anyone can come up with an example of someone who's physically capable of gripping a pen but who makes any quantity of input by this method, I'm amazed. Put simply, that claim is extraordinary enough that I demand a reference.
PDAs and phones? Well, most PDAs have touchscreens already so don't need anything this complex unless people want to input text to them by drawing on another surface, which seems to miss the point of a portable device. Phones? Cheap, commodity things with little data input that have to be rugged and survive teenagers? The pen makes them expensive and is going to get lost _really_ quickly. And who needs it, exactly? I mean, with decent predictive text we can already write at a pretty good speed for the length of input.
A pen is nice for drawing, some people like them for GUI use. Personally I like a touchpad which I can use without significantly moving my hands from the keyboard but hey, everyone's different
Someone has had a bright idea and has oversold a story to Reuters, who've published it straight. No problem with that, they're a wire service not a newspaper, but this isn't a credible story. These people aren't going to take over the world and their claims are rubbish.
Ahh, thanks :-)
I knew they made computers that small (Original ZX81 came with 256B IIRC... and I definitely remember our 48KB Spectrum or the 4ish KB Vic-20) just didn't know how small they'd made IBM PCs.
128 Kb (16KB) or 128 KB?
Just that I didn't know they ever made PCs _that_ tiny. Fascinated to know if they did...
OK, I've read that and I've read Seth's site. I know neither except by those sites so I'm not commenting on either personally, I'm in no position to do so.
But I'm still not quite sure what Michael achieved by taking the site down like that. That one step baffles me.
Anyone?
If that's the case then can I quickly renounce my UK citizenship, gain US and get elected to congress (not fussy about which house, will do the job for subsistence wages...) to be shot of the annoying little character?
;-)
No, not quite.
Even before this (IIRC), they were getting links to their sites if you just searched for 'Scientology'. So buying the ads doesn't actually give you any new links.
Advertising xenu.net does. So what if they get more ads? Every xenu.net ad gets more information out there, even if it only comes up on 1% of searches.
Besides, wouldn't you be suspicious if the top linked page was also the only source of ads on a page?
It may well not be comfortable for them in the short term, but I would suggest that Google are potentially as powerful as any of the major media companies, if they want to be.
Let's say that Scientology started pulling this against Rupert Murdoch. Just in this country he controls the biggest selling tabloid newspaper (The Sun) and broadsheet (The Times) and the biggest ditigal TV provider (Sky) which has its own news channel (http://www.sky.com/skynews/home/) which is OK and pretty popular.
Think of the stink he'd raise and what sort of publicity it would get Scientology. They'd be buried, quickly, under a deluge of accurate information about their practices.
Scientology tactics may work very well against small or uncoordinated groups and individuals - but I wouldn't want to try them against a group with real power to get information out. On the net, that's exactly what Google is. It would be ugly for a little while, then Scientology would be hit very, very hard.
They can only win by picking their battles. None of the big boys seem to have been motivated enough to really go for them, _yet_ - because there's abig story out there but it's ugly while it starts so you've got to really want to pursue it. Google may have just been given that motivation...
I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. OK, what I've posted is optimistic, but let's hope...
Google could be made useless and given an extremely difficult life by this sort of thing if people want to be malicious. Google also seem to have a reputation for being trustworthy with their users. So...
The Scientologists seem to have decided that Google can't index those pages, right? Well, search for Operation Clambake and you still get a bunch of pages on the site. So, how about putting an apology to their users on the front page, explaining that they've had to remove many references to Operation Clambake from their database because of alleged copyright infringement, and that American law means they can't assess the validity of these claims, they have to just remove them.
This would seem to:
* Help with the trust thing
* Help people understand how silly the DMCA is
* Send a lot of people searching for Operation Clambake (which still works) to find out what the fuss was about...
Now, how _long_ that would work for I don't know - Scientology (I will _not_ call them a church, they're no such thing) will probably jump on them fairly soon. However, Google's a busy site and this will get people interested, so how long will it be before the news media picks up on this one?
Result? Hopefully, about as helpful for the Scientologists as when they got Slashdot to remove one of their (trade secret, I ask you... they're just worried that people will realise how mad their teachings are) holy texts and it was instead replaced by a large pile of anti-Scientology information and a big story, really nasty to them, on the front page of one of the web's busier sites.
Google, you game for this?
Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash on March 27, 1968, over a year before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, or a secret TV studio if you believe the above...
Disclaimers: I'm a CS guy and a database programmer, I haven't studied physics, chemistry, anything like that in nearly 7 years.
My memory states that Venus, from the right POV, has a noticeable trail because it doesn't have any natural magnetic field so its atmosphere isn't properly contained. So, all that fog and gas is gently spilling into space.
Would that happen if Earth's fields flipped and, if so, what would be the consequences? Anyone?
Depends how you define the term 'Ice Age', really.
:-)
If the gulfstream disappears, Europe cools very noticeably, it's all that gives us our pleasant climate. Example: I'm typing this from Bedford, in the UK. Mid March, it's probably peaking at 10-12 degrees celsius on average during the day. Not wonderful but perfectly survivable without heroic measures and hey, this isn't exactly the hottest we get
Now, the nearest city my Psion map can identify is Cambridge, about 30-45 mins drive away. Latitude 52.13N. Or, to put it in North American terms, just under a degree _north_ of Calgary, host of the 1988 Winter Olympics and which Yahoo! Weather doesn't reckon will clear freezing in the next week, while it's currently sitting at -16 and has a predicted low of -25. Cambridge, they're predicting to hit 13 and not drop below 6. Sorry, all temperatures in Celsius.
I know all about Continental climates, so how about St. Johns? Nice and coastal, 47.35N so some distance south of Cambridge. Currently -2, week high of 3 and low of -8.
Europe, without the gulfstream, would get substantially colder. Whether that's an ice age or not is up to you, but it would affect Europe's 300mish million people in that way.