Any marketer will tell you that what people tell you they want and what people actually want are very different things. Even if people answer honestly, the data you gather is often unreliable: people simply don't have as good a handle on what they want as they think they do.
Not that marketers have a better handle, but simply that people will swear up and down that they would buy a peanut-butter-filled hot dog, that they loved the one they tried, and then don't actually buy any.
Don't believe me? Go see Snakes on a Plane. Nobody else did. (Sure, $33 million seems like a lot, but that's chump change for a major studio release these days.)
The best improvements will come from insights gained between the lines. You may have rated The English Patient eleventeen stars, but if your next seven rentals were all episodes of The Girls Next Door, which you only rated 3 stars, it certainly looks like you want more Hugh Hefner and less Ralph Fiennes.
The best data is the data that the subject doesn't realize he's giving you. Once you start imposing conscious choice on the ratings, you get only what they say they like, not what they really like.
It's not often we get the actual author here on Slashdot to explain the paper. We usually don't get it until it's been from the scientist to the press-release-writer to the newspaper writer/blogger to the Slashdot summary writer. The actual significance of the paper is often lost along the way (usually as some minor aspect is exaggerated so that the thing seems more earth-shaking).
So any clarifications straight from the horse's mouth would be greatly appreciated.
You're right that it's old news. It was a bit sensationalist in that it's not really soft tissue but rather a stable polymerization of the soft tissue. Still, it remains an important discovery, and I'm still waiting for more follow-up.
The article is phrased ambiguously: "Bubblare.se has up to 30 times more viewers for Scandinavian film clips". The implication is that Bubblare, showing only Scandinavian film clips, has 30 times as many viewers as YouTube does for everything. But that's not it: it's just saying that for Scandinavian viewers, local beats global. In fact, it could well be that Scandinavians spend more time watching YouTube non-Scandinavian clips than Scandinavian clips from Bubblare.
It just means that a targeted site sells more of the targeted stuff than the superstore to the target audience. It doesn't mean that the superstore doesn't sell more, even of the targeted stuff, to the global audience.
That's not uninteresting; one would think that there's no reason for anything on Bubblare not to also be on YouTube, for the whole world to enjoy and for Scandinavian viewers to stumble to other contexts.
Maybe they just enjoy having the whole site localized in their language. Maybe the bandwidth is better because it's all local. Or perhaps being under the radar it doesn't get quite the array of crud.
None of which supports the idea that YouTube is going anywhere.
Amplifying what Dragonslicer said, yes, you do have a scientific theory, but it's rather narrow. It's impossible to use that theory to demonstrate that God created the heavens and the earth, or that God wants us to not eat shellfish.
Given that it's a testable hypothesis, you're free to go explore the ramifications of that hypothesis. What kind of God is it who exists only to save the Earth from its direst peril? What would he say if in fact he appeared to flick that black hole out of the way? What else does He want/do?
No immediate conclusions come to my mind, but as a scientist you're free to pursue your theory, do experiments to test it, and get others to replicate those experiments. We'd prefer you stick to ethical experiments (i.e. not actually risking the earth in a black hole), but scientific ethics is a whole 'nother topic.
Hey, thanks. It's always kinda depressing to make a minor misstatement and get swamped with people who are so happy to make the correction that they don't bother to note that it's already been corrected, all while missing the key point (the fact that it does have a few draws).
Well, it does have a larger screen, one capable of playing wide format movies. I don't know if that's enough to make it an iPod "killer", but it's certainly a compelling argument for buying the Zune if you want to watch video on the thing.
To be a scientific theory, you have to be able to describe the test, even if you can't do it. For string theory, there exist experiments one could describe, but lack the resources to perform. One could write the paper down and give excruciating detail of exactly what constitutes a failure of the experiment. The resources provably exist in the universe; collecting them is just too expensive to actually do.
"God" lacks any scientific theory at the moment precisely because it lacks such a test. Partly that stems from the malleable definition of the term. Once "God" was that which created the species of the earth, but the term was redefined when a more testable hypothesis was elucidated. Various people point to gaps in demonstrating that hypothesis ("irreducible complexity"), but such gaps are routinely covered with new and compatible explanations, and the term "God" altered to fit the remaining gaps. For an experiment to work you're not allowed to redefine your terms in the middle.
Simiarly, "God" is sometimes defined as a non-human entity who wrote a book of moral codes. Disproving that is impossible; whenever additional evidence is found for human authorship, the term is redefined to be a sort of Divine Inspiration. It's not impossible that Divine Inspiration did in fact happen, but since nobody can say what the term means (nobody ever having witnessed it or having any idea when they might again witness it), it's not a falsifiable hypothesis.
The test does have to be finite. One can say "God is that which punishes sins", but many sins in fact go unpunished, and the hypothesis is false. If one tacks on "eventually", the hypothesis is no longer falsifiable, because you'd have to wait forever to know that the sin was punished.
None of this, by the way, should be construed to prove the non-existence of God. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Scientists tend to apply Occam's Razor: if you can't test for something, it doesn't mean it isn't there, but we'll ignore it until it forces us to believe in it.
It gets sticky there. One could say, "God punishes sins, and I'll know it after I die" sounds like a testable hypothesis; all you have to do is die. But even if it's true that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, the source of the data "things are different in heaven" is suspect. One can expand one's epistemology to include a trap door, but Occam's razor suggests that we exclude it on practical grounds. Again, feel free to believe it, but you have no grounds to quibble if I do not.
You are, in fact, free to continue to believe in it. It gets sticky when you start to draw conclusions from it, especially when they apply to me: not just "God exists" but "God told me to pass a law that bans X". The former is valid, though not terribly useful. The latter is, at least scientifically, invalid without further evidence.
There's a difference between what's not practically testable and what's truly unfalsifiable. As long as it's conceptually possible to come up with a falsifying experiment, even if it's wildly impractical, it's still a scientific theory. We may yet come up with ways to test the theory. Sometimes that's because somebody comes up with a clever new test, an ingenious new reformulation of the theory, receives unexpected results from an exsting accelerator, or builds a new particle accelerator.
What's happening here is that people are complaining that the scientific establishment has made it difficult to work in alternatives to string theory. But just because you can't get a job to disprove a theory doesn't make it unfalsifiable. There needs to be healthy debate in the scientific community about which theories to work on. Shutting valid theories down is not healthy for science, but neither are accusations that conflate "impractical" with "impossible".
The 419 scam is usually more work for them than that. The scam usually runs like "Hey, I have all this money, and I'll give you some if you front me the money to get it out of the country". All they steal is the money you send, though frequently they get even more when they ask for money for "additional unexpected circumstances". Once they've found somebody sufficiently greedy or gullible, they milk them, not the account.
Occasionally it's been known to turn to kidnaping and ransom when people visit Nigeria to try to get their money back or even follow an invitation to "help".
It's also called "Advance Fee Fraud". I still don't know why it's the Nigerians who make it so famous, since the scam has been played for centuries, even without bank transfers. They just seem to have turned it into a national industry.
I hate it with a passion. It's intolerably childish that a single individual has the power to tack on a highly specific, irrelevant amendment that the whole of Congress is powerless to remove.
I'm serious that I've considered running for Congress on a platform of reforming the rules to decrease that. (They'd find a way around whatever new rules I proposed, but we'd at least have a few years of relative sanity). I was quite bugged to discover that my senator was retiring this year, because I'm not ready to run yet, and six years from now when I am ready it'll be hard to beat an incumbent.
In some parliamentary systems, there is a motion to split a measure. By some vote (often a simple majority) the bill can be split into two bills. It's less a matter of law as of parliamentary procedure. Neither the US House nor Senate Rules of Order permit the motion to sever.
They do have a complex array of amendment procedures which could, in theory, be used for similar purposes. But the Congressional Rules of Order make floor votes to amend difficult. The work is supposed to be done in committees, and the committees present whole bills to be voted up or down.
That's how a single senator (in this case Warner of Virginia) can stomp the bill: the chair of the committee said no, and he gets to decide what amendments are considered.
It gets even more complicated from there. Once the House and Senate pass separate bills, there's yet another comittee that gets to merge the two bills and present the unified bill for an up-or-down vote to both houses. Getting on that committee is pure gold: you can basically chuck in anything you like, and if the bill is important (like, say, the defense budget) they basically have to pass it.
They don't have a motion to split because that's how deals are made. Compromises succeed or fail as a whole, and it wouldn't be a compromise if you could renege on part of it later. Work in Congress would grind to a halt. Whether that's good or bad I leave up to you.
I think nearly all economists consider some regulation a good thing. (In this case taxation is a form of regulation). There are some situations where the market will theoretically, eventually fix the problem, but the short-term consequences are intolerable.
For example, eventually a polluting company will be shunned and forced to shut down by the market, but before that happens it can do enormous damage lasting long past the life of the company. So the government exercises prior restraint on pollution.
Capitalism argues for minimizing that prior restraint, but not eliminating it. Finding the proper minimum is a job for skilled economists and other experts, and it's not easy.
So the market is never completely free. I'm not sufficiently skilled to say whether it should be in this case, but I'm not inherently opposed to the idea.
Is it any more of a hack than assuming that "google" typed into a cell phone/wireless PDA means "google.mobi"? Even with the imprimatur of having a TLD, I'm not aware of any standard that endorses the shortcut.
It's a convenience of the device, and if enough device manufacturers make it policy, it becomes convention. Convention is usually more important than standard, but de facto conventions can become de jure standards with an RFP.
Beyond that, it's really not necessary for all phones to apply to the standard. We really are talking about a hack in the first place, whether it's adding ".mobi" or adding "mobi.###.com".
And it's easier than the hack you get when foo.com and foo.net start competing for foo.mobi. That's a hack that can only be solved with legal arbitration and/or money paid up to squatters. And I reeeeeally hate squatters.
Agreed there. The idea that foo.mobi should be owned by anybody except the owner of foo.com is ludicrous and clearly a money-grab. I strongly advise against buying anything except.com domains in the US.
The other reason I've seen for.mobi is that a handheld device could automatically add it, saving keystrokes, which are more difficult on a tiny device. Well, web browsers regularly route "example" to www.example.com, and could just as easily turn "example" into "mobi.example.com" (and fall back to www.example.com if that fails)
Domain registrars piss me off; just today I had to route through three pages of upselling to renew my damn domain. Not quite as much as domain squatters, but they're up there.
Is changing the CSS sufficient? I'd imagine that for handheld devices, you want to change more than just the formatting. You'd want to deliver fewer bits overall (because of limited bandwidth), and possibly less content per page (because of small screen sizes).
That's not just a formatting change; that's a radical restructuring of the way you'd want to design the web site. I don't think you can accomplish all that with CSS.
Cats are rather easier to care for than dogs. A dog really requires attention every day. Not just for its physical needs, but because dogs are pack animals and really crave attention from their owners. Most cats can be left on their own for up to a few days with sufficient water, food, and a big litter box.
They're also content in relatively small spaces, like an apartment. A dog really should be taken outside every day if at all possible.
This isn't a debate about what's "better". It's just some people will really want a pet, and can't have a dog, and are allergic to most cats.
Is it worth $4k? To somebody, I guess. I do know that I nearly spent that much trying to save a beloved pet (the poor thing croaked before they could actually do the procedure). That of course is a pet I knew rather than an animal I didn't know, but it serves to illustrate how strongly people can feel about pets.
I can't say for certain. My guess: they can't possibly rig for paper ballots between now and November. So he's encouraging people to cast provisional ballots.
Provisional ballots require much closer scrutiny of the identity of the voter. That may tend to scare away traditionally Democratic voters, poor blacks and Latinos, who are afraid of being caught at voting booths for minor crimes and/or immigration violations, or at least be hassled for them.
In 2000 there was a leaflet campaign in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore, supposedly from Democrats, reminding people to make sure that their child support was paid up or they risked being arrested when they voted. It was said to be a Karl Rove trick, but I can't give you a solid citation and I certainly don't have any proof. I'm just using it as an illustration of what people think about the campaign and Democratic voting patterns, and why that might lead to a Republican advantage if they switch suddenly to non-electronic ballots.
Or it could just be an honest (but belated) look at the mechanics of electronic voting by the Governor.
The problem is the clumpiness. If that 10-15% were evenly spread over all sites, you'd mark it down as the cost of doing business. But if the fraudulent clicks are being targeted to some businesses, somebody's being royally screwed. A greedy click-spammer might end up making 50% or 90% of a particular site's clicks fraudulent.
The upside, I guess, is that if there are a large number of fraudulent clicks, you'd probably be able to identify them as a group (say, when they come in a sudden spurt, or all from the same referrer). I'd love to see Google say, "OK, obviously you're the subject of an attack. We'll eat the cost this month and try to track down the jackass responsible, but you should probably take a month or two hiatus from advertising with us while waiting for that jackass to move on to somebody else. Sorry."
If that makes smart fraudsters try to even things out a bit, then yeah, I guess you end up just lumping it in as the cost of doing business. It kinda sticks in your craw that somebody's making something for nothing, but you pursue them the best you can and try not to dwell on it since overall you're making money.
Maryland having a Republican governor is actually something of an anomaly. The last Republican governor of Maryland was Spiro Agnew back in the 60s. Ehrlich won a race over a Democrat who was said to have run a singularly terrible campaign, and even at that he won only 51-48.
Which means Ehrlich is in trouble now, and the polls reflect that: he's losing 51-44 and 49-42 in the most recent polls.
He's going to need every advantage if he's going to win. In fact, he's almost certain to lose, but his lieutenant governor has a fighting chance to take the Senate seat currently occupied by the retiring Democrat Paul Sarbanes. The last poll was 48-47 in favor of the Republican. The Democrat is still the favorite, but it's a very good reason for Governor Ehrlich to try very hard to take any advantage.
Strictly speaking a non-profit is supposed to stay out of lobbying Congress. They're starting to crack down on the non-profit status of churches who get into politics. There's a separate section of the tax code, 527, for political organizations. They get most of the same tax benefits, but there's a lot more scrutiny as to where the money comes from and where it goes.
The downside from those large lots, as it relates to the price of gas, is that neighbohoods built that way essentially preclude public transportation. Things are too spread out to make public transportation economical because each bus stop would service only a few people. And essential services, like the grocery store, will be too far away to walk to, so you end up having to have a car for everything; even a stay-at-home spouse must have a car.
But clearly that's the way many people like to live. I've got my own 1/4 acre and would love to be even further spread out from my neighbors. Maybe as a society we're rich enough to afford it, and maybe the oil will hold out long enough to support it.
But it has economic consquences, and you need to be aware of what they are if you're going to make rational choices. It's more than just a question of how much land is available.
Slashdot Mirror
Any marketer will tell you that what people tell you they want and what people actually want are very different things. Even if people answer honestly, the data you gather is often unreliable: people simply don't have as good a handle on what they want as they think they do.
Not that marketers have a better handle, but simply that people will swear up and down that they would buy a peanut-butter-filled hot dog, that they loved the one they tried, and then don't actually buy any.
Don't believe me? Go see Snakes on a Plane. Nobody else did. (Sure, $33 million seems like a lot, but that's chump change for a major studio release these days.)
The best improvements will come from insights gained between the lines. You may have rated The English Patient eleventeen stars, but if your next seven rentals were all episodes of The Girls Next Door, which you only rated 3 stars, it certainly looks like you want more Hugh Hefner and less Ralph Fiennes.
The best data is the data that the subject doesn't realize he's giving you. Once you start imposing conscious choice on the ratings, you get only what they say they like, not what they really like.
It's not often we get the actual author here on Slashdot to explain the paper. We usually don't get it until it's been from the scientist to the press-release-writer to the newspaper writer/blogger to the Slashdot summary writer. The actual significance of the paper is often lost along the way (usually as some minor aspect is exaggerated so that the thing seems more earth-shaking).
So any clarifications straight from the horse's mouth would be greatly appreciated.
Boo on the anonymous coward.
You're right that it's old news. It was a bit sensationalist in that it's not really soft tissue but rather a stable polymerization of the soft tissue. Still, it remains an important discovery, and I'm still waiting for more follow-up.
The article is phrased ambiguously: "Bubblare.se has up to 30 times more viewers for Scandinavian film clips". The implication is that Bubblare, showing only Scandinavian film clips, has 30 times as many viewers as YouTube does for everything. But that's not it: it's just saying that for Scandinavian viewers, local beats global. In fact, it could well be that Scandinavians spend more time watching YouTube non-Scandinavian clips than Scandinavian clips from Bubblare.
It just means that a targeted site sells more of the targeted stuff than the superstore to the target audience. It doesn't mean that the superstore doesn't sell more, even of the targeted stuff, to the global audience.
That's not uninteresting; one would think that there's no reason for anything on Bubblare not to also be on YouTube, for the whole world to enjoy and for Scandinavian viewers to stumble to other contexts.
Maybe they just enjoy having the whole site localized in their language. Maybe the bandwidth is better because it's all local. Or perhaps being under the radar it doesn't get quite the array of crud.
None of which supports the idea that YouTube is going anywhere.
Amplifying what Dragonslicer said, yes, you do have a scientific theory, but it's rather narrow. It's impossible to use that theory to demonstrate that God created the heavens and the earth, or that God wants us to not eat shellfish.
Given that it's a testable hypothesis, you're free to go explore the ramifications of that hypothesis. What kind of God is it who exists only to save the Earth from its direst peril? What would he say if in fact he appeared to flick that black hole out of the way? What else does He want/do?
No immediate conclusions come to my mind, but as a scientist you're free to pursue your theory, do experiments to test it, and get others to replicate those experiments. We'd prefer you stick to ethical experiments (i.e. not actually risking the earth in a black hole), but scientific ethics is a whole 'nother topic.
Hey, thanks. It's always kinda depressing to make a minor misstatement and get swamped with people who are so happy to make the correction that they don't bother to note that it's already been corrected, all while missing the key point (the fact that it does have a few draws).
Well, it does have a larger screen, one capable of playing wide format movies. I don't know if that's enough to make it an iPod "killer", but it's certainly a compelling argument for buying the Zune if you want to watch video on the thing.
To be a scientific theory, you have to be able to describe the test, even if you can't do it. For string theory, there exist experiments one could describe, but lack the resources to perform. One could write the paper down and give excruciating detail of exactly what constitutes a failure of the experiment. The resources provably exist in the universe; collecting them is just too expensive to actually do.
"God" lacks any scientific theory at the moment precisely because it lacks such a test. Partly that stems from the malleable definition of the term. Once "God" was that which created the species of the earth, but the term was redefined when a more testable hypothesis was elucidated. Various people point to gaps in demonstrating that hypothesis ("irreducible complexity"), but such gaps are routinely covered with new and compatible explanations, and the term "God" altered to fit the remaining gaps. For an experiment to work you're not allowed to redefine your terms in the middle.
Simiarly, "God" is sometimes defined as a non-human entity who wrote a book of moral codes. Disproving that is impossible; whenever additional evidence is found for human authorship, the term is redefined to be a sort of Divine Inspiration. It's not impossible that Divine Inspiration did in fact happen, but since nobody can say what the term means (nobody ever having witnessed it or having any idea when they might again witness it), it's not a falsifiable hypothesis.
The test does have to be finite. One can say "God is that which punishes sins", but many sins in fact go unpunished, and the hypothesis is false. If one tacks on "eventually", the hypothesis is no longer falsifiable, because you'd have to wait forever to know that the sin was punished.
None of this, by the way, should be construed to prove the non-existence of God. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Scientists tend to apply Occam's Razor: if you can't test for something, it doesn't mean it isn't there, but we'll ignore it until it forces us to believe in it.
It gets sticky there. One could say, "God punishes sins, and I'll know it after I die" sounds like a testable hypothesis; all you have to do is die. But even if it's true that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, the source of the data "things are different in heaven" is suspect. One can expand one's epistemology to include a trap door, but Occam's razor suggests that we exclude it on practical grounds. Again, feel free to believe it, but you have no grounds to quibble if I do not.
You are, in fact, free to continue to believe in it. It gets sticky when you start to draw conclusions from it, especially when they apply to me: not just "God exists" but "God told me to pass a law that bans X". The former is valid, though not terribly useful. The latter is, at least scientifically, invalid without further evidence.
There's a difference between what's not practically testable and what's truly unfalsifiable. As long as it's conceptually possible to come up with a falsifying experiment, even if it's wildly impractical, it's still a scientific theory. We may yet come up with ways to test the theory. Sometimes that's because somebody comes up with a clever new test, an ingenious new reformulation of the theory, receives unexpected results from an exsting accelerator, or builds a new particle accelerator.
What's happening here is that people are complaining that the scientific establishment has made it difficult to work in alternatives to string theory. But just because you can't get a job to disprove a theory doesn't make it unfalsifiable. There needs to be healthy debate in the scientific community about which theories to work on. Shutting valid theories down is not healthy for science, but neither are accusations that conflate "impractical" with "impossible".
The 419 scam is usually more work for them than that. The scam usually runs like "Hey, I have all this money, and I'll give you some if you front me the money to get it out of the country". All they steal is the money you send, though frequently they get even more when they ask for money for "additional unexpected circumstances". Once they've found somebody sufficiently greedy or gullible, they milk them, not the account.
Occasionally it's been known to turn to kidnaping and ransom when people visit Nigeria to try to get their money back or even follow an invitation to "help".
It's also called "Advance Fee Fraud". I still don't know why it's the Nigerians who make it so famous, since the scam has been played for centuries, even without bank transfers. They just seem to have turned it into a national industry.
I hate it with a passion. It's intolerably childish that a single individual has the power to tack on a highly specific, irrelevant amendment that the whole of Congress is powerless to remove.
I'm serious that I've considered running for Congress on a platform of reforming the rules to decrease that. (They'd find a way around whatever new rules I proposed, but we'd at least have a few years of relative sanity). I was quite bugged to discover that my senator was retiring this year, because I'm not ready to run yet, and six years from now when I am ready it'll be hard to beat an incumbent.
In some parliamentary systems, there is a motion to split a measure. By some vote (often a simple majority) the bill can be split into two bills. It's less a matter of law as of parliamentary procedure. Neither the US House nor Senate Rules of Order permit the motion to sever.
They do have a complex array of amendment procedures which could, in theory, be used for similar purposes. But the Congressional Rules of Order make floor votes to amend difficult. The work is supposed to be done in committees, and the committees present whole bills to be voted up or down.
That's how a single senator (in this case Warner of Virginia) can stomp the bill: the chair of the committee said no, and he gets to decide what amendments are considered.
It gets even more complicated from there. Once the House and Senate pass separate bills, there's yet another comittee that gets to merge the two bills and present the unified bill for an up-or-down vote to both houses. Getting on that committee is pure gold: you can basically chuck in anything you like, and if the bill is important (like, say, the defense budget) they basically have to pass it.
They don't have a motion to split because that's how deals are made. Compromises succeed or fail as a whole, and it wouldn't be a compromise if you could renege on part of it later. Work in Congress would grind to a halt. Whether that's good or bad I leave up to you.
Thanks. I'll check it out the next time I'm at the library.
I think nearly all economists consider some regulation a good thing. (In this case taxation is a form of regulation). There are some situations where the market will theoretically, eventually fix the problem, but the short-term consequences are intolerable.
For example, eventually a polluting company will be shunned and forced to shut down by the market, but before that happens it can do enormous damage lasting long past the life of the company. So the government exercises prior restraint on pollution.
Capitalism argues for minimizing that prior restraint, but not eliminating it. Finding the proper minimum is a job for skilled economists and other experts, and it's not easy.
So the market is never completely free. I'm not sufficiently skilled to say whether it should be in this case, but I'm not inherently opposed to the idea.
Is it any more of a hack than assuming that "google" typed into a cell phone/wireless PDA means "google.mobi"? Even with the imprimatur of having a TLD, I'm not aware of any standard that endorses the shortcut.
It's a convenience of the device, and if enough device manufacturers make it policy, it becomes convention. Convention is usually more important than standard, but de facto conventions can become de jure standards with an RFP.
Beyond that, it's really not necessary for all phones to apply to the standard. We really are talking about a hack in the first place, whether it's adding ".mobi" or adding "mobi.###.com".
And it's easier than the hack you get when foo.com and foo.net start competing for foo.mobi. That's a hack that can only be solved with legal arbitration and/or money paid up to squatters. And I reeeeeally hate squatters.
Agreed there. The idea that foo.mobi should be owned by anybody except the owner of foo.com is ludicrous and clearly a money-grab. I strongly advise against buying anything except .com domains in the US.
.mobi is that a handheld device could automatically add it, saving keystrokes, which are more difficult on a tiny device. Well, web browsers regularly route "example" to www.example.com, and could just as easily turn "example" into "mobi.example.com" (and fall back to www.example.com if that fails)
The other reason I've seen for
Domain registrars piss me off; just today I had to route through three pages of upselling to renew my damn domain. Not quite as much as domain squatters, but they're up there.
Is changing the CSS sufficient? I'd imagine that for handheld devices, you want to change more than just the formatting. You'd want to deliver fewer bits overall (because of limited bandwidth), and possibly less content per page (because of small screen sizes).
That's not just a formatting change; that's a radical restructuring of the way you'd want to design the web site. I don't think you can accomplish all that with CSS.
Cats are rather easier to care for than dogs. A dog really requires attention every day. Not just for its physical needs, but because dogs are pack animals and really crave attention from their owners. Most cats can be left on their own for up to a few days with sufficient water, food, and a big litter box.
They're also content in relatively small spaces, like an apartment. A dog really should be taken outside every day if at all possible.
This isn't a debate about what's "better". It's just some people will really want a pet, and can't have a dog, and are allergic to most cats.
Is it worth $4k? To somebody, I guess. I do know that I nearly spent that much trying to save a beloved pet (the poor thing croaked before they could actually do the procedure). That of course is a pet I knew rather than an animal I didn't know, but it serves to illustrate how strongly people can feel about pets.
I would expect that a spammer would automatically strip out anything after the +, but I don't have any experimental data on that.
I can't say for certain. My guess: they can't possibly rig for paper ballots between now and November. So he's encouraging people to cast provisional ballots.
Provisional ballots require much closer scrutiny of the identity of the voter. That may tend to scare away traditionally Democratic voters, poor blacks and Latinos, who are afraid of being caught at voting booths for minor crimes and/or immigration violations, or at least be hassled for them.
In 2000 there was a leaflet campaign in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore, supposedly from Democrats, reminding people to make sure that their child support was paid up or they risked being arrested when they voted. It was said to be a Karl Rove trick, but I can't give you a solid citation and I certainly don't have any proof. I'm just using it as an illustration of what people think about the campaign and Democratic voting patterns, and why that might lead to a Republican advantage if they switch suddenly to non-electronic ballots.
Or it could just be an honest (but belated) look at the mechanics of electronic voting by the Governor.
The problem is the clumpiness. If that 10-15% were evenly spread over all sites, you'd mark it down as the cost of doing business. But if the fraudulent clicks are being targeted to some businesses, somebody's being royally screwed. A greedy click-spammer might end up making 50% or 90% of a particular site's clicks fraudulent.
The upside, I guess, is that if there are a large number of fraudulent clicks, you'd probably be able to identify them as a group (say, when they come in a sudden spurt, or all from the same referrer). I'd love to see Google say, "OK, obviously you're the subject of an attack. We'll eat the cost this month and try to track down the jackass responsible, but you should probably take a month or two hiatus from advertising with us while waiting for that jackass to move on to somebody else. Sorry."
If that makes smart fraudsters try to even things out a bit, then yeah, I guess you end up just lumping it in as the cost of doing business. It kinda sticks in your craw that somebody's making something for nothing, but you pursue them the best you can and try not to dwell on it since overall you're making money.
Maryland having a Republican governor is actually something of an anomaly. The last Republican governor of Maryland was Spiro Agnew back in the 60s. Ehrlich won a race over a Democrat who was said to have run a singularly terrible campaign, and even at that he won only 51-48.
Which means Ehrlich is in trouble now, and the polls reflect that: he's losing 51-44 and 49-42 in the most recent polls.
He's going to need every advantage if he's going to win. In fact, he's almost certain to lose, but his lieutenant governor has a fighting chance to take the Senate seat currently occupied by the retiring Democrat Paul Sarbanes. The last poll was 48-47 in favor of the Republican. The Democrat is still the favorite, but it's a very good reason for Governor Ehrlich to try very hard to take any advantage.
Strictly speaking a non-profit is supposed to stay out of lobbying Congress. They're starting to crack down on the non-profit status of churches who get into politics. There's a separate section of the tax code, 527, for political organizations. They get most of the same tax benefits, but there's a lot more scrutiny as to where the money comes from and where it goes.
The downside from those large lots, as it relates to the price of gas, is that neighbohoods built that way essentially preclude public transportation. Things are too spread out to make public transportation economical because each bus stop would service only a few people. And essential services, like the grocery store, will be too far away to walk to, so you end up having to have a car for everything; even a stay-at-home spouse must have a car.
But clearly that's the way many people like to live. I've got my own 1/4 acre and would love to be even further spread out from my neighbors. Maybe as a society we're rich enough to afford it, and maybe the oil will hold out long enough to support it.
But it has economic consquences, and you need to be aware of what they are if you're going to make rational choices. It's more than just a question of how much land is available.