If we're talking about text and contextual ads, then I'd say that's just fine.
Why? Because of the nature of this method of advertising, which is inherently more balanced than anything on TV. If you search for "Sicko" and see the #1 ranked page, a huge majority of the time you'll choose to navigate to THAT page, or one of the other top few pages, and not a sponsored ad. You're looking for information, the best information, and you want to locate it by relevance to your search terms.
Unlike the insidious -- in fact, utterly sickening -- nature of modern PR, currently nothing that google offers to advertisers can compromise this dynamic.
However, if these companies want to make their side of the story available, well, there are sponsored results. They can always make their side of things just a click away, if they pay for it. But they can't interfere with people informing themselves, at least, not through Adsense/Adwords. Contrast this with traditional mediums, where they can not simply interfere, but can absolutely dominate the discussion.
And this holds just as true for a tobacco company as an HMO.
No, no and no. It says nothing about censorship, tailoring of google's 'search formulas', or google bomb insurance.;)
As surprising as this may be, it's just a straight-up plug for the utility of their text search ads.
Is it evil? Well, now. That's quite a question.
Sure, HMO's are evil. Sure, censorship is evil. But it would also be evil for google to refuse to sell ads to the health insurance industry.
This is not, as people have stated, a sign of google moving to protect its interests and maximize profits in a way that puts people after corporations. Offering these services, in order to let health insurance companies respond to a particularly strident and vocal political opponent, by selling them context ads, is hardly evil.
Far from it. I'd rather have text ads than know about the truly evil PR crap that is, and will continue to be, spewed across our television screens if the HMO's really feel threatened, like they did in the mid-90's.
THAT is pretty cool, actually. As someone often called on to do design tasks that straddle the line between infographic and visualization, I think I need to give WW another look. I never really considered it once Google Earth came out, because Google Earth was easier for whatever globehopping question I had. But being able to quickly do this kind of visualization ("uh, hey -- we need a picture of the population density of South Dakota, matching our company's color scheme, by tomorrow") should make my life a little easier.
In addition to relative atime, relocatable kernels, microoptimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared pagetables for hugetbl, the new version includes:
Cropotactical callipygization, hoptic chamferbytes, chrome-plated floydbarbers, brillig/mimsy optimizations and full slithy tove support.
First, you describe it as a 'nightmare'. Is this a deal-breaker, or not, for you?
If it's not, and you'd honestly take the job even without the better relocation package, then your goal is just to try to negotiate, right?
If it IS a DEFINITE deal-breaker, call them up and tell them that, bluntly but softly: "I'm sorry, but that's what I was promised. I don't want to cause any trouble, but for me right now this is definitely a deal-breaker. Please talk to whoever you need to talk to," get info on how long it will take them to make a decision and arrange to call back, and then call back.
If it's not a definite deal-breaker but you want to negotiate, the procedure is the same, but use softer wording.
"Bob, you told me that there was [blah] to help me get there and get going, and they're telling me [blahrg]. I'm just really concerned, and I wanted to let you know where I'm at with this. I'm really excited about coming on board with you guys, and I'm really looking forward to it, but my situation right now is that without an adequate relocation package like the one you described, it just might not make sense for either of us."
Also, mention to them that there are two ways that this is bad -- first, that the financial hit you'd take from the lower relocation package is enough to make taking the position a lot less attractive. But second, that taking that hit -- a substantial financial penalty -- is enough of a negative for you that it just might not make sense to start off what you *had* hoped would be a long and mutually rewarding career by being asked to take a big financial penalty.
You didn't quit your job yet, right? You haven't yet taken a dump on your supervisor's desk, right? So you can survive. If your prospective new bosses react to these kinds of reasonable concerns unreasonably, you're better off where you are, so expressing your concerns can only help you.
I'm afraid I can't offer links to studies, although I know they must exist. For starters, I would reccomend Consumer Reports.
However, I have some experience with the effects of modern insulation on energy costs. Recently, I had a contract software job for a client that turned so sour it soured me on programming for money, and I decided to do a little blue-collar work and then travel the world. (I know, I know. I'm a filthy hippy).
So, prior to heading down to Ecuador, I worked for 5 months at a production/construction company that builds light commercial buildings in pieces and assembles them on-site, and also handles a lot of large-scale renovations for things like strip malls, etc. Over 120 McDonalds were built there in a year, for instance.
Anyway, everything they make uses what are called EIFS, or Exterior Insulation Finish Systems. These are either thin-brick-and-mortar, or Dryvit (think 'country club style fake stucco'). And as a result, guys that worked in this factory became so skilled and quick at EIFS that they'd all get together and help each other redo their houses with EIFS, usually dryvit.
They all said that the savings in their energy bills were just under half. Given the relatively low incomes we got as factory workers, people wouldn't have been doing it in such numbers simply for potential property-value increases; no one had the money to spare. Literally, the MAJORITY of the Finish guys had redone their houses in dryvit, and they all said that they recouped the negligible materials cost in about 3 months just from the reductions in their energy bills. (Second disclaimer: we're in Minnesota, so it hits the wallet harder here than some places).
This seems to correlate well with my own googling, which (for similar, concrete-form houses with dryvit-style EIFS) shows from 31% to 46% savings. Some of these studies are done by groups with names like "The Portland Cement Association", but still, it sounds about right.
It turns out, I wasn't born in Creston Iowa to Matt and Barbara at all. I was created as part of a series of a domestic experiments with in-vitro fertilization, and... and my father...
My father is Margaret Thatcher./me sits on ground and cries.
First, no offense, but you saw this on foxnews.com? Was this one of those "best to know what tunes the Devil is playing" things? Or do you have some other acceptable explanation, like... being retarded?
Second, if you see a story on Fox News, that might be a tip-off that it's the kind of soft news Slashdot may not bring its A-game for.
Even better is that the torrent tracker referred to is The Pirate Bay -- who mocked microsoft's legal threats, resulting in Microsoft appearing to pull strings that lead to an unprecedented, although ultimately unsuccessful, raid on their servers.
So, when the first hacks for Vista start popping up, it's nice to know that I can rely on The Pirate Bay to host those.torrents for me!
Public transparency is the arch-enemy of entrenched power -- of all sorts.
So all that measures like this mean are that obfuscation and securing of information will move from the process and mechanics of apportioning tax money -- quietly sneaking in billions in pork, as evidenced by the efforts of Byrd and Stephens to kill this bill (read TFA) -- to their initial conception.
We've already seen this in, say, the environmental policies of the past six years. Healthy Forests; who is against those? Such a program certainly wouldn't be associated with distasteful policies like logging national forests...
Instead of quieting the *passage* of wasteful bills or the awarding of ridiculous military contracts and other such theft, the process of weaselifying government spending will happen in the early stages of their conception.
Since the military and security is a sacred cow, Head-Start will be renamed the Homeland Child Protection and Institutional Defense Agency.
The military itself will show up on the budget as "1 trillion annually: FREEDOM."
The solution, of course, would be to allow citizens to annotate the entries for their fellow citizens, and to rate the contributions of their fellow citizens to allow popular opinions the visibility they deserve.
Which, despite its negligible cost, would never, ever, ever be allowed to happen. Control of information is power, and the government never gives away power to citizens unless forced.
Now I want to know how much they lose on each 360 they build. With the XBox, it was originally a $100 loss on each console. With the 360, maybe it's $360?
Personally, I have never noticed ghosting on ordinary video files -- even action movies, which I've watched on many a dell 19" screen.
The only thing that I have noticed ghosting on is while gaming -- but, since I only use good LCD's (do your homework!) the ghosting is barely noticeable.
What I'm left with, then, is a subtle, clean-looking form of motion blur in my games. Shit, some games steal my megahurts to create that effect! With an LCD, I get it for free!
Trails? Set them to OFF, MOFO! For I -- I have an LCD!/me gets some more coffee.
I had a pair of Sennheisers that I tried this with, with disastrous results.
Firstly... the really thin cord once left me with a bright purplish-red birthmark-looking thing all the way around my neck. It looked like someone tried and failed to decapitate me, which I guess is true enough.
Secondly... the other thing that happens often with a really light, thin wire is that it snaps. You sit down on a bench, it's dropping down a bit, someone walks by, it snags on their coat and *chik* NO AUDIO AAAAAAAAGH M###ER F###ER[1]!!!
I think that a REAL innovation -- and maybe this exists, but if so it's not widespread -- would be elastic audio cables. Stretchy cables. Why aren't these common? Assuming sufficient stretchability, I have to believe that such cables would all but eliminate both of the problems listed above.
I think that the original poster has a point about MS competing with AdSense, but as many people will bring out, WinXP will be a gigantic installed base for the next 5 to 10 years at least.
MS is likely hoping to counter Google by integrating an AdSense competitor directly into the browser, in a manner similar to Claria, but shipped with the next OS. However, the huge install base of previous versions of windows is likely to be dominant for the next 5 years at least.
This is their way of ensuring that their AdSense competitor is available for previous versions of their OS -- allow their own viral marketing products to slip by.
Frankly, it would be an intelligent tactic, and not necessarily a bad way of accomplishing their ends.
The less scrupulous way would be to force people to upgrade to the newer OS, but they are rightly wary of losing trust, particularly with corp. clients.
Disclaimer: hey, I'm a.NET developer... using Pythonnet, or RDNZL.;) Figure out for yourself where my loyalties lie.
The best thing about this whole situation is that in order to see mirrored screenshots of a Microsoft one-up of another company's innovations (Apple's UI, of course)...
I walked through two levels of Google active content ads -- a *real* innovation -- which are doubtless paying for the mirroring service.
Microsoft comes to E3 with a console that is looking amazingly polished, down to the extensive new XBox Live features, and with tons and tons of in-engine first looks.
Sony comes to E3 with a gigantic press event held at their cinema, with 2 simple real-time tech demos, prerendered (although using PS3 hardware) gameplay footage that blows away any other *footage* to date, and a bunch of video clips featuring their spider-man franchise.
There is no doubt about it -- MS is shipping earlier, MS has a better online infrastructure, and many of MS' games are already playable...
But Sony won E3. All anyone wanted to talk about was the KillZone trailer.
Now, to keep anyone from pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes, they're disappearing. So all anyone will talk about, until they're ready, will be... the KillZone trailer. Which is not a bad situation to be in, because that trailer was pretty amazing.
It's absolutely a great idea. For the record, I have nothing against MS, but I'm WARY of them. Anything, even something unfair, that keeps them on their toes is probably a good thing for the rest of the world.
I won't buy either until they're both out next summer, though, so it's sort of moot.
You can grab it with StreamRipper (as the download link appears to be broken, even via ftp), and listen to your heart's content. I'll spare you the details, but at one point he mentions how the USS Jimmy Carter has been overhauled -- at MASSIVE expense -- to have a bigger "ocean interface", which means (as it has in the past) that, in addition to the incredibly rare rescue scenarios, they still believe that tapping undersea cables is a viable technique.
Since almost everything important is running on fiber nowadays, and the old cables are going the way of the dodo, the obvious conclusion of security industry observers (and of Sy Hersh, recently and notably) is that the big players in the sigint/commint community can tap undersea fiber.
This is not make-believe! It's not bull, or exaggeration. It's widely known and accepted within the intelligence community (including the community of intel watchdogs).
Generally, the US *does* tap endpoints (and the countries that it shares intel with, like Britain and Australia and New Zealand, all help), and there are really only a couple of cables of interest in the Mediterranean, but in Asia and the Middle East, there are a lot of places that the US does not have end-point access to via the ISPs.
Contrary to popular belief, it is far less risky for the US to tap an undersea cable than to do so covertly on land in a country like Pakistan (or to secure THAT level of intel cooperation with their government; they're cooperative in some ways, but not THAT cooperative).
So many people think that Javascript has something, ANYTHING, to do with Java.
In fact, Javascript is a much more powerful language, supporting not only the simplistic forms of code reuse that we associate with object-oriented programming but considerably more powerful and useful functionality. This is proved by the fact that Crockford was able to write an interpreter for Scheme in Javascript.:D
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/scheme.html
Don't get me wrong, I think that strongly-typed languages have their place and are useful . . . but Python, Javascript -- it looks like Google has definitely got the ability to take the productivity gains from dynamic languages and apply them in the real world.
Well, while that might explain changes in the skin etc of the people viewing the slides (and I think that probably IS the reason -- and moreover, heh, I wouldn't be surprised if there WAS some kind of cue being given by accident; a click, a button press, that preceded slide change), it wouldn't address fluctuations in the RNG.
Slashdot Mirror
If we're talking about text and contextual ads, then I'd say that's just fine.
Why? Because of the nature of this method of advertising, which is inherently more balanced than anything on TV. If you search for "Sicko" and see the #1 ranked page, a huge majority of the time you'll choose to navigate to THAT page, or one of the other top few pages, and not a sponsored ad. You're looking for information, the best information, and you want to locate it by relevance to your search terms.
Unlike the insidious -- in fact, utterly sickening -- nature of modern PR, currently nothing that google offers to advertisers can compromise this dynamic.
However, if these companies want to make their side of the story available, well, there are sponsored results. They can always make their side of things just a click away, if they pay for it. But they can't interfere with people informing themselves, at least, not through Adsense/Adwords. Contrast this with traditional mediums, where they can not simply interfere, but can absolutely dominate the discussion.
And this holds just as true for a tobacco company as an HMO.
No, no and no. It says nothing about censorship, tailoring of google's 'search formulas', or google bomb insurance. ;)
As surprising as this may be, it's just a straight-up plug for the utility of their text search ads.
Is it evil? Well, now. That's quite a question.
Sure, HMO's are evil. Sure, censorship is evil. But it would also be evil for google to refuse to sell ads to the health insurance industry.
This is not, as people have stated, a sign of google moving to protect its interests and maximize profits in a way that puts people after corporations. Offering these services, in order to let health insurance companies respond to a particularly strident and vocal political opponent, by selling them context ads, is hardly evil.
Far from it. I'd rather have text ads than know about the truly evil PR crap that is, and will continue to be, spewed across our television screens if the HMO's really feel threatened, like they did in the mid-90's.
It's an old rule, and you got it wrong.
If you smoke pot, you can't spell.
I noticed that the kinds of infographic abilities shown here: http://www.dynagis.net/gallery_screenshots/ are now free, as the plugin that provides them is now CC licensed. (more info here: http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Add-on:DYNAGI S_Golden_Pearl)
THAT is pretty cool, actually. As someone often called on to do design tasks that straddle the line between infographic and visualization, I think I need to give WW another look. I never really considered it once Google Earth came out, because Google Earth was easier for whatever globehopping question I had. But being able to quickly do this kind of visualization ("uh, hey -- we need a picture of the population density of South Dakota, matching our company's color scheme, by tomorrow") should make my life a little easier.
In addition to relative atime, relocatable kernels, microoptimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared pagetables for hugetbl, the new version includes:
Cropotactical callipygization, hoptic chamferbytes, chrome-plated floydbarbers, brillig/mimsy optimizations and full slithy tove support.
First, you describe it as a 'nightmare'. Is this a deal-breaker, or not, for you?
If it's not, and you'd honestly take the job even without the better relocation package, then your goal is just to try to negotiate, right?
If it IS a DEFINITE deal-breaker, call them up and tell them that, bluntly but softly: "I'm sorry, but that's what I was promised. I don't want to cause any trouble, but for me right now this is definitely a deal-breaker. Please talk to whoever you need to talk to," get info on how long it will take them to make a decision and arrange to call back, and then call back.
If it's not a definite deal-breaker but you want to negotiate, the procedure is the same, but use softer wording.
"Bob, you told me that there was [blah] to help me get there and get going, and they're telling me [blahrg]. I'm just really concerned, and I wanted to let you know where I'm at with this. I'm really excited about coming on board with you guys, and I'm really looking forward to it, but my situation right now is that without an adequate relocation package like the one you described, it just might not make sense for either of us."
Also, mention to them that there are two ways that this is bad -- first, that the financial hit you'd take from the lower relocation package is enough to make taking the position a lot less attractive. But second, that taking that hit -- a substantial financial penalty -- is enough of a negative for you that it just might not make sense to start off what you *had* hoped would be a long and mutually rewarding career by being asked to take a big financial penalty.
You didn't quit your job yet, right? You haven't yet taken a dump on your supervisor's desk, right? So you can survive. If your prospective new bosses react to these kinds of reasonable concerns unreasonably, you're better off where you are, so expressing your concerns can only help you.
The "being who designed everything" makes mistakes?
I'm confused. Are you espousing ID/evolutionary creationism, or are you saying we were all created by the Greys?
And if we were created by Greys, what would they have left to learn with anal probes?
That's like asking "does tv make you stupid or smart?"
...
Answer: depends.
I'd answer you in more detail, but I've been watching cable news, so uh
I'm afraid I can't offer links to studies, although I know they must exist. For starters, I would reccomend Consumer Reports.
However, I have some experience with the effects of modern insulation on energy costs. Recently, I had a contract software job for a client that turned so sour it soured me on programming for money, and I decided to do a little blue-collar work and then travel the world. (I know, I know. I'm a filthy hippy).
So, prior to heading down to Ecuador, I worked for 5 months at a production/construction company that builds light commercial buildings in pieces and assembles them on-site, and also handles a lot of large-scale renovations for things like strip malls, etc. Over 120 McDonalds were built there in a year, for instance.
Anyway, everything they make uses what are called EIFS, or Exterior Insulation Finish Systems. These are either thin-brick-and-mortar, or Dryvit (think 'country club style fake stucco'). And as a result, guys that worked in this factory became so skilled and quick at EIFS that they'd all get together and help each other redo their houses with EIFS, usually dryvit.
They all said that the savings in their energy bills were just under half. Given the relatively low incomes we got as factory workers, people wouldn't have been doing it in such numbers simply for potential property-value increases; no one had the money to spare. Literally, the MAJORITY of the Finish guys had redone their houses in dryvit, and they all said that they recouped the negligible materials cost in about 3 months just from the reductions in their energy bills. (Second disclaimer: we're in Minnesota, so it hits the wallet harder here than some places).
This seems to correlate well with my own googling, which (for similar, concrete-form houses with dryvit-style EIFS) shows from 31% to 46% savings. Some of these studies are done by groups with names like "The Portland Cement Association", but still, it sounds about right.
That thing got a HEMI?
It turns out, I wasn't born in Creston Iowa to Matt and Barbara at all. I was created as part of a series of a domestic experiments with in-vitro fertilization, and ... and my father ...
/me sits on ground and cries.
My father is Margaret Thatcher.
First, no offense, but you saw this on foxnews.com? Was this one of those "best to know what tunes the Devil is playing" things? Or do you have some other acceptable explanation, like ... being retarded?
Second, if you see a story on Fox News, that might be a tip-off that it's the kind of soft news Slashdot may not bring its A-game for.
Even better is that the torrent tracker referred to is The Pirate Bay -- who mocked microsoft's legal threats, resulting in Microsoft appearing to pull strings that lead to an unprecedented, although ultimately unsuccessful, raid on their servers.
.torrents for me!
So, when the first hacks for Vista start popping up, it's nice to know that I can rely on The Pirate Bay to host those
Public transparency is the arch-enemy of entrenched power -- of all sorts.
...
So all that measures like this mean are that obfuscation and securing of information will move from the process and mechanics of apportioning tax money -- quietly sneaking in billions in pork, as evidenced by the efforts of Byrd and Stephens to kill this bill (read TFA) -- to their initial conception.
We've already seen this in, say, the environmental policies of the past six years. Healthy Forests; who is against those? Such a program certainly wouldn't be associated with distasteful policies like logging national forests
Instead of quieting the *passage* of wasteful bills or the awarding of ridiculous military contracts and other such theft, the process of weaselifying government spending will happen in the early stages of their conception.
Since the military and security is a sacred cow, Head-Start will be renamed the Homeland Child Protection and Institutional Defense Agency.
The military itself will show up on the budget as "1 trillion annually: FREEDOM."
The solution, of course, would be to allow citizens to annotate the entries for their fellow citizens, and to rate the contributions of their fellow citizens to allow popular opinions the visibility they deserve.
Which, despite its negligible cost, would never, ever, ever be allowed to happen. Control of information is power, and the government never gives away power to citizens unless forced.
Jesus.
That DOES explain a lot.
Now I want to know how much they lose on each 360 they build. With the XBox, it was originally a $100 loss on each console. With the 360, maybe it's $360?
Personally, I have never noticed ghosting on ordinary video files -- even action movies, which I've watched on many a dell 19" screen.
/me gets some more coffee.
The only thing that I have noticed ghosting on is while gaming -- but, since I only use good LCD's (do your homework!) the ghosting is barely noticeable.
What I'm left with, then, is a subtle, clean-looking form of motion blur in my games. Shit, some games steal my megahurts to create that effect! With an LCD, I get it for free!
Trails? Set them to OFF, MOFO! For I -- I have an LCD!
I had a pair of Sennheisers that I tried this with, with disastrous results.
... the really thin cord once left me with a bright purplish-red birthmark-looking thing all the way around my neck. It looked like someone tried and failed to decapitate me, which I guess is true enough.
... the other thing that happens often with a really light, thin wire is that it snaps. You sit down on a bench, it's dropping down a bit, someone walks by, it snags on their coat and *chik* NO AUDIO AAAAAAAAGH M###ER F###ER[1]!!!
Firstly
Secondly
I think that a REAL innovation -- and maybe this exists, but if so it's not widespread -- would be elastic audio cables. Stretchy cables. Why aren't these common? Assuming sufficient stretchability, I have to believe that such cables would all but eliminate both of the problems listed above.
_______
[1] MOTHER FATHER, guttermind.
it's the US telling the EU
"ICANN, EUCANT"
I think that the original poster has a point about MS competing with AdSense, but as many people will bring out, WinXP will be a gigantic installed base for the next 5 to 10 years at least.
.NET developer ... using Pythonnet, or RDNZL. ;) Figure out for yourself where my loyalties lie.
MS is likely hoping to counter Google by integrating an AdSense competitor directly into the browser, in a manner similar to Claria, but shipped with the next OS. However, the huge install base of previous versions of windows is likely to be dominant for the next 5 years at least.
This is their way of ensuring that their AdSense competitor is available for previous versions of their OS -- allow their own viral marketing products to slip by.
Frankly, it would be an intelligent tactic, and not necessarily a bad way of accomplishing their ends.
The less scrupulous way would be to force people to upgrade to the newer OS, but they are rightly wary of losing trust, particularly with corp. clients.
Disclaimer: hey, I'm a
The best thing about this whole situation is that in order to see mirrored screenshots of a Microsoft one-up of another company's innovations (Apple's UI, of course) ...
I walked through two levels of Google active content ads -- a *real* innovation -- which are doubtless paying for the mirroring service.
I have to hand it to Sony.
...
... the KillZone trailer. Which is not a bad situation to be in, because that trailer was pretty amazing.
They really know how to do this "business" thing.
Microsoft comes to E3 with a console that is looking amazingly polished, down to the extensive new XBox Live features, and with tons and tons of in-engine first looks.
Sony comes to E3 with a gigantic press event held at their cinema, with 2 simple real-time tech demos, prerendered (although using PS3 hardware) gameplay footage that blows away any other *footage* to date, and a bunch of video clips featuring their spider-man franchise.
There is no doubt about it -- MS is shipping earlier, MS has a better online infrastructure, and many of MS' games are already playable
But Sony won E3. All anyone wanted to talk about was the KillZone trailer.
Now, to keep anyone from pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes, they're disappearing. So all anyone will talk about, until they're ready, will be
It's absolutely a great idea. For the record, I have nothing against MS, but I'm WARY of them. Anything, even something unfair, that keeps them on their toes is probably a good thing for the rest of the world.
I won't buy either until they're both out next summer, though, so it's sort of moot.
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=423
"ECHELON and the Insecurity Industry"
You can grab it with StreamRipper (as the download link appears to be broken, even via ftp), and listen to your heart's content. I'll spare you the details, but at one point he mentions how the USS Jimmy Carter has been overhauled -- at MASSIVE expense -- to have a bigger "ocean interface", which means (as it has in the past) that, in addition to the incredibly rare rescue scenarios, they still believe that tapping undersea cables is a viable technique.
Since almost everything important is running on fiber nowadays, and the old cables are going the way of the dodo, the obvious conclusion of security industry observers (and of Sy Hersh, recently and notably) is that the big players in the sigint/commint community can tap undersea fiber.
This is not make-believe! It's not bull, or exaggeration. It's widely known and accepted within the intelligence community (including the community of intel watchdogs).
Generally, the US *does* tap endpoints (and the countries that it shares intel with, like Britain and Australia and New Zealand, all help), and there are really only a couple of cables of interest in the Mediterranean, but in Asia and the Middle East, there are a lot of places that the US does not have end-point access to via the ISPs.
Contrary to popular belief, it is far less risky for the US to tap an undersea cable than to do so covertly on land in a country like Pakistan (or to secure THAT level of intel cooperation with their government; they're cooperative in some ways, but not THAT cooperative).
But they gotta pay. Giggity giggity!
311 Debug.info("HELP: Looking for a");
312 BST result = bst.find_tree("a", false);
313 result.traverse_find("a");
314
315 Debug.info("HELP: Looking for as");
316 result = result.find_tree("as", false);
317 result.traverse_find("as");
318
319 Debug.info("HELP: Looking for ass");
320 result = result.find_tree("ass", false);
321 result.traverse_find("ass");
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/search?q=ass&de
I just have to plug this.
:D
So many people think that Javascript has something, ANYTHING, to do with Java.
In fact, Javascript is a much more powerful language, supporting not only the simplistic forms of code reuse that we associate with object-oriented programming but considerably more powerful and useful functionality. This is proved by the fact that Crockford was able to write an interpreter for Scheme in Javascript.
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/scheme.html
Don't get me wrong, I think that strongly-typed languages have their place and are useful . . . but Python, Javascript -- it looks like Google has definitely got the ability to take the productivity gains from dynamic languages and apply them in the real world.
Well, while that might explain changes in the skin etc of the people viewing the slides (and I think that probably IS the reason -- and moreover, heh, I wouldn't be surprised if there WAS some kind of cue being given by accident; a click, a button press, that preceded slide change), it wouldn't address fluctuations in the RNG.