Streetview is a convenient tool for burglars to scope out neighborhoods, since Google has already done all the legwork for them.
What legwork? Wouldn't it be faster, not to mention a lot more reliable, for burglars to just drive/walk around those upscale neighborhoods in question?
Yeah, but then your Queen totally dropped the ball. An autographed picture of herself. How narcissistic is that? Obama should just have given her an autographed picture of himself. The symbolism of frugality and restraint for our elite, that's what we need these days.
You should try Linux Mint (current Felicia version), it's 99% Ubuntu, but they release each version alphabetically using a girl's names that ends in 'a'. By default, the root account gets the same password as the main user account. Mint Linux also comes with plenty of pre-configured drivers by default, and a slightly different layout, and thought it may not be as ideologically pure as Ubuntu -- it's a lot more user friendly overall.
At least, that's the plan. Your grandchildren will be fighting themselves for drinkable water, and my grandchildren will probably have so much drinkable water -- they'll probably just waste it on watering their lawns and filling up their swimming pools and hot tubs with it.
I will argue that someone who has Russian as a first language and Chinese as a second will most likely be better off to code than someone with merely English as a first language.
I would argue that someone who is bilingual/trilingual in the languages you've mentioned would not even be working as a programmer. After all women have better language skills than men (many brain injury studies seem to have proven that), but I would assert that many of them do not ever go into programming because they have other interests and other things they were very good at while growing up.
I recommend that you get this little free utility called ZoomIt and add its shortcut to your startup folder (assuming you're on Windows, and not Linux -- most Linux flavors can configure this with Compiz Fusion). It's not going to make your sub-netbook more manly, but it might just make it more useful.
I installed ZoomIt on my mom's sub-netbook which is even smaller than yours (its screen is 8.4 inches and it has Windows XP Home edition), and it definitely helped. Let's say you want to show someone something on your screen, you just press Ctrl-1 to zoom in (it uses the pointer of your mouse to know where to zoom in) and to come back to normal -- you just release those keys. This zooming effect is really smooth and gets even better if you hook up a mouse with a wheel on it. Also, as an added bonus, the program allows you to draw on the surface of your screen once you're zoomed in, which is useful if you want to call attention to a particular part of the screen.
And of course, it comes in really handy if you have to strain your eyes to read some of the stuff on that small screen. Some of the Internet browsers (like Opera) also have some decent zooming facilities, but it's better I think to get used to one zooming facility that you can use everywhere on any application that you might be working on, and it's definitely one of the most usable ones -- with one of the smallest memory footprints -- I've seen out there.
Yeah, hopefully that contractor didn't click on the "Offline" link on google docs -- because that would have kept a local fresh copy of them on his computer, or if you gave him a work email address -- hopefully you didn't give him POP access to it on his own private computer.
while i will agree that the post you replied to is snarky, there are throngs of people who will risk life and limb to get into the US (and Canada-i assume into the UK also). how many people are trying to get into China to better their lives? or India-undeniably the largest democracy in the world?
Actually, there are plenty of Tibetans trying to cross the border into India, and there are plenty of people trying to get into Saudi Arabia or Dubai. Don't delude yourself. People go where the jobs are. Or people go where there is food. It's not like the rights of an illegal immigrant in Saudi Arabia or in the US are that great to begin with.
Why can't they reduce the memory allocation of the graphics to 256 or 128Mbyte?
You seem to be misunderstanding what an Acer sub-notebook is.
I just bought an Acer Aspire One 120gigs/1 gig of ram/1.6/8.9 inch screen/Windows XP Home for my mom (it cost me $369 refurbished from tiger direct -- which included the price of second day delivery)
The Acer Aspire One is a nice machine, I did my research on it, and my mom absolutely loves it, but I was really surprised that I couldn't install some Adobe software initially on it -- because I couldn't accept the EULA. The Ok button of the EULA kept on going off screen, which normally is not a problem, I can press 'enter' blindly or press tab a couple of times, and then press 'enter', but that didn't work either. And normally on a windows machine, you would only need to go to the control panel, double-click on display, and change the resolution to make the off-screen part visible -- but that part didn't work either -- don't ask me why. Eventually, I did get the damn software installed, but that's more because I'm a programmer and I knew which tools to use.
If the machine kept freezing and crashing, why didn't they return it under warranty rather than go to law?
They probably did. It also looks like they did a couple of things to make the thing work. Besides, a warranty doesn't cover a machine that works fine within a normal operating range. At least, that's what I was told when I tried returning my Mac Powerbook 150 (more than ten or fifteen years ago). My problem with my Powerbook was different, but just as outrageous in my opinion. And I did get an exchange for another Powerbook 150 from the store (which luckily didn't have the same problem, it was the same model -- but Apple had farmed it out to different OEM manufacturers), but that was only after making a very big stink in the store and staying my ground for over two hours.
And how much is the lawsuit going to cost them?
Personally, I would have tried suing in Small Claims court, which would have cost me $60 plus three to six months of waiting, but then I live near the city they're suing in -- so it doesn't look that was an option for them. I doubt it was their choice to sue in California since they're both Ohio residents.
So since they're suing remotely, they're probably subscribed to pre-paid legal aid. And for some of those outfits, if you don't use those hours accumulated, you lose them (just like those cell phone minutes). So at the end of the first year, you better sue someone (it's just like those people I know who only call me at the end of the month before they're about to lose all those minutes). I really wouldn't be surprised if it was the prepaid legal aid thing. It seems everyone I know pays for pre-paid legal aid of some kind, even if most of them never end up using them.
If you send your kids to MIT, have them study marketing.
From experience, the marketing folks are usually the last people to understand the PR value and goodwill that creative commons and open source can generate, so no, don't do that. I'm sure the MIT Sloan School of Business is a good one, and I'm sure they'll understand this concept eventually, but I wouldn't bank on it right now.
In any case, you should be a Dean or something. Faculty always likes to hear that their amount of published research is lacking, but that you want them to take on even more undergraduates -- ultimately diminishing the amount of hours they'll be able to devote to said research.
Environmental damage that happens in other countries counts as US caused if it's done by US corporations. E.g., the Union Carbide disaster may have happened in India, but it was a US corporation that caused it.
Come now, take responsibility for your (collective) actions.
So the 2006 Alaskan oil spill (Prudhoe Bay?) wasn't our fault since it was done by BP (a British Company)? Those damn British!! When are they going to start taking responsibility for their (collective) actions!
The whole San Francisco entry basically talks about why they made it a separate entry from Silicon Valley, and how its different.
It's too bad they never made it to Japan, otherwise they would have noticed the differences between technology centers over there as well. This list is more about the places they've been to, or the places they know about, but little else.
We can vote with high confidence for American Idol but the guys who make our freaking ATM machines can't get it right?
ATM machines have an audit trail. When money disappears, somebody freaks out. When a vote disappears, nobody knows.
Maybe the American Idol guys should be making our ATM machines instead.
You mean Rupert Murdoch?
That's a cool idea. I would love to pay $2 every time I vote in a "Fair and Balanced -- American Idol-like" election, and be able to vote as many times as I want so I can enrich Rupert Murdoch even more, and then still have no freaking idea whether my vote(s) and my corresponding money was counted (or not) in the final tally (by the way, in just one popular night Rupert Murdoch has made up to 160 Million dollars just from voting in American Idol alone). Think of how much profit and good he would be able to generate if he was put in charge of the entire US elections!
I would also love Rupert Murdoch to be the one who selects who we're allowed to vote on, and we're not allowed to vote for, based on what kind of indentured servitude contract those candidates were willing to sign with him and Simon before he would even allow them in the room. That would make democracy so cool, and so much more streamlined. I really doubt that Diebold could outdo Rupert Murdoch in that area.
Another factor could be glucose level or dehydration. I can't claim to have been near death, in fact it really turned out I really wasn't near death after all, but one time I was so dehydrated and so weak I really did think I was going to die, and I was so weak anyway -- I wasn't disturbed by that thought in the least. And this is not because I thought the pain would end if I died, it was because my brain was so starved -- I just couldn't concentrate strongly on any thought in particular.
If you really want to do the armpit-to-armpit teamwork go back to Yourdon's original structured programming team. You had a senior guy, a junior guy, and a librarian. Today that would be senior guy, junior guy, and documentor. It works in threes, but not in twos for some reason. I think it has something to do with allowing intelligent people to lead design, rather than have to check around to see if what they're doing is ok. In pair programming you have no leader. With no leader you have no direction and thus no progress.
That metaphor can be extended to a surgical team, where you have one chief surgeon and everyone else around the table has a specific role and is there to assist. Or it could be extended to the 911 phone operators, where there is usually one operator on the line, and two assistant operators listening on the call and following the directions of the first (although, that part is almost never shown on 911 reenactments).
Personally, I have no problem letting another programmer take the lead when pair programming, my only two requirements are that we set some time aside for debriefing each other beforehand (so that I know where we're going) and that we set some time aside for debriefing each other afterward. I don't usually interrupt (unless I have to), and besides I take copious notes when sitting shotgun -- this is a trick I use to keep on paying attention -- while keeping the things I say to a bare minimum until later.
I find it also helps to let the person typing make their own mistakes, a typo, or what have you. Usually the guy typing will correct himself without interruption needed on my part. So if I see an error, I take a quick note of it in the margin of my notebook, and it's only after 10 or 15 seconds or just before the compile cycle, that I'll point out the errors as tactfully as I can.
That being said, that Amadeus reference you cited scares me. Most programmers are not at the Amadeus-level, and yet most programmers think that they are. And I can't tell you the number of times I've had to stop a fellow programmer from coding because he had no clue where he was going, and no clue on how to get there, he just wanted to make himself feel better by coding something -- anything -- right away.
I do too, although arguably street view is a lot more useful for that.
Not everyone in the United States has street view yet (although it's getting there for sure). Hawaii still needs to be done, and entire suburbs in the rest of the United States are still missing.
Well technically, the terrorists that have been targeting schools in the US are usually the students themselves. So it's really the students you have to watch out for, don't let them memorize the layout of their schools.
Blindfold them and hood them between classes. Chain them up together, so that you don't let one be able to go on a reconnaissance mission. Let the security guards lead them in and out of the school. Move furniture around and walls to keep them guessing. Remove all campus maps from the premises, especially those "Fire Exit" maps on all the doors, I don't have to tell you, those are the worse.
And don't forget radios, if you live in the UK and own a radio that can receive a BBC signal (which pretty much means all AM/FM radios in the UK), then you have to pay at least half of the TV-licence fee each year (I recall that was what a blind man with a radio was ordered to pay).
In any case, I'd still call the TV-licence a tax thought. It's a revenue stream that's predicated on coercive governmental powers, and special preferential treatment -- which other television channels have no access to. Also, a tax is not necessarily paid by everyone. For instance, there is a pretty hefty tax on alcohol in the UK, but it's still called a tax even if not everyone buys alcohol. Also, the TV-licence is not directly correlated with consumption, like getting stamps for instance or getting gas and electricity. You can have multiple TVs in one household, or you could have just one working TV -- but never watch it, and you'd still have to pay for one licence for your household either way. So I'd say, the TV-licence is more tax-like because of this (even thought, I'll concede that alcohol doesn't really follow that model)
And taxes don't necessarily all go through one central location (at least, in the US they don't, I'm not sure about the UK, I've only lived in the UK a short while some time ago, but I'd suspect that even there the smaller city/council governments wouldn't want to mingle all their revenue streams with the national/regional governments, and I'd guess the same would be true as well for a number of independent governmental agencies, or semi-independent governmental agencies, or former governmental agencies, although I'll admit that there must still be a significant amount of money that still primarily goes through the Treasury of course).
I wish Yahoo would take a cue from Google on branding. The last I've checked, they needed a big British underground-like map to even figure out what each product/department was doing. For instance, FireEagle? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Seriously? Yahoo Location or Yahoo GPS would be so much simpler. And what about the other ones, forgive me, but I already forgot their names, I'd rename them to: Yahoo Mail Server, Yahoo Toolkit, Yahoo Events, etc.
Registered Coward,
I'm replying to a response you gave me a while ago (but since the story is archived, I couldn't reply over there).
While I've heard a lot of people say BB censors, beyond not carrying certain movies (such as NC17) I've never seen any hard evidence that they force studios to edit films prior to carrying them.
Now, studios may edit a movie with an eye towards will WalMart/BB et al carry it; but that's noting new - they've worried about what rating a movie will get before videotape.
I'd be curious to her about verified examples of BB editing a film before carrying it; not just refusing to carry a certain rated film or carrying an edited version that was released to general sales and not BB specific.
Blockbuster doesn't ask the movie studios to censor the movies they get from them, they go a step further, they censor the content themselves, and they replace it with an alternative to make the alteration seamless. For instance, Blockbuster censored "Team America" by the creators of South Park, and not to get a lower age rating. Blockbuster was also sued by some Holywood directors for censoring Movies without consulting them, and without even telling their audience that they did so. But Blockbuster won that case, the judge felt that the usual notice "This movie has been reformatted and edited to fit your screen. Blah, blah." was enough of a disclaimer to consumers, and that he really didn't want judges to get into the details of what part was cut for what reason, and what part wasn't.
And while I don't claim to be a film specialist, nor would I know how to edit a movie to make it fit a smaller screen that's not even proportional to the original one. If you do watch "Team America" in both the normal Blockbuster DVD version and the normal Netflix DVD version, I can pretty much guarantee you that you'll come to the same conclusion I did, that the Blockbuster version was really edited for offensive content, the examples are pretty glaring -- at least in that movie especially. Entire scenes have been cut from it, and even the dialogue was changed, so much so, that most of the jokes stopped making sense in the Blockbuster version (not that the original movie was that funny to begin with, I'm just saying...).
That being said, many of the Blockbusters stores in my area seem to be shutting down. It really seems to be a very tough year for them, at least in my area. And I would hope that they stopped censoring movies the very day they found out they were losing a significant portion of their market to Netflix. It would have been really idiotic to continue their policy as is. At least, I would hope that they would have stopped doing that (if nothing more, than their own survival as a business).
what if your reaction is "this looks and sounds like ass" ?
That's what they said about placing all kinds of fonts and all kinds of clip art on your newsletters (when the first real word processors came out). And that's what they said about Yahoo's front page during their heyday. Clearly, they were all wrong. Mixing and matching is totally cool. The more of it, the better. Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when those multi-media tools become even cheaper and easier to use, so then everyone will have something like this -- on their myspace page.
Fellow Kindle-owners, I can smell a good old fashioned book-burning bonfire coming on. Who's with me? Who's got the contact with the press? Who's got a Kindle to loan me for the duration of the event?
I'm afraid I lied about owning a Kindle, but this doesn't mean I would pass up the chance to burn someone else's Kindle on principle (if that's what that person wanted).
Slashdot Mirror
What legwork? Wouldn't it be faster, not to mention a lot more reliable, for burglars to just drive/walk around those upscale neighborhoods in question?
The only difference being that this guy goes stupid on April 1st, and Jack Thompson it's all year around.
Yeah, but then your Queen totally dropped the ball. An autographed picture of herself. How narcissistic is that? Obama should just have given her an autographed picture of himself. The symbolism of frugality and restraint for our elite, that's what we need these days.
You should try Linux Mint (current Felicia version), it's 99% Ubuntu, but they release each version alphabetically using a girl's names that ends in 'a'. By default, the root account gets the same password as the main user account. Mint Linux also comes with plenty of pre-configured drivers by default, and a slightly different layout, and thought it may not be as ideologically pure as Ubuntu -- it's a lot more user friendly overall.
What did you see exactly? Did you rule out Solar flare activity?
At least, that's the plan. Your grandchildren will be fighting themselves for drinkable water, and my grandchildren will probably have so much drinkable water -- they'll probably just waste it on watering their lawns and filling up their swimming pools and hot tubs with it.
I would argue that someone who is bilingual/trilingual in the languages you've mentioned would not even be working as a programmer. After all women have better language skills than men (many brain injury studies seem to have proven that), but I would assert that many of them do not ever go into programming because they have other interests and other things they were very good at while growing up.
I recommend that you get this little free utility called ZoomIt and add its shortcut to your startup folder (assuming you're on Windows, and not Linux -- most Linux flavors can configure this with Compiz Fusion). It's not going to make your sub-netbook more manly, but it might just make it more useful.
I installed ZoomIt on my mom's sub-netbook which is even smaller than yours (its screen is 8.4 inches and it has Windows XP Home edition), and it definitely helped. Let's say you want to show someone something on your screen, you just press Ctrl-1 to zoom in (it uses the pointer of your mouse to know where to zoom in) and to come back to normal -- you just release those keys. This zooming effect is really smooth and gets even better if you hook up a mouse with a wheel on it. Also, as an added bonus, the program allows you to draw on the surface of your screen once you're zoomed in, which is useful if you want to call attention to a particular part of the screen.
And of course, it comes in really handy if you have to strain your eyes to read some of the stuff on that small screen. Some of the Internet browsers (like Opera) also have some decent zooming facilities, but it's better I think to get used to one zooming facility that you can use everywhere on any application that you might be working on, and it's definitely one of the most usable ones -- with one of the smallest memory footprints -- I've seen out there.
Yeah, hopefully that contractor didn't click on the "Offline" link on google docs -- because that would have kept a local fresh copy of them on his computer, or if you gave him a work email address -- hopefully you didn't give him POP access to it on his own private computer.
Actually, there are plenty of Tibetans trying to cross the border into India, and there are plenty of people trying to get into Saudi Arabia or Dubai. Don't delude yourself. People go where the jobs are. Or people go where there is food. It's not like the rights of an illegal immigrant in Saudi Arabia or in the US are that great to begin with.
Economics is not a Science. It never was. Even fools can get some predictions right. Just take a look at Astrology.
You seem to be misunderstanding what an Acer sub-notebook is.
I just bought an Acer Aspire One 120gigs/1 gig of ram/1.6/8.9 inch screen/Windows XP Home for my mom (it cost me $369 refurbished from tiger direct -- which included the price of second day delivery)
The Acer Aspire One is a nice machine, I did my research on it, and my mom absolutely loves it, but I was really surprised that I couldn't install some Adobe software initially on it -- because I couldn't accept the EULA. The Ok button of the EULA kept on going off screen, which normally is not a problem, I can press 'enter' blindly or press tab a couple of times, and then press 'enter', but that didn't work either. And normally on a windows machine, you would only need to go to the control panel, double-click on display, and change the resolution to make the off-screen part visible -- but that part didn't work either -- don't ask me why. Eventually, I did get the damn software installed, but that's more because I'm a programmer and I knew which tools to use.
They probably did. It also looks like they did a couple of things to make the thing work. Besides, a warranty doesn't cover a machine that works fine within a normal operating range. At least, that's what I was told when I tried returning my Mac Powerbook 150 (more than ten or fifteen years ago). My problem with my Powerbook was different, but just as outrageous in my opinion. And I did get an exchange for another Powerbook 150 from the store (which luckily didn't have the same problem, it was the same model -- but Apple had farmed it out to different OEM manufacturers), but that was only after making a very big stink in the store and staying my ground for over two hours.
Personally, I would have tried suing in Small Claims court, which would have cost me $60 plus three to six months of waiting, but then I live near the city they're suing in -- so it doesn't look that was an option for them. I doubt it was their choice to sue in California since they're both Ohio residents.
So since they're suing remotely, they're probably subscribed to pre-paid legal aid. And for some of those outfits, if you don't use those hours accumulated, you lose them (just like those cell phone minutes). So at the end of the first year, you better sue someone (it's just like those people I know who only call me at the end of the month before they're about to lose all those minutes). I really wouldn't be surprised if it was the prepaid legal aid thing. It seems everyone I know pays for pre-paid legal aid of some kind, even if most of them never end up using them.
From experience, the marketing folks are usually the last people to understand the PR value and goodwill that creative commons and open source can generate, so no, don't do that. I'm sure the MIT Sloan School of Business is a good one, and I'm sure they'll understand this concept eventually, but I wouldn't bank on it right now.
In any case, you should be a Dean or something. Faculty always likes to hear that their amount of published research is lacking, but that you want them to take on even more undergraduates -- ultimately diminishing the amount of hours they'll be able to devote to said research.
So the 2006 Alaskan oil spill (Prudhoe Bay?) wasn't our fault since it was done by BP (a British Company)? Those damn British!! When are they going to start taking responsibility for their (collective) actions!
It's too bad they never made it to Japan, otherwise they would have noticed the differences between technology centers over there as well. This list is more about the places they've been to, or the places they know about, but little else.
ATM machines have an audit trail. When money disappears, somebody freaks out. When a vote disappears, nobody knows.
You mean Rupert Murdoch?
That's a cool idea. I would love to pay $2 every time I vote in a "Fair and Balanced -- American Idol-like" election, and be able to vote as many times as I want so I can enrich Rupert Murdoch even more, and then still have no freaking idea whether my vote(s) and my corresponding money was counted (or not) in the final tally (by the way, in just one popular night Rupert Murdoch has made up to 160 Million dollars just from voting in American Idol alone). Think of how much profit and good he would be able to generate if he was put in charge of the entire US elections!
I would also love Rupert Murdoch to be the one who selects who we're allowed to vote on, and we're not allowed to vote for, based on what kind of indentured servitude contract those candidates were willing to sign with him and Simon before he would even allow them in the room. That would make democracy so cool, and so much more streamlined. I really doubt that Diebold could outdo Rupert Murdoch in that area.
Another factor could be glucose level or dehydration. I can't claim to have been near death, in fact it really turned out I really wasn't near death after all, but one time I was so dehydrated and so weak I really did think I was going to die, and I was so weak anyway -- I wasn't disturbed by that thought in the least. And this is not because I thought the pain would end if I died, it was because my brain was so starved -- I just couldn't concentrate strongly on any thought in particular.
That metaphor can be extended to a surgical team, where you have one chief surgeon and everyone else around the table has a specific role and is there to assist. Or it could be extended to the 911 phone operators, where there is usually one operator on the line, and two assistant operators listening on the call and following the directions of the first (although, that part is almost never shown on 911 reenactments).
Personally, I have no problem letting another programmer take the lead when pair programming, my only two requirements are that we set some time aside for debriefing each other beforehand (so that I know where we're going) and that we set some time aside for debriefing each other afterward. I don't usually interrupt (unless I have to), and besides I take copious notes when sitting shotgun -- this is a trick I use to keep on paying attention -- while keeping the things I say to a bare minimum until later.
I find it also helps to let the person typing make their own mistakes, a typo, or what have you. Usually the guy typing will correct himself without interruption needed on my part. So if I see an error, I take a quick note of it in the margin of my notebook, and it's only after 10 or 15 seconds or just before the compile cycle, that I'll point out the errors as tactfully as I can.
That being said, that Amadeus reference you cited scares me. Most programmers are not at the Amadeus-level, and yet most programmers think that they are. And I can't tell you the number of times I've had to stop a fellow programmer from coding because he had no clue where he was going, and no clue on how to get there, he just wanted to make himself feel better by coding something -- anything -- right away.
Not everyone in the United States has street view yet (although it's getting there for sure). Hawaii still needs to be done, and entire suburbs in the rest of the United States are still missing.
Well technically, the terrorists that have been targeting schools in the US are usually the students themselves. So it's really the students you have to watch out for, don't let them memorize the layout of their schools. Blindfold them and hood them between classes. Chain them up together, so that you don't let one be able to go on a reconnaissance mission. Let the security guards lead them in and out of the school. Move furniture around and walls to keep them guessing. Remove all campus maps from the premises, especially those "Fire Exit" maps on all the doors, I don't have to tell you, those are the worse.
And don't forget radios, if you live in the UK and own a radio that can receive a BBC signal (which pretty much means all AM/FM radios in the UK), then you have to pay at least half of the TV-licence fee each year (I recall that was what a blind man with a radio was ordered to pay).
In any case, I'd still call the TV-licence a tax thought. It's a revenue stream that's predicated on coercive governmental powers, and special preferential treatment -- which other television channels have no access to. Also, a tax is not necessarily paid by everyone. For instance, there is a pretty hefty tax on alcohol in the UK, but it's still called a tax even if not everyone buys alcohol. Also, the TV-licence is not directly correlated with consumption, like getting stamps for instance or getting gas and electricity. You can have multiple TVs in one household, or you could have just one working TV -- but never watch it, and you'd still have to pay for one licence for your household either way. So I'd say, the TV-licence is more tax-like because of this (even thought, I'll concede that alcohol doesn't really follow that model)
And taxes don't necessarily all go through one central location (at least, in the US they don't, I'm not sure about the UK, I've only lived in the UK a short while some time ago, but I'd suspect that even there the smaller city/council governments wouldn't want to mingle all their revenue streams with the national/regional governments, and I'd guess the same would be true as well for a number of independent governmental agencies, or semi-independent governmental agencies, or former governmental agencies, although I'll admit that there must still be a significant amount of money that still primarily goes through the Treasury of course).
I wish Yahoo would take a cue from Google on branding. The last I've checked, they needed a big British underground-like map to even figure out what each product/department was doing. For instance, FireEagle? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Seriously? Yahoo Location or Yahoo GPS would be so much simpler. And what about the other ones, forgive me, but I already forgot their names, I'd rename them to: Yahoo Mail Server, Yahoo Toolkit, Yahoo Events, etc.
I'm replying to a response you gave me a while ago (but since the story is archived, I couldn't reply over there).
Blockbuster doesn't ask the movie studios to censor the movies they get from them, they go a step further, they censor the content themselves, and they replace it with an alternative to make the alteration seamless. For instance, Blockbuster censored "Team America" by the creators of South Park, and not to get a lower age rating. Blockbuster was also sued by some Holywood directors for censoring Movies without consulting them, and without even telling their audience that they did so. But Blockbuster won that case, the judge felt that the usual notice "This movie has been reformatted and edited to fit your screen. Blah, blah." was enough of a disclaimer to consumers, and that he really didn't want judges to get into the details of what part was cut for what reason, and what part wasn't.
And while I don't claim to be a film specialist, nor would I know how to edit a movie to make it fit a smaller screen that's not even proportional to the original one. If you do watch "Team America" in both the normal Blockbuster DVD version and the normal Netflix DVD version, I can pretty much guarantee you that you'll come to the same conclusion I did, that the Blockbuster version was really edited for offensive content, the examples are pretty glaring -- at least in that movie especially. Entire scenes have been cut from it, and even the dialogue was changed, so much so, that most of the jokes stopped making sense in the Blockbuster version (not that the original movie was that funny to begin with, I'm just saying...).
That being said, many of the Blockbusters stores in my area seem to be shutting down. It really seems to be a very tough year for them, at least in my area. And I would hope that they stopped censoring movies the very day they found out they were losing a significant portion of their market to Netflix. It would have been really idiotic to continue their policy as is. At least, I would hope that they would have stopped doing that (if nothing more, than their own survival as a business).
That's what they said about placing all kinds of fonts and all kinds of clip art on your newsletters (when the first real word processors came out). And that's what they said about Yahoo's front page during their heyday. Clearly, they were all wrong. Mixing and matching is totally cool. The more of it, the better. Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when those multi-media tools become even cheaper and easier to use, so then everyone will have something like this -- on their myspace page.
Fellow Kindle-owners, I can smell a good old fashioned book-burning bonfire coming on. Who's with me? Who's got the contact with the press? Who's got a Kindle to loan me for the duration of the event?
I'm afraid I lied about owning a Kindle, but this doesn't mean I would pass up the chance to burn someone else's Kindle on principle (if that's what that person wanted).