The BBC article is a common kind of media fraud, in my opinion. The BBC, to make its article more interesting, has vastly over-extended what the science shows. The researchers themselves commonly participate in this kind of fraud, as is shown in this quote from the article,
"When volunteers were shown a plaid pattern made up of two different sets of stripes but asked to pay attention to only one set, the program was able to tell which one the subjects were thinking about."
"Dr Rees said: 'This is the first basic step to reading somebody's mind...' "
Complete baloney. It was the first step toward detecting what someone was doing when they cooperated fully.
Fraud, fraud, fraud. BBC, you should be ashamed of yourself.
In the U.S. government of today, anyone can get anything they want if they have money.
Quotes:
"After all, the music and movie industry moguls who spend so much time
and money getting Congress to do their bidding are not without sins of
their own. Just as an example, last month Time Warner -- a corporation
with a foot in both industries -- agreed to pay
a $300 million fine to the SEC to settle civil fraud charges. It had
earlier paid $210 million to get the DoJ to go away on criminal fraud
charges involving some of the same accounting shenanigans. Time Warner
just had to pay this chump change rather admit guilt, in spite of the
fact that, as one SEC officer noted, some 'of the misconduct occurred
while the ink of a prior Commission cease-and-desist order was barely
dry.' Oh, by the way, the Time Warner CFO, Controller, and Deputy
Controller also agreed to never do such nasty things again. But
apparently they don't face jail time, or even fines, and they're still
working for Time Warner.
"So it's
possible some of the same Time Warner officials who have been caught
once or twice robbing investors in the past could be doing so again
even as we speak. Of course, last week they may have been too busy
passing out rewards to their minions on Capital Hill, or perhaps they
were involved in all those lawsuits the MPAA and RIAA were filing to harass the researchers developing the Internet2."
How do problems and confusion like this get started? They start because marketing people in technical companies are generally amazingly ignorant about what they are marketing. Marketing people can do sink-the-company things without having any idea of their destructiveness.
When corrupters do a big enough crime, it overwhelms people so much that they ignore it. There are entire books detailing Karl Rove's dishonest methods, but they don't get attention.
Peter Mandelson is apparently the go-to guy in the EU when someone wants something illegal done: "Mr Mandelson had come under pressure to explain his involvment in the passport application of Srichand Hinduja, an Indian billionaire who, along with his brother Gopichand, appeared in court in connection with a 1986 arms dealing scandal."
Conflict of interest is extremely destructive of good government even when it is only the appearance of conflict of interest.
There are many, many senators and representatives who are just conduits for corruption. Most people in the U.S. are overwhelmed and just don't want to know how corrupt their government is.
That was not normal competition. Microsoft gave its product away free, and used the distribution of its operating system to tie IE to OS sales, illegally, a U.S. court found.
It would be great if these were available to supply multiple voltages. A problem, however, would be that all devices powered would need to have the same ground, a condition that might not exist. Deciding whether all devices had the same ground might be tricky.
From the Globe and Mail article: "If Sergey and Larry stick to their
corporate mantra - Don't be evil - and are able to stem degeneration into the
typically corrupt corporate ethos,..."
I find that interesting. I have come to the same conclusion, that
there are social processes that cause organizations to become corrupt. I doubt
that the leadership of Google has much theoretical understanding of those
processes, so I worry that Google will eventually lose its ability to be successful.
Don't bother reading the Fortune Magazine "article". It is the typical
Fortune Magazine hack job. In my opinion, Fortune Magazine's business plan is
just to tell rich people what they want to hear. Also, the article is an
advertisement to give money to the magazine, not the full article.
The Fortune Magazine article is called "Gates vs. Google". However,
Microsoft has never been successful competing in areas where the company does
not have a virtual monopoly due to proprietary file formats like those in NTFS and
Microsoft Word.
In my opinion, Microsoft so lacks the ability to compete honestly that the company
tries to steal what it cannot create. Microsoft is more a troublemaker than a
competitor.
In general, I agree. However, there are times when BroadVoice spontaneously disconnects. There are other times when you cannot dial to some regions, maybe because the equipment is busy. Sometimes a few seconds of sound is lost.
My best understanding is that Mr. Langa is not technically qualified to
judge security vulnerabilities. Any judgement of security vulnerabilities
depends on an intimate knowledge of the difficulty of exploiting the
vulnerabilities, and the chance that the exploit will seriously compromise a
system. I've never seen any indication that Mr. Langa has programming ability.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is the buggiest
widely used software I've ever known. In one two-year period, there were 57
serious vulnerabilities in the most recent versions of IE. The link above
lists 117 vulnerabilities of all kinds at present.
Langa's free LangaList and the paid version with 20%
more content, LangaList
Plus can sometimes be useful if you must administer Windows computers.
The $11 per year paid edition is supposed to be free of advertising,
but it is perhaps 25% advertising. The paid edition advertises the LangaList
extensively, Langa's favorite charities, and his sense of humor. In the most
recent edition of the paid version, 4 of the 13 articles are his personal
advertising, and not related to Windows computer issues.
Often links in the LangaList lead to articles in magazines for which
Mr. Langa is a paid writer. So, part of his advertising is for publications
for which he writes.
The LangaList is often somewhat lacking in considered content.
Sometimes he just links to Google searches.
The content of the LangaList is partly written by readers. Typically,
the letters to Fred that are quoted begin something like this: "Fred, you are
my hero. All other newsletters are terrible, yours is wonderful. I have been a
paid subscriber for years." So, typically, the first sentence of the letters
written by readers is advertising, also.
The result is that Mr. Langa
makes his paid subscribers wade through a lot of material not relevant to
Windows.
People who are knowledgeable about computers usually have no idea how
complicated it is to do marketing, and their lack of knowledge shows in every
attempt. Mr. Langa is embarrassingly lacking in marketing insight.
Mr. Langa has a history of finding fault with Linux. Perhaps this is
another novice marketing attempt. Perhaps he does not want to lose subscribers
because they converted to Linux. I've never seen any indication that he is
qualified to judge the quality of operating systems.
The LangaList often passes on recommendations from readers about free
software apparently without sufficient testing. As far as I'm aware, there
have been no problems with this, but how would someone discover this if Mr.
Langa did not write about it? It seems possible that the LangaList could
spread problem software to its readers.
I notice that imperial CEO's always self-destruct, like Jerry Levin of Time-Warner, who sold his company to AOL just before the Internet company crash. Perhaps that's why the Verizon CEO sounds so arrogant.
Slashdot Mirror
A prankster putting explosives in toads?
My experience with Windows 98 and Windows XP leads me to believe that the first release version of a Microsoft OS is what Microsoft calls SP2.
"Our beta test site is the whole world."
The BBC article is a common kind of media fraud, in my opinion. The BBC, to make its article more interesting, has vastly over-extended what the science shows. The researchers themselves commonly participate in this kind of fraud, as is shown in this quote from the article,
"When volunteers were shown a plaid pattern made up of two different sets of stripes but asked to pay attention to only one set, the program was able to tell which one the subjects were thinking about."
"Dr Rees said: 'This is the first basic step to reading somebody's mind...' "
Complete baloney. It was the first step toward detecting what someone was doing when they cooperated fully.
Fraud, fraud, fraud. BBC, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Want a recent example of the corruption in the U.S. government? Here's one from Ed Foster: Crime and Punishment, and Copyright.
In the U.S. government of today, anyone can get anything they want if they have money.
Quotes:
"After all, the music and movie industry moguls who spend so much time and money getting Congress to do their bidding are not without sins of their own. Just as an example, last month Time Warner -- a corporation with a foot in both industries -- agreed to pay a $300 million fine to the SEC to settle civil fraud charges. It had earlier paid $210 million to get the DoJ to go away on criminal fraud charges involving some of the same accounting shenanigans. Time Warner just had to pay this chump change rather admit guilt, in spite of the fact that, as one SEC officer noted, some 'of the misconduct occurred while the ink of a prior Commission cease-and-desist order was barely dry.' Oh, by the way, the Time Warner CFO, Controller, and Deputy Controller also agreed to never do such nasty things again. But apparently they don't face jail time, or even fines, and they're still working for Time Warner.
"So it's possible some of the same Time Warner officials who have been caught once or twice robbing investors in the past could be doing so again even as we speak. Of course, last week they may have been too busy passing out rewards to their minions on Capital Hill, or perhaps they were involved in all those lawsuits the MPAA and RIAA were filing to harass the researchers developing the Internet2."
This kind of law requires a huge amount of wisdom to write and implement. The U.S. government just does not have that ability at present. Instead, the government is being sold to whomever will pay the most: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
Good thinking.
How do problems and confusion like this get started? They start because marketing people in technical companies are generally amazingly ignorant about what they are marketing. Marketing people can do sink-the-company things without having any idea of their destructiveness.
Big Mistake in the article: Use only nylon straps as brackets. A metal strap conducts the fan vibration to the hard drive.
Not completely behind the scenes: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
When corrupters do a big enough crime, it overwhelms people so much that they ignore it. There are entire books detailing Karl Rove's dishonest methods, but they don't get attention.
More about Mandelson's activities: See "Mandelson and Mortgage Fraud", for example.
Slashdot editors can be so disgusting sometimes. The name is "Peter Mandelson", not Mandleson. BBC News Online's Nick Assinder looks at the turbulent career of Peter Mandelson. His "career had twice been dashed on the rocks of sleaze,
Peter Mandelson is apparently the go-to guy in the EU when someone wants something illegal done: "Mr Mandelson had come under pressure to explain his involvment in the passport application of Srichand Hinduja, an Indian billionaire who, along with his brother Gopichand, appeared in court in connection with a 1986 arms dealing scandal."
Conflict of interest is extremely destructive of good government even when it is only the appearance of conflict of interest.
The U.S. government has become a conflict of interest machine: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
There are many, many senators and representatives who are just conduits for corruption. Most people in the U.S. are overwhelmed and just don't want to know how corrupt their government is.
I wrote a short article that discusses a small percentage of that corruption -- Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government
Notice that someone has marked many of the replies to this as "Troll"!
Huge eyebrows are out?
Andy Rooney
What is the Bugzilla bug number?
The referenced article crashes the latest version of Firefox, but not the latest version of Mozilla.
Google amazes me. It is the only well managed technically oriented company of which I am aware.
That was not normal competition. Microsoft gave its product away free, and used the distribution of its operating system to tie IE to OS sales, illegally, a U.S. court found.
A Froogle search for Universal Power Adapter found this: Coby CA-33 Universal 110-/220-Volt AC Power Adapter, but it only supplies one voltage at a time.
It would be great if these were available to supply multiple voltages. A problem, however, would be that all devices powered would need to have the same ground, a condition that might not exist. Deciding whether all devices had the same ground might be tricky.
It's possible you don't remember how painfully time-consuming were searches using AltaVista and Lycos.
From the Globe and Mail article: "If Sergey and Larry stick to their corporate mantra - Don't be evil - and are able to stem degeneration into the typically corrupt corporate ethos,
I find that interesting. I have come to the same conclusion, that there are social processes that cause organizations to become corrupt. I doubt that the leadership of Google has much theoretical understanding of those processes, so I worry that Google will eventually lose its ability to be successful.
Don't bother reading the Fortune Magazine "article". It is the typical Fortune Magazine hack job. In my opinion, Fortune Magazine's business plan is just to tell rich people what they want to hear. Also, the article is an advertisement to give money to the magazine, not the full article.
The Fortune Magazine article is called "Gates vs. Google". However, Microsoft has never been successful competing in areas where the company does not have a virtual monopoly due to proprietary file formats like those in NTFS and Microsoft Word.
In my opinion, Microsoft so lacks the ability to compete honestly that the company tries to steal what it cannot create. Microsoft is more a troublemaker than a competitor.
In general, I agree. However, there are times when BroadVoice spontaneously disconnects. There are other times when you cannot dial to some regions, maybe because the equipment is busy. Sometimes a few seconds of sound is lost.
BroadVoice Unlimited World Plus is better than Teleo, recommended in the article.
BroadVoice is not completely reliable, but fine for informal situations.
My best understanding is that Mr. Langa is not technically qualified to judge security vulnerabilities. Any judgement of security vulnerabilities depends on an intimate knowledge of the difficulty of exploiting the vulnerabilities, and the chance that the exploit will seriously compromise a system. I've never seen any indication that Mr. Langa has programming ability.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is the buggiest widely used software I've ever known. In one two-year period, there were 57 serious vulnerabilities in the most recent versions of IE. The link above lists 117 vulnerabilities of all kinds at present.
Langa's free LangaList and the paid version with 20% more content, LangaList Plus can sometimes be useful if you must administer Windows computers.
The $11 per year paid edition is supposed to be free of advertising, but it is perhaps 25% advertising. The paid edition advertises the LangaList extensively, Langa's favorite charities, and his sense of humor. In the most recent edition of the paid version, 4 of the 13 articles are his personal advertising, and not related to Windows computer issues.
Often links in the LangaList lead to articles in magazines for which Mr. Langa is a paid writer. So, part of his advertising is for publications for which he writes.
The LangaList is often somewhat lacking in considered content. Sometimes he just links to Google searches.
The content of the LangaList is partly written by readers. Typically, the letters to Fred that are quoted begin something like this: "Fred, you are my hero. All other newsletters are terrible, yours is wonderful. I have been a paid subscriber for years." So, typically, the first sentence of the letters written by readers is advertising, also.
The result is that Mr. Langa makes his paid subscribers wade through a lot of material not relevant to Windows.
People who are knowledgeable about computers usually have no idea how complicated it is to do marketing, and their lack of knowledge shows in every attempt. Mr. Langa is embarrassingly lacking in marketing insight.
Mr. Langa has a history of finding fault with Linux. Perhaps this is another novice marketing attempt. Perhaps he does not want to lose subscribers because they converted to Linux. I've never seen any indication that he is qualified to judge the quality of operating systems.
The LangaList often passes on recommendations from readers about free software apparently without sufficient testing. As far as I'm aware, there have been no problems with this, but how would someone discover this if Mr. Langa did not write about it? It seems possible that the LangaList could spread problem software to its readers.
I notice that imperial CEO's always self-destruct, like Jerry Levin of Time-Warner, who sold his company to AOL just before the Internet company crash. Perhaps that's why the Verizon CEO sounds so arrogant.
What company in the U.S. uses UMTS?