Of course, bad ratings are bad for sites and they should be -- if a site sucks and gets few visitors who are of the right demographic and right frame of mind for click-throughs, then its no surprise that advertisers would want to avoid them. The real issue is badly estimated ratings. If GoogScore claims a bazillion unique visitors when there really was a gajillion, then something is wrong.
The web advertising ecosystem needs metaraters -- services that determine the quality of ComScore, Google Analytics, et al.
This really has the potential for providing a third way (versus semiconductor and photochemical systems) for converting light into electricity (for power or signals). Light is just extremely high frequency radio waves. With conductive nanotubes, one could create dipole antenna arrays for submicron wavelengths.
I wonder if Vista's adoption will be at all similar to that of OS X. Version 10.0 wasn't all that great and created quite a bit of gnashing of teeth over issues of speed, backward compatibility, missing features, etc. By version 10.3, Apple had a really nice OS. Perhaps Vista will follow a similar path of improving performance and usability over the next few years.
I really doubt this hypothesis because it assumes that organisms are helpless in the face of change levels of cosmic radiation. The reality is that DNA repair mechanisms are subject to evolution (and can evolve relatively quickly in lab experiments). If background radiation rose, organisms would simply evolve more robust DNA repair mechanisms. If cosmic radiation dropped off, then organisms would simply evolve less robust DNA repair mechanisms.
1. Create picture with a barcode URL to a malware site 2. Post on flickr, youtube, et al 3. Wait for someone wearing glasses to visit the image 4. Let MS's automagical software see the barcode in the reflection in the user's glasses via the PC's 5.......... 6. Profit.
This is the visual equivalent of the exploit that uses an audiofile to tell the voice recognition software to do things.
I'm sure this is a great way to propagate malware -- force the user to use an insecure browser so that the site can install malware on the person's PC.
"This site works best (for us, not for you) with Internet Explorer"
Although the article cited Office 97 as an "also ran" annoyance, I'd have to cite the entire suite in all its incarnations as one of the worst annoyances in my daily life. I have so many reasons for my conclusion, that I'm sure I could exceed the character limit of a/. post. But the top reasons for giving Office a Supreme Annoyance Lifetime Achievement Award include:
1. UI inconsistencies across the suite and even within products. 2. Bugs that have survived at least 7 years and 3 upgrades (upgrade = another chance to extract more money from the customer). 3. The fact that "Autosave" is a known cause of corrupted documents and crashes. 4. Automagical formatting and replacement wizards that you can't turn-off. 5. Word's horrible horrible outliner that singlehandedly killed off actually useable outliners. 6. The fact that O'Reilly was able to create an entire series of "Annoyance" books just from Office.
1) You can sell an object for less than you paid for it and still owe taxes.
If you buy an item for your business, and deduct that purchase from your taxes, and then sell that item later, you owe taxes on it. You can't buy a $2000 laptop, deduct $2000 from you income, and then sell the laptop for $1500 and still retain the $2000 deduction. Beyond this basic fact, the exact tax effects get more complex because it depends on how you are deducting the original purchase of the laptop (either as a Section 179 expense, as purchased inventory in the laptop reselling business, or depreciated on a multiyear schedule).
2) You can't have a "business" that generates losses year after year
If you have a "business" that loses money too often, the IRS will start to get suspicious and they will try to declare the business as a hobby. The exact rules are unclear, but you need to be able to show the IRS that you really are trying to make a profit, are dependent on that income, etc.
As an aside, there is no fixed limit on the deduction of ordinary losses from a business (other than you other income sources). The $3,000 limit applies only to losses on purchases of capital assets.
Perhaps if more people are exposed to the unpleasantness of taxes on their de facto small businesses, then more people would vote for candidates that include tax simplification as a key goal. The current U.S. tax code is a Byzantine mess that is great for accountants, tax attorneys, and tax software companies who add no value to society other than to comply with artificially enacted arcana.
I have no problem paying my fair share (and think everyone should), but I hate that I have to spend so much money and time dealing with all the rules, forms, and administriva of compliance.
It's worse than just the combinations of phones and planes. An aircraft makes a nice enclosed resonant space for cell signals to bounce around inside. Anyone who has looked at simulating or measuring RF fields would know that the field strength can vary by orders of magnitude depending on the exact location, orientation, and frequencies of the emitter and the exact orientation and location of the susceptible wiring or instrument. A tall person sitting in seat 6B with a CDMA phone may cause no problems, but a short person with a GSM phone in seat 32F could interfere with the automatic landing system. The field strength won't necessarily drop with distance inside the plane and may be focused to high levels anywhere inside the aluminum tube.
And testing individual phones isn't sufficient. What happens when 100 people all use their phones at the same time.
Publishers using this tool will presume that any found copies are infringing examples of copyright violation. But what happens when a work "created" and copyrighted in 2006 turns out to be "infringed" by something created in 2000? If the pubisher's "original" copyrighted work turns out to not be so original after all, then things could get sticky. I wonder how many cases of plagiarism will be uncovered in which the publisher/copyright holder becomes the defendant.
It would seem that any remotely defined cursor could be used maliciously by displacing the hotpoint relative to the cursor graphic and encouraging the user to click on something "safe" when the real hot spot for the click is elsewhere over something untrustworthy.
Think about the total amount of food grown and the land used to grow food. The average person eats about 2000-2500 kCal per day in food. The average person consumes about 36,000 kCal per day worth of oil (just oil, not including coal, nat gas, etc.).
Is the Earth big enough to provide 15-20 times the current food production level of biofuel-grade plant material? And if we plant more energy crops won't we be planting less food crops?
The US will be fine, but any one who eats food grown on land that could be used to grow an energy crop will see higher food prices.
Next, we need some nifty means of printing/etching/plating optical traces on PCBs. An OGA (Optical Grid Array) would interface chips to board which would route the light to other chips.
The optimum combines both a "messy" desktop cache and an organized "neat" secondary storage medium but that seems like a rarity among humans.
I'm workin' on it, honest!
Excellent! Please send me a copy when you get it working. My desktop (and floor) cache is relatively effective, but my secondary storage architecture is a mess. I really need HFS (Human Filing System) 2.0 although I fear my old brain has too many bad sectors to support installation of a new file system software.
The only change I'd make is that neat people suffer greater access times due to the differences in the physical media. The seek time for eyeballs on the desktop is much lower than the seek time on the hands in the cabinet.
A messy desk is like a big L2 cache and a neat desk is a cache-less system (everything is relegated to secondary storage). A messy person might suffer from O(n^2) search on their desktop, but its on a very low latency system. Physically delving into a filing cabinet always takes longer than scanning the desktop, even if the the organized cabinet access is O(n).
The optimum combines both a "messy" desktop cache and an organized "neat" secondary storage medium but that seems like a rarity among humans.
IANAL, but I wonder when the class of people harassed by RIAA will grow so large as to constitute a class for suing the organization. If RIAA is indeed making extortionate use of barratry, then falsely-accused consumers would seem to have just cause for legal action.
Of course, if they do win, RIAA will probably try to offer an in-kind compensation -- discounts for music downloads.
In fairness, Izsak makes exactly that point a few sentences above. It's the guys promoting their book, with their made-up "findings", who are blurring the difference between the two.
No doubt both sides overplay their hand in promoting their beliefs of the costs/benefits of neatness/messiness. It always amuses me how everyone thinks that "normal" comes in one flavor. Perhaps its actually due to excessive empathy -- neat people shudder at the thought of living the messy-person's life and messy-people shudder at the thought of living the neat-person's life. Both sides think they could help the other side if they could just cure them of their affliction of neatness or messiness.
FTFA: "When you're disorganized, it's an expense you have no control over, the cost in lost productivity," Izsak said. "You're losing money if you're not organized."
As a veteran "messy" person I see the deep flaw in quotes about productivity losses due to disorganization. Neatness does not imply productive ease of access and mess does not imply disorganization. I know where things are on my mess of a desk. And every single time I waste time "organizing" it, I then waste time trying to find stuff.
For me, and for other messy-deskers, neatness is the antithetical to productivity.
Although I'm sure this is safe for day-to-day operations (for low-altitude data centers) and will prevent a self-sustaining blaze, I'd bet that a smoldering powersupply would convert an unpleasant fraction of the low-oxygen atmosphere into carbon monoxide. Oxygen-staved combustion tends to produce this deadly gas (which kills by binding to hemoglobin better than does oxygen)
I've often wondered whether patents could be subject to a type of perpetual public auction in which anyone can make a binding bid on a patent. The price on the patent would be part of a delayed mark-to-market capital gains tax accounting system that would encourage companies to either monetize or sell patents because they would be paying taxes on those patents. Some small entrepreneurs might be "forced" to sell their patents (i.e., they owe the IRS $2,000,000 because they got a bid for $10,000,000), but then they'd get far more money from the high bidder than they could have if they kept the patent. High bidders would, in turn, have serious skin in the game and want to make money from the patent. Patent-horders would need to pay the gains taxes on their patent portfolios as if those patents where being economically used. I suspect the scheme would make it more costly to keep frivolous patents or to sit on a patent to prevent competitive innovation.
As much as I loath the garbageware generated by Ballmer's 70,000 minions (today is "fun with MS Word" day), he is correct that high growth is extremely hard to sustain.
If a company doubles in size every year, it means that half the employees have less than a year's experience before they need to hire the next layer of people. With so many fresh faces, its extremely hard to create a cohesive culture. And if you look at the labor it takes to find good employees (not just smart ones, but good ones), then you can see that either Google workers spend a large fraction of their time hiring (and not doing their jobs) or, if they do their actual jobs, then they are hiring sloppily. Inevitably, the A-level people are forced to hire B-level people and the B-level people are hiring C-level people.
Slashdot Mirror
Write it the right way once, call it often, and it's fixed. Please outlaw code that reinvents insecure versions of routines for basic data structure.
In this day and age of OOP and libraries, there's no excuse but negligence for crappy code.
Of course, bad ratings are bad for sites and they should be -- if a site sucks and gets few visitors who are of the right demographic and right frame of mind for click-throughs, then its no surprise that advertisers would want to avoid them. The real issue is badly estimated ratings. If GoogScore claims a bazillion unique visitors when there really was a gajillion, then something is wrong.
The web advertising ecosystem needs metaraters -- services that determine the quality of ComScore, Google Analytics, et al.
1. Rectify it for power
2. Phase shift it to create a beam-former
3. The compare it to a local or global reference signal to extract phase information
This really has the potential for providing a third way (versus semiconductor and photochemical systems) for converting light into electricity (for power or signals). Light is just extremely high frequency radio waves. With conductive nanotubes, one could create dipole antenna arrays for submicron wavelengths.
I wonder if Vista's adoption will be at all similar to that of OS X. Version 10.0 wasn't all that great and created quite a bit of gnashing of teeth over issues of speed, backward compatibility, missing features, etc. By version 10.3, Apple had a really nice OS. Perhaps Vista will follow a similar path of improving performance and usability over the next few years.
I really doubt this hypothesis because it assumes that organisms are helpless in the face of change levels of cosmic radiation. The reality is that DNA repair mechanisms are subject to evolution (and can evolve relatively quickly in lab experiments). If background radiation rose, organisms would simply evolve more robust DNA repair mechanisms. If cosmic radiation dropped off, then organisms would simply evolve less robust DNA repair mechanisms.
If he tries to sue enough people, then they could band together and countersue as a class action suit. (assuming Canada has class-action lawsuits)
1. Create picture with a barcode URL to a malware site .........
2. Post on flickr, youtube, et al
3. Wait for someone wearing glasses to visit the image
4. Let MS's automagical software see the barcode in the reflection in the user's glasses via the PC's
5.
6. Profit.
This is the visual equivalent of the exploit that uses an audiofile to tell the voice recognition software to do things.
I'm sure this is a great way to propagate malware -- force the user to use an insecure browser so that the site can install malware on the person's PC.
"This site works best (for us, not for you) with Internet Explorer"
Although the article cited Office 97 as an "also ran" annoyance, I'd have to cite the entire suite in all its incarnations as one of the worst annoyances in my daily life. I have so many reasons for my conclusion, that I'm sure I could exceed the character limit of a /. post. But the top reasons for giving Office a Supreme Annoyance Lifetime Achievement Award include:
1. UI inconsistencies across the suite and even within products.
2. Bugs that have survived at least 7 years and 3 upgrades (upgrade = another chance to extract more money from the customer).
3. The fact that "Autosave" is a known cause of corrupted documents and crashes.
4. Automagical formatting and replacement wizards that you can't turn-off.
5. Word's horrible horrible outliner that singlehandedly killed off actually useable outliners.
6. The fact that O'Reilly was able to create an entire series of "Annoyance" books just from Office.
1) You can sell an object for less than you paid for it and still owe taxes.
If you buy an item for your business, and deduct that purchase from your taxes, and then sell that item later, you owe taxes on it. You can't buy a $2000 laptop, deduct $2000 from you income, and then sell the laptop for $1500 and still retain the $2000 deduction. Beyond this basic fact, the exact tax effects get more complex because it depends on how you are deducting the original purchase of the laptop (either as a Section 179 expense, as purchased inventory in the laptop reselling business, or depreciated on a multiyear schedule).
2) You can't have a "business" that generates losses year after year
If you have a "business" that loses money too often, the IRS will start to get suspicious and they will try to declare the business as a hobby. The exact rules are unclear, but you need to be able to show the IRS that you really are trying to make a profit, are dependent on that income, etc.
As an aside, there is no fixed limit on the deduction of ordinary losses from a business (other than you other income sources). The $3,000 limit applies only to losses on purchases of capital assets.
Perhaps if more people are exposed to the unpleasantness of taxes on their de facto small businesses, then more people would vote for candidates that include tax simplification as a key goal. The current U.S. tax code is a Byzantine mess that is great for accountants, tax attorneys, and tax software companies who add no value to society other than to comply with artificially enacted arcana.
I have no problem paying my fair share (and think everyone should), but I hate that I have to spend so much money and time dealing with all the rules, forms, and administriva of compliance.
It's worse than just the combinations of phones and planes. An aircraft makes a nice enclosed resonant space for cell signals to bounce around inside. Anyone who has looked at simulating or measuring RF fields would know that the field strength can vary by orders of magnitude depending on the exact location, orientation, and frequencies of the emitter and the exact orientation and location of the susceptible wiring or instrument. A tall person sitting in seat 6B with a CDMA phone may cause no problems, but a short person with a GSM phone in seat 32F could interfere with the automatic landing system. The field strength won't necessarily drop with distance inside the plane and may be focused to high levels anywhere inside the aluminum tube.
And testing individual phones isn't sufficient. What happens when 100 people all use their phones at the same time.
Publishers using this tool will presume that any found copies are infringing examples of copyright violation. But what happens when a work "created" and copyrighted in 2006 turns out to be "infringed" by something created in 2000? If the pubisher's "original" copyrighted work turns out to not be so original after all, then things could get sticky. I wonder how many cases of plagiarism will be uncovered in which the publisher/copyright holder becomes the defendant.
It would seem that any remotely defined cursor could be used maliciously by displacing the hotpoint relative to the cursor graphic and encouraging the user to click on something "safe" when the real hot spot for the click is elsewhere over something untrustworthy.
Think about the total amount of food grown and the land used to grow food. The average person eats about 2000-2500 kCal per day in food. The average person consumes about 36,000 kCal per day worth of oil (just oil, not including coal, nat gas, etc.).
Is the Earth big enough to provide 15-20 times the current food production level of biofuel-grade plant material? And if we plant more energy crops won't we be planting less food crops?
The US will be fine, but any one who eats food grown on land that could be used to grow an energy crop will see higher food prices.
Next, we need some nifty means of printing/etching/plating optical traces on PCBs. An OGA (Optical Grid Array) would interface chips to board which would route the light to other chips.
The optimum combines both a "messy" desktop cache and an organized "neat" secondary storage medium but that seems like a rarity among humans.
I'm workin' on it, honest!
Excellent! Please send me a copy when you get it working. My desktop (and floor) cache is relatively effective, but my secondary storage architecture is a mess. I really need HFS (Human Filing System) 2.0 although I fear my old brain has too many bad sectors to support installation of a new file system software.
Ah, the joys and sorrows of wetware.
I like your analysis.
The only change I'd make is that neat people suffer greater access times due to the differences in the physical media. The seek time for eyeballs on the desktop is much lower than the seek time on the hands in the cabinet.
A messy desk is like a big L2 cache and a neat desk is a cache-less system (everything is relegated to secondary storage). A messy person might suffer from O(n^2) search on their desktop, but its on a very low latency system. Physically delving into a filing cabinet always takes longer than scanning the desktop, even if the the organized cabinet access is O(n).
The optimum combines both a "messy" desktop cache and an organized "neat" secondary storage medium but that seems like a rarity among humans.
IANAL, but I wonder when the class of people harassed by RIAA will grow so large as to constitute a class for suing the organization. If RIAA is indeed making extortionate use of barratry, then falsely-accused consumers would seem to have just cause for legal action.
Of course, if they do win, RIAA will probably try to offer an in-kind compensation -- discounts for music downloads.
In fairness, Izsak makes exactly that point a few sentences above. It's the guys promoting their book, with their made-up "findings", who are blurring the difference between the two.
No doubt both sides overplay their hand in promoting their beliefs of the costs/benefits of neatness/messiness. It always amuses me how everyone thinks that "normal" comes in one flavor. Perhaps its actually due to excessive empathy -- neat people shudder at the thought of living the messy-person's life and messy-people shudder at the thought of living the neat-person's life. Both sides think they could help the other side if they could just cure them of their affliction of neatness or messiness.
FTFA: "When you're disorganized, it's an expense you have no control over, the cost in lost productivity," Izsak said. "You're losing money if you're not organized."
As a veteran "messy" person I see the deep flaw in quotes about productivity losses due to disorganization. Neatness does not imply productive ease of access and mess does not imply disorganization. I know where things are on my mess of a desk. And every single time I waste time "organizing" it, I then waste time trying to find stuff.
For me, and for other messy-deskers, neatness is the antithetical to productivity.
Although I'm sure this is safe for day-to-day operations (for low-altitude data centers) and will prevent a self-sustaining blaze, I'd bet that a smoldering powersupply would convert an unpleasant fraction of the low-oxygen atmosphere into carbon monoxide. Oxygen-staved combustion tends to produce this deadly gas (which kills by binding to hemoglobin better than does oxygen)
I've often wondered whether patents could be subject to a type of perpetual public auction in which anyone can make a binding bid on a patent. The price on the patent would be part of a delayed mark-to-market capital gains tax accounting system that would encourage companies to either monetize or sell patents because they would be paying taxes on those patents. Some small entrepreneurs might be "forced" to sell their patents (i.e., they owe the IRS $2,000,000 because they got a bid for $10,000,000), but then they'd get far more money from the high bidder than they could have if they kept the patent. High bidders would, in turn, have serious skin in the game and want to make money from the patent. Patent-horders would need to pay the gains taxes on their patent portfolios as if those patents where being economically used. I suspect the scheme would make it more costly to keep frivolous patents or to sit on a patent to prevent competitive innovation.
As much as I loath the garbageware generated by Ballmer's 70,000 minions (today is "fun with MS Word" day), he is correct that high growth is extremely hard to sustain.
If a company doubles in size every year, it means that half the employees have less than a year's experience before they need to hire the next layer of people. With so many fresh faces, its extremely hard to create a cohesive culture. And if you look at the labor it takes to find good employees (not just smart ones, but good ones), then you can see that either Google workers spend a large fraction of their time hiring (and not doing their jobs) or, if they do their actual jobs, then they are hiring sloppily. Inevitably, the A-level people are forced to hire B-level people and the B-level people are hiring C-level people.