>> I wouldn't know how to find this particular article in any other way. >>
Don't worry, deep in the Slashcode is a sophisticated AI routine which recreates content if it detects that an interested reader missed it the first time. Sadly, it is written in Perl and no one knows how to edit it to make it only show the content to that reader... Some folks have suggested disabling it but, again, its Perl -- who knows whether it also controls launch codes for nuclear missiles...
I use cygwin and/or SSH for this purpose. It has 100% cured me of my desire to keep an Ubuntu live CD around "just in case". (I have Dapper Drake happily chugging along on a pair of VPSes which I could use if I suddenly had an urgent need to do some scripting that, for whatever reason, didn't work in Cygwin.)
Incidentally: Vista has some issues with Cygwin. For example, "cp foo.txt someDir" will sometimes result in someDir/foo.txt being not writeable to the user who was running Cygwin, for reasons which are not entirely clear to me. Happily, you can fix this the same way you fix stupidly obtuse permissions issues on a Linux system -- chmod.
There is not a single American black male imprisoned in Gitmo. Never has been, either, never will be until somebody gets the bright idea to join the jihad and go off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban then get caught by the troops over there. They would then be taken out of Gitmo after their US citizenship is discovered. (It has happened before -- they had a one fairly well-off white kid, John Walker Lindh who styled himself "Sulayman al-Faris", from California who got bored, converted to Islam, and went off to meet Osama bin Laden. He plead guilty of providing material support to terrorists and was sentenced to twenty years. There was also an American/Saudi dual citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was transfered to a US prison from where he mounted a Supreme Court appeal to not be held as an enemy combatant. He was let out in a deal with Saudi Arabia -- essentially, "He gives up his citizenship and you keep him away from any place where he can shoot at Americans, and we'll let him go".)
You may now return to your regularly scheduled Republican bashing. Did you hear the one where they threw a four-year old girl in Gitmo because her mom was gay? True story, I read it on Slashdot.
After years of taking abuse from the entire Computer Science community, GOTO snapped and decided that it was going to get the last laugh. "'Considered' harmful, huh. I'll show them... I'll show them all!"
"Environmentalists responsible for global warming!"
Well, OK, the New York Times won't ever print it, but it is still true in that scenario. Makes you wonder what are current bunch of environmentalists are setting themselves up to be responsible for with all the various carbon management schemes they're planning.
... but for equipment which is all critical, all essentially one-of-a-kind, and all lethal if compromised, there are only two safety states: failed and "has not failed... yet".
But 5% of.1% of Amazon's sales would make accessibleAmazonAffiliate.com a very, very stinking rich individual. That is, if they manage to beat out bookstore-for-the-blind.com and the other fifteen people competing for that space. Its the Internet -- whatever you want, SOMEBODY has made it already, and Google will probably find it for you pretty quickly. (Need an accessible website offering Braille erotica? I'm almost positive one exists, and I'm scared to look for it.)
As an aside, there are too many things which can make a web site inaccessible to you and they can't all be rectified. (Here is the world's simplest example: how do you make a shopping cart accessible for someone who is not literate in English. Bonus points: Do that answer again, but note that I didn't say he was literate in anything else.) Having courts or other government officials decide which disabilities get mandated protection ("OK, blind folks are politically active and sent letters to the right people, illiterate folks didn't send the letters, Spanish speakers did...") guarantees that the question will be resolved in a way which maximizes the gains of a few political actors and spreads massive costs among everybody else. Solving for the same issue through the market spreads the cost for the improvements among those who want to bear it AND will provide fairer and more rationale coverage (targetting the largest and most put-upon usability minorities because, hey, that is where the money is going to be rather than optimizing for minorities-of-one-who-happen-to-live-next-to-a-New-York-Times-reporter).
There are very few countries I would trust in a foxhole, and only one of them doesn't speak English as the national language. That one is Japan. Japan is so intimately tied with the United States politically, economically, and culturally that to suggest that Japanese rearmament (a frog that has LONG since boiled -- they now have something like the world's 5th largest military) leads to military conflict with the United States is like suggesting that Canada is planning to continue the War of 1812 grudge match at the first provocation.
In some bizzaro world where Japan and the United States had economic hostilities (as opposed to the odd disagreement among friends over import levels, tariffs, and the like), Japan cutting off trade with the US would ruin the nation in a matter of months. (And that is assuming we didn't respond by having the Navy cut off their oil supply, in which case she would quite literally cease to have a modern economy in a matter of weeks.) That is the flipside of them being economically dependent on exports to America and their other overseas markets.
Additionally, debt is a weapon that goes both ways. There is a nice expression -- "When you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you. When you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank." The economic nuclear option for the United States is having a midlevel Treasury functionary say one catastrophically important sentence: "We will not pay interest on the T-bills held by the Japanese government, or anyone they should sell them to, for the duration of the hostilities." Oh, we owed you a trillion dollars? Sorry, our mistake -- the accountant has been fired.
That is a heck of a lot more important with regards to China than it is to Japan, by the way. I really don't mind China investing their profits in the US debt (*somebody* is going to own it, who cares who) -- should they decide to have an attack of stupid and talk about nuking Los Angeles again, we can just threaten them with causing a financial panic on a scale unheard of in history. All of the devastation with many less bodies than threatening to match them in megadeaths.
I call this the economic nuclear option because it would NOT be consequence free -- it would pretty much guarantee a worldwide financial panic. But, hey, if you're talking about a major conflict between two of the richest nations in the world the worldwide financial panic is a given.
I don't care much about the Gods being canceled, I've got one and He is plenty, but if NBC cancels Heroes they'd better find a recently unemployed war god to do security at the corporate office.
Because I think Mass is 3 for 3. Well, granted, it only involves alcohol briefly and by the time it gets to anybody it is already Jesus, but the sophistication and parking stick around for the whole service.
Drop the personality disorder and patch me through.
---
I liked Chloe so much that I have a Cygwin alias for ssh into my VPS. It is, of course, damnitchloe. Really its more like damTAB but I get a chuckle every time I see it.
I can also watch Season 7 of 24 in a command line, due to an extremely efficient homebrew compression scheme. Observe:
I'm sure the teachers unions will embrace that idea with the same wonderful sense of acceptance and experimentation that they embraced charter schools, school choice, and merit pay with.
... "Back in my day, sonny, you didn't need the hearing aides! But they reformulated the Bengay, cheap penny-pinching corporate bastards! Just the other day someone tried to sell me a shoelace that you couldn't use as an explosive cord! Honestly, how do you younguns live with this shit?"
The "square tattoo on paper" are called "QR codes", sometimes referred to in my previous employer's English literature as "two-dimension barcodes". You are correct, you use the built-in camera to photograph it, and then the code gets OCRed. This is fairly easy because they are square, black and white, and have positional markers at three corners, which makes them easy to read under a variety of lighting and orientations. They're even pretty robust against being lightly bent, such as what often happens when you print a QR code on a manga (it won't be on a plane when it is scanned, but rather on a gently sloping surface).
The amount of data they can hold isn't all that impressive -- about 1kb for the most common variety. However, 1kb packs in a URL pretty nicely. That is their primary use and one of the reasons they're so explosively popular. Making the system open and mostly based on the open (and mostly solved) problems of web delivery means everyone inhabits the same information ecosystem, and that means you can invest in it and not be at the mercy of the fickle Japanese phone-buying public. Manufacturers already have the big investment (the camera) on the phone, its all but impossible to sell in Japan without one -- adding OCR to support the QR code is child's play (it would be a decent, and not too challenging, project for any graphical processing class at the undergrad level). Content publishers are already capable of writing websites. Send Marketing your QR code for the URL to the website, on the website impliment a CGI page circa 1996 to collect email addresses, boom, you now have a cellphone enabled mailing list that you can be sure works with 99% of the country's installed base.
(I'm abstracting away some practical issues -- character encoding, screen sizes, etc. QR codes solve one problem domain very well, they don't completely eliminate all of the content problems with cellphones.)
... they were free to do whatever they liked, mostly, right up until they thought the government was sniffing around too much. Unfortunately for Japan, whatever they liked was "lets set up a full-scale chemical and biological warfare factory, and then use it to poison the magistrates investigating us so we can get back to causing the Apocalypse". Luckily for Japan, they were worse weapons engineers than they were chemists and the most of the sarin gas they whipped up, then released on the Tokyo subway system, stayed contained. So they only ended up killing a handful of people, many of them from stress-induced shock after the news got out that there was a lethal nerve agent on the subway they had taken this morning.
But hey, up until about thirty seconds after they punctured the boxes carrying the sarin on the subway, their little chemistry experiment hadn't hurt anybody! Harmless eccentrics, Japan has plenty of those, why would you pick on them? *
* Yeah, I know, I know, technically they had a few borderline effectual incidents before that, but it wasn't enough to bring down the hammer yet, so for the purposes of illustration we'll write those off as "Nobody got hurt" even though that is factually inaccurate. Nowadays, if you're a crazy apocalyptic nutjob and you make a $300 million chemical weapons plant in downtown Tokyo, the authorities will presumably give you the Nth degree on what you want to do with your chemical weapons. And you know? I am pretty freaking OK with that. Similarly, I am pretty freaking OK with the cops saying "Excuse me, sir, that over there on your kitchen table resembles, to my semi-trained eye, a functioning biological warfare experiment. You'll pardon my curiosity, but I'm going to have to ask you some questions about it".
So we're trying to a) vindicate Jack Thompson's delusions that there are actually people who want him dead and, simultaneously, at least five Slashdotters with a modicrum of intelligence and karma to spare modded this up. Come on folks, wise the heck up -- when the Orlando News Sentinel prints "In response to Jackson's filing of the lawsuit, an anonymous member of the technology website Slashdot said, regarding methods of stopping Thompson, 'A single bullet ought to do the trick nicely'", it will NOT be Jack Thompson who looks like the crazy wacko.
... the talk page would be filled with the bloated corpses of editors who had died dueling about the proper spelling of "marijuana" and whether Anglicizing the word warranted the article being tagged as insensitive or having NPOV issues.
I don't care whether its the police or the Aqua Teen Hunger Force but somebody needs to do something about the elephants who keep trampling my sheep. You know their numbers have doubled in the last 6 months.
-- Not actually a New Zealand citizen, but I play one on Wiki
I keep a high percentage compared to comparably situated American engineers largely as a result of lifestyle choices, but if I were personally living in America and earning say $55k instead of $25k to start out I would have been able to save more than the $10k a year that I did end up saving. $40k is adequate to the cost of living here, where $40k would be inadequate to maintain a comparable standard of living in some locations in America, but I have a feeling that even including the cost-of-living-adjustment I'd be keeping more money at the end of the month if I were paid as an American engineer.
But, eh, I enjoy my life and don't particularly need more money, so there is little incentive to go hop on a boat and find myself a job in the Valley. (Or hop on a train and find a job in Tokyo, for that matter.)
I like your idea, but don't like requiring two steps. How about we make it into one by taking a one-way hash function of the URL of suspect sites and using it as the key to a sparsely populated but fairly small hash table (say, a million entries). When Google finds a bad domain, they put it into the appropriate row in the hash table (concatenating with all the ones already there). When I check a URL, I say "Yo Google, give me row 0xDEADBEEF", and then I iterate through the handful of entries I just got back to check against my URL. Can Google reverse from 0xDEADBEEF back to the site I am visiting? No, because there are only a million buckets in the hash table, and there would be thousands of sites in that bucket if I were recording all legitimate sites, ranging from www.vatican.va to www.ienjoylickingstrawberryjamoffgoats.com and everything in between, with no rhyme or reason to the categorizations.
You can expire the domains in the hash table after they've been down for 6 months, to save bandwidth on the requests.
P.S. Thank you, observant Slashdot reader, I know 0xDEADBEEF is more than a million. But I like old bad jokes.
US engineers get (mostly) paid on merit and (mostly) get paid a heck of a lot more than regular old company workers with similar degrees and experience. Example: the average national starting salary for a liberal arts major working 9-5 is somewhere in the $30k range. The average starting salary for a graduate from my CS department is in the $55k range. A disproportionate number of our graduates go on to live in high, high cost areas (California, New York City), but you can still see the disparity (there are plenty of 22 year old graduates in NYC not making 55k a year or anything close to it).
So, back to Japan: my starting salary approximately $25k, with some perks that could scarcely be believed (by American standards) which probably contributed an effective $15k on top of that. That is on a low-stress 9-5 We Don't Crunch You job.
Three years later, I switched into a job at a different company, with work habits which are more typical of Japanese companies and American programmers. My pay package is now about $40k, exclusive of perks. Perks are decent but no longer jawdropping. Of note to American engineers, I get paid overtime, national health care, 100% subsidized transportation expenditures, and am statistically speaking impossible to fire. (Number of nonvoluntary separations in my company's history is about 5, we have 1,000 employees, you do the math.) $40k is adequate where I live, where the cost of living is generally comparable to a Midwestern state with Californian food and fuel prices.
Total tax burden (national income tax, local residence tax, 5% consumption tax) is in the general neighborhood of a generic US state. (For those folks unfamiliar with the US system, local and state taxes can vary drastically in the United States based on where you are. For example, Alaska doesn't charge individual income taxes at all, California's top rate is almost 10%. Sales taxes are a similar mixed bag.)
The brass ring which many of my Japanese coworkers are aiming for is a management position paying approximately $80k, which they would achieve in the 35-40 year old range. (There are, of course, numerous promotions between then and now.) That doesn't fit into my long term plans but, hey, to each their own.
I should point out that I am working at a software development house in a major Japanese city other than Tokyo. If I were working in Tokyo, as a bilingual engineer if I were inclined to work in the financial sector I could name my price. I'd also be expected to work the sort of hours that come with having a job where the top rung of the salary scale is "Let your imagination run wild a bit".
Slashdot Mirror
Who would listen to Kucinich when you had the tribal beats of your own race of cycloptic camoflauging tentacle monsters as an alternative.
>>
I wouldn't know how to find this particular article in any other way.
>>
Don't worry, deep in the Slashcode is a sophisticated AI routine which recreates content if it detects that an interested reader missed it the first time. Sadly, it is written in Perl and no one knows how to edit it to make it only show the content to that reader... Some folks have suggested disabling it but, again, its Perl -- who knows whether it also controls launch codes for nuclear missiles...
I use cygwin and/or SSH for this purpose. It has 100% cured me of my desire to keep an Ubuntu live CD around "just in case". (I have Dapper Drake happily chugging along on a pair of VPSes which I could use if I suddenly had an urgent need to do some scripting that, for whatever reason, didn't work in Cygwin.)
Incidentally: Vista has some issues with Cygwin. For example, "cp foo.txt someDir" will sometimes result in someDir/foo.txt being not writeable to the user who was running Cygwin, for reasons which are not entirely clear to me. Happily, you can fix this the same way you fix stupidly obtuse permissions issues on a Linux system -- chmod.
There is not a single American black male imprisoned in Gitmo. Never has been, either, never will be until somebody gets the bright idea to join the jihad and go off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban then get caught by the troops over there. They would then be taken out of Gitmo after their US citizenship is discovered. (It has happened before -- they had a one fairly well-off white kid, John Walker Lindh who styled himself "Sulayman al-Faris", from California who got bored, converted to Islam, and went off to meet Osama bin Laden. He plead guilty of providing material support to terrorists and was sentenced to twenty years. There was also an American/Saudi dual citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was transfered to a US prison from where he mounted a Supreme Court appeal to not be held as an enemy combatant. He was let out in a deal with Saudi Arabia -- essentially, "He gives up his citizenship and you keep him away from any place where he can shoot at Americans, and we'll let him go".)
You may now return to your regularly scheduled Republican bashing. Did you hear the one where they threw a four-year old girl in Gitmo because her mom was gay? True story, I read it on Slashdot.
After years of taking abuse from the entire Computer Science community, GOTO snapped and decided that it was going to get the last laugh. "'Considered' harmful, huh. I'll show them... I'll show them all!"
"Environmentalists responsible for global warming!"
Well, OK, the New York Times won't ever print it, but it is still true in that scenario. Makes you wonder what are current bunch of environmentalists are setting themselves up to be responsible for with all the various carbon management schemes they're planning.
... but for equipment which is all critical, all essentially one-of-a-kind, and all lethal if compromised, there are only two safety states: failed and "has not failed... yet".
But 5% of .1% of Amazon's sales would make accessibleAmazonAffiliate.com a very, very stinking rich individual. That is, if they manage to beat out bookstore-for-the-blind.com and the other fifteen people competing for that space. Its the Internet -- whatever you want, SOMEBODY has made it already, and Google will probably find it for you pretty quickly. (Need an accessible website offering Braille erotica? I'm almost positive one exists, and I'm scared to look for it.)
As an aside, there are too many things which can make a web site inaccessible to you and they can't all be rectified. (Here is the world's simplest example: how do you make a shopping cart accessible for someone who is not literate in English. Bonus points: Do that answer again, but note that I didn't say he was literate in anything else.) Having courts or other government officials decide which disabilities get mandated protection ("OK, blind folks are politically active and sent letters to the right people, illiterate folks didn't send the letters, Spanish speakers did...") guarantees that the question will be resolved in a way which maximizes the gains of a few political actors and spreads massive costs among everybody else. Solving for the same issue through the market spreads the cost for the improvements among those who want to bear it AND will provide fairer and more rationale coverage (targetting the largest and most put-upon usability minorities because, hey, that is where the money is going to be rather than optimizing for minorities-of-one-who-happen-to-live-next-to-a-New-York-Times-reporter).
I have been selling software for a while, it is no more real than the database entries at issue here, and the world has yet to come to an end...
There are very few countries I would trust in a foxhole, and only one of them doesn't speak English as the national language. That one is Japan. Japan is so intimately tied with the United States politically, economically, and culturally that to suggest that Japanese rearmament (a frog that has LONG since boiled -- they now have something like the world's 5th largest military) leads to military conflict with the United States is like suggesting that Canada is planning to continue the War of 1812 grudge match at the first provocation.
In some bizzaro world where Japan and the United States had economic hostilities (as opposed to the odd disagreement among friends over import levels, tariffs, and the like), Japan cutting off trade with the US would ruin the nation in a matter of months. (And that is assuming we didn't respond by having the Navy cut off their oil supply, in which case she would quite literally cease to have a modern economy in a matter of weeks.) That is the flipside of them being economically dependent on exports to America and their other overseas markets.
Additionally, debt is a weapon that goes both ways. There is a nice expression -- "When you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you. When you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank." The economic nuclear option for the United States is having a midlevel Treasury functionary say one catastrophically important sentence: "We will not pay interest on the T-bills held by the Japanese government, or anyone they should sell them to, for the duration of the hostilities." Oh, we owed you a trillion dollars? Sorry, our mistake -- the accountant has been fired.
That is a heck of a lot more important with regards to China than it is to Japan, by the way. I really don't mind China investing their profits in the US debt (*somebody* is going to own it, who cares who) -- should they decide to have an attack of stupid and talk about nuking Los Angeles again, we can just threaten them with causing a financial panic on a scale unheard of in history. All of the devastation with many less bodies than threatening to match them in megadeaths.
I call this the economic nuclear option because it would NOT be consequence free -- it would pretty much guarantee a worldwide financial panic. But, hey, if you're talking about a major conflict between two of the richest nations in the world the worldwide financial panic is a given.
I don't care much about the Gods being canceled, I've got one and He is plenty, but if NBC cancels Heroes they'd better find a recently unemployed war god to do security at the corporate office.
Because I think Mass is 3 for 3. Well, granted, it only involves alcohol briefly and by the time it gets to anybody it is already Jesus, but the sophistication and parking stick around for the whole service.
Drop the personality disorder and patch me through.
---
I liked Chloe so much that I have a Cygwin alias for ssh into my VPS. It is, of course, damnitchloe. Really its more like damTAB but I get a chuckle every time I see it.
I can also watch Season 7 of 24 in a command line, due to an extremely efficient homebrew compression scheme. Observe:
ruby -e "(24 * 6).times do puts 'Damn it'; end"
I'm sure the teachers unions will embrace that idea with the same wonderful sense of acceptance and experimentation that they embraced charter schools, school choice, and merit pay with.
... and name a rock in my backyard after him. Now he has his name applied to two hithertofore anonymous rocks which he will never see.
Plus, the only vowel allowed in Canadian domain names is A, eh?
... "Back in my day, sonny, you didn't need the hearing aides! But they reformulated the Bengay, cheap penny-pinching corporate bastards! Just the other day someone tried to sell me a shoelace that you couldn't use as an explosive cord! Honestly, how do you younguns live with this shit?"
The "square tattoo on paper" are called "QR codes", sometimes referred to in my previous employer's English literature as "two-dimension barcodes". You are correct, you use the built-in camera to photograph it, and then the code gets OCRed. This is fairly easy because they are square, black and white, and have positional markers at three corners, which makes them easy to read under a variety of lighting and orientations. They're even pretty robust against being lightly bent, such as what often happens when you print a QR code on a manga (it won't be on a plane when it is scanned, but rather on a gently sloping surface).
The amount of data they can hold isn't all that impressive -- about 1kb for the most common variety. However, 1kb packs in a URL pretty nicely. That is their primary use and one of the reasons they're so explosively popular. Making the system open and mostly based on the open (and mostly solved) problems of web delivery means everyone inhabits the same information ecosystem, and that means you can invest in it and not be at the mercy of the fickle Japanese phone-buying public. Manufacturers already have the big investment (the camera) on the phone, its all but impossible to sell in Japan without one -- adding OCR to support the QR code is child's play (it would be a decent, and not too challenging, project for any graphical processing class at the undergrad level). Content publishers are already capable of writing websites. Send Marketing your QR code for the URL to the website, on the website impliment a CGI page circa 1996 to collect email addresses, boom, you now have a cellphone enabled mailing list that you can be sure works with 99% of the country's installed base.
(I'm abstracting away some practical issues -- character encoding, screen sizes, etc. QR codes solve one problem domain very well, they don't completely eliminate all of the content problems with cellphones.)
... they were free to do whatever they liked, mostly, right up until they thought the government was sniffing around too much. Unfortunately for Japan, whatever they liked was "lets set up a full-scale chemical and biological warfare factory, and then use it to poison the magistrates investigating us so we can get back to causing the Apocalypse". Luckily for Japan, they were worse weapons engineers than they were chemists and the most of the sarin gas they whipped up, then released on the Tokyo subway system, stayed contained. So they only ended up killing a handful of people, many of them from stress-induced shock after the news got out that there was a lethal nerve agent on the subway they had taken this morning.
But hey, up until about thirty seconds after they punctured the boxes carrying the sarin on the subway, their little chemistry experiment hadn't hurt anybody! Harmless eccentrics, Japan has plenty of those, why would you pick on them? *
* Yeah, I know, I know, technically they had a few borderline effectual incidents before that, but it wasn't enough to bring down the hammer yet, so for the purposes of illustration we'll write those off as "Nobody got hurt" even though that is factually inaccurate. Nowadays, if you're a crazy apocalyptic nutjob and you make a $300 million chemical weapons plant in downtown Tokyo, the authorities will presumably give you the Nth degree on what you want to do with your chemical weapons. And you know? I am pretty freaking OK with that. Similarly, I am pretty freaking OK with the cops saying "Excuse me, sir, that over there on your kitchen table resembles, to my semi-trained eye, a functioning biological warfare experiment. You'll pardon my curiosity, but I'm going to have to ask you some questions about it".
So we're trying to a) vindicate Jack Thompson's delusions that there are actually people who want him dead and, simultaneously, at least five Slashdotters with a modicrum of intelligence and karma to spare modded this up. Come on folks, wise the heck up -- when the Orlando News Sentinel prints "In response to Jackson's filing of the lawsuit, an anonymous member of the technology website Slashdot said, regarding methods of stopping Thompson, 'A single bullet ought to do the trick nicely'", it will NOT be Jack Thompson who looks like the crazy wacko.
... the talk page would be filled with the bloated corpses of editors who had died dueling about the proper spelling of "marijuana" and whether Anglicizing the word warranted the article being tagged as insensitive or having NPOV issues.
I don't care whether its the police or the Aqua Teen Hunger Force but somebody needs to do something about the elephants who keep trampling my sheep. You know their numbers have doubled in the last 6 months.
-- Not actually a New Zealand citizen, but I play one on Wiki
I keep a high percentage compared to comparably situated American engineers largely as a result of lifestyle choices, but if I were personally living in America and earning say $55k instead of $25k to start out I would have been able to save more than the $10k a year that I did end up saving. $40k is adequate to the cost of living here, where $40k would be inadequate to maintain a comparable standard of living in some locations in America, but I have a feeling that even including the cost-of-living-adjustment I'd be keeping more money at the end of the month if I were paid as an American engineer.
But, eh, I enjoy my life and don't particularly need more money, so there is little incentive to go hop on a boat and find myself a job in the Valley. (Or hop on a train and find a job in Tokyo, for that matter.)
I like your idea, but don't like requiring two steps. How about we make it into one by taking a one-way hash function of the URL of suspect sites and using it as the key to a sparsely populated but fairly small hash table (say, a million entries). When Google finds a bad domain, they put it into the appropriate row in the hash table (concatenating with all the ones already there). When I check a URL, I say "Yo Google, give me row 0xDEADBEEF", and then I iterate through the handful of entries I just got back to check against my URL. Can Google reverse from 0xDEADBEEF back to the site I am visiting? No, because there are only a million buckets in the hash table, and there would be thousands of sites in that bucket if I were recording all legitimate sites, ranging from www.vatican.va to www.ienjoylickingstrawberryjamoffgoats.com and everything in between, with no rhyme or reason to the categorizations.
You can expire the domains in the hash table after they've been down for 6 months, to save bandwidth on the requests.
P.S. Thank you, observant Slashdot reader, I know 0xDEADBEEF is more than a million. But I like old bad jokes.
US engineers get (mostly) paid on merit and (mostly) get paid a heck of a lot more than regular old company workers with similar degrees and experience. Example: the average national starting salary for a liberal arts major working 9-5 is somewhere in the $30k range. The average starting salary for a graduate from my CS department is in the $55k range. A disproportionate number of our graduates go on to live in high, high cost areas (California, New York City), but you can still see the disparity (there are plenty of 22 year old graduates in NYC not making 55k a year or anything close to it).
So, back to Japan: my starting salary approximately $25k, with some perks that could scarcely be believed (by American standards) which probably contributed an effective $15k on top of that. That is on a low-stress 9-5 We Don't Crunch You job.
Three years later, I switched into a job at a different company, with work habits which are more typical of Japanese companies and American programmers. My pay package is now about $40k, exclusive of perks. Perks are decent but no longer jawdropping. Of note to American engineers, I get paid overtime, national health care, 100% subsidized transportation expenditures, and am statistically speaking impossible to fire. (Number of nonvoluntary separations in my company's history is about 5, we have 1,000 employees, you do the math.) $40k is adequate where I live, where the cost of living is generally comparable to a Midwestern state with Californian food and fuel prices.
Total tax burden (national income tax, local residence tax, 5% consumption tax) is in the general neighborhood of a generic US state. (For those folks unfamiliar with the US system, local and state taxes can vary drastically in the United States based on where you are. For example, Alaska doesn't charge individual income taxes at all, California's top rate is almost 10%. Sales taxes are a similar mixed bag.)
The brass ring which many of my Japanese coworkers are aiming for is a management position paying approximately $80k, which they would achieve in the 35-40 year old range. (There are, of course, numerous promotions between then and now.) That doesn't fit into my long term plans but, hey, to each their own.
I should point out that I am working at a software development house in a major Japanese city other than Tokyo. If I were working in Tokyo, as a bilingual engineer if I were inclined to work in the financial sector I could name my price. I'd also be expected to work the sort of hours that come with having a job where the top rung of the salary scale is "Let your imagination run wild a bit".