You cant be serious, can you? Who the hell looks at their memory usage when browsing the web? If you do, you need to purchase more RAM, not limit your browsing options.
Well, it wasn't really my memory I was concerned with, it's a combination of that and my bandwidth. And memory, in addition to size, has a speed. The combination leads to your overall experience.
Since many people have been making fun of me for posting this, I'm going to go ahead and point out that soon one of the most common computers in the world will be the OLPC. Now, my parents are still stuck on a phone line so when I visit them I use Google. And I definitely see a difference. I suspect that the people using OLPCs will be using simply the search engine that is fastest for them. They will have low bandwidth & little, slow memory.
So, yeah, I think my initial argument was valid. Now, you might say that they don't want people with no money using their search engines (what ads will they click?) or that these people will probably speak Swahili or another non-English language, but I contend that having the traffic will reflect your market share. And in the end, the image as "the penultimate search engine" is the only thing that matters to these guys.
I don't want this to be a browser war, I want this to be an analysis of these search engines. In IE6, Yahoo fares even worse. The ratio ranges from 1:2 on the homepage to 3:5 on a random search.
When the first spam messages went out back in the 90s...
Hold it right there. I believe that spam predates the modern internet in that it was present on Arpanet. Now, it might not have been as prevalent but it was there.
In my opinion, any unsolicited advertising I didn't ask for is treated the same way--as spam. It's ignored by me. And I would think that, given any past/present/future communication medium, spam will be there. Those flyers you get in the mail about crap you never asked for? Spam. Those phone calls from telemarketers? Spam. Those ads on TV & Radio for products you're not interested in? Spam. Those mails & whispers from gold sellers in Warcraft? Spam. The only reason e-mail spam is the most prevalent is that one person can produce near infinite amounts of it.
I don't care if it's a legitimate business trying to send me a flyer about a new sale. If I didn't sign up for the flyer, I DON'T WANT IT IN MY MAILBOX. It congests traffic & destroys the quality of my experience when using e-mail. If legitimate businesses are only sending mail to customers who declared they wanted it (not tricked by having a pre-selected radio button on the bottom of a checkout form, I mean legit), then they shouldn't be marked as spam.
My proposed solution to businesses that are legitimately sending out information and flyers is to only offer them to repeat customers. And, on top of that, require them to take the initiative to sign up for it. Don't include it in a checkout process--something else is going on there, that's not the place to advertise it. Have a small area of your home page with an icon linked to signing up for the mailer. And make it easy to remove one's self from this. That way, people will have to make an effort to get it and you won't be 'accidentally' flagged as spam!
Yahoo! will display that box for any search engine, try "msn search" or "ask.com" and I personally wouldn't use the words "thoughtful" or "cutsie" to describe it. It's just selective advertising. And--like nearly all forms of advertising--I hate it.
Considering that www.yahoo.com takes about 5,000k more memory than www.google.com in my Firefox browser, it's obvious to me which one I use by default. Now with the search box in the upper right being able to link to either of them, I still find that Yahoo!'s returned results has a larger memory footprint than Google's.
My aunt & uncle live in Wisconsin and they use geothermal energy to heat their house. A pump sends water out along tubes underground that they've laid beneath 7 layers of different things. It was expensive to set up but during the winter, they don't spend a dime on heat. There's a glorified water heater that extracts the heat from the water and transfers it into a separate set of pipes that run underneath the cement in their basement. I'm probably missing some of the details and I can't remember the company they bought it from but I've been there this year and I've seen it work.
I would imagine that Max's design could use the blades to pump the water and run it through coils that the air passes through. Like a dehumidifier, it would extract the water and drip it into a basin.
And plonk a few hundred in marginal outback land -- specifically to water tree-lots -- and you could start to improve local rainfall.
Well, I know trees consume a lot of water (tens of gallons a day) so these windmills would have to do a lot. But I'm not sure how that would improve local rainfall. It may be a way to augment local rainfall but in no way would it improve it. Trees are known to improve water quality but I think they actually take away from the water table and increase evaporation. I think that final statement is one to attract venture capitalists and government workers than to spread the truth.
I didn't think it would come to this, and yet here we are.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. My father often worked from 4 AM to 9 PM so I didn't see much of him. Occasionally, there'd be an auction in the summer when I didn't have school and it'd be on a Saturday when I wasn't needed on other farms picking rock or bailing hay. And I'd get to come along and sit in silence with my dad as he mulled over screeders, forms & other utensils dealing with his trade, cement. If the price was right, we'd pick up boxes of old coins and I'd get to flip through them--funny how you could find 500 mercury dimes (truly assorted) for 10 cents apiece! Now that was $50 (1990's money) well spent.
And now we come to the sandwiches. Every time I went one (no matter where it was), they would sell BBQ sandwiches for 50 cents. They were very sweet and the meat was often real meat. At the time, I don't think I was used to something that wasn't ground chuck or hot dogs. My dad wolfed them down like god himself had cooked them. My dad was a trash compactor. I liked food, but probably half as many things as he did. I've slowly come around and now eat all the horrible things he used to--pickled jalepenos, sardines straight from the can, eggs cooked in bacon grease, egg coffee, oatmeal with various things mixed into it, bratwurst, etc. And the weird thing is that I now love them (although I have not had lutefisk that I've liked yet). What I use to look at with disgust I now find myself craving. I think my dad was the same way at a young age, I'm not sure why.
So, in the end, you're right. They probably are the best BBQ sandwiches out there, I just didn't realize it at the time. I had been used to institutionalized food at school or cheap ground meat and found the texture and taste of the real thing scary. And this completes my offtopic post, mod away.
Am I the only one failing to see the damage done here?
Ok, so I've used eBay and I know there's a "Reserve Price" option for an auction. You set it when you start the auction and if the bids never crest that benchmark, you are under no obligation to provide product/service for amount tendered.
Now, that said, I will concede that a "Reserve Not Yet Met" sign on an auction will cause me to over look an auction. I feel less like I'm getting a deal if that phrase is staring me down. I will also mention that the more bids on an auction the more desirable it is to me (childish, I know, but hey I'm human).
Now, on the other hand, if I were an seller, I could think of a thousand ways to simulate bids. Configure a friend's computer on the other side of the country to forward my internet traffic, for one. And then the cat and mouse game between eBay and I would begin. And what would happen? eBay would have to spend a lot of time investigating this stuff. A lot of time and resources. Only to do what? Send me a nastygram asking me to use Reserve Prices next time? Place a black star next to my name to let bidders know I've been known to use shill bids? Social stigmas of some other sort?
In the end, who cares? eBay should keep it in their TOS & simply let people know that professional seller often practice this. You're not going to find the same deals on eBay that you'd find at some middle of nowhere country farm house liquidation auction where you have to show up in person and stomach 8 hours of farm tools and the worst BBQ lunch sandwiches you've ever tasted.
As with most lists, I've got some nitpicking to do.
All the large companies I've worked for don't care about world wide web search engines. Those engines used by the populace with the revenue coming from ads or 'paid search' or some indirect service business model. Now, a lot of companies are interested in Enterprise Search Engines and would pay a lot of money directly to a search engine company to come in and set up the technology to do intranet searches.
The engine we currently use at my fortune 500 company sucks. I mean it is the worst. I would rather have a blindfold on with stumps for hands trying to type in an estimation of the internal IP address than use our search engine. That said, I have been told that we investigated using "Google Technology" although my superiors soon found that it wasn't at all better than what we already had. And so I've heard of a few others that have doubted Google's ability to dominate in a closed domain. They are clearly the winners in an open domain internet search but I haven't seen anyone take advantage of it as well internally... yet.
So while the external market may be broken down 99.99 to 0.01, the internal enterprise search side isn't that lopsided.
Two engines that I've used and found to be novel ideas are BrightPlanet's Deep Query Manager and Collexis (NIH demo). DQM is able to extract data from databases that are available through search on the local page but are not indexed by Google. DQM has you create jobs since they take so long to run. Collexis can process raw text and fingerprint it, then compare that fingerprint to documents that have been fingerprinted quickly. Two ideas that Google, MSN & Yahoo! don't really cover. I find it odd that a site like Yoople (what appears to be a slow German Google) made it on this list but not DQM.
So, I'm aware that things like this have been implemented in the past. But the easy way to get around them is to not offer the item, gold or online property but instead offer to the bidders your personal time and service to acquire the items.
Examples:
"level 60 epic gear warrior for sale" => "leveling services to get you a epic gear warrior"
"5000 gold on Thunderlord" => "the five days of playing time it takes me to get you 5000 gold"
"1337 item" => "time it took me to farm this item and give it to you"
I mean, are they safe guarding against this also? Because, in the end, what's wrong with selling people your time or services to them? Once they complete the service, you pay them. I don't know how they could find some way around this or tell which auctions for services need to be revoked.
The uploaded material could cause Fox "irreparable harm," Sunderland said, but it was not immediately clear if the episodes in question still were posted on the site or perhaps had been removed.
That's beside the point, though. Once Jack finds out that there is some person somewhere acting unlawfully against him, all civil laws and the Geneva Conventions will be ignored in his quest to find them. With in the first hour of Bauer's angerment, he will see the news and say "damn it!" then proceed to use his ties with Rupert Murdoch to gain access to Larry Page's dog, Foo-Foo. Using CTU personnel that are risking their own jobs to do it, he will find Larry's home address. 20 minutes into the episode, Bauer will have interrogated Foo-Foo and have the dog's head in a basket and be in route to Larry's home.
Meanwhile, the terorrist ECOTotal will be sitting on the couch munching on Dorritos laughing at a family on Geraldo.
At the half way point, Jack knocks on Larry's door as an innocuous deliveray boy carrying a sidearm and a basket dripping with blood. When Larry opens the door, Jack throws the poodle's head at him and pushes him inside with a gun to Larry's head. Interrogation and dialogue of the lowest calibre ensues. Larry Page is left unable to father children.
Meanwhile, ECOTotal is looking on eBay for their new SLR lens.
Jack interrogates Larry to a bloody pulp and finds out that ECOTotal is really a 16 year old high school student dabbling in photography and computer video processing.
The clock is ticking but by the end of the episode the Muslim terrorist ECOTotal is dead and the Chinese government is involved for some reason... um, because we hate them, that's why.
--
Does anyone else see this over the top action as becoming laughable as Walker, Texas Ranger? I mean, the last tag line I heard on a Fox commercial was "All hail the power of Bauer!" What the hell?
The weapon is called the silent guardian. It's made by Raytheon and that site has a short video just showing it off with a product sheet.
The most interesting things from that product sheet:
Targeting: Stationary firing position with 360-degree coverage
Integrated sensors with joystick control
Single-man operation
System Setup: Automatic target tracking
Modular architecture
Secure antenna stabilization platform
able to operate in 40 mph winds
Mission Profile: Less than 2-second retargeting capability
Shoot-and-scoot capability
Less than 2 seconds to switch from standby mode to armed
Contractor Support: Complete logistics support package available to include:
- Return and repair maintenance
- System training
- Web-enabled supply support
- Supports Army two-level maintenance system
And I personally think the most important aspect of this weapon is that it fills the gap between shout and shoot which is a big thing when you think about it.
It is much easier, more effective and cheaper to kill humans than to render them unable to continue combat but still alive. Afterward, corpses don't sue or raise a human rights ruckus. And remember, we're talking about Singapore, not the U.S.
I've seen cops (in riot situations) revert to these zip ties that are similar to what I tie the cables in my computer up with. The cop takes a zip tie, forces the individuals arms behind his or her back and applies the zip tie.
These zip ties cost maybe 10 or 20 cents each. They are not fool proof. And the way in which you get the human into the physical position to apply the zip ties is a problem an engineer has yet to solve. But if you're telling me that this is too expensive. Or that, in the aftermath of the war, the individual (who at no time had any risk save maybe a broken arm through failed cooperation) will sue you. I will have to laugh. Have you priced bombs or even arms and ammunition recently? Not cheap. And through the use of those, the alternative is death. You can't put a price on life.
Afterward, corpses don't sue or raise a human rights ruckus.
Well if that sentence doesn't send a chill down my spine, I don't know what does. If you're using that as an actual retort to my original statement, I certainly am confused. Are you suggesting we kill them all because they'll be silent afterwards? Sounds like a war crime which is probably something I'd fear more than a "human rights ruckus". Wasn't that the idea behind the My Lai Massacre? With the most recent Iraq war, hopefully we'll realize that our image to the rest of the world is just as important as our arsenal when entering a conflict.
I'm not suggesting we use this in a civil setting or time of peace in our own society or anywhere. I consider even this an extreme measure only to be used in times of war.
And remember, we're talking about Singapore, not the U.S.
I don't care if we're talking about Morocco, I hold all governments to a high standard in this modern world. Oh, well, Singapore has a history of sneezing at human rights, so I'll let them slide? No way. If anything, we need to be more critical of them.
By then they have already done the deed, and may not even believe that their wrongdoing was wrong. Too late.
And I will assert that oftentimes the reason they feel they were doing the right thing is because of the deaths of people they loved from prior conflicts with their enemies. The trick here is to minimize the deaths and expose those causing the conflicts for what they really are. If you can't expose them to their own people, than maybe you shouldn't be there in the first place. Imagine if we found every Al-Queda member and marked them and made publicly known to everyone around them that they were part of an organization responsible for the deaths of innocent men, women & children, surely their families and societies would hold them as murderers. In our society, when your brother is murdered and you murder the person responsible, you are still tried for murder. Just because they did a crime does not give you the right to replicate the crime on them. And I think a lot of societies today agree with this or should come around to realizing that you can't let people murder each other. Justice & the truth are the only answers.
I don't understand why the summary uses the phrase "destroy targets." Honestly, I was thinking that a while ago, the United States should be prioritizing weapons that disable humans through means other than chemical or lethal implementations.
Every time someone is killed by a US soldier (or even UN peacekeeper for that matter), more enemies of the United States are bred. It doesn't matter what the conditions were or the whether or not the rule of engagement were followed.
I understand this is Singapore issuing the challenge, but I would like to see robots (in any format) capable of navigating buildings and hogtying humans without injuring them. The robots themselves may be at risk but the unknown targets inside could be detained and processed under law. Make them infra red or heat sensing so they can operate in the dark. But I am strong believer that combat needs to move away from lethal harm to the individual. More importantly, you would remove the lethal harm to our own troops. Wars are no longer solved through death. What seems to be prolific in today's world is something the Native Americans called a "Mourning War" where you kill my brother so I kill two of yours and the problem compounds upon itself. There was some sort of mental shift after 1914 where you didn't just destroy a force and the country bowed to you. Each side has put themselves on a pedestal and, as a result, even the populace believes they are right or correct.
I heard once someone say that the only way to end conflict these days was total elimination of one side of the conflict. They weren't suggesting the implementation of that or genocide, they were merely pointing out the conundrums that exist over pieces of land like the Gaza Strip.
What does Singapore hope to accomplish with this challenge? Why do they think that wars of the future will still be bent on how lethal your weapons are? Can't they see that the United States has more and better lethal weapons than any other organization in the world... and yet we are still vexed and taunted by a rag-tag terrorist organization. It's not a matter of flexing your muscle anymore, it's not a matter of dropping a nuke or making an example--I believe that it's a matter of being able to subdue elements inside and expose them for the evils and crimes they commit. Bring justice to them & let them live in shame for what they've done.
In fact, more than 8 out of 10 Americans (84%) say they are more dependent on their home computer now than they were just three years ago.
Shocking 'facts' aren't they? But they failed to mention that these people who find themselves more dependent on computers probably find themselves less dependent on other things. For instance, transportation. You don't have to go down to the mall and hoof around looking for a CD or even books for that matter. You don't have to go out to rent videos--just use Netflix or Blockbuster. Why are malls becoming predominantly clothing stores? Because you can't try clothes on online. You can do your banking online now and I'm sure the things you can do online instead of driving your vehicle to the office to make the payment are numerous.
And I'll bet these people are a little less glued to their televisions than they were three years ago. And instead of going to the movies or getting hammered at a bar, they might find an online game to be a bit more entertaining.
The obvious downside is that I'm sure that some people are probably less active than they were before, but not all of them. If you percieve this to be a growing threat or strain on relationships, market software/hardware that makes the PC experience something shared between two people. I know tons of couples (and families) that have two or more computers and they simply play games like WoW together.
Honestly, I don't see anything unhealthy with this trend so long as the people excersize or go out walking/running once a week or more.
Well, if you get the super duper upgrade maxi plus version of Vista for $800, it comes with accessories. But wait! Order within the next fifteen minutes and Steve Ballmer will throw in his patented hair growth formula! A $4500 value for 8 easy payments of $100 plus shipping and handling!
When the last time this system would have saved an aircraft?
Off the top of my head, never. However, it will probably make a whole lot of people 'feel' safe. And, in the end, that's what matters today. A few billion for a sense of safety? That's nothing.
She and other members of Congress are hoping to equip all US commercial passenger liners with this system in 20 years, at a cost of billions of dollars. Is this good common sense or the costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism?
How is this 'costly'? How many human lives would be lost as you install these defense systems in passenger liners? I don't think any. And as long as that billions of dollars goes back into the economy of the United States, it's not like we'd be losing billions of dollars. That money would be doing something and going back into the cycle of cash flow.
These defense systems for passenger jets are a drop in the bucket compared to the war in Iraq. And, as far as human lives go, you can't even compare the two.
In the end, this movement doesn't even need to be common sense. It just has to be something that counteracts the fear that some Americans live with. I myself am not one of them--but if these politicians that the country elected believe they'll do the trick, then go ahead. I'd much rather see legislation like this being passed than to have our fearless leader attack Iran or North Korea.
To recap, it's not about if it would ever have saved a passenger jet, it's more so that people will think that the security on planes have become impervious to the types of attacks that terrorists have the means to execute.
Mr. Wozniak says Mr. Draper's problem is that his skills lie in technology rather in making business deals or starting a company. "He didn't come from a business orientation," says Mr. Wozniak.
That's funny, "not coming from a business orientation" is pretty desirable when I'm looking for someone to talk to. I think Mr. Draper's real problems were that he picked the wrong friends when he was starting out & incurred legal fees he couldn't afford. If one of my friends was ever living in a vehicle, I'd be certain to lend a hand. Especially if I was some Apple hot shot. I guess my definition of "friend" differs from Mr. Wozniak's. A bright man under utilized in our society. And the article points out all of his problems. Although he made mistakes, I doubt his situation is entirely his fault. Another misunderstood engineer.
Question: why do I need to upgrade to Office 2007?
Answer: Nobody needs to upgrade to Office 2007.
Microsoft isn't holding a gun to your head. You don't have a need for a ribbon. You may find out later that it increases your productivity and then you may learn that it provides a better solution for your problems. But if you're accomplishing your job and tasks with older copies of Office, why do you need 2007? The fact is you probably don't. I myself am quite successful with OpenOffice.org but I don't use the spreadsheet much if at all.
Hell, as long as Microsoft keeps supporting the copy of Office you use, who cares about 2007? Let the early adopters play around with it and work the bugs out. I'll use the ribbon when everyone else is--no reason for me to learn another "J++" Microsoft product only to have that skill be completely useless. Office 2007 will probably be the de facto standard but why pay the price and risk of an early adopter?
We're all intelligent people here (I think), and we're all capable of weighing the pros and cons of software. Office 2007 should be no different. If you want to present a good article to me on 2007, I'd like to see all sides of the issue, not just telling me why I need to use it.
I own An Inconvenient Truth (the movie not the book). And I would like to say that although some people still consider the effects that are predicted by that movie to be "a theory," they are hard to disprove. A fact is that we're sitting at carbon levels in our atmosphere above anything ever indicated by ice cores from around the world. Correlating the temperature with carbon levels could be construed as erroneous. Maybe the temperatures have a capping limit? I don't want to think up possibilities because I happen to agree heavily with that correlation.
Now, I might have sat here and ranted and raved about how I watched material in high school or grade school on physics or nature programs that could have been just as theoretical as An Inconvenient Truth but I'm not going to. Why? Well, there were two points in the movie that I didn't care for. One was the election campaign. The other was Gore's son's near death experience. These are political and emotional issues. They do not belong in science nor do they belong being taught in a classroom setting that is centered on science. Politics class? Psychology class? Maybe. But I would really wish he had stuck to the facts and used that valuable time that he had my undivided attention to counter some arguments I've heard against his movie.
I have tried to keep an open mind about this issue for both sides. Gore's movie certainly swayed me, I'm not ashamed or afraid to admit that. The fact is that it's a political issue no matter how much science is involved. If parents don't want it taught to their children, that's fine. I've bought the movie twice (once for me, once for my sister), the word will get out someway somehow.
You know, I was thinking about this the other day. When I tried an online PHP tutorial a while ago, it turned out that it was trying to get me to use an upload.php file to put files on your webserver to try out. Tsk tsk, lazy developers!
Now, the tutorial showed me this but I'm sure nobody uses it in real life, right? Well, explain this then!
Now you may be able to convince me that some are fairly safe. That they check file type and all that jazz. Problem is that I know not everyone is being safe.
I know this doesn't nearly cover this issue at all... but for some reason in my mind I associate this upload script with PHP. Is it taught to everyone? I'm not sure, having received no formal training. I guess this is just anecdotal evidence of some lazy developers in PHP. But can you really criticize a language for its users being stupid? Probably since I've seen arguments all over about which language is "safer" than others.
Really, this is a great step towards "Cyberspace" á la Snow Crash. Open Source and, eventually, Open Standars will vastly spur development of this technology.
I'm generally positive about this move also. However, I played Second Life for a couple weeks back when it was coming out and, it's quite clear that Linden Dollars are directly equivalent to USD in some ratio. Now, one thing I've learned about MMORPGs like World of Warcraft & Ultima Online is that the client needs to be protected. What better way to protect it than to open source it, right? While I am of that opinion when it comes to other software, I feel that this just presents many problems for the server side of things. From the article,
But now, says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale, independent programmers will be able to "modify it, fire it up and sign on with it." The company gave Fortune exclusive access to executives in advance of the change.
Ok, so this is good unless hackers figure out how to modify the code to just perpetually make them Linden dollars. This isn't a combat game and position hacks really wouldn't do anything for you since you can fly anywhere in the game anyway. But I'm still a bit worried about people being able to look at the code of the client and abuse some action or property that is left responsible to the client and, in this manner, they gain an edge or amass Linden dollars.
Perhaps my fears are unfounded but I would imagine that the servers would be heavily taxed if everything was going on server side. I mean, let's say you make a product. It's possible this creation process is left to your client and then the server is informed of the new object and persists it. Well, wouldn't it be profitable to make a client that just keeps notifying the server of new objects that sell well in the world? I'm not too clear on the crafting process in Second Life but I imagine it takes resources.
I've heard a lot of comparisons of Second Life to Snow Crash but I'm not sold yet on this step being purely progress forward. I don't even think I could think of server software that could handle all possible clients without the processing and network traffic getting exponential.
ICM also mentioned the collaboration with International Foundation for Online Responsibility.
As the article notes, the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR) is not a separate organization. Nor is it in anyway committed to online responsibility of any other nature than asking and/or requiring porn sites register in the XXX TLD.
ICM created IFFOR with the sole intention of having the regulation of porn sites run by a community rather than a company. The name is impressive but the goals of it seem rather specific. You can look at this two ways, ICM really wants porn regulated and easily blocked because they're thinking of the children. The other angle is that ICM wants domain registration moneys. Both can be correct and most likely are.
... some statements which may sound quite unusual from mainstream press, especially if targeted to home users: 'Using a non-Windows-based PC may be one defense against these programs, known as malware...
I don't find it that unusual. I mean, I recall a bunch of articles in other newspapers talking about and recommending Firefox. I've also read many magazines & seen television news on the lack of viruses on an Apple.
I must admit that initially I was a bit humored by the idea that a New York Times author had a right to caution me about computer usage. But when I looked up his credentials, he seems to be a qualified and experienced tech writer who probably has good advice for the general public. Granted, his last recommendation: "Don't click if someone offers you something too good to be true. It is." worries me that people may be wary of certain open source projects but in the end, I'd agree that I'd tell my sister and friends just not to install anything and to ask me for specific links to programs that solve problems or fill needs.
In the end, it's a very short article and doesn't provide a very comprehensive picture of security for a home user. You may think its news that Mr. Markoff decided to push people away from Microsoft but he's only telling you the facts about the numbers. You won't have as many problems with Linux but there's no way your daughter's iPod will work with iTunes Music Store on your computer anymore. If he wanted to make this a notable article, he should have delved into trade offs and better coverage of issues.
So Markoff doesn't like the benefits of running Microsoft software. So what?
This is "the dirty secret" of many large philanthropies, said Paul Hawken, an expert on socially beneficial investing who directs the Natural Capital Institute, an investment research group. "Foundations donate to groups trying to heal the future," Hawken said in an interview, "but with their investments, they steal from the future."
I'm sure that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had good intentions when supporting firms such as Eni. Some people might call this the price of industry. They might point at the industrial revolution that the west went through with mills and plants galore. But the key difference is that these people aren't suffering for their future. They aren't building an infrastructure or priming their economy. Because the firms running these plants are most likely foreign based. Meaning that the profits are probably shipped outside of the country. If the company was setting up jobs & providing services and money in the economy, then I'd almost be tempted to overlook the asthma & health problems associated with these companies. The problem is that I'm almost certain none of that wealth is returning to the local community.
Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation gives away at least 5% of its worth every year, to avoid paying most taxes. In 2005, it granted nearly $1.4 billion. It awards grants mainly in support of global health initiatives, for efforts to improve public education in the United States, and for social welfare programs in the Pacific Northwest.
And that's the problem. It's run like a business when it's supposed to be losing money. In today's world, it's easy to make money with more money. And certain foundations take advantage of that. I'm sure the Gates' foundation found it lucrative to invest in companies like Eni. After all, the company is avoiding environmental limitations imposed in its home country or the United States. And, in this manner, the foundation stays wealthy. Never losing money but always apparently "helping" people.
You still see the Gates Foundation doing good things but why is it that so many foundations of insurmountable wealth are somehow ignorant of the economic problems they persist for those they try to help?
Slashdot Mirror
Since many people have been making fun of me for posting this, I'm going to go ahead and point out that soon one of the most common computers in the world will be the OLPC. Now, my parents are still stuck on a phone line so when I visit them I use Google. And I definitely see a difference. I suspect that the people using OLPCs will be using simply the search engine that is fastest for them. They will have low bandwidth & little, slow memory.
So, yeah, I think my initial argument was valid. Now, you might say that they don't want people with no money using their search engines (what ads will they click?) or that these people will probably speak Swahili or another non-English language, but I contend that having the traffic will reflect your market share. And in the end, the image as "the penultimate search engine" is the only thing that matters to these guys.
http://www.google.com/
- 501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
IE6: 15,524k
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing
IE6: 15,896k
http://www.yahoo.com/
IE6: 29,492k
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=testing&fr=yfp-t
IE6: 25,848k
I don't want this to be a browser war, I want this to be an analysis of these search engines. In IE6, Yahoo fares even worse. The ratio ranges from 1:2 on the homepage to 3:5 on a random search.
In my opinion, any unsolicited advertising I didn't ask for is treated the same way--as spam. It's ignored by me. And I would think that, given any past/present/future communication medium, spam will be there. Those flyers you get in the mail about crap you never asked for? Spam. Those phone calls from telemarketers? Spam. Those ads on TV & Radio for products you're not interested in? Spam. Those mails & whispers from gold sellers in Warcraft? Spam. The only reason e-mail spam is the most prevalent is that one person can produce near infinite amounts of it.
I don't care if it's a legitimate business trying to send me a flyer about a new sale. If I didn't sign up for the flyer, I DON'T WANT IT IN MY MAILBOX. It congests traffic & destroys the quality of my experience when using e-mail. If legitimate businesses are only sending mail to customers who declared they wanted it (not tricked by having a pre-selected radio button on the bottom of a checkout form, I mean legit), then they shouldn't be marked as spam.
My proposed solution to businesses that are legitimately sending out information and flyers is to only offer them to repeat customers. And, on top of that, require them to take the initiative to sign up for it. Don't include it in a checkout process--something else is going on there, that's not the place to advertise it. Have a small area of your home page with an icon linked to signing up for the mailer. And make it easy to remove one's self from this. That way, people will have to make an effort to get it and you won't be 'accidentally' flagged as spam!
Yahoo! will display that box for any search engine, try "msn search" or "ask.com" and I personally wouldn't use the words "thoughtful" or "cutsie" to describe it. It's just selective advertising. And--like nearly all forms of advertising--I hate it.
Considering that www.yahoo.com takes about 5,000k more memory than www.google.com in my Firefox browser, it's obvious to me which one I use by default. Now with the search box in the upper right being able to link to either of them, I still find that Yahoo!'s returned results has a larger memory footprint than Google's.
I would imagine that Max's design could use the blades to pump the water and run it through coils that the air passes through. Like a dehumidifier, it would extract the water and drip it into a basin.
Well, I know trees consume a lot of water (tens of gallons a day) so these windmills would have to do a lot. But I'm not sure how that would improve local rainfall. It may be a way to augment local rainfall but in no way would it improve it. Trees are known to improve water quality but I think they actually take away from the water table and increase evaporation. I think that final statement is one to attract venture capitalists and government workers than to spread the truth.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. My father often worked from 4 AM to 9 PM so I didn't see much of him. Occasionally, there'd be an auction in the summer when I didn't have school and it'd be on a Saturday when I wasn't needed on other farms picking rock or bailing hay. And I'd get to come along and sit in silence with my dad as he mulled over screeders, forms & other utensils dealing with his trade, cement. If the price was right, we'd pick up boxes of old coins and I'd get to flip through them--funny how you could find 500 mercury dimes (truly assorted) for 10 cents apiece! Now that was $50 (1990's money) well spent.
And now we come to the sandwiches. Every time I went one (no matter where it was), they would sell BBQ sandwiches for 50 cents. They were very sweet and the meat was often real meat. At the time, I don't think I was used to something that wasn't ground chuck or hot dogs. My dad wolfed them down like god himself had cooked them. My dad was a trash compactor. I liked food, but probably half as many things as he did. I've slowly come around and now eat all the horrible things he used to--pickled jalepenos, sardines straight from the can, eggs cooked in bacon grease, egg coffee, oatmeal with various things mixed into it, bratwurst, etc. And the weird thing is that I now love them (although I have not had lutefisk that I've liked yet). What I use to look at with disgust I now find myself craving. I think my dad was the same way at a young age, I'm not sure why.
So, in the end, you're right. They probably are the best BBQ sandwiches out there, I just didn't realize it at the time. I had been used to institutionalized food at school or cheap ground meat and found the texture and taste of the real thing scary. And this completes my offtopic post, mod away.
Am I the only one failing to see the damage done here?
Ok, so I've used eBay and I know there's a "Reserve Price" option for an auction. You set it when you start the auction and if the bids never crest that benchmark, you are under no obligation to provide product/service for amount tendered.
Now, that said, I will concede that a "Reserve Not Yet Met" sign on an auction will cause me to over look an auction. I feel less like I'm getting a deal if that phrase is staring me down. I will also mention that the more bids on an auction the more desirable it is to me (childish, I know, but hey I'm human).
Now, on the other hand, if I were an seller, I could think of a thousand ways to simulate bids. Configure a friend's computer on the other side of the country to forward my internet traffic, for one. And then the cat and mouse game between eBay and I would begin. And what would happen? eBay would have to spend a lot of time investigating this stuff. A lot of time and resources. Only to do what? Send me a nastygram asking me to use Reserve Prices next time? Place a black star next to my name to let bidders know I've been known to use shill bids? Social stigmas of some other sort?
In the end, who cares? eBay should keep it in their TOS & simply let people know that professional seller often practice this. You're not going to find the same deals on eBay that you'd find at some middle of nowhere country farm house liquidation auction where you have to show up in person and stomach 8 hours of farm tools and the worst BBQ lunch sandwiches you've ever tasted.
As with most lists, I've got some nitpicking to do.
... yet.
All the large companies I've worked for don't care about world wide web search engines. Those engines used by the populace with the revenue coming from ads or 'paid search' or some indirect service business model. Now, a lot of companies are interested in Enterprise Search Engines and would pay a lot of money directly to a search engine company to come in and set up the technology to do intranet searches.
The engine we currently use at my fortune 500 company sucks. I mean it is the worst. I would rather have a blindfold on with stumps for hands trying to type in an estimation of the internal IP address than use our search engine. That said, I have been told that we investigated using "Google Technology" although my superiors soon found that it wasn't at all better than what we already had. And so I've heard of a few others that have doubted Google's ability to dominate in a closed domain. They are clearly the winners in an open domain internet search but I haven't seen anyone take advantage of it as well internally
So while the external market may be broken down 99.99 to 0.01, the internal enterprise search side isn't that lopsided.
Two engines that I've used and found to be novel ideas are BrightPlanet's Deep Query Manager and Collexis (NIH demo). DQM is able to extract data from databases that are available through search on the local page but are not indexed by Google. DQM has you create jobs since they take so long to run. Collexis can process raw text and fingerprint it, then compare that fingerprint to documents that have been fingerprinted quickly. Two ideas that Google, MSN & Yahoo! don't really cover. I find it odd that a site like Yoople (what appears to be a slow German Google) made it on this list but not DQM.
Examples:
- "level 60 epic gear warrior for sale" => "leveling services to get you a epic gear warrior"
- "5000 gold on Thunderlord" => "the five days of playing time it takes me to get you 5000 gold"
- "1337 item" => "time it took me to farm this item and give it to you"
I mean, are they safe guarding against this also? Because, in the end, what's wrong with selling people your time or services to them? Once they complete the service, you pay them. I don't know how they could find some way around this or tell which auctions for services need to be revoked.That's beside the point, though. Once Jack finds out that there is some person somewhere acting unlawfully against him, all civil laws and the Geneva Conventions will be ignored in his quest to find them. With in the first hour of Bauer's angerment, he will see the news and say "damn it!" then proceed to use his ties with Rupert Murdoch to gain access to Larry Page's dog, Foo-Foo. Using CTU personnel that are risking their own jobs to do it, he will find Larry's home address. 20 minutes into the episode, Bauer will have interrogated Foo-Foo and have the dog's head in a basket and be in route to Larry's home.
Meanwhile, the terorrist ECOTotal will be sitting on the couch munching on Dorritos laughing at a family on Geraldo.
At the half way point, Jack knocks on Larry's door as an innocuous deliveray boy carrying a sidearm and a basket dripping with blood. When Larry opens the door, Jack throws the poodle's head at him and pushes him inside with a gun to Larry's head. Interrogation and dialogue of the lowest calibre ensues. Larry Page is left unable to father children.
Meanwhile, ECOTotal is looking on eBay for their new SLR lens.
Jack interrogates Larry to a bloody pulp and finds out that ECOTotal is really a 16 year old high school student dabbling in photography and computer video processing.
The clock is ticking but by the end of the episode the Muslim terrorist ECOTotal is dead and the Chinese government is involved for some reason
--
Does anyone else see this over the top action as becoming laughable as Walker, Texas Ranger? I mean, the last tag line I heard on a Fox commercial was "All hail the power of Bauer!" What the hell?
The most interesting things from that product sheet: And I personally think the most important aspect of this weapon is that it fills the gap between shout and shoot which is a big thing when you think about it.
These zip ties cost maybe 10 or 20 cents each. They are not fool proof. And the way in which you get the human into the physical position to apply the zip ties is a problem an engineer has yet to solve. But if you're telling me that this is too expensive. Or that, in the aftermath of the war, the individual (who at no time had any risk save maybe a broken arm through failed cooperation) will sue you. I will have to laugh. Have you priced bombs or even arms and ammunition recently? Not cheap. And through the use of those, the alternative is death. You can't put a price on life.
Well if that sentence doesn't send a chill down my spine, I don't know what does. If you're using that as an actual retort to my original statement, I certainly am confused. Are you suggesting we kill them all because they'll be silent afterwards? Sounds like a war crime which is probably something I'd fear more than a "human rights ruckus". Wasn't that the idea behind the My Lai Massacre? With the most recent Iraq war, hopefully we'll realize that our image to the rest of the world is just as important as our arsenal when entering a conflict.
I'm not suggesting we use this in a civil setting or time of peace in our own society or anywhere. I consider even this an extreme measure only to be used in times of war.
I don't care if we're talking about Morocco, I hold all governments to a high standard in this modern world. Oh, well, Singapore has a history of sneezing at human rights, so I'll let them slide? No way. If anything, we need to be more critical of them.
And I will assert that oftentimes the reason they feel they were doing the right thing is because of the deaths of people they loved from prior conflicts with their enemies. The trick here is to minimize the deaths and expose those causing the conflicts for what they really are. If you can't expose them to their own people, than maybe you shouldn't be there in the first place. Imagine if we found every Al-Queda member and marked them and made publicly known to everyone around them that they were part of an organization responsible for the deaths of innocent men, women & children, surely their families and societies would hold them as murderers. In our society, when your brother is murdered and you murder the person responsible, you are still tried for murder. Just because they did a crime does not give you the right to replicate the crime on them. And I think a lot of societies today agree with this or should come around to realizing that you can't let people murder each other. Justice & the truth are the only answers.
I don't understand why the summary uses the phrase "destroy targets." Honestly, I was thinking that a while ago, the United States should be prioritizing weapons that disable humans through means other than chemical or lethal implementations.
... and yet we are still vexed and taunted by a rag-tag terrorist organization. It's not a matter of flexing your muscle anymore, it's not a matter of dropping a nuke or making an example--I believe that it's a matter of being able to subdue elements inside and expose them for the evils and crimes they commit. Bring justice to them & let them live in shame for what they've done.
Every time someone is killed by a US soldier (or even UN peacekeeper for that matter), more enemies of the United States are bred. It doesn't matter what the conditions were or the whether or not the rule of engagement were followed.
I understand this is Singapore issuing the challenge, but I would like to see robots (in any format) capable of navigating buildings and hogtying humans without injuring them. The robots themselves may be at risk but the unknown targets inside could be detained and processed under law. Make them infra red or heat sensing so they can operate in the dark. But I am strong believer that combat needs to move away from lethal harm to the individual. More importantly, you would remove the lethal harm to our own troops. Wars are no longer solved through death. What seems to be prolific in today's world is something the Native Americans called a "Mourning War" where you kill my brother so I kill two of yours and the problem compounds upon itself. There was some sort of mental shift after 1914 where you didn't just destroy a force and the country bowed to you. Each side has put themselves on a pedestal and, as a result, even the populace believes they are right or correct.
I heard once someone say that the only way to end conflict these days was total elimination of one side of the conflict. They weren't suggesting the implementation of that or genocide, they were merely pointing out the conundrums that exist over pieces of land like the Gaza Strip.
What does Singapore hope to accomplish with this challenge? Why do they think that wars of the future will still be bent on how lethal your weapons are? Can't they see that the United States has more and better lethal weapons than any other organization in the world
And I'll bet these people are a little less glued to their televisions than they were three years ago. And instead of going to the movies or getting hammered at a bar, they might find an online game to be a bit more entertaining.
The obvious downside is that I'm sure that some people are probably less active than they were before, but not all of them. If you percieve this to be a growing threat or strain on relationships, market software/hardware that makes the PC experience something shared between two people. I know tons of couples (and families) that have two or more computers and they simply play games like WoW together.
Honestly, I don't see anything unhealthy with this trend so long as the people excersize or go out walking/running once a week or more.
Billions of dollars. Big deal. How about we discuss the real costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism and (for some reason) Muslims? Yes, I'm talking about the $1 trillion that the Iraq war is costing us. Then there's the human lives being lost. You can't really put a price tag on those, as you would have to do so your own in the process.
These defense systems for passenger jets are a drop in the bucket compared to the war in Iraq. And, as far as human lives go, you can't even compare the two.
In the end, this movement doesn't even need to be common sense. It just has to be something that counteracts the fear that some Americans live with. I myself am not one of them--but if these politicians that the country elected believe they'll do the trick, then go ahead. I'd much rather see legislation like this being passed than to have our fearless leader attack Iran or North Korea.
To recap, it's not about if it would ever have saved a passenger jet, it's more so that people will think that the security on planes have become impervious to the types of attacks that terrorists have the means to execute.
I suppose now I'll be called an isolationist.
Observer: "Looks like somebody voted for Dammechien Peteersrotmensenpoepjespiestnaaktgeborenzeldenthu
Microsoft isn't holding a gun to your head. You don't have a need for a ribbon. You may find out later that it increases your productivity and then you may learn that it provides a better solution for your problems. But if you're accomplishing your job and tasks with older copies of Office, why do you need 2007? The fact is you probably don't. I myself am quite successful with OpenOffice.org but I don't use the spreadsheet much if at all.
Hell, as long as Microsoft keeps supporting the copy of Office you use, who cares about 2007? Let the early adopters play around with it and work the bugs out. I'll use the ribbon when everyone else is--no reason for me to learn another "J++" Microsoft product only to have that skill be completely useless. Office 2007 will probably be the de facto standard but why pay the price and risk of an early adopter?
We're all intelligent people here (I think), and we're all capable of weighing the pros and cons of software. Office 2007 should be no different. If you want to present a good article to me on 2007, I'd like to see all sides of the issue, not just telling me why I need to use it.
I own An Inconvenient Truth (the movie not the book). And I would like to say that although some people still consider the effects that are predicted by that movie to be "a theory," they are hard to disprove. A fact is that we're sitting at carbon levels in our atmosphere above anything ever indicated by ice cores from around the world. Correlating the temperature with carbon levels could be construed as erroneous. Maybe the temperatures have a capping limit? I don't want to think up possibilities because I happen to agree heavily with that correlation.
Now, I might have sat here and ranted and raved about how I watched material in high school or grade school on physics or nature programs that could have been just as theoretical as An Inconvenient Truth but I'm not going to. Why? Well, there were two points in the movie that I didn't care for. One was the election campaign. The other was Gore's son's near death experience. These are political and emotional issues. They do not belong in science nor do they belong being taught in a classroom setting that is centered on science. Politics class? Psychology class? Maybe. But I would really wish he had stuck to the facts and used that valuable time that he had my undivided attention to counter some arguments I've heard against his movie.
I have tried to keep an open mind about this issue for both sides. Gore's movie certainly swayed me, I'm not ashamed or afraid to admit that. The fact is that it's a political issue no matter how much science is involved. If parents don't want it taught to their children, that's fine. I've bought the movie twice (once for me, once for my sister), the word will get out someway somehow.
Disclaimer, I am not a PHP developer!
... but for some reason in my mind I associate this upload script with PHP. Is it taught to everyone? I'm not sure, having received no formal training. I guess this is just anecdotal evidence of some lazy developers in PHP. But can you really criticize a language for its users being stupid? Probably since I've seen arguments all over about which language is "safer" than others.
You know, I was thinking about this the other day. When I tried an online PHP tutorial a while ago, it turned out that it was trying to get me to use an upload.php file to put files on your webserver to try out. Tsk tsk, lazy developers!
Now, the tutorial showed me this but I'm sure nobody uses it in real life, right? Well, explain this then!
Now you may be able to convince me that some are fairly safe. That they check file type and all that jazz. Problem is that I know not everyone is being safe.
I know this doesn't nearly cover this issue at all
Perhaps my fears are unfounded but I would imagine that the servers would be heavily taxed if everything was going on server side. I mean, let's say you make a product. It's possible this creation process is left to your client and then the server is informed of the new object and persists it. Well, wouldn't it be profitable to make a client that just keeps notifying the server of new objects that sell well in the world? I'm not too clear on the crafting process in Second Life but I imagine it takes resources.
I've heard a lot of comparisons of Second Life to Snow Crash but I'm not sold yet on this step being purely progress forward. I don't even think I could think of server software that could handle all possible clients without the processing and network traffic getting exponential.
ICM created IFFOR with the sole intention of having the regulation of porn sites run by a community rather than a company. The name is impressive but the goals of it seem rather specific. You can look at this two ways, ICM really wants porn regulated and easily blocked because they're thinking of the children. The other angle is that ICM wants domain registration moneys. Both can be correct and most likely are.
I must admit that initially I was a bit humored by the idea that a New York Times author had a right to caution me about computer usage. But when I looked up his credentials, he seems to be a qualified and experienced tech writer who probably has good advice for the general public. Granted, his last recommendation: "Don't click if someone offers you something too good to be true. It is." worries me that people may be wary of certain open source projects but in the end, I'd agree that I'd tell my sister and friends just not to install anything and to ask me for specific links to programs that solve problems or fill needs.
In the end, it's a very short article and doesn't provide a very comprehensive picture of security for a home user. You may think its news that Mr. Markoff decided to push people away from Microsoft but he's only telling you the facts about the numbers. You won't have as many problems with Linux but there's no way your daughter's iPod will work with iTunes Music Store on your computer anymore. If he wanted to make this a notable article, he should have delved into trade offs and better coverage of issues.
So Markoff doesn't like the benefits of running Microsoft software. So what?
You still see the Gates Foundation doing good things but why is it that so many foundations of insurmountable wealth are somehow ignorant of the economic problems they persist for those they try to help?