My sig says "evil is as evil does". I don't care what the economists says they are about, I don't care they profess to believe in, I don't care what they see when look in the mirror. I only care about what they say and do. From where I sit the economist has been the biggest cheerleader for this war in the world. To me advocating a war and making excuses for GW is not about free trade. If anything it's the opposite of free trade, it's waging war to invade and occupy a nation and taking control of their natural resources.
Fair enough. You and The Economist, disagree about the merits of the Iraq invasion.
You don't disagree about President Bush. The Economist endorsed John Kerry in the most recent US Presidential election. The headline was "The incompetent [Bush] or the incoherent [Kerry]?"
I have no idea when their coverage changed from the unquestioning agreement, that caused me to stop reading the publication, to their traditional (dryly humourous) analysis but I started reading again around the time of the EU Constitution debate and feel their coverage is balanced.
At the end of the year they produce a "The Year In..." publication that predicts the possible changes of the next twelve months. In one of these, I forget which, a retiring Economist journalist gave her thoughts on changes in the world and The Economist during her career. Part of the article dwelt on the passionate disagreement there was within The Economist at the time I stopped reading. Memory tells me it was something like "...too close to the current administration..."
When Google first launched they were just like any other startup, cool technology but no profit model. He was determined to have a profitable business and thus Google Adwords was born.
Brin had nothing to do with Google's profitability. Adwords was the initiative of Eric Schmidt.
The only one that comes to mind is "The Economist" (they state quite often that they are "a conservative newspaper.").
Disclaimer - I subscribe to The Economist's online edition, and I think it's a very good publication. (The FT's probably better.:) )
If by 'conservative' you mean ' [USA] conservative republican', I think you're mistaken. The Economist is primarily a 'free trade' supporter. That very often leads to common cause with the political right, but the allegiance is to 'free trade'
Another Disclaimer - I let my print subscription to The Economist lapse during the early part of President GW Bush's first term as US President as I thought they had lost sight of this, and their USA coverage was offering fawning paeans to the White House, rather than the [wry] analysis I was paying for.
The quote below is taken from The Economist's website, so it's their philosophy in their own words.
What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as--more recently--gun control and gay marriage.
Lastly, The Economist believes in plain language. Walter Bagehot, our most famous 19th-century editor, tried "to be conversational, to put things in the most direct and picturesque manner, as people would talk to each other in common speech, to remember and use expressive colloquialisms". That remains the style of the paper today.
Established in 1843 to campaign on one of the great political issues of the day, The Economist remains, in the second half of its second century, true to the principles of its founder. James Wilson, a hat maker from the small Scottish town of Hawick, believed in free trade, internationalism and minimum interference by government, especially in the affairs of the market. Though the protectionist Corn Laws which inspired Wilson to start The Economist were repealed in 1846, the newspaper has lived on, never abandoning its commitment to the classical 19th-century Liberal ideas of its founder.
The Corn Laws, which by taxing and restricting imports of corn made bread expensive and starvation common, were bad for Britain. Free trade, in Wilson's view, was good for everyone. In his prospectus for The Economist, he wrote: "If we look abroad, we see within the range of our commercial intercourse whole islands and continents, on which the light of civilisation has scarce yet dawned; and we seriously believe that free trade, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilisation and morality throughout the world - yes, to extinguish slavery itself."
Wilson's outlook was, therefore, moral, even civilising, but not moralistic. He believed "that reason is given to us to sit in judgment over the dictates of our feelings." Reason convinced him in particular that Adam Smith was right, that through its invisible hand the market benefited profit-seeking individuals (of whom he was one) and society alike. He was himself a manufacturer and wanted especially to influence "men of business". Accordingly, he insisted that all the arguments and propositions put forward in his paper should be subjected to the test of facts. That was why it was called The Economist.
I read somehwere, and I am too lazy to Google it, that debit card fraud took in $44 million in 2003 from around 27,000 people. That's approximately $1600 per person. I can't afford to lose that much and the banks don't seem to care. If you kick up a fuss and manage to get the media's attention then they'll do something about it and reimburse you, but count yourself lucky. At an estimated cost of $500 million to switch Interac to something like the chip and PIN system in the UK they can afford to lose a few customers here and there.
I'd never heard of a "Net promoter score", so I asked Google, and it pointed me to another Businessweek article.
...companies measure customer loyalty by asking one simple question rather than relying on lengthy satisfaction surveys: "On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to your friends or colleagues?"
"net promoter scores,"... [are]... the difference between the percentage of customers who give high responses ("promoters") and those who give low ones ("detractors"),
It sounds like you should take a course in Project Management, and get a handle on how people handle budgeting and resource issues for projects, large and small.
A 2002 Economist article looked at the pebble bed reactors, they described the process as
One advantage of the PBMR is that it can be refuelled continuously. As the fuel burns, the pebbles gradually shuffle down the core, like bubble gums in a sweet dispenser. They drop out of the bottom of the core at a rate of about one a minute, and can then be reinserted at the top if they still contain useful fuel, or replaced if they do not. Eskom say the reactor could be kept running non-stop for six years in this way, unlike a PWR, which has to be shut down every so often for refuelling. Another advantage of the pebble-bed reactor is the helium coolant. Helium conducts heat well--making the reactor efficient--and, unlike water, is not corrosive. Also, it can be fed directly into a turbine, rather than having to pass its energy on via a heat exchanger.
I agree that nuclear energy is probably one of the best choices for the future as coal, natural gas and oil run out, but it's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
The obstacles are essentially political, in the UK they seem to have been overcome.
A year or 18 months ago the idea of new nuclear investment was politically dead. The future was seen to be gas & renewables (principally wind). But the change of the UK to a nett importer of oil/gas as the North Sea fields taper off, coupled with some worrying examples of the perils of relying on imported energy sources, have given nuclear a new lease of life, and currently it looks like the political argumenthas been won, largely thanks to Russia's very public use of natural gas supplies as a political bludgeon.
We currently offer all the major GNU/Linux distributions on our systems; including Debian, Fedora, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE and White Box
Unlike other system builders we offer all GNU/Linux distributions at no charge with our systems and we also sell the retail boxed products as an option
We can offer a degree of customisation for our customers that the large OEMs simply cannot match
We pride ourselves on our customer support - all our technicians are experienced with GNU/Linux support
Customers can communicate directly with the very same technicians that built their systems
We do not use offshore support departments in India!
True. But that's in comparison to other Apple computers -- running Mac OS X. I don't think the low-end Mini will ever go as cheap as a "comparable" Dell.
I'm going to use UK prices because I'm more familiar with them.
The cheapest CRT iMac / eMac was GBP550 ish. This, I always considered, to be priced as a mid-range Dell/HP system. Keyboard, screen and popular software were included.
The PPC-Mini entered a new market. @ GBP 350 it competed with low-end Dell/HP systems. It was a little more expensive, but not a lot, and of course it was prettier.
The Intel-Minis are priced at GBP 450. At that price they are no longer competitive with name brand Celeron machines and if they are intended to replace the eMac then the absence of screen and keyboard means that Apple's entry level system is now more expensive than it was before they introduced their bargin basement Bring Your Own Keyboard And Monitor offering.
Odd.
Given that you can now buy brand name laptops for GBP 500 ish, the intel Mini looks, to me, to be mis-priced. But then I don't sell computers:-)
The only reason people buy Apple computers is because of the software.
Oh yes, now back to hardware. Is that cheap Dell box two and one half inches tall and six inches square and compleatly silent
The mini is Apple's entry level machine. Price is its single most important feature.
The PPC mini was priced to compete with Celeron wintels and by all accounts it sold well. I find it odd that Apple decided to abandon this price bracket to go with the new Intel Solo chip rather than keep the price that was selling for them, and use a Celeron.
Apple would be asking its customers to spend hundreds of dollars (?) on a piece of hardware that would be doing more or less the same job as the DVD player they already own.
To be fair, in order for them to become compulsory, they'll have to go back and get legislation passed through both houses. Of course, anyone who gets their passport renewed will be required to get an ID card anyway (which in the UK is a large percentage of the population) so they'll be compulsory in everything but name.
The gov't is quite open that the ID cards scheme is intended, long term, to be compulsory.
Even the opponents of the scheme say that once begun, there will be political pressure on any future gov't to make the scheme compulsory, to justify the sunk costs (estimates vary from GBP 5 billion to GBP 19 billion).
This isn't going to do anything the passport can't do.
Yes it is.
There will be a physical ID card, but there will also be a National Identity Register.
The vision is that whenever the ID card is presented, whenever you access state services, it will be verified against the National Identity Register and a record of that transaction will be added to the register so that the benevolent state knows where you are, and have been, every minute of the day.
A9 also uses Google search results. At the bottom of the search results it says, "Search results enhanced by Google. Results also provided by a9.com and Alexa."
I didn't know that.
From that, however, it isn't entirely clear if A9 is just using google's search results or if they actually are doing some of their own search voodoo.
I tried a search for marzipan recipe the results matched a google.com search as you suggest so Alexa's contribution would seem to be the
people who visit this page also visit..
that you see if you mouse over the "site info" button.
Google may collect information about web pages that you are viewing when the advanced functionality is enabled. However, this advanced functionality is optional, and can be easily disabled and re-enabled at any time (by selecting "Privacy Information..." in the Toolbar's "Google" menu.)
So Google appear to be interested in analysing individual browser's web trails, and collecting data, already.
So Google is - uses as a ranking mechanism how many people link to an article..... Alexa was also based around meta data. It was people who visited this site also visited this site.... So using people's trails as a mechanism of finding what's important out of the net.
So perhaps pagerank will be / is informed by analysing individual websurfers?
Amazon (who own A9/Alexa) use the same technology to suggest purchase Recommendations to you.
From my experience Experts Exchange lets you see all answers to questions, but you can't post your own question unless you register. Posting questions is also free I believe, but you get better results if you offer a bounty [-- totally based on anecdotal evidence. I've never used EE to post questions before.]
I've never used it either, but it looks quite clever.
If you don't register, you browse an ad sponsored site, and you can't ask questions.
If you register, to gain the premium/expert benefits of an ad free site and the ability to ask questions, you either pay, or qualify as an expert by answering some questions.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a reason PHP scripting is included in the cheapest packages and the others aren't?
Fair enough. You and The Economist, disagree about the merits of the Iraq invasion.
You don't disagree about President Bush. The Economist endorsed John Kerry in the most recent US Presidential election. The headline was "The incompetent [Bush] or the incoherent [Kerry]?"
I have no idea when their coverage changed from the unquestioning agreement, that caused me to stop reading the publication, to their traditional (dryly humourous) analysis but I started reading again around the time of the EU Constitution debate and feel their coverage is balanced.
At the end of the year they produce a "The Year In..." publication that predicts the possible changes of the next twelve months. In one of these, I forget which, a retiring Economist journalist gave her thoughts on changes in the world and The Economist during her career. Part of the article dwelt on the passionate disagreement there was within The Economist at the time I stopped reading. Memory tells me it was something like "...too close to the current administration..."
Brin had nothing to do with Google's profitability. Adwords was the initiative of Eric Schmidt.
Quote below is taken from The Register
Schmidt is Google's Chairman and CEO, Brin is president in charge of technology.
Disclaimer - I subscribe to The Economist's online edition, and I think it's a very good publication. (The FT's probably better.:) )
If by 'conservative' you mean ' [USA] conservative republican', I think you're mistaken. The Economist is primarily a 'free trade' supporter. That very often leads to common cause with the political right, but the allegiance is to 'free trade'
Another Disclaimer - I let my print subscription to The Economist lapse during the early part of President GW Bush's first term as US President as I thought they had lost sight of this, and their USA coverage was offering fawning paeans to the White House, rather than the [wry] analysis I was paying for.
The quote below is taken from The Economist's website, so it's their philosophy in their own words.
There was an article about the effect of the new PIN system on (UK) card fraud the other day.
I'd never heard of a "Net promoter score", so I asked Google, and it pointed me to another Businessweek article.
If you're in the UK, the British Computer Society (BCS) offers some qualifications in this area.
A 2002 Economist article looked at the pebble bed reactors, they described the process as
That's not a sign of lack of creative writer's, that's a sign of risk averse capital investment. The studio's are looking for predictable returns.
The obstacles are essentially political, in the UK they seem to have been overcome.
A year or 18 months ago the idea of new nuclear investment was politically dead. The future was seen to be gas & renewables (principally wind). But the change of the UK to a nett importer of oil/gas as the North Sea fields taper off, coupled with some worrying examples of the perils of relying on imported energy sources, have given nuclear a new lease of life, and currently it looks like the political argument has been won, largely thanks to Russia's very public use of natural gas supplies as a political bludgeon.
From the article, "you'll soon figure out that competing solely on price is a fool's game"
Quote below taken from DNUK's website
I'm going to use UK prices because I'm more familiar with them.
The cheapest CRT iMac / eMac was GBP550 ish. This, I always considered, to be priced as a mid-range Dell/HP system. Keyboard, screen and popular software were included.
The PPC-Mini entered a new market. @ GBP 350 it competed with low-end Dell/HP systems. It was a little more expensive, but not a lot, and of course it was prettier.
The Intel-Minis are priced at GBP 450. At that price they are no longer competitive with name brand Celeron machines and if they are intended to replace the eMac then the absence of screen and keyboard means that Apple's entry level system is now more expensive than it was before they introduced their bargin basement Bring Your Own Keyboard And Monitor offering.
Odd.
Given that you can now buy brand name laptops for GBP 500 ish, the intel Mini looks, to me, to be mis-priced. But then I don't sell computers :-)
The mini is Apple's entry level machine. Price is its single most important feature.
The PPC mini was priced to compete with Celeron wintels and by all accounts it sold well. I find it odd that Apple decided to abandon this price bracket to go with the new Intel Solo chip rather than keep the price that was selling for them, and use a Celeron.
Weirdly enough, that has worked in the past.
Vinyl > CD
Video > DVD
But I agree the idea is a bit loopy
News to me.
Then the voices in your head are wrong.
The most common webhost linux flavour is Fedora Core, which is not to be confused with the commercially supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The gov't is quite open that the ID cards scheme is intended, long term, to be compulsory.
Even the opponents of the scheme say that once begun, there will be political pressure on any future gov't to make the scheme compulsory, to justify the sunk costs (estimates vary from GBP 5 billion to GBP 19 billion).
Yes it is.
There will be a physical ID card, but there will also be a National Identity Register.
The vision is that whenever the ID card is presented, whenever you access state services, it will be verified against the National Identity Register and a record of that transaction will be added to the register so that the benevolent state knows where you are, and have been, every minute of the day.
Nothing to fear. Move along.
The National Insurance number is used by the health service, the Treasury and many other state services. It is unique to an individual.
When the welfare state was established the existing, wartime, ID Card scheme was used to bootstrap the new system.
The impression I got from the article was was that he was pointing out the benefits you get from team work, and the usefulness of dtrace.
I didn't know that.
I tried a search for marzipan recipe the results matched a google.com search as you suggest so Alexa's contribution would seem to be the
that you see if you mouse over the "site info" button.
If you look at Google's privacy policy for the Google Toolbar we see
So Google appear to be interested in analysing individual browser's web trails, and collecting data, already.
A9 grew out of Alexa. Cringely interviewed Alexa's founder who pointed out a difference in Alexa's and Google's approach
So perhaps pagerank will be / is informed by analysing individual websurfers?
Amazon (who own A9/Alexa) use the same technology to suggest purchase Recommendations to you.
Cringely interviewed Brewster Kahle - the man who created Alexa.
Google Adwords uses MySQL.
I've never used it either, but it looks quite clever.