This company is jockeying to become a social website by allowing its registered users to construct their family trees. The idea seems to be once a vast tree is created the users will be able to find their rich and famous relatives etc. I could imagine this being a very useful service to many people. One of my relatives added my name to his tree and geni created an account in my name and added me to the tree and notified me about it. The email had options to opt out of more spam from them. I had a talk with my relative and expressed my concern about adding vast quantities of private info about our lives to a searchable, indexable database owned by some for-profit company over which we have absolutely no control. As it is the net has so much of our public information. Why compound the problem by adding our private information as well?
Looks like it had an impact and my relative decided to close his account and destroy the tree. But geni claims they need my permission to destroy my account. Is it reasonable for a company that bribes its users with free family tree service in exchange for private info about people to follow a opt-out policy? Shouldn't they be required to notify me and get my consent before they add my name? I have received invites from other social networking sites, but they all require me to create an account first. If I ignore the email, I hope, they would not add me to their databases. Probably they will just sell my email address to spammers and stop with that.
I believe there is neither a technological or legal solution to this problem. A new geni.com could easily be run by Russian mafia outside US borders and thumb their noses at us. I think the only solution is social. They are using social engineering to pry private info from the public by offering some service or the other for free. We need to educate the public about the implications of succumbing to the temptations by them. Today if I set up a stand in a fairground and ask people to give the names, addresses and phone numbers of their relatives and friends in exchange for small token gifts the response would not be overwhelming. Somehow people believe it is wrong to tell strangers such information. But set up the same stand in the internet and people are punching in the email addresses of their friends and relatives like gangbusters. What would it take to educate the public about the menace to privacy these companies pose?
I did my best. I pointed out the liability issues the company has like some stalker tracking down someone hiding in a relative's home or identity thieves making use of the mother's maiden names data etc. Told the company that they must disclose their liability to their investors and to anyone they are trying to sell to. Made it official and made it difficult for the company officers to claim later, "We never anticipated that development". If we keep raising the liability issue with these companies, may be we can get their venture capital to dry up. Just a thought.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
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Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
5. Better Gmail
6. Better GReader (yes, not useful for common joes)
I can hear the cry in the Google headquarters.
Chrome isn't done, till gmail won't run.
The developers asked too much money?
Hasbro was too stingy? Hope they realize their mistake now and offer a decent price to the brothers who developed scrablous.
I am looking for a extra long USB cable extender. It should plug in to the computer in the next room and allow the thingie given by the university to by in my room, allowing me to pretend I am working on a computer, while my friend, (friend? What friend charges 200$ for one lousy test, he is no friend) Venkatasubramaniapalvayantheeswara Rao takes the examn on the other computer.
Why these green/red thingies?
on
Mars In 3D
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The glasses look admittedly geeky but steroscopic projection has come a long way since 1985. Better than even the polarized glasses are the LCD shutter based glasses. They effectively have LCDs that will black out the left eye and then the right eye some 30, 60 or 120 times a second. The glasses are synched with a display that will show left image when left eye lens is clear and right eye's view when right lens is clear. Thus most CAD models and CGI images leap out of your plain LCD display screens.
What is more important almost all the 3D Computer Generated Images have depth information already to do hidden line removal. Thus there are already displays in the market to render any OpenGL or similar input into stereoscopic projection. So yeah, it is getting more and more popular in CAD, CGI worlds.
Sorry don't have time to search and post links to these technologies, but they are easy enough to find using google.
Dear Spam Recipient,
I am the Spam King, and I have hidden 200 million dollars ($200,000,000) in a secret location in the USA. Since I have escaped from the prison and left the country to work for the Russian Mafia , I am not in a position to recover the money from that location. If you will help me recover my money, I will give you 25% of it. Please contact me at ivan@the_terrible.mafia.ru
I don't know why you call my posting disingenuous, we both seem to agree. In your example of storefronts and strip malls, there are other strip malls and storefronts that offer better value to the businesses that rent from them. So the businesses move. The storefront owners who refused to lower the prices lose. If their municipal tax bill is 5000$ and that is why they refused to lower their prices, it is quite reasonable reaction. It is really the municipality killed the businesses, let it take out a bond issue to rehabilitate the affected area.
If a Google competitor offers better prices people will move. It is not like other software houses where if you were to dump MsOffice to switch to OpenOffice (or dump Ansys CAD to switch to Abacus CAD or dump Oracle to switch to SAP) it would incur huge costs and disruption to the business.
How difficult is it for you type MSLive.com instead of Google.com ? There is low switching costs. That tells me the pricing model if Google is probably very fair.
Well, you think you could do it cheaper? Then do it man! That is what the free markets are for. You are free to enter and undercut prices of established players. If you can't, someone else will. If someone else does not, it means things are more complex.
Injecting a bit of html tags does not cost that much. But the value of Google is not merely tacking on bits of html. It is collecting all that data on the net and making it easily available. It costs money. That cost gets amortized over every bit of html it injects in.
I am sorry for your predicament, you want the service at a lower price. But so does every body for everything. As I said earlier, it is a free market. Google does not have a vendor lock or a platform lock on its user base. Any one can compete with Google. There is no switching cost to the user to go from Google to its competitor. If it is pricing the ads too high, it will go out of business. It is not like Microsoft with a defacto monopoly on OS or Office software.
From the article:Don't believe me? Search for "Flash" and you'll see it has zero ads. In a totally free market, that means you have no competition, and thus should be able to bid as low as you want to get your ad to appear. But when you try to create an AdWord for the "Flash" keyword, you'll see it sets the minimum price at $0.10. So even if the market (me) only wants to pay $0.01, it's priced 10x higher than the market (I) will bear. Which is why there are no ads on the "Flash" keyword.
Free market wants to pay zero dollars for an ad? You mean people want to pay more than zero dollars for milk, cereals and bread? Come on! No body wants to pay more than zero dollars for anything. But the other side of the equation is, no body would sell things below the cost of production, at least not for sustained long durations. Google has a minimum bid because that is the cost of production for that ad.
The author displays profound ignorance about economics.
"It's difficult to come up with a faux urine, explained NASA's Jim Lewis, the systems manager overseeing development of Orion's potty. 'That's why we depend on collections.'"
Perfect reason to write a project proposal with a couple of million bucks in budget. All down the drain now with this kind of simple solution. Contractors are not going to be happy.
I concur with the most recent ancestor poster. I object to repeatedly tautologically redundant grandiloquence. I eschew such verbiage diligently. This very response shows you all that I am the very epitome of plain talking simple folk, scratch scratch, the very epitome of rustic linguistics.
I mean if multiple photons arrive at the same time at the detector should they be counted as a single vote or multiple votes? Whatever you say someone or the other would object and eventually it will be decided in the Supreme Court. Counting is quite weird in Florida.
The real sign of success or progress would be when OEMs pre-install FireFox. I don't understand why the OEMs are so timid and still so tied to MSFT.
Imagine what preloading FireFox could do to the brand-differentiation of Dell or HP. Why do they not try this obvious move but insist on fighting on price? What really is in the undisclosed agreements between the big name PC vendors and MSFT? What it would take for them to break out?
The solution is not to establish a huge government bureaucracy to collect and recycle. The way to do it would be to estimate the cost of properly disposing of a product, any product and add it to the purchase price. The collected money would be rewarded as booty to those who do the disposal.
Let us say mattresses, sofas or car batteries will have the disposal fee added to the purchase price. The collected money held by a government chartered but not government run agency. Roving bands of recyclers will grab these items from the curbside, document proper disposal and collect the disposal fees as booty. Any residual value in these items would be additional profit for these disposal companies.
No doubt sellers and manufacturers will resist the idea because they fear any increase in the price will reduce demand. They are right, it will reduce demand. They can't just shirk and saddle the general population with disposal costs either. Why should my tax dollars be used to dispose your car battery? So we should demand a disposal fee tacked on to all items sold that have significant disposal cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like it had an impact and my relative decided to close his account and destroy the tree. But geni claims they need my permission to destroy my account. Is it reasonable for a company that bribes its users with free family tree service in exchange for private info about people to follow a opt-out policy? Shouldn't they be required to notify me and get my consent before they add my name? I have received invites from other social networking sites, but they all require me to create an account first. If I ignore the email, I hope, they would not add me to their databases. Probably they will just sell my email address to spammers and stop with that.
I believe there is neither a technological or legal solution to this problem. A new geni.com could easily be run by Russian mafia outside US borders and thumb their noses at us. I think the only solution is social. They are using social engineering to pry private info from the public by offering some service or the other for free. We need to educate the public about the implications of succumbing to the temptations by them. Today if I set up a stand in a fairground and ask people to give the names, addresses and phone numbers of their relatives and friends in exchange for small token gifts the response would not be overwhelming. Somehow people believe it is wrong to tell strangers such information. But set up the same stand in the internet and people are punching in the email addresses of their friends and relatives like gangbusters. What would it take to educate the public about the menace to privacy these companies pose?
I did my best. I pointed out the liability issues the company has like some stalker tracking down someone hiding in a relative's home or identity thieves making use of the mother's maiden names data etc. Told the company that they must disclose their liability to their investors and to anyone they are trying to sell to. Made it official and made it difficult for the company officers to claim later, "We never anticipated that development". If we keep raising the liability issue with these companies, may be we can get their venture capital to dry up. Just a thought.
6. Better GReader (yes, not useful for common joes)
I can hear the cry in the Google headquarters. Chrome isn't done, till gmail won't run.
I spotted 100 bugs for Vista and All I got was this lousy wristband.
Hi Sanjay Ramaswamy! Funny running into you like this. Don't panic, I am a friend.
The developers asked too much money? Hasbro was too stingy? Hope they realize their mistake now and offer a decent price to the brothers who developed scrablous.
I am looking for a extra long USB cable extender. It should plug in to the computer in the next room and allow the thingie given by the university to by in my room, allowing me to pretend I am working on a computer, while my friend, (friend? What friend charges 200$ for one lousy test, he is no friend) Venkatasubramaniapalvayantheeswara Rao takes the examn on the other computer.
What is more important almost all the 3D Computer Generated Images have depth information already to do hidden line removal. Thus there are already displays in the market to render any OpenGL or similar input into stereoscopic projection. So yeah, it is getting more and more popular in CAD, CGI worlds.
Sorry don't have time to search and post links to these technologies, but they are easy enough to find using google.
Dear Spam Recipient, I am the Spam King, and I have hidden 200 million dollars ($200,000,000) in a secret location in the USA. Since I have escaped from the prison and left the country to work for the Russian Mafia , I am not in a position to recover the money from that location. If you will help me recover my money, I will give you 25% of it. Please contact me at ivan@the_terrible.mafia.ru
If a Google competitor offers better prices people will move. It is not like other software houses where if you were to dump MsOffice to switch to OpenOffice (or dump Ansys CAD to switch to Abacus CAD or dump Oracle to switch to SAP) it would incur huge costs and disruption to the business. How difficult is it for you type MSLive.com instead of Google.com ? There is low switching costs. That tells me the pricing model if Google is probably very fair.
Injecting a bit of html tags does not cost that much. But the value of Google is not merely tacking on bits of html. It is collecting all that data on the net and making it easily available. It costs money. That cost gets amortized over every bit of html it injects in.
I am sorry for your predicament, you want the service at a lower price. But so does every body for everything. As I said earlier, it is a free market. Google does not have a vendor lock or a platform lock on its user base. Any one can compete with Google. There is no switching cost to the user to go from Google to its competitor. If it is pricing the ads too high, it will go out of business. It is not like Microsoft with a defacto monopoly on OS or Office software.
Free market wants to pay zero dollars for an ad? You mean people want to pay more than zero dollars for milk, cereals and bread? Come on! No body wants to pay more than zero dollars for anything. But the other side of the equation is, no body would sell things below the cost of production, at least not for sustained long durations. Google has a minimum bid because that is the cost of production for that ad.
The author displays profound ignorance about economics.
2. Are they bolted on? Any locking mechanisms?
3. Is it easy to climb on to the roof?
4. Do you have good access to a road from the home?
5. When are you planning to take a vacation?
6. Does it have any kind of GPS thingie or Wifi thingie attached that will phone home?
Thanks buddy.
Perfect reason to write a project proposal with a couple of million bucks in budget. All down the drain now with this kind of simple solution. Contractors are not going to be happy.
Didn't a famous violinist forget his 2 million dollar violin in a New York cab?
I believe in Last Thursdayism, you insensitive clod.
I concur with the most recent ancestor poster. I object to repeatedly tautologically redundant grandiloquence. I eschew such verbiage diligently. This very response shows you all that I am the very epitome of plain talking simple folk, scratch scratch, the very epitome of rustic linguistics.
Iridium!
I mean if multiple photons arrive at the same time at the detector should they be counted as a single vote or multiple votes? Whatever you say someone or the other would object and eventually it will be decided in the Supreme Court. Counting is quite weird in Florida.
They keep bragging about something called the Beijing Olympics in NBC. What the hell is Olympics?
... is definitely going to be browser-FORTRAN.
Microwave audio effect? That explains why I keep hearing "90% power... white rice... sensor cook" over and over again.
He was checking you for partial color blindness. Your personal experience might not carry over to general population without color blindness.
Imagine what preloading FireFox could do to the brand-differentiation of Dell or HP. Why do they not try this obvious move but insist on fighting on price? What really is in the undisclosed agreements between the big name PC vendors and MSFT? What it would take for them to break out?
Let us say mattresses, sofas or car batteries will have the disposal fee added to the purchase price. The collected money held by a government chartered but not government run agency. Roving bands of recyclers will grab these items from the curbside, document proper disposal and collect the disposal fees as booty. Any residual value in these items would be additional profit for these disposal companies.
No doubt sellers and manufacturers will resist the idea because they fear any increase in the price will reduce demand. They are right, it will reduce demand. They can't just shirk and saddle the general population with disposal costs either. Why should my tax dollars be used to dispose your car battery? So we should demand a disposal fee tacked on to all items sold that have significant disposal cost.