akadruid

Surely the ethical way of dealing with negative reviews is to improve what you are doing, not to drown out your critics and ignore your problems?

tl;dr: he was doing something constructive but not making money, so he's decided to emulate a guy who sells "how to paste over online criticism" videos.

If the writer is reading this thread: please don't. Your integrity and self-respect have value too.

At least the counselor got him a job. What is strange is that he apparently gave up on his job hunt despite being underemployed in his new position.

I wonder at some of these stories I read where people spend months looking for work as if it were some kind of game. Do they not eat or live under a roof? How do they pay for those letters and faxes?

When I left school, I temped in warehouses, factories, offices, whatever, while I was hunting for a programming job. When I lost my programming job some years later, I temped at a bank until I got another programming job.

I think free movement between governing systems would do a lot to weed out some bad ones and make them all more competitive. Your big problem is of course geography - you couldn't, for example, allow tens of millions of badly governed people to migrate into a small country, as they would destroy what made it desirable. But if you could vote to put your physical area under the control of a more desirable government, that would be a great leveller. Imagine you lived in Darfur and you could vote for the Swedish government instead of your own. It'd be a bit of a pain for the succesful government to adjust to ruling a culturely, geographically, and economically different area, but in the longer run, well managed governments would probably benifit from the increased territory, population and diversity.

I can barely see the difference even after the explanation; but it's a beautiful thing to watch perfectionists creating a truly great tool, and making it free. They really are making the world a better place.

Hence cheap and effective justice being the improvement.

Justice that benefits only one party is of course no justice.

In the long term, this actually bodes well for society.

Previously, the reason for not collecting debt was due to the higher cost of legal action, resulting in people using a variety of methods from simple reminders and payment plan offers, to intimidiation and threats.

Now that legal action is cheaper, courts will be requiring much more is done to ensure accuracy and fair representation. This will still be fairly cheap (things like ensuring the bank's data dump includes all the relevant documents, and verifying the records that make up the chain of custody for the debt, which are all just electrontic transactions), resulting in the ladder becoming firstly reminders and secondly a fair and accurate hearing in court, with hopefully no resorting to threats and intimidation.

Cheap and effective justice is something to be praised, and in this case will eventually reduce the cost of credit too - and increasing better informed consumers of credit mean a competitive marketplace, passing the savings on to where they will boost the economy overall.

Many of the questions that confused the author are down to language or cultural issues I think.

A "C Form" is a common name for a tax form in several countries, including India. Also short for concessional form.

CA is likely Chartered Accountant, an important accountancy qualification in several countries.

How can I get office/windows/etc for free: If you're new on the internet, it's going to be difficult to understand how such expensive software is ubiquitous. Office in particular costs 6 months salary in many places of the world (G8 countries: can you imagine spending $20k on an office suite?) Plus of course there are both valid, and copyright-infringing methods of getting these products for free.

How can I view a street? Google Street View - a valid question if you've seen/heard of it but don't have the name.

how can i copyright a website: It seems almost no-one understands copyright well, and copyright notices are everywhere on websites (despite copyright being automatic)

how can i get the new facebook 2010: related to phased rollouts of new features, or some scam or hoax, or both.

what version of windows 7/ office 2007 do I have? They mean which edition, Basic/Ultimate etc. Not a stupid question at all.

how can i start share business?: How can I start investing in stocks/shares.

how can i tell how tall my son will be: It's actually easy to calculate a fairly accurate prediction from the parent's height, and height is pretty important in many cultures.

It seems the https equivilent of this page is missing, so if you're running EFF's HTTPS-Everywhere add-on, you'll need to disable it via the Options button in Add-ons.

This still doesn't work. For the flattr buttons to be there, there must be mugs paying for the system. Those mugs are doing it becuase they think they are going to be taking money out - but, like any pyramid scheme, only the people at the top of the pile will make any money. How long do you think those mugs will keep paying in without getting anything out?

I'm willing to go on record with the following predictions:

1. No big site will get enough money to be worth the pixels the button takes up. 2. No small site will get back as much as they put in. 3. The number of people who pay in without expecting to get anything out will be essentially zero. 4. Flattr will shut down entirely within 2 years from today.

You're dreaming. There is no pool of millions of non-creators willing to jump through hoops and sign up for a recurring monthly for your article. And there never will be an article worth doing that for, and they will never join. The only people who will ever join are the pie-in-the-sky dreamers who desperately want this to work on their blog. It's just a giant pyramid scheme. The suckers are the blog owners, and the lies to make them join are the millions on non-creators who will never exist.

The perfect pyramid scheme - require all the marks to pay to get paid, and promise them other mugs will keep paying in.

Of course no-one outside the pyramid will pay (we've proved paywalls always fail and donate buttons won't pay for their pixels), and the lot will collapse when the marks realise they've lost their audience for a few cents.

Not as evil as those "pay to bid" auction scams, but it has promise.

The problem is that chatrouletter was a novelty. The bored teenagers are already moving on to the next thing. I don't even want to imagine what you'd try and sell to an audience of a few dozen exhibitionists.

tl;dr: converting the darker parts of the web into a viable business model is hard.

Mind you, I'd say chatroulette's problem is not obscene content, but the fact that it's a fad for bored teenagers.

this article is a good demonstration of the all-or-nothing big-government requirements of high speed rail.

In the two countries which have working, effective, high speed rail networks (France and Japan) it cost billions, took many years and required 100% government commitment to achieve. Only a few countries have the political setup to achieve something like that.

Of course it's different. We sell and support (very expensive) software on Linux and Windows. If our customers thought the Linux dev team could stop us releasing updates, they'd be looking to migrate to more reliable platform sooner rather than later.

This article bugs me a bit, since it seems to be a "Big Tech Hates Africa" article, whereas I think the reality is more "all large companies are spending minimal resources on poorer areas of the world". It certainly does make Africa look a left out on a map, but large areas of Asia are equally not targeted by large companies, but the geo-political layout is different.

While it is odd that so many large tech companies haven't highlighted their presence in Africa, there are some notable omissions from that list. Microsoft, for example, have clearly listed contact points and targeted support pages all over Africa, including Kenya[1], and SAP has a number of operations across Africa[2].

The reason for Google not listing their Kenya office seems to be to do with the type of office it is[3]. They do have quite a few jobs listed in both Kenya, and the author's own city: Kampala in Uganda[4].

Perhaps when the tech industry matures, we'll see the kind of coverage a large manufacturing company has[5].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/phone/contact.aspx?countr... [2] http://www.sap.com/contactsap/countries/index.epx [3] http://whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-goog... [4] http://www.google.com/jobs/africa/ [5] http://toyota-africa.com/cars/new_cars/index.asp

I enjoyed the article; I would also normally enjoy the images alongside it, but in this case I found them really jarring and the fact that the article does not even make any mention of why they are there which left me wondering if I'd missed some subtle point. In the end I think they just spoiled the article.

I've been surprised just how long "amateur" server rooms survive cooling failure. Mostly becuase the densities tend to be lower, but also becuse you just get lucky with the way they're built. At our current office we had a server room total cooling failure (due to copper piping stolen off the back of the building...) and although it got very hot (and very loud) in there, we didn't get any machine failures or thermal shutdowns. But you could feel the heat radiating out of the walls the rooms around and above the server room were noticably hotter. If we'd been an older building or the server room had been built for physical security, the thicker walls would have trapped the heat and it would be a different story.

I don't think this is workable. First off, it means that everyone requires a single, authoratative identity on the web, which search engines and content grabbers can reference. Second, there's nothing in it for the search engines/content grabbers. Any service that gives people sweeping power to delete content is at a disadvantage to those who don't. And third, there are plenty of good reasons why you can't lay claim to everything on the web that involves you. Say, for arguments sake, that we're just talking about photos. Suppose I take a great photo and you're in it. Now I upload that photo. My 2015 photo sharing site uses facial recognition, and it appears on your list of personal data. Now what if you don't like my pic? Should the photo sharing site take it down? What if I don't even know you, but you happened to be walking in front of a public landmark on the day you said you were off sick? In fact, what if I'm a photojournalist?

Twitter is not a community. Twitter is a tool. A community can use Twitter, but I think describing spamming Twitter as destroying a community is disingenuous. The success of email, usenet and blogs/microblogs etc depend on their openness and easy access to all. Which also means people can and will spam them. So spam on twitter should be seen as a natural and nessecary side-effect, not the end of twitter. Berating the spammers will only increase your blood pressure - the spammers, tweeters and Twitter itself will continue as always.

Please stop caring. Its bad for your blood pressure.

Seriously, it's only Twitter. Conflict, famine, and poverty are bad for the world, but Twitter doesn't matter.

Yes, it was a trademark dispute. I believe the same is true in Germany (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10096107.stm)

The travel times are unduly pessamistic. Australia is an edge case - the reason that travelling London to Australia takes so long is largely due to poor overland connections after you reach southeast Asia. You can travel by train from London to e.g. Beijing in around 10-11 days.

London to Rome can be done comfortably and cheaply by train in under 24 hours. Some people prefer this to flying.

The website seat61.com has a huge amount of info on travelling internationally by rail.

Also I suspect rail travel would suddenly recieve a lot of investment should air travel become impossible.