I did the exact same thing at reusableimages.com a few years back, but gave up due to lack of traffic and a growing sense of being out of my league. The site just uses Yahoo image search now.
130 karma · joined April 17, 2010
In the case of undercover officers, it is reasonable in some cases to to hide the fact they are police officers.
I believe there are cases in which police may seek and should probably be granted the ability to obscure their identities, while still acting as uniformed officers, for specific operations. The Mexican police who took down a major drug lord recently all wore balaclavas and helmets in public, for this reason. This needs to be justified on a case by case basis or you will get abuse (like the cop who attacked Ian Tomlinson).
But in every case, their actions should be legal and legitimate. They should having nothing to hide.
It's evil, but evil in a kind of clinically beautiful way. I'd say it stands a good chance of working in the short term too - like punch they monkey ads made a lot of money for some people back in the day
This is not considering the potential difference in disposable income between purchasers of £45/month iphones and £15-20/month androids
Party #2 is the spammee: "they can always unsubscribe" shows a callous and naive disregard for the depth of the problem. The spamee has incurred a small cost in time to deal with this particular spam; this may not seem much but soon multiplies; If the spammer is now dealing with tens of crap messages, on their mobile phone, during a ten minute lunch break, the spammers have just suceeded in breaking the spammee's email system. Completely.
Party #3 is the legimate email sender. Sending email is now so complicated that legimate mail users must delegate to ever more technically proficent third parties to deliver legitimate mail, and the deliverability of mail between consenting parties is compromised.
Whether or not they "subscribed" is irrelevant, due the number of ways people get "subscribed". What they actually wanted was the item they purchased online, or the service they are paying for, or whatever; not an inbox full of special offers.
Interestingly, this debate is about to blow up in a different area. The cost of access to the PSTN from disposable numbers is collapsing thanks to competition in the VOIP space, most PSTN terminals have zero filtering, and unlike email, the PSTN started being used for important stuff long before anyone started abusing it. Voice spam will be huge in 2011.
I disagree with their fundamental premise that Google is "the world's last digital library". Google's demonstration that such a thing is actually possible removes one barrier to entry. They have also set a precedent which reduces the negotiation required for future projects.
The fact that Google has done a poor job (so far) on the metadata is something that's worth highlighting - but it's not a reason to curse the whole project. This is fixable, possibly even a transient issue. GBS is an entirely new resource, which scholars have not had before; if they find it unsuitable for scholarly research, perhaps they could continue to use their existing tools or work to improve it, rather than slam the effort as "A Disaster For Scholars". "A Useful Tool Which Still Needs Improvement" might not be as snappy but the The Chronicle Of Higher Education doesn't look like the Daily Mail either.
Try finding anything from 10 years ago or for anyone named Smith, Jones, Taylor, or Patel. I'll bet that doesn't improve in the next ten years either.
We've switched once already this month - our new office was assigned an IP by C&W business that is in the same block as thousands of Virgin home cable-modems, so we got blacklisted by Spamhaus and others. Management got quite twitchy so I moved all the outgoing email to go via our Postini account which was previously only filtering incoming. Don't fancy having to find a third option now.
Also, that's a survey of the android market, which will be slightly skewed towards newer handsets (i.e. people who've had their android for a year probably have every app they might use already)
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/only-27-3-of-android-phones...
That's a pretty huge jump. Maybe we're seeing an attitude change for manufacturers already? I suppose some of them are now pushing their third generation of android handset and learning lessons from the second.
I suspect many of the early adopters are now including this in their purchasing decision when they upgrade.
I've not seen that many software products which were so obviously disruptive; it's no wonder they became giant-killers. Facebook is the only other one I can think of.
On the other hand, some of their other big products have not be a huge success precisely they haven't been game-changers. Google Docs, for example, might be a good example of a web office suite; but it's hardly a game changer as far as office suites go, because it doesn't do some of the core things that people do daily with office suites. It was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow starter. Whereas Maps for example, you knew at the beiginning that nothing else could touch it
Humans are natural pattern matches and subscribe to a set of ideals; anyone that does not fit their pattern and forces them to think differently is going to cause defensiveness in some people; the least of which is simple dismissal.
On the other hand, it's great that society has progressed the stage where people are being rude about your hobby instead of violent because of your skin colour.
I can't imagine why anyone would leave their laptop / phone / other device lying around. I go out and about in London, and I don't see anyone doing this.
I suppose LAN parties are an exception, but properly organised large events have a policy of tagging all equipment coming in and checking it on the way out. I have not been to a small private event where people were allowed in without being known and vouched for by another attendee.
Frankly, I'm kind of on the fence about this. It seems like a nice idea, that one can build a business on selling ideas on the internet, and kind of callous that people no longer sufficently value it.
But then I suppose no-one worries how a verbal storyteller is to make a living in this age of cheap newspapers, or war painters in the age of digital photography. Sewing instruction salesmen seem destined to go the same way.
On the other hand, who cares if the middlemen get paid to distribute frozen copies of art, even if such distribution is to cheap to measure?
These designs are unusually easy to copy. Unlike, say, a watercolour, it is simple to create an exactly identical copy (lossless copying) with Roman-era technology and limited skill. The "intellectual property" can be represented by an 80x80 bitmap (in the case of the design which is discussed in the linked article), with perhaps a few additional bits to provide some hints on different stitches or sequence.
Only in the past few years have people begun selling simple frozen data representations of these designs (without any physical product) long after the internet, mass production, modern copyright law and discussion - in fact largely after people begun freely sharing other commercial digital representations such as music and film. How someone can invest such a business while being totally oblivious to the fundamentals of it is beyond me. It would be like starting a taxi company before discovering there were private cars on the road or something. In fact, the major of these shops were started by hobbyists, who were previously artists who would create, evolve and freely share their designs - and were probably much happier that way. The creation of this artifical industry by modern copyright law simply adds inefficiency to the system - there is demonstrably no shortage prior to the laws, and with modern technology, there is a greater supply of both copyrighted and free design than at any time in history. The argument for copyright at all seems weak and the argument for our current infinite copyright system weaker still. Ditch the lot, have the artists go back to designing and sewing instead of spending their time scouring the web looking for their "intellectual property", and everyone will be happier and more creative.
No-one expects them to be perfect, but they do expect avoiding the killing of innocent civilians to be a priority. If there is evidence to suggest it is not, it should be given due attention.
A prefectly free and unhindered press helps to prevent atrocities by making armies accountable for their actions. Wikileaks might be a very crude tool, but it's definitely enhancing press freedom