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Comment Re:Does the Bear poop in the woods ? (Score 1) 378

by phantomflanflinger (#34074546) Attached to: Is Google Polluting the Internet?
People think Google is a good search engine because when they type their query it finds what they want. I am amazed so many nerds can't grasp this and think people want something else from a search engine - and attempt to code it.

As for Google being a corporation and making money, they are guilty of that.

As for Streetview, you can get higher res pictures of streets by walking down them. Molecules are smaller than pixels. Thus far.
Advertising

Is Google Polluting the Internet? 378

Posted by Soulskill from the hippie-talk-two-point-oh dept.
Pickens writes "In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise: 'We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.' Now, Micah White writes in the Guardian that the vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact, where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising, and the omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought. And at the center of it all, with ad space on 85% of all internet sites, is Google. In the gleeful words of CEO Eric Schmidt, 'We are an advertising company.' The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore, writes White. 'The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation has the right to privatize the index, commercialize the index, censor what they do not like or auction search ranking to the highest bidder.' Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred. 'Now it is up to us to realize the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organizing the internet. ... We have public libraries. We need a public search engine.'"

Comment Re:I would not be too surprised (Score 2, Informative) 142

by phantomflanflinger (#33094938) Attached to: Who Is Downloading the Torrented Facebook Files?
Most of the traffic PeerBlock blocks is false positives. It blocks huge ranges of IP addresses, YOU could be on one of their lists. The Gizmodo article says "it should be mostly accurate". Lol.

It used to be called PeerGuardian, remember? The "lucky talisman" app that stops teh RIAA catching you? What a load of balls.
Firefox

Firefox Tab Candy Alpha 189

Posted by kdawson from the making-tabs-sweet dept.
Nunavut writes in with a note from TechCrunch on Aza Raskin's latest Mozilla goodie, Tab Candy. "Be sure to watch the video for a full overview — from the looks of it, it seems as if Tab Candy is sort of like Apple's Expose feature mixed with their Spaces feature, both of which are baked into OS X. For those who don't use a Mac, basically these features allow you to zoom out and get a bird's-eye-view of all your windows (or tabs, in this case) that are open — and you can also arrange open windows (or again, tabs, in this case) in certain spaces so they're clumped together. This allows you to more easily find what you're looking for with so many tabs open." Here's Raskin's blog post, the download link, and the FAQ.
Windows

86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory 613

Posted by samzenpus from the brand-new-resource-hog dept.
CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"
Privacy

India To Have Automatic Communications Monitoring 96

Posted by timothy from the top-down-with-a-vengeance dept.
angry tapir writes "India plans to set up a centralized system to monitor communications on mobile phones, landlines and the Internet in the country, a minister has told the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament. Indian laws allow the interception and monitoring of communications under certain conditions, including to counter terrorism. A pilot of the new Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) is to be started by June next year, subject to clearances by other government agencies."
The Internet

The Men Who Fix the Internet 162

Posted by kdawson from the physical-side-of-things dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Remember all those undersea cables breaking? PopSci.com introduces John Rennie, who '... has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by UK-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie — a congenial, 6'4", 57-year-old Scotsman — patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables.' The article goes on to outline the physical infrastructure of the Internet, including some of its points of vulnerability."

Comment Re:Better late than never (Score 1, Funny) 69

by phantomflanflinger (#26762685) Attached to: RIAA Drops Enforcement Case To "Sort Out" Inaccuracies
Indeed; the British government never underestimated the IRAA. Thankfully, the permanent ceasefire brought peace to Northern Ireland. Or rather, it stopped IRA bombs going off in England, which is all the British Government (and the British public) ever cared about.

I'm just glad I live in Britain - yes, the IRA used to be a threat to me, but the RIAA never will.
Space

Black Hole At Center of Milky Way Confirmed 392

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-can-see-it-from-here dept.
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso). The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."
Graphics

Silverlight On the Way To Linux 475

Posted by timothy from the howl-at-the-moonlight dept.
Afforess writes "For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports 'In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.' Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works."

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