It's very easy to build something like scroogle yourself. You need a server with support for php (or maybe java or python) that performs your searches server side and there you go. Three years ago, with no knowledge of php to start with, I wrote a simple program to send and fetch queries to and from google in about a day. It didn't even use the google search API it just parsed the returned HTML. I think anybody who just looks at the search API could put something together very fast. In the (unlikely) case anybody should ever be interested in who is behind your server you can share your server publicly to increase anonymity.

Actually, I use ear buds specifically because of that. Most *decent* earbuds will block out external noise, which lets you use a much lower volume. The downside is that it makes you pretty oblivious to your surroundings.

Sticking with the theme of Firefox extensions there is also customize google, it does more than search too. http://www.customizegoogle.com/

I found iMeem an invaluable way to quickly check out new releases I'd read about, or catalog releases by artists. Now that it's gone, what's the best commercial alternative? Who has the best library of streamable music for free or a reasonable monthly fee?

I thought about doing this several years ago to archive a huge stack of old lab notebooks, then we bought some Ricoh copiers that were also scanners with a platen large enough to scan two pages at once. I was able to turn a 300 page notebook into pdfs in about a half hour.

The school is NDSU. Yes we (he) looked. No our library does not have one.

He has details of the reasons on his blog danreetz.com/blog

Unfortunately most people don't know that and/or don't want to pay the cost of headphones that actually specify that and/or don't want to carry arround two sets.

Afaict the standard issue headphones are open designs so when people want to listen to thier music and nothing else they turn the volume up way too loud.

Bingo, there is some major over generalization going on in this article. The chemical reactions of bacteria to a chemical threat, even honed by millions of years of evolution, are not directly comparable to human reactions to information or threat. Even with billions of members a colony of bacteria has less chemical and informational content than a much smaller number of humans.

"Everyone knows the need to try to postpone important decisions until the last moment but apparently there are simple creatures that do it well and therefore can really teach us -- the bacteria," Really? And if postponing the decision has an impact on the possibility of implementing the selected solution? When a politician delays making a decision he can appear weak and indecisive which is certainly not a benefit - IF he has the data and can make the correct decision earlier. Similarly delaying one decision can have a direct impact on later decisions even when you don't know what those decisions are.

In defense of the article the true value could be in the calculations for weighing the probability of the optimum solution given perfect information that are derived from the bacteria. - a situation never to occur in human history but useful for reference and as a base for future theory.

Well, I have been to Naples and I have to disagree. It may be that the best pizza is there, but I didn't run into it. The fact is that Italy is filled (overrun even) with mediocre pizza places serving tourists who have only eaten Domino's. You have to work hard to find the really good places. Within five minutes of where I live (in North Carolina!) there are two local pizzerias that make better pizzas than most of what I have had in Italy.

The best I have had is Pizza Paradiso in Washington DC. They have a wood fired brick oven and long lines.

They are being hurt by products that are unsafe and improperly labeled. There's warnings deep inside the documentation of the thing, but that doesn't change the fact that when you're listening to loud music, the line between "loud and fun" and "loud and damaging" is pretty razor thin.

or stop shipping MP3 players that go to 11 because that can hurt your god damned hearing. 85db is enough, if you want more, you can build an inline headphone amp, or buy one. Volume creeps up when you're trying to block out external noise and focus, you can listen to noises that don't cause pain, but are causing damage.

Governments mandate product safety guidelines all the the time anyway. It's not like the Government's not saying you can't listen to loud music, it's just saying that music player vendors can't ship out music players that harm ear drums

I don't think that MySQL has any importance... Now that the split has been announced for some time and blocked by the EU, Sun is falling down...

So, either the merge completes and SUN survives or the merge stop and SUN disappear...

In the first option, some project may have to leave SUN (GPL project may always fork) and some will be saved... In the second option, all project will become homeless...

I think that the biggest issue is from IBM and Microsoft...

IBM zSerie + zOS + DB2
MS windows + MS SQL server (+IIS)
SUN + Oracle

We have 3 different platforms... Right now, Oracle is the preferred DB over DB2 and MS SQL... But they don't provide end to end support. If Oracle gets SUN (which is the preferred platform for Oracle), they'll be able to sell "black boxes" with all inside : Hardware (SUN), OS (Solaris), DB (Oracle), Framework (J2EE + Oracle PL/SQL)... this would be a big hurt to MS business (they would get a little more "out of the server room") and to IBM... Instead of having 2 actors, we'd have 3... better for the concurrence and for the consumers... But IBM and MS lobbying is quite powerful

MySQL will live anyway... Maybe it'll have a name change if a fork is needed, but it won't disappear...

By that logic, this regulation of mp3 player volume level shouldn't exist either because the owners of the players should be responsible for their own actions and turn down the volume. I'm not saying I support that decision, I'm just saying it is a good point that if you're going to regulate headphone volume level, then you might as well also regulate volume level of bands.