...now one seldom goes to the second page.
Speak for yourself. I have Google set to deliver not 10, but 100 results per page; yet I regularly get 5, 6, or more pages into the results looking for what I want - especially with all the irrelevant crap that Google insists on throwing up in the vain hope that it will be 'helpful'.
...If you entered "Paris Hilton" you got a tree with separate branches for French hotels and for sluts.
Thank you so much for that! Made my night - I'm still laughing!
How is it useful to give me thousands of results that are completely irrelevant to what I am searching for? Only give me results that contain EXACTLY the words I typed. And I shouldn't have to use quotations marks or other silly nonsense.
Amen brother!!
It would be interesting to see how much their energy usage would go down if they defaulted to basic pattern matches and only applied their 'crystal ball and tea leaves' algorithms on demand. I bet they'd chew through a lot fewer CPU cycles. But then, since Google threw 'don't be evil' under the bus they haven't exactly been all about choice and customization.
but you had to be something of a lexicographer (i.e. you effectively "think like a search engine" and do your own categorizations, rather than relying on the search engine) to get better results out of it than the average person, who is a relatively poor classifier, gets out of Google doing their classifying for them.
I don't mind that Google panders to the lowest common denominator; I just really REALLY wish they'd introduce an 'advanced' mode for people who know how to do more sophisticated searches. Especially, I want them to stop trying to give me more 'information' at any cost when I'm trying to reduce the number of hits to just the relevant ones, especially where having zero legitimate hits is a really important piece of information. And they really need to just totally fuck off with the full-of-fail, utterly inane, ESL versions of 'synonyms' that they keep contaminating their search results with. I get really tired of using allintext and double quotes, and I've noticed that the effectiveness of both of these is starting to decrease anyway.
Yeah, I might get better results if I signed in, but I'd rather walk around with stones in my shoes than do that. And I suspect I'd have to enable JS to make that work anyway; for me Google is even worse with JS enabled.
While I do not condone the activities of Paypal here, changing bank accounts is pretty trivial these days to short-circuit this kind of automated bullshit.
I long ago gave up on PayPal because I consider them to be hopelessly evil and corrupt. I simply refuse to use PayPal, (and advise everyone who will listen to also not use them); not because I can't successfully evade their attempts at organized theft, but because I choose not to support what amounts to criminal behaviour.
If everyone who knows how bad PayPal is simply stopped using their services, we might not be having this discussion now.
Will I be able to get an HTML5 video blocker to do what the Flashblock plugin currently does? I'd hate to go back to the days when multiple YouTube browser tabs all started playing as soon as the pages loaded. My DVD player doesn't start playing a disc when I turn the power on - why should a web page start playing the video as soon as it loads?
Lets look at this for a second.... Who are a businesses customers? Hint: It's the people who get paid a wage. These people get more money, more businesses get more customers. More customers mean more sales. More sales means more profits.
The part you're missing there is that the money you give to the employee needs to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from people who would have done something more useful with it than the employee spending it on consumption.
"More useful" by whose definition? Money is llike water - it can only generate power if it's moving. That 'useful stuff' you speak of often looks like putting the money behind a dam, where it does nothing to stimulate the economy. Consumption, on the other hand, drives the economy.
Not that I'm in favour of this state of affairs - the entire economy is a pyramid scheme/shell game, and the sooner everybody realizes that, the sooner we can put in place something sensible that minimizes the wealth gap and drastically reduces our senseless raping of Earth.
Why couldn't the trains simply be equipped with GPS connected to the on-board computers that control the throttle and brakes? Seems like a pretty simple programming exercise to say "hey, our current coordinates indicate the need for reduced speed", then adjust throttle and/or brakes as required. I understand the need for integration into the greater system to prevent accidents from trains following too closely, etc, but even using GPS as a failsafe mechanism could have prevented this derailment.
I was asking similar questions after the Lac Megantic disaster. Having a train a) apply its own brakes if the train is moving when it shouldn't be, and b) send out a distress call if it can't stop itself, isn't rocket science; and it isn't even expensive. Why is the whole railroad industry on this continent so far behind the technology curve?
...that the data stolen belonged to people whose privacy was already being grossly invaded, rather than to the fuckwits who thought it was a good idea to spy on their family members.
Local. Storage.
Yes, I know that battery technology isn't quite there yet, a tall water tower for every house or neighbourhood is impractical, and the whole flywheel-in-a-vacuum-can concept hasn't yet lived up to its promise. But really, we NEED to start moving away from 'the grid' as the primary power distribution system. Such a move would hasten the development of viable, economical energy storage methods; incidentally, it would also make moot the arguments about feeding power from household solar panels to the local electrical utility.
The grid is OK as a fallback position, and to provide power to heavy industry because local power storage on that scale probably won't be practical for a long while yet. But the only way we're going to have a resilient system that isn't prone to a large portion of the continent's electricity supply being taken down by an ice storm, (or, God forbid, a terrorist attack), is to start de-centralizing power production and distribution. Yes, there are technical hurdles, but we can get over them. I am less sure that we can get past the entrenched business interests fighting that kind of disruption with all of the resources at their disposal, including the money we pay them.
I wonder if it would be a better world if every word we ever speak was filmed and available for all to see permanently. We often get to know people as we first see them at their best moments but how low are they in their very worst moments? How stable are they in real life? Shouldn't others know when a person is in a defective state of being? For example the pilot that locked the cabin door and flew his plane into the side of a mountain could have been stopped before he acted out.
You wonder? Really? Do you honestly think there's even a shred of a possibility that we would all be better off if we habitually paused to think about and weigh every utterance and action beforehand? Would you consider the loss of all spontaneity for everyone in society a fair price to pay for your incredibly narrow personal vision of safety and security? Also, who the hell are you to judge whether someone is in a "defective state of being"?
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
