Putting trees in your icon and linking to news results for ‘Earth Day’ does not make you a noble company. I’d just like my search results please.
That is all.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown tired of all the different standards for modern electronic communication.
For instant messaging, some people use MSN, some Yahoo Messenger, some AOL, some Skype – and while there are clients that can handle many of these and more, frequently they do so at the cost of not supporting features like video or audio chat, or by having only hazy support for filesharing. In the world of social networking, there are people’s Twitter feeds, their Facebook statuses…and so on and so forth.
To all of which I say, if you will forgive the American imperative, ‘pick a lane!’ I might even add, ‘Dammit! [sic]‘.
Let us compare with email. No one has to run more than one email client: but that is because email is an open standard, that requires no central service to operate, created before anyone had thought to lock users into a proprietary system to sell them advertising.
The domain name system was created by people who were used to a unix command line, and therefore does not allow spaces. While some websites use hyphens in their addresses, most just run the words together. Sometimes with amusing results.
The Daily show takes a look at Fox News.
Part two is here.
What is it like to drive a time machine? The NYT knows.
A non-conspiracy theory about why Apple has banned background applications from the iPhone. Battery life. I, for one, find the argument convincing.
You can read the contents of a computer’s memory by plugging in a firewire device. I’ve read of similar attacks with USB, but those have generally been exploits. The firewire problem appears to be part of the design.
I’ve written elsewhere about not writing HRC off – yet, anyway. But, I have to say, even when she is using lines that got her husband great applause, she just can’t quite get the oratory right.
I’m posting it here, because I have not done any fact-checking, but the the premise behind this book is shocking and intriguing. It is amazing what things a war far away can be used to justify.
During World War I, 30,000 American women were rounded up, and half of them were detained, often for months, for the supposed purpose of preventing the spread of venereal diseases in soldiers. Some of the arrested were prostitutes, while others were so-called charity girls, young women who picked up men at dance halls simply to have a good time. That the incarceration of these women at detention camps surrounded by barbed wire did nothing to change the rate at which soldiers were contracting STDs was a piece of information that the Committee on the Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding Military Camps was not much interested in during the late summer of 1918. Nor did the committee seem to care that it was often the men who had infected the women.
The unfortunate female detainees at 43 sites around the country were subjected to hard labor, forced medical treatment, unspeakable humiliations and even rape. Their ordeal provides the inspiration for Michael Lowenthal’s lively and illuminating novel Charity Girl.