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.
Flashing LEDs on bicycles are legal, as of October 2005, providing they are of a sufficent intensity. The actual law (The Road Vehicles Lighting (Amendment) Regulations 2005) can be read online here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/2559/contents/made
I suspect this must be a European thing then. I'm in London and I'd assumed that leaf blowers were a universal thing, and I had to google "supermarket bagger" - it seems like a weird gimmick, is this common?
No. It's never reasonable to prevent a record being made of the actions of a police officer.
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.
You're right. I'm normally first in the Facebook-bashing line, but suggesting that Facebook should pay it's users because they provide network effects is like suggesting the phone companies should pay users for hosting terminals. Or the post office should pay you for having a letterbox.
You've got the nail on the head. Capatcha publishing sites are already weeding out the idiots who will jump through hoops to join and blog comment argument or whatever it is - now they can sell the idiots to the highest bidder. Even if they get more spam, the idiot just earnt them cold hard cash in exchange for the spam, and you can still go back to solving spam the non-capatcha way.
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
Also, the android Market is available in far fewer countries, and sometimes apps don't show up in different regions even when they have a Market there.
This is not considering the potential difference in disposable income between purchasers of £45/month iphones and £15-20/month androids
It's not just a U.S. thing. I'm a UK father of 3 small boys, and it's a given over here that you should be very wary of interation with any child unless you have some kind of relationship with their parent. It's somewhat relaxed where parents feel more comfortable; a zoo might qualify for that.
You're only considering one of the three parties; the spammer.
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.
We're running HP-UX on PA-RISC and AIX on RS64. Don't know whether you can buy these architectures still, but these are real production machines in a datacentre.
This article argues seems to be suggesting that Google have a unique responsibility - almost as if they have somehow removed something that already existed.
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.
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.
Just noticed the historical chart at the bottom. It seems that practice of releasing updates is definitely increasing - at the beginning of the year, the average version was actually _decreasing_, as already obsolete 1.5 and 1.6 phones were presumably being sold faster than updates were being released. However, it does look like you're still likely to be left in the cold if you've got something other than a HTC or Motorola (particularly an LG - suckers!) or in some cases even if you live outside the US.
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)
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.
There's increasingly mainstream coverage of apps which are incompatible with almost every android phone out there - requiring 2.1 or even 2.2 like this does. I wonder how long it will take for manufacturers to take upgrades seriously? Some of them are still abandoning their handsets as soon as they go out the door.
I suspect many of the early adopters are now including this in their purchasing decision when they upgrade.
The thing that those 3 have something in common with their search engine and Adwords; they all inspired the same initial reaction: "Someone's finally fixed what's wrong with incumbant market players - this is a game changer". Do you remember what it was like in the days when spammed to death AltaVista, "2MB inbox" Hotmail, static image Multimap, clunky WinMobile and popups/animated gif banners were the kings? (Android is not quite the same, since the iPhone had pointed the way).
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