Maybe there should be a limit to capitalism. For example, tax 100% of income over, say, $5M/year. That way you still have incentive to work hard, but you have to think long term. Screwing over a bunch of people to get $100M right now won't help you. You need to create something sustainable that will generate income over a lifetime.

Ack, I didn't realize how crazy the system requirements were for a BES. Perhaps not the best solution. Though if you set up your own VPN and IMAPS server the devices will still be the most secure available (keys never leave the device).

Set up a BES Express server, and get a BlackBerry. I'm not sure you can find equivalent security on any other platform. The BES Express server (free) offers transparent VPN. The devices themselves are unmatched, security-wise (though you'd be stepping back like 5 years in features). Email might be a problem if you don't want to also run exchange or lotus domino, but you could easily set up an IMAPS server and use that.

I'm sure it's much more complicated than this, but off the cuff: You need a manual process to find cases like Penney's. Then, when you find a Penney's, you see all the sites linking to Penney's and they immediately become suspect. Not all of them will be selling links, but a lot will be. If you find a few Penney's's you start to build a spamrank(tm), narrowing in on sites that use stuff like TMX. You make outbound link weight inversely proportional to spamrank(tm, remember), and when you cross some line in your spamrank your outbound links become invisible altogether. Permanently. Additionally, the spamrank would add up like pagerank does on the target site and you make spamrank, say, 10x the weight of pagerank. You buy links, you get punished.

But it sounds like Google hates manual processes, they want to fix the algo. I don't see how that's possible without some crazy AI stuff going on (not that they couldn't go that route, mind you). Whereas I (a person) can look at a page and immediately say "link farm," doing that with a computer would likely be crazy difficult. Mostly because the best spam sites are legit sites, they just also sell links.

Speaking as a small business owner it's frustrating as hell. We've tried going to 'SEO' route, but A) there are a ton of super shady businesses out there selling this crap, and B) THIS IS NOT THE WAY IT SHOULD WORK. It's annoying when Blekko has us #1 for almost every related search term, but on google we don't even hit the first page for half of them. And if I take a handful of the people above us, scan their inbound links, the vast majority are all paid links. ARG. (Not that I think blekko has a better long term strategy, I think it's just as easily gamed, it just hasn't been... yet.)

I guess we just need to get as big as stackoverflow and complain, that way we can get customized changes. /END RANT

The IRS would refund the difference. (Assuming they caught the mistake)

Isn't mars in our 'goldilocks zone'? But because it doesn't have a magnetosphere it can't sustain an atmosphere against solar winds? (Not sure, just something I remember reading about). If so, how do we know the odds of habitability of planets in the zone? Couldn't it be that, yes, they do need to be in that zone to support life, but only 1% of planets in that zone have other factors that contribute to that support? (Like a magnetosphere)

While I agree for the most part, the critical exception is that [most] of the android phones don't have to use the single all-powerful app store, you can still install apps from anywhere. (There are exceptions to even this, though)

Well, they probably did test, but their testing apparently included a case that looked like the iphone 3gs to hide the fact that someone was out using a new iPhone. I'm wondering if that's why they didn't discover the issue sooner. None of the testers were using bare phones.

I think the issue is not that we're bad at security, it's just that attacks are cheap, so you need the virtual equivalent of fort knox security on every webserver. That sort of thing isn't feasible.

The lock on my house isn't 100% secure, but a random script kiddie isn't pounding on it 24/7, so it's good enough.

I could see mandatory automated interstate driving. That might be a reasonable compromise, while eliminating a huge bottleneck in most cities. Plus it's probably a much easier problem to solve.

But you can only play free iphone games on an iphone. You could (theoretically) play free flash games on any phone. Apple wants the lock-in more than anything else.

Problem is that it only increases AFTER it is thrown away. Until you do that it is an almost useless piece of junk.

I think that may have whooshed on you, which is understandable if you've never seen the Zero Punctuation videos. The voiceovers of the videos are delivered by an ornery English-born Australian EXTREMELY rapidly, and often end with an emphatic non-sequitur.

A good Ask Slashdot... how does one quickly and securely wipe a pile of hard drives? As for the old memory, one can make money on it if their timing is right. Good old Rambus RAM sold for a pretty penny when the 5 people still using those machines wanted more RAM.

The problem is that local politics is VERY corrupt. It is very hard to influence local politics, since most voters just vote party line. Your ability to actually impact an election is small - as odd as that might seem.

All the geeks on the internet can speak with a loud voice at the national level. All the geeks in Folksville, IN would be 1-2 people most likely - good luck having an impact with that.