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Comment Re:Yes, trust us. (Score 1) 100

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.

Comment Blackberry + BES Express (Score 4, Informative) 198

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.

Comment Re:What do you mean by "know better?" (Score 2) 154

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

Comment Mars (Score 1) 662

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)

Comment Re:For the truly anti-punctuation (Score 1) 660

Nonsense, there is still punctuation -- and capital letters! -- in that. What you want is http://antipunctuation.com/ for no spaces, no lower-case, truly zero punctuation.

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.

Comment Re:I painfully threw away three P.C.s just this we (Score 1) 268

Took out the hard drives... maybe... maybe... I'll mount them and extract them.

Took out the memory (???? who is going to use the old memory- why did I do that?)

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.

Comment Re:Whoever creates the monopoly, should regulate i (Score 1) 223

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.

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