"So we're trying something new: we're going to list some of the ideas we've been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn't anticipate." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Good ideas, mostly. Of course, as always, the devil is in the details (and to some extent, I think that's the point). - Paul Buchheit
interesting list, surprised to see photo/video sharing sites on there. - Adam Kazwell
From pg's comment "Most people who read that one [search engine that concentrates on design] will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from." - seman
"More open alternatives to Wikipedia." Wonder whatever happened to Google Knol... - Philipp Lenssen
They should start FF rooms for each of these. I'd contribute to a few. - Amir Gharaat
I think most of these are *great* ideas. This post isn't food for thought, it's a banquet :-) - Karim
Seems a little like bait? Some of the ideas are excellent reading and should be interesting to a few thinking about 'what they can do better'. Some of the other mentions (and wording in particular) leads me to wonder why go public with the list. - Charlie Anzman
Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it. --- :-) - Kishore Balakrishnan
Oh boy. Y Combinator funding. That might cover a couple of laptops. - Steve Weis
Jesus, this single page has more original content and ideas than the last 1000 ff and blog posts I read. Inspiring. - John Murray
Would it be a bad thing to admit that I've never once been to Facebook's website? - Cyrus Lendvay
@Chris, @Cyrus. I have yet to join facebook, even though many of my friends are on it. I already have my own website, where I put actual content that some people find useful. I am not very interested in being poked. - Robert Felty
I think they believed the ancient alchemists could. Too bad we don't have rumors of cave men with iphones. - Ranjit Mathoda
Before people figured out the difference between compounds and atoms, maybe some alchemists really believed they could. I don't remember any concrete discussions of this though. Maybe it was just fund-raising/politics/vaporware? - Mitchell Tsai
common theory at one time was the earth was flat and the center of the universe... I guess part of evolution includes loosing faith in what can and can't be done or true - nick carrasco
It wasn't just lead but base metals - it was part of the theory that everything was linked and it was a question of finding the rights answers to transmute things. The other main goal was to find the elixir of life which would cure all illness and give youth. As Mitchell says, before a better understanding of how things were made it was belived that just about any substance could be altered with the correct process. - Colin Walker via fftogo
Paul, have you read Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, particularly Quicksilver? - DeWitt Clinton
Modern-day alchemy is alive and well (or not so well at the moment) on Wall Street. Wall Street firms have made their money by taking typically under-performing assets and slicing and dicing them in to a dizzying array of products that get rated investment-grade (AAA) meaning sellable and gold. Humans will continue to try to produce gold from lead from now until the end of the species, guaranteed. - Morgan
DeWitt: Quicksilver made my head spin. It was an awesome book. Weird in places, but awesome nonetheless. I plan on picking up the rest of the cycle soon. - Harvey Simmons
Interesting question. Maybe the western alchemists were pragmatic but the eastern neighbors were more interested in immortality. I hope this is correct (from memory) - LPH
Regarding Quicksilver - the descriptions of phosphorous and its uses were worth the price of admission right there, DeWitt. - J. Phil
I find it amusing that now we really can transmute lead into gold, using a particle accelerator to knock three protons out of the lead nucleus, but the energy required to do so costs more than the resulting gold is worth. So though we can do it, it isn't very interesting. - Denton Gentry
I used to read Stephenson's books, but then they got too intimidatingly long. I guess I'm not a very fast reader. - Paul Buchheit
Both. They believed that they could meet their goal eventually, if they did things right in the lab. Just like all of us. :-) - Daniel Dulitz
They wouldn't have believed in just about anything that happened over the last hundred years either. Alchemy would have seemed as plausible as a cell-phone or nanotech at the time. - Nicholas Molnar
This wasn't really a historical question so much as a reflection on their mindset. I just wonder to what extent they actually expected to create gold vs liked tinkering in the lab (and creating gold was a good way to fund their tinkering). The same personality types probably exist across different times and cultures, so it's interesting to think about what roles they will occupy in those cultures. - Paul Buchheit
don't know if you're going to get to the bottom of this on FF, but people believed some pretty stupid stuff back then. - Mark Schulz
actually it's been proven that if you smash one more atom of lead into a larger chunk of lead you get gold ... so maybe there were simply ahead of their time? - JohnBfromMemphis via twhirl
There were no doubt people who liked to tinker and just called themselves alchemists because it was the word that best described what they did, but I would have to assume that most of them thought their goals were achievable (and it is, just not with their technology). I suppose you could just as easily ask if televangelists really think they're acting on behalf of god, or if they just think it's a good way to raise money to fund their lifestyles? - Gabe Schaffer
I find organic alchemistry more interesting. bring back the dead. we can regrow old tissue? - Noah David Simon
If you are into Alchemist and Anime, you should watch Full Metal Alchemist. That got me started on wiki-ing the history of Alchemists. - Winston Teo
I guess there were at least both types of alchemists: those who expected to create gold and those who expected to monetize the expectations of others. I'm mostly interested in the third type. - Eugene
I have better analogy. Compare turning lead into gold with attempts to create AI - Phil Smirnov
It seems unusual to me that the salesman personality is crossed with the tinkering personality. But maybe it is less unusual that I might think. - Clare Dibble
Clare: salesman + tinkering = Edison? - Gabe Schaffer
Yeah, just like people whose goal is to cure cancer, help people live forever, prove P=NP or whatever, they have to like to tinker for its own sake, because actually achieving their goal is very unlikely. But the people who just like to tinker, with no goal, rarely accomplish big things because big things are too hard. So I think the wacky goal and satisfaction from the process are both required in order to make progress. - Daniel Dulitz
Your post was surely not a serious question, but there were really many different groups of people which we have labeled "alchemists" after the fact; the quest for transmutation is a stereotype of ours and by no means a universal pursuit of alchemy. As far as I can tell, in those times and places where alchemists were funded, it was usually not for transmutation work but for more immediately useful contributions (explosives, medicines, paints, etc). - ⓞnor
Are all Republican presidential candidates broken? Is it some sort of party requirement to be ignorant of the basics? Must we elect someone who is stuck in 1980s Cold War mode -- again? - Chris Baskind
I'll be impressed if he talks about the need to be strong when dealing with the Soviet Union. - Kevin Fox
"Is it some sort of party requirement to be ignorant of the basics?" Perhaps not, but I think smart criticism of a candidate's intellect can make that candidate more likable to some people, and easier to identify with. I believe it was Chomsky who arged Bush *may* intentionally use certain phrases to come off as less intelligent. (Not to say any of this makes sense... a president *should* be very intelligent.) - Philipp Lenssen
It's even got to the point where you can't take photos of your kids in a school event because of the potential issues. The school say they would have to get permission from all parents to do it etc. and it's not worth the hassle. - Colin Walker via fftogo
my favorite comment is "In the words of John McEnroe - 'you can't be serious?'." - guess the guy made an impression over their in england if they're still referring to him years after his retirement ;) - mike "glemak" dunn
"What is the world coming to when anybody seen with a camera is assumed to be doing things that they should not? " - Clare Dibble
"The woman running the slide at Wolverhampton Show asked him what he was doing and other families waiting in the queue demanded that he stop." Other families? Love the mob mentality that took hold. - Hutch Carpenter
Remember this is the Daily Mail, you couldn't get a more knee-jerk, newspaper if you tried. I'm suprised they didn't contact the slide owner for some quotes and spin it to make the bloke look like the pervert they accused him of being, with the headline "WONT SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN" (This time attached to the right story :-) - Stuart Grimshaw
there is also another side of coin - while in paper photo era that photo of your kid by someone else most probably will be shelved in dusty album; in digital era, with all its huge botnets reality, likelyhood that your photo archive will be stolen and scanned for purposes of sale are _relatively_ higher... - silpol
The irony of the situation is that if the father were a newspaper photographer, the parents would be queueing up to get their kid on the front page -- where it would be seen by everybody in the city, and end up on the Internet where the whole world would be able to see their precious snowflake! - Gabe Schaffer
If you have a serious telephoto, people REALLY get weirded out. Especially if you're in full camo and hiding in a tree. Sheesh. Parents. - Matthew Davidson via twhirl
My mother better get rid of those baby pictures she took of me. That's *hardcore* stuff, I tell you! *grin* - Rodrigo Jaroszewski
personally, I am getting next to ballistic when asian tourists turn their cameras on my kids - and most of them don't even want to realise that concept of privacy _is_ different here, and also we are not here for their entertainment. One of those tourists learned it _hard_ way. - silpol
Isn't this sort of thing going to teach children that society is dangerous? - Robin Barooah
@ajbatac what do you mean? "mean" is photographing not yours kids "on the street" while parent shows you NO, or what ? - silpol
In Brazil, you can take pictures of children, but you must have parental consent to show their faces in it, if you're talking about a somewhat serious subject and picturing them in a somewhat serious situation. Otherwise you must mask their faces. - Rodrigo Jaroszewski
Rodrigo: wow, that's awful. I like freedom of expression, and don't agree with putting limits on what we can/can not photograph. lame-O - Susan Beebe
@susan it is matter of culture - yes I know that in US privacy is taken light heart, and very sparse. In Finland you can find yourself in police precinct, if you do that (kids photo without parent permit): Europe is much more stringent and consistent about privacy, and kids are priority #1 in this sense too. And, yes, to the hell self-expression when it comes to kids privacy. - silpol
Silpol what does police have to say about people beating up tourists? :) - Philipp Lenssen
@silpol, Don't know exactly what you meant by "learned it _hard_ way" but it sounded mean from here. Photography is not a crime. You can politely ask them not to take pictures. I also find targeting "asian tourists" a bit offensive. Not everyone carries a camera, takes photos of kids without permission, and continues to do so when being told not to. - AJ Batac
If you READ the post, you will see that he showed the morons that it was photos of HIS children. He was not taking photos of everybody else. @silpol How do you feel about children being photographed by surveillance and security cameras without your permission and without any assurance of how the photos are used, while you do not have the right to do the same? - Jeremy Brooks
@ajbatac he has seen my hand raised with palm up way before, heard laud NO and even after I had turned pram with daughter to another angle (to try passive protection), he jumped in to try it anyway - do you think I have a grain respect for such arsehole? camera dragged from his hand, SD card pulled out from and formatted in my tablet, returned. - silpol
In the US the law says you can photograph anything you want as long as you are on public property even if people ask/tell you to stop you are perfectly within your rights to photograph children / dogs whatever. - gregory
@gregory: That is correct; and what is more, you SHOULD stand up for your rights when you are confronted. - Jeremy Brooks
Have you ever noticed that the parents who make the biggest stink about this have the ugliest kids? - Matthew Davidson via twhirl
@silpol: What does the law there say about what you did? I hope the person knew that he could recover the photos with simple software tools. - Jeremy Brooks
@silpol, you failed to mention all of those details on your 1st comment. anyway, that SD card might have contained proofs or evidence leading to the arrest of _. just saying. - AJ Batac
@gregory that's one of reasons why I avoid US in first place, even at inconvenience for me - country which treats personal privacy below other rights can easily "survive" my absence :) and I am not alone in that notion ;) - silpol
@silpol: I am curious how you rationalize your perception of lack of personal privacy in the U.S. with your lack of personal privacy when you are being photographed and videotaped by security cameras.... - Jeremy Brooks
@jeremy Finnish law gives me next to infinite rights to protect my kid rights - the only thing I may NOT do is "stop court order execution" or "counter-attacking other kids". As for card recovery - I know how to do that true formatting with 99,999% guarantee. - silpol
talk about out of control, someone needs to talk to the parents making the acusations. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? My son just *graduated* grade 5 and at the start of the ceremony the principal asked that parents only take pictures of their own children. In a gym filled with kids no less. - Chris Jones via twhirl
@sam no, enjoy local habits, being a 100% foreigner :) local joke says when Finn learns that neighbour appears in 20 km radius, he takes axe and goes to solve *issue* :) - silpol
Here in the US, you as a photographer have rights and you should stand up for them. Here's a couple of memos that's worth reading if you have ever been confronted by angry wifes/parents/stupid people: http://www.kantor.com/blog/Leg...http://www.krages.com/ThePhoto... The irony of this is that I have never photographed children without parents permission, still I've been confronted twice for simply holding camera in public place. - Andrei
@silpol, a public place is just that - public - if your privacy is that important just never go outside :) - gregory
@gregory: you can't photograph most military objects, also rights to photograph on private property is solely at discretion of the owner. There's also bunch of post-9/11 extensions to that. That said, in most public places you can photograph anything or anybody you like. Privacy is no concern here because one cannot reasonably expect privacy in public place. - Andrei
@gregory public place in US is not public place in Europe - if your freedom at other's expense is that important, stay at home ;) - silpol
I gotta say, the way parents are these days is a reason why I stay away from children anywhere. Let alone take pictures anywhere near their vicinity. Those people in that article were stupid for giving that guy a hard time for shooting pictures of his own children. That said, I think silpol was right for protecting her child from unwanted cameras. Just as people should have the right to take pictures whenever, wherever and whomever they want, there's the right to NOT have pictures of us/our kids taken. - Helen
When I'm in a new town or city taking pictures or videotaping, I go out of my way NOT to have persons (or if it can't be helped, recognizable faces) in my pictures or videos. Saves me the trouble of asking. And I still had one guy, who accidentally got into one of my outdoor videoshots wearing a motorcycle helmet, come up and joke about getting a royalty for getting his likeness used. I, of course, assured him that his image was not going to be in the video...GRRRR.... - Helen
I guess I'm just unable to comprehend the cognitive dissonance required to be outraged over a person I can see taking photos but think that I'm being protected by a person I can't see taking photos (i.e. security camers). - Gabe Schaffer
@bigstarlet a.k.a. Helen: I've been taking pictures of strangers and exhibiting those images for about 20 years now in 4 countries (Russia, Italy, France, U.S.), and I don't agree with silpol: it's not "your freedom at other's expense": as soon as I'm not making profit out of someone's recognizable likeness taken at a public place, I don't really care what they think about _my_art_. And "a tourist" approach (think of it as being a visitor on a planet Earth) makes those images even more interesting. - earlyadopter
@bigstarlet: here "privacy" and "intellectual property" are intertwined in an interesting way. sometimes proponents of "privacy" bash "IP"; here it is not easy to do. - 9000
Can't wait until consumer cameras become so compact as to be worn on sunglasses or such, with pupil and eyelid control — just to see what privacy advocates will say :) - 9000
@9000 Then crazy parents will attack anybody who looks suspicious, with or without camera :) - Andrei
@earlyadopter that's cool and all, but not everyone thinks like that. At least in my neck of the woods, folks here don't think of picture taking by strangers as art, they think of it as invasion of privacy, especially since their kids are hooked into the internet, and there's the liability of whatever images you take ending up on Flickr or wherever. I'm sure you ask before shooting, right? - Helen
@ Andrei, they're already starting to do that, at least around here. - Helen
The fear of the "paedo" is nothing new in the UK. Parents have been whipped up into a frenzy by newspapers. I actually think that the fact that this story has appeared in The Mail is a sign that things may be changing. This type of behaviour is no longer acceptable in our society. There was a time when normal parents would be guilty of this. Now it just seems to be nutters. - Chris Nixon
@earlyadopter your logic is clear but... it has several problematic areas. I have no time for whole analysis, but your worst "gap in logic" is that you substitute impersonated analysis with wishful thinking. In particular, you take as granted your past experience and your cultural background. But you are just don't care hence you go try-and-see way -- welcome to Darwin Awards championship http://www.darwinawards.com/ :) - silpol
"Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
This was actually one of my favorite interview questions early on at Google ("how would you write a spell corrector?"). Most applicants fumbled around and needed quite a bit of help. Noam, on the other hand, had the best answer I ever heard. It was immediately obvious that he was smarter than me. - Paul Buchheit
What did Noam say? Was it the one Google lists as "The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries."? - Philipp Lenssen
That's a very basic summary Philipp -- the actual algorithm is quite sophisticated. - Paul Buchheit
"Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major." Amen! - Nenad Nikolic via twhirl
@paul: its wrapper can use some common-sense improvements, though. - Alex
@paul Noam was a legend at Duke (at least among the Putnam-inclined math majors.) I love the feeling of asking an interview question I really like a few dozen times and then having someone come along who gives a better answer than the one I came up with. Of course, that raises the bar for all subsequent candidates. :) - Josh
I always worry about a company or organization that hires the same types of thinkers, even if they are thinking in a good way. Some of the best ideas I've ever had have come from trying to answer the questions of pretty dumb people who just weren't thinking through something. It's best to have a mix to truly spur on creativity. - Andrew Leyden
That algorithm explains why searching for an obscure word (vetted) causes it to give me search results for "Dictionary". - Gabe Schaffer
@penguinsix: one can quite safely assume that an average googler (and non-googler) has enough interaction with the outside world to be routinely presented with such questions. Hiring them might be useful to increase the concentration of them, though =) - Alex
Paul, That's a great example, I use Google Search as a spell check tool all the time. esp when FireFox and MSFT spell checks don't offer the right suggestions, or pick up words like blogosphere. Google always gets it right. - Tac Anderson
I've found that companies that ask interview questions about problems they've actually faced or solved have a better chance of understanding the candidate than those that make a question up. - Robin Barooah
It's interesting to see Google saying "Major in learning" on their blog, when it seems like the first step in filtering for many of their jobs is "Did you major in computer science?" I guess saying "Major in computer science with a minor in learning" is a bit more awkward. ;-) - Keith Pelczarski
I'm frustrated that his response to the uproar has been 'it's okay that we disagree'. I'm looking for the rationale behind his change of course. We can't forgive what we can't understand. Has Obama given a believable rationale? - Kevin Fox
Kevin, his rationale is that he wasn't against the idea of FISA (as most of Congress isn't against the idea, too, for what it's worth), but that the law Bush wanted to sign previously went too far. He believed, as did most of Congress, that the current law was a compromise that was good enough. One thing that I had been hearing every time this comes up is that Congress really wanted to pass FISA all along, but felt compelled by their constituencies who kept complaining to postpone action. They were merely waiting for a time when people would be complaining the least (like the summer). I don't think this is much a failure of Obama, but a failure of our Congress as a whole. - Mark Trapp
The vision of Obama was that he wouldn't let us down like the rest of Congress is in the habit of doing. And didn't HRC vote against the thing? - ⓞnor
Sure ⓞnor, after she knew it was going to pass. Not to mention it's not an election year for her anymore. - Mark Trapp
Well, he coulda voted against it after he knew it was going to pass, too. Anyway, the point isn't FISA, it's immunity. There were a lot of ways he could have expressed much more opposition to immunity. - ⓞnor
Sorry Mark, I don't buy it. You don't go from "I will fillibuster rather than let telco immunity pass" to "I voted for the provision including telco immunity because they gave other concessions" simply because it's summer and 'people would be complaining the least". Maybe that's the rationale of a senior senator, but not for a presidential candidate. There's nothing low-key about anything Obama does for the next four months and he's fully aware of that. Also, the wording in your comment is odd. "He wasn't against the idea of FISA" makes it sound like FISA means something other than the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I doubt any democratic senator is against the idea of FISA. - Kevin Fox
OK so i did not want to like this but it is funny. unfortuantley true - Ruth Ferguson
Kevin, I apologize: I mean the admendments made in 2007 regarding the government's ability to acquire intelligence quickly without waiting for court approval. The Protect America Act was unnecessarily vague in terms of who they could target, unnecessarily lenient in checking intelligence gathering procedures, and provided no recourse for telecoms to challenge an acquisition order. In the new law, they must get FISA Court approval when targeting Americans, the frequency of procedural review by the FISA Court is increased, procedural review by Congress has been added, and allows any telecom to challenge an order in the FISA court before complying. - Mark Trapp
The law still sucks, but I can definitely see how most members of Congress saw this law as good enough to provide basic accountability provisions to limit the DNI and Attorney General's power. Because everyone focuses on the telecom immunity clause, it was smart to wait until the fewest amount of people were caring. Now as to why Obama decided to back down from "I will filibuster any law that contains telecom immunity" to voting for the law; I think you can pick and choose which rhetoric you want to believe is realistic. I viewed it as empty as "Read my lips: no new taxes." - Mark Trapp
I think it comes down to him and other members of Congress believing this is the best compromise they could get with Bush in power, the people Congress and Obama needing to appeal to in November don't really care about telecom immunity (but care about national security), and the people who do care about telecom immunity going to vote Democrat anyway. Though Kevin, I'd be interested to see what you thought his motivations are, if it's not the reality of a compromise setting in. - Mark Trapp
Why bother to try to negotiate a FISA compromise with a presidential administration that has shown nothing but contempt for the law to begin with? The Bush Administration, instead of going to Congress and requesting a change in the FISA, went ahead and blatantly violated that law. And the Administration said it would continue to violate the law, so what's the pressing need to fix the FISA, especially when negotiating with an Administration that only will meet you about 2% of the way? http://www.concurringopinions.... - Jason Wehmhoener
I don't think there's any mystery about his motivations, but it still sucks. - ⓞnor
I'm a big Obama fan. But that poster still makes me laugh. - Bill Bittner via twhirl
Perhaps a "person room" could be utilized for that (everyone could then set their person room to be interactive, or closed, or invite only etc.) or another way, as long as it's not "spammable". E.g. maybe I found a link and I know Johnny is using Friendfeed and I want Johnny to see the link, but as a sort of "FYI" or "BTW" integrated into Friendfeed and not like an email. - Philipp Lenssen
Would you require them to receive an alert or mark the item as read? If not, how does it differ to now where all the people following you may or may not see the links you post? I don't think you could ever allow this for people who aren't subscribed to you since that would open up the channels for spammers to reach everyone. Would basic for private messages work? (Not private *messages* as such; more like private *feeds* where you could push a link to specific people.) - Tony Ruscoe
Exactly, it would not differ insofar as the other person may or may not see your link... that would be the nice thing (otherwise you could send email, but this would be more like "I'm sharing this with you in case you take some time to check some new sites in Friendfeed"). As far as avoiding spam, it could either use a "person room" -- meaning you could edit the settings just like in other rooms, so you could make the room invite-only, or non-postable -- or perhaps it could work for subscribers only. - Philipp Lenssen
private messaging is a must-have on FF. then again, we could all just go back to using... email. - Jeremy Toeman
It's funny. The last time I used email it worked pretty well. - Jason Wehmhoener
Philpp, share link with a drop down of all your FF friends to select from ? - Peter Dawson
Yes, something like that Peter -- a way to share only with a select group or only a single person, perhaps allowing you only to select from your subscribers to avoid spam tactics. One difference to email would be that you could tune in and out of the Friendfeed "find new links" feed anytime your time pressures you to do so, whereas it's often harder for us to treat email the same way (as email also contains "should attend to/ ought to reply" items). - Philipp Lenssen
It would be a logical step and I would appreciate it.Twitter should be worried about this... ;-) - Matthias Schwenk
Philipp, yes that would have been great. I wanted to do the same thing for my special links to a pvt room for myself. However, if yu remember one could not create rooms with the same userID. This is by design and not a flaw. However, by that very deceision, this simple but VERY powerfull share mode has been negated. Imgaine , If I had a pick list of all my ff friends and then shared the link. this would reside in there own room. !! - Peter Dawson
Wow, Hotmail isn't even on the first page of Google results for 'mail'. Pity that Yahoo Mail is #1 and Gmail is #2. I'm guessing it's largely because more people refer to Gmail as 'Gmail' and Yahoo mail as 'mail'. - Kevin Fox via Bookmarklet
Interestingly, Gmail is first and Yahoo second for a search on 'email'. Hotmail is still not to be found. - Kevin Fox
perhaps because MS locks down Hotmail so tight that even Google can't index it? - Trent Olson
Not many people would write "Hotmail mail" or similar, which may explain the lower ranking -- even though Microsoft's quasi-Hotmail Live Mail *is* in the top 10. In turn, "Google Mail" on the other hand is actually Gmail's official title in some countries where there were trademark issues with the word "Gmail", pushing the application upwards for that "mail" keyword. - Philipp Lenssen
i like how this juxtaposes y!'s and g's marketing and branding strategy: Y! says: "ours is the best!!!!" and G says: "here's some email if you wanna use it." - jenna
might be partly to do with the fact that Yahoo mail has many more users than Gmail. They're friggin' huge. - Cyrus Lendvay
"mail.live.com" is somewhere on the first page. - Martin Añazco
Must be search results customization in effect. mail.live.com doesn't appear on my first page at all. - Kevin Fox
Tim Berners-Lee gets involved in the thread too, suggesting the alternative of using the <a> tag but with a special "embed" relation. - Philipp Lenssen
Really interesting snapshot of the early web. - Richard Bradshaw
In a later suggestion, Tim hopes for the tag to be called <embed> or <include> to be more general in terms of media types. Marc Andreesen's reply to Tim: "We're not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point; it raises a
number of nasty issues that are quite separate from the idea of
inlined images." - Philipp Lenssen
"Flagging malware on the web doesn’t earn any money for Google". Not directly, you mean... indirectly, everything that increases results quality may end up attracting more visitors (of which a portion clicks on Google AdWords). - Philipp Lenssen
Now I wish he'd debunk this googlebowling-bad-links can hurt you nonsense. - John Honeck
I would really like for Brett Glass to apologize for jerking his knees two much. - Sudhakar Chandra
Over on the Stopbadware Google Group we are forever visited by the "But my site has no illegal downloads or malware on it because I've... (a) run anti-virus on it (b) I'm not on windows (c) because I'm an obnoxious SOAB and it could never happen to me.. (d-infinity) etc etc etc
But hardly ever do they come back and thank you, let alone apologise when you point out (to the line/column/char) where and why the malware is there.
(Even when you try and politely point out, are you sure Word Press 0.0.1 pre-Alpha is the latest version? - ok, I'm kidding on that one, but only just).
Even when you cut and paste the malware and show it to them, they still can't see the wood for the trees (only to find they've been looking at the local copy of their code on their machine, not their server).
Who was it that said something about making software idiot proof, only for mother nature to keep inventing bigger and better idiots... (My favourite all time quote - it'll never be out of date).
Now that AVG and the other vendors a - Chris Wright
As someone who's helped many webmasters find issues like that in the Google groups, I think it's great that we flag malware like this because often times the webmaster will not know what's happening otherwise. There's more to keeping a site online than just keeping the server running :). - John Mueller
... many of their "best of" drawing selections look more like a single-vision artist drawing succeeding *despite*, not because of the collaboration and community aspects. - Philipp Lenssen
Wow. I suppose the artist chose such an intrinsically hostile medium as a sort of challenge or game? I can't imagine anyone choosing it as a medium for serious art for any of the normal reasons... But given the tiny amount of attention it is likely to generate, it hardly seems worth the trouble. - Jake Eakle
'David Brooks (b. August 11, 1961) is a columnist for The New York Times, a commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and a dick. He has written two pseudo-intellectual books of junk social science, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. Though he is a conservative, the primary reason for his success is not his popularity among conservatives, but, rather, among liberals. He is, in fact, known as the liberals’ “favorite conservative.” This is because he speaks softly, is effeminate, and gently gratifies their self-loathing, masochistic wish to be insulted' - j1m via Bookmarklet
hmm, answering my own question, the edit function doesnt work for me, and all the entries seem to be added by a single user. So sad :-( - j1m
Yeah, their edit page says "If this were a real wiki, you would be able to edit posts. But since it's not, you can't." Wonder if wiki-style editing lends itself to certain types of humor, where pacing and consistency in style (more than facts) may be very important. - Philipp Lenssen
that is quite odd. It would be even more interesting if you could understand the language and tell which was more accurate. - David Adam
it could be either because of separate licensing agreements & vendors for the subtitles or because one is made for deaf people and the other for non-Chinese. Considering how many "fansubs" there are for Japanese animes, it's not really all that surprising. - Vincent van Wylick
I think there are multiple versions of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" out there too. One set of subtitles gives you a better sense for some of the Swedish wordplay and makes a couple of comic moments hilariously funny. The other, not so much. - Karim
big up for the fansub-sceners :) how could i get my anime-fix without them? - krz9000
After watching tons of English movies with Spanish subtitles and vice versa, I have lost all confidence in the accuracy of subtitles in conveying the movie's message. As a translator, I also know that the poor quality is a result of the pittance most studios pay for subtitling... guess they get what they pay for. - Shannon Jiménez
Are the dubbed translations any better? - Jim Norris
I love that movie though, on both an artistic and philosophical level. - Colby Olson
One of my favorites: German movies with English titles that are simplified "translations" of the original English title. (Like "Miss Undercover", originally "Miss Congeniality".) - Philipp Lenssen
Dubbing quality varies widely. Disney is pretty well known for their high standards for dubbing, while kung fu movies... not so much. I think that in general dubbing often requires more compromise in translation than subtitling, since the target-language words have to take the same length of speaking time as the source-language words. - Shannon Jiménez
The closed captioning is probably the same as the dubbed translation which, as Shannon mentioned, has extra length constraints. (Aside: it seems weird to me for the closed captions to be in a different language than the soundtrack) - Laurence Gonsalves
