This just in from the “Microsoft sure is funny” dept:
I was just asking Microsoft to send my password so I can use some “LIVE” features that absurdly require confusing logins, and suddenly invalid certificates start popping up.
Kind of funny because you’d think Microsoft would, well, know about …. Microsoft:
Is it a naive idea? I waste SO much time now dealing with spam that eludes my ISP and Gmail filters – I’d say as much as an hour a week and that does not factor in the frustration and potential for lost “real” email.
My proposal is to create a fund through voluntary, very small personal contributions of a few dollars and larger ISP contributions to pay people to personally identify spammers, their businesses, and their location. Spam Bounty Hunters.
This blacklisted database would be available to all with an excellent feedback forum to quickly remedy false positives. If they protest, the accused would be deemed innocent until proven guilty by 95% agreement in forum feedback.
However, those deemed spammers would be tracked and followed as they changed businesses, emails, etc, and would be hounded by the masses via email, telephone, and real visits. Collectively the “community” would make the costs of *even trying spamming* greater than any benefits.
Unlike current blacklists used by ISPs, this would bring the collective intelligence, and collective outrage, to bear against spammers.
Those who chose to be “spam bounty hunters” would be compensated from the fund by a formula designed to distribute whatever amount was in the fund devided by an estimate of the number of total email spammers (or some other formula designed to pay out at the rate the problem is fixed).
Over in China, people are getting paid a few bucks a day to play second life and accumulate Linden dollars for affluent US SecondLifers. Wouldn’t this be a better use of their time?
This Myspace post moved to TR
Fresh from a great trip in the California Wilderness I feel guilty as usual for challenging Global Warming alarmism from folks I respect and admire and who seem to spend a lot more time than I do on this topic, such as Al Gore and a lot of respected scientists participating in the IPCC.
However it’s really hard for me to view the catastrophe claims without feeling that 1) the major concerns don’t come from the science, rather from emotion and narrow focus and 2) clearly poverty, hunger, and disease are far more pressing human concerns – all being present catastrophic human conditions, solvable with simple technologies and at relatively low cost.
Of course humans are not the only thing to worry about when you’re looking at problems on our earth. However the case for expensive Global Warming “remedies” vs other methods of protecting the environment seems to get much weaker the farther you go from the human consequences. For example Kilauea in Hawaii could care less about GW. In fact Volcanos spew considerable CO2 into the atmosphere naturally (though not as much as humans, contrary to some GW denier claims).
SO…. maybe the best way to figure this out is to take a little more time to carefully examine the main catastrophe claims and compare them to what the actual research suggests. Luckily, the Climate Crisis website, a companion to the film “An Inconvenient Truth” gives us a clear starting point in our quest with these catastrophes they clearly feel are 1) a big deal and 2) looming on the near horizon:
If the warming continues, we can expect catastrophic consequences.
Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years — to 300,000 people a year.
Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.
Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense.
Droughts and wildfires will occur more often.
The Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2050.
More than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by 2050.
…. TO BE CONTINUED ….
What a fine time in the Trinity Alps with our great friends Linda and John from the Bay Area. The kids handled the 4 miles in no problem and we got our *favorite* spot just down from the lower waterfalls that plunge into a cool-green deep pool surrounded by trees with a huge peak rising upstream in the background. Even my two Yellow Jacket stings didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. The next day another 4 miles up to the Canyon Creek Lakes and playing around the upper waterfall.
John took a LOT of pix and I’ll post or link some soon.
Wow, that may be the first time I’ve spell “Aisle” since learning to … spell.
OK, so I’m noticing that processed flour products really vary in price in ways that simply can’t be explained by supply of flour, demand for flour, or anything remotely related to flour. At pennies a pound, flour is cheap. So is bread at perhaps a buck a pound, maybe two if you get really good stuff. But crackers, which are also almost all flour, cost a LOT, especially premium crackers which can run you over $5 per pound. And then there are cookies, which seem to vary in ways that are downright amazing. Little specialty cookies from Pepperidge farms can approach $10 per pound where the coconut oil saturated oatmeal specials take us back to the dollar a pound that seems most consistent with the price of flour. Obviously labor production costs vary, but I don’t think it’s that either. Marketing? Maybe, but many of the cheapies seem to have more marketing than expensive stuff (Wonder bread (cheap) vs our local artisan bread (expensive). The latter spends a fraction of the former.
What does all this have to do with Global Warming? Nothing. I just thought I’d put in that spurious tag for fun.
The mystery continues…..
Tomorrow we’ll head down to the Trinity Alps in Northern California for a 2 night backpack. I really love this wilderness area, which is spectacular, sublime, and always uncrowded. This will be our third trip to the Canyon Creek Lakes part of the Trinity Alps and we’ll camp about 4 miles in, hopefully at the spot above the little waterfall.
Another 4 miles in the next day without heavy packs will take us up into the heart of the region, three lakes in a valley surrounded by granite peaks of up to 9000 feet. The last trip here was 3 years ago and we’d just spent a week in Yosemite but I kept thinking how great the Trinities are as a place to really immerse yourself in the splendor of California mountains and woods.
Although the Trinity Alps are not as spectacular as Yosemite (I’m not sure any place on earth can compete with the many unique vistas in Yosemite Valley), they offer a lot more solitude, similar beautiful scenery, and the kind of insight into the workings of the world you just can’t get unless you surround yourself in a cathedral of granite, mountains, and forest that has remained largely unchanged for thousands and thousands of years.
Ok I’m getting sort of confused and dizzy trying to decide if I should start a blog at every new place I test or log onto or whatever…. given that this is WEB 2.0 can’t we use the power of integration and collective blogginess?
So many people have their own blogs, especially in the crowd who tends to test new 2.0 applications, that I really like the idea of integrating existing blogs rather than creating brand new ones that’ll just get lost in the digital maelstrom.
But in the meantime I guess I’ll have a FLOCK and VOX and MYSPACE and 360 and Blogger AND this real one.
Dang. I was going to write about how damn snooty and elitist O’Reilly and Battelle are with their “invitation only” Web 2.0 events. But whenever I read O’Reilly’s blog, and the few times I’ve met him in person, I always come away thinking he’s quite simply the clearest and most innovative fellow who thinks and writes about changes in the internet landscape. John is pretty dang sharp as well.
So, instead of criticizing those guys I’ll note the upcoming non-snooty version of their Web 2.0 events, called the Web 2.0 Expo , to be held in April 2007 at Moscone in San Francisco. Be there or be …. Web 1.0.
I’m was messing around *a little* with Yahoo!’s excellent social networking application “Yahoo 360”, wondering why it’s not more popular and why I’m not spending more time with it. They are of course related, since widespread adoption is going to justify more of a committment from me and until I see that happening I can’t “afford” to spend time building up contacts and 360 groups only to find nobody else is using it. I had a similar experience with LinkedIn which is also very good but seems narrowly focused more on those who are looking for work, hiring people, etc rather than lazy pseudo-tech bums like me who are happy where we are.
I’d like to keep up with Jeff Clavier and the Silicon Valley Search SIG group, but the 360 group is not active at 360…yet. I do think Yahoo’s built a great environment for virtual biz “meetings” and it may spring to life. It’s totally understandable that the SIG is not using this much – they also would need to see a “critical mass” of interest and commitment to become more involved.
In terms of utility Yahoo 360 seems to be in what I’d think would be a sweet spot – somewhere between Myspace’s legions of ranting teenagers and LinkedIn’s almost elitist business formality and (at least for now) narrow focus on technology workers.
I don’t spend much time on any single application – even my own sites which really need the TLC not to mention major overhauling, but to me 360 is really getting close to the right social networking environment if it had widespread adoption.
Joe Duck 