2004 December

Dec 31 2004
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The emergence of a fascist cult in the Ayn Rand Institute

Posted by | religion | No Comments

I am currently mulling over the sheer generosity and heartfelt sentiment from the goose-stepping Ayn Rand Institute: U.S. Should Not Help Tsunami Victims The argument being that all money should come from individual donations. Only there is no donation box for Tsunami victims on the Rand website. Tsunami victims are presumably from ‘primitive nations’ where ‘the mere fact that they needed help should not have created a claim ‘as simultaneously Isolationist and Jingoist Ed Locke says of Vietnam, in another classic muddle headed Rand Institute Op Ed. By extension, should all Iraq rebuilding money come from donations from those who were in favor of invasion? Should the invasion itself have been funded from donations? It’s a nice thought, perhaps the Iraq war would have never happened if people had to put their money where their mouth is. But democracy ain’t like that, you can’t hold a referendum for everything. Society…

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Dec 30 2004
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Realtor destroying wishlist.

Posted by | business | No Comments

My recent experiences with realtors show me that: most of them don’t know very much about buildings; waste your time by lying in descriptions; seem to be the last people on earth to use email and digital cameras instead of time wasting phone calls and expensive on-site visits. Realtors charge up to a quarter of what architects do, without most of the skill, service or liability. The reason that this happens is that they own the customer. By extension, if their services don’t benefit customers then this will change. Why hasn’t the Internet destroyed the current hopeless realtor merry-go-round. Perhaps a listings service could be built where data can only be submitted if: 1. the realtor or seller lists a contact email(rather than them contact you, or by phone). 2. all listing have digital pictures of outside and all rooms. 3. all room sizes are listed in square foot. 4….

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Dec 15 2004
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The real reason why Google is digitizing libraries?

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

It sounds like a very magnanimous thing for Google to do – to build a virtual library of Alexandria, but there is a solid business reason as well. One of the simplest ways to game Google is to scan out of copyright books, rare ones ideally, boost Pagerank by buying hard links, and serve Adsense against the results. This is commonly done currently, with specialist Dictionaries. However, Pagerank only really works if you have original content, i.e. stuff that is not already on the web; slapping up a copy of the works of Shakespeare won’t do. If Google scans out of copyright books, and serves them up itself, then attempts to trick Google into handing out Adsense revenue without generating any content will not work. Google adds major libraries to its database

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Dec 07 2004
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Good RSS article by David Berlind

Posted by | rss | No Comments

David Berlind has done his homework in What’s wrong with RSS is also what’s right with it. The first sensible piece about RSS all year. The reality of RSS is that modules have been a failure, and that leaves RSS as a standard for headlines and links and a miscellaneous catch all called description or content. As Berlind points out you dont always have headlines and links are sometimes ambiguous, so that leaves us looking at a rather naked emperor. But that doesn’t mean to say that RSS isn’t useful as a meme if not a standard.

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Dec 07 2004
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BBC documentary on atheism

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BBC – BBC Four Documentaries – Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief “In this first ever television history of disbelief, Jonathan Miller leads viewers on a personal journey exploring the origins of his own lack of belief and uncovering the hidden story of atheism.” via Blackbeltjones’ delicious

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Dec 06 2004
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I’ll be using my blog to collect notes for a book on atheism

Posted by | religion | No Comments

I am going to be using this blog to collect notes for a book, so postings may sometimes seem a bit random. The book will be about faith – a defense of atheism and an attack on ideology and blind faith, from religion to secular political doctrine and cults. This comes at a time when the US has suffered terribly from attacks justified entirely by faith, while at the same time becoming more religious than any other developed nation. The book will not beat about the bush, I aim to put forward the argument that faith is necessarily bad, something to be tolerated where it is itself tolerant but not to be respected. The aim is still to write something positive, something that contains not just an argument for science over superstition, but also argues for a richer culture based upon appreciating art without having to literally believe it.

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