Now, according to Forbes, an Ask.com spokesperson says that “reports of the site becoming oriented towards older women are false and were fueled by an erroneous Associated Press article that has since been changed"*. According to Forbes, “even though the company plans on building on this user base it isn’t going to abandon other users in pursuit of it.”
"We join the ODF Alliance and many other experts in our belief that OOXML doesn't meet the criteria required for a globally-accepted standard. (An overview of our findings and sample technical issues unresolved are posted here.)"
To remind us that not ALL wastefulness, fraud, deceit and excuse-making happens at the federal level:
According to Cole, the state expects to announce the new bidding process for the project “within a month,” and the contract to be awarded “within a year.” Construction on the new bridge should begin shortly after that. And to answer a question that has been posed on the air a few times, whatever bridge ends up being built should work just fine with the new approaches.
As hard as the previous story is to believe, this may be even worse:
"WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California. The agency—much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago—arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency's deputy director."
Link from Slashdot.
This is hilarious.
On Slashdot they are arguing over whether Dems or Reps are more likely to experience such a snafu.
Correct answer: both equally
If the actual error was made by a contractor, there is a good chance someone will lose their job or at least get shuffled to a position where they can do no further harm. Not so with government jobs.
Believe what you will about the motives for each political party, but doesn't this make the case for smaller government?
But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".
Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the "to:" field, according to a recipient of the emails.
A committee spokesperson emailed the following statement in response to TPMmuckraker's questions:
The tip line was created to be a confidential method for Justice Department employees to provide the Judiciary Committee with information that might aid the Committee in its ongoing investigation of politicization at the Justice Department. Because of the confidentiality agreement, the Committee will not discuss any emails sent on this tip line. A technological error in a recent communication inadvertently disclosed certain email addresses.
Even though almost every comment submitted for this article disagrees with the favorable treatment given to Yahoo mail, my post must have gone over the line somehow. It got deleted. I hate when that happens, and when it happens I tend to become a bit bitter about it. I don't remember what I wrote now, but basically pointed out that the review was wrong, WRONG, WRONG! and that it read like a sales piece for Yahoo (which I still think it does).
Saying that doesn't make it so (in other words I wasn't accusing them of being on the take, just implying that it read that way) but having my saying that deleted makes me wonder just what the fixation is between ATD and Yahoo. It merits watching. They're independent, yada, yada, yada, but they got to get advertising from somebody. And they've even boasted lately about how frequently they write articles about Yahoo. Let's keep an eye on who wins the big banner ad sweepstakes shall we?
Succinctly:
(1) Only Gmail and AOL/AIM mail (which was not even included in the comparison) allow you to read your e-mail into any generic local POP/IMAP compatible reader without paying a fee (Yahoo and MSN charge for the privilege).
(2) All the e-mail systems under consideration now have more storage than the average person is ever likely to need. Only Gmail offered it first and the rest followed. Sans competition, Yahoo mails storage limits actually went DOWN.
(3) Yahoo's spam filtering is horrible. Again, they make you pay to get better service in this area.
(4) Yahoo is slow. That's in web mode. Comments in the referenced article indicate the POP capability is even slower. I have no reason to doubt that.
(5) Finally, Yahoo ads are obtrusive, annoying, and so bloated they even crash your browser from time to time, not to mention adding even more delays between screens. Gmail ads are text only, take up little real-estate, and because they are targeted, are occasionally handy to have around (for example taking you to pages that allow you to track a package when you get a confirmation from a vendor on something you have ordered).
As I've had to do with other "objective" journals, I'll be mirroring my posts to the WSJ and affiliates right here from now on. Heck, I may even cancel my (paid) subscription. I'm PISSED!
"Mr. Gates said a worker's mother country is helped when that worker sends home some of his or her wages to remaining family members. He also said that countries with health problems would be better served by greater investment in health care and not by trying to prevent their health-care professionals from moving abroad."
"Let me tell you about an audiobook that I hated.
I didn't hate it because it was badly written -- it was mediocre in the way that mediocre thrillers usually are, and that means it would ordinarily have been tolerable.
No, the reason I stopped listening to Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link is that this book is evil."
As the professor on Futurama says: "Good News Everyone!"...
"Diebold Inc. saw great potential in the modernization of elections equipment. Now, analysts say, executives may be angling for ways to dump its e-voting subsidiary that's widely seen as tarnishing the company's reputation."
No surprise here:
March 05, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. threatened to dump the Macintosh version of Office 10 years ago during talks with Apple Inc. because the move would "do a great deal of harm" to its rival, according to a memo made public in a recently-settled antitrust case.
The 1997 memo from Ben Waldman, at the time the head of Microsoft's Macintosh development group, to then-CEO Bill Gates, urged Mac Office 97's release. The suite, which in June 1997 had not yet reached beta, was eventually released as Office 98 in March 1998.
But Waldman understood that the next Mac Office was a stick that could be used against Apple. "The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also think that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously," Waldman said in his e-mail to Gates.
"The programme claims there appears to be a consensus across science that CO2 is responsible for global warming, but Professor Paul Reiter is shown to disagree.
He said the influential United Nations report on Climate change, that claimed humans were responsible, was a sham.
It claimed to be the opinion of 2,500 leading scientists, but Prof Reiter said it included names of scientists who disagreed with the findings and resigned from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and said the report was finalised by government appointees.
The CO2 theory is further undermined by claims that billions of pounds is being provided by governments to fund greenhouse effect research, so thousands of scientists know their job depends on the theory continuing to be seen as fact. "
The film features an impressive roll-call of experts, including nine professors – experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, environmental science, biogeography and paleoclimatology – from such reputable institutions as MIT, NASA, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia.
(Nice cartoon at title link)
From the Mercury News Article:
"Language fluency was a big reason some of Sun Microsystems' technical support jobs were moved from India to Nova Scotia. Customers in the Americas who needed tech support had griped about having a difficult time understanding the English typically spoken in India. ``This move offered a better fit for our customers,'' said Sun spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek."
"Innovation is the source of U.S. economic leadership and the foundation for our competitiveness in the global economy. Government investment in research, strong intellectual property laws and efficient capital markets are among the reasons that America has for decades been best at transforming new ideas into successful businesses."
This was, for Microsoft, a perfect ending. The damning tapes were lost in a way that could be blamed on a contractor -- a contractor over which Microsoft had great power -- power greater than just a services contract. The contractor "accepted" responsibility though there was no real evidence they had done anything wrong. It could just as easily have been a Microsoft employee who destroyed the tapes. It is clear that Microsoft never [r]evealed to the court either that the tapes had been found or that they had been destroyed. This would have had to have taken place at the spoliation hearing that would have happened had Microsoft not settled with Burst for $60 million.
*Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story. Even the lady at “The Weather Channel” probably gets paid good money for a prime time show on climate change. No man-made global warming, no show, and no salary. Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab.
In addition, Cullen’s December 17, 2006 episode of "The Climate Code" TV show, featured a columnist who openly called for Nuremberg-style Trials for climate skeptics. Cullen featured Grist Magazine’s Dave Roberts as an eco-expert opining on energy issues, with no mention of his public call to institute what amounts to the death penalty for scientists who express skepticism about global warming.
Are you freakishly obsessed with the daily casualty count in Iraq? Do you find yourself disappointed when a day or two goes by and no American soldiers die? Have you ever been at a cocktail party and said, "How can we be so damn jovial when George Bush is responsible for a death toll in Iraq that is approaching one-tenth the total of British dead in the Second Boer War?"
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need the new Associated Press Pocket Iraq Casualty Counter! Now the information you need to make bizarre, extraneous points about the Iraqi War is at your fingertips, 24 hours a day!
And, although I love Apple (I have three Macs and three PCs in my house right now) I can't display full HDTV images through mine onto my HDTV screen (I have a slightly older Sony screen than Dave does). But with Xbox 360 and Media Center I can.
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