or sign in to get started

Show: Comments - Likes - Both

Tom Stocky posted a link

Official site to opt out of those annoying credit card and insurance offers

Wednesday at 11:56 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Brett Cannon, Joel Webber, Nikpay and 6 other people liked this

I blogged about this one and a few others a while back... I have been getting very little unsolicited paper mail since using these 3 services: http://www.waded.org/2008/06/l... - Wade Dorrell

3 more comments

@Wade: Good call, though I think your post has the wrong link for Valpack opt-out -- I believe this is the right one: http://www.coxtarget.com/mails... In addition to DMA (https://www.dmachoice.org/MPS/...), ADVO is another good one to opt-out from: http://www.advo.com/consumersu... - Tom Stocky

Thanks Tom, I fixed the link. - Wade Dorrell

giving your ssn out on a website? sketchy... - Peter Deng

@Peter SSN was optional when I went through this system in June. Yeah, don't give out SSN if you don't have to. Did something change? - Wade Dorrell

I guess it's not required, but it says in red text "SSN will be encrypted for your protection." I'm not sure what good is a hashed SSN, hence my skepticism. - Peter Deng

Robert Scoble posted a message

“I've seen it all now. An event for bacon lovers: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/even...”

yesterday at 12:09 am - Link

April Russo, Threepwood, Victor Ganata and 11 other people liked this

Scoble posting about bacon...? *goes off to check the time-space continuum* - Johnny Worthington

9 more comments

Are you kidding ?! Love the event title, "Masterbacon" wow! where's Mona? - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

I was thinking of Mona when I saw this on Upcoming. - Robert Scoble

...makes you wonder what he was searching for, and whether Mona has been holding out on us... - WorldofHiglet

John, I did a double-take, too! Scoble...bacon...wha?! - Jandy Stone

haha - in the time it took me to type my other comment 'Mona' is mentioned twice! - WorldofHiglet

WorldofHiglet: I just added tons of events to my calendar and was looking through various events. I don't know how I found this one. Just appeared and I thought "Mona has to see this." - Robert Scoble

That's nothing. I've got your "event for bacon lovers who love bacon lover events" right here... _________ No never mind, I don't have that. - Wade Dorrell

And, of course, it's in Portland. Bacon capital of the world. - Rick Turoczy

:) I'm sure she'll appreciate it. - WorldofHiglet

But it's all slight of hand! It says a *day* for bacon lovers but it's really only 4 hours. I mean c'mon. It's bacon! (and Mona will be here shortly, I'm sure - the lure of bacon is strong!) - Lucretia Pruitt

I refuse to believe that that there is very much approximating to real bacon in the continental US. - Simon Lucy

DeWitt Clinton posted a message

“(1) ASint DDRII 1GB-667 RAM - free to the first person who takes it off my desk.”

Tuesday at 1:18 pm - Link

Morton Fox and James Williams (willia4) liked this

Otherwise it is going in the box with the other several thousand pieces of orphaned RAM. - DeWitt Clinton

7 more comments

Dibs. I'll be in MTV tomorrow. - Benjamin Golub

My desk is in San Francisco. : ) - DeWitt Clinton

Ah, not worth it then :P - Benjamin Golub

MV, MTV is a music channel, regardless of Google's HR website. - Chris White

@Ben, actually, I'll be in MTV tomorrow if you want to stop by. I can show you around if you haven't seen the campus before. - DeWitt Clinton

@Chris, would you be okay with MtV? - DeWitt Clinton

DeWitt, no. It's two words: "Mountain" and "View", you don't abbreviate Palo Alto as PlA.. And how long is that Android thing going to be in front of b44? - Chris White

Some people tried to move it. Once. Angry android was angry. - DeWitt Clinton

I'm making a wreath out of red LEDs and orphaned RAM. - Wade Dorrell

Paul Thurrott posted an entry on SuperSite Blog

Windows Live Wave 3 coming today

Tuesday at 10:52 am - Link

Judy Jones, Hakan and invariant liked this

Interesting new features although a bit late to the party. The real question is though, do they lock-in your data? It's evil that they don't allow you to get your email out of Hotmail for example. - invariant

2 more comments

where is it???? - Hakan

@invariant You can use DeltaSync to retrieve data at a minimum. POP is also available to pull out your data, http://mailcall.spaces.live.co... (and I thought I read somewhere POP access was going to be open up to non-paid users sometime soon, although now I can't find a link.) - Wade Dorrell

Thanks Wade, I didn't know they had POP whether paid or free. - invariant

@invariant I just now realized that POP mention in the link I provided is pretty old... stupid blog theme w/o year dates... and I do not use POP nor do I pay for Hotmail so I don't know of it's actual status. What I do know is I use Windows Live Mail (desktop client) which uses DeltaSync, and all mail data is synced & stored locally via that protocol. Should be easy enough to push all my mail somewhere else if necessary; the way one would go about it is not significantly different than a direct POP migration. - Wade Dorrell

Chris White posted a message

“Isn't Black Friday kind of a bad name for something that is suppose to be a good thing? Perhaps Green Friday would have been a better choice, given the tendency to use the term Black for stock market crash days.”

November 26 at 1:05 pm - Link

Henry Winckelmann and Morton Fox liked this

indeed, Chris, Black Thursday is the official start of Great Depression on october 24, 1929. - Hayk

2 more comments

Perhaps black friday is not a mis-nomer considering the emptiness of consumer society? An ironic day filled with artificial joy. - TStowers

It is the day Retailers sales figures are SUPPOSED to go from Red to Black. Notice I said Supposed! - Elizabeth

digestion day - Brian Ries

Maybe it's the name of bad things that should shift away from "Black." Did you see the latest National Geographic cover? The world is pretty lit up now even at night... dark isn't dangerous anymore. And I don't think Green Friday works... the last bill I saw wasn't very green. How about Mottled Green/Blue/Red/Brown Friday? - Wade Dorrell

Robert Scoble posted an entry on Scobleizer -- Tech geek blogger

Mike Arrington is wrong about Google search

November 23 at 1:27 pm - Link

Hutch Carpenter, Jennifer Dittrich, andrei_c and 21 other people liked this

How you two get personal is now legendary. I love it. I've even used it in one of my university essays. - Sofia Gkiousou

20 more comments

No, I can't see the note you made on the TechCrunch entry. - mojay

Sofia: yeah, we'll have a good debate at LeWeb. Mike's a good guy and I do appreciate boxing with him, even though I usually end up on the mat on my back. - Robert Scoble

Wonderful advance, when doing directed research these will be incredible productivity and effectiveness enhancers. - David HC Soul

Robert oh I don't think it's about who gets his backside whooped - for me it's all about the debate. Even though I do wonder from time to time if you guys don't feel like we are enjoying the blood too much. - Sofia Gkiousou

"It NEEDS to increase the time we spend interacting with it." -- Look at google's philosophy: http://www.google.com/corporat...: "Google may be the only company in the world whose stated goal is to have users leave its website as quickly as possible" - Vishy

Vishy: that was the philosophy up to now. Today they are totally ad driven and need you to stick around. They got TOO GOOD at sending you away. You left so fast you weren't even clicking on the ads anymore. - Robert Scoble

I'm still in two minds about this. On the one hand it can be distracting so I see Arrington's point. I should have a choice to turn it off. But on the other hand aren't we all banging on about the potential of user-generated content? Shouldn't we be practising what we are preaching? - Sofia Gkiousou

I left a comment on this comment about your entry on Google Search. I still didn't click on any ads. - Wade Dorrell

People use Google to search, plan and simple. Some of us super users will leave comments and use the additional features, but a majority of people will continue to use Google the way they always have. It's a non issue for me. - Jennifer Van Grove

Google should allow the option to turn it off easily (profile/account setting..I assume it can't be done now). What separates Google imnsho from its old & upcoming competitors => simplicity of use.This clutters the screen.Detracts from a key value proposition.As users, we allow Google many liberties with our attention because we feel they act in mutual best interests & we get something out of the relationship... If they start foisting stuff on people, that goodwill & bonhomie might evaporate... - Suzan Gray

SearchWiki is VERY misunderstood. Not only do you not have to "turn off" what other people vote and write, you have to go digging at the bottom of the page if you want to see it. The only stuff you see automaticaly is stuff YOU wrote and voted up or down. - Josh Bancroft

...I don't even want to see the voting buttons, unless I choose to... ( I wasn't even talking about the comments.) This is not about search wiki.. It's about being able to choose what clutters my horizon or not. - Suzan Gray

I agree, there should be an option to opt out. - Jay

This time I disagree..they don't need to keep us on Google.com, it is non-conducive for them in long run..Google.com is not a social network and for that matter, social networks are not making money either..So it is non-conducive, for sure - Varun Mahajan

I'm with Josh, I don't understand the problem. This just lets you personalize your search. You never have to view others' comments if you don't want to. Are the X and comment bubble so tedious? If so, you can always stick with http://www.scroogle.org/ - Jeremy Schultz

I should add, for the searches where I'm "feeling lucky," I always use http://goodsearch.com/ - donate ad $$ to your favorite charity. - Jeremy Schultz

I don't know why Arrington makes such a big deal. Results modified by other users don't even appear on the SERP - yet. I'm sure there will eventually be an opt-in for including modified results from other peple on the results page. Google won't release that until they've collected enough data and implemented functionality to prevent gaming of the system. - GeekLad

really, seriously... prevent gaming the system... you've got to be kidding me. - Brian Roy

Commented on the blog. But Mike is right about there not being an easy opt-out, and *maybe* about comments. He's wrong about the usefulness of the product (it'll make Google search algorithm smarter) and about the potential for abuse (there is some, but not enough to overwhelm normal usage or smoothing factors etc.). My take: http://www.blindfiveyearold.co... - AJ Kohn

Brian, Digg has measures in place to prevent gaming their system. I don't know why you think Google is incapable of it. They constantly prevent people from gaming search results. They even made up an HTML anchor tag parameter (nofollow) that isn't even W3C compliant (in HTML 4.0 - it is now part of the HTML 5.0 draft spec). They'll do what it takes and I'm sure they'll do it well. - GeekLad

ok... yeah. No one games Digg... oh wait... didn't I get a tweet yesterday asking me to digg something to bump it up? Trying to prevent gaming is a silly notion. These types of services invite (and thrive off of) gaming. Essentially all SEO is Gaming page rank. They may attempt to prevent abuse... but not gaming. - Brian Roy

@Josh, THANK YOU for clarifying. I was wondering how to get to see others' comments. It takes multiple clicks to see them, so it is not intrusive at all. I agree with David Soul, it's a great research tool. My only concern would be needing to log off in order to check "pure" SEO results for various terms. Not a huge burden. - Laura Norvig

James Kendrick posted a message on Twitter

“FolderShare becomes Windows Live Sync. So what about Live Mesh?: It's hard not to ask the question that.. http://tinyurl.com/6bep8r”

November 21 at 12:35 pm - Link

Ian Fogg, Dennis E. Hamilton, Evan Sims and Robert Scoble liked this

Live Mesh is awful; I'm glad they aren't replacing FolderShare with it. It's been my favorite file sync service for the last several years, and was long overdue for some upgrade love from Microsoft. - Evan Sims

3 more comments

Funny, live Mesh works great for me, although I only use it in P2P operations. I mostly don't have content at the Live Mesh Desktop. And the Windows Explorer integration is super for me. - Dennis E. Hamilton via twhirl

The biggest problem I have with Live Mesh is it's Remote Desktop feature. It installs a virtual display adapter that destroys Direct3D performance, especially under Vista x64. - Evan Sims

@Evan If the Remote Desktop feature isn't enabled, is the virtual display adapter still an issue? I didn't enable the feature in the first install of Mesh I did; the sync'ing functionality worked fine without it. - Wade Dorrell

I installed Mesh this last week to give it another try and wasn't presented with an option to not install or disable it. =( Maybe I missed it? - Evan Sims

I've been using FolderShare for a while and it's doing the job. Live Mesh isn't all that bad either though. I may uninstall Live Mesh since I'm not using the free cloud space and remote desktop feature much. - Rodfather

Robert Scoble posted a link

RSS Hat Meme

November 19 at 10:06 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

accesine, (jeff)isageek, Jesse Hattabaugh and 125 other people liked this

RSS Hat Meme. As shot at the Chinese BloggerCon in Guangzhou over the weekend. - Robert Scoble via Bookmarklet

33 more comments

Thats great, simple & elegant. - Nicholas Kreidberg

I want one that is for sure - John D. Lemke via twhirl

باهاش فید مغزمونو شیر میکنیم! بده که آخه! هیچی توش نیست! - Farzad Zamani

Soooo if I want to subscribe do I go up and push them in the head ? :D What would be cool is if you could scan the symbol with a mobile phone and get the bloggers feed - Mo Kargas

Mo: Closer than you might think http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - David HC Soul

David, that's fantastic! Additionally, the last argument I need to finally purchase an iPhone. - Mo Kargas

WANT - Ariel Torres

I like it, how can i get one, scoble? - jimmy howe

I want one! - Michael Fidler via twhirl

I want as well. - Adam Helweh

Drew Olanoff has an RSS tattoo. Who's man enough to start that meme? - Louis Gray

I'll take an OPML hat. I look better in blue. - Mark Krynsky

ugggg, RSS overload - sofarsoshawn

Louis that is so tempting - wonder what my wife would say - Jesse Stay

Hotness. - Vera Hannaford

Every time I wear the hat I get a bar at the top that asks me if I want to wear it with Live Bookmarks, Google Reader or another outfit. - Kevin Leroux

@Kevin: ahah! - Jérôme Flipo

I so want one of those hats. Where can we get them? - Rob Diana

Nice hat. I wonder if it comes in newspaper. - Col. Tribune

You can contact @digitalboy at twitter for this hat :) - number5

I guess it has a QR-code pointing to the feed url at the back. Right? :-) - Panayotis Vryonis

WANT x5 or whatever. - Tamar Weinberg

This is my cap, pls follow me via Twitter @digitalboy. - digitalboy

OK...but where is the RSSmeme hat? - Shey

I Want!! - Sarah Perez

That is nice, I almost want to wear a hat now. - Aram Zucker-Scharff

I want one. - James Hull

@vista models the hat (which also comes in black): http://www.flickr.com/photos/s... - Robert Scoble

That'd be kind of a cool shirt. Does it exist? - Wade Dorrell

Why do I want this? Why? - tehKenny

Where can I get one? - Aad 't Hart

want - Richard Akerman

I think I just found @marshallk's Christmas present - Rick Turoczy

here is anothter. http://www.flickr.com/photos/h... - digitalboy

I got one of their T-Shirts,I should have got the hat. - Steve Chou

Paul Thurrott posted an entry on Paul Thurrott's newly used software on Wakoopa

Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool

November 14 at 2:33 pm - Link

Paul, is there a reason your FriendFeed contains this feed? I find it pretty useless/dead-end information; I don't know whether you even like the software or not, and wakoopa doesn't tell me much about what it does/is. - Wade Dorrell

Steve Rubel posted a link

Nielsen: 80% of Google Docs & Spreadsheet users also used Word or Excel

November 14 at 3:44 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jesper Lind, Lu Tao, Chris Herbert and Burak Arikan liked this

Great data from Nielsen, which complements what Compete.com put out there yesterday. - Steve Rubel via Bookmarklet

Interesting. - Wade Dorrell

Steve Rubel posted an entry on Micro Persuasion

The Coming End of Tangible Media is in Sight

November 14 at 8:34 am - Link

Adam Singer, Mike Coulter, Nikos Anagnostou and 10 other people liked this

It won't happen by 2014. Need to cycle through the Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and Millenials before this is a reality. - Hutch Carpenter

3 more comments

I predict a massive backlash against online media being "green" (which is as much of a myth as food miles and "carbon neutral") once people figure out that it's massively costly and not carbon neutral beyond the point of purchase for the duration of its lifecycle. Unlike a book which (unless you burn it) has no further direct environmental impact beyond its point of production. - Alex Murray

I will buy books until they are no longer printed, and while their print runs may get smaller, I don't see them ending in my lifetime; furthermore, I could see myself buying books that I read and enjoyed electronically, just as I often buy books that I originally read at the library. - RAPatton

@Alex sure, but I suspect E=mc^2 says that book could support transmission of that book to every human on earth, once a second, for the next 1000 years. Of course that sort of "book burning" probably isn't green either, and will lead to the universe imploding or something nasty like that, but whatever. - Wade Dorrell

@Steve: Just a correction. The Christian Science isn't going to be entirely online. Effective April 2009, it will no longer have a daily print edition, but it will print a Sunday edition (magazine style, I think). That's not to say that weekly print edition won't eventually go away, too, but that's not happening yet. - Bryan Person

@Bryan you're right. Thanks. - Steve Rubel

Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a message on Twitter

“@digiphile thanks, I actually think Obama on YouTube ever week is going to be a reall big deal”

November 14 at 3:09 pm - Link

Matt Cutts, Derrick Burns, Justin Davey and 7 other people liked this

Me too. - Robert Scoble

10 more comments

agreed I don't think people understand the importance of it yet. - Kipp Bodnar

though I also agree with one of the commenters on our post that it's really important to keep doing the radio and talking to older folks too - Marshall Kirkpatrick via IM

This is awesome. I have been hoping someone would bring back the fireside chat idea. I hope Obama really delivers to the nature of this new platform and not just the same old "presidential radio address" repackaged for video. - David Jacobs

Like all Internet media, after the novelity wears off it will depend on content. - Robert Hafer

Wonder what's going to happen around accessiblity/508 on this point. Hopefully there will be a nice way to get transcripts. - Wade Dorrell

I just want a podcast (audio preferred, but video would work) so I can stick them on my iPod and listen to them in my car. The lack of ability to placeshift is STILL the biggest drawback to streaming-only platforms like YouTube. - Josh Bancroft

Loving that idea a lot right now!! Yeah for a savvy Pres!! finally!! - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

The Presidential weekly addresses are already available as podcasts (have been for 2 years, IIRC) The website is something like whitehouse.gov/podcasts. EDITED TO ADD: The audio files have been on the website for almost 10 years, and the transcripts have been available since whitehouse.gov went live. - Anika Malone

But Youtube works on iPhones. Can't download podcasts (yet) regularly on iPhones. Besides, I never wanted to listen to Bush. :) - Karoli

The question is what will the comments be like, or will there be any? - Andrew Wilson

Anika - thanks, I didn't know that the president already podcasts. I haven't wanted to listen before now. :-) Hope Obama continues to make things available that way. - Josh Bancroft

It's not significantly different from the radio address, so it's clearly the hype (not pejorative) or rather the importance the candidate gave to feedback, that makes the difference. Unless they use the (poor) comment feature, YouTube really is nothing but a (heavily compressed) video host, or a nod to Google's profit line. - Bertil Hatt

Tac Anderson posted a message

“just weeded my FF down to 14 people. i'm planning on "starting over" w/ it.”

November 12 at 7:33 am - Link

Alex Scoble CISSP and anna liked this

I weeded a while back, but haven't really gotten back into FriendFeed since then. Will eventually, just don't have time at the moment. Thanks for keeping me in your list! Do you have a list of Boise FF'ers; is it best captured by the TechBoise room or...? - Wade Dorrell

Robert Scoble shared an item on Google Reader

50% of US engineering students drop out - Why?

November 12 at 12:26 am - Link

Nenad Nikolic, kamla bhatt, Sarah Miller and 27 other people liked this

I am part of the 50% who don't drop out! - Kevin Mohr

31 more comments

I didn't drop out but here is part of my experience in this post from years ago. It was discouraging to hear the professors talk. Needless to say i don't code. :-) http://www.altamirano.org/mark... - antonio

Thankfully I'm in the other 50%, but I can see why many would change their major or drop out. I saw it first hand where many 1st and 2nd year Mechanical Engineering students changed their majors to something 'easier'. The most common reason was difficulty with the required advanced Math courses. Calculus being the road block for many. - Jeff P. Henderson

If I were entering college now, I would try to go to Olin. I really like their approach. - Paul Buchheit

nice post, I'm looking for the number of engineers (or per thousand capita ratio) graduating in Greece (or greeks graduating around the world) - george tziralis

Many of Computer Science professors at Stanford were luminaries in their fields, but weren't very good at engaging students in the subject matter. Brilliant researchers don't always make the best teachers. I think this contributed a lot to the dropout rate. - Jess Lee

How does this compare to drop-out rate for all US college students? And does "drop out" mean "of college entirely" or "take a break then come back" or "and choose another major"? The discussion may be lusty but I really don't like discussions that start on a figure w/ no bother to compare it to anything else, or link to info about how it's calculated. - Wade Dorrell

In CA we have two types of public universities. The UC schools require the professors to do research, where as the State University schools do not. I think the State University schools are much better for undergrad tech education as you get much more attention from your professors. - Jeff P. Henderson

The UC Berkeley College of Engineering started the Center For Entrepreneurship and Technology http://cet.berkeley.edu to address some of the issues Dodge talks about. - Ruchira S. Datta

Engineering is hard and requires above-average intelligence. Think about it this way: Statistics tells us that probably 50% of people will be below-average. Wouldn't you want those 50% of the students to drop out before actually becoming an engineer? MIT just doesn't admit that half of the population in the first place, but most schools don't have that luxury. - Gabe

People have a lot of options for (a) careers (b) money (c) power (d) image (e) attracting mates in the US, compared to China/India. Engineers are not valued very highly in the US compared to businesspeople, doctors, and lawyers. - Mitchell Tsai

boring - Gregory Lent

@Gabe: You would think that all the people that go to study Computer Sciences or seek other Engineering degrees are above the 50% average to begin with. - Amit Morson

somestimes it's a scoail or maturity thing - was for me. I get by. Wished I finished. - Alan Wilensky via Alert Thingy

It's because of the fact that people with higher standards of living pursue less demanding challenges offering similar ROI (I = investment+involvement). That's why there's so many non-US students (especially from lower income countries) in engineering and why they're much less inclined to fail. - Nenad Nikolic via twhirl

Engineering sucks. I think there's a point where any engineering student realizes that even with a degree they're looking at a pretty mediocre salary working in a really boring job. Add this to the difficult coursework and boring courses, well, engineers are good at math. It adds up to being a raw deal. That being said, if you get into engineering at Stanford or UC Berkley, your ROI would look a lot better then mine. I'm sure a large number of engineering students consider dropping out, even after Calculus. - Will Higgins

All I can do is nod. For a couple of years, not a day when by when I didn't consider jumping ship, for all the reasons commenters here have mentioned: long hours, heavy workload, fickle job market, salary barely comparable with what I could expect with a business or law degree. But here I am, a month away from (finally!) finishing my EE degree, and I couldn't be happier. - Derrick Burns

Continued from above: Basically, I think so many give up because they were looking to get something out of being an engineer: money, prestige, etc. But it's simply too great a commitment on several levels. You really have to pursue engineering because it's something you want to do, something you care about. - Derrick Burns

I dropped out because Chemical Engineering was not what I was expecting. I wanted more Chemistry, less Math. I switched to IT Management and found it much more interesting. Mind you, I'm Canadian. - Shey

I remember having a crisis in my final year of Electrical/Computer Engineering. Dropping out was a non-option, but I did consider completely abandoning 3.5 years of engineering study to switch fields and schools during my senior year. In hindsight, I didn't understand what engineers really did. My vision at the time was closer to industrial or product design than engineering. I had to take it on faith in my first two years that I was on a path to do what I was envisioning. - Kelly Norton

I suspect that more than 50% (even at good schools like GATech, I have friends who have done this) are in the wrong field. Many of my friends went into programming because they enjoyed computers and I've told them they would hate it because they don't like math. They don't listen. :) - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

still others go into engineering due to parental expectation, which I find ridiculous, but understandable - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

Amit: one of the properties of being in the lower 50% is not knowing that you're in the lower 50%. That means many of the applicants do not know they are unqualified. - Gabe

Extensive aptitude/personality testing could fix this - Aaron Eaton

Engineering is a tough subject. how does that compare to other subjects? - John Cass via twhirl

I actually sit on an advisory board for ASU (arizona state) Poly - I can tell you that what I see is students becoming disillusioned by all the stuff they have to learn before they can go out and create something "cool". The challenge is keeping them engaged through the pre-reqs/early coursework. BTW - IMHO the problem with "drop out and learn X" is that they've intentionally skipped the fundamentals that make good engineers. Just because you can code doesn't mean you can engineer... two different things. - Brian Roy

Is Computer Science part of engineering? Because it didn't take much training in Computer Science for me to start doing cool stuff. I wrote my first game and posted it onto the internet my freshman year (Core Wars). By my Junior year, I had designed a programming language and integrated in it into a MUD. Pengtoh had contributed to Linux by his sophomore year. On the other hand, I always flunked electrical engineering classes, and couldn't stomach math past linear algebra. - Piaw Na

I switch from Engineering to a Computer Science degree. Apart from the fact that I wanted to program, there were two reasons. 1) The load was very high (it was close to 40 contact hours/week in first year). 2) The maths was hard - I'm ok at math, but combined with the high load I found I struggled when I wasn't too interested in it. - Nick Lothian

"the US should staple a Green Card to every foreign student's engineering diploma and encourage them to stay in the USA." - Clare Dibble

Same as Nick here. Dropped out due to difficulty and lack of passion for the field. Went back later to finish a BS in Computer Information Systems. - Bill Sanders

I wonder what percentage of medical school students drop out. Engineering is a hard discipline, if you want to be a web dev or a study IT or "new media" instead. Making engineering "softer" because today's students don't like to work hard and expect results instantly will just create generations of mediocre engineers and will not make the US more of an engineering power. - Kevin Goldsmith via twhirl

engineering is not hard, it is so specialized and narrow, that anybody with any sort of wide mind feels suffocated .. - Gregory Lent

engineers are boring and dry, pay is low, classes are full of non-social ppl. (and almost no girls). Why not study finance, or something, girls and pay is much better. - imran

Engineering is fun! The big thing is that school's curriculums are frequently irrelevant. For instance, a lot of CS majors require irrelevant Math or Physics not because it's a requirement to do good software (they aren't), but because those classes serve as weeders. The result is, for instance, we get lots of CS majors who can't communicate or string a sentence together. If we rearranged the CS major so that we didn't impose a stupid requirement, we'd get a bigger diversity of candidates and less dropout. - Piaw Na

Dare Obasanjo posted a message on Twitter

“According to Google: Spying on users is great because we can detect flu epidemics. More spin at http://bit.ly/g0BV”

November 11 at 3:57 pm - Link

MikeAmundsen, Eugene, Atul Arora and 4 other people liked this

Are you really saying that no matter how many lives are saved by this you would still be against it? Wow. - Adewale Oshineye

47 more comments

Yup. Do the ends justify the means? I don;t think so. Google has no right to mine (or rape) my search queries for identifiable data, no matter what they do with the date. It's mine and I say they can't have it. - RudĩϐЯaЯïaȵ

Sometimes I wish Google had an "Opt out" option in google account settings to prevent my data from being used frivolously. Preferrably that they didn't store it in the first place. - Daniel Bruce

If they are correlating my search to info they are sucking off my browser or my IP address, they are pulling individually identifiable info. How else do they know where my search is taking place? - RudĩϐЯaЯïaȵ

Rudi - via GeoIP. http://www.maxmind.com/app/loc... , for example. and once they have the GeoIP they don't need to keep your IP around for that info. - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

Does that just opt out of collecting identifiable data, or all data? I'd rather not any of my data be retained, even if it's scrubbed for identifiable data. =) - Daniel Bruce

dude, are you THE Obasanjo?! The one who confronted Arrington and lived to tell the tale?! I can't believe I never saw you before here! Sub'd! - Mohomed=genieyclo

Well, personally I'd prefer that no data was retained in the first place, no matter who it is, but as said, if you have an account, and you are logged in, there could be an option to opt out of collecting data (such as searches and what have you). However, I'm not really all that militant about it :) - Daniel Bruce

And before it all gets lost in the void of time, it IS a very nice service though, even though it's a little Big Brother-y. ;) Would be nice if it were available for other countries as well. - Daniel Bruce

Well flu vaccine is one of those things that often has a *constrained supply* -- for various reasons, it's impossible for everyone to get a flu shot, so doctors, medical associations and public health officials have to figure out who gets one and who doesn't -- e.g. "high-risk" populations (elderly or immunocompromised people) and health care personnel. - Karim

What happens if people start gaming Google by searching on "flu symptoms" in the hopes it will motivate public health officials to send scarce supplies of vaccine to their geographic vicinity...? What happens if that kind of gaming is automated, with spoofed IP addresses? - Karim

Karim just blew my mind on a number of fronts. Nice work, Karim. - Wade Dorrell

[doffs hat] :-D - Karim

is that a reverse googlebomb, karim? - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

Of all the things to worry about, this is not one of them. Btw, have you all heard of Google Trends? - Paul Buchheit

I don't know if there's a name for it or if it already exists -- don't know much about SEO blackhattery but I thought "reverse googlebomb" was trying to undo a googlebomb -- e.g. having "miserable failure" link somewhere *other* than George W. Bush -- but my understanding is that googlebombs don't work as well as they used to anyway, as Google can now spot link swarms that develop over short periods of time. - Karim

If it needs a name... hmmm how about something off of Munchausen (Goohausen? Munchaugle?) because Munchausen's Syndrome is when you fake having illness to get attention. :-) Likewise you could riff off of "hypochondria" or "hypochondriasis," but doctors already use "cyberchondria" to describe people who spend too much time looking up illnesses on the internet :-D - Karim

Paul, I'm not sure what the antecedent to "this" is -- we shouldn't worry about Google collecting aggregate, non-personally-identifying data? Or gaming the system? Or getting the flu? :-D - Karim

The former Karim. The notion that tracking the aggregate search volume is somehow harmful is absurd. - Paul Buchheit

gaming the system? Srsly? what if someone owned a media company and decided to foist a personal political agenda into the mainstream? what if a newspaper tycoon thought ginning up excitement for a small war would increase sales of his papers? what if a gov't decided to monitor the movement of it's citizens and search for troublemakers. yeah, Google is so scary. - MikeAmundsen

Paul, I generally agree it's absurd, though I think some consideration needs to be given to *what* is tracked and what the level of anonymity is (i.e. how granular is the geolocation). Sure, today we might be talking about influenza and ZIP codes, but if one day Google tells me (for example) that 50% of the people living in your *block* are currently puking their guts out with norovirus, or Ebola, I *guarantee* that's going to lower the attendance at your BBQ. :-D - Karim

In fact, I *expect* Google Calendar at that point to find the BBQ on my calendar, realize it's in your block, correlate that with the Ebola and then suggest that I don't attend. lol - Karim

Mike, just saying that people have "gamed the system" many times in the past, so why should we care, isn't particularly comforting. The examples you gave are all of *rich* people gaming the system. Society is used to that. Google has the potential of lowering the bar so that some script kiddie sitting in his parents' basement can game the system, possibly to the point where it affects who gets flu shots and who *dies of the flu.* I don't think society is prepared for that one... - Karim

Eh. No one is putting a gun to your head to use Google. You query, you expose yourself. - Victor Ganata

@Karim: i understand your point. you're not worried that data is used or abused as it often has been and will be. your point is that it's now easier to use/abuse the data and that Google is part of that. you're concerned that more harm can result since more opportunity exists to use/abuse the data, right? - MikeAmundsen

actually, Victor, it seems like the implication here is, "you DON'T query, you DON'T expose yourself, your community DOESN'T get medicine." seems like a pretty strong incentive to me. Google or die. lol - Karim

Mike, yes, basically -- there's always going to be people gaming the system -- if you have enough money, you'll always be able to get a flu shot -- but since there are *relatively* few rich people, there's *relatively* little gaming. Of course, letting everyone game the system is more democratic -- why should the rich have all the fun? -- but if everyone cheats, the system is in danger of collapse. It's just clans and warlords at that point -- federate with us and you'll get flu vaccine! - Karim

Obviously I'm just playing devil's advocate here, because it seems like the Interwebs have made mistakes like this before, and I'm hoping someone will say that they only use non-spoofed IPv6 addresses, or they only count single queries from logged-in Google accounts -- something that indicates they are thinking about the potential for misuse instead of the usual "Isn't this COOL?" and then figuring out it was abused later. - Karim

because if this has potential to *save* lives -- which it might -- it also has the potential to end them prematurely. - Karim

Yeah, I don't know the technical details of how Google scrubs their data, but it seems no more and no less nefarious as the practice of basic epidemiology. After all, how do you think the CDC gathers their data? All of those flu cases obviously have names, ages, and locations attached to them, too. - Victor Ganata

The difference between the Google system and current epidemiology is that Google relies on *self-reporting.* Currently, a *doctor* tells the CDC you have the flu. If you knew that going to google.com and clicking on "I'm Feeling Nauseous" would affect how much medicine your community received, don't you think you might be tempted to click on it, especially if flu vaccine became scarce, as it so often does? - Karim

A Google employee, Niniane Wang, demonstrated conclusively that a lot of the talk about "anonymized" logs is just pure B.S., and people like Greg Linden have shown that it's possible to identify people even from aggregate data. So I think some of the Google apologists here are being a bit too partisan. But in this specific case, I think it's perfectly legitimate (and even honorable) to mine the data in aggregate. - Joshua Allen

But that's the thing. For same reason why it's hard (but not impossible) to game your doctor, and why it's harder to still to game an epidemiologist, I think it would be hard to game Google. It certainly won't be a single variable that they're analyzing, and it's a lot easier to spot a vociferous faker, than someone who is quietly trying to hide their symptoms. - Victor Ganata

The real gripe I have with this and similar aggregate mining exercises is that this data belongs to the public. Any aggregate data like this which is computed on the backs of the public should be made freely available to the public. I don't care about data like PageRank -- that's perfectly reasonable to remain proprietary. But the idea that Google should own the rights to important public information, derived from our activities, is morally unconscionable. - Joshua Allen

And while the CDC utilizes self-reporting for the flu (although this is actually changing), for things like West Nile, Strep throat, and gonorrhea, it's a lot less voluntary. In essence, if you visit your doctor, you invite the possibility that your identifying data will be transmitted to the CDC (not to mention to the health insurance companies, but I digress.) - Victor Ganata

Victor, I think it's far easier to game Google than game a doctor. It is *far* easier to pretend to be multiple user agents and IP addresses on the Internet than it is for you to convince your doctor that you are really [insert arbitrarily large number] different people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... - Karim

Karim, I agree with your point about anonymity and the ease of creating bots. But it would have to be done pretty expertly, to mimic a normal pattern of queries. Without knowing what a normal pattern looks like, how do you mimic it? - Victor Ganata

Victor, hmm, well, I suppose Google might not divulge the search terms they are using, but I'm not sure how "expert" you have to be "to mimic a normal pattern of queries." The problem here is thinking like the average I.Q. 100 person who uses Google, which, on the Difficulty Scale, ranks quite a bit lower than solving the Goldbach conjecture. :-D - Karim

guessing people type in things like "flu" and "flu symptoms" and "cold or flu." The reason why googlebombs don't work like they used to is that Google can spot too much activity over too short a period of time from too few sources. Just theorizing here, but if it's sufficiently *slow*, from sufficiently *many* addresses, it probably does a passable job at a search-specific Turing Test (i.e. bot searches that are indistinguishable from human) - Karim

There could be subtle patterns of course -- maybe people search on "flu" for a few minutes, then go away and search an hour later on "chicken soup recipes" -- but given that you are trying to emulate what normal, average, everyday people do, it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem... - Karim

Crazy thought: if you don't want your data mined by Google, don't use Google. Chances are MS will do the same thing to less effect on Live Search, or that Yahoo will do it ... but hey, vote with your feet. - Clay Newton

Seriously, if you don't want to be exposed, don't expose yourself. In any case, if you're an American, your data is being mined by the government anyway. - Victor Ganata

We're so used to thinking of these things in terms of privacy -- "spying on users," as Dare put it -- that I think the kneejerk reaction is to say "don't share the information with Google if you don't want them to have it." But it's aggregate data -- I don't think *privacy* is the most important concern here. - Karim

The concern is that search queries are being used to determine who gets supplies of scarce, potentially life-saving medicine. i.e. *potentially* speaking, who lives and who dies. Dropping dead is a slightly more serious problem than having your privacy violated. - Karim

Karim, I think vaccination is a bad example of that kind of abuse, though. If there's an outbreak somewhere, vaccination isn't going to be the main life-saving intervention. So there aren't going to be major diversions of scarce flu vaccines because someone launched a botnet against Google. - Victor Ganata

I could see the concern if we were talking about, say, anthrax, but only if for some bizarre reason penicillin became scarce. I just need a better example for me to feel concerned that this type of abuse would actually cost lives. - Victor Ganata

If we start talking about West Nile or ebola, well, there is no cure for these things, the only thing you can do is quarantine. I suppose that would be concerning, if somehow a botnet were able to convince people to not visit, for example, NYC because ebola was running rampant when in fact it wasn't. But then you would think Google would be a little more responsible than letting their automated services talk to the press without being filtered by a human. - Victor Ganata

36,000 people die from influenza each year in the US alone (http://www.usmedicine.com/dail...). It's not clear what percentage of deaths are directly or indirectly attributable to decisions about the distribution of vaccine, but there isn't enough vaccine for everyone. - Karim

I'm sure it's a complex process for public health agencies to decide who needs a vaccination -- the supply varies each year with the strain, sometimes supplies go bad, etc. -- but it seems possible that the CDC might say, "Based on our Google data, we had 10 X more illness in this region than we expected, therefore next year we should send more vaccine to these people." If that means someone else *can't* get a flu shot, you could theoretically be making life-and-death decisions on search engine queries. - Karim

36,000 deaths probably doesn't sound like a lot. unless you were one of the 36,000 people killed that year by the flu, in which case it probably seems significant :-D - Karim

DeWitt Clinton posted a message

“User-Agent headers are out of control.”

November 8 at 11:08 pm - Link

Amund Tveit, Michael J. Cohen (mjc), abacab and Yu-Jie Lin liked this

Actual example from my logs: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Tablet PC 2.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; Media Center PC 5.1; Zune 3.0; OfficeLiveConnector.1.2; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618)" - DeWitt Clinton

9 more comments

It's probably wrong that I recognize my useragent string... but after double-checking... yep, that could be me. - Wade Dorrell

How do you like the Zune? - DeWitt Clinton

The subscription service & music discover is great, although lately my interest in it has waned. I should suspend it during months I don't suspect I'll listen to anything other than my base MP3 library. The device & player software isn't top-notch, but it's nice enough. Wish the device had a better input mechanism (keyboard.) - Wade Dorrell

Does it do wifi? That would be pretty cool with the subscription service. - DeWitt Clinton

Yes, and wi-fi can be used to browse & download music from the service... cool at first, but it's a one-a-month sort of use case... downloading a bunch of influenced-by or related-to music graphs is more easily done w/ the desktop software. - Wade Dorrell

I've used both the Yahoo and the Rhapsody subscription services in the past and liked them when I had a windows desktop available, but that's pretty infrequently. I use an ipod touch now and would love to be able to stream directly to it. Definitely worth $20/mo or whatever if it can be made available everywhere. Not so much if you need to be in the right place with the right software or hardware in front of you... How much was the Zune service? - DeWitt Clinton

BTW, I blogged about a proposal to fix user-agent headers: http://blog.unto.net/programmi... - DeWitt Clinton

my iphone streams music wonderfully with SimplifyMedia, from my collection, or last.fm - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

Interesting... Never heard of SimplifyMedia before (http://www.simplifymedia.com/</