Ming the Mechanic - Category:
News

The NewsLog of Flemming Funch

Tuesday, July 3, 2007day link 

 Roswell PR officer finally speaks, on his deathbed
picture Or he writes, at least. Slashdot:
"The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
news.com.au:
Lieutenant Walter Haut was the public relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued the original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard.

Haut died last year but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death.

Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar.

He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.

He wasn't the first Roswell witness to talk about alien bodies.

Local undertaker Glenn Dennis had long claimed that he was contacted by authorities at Roswell shortly after the crash and asked to provide a number of child-sized coffins.

When he arrived at the base, he was apparently told by a nurse (who later disappeared) that a UFO had crashed and that small humanoid extraterrestrials had been recovered.

But Haut is the only one of the original participants to claim to have seen alien bodies.

Haut's affidavit talks about a high-level meeting he attended with base commander Col William Blanchard and the Commander of the Eighth Army Air Force, General Roger Ramey.

Haut states that at this meeting, pieces of wreckage were handed around for participants to touch, with nobody able to identify the material.

He says the press release was issued because locals were already aware of the crash site, but in fact there had been a second crash site, where more debris from the craft had fallen.

The plan was that an announcement acknowledging the first site, which had been discovered by a farmer, would divert attention from the second and more important location.

Haut also spoke about a clean-up operation, where for months afterwards military personnel scoured both crash sites searching for all remaining pieces of debris, removing them and erasing all signs that anything unusual had occurred.

This ties in with claims made by locals that debris collected as souvenirs was seized by the military.

Haut then tells how Colonel Blanchard took him to "Building 84" - one of the hangars at Roswell - and showed him the craft itself.

He describes a metallic egg-shaped object around 3.6m-4.5m in length and around 1.8m wide.

He said he saw no windows, wings, tail, landing gear or any other feature.
Ah, everybody knows that's a weather balloon. Because that's what the government told us it was, after they double-checked it, and of course they wouldn't lie. Conform, Consume, Obey!
[ | 2007-07-03 01:22 | 17 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Wednesday, June 20, 2007day link 

 Lessig takes on corruption
Lawrence Lessig has for years been a leading voice in the fight against crazy, excessive copyright and intellectual property laws. Now he's announced that he's not exactly retiring, but he's moving on to the root of the issue: corruption.
From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a "no brainer." As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea -- both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

The point of course is not new. Indeed, the fear of factions is as old as the Republic. There are thousands who are doing amazing work to make clear just how corrupt this system has become. There have been scores of solutions proposed. This is not a field lacking in good work, or in people who can do this work well.
Of course he says it diplomatically, that there's a kind of curruption of the system. Yes, most politicians who vote for those laws have been paid by the mega media companies to do just that. But it is the system that is the problem, a system where the interests of big money somehow win most of the time.
[ | 2007-06-20 23:23 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Wednesday, April 25, 2007day link 

 Tunnel across the Bering Strait
picture
Russia plans to build a $65 billion tunnel under the Bering Strait to Alaska. Cool, finally I'll be able to drive to California, even though it will be a bit long. CNN:
The proposed 68-mile tunnel would be the longest in the world. It would also be the linchpin for a 3,700-mile railroad line stretching from Yakutsk -- the capital of a gold- and mineral-rich Siberian region roughly the size of India -- through extreme northeastern Russia, in waters up to 180 feet deep and into the western coast of Alaska. Winter temperatures there routinely hit minus 94 F. (Map)

By comparison, the undersea tunnel that is now the world's longest -- the Chunnel, linking Britain and France -- is only 30 miles long.

That raises the prospect of some tantalizingly exotic routes -- train riders could catch the London-Moscow-Washington express, conference organizers suggested.

Lobbyists claimed the project is guaranteed to turn a profit after 30 years. As crews construct the road and rail link, they said, the workers would also build oil and gas pipelines and lay electricity and fiber-optic cables. Trains would whisk cargos at up to 60 mph 260 feet beneath the seabed.

Eventually, 3 percent of the world's cargo could move along the route, organizers hope
Russia's last czar, Nicholas II, approved a similar plan already more than 100 years ago. Hopefully it works out this time.
[ | 2007-04-25 13:51 | 6 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, March 31, 2007day link 

 Denmark unseats the US as technology king
Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but, indeed, a report from the World Economic Forum says that in a list of countries rated by how well they've created the infrastructure that fosters technological innovation, progress and leadership, Denmark is number one. Last year the U.S. was number one, but now it is number 7.
Denmark is now regarded as the world leader in technological advancement, with its Nordic neighbours Sweden, Finland and Norway claiming second, fourth and 10th place respectively.

"Denmark, in particular, has benefited from the very effective government e-leadership, reflected in early liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory environment and large availability of e-government services," said Irene Mia, senior economist at World Economic Forum.
That's a bit surprising, but, hey, cool, I'm proud to be Danish, even if I have nothing to do with it. Business does seem to be doing well in Denmark, and the country is certainly very wired.
[ | 2007-03-31 00:51 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Tuesday, March 27, 2007day link 

 A380 in L.A.
picture picture
A guy named Bob has a couple of pictures from when the A380 came to Los Angeles recently. And he gave this nice overview:
The Airbus A380, the largest passenger plane in history, landed at LAX (Los Angeles airport) on March 19 2007. This eight-story-tall (80 feet from bottom to the top of the tail), 1.2-million-pound jet- “Airbus 380”, more than 239 feet long, which can carry 555 passengers and has a 261-foot wingspan, was making its inaugural test flight from the Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France. It carried only 22 crew members, but was full of added instrumentation for the test flight.
An identical A380 (this had about 550 passengers aboard and tested all boarding/flying procedures) landed in New York within minutes of the Los Angeles touchdown. A 380 has two decks.
End of 2007: Singapore Airlines becomes the first carrier to put the A 380 in the air with paying passengers, with about 480 ticket holders; Summer 2009: Lufthansa begin flying the plane with about 549 passengers.
The European made Airbus A 380 produces half the noise of a Boeing 747, mostly because of its state-of-the-art Rolls Royce engine. Its designed to have more than 850 seats in the future if necessary.
I see A380s almost every day. They start and land constantly, for testing, and we live next to the incoming flight path. And we know quite a few people who work on it at Airbus. But it is still something new to see it in L.A. Not that this particularly looks more like L.A. than anywhere else.

I ought to feel like Los Angeles was still my hometown too, but somehow I don't. Felt like home when we lived there, and it was even something to be a bit proud of. But every time I landed there in a plane, after having been gone a few weeks, it felt sort of strange. You land into a brown soup of city as far as the eye can see in all directions. And it never felt exactly friendly to arrive in LAX, even if it usually was warm. Long passport check lines, an endless stream of courtesy vans, taxis and police cars, and then out on the wall-to-wall freeways. But after a few days it felt normal again.
[ | 2007-03-27 12:04 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Friday, March 23, 2007day link 

 The worst company in America
picture Over 100,000 people have voted at Consumerist on who they think is the worst company in America. A well deserved number one, beating the likes of Haliburton and Monsanto, is RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America.

It shouldn't be any big surprise. Not only have they succeeded in turning all their customers into their enemies, they might also have managed to permanently destroy the music business altogether. And that despite the billions of dollars they have in the bank and the hundreds of corrupt politicians they've bought off.

I wouldn't mind paying for music, but personally I'm never going to pay another dime to anybody who has any kind of link to the RIAA.
[ | 2007-03-23 18:39 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, March 22, 2007day link 

 France opens secret UFO files
picture Breitbart:
France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists.

"It is a world first," said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of "non-identified aerospatial phenomena."

Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption.

"Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like a flying roll of toilet paper" are clearly not worth investigating, said Patenet.

But many others involving multiple sightings -- in at least one case involving thousands of people across France -- and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.

A phalanx of beefy security guards formed a barrier in front of the space agency (CNES) headquarters where the announcement was made, "to screen out uninvited UFOlogists," an official explained.

Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly 25 percent are classified as "type D", meaning that "despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can't explain," Patenet said.
This is their website. Seems to be down right now, so obviously it is popular. And it is a courageous thing to do. It would of course be more interesting if it were the Americans, who sofar haven't succeeded in coming up with more than phoney studies like Project Blue Book, that ignored most of their own data and concluded that nothing whatsoever has ever been going on, other than weather balloons and mass hysteria.
[ | 2007-03-22 16:42 | 8 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Friday, March 16, 2007day link 

 Mohammed, the mastermind
picture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confesses to being responsible for just about every terror attack that happened anywhere in the past 10 years. Although there's some concern that maybe he's exaggerating a little bit. Maybe because he was tortured just a little bit. But he says that he for sure was responsible for planning 9/11 "from A to Z".

Good, I'm really looking forward to hearing how he managed to melt that steel in the foundation of the towers, and for that matter how he brought them down in such a neatly executed demolition, with nothing but jet fuel and burning office supplies. And Building Seven, I'm really looking forward to that explanation. Conveniently bringing down the 47-story building that housed the New York City Emergency Command Center, and the local offices of the State Department, the CIA and the FBI, with nothing but falling debris. Must have been quite a master plan.
[ | 2007-03-16 02:08 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Sunday, February 25, 2007day link 

 Tales from the Crypt
picture According to this entry from Times, film-maker James Cameron is going to announce that the tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and their son has been identified in Jerusalem.
Let's go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.

..Film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family.

..Cameron is holding a New York press conference on Monday at which he will reveal three coffins, supposedly those of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary and Mary Magdalene. News about the film, which will be shown soon on Discovery Channel, Britain's Channel 4, Canada's Vision, and Israel's Channel 8, has been a hot blog topic in the Middle East
That's tomorrow. Of course, what we're talking about is essentially the trailer for a film documentary. But I think it would be great fun if he really has some kind of proof that would stand.
[ | 2007-02-25 15:57 | 5 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Wednesday, February 14, 2007day link 

 Who's Funding Global Warming?
picture Interesting question. Article from AlterNet. A Texas utility company called TXU plans on building 11 new coal-fired powerplants in the US, to the tune of 11 billion dollars. That will be the biggest investment in advancing global warming ever. And who's raising the money? Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are. Dirty money, you could say.
[ | 2007-02-14 23:43 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Sunday, January 21, 2007day link 

 The All Seeing Eye in the Sky
picture An oddball retired aerospace engineer named Bill Grisham seems to maybe have invented something rather revolutionary, which the U.S. military complex would very much like to get their hands on. The site that explains it is here. And if we believe what it says, the idea is to provide globally accessible real-time 3D imaging of every point on the planet, and that it will be available to anybody. It says stuff like this:
According to Grisham, “MIRIAH is everybody´s Spy in the Sky. It´s like a Google Globe but in 3D and in real time. It´s like Internet, but with universal wireless remote wifi access without webservers. Anyone anywhere, will be able to virtually walk around anything or anyone, anywhere. Users will swoop down and walk around objects on the other side of the world. In the future when the Pentagon says there are WMDs somewhere anyone will be able to personally confirm whether or not that is true. There will always be spies on Earth and all that we can ever do about that is for all of us to spy on the spies. In the near future, the biggest secret governments will have to keep will be, How to hide from MIRIAH users? It’s Espionage4Everyone and Everyone2Everybody”.

In the official proposal MIRIAH is described as: an Interferometer satellite sensor which uses convergent illumination for a 2nd Power-Aperture to lower costs for the best characteristics of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Optical Satellites. It provides day or night, all weather, penetrating imaging with extremely fine spatial resolution (half a wavelength), and extremely fine spectral resolution in its 1st Power-Aperture, for automatic GIS capable hyper-spectral imaging. It offers 10 samples/day, with 10 channels, to form square matrix Eigenvector “signatures” to instantly isolate critical tactical targets. SAR captures digitized “virtual” images needing extensive, time consuming processing, while MIRIAH captures “real” images, needing only digitization for delivered images, allowing for faster delivery of finished intelligence. This throughput time also varies with the satellite population: from 12 hours for 3 satellites down to 30 minutes for 12 satellites. Its architecture is 3-D symmetric, so piggybacked launching cuts expensive boosters in half, while balanced moments reduce precession to enable simpler cost effective satellites, adding powerful and secure communication and navigation capabilities.
Which, uhm, I didn't quite catch. But they claim that NRO (the National Reconnaissance Office) has examined the patents and found no flaw in the scheme, and that they're very interested. And that it is thousands of times cheaper and more efficient that any competing proposals. And that Grisham refuses to sell out, and will only grant non-exclusive uses for his patents, because he wants everybody to have access to it. You can read another article about all this here. Of course you should take all of that with a big grain of salt. These might of course be crazy religious fantatics and conspiracy theorists with a lively imagination. Or it might just be right, which would be cool.
[ | 2007-01-21 15:11 | 10 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Flatland, the movie
picture Seems that Flatland is being turned into an animated movie. It is scheduled to be released this year and is narrated by Martin Sheen. You can see the trailer there.
The third dimension is real!
Yes, I believe! And actually it turns out that there was a previous attempt, in 1962, for which you can see the trailer here, although it doesn't look quite as interesting.
[ | 2007-01-21 14:05 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Sunday, January 14, 2007day link 

 Snow in L.A.?
picture Wow, it is snowing in parts of L.A. it seems. Not much, but see these pictures from Fontana at least. Enough to make the TV news in France. And cold enough for the Governator to declare a state of emergency. It really doesn't snow much in Southern California. While we lived there it was maybe once every couple of years that it snowed for something like five minutes somewhere. Here in Toulouse it is 11 degrees celcius, and it hasn't snowed this winter.
[ | 2007-01-14 19:44 | 7 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, January 11, 2007day link 

 What's going down?
picture Is it just me, or hasn't there been many more strange aerial events in the news recently?

Bunch of United employees see a UFO over O'Hare, which leaves, poking a hole in the clouds. United and FAA first deny it, but through FOI, FAA admits it was reported, but they won't look into it

Burning pieces of metal rain over Wyoming after spectacular display in the sky. Norad says it was a piece of a Russian rocket

Meteorite lands in New Jersey bathroom

Strange smell all over Manhattan, seems to come from New Jersey

Thousands of dead birds fall from the sky in both Australia and America

Best comet sighting for 32 years, spotted over "World's End"

Something is obviously in the air. I hope it is better than it smells.
[ | 2007-01-11 15:16 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Sunday, December 10, 2006day link 

 IndieKarma
IndieKarma is a good idea, but nevertheless, I've turned it off on my blog here.

The idea is that visitors to a website, like a blog, would automatically pay a very small amount (1 cent) whenever they visit the blog. That would create a sort of attention economy where, if you have many visitors, you'd also receive a bit of income from it, which maybe would pay the costs of hosting the site.

At an earlier point in the history of the Internet, that could have been a really big idea. Would be quite reasonable if it worked like that. Otherwise, if you put up some very popular content for free on the net, you might well get killed by the bandwidth costs.

But at this point the idea might not catch on. Yes, one can sign up to voluntarily participate in something like that, which is what IndieKarma offers. But relatively few people do. There are right now 1088 people who signed up for it as users, and 461 sites, and the users have given a total of 4778 donations of 1 cent. Doesn't really add up to much.

I started off with the $1 credit one would get automatically, and I put the javascript code on my site. And, well, there has been some 'donations' every day, but I'd also get charged 1 cent when I accessed my blog myself. So, anyway, after a few months, that has added up to a balance of $1.07. I made 7 cents. Great, thank you for the support everybody. But that doesn't really make it worth it to bug everybody with a pop-up message about joining IndieKarma. So, off it goes.
[ | 2006-12-10 13:01 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, July 22, 2006day link 

 Lt. Watada
picture Lt. Ehren Watada is an American army officer who has refused to be deployed to Iraq based on the war being illegal. Which he's right about, of course. But he's now being court-martialed. Does he have a chance? Probably, as his case is very well founded, and he's a patriotic model soldier, who speaks well for himself, and he has a lot of support. You're not likely to see much of it in mainstream media, but that can easily change. The Nation:
On July 5 the US Army brought charges against First Lieut. Ehren Watada, an infantry officer stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, who has refused to deploy to Iraq with his unit because he believes the war there is illegal. Watada faces up to eight years in jail and a dishonorable discharge. But in trying the 28-year-old officer, the Army is really putting itself, the Iraq War and the Bush Administration on trial.

At the June 7 press conference announcing his decision, Watada argued that the Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq was "manifestly illegal" because it "violates our democratic system of checks and balances. It usurps international treaties and conventions that by virtue of the Constitution become American law." Watada also said, "As the order to take part in an illegal act is ultimately unlawful as well, I must as an officer of honor and integrity refuse that order."

His refusal to deploy was an act of courage. It was also the product of profound reflection on taking personal responsibility for halting the US government's careening course toward authoritarianism and criminality--and of the legal justification for such acts of responsibility.
Or, see this article, with a video statement from Watada. Or a site with a lot more suporting material.

Being legally and morally right is not enough, unfortunately, as there are powerful forces opposed to letting him get away with it. But, luckily, the U.S. Supreme Court isn't entirely corrupt:
Watada's most crucial legal claims were corroborated June 29 by the US Supreme Court, in what Duke University law professor Walter Dellinger calls "the most important decision on presidential power ever."

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Court rebuked the Bush Administration not only for the Guantánamo tribunals but also for the entire view of executive power the Administration used to justify them. In a 5-to-3 decision, the Court ruled that the President cannot act contrary to "limitations that Congress has, in proper exercise of its own war powers, placed on his powers." That's just what Watada said about Bush's policy two weeks before: "It violates the Constitution and the War Powers Act that limits the President in his role as Commander in Chief from using the armed forces in any way he sees fit."

The ruling also supports Watada's claim that the Administration is breaking international law. It found the President's conduct illegal because it violated international treaties--specifically, the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. This has ramifications far beyond Guantánamo: It means the government must obey the provisions of the Geneva Conventions--such as the ban on cruel and degrading treatment and the obligation of an occupying power to protect civilians. And it solidifies the incorporation of other treaties--notably, the UN Charter, with its ban on military aggression--into US law. (For a more extended discussion of the implications of the Hamdan decision for the Watada case, see our essay, Hamdan and Watada, on WarCrimesWatch.com.)
But the Supreme Court doesn't have its own police force. So, like in other cases where it is the government that is the criminal, it will be the concerted actions of the public that is likely to determine the outcome.
[ | 2006-07-22 12:45 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Monday, July 17, 2006day link 

 The US is bankrupt?
The Telegraph:
The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank.

A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve.

Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. "To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors," he asked.

According to his central analysis, "the US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds''. ...
Oh, nothing to worry about, I'm sure. Just lower taxes some more, and start some more wars, and focus on important stuff like gay marriages, and God will take care of everything.
[ | 2006-07-17 13:22 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]


Tuesday, November 1, 2005day link 

 Buy an underground city
A previously secret underground installation is for sale in England.
WELCOME to Cold War City (population: 4). It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown.

The most underpopulated town in Britain is being put on the market. But there will be no estate agent’s blurb extolling the marvellous views of the town for sale: true, it has a Wiltshire address, but it is 120ft underground.

The subterranean complex that was built in the 1950s to house the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan’s cabinet and 4,000 civil servants in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack is being thrown open to commercial use. Just four maintenance men are left.

Property developers looking for the ultimate place to get away from it all need not apply. The site has a notional value of £5m but there is a catch. It is available only as part of a private finance initiative that involves investing in the military base on the surface above.

I don't have 5 million pounds to spare, but I'd really like an underground city.
[ | 2005-11-01 15:52 | 9 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Friday, August 19, 2005day link 

 23
picture Yesterday I was at the launch event for 23 in Copenhagen. I'm on vacation in Denmark at the moment. "23", spearheaded by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, is a photo storage and sharing website. Well, there are several of those already, but these guys seem to have gone a good deal further and really created a system that does what most people actually need and want. It seems quite suited to replace whatever local program you store your digital photos in. I use iPhoto. 23 does most of what iPhoto does, and most of what Flickr does, and some things none of them do. While still appearing very simple. You can add photos a number of ways. By e-mail, by an upload, either individually or as a zip file, from a URL, or from plugins to iPhoto or similar programs. You can organize your photos in a number of ways, like tagging them and putting them in albums. You have finegrained control over who can look at the photos. They can be all private, they can be public, or you can give particular people access to particular photos or albums. You can subscribe to photos from certain people or with certain tags. Even with a free account you can upload lots of photos, and with a very cheap paid account you have unlimited storage. Doesn't scare them at all that lots of folks are going to upload the multiple gigabytes they have on their disks already. The system is very new so you might well run into quirks, or things that aren't there yet. And there are less than 100 users right now. But overall it seems very well designed. They've thought a lot about the usability, and interviewed many people about how they use photos and what they need. Anyway, be one of the first to check it out.
[ | 2005-08-19 20:20 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Monday, June 6, 2005day link 

 Apple on Intel
Apple switches to Intel. Uarrrh, I'm shocked. ....... Well, maybe it can end up being a good thing, even if it flirts a little too much with the dark side of the force. Maybe macs can cost the same as PCs. Maybe they'll find some way of making them better anyways. Maybe they'll run Windows apps at full speed, and then finally be able to sell tons of Macs to enterprises, based on having zero viruses and zero spyware and few security vulnerabilities, and having much lower cost of ownership. I don't know.
[ | 2005-06-06 23:32 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]



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