Reluctant Blogger

From NetworkWorld:  You might be digitizing books on the Web without knowing it thanks to this stealthy anti-spam technology

You know those pesky but necessary CAPTCHA boxes whose squiggly letters and digits you need to retype to make use of certain parts of sites such as Yahoo, Wikipedia and PayPal?

A computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon is looking to replace many of those boxes with anti-spam boxes of his own for the purpose of helping to digitize and make searchable the text from books and other printed materials. To boot, the system could help companies better secure their Web sites.

 

For earlier coverage of this concept, see: The Internet is one giant, attractive nuisance - productive gaming & spare cycles

Why does Google Apps for my domain, which I pay for, have fewer features (and screwier authentication) than the free version?

Today’s annoyance - Google docs publish to blog feature apparently doesn’t exist at all in Google Apps…  grrr.

And on a related note, it would be very cool if G added a "watch this page" feature to Google Docs.  I really want to use it more aggressively, but creating another bin that I need to check for updates is a non-starter.

From Tuesday’s Financial Times:

Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

@Blog

There’s a hole in your Twitter  as I’ve said before:  there *is* no indoor/outdoor voice anymore.  Ignore this reality at your own peril.

90% of handset owners believe iphone is superior to anything else on the market.  In other news, 90% of consumers are extraordinarily gullible.  Or sheep for the latest fad.

Who besides Jobs gets away with selling vaporware to this extent anymore?

I personally don’t think I’ll be buying a phone that lacks any tactile feedback.  (Similarly, I won’t buy another portable MP3 player that doesn’t allow me to change my own batteries… )

 This has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I normally write about here except that I thought M might enjoy it.  Great photos from a sandcastle contest in British Columbia.

H/T JDawg’s Delicious feed

I received this via email because of the alerts I signed up for when I was tracking the Menu foods pet food/melamine poisoning crisis.

Diethylene glycol, a poison, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said Friday that the product appeared to have originated in China…

…Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government inadvertently mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. Records show that in that incident the poison, falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, also originated in China.

There is no evidence that the tainted toothpaste is in the United States, according to U.S. government officials.

From the International Herald Tribune

Bookmarking for now, more complete write up to follow when I have time.  For now, it seems worth observing that the thesis:  “global markets without global governance are unsustainable” looks truer all the time, at least if we value niceties like safe food and consumables.

For the few people who are regular readers of this blog - - just FYI, I’m back.

From email:

What did you do for your birthday, Paul?

Hauled cinderblock through the Central Valley, actually.  Thanks for asking!  :)

Some further explanation may be required….

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(Note: written May 8th for posting while I’m away.)

Dani Rodrik, Feasible Globalizations:

We want economic integration to help boost living standards. We want democratic politics so that public policy decisions are made by those that are directly affected by them (or their representatives). And we want self-determination, which comes with the nation-state. This paper argues that we cannot have all three things simultaneously. The political trilemma of the global economy is that the nation-state system, democratic politics, and full economic integration are mutually incompatible. We can have at most two out of the three. It follows that the direction in which we seem to be headed — global markets without global governance — is unsustainable.

Bookmarking with yet-another-placeholder because I’ve ended up inadvertently writing about globalization frequently these last couple months and I want to explore further.  H/T Liquidgeneration.

(Note: written May 8th for posting while I’m away.)

I still like you…  really.  Of all my virtual friends, you’re my favorite.  It’s just that I have work that really needs to get done.

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Sounds like Twitter management is already on the feature I wished for yesterday.  Cool.

This is an experiment.  I want to get Jason Calacanis‘ attention (I’ll get to why in a moment.)  No luck so far with multiple tweets or email , and I don’t want to spam Calacanis.com’s comments section with OT personal messages, but Jason said a few weeks ago that these were all weak anyway when compared to the power of the link.

Jason had some linkbait rules which I’m going to follow below, even though this post isn’t about that - - but I’m going to begin by cutting to the chase…

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