this game is rigged

At lunch we were discussing how ass-backwards the sales approach has been this quarter. I said, with my usual animation, "When you are falling from a 100-story building, until 50th floor it feels like flying."

CrazyFinger.

Rising Food Prices and What That Means-Becker

Most of these policies are counterproductive because they discourage rather than encourage food production. This is especially true of price controls since farmers will grow less of the foods that have artificially low price ceilings. For example, if price controls were placed on wheat, farmers will shift some land from wheat to other products whose prices are allowed to rise faster.

43 Exceptionally Useful AJAX Applications

Usability on websites is exploding right now. AJAX has enabled web developers everywhere to add functionality to their sites like never before. I’ve gathered 43 extremely useful (but still easy to implement) AJAX applications for use on any website. Keep your users coming back and increase your website’s functionality.

Blogs

Machinist has a good list: Sites I check Daily

The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back

Here's a cheap way to replace your cellphone if you lose it while under contract. Just go to Walmart and buy one of their pre-paid cellphones, then call up your provider and ask for them to activate the phone under your account. You'll need the provide the serial number and the ESN of your old phone. Those are found underneath the battery (so it's a good idea to write them down BEFORE you lose your phone).

Your savings can earn upwards of 4 more percentage points of interest, if you put it one of these high-yield online savings accounts. Here's seven to check out.

How does Frank Abagnale, an infamous check forger in the 60's, protect himself from modern day identity thieves?

With energy costs seeming to go nowhere but up and a growing "green" movement, you gotta love tips that save energy and money. Yahoo Finance has a list of seven eco-friendly ways to cut energy costs. Following even just a few of these can save you big bucks.

Consumerist's 10 Commandments of Credit

Screen Capture: How To Make Your Computer Catch People Stealing Your Porn

1) Load up a base Windows XP system, and fill it with sweet, sweet "honey". As a baseline, our Poohbear system was a 1.2 GHZ AMD Athlon with 256MB of RAM, about the minimum system requirements you'll need.

2) Set up software that would allow us to review the actions that took place during repair.

3) Send it out into the field.

Two main pieces of software make up Poohbear's guts:

• TightVNC (or any VNC program)

TightVNC operates as the recorder, providing an interface to output the desktop of the PC. Pyvnc2swf captures the results of those images and archives them into a file for later retrieval. Pyvnc2swf provides several methods for archival. As Poohbear had minimal CPU/Memory, we opted for raw dumps to a VNC file. A beefier system could allow for straight dumps to a compressed SWF file.

• Pyvnc2swf

FULL-BLOWN SCANDAL

What started out as a story of mean-spiritedness at USCIS regarding efforts to head off accepting visa applications in July may be turning in to a serious scandal that involves blatant disregard for the law and a potential jeopardization of national security.

Health Insurance and the Web Worker

While we watch this insurance-reform-through-the-tax-code wind its way through the political process, there are some resources online to help us make insurance decisions today. Apologies to our international readership, this post only applies to web workers living in the United States. If you live outside the US, and have tips to share, please leave a comment.

storagemojo.com

I got into it today on ZDnet with one of the other bloggers, George Ou, who published Why dumb-downed no-RAID storage is bad for consumers. As I believe that RAID is an idea whose time is coming to a close, I responded with Why home RAID won’t fly.

Joie De Vivre

Evolution is some how a word that misleads you. It makes you think that we are evolving towards something better.

Adding to it, We are self aware. This self awareness made us special and superior to the rest of the species we were told.

But how does self awareness makes you superior? Thought is a by product of self awareness. Does that make us superior? How and why? Why are we so sure?

What makes you superior?

You can build better buildings than an ant can?That makes you superior only if the ant is comparing its hill with your building.But the ants dont care. You are the one who is comparing.

What if the ant says,Hey I can trace food with my antenna thats 100 meters away. You cant find that cookie crumble in your sofa. What if the ant says, Hey I can lift a weight thats 100 times my body weight. What if the ant says, Hey long before you thought of socialism, communism
and found religions, we discovered living a selfless life, to live for a society.

The thing is, your metrics for superiority are your metrics. Not the ants. Ants dont even have metrics. Actually that makes them too superior because you can NEVER beat them. No matter how complex a thing you evolve into.

Prakash Dantuluri is thoroughly enjoying life. Based in Hyderabad, teaches Tinglish, reads Losing My Virginity (and lots of books) loves alpha's sense of humor (which I haven't looked at yet), has several other blogs: The Great Indian Dream (fail-over blog, in case GoI censors blogspot?); some posts: Scented Erasers, SMS relationship building, Hyderabad Bloggers meet, Kodi Pandem (cock fights), Role of Media, Advertising, unsung heroin of society, vipassana, distributes diwali crackers to kids in slums and so on ...

Rewiring Neuroscience: nine-radical

In the early 1990s, our long accepted (cc 1926) understanding of how a nerve encodes and conveys information was unexpectedly overturned by experiments on fast flying bats and insects. Around 1995, we began to realize we no longer knew what neurons actually do.

This is heavily advertised by Google.

infinitethinking.org

The Infinite Thinking Machine (ITM) is designed to help teachers and students thrive in the 21st century. Through an active blog, an Internet TV show, and other media resources, the ITM shares a "bazillion practical ideas" for turning the infinite universe of information into knowledge. We showcase examples of innovative instructional methods, talk with leading experts, and share real stories from the classroom to improve how we think, learn, teach, and live. And we try to have a little fun along the way.

Our shows and website are an important way to spark dialogue and help educators explore a wide range of innovative ideas. We rely on the collective wisdom of many experienced educators to select interesting ideas to share, but we cannot validate these practices beyond that. Also, please keep in mind that any mention of products, ideas, websites, and organizations does not represent an endorsement by the producers or sponsors.

Ideas to help teachers and students thrive in the 21st century.

Powerline Adapters Bring Internet Access To Your Entire Home

n all scenarios, the Netgear XE104 adapters delivered nearly the full speed of my Internet service, which in my case is very fast — 15 megabits per second downstream and two mbps upstream. In fact, the XE104 can handle speeds up to 85 mbps, far faster than any common connection.

Delusions of skill and of grandeur

Industry pundits like Guy Kawasaki, Michael Arrington, and other respected, successful people who have achieved fame and fortune dismissed Smalltalk in the 70s and 80s. Virtual machines? Garbage collection? Integrated development environments? Clearly, this had no place in business computing. You know why? Too slow. Too weird. And, actually, too innovative for their pea-brains to recognize the significance of. Respected industry pundits knew that serious business computing had to be done using serious systems programming languages like C, assembly language, or C++. Now no one would think of developing a business application that has to be rapidly brought to market in a language that wasn’t garbage-collected, and, if at all possible, dynamically typed. What was useless academic research is now common sense. Now Ruby, an interesting rehash of Smalltalk ideas into a form more palatable to people used to C-style syntax, is the shit for creating web applications and enterprise integration.

Arrington and the rest of the Web 2.0 echo chamber nitwits think they know what’s innovative and where things are going. They don’t and they never have. They have no appreciation of the fact that they owe their entire careers to the work of people in academic and industry labs. The TCP/IP stack and the Internet; GUIs, the WIMP interface, and pointing devices; IDEs; garbage collection; virtual machines; relational databases; dynamic typing (Michael Arrington doesn’t know what many of those things actually are, of course); all of this comes from people with PhDs at places like Berkeley, MIT, IBM, and Xerox. When they create it, it is useless and worthless. Twenty years later, navel-gazing pundits like Michael Arrington are confronted by the fact that they have become essential in creating computer software. It then becomes common sense and it’s perfectly OK to take credit for the things done in labs by forgotten names long ago.

Where is the praise for the real innovators like Alan Kay? Kay’s work with Smalltalk and human factors strongly influenced nearly everything we consider essential today. But Michael Arrington doesn’t care about Alan Kay or any of the other people responsible for the stuff that is now his livelihood. Does Alan Kay work at Google? Does he have a me-too startup with a faux-reflecty logo and an Ajax chat application in beta? No? Then forget him.

Biosand Filter Reduces Diarrheal Diseases

University of North Carolina researchers, lead by Mark Sobsey, are the first to scientifically document that filters made of concrete, gravel, and sand can significantly reduce the incidence of diarrheal diseases, the leading cause of death in many third world countries.

Sobsey and researchers in UNC's School of Public Health compared rates of diarrhea and the condition of drinking water in homes in two villages near Bonao, Dominican Republic. They monitored about 150 households without filters for four months, assessing the rate of illness. Then, about half the houses were given biosand filters - concrete containers that hold gravel and sand. All households were monitored for another six months. The team's initial analysis showed the filter reduced diarrheal disease among household members by an estimated 30 percent to 40 percent, including in highly vulnerable young children less than 5 years old. At the end of the study, filters were given to all participating homes.

Google and the Third Age of Computing

To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment. Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success.

Health Care Blog

POLICY: Why Is Fixing American Health Care So Difficult?

Almost all the problems with the American health care system boil down to two questions. How do we create a system that ensures that all citizens, and perhaps residents, have access to health insurance? And how do we contain the huge cost increases?

Of course, behind these questions lies the question of how to reform the nation's largest industry that serves and richly rewards many powerful interests. Continue.

POLICY: Health insurance 101

PHARMA: Drug Prices here and there

There's no question that in the US big pharma and its employees colleagues at USTR are on the attack over "low drug prices" in other countries, with the assumption that the US consumer is subsidizing R&D here and therefore allowing foreigners to get the benefit of new drugs without paying their fair share. Late last year I spent some futile time (aided by Derek Lowe who writes the excellent In the Pipeline blog) trying to get at the issue of whether this is true, and whether drug profit margins abroad are so low that they wouldn't support said R&D. Of course the alternative is that drug prices are too high in the US (or at least higher than they need to be to attract investment in pharma R&D). It's a common estimate that pharma companies make about 60-70% of their profits in the US. It's also well known that net margins in the pharma industry are the highest of any major sector at roughly 17%, compared to the next highest, financial services at 14% and way above any other manufacturing industry, including software.

You don't see software companies complaining about their need for government to ensure high prices to promote R&D, although monopolies by technology standards work equally well for one well known company. Pharma companies will argue the they only have limited time to make money, as patent expiration takes away their monopoly position and essentially forces them to start again from scratch, but in any other business, competitors will also come into the market using lower prices as their wedge in. (And to be fair to big Pharma they are by no means alone in looking to regulation or tariffs to protect them--which is why American car companies concentrate on minivans and SUVs, as there's a 25% tax on foreign "light trucks"). Pharma companies also must essentially give away the fruit of their research to generic companies. So the whole issue is very complex.

PHARMA: Drug Prices here and there