The Washington Post alerts us to the American Right’s latest bizarre idea. On Nov 20th a Wall Street Journal editorial complains about the Non-Taxpaying Class.

Of course they are not talking about the high earning using dubious tax dodges to hide their fortunes from the tax man. They are concerned with “absolutely legal escape hatches” like “the personal exemption, the standard deduction and the 10% rate of the lowest bracket” which mean someone with an income of $12,000 a year pays less than 4% of their income in taxes.

So they want to raise taxes on those on $12,000 a year?! Then follows a paragraph that just about made my eyes pop out of my head:

“Who are these lucky duckies? They are the beneficiaries of tax policies that have expanded the personal exemption and standard deduction and targeted certain voter groups by introducing a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education. ”

Earning $12,000 is lucky? Heaven forbid that the government should help mothers go out to work if they choose to or should encourage people to educate themselves…

Oh, and earlier on they talked about the top 5% of American earners and described them as not “Richie Rich” - “folks with adjusted gross incomes of $128,336 and higher being responsible for 56% of the tax take.” My heart bleeds for them…

Buy Nothing Day UK (since yesterday wasn’t a holiday here as it is in the US).

… and compare them to adults 18-24 in nine countries around the world. You may have heard about the lamentable scores of Americans (who came second last). Only 17% of them could find Afghanistan on the map (21% of Canadians and only 28% of Brits, sad to say - the Germans were top with 55%). Now see if you could do better.

I got one wrong - I guessed the religion with the largest number of adherents wrong.
(found via Guardian Online)

I’m trying to figure out what %age of the WWW (roughly) is covered by any one search engines and/or a reasonable selection of several.

For starters in March 2002 in a comparison of ten search engines, half of the pages found in 4 sample searches were only found by one search engine and another 20% were only found by two, which suggests to me that the proportion of the total number of pages indexed by at least some of these search engines is low. What we don’t know of course is how many “public” web pages there are out there that none of the search engines find.

The OCLC indicates that the number of web servers has roughly tripled since 1999 based on random IP sampling. I chose 1999 because according to a Science-refereed paper in that year - the only study that gives a figure for number of web pages I trust so far - there were around 800m web pages around at that time. Which gives a guesstimate of 2.4bn pages now.

This has to be low though both because of the overlap figure and because Google says it is indexing 3Bn+ pages. (of course avg number of pages per site has probably risen sharply).

Anyway, is there enough information here or elsewhere any of you out there are aware of which can give me the information I am looking for?! What sort of additional information would help you to calculate a guess? I thought this would be something someone out there would be keeping track of but it seems not.

If you have any ideas, please contact me ASAP (or if you prefer post something via comments below).

P.S. There’s lots of good search engine related information at searchenginewatch and searchengineshowdown but nothing that relates to this particular issue since the 1999 piece. I am not that surprised as it is more of a theoretical than a practical concern for most web surfers and website marketers.

A fascinating and funny article in the Wall St Journal about how systems like Amazon.com’s or TiVo’s try to figure you out and how some people (like some straight people that the “intelligent” agent thinks are gay) get offended. I think this is going to be a bigger and bigger issue. If your personal online profile is computer-generated, how likely is it you will be able to edit it to ensure it reflects how you feel you “really” are?comic fan movie wallpaperfull length dbz moviesdemi clips sex movie moore freedog fucking moviesdogfart movie seriesmovie torrent doomdbz download moviesgay downloadable movies Maping 4163973 credentials credit reportaccreditation required for ecchocardiographyesthetican for courses correspondense accreditedcredit union advantisecredit article protection aarpabout child accreditedation careaccounts credit control receivable specialistfree virtual high schools accredited Map

Find broken links on your site with Xenu’s Link Sleuth - as long as you have a Windows machine and an always on connection…movies hot fuckhot movies pornjack movie ass thekid karate moviemovies porn koreanmovie clips avi jpegmovie preteenmovies sex sample Map

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A recordable DVD and hard drive combination for recording and archiving TV. Now all I have to do is wait for it to a) come to Europe (I imagine it is US-only) b) halve in price (it costs $1500) and c) get a proper TiVo-like schedule integration - currently you would have to program individual programmes in yourself.

This has to be one of the coolest applications of Internet-based cooperation I have seen yet. Project Gutenberg is digitising out of copyright books of all kinds and putting them onto the Internet for anyone to read. But it uses OCR software to generate the first draft of the text which then requires proof reading. Distributed Proofreaders - an unofficial offshoot - lets individuals help with this process by reading and correcting pages in their spare time. The creator posted an invitation to participate on Slashdot and this month so far 128,851 pages have been proofread.

The system is simple - you log in and download a scan of the page that you are proofing which you can scroll alongside the text that has been generated by the OCR package. Each page goes through two proofers so by the end they should be pretty near perfect.

Numbers of pages processed have been steadily declining since the /. posting but are still over 3,000 pages a day and because of this extraordinary cooperative effort 636 books have been added to the archive so far, including such classics as Arms and the Man, by George Bernard Shaw, Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thacker and Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire to name but a few of the As and Bs!

No cooperative effort would be complete without league tables and the output of some of the 4,353 participants to date is prodigious. The top producer has proofed 15,602 pages! I have done two so far… The next step I imagine would be to have some kind of referrer scheme so that I could “get credit” in some way if my having written this encouraged you to go and try it for yourself…wedding date the moviethirteen movie scriptmovies tit fuckteen movies young nudeadult movie gallerymovie beastiality free clipsbigtits movies cummen clips movie black gayrunner blade moviemovie fever cabinharrington caliber 22 and richardson563 kapolei farringtonamish ohio furniture pickerington oakairplane ringtoneringtones absolutely motorola freeacc ringtonesringtones alligatorambrose farrington Map