(See my earlier posting for more information and the link).morgage bank 5 3 loansinternet payday advance cash loancredit check with no loan $10000home loans 580$5000 check credit loan noagricultural loans wapersonal $25,000 loandownpayment mortgage 5 loanmilitary loans advanceloan mortgage 228

Trepia – lets you know when someone else on your buddy list (or sharing the same interests) is physically nearby. Oddly reminiscent of the lovegety but with more built-in intelligence. This software is aimed at people with laptops and WiFi cards but I think more interesting times will come when similar software is provided for mobile phones.

Thanks to Smart Mobs for the link

Reporters Sans Frontieres reports that “on some estimates” around 30,000 people in China are employed just to monitor Internet usage and censor views. Their report gives a lot of interesting detail on just how and how thoroughly message board censorship is practiced in China.

This week’s edition of On Digital – the radio programme from the BBC World Service – includes a segment on the report.

For more on Internet censorship in dictatorships, check out the recent book “Open Networks, Closed Regimes“.

I just learned about his sudden death via a mailing list I subscribe to. Take a look though the list of publications on his site (many of them available in full text) to get an idea of the many contributions he made to the understanding of the social impacts of computing. It’s sad he won’t be able to provide any more similar insights.

Tom Coates suggests that because weblogs tend to link more to other sites that have useful information or views on a subject, one can get to “100% information saturation on any given subject in the blogosphere without reading anywhere near 100% of the weblogs in it”.

But while he qualifies the statement later on to “100% of the information available in the blogosphere” there remains an unspoken assumption that because there are so many weblogs and sites out there, there will be thoughtful posts on any given subject. But how many – say – liberal arts professors have weblogs or even websites? How many trade union leaders or indeed politicians? How many people living in the developing world?

Moreover the idea that more incoming links > a more informative opinion is flawed. People often link to things they disagree with or think are stupid(*), and sites that start being the most popular have a substantial advantage in likelihood of being linked to again simply because more people visit them and have a chance to see a view. If an issue like “will Venice sink into the sea” turns up in the news, and a weblogger who has hitherto laboured in obscurity happens to be the world expert on the subject, what is the likelihood that enough people will find her to make her weblog rise to visibility through the haze of links that are popular just because the posters are?

This is also the problem with search engines like Google that weight pages by number of inbound links – the results appear good, but lots of stuff that might be better remains obscure because it doesn’t yet have lots of incoming links. In fact the more useful the links you do find are the more dangerous it is because you may fail to realise the extent of what’s missing.

(*) Some people (can’t remember who offhand, though) have the clever idea of trying to put metadata into the HTML of links saying useful stuff like “I think this link contains useful/useless information” or “I agree/disagree with this link”. They want to come up with something that could be accepted as a standard. Of course the “installed base” of links out there is collosal so even if successful it would take years for this innovation to have much of an impact.

This popped up on my screen this afternoon. And something like it popped up a few months back. I just downloaded and ran AdAware 6 to see if some spyware could be to blame but didn’t find anything.

Later Thanks to the timely intervention of Simon Forrest I found out this problem is due to an obscure feature built into Windows NT, 2000 and XP for network admins to use to warn of network shutdowns and the like, and thanks to “Res the Sorceror” I found out how to fix the problem:

“Go to control panel. Double-click on Administrative Tools select Services, scroll down to Messenger, go to properties, change Auto to Disabled.”

So if this has happened to you that’s how to fix it. Hope this helps!movies squirtnude movie sceneslesbian big movieerotic moviesclips movie hentaistriptease moviesmovies bestialityfree animal movies sex Map

The Economist this week speaks approvingly of the US Army’s rather unorthodox way of paying unpaid Iraqi workers in Kirkuk. Reportedly, they “drilled a hole in the roof of a bank vault, retrieving around half a million dollars’ worth of Iraqi dinars.” And who were the first to get paid? The 9,000 workers of the North Oil Company – followed, admittedly, by teachers then health care workers…

I downloaded the SuSe 8.2 “experience” CD and it installed without any problem at all. But I didn’t want to be stuck booting from a CD ROM every time I wanted to mess about with Linux (and I don’t know what they left off the “experience”). So I downloaded every file in SuSe’s 8.2 download directory onto my hard disc, created a boot CD from the boot.iso image in the /boot directory and tried to install from the HD with the files onto a new blank HD. And hit a brick wall.

Soon I was on IRC in the #suse channel trying to sort it out and though they were very helpful there (thanks localhorst and cz^thc!) they couldn’t figure out my problem either. And I quickly descended into the hell of trial and error and typing things like “mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt” (!)

So I’m giving up again – unless someone who lives relatively nearby would care to have a try at sorting me out either using the stuff I have downloaded or (chance would be a fine thing!) using the pukka 8.2 install CDs.

Failing that, I will have to drag my desktop into town for the next meeting of the Greater London Linux Users Group.

Admittedly my installation is just a tiny bit outside the usual (not having the CDs) but if SuSe is going to make its new Linux downloadable why not do so by just providing the .iso files for all the install CDs instead of providing every last file and expecting the poor user to figure out how to do an installation for themselves?

Anyway, this agony has dulled some of my early enthusiasm for Linux for the desktop I can tell you!

The government is allocating £125m and wants to hear from organizations by 21st July. So if you are a needy voluntary organization, get cracking.

Thanks to the (not particularly active) McNeill family website for the link!

I particularly discussed the threat of Linux to Microsoft and its usefulness in the developing world. The RealAudio stream is here (you have to download it all at once and listen to it – I don’t have a realaudio streamer running).

You may note I have warmed significantly to the OS and its usefulness abroad since I last wrote about this subject in 2001. This is largely due to the ease with which I found SuSe 8.2 installed recently and because I have been impressed with the power of desktop Linux apps like OpenOffice.

I am still not totally convinced it is suitable for the least developed countries but I couldn’t get every nuance of my view in in the few minutes allotted.

The news “hook” for the broadcast was the revelation of a special Microsoft “anti-Linux” fund aimed to make sure gov’ts and large institutions don’t choose Linux by offering cheap or free Microsoft software.

If you want the gist of what was actually broadcast I started by discussing how Linux has been more successful as a desktop than a server application but could have a brighter future in places where people haven’t touched computers before (so they won’t have to unlearn Microsoft habits and the cost savings in software are significant relative to the cost of labour). I went on to suggest that Microsoft may pressure developing countries not to use Linux and when the interviewer suggested this could get MS into trouble I remarked that they have plenty of experience putting private pressure and dodging criticism.

And yes, I admit I may not be everyone’s idea of an expert but they chose me and I hope you’ll agree when my contribution is available that it was at least somewhat helpful, whatever the limits of my knowledge.commercial loans 100 and financecash loan 50020 mobile loan 100 home20 african loans 20to loans uk accessinterest loans 31 onlyaccess college loanspayday credit loan bad advancebad credit 2000 personal loanpayday 2nd loan