Technical Agile Coach and Trainer
These are my links for March 9th from 21:12 to 21:15:
It sounds like the NY Times is planning on charging for online content. Right now they ask you to register, but the content is free. Rumors are that they will let you read a few articles for free before asking you to subscribe.
Maybe this will work, but I think it ignores the way the web is fundamentally different than a newspaper. When I subscribe to a newspaper, I’ll probably read a good portion of it. When I’m reading news on the web, I will read the articles I find interesting from a variety of different sites. Subscribing to a newspaper that gives you 75% of your news probably makes sense. Subscribing to a newspaper where you get 5% of your news is a harder sell.
For a subscription model to work well, I think you’d either need something like micro-payments or a subscription to a group of online resources. Micro-payments are problematic because they are confusing and because Americans seem to prefer unlimited or package options. Subscriptions that give you access to a bunch of different web sites might work, but it would require publishers to work together.
Imagine a subscription where you can pay $20 per month and get access to the 20 top papers in the US, plus some sites like Britannica, etc. Your subscription could be divided up between the publishers based on the number of articles, page views or time spent on each site. As the number of subscribers grew, more publishers would want to be part of it to get some of the income pie. As the number of publishers grew, more individuals would be interested in subscribing.
The company who seems uniquely positioned to pull something like this off is Google. They could easily show subscribers results that they have access to, while showing non-subscribers what they are missing. Since Google controls a good percentage of the traffic for many of these sites, they would be a good company to handle the subscription process. More importantly, if these companies simply start restricting access to their content, Google will probably stop showing their content in the search results.
So if you subscribe to WIRED magazine what do you get for free? A wireless mouse of course. In other news, Field & Stream is giving away chunks of asphalt and Scientific American is giving away dowser rods.
On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less.
And it worked. In less than a week, the trader turned his money into over a quarter of a billion dollars. Funny thing is, no one knows who did it.
Some unimaginative types consider this to be a case of insider trading, but I prefer to think it proves the existence of time travel.
Eventually this post made it to the front page of Google for “proof of time travel” and some people reading the page were quite angry for one reason or another. So in order to help fill the Internet with useful information and keep from getting flamed by people looking for better proof, I’ve included the incidents below that are often considered proof of time travel.
In 2008 during the excavation of a 400 year old sealed tomb in Shangsi Town, China a chunk of dirt was knocked off and landed with a metallic sound. Upon investigation it was discovered that there was a Swiss ring watch in the dirt. The watch was supposedly of a make that wouldn’t be developed until hundreds of years after the tomb had been sealed.
In one of Charlie Chaplin’s movies called The Circus, a lady walks past and she appears to be talking on a cell phone. It seems plausible that there may be a different explanation for her behavior–especially when you consider that if you go back in time with a cell phone, it probably wouldn’t be particularly useful before the infrastructure is built to support making calls, but if she is a traveler from the future, who knows what type of amazing device she might be holding.
I’m just glad to see that in the future people aren’t walking around like idiots talking to themselves with invisible earpieces embedded in their ear.
Below is the video of the woman from the movie.
There is an old photo from the re-opening of a bridge in 194 where one of the people looks like they are dressed in a style that post dates when the photograph was taken. The caption reads: Reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood in Nov. 1940. 1941
Here is a close up of the man that seems dressed a bit out of his time period.
This guy claims he crawled under his sink and just kept going. He stood up and met himself as an older man. He shot some video with his phone with “himself” and they both show that they have the same tattoo. Update: I’m told that this is actually an advertisement for mutual funds or retirement planning, so I guess we can’t count this as proof.
If you’ve made it this far, you are probably very interested in time travel. According to this article, it is impossible. However, if we’ve learned anything from history, we should know that you have to be very careful what you say is impossible.
From the Wikipedia page on Brainstorming:
Some governmental organisations (The Welsh Development Agency and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Belfast) have reached the conclusion that the term ‘brainstorming’ is offensive to people with epilepsy. Some organisations have suggested the alternative “mind shower”. However, research by the National Society for Epilepsy found of those affected by epilepsy questioned, 93% found the term inoffensive. Some resented the term “mind shower” because of the suggestion that people with epilepsy were, as a group, easily offended.