Jinn of Quality and Risk

I have now created a new category, Current Events, where I'll put stuff that doesn't belong in my intended Quality and Risk themes. I would like to have a voice in multiple themes, but keep them relatively separate. Radio UserLand made it so easy to set up, it's amazing. Now all I need to do for that category is to modify the template and adjust category definitions for postings in the last few weeks (I wish there were an easier way to move a group of existing items to a new category). 

We live in a wonderful age of accelerating invention. Light-emitting diodes -- which create light by passing a current through a semiconductor, rather than heating a wire filament to high temperatures -- are now cheap enough to compete with traditional incandescent light bulbs. [Wired]

Says a producer: consumers don't understand (the technology), [the] key benefit they understand is the run time. In other words, market success is based on saving people's time and/or money, not technical prowess. Most people value their time, not tricks. 

The algorithms and tools that are being used to get rid of spam messages could be put to use in another, more positive context: rating RSS feeds and contents based on similarity with what one is reading. At the moment finding interesting RSS feeds and subscribing to them takes too much research, luck, and manual work. What we need is a higher semantic level of operations on RSS feeds.

Tesugen.com: I would like an RSS client that is smart. ... All entries from the feeds that have the favorite flag are presented, but then the reader selects entries based on a simple scoring algorithm. Since it knows which feeds are my own and which are my favorites, it can compare entries and give more similar entries a higher score, and thus a higher position on the list of unread entries. In addition, it should randomly pick entries that get a high score, in order to provide me with a varied reading experience. 

Today's Mac market is ten times the size of the PC market in 1982, the one that made Mitch Kapor a mega-gazillionaire with his hit spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. ... Basically, [John Doe] is a thoughtless self-congratulatory Windows-only developer with Mac envy. [Scripting News] 

Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, recommends four golden rules for the commander-in-chief. In fact, they are rules of leadership that apply very broadly: maintain the will to succeed, however great the difficulties; require unanimity in leadership, and preserve it; define distinct roles, delegating with trust; and stay on a resolute, confident course. Speed and success are everything... But those golden rules must be kept. [Forbes: Current Events] 

Entry-level software engineers in India earn $4,500 a year. Also, they tend to willingly work 7 days a week, 12-14 hours a day. Unlike manufacturing which can easily be located offshore, software development (especially analysis and design) requires close interaction with end-users and with clients when it's contract work. Thus it cannot profit from cheap offshore labour to the extent that manufactoring does. 

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. — Bernadette Devlin

This captures the essence of extreme human action. To pursue the blessings of liberty for themselves and future generations, the US Founding Fathers pledged their life and fortune. To reach an entrepreneurial goal, one may need to accumulate debt and give up one's house and furniture. And, to take a much less pleasing example, evil men may risk their life and sacrifice millions of other lives in order to gain that which they believe is worth having i.e. to pursue their own values, no matter how evil they may be. It is always difficult to understand the value-hierarchy of evil people, because it doesn't make sense to a reasonable, sane person. Hitler's goals included the systematic murder of Jewish people, and the conquest of Europe in the service of that evil, as he had announced in his book Mein Kampf. Imagine what would have happened if Nazi Germany had succeeded in building atomic bombs before the end of WWII. Only six decades later, Saddam Hussein similarly wants to annihilate Israel and the USA, as he has repeatedly announced. Imagine what would happen... 

According to a US survey, 78% of internet users would rather give up their daily newspaper than live without broadband. And 63% of respondents would even sacrifice their morning cup of coffee rather than lose their high-speed internet connection. I neither get the daily newspaper nor drink coffee in the morning, but I still haven't got broadband access! BT has been claiming, for three weeks, not to know whether my phone line is good enough for ADSL; they've asked me to just wait. What do I need to do, give up my morning tea?