Category: Internet

Quote of the Day

The level of awe that you get by contemplating the modern scientific view of the universe: deep time (by which I mean geological time), deep space, and what you could call deep complexity, living things..... that level of awe is just orders of magnitude greater and more awe-inspiring than the sort of pokey medieval world-view which the church still actually has. I mean, they sort of pay lip-service to the scientific world-view, but if you listen to what they say on Thought For The Day [a religious program on BBC Radio] and things like that, it is medieval. It's a small world, a small universe, with the sky up there, very little advance since that time. So I yield to nobody in my awe for the universe and for life, but I also have a deep desire to understand it, in terms of what makes it work, what makes it tick, and not to take refuge in spurious non-explanations like "I just believe it because I believe it," that sort of thing.
-- Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams

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AltaVista

AltaVista – Why did Altavista search engine lose ground so quickly to Google? From the standpoint of information retrieval, Altavista and earlier search engines adapted the principles that had been developed since the 1960’s to do automatic searching on large bodies of information. Several information retrieval theories had been developed (principally Boolean, vector, and probabilistic) … Continue reading “AltaVista”

Big Cable fronts fake anti-Net-Neutrality group

Big Cable fronts fake anti-Net-Neutrality group whose “members” never joined Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm Wed, Jun 11, 2014 Broadband For America is an anti-Net Neutrality group entirely funded by the National Cable and Telecom Association — Big Cable’s lobbying front, that has represented itself to the FCC as a broad-based coalition that demands as … Continue reading “Big Cable fronts fake anti-Net-Neutrality group”