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When your business is lading shit, you buy good shovels.
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The new 185,000-square-foot Church of Scientology International Dissemination and Distribution Center is a one-of-a-kind printing and production facility. It houses manufacturing, distribution and administration all under one roof and is manned entirely by Church staff members. This new Center generates dissemination materials for the more than 9,000 Scientology Churches, Missions and affiliated groups worldwide, enabling these organizations to meet the unprecedented demand for Scientology services and programs.
The anchor of the printing plant is a custom-built 121-ton web press. Among other materials, it prints Church magazines in 15 languages, with a global circulation of millions. The press accommodates these diverse needs with the capability to automatically switch print jobs from one language to another. It prints at a rate of 55,000 pages per hour.
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A harrowing, historic week in Egypt
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They have been days of chants and chaos, bloodshed mixed with moments of breathtaking solidarity between the protesters and the soldiers sent to subdue them. The flame of social unrest that first flickered in Tunisia has spread to Egypt, culminating with the announcement Tuesday by President Hosni Mubarak that after three decades in power, he would not run for another term. The clashes left government buildings in ashes, stores ransacked, and an economy teetering. Cairo’s international airport teemed with Americans and other foreigners trying to flee; Egypt’s tourism industry froze. At Cairo’s Liberation Square, Mubarak’s announcement was met with jeers and calls for an immediate resignation. Pro-Mubarak forces struck back, attacking the protesters in waves. The country of 80 million, rich in history but bereft of personal freedoms, awaits the next stage. Collected here are images from the last week focusing inside Egypt. — Lloyd Young (45 photos total)
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Protesters pray in front of an Egyptian army tank in Liberation Square in Cairo Saturday, Jan. 29. In several parts of the city, confrontation gave way to camaraderie as protesters and soldiers shared water bottles and stories. (Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press) #
Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S.
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Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. – including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. – cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egyptattempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting.
The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has been a surge in traffic to the media outlet’s website, where footage can be seen streaming live. The last 24 hours have seen a two-and-a-half thousand percent increase in web traffic, Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English, told HuffPost. Sixty percent of that traffic, he said, has come from the United States.
Al Jazeera English launched in the fall of 2006, opening a large bureau on K Street in downtown Washington, but has made little progress in persuading cable companies to offer the channel to its customers.
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In most cases, I think it’s undesirable. The WalMarts, Microsofts, Dells, and Amazons, with their insatiable appetites for growth and their obnoxious practices of protecting their image and their message, are effectively killing off their competition. By doing so, they’re limiting all of our choices. There has been a backlash, though. WalMart is finding it increasingly difficult to put stores up. They have significant opposition wherever they go now. Microsoft has been in legislators area of scrutiny for years. If any of these corporate giants get too big, they’ll be busted up. How big is too big, though? I think they’re pretty close. The problem we’ll all have, though, is that consumer prices go way up when these giants are not around. It’s a delicate balance. We need the giants around to keep the little guys honest and we need the little guys around to keep the giants honest. Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code
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The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.
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Microsoft Spying on Internet Explorer Users Google Searches in Order to Enhance Bing Search Engine
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Has Microsoft been spying on the Google searches of Internet Explorer users in order to use the data to enhance their own Microsoft Bing search engine, to make it more competitive with Google? According to Google, who claims to have caught MS watching their own IE users, tapping their Google searches and using the information gleaned from those searches to make their Bing searches more accurate.
According to Google, by manually seeding their Google search results with false data, they have caught Microsoft copying their data. They compare it to someone cheating on an exam by looking over someone else’s shoulder.
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By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google’s results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.
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Couldn’t they have put that land and all those materials to better use? Like as a landfill?