I thought I’d mention this Wired News article while I was on the subject of the Everglades. As if things aren’t bad enough down there with pesticide run-off, drought and species extinction, we now have pet boa constrictors roaming around and tussling with the alligators. Guess who’s behind this latest mess? Yup, you guessed it, it’s people. Forget invasive species, we’re the number one threat to both ourselves, and the planet.
Category Archives: Thoughts
Quote for today
Walt Disney – “Laughter is America’s most important export.”
We’d do well to remember this nowadays. I wonder what our most important export is today. Can we put our finger on it, and if we can, is it something we’d be proud of?
The story of Comeacross and Doublecross
I did a search for ComeAcross on Google today, and stumbled upon an old folktale printed in Bagdad in the early years of the 20th century. It’s recorded on the website of Allan D. Corre of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where it’s part of a collection of popular Arabic literature of the Jews. Read it, it’s nice, and the moral is good. I’m glad to see Comeacross behaved wisely even before it became an informative website! 😀
➡ Updated 2/17/08: ComeAcross was the name of my site from May 2006 to December 2007.
Two spyware companies slapped down by the FTC
The FTC is to be praised for its efforts in shutting down spyware companies. In its latest coup, two of them, Spybot.net and Odysseus Marketing, were fined and closed, and their owners are now responsible for payment of the fines. The FTC wants to put a permanent halt to their services, and to make them cough up all the money they made: over $4 million. I hope they shake them for every penny!
Google Translation is fantastic!
The Google Research blog has a great post about their latest development: Arabic translation. From what I understand, it’s hard to translate back and forth between English and Arabic because of the different sentence structures, but they’ve done it!
Thanks to Google Translation and the power of the Internet, now you can read my site in eight languages other than English: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Arabic is coming soon.
Let me know how it reads in your language! 🙂 Just look for the Translate section in the site’s sidebar footer.
Updated 9/28/07: Arabic was added several months ago.
Raoul Pop 