Is there life after death?

All souls

"A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the "immortal soul clause" to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul."
Shoppers were invited to tick the online terms and conditions (that nobody usually reads)in which the company reserved the right of customer´s soul ownership.

Due to the number of people who ticked the box, GameStation claims believes as many as 88 percent of people do not read the terms and conditions of a Web site before they make a purchase.

The company noted that it would not be enforcing the ownership rights, and planned to e-mail customers nullifying any claim on their soul.

Why DRM doesn´t work

Look

The question you should ask when choosing Submitedge.com is: will it be worth?

Few people realize that 95 percent of all Web searches in the United States are handled by two companies, Google and Yahoo, either directly or through other sites that use their technology.
While search engines are indispensable for finding information online, the technology on which they are based serves to narrow the field of sites that people see.
Google's use of links to find content essentially turns the Web into the world's biggest popularity contest - and just as in high school, this can have negative consequences.
Google's great innovation in online searching, and the main reason it is so successful, is that its technology analyzes links among Web pages, not just the content within them.
Behind Google's complex ranking system is a simple idea: each link to a page should be considered a vote, and the pages with the most votes should be ranked first.
This elegant approach uses the distributed intelligence of Web users to determine which content is most relevant.
The company's technology is so strong that its competitors have adopted a similar approach to organizing online information, which means they now return similar search results. Thus popular sites become ever more popular, while obscure sites recede ever further into the ether.
Google to prevent people from cheating has implemented a sophisticated system called LSI and has already started excluding websits with links to link farms, and paid links. For any SEO firm or webmaster, the only worthwhile ways to have good placement are articles and other web contents.
Each manual directory you submit should be relevant to your site; each directory should be chosen on the base of pedigree and reliability.
That is what a good SEO company does.

The two most important RULES to remember for effective SEO and internet marketing are:

1) Content is King!
2) Link Popularity is Queen!


Combining these rules with the services below continually result in extremely positive ROI:

Directory Submission.

Right SEO Firm

Relevant Article Submission

Good Link Building Service

Reliable Directory Submission Service

Good service as the one provided bySubmitEdge

The question you should ask when choosing the right SEO is: will it be worth?

The German Paradox

The German paradox has nothing to do with Germans.
I am Italian and I wouldn´t like to be in Google without makeup...

There are people who think that their image, even in public IS not public (doesn´t belong to anybody but themselves) and other who think the opposite.
Both have the right to decide to be or not to be in a public picture or website.
This is what the Americans call democracy, and this is the way we intend it.

The Bill of rights in cyberspace should be that: I have the right to think what I decide to think, that Google is right or that Google is wrong.
A Paradox is something else.

Piano Staircase

The fun theory

Oil´s taste

The U.S. Joint Forces command has issued a Joint Operating Environment report:


"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day, While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds.
Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India."


Goldman Sachs controls over 43,000 miles of pipeline and more than 150 oil storage terminals. Morgan Stanley has the capacity to store and hold 20 million barrels. And these firms have the power to direct billions of dollars of their clients' money in oil.

Which way do you think they will push oil prices?


Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. ~Cree Indian Proverb
And also oil. It has quite a bad taste.

It is the Mafia that KNOWS it will win

It's interesting and instructive to read The New York Times' lead story this morning, Top Goldman Leaders Said to Have Overseen Mortgage Unit.

I bet they did, and I am not an economist.
Why would have they bet on it?
Usually when you bet on a horse you think it will win.
It is the Mafia that KNOWS it will win.

Ideas do not need planes to travel.

The cloud spreads.

One can make similar predictions about other industries.
* Tourism: Too obvious. I was planning to take my family to Europe this summer. Holding off on booking those tickets.
* Conventions: Also obvious. I’ve been talking to many events lately via Skype. We’ll see more of that.
* Airlines: Screwed even more than they are now.
* Hotels: Itchy.
* Food: Perishable food will be risky to ship to Europe. The local food movement will rejoice. Poor Chilean strawberry farmers not so much. People like me who loathe winter veggies will have to suck it up. Restaurant and grocery prices will rise.
* Oil: Demand will decline. I leave it to others to tell me the geopolitical impact and opportunity.
* Education. Will international student enrollment suffer?
* Defense. The shutdown of Europe’s airspace is already affecting America’s troops in Afghanistan. Want to launch a coup? Pretty good time.
* Globalization. Will companies be less willing to buy companies halfway around the world if they risk not getting there to manage them?

Jeff Jarvis


What the clouds won´t do in the near future, Peak Oil will.
It is just a matter of time.
I wouldn´t bet on planes.

The scenario you proposed is very likely to happen.
We will be virtually global, but reality chained to our lands.
May be it is not as bad as it looks, there is always a bright side in everything.
Less meetings, more thinking and talking. Ideas do not need planes to travel.

Social Networks: the big brothers of our age

The importance of social networks is less social and more Data collection than ever.

"The US Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March, 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research.

These kinds of large data sets are poised to become one of the most important resources the Internet creates. As Kenneth Cukier wrote in the Economist's recent Special Report on Big Data, "Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour."

It's hard to imagine a more significant milepost in social media's early march toward becoming an essential component of our social experience."

No Future for iPad in Israel

Israel has banned imports of Apple Inc.'s hottest new product, the iPad, citing concerns the powerful gadget's wireless signals could disrupt other devices.

Customs officials said Thursday they have already confiscated about 10 of the lightweight tablet computers since Israel announced the new regulations this week. The ban prevents anyone -- even tourists -- from bringing iPads into Israel until officials certify that they comply with local transmitter standards.

"If you operate equipment in a frequency band which is different from the others that operate on that frequency band, then there will be interference," said Nati Schubert, a senior deputy director for the Communications Ministry.


"There are several hundred people in Israel who make their livelihood developing apps ... and there are going to be companies that suffer, because they can't deliver the services they're supposed to be delivering,"

In the meantime, confiscated iPads will be held by customs -- for a daily storage fee -- until their owners depart the country or ship the gadgets back to the U.S. at their own expense.

A good web hosting is not only about the price, it is mostly about the quality

Marketing is the key to success and the Internet is the new MEDIA for Marketing.
Social Media is the answer to the question: what is a successful marketing?
The presence on the Internet has never been so important as now.
And a good and quality Web Hosting company is the first need to be there in a reliable, continuous way, which can accommodate with the growth of your company.

How can a company decide which is the best, among the jungle of offers of today's market world?
Simple, just look in a good web hosting rating website.
But how to find out what to decide for?

1) Testimonial from existing company. What is good for them could be good for you.
My motto is: learn from others' experience.
2) Avoid sharing the server with bad customers. Avoid partners who abuse bandwidth. Choose the ones who need a low bandwidth.
3) Choose experienced and evolving services like HostMonster.
4) Choose the company that offers best services like technical support.
It can happen that your website goes down, you need the company to have it fixed as soon as possible. This is where technical support comes in. Find a host with 24-hour technical support so that you can ensure that your problems are attended as and when you need it.

Finding a good host is not only about the price, it is mostly about the quality.
And quality means you'll be on the Internet in the best way, with the best features now and in the future.

Where secure doesn´t mean secure and safe doesn´t mean safe

You may update your antivirus software religiously, immediately download all new Windows security patches, and refuse to click any e-mail links ostensibly sent by your bank, but even if your computer is running exactly the way it’s supposed to, a motivated attacker can still glean a shocking amount of private information from it.

The time it takes to store data in memory,fluctuations in power consumption, even the sounds your computer makes can betray its secrets. MIT researchers centered at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab’s Cryptography and Information Security Group (CIS) study such subtle security holes and how to close them.

“Imagine a stock broker that specializes in a specific company,” Tromer says.
“If you observe that his virtual machine is particularly active, that could be valuable information. Or you may want to know how popular your competitors’ website is. We’ve actually demonstrated that we can very robustly estimate web server popularity.”

“This has sparked the imagination of both the research community and industry,” Rohatgi says. “I interact with a lot of people in industry, and when they say, ‘Give me the technical basis for this,’ I point to [Tromer and colleagues’] papers.”

Finally, Tromer is continuing work he began as a graduate student, on the use of a “hundred-dollar commodity microphone” to record the very sounds emitted by a computer and analyze them for information about cryptographic keys. So far, Tromer hasn’t been able to demonstrate complete key extraction, but he believes he’s getting close.

Any information at all about a computer’s internal workings “is actually fairly damaging,” Rohatgi says. “In some sense, some of these cryptographic algorithms are fairly brittle, and with a little extra information, you can break them.”

News in clouds

If you are somebody like me, the sight of clouds is the least alluring, but this time I am talking of digital clouds (or virtual if pleases best).
It looks like today publishing — from the cloud, changing not only the production process of news but also its culture is possible and real.
"A news(paper) can be produced from WordPress, Google Docs, and Flickr (or their equivalents). We’ll get to the other functions shortly."
"So now a reporter can start blogging at the beginning of a story.
And that makes a profound shift in the culture of news: it opens up the process to the public.
“Here’s what I think I’ll work on,” the reporter says to the community she covers.
“Good idea? Is there something else you think I should do instead? What’s the best use of my time? What do you want me to find out for you? If I do this story, what questions do you have?
What do you know? Whom should I call?” As the process continues, the reporter can share what she learns — and doesn’t learn — and the community can help fill in blanks and make the reporting better."
"At the same time, the reporter and editor can ask the community for photos to illustrate the story. They can be shared via Flickr. When it’s time to print, an editor can copy the high-resolution version of an image. If the photographer chooses, he can make the photo available under Creative Commons. If the paper chooses to (as Bild does in Germany), it can pay. That’s up to them. The taking of photos can become competitive: a reader says “I can beat that.” "
That also can make the newspaper ( at this point we should find something else to call it)always changing.
The news begins with the first photos and then we get better and better...
This IS globalization.
A newspaper written in the cloud, things which are accessible from China to Europe to America...and of course the Internet plays the part of the King.

How could we call it?

iNews, or weNews, or cloudNews, broadbandnews, WDFnews
Write, read now and never pay? Be part of the news?

This is a big step in the future of news, may be the only possible bail out for newspaper.
Remember? Everything has to change, so that everything is always the same...
This is the Internet generation, the end to end network.
Not a centralized power or centralized news, but an end to end news...

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Italy: a geographical expression

Italy is a various States´collection subdivided into arcs, just like the meridians.
One arc is the North, it´s green and has a secessionist party that is masked by federalism and interbred with the very same centralist ideas that it claims to fight.
It breeds on an alleged hatred for Rome, but gets its food from Rome.
The Lega is merely a warm cloth.
The Piedmont region would very happily become part of France and seamingly the Lombardy-Veneto region would like to be part of Austria.
After the north, just after the River Po, lie the glorious old States, among them the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which now goes under the name of Tuscany.
These are the Indian reservations of a party that is falling apart, and simply waiting to get back their former identity (which they will never do).
At the centre, white and yellow, (nothing has changed in one and a half century) the Church State has elected its own candidate, Renata Polverini.
The Vatican rules over Rome, including its clinics and its schools, and owns vast amounts of real estate (more than 50%).
Pope-King Ratzinger is more powerful than what the deceased Pope Pious IX was before the Bersaglieri entered Rome through the breach of Porta Pia.
In addition to exercising worldly power over the Church State, they also exercise this power over the Italian State.
The South, black with a few red bands, is self-governed by a variety of groups with strong local ties, which form federations amongst themselves in order to develop the underground economy, from protection rackets to fraudulent tender bids.
The Camorra in Campania, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia and surrounding areas and the Cosa Nostra in Sicily.
This is the heritage of Garibaldi and the dissolution of the Reign of the two Sicilies.
All what´s left is Sardinia, the domain of the Seignorage of Arcore, and the border regions where German, Patois and the Friulano dialect is spoken.
"For centuries we have been downtrodden and laughed at – Because we're not one people – Because we're divided – Let's unite under one flag, one dream, to melt together". Goffredo Mameli wrote these words for his hymn, in 1847.
"We aren't one people" is still Worth and the desire to "melt together" shows that, already then, we knew that we had never been one people.
"Having created Italy, we need to create Italians" said Massimo d'Azeglio. "Create Italians?": People cannot be built. People are not made with bricks , but with culture and memory.

From Beppe Grillo

Mchouses: a lipstick on gorilla´s lips

Spring has arrived and with it good weather and people working outside.
They begin early morning because it is so much warmer and light and they are far behind schedule with the houses they began last Autumn.
In my opinion they shouldn’t bother to go on, they shouldn’t bother to finish what they shouldn’t have bothered to begin.
This is a beautiful little Medieval town, with 1350 old fackwerkhäuser and it didn’t really need to be ruined by some new and ugly McHäuser in the main road that leads to the Market square.
I agree that if you build in 2010 the houses are different, but that doesn’t mean they have to be that ugly.
In one way you can openly see how so many centuries didn’t mean progress, they just meant doing something worse with less job and much more money.
They are cheap, but cost more.
They are new, but they will last much less than the ones built 500 years ago.
The old ones are made with stones, the new with carton.
They are big carton boxes, colored with bright colors to look better, but it’s like lipstick on a gorilla: the lipstick is nice, but the gorilla still isn’t.

Spring´s thoughts

"This Universe is too large for humankind but it is just the right size for me. I could mourn for humankind's sad fate but the dinosaurs existed longer before they went extinct and they were utterly innocent victims of circumstance.

Humankind was a mistake from the beginning and the species has only become a greater mistake as it approaches its end.

Thank God there are ospreys, dolphins and butterflies. Otherwise this planet would be a total loss."

What if machines outsmart man?

Criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

There are possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home.

What if technology undermines our world, our daily life, ourselves?
What if technology goes too far?

I would ask: what if it doesn’t?
What if man stopped in the name of safety, of certainty, of humanity?
This is an impossible scenario.
We cannot stop just because something can go wrong, or robots could be a threat to us.
Technology is a part of our humanity.
Being human is thinking and thinking is evolving.
Not necessarily ALWAYS in better, because the best of the best has a part of bad in it.
What is good for me can be wrong for you.
But that doesn’t mean I have to stop to be me, as you cannot stop to be you.
What we can do, is what man did since the dawn of humanity: finding rules that define the boundaries of my freedom to allow you to enjoy yours.
And may be also care that I, as well as you, am aware that those boundaries exist.

Think big to become big and Seo yourself to become even bigger...

It could take months for your site to get traffic from search engines with a brand new blog, so while you are waiting on the search engines to give you page rank and good positioning, you can be driving another avenue of traffic to your blog with special tools that could help you to reach the placement of your dreams.

SEO is extremely important and you should always think about the level of search engine optimization you are placing into each web page. If you properly SEO your site with good keyword phrases, and relative content then you can get a ton of traffic from the major search engines. I maintain a site for a friend of mine and when the site started there was absolutely no traffic, but the site had been optimized for the search engines. The reasons were many - the site was brand new, linkage was poor, not a lot of indexed pages, etc. It didn’t take long for the site to take off, and it is now on the front page of all 3 search engines with most of it’s search terms, and it gets a lot of traffic without having to submit anything to social sites.
SEO Search engine optimization is the most important aspect of getting traffic to your site, so, you should spend either a fortune to have the job done by somebody else, or do it yourself with the help of an experienced company, a do it yourself seo ,and with as little as $ 24.99 per year.
What you need is a do it yourself software that will submit your site to 200 Directories and Engines with a click of a button and analyze your site for keywords that will make you money.
But that is not all.
In the price is also included a learning section with the most current SEO best practices.
Do you want your website to be successful?
seo yourself!!!

Bones should think twice before revealing...

Perhaps the aging process can’t be stopped. But it can be predicted, and new research from Tel Aviv University indicates that people may live longer and lead healthier lives as a result.

Researchers have developed a new biological marker that represents the age of a body’s bones. It reveals that the speed of physical aging is strongly influenced by genetics.

Christened the osseographic score (OSS), this new marker can be used by doctors as a scientific tool for predicting a person’s general functioning and lifespan, says Tel Aviv University scientist Dr. Leonid Kalichman, an instructor at The Stanley Steyer School of Health Professions. He is a co-author of the study published in Biogerontology and the American Journal of Human Biology (2007), which was conducted in partnership with Dr. Ida Malkin and Prof. Eugene Kobyliansky, both from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.

Add Years to Your Life

If a doctor can determine that a person is aging “biologically faster” than he or she should, measures such as vitamin supplements and exercise can help slow down the process, says Dr. Kalichman.

“While different biomarkers such as grey hair, wrinkles or elasticity of the skin can help us estimate a person’s biological age, these features are hard to quantify,” he says. But with the new OSS biomarker, and treatment at a younger age, “at age 90 people can function as though they are 30,” says Kalichman.

He predicts that biological aging will be an increasingly hot topic of study in the coming years, especially in the western world where people are living longer than ever before.

Full Article

The new step towards the Apple´s monopoly

As much as I hate to admit it, as much as I hate monopolies it looks like people love them.
So much that they are willing to leave the limited and more open world of Microsoft and go totally in the hands of an even closer world.
The new iPad has everything to be happy with, beautiful design, portability, compactness, sturdiness, ease of use, and lower cost.
Except that you pay and think to be the owner of a revolutionary device and soon you realize you pay to be the slave (moneywise) of Apple.

It’s thinner and lighter than a netbook or laptop but at 680 g (the same weight as some netbooks), it’s still heavier than a Kindle (the larger Kindle weighs 535 g, the smaller 290 g).

The iPad has significant limitations, of course, including no support for multitasking, no physical keyboard, a non-replaceable battery, and non-expandable memory. Unlike netbooks and laptops, the iPad has no Webcam and no USB ports.

Well, it is like buying a pair of glasses that will be useful to read JUST what the glasses producer will allow you.
It is the same story.
You buy a printer and then you have to buy a certain type of ink, you buy a vacuum cleaner and you are bound to the producer for the bags, for the entire life of your vacuum cleaner.
I really hate it...

The @ sign

It’s the @ symbol on the computer keyboard, which is an essential component of every e-mail address.
No one knows for sure when it first appeared.
One suggestion is that it dates to the sixth or seventh century when it was adopted as an abbreviation of “ad,” the Latin word for “at” or “toward.”
Another theory is that it was introduced in 16th-century Venice as shorthand for the “amphora,” a measuring device used by local tradesmen.
The @ appeared on the keyboard of the first typewriter, the American Underwood, in 1885 and was used, mostly in accounting documents, as shorthand for “at the rate of.”

In the U.S. Department of Defense Mr. Tomlinson was responsible for the messaging service. He wrote the addresses in computer code, which needed to be translated into a form of words that the rest of us could understand.
Having decided that the first half of the address should identify the user and the second the computer, he looked for a symbol to indicate that he or she was literally “at” that machine.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has deemed it to be such an important example of design that the @ has been officially admitted to its architecture and design collection.
How did the @ fare? Brilliantly, according to Ms. Antonelli.

More...