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Comment Threads

• Jay commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  search is fundamentaly broken. Search worked better 15 years ago, as I recall it. Ad-funded search depends on a balance between 1) showing ads, which provide revenue, 2) returning useful information, which supplies viewers for all the ads, and 3) search engine optimization, which brings commercial links to the top of the search without funding the search engine. We'd like to think #2 would win out, but Google makes more money if #2 is just enough to avoid mass defections (to Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc.)....
• Adrian Howard commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Search worked better 15 years ago, as I recall it Number of folk on the net in 1999: 248 million Number of folk on the net March, 2014 (Estimate): 2,937 million (source http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm) Number of pages first indexed by Google in 1998, 26 million. (source http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html) Number of pages indexed last year, over 30 trillion! (source http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/) TL;DR: Search was a lot, lot easier 15 years ago ;-)...
• SFreader commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Saw this, and thought the readers here might want to participate as voters and/or inventors: "UK prize lets public decide on world's biggest science problem. Winning challenge will be focus of £10-million Longitude Prize fund... more than 100 leading scientists have identified six major scientific problems, and the public are being invited to vote on which one should be made the focus of the challenge. The six problems include food, water scarcity, climate change, antimicrobial resistance, paralysis and dementia. The public voting will start on 22 May and will go on until 25 June. Inventors around the world will then...
• Jay commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  I can't say I know what good 10 million pounds worth of solution to climate change would be. To solve the same problem, ITER had an initial budget of 10 billion euros, is way over budget, and may not work anyway....
• anonemouse commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  There isn't a "climate change" challenge. There is a "build an aeroplane that flies London-Edinburgh at comparable speed to today's aircraft emitting as close to zero carbon as possible" one. Whoever designed this understood the need for achievable goals, it seems....