The weaknesses of search engines: You don’t know how much they miss!

Sunday, March 26, 2006

http://pacpub.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16358744&BRD=1091&PAG=461&dept_id=425716&rfi=6

03/23/2006
End of the run for coach 
By: Carolyn M. Hartko , Sports Writer 

{Begin Quote} 

Brian Jost will retire in June after 33 years of coaching cross-country and track and field at SBHS.

 The South Brunswick sports community had no way of knowing it at the time, but an injury to a Manhattan College sprinter in the late 1960s would have a profound effect on future runners at South Brunswick High School.

{extraneous deleted}

Over the summer, Mr. Jost and his wife of 33 years, Catherine, are moving from Perrineville in Millstone Township to Solivita, an active-adult community in central Florida, about 20 miles south of Disney World. Their grown children, 24-year-old Katie and 22-year-old Patrick, are expected to be frequent visitors, especially for the free room and board so close to the theme park.

Ms. Jost is wrapping up her 35th year as an elementary school teacher in Strathmore School in the Matawan/Aberdeen school district. Like the seasoned educators they are, the Josts did their homework before choosing Solivita as their new home.

{End Quote}

This story illustrates the weakness of the search engines. They don’t find it all! And, you don't realize it. Here's a story on the internet. Findable if you know where to look and know that it exists. But, invisible to the major search engines.

I happen to glance over my local rag. We get it because Frau Reinke likes it. It just aggravates me with the liberal leftist statist drivel. Appologies for why taxes have to go up. Or, why we aren’t getting our fair share of this state program or that federal program. Or isn’t it good that the state collectivist education program put on an anti-drug program. That one just sets me off in so many directions it isn’t funny. I usually read the rag for ammo to for my blog or to stick thought provoking comments in theirs.

Anyway. Front page bottom I find a Jasper story! Huh? I’ve lived here for too many years. I thought I knew all the Jaspers in town. And here’s pops up one. Worse than that, it never showed on any search engine.

My alumni ezine attempts to be the The Journal of Jasper Accomplishments. Whie the search engines are great at somethings, they are obviously terrible at these things. So I need all my readers to become reporters, collectors, and detectives in the effort. I know I can’t do it with automated tools alone.

Now on a liberty perspective, here is a story about two teachers retiring on state pensions with good benefits. THe taxpayers of the Peoples Republic of New Jersey will be paying that forever. I have no doubt that they played by the rules and followed all terms of their contracts. But it just illustrates the basic unfairness of government employment. You get into "public service", work for 30 years, and then live out the rest of your life on the public. Not only can't the State afford that but it is unamerican.

We have to get the gummamint out of education. They fail to educate. They are ruinously expensive. And, it is not fair to make everyone pay for services that they get no benefits from. I don't pay to feed your chioldren, clothe them, shelter them. So why do I have to pay to badly educate them.

No where in society to we have lifetime employment, with a generous guaranteed retirement, with jobs that have such a poor output. In the free market, it is "serve and survive" or "fail and die".

The first thing that we need to eliminate is government education. The second is state pensions. And, the third is gumamint "jobs"!

Now you know why I don't read the local rag. It aggrevates me on many levels.


“Tear down the Electoral College” or why techies should stick to tech

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/5148

Responding to Paul McNamara in NetworkWorld: Tear down the Electoral College

Popular vote is mob rule. The Electoral College throws a roadblock in their path.

We have gotten into the mess we are in by ignoring the wisdom of some dead old white guys who were pretty smart. They revolted over 1% taxartion and we can’t even calculate the per cent we pay. We’d have a better chance of knowing where an electron is than the exact percentage we pay in taxes. Politicians do a GREAT job of hiding the true cost.

Before you continue the erosion of the Constitution, let’s consider that we are NOT a democracy. We are republic. The foundation of a republic is that minorities have rights! And, we are all minorities at one time or another.

I am immediately opposed to anyone changing the Constitutional process since we have a great track record of screwing things up. Let’s just review some of the more bone-headed ones: Sixteenth Ammendment gave us an income tax. Ninteenth Ammendment women’s vote gave us the Prohibition Ammendment which gave us organized crime. Twenty Second Ammendment that gives us lame duck Presidents.

And we have enough screwballs running around changing stuff even without changing the Constitution. Our money is valueless; backed only by the full faith and credit of something called the “Federal Reserve Bank” — a club of bankers. Our national debt is a joke. Education is a government run dumbing down of our people. Illegals are invading our country. The “war on drugs” is filling our prisons, infringing on our liberty, and defying human nature. Government in healthcare is killing us while bankrupting us. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

AND, government at all levels is running amok.

Here you are advocating changing to be MORE democratic?

Please stick to technology. Social engineering is best left to the philosophers and cynics. At least they understand what a dangerous thing a human being is. And when that life form gangs up into “government”, it is like a plague of locust.

Bear in mind that only the government is capable of committing a genocide. It’s a powerful force that needs to be constrained, restricted, and severly limited.

The electoral college is one way to do just that.
IMHO!


Dilbert author advocates mob rule; imho he should stick to ‘toons

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/03/constitutional_.html#comments

Dear Scott Adams: This is a “howler”. You can’t be serious. What you describe is mob rule that is as short-fused as a polsters dream. The constitution, if it was followed, enshrines the minorities’ rights. It used to before the popular election of senators slowed things down to a reflective pace. Before that change, there was no such thing as an “unfunded mandate” (unless the Senators wanted to be lynched by their respective state legislatures). But, then we used to have “honest money” at one time too. The dead old white guys who wrote that Constitution were pretty smart about how to try to limit government power. Unfortunately, we became as “dumb” as the pointy head mamager in your strip. Government is into everything and we are being slowly enslaved by the majority.


Interesting. I see how old folks can drain their savings when there’s little coming in.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

This is scary stuff. 

-begin quote- 

The Wealth of the American Nation

Americans are clearly the richest people on earth. Or are they? With some $50 trillion in stocks, bonds and real estate, we are watching our net worth grow each year. Some argue that the low US saving rate is not a problem as real net worth is growing fairly rapidly.

But not for the average family. A survey by the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances offers us the most detailed recent look at the balance sheet of U.S. households.

The median family has about $3,800 in the bank, do not have a retirement account, has a home worth $160,000 with a mortgage of $95,000. No mutual funds, stocks or bonds populate their investment portfolios. They make (jointly) $43,000 and struggle to pay off their $2,200 in credit card debt. That means 50% of Americans are in worse shape than the above. It is not a pretty picture.

As I noted last week, “…we find that 67% of the people aged 50-64 saved less than $10,000 last year. Over 40% saved less than $1,000!!!” No wonder that most people expect to work after age 65.

-end quote-
 


Restoring “luggable” to service!

Thursday, March 9, 2006

The disks arrived yesterday from Dell. That was quite quick. I was pleased (undeservedly so) and got right to work on the project. I first booted from the recovery disk. And tried a repair. Reboot and that left the stuck mcafee entry in the registry. Remember my problem is that the privacy software was blocking the wireless tcpip and I couldn’t get it to uninstall or install. So that problem remained. I tried a few other things. Visualize a dying fish on the end of  line flopping about struggling to get loose. You, that was me. So I more ahear to a reinstall. An HOUR LATER, arch, the new disks trow up all sorts of missing file errors and hangs. Argh! So I dig out an old xp pro sp1 install disk and copy it to the hard drive. And retry. Luckily I was smart enough not to reformat the ntfs partition else it would have been really bricked. So when going through the pig again, I was able to find the missing files on the “old” installation disk. Install completes and it is ugly. No drivers are loaded and I have forgotten how to be administrator. Argh. Argh. So I start pouring in the disks they sent me. I was under the illusion that the “recovery disks” would magically transport me back to the way it was when it arrived. Hah! Another two HOURS of fruitless playing with the stuff gets me to a working system with zero connectivity to my home net. So I start zeroing in on drivers. Mind you now, I have nothing workign in the way of a browser or any other tools. just my wits. So I go back to the driver disk. I had thought that it would intall the necessary drivers that it knew I needed. Nope, gotta go in and do them one by one. Argh! Argh! I got that working and could connect to the world. Yeah. Still have to reinstall Office Xp but tomorrow night.

One nagging problem is that it didn’t pick up me “reinkefj” from the prior install. My files and stuff are all there. It is just that it’s not seeing it as a user. Argh! So, last thing before I went to bed was to kick off a massive copy from the old “reinkefj” to the new “reinkefj dot machinename”. I have no idea how that went since I got up late. Argh!

Whatta mess. Thanks mcafee!


The Ds and Rs target voters; what about us Ls?

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701860_pf.html

Where are out databases?


What part of the Second Ammendment do these bozos not understand?

Sunday, March 5, 2006

http://www.anjrpc.org/fopalawsuit.htm

/begin quote/

February 27, 2006 – The Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. (ANJRPC) announced that it has commenced a lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and one of its police officers for wrongfully arresting and imprisoning for nearly five days a 57-year old Utah man delayed at Newark Airport by a baggage error while traveling from Utah to Pennsylvania.

/end quote/

It is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable. I plan to write the various critters that respresent me. To do the correct thing!

 


Report from a Saint Patrick’s Day dance

Sunday, March 5, 2006

Ahh sure an begora the Fifties are alive and well in Flushing Queens. We went, health problems aside, with our old firends to their local parish st pats dance. It was a hoot. They had some young Irish step dancers preform, who were very good and colorful. But, to my eye, only one of them “look” irish. If you lined them up and said pick out the irish girls, then you’d have been hard pressed to do it. One girl looked definitely Italian. But, if they think they are, then they are. I like Riverdance; so you can imagine that I liked them. There was a pipe band. And some speeches. And a politician. (Amazing how they can always find a camera and local voters!)

Out of the evening, I came away more convinced of the sad fact that activities such as this are a dying breed. Just in the last decade, events at this parish have gone from overflowing, (my friend would call several months in advance and say I have to buy tickets now), to smaller and smaller venues. I see this as everyone converting to the state religion of secular humanism with it’s apathetic sacrament of tv. Catholic education can not compete with the “free” edcuation provide by the taxpayer. And the total loss of stature of all Churches in the paradigm. In the France, symbolized by the Three Musketeers, the King was balanced by the Cardinal. We are losing that balance. In New York, the Irish fraternal societies were overflowing. The parishes were vibrant with activity. It’s a losing battle. But, I can’t see what replaces it? People sitting in their homes, cacooned, watching tv? Maybe the Matrix story is right.


Schools wasting money on computing is a symptom of the problem of “gummamint”

Friday, March 3, 2006

http://stevehargadon.blogspot.com/2006/03/more-on-ed-tech-in-rebuilding-gulf.html

/begin quote/

OK, so as a liberal arts major who is also a geek, it is hard for me to watch how much we spend on computers, and then how quickly we discover we have to spend it again to keep current… There are no simple answers, but I would imagine that many schools and districts have already looked back and wondered if they could have used some of that money for other things. 

/end quote/

If I can interject a little Austrian-economic Libertarian (I.e., classical liberalism) thinking, then I’d say that State Skooling suffers from the fatal flaw of all gummamint thinking.

They are, or have, THE solution. Only THEY can have the right ideas. THEY are the intelligentsia looking out for the befuddled masses.

Austrian economic thinking points out that only economic man struggling to satisfy his fellow man has the benefit of the marketplace to learn what people do and do not want. They don’t have that competitive marketplace to serve as a check on their ideas.

From my view, they have no competition to:

(1) assess if the money they are spending makes sense.

Envision that there were two competing schools. They are identical in all respects except one. One comes with all the latest and greatest computing. One come with the “old” LTSP model with old surplus hardware networked to one powerful server. Now clearly the “new” school would have to charge more for all that new hardware. Would the parents pay the difference to have their children go to the “new” school or would they e satisfied with the “old” school. There is no place to test if the extra money is well spent.

(2) in the “public school” funding model, the taxpayers don’t get a choice.

I am saddened by the implicit assumption that the school gets to use money for alternatives. It’s never given back to the poor taxpayer. Just keep using it and using it. Like a duck being fatten for pattefoigras. Just keep stuffing as much money as posible into the “education factory”. Without the discipline of the marketplace to tell a school administrator that they have reach the end of the marginal utility curve, how does a school administrator knwo when they have spent to much? When they have spent 200% of their budget and then whine in the press that there is never enough money. For the children.

When the taxpayers wake up and say we don’t want, or Intelligent Designer forbid, we can’t, to pay anymore, they will get the cold ice water bath of a “pair of dimes” (paradigm) shift.

The principles of the new paradigm will be: (1) Publik skools fail because there is no marketplace to discipline them. Marketplaces satisfy our needs by the greedy self-interest of providers. The ineffective or inefficient fail. We need failure so that we can fine tune how much resource is applied to the various human needs. (2) People want their children educated to suceed. He who has the gold makes the rules. The marketplace empowers the buyer to satisfy their various needs. Education is just one of those needs. (3) Government (gummamint) is the worst way to provide any social service. It really has only one role to protect us from violence and fraud. Citizens need to restrain it to only those functions. Gummamint running education is a conflict of interest; educated citizens are needed to restrict it to its proper role.

Can’t happen fast enough if we are as a nation to survive.
 

 


Not having a good day!

Thursday, March 2, 2006

Today’s a mess of multiple failures. Arghh!

Luggable has been suffering winrot, but it is limping along. Today, I thought the winrot had taken it out. With two laptops one working and one not, I focused on luggable. After two hours of rebooting, deleting adapters, and reinstalling stuff. Laptop #2 starting to go flaky. Huh? Is like bird flu contageous between the two laptops? I powered down the internet connection and finally everything started to work on both boxes. Almost! The old laptop’s mcafee was corrupted. So, after much tinkering. I had to reinstall. To reinstall, every component has to be uninstalled. With a reboot after everyone. And, then a reinstall after everyone. Argh! Then, it still doesn’t work because it won’t verify with mcafee. Argh! So, I just gave up trying to fix that! Boy do I hate everything other than open source.