Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[bobAlike]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

Yes, even google has it's haters. Sign of success, I guess.

I could be considered a hater, but I'm not really I just hated the WiFi snooping debarcle. There is NO WAY Google didn't know what was going on.

[kinboshi]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

Yes, even google has it's haters. Sign of success, I guess.

I could be considered a hater, but I'm not really I just hated the WiFi snooping debarcle. There is NO WAY Google didn't know what was going on.

Why am I a Google-hater just because I'm not impressed that a company that has the UK as its second largest market pays ZERO tax on its profits here?  Do you think that's good and ethical business behaviour tikay?  Same goes for Amazon as well.

I use lots of google products.  I've had a Google phone since android was launched, I use gmail, I work in an industry that utilises google's services.  They're far from perfect though, and their tax avoidance in the UK is definitely one case of them moving away from their mantra of 'Do no evil'.  Celtic's brother pointed out another example.  I don't think that someone can be tagged as a hater just because they don't constantly bombard them with obsequious praise.

[tikay]

Will you be glued to the screens for the Olympics?

Business will be on the back burner for the 18 days for me.

24 hour multi media coverage, but I still believe the photograph will capture the spirit & occasion best.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/interactive/2012/jul/24/olympics-2012-great-photography

I loved those photos (except those in the "Innovation" section), thank you.

"Glued to thje Olympics"?

I don't know, but I plan to at least try. Thus far, I have not shown an iota of interest, it leaves me stone cold, except for the inconvenience it causes me in my daily life. I can't say I have ever watched an Olympics with much interest, even though I adore Sport. I don't know why that is.

I will try though, honest!

I am deffo NOT a moaner about those who love it though, it's a grand thing, & if others love it, I'm delighted.

I live near Hampton Court, right on the Cycle Race Route, so there is much Olympic activity here of late, they have a Time-Trial in the grounds of the Palace I think, & have built a whole temporary infrastructure on the formerly pristine Hampton Court Green.

I drove over Hampton Court Bridge at 05.15 this morning, & it was thronged with people, setting up for the day, with their rucksacks & sandwiches, & it made we want to try & find the "mood & spirit". There is a big golden sailing boat thing moored on the Thames here, too, which I think is going to sail up to London later today, all shiny & majestic.

If nothing else, I hope the Olympics is wonderful, & that everyone enjoys it. I just can't seem to find that spark.

Watch the Opening Ceremony on TV? Nah, I'll be reading a book. Great book though. Reading is the greatest. 

[neeko]

You know how annoying these things (Captcha's) are when you're trying to register an account somewhere.



Well do you know the link between

1. A modified version of these

Click to see full-size image.

2. One of the companies you admire greatly - Google

3. The Google Book project where they have already scanned over 20 million books into an online readable format?

Yes?  Oh, crap.

No?  Great I'll explain for no other reason than I found out about this a while ago and though you'd find it interesting.

Every time someone is presented with one of these modified Captcha's, known as ReCaptcha's they are solving a puzzle.  What's clever is that Google realised they could put this mass-problem solving workforce on the internet to work.  They have around 200 million of these solved by people on the internet every day, so that's 200 million words deciphered by users for free.  You solve one of those you're working for Google!

How is that helping Google?

Each time they show a ReCaptcha one of the words is a "known" word and one is "unknown".  The "known" word is taken from a set of words suitable for mangling to make it tricky to guess. The "unknown" word is taken from the Google Books project book scans.  When they scan a book they can Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the output and turn most of the scan into text, the parts they can't OCR they break into "words" and pass to ReCaptcha for solving.  Ingenious!

Check out the following link to see the pretty amazing accuracy achieved

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/digitizing



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

Thanks Aaron, that is nothing short of beautiful.

It's all about upside down thinking, isn't it, thinking different?

Sheer simplicity, & sheer genius.

In one of the books I have about google, they go through the conception, gestation & birth of book scanning, which was done largely in conjunction with the great University Libraries of the world. The thing that is so hard to comprehend is the sheer scale of the task. The world contains "quite a few" books.

Page & Brin constantly discussed "scaleability" when doing their google think-tank stuff in the early days, but scanning every single book on earth is just beyond my imagination.

The world is overflowing with stuff we can barely comprehend.

What puzzles me about this....
If CAPTCHAs are used in this way, on Google Books, how can it be used to authenticate a real person who is trying to access a site? If these words are unrecognisable to OCR then surely a human is needed to check what the real user has entered??

I may be missing loads here but something doesn't quite fit.

The one they know the answer to is for the verification, the other ( which will be done by a couple of dozen others as well) is used as free word identification service.

[tikay]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

Yes, even google has it's haters. Sign of success, I guess.

I could be considered a hater, but I'm not really I just hated the WiFi snooping debarcle. There is NO WAY Google didn't know what was going on.

Why am I a Google-hater just because I'm not impressed that a company that has the UK as its second largest market pays ZERO tax on its profits here?  Do you think that's good business behaviour tikay?  Same goes for Amazon as well.

Every multi-national does the same thing, Dan, they organise their affairs & business to be tax-efficient. It is an absolute duty they have to their Shareholders.

Sometimes dual "duties" (in this case, to Shareholders, & to Great Britain) unavoidably clash. We have all been on different sides of awkward fences, have we not?   

[bobAlike]

You know how annoying these things (Captcha's) are when you're trying to register an account somewhere.



Well do you know the link between

1. A modified version of these

Click to see full-size image.

2. One of the companies you admire greatly - Google

3. The Google Book project where they have already scanned over 20 million books into an online readable format?

Yes?  Oh, crap.

No?  Great I'll explain for no other reason than I found out about this a while ago and though you'd find it interesting.

Every time someone is presented with one of these modified Captcha's, known as ReCaptcha's they are solving a puzzle.  What's clever is that Google realised they could put this mass-problem solving workforce on the internet to work.  They have around 200 million of these solved by people on the internet every day, so that's 200 million words deciphered by users for free.  You solve one of those you're working for Google!

How is that helping Google?

Each time they show a ReCaptcha one of the words is a "known" word and one is "unknown".  The "known" word is taken from a set of words suitable for mangling to make it tricky to guess. The "unknown" word is taken from the Google Books project book scans.  When they scan a book they can Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the output and turn most of the scan into text, the parts they can't OCR they break into "words" and pass to ReCaptcha for solving.  Ingenious!

Check out the following link to see the pretty amazing accuracy achieved

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/digitizing



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

Thanks Aaron, that is nothing short of beautiful.

It's all about upside down thinking, isn't it, thinking different?

Sheer simplicity, & sheer genius.

In one of the books I have about google, they go through the conception, gestation & birth of book scanning, which was done largely in conjunction with the great University Libraries of the world. The thing that is so hard to comprehend is the sheer scale of the task. The world contains "quite a few" books.

Page & Brin constantly discussed "scaleability" when doing their google think-tank stuff in the early days, but scanning every single book on earth is just beyond my imagination.

The world is overflowing with stuff we can barely comprehend.

What puzzles me about this....
If CAPTCHAs are used in this way, on Google Books, how can it be used to authenticate a real person who is trying to access a site? If these words are unrecognisable to OCR then surely a human is needed to check what the real user has entered??

I may be missing loads here but something doesn't quite fit.

The one they know the answer to is for the verification, the other ( which will be done by a couple of dozen others as well) is used as free wvice.

Thats what I missed.

[MANTIS01]

This Mitt Romney seems like a bit of a clown so no doubt a shoe-in for the American election. I spat my cornflakes onto the telly yesterday when he thanked Mr. errrrrrrrrr Leader and the camera panned to the instantly forgettable Ed Miliband. I love Ed Miliband.

[kinboshi]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

Yes, even google has it's haters. Sign of success, I guess.

I could be considered a hater, but I'm not really I just hated the WiFi snooping debarcle. There is NO WAY Google didn't know what was going on.

Why am I a Google-hater just because I'm not impressed that a company that has the UK as its second largest market pays ZERO tax on its profits here?  Do you think that's good business behaviour tikay?  Same goes for Amazon as well.

Every multi-national does the same thing, Dan, they organise their affairs & business to be tax-efficient. It is an absolute duty they have to their Shareholders.

Sometimes dual "duties" (in this case, to Shareholders, & to Great Britain) unavoidably clash. We have all been on different sides of awkward fences, have we not?   

There are different ways of operating, and just because a business is a multi-national, or because they were founded by a couple of geeks, it doesn't mean they always act ethically.

I just don't see why this means you'd tag me as a google 'hater' - as I said:

I use lots of google products.  I've had a Google phone since android was launched, I use gmail, I work in an industry that utilises google's services.  They're far from perfect though, and their tax avoidance in the UK is definitely one case of them moving away from their mantra of 'Do no evil'.  Celtic's brother pointed out another example.  I don't think that someone can be tagged as a hater just because they don't constantly bombard them with obsequious praise.

[tikay]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

Yes, even google has it's haters. Sign of success, I guess.

I could be considered a hater, but I'm not really I just hated the WiFi snooping debarcle. There is NO WAY Google didn't know what was going on.

Why am I a Google-hater just because I'm not impressed that a company that has the UK as its second largest market pays ZERO tax on its profits here?  Do you think that's good business behaviour tikay?  Same goes for Amazon as well.

Every multi-national does the same thing, Dan, they organise their affairs & business to be tax-efficient. It is an absolute duty they have to their Shareholders.

Sometimes dual "duties" (in this case, to Shareholders, & to Great Britain) unavoidably clash. We have all been on different sides of awkward fences, have we not?   

There are different ways of operating, and just because a business is a multi-national, or because they were founded by a couple of geeks, it doesn't mean they always act ethically.

I just don't see why this means you'd tag me as a google 'hater' - as I said:

I use lots of google products.  I've had a Google phone since android was launched, I use gmail, I work in an industry that utilises google's services.  They're far from perfect though, and their tax avoidance in the UK is definitely one case of them moving away from their mantra of 'Do no evil'.  Celtic's brother pointed out another example.  I don't think that someone can be tagged as a hater just because they don't constantly bombard them with obsequious praise.

It was a throwaway line Dan, I'm sorry that I never realised that you would be so sensitive to it.

[bobAlike]

This Mitt Romney seems like a bit of a clown so no doubt a shoe-in for the American election. I spat my cornflakes onto the telly yesterday when he thanked Mr. errrrrrrrrr Leader and the camera panned to the instantly forgettable Ed Miliband. I love Ed Miliband.

I used to like you.

[Tal]

This Mitt Romney seems like a bit of a clown so no doubt a shoe-in for the American election. I spat my cornflakes onto the telly yesterday when he thanked Mr. errrrrrrrrr Leader and the camera panned to the instantly forgettable Ed Miliband. I love Ed Miliband.

The funny thing is Ed Milliband wasn't able to jump in and advise Mr Romney, cos he had forgotten his own name, too.

He's the Mark Rothko of politicians. People tell me there's a lot going on and has huge value but it just looks boring to me.

[Simon Galloway]

There are no shortages of bad things to say about the Olympics.  The momentary patriotism, the personal inconvenience, the "expense" to the public purse, the ticket allocations... it goes on.

But ultimately, whatever sport is your thing, there is a chance to watch some of the best in the World compete nearby.

That's good enough for me.

[Tonji]

This Mitt Romney seems like a bit of a clown so no doubt a shoe-in for the American election. I spat my cornflakes onto the telly yesterday when he thanked Mr. errrrrrrrrr Leader and the camera panned to the instantly forgettable Ed Miliband. I love Ed Miliband.

The funny thing is Ed Milliband wasn't able to jump in and advise Mr Romney, cos he had forgotten his own name, too.

He's the Mark Rothko of politicians. People tell me there's a lot going on and has huge value but it just looks boring to me.

haha love the dropping in of absract expressionist art criticism, tikay loves it.

[kinboshi]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

Yes, even google has it's haters. Sign of success, I guess.

I could be considered a hater, but I'm not really I just hated the WiFi snooping debarcle. There is NO WAY Google didn't know what was going on.

Why am I a Google-hater just because I'm not impressed that a company that has the UK as its second largest market pays ZERO tax on its profits here?  Do you think that's good business behaviour tikay?  Same goes for Amazon as well.

Every multi-national does the same thing, Dan, they organise their affairs & business to be tax-efficient. It is an absolute duty they have to their Shareholders.

Sometimes dual "duties" (in this case, to Shareholders, & to Great Britain) unavoidably clash. We have all been on different sides of awkward fences, have we not?   

There are different ways of operating, and just because a business is a multi-national, or because they were founded by a couple of geeks, it doesn't mean they always act ethically.

I just don't see why this means you'd tag me as a google 'hater' - as I said:

I use lots of google products.  I've had a Google phone since android was launched, I use gmail, I work in an industry that utilises google's services.  They're far from perfect though, and their tax avoidance in the UK is definitely one case of them moving away from their mantra of 'Do no evil'.  Celtic's brother pointed out another example.  I don't think that someone can be tagged as a hater just because they don't constantly bombard them with obsequious praise.

It was a throwaway line Dan, I'm sorry that I never realised that you would be so sensitive to it.

Just wondered really.  Someone criticises an aspect of a business, organisation, or even of an individual - doesn't mean they're a "hater" does it?  The same way you can appreciate or acknowledge something good someone does, without being a "fanboy".

[tikay]

I will say it again.

It was a throwaway line Dan, I'm sorry that I never realised that you would be so sensitive to it.