Research show that Reseach doesn't matter

Ok, I didn't do any real "research" on this topic but it has always bothered me. Why is it that when any number of completely unbiased institutions around the world come to some concrete conclusion after years and years of painstaking research and testing, some people just don't care. They can be utterly unchanged in their opinion on a subject even though they have been proven wrong by numerous research and development groups.

You can Google Research on Research and get a lot of results about how to do research properly and how to get involved in research but nobody seems to care about how many people around the world simply do not care what research presents to us.

My in-laws for example are dead certain that a programmable thermostat doesn't save any energy at all. They know that it just takes more power to "bring the house back up to that temperature" so you really don't save any money (or energy for that matter). It wouldn't matter what I did to convince them otherwise. I could hire a team of HVAC people to come to their house and show models and slide shows of how climate control systems work and they would remain unconvinced. They would be just as certain, if not MORE SO, than before. It would all be some kind of scheme to get them to buy something that they didn't need or save energy that doesn't need saving.

A recent article in USA Today shows how same sex couples can be just as effective at raising kids as a couple consisting of both sexes. Do you think this is really going to change the minds of people opposing same sex marriages? Are these people really going to sit back and say "Hey, maybe after all theses years... they are right."?

I'm not saying we should stop all research and give up our causes. I'm just wondering how we can present these things to people in a way that seems less threatening. In a way that will make people listen. In a way people can learn, without realizing they are learning, I guess.

Removing News Corps. Feeds

Well, it looks like I can start removing all my News Corps. Feeds. I know my little blog won't mean much. I'd sure like to see all the News Corps. links drop off the Internet. That might wake this guy up. Maybe all of the bloggers that work for this guy can talk some sense into him.

Here's a link to the papers run by News Corp. Feel free to start dropping their feeds as well.

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Time to celebrate -- Murdoch to hide his crap: "

For someone as successful as he's been, Rupert Murdoch sure has no clue what the internet is all about.

Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

In an interview with Sky News Australia, the mogul said that newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.

In recent months, Murdoch his lieutenants have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of "kleptomania" and acting as a "parasite" for including News Corp content in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google's search indexes – a simple technical operation – Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards.

'I think we will, but that's when we start charging,' he said. 'We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it's not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you're not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.'

The 78-year-old mogul's assertion, however, is not actually correct: users who click through to screened WSJ.com articles from Google searches are usually offered the full text of the story without any subscription block. It is only users who find their way to the story through the Wall Street Journal's website who are told they must subscribe before they can read further.

Murdoch also wants to legally challenge the doctrine of Fair Use. Please, please do!

Murdoch added that he did not agree with the idea that search engines fell under 'fair use' rules - an argument many aggregator websites use as part of their legal justification for reproducing excerpts of news stories online.

'There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether... but we'll take that slowly.'

Of course, Murdoch will never challenge Fair Use. Media organizations live in fear of a clear judicial affirmation of Fair Use. It would make it harder for them to threaten people who engage in accepted Fair Use practices.

Still, it's amazing how little Murdoch knows about how his products interact with the internet -- that one can get full stories off of WSJ if you just know how, or that Google News doesn't actually do anything except provide a headline, part of the first sentence and a link to the source material. He actually thinks Google news is a 'parasite' for linking to his products!

The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

That level of ignorance of the medium is breathtaking.

With luck, Murdoch will also order Fox News to pull their stuff off Google News and enact a paywall to keep those freeloading communist conservatives from reading the material for free. It'd be the fair and balanced things to do. And I, for one, can't wait.

Gmail outages could turn off enterprises

Must have been a slow news day over at Macworld. Are you telling me that if something is unreliable people tend to not rely on it? That's frickin' genius. I HATE captain obvious headlines.

Gmail outages could turn off enterprises. Repeated outages of Google's Gmail online e-mail system could discourage enterprise customers from using it.