] This step that we have taken has implications for all
] search engines. These engines crawl the public web
] without asking permission, and cache and reproduce the
] content without asking permission, and then use this
] information as a carrier for ads that generate private
] profit. We are convinced that if citizens scrape Google
] and strip the ads, and make the scraped results available
] as a nonprofit public service, that this is legal. This
] is especially the case if there are public policy
] concerns behind the scraping.
]
] Google Watch has been the most prominent critic of
] Google's outrageous privacy policies for more than two
] years. This is why we started the proxy, and it's why we
] continue the proxy. We invite Google to serve us with a
] cease and desist letter as a first step toward resolving
] this issue. So far, we have yet to hear from Google's
] lawyers. By releasing the source code for our proxy,
] we're trying to escalate the issue.

Google should not save all 4 octets of your IP address. There is no "good" use of that data. Of course, MemeStreams does this too, so yes I'm being hyprocritical, but I didn't just make a fortune in a public offering either. They should store a SHA1 hash of the last 2 octets so they can identify unique visitors without storing identifying data. And the cookie could use some end user control.

Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results

] NSA initiatives in enhancing software security cover both
] proprietary and open source software, and we have
] successfully used both proprietary and open source models
] in our research activities. NSA's work to enhance the
] security of software is motivated by one simple
] consideration: use our resources as efficiently as
] possible to give NSA's customers the best possible
] security options in the most widely employed products.
] The objective of the NSA research program is to develop
] technologic advances that can be shared with the software
] development community through a variety of transfer
] mechanisms. NSA does not favor or promote any specific
] software product or business model. Rather, NSA is
] promoting enhanced security.

NSA's guides to securing machines

NSA - Security Configuration Guides

Photos of the hardware all of Google ran on in 1999

Google's Hardware Setup in 1999

] To use the "Wiki It!" bookmarklet, simply highlight the
] word or words you wish to look up, and click the
] bookmarklet. A separate, minimalist window will open with
] the Wikipedia entry for it.

] Just drag the Wiki It! link onto your personal toolbar.
] It has been tested on Mozilla 1.5 on Linux and Windows
] systems, as well as Firefox 0.7, and Internet Explorer 6.
]

Most Significant Bit :: Wikipedia Bookmarklet

Shipping work overseas saves money that drops to the bottom line as profit.  Stock prices are today keyed to earnings-per-share as is, to a certain extent, executive compensation.  Now look at the average time that an institutional investor actually holds a given stock.  This can be measured in months, sometimes in weeks, but hardly ever in years.  So the investor timeline is short and the CEO timeline -- with average tenancies in those positions at less than five years -- is not much longer.  So offshoring works great for these two groups.  The stock goes up and along with it, the CEO's bonus and stock options.  By the time the long-term effects of this policy are felt, both the investors and the CEO are long gone.  And even if the CEO is still around, it is with a golden parachute negotiated long before that often pays him more to go away than he might have got to stay.

PBS Cringely on IT Outsourcing

] Anyway, for this we also needed something moving or
] changing very fast, so we decided to build a bolt gun. Of
] course, bolt guns aren't very fun unless you can see, in
] great detail, the object they are hitting explode, so
] these two projects seemed like a match made in nerd
] heaven. With the aforementioned micro-controller, we
] simply had no choice but to build a flash timing
] mechanism to capture images of hot bolt-on-food action.

The tale of what evils can occur when 3 nerds from MIT are bored over winter break. They build a bolt gun power by a BASIC stamp, that takes cool bolt-traveling-through-fruit-at high-velocity photos

Fruit Killing bolt gun powered by BASIC!