Sometimes, innocent people have to die

All too often, innocent people have to die before action is taken. Here’s another sad example. In this case, both a limousine company and a highway department are at fault.

"The crash about 170 miles north of New York City came three years after another deadly stretch-limo wreck in New York state spurred calls for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to examine such vehicles’ safety. There is no evidence the state took any steps to do so."

Headline: Cuomo says limo shouldn’t have been on road

To Pope Francis: There is no "Devil"

Pope Francis believes that people need to pray daily to protect the Roman Catholic Church from the Devil. We can argue whether there's is a God or not, but it's clear to me that "The Devil" does not exist except as a bogeyman cooked up by Catholics and other religions. When something bad happens to the Pope, maybe he should look at the decisions he made and not blame the Devil for it.

AP Story here.

Google News has flaws

Google News, viewed with Google Chrome on my Apple iPhone 4S, has five flaws. When I view Google News, I am signed on to my Google account. This customizes the news for me.

First, look at these screen shots, taken today, one at 8:30 a.m. EDT (United States) and one at 8:32 p.m. Do you see any difference with the news? Nope, neither do I. The thing that bothers me the most is the age of the stories. In the a.m. version, the China story is supposedly one hour old. Shouldn't it be 13 hours ago 12 hours later? How do I get new stories? Eventually (overnight), they will be updated but during the day I have to manually refresh the display. Even after I manually refresh, it still tends to revert to the early-morning version.

Second, as you know. Major League Baseball games are played in a series of two or more games (up to five when the Chicago Cubs played the Cincinnati Reds recently). Google News has no concept of separate games, completely mixing up the stories about the games in the series. I would prefer that each game in the series be listed separately with the pregame and postgame stories shown together.

Third, Google News does not evaluate the quality of the news sources but figures that the last news source is the best. This results in the main story being from a dodgy source (like a site that scrapes stories from other sites) or an Associated Press story instead of the breaking story from the local news media. Take the first story above. The main source is a newspaper in Nigeria. Nigeria? Clicking on "More sources" gives you stories from Sydney Morning Herald (yes, Sydney as in Australia) and Daily News & Analysis. If I click on "all 397 news articles," I get a list of articles about sending advisers to Iraq and not a peep about China (this normally doesn't happen; it's just a glitch). Normally, I get the better stories only if I click through.

I recently wanted to read about an incident in Miami, Florida. The first story was an AP story in the Seattle (Washington) Post-Intelligencer. I had to dig to get an actual story from a television station in Miami. I miss the days when there was only one copy of Associated Press stories. Now there are dozens of them, all repeated ad nauseam as if they were unique.

Fourth, I have local news sections for two cities (Norwood, Ohio, where I live and Brookville, Ohio, where I work some of the time). These sections were rarely updated, although that may be fixed once I complained. Here is an example from April 1 (no fooling):

So which is it? A delay or an approval? If you look closely, the first story is dated March 18 and the second April 1. In those days, a story could stick for a month or more even though there's always new news to replace it. I had a disgusting Brookville child molestation story stuck on there for so long (over a month) that I finally flamed Google and it was fixed within hours. (There is an option to provide feedback about News separately from feedback about Chrome.)

Finally, on my iPhone the page takes at least 15 seconds to load (Aug. 13: 29 seconds). To load Google News on my MacBook Pro, using the same wireless Internet connection, takes three seconds. I suspect the problem is with either DNS lookup or SSL negotiation. Update Aug. 24: The problem is a Chrome problem that affects other sites as well. I have filed a report with Google but no fix yet.

I will still use Google News but I am still frustrated with its limitations. Thanks, Google, for letting me vent about this on Blogger, operated by Google. I will update this post as the situation improves.

Updated Aug. 13: Added/changed load times.

Beaumont Bomber gets no love from hometown newspaper

On Tuesday, Sept. 17, Jay Bruce of the Cincinnati Reds hit a grand-slam home run at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas. Did his hometown newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise, even mention that he's from Beaumont? Nope, not a word. They just ran the Associated Press story of the game with no apparent additions. Sorry, Jay.

Seven months since leaving Slashdot

At the end of December 2012, I left Slashdot. Cold turkey, no more reading, no more story submittals, no more comment moderation. I had good karma and I have no idea what they did with it. Like others, I posted under a handle so you won't find my contributions without working at it.

In case you are not familiar with Slashdot, it "is a technology-related news website owned by the US-based company Dice Holdings, Inc. The site, which bills itself as 'News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters,' features user-submitted and evaluated news stories about science and technology related topics." (Source: Wikipedia)

I left for four reasons: I have better sources for "News for Nerds," they refused to track a story back to its original source, the editing of stories was atrocious and I got tired of the stupid comments. Let me expound on these.

Better sources: I have several blogs and other news sources for my tech news. As a whole, they are faster and have better reporting and editing than Slashdot. One of the last straws in December was when Slashdot posted a story that I had read elsewhere two days earlier.

Original source: Slashdot relied on reader-submitted stories. While there is some original reporting on the Internet, many news sites simply scrape and rewrite content from the originators. How many times have you read a story in a major media source and realize that it was written by the Associated Press? The readers who submitted content rarely took the effort to track the story back to its roots, something I always try to do on this blog. This resulted in incorrect information and incomplete stories.

Sometimes, they had ridiculous situations where an Australian news publication was used a source for a United States story. It also resulted in a couple of cases where someone was able to sneak through a story that was a couple of years old.

Atrocious editing: Readers are nerds and their submissions need editing. This didn't happen as much as it should have. Ranging from misspelled words and wrong word usage to summaries that totally misrepresented the stories, this got really obnoxious after a while. Also, the problems listed in "Original source" were passed right on through by the editors.

Stupid comments: Every blog or other site that allows comments has to have a way to deal with stupid ones. Slashdot had an excellent moderation system that used people like me with good karma to keep the stupid comments in line. It was just too much work and there was just too much stupidity to deal with.

I really have a problem with tech people who work exclusively in a Wintel world (Windows + Intel) world and have no clue that there's other worlds out there that have nothing to do with Microsoft or Intel. They would be amazed to know that there are servers out there that don't run any antivirus software and yet are not vulnerable to malware!

Last year, I was wasting too much time cussing at stories and comments on Slashdot. Now I have that time back to do other things, like write this blog.

Updated Aug. 9: Replaced "stupid commenters" with "stupid comments." I really shouldn't call people stupid. People aren't stupid, they just do stupid things, like post stupid comments. As Forrest Gump's mother used to say, "Stupid is as stupid does."

“There’s gold, er, rare-earth metals in them thar hills, boys!”

It turns out that the waste from many gold mines contains rare-earth metals. Why is that important? According to this article by the Associated Press, "Two years ago, China raised prices — in the case of neodymium, used to make Prius electric motors stronger and lighter, from $15 a kilogram in 2009 to $500 in 2011, while dysprosium oxide used in lasers and halide lamps went from $114 a kilogram in 2010 to $2,830 in 2011. It's also about the time China cut off supplies to Japan, maker of the Prius, in a dispute over international fishing territory." So it's important that new sources of these rare-earth metals are found.

The AP explains that miners in the early days of the West were looking for gold, silver and copper. They didn't even know what rare-earth metals were; even if they did, these metals are much more difficult to extract. With China raising the prices for political reasons, companies are looking for new sources and they have found them in an unexpected place.

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The quote that the title is based on was originally from "The American Claimant" written by Mark Twain in 1892. However, there is some indication that this phrase was originally spoken by M.F. Stephenson describing the hills around Dahlonega, Georgia.

From Wikipedia, here are the 17 rare-earth metals. They get the name "rare earth" because they are widely distributed and not concentrated in ores as are gold, silver and copper. Also, they tend to bind to each other. This makes these metals harder to concentrate and refine.

Note that indium, also mentioned in the story, is not considered a rare-earth metal. Also, I doubt that AP Style calls for capitalizing element names. Oops.

Updated July 23 to improve formatting.