Link: Paying People to Argue With You

Bennett Haselton has written in with an essay on a strange experiment on-line. He starts When you first hear about Amazon.com’s “Mechanical Turk” service, which allows “requesters” to pay “Turk workers” a few pennies to complete some task which is hard to automate but easy for humans, what’s the first application that comes to your mind? The system has been discussed previously on Slashdot, but I’ll bet a week’s wages for a Mechanical Turk worker ($1.45, according to one of them) that I was…

Link: US Wants Courts to OK Warrantless Email Snooping

Erris writes “The Register is reporting that the US government is seeking unprecedented access to private communications between citizens. ‘On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government’s request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. … the position that the United States government is taking if accepted, may mean that the government…

Link: 10.5: Stop X11 from opening xterm on launch

X11 has changed in 10.5 to an xorg-based Xserver. Also, /etc/X11 no longer exists. The X11 startup list is now in ~/Library > Preferences > org.x.X11_launcher.plist. This file gets created if it’s not there, or if the forma…

Link: 10.5: Use Help to select menu items via keyboard

One of the cool new features of Mac OS X Leopard is the search field in the Help menu of each application. Entering a search term in this field will pull up not only help topics related to your search, but anything that appea…

Link: Flash player updated for Leopard, Flash-dependent nerds rejoice

Flash acting a little funny in Leopard? Perhaps you’re having trouble uploading photography to Flickr? Don’t adjust your browsers: it’s Adobe, not you. Luckily, there’s a fix.

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Link: RSPlug.A Mac OS X trojan: a new threat, but the sky is not falling

A new Mac trojan has appeared in the wild. This one appears to be legitimate malware, but requires a heavy dose of user intervention to deliver its malicious payload.

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Link: 10.5: View iCal events with Quick Look and Cover Flow

I discovered that if you do a Spotlight search for a particular file and you end up having an iCal event in the search results (in the Finder window), you can use Quick Look to see a little day calendar page icon with that da…

Link: Turning Obstacles Into Marketing Opportunities

How many of you entrepreneurs can’t get a break in marketing your small business? Is your competition too fierce? Are your clients too hard to reach? Is your location too far off the beaten path? Is your domain name not very memorable? Is your brand too hard to differentiate?

As a small business development specialist, I frequently hear all of these concerns from my clients. That’s why I get so excited when I see a business owner literally ignoring all of these obstacles, and turning all…

Link: All About Electric Text

This sounds like a really interesting book. Go read the review!

Link: 上海: After Dark

Really neat pictures… go see.