building a bureaucracy

just pick a favorite bureaucratic website and see the document requirements page. for instance the consulate of any country and their page listing documents for any particular service. My wager is over 100 years requirements would have been added or replaced, but only rarely will they be dropped.

The list will grow and continue to grow. at our expense.

open office file sizes v. windows

word files v. open document format (.doc v. .odf)
74K v. 11K
93K v. 13K

excel files v. open document spreadsheet (.xls v. .ods)
127K v. 5K
126K v. 6K

exact same content. very different sizes.

Search Engine Spoilers

I wanted to search for consumer experiences of a decent dealership in my area. Since, google general search includes all kinds of corporate sites, I looked up something like "subaru decent dealer in my neighborhood nice people" in google blog search. The top 10 results were hijacked by very random corporate spam links from dealerships that want to sell cars, but are not even in my neighborhood! We are told blogs are a democratic medium, and these search results seem to show that blog network is not well connected enough for good regular blogs to trump over cheap sleazy spam.

Maybe google can tweak their engine for blog search to weed out these spammers more effectively.

Crazy!