• http://www.mortgagegirl.ca/the-chinese-housing-bubble/

An estimated 64 million apartments and houses sit empty in China today. That number is almost two times the population of Canada, but if we consider that each of those properties is the average dwelling for a typical Chinese family of three (parents and one child), all those vacant apartments and houses could accommodate almost 200 million people, which is the equivalent of two-thirds of all U.S. souls or more than 15% of China’s 1.3 billion population.

Escalating prices in China have transformed the country within two decades from a landscape of modest houses and huts next to vegetable fields to modern houses and skyscrapers scattered all over the country, specially in major urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing. Statistics from Goldman Sachs showed that over the past six years, housing price hikes have outpaced income rises by 30 percentage points in Shanghai and 80 percentage points in Beijing. In Beijing, the housing price of per square meter is as much as a resident’s seven months’ salary on average.

The Chinese property market has set new record highs after the government unleashed $1.3 trillion in new bank lending to counter the global recession. The nation’s real estate and stock markets are a “bubble” that will burst when inflation accelerates in 2011, as described by former Morgan Stanley chief Asian economist Andy Xie:

“China’s asset markets are a Ponzi scheme,” said Xie, now a Shanghai-based independent economist. “Property is heading for one huge bust that will take a year and a half to unfold.”

Premier Wen Jiabao said late last year that property speculation must be suppressed, and the government proceeded to reinstate a sales tax on homes sold within five years of purchase after reducing the period to two years in January 2009. These new regulations are meant to address the escalating price trend, although many analysts doubt they will have any real effect. Take for example Gloria Gu, who paid $483,000 in mid-2009 for an apartment near Shanghai’s financial district so her 3-year-old son could attend one of the city’s best kindergartens. Six months later, a similar place in her building sold for $615,000.

Piece of  Cake.

First Google: “How to build a hydrogen bomb”.
Cut the crap by just looking for images:
http://www.google.com/images?q=%22How%20to%20build%20a%20hydrogen%20bomb%22

You’ll probably arrive to a page that explains that the basic idea of how to build a hydrogen bomb has been available to interested parties for quite a while.

There you will also read about how Howard Morland’s attempt to explain the inner workings became a court case (United States v. Progressive), and how Greenpeace later got its hands on some British government H-Bomb for Dummies schematic:

How to detonate a hydrogen bomb?

See below, an image is worth more than a thousand detonations:

How to use a hydrogen bomb?

Now, that may seem like a dumb question, unless you are one of the desperate fans of the recently concluded television series Lost, and are speculating that the program is continuing on in a parallel dimension somewhere, and that alternate versions of showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are currently writing new episodes of the series.

That will be a worthy use for a hydrogen bomb, to open up a multidimensional wormhole.
See more details here:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/lost-possibly-still-airing-in-parallel-dimension-d,17485/

• http://usedboatgear.com/precautions-to-take-when-buying-second-hand-marine-equipment/

If after buying an used marine item you find that you have mislead and the quality of the article is not what it was advertised, there are a plethora of things you can try to get your money back, but none of them is guaranteed to succeed, unless you have taken the necessary precautions beforehand.

It all depends on whether you as a buyer can establish that the seller took substantial steps to conceal the problem for the sole purpose of selling the item to an unsuspecting buyer, and whether the broker (if there was any involved) knew of the concealment.

The law is also different depending on the state in which the transaction has taken place. For example, although law in California requires various disclosures to be made in real estate transactions, that requirement does not extend to boat-related sales. As such, it will be extremely difficult to hold a seller liable if he or she remains silent regarding any known faults with the items being sold.

A broker may be held under a different standard. For example, if the buyer was represented by a broker who was involved in a prior rejected transaction due to some kind of faulty specifications or who otherwise knew of the problem, that broker may be found liable for breaching the fiduciary duty owed by every broker to a client.

That goes to show why it is never reasonable for a buyer’s expert to rely upon the seller’s representations. The job of a buyer’s inspector is to perform an independent inspection, and any representations made by the seller should be disregarded during the inspection process.

For example, saying that a boat is “seaworthy” is like a used car salesman saying that an old car it’s in “great condition.” In some contexts, such as a maritime personal injury claim, “seaworthiness” is a legal term that will be a significant factor in the case. However, in boat sales, it is a subjective term that has no particular legal significance, because of the extent to which that term is used.

This is different than, for example, misrepresenting the length of a boat or the horsepower of the engine, which are objective facts. If those were subjective terms, you could never hold someone liable for their use.

The best approach is to avoid the dispute altogether by doing some homework before entering the market in the first place. Buying a used boat gear may be a complicated endeavor, but the process can be simplified enormously through a little preliminary research into the make and model of the article.

• http://web-dev-cheat-sheets.blogspot.com/2009/08/flat-file-based-php-cmss.html

After several unsuccessful attempts to access the MySQL databases that provide the data for the web pages of my main client, I have decided to look into other options that do not require a separate MySQL database that returns errors far too often, with a separate password that nobody knows who’s got it or how to retrieve it, and a separate set of skills outside the realm of most web designers.

To my surprise, since last time I checked on flat-file based PHP Content Management Systems, there have been emerged/developed quite a few (and good) options around this approach that I’m listing below:

CMSimple is simple, small and fast. It writes page data directly to a HTML file on the web server. Configuration files and language files are also saved in .txt format.
CMSimple also offers a wide variety of plug-ins, including many made by third parties.

DokuWiki is wiki software that works on plain text files and thus needs no database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki and its data files remain readable outside the wiki.
It has a generic plugin interface which simplified the development and maintenance of add-ons.
DokuWiki is included in the Linux distributions of Debian and Gentoo Linux.

Pluck allows for easy web page creation for users with little or no programming experience, and does not use a database to store its data.
Pluck also includes a flexible module system, which allows developers to integrate custom functionality into the system. Pluck includes 3 default modules: Albums, Blog and Contact form.

razorCMS is designed to be as small as possible ( around 300 KB including a WYSIWYG – Editor), just enough to be useful on a base install. Then extra functionality can be added as needed via the Blade Pack management system.
Skeleton CMS isn’t really a CMS as much as it is a very simple framework for rapid prototyping. If nothing more, it’s a good structured site model to start building a website with. There is no need for a database and no fancy admin area, but if you’re building a site for a client and you don’t need the power of WordPress this might be exactly what you’re after.

As pointed out, the main advantage of using flat-file (text) files as a database for a PHP driven CMS is that you no longer depend on external software to edit and maintain a part of the CMS, without which the system simply will not run.

But you must keep in mind that although flat-file files are an acceptable solution for small databases, they become sluggish as the database grows because access mode is sequential.
Another disadvantage is their inability to support transactions and probably the biggest concern is Security: A database protects the data from outside intrusion better than a flat file because it provides a security layer of its own.
Having said that, NOTHING that is hosted on a server connected to the Internet is secure and if there are hackers equipped with enough resources who are intent in breaking into your system, they eventually will.

An intermediate solution would be the use of SQLite an Open Source embedded relational database management system contained in a small C programming library that when is linked in it becomes an integral part of the program. The entire database including definitions, tables, indices, and the data itself are stored as a single text file on a host machine.
SQLite is embedded into a growing number of popular applications, such as Mozilla Firefox or Google’s Android OS.

Sounds good to me.
Below some of the CMSs that are able to use SQLite to store their data:

eoCMS (everyone’s Content Management System) uses MySQL or SQLite and php to deliver content in a user-friendly interface.
It features a forum, moderation features, custom 404 pages, personal Messaging , plug-ins, RSS output, ratings, etc.

Frog CMS is an extendable open source content management system designed to use PHP5 along with a MySQL database backend, although it also has support for SQLite. It is actually a port of Radiant, the Ruby on Rails CMS, although Frog has begun to take its own development direction.

FUDforum supports all the standard features you may come to expect from a modern forum with a robust MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite back-end, that allows for a virtually unlimited number of messages (up to 2^32 messages).

Habari is a modular, object-oriented blogging platform that supports Multiple users, Multiple sites, Plugins, Importers for Serendipity and WordPress, etc.
Habari prides itself in being standards compliant and more secure than other blogging platforms by making use of PDO and enabling prepared statements for all interactions with the database.

Jaws is a CMS and modular framework that focuses on User and Developer “Friendliness” by providing a simple and powerful framework to hack your own modules.
Lanius CMS comes out of the box with two flatfile database choices (Gladius DB and SQLite), that will work out-of-the-box with both PHP4 and PHP5.

phpSQLiteCMS is based on PHP and SQLite and runs “out of the box”. phpSQLiteCMS uses PDO as database interface, which makes it also possible to run with MySQL.

Serendipity is a PHP based blog and web-based content management system that supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite database backends, the Smarty template engine, and a plugin architecture is kept updated by automatically checking the plugin repository online.

The only drawback to this approach in many of the systems above is that they use the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension, a lightweight, consistent interface for accessing databases in PHP, that although greatly reduces the system’s vulnerability to SQL injection attacks, it does require the new OO features in the core of PHP 5, and so will not run with earlier versions of PHP.

• http://www.mortgagegirl.ca/tax-deductible-mortgages/

On October 27th, 1988, John Singleton had $300,000 in his business capital account and he wanted to use $300,000 of his equity to assist in the purchase of a house. He then borrowed that same amount, in the form of a mortgage on the real estate he just purchased, to refinance his partnership capital account. Because he was now investing the money in the firm instead of the house, the interest on the loan became tax-deductible. He did all those operations on the very same day, and as a result, Singleton got a new house, a mortgage on the new house, and $300,000 back in his capital account.

Singleton deducted the mortgage interest on his 1988 and 1989 tax returns but the government disallowed the deduction. After Singleton sued, he lost in the Tax Court of Canada but won the appeal in the Federal Court of Appeals and in October 2001 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that,

“It is an error to treat this as one transaction – the transactions must be viewed independently.”

As Singleton recalls,

“The Court said the act said I can do what I did, and [Revenue Canada] had no right to look behind what I did to see whether or not it was a sham, which is what they kept calling it. If the act says you can do it, then you can do it and deduct it. End of story, nice and simple, which was our position throughout.”

The implications of that resolution are that structuring your affairs to shrink your tax burden is 100% legal, since the Courts have ruled that Singleton could write off his mortgage interest and that has paved the way for homeowners, who apply the same principles, to make non-deductible principal mortgage interest tax deductible.

What Singleton did was actually a variation of the so-called Smith Manoeuvre, a strategy also known as “leveraging” that Fraser Smith developed after years of watching wealthy Canadians get away with the trick, while the vast majority of citizens laboured for years to pay off their mortgage and wound up entering retirement with empty pockets.
As he said,

“This is for all those people who would like to be wealthy but who are getting killed both by their mortgages and by income taxes.”

Most people do not write off the interest on their mortgage. Although many homeowners write off a portion of their mortgage payment as it relates to a home office space, that is not the same as writing off the interest on their mortgage.

Your principal homes mortgage interest is deductible, when the borrowed money is used to earn income from a business or investment that has an expectation of making a profit, even if your home is the pledged security. How the funds are spent determines interest deductibility of your mortgage, not the collateral. If a direct link can be established between the loan and its business use, it is irrelevant that the security for the loan is a mortgage against your principal residence.

And, what’s more, as long as you pay the tax-deductible interest to the institution that loaned you the money to invest, you never have to pay back the principal. It’s a debt you can die with if you want, at which point the money will be paid back out of your estate.

So, is the Smith Manoeuvre right for you?
According to Fraser Smith, it is the right Manoeuvre if:

a) you own more than 25 per cent of your home,
b) you’re capable of living within your means and using your tax savings to pay down your original mortgage.

Obviously, if you’re close to retirement and the house is paid off, it’s not for you. But, if you’ve got some idle equity in your home and you’d like to free up some cash up to do some investing, this might be the right time to do some manoeuvring.

• http://1001webs.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-is-google-affiliate-network.html

When Google acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, it also acquired its affiliate ad network program called Performics, the first full-service affiliate network founded in 1998 and that in turn had been acquired by DoubleClick in 2004. Google has now further developed and rebranded Performic as the Google Affiliate Network.

The Google Affiliate Network works like any ordinary affiliate ad network, by enabling advertising relationships between publishers and advertisers, whereby publishers get paid for every successful sale transactions that their site brings to advertisers.

As a Google Affiliate Network publisher, you can add an advertiser’s banner or text link on your site. When a transaction, such as a sign-up or purchase, occurs through one of these affiliate links, Google Affiliate Network will track the sale and pay you a commission or bounty.

The Google Affiliate Network has been integrated into Google AdSense. All Google Affiliate Network publishers must accept AdSense terms. Additionally, all earnings are distributed through AdSense.
But being a Google AdSense publisher does not make you automatically a publisher in Google Affiliate Network. You must complete a separate application for Google Affiliate Network.
In order to join the program, you need to apply to their network in two steps:
Step 1: Link to or apply for a Google AdSense account.
Step 2: Tell Google about your site and promotional methods.

Each application is reviewed by the Google Affiliate Network quality team which will check some requirements, such as being a site that attracts a desirable audience for the products offered, able to test advertising offers and nurture the most productive relationships, being an expert in driving and converting visitor traffic and adhere strictly to Google Affiliate Network quality standards and advertiser policies.
In addition Google states that,

we’ve found that Google Affiliate Network tends to yield greater benefits to publishers who create niche content, manage loyalty and rewards programs, aggregate coupons and promotions, or manage social media.

Payments are processed on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, typically as a revenue share or fixed bounty for a lead or other action. Google Affiliate Network earnings will be posted to your Google AdSense account approximately 30 days after the end of every month.

• Affiliate Network Help
• Help forum
• Google Affiliate Network Blog
• Google Group for the Affiliate Network Blog

What are supplemental results?
Supplemental results usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They are a way for Google to extend their search database while also preventing questionable pages from getting massive exposure.

How does a page go supplemental?
From my experiences pages have typically went supplemental when they became isolated doorway type pages (lost their inbound link popularity) or if they are deemed to be duplicate content. For example, if Google indexes the www. version of your site and the non www. version of your site then likely most of one of those will be in supplemental results.
If you put a ton of DMOZ content and Wikipedia content on your site that sort of stuff may go supplemental as well. If too much of your site is considered to be useless or duplicate junk then Google may start trusting other portions of your site less.

Negative side effects of supplemental:
Since supplemental results are not trusted much and rarely rank they are not crawled often either. Since they are generally not trusted much and rarely crawled odds are pretty good that links from supplemental pages likely do not pull much – if any – weight in Google.

How to get out of Google Supplemental results?
If you were recently thrown into them the problem may be Google. You may just want to give it a wait, but also check to make sure you are not making errors like www vs non www, content management errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs (doing things like rotating product URLs), or too much duplicate content for other reasons (you may also want to check that nobody outside your domain is showing up in Google when you search for site:mysite.com and you can also look for duplicate content with Copyscape).
If you have pages that have been orphaned or if your site’s authority has went down Google may not be crawling as deep through your site. If you have a section that needs more link popularity to get indexed don’t be afraid to point link popularity at that section instead of trying to point more at the home page. If you add thousands and thousands of pages you may need more link popularity to get it all indexed.
After you solve the problem it still may take a while for many of the supplementals to go away. As long as the number of supplementals is not growing, your content is unique, and Google is ranking your site well across a broad set of keywords then supplementals are probably nothing big to worry about.

Note:
All of the text above has been copy&pasted from:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001545.shtml
so, if those points are correct this post should go Supplemental in no time, right?
Wrong. Wait and see …

Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, asked for feedback on the widespread supplemental indexing issue in this thread. As noted by Barry, in comment 195 Matt said:

Based on the specifics everyone has sent (thank you, by the way), I’m pretty sure what the issue is. I’ll check with the crawl/indexing team to be sure though. Folks don’t need to send any more emails unless they really want to. It may take a week or so to sort this out and be sure, but I do expect these pages to come back to the main index.

In the video below Matt Cutts answers questions about Supplemental Results:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3494613828170903728&hl=en#

In the video, to the question of should I worry about results estimates for:

1. supplemental results
2. using the site: operator
3. with negated terms and
4. special syntax such as intitle: ?

And the answer was: No. That’s pretty far off the beaten path

Getting Out of Google Supplemental Results

Getting out of the Google Supplemental Results may be possible by improving your website navigation system. To get more pages fully Google indexed, the prominence of important website pages can often be boosted by linking to them from pages within your domain having the highest Page Rank, such as your homepage. The reason for this being that Page Rank is passed from one page to another by links and the most common cause of Supplemental results is lack of Page Rank.

Start by determining your most important web pages which have been made supplemental – for example those promoting lucrative products and services, and then improve your website internal linking by adding links to these pages from more prominent fully Google indexed pages of your site including your homepage. At the same time, ensure that your website navigation system is search engine friendly using a website link analyzer.

Site Link Analyzer Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL Type of links to return: External (links going to outside web-sites) Internal (links inside the current web-site) Both types Additional Info Show nofollow links? Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

By improving website navigation and getting more inbound links from other Worldwide Web sites, you may be able to get more website pages fully Google indexed, solving the problem of partial Google indexing and Supplemental pages.

Where the Google Page Rank of your website homepage is PR4 or PR3, improving your website navigation system and in particular the prominence of internal pages may help to get out of supplemental results. This can be done by including static hyperlinks from the homepage to your ‘problem supplemental result pages’.

However, where your homepage is PR3 or lower and you have a large website, internal navigation improvements alone may still not be enough when it comes to getting out of the Google Supplemental Results. At PR3 or lower, your homepage Page Rank is probably too low to pass on enough Page Rank to your internal pages to completely get out of Supplemental Results.

To fully solve the problem of partial Google indexing, get more one way links to your site from quality web directories and sites of a similar theme and wait patiently to become fully Google indexed. In addition, getting more quality one way links pointing to internal pages of your website (rather than just targeting your homepage) is another powerful way of boosting the ranking of those pages against specific keyword terms, and it will also assist in getting them out of supplemental results. This is often referred to as “deep linking”.

Note:
Google states that they have now removed the label “Supplemental Result” from their search result pages:

“Supplemental Results once enabled users to find results for queries beyond our main index. Because they were “supplemental,” however, these URLs were not crawled and updated as frequently as URLs in our main index.

Google’s technology has improved over time, and now we’re able to crawl and index sites with greater frequency. With our entire web index fresher and more up to date, the “Supplemental Results” label outlived its usefulness.”

Right, that is correct. It is called now “Omitted Results“. Same thing really, and same side-effects, at least from this non-Google point of view.

More Info

• Condemned to Google Hell“
• What happened to Google’s supplemental results? My pages no longer show this label. “ on Google’s help center for webmasters.
• Google Hell? from Matt Cutts blog.
• Supplemental Results? Still a problem?
• Exploring Supplemental Indexing and website trust

A theme framework in WordPress consists of a highly customized theme foundation designed to create a flexible platform that can serve as a parent theme for building child themes.

The use of WordPress theme frameworks does ease theme development considerably by reducing the volume of work that is needed in creating a backbone for a WordPress theme, something that is traditionally done by using PHP and WordPress Template Tags.

Another advantage of theme frameworks is that they also make theme development more accessible, removing the need for programming knowledge.

Below you can see a list of Available Frameworks in WordPress:

• Sandbox (Scott’s page)
• Thematic (Ian’s page)
• WP Framework (Official page)
• Hybrid (Official page)
• Carrington (Official page)
• The Buffet Framework (Official page)
• WP Basis (Official page)
• Starkers (Official page)
• Basic Foundation Themes (Official page)
• K2 (Documentation)

After some research we have decided to focus on developing the Thematic Framework, a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized Framework that comes out-of-the-box with some very convenient features, such as 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, etc. Not to mention the support of a whole community behind it, which makes it perfect for both beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.

Additional features are:

• Includes a sample WordPress Child Theme for rapid development
• A wiki-editable guide to Thematic Customization
• Ready for WordPress plugins like Subscribe to Comments, WP-PageNavi, and Comment-license
• Fully compatible with All-In-One SEO and Platinum SEO plugins
• Multiple, easy to implement, bulletproof layout options for 2, or 3 column designs
• Modular CSS with pre-packaged resets and basic typography
• Dynamic post and body classes make it a hyper-canvas for CSS artists
• Editable footer text—remove the theme credit without harming the theme
• Options for multi-author blogs

As big, powerful wines, Barolo needs to be matched with foods of similar weight. If paired with light dishes, such as steamed vegetables, the wines will overwhelm the dish and seem excessively tannic and powerful. Therefore Barolo wines should be paired with heavy pastas, red meat, hard cheeses and the such. When paired with these kind of dishes that are high in proteins and fats the tannins will bind to the proteins and come across as softer. Without those proteins in the pairing food the tannins will react with the proteins on the tongue and sides of the mouth accentuating the bitterness and having a drying effect on the palate.

Barolos used to be very tannic (having the plant poly-phenols that cause the dry and puckery feeling in the mouth after consuming unripened fruit or red wine, and they took more than 10 years to soften up. That was at least the wine created by the Frenchman Louis Oudart in the 19th century. Oudart had been hired by the Marchesa of Barolo, who wanted to add some class to her locally produced red wine.
Oudart was so successful in his task that other Piedmontese producers copied the method and a new style of Barolo was created, which is the one that classicists are still making today.
Nonetheless, another style of fermenting has recently arisen, one by which “modernists” cut fermentation times to a maximum of ten days and put the wine in new French small oak barrels. All this controversy has lead to the “Barolo wars”, with “classicists” saying that the resulting wine isn’t even recognizable as Barolo and tastes more of new oak than of wine.

The more prestigious houses however, still reject oak barrels and insist on the traditional method for their wines. These wines are reserved for connoisseurs who make Barolo Italy’s most collected wine, sought after by aficionados in Italy, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, United States and all over the world.

Needless to say that with such an impressive and novelistic background, Barolo is the perfect gift for Christmas. But be aware that the price tag may come as a bit excessive and you should reserve Barolo wine gifts to those who really appreciates big, structured wine.
Still, there are some that are not too expensive. Mauro Veglio for example makes a basic Barolo that sells for around $30. It drinks well when young although 10 years of aging brings out the best in it.
If you want a classic label vineyard you’ll be parting with close to $50. Connoisseurs will recommend that you store them away in a cool cellar for at least 5 even 10 years. Almost any of the vintages from the past 12 years are very good, although you should avoid the 2002′s.

L’Âge d’Or is a surrealist film from 1930 directed by Luis Buñuel and written by him and Salvador Dalí, following their classic experimental and surrealist short film, Un chien andalou (1929).

A deliriously surreal, provocative, and blasphemous take on l’amour fou and the constraints of a stultifying, oppressive society.

It begins as a documentary about the poisonous power of scorpions and irrationally moves towards a peasant revolution (led by famed surrealist painter Max Ernst).

Preview what it was considered to be a highly pornographic scene from the film below:

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.

Watch the full movie below:

L’Âge d’Or was Buñuel’s first feature film and it was banned from public exhibition in his native country, Spain, almost immediately from the moment of its 1930 premiere. Its principal opponents were high-ranking members of the Catholic church, who condemned the film as savagely sacrilegious.