Pride

Inside Pictures of Bill Gates Home

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:54:00 +0000

Picture Gallery of Bill Gates house - (Virtual tour of Bill Gates house in Media overlooking Lake Washington opens in a new window)

Take a virtual tour of the Bill Gates Mansion where he stays with his family. Watch the beautiful neighbourhood of Bill Gates house.

The Bill Gates family lives in the exclusive suburb of Medina, Washington, in a huge earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington.

Billionaire Bill Gates home is a very modern 21st century house in the "Pacific lodge" style, with advanced electronic systems everywhere. In one respect though it is more like an 18th or 19th century mansion: it has a large private library with a domed reading room. While it does have a classic flavour, the home has many unique qualities.

Lights would automatically come on when you came home. Speakers would be hidden beneath the wallpaper to allow music to follow you from room to room. Portable touch pads would control everything from the TV sets to the temperature and the lights, which would brighten or dim to fit the occasion or to match the outdoor light.

Visitors to Bill Gates House are surveyed and given a microchip upon entrance. This small chip sends signals throughout the house, and a given room's temperature and other conditions will change according to preset user preferences. According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the median American house size is slightly more than 2,000 square feet. Microsoft founder William Gates III house is more than 30 times that size.

Bill Gates Mansion satellite view from Google Maps

Bill Gates House Aerial view from MSN Virtual Earth

There has been lot of speculation that the home of Bill Gates on Lake Washington was designed on a Macintosh. Pictures of the Gates' complex are both private and copyrighted, so in order to see what this place really looks like you need to go to BCJ's website. Following the "residential menu" click on the forward arrow key at the bottom of the pictures to advance to the house entitled, "Guest House and Garage, Medina, Washington".

USNews.com provides an interactive tour of Bill Gates home that covers the Pool building, Exercise facilites, Library, Theater, Formal dining room. Microsoft's own Seattle Sidewalk site has a birds-eye view of the project under construction. (Medina Washington project)

It took seven years to build the 40,000-square-foot Bill Gates mansion on a wooded five-acre compound in the moneyed Seattle suburb of Medina. [Bill Gates House Address: 1835 73rd Ave NE, Medina, WA 98039 map - arial photo] Much of the Bill Gates house is built underground into the hill, so the house looks smaller than it actually is. Unfortunately the hidden section underground did not escape the taxman's view; Bill paid over a million dollars last year on property taxes.

Earlier, Bill Gates organized a private party at his waterfront mansion. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a "temporary security zone" around Gates' Lake Washington home which locked down all of Lake Washington south of the Highway 520 bridge and stayed in effect for two days. Gates' homestead is approximately 48,000 square feet with a garage that reportedly accommodates 30 cars.

The architects who designed Bill Gates' famous residential compound in Washington were James Cutler Architects and the architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ).

Inside Bill Gates' Garage, you'll find a 1999 Porsche 911 Convertible and 1988 Porsche 959 Coupe. Steven Ballmer drives a 1998 Lincoln Continental. In fact, due to the 959’s questionable emissions and unknown crash ratings, it took a federal law signed by President Clinton for Bill Gates to legally drive his 959 on American roads.

Read this interview with James Cutler, FAIA, the best-known architect of Northwest Style and the designer of the Bill and Melinda Gates residence on Lake Washington near Seattle. Firm: Anderson Cutler Architects (formerly James Cutler Architects), on Bainbridge Island, off the Seattle coast.

Access Restricted Websites

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:19:00 +0000

Blocking access to undesirable Web sites through the use of Internet protocol filters has been a common government tactic since commercial Internet access first became available here in 1995. A recent example is the Indian Government blocking over thirteen websites and the whole of blogger and typepad. China and Saudi Arabia are believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other country in the world under the pretext of information control.

Most of the blacklisted sites in Saudi Arabia are either sexually explicit or about religion, women, health, drugs and pop culture. They even block access to websites about bathing suits. So if you want to buy something to swim in, they seem to treat that as if it were pornographic in Saudi Arabia.

In China, webites containing sexually explicit content were among those blocked, but they also included sites on sensitive topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, and dissident activity. China also blocks access to Google News, Typepad and Blogger hosted blogs.

But what if an innocent website is accidentally blocked by your ISP or your government. There are always legitimate reasons to visit these blocked websites. We have listed a few methods to help you access blocked websites in school, college, office or at home.

Approach 1: There are websites Anonymizer who fetch the blocked site/ page from their servers and display it to you. As far as the service provider is concerned you are viewing a page from Anonymizer and not the blocked site.

Approach 2: To access the blocked Web site. type the IP number instead of the URL in the address bar. But if the ISP software maps the IP address to the web server (reverse DNS lookup), the website will remain blocked.

Approach 3: Use a URL redirection service like tinyurl.com or snipurl.com. These domain forward services sometimes work as the address in the the url box remain the redirect url and do not change to the banned site.

Approach 4: Use Google Mobile Search. Google display the normal HTML pages as if you are viewing them on a mobile phone. During the translation, Google removes the javascript content and CSS scripts and breaks a longer page into several smaller pages.

Approach 5: Enter the URL in Google or Yahoo search and then visit the cached copy of the page. To retrieve the page more quickly from Google's cache, click "Cached Text Only" while the browser is loading the page from cache.

Approach 6: A recent Oreilly story on accessing blocked websites suggested an approach to access restricted web sites using Google language tools service as a proxy server. Basically, you have Google translate your page from English to English (or whatever language you like). Assuming that Google isn’t blacklisted in your country or school, you should be able to access any site with this method.

Approach 7: Anonymous Surfing Surf the internet via a proxy server. A proxy server (or proxies) is a normal computer that hides the identity of computers on its network from the Internet. Which means that only the address of the proxy server is visible to the world and not of those computers that are using it to browse the Internet. Just visit the proxy server website with your Web browser and enter a URL (website address) in the form provided.

A list of the pages recently blocked in India.

1. www.hinduunity.org
2. mypetjawa.mu.nu [American right-wing blog]
3. pajamaeditors.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
4. exposingtheleft.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
5. thepiratescove.us [American right-wing blog]
6. commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com [This is isn't even in English!]
7. bamapachyderm.com [American right-wing blog]
8. princesskimberley.blogspot.com [Long defunct]
9. merrimusings.typepad.com [Defunct American right-wing blog, but now at www.merrimusings.mu.nu ]
10. mackers-world.com [American right-wing blog]
11. www.dalistan.org [They actually mean www.dalitstan.org which is currently down]
12. www.hinduhumanrights.org/hindufocus.html
13. www.nndh.com [Dead URL]
14. bloodroyaltriped.com [Dead URL]
15. imagesearchyahoo.com [Dead URL, but it wouldn't be a blog!]
16. www.imamali8.com [They probably mean imamali.com but somebody mistyped]
17. www.rahulyadav.com [Computer geek at IU Bloomington - not a blog at all - banned merely for his links to the BJP, RSS, etc]

Beautiful Wallpapers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:50:00 +0000

I just came across Michael Swanson's blog and it has some of the most wonderful desktop wallpapers I have ever seen.
Each wallpaper is available at 1920 x 1200 (16:10 aspect ratio, "widescreen") and 1600 x 1200 (4:3 aspect ratio, "standard").

Download the entire collection - Widescreen Images (15.9MB) or Standard Size photos (13.6MB).

So bring a bit of nature onto your computer.

Why I Believe There Is A God

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 21:30:00 +0000

Why I believe there is a god? Please take your time to read this and think about it while reading...

until now it has been discussed and thought about so many times whether there is a GOD or not. Some people say that there was a purpose to create all existence and called the creator God/Allah or anything else. Others say that all existence is a coincidence and think that everything all material and life has been made by itself and don't believe there is a bigger power who created all. People don't understand that GOD is not a material and cant be calculated or investigated or examined with kilo's or centimeters or anything like that and cant be proven by scientists.

=======================
By Immanuel KANT:
All arguments, however, to prove the existence of God must, in order to be theoretically valid, start from specifically and exclusively sensible or phenomenal data, must employ only the conceptions of pure physical science, and must end with demonstrating in sensible experience an object congruous with, or corresponding to, the idea of God. But this requirement cannot be met, for, scientifically speaking, the existence of an absolutely necessary God cannot be either proved or disproved. Hence room is left for faith in any moral proofs that may present themselves to us, apart from science. With this subject ethics, the science of practice or of practical reason, will have to deal.
=======================

It's clear that if GOD wanted us to see HIM everyone would have believed in him and our exam/test/journey in this world would be pointless.

Here are some of my own thoughts,

- Why does everyone, even non-believers pray to god when something bad happens? I'm sure you have called his name too when something bad happened in your life. People do believe but are just too selfish to admit it.

- Everything we see has been created. Example, the wooden chair you are sitting on has been made by humans - the wood has been cut from a tree - where did the tree FIRST come from? Where did humans first come from? Created by nature? Where did 'nature' come from? Where did the planets come from ? Our knowledge has a limit and this just proves that there must be something greater then us - something that created us.

A Quote... "Art wouldn't exist without Artists"

Here is another quote "The one who doesn't see the hand will think the pencil is writing the letter"

Think about it.

Some people just don't WANT TO believe that there is something greater than them.

You say you want evidence about GOD why don't you give me a good reason or evidence that GOD doesn't exist.

There is only one God and all religions believe in the same God, the only difference is the different roads we take to reach him.

Banned Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 20:39:00 +0000

Just an update on the list of sites banned by the Indian Govt.

1. www.hinduunity.org
2. mypetjawa.mu.nu [American right-wing blog]
3. pajamaeditors.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
4. exposingtheleft.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
5. thepiratescove.us [American right-wing blog]
6. commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com [This is isn't even in English!]
7. bamapachyderm.com [American right-wing blog]
8. princesskimberley.blogspot.com [Long defunct]
9. merrimusings.typepad.com [Defunct American right-wing blog, but now at www.merrimusings.mu.nu ]
10. mackers-world.com [American right-wing blog]
11. www.dalistan.org [They actually mean www.dalitstan.org which is currently down]
12. www.hinduhumanrights.org/hindufocus.html
13. www.nndh.com [Dead URL]
14. bloodroyaltriped.com [Dead URL]
15. imagesearchyahoo.com [Dead URL, but it wouldn't be a blog!]
16. www.imamali8.com [They probably mean imamali.com but somebody mistyped]
17. www.rahulyadav.com [Computer geek at IU Bloomington - not a blog at all - banned merely for his links to the BJP, RSS, etc]

Batman Art

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 16:07:00 +0000

Batman art is inspiring. I wish I could make that kind of stuff...

Your ISP May Be An Undercover Spy!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 15:06:00 +0000

Downloading a copy of a pirated copy of Windows XP or Office 2003 from warez sites may land you in trouble as your local ISP might alert Microsoft of your illegal download.

Microsoft may sue you, or your ISP will jam your internet connection while the download is in progress. This latest piracy tracking software for ISPs, still in development stages, is able to recognise the legal and illegal versions of programs being downloaded by individual users and can help ISPs track their subscribers’ downloading activities.
Accordingly, the ISPs can alert the original music or movie companies, and subsequently initiate appropriate action as per the latter’s instruction.

First Post

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 02:57:00 +0000

Well, as I have nothing to do and so much free time, I'll just keep typing here. Lets see how many words I type before I stop.
I dont know what to say right now. I mean I feel wierd when I meet people for the first time. So I will leave this post here, even though it looks awkward, and then post another thread, coz that will be the second post, not the first one.
I dont know if this even makes sense.