Posts by Big Al 314 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007
To be honest I had always assumed Google did this for any passing punters, whether logged in or not, anyway. Makes sense if you have the cookies anyway.
Do I care? Not really.
Can I still get useful and obscure info from Google when needed? Yep
Do I ever click on Google adverts anyway? Nope.
Do I use the usual range of anti-cookie and pro-privacy addons? Yep.
And if SEO's are upset, do I mind? NOT AT ALL!
Paris, because she already knows what she wants anyway.
"It's been a truism to say Windows 7 is the last big operating system launch before all our software ends up on a server parked somewhere in Iceland."
This won't be happening for a LONG time in an awful lot of places with less than stellar connectivity and bandwidth availability. And for even longer outside one or two 'advanced' countries.
Time for a reality check.
"How can you have an article one week on the lack of global warming and the next on the lack of problems from global warming?"
Isn't that called keeping an open mind, which is what journalists are *supposed* to do?
And for ALL the 'climate change is real' v 'climate change is scaremongering' brigades on both sides... stop being to be such bloody absolutists and face up to the fact that we really just don't have a clue. There's plenty of evidence in both directions, and as a species we're just not far enough along to understand what it might mean yet.
Is it really so long ago that the trendy thing in Science was the hypothesis?
"Contrary to what banks say, writing checks really isn't that much of a hassle, at least if you don't write that many of them."
You're lucky to live in a country where that is actually an option. Many, including the one I live in, have banking systems that have jumped straight from being cash-only to all-virtual without stopping at the check/cheque on the way. And all the banks here are owned by multinational banking houses, too.
As to evading systems... my local bank sends a unique session code to my mobile phone whenever I want to do anything on my account. This means that anyone wishing to impersonate me and do more than just look at the figures must have my certificate (or access to a copy), AND my password, AND my mobile phone SIM card.
I was one of the first people to browbeat my local bank into allowing me to have online banking access - it was so new back then that the branch staff didn't have a clue. The only time I've had problems since was with my UK bank paying out to someone who'd hijacked a trade website I did business with - and even then they refunded both quickly and without quibble.
Of *course* any machine used for online banking purposes should be swept, cleansed, detoxed and whatever on a very regular basis indeed - but that's true whatever the operating system. I'm no great fan of Windows, and certainly not of Microsoft, but blaming the OS in this case is just ridiculous. So I shall use the rarely employed St Bill icon in revenge!
This message is a requisition form for 1 (one) new keyboard, reference comment
"I just felt a great disturbance in the force myself.. as if millions of voices suddenly cried out "Isn't it time for an election yet?""
Additional note:
Brilliant line that I shall be using myself in the very near future...
I would guess that this trial is based on the fact that certain mtDNA sub-clades can be traced to particular, relatively narrow areas, e.g. the L3f2 and L3e5 sub-clades that seem to be autochthonous to the Chad Basin.
Research published in 2006* showed, for example, that L3f2 is nearly restricted to the Chad Basin and in particular to Chadic speaking populations, whereas L3e5 shows evidence for diffusion into North Africa at about 7,100 Y.B.P.
However, as others are obviously telling the Government, there's no way that this principle can yet be applied reliably to distinguish closely-related ethnic groups in the Horn of Africa.
* Cerny et al, A bidirectional corridor in the Sahel-Sudan belt and the distinctive features of the Chad Basin populations: a history revealed by the mitochondrial DNA genome, Annals of Human Genetics.
Is this really news?
Let's assess....
* Google sticks to its usual policy of not providing information unless ordered to do so by a court.
* Google complies with a court order to provide information, i.e. obeys the law and/or justice system
* Google complies with a court order to shut down the mail account concerned for the duration - but apparently would not have done this otherwise.
So... the real story here is the one already reported, which is that some moron in a bank sent sensitive info to the wrong place. And now a judge who probably just wants to play safe with a technology they may not be intimately familiar with has ordered the account closed until he/she knows what's actually going on.
Gosh. Exciting stuff...
Mine's the one with the leaflet from the Campaign for Real News in the pocket.
""The officer added: "We were very impressed with the workmanship so we congratulated him and then we confiscated the machine."""
Thereby neatly encapsulating the well known German passion for precision engineering with the efficiency for which the nation is known, all in a single line quotation! Priceless :-)
"The company is able to detect it by examining the fingerprint Zeus leaves when it penetrates an infected PC's browser process."
So given the scale of this threat, I do hope that we can expect a handy standalone detection app to be appearing imminently then? That would, after all, be the responsible thing to do...
Paris because she's known for being good with standalones.
Jagex's 'RuneScape' game, at one point in danger of being submerged by the macros used by gold farmers, had its trading system radically altered to prevent the unbalanced transfer of large sums of virtual cash, along with the compensatory introduction of a centralised marketplace where buyers and sellers are matched by the game rather than by choice. This cut off the scammers' source of real world income, and reduced the disruption to the game caused by the macros.
To a great extent this rather radical approach has been successful, although the scammers have naturally moved to offering to train accounts for the lazy instead - something which is far easier to spot in the vast majority of cases.
So we're about to dispatch something with a nuclear reactor on board, when the success rate for landing things safely on Mars is... rather less than perfect?
Well, it's one way of settling the 'life on Mars' argument: if a nuclear 'incident' doesn't push Marvin and his pals into invading, it's a safe bet there's nobody there after all.
Since the agreement was not to *actively* recruit (i.e. poach, headhunt or cold call) each other's staff, then fair enough, surely?
Sounds like a very civilised and (dare I say it) gentlemanly arrangement, which does nothing to prevent the staff of either moving of their own volition from one firm to the other, and which also prevents enmity building up between the firms.
Surely you can't legislate to *force* companies to headhunt from each other?
"What with this and targeted attacks on the baltics states in the last few years it rather shows a country that is insecure , adolescent in its approach to world affairs and just can't accept that the bolshevik revolution is over and the eastern europe that did not want to be part of a greater russia under the heal of the Bear is now free. The world moves on , russia needs to move on with it or get left behind licking its wounds and pretending its still the 1960s."
Or it could just show that the Russian government is one of the first to truly understand and 'weaponise' cyberspace, as shown by the coordinated but allegedly unofficial attacks that downed Georgian government sites during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.
After all, the US policy of encircling Russia was hardly the sign of a country willing to move on, was it?
And by golly, hasn't the US government been trying to set up some sort of unified cybercommand?
I for one wish to welcome our Cyrillic-scripted overlords for just as long as it takes to find alternatives to (or alternative sources of) the oil and gas supplies that Europe depends on Russian goodwill to avoid freezing it's collective ass off in the winter...
Unexciting it may be, but to be honest unexciting is what I look for in a browser - I want it to do what it needs to do, without containing lots of extras that are just going to bork everything when they go titsup.
Solid reliability is just fine by me - I don't CARE if the features are the very latest or not, as long as they work. My browser isn't a toy, it's a tool.
Because it's a tool, that huge library of addons is of course a big draw, and upgrades that increase speed and/or memory usage are naturally always welcome... meaning that for people like me, this new FF release is a good one.
"More recently, Google has stepped up the aggressiveness of its program by shifting the tracking cookie used by AdSense from an opt-in to an opt-out system of consent, where opting-out requires arcane knowledge on the part of the consumer"
Or the 10 seconds needed to install something like the TACO (Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out) add-on for Firefox - which takes care of Google and another 83 networks.
There, that wasn't too difficult, was it?
So the 14p comes from the monthly advertising revenue... but the fifty quid, whilst also income not profit (not explicitly stated in the article), is the _consumer_ spend.
So we're not really comparing like with like here, are we?
It would be rather more useful if we had some idea of the overall turnovers and percentage profits per year, instead of just some bland numbers that don't really mean much by themselves.
P.S. Out of interest, what proportion of startups manage to reach the 1m per year (82k x 12...) ad revenue mark?
The Google Street-View image says nothing, even if you can be identified, except that you were at a certain point on a certain day. There is no way to know whether you're shopping locally or not, visiting a friend or going into your own house, paying a business call or entering the premises of your own employer, and so on. Frankly, anyone who can use Street-View to determine the relevance of the image to your daily routine must by definition know a fair bit about you already - so the Street-View image won't make much difference anyway.
Paris because she knows all about public displays.
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