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http://arstechnica.com/informa... /sarcasm

who, this germany?:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

americans are and should be angry at the NSA

but other countries complaining about the NSA is hypocrisy

if i was german, would i be worried about the NSA? or the BND and the BfV?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

if you live in a country outside the USA, and your biggest privacy concern is the NSA, you're a moron: your own country is doing everything the NSA is doing, and in many countries, far worse. obviously, they can also abuse you a lot easier than the USA can. and they do

again: i don't have a problem with americans complaining about the NSA. americans SHOULD complain about the NSA. but i do have a problem with other countries complaining about the NSA when they do the same or worse

Support from the SoC vendor is the first step in getting an update out the door, and you'll see many phones' support lifecycles cut short thanks to the likes of Texas Instruments and Nvidia. The Galaxy Nexus used a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 SoC. TI quit the smartphone business in 2012, leaving Google's flagship without support for KitKat. The only device we've seen update to KitKat without support from the silicon vendor is Google Glass, which uses the same chip as the Galaxy Nexus. If the incredibly buggy performance of Google Glass post-KitKat update is any indication, though, that was an experiment that went very poorly.

The speculation is Google Glass will be switching to Intel for the next iteration. There's a reason why many of the mass market mobile device players such as Apple and Samsung have invested in their own ARM SoCs. There is in fact an uncanny correlation between mobile device companies selling hardware having catastrophic collapse of market share such as Nokia and Blackberry with failure to develop an ARM SoC for the 2010s and beyond.

Yes, but.

Once McAfee detected critical Windows XP system files as a virus and quaranteed them. http://arstechnica.com/busines...

It affected Intel, and many other companies, basically cancelling work for the day.

Intel was so impressed with it they bought McAfee later that year.

As for Facebook:

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Like Google, Facebook designs its own servers and has them built by ODMs (original design manufacturers) in Taiwan and China, rather than OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like HP or Dell. By rolling its own, Facebook eliminates what Frankovsky calls "gratuitous differentiation," hardware features that make servers unique but do not benefit Facebook.

"Most of our new gear is built by ODMs like Quanta," the company said in an e-mail response to one of our follow-up questions. "We do multi-source all our gear, and if an OEM can build to our standards and bring it in within 5 percent, then they are usually in those multi-source discussions."

Yes, actually. And considering the previous collaborative environment, it has been a big improvement.

Citations:
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Yes, actually. And considering the previous collaborative environment, it has been a big improvement.

Citations:
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

You do realize that President Bush (#43) had his own share of email shit-storms don't you? In fact this might have lead to Hillary's decisions, flawed as they were, (I don't know). Citations follow...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

You do realize that President Bush (#43) had his own share of email shit-storms don't you? In fact this might have lead to Hillary's decisions, flawed as they were, (I don't know). Citations follow...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Ars Technica just published an excellent piece on Microsoft's contribution to Open-Source data center designs: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

If the Facebook's and Microsoft's of the world are being so proactive in this space, it'll only be a matter of time until their lawyer's get to work. That's what they're there for, right? Gotta do something to keep earning those fat retainers.

I keep hearing about Microsoft's Android patents but I still don't know what they are?

Ars Technica has a list in their article.

That's why SpaceX is planning to put these satellites into a lower orbit at around 1200 km.

Motorola (Google?) is not compliant; they are in fighting Microsoft in court. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... Arstechnica reports that most cell phone makers pay Microsoft royalties on each phone but Kyocera and Motorola are not paying.

Google's Iron Grip on Android

We've got 4k TVs now. We had them when the current gen of consoles launched, and yet those consoles, which they want us to believe are high-end machines, only output 1080p; except that they don't even do that because in this, the age of 3840×2160, the best they can give us is 1600x900. I mean, hell, my nearly decade old Xbox 360 and 8 year old PS3 can belt out 1080p@30 for a large number of games. True, many titles on those systems suffer the same "not quite 1080p" issues, but really, did the new generation of consoles simply tack on different hardware with minimal increase in processing power? Were they trying to make as little progress as possible?

Take Advanced Warfare as an example. On the Xbox 360 it runs at (give or take) 1600x900@30 (1.44MP/frame, 43.2MP/sec), while the Xbox One switches between 1360x1080@60 (1.47MP/frame, 88.13MP/sec) and 1920x1080@60 (2.07MP/frame,124.24MP/sec). Are you telling me that, over the course of nearly a decade, and with the ability to offload some processing to the cloud, we haven't seen even a three-fold increase in processing power?

Yes, I understand the difference between CPU and GPU, and it appears that the Xbox One is being hamstrung by its CPU, not its GPU, in this case; Sledgehammer's engine renders at the anamorphic resolution when the data arrives late (because the CPU wasn't keeping up) and it doesn't have time to render the full frame. Of course, a faster GPU would help here, as well, but we all know a faster CPU is often cheaper, especially when we're talking about the difference between processing some data in .014s vs .015s (a 7% increase in performance), compared to pumping out a frame in .002s vs .003s (a 50% increase in performance). It's not like faster CPUs in the same class, with similar power consumption, didn't exist at launch time, and they're commodity desktop CPUs so there's literally no reason they couldn't have developed with the best chips available when development started and shipped with the best chips available when the first production run was set to begin; within the same class and power range, of course. That would have easily netted at least a 10% performance increase for, maybe, another $2 per unit. Which I'm sure most gamers would happily pay, ten-fold, for a machine that actually, and consistently, performs like the back of the box says it can.

The same may or may not have been possible with the GPU since, even within the same product line, typically more than just the clock speed is changed from one GPU model to the next, and we haven't seen a 50% bump in graphics performance in the power range these consoles are aiming for in much longer than it took to develop either of them. That's why I'm focusing on CPU, rather than GPU; and the cloud was supposed to make all of that better, for the Xbox One at least.

For what it's worth, the PS4 spits out Advanced Warfare and a solid 1920x1080@60, so maybe Sony followed my formula.

Actually... I decided to spend 30 seconds googling before posting this and... well, I'm gonna post my rant anyway, for all to see, because, as it turns out, Microsoft actually did follow my formula and increased the CPU clock by about 10% before production, while the PS4 has a (roughly 40% faster) GPU. I'm betting another 10% would've done the trick, though; and reducing the number of cores from 8 to 6 would have kept the power consumption and cost down. After all, studios want to be able to port to PC and they largely haven't figured out how to utilize more than a couple of cores at a time, anyway, so fewer and faster cores would seem to provide better performance, at least for this generation.

Now, please tell me how I'm wrong. Because I know I am, I just don't know how, yet.

How can a country that hosts so many of the world's call centers still have no idea how the internet works?

Well, if their understanding of Microsoft Windows support is any guide ...

OpenGL 4 got a bunch of really major improvements, for example, direct state access in 4.5.

Sorry, I do not know too much about this, but I read about Intel Rosepoint that seems to be the same thing. Is that not so? And this was 3 years ago.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

> Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?

Here you go, just as you asked for!

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Did you do that on purpose? ;)

If this doesn't apply until they're eighteen, why is this a decision that you need to make for them? Eighteen (or seventeen and N days) is old enough to make a choice for themselves. Like tattoos, piercings, and circumcision, this is a permanent decision that should not even be available to you as their parent. It is a choice that only they can make.

As for what they should choose... Most people seem to be saying no, and with good reasons, but I'd like to point out that traveling to the US, and particularly working in the US, isn't trivially simple for Europeans, especially if you value your privacy. The more burdensome aspects of crossing the border that were put in place after 9/11 aren't inflicted on US citizens, like the pictures and the fingerprinting.

In this article from 2009 our-secrets-live-online-in-databases-of-ruin, researchers were able to identify %87 of Americans with just 3 piece of information: zip code, birthdate and sex. With the mountains of personal data both publicly accessible and in private databases and with what are essentially clearing-houses especially designed to aggregate this data, identifying people in anonymized data is almost trivial unless that data is so heavily sanitized as to be useless to research and in effect fail the "reproducible" requirement of the law.

Malware writers are much smarter: They hide the last extension themselves.

See this article: http://arstechnica.com/securit...

It also used a special unicode character known as a right-to-left override to make the infection file appear as a PDF document rather than a potentially dangerous executable file.

There is no reason the OS can't show you the metadata associated with the file when you do a file listing. Also, if they are really that necessary then why can I name a Linux executable anything I want...no extension necessary. Part of the point here is that you can't trust file extensions.

Good discussion of the issues are at http://archive.arstechnica.com... and http://arstechnica.com/staff/2...

There is no reason the OS can't show you the metadata associated with the file when you do a file listing. Also, if they are really that necessary then why can I name a Linux executable anything I want...no extension necessary. Part of the point here is that you can't trust file extensions.

Good discussion of the issues are at http://archive.arstechnica.com... and http://arstechnica.com/staff/2...

"The so-called FREAK attack - short for Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys - is possible when an end user with a vulnerable device - currently known to include Android smartphones, iPhones, and Macs running Apple's OS X operating system - connects to an HTTPS-protected website configured to use a weak cipher that many had presumed had been retired. At the time this post was being prepared, Windows devices were not believed to be affected, and the status of Linux devices was unknown"

Well, if anybody else in government did this, they'd get fired, lose their pension, and possibly face criminal charges.

Sarah Palin didn't, neither will HRC.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Yeah, at least with major league OSes like Windows we never have to worry about decade-old bugs. And Windows 8.0 was the model of usability.

But remembering interviews with Occulus developers there is more to VR than a good resolution and tracking. Things like ridiculous low latency needed to prevent motion sickness and screen artifacts caused by rapid panning. Has Valve solved these things in record time in secret or will this be a better specs on paper but worse in practice product ? Or maybe I'm just falling for Oculus marketing: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

If you remember, the monkey couldn't claim copyright because monkeys have no standing to claim copyright.

As for getting a DMCA takedown notice, I've been threatened a couple of times in the past, and basically told them to go pee up a rope. DMCA only works in the US :-)

As for the NFL, who cares? Not me, that's for sure. But the NFL's over-broad copyright claims have not been upheld by the courts.

This isn't really the right website to start talking about 'harmful' rf radiation without any sort of proof.

Proof exists only in mathematics. Science relies on evidence.

The limited evidence so far produced has left experts divided:
http://www.eea.europa.eu/highl...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

"One reason scientists disagree is because the mechanisms by which the radiations from mobile phones could cause cancer are not yet understood. However, waiting for that knowledge could take decades: the biological mechanisms connecting tobacco smoke and cancer are still not fully understood, some 60 years after the first published studies linked smoking and lung cancer."

I would no more support your apparent complacency than [my alleged] paranoia. But to clarify the record, raising discussion about a point on which experts are divided does not strike me as remotely paranoid.

Care to show any credible studies that show this to be a problem?

By "this" I assume we are both referring to near-field RF radiation. According to credible sources, there is insufficient evidence currently to state that it either is or is not a problem, but one consensus of experts agree that mobile phone radiation is worthy of further exploration as a possible risk:

"The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a global authority on cancer, recently concluded that radiation from mobile phones is a ‘possible’ head cancer risk. However, scientific opinion is split on the issue – many different studies have reached different conclusions based on the same evidence." -- http://www.eea.europa.eu/highl...

In Europe they have proposed regulations to reduce exposure of children to mobile phone and wifi radiation: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

So, yes, there are credible experts who don't share your complacent surety. Personally, I am neither convinced one way or the other and adopt a wait-and-see attitude.

But if we grant that it is a possible issue, then we must consider that these earbud things are "ultra low power," but seeing as electromagnetic field strength increases in an inverse proportion to the square of a decrease in the separation distance, putting a transmitter INSIDE your skull makes an orders of magnitude strength difference over even the few millimeters of additional separation present by holding a phone against your ear.

As I said, I avoid paranoia, but I've lived long enough to see lots of "safe" things turn out to be absolutely not safe (like BPA) or at least called into question (like saccharin).

So I raise it as a possible consideration here, but I am absolutely not saying it is a problem; run for the hills!

No. If I want to lay cable... I will be stopped... Here is a quick little education for you, sport:

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

There are lots of articles on the subject. The ISP monopolies tend to get exclusive agreements in cities in exchange for giving free internet to schools or some other bullshit. And in return for that, the entire fucking city becomes at best a duopoly. That is why the duopologies reign. Because you are literally legally forbidden to compete with them.

And to clarify... I mean running my own fucking cable not sharing their broken down over priced under funded infrastructure.

Shopping around for juries and judges in rural areas is a big problem that should be addressed

If it were that simple, the small player would have an equal chance.

The problem is there are some courts where the jury pool is populated by patent friendly people, some of which are not above going to great lengths to hide these facts during Voir dire. The Eastern District of Texas

It isn't entirely that the juries are patent friendly. While you are far more likely to get a juror that actually holds (and understands the value of) intangible property in East Texas due to the widespread distribution of severed mineral and royalty rights, most East Texans don't care one way or another about patents. If you don't count general collegiality, there are three reasons the Eastern District is chosen for cases (not just patent cases, remember EDTEX was also the center for asbestos litigation):

1) The speed of the EDTEX Docket. The Marshall Court is known for getting cases from filing to trial in 18 months or less. I don't know how Judge Gilstrap does it, but he does . . .as did Judge Ward before him and other judges in the district (Though Judge Davis had a heart attack that could have been attributed to his workload). Other districts take significantly longer. This is not just with patent cases, as there has been a longstanding tradition in the area that "justice delayed is justice denied".

2) Discovery. Before you go to trial you have a chance to gather evidence, including compelling evidence from other parties (which means adverse parties as well). Texas has generous discovery rules, which the Federal Courts must adopt under the Eerie doctrine, and the Eastern District believes that a litigant is "entitled to every man's evidence", as outlined by the Supreme Court in Branzburg v. Hayes. This allows litigants to get more discovery from their opponents, which can be used as a tool to apply pressure to settle. Discovery is expensive.

3) The EDTEX Court follows the 7th amendment scrupulously. In court, questions of law (e.g. Do I have to prove that the car was speeding beyond a reasonable doubt, or merely more likely than not?) are decided by the judge, and questions of fact (e.g. How fast was the car going?) are decided by the jury. Many questions in patent litigation are "mixed questions of law and fact" (e.g. What did the drafter of the patent mean when he used the phrase "one of one or more downloading apparatuses"?). Many other courts overstep their bounds and decide many questions of fact without sending the issue to a Jury, and they get away with it because the question involves a mixed aspect of law. ED Tex judges tend avoid doing this.

To sum up, it isn't corrupt Juries but a completely different judicial philosophy . . . but most important is the speed of the docket because it puts pressure on defendants to settle earlier.

Shopping around for juries and judges in rural areas is a big problem that should be addressed

If it were that simple, the small player would have an equal chance.

The problem is there are some courts where the jury pool is populated by patent friendly people, some of which are not above going to great lengths to hide these facts during Voir dire. The Eastern District of Texas

What I like about WebRTC is that it restores the 'end-to-end encrypted' part we had lost.

Skype, Facetime and others were all sued by this company which has patents:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

They all made deals and changed the way their software worked instead of paying for the patent directly.

Do you know what they changed ? They are no longer peer2peer applications anymore.

And at least in the case of Skype, we know Microsoft can decrypt the calls. And we know they have at least automated systems which watch the text-messages you send over Skype because they have an anti-spam system in place.

WebRTC does real peer2peer for free, without patents, with standardized protocols. With probably-free codecs. At least the Opus audio codec is completely free. VP8 and VP9 probably don't have problems. But you might end up talking to an endpoint which only supports H.264 so you'll need something for that.

And there are libraries which you can use that use the same protocols and you can build your own desktop or smartphone app with that if you want.

I'm sorry, but I see WebRTC as something which solves real problems we thought we didn't have a couple of years ago.

Yes, mostly due to government regulations, planning departments, and other governmental gatekeepers.

I don't doubt that those contribute significantly (although nobody seems to want to put up real numbers to back up the claim), but even in the absence of regulation, wiring up a large geographical space is bloody expensive. There are very high capital investments to be made in either case, and you have to be reasonably sure they'll pay off.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that our regulatory regime is the major source of the problem, but I'm skeptical that the problem is "regulation exists" rather than, "our regulation sucks." I mean, not all of the countries that are beating the snot out of us on the broadband front are known for their light regulatory touch. Their regulatory environment likely just encourages competition better than ours does.

Actually, the majority of Americans have two or more wired providers, plus two or more wireless providers. That's in addition to satellite Internet and various local options based on microwave links.

I think this hinges pretty heavily on the definition of "broadband." A lot of these claims are based on somewhat dated thresholds like 4Mbit, which is "broadband" by some definitions, but kind of laughable when you compare the results to other civilized countries. Once you get to higher tiers like 10, 25, and 50Mbit, things start looking substantially less competitive.

I'm hopeful for what wireless providers will be able to bring in the coming years, but the competition situation for real broadband right now is pretty grim, limited by the fact that the best ways to move lots of data fast is over physical wires and it takes time and money to run wires.

If Company X can offer the same service as Comcast but more efficiently, then it is rational for Company X to enter the market. What Comcast currently charges makes no difference.

That needs to be phrased very carefully. It needs to be able to do it more efficiently than Comcast at its equilibrium competitive price. Your second sentence is key. What Comcast currently charges isn't the rate you have to beat. The target rate is whatever you think Comcast could cut its rates to if it had to compete with you. Given that has already amortized a goodly chunk of its capital investments and it's able to bundle with television and sell one or the other as a loss leader depending on the market, that makes it a risky prospect. So unless you have a real ace up your sleeve, you'd generally invest elsewhere and Comcast never actually has to come anywhere near that rate.

The best evidence I know of is this one:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

You can see how changing the ID string of the CPU will change the performance of the exact same hardware.

Nope.
Funding does not determine outcome.
People are paid for the act of research, not the outcome.
They get paid regardless of the outcome.
And most research of global warming comes from federal sources.
And federal funding carries NO stipulations about outcome.*
In fact that's why a predetermined outcome is such a big ethical deal.

The very idea that the majority of the worlds scientists are frauds and paid for a predetermined outcome is the rankest ignorance or how scientific funding even work, let alone the idea that tens of thousand of scientists could be involved in a global conspiracy and not one of them blows the whistle.

http://arstechnica.com/science...

*Seriously, do you really think the larger scientific community, let alone the watchdogs, and science deniers, would let such a thing happen?
Its kind of like the nonsense about "Impeach him now!"....do you really think they would at all hesitate to do so if they actually had any legitimate reason they could bring up?

It's a common refrain to say that nobody benefits from class action suits except the lawyers. While that may be true for the class litigants themselves it is entirely untrue for the public at large.

It's only true for the class members at large, if at all, because they typically refuse to pay any attention to the class litigation and/or court approval of the settlement. If you think that a settlement is only enriching the class lawyers -- OBJECT TO IT.

It's a common refrain, yet almost nobody attempts to file objections with judges, much less retain legal counsel who might successfully oppose a settlement, because that would mean expending actual effort. If the class target, the class lawyers, and the class representatives are telling the judge that a settlement is fair, and nobody opposes that position, what do you expect to have happen?

Judges are an independent check on class shennanigans, but only to the extent that any extremely busy professional receiving information from only one side can be. Just like in every other aspect of life, you must offer decisionmakers -- whether employers, politicians, or judges -- sound reasons for supporting and advancing your interests above other, competing interests.

If you do not, you can hardly be surprised at what you get.

you missed the whole Komodia/Superfish kerfuffle, i gather: http://arstechnica.com/securit...

OMG!! Apple doesn't have a Twitter presence! .... Get a grip will you?!?

What, do you think the first thing I did for tech support was to whine about a problem on Twitter? I was trying to figure out a problem I had with Windows/my Samsung laptop and complained about it on Twitter, and because Microsoft/Samsung actually want their customers to be happy they reached out through it and helped me solve my problem.

With Apple, you search the web for your issue, find a ton of enthusiast sites where people are having the very same issue, and discover that there's no solution from Apple yet but they're sure there will be oh so soon now. (Originally posted: 2009.)

Apple does not deny the existence of problems with their products because they do not flip you a bird when you ask them for support

No, they just don't offer support. At all. So it's less that they flip you the bird and more that they just entirely ignore you. Except at the Apple Stores, I guess. Or did you mean I was supposed to shell out for Apple Care if I wanted their software to actually goddamned work?! (Another example: in OS X Yosemite, Apple flat-out broke DNS. Solution: copy over the DNS resolver from the previous version.)

So why don't you proclaim "the year of the OS/2 desktop" while you are at it since by your bullshit it can mean any fucking thing in the world?

Or better yet why not just accept the fact YOU FUCKING LOST and quit being a butthurt sore loser,mmmkay? Your devs were too busy having pissing contests over DEs to get their shit together, Torvalds was too busy acting like Linux is still his class project to get off his dusty ass and come up with a functional driver model,and all this circle jerking left the field wide open for MSFT to waltz right on in and take the trophy.

The most hilarious part? You and the rest of the community are still so stuck in the past worrying about "the big bad M$" and refusing to admit you lost the desktop wars you aren't even seeing the train fucking Google is about to give you. Google is about to pull a EEE on Linux and nobody is gonna see it coming, that is a knee slapper IMHO.

So go ahead and pretend that year of doesn't mean what it actually means, hey maybe when they say malware they really means puppies, right?

The built-in versioning that the AC is referring to was detailed by John Siracusa in his Lion review. You can see that it is a close cousin of Time Machine interface-wise, so it is easy to mix them up.

I'll agree with you that anyway it is not the solution the poster is looking for anyway, for a number of reasons.

Using basic encryption to authenticate a download of an operating system is to an official server is what I'd class as absolute bare basics.

Does it check hash values or signed packages? I would hope the answer's yes for anything made in the last ten years.

That's not a "killer feature". That's basic expectation.

On the Apple front - they do this by removing much of your control of the device. There are as many rogue apps on the iTunes store as anywhere else. There are also security problems that were left alone for just as long as everyone else:

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

(Note: published after 90 days past initial notification, the article says two were definitely still unpatched. Apple are no different to any other large company in this regard, so saying it's "a pretty big deal for them" is probably hyperbole).

I'd also say, just if they're making their money from hardware there's little incentive to fix software - at least compared to companies that just or primarily sell software.

Linux has 2,000 new developers and gets 10,000 patches for each version Linux recently saw "busiest development cycle" in its history.
The new developers are helping fuel an ever-bigger Linux community, according to the latest Linux Kernel Development report, which will
be released today by the Linux Foundation. The report is expected to be available at THIS LINK .

Are you REALLY buying your own BS, or are you just trolling? As one Linux friendly site easily defines "a year of the desktop where Linux desktop market share suddenly rises in relatively dramatic fashion."

And NO Virginia that does NOT mean going from the current lousy 1.34% which just FYI is sooo low that they officially now lump Linux in the "other" category to a 2%, that means a real significant rise as in double digits?

But lets face reality, its been...what? 24 years now? And you've NEVER even cracked 2%? I'm sorry but you have less of a chance at having a year of the Linux desktop than RMS has of becoming the POTUS. Its not gonna happen, it didn't happen when Shuttleworth was blowing millions plugging Ubuntu, didn't happen when Wally World was trying to hawk gOS desktops for $199, and its certainly not gonna happen now that Ballmer has been replaced by a guy with a functional brain, its just not gonna happen. We have already seen the future, and its a proprietary Android, a proprietary OSX/iOS, and a proprietary Windows....THAT is the future. Pretending the "year of a Linux desktop" is anything but a punchline? I'm sorry but you really shouldn't be hitting the pipe THAT hard buddy.

How does this (from TFA):

AT&T says it tracks "the webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter... AT&T Internet Preferences works independently of your browser's privacy settings regarding cookies, do-not-track, and private browsing. If you opt-in to AT&T Internet Preferences, AT&T will still be able to collect and use your Web browsing information independent of those settings."

equal this:

Technical information collected from the use of Google Fiber Internet for network management, security or maintenance may be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, but such information associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber will not be used by other Google properties without your consent. Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.

The last blurb just makes it clear that Gmail's terms of service apply when you use Gmail, this doesn't supersede any other agreement. And if you use Hotmail or Yahoo or your own email server Google won't collect any information on you, but AT&T will.

He gave all his money to his family to appear broke on paper.

Battleships disappeared due to two separate but equal reasons. The armor effectiveness/ weight versus gun size and firepower was drastically shifting in favor of the guns.

Not sure what you're getting at there. The battleships of WWII, especially the US Iowa class, were the pinnacle of large caliber naval gunnery. The analog computer that tracked targets, aimed and fired the main battery really was a marvel of mechanical computing, worthy of a Slashdot article in it's own right. In fact Ars Technica had a spread not too long ago on the Mark 8 Range Keeper analog computer: Gears of war; When mechanical analog computers ruled the waves. It wasn't a better gun that sank the battleship (pun intended), but as you point out: airpower.

And airplanes made those big honking guns worthless for antiship combat. As one or two bombs could still sink that battleship.

Even at the beginning of WWII it was clear that the battleship had seen its day as the primary capital ship of the world's navies. Two battles were key in demonstrating the vulnerability of battleships to carrier or land based aircraft. The first was the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse in 1941 by Japanese aircraft. The second was the sinking of the Japanese super battleship Yamato by American carrier based aircraft during Operation Ten-Go. In addition to these high profile sinkings, there were numerous other battles during the Pacific Campaign of WWII in which battleships played no substantial role as carriers attacked each other from beyond visual range with aircraft. For example, the Battle of the Coral Sea was the first major naval engagement in which the opposing ships never made visual contact. All of these things and more were a taste of things to come and signaled the decline of the battleship from backbone of naval power to a supporting bombardment role in amphibious landings. The last great battleship vs battleship engagement came on October 25th 1944 in the Battle of Surigao Straight in which American battleships under the command Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf crossed the T of a force of Japanese battleships under the command of Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura. The result was a decisive US victory. However, even after these events the days of the battleship in blue water naval operations were still numbered. The United States continued to operate it's Iowa class battleships off and on long after other navies had scrapped theirs, with the Iowas providing fire support in the Korean War, along the gun line in Vietnam, and even into the cold war in Lebanon and the first Gulf War of the 1990s. But these were sideshow affairs for the most part, made possible by US control of the air during those appearances, and even the United States had to give this up as the cost benefit comparison versus a modern guided missile destroyer became ever more unfavorable to the Battleship, even with it's unique support bombardment capability and especially since we don't do too many opposed amphibious landings anymore.