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Any one else think we need CARPA - the Civilian Advanced Research Project Agency? Preferably one that has nothing to do with the government.

Based on the amount of money US companies invest in R&D, I think the answer is self-evident: no, no one else thinks that.

Exception: Google does spend a metric shitload of money on R&D, but since their main business is spying on you and stealing intellectual property they didn't produce, that kind of calls into question the public benefit of their "research".

keyboard shortcuts (something Gmail doesn't support at all)

http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594

tabs on the interface, so I can have several messages composing at once (again, no such thing in Gmail)

Click the button in the upper-right to detach the "Compose Mail" dialog into a new window, then click "Compose Mail" again and voila, you will be composing two messages simultaneously.

folders (very important for me, very useful, and not present at all in Gmail)

Labels are strictly more powerful than folders especially now that gmail has nested labels: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/superstars-and-nested-labels-now.html.

Spend at least 5 seconds googling, or, umm, yahooing, before complaining.

urban /= city; moron.

Well, we are talking about Oakland, so that's urban by any definition.

Add to that list Crimson Tide because it dealt with a mutiny aboard a US submarine.

You're thinking of Google TISP.

Facebook stock almost back down to it's opening price this morning. I look for it's stock to hit a floor of around $10 in the next 3-6 months.

With Google Custom Search, you can harness the power of Google to create a customized search experience for your own website.

So yes, Google does exactly that. You might have a point if it was the site owners themselves creating the search boxes, but Google offers large choice of tools to do exactly that.

Google Apps for business is free for up to 10 people. See https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/new3?hl=en&source=gafb-pricing-tabletop-en . You don't get an SLA, but when was the last time you tried to get an SLA enforced?

I got a Droid about 3 months after they came out. They definitely weren't using Chrome. It was one of my gripes. Chrome for Android was released in Beta 4-5 months ago. Before that, you just had Browser. Both can coexist on a phone.

The fourth FAQ here indicates that they are different: https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/faq

That must have been a quite a while ago - it's been a criminal offense to sell quite a lot of things by pounds weight in the UK for some time. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-1074249%2FMetric-martyr-trader-gets-criminal-record-selling-fruit-veg-pound-stall-set-mother-Blitz.html&ei=gfu8T4L0IqbG6gGHr_Va&usg=AFQjCNEbzPLm9SDij6B0yK_7-th0-PEXrA&sig2=I2BPME0SSMgJC0zarfpTrQ

I didn't see you mention Google Apps. My company (500'ish people) are all on Google Apps and I really like it. Plus its free for up to 10 users, so you could at least give it a test drive. It integrates email, calendar, docs, and contacts all into one package (with names shared between each).

I see that you mentioned Google Docs, but have you looked at Google Apps for Business (runs on a domain of your choice)? There's a free version for up to 10 accounts. Otherwise, I think it is $50 per user per year.

It supports calendar sharing and company-wide contact sharing (from the web UI anyway). Though I think that the global contact list might be missing from the free version.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html At $5/user/month, it's decently priced.

It seems to me that Switched Digital Video is a reasonable way to manage the limited channel capacity on cable, even though Cisco tuning adapters initially were garbage. How expensive is it to deploy SDV in a mid size market?

They might be related, but you'd have to control for the effect of Greece.

SMART will not tell you if your drive has failed in over 1/3rd of cases.

From Google: Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no
count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely
scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and
probational count. In other words, models based only
on those signals can never predict more than half of the
failed drives. Figure 14 shows that even when we add
all remaining SMART parameters (except temperature)
we still find that over 36% of all failed drives had zero
counts on all variables.

It is difficult to add temperature to this analysis since
despite it being reported as part of SMART there are no
crisp thresholds that directly indicate errors. However,
if we arbitrarily assume that spending more than 50%
of the observed time above 40C is an indication of possible
problem, and add those drives to the set of predictable
failures, we still are left with about 36% of all
drives with no failure signals at all.

Perhaps you should do the math. Assuming a 3.6e8 km^2 surface area for the ocean, the largest reservoir alone, going by Wikipedia's 180km^3 figure, could account for 0.5mm of sea level. A trivial calculation. Others have posted similar further up the page.

For your convenience Windows vastly out numbers other operating systems either by market share or by usage.

Sourced from first hits (at least for me) on searches for operating system market share and operating system by usage respectively.

For your convenience Windows vastly out numbers other operating systems either by market share or by usage.

Sourced from first hits (at least for me) on searches for operating system market share and operating system by usage respectively.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ljobjlafonikaiipfkggjbhkghgicgoh

There's even a London in Canada which has a River Thames running through it!

And a "New London" in Connecticut, with a river Thames running through (alongside at least) it.

This.: make a folder for it somewhere on your system, and always use it as a shortcut to "start" Chromium.

Also keep it in an empty folder on a USB key ready to copy over onto another system: not truly portable, but still useful.

As long as you don't want the PDF viewer, or Flash, or the H.264 video, or the MP3 audio, or a few other goodies.

You can use any PDF plugin, and flash plugin is also available. Regarding MP3/H264: if there were strong demand
for them, Open Source developers would have already implemented it. Also, dropping MP3/H264 is arguably a
good thing.

I have heard people from Opera and Microsoft explicitly express concerns about the licensing of NaCl; whether it was copyright or patent issues I can't tell you.

I would thank if you provided links.

If they ever manage that (which is somewhat doubtful), we can revisit the situation. In the meantime, PNaCl is vaporware, and Google is pushing hard to get people to use NaCl.

I read nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf and it seems that PNaCl is well within the reach of Google and LLVM. And the creation of optimised portable bitcode will benefit the whole software market. And PNaCl seems very active - http://code.google.com/feeds/p/nativeclient/issueupdates/basic.
As for Google pushing hard, it may be a good thing. This will showcase the superiority of Chrome, helping make it more popular. And we need Chrome to be very popular by late 2012, when Microsoft will launch Windows 8. Microsoft wants to lock WIndows 8 to MSIE, which could be a disaster. But if Chrome is popular by late 2012, then it will be in Microsoft's best interest to support Chrome.

I still want MSIE to die. One of the reasons for my hate is that I find it outrageous that a clearly inferior product is used only because it comes bundled with Windows.

And how would you create something like his so.cl site or DuckDuckGo with that kind of rate?

The preferred method is to call (or email) google and ask for free access for your project. Or you could apply to the summer of code project and see if you can get google to pay you.

And you continue jabbering about things you don't know anything about.

It's not automatic. Facebook Connect will popup in a new window, it will tell you what information the site will get and then you have a button where you can login using Facebook.

Google has similar stuff, but for Google accounts.

Google has nothing of the sort, except its API, which allows only 100 queries per day per account, unless you pay at a rate of $5 per 1000 queries. That's well within most research budgets, and certainly within the needs of most individuals.

There's even a London in Canada which has a River Thames running through it!

I live in Connecticut, US, we have a New London County, and the Thames right behind it.

We're so original *ducks*

Security isn't the issue. The problem is that electronic records are easy to manipulate. Electronic voting has a wide potential for abuse. I believe laws should be passed to ban electronic voting and the electronic tallying of paper ballots. I realize this isn't convenient, but paper does make it much easier to prove election fraud and gives a better account of what really happened in an election. There are plenty of people who believe that the 2008 elections and the current 2012 Republican primaries show evidence of vote flipping. I believe this is possible, but I'm not convinced this has actually occurred. My concern isn't that this has happened, but that it potentially could.

I've seen a couple documents recently that make a compelling argument both for and against it having taken place in the Primaries. As I stated, I'm not convinced this has happened, but the plausibility of it is enough that I don't feel comfortable with an electronic voting system.

Short Version
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumZzI2bVlON2VTMnFyYVZZSnpDYnNyQQ/edit?pli=1

Long Version
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumdkE4d0Y2eWtURTZ2eDM5RmlLc3ZhQQ/edit?pli=1

Security isn't the issue. The problem is that electronic records are easy to manipulate. Electronic voting has a wide potential for abuse. I believe laws should be passed to ban electronic voting and the electronic tallying of paper ballots. I realize this isn't convenient, but paper does make it much easier to prove election fraud and gives a better account of what really happened in an election. There are plenty of people who believe that the 2008 elections and the current 2012 Republican primaries show evidence of vote flipping. I believe this is possible, but I'm not convinced this has actually occurred. My concern isn't that this has happened, but that it potentially could.

I've seen a couple documents recently that make a compelling argument both for and against it having taken place in the Primaries. As I stated, I'm not convinced this has happened, but the plausibility of it is enough that I don't feel comfortable with an electronic voting system.

Short Version
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumZzI2bVlON2VTMnFyYVZZSnpDYnNyQQ/edit?pli=1

Long Version
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByJAC-sfXwumdkE4d0Y2eWtURTZ2eDM5RmlLc3ZhQQ/edit?pli=1

This is not strictly true. We have strong cryptography, and, if we're willing to give up forcible secrecy of ballots, we can use it to make online voting verifiable. (Ballots can still be known only to the voter, or to those they choose to disclose the vote to -- meaning they can choose secrecy, but can also choose to reveal their vote for a bribe payoff.)

Personally, I think that's a choice we should make -- better to enable individuals to sell their vote than to enable election officials to sell the entire thing. (Like is happening now, and also in 2008.) We had non-secret ballots before, and democracy more-or-less struggled through, and I think at this point, ballot secrecy is sufficiently culturally ingrained that few voters will reveal it, so the worst situations (e.g. bosses or union leaders demanding proof that they voted republican or democrat) are unlikely to take hold -- you need a critical mass of compliance to be able to act against refusers. Of course, both parties will happily hand out $20 if you prove you voted for them, cutting into their massive advertising budget -- wait, that sounds like a good thing! (Realistically, nobody pays voters in solid red or blue states; Republicans will pay big bucks in cities in swing states, Democrats will pay big bucks in rural areas in the same states, and they may or may not both waste money trying to buy their own demographics back -- overall, it's unlikely that it'll alter the outcome much, but it could tip a close race either way. Ugly, but livable, IMO.)

(Paper ballots are good, too, don't get me wrong! Call me cynical, but I don't see us as a nation actually mustering the willpower to resist the convenience of electronic voting machines and better yet, internet voting, so I think we should settle for ensuring electronic voting of a form with the least chance of election-thievery.)

Check it.

So, in other words, you can't provide a citation to prove your claim that cops turn each other in for criminal behavior? Somehow, judging from the rest of your response, I'm far from surprised.

Sometimes I really wonder how dumb paranoid people like you are.

Smart enough to not make blanket generalizations and statements I can't back up, which translates to 'obviously smarter than you.'

Do you REALLY believe that every single cop in the world is corrupt, and that no cop ever reports another corrupt cop?

Not necessarily; then again, I'm not the one making specious claims without having the wherewithal to back them up.

And then on top of that, you can't be bothered to do basic research?

You made the claim, you need to provide the reference, asshat. I assume you never went to college? I pray not, otherwise I would have to wonder how you managed to survive without understanding the concept of bibliography.

There's even a London in Canada which has a River Thames running through it!

This will generate fantastic amounts of legal billing as Apple embarks on the next phase of their "Suing Everyone is Really Our Only Business Model" strategy.

1. I'm pretty sure that Apple's business consists of, you know, selling shiny electronics. I'm no math genius or anything, but it certainly looks like Apple made more money selling devices last year than it could get even if it somehow managed to literally sue the combined Motorola and Google for every penny they had. Lawsuits are nowhere near as profitable as selling iPhones; Apple would be foolish to pursue that business model.

2. Lest you cast Google in the role of the innocent victim, Google pretty much admitted that its acquiring Motorola for it's patent war chest, not because they suddenly wanted to get into the handset-making business.

This will generate fantastic amounts of legal billing as Apple embarks on the next phase of their "Suing Everyone is Really Our Only Business Model" strategy.

1. I'm pretty sure that Apple's business consists of, you know, selling shiny electronics. I'm no math genius or anything, but it certainly looks like Apple made more money selling devices last year than it could get even if it somehow managed to literally sue the combined Motorola and Google for every penny they had. Lawsuits are nowhere near as profitable as selling iPhones; Apple would be foolish to pursue that business model.

2. Lest you cast Google in the role of the innocent victim, Google pretty much admitted that its acquiring Motorola for it's patent war chest, not because they suddenly wanted to get into the handset-making business.

This will generate fantastic amounts of legal billing as Apple embarks on the next phase of their "Suing Everyone is Really Our Only Business Model" strategy.

1. I'm pretty sure that Apple's business consists of, you know, selling shiny electronics. I'm no math genius or anything, but it certainly looks like Apple made more money selling devices last year than it could get even if it somehow managed to literally sue the combined Motorola and Google for every penny they had. Lawsuits are nowhere near as profitable as selling iPhones; Apple would be foolish to pursue that business model.

2. Lest you cast Google in the role of the innocent victim, Google pretty much admitted that its acquiring Motorola for it's patent war chest, not because they suddenly wanted to get into the handset-making business.

This will generate fantastic amounts of legal billing as Apple embarks on the next phase of their "Suing Everyone is Really Our Only Business Model" strategy.

1. I'm pretty sure that Apple's business consists of, you know, selling shiny electronics. I'm no math genius or anything, but it certainly looks like Apple made more money selling devices last year than it could get even if it somehow managed to literally sue the combined Motorola and Google for every penny they had. Lawsuits are nowhere near as profitable as selling iPhones; Apple would be foolish to pursue that business model.

2. Lest you cast Google in the role of the innocent victim, Google pretty much admitted that its acquiring Motorola for it's patent war chest, not because they suddenly wanted to get into the handset-making business.

Check it. Sometimes I really wonder how dumb paranoid people like you are. Do you REALLY believe that every single cop in the world is corrupt, and that no cop ever reports another corrupt cop?

And then on top of that, you can't be bothered to do basic research? Like, does it bother you to be that clueless?

And well if I remember correctly Google is incorporated in Ireland

Not unless Ireland conquered the State of Delaware when I wasn't looking.

People don't make a fuss about Google because Google has always been transparent about their dedication to clean energy, and has been recognized many times for it. They're even making giant investments in renewables. http://www.google.com/green/energy/

Meanwhile, Apple has been as opaque as possible regarding their environmental effects, only opening up about it when they think it'll affect their bottom line.

And that's why the greenpeace thing was BS to begin with - they're not measuring "environmental friendliness", they're measuring "environmental PR column-inches". The more PR crap you post about being green, the higher you are up in the rankings.

Hell, HP kept winning with vague promises to "reduce emissions" and crap that like with no firm targets or anything.

All Apple's doing is producing PR column-inches on what they're doing which increases their ranking. (it is easy to do when plans are already being executed to do it).

Hell, I bet BP could get to be the #1 cleanest company in the world according to the greenpeace metric.

Another case in point is the exclusivity agreement in AdWords. If you want to use AdWords (and you often have to because it's the prominent player and they also own Doubleclick since long time ago), you cannot run your ads on competitors services. It is prohibited in the terms. That is just monopoly abuse.

There is no such clause in the AdWords terms of service or in the guidelines. You can check it yourself:
https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/static.py?hl=en&guide=1316546&page=guide.cs&rd=2

I've been advertising on AdWords for 10 years.. I have never seen such a policy, or heard of such a policy with regards to AdWords.

AdSense does have that policy. IE: if you place google ads on your website, you cannot place bing ads on your website also.

ADSENSE != ADWORDS.

Another case in point is the exclusivity agreement in AdWords. If you want to use AdWords (and you often have to because it's the prominent player and they also own Doubleclick since long time ago), you cannot run your ads on competitors services. It is prohibited in the terms. That is just monopoly abuse.

There is no such clause in the AdWords terms of service or in the guidelines. You can check it yourself:
https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/static.py?hl=en&guide=1316546&page=guide.cs&rd=2

I've been advertising on AdWords for 10 years.. I have never seen such a policy, or heard of such a policy with regards to AdWords.

AdSense does have that policy. IE: if you place google ads on your website, you cannot place bing ads on your website also.

ADSENSE != ADWORDS.

There's no link because the point is bogus. https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/adwords/select/TCUSbilling.html

Wait a minute... I see what you did there!

I don't know whether did you noticed but the software that you seem to be so addicted to is not part of the Windows as such. It is a third-party software and you know, applications can be developed on Linux too! If this company would have the balls they would release their software for other platforms too, such as OSX and Gnome/KDE. If you love that software, you should email them to send over the source code so you can make a version for Linux. Predictably, they won't send you the source code to use it on the system of your choice.

So you're saying that you're confined to Windows because of this piece of software. It's really sad because gnome and nautilus can be enhanced to whatever you would like to do with them. Also, there are other file managers like this Laziness isn't a good excuse, especially when you are already using a third-party software.

- AdBlock works perfectly fine in Chrome for me. I don't know where this shit keeps coming from. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifdd

Because you're ignorant.

Webrequests. Up until Chrome 17, Adblock extensions had to inject javascript into the webpages which then scraped the contents and hid the ads. This didn't stop the ads from loading, only made them invisible once the JS had run so you still got to experience all the tracking, cookie and HTML5 localstorage crap. Such code also didn't work perfectly for pages which created ads after the initial loading using scripts which required the adblock scripts to reprocess the page every time something changed, all this junk bloated Chrome's memory usage and was well-known among Chromium developers to create significant (showed up in their telemetry) UI lag and crashes.

Adblock Plus in Firefox, by contrast, blocks ads at the network layer, it intercepts every network request to download a file and checks the target URL against the filters, returning about:blank instead if a filter hits. Until Webrequests were added to Chrome (earlier this year, Firefox has supported this since before 1.0) it was impossible to provide the technically correct and efficient solution.

So, yes, Chrome's Adblock works now but it didn't for years.

What's wrong with Scriptno? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=blg&q=dea%20scanner
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2012/5/19/03417/6341
http://www.phantomreport.com/dea-wants-to-scan-license-plates-all-of-them-on-utahs-drug-corridor

Maybe this is old news...

> But did Google *pay* for Angry Birds to do that?

I have no idea what their contract, if any, with Angry Birds looked like.

But they have certainly been encouraging web developers to do just that, yes.

> And what is your source for that Skype behaviour?

Personal experience, for one thing. You can see a screenshot from the advanced install at http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png if you want.

As far as a Google search not finding anything.... https://www.google.com/search?q=skype+chrome+bundling shows http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/4135280.htm and http://www.winrumors.com/skype-for-windows-updated-to-remove-google-product-bundling/ and http://mynetx.net/6494/skype-removes-google-integration

It also finds, not coincidentally, http://www.osnews.com/comments/25184 (do read the first response too!) and http://www.salsitasoft.com/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/

A similar search on Bing also finds http://www.quora.com/Just-got-a-Skype-update-and-they-wanted-me-to-install-Chrome-Why

He's never offered one genuine, unqualified note of concession about any of it. Everyone else is wrong. "I believe strongly in safety" is as close as he's ever gotten to an explanation. Turning the NRC board of commissioners into a snake pit is somehow supposed to promote safety. ...
  and he oversaw the certification of the AP1000 reactor.

Believes in "safety", eh? He should read this.

so how likely do you expect the share price to rise above $38? What magical thing would FB have to do for such a rise?

They need whatever voodoo Linked In is using. Linked In has a P/E of over $600 and a profit margin of about 2%, yet it's trading at close to $100 with a market cap of about $10B.

FB has twice the EPS, profit margin of 20% last quarter (down from 30% same quarter last year), and it's debt to equity ratio is lower.

Looks like it actually got down to -12% within an hour of opening. From the sounds of it, NASDAQ royally screwed up this IPO and there's probably unexecuted orders lying around which is likely going to result in some very hilarious realized losses. Look, if Goldman Sachs is securing hundreds of millions of dollars in shares ahead of time and cashing out during a tech IPO, you as an individual are probably already too late the party. Of course, that's investment advice from an anonymous idiot on Slashdot but it looks like they will be one of the few parties laughing all the way to the bank (as usual).