The APS is not something you were able to prevent; it's just part of the cost of maintaining that business branch alive.
If you are keeping the film branch alive, it IS expected to keep operating and innovate within its own bounds, and thatâ(TM)s what the APS was.
Doomed to fail? Perhaps, but I lived that window of time and digital cameras were widely regarded as still not-viable in 1996. Actually, I was studding art at the time and recall a conversation between a graduate student friend of mine and his former photography professor talking about digital photography in 1998. The professor stated that maybe in another year or two it would be required to jump into that wagon but it still was a bit too early. Given the APS was introduced to the market 2 years before that and likely in R&D for longer than that, I would not call its development time and cost brainless.
Image quality was not the only issue; storage was also a huge issue at the time. It was not until the late 21st century that mass storage large enough to replace film in long trips or photo shoots became viable.
Still gives Kodak 11 years to catch up but how do you justify to investors you just have to axe the film branch, that constitutes perhaps 60%-70% of your company? Even Steve Jobs saw a lot of negative feedback when he axed huge chunks of Apple after his return (he axed about every product line but 4 computer models, the Newton PDA between them.)
I may had gone too verbose on my post. My point is that they adapted but they were encumbered by huge branches they were not able to axe.
We see companies go under every day despite them being slightly profitable, simply because certain standard can't be sustained without huge sacrifices, and in the corporate world those sacrifices are not accepted.
Look at Borders. There were plenty of extremely profitable stores in many areas, stores that were packed and busy all day. In theory, the chain would had been able to survive by axing every single unprofitable store and retaining the profitable ones, even if that meant going down to 10% of the former store number.
Corporate and investors do not accept such moves, though and thats the same type of move Kodak had to move (and is trying to do now but too late by axing the camera business and just keeping printers, under the protection of bankruptcy law, though.)
As some one that carefully preserves 50 year old photos around, I fully understand.
But as the same person having a dog eat one of said photos, and others eaten by termites over the years, I also got to say most of them will not survive many more years without digital preservation.
In the year 2062 my grandchildren may talk equally nostalgically about that old cracked glass screen relic iPad they managed to get to work so they were able to see obsolete PNG files that no system bothers supporting anymore. They may look at their holocubes and gasp how its not the same as that digital screen that I actually held on my hands before their parents were even conieved.
Sadly lost in all of this is the family photo album, or the shoebox of history. Nobody prints photos anymore. Entire family photo history is lost to the first hard drive failure, and the one at a time viewing of computer files on a monitor is simply unsatisfying.
Forgot to answer this: tablets are very likely going to do a very nice replacement for family albums.
Without axing branches of the company, I guess the only other path would had been to go Sony-Like: offer good quality digital cameras very cheap, cheaper than anyone, and then equip them with a proprietary media format that is sold at an expensive premium. Market this media format as having some imaginary brand related quality to it, same as they did with Kodak brand film.
Perhaps it's also an issue that they headed into digital too early, at a time where the market didn't care for digital because it was still not good enough.
There are many many ways to analyze this company and with a time machine, perhaps there is more than a couple of ways to save it from it's impending fate.
Apple is a great example of a company that does not stick to the "little cash on pocket" rule, but it also has been heavily criticized for it. They are a rare exception, though.
You can't file for bankruptcy just because you see that the market is headed in a different direction than you. You must be in very bad position already for that to be an option.
There is one common trait that Kodak shares with every single other company out there (and most American households, ironically) and it's that they lived nearly month to month. Unlike households (that tend to just want to enjoy the moment so they don’t save for a year of potential unemployment) most companies don’t like having too much money "burning a hole in their pockets" since they feel every unspent penny is missed opportunity.
They live with barely enough money to pay operational costs for a month or two. If profits go down, they are forced to fire people left and right (why we see investors go crazy for small 2% profit drops.) Some drastic thing happens that changes your market within a year and you will go bankrupt quickly, even if you are willing to adapt or even if you are yourself the first to start such a market trend.
Not true, Kodak actually adopted digital technology extremely early. They ventured into inventing many of the first generation digital photography technologies in association with Apple (and that’s biting them in the rear since now the patents they got from that and are using to sue Apple, among others, are being disputed by Apple as also or exclusively belonging to them.)
What really killed Kodak was the structure. The company had an extremely high profit margin business model in the film arena. So profitable they own[ed?] their own silver mills. When digital photography came to be, and film finally died, a humongous branch of their business died.
The only way for them to survive would have been to axe a gigantic percentage of the company, firing insane chunks of their manpower and getting rid of a lot of physical assets. The problem with such a move with a publicly traded company is that it makes it sound like the company is dying; investors will pull back in a heartbeat if the company suddenly axes over 60% of their manpower (and I’m being generous, they likely would have had to cut back even more.)
Another issue was that Kodak had too many eggs in one simple basket. They did go into photocopiers and printers, but those are two shrinking markets. In fact, now that it’s dying the company finally decided that they may as well axe the entire photography business and stick to printers. At this point they have little to lose since everyone knows they are walking dead. Investors that would had pulled out already did.
Kodak could have expanded in other fields, like computers and displays or TVs, spread their boundaries. This would have made them a bit more resilient to any given branch drying up. Or they could have gone the Apple way and not expand like crazy just because they can, keep a huge stockpile of cash in the bank and not expand operations just because they can afford to, only if they had to. Actually Apple did both. They expanded from computers into music, mobile smartphones, and TV setup boxes (business that is rumored to expand even further) not to mention invent a brand new computing branch with content consumption focused tablets.
So, Kodak did try to adapt, react and even be proactive, but restricted themselves to the familiar grounds (photography) and decided to live (like most companies) using up almost all their income nearly as quickly as they acquired it.
I am not sure if anyone is arguing to "bail them out" or anything like that, but it is an interesting experiment to try to figure out what exactly went wrong and what way would had it been possible to save the company.
I think in the future, during economy or enterprise management studies; Kodak's history will be deeply dissected and studied.
The true hate crime was not committed by Dharun Ravi.
The true hate crime was committed by most of us.
Tyler Clementi didn’t kill himself just because of one guy finding out he was gay. He killed himself because all of society leads him to believe his entire life was ruined, that anyone knowing he was gay was too much to bear and that society would forever reject him.
Yes, Ravi committed a crime, but it seems the court system is trying to stamp the entire blame of the suicide on the one guy and call it all good. It won’t be good as long as society makes people feel that going out of the closet is an unbearable burden.
Fast food is extremely expensive. It's way cheaper to buy raw meats, vegetables and fruit. Grass feed beef and antibiotic free chicken, plus organic fruits and vegies are ideal and are on the expensive side, but going for the regular store stuff is still WAY healthier than fast food and also much more affordable.
Grains and complex carbs are all very unhealthy. A proper healthy diet should only consist of fruit, vegetables and meats (there is a LOT of room to do good cooking there, you can do many sauces and stuff just with vegies.) Nuts and mushrooms are also fine.
Bread, potato, pasta and rice are the biggest reason for obesity. You don’t even have to over eat them to gain weight if your diet is nearly heavily based around them. You won’t lose weight counting calories as long as these items are still on your diet.
Fats are actually not as bad as most people think. The correlation between fat and heart decease is something I still don’t understand. It has no real medical study backing and almost seems religious in nature (pure faith.) In combination with complex crabs they can buildup but it’s not because of fats, it’s because of what the crabs do to you that your body can’t process them properly.
It’s actually takes a lot of effort to gain weight if you only consume meats, fruits and vegetables.
Big clarification: some confuse this with “low carb” diets. That’s not how this goes. It’s not about eliminating all carbs; it’s about eliminating gluten and complex carbs. You should get your carb intake from fruit and vegetables, and most meals may actually not go down very well if they are entirely composed of meat and fat.
One last note: candy and granulated sugar are not mentioned here but are horrible for you. Get your sweet stuff from fruit like pears and kiwi. Oh and the stuff stores sell under the name of “yogurt” is either just candy or artificial chemical hell. Avoid that stuff.
Sources: The prices at the grocery store, the prices at fast foods and my wife who is a diabetes researcher.
Fats are actually not as bad for you as most people think. The correlation between fat and heart decease is something I still don’t understand. It has no real medical study backing and almost seem religious in nature (pure faith.) In combination with complex crabs they can buildup but it’s not because of fats, it’s because of the crabs.
It’s actually takes a lot of effort to gain weight if you only consume meats, fruits and vegetables.
Big clarification: some confuse this with “low carb” diets. That’s not how this goes. It’s not about eliminating all carbs; it’s about eliminating gluten and complex carbs. You should get your carb intake from fruit and vegetables, and most meals may actually not go down very well if they are entirely composed of meat and fat.
Sources: The prices at the grocery store, the prices at fast foods and my wife who is a diabetes researcher.
Microsoft does not pretend they are not in the advertising industry. They simply make it clear where that line ends. Hotmail is indeed ad driven, but it's not pushed as a business solution. Business solutions are entirely ad free, and are not dropped or cut without years of continued support.
Presenting a choice to the user is not the same as providing a choice to the user.
Presenting would imply that you see a dialog box at launch asking you to decide what you want, they show you, they present you, and they don't just stash it away in a preference window without even telling you it is now there. Sure, its not hard to find, but how is the (common) user supposed to know what new options made it into their browser since they first installed it, or even at the time they installed it?
This is an important enough setting to actually request the user a forced decision on first availability or first configuration (or at next update if the user never manually configured it in the past.)
Do Not Track is intended to express an individual's choice, or preference, to not be tracked. It's important that the signal represents a choice made by the person behind the keyboard and not the software maker, because ultimately it's not Firefox being tracked, it's the user.
If this was even remotely true, the right approach would be to ask the user, no defaults, force a choice, simple question: Do you want to enable "Do Not Track"?
Yes and No with no button mapped to Esc or Enter/Return. Force a mouse click on the desired option.
If a browser has never asked this question, it should, upon the next update that enables the question to be asked, ask the question.
Adding a "Do not Track" option is an extremely important feature addition, but no one is going to go hunting down for it, especially if it was not there the first time they installed it. Only us geeks would ever realize about it.
It's up to the individual user to decide how harmful tracking is for them, but no matter how little or strongly they feel about it, there is no way to undo any harm they feel was done due to the flag was set to allow tracking by default. Therefore if a default is going to be provided it should not be the one that leaves the user the most exposed, but the one that grants them the most privacy.
Not entirely true. This is just email we talking about, and any paid email service that has no ads is a viable alternative, not a disaster (unless you consider paying a small fee a month to be a disaster.)
But the Gmail Man video is right in many aspects, specially the Gmail Man's own arguments, like "who care" or "it's business" and "I'm just skimming for keywords." It IS a funny video, and I have a Gmail account that I keep active until the day I find a decent and viable replacement for Reader... until then, may as well use GMail too if they are anyways scanning my news reading preferences.
You are not "affected" with them directly tracking you either.
Truth be told, if consider you are "affected" by tracking, you will still be "affected." There are some valid reasons to feel affected, too. Things like personal like sexual preferences or a teenager quietly getting pregnant and performing an abortion, these are things you rather keep to yourself but are not (at least in liberal eyes) wrong. Google may splash to your family by "accident" via targeted advertisement comes to mind, ironically it's even more likely to happen in a household with pure IP tracking (if everyone in the household has their web history turned off.)
In theory it may even sound better to keep the tracking on, but then it "is there", where someone may some day gain access and look at it.
Not everyone has these types of secrets or privacy concerns, but just because you have one does not mean it's invalid or you are a criminal.
Now on a separate note.... is there a way to download the history? I found interesting how far my history goes and would rather download it all than delete it, at least for the time being. I can’t find anywhere an option to download it, other than go page by page downloading the HTML pages... a bit too much for 5 years of history.
I nearly saw it happen. Female coworker divorced, 3 kids. Husband was a repo man who always got paid cash and never filed taxes. He managed to prove he got nearly no work all year long, did was smart enough to claim a minimal amount.
Result was he didn’t have to pay a cent to her because "due to bad economy he had no job and was [now] living with parents." She did wanted the father to share more time with the kids than the absolute minimum default, but she was told that should he have any more time with the kids SHE would have to pay him, so she backed off. Man was that woman ticked off, especially since she knew he was actually making good money.
And before you ask, yes she considered ratting him up but her lawyer warned her she would have to come up with solid evidence of such an accusation, something she did not have.
That's pretty fucked up. What bearing does the sex life of the parent have on the fitness of the parent?
Sex life has every bearing when it comes to marriage. That’s... sort of what marriage is about. It's... you know.... a legally backed monogamous institution.
In the state in question (my understanding) it's not just the kid’s custody that is lost, but any properties and wealth is not even split in half. The party that was infidel (if only one was) loses every right to everything the law can grant.
It’s a bit like an insured warehouse. If it catches fire because someone set fire on it, you can claim insurance and that other party may suffer legal consequences. If you set it on fire yourself not only do you get to claim no insurance but you may be subject to legal consequences yourself (i.e.: you lost everything.)
Note everywhere it may be possible to prove that drug usage, alcoholism or domestic violence from the other party are evidence enough that he can’t have custody, but should the divorce be specifically because of infidelity, well... why on earth is the other stuff not part of the divorce process? And why not just divorce before sleeping with others? In the end, it's not fucked up. You are not happy with the marriage, do the right thing and do a proper divorce before you go sleeping around with others.
No mod points but I'll applaud you. I suspect this whole story will be riddled with various anecdotes of how the man shafted a man over the same issues.
My most immediate frustration with the system is the insane imbalance of child support and how it's geared so the father pays 100% of what they say is required to support a kid. Even if prior to the divorce the wife worked and paid half into such expenses. It's completely unrealistic.
To be fair, ever state handles things extremely differently. From recent experience of a friend, I have learned that Tennessee has fixed tables for child support and they are entirely based off W2 and income. If the father has no income job, he is not forced to pay. Actually, without a job but with shared custody every other weekend, the woman may be forced to pay him based off how much time a year he has the kids and how much she earns. It's insanely unlikely a man will get main custody there, though.
I hear in Florida... or California... can’t remember and may not be either... but at least one state will take infidelity insanely seriously. If a mother is found guilty of infidelity, she will lose complete custody and may get weekends IF the father is generous.
However, this is from my experience as a third party witness. Once of the premarital discussions I had w/ my wife was to agree that we'd settle shit like adults if things went sour. Life's too short to be worrying about making the other miserable. There's no need to drag kids through that crap either. The more disagreements you can resolve outside of the court amicably the better, IMO. Now we'll see if things actually pan out that way if I ever have the cross that bridge...
As my dad said in regards to getting married "Boy, choose wisely."
If it's not written in paper, good luck with that. The person I noted above had similar oral agreement. She took the guy to court every other month (she also happened to steal "from him" during the marriage over the years until she collected enough in a secret bank account to put the down payment on her new house immediately after the divorce started (she did not even wait until it was finalized, she knew the guy didn’t had the money to fight possession of that house in court.)
Slashdot Mirror
The APS is not something you were able to prevent; it's just part of the cost of maintaining that business branch alive.
If you are keeping the film branch alive, it IS expected to keep operating and innovate within its own bounds, and thatâ(TM)s what the APS was.
Doomed to fail? Perhaps, but I lived that window of time and digital cameras were widely regarded as still not-viable in 1996. Actually, I was studding art at the time and recall a conversation between a graduate student friend of mine and his former photography professor talking about digital photography in 1998. The professor stated that maybe in another year or two it would be required to jump into that wagon but it still was a bit too early. Given the APS was introduced to the market 2 years before that and likely in R&D for longer than that, I would not call its development time and cost brainless.
Image quality was not the only issue; storage was also a huge issue at the time. It was not until the late 21st century that mass storage large enough to replace film in long trips or photo shoots became viable.
Still gives Kodak 11 years to catch up but how do you justify to investors you just have to axe the film branch, that constitutes perhaps 60%-70% of your company? Even Steve Jobs saw a lot of negative feedback when he axed huge chunks of Apple after his return (he axed about every product line but 4 computer models, the Newton PDA between them.)
I may had gone too verbose on my post. My point is that they adapted but they were encumbered by huge branches they were not able to axe.
We see companies go under every day despite them being slightly profitable, simply because certain standard can't be sustained without huge sacrifices, and in the corporate world those sacrifices are not accepted.
Look at Borders. There were plenty of extremely profitable stores in many areas, stores that were packed and busy all day. In theory, the chain would had been able to survive by axing every single unprofitable store and retaining the profitable ones, even if that meant going down to 10% of the former store number.
Corporate and investors do not accept such moves, though and thats the same type of move Kodak had to move (and is trying to do now but too late by axing the camera business and just keeping printers, under the protection of bankruptcy law, though.)
As some one that carefully preserves 50 year old photos around, I fully understand.
But as the same person having a dog eat one of said photos, and others eaten by termites over the years, I also got to say most of them will not survive many more years without digital preservation.
In the year 2062 my grandchildren may talk equally nostalgically about that old cracked glass screen relic iPad they managed to get to work so they were able to see obsolete PNG files that no system bothers supporting anymore. They may look at their holocubes and gasp how its not the same as that digital screen that I actually held on my hands before their parents were even conieved.
Sad, would had been an interesting read.
Sadly lost in all of this is the family photo album, or the shoebox of history. Nobody prints photos anymore. Entire family photo history is lost
to the first hard drive failure, and the one at a time viewing of computer files on a monitor is simply unsatisfying.
Forgot to answer this: tablets are very likely going to do a very nice replacement for family albums.
Without axing branches of the company, I guess the only other path would had been to go Sony-Like: offer good quality digital cameras very cheap, cheaper than anyone, and then equip them with a proprietary media format that is sold at an expensive premium. Market this media format as having some imaginary brand related quality to it, same as they did with Kodak brand film.
Perhaps it's also an issue that they headed into digital too early, at a time where the market didn't care for digital because it was still not good enough.
There are many many ways to analyze this company and with a time machine, perhaps there is more than a couple of ways to save it from it's impending fate.
Apple is a great example of a company that does not stick to the "little cash on pocket" rule, but it also has been heavily criticized for it. They are a rare exception, though.
You can't file for bankruptcy just because you see that the market is headed in a different direction than you. You must be in very bad position already for that to be an option.
I think there is plenty wrong to find in Kodak's history, but not as obvious as many think.
I went deep into another post in this article here: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2695641&cid=39177755
There is one common trait that Kodak shares with every single other company out there (and most American households, ironically) and it's that they lived nearly month to month. Unlike households (that tend to just want to enjoy the moment so they don’t save for a year of potential unemployment) most companies don’t like having too much money "burning a hole in their pockets" since they feel every unspent penny is missed opportunity.
They live with barely enough money to pay operational costs for a month or two. If profits go down, they are forced to fire people left and right (why we see investors go crazy for small 2% profit drops.) Some drastic thing happens that changes your market within a year and you will go bankrupt quickly, even if you are willing to adapt or even if you are yourself the first to start such a market trend.
They failed to react to changes in their market.
Not true, Kodak actually adopted digital technology extremely early. They ventured into inventing many of the first generation digital photography technologies in association with Apple (and that’s biting them in the rear since now the patents they got from that and are using to sue Apple, among others, are being disputed by Apple as also or exclusively belonging to them.)
What really killed Kodak was the structure. The company had an extremely high profit margin business model in the film arena. So profitable they own[ed?] their own silver mills. When digital photography came to be, and film finally died, a humongous branch of their business died.
The only way for them to survive would have been to axe a gigantic percentage of the company, firing insane chunks of their manpower and getting rid of a lot of physical assets. The problem with such a move with a publicly traded company is that it makes it sound like the company is dying; investors will pull back in a heartbeat if the company suddenly axes over 60% of their manpower (and I’m being generous, they likely would have had to cut back even more.)
Another issue was that Kodak had too many eggs in one simple basket. They did go into photocopiers and printers, but those are two shrinking markets. In fact, now that it’s dying the company finally decided that they may as well axe the entire photography business and stick to printers. At this point they have little to lose since everyone knows they are walking dead. Investors that would had pulled out already did.
Kodak could have expanded in other fields, like computers and displays or TVs, spread their boundaries. This would have made them a bit more resilient to any given branch drying up. Or they could have gone the Apple way and not expand like crazy just because they can, keep a huge stockpile of cash in the bank and not expand operations just because they can afford to, only if they had to. Actually Apple did both. They expanded from computers into music, mobile smartphones, and TV setup boxes (business that is rumored to expand even further) not to mention invent a brand new computing branch with content consumption focused tablets.
So, Kodak did try to adapt, react and even be proactive, but restricted themselves to the familiar grounds (photography) and decided to live (like most companies) using up almost all their income nearly as quickly as they acquired it.
I am not sure if anyone is arguing to "bail them out" or anything like that, but it is an interesting experiment to try to figure out what exactly went wrong and what way would had it been possible to save the company.
I think in the future, during economy or enterprise management studies; Kodak's history will be deeply dissected and studied.
The true hate crime was not committed by Dharun Ravi.
The true hate crime was committed by most of us.
Tyler Clementi didn’t kill himself just because of one guy finding out he was gay. He killed himself because all of society leads him to believe his entire life was ruined, that anyone knowing he was gay was too much to bear and that society would forever reject him.
Yes, Ravi committed a crime, but it seems the court system is trying to stamp the entire blame of the suicide on the one guy and call it all good. It won’t be good as long as society makes people feel that going out of the closet is an unbearable burden.
Fast food is extremely expensive. It's way cheaper to buy raw meats, vegetables and fruit. Grass feed beef and antibiotic free chicken, plus organic fruits and vegies are ideal and are on the expensive side, but going for the regular store stuff is still WAY healthier than fast food and also much more affordable.
Grains and complex carbs are all very unhealthy. A proper healthy diet should only consist of fruit, vegetables and meats (there is a LOT of room to do good cooking there, you can do many sauces and stuff just with vegies.) Nuts and mushrooms are also fine.
Bread, potato, pasta and rice are the biggest reason for obesity. You don’t even have to over eat them to gain weight if your diet is nearly heavily based around them. You won’t lose weight counting calories as long as these items are still on your diet.
Fats are actually not as bad as most people think. The correlation between fat and heart decease is something I still don’t understand. It has no real medical study backing and almost seems religious in nature (pure faith.) In combination with complex crabs they can buildup but it’s not because of fats, it’s because of what the crabs do to you that your body can’t process them properly.
It’s actually takes a lot of effort to gain weight if you only consume meats, fruits and vegetables.
Big clarification: some confuse this with “low carb” diets. That’s not how this goes. It’s not about eliminating all carbs; it’s about eliminating gluten and complex carbs. You should get your carb intake from fruit and vegetables, and most meals may actually not go down very well if they are entirely composed of meat and fat.
One last note: candy and granulated sugar are not mentioned here but are horrible for you. Get your sweet stuff from fruit like pears and kiwi. Oh and the stuff stores sell under the name of “yogurt” is either just candy or artificial chemical hell. Avoid that stuff.
Sources: The prices at the grocery store, the prices at fast foods and my wife who is a diabetes researcher.
Fats are actually not as bad for you as most people think. The correlation between fat and heart decease is something I still don’t understand. It has no real medical study backing and almost seem religious in nature (pure faith.) In combination with complex crabs they can buildup but it’s not because of fats, it’s because of the crabs.
It’s actually takes a lot of effort to gain weight if you only consume meats, fruits and vegetables.
Big clarification: some confuse this with “low carb” diets. That’s not how this goes. It’s not about eliminating all carbs; it’s about eliminating gluten and complex carbs. You should get your carb intake from fruit and vegetables, and most meals may actually not go down very well if they are entirely composed of meat and fat.
Sources: The prices at the grocery store, the prices at fast foods and my wife who is a diabetes researcher.
Microsoft does not pretend they are not in the advertising industry. They simply make it clear where that line ends. Hotmail is indeed ad driven, but it's not pushed as a business solution. Business solutions are entirely ad free, and are not dropped or cut without years of continued support.
No, They provide the choice to the user.
Presenting a choice to the user is not the same as providing a choice to the user.
Presenting would imply that you see a dialog box at launch asking you to decide what you want, they show you, they present you, and they don't just stash it away in a preference window without even telling you it is now there. Sure, its not hard to find, but how is the (common) user supposed to know what new options made it into their browser since they first installed it, or even at the time they installed it?
This is an important enough setting to actually request the user a forced decision on first availability or first configuration (or at next update if the user never manually configured it in the past.)
Do Not Track is intended to express an individual's choice, or preference, to not be tracked. It's important that the signal represents a choice made by the person behind the keyboard and not the software maker, because ultimately it's not Firefox being tracked, it's the user.
If this was even remotely true, the right approach would be to ask the user, no defaults, force a choice, simple question: Do you want to enable "Do Not Track"?
Yes and No with no button mapped to Esc or Enter/Return. Force a mouse click on the desired option.
If a browser has never asked this question, it should, upon the next update that enables the question to be asked, ask the question.
Adding a "Do not Track" option is an extremely important feature addition, but no one is going to go hunting down for it, especially if it was not there the first time they installed it. Only us geeks would ever realize about it.
It's up to the individual user to decide how harmful tracking is for them, but no matter how little or strongly they feel about it, there is no way to undo any harm they feel was done due to the flag was set to allow tracking by default. Therefore if a default is going to be provided it should not be the one that leaves the user the most exposed, but the one that grants them the most privacy.
Not entirely true. This is just email we talking about, and any paid email service that has no ads is a viable alternative, not a disaster (unless you consider paying a small fee a month to be a disaster.)
But the Gmail Man video is right in many aspects, specially the Gmail Man's own arguments, like "who care" or "it's business" and "I'm just skimming for keywords." It IS a funny video, and I have a Gmail account that I keep active until the day I find a decent and viable replacement for Reader... until then, may as well use GMail too if they are anyways scanning my news reading preferences.
They have no choice. The minute they start controlling the content they lose the "web host" IP protection status.
darn... there has to be an easier way to expor this stuff accurately (with date and other fields that are shown in the /history page)
Google likes to brag about your ability to take your data out of Google, where is that tool for web history!?
You are not "affected" with them directly tracking you either.
Truth be told, if consider you are "affected" by tracking, you will still be "affected." There are some valid reasons to feel affected, too. Things like personal like sexual preferences or a teenager quietly getting pregnant and performing an abortion, these are things you rather keep to yourself but are not (at least in liberal eyes) wrong. Google may splash to your family by "accident" via targeted advertisement comes to mind, ironically it's even more likely to happen in a household with pure IP tracking (if everyone in the household has their web history turned off.)
In theory it may even sound better to keep the tracking on, but then it "is there", where someone may some day gain access and look at it.
Not everyone has these types of secrets or privacy concerns, but just because you have one does not mean it's invalid or you are a criminal.
Now on a separate note.... is there a way to download the history? I found interesting how far my history goes and would rather download it all than delete it, at least for the time being. I can’t find anywhere an option to download it, other than go page by page downloading the HTML pages... a bit too much for 5 years of history.
I nearly saw it happen. Female coworker divorced, 3 kids. Husband was a repo man who always got paid cash and never filed taxes. He managed to prove he got nearly no work all year long, did was smart enough to claim a minimal amount.
Result was he didn’t have to pay a cent to her because "due to bad economy he had no job and was [now] living with parents." She did wanted the father to share more time with the kids than the absolute minimum default, but she was told that should he have any more time with the kids SHE would have to pay him, so she backed off. Man was that woman ticked off, especially since she knew he was actually making good money.
And before you ask, yes she considered ratting him up but her lawyer warned her she would have to come up with solid evidence of such an accusation, something she did not have.
Perfectly stated.
Some one else replied to your post with a perfect answer to that, I requote it replying to you so you can see it (since ACs stay a bit hidden here)
A good parent is, above all, a role model.
A bad husband is a bad father.
A bad wife is a bad mother.
In more general terms, anyone who breaks a close trust has no place in a position of responsibility.
A failing marriage can be ended amicably. The partners are free to hump others after this.
That's pretty fucked up. What bearing does the sex life of the parent have on the fitness of the parent?
Sex life has every bearing when it comes to marriage. That’s... sort of what marriage is about. It's... you know.... a legally backed monogamous institution.
In the state in question (my understanding) it's not just the kid’s custody that is lost, but any properties and wealth is not even split in half. The party that was infidel (if only one was) loses every right to everything the law can grant.
It’s a bit like an insured warehouse. If it catches fire because someone set fire on it, you can claim insurance and that other party may suffer legal consequences. If you set it on fire yourself not only do you get to claim no insurance but you may be subject to legal consequences yourself (i.e.: you lost everything.)
Note everywhere it may be possible to prove that drug usage, alcoholism or domestic violence from the other party are evidence enough that he can’t have custody, but should the divorce be specifically because of infidelity, well... why on earth is the other stuff not part of the divorce process? And why not just divorce before sleeping with others? In the end, it's not fucked up. You are not happy with the marriage, do the right thing and do a proper divorce before you go sleeping around with others.
No mod points but I'll applaud you. I suspect this whole story will be riddled with various anecdotes of how the man shafted a man over the same issues.
My most immediate frustration with the system is the insane imbalance of child support and how it's geared so the father pays 100% of what they say is required to support a kid. Even if prior to the divorce the wife worked and paid half into such expenses. It's completely unrealistic.
To be fair, ever state handles things extremely differently. From recent experience of a friend, I have learned that Tennessee has fixed tables for child support and they are entirely based off W2 and income. If the father has no income job, he is not forced to pay. Actually, without a job but with shared custody every other weekend, the woman may be forced to pay him based off how much time a year he has the kids and how much she earns. It's insanely unlikely a man will get main custody there, though.
I hear in Florida... or California... can’t remember and may not be either... but at least one state will take infidelity insanely seriously. If a mother is found guilty of infidelity, she will lose complete custody and may get weekends IF the father is generous.
However, this is from my experience as a third party witness. Once of the premarital discussions I had w/ my wife was to agree that we'd settle shit like adults if things went sour. Life's too short to be worrying about making the other miserable. There's no need to drag kids through that crap either. The more disagreements you can resolve outside of the court amicably the better, IMO. Now we'll see if things actually pan out that way if I ever have the cross that bridge...
As my dad said in regards to getting married "Boy, choose wisely."
If it's not written in paper, good luck with that. The person I noted above had similar oral agreement. She took the guy to court every other month (she also happened to steal "from him" during the marriage over the years until she collected enough in a secret bank account to put the down payment on her new house immediately after the divorce started (she did not even wait until it was finalized, she knew the guy didn’t had the money to fight possession of that house in court.)