I don't think there is an equivalent for Google yet, but there are several options for blocking Facebook having anything to do with the sites you visit (other than facebook itself). Both adblock and script block have relevant options, for instance.
If you don't want to use adblock or scriptblock, or use a browser that they do not support so can't use them even if you want to, then there is this plugin: http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/ - there are versions for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
I feel a plugin coming on that will randomise the ID reported this way. Or submits misleading results from sites that are not using the service. Or even shares IDs between users so the tracked information becomes one large blob that doesn't identify the actions of any one person/group...
Another solution is to pay a little more for the "premium" options. Unfortunately this is not what most home users want to hear - the Internet is not important enough to justify the extra if they can possibly get by without it.
I switched off Be (though I still strongly recommend them if they are available in your area and FTTC isn't or you don't need FTTC) who have their own backhaul instead of using BT's, as I wanted to move to FTTC for the extra upstream capability (I now sync at ~10Mbit upstream, and see about 8.5Mbit in usable throughput, where the best my line was capable of otherwise was ~1.5Mbit). You pay extra for the 10Mbit up (otherwise you are capped at 2Mbit) usually by way of effectively being on plan intended more for commercial users and techies (like me) than the average home user, and the extra you pay also nets you "premium" status in certain parts of BT's network which apparently implies some traffic priority and thus far (I only move a month ago) seems to have protected me from the congestion problems other people on BT based ISPs report on the same exchange at certain times of the week.
In order of preference, if you are looking for reasonable speed with reliable QoS, I would suggest:
1. FTTC with 10Mbit up (even if you don't need the speed upstream, it may help) with an ISP that does not shape traffic or filter it (someone like AAISP) *if* you can afford it and FTTC is available in your area
2. ADSL2+ via Be if they are available from your exchange and your line isn't so long that you can't get more than ~5Mbit
3. ADSL2+ via another LLU provider (though do some research, not all are as good value for money), similarly dependant on line length
4. FTTC without premium (it at least puts you on the 21C network not the old IPStream setup) with a good non shaping/filtering ISP (yes, I would suggest copper to the exchange with Be or similar instead of FTTC via BT at the moment if you care about consistent quality of service more than raw speed)
5. ADSL2+ with a good ISP that either performs little or no traffic shaping (besides the minimum traffic management required for QoS purposes) and no filtering or one that is up front and honest about the traffic management they perform (good look reading between the lines there though!)
6. FTTC without premium with BT or just about any other ISP
7. Anything else if none of the above are available (i.e. if you are on a rural exchange that hasn't seen any upgrades in ten years) or you really do want the cheapest possible (as not of the above will be cheaper than a bog standard ISP where you will experience congestion issues at peak times and have terrible tech support should you ever need it)
I'm not sure where Virgin and other alternative fibre providers fit in there, none of them are available in my area so I've not really researched the ins and outs (though I'll point out that Virgin are usually third in line (behind TalkTalk and BT) when people are complaining about bad service and other behaviour customers would be irritated by if they know about it like http://www.badphorm.co.uk/).
This is probably why BT are seeing a drop in customers: people upgrading to FTTC but using another ISP rather than them, or people moving to LLU providers to try cure congestion/shaping issues they are seeing. For Sky I think they are just seeing a lot of people not renewing after the initial minimum contract - people that signed up because it was very cheap if you already have Sky TV but are jumping ship as soon as the contract is up as they've had problems with the service in that time.
In the case of the above mentioned grandfather I would use the wording "put up a house" which is as unambiguous a phrase as I can think of. It is certainly the wording I would use when I "put up some shelves" I bought from Ikea or "put together" a chest of drawers from the same source.
Your example is far more than than just putting something together, so building (which to me is a word that implies more then "putting up/together") is the least I'd use to describe it. You could probably say you "researched, designed, and built" it and more besides.
What many people mean when they say the did something these days though, is that they commissioned the work and watched someone else do it.
I can confirm that as another brit. Though there are some people woudl would use the "I built..." form. If I might be a bit classist for a moment, more often than not is it the "upper middles" trying to impress at dinner parties (the party being held at the home of someone who "put in an Aga" which means "paid for and had labourers put in an Aga") and other social gatherings where one-up-man-ship is standard practice. Caveat: it is not all people of that standing, just a certain (vocal and irritating) minority, and there are people in lower financial/social categories guilty of it too.
This won't affect anyone except the spammer's marks and people in the circles of those marks.
The +1s you give may affect results for you and to a lesser extent the results of people who you are linked two both ways (you have them in a circle and vice-versa).
The only way this is going to affect users in general is if those users have had their accounts hacked (by falling for a phishing attack or such) and are being used to click the +1s without their knowledge (and no spammer is going to waste time on that, as there are far more immediate ways to take advantage of a stolen Google account).
You could manage security at the per service level, but often managing it at a per server level is slightly less hassle, so the VM option reduces admin effort a little in that area.
Also by keeping the tasks on separate (virtual) machines you reduce the chance of a configuration change for one app having unexpected effects on another. Shared libraries can be an issue to - some commercial app vendors will not support you if you don't have exactly the right library versions and those exact versions might not be the same as the versions required by another app. While it is possible to have multiple versions around on one OS instance, using VMs is much less hassle.
There are other benefits to: for instance when the workload seen by one or more of the tasks increases to the point where the host is overloaded, moving a VM to a new host is often quicker and easier than pulling a particular service from one mixed task machine to another.
You are not wrong in that the overhead of virtualisation can be considerable and in some cases the option is far from optimal, but for a lot of environments it ends up making sense to use it over other options.
Firefox mobile failed for me as tab switching is unusable on the poxy little QVGA screen my phone has, though I found the built-in browser irritating enough (I'm on Andoid 2.1, it may have improved in later revisions of course) to look into other options. Opera Mobile is what I settled on in the end. Works like a charm, and it seems both nippy and stable. You just need to tweak the settings a little to make best use of a low resolution screen.
Actually, the first of the final straws was provided by Hugh Grant some weeks before the Millie Dowler thing became widely known. Up until that point there had been little publicly available evidence that the accusations (circulated for a few years and thus far dismissed by the police despite the fact they were sitting on a large chunk of evidence that was either being ignored or simply hadn't been properly analysed). Hugh, bitter at being one of the targets, pulled a blinder and managed to record an ex NotW reporter talking about some og the things that had gone on but were being publicly denied.
This caught the attention of non-Murdoch media anew, which in turn piqued the public interest to the point of forcing the police to (re)review the evidence. At this point the information about Millie's phone came out, particularly the part about them wiping the existing messages so more could come in which did interfere with the investigation (and legally speaking is evidence tampering, which is a serious offence, and morally speaking is completely reprehensible too). Whether this new evidence about Millie came from the police looking at their records again or from "new" information found/provided by other media bodies, I forget.
Now the public were baying for blood. Celebrities? We couldn't give a monkey's chuff, to be frank. Let them sort their own problems out. They can afford good lawyers. Interfering with the investigation into the disappearance (and, it turn out, murder) of a young girl? Now that is something we got hot under the collar about. The final nails in the coffin were evidence coming out of the woodwork regarding the "hacking" of the voicemail of victims of the "7/7" bombings in London and their families, and the voicemail of injured/killed soldiers. This brought new condemnation from other sources and was what closed the NotW (many organisations, commercial and charitable, call all ties with the paper after those revelations - though why some of them didn't over just the murder case rather than sitting quiet until these new accusations is beyond me).
Whether Hugh was put up to his actions by someone in the know who wanted to skupper the BSkyB thing (there are many people, both high and low profile, who wanted to see that fail), and/or whether the ex reporter he "stung" was in on it, or whether the timing was coincidental, is subject to debate. Personally I err on the side of coincidence here, partly as the timing would require some impressive orchestration to pull off intentionally, with advantage being taken once the situation arose rather then some group planning it all to start with, but you never know.
The accusations of 9/11 victims and their families having been invaded in a similar manner are as yet just pure speculation as far as I can see. If good evidence for any such thing ever becomes apparent that could be very series for everyone significant in the organisation, old man Murdoch downwards, especially with this year being the 10th anniversary. I can see many people being most (justifiably) angry, that feeling deepened by thoughts and recollections close to the anniversary, and rival media outlets fanning the flames much enthusiasm, and that would lead to public calls for action against Murdoch in the US (calls too loud for the relevant authorities to ignore, even if they wanted to).
That is my point: I think they need to find a way to better nurture their product (like a good farmer works to take good care of his crops and livestock!), lest they start leaving for better pastures.
Though for the userbase Google has, the number of products they are spread over, the number of languages they speak, and so forth, I'd guess that "5 or 6 people" is massively (as in orders of magnitude) wide of the mark when it comes to judging what is needed!
Webmail might be useful when you're not near your own computer, but I'd prefer a fully-fledged MUA over any of the available webmail interfaces any day.
You shouldn't conflate all webmail clients with gmail. There are a number of http based clients that provide a fairly complete set of features akin to those found in desktop MUAs. I use Zimbra for both a small office mail server I run and for my own mail server, and its web based client is pretty good. There are a number of other web based MUAs that provide a similar feature set and can be attached to any IMAP/POP/SMTP service you may use.
This is the same for any free-to-use ad-sponsored system. I don't have a problem with it, though I do wish more people were wise to it as they'd understand the dynamics of the online world better if they were and be less surprised by certain happenings when they occur.
Google do sometimes show a lack of care for their product though. Yes they provide us with a collection of very useful tools and some fun toys too which is great when it all works, but they should try make a little more effort to provide speedy methods of resolution when mistakes are made.
Some of my family manage to get infections regularly. I've stopped doing even this three step process as I'm tired of trying to educate them to be careful. First I'll try the built in "system restore" feature and if that doesn't work (either because the restore points don't go back far enough, or we'd need to go too far back to be useful anyway, because the malware has managed to infect the restore point data too, or because it is rootkit aided (or similar) and gets around system restore that way) it is a boot sector wipe and full OS reinstall I make them explicitly state that they've got a backup of their important data before they hand me the machine, of course.
It is amazing how much more careful people become when they know the only fix is likely to be a refresh which means reinstalling all their games and crap afterwards.
At least it is in a fit state for any information stored to be drawn off onto a replacement device though. That is certainly a bonus over not powering up at all.
IIRC IE7 and IE8 won't run without SP2 or SP3 installed, which may pose a problem to those with pirate copies who can't be bothered to jump through the hoops to get them installed without a properly activated copy of XP (and are therefore running SP1 or "pure" XP).
But do they support XP before any service packs are installed? Many software packages don't officially support XP "pure" or XP with just service pack 1. If FF needs SP2 and most of the pirate copies over there are still running "pure" or SP1 due to activation issues stopping the service packs installing then FF is not an option.
Though I think a lot of web based apps like online banking facilities use ActiveX for stuff over there (and in other countries, such as South Korea, too), which locks users into IE of some sort to an extent. IE6 is probably common (if the piracy is as big an issue as I'm lead to believe) because IIRC IE7 and IE8 won't install without an "activated" copy of XP with SP2 or later applied.
But what constitutes part of an article? Without at least the headline stored at Google how will the search engine present a link to the user? Without at least some of the text from the article how would it display any sort of summary about what is being linked to? In fact, without any of the article how does the search engine know that it is relevant to your search?
They can't provide a link as a result of my search while still obeying the court, unless they are expected to include a link to those papers in the results for every search just in case there is relevant information there...
Even if Google are being spiteful rather than just following the letter of the court's order, they are at worst spitefully following the letter of the court's order and following the letter of the court's order, spitefully or not, is what they have to do to avoid further legal action regarding the matter.
The same with eBay: the buyer is king (unless you are a very large seller, though in eBay's case I can see their business case for it rather than it seeming arbitrary: if buyers start to leave in any significant number prices fall and so does their cut, if sellers leave in any significant number competition drops leaving room which new sellers will come in to take advantage of bringing things back to equilibrium.
But is it not religious memes that make you have this problem?
Monogamy is not unique to the teachings of religion, nor are other relationship patterns anathema to all religions. While you could claim that atheists who are monogamous are so through tradition based on the old religions of their upbringing/ancestors, that doesn't hold water as some religions openly permit other forms of relationship.
For many it is a trust/safety issue and has nothing to do with what religion and tradition say on the matter. I'm an athiest and aside from my mentalist period over a decade ago I've either been monogamous or single and it feels the right way to be from my standpoint. Of course there are those who feel different and good luck to them I say: if all the members of a relationship network are mentally healthy and happy in (and fully informed of) the arrangement who am I to say they are wrong and I am right?
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. . ..
Is that really necessary? I know there's a serious anti-Fox News crowd here, but it's quite a stretch to include the entire organization when even the tabloid itself probably frowned on what one individual did.
The tabloid itself is only now frowning on what one person did because it had been made public. Before then they were perfectly happy to ignore the behaviour completely and make what money they could by raking as much as they could from any resulting scoop.
Not OP, but I agree that it's ridiculous to mention News Corp. and especially Rupert Murdoch. The only motivation I see for doing so is out of dislike. When ESPN does something, you don't say "A Disney subsidiary . .." Rupert didn't do this, and no one from News Corp. (outside of the tabloid) had anything to do with it either.
If those higher up in the group did not know what was going on then they should have or should at least take action against those who should have told them and those who should have not done it in the first place.
Perhaps when ESPN does something we should say "a Disnet subsidiary..." - that way umbrella groups might start taking in interest in what their underlings are doing instead of ignoring it until it becomes publicly noticed, defending them until it becomes painfully obvious there is no "reasonable doubt", then disclaiming all responsibility. If they don't get let off becuse the public don't know of the connection they might take an effort to control the worst nature of their investments.
It depends how the technicalities have translated to modern technology (sometimes old case law ends up being applied in the most illogical ways).
If they had removed and destroyed mail addressed to anyone involved in a case they would definitely be guilty of tampering with evidence and interfering with a legal investigation. A "good" lawyer might even get them for willingly perverting the cause of justice.
There had been many prior rumblings, the IE thing that pushed the industry over the edge. Once That one was out of the bag and running everyone else dropped out of the woodwork and started ayellin'. If it had not been for IE, something else would have been the catalyst not long later.
Flashblock (or script block if you want to go one further). Auto-playing audio adverts are the main reason I installed that in the first place. Also useful for video ads when I'm mobile and don't have that much bandwidth to throw at something I couldn't give a rat's arse about.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there is an equivalent for Google yet, but there are several options for blocking Facebook having anything to do with the sites you visit (other than facebook itself). Both adblock and script block have relevant options, for instance.
If you don't want to use adblock or scriptblock, or use a browser that they do not support so can't use them even if you want to, then there is this plugin: http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/ - there are versions for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
I feel a plugin coming on that will randomise the ID reported this way. Or submits misleading results from sites that are not using the service. Or even shares IDs between users so the tracked information becomes one large blob that doesn't identify the actions of any one person/group...
Another solution is to pay a little more for the "premium" options. Unfortunately this is not what most home users want to hear - the Internet is not important enough to justify the extra if they can possibly get by without it.
I switched off Be (though I still strongly recommend them if they are available in your area and FTTC isn't or you don't need FTTC) who have their own backhaul instead of using BT's, as I wanted to move to FTTC for the extra upstream capability (I now sync at ~10Mbit upstream, and see about 8.5Mbit in usable throughput, where the best my line was capable of otherwise was ~1.5Mbit). You pay extra for the 10Mbit up (otherwise you are capped at 2Mbit) usually by way of effectively being on plan intended more for commercial users and techies (like me) than the average home user, and the extra you pay also nets you "premium" status in certain parts of BT's network which apparently implies some traffic priority and thus far (I only move a month ago) seems to have protected me from the congestion problems other people on BT based ISPs report on the same exchange at certain times of the week.
In order of preference, if you are looking for reasonable speed with reliable QoS, I would suggest:
1. FTTC with 10Mbit up (even if you don't need the speed upstream, it may help) with an ISP that does not shape traffic or filter it (someone like AAISP) *if* you can afford it and FTTC is available in your area
2. ADSL2+ via Be if they are available from your exchange and your line isn't so long that you can't get more than ~5Mbit
3. ADSL2+ via another LLU provider (though do some research, not all are as good value for money), similarly dependant on line length
4. FTTC without premium (it at least puts you on the 21C network not the old IPStream setup) with a good non shaping/filtering ISP (yes, I would suggest copper to the exchange with Be or similar instead of FTTC via BT at the moment if you care about consistent quality of service more than raw speed)
5. ADSL2+ with a good ISP that either performs little or no traffic shaping (besides the minimum traffic management required for QoS purposes) and no filtering or one that is up front and honest about the traffic management they perform (good look reading between the lines there though!)
6. FTTC without premium with BT or just about any other ISP
7. Anything else if none of the above are available (i.e. if you are on a rural exchange that hasn't seen any upgrades in ten years) or you really do want the cheapest possible (as not of the above will be cheaper than a bog standard ISP where you will experience congestion issues at peak times and have terrible tech support should you ever need it)
I'm not sure where Virgin and other alternative fibre providers fit in there, none of them are available in my area so I've not really researched the ins and outs (though I'll point out that Virgin are usually third in line (behind TalkTalk and BT) when people are complaining about bad service and other behaviour customers would be irritated by if they know about it like http://www.badphorm.co.uk/).
This is probably why BT are seeing a drop in customers: people upgrading to FTTC but using another ISP rather than them, or people moving to LLU providers to try cure congestion/shaping issues they are seeing. For Sky I think they are just seeing a lot of people not renewing after the initial minimum contract - people that signed up because it was very cheap if you already have Sky TV but are jumping ship as soon as the contract is up as they've had problems with the service in that time.
In the case of the above mentioned grandfather I would use the wording "put up a house" which is as unambiguous a phrase as I can think of. It is certainly the wording I would use when I "put up some shelves" I bought from Ikea or "put together" a chest of drawers from the same source.
Your example is far more than than just putting something together, so building (which to me is a word that implies more then "putting up/together") is the least I'd use to describe it. You could probably say you "researched, designed, and built" it and more besides.
What many people mean when they say the did something these days though, is that they commissioned the work and watched someone else do it.
I can confirm that as another brit. Though there are some people woudl would use the "I built..." form. If I might be a bit classist for a moment, more often than not is it the "upper middles" trying to impress at dinner parties (the party being held at the home of someone who "put in an Aga" which means "paid for and had labourers put in an Aga") and other social gatherings where one-up-man-ship is standard practice. Caveat: it is not all people of that standing, just a certain (vocal and irritating) minority, and there are people in lower financial/social categories guilty of it too.
This won't affect anyone except the spammer's marks and people in the circles of those marks.
The +1s you give may affect results for you and to a lesser extent the results of people who you are linked two both ways (you have them in a circle and vice-versa).
The only way this is going to affect users in general is if those users have had their accounts hacked (by falling for a phishing attack or such) and are being used to click the +1s without their knowledge (and no spammer is going to waste time on that, as there are far more immediate ways to take advantage of a stolen Google account).
You could manage security at the per service level, but often managing it at a per server level is slightly less hassle, so the VM option reduces admin effort a little in that area.
Also by keeping the tasks on separate (virtual) machines you reduce the chance of a configuration change for one app having unexpected effects on another. Shared libraries can be an issue to - some commercial app vendors will not support you if you don't have exactly the right library versions and those exact versions might not be the same as the versions required by another app. While it is possible to have multiple versions around on one OS instance, using VMs is much less hassle.
There are other benefits to: for instance when the workload seen by one or more of the tasks increases to the point where the host is overloaded, moving a VM to a new host is often quicker and easier than pulling a particular service from one mixed task machine to another.
You are not wrong in that the overhead of virtualisation can be considerable and in some cases the option is far from optimal, but for a lot of environments it ends up making sense to use it over other options.
Firefox mobile failed for me as tab switching is unusable on the poxy little QVGA screen my phone has, though I found the built-in browser irritating enough (I'm on Andoid 2.1, it may have improved in later revisions of course) to look into other options. Opera Mobile is what I settled on in the end. Works like a charm, and it seems both nippy and stable. You just need to tweak the settings a little to make best use of a low resolution screen.
Actually, the first of the final straws was provided by Hugh Grant some weeks before the Millie Dowler thing became widely known. Up until that point there had been little publicly available evidence that the accusations (circulated for a few years and thus far dismissed by the police despite the fact they were sitting on a large chunk of evidence that was either being ignored or simply hadn't been properly analysed). Hugh, bitter at being one of the targets, pulled a blinder and managed to record an ex NotW reporter talking about some og the things that had gone on but were being publicly denied.
This caught the attention of non-Murdoch media anew, which in turn piqued the public interest to the point of forcing the police to (re)review the evidence. At this point the information about Millie's phone came out, particularly the part about them wiping the existing messages so more could come in which did interfere with the investigation (and legally speaking is evidence tampering, which is a serious offence, and morally speaking is completely reprehensible too). Whether this new evidence about Millie came from the police looking at their records again or from "new" information found/provided by other media bodies, I forget.
Now the public were baying for blood. Celebrities? We couldn't give a monkey's chuff, to be frank. Let them sort their own problems out. They can afford good lawyers. Interfering with the investigation into the disappearance (and, it turn out, murder) of a young girl? Now that is something we got hot under the collar about. The final nails in the coffin were evidence coming out of the woodwork regarding the "hacking" of the voicemail of victims of the "7/7" bombings in London and their families, and the voicemail of injured/killed soldiers. This brought new condemnation from other sources and was what closed the NotW (many organisations, commercial and charitable, call all ties with the paper after those revelations - though why some of them didn't over just the murder case rather than sitting quiet until these new accusations is beyond me).
Whether Hugh was put up to his actions by someone in the know who wanted to skupper the BSkyB thing (there are many people, both high and low profile, who wanted to see that fail), and/or whether the ex reporter he "stung" was in on it, or whether the timing was coincidental, is subject to debate. Personally I err on the side of coincidence here, partly as the timing would require some impressive orchestration to pull off intentionally, with advantage being taken once the situation arose rather then some group planning it all to start with, but you never know.
The accusations of 9/11 victims and their families having been invaded in a similar manner are as yet just pure speculation as far as I can see. If good evidence for any such thing ever becomes apparent that could be very series for everyone significant in the organisation, old man Murdoch downwards, especially with this year being the 10th anniversary. I can see many people being most (justifiably) angry, that feeling deepened by thoughts and recollections close to the anniversary, and rival media outlets fanning the flames much enthusiasm, and that would lead to public calls for action against Murdoch in the US (calls too loud for the relevant authorities to ignore, even if they wanted to).
That is my point: I think they need to find a way to better nurture their product (like a good farmer works to take good care of his crops and livestock!), lest they start leaving for better pastures.
Though for the userbase Google has, the number of products they are spread over, the number of languages they speak, and so forth, I'd guess that "5 or 6 people" is massively (as in orders of magnitude) wide of the mark when it comes to judging what is needed!
Webmail might be useful when you're not near your own computer, but I'd prefer a fully-fledged MUA over any of the available webmail interfaces any day.
You shouldn't conflate all webmail clients with gmail. There are a number of http based clients that provide a fairly complete set of features akin to those found in desktop MUAs. I use Zimbra for both a small office mail server I run and for my own mail server, and its web based client is pretty good. There are a number of other web based MUAs that provide a similar feature set and can be attached to any IMAP/POP/SMTP service you may use.
This is the same for any free-to-use ad-sponsored system. I don't have a problem with it, though I do wish more people were wise to it as they'd understand the dynamics of the online world better if they were and be less surprised by certain happenings when they occur.
Google do sometimes show a lack of care for their product though. Yes they provide us with a collection of very useful tools and some fun toys too which is great when it all works, but they should try make a little more effort to provide speedy methods of resolution when mistakes are made.
Some of my family manage to get infections regularly. I've stopped doing even this three step process as I'm tired of trying to educate them to be careful. First I'll try the built in "system restore" feature and if that doesn't work (either because the restore points don't go back far enough, or we'd need to go too far back to be useful anyway, because the malware has managed to infect the restore point data too, or because it is rootkit aided (or similar) and gets around system restore that way) it is a boot sector wipe and full OS reinstall I make them explicitly state that they've got a backup of their important data before they hand me the machine, of course.
It is amazing how much more careful people become when they know the only fix is likely to be a refresh which means reinstalling all their games and crap afterwards.
At least it is in a fit state for any information stored to be drawn off onto a replacement device though. That is certainly a bonus over not powering up at all.
IIRC IE7 and IE8 won't run without SP2 or SP3 installed, which may pose a problem to those with pirate copies who can't be bothered to jump through the hoops to get them installed without a properly activated copy of XP (and are therefore running SP1 or "pure" XP).
But do they support XP before any service packs are installed? Many software packages don't officially support XP "pure" or XP with just service pack 1. If FF needs SP2 and most of the pirate copies over there are still running "pure" or SP1 due to activation issues stopping the service packs installing then FF is not an option.
Though I think a lot of web based apps like online banking facilities use ActiveX for stuff over there (and in other countries, such as South Korea, too), which locks users into IE of some sort to an extent. IE6 is probably common (if the piracy is as big an issue as I'm lead to believe) because IIRC IE7 and IE8 won't install without an "activated" copy of XP with SP2 or later applied.
But what constitutes part of an article? Without at least the headline stored at Google how will the search engine present a link to the user? Without at least some of the text from the article how would it display any sort of summary about what is being linked to? In fact, without any of the article how does the search engine know that it is relevant to your search?
They can't provide a link as a result of my search while still obeying the court, unless they are expected to include a link to those papers in the results for every search just in case there is relevant information there...
Even if Google are being spiteful rather than just following the letter of the court's order, they are at worst spitefully following the letter of the court's order and following the letter of the court's order, spitefully or not, is what they have to do to avoid further legal action regarding the matter.
The same with eBay: the buyer is king (unless you are a very large seller, though in eBay's case I can see their business case for it rather than it seeming arbitrary: if buyers start to leave in any significant number prices fall and so does their cut, if sellers leave in any significant number competition drops leaving room which new sellers will come in to take advantage of bringing things back to equilibrium.
But is it not religious memes that make you have this problem?
Monogamy is not unique to the teachings of religion, nor are other relationship patterns anathema to all religions. While you could claim that atheists who are monogamous are so through tradition based on the old religions of their upbringing/ancestors, that doesn't hold water as some religions openly permit other forms of relationship.
For many it is a trust/safety issue and has nothing to do with what religion and tradition say on the matter. I'm an athiest and aside from my mentalist period over a decade ago I've either been monogamous or single and it feels the right way to be from my standpoint. Of course there are those who feel different and good luck to them I say: if all the members of a relationship network are mentally healthy and happy in (and fully informed of) the arrangement who am I to say they are wrong and I am right?
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. . . .
Is that really necessary? I know there's a serious anti-Fox News crowd here, but it's quite a stretch to include the entire organization when even the tabloid itself probably frowned on what one individual did.
The tabloid itself is only now frowning on what one person did because it had been made public. Before then they were perfectly happy to ignore the behaviour completely and make what money they could by raking as much as they could from any resulting scoop.
Not OP, but I agree that it's ridiculous to mention News Corp. and especially Rupert Murdoch. The only motivation I see for doing so is out of dislike. When ESPN does something, you don't say "A Disney subsidiary . . ." Rupert didn't do this, and no one from News Corp. (outside of the tabloid) had anything to do with it either.
If those higher up in the group did not know what was going on then they should have or should at least take action against those who should have told them and those who should have not done it in the first place.
Perhaps when ESPN does something we should say "a Disnet subsidiary..." - that way umbrella groups might start taking in interest in what their underlings are doing instead of ignoring it until it becomes publicly noticed, defending them until it becomes painfully obvious there is no "reasonable doubt", then disclaiming all responsibility. If they don't get let off becuse the public don't know of the connection they might take an effort to control the worst nature of their investments.
It depends how the technicalities have translated to modern technology (sometimes old case law ends up being applied in the most illogical ways).
If they had removed and destroyed mail addressed to anyone involved in a case they would definitely be guilty of tampering with evidence and interfering with a legal investigation. A "good" lawyer might even get them for willingly perverting the cause of justice.
No, it all started with the IE suit.
Yes. But no.
There had been many prior rumblings, the IE thing that pushed the industry over the edge. Once That one was out of the bag and running everyone else dropped out of the woodwork and started ayellin'. If it had not been for IE, something else would have been the catalyst not long later.
Even with WiFi, bluetooth and GPS off all the time my Motorola thingy can barely do more than 36 hours standby time.
Flashblock (or script block if you want to go one further). Auto-playing audio adverts are the main reason I installed that in the first place. Also useful for video ads when I'm mobile and don't have that much bandwidth to throw at something I couldn't give a rat's arse about.