FWIW, I'm a Google engineer. I'm 46. Many members of my previous team were in their 50s and 60s, and the median age there was probably around my age. That team was working on complex internal enterprise systems, where decades of experience with complex business logic was at a premium. My current team is younger... but I'm not the oldest.
Rumor has it the selection process happens through your Google search history over a long period of time, so you're not going to be able to just spam Python jargon at the search engine and get in tomorrow.
Do you keep yourself logged in with a google account when you search? I specifically try to avoid Google tracking my searches to the extent that I can control. This whole thing is kind of creepy to me, and I never ever log into a google account unless I'm in a VM, though I am sure there are still ways to track me.
Out of curiosity, what are you concerned that Google is going to do with your search history?
FWIW, my approach is that I stay logged in all the time, with web history enabled (so Chrome sends a log of every page I visit to Google for storage, not just my searches) and open an incognito window when I'm doing something I don't want recorded. I try not to do that much, though, because I get a lot of value from being able to search my own web history (web history allows you to search in all the stuff you've looked at, so when you find yourself thinking, "I know I read that on some site..." you can typically find it pretty easily).
While there probably is stuff that I'd rather not share with the world, I really have no concern about sharing it with Google, because no one is ever going to see it. Unless there's a warrant or a subpoena for my information, but that seems pretty unlikely, and even more unlikely that any warrant or subpoena wouldn't get more from my e-mail, bank records, etc.
In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I'm a Google employee, but this post really isn't about trying to convince you that you're wrong. I'm just curious.
Dude got nerd sniped. I wouldn't be able to resist. An interesting puzzle mysteriously shows up? Yes please. Basically how I got into programming and math in general.
Of course all they're going to get are people who aren't savvy enough to use ad/tracking blockers and duckduckgo...
Heh. Google Foobar popped up for me last week. I blew two hours solving problems before I pulled myself away and got back to work.
I set to work and solved the first problem in a couple hours. Each time I submitted a solution, foo.bar tested my code against five hidden test cases."
After solving another five problems the page gave Rossett the option to submit his contact information
Curious: what prompted Max Rossett to spend hours solving programming puzzles before being even given the opportunity to submit contact information for a job consideration?
The same thing that prompts people to spend hours solving Project Euler or Top Coder or similar puzzles, with absolutely no expectation of return beyond the joy and satisfaction they derive from solving the problems.
Whether or not the sort of person who does is what Google needs is an open question, but it's definitely the sort of person Google hires. The interview process is composed of a series of programming puzzles, and one of the things interviewers look for is people who not only handle that sort of challenge, but who clearly enjoy it -- largely because the interviewers and all of their co-workers like such puzzles, and anyone else who does is very likely to fit in.
It makes perfect sense; the recruiting tool selects for exactly the sort of person who is likely to get hired, and to fit into the culture.
I know AM tried to sell itself as a classier place, not just for hookups, but "Life is short, have an affair"?
And with a close up picture of a woman's full red lips. Mostly advertised on porn sites, whose viewership skews male.
They did not place ads with a picture of a hot dude on pintrest.
So, what you're saying is that while AM claimed to be marketing heavily to women, that claim was just part of their actual marketing to their actual target demographic: lonely, unhappy men.
This is not true. Assisted GPS doesn't rely on cell networks, it makes use of cell networks for faster fixes. They still work fine without service, but they do take much longer to get a fix. This is evidenced by the fact that you can put your phone in airplane mode and hold it near the window of an airliner and still get a 10-satellite fix.
This is correct. There are a number of signals that GPS receivers use to improve their performance and accuracy. They use both cell-based network location and detection of nearby Wifi access points to get a very fast, rough idea of the location. That enables the system to know what GPS satellites should be in view, which means the GPS receiver doesn't have to wait for as much data from the satellites to get a good location.
They also use Wifi triangulation to fill in gaps in GPS coverage, when they don't have a clear line of sight to the sky. For this reason mobile phones often work much better than dedicated GPS units in cities where the rows of tall buildings reduce visibility of the sky.
They also use the GPS WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) when available to help make the GPS location fixes more precise. This system is primarily designed for use by aircraft but it can help ground-based receivers as well.
But you can shut off all of the other stuff, and you phone's GPS will still be able to get a location, as long as it can receive signals from the sky. It'll take longer and may not be as precise, but it will work.
That doesn't sound right. I expect that the men completely outnumber the women, and that the 'women' are largely fake, but only 12,000?
With all the advertising that AM has done, and with the huge number of women online (consider pinterest for heavens sake), and the huge number of women that have affairs, it seems unlikely to me that only 12,000 actual women signed up.
I made the same point to my wife. She said she wasn't surprised.
Her explanation is that although there are plenty of unhappy women interested in affairs, she thinks women are more cautious and, more importantly, far less likely to be looking for sex rather than a relationship. If you want to find a relationship instead of a hookup, web sites aren't as good as real-world meetups (bars or whatever), and sites specifically focused on affairs aren't as good as general dating sites. I know AM tried to sell itself as a classier place, not just for hookups, but "Life is short, have an affair"?
When I first started paying for it, everyone else thought it was too expensive and I was the only one on it. It was fast enough then. But others got on and it slowed down. And FWIW, I wouldn't care if it was $50. It would be worth it. I wish they'd raise the prices so fewer would use it.
Well no, even when travelling on business all my docs are on a web-server, often with images. Also, VNC is an essential part of my job, in that I cannot run the sims on a puny IT issued laptop, and need my desktop or datacenter to see waves and do any form of debug. But wifi as it exists makes this painful.
Jesus. Sometimes "on the plane" means you're on a fucking plane, and can't do some things.
Which just means you have to do them later. Why waste the time? Personally, when I traveled a lot I tried to schedule tasks for when I was on the plane. It was a great opportunity to get a block of interrupt-free time. Better for reading than typing, though, so not great for coding. Unless I knew I was going to be in first class.
...But I didn't think having system-level permissions was enough to root a device....
It is, I don't know if you're familiar with that "rooting the device" actually means, but it's putting the su binary into/system/, that's it.
True, but system-level permission isn't sufficient to allow you to remount the/system partition as read-write and install su. You need to find a privilege escalation attack that allows you to obtain root first. However, once you have system-level permission you have access to an enormous attack surface for priv escalation attacks. Odds are you can find a way to do it.
Also, even without rooting an attacker with system-level privileges has enormous power to get the data from your device.
I like Marshmallow quite a bit. It's actually been so long since I ran Lollipop (since February or so) that I'm not always sure what's new and what's not, though.
I have a Nexus 6, though I'm sure I'll upgrade to a new device shortly. I get the build from Google's internal build servers, except when I build it myself. I'm an Android engineer.:-)
The CEO's whole job is being responsible for the actions of his underlings. If they do something wrong that he didn't know about, he's responsible for not knowing about it.
So, Obama is responsible for Hillary's email server?
I think maybe you didn't read the fourth sentence of my post.
She hid it from him and there's no way he could reasonably have known. He can prove that, and identify the person responsible. So he gets a pass. Mostly.
"Mostly" because he appointed her. That's somewhat unfair, but it comes with the job.
Of course, if it turns out he did know about her private mail server, and that she was using it for government business and didn't order her to stop, then the entire burden of responsibility shifts to him. That's what it means to be the boss.
then the CEO claims he can't be blamed for the actions of his underlings
Anyone who accepts that argument from the CEO is responsible for whatever they get. The CEO's whole job is being responsible for the actions of his underlings. If they do something wrong that he didn't know about, he's responsible for not knowing about it. If they do something wrong and he did know about it, then he's responsible for it. In rare cases he gets a pass when they do something wrong and actively hide it from him, well enough that it's not reasonable to expect that he could have known about it... but in that case he'd better be able to prove that's what happened and identify the person who was responsible.
Of course, it's hard to distinguish that last case from an incompetent CEO who's good at finding scapegoats... but that's why smart underlings recognize the nature of such a boss and keep documentation to prove that he really did tell them to do the wrong thing.
Galaxy S5. They don't auto-download (as I've got auto-update disabled) but they're keep prompting to do so in my list of updates.
That's bizarre. If you search for the app in the Play Store app, what do you see? The button that is normally labelled "Install" or "Open" should be labelled "Enable". If you don't enable it, Play will never offer you an update.
Just to be sure I wasn't misremembering, I both checked the code and tested on my Nexus 6. To test, I disabled the pre-installed Gmail app (which I don't use, since Inbox is so much better) which removed an update from/data, leaving just the factory Gmail app on/system. In Play, I see the app listed as Disabled and if I touch on it, I see the "Enable" button. No updates are offered, even though one is available.
Something is weird on your device. Mine is running Marshmallow while yours is Lollipop, but this is behavior that hasn't changed in a long time.
I'd like to see a reasonable publication out of the FTC first. Bank-like security would cripple most shops.
"Bank-like security": I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
I spent ten years as a security consultant in the financial industry, and bank security sucks. Large tech companies do a better job. Google, where I work now, is dramatically better than any major US bank, and although I haven't been behind their curtains it appears to me that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc., are very good as well.
I think what it boils down to is that while banks know they need security they tend to be dominated by bankers, not the sort of technical people who know how to build secure systems. Big tech companies, on the other hand, may or may not actually need as much security but they have lots of geeks, among them a number who understand how to think about I/T security. Well, somewhat. Banks do tend to have a better understanding of the notion of risk mitigation, especially non-technical mitigation; techies tend to think in more absolute terms and about automated solutions. That absolutist, automated view allows fewer compromises, though, and more comprehensive and proactive analysis, where banks tend to be more reactive.
Anyway, I think you'd find that actual bank-like I/T security is not what you imagine bank-like I/T security to be, and wouldn't be particularly onerous.
Anyone trying to use this extremely common words combination will have to pay royalties? This is way past ridiculous. It's just like microsoft trying to trademark the word "Windows"...
No. Royalties are a patent and copyright thing. They have nothing to do with trademarks. And, no, it's not the case that anyone trying to use these words will be restricted. Only other people in lines of business that are sufficiently close to Swatch's that their use of the words might confuse people, might make people think that the other product was from Swatch.
So, if you make brightly-colored, trendy watches and try to use "One more thing" in your advertising, you may get slapped with lawsuit to force you to stop, and maybe pay damages.
If you make anything other than trendy watches, you're almost certainly fine to use the phrase.
Re:Am I the only one that sort of liked Flash?
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A Farewell To Flash
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· Score: 3, Informative
You can thank Google for that. They tricked the majority of web masters into using third party domains for essential parts of the web site, so blocking all third party content is no longer feasible. There is no good technical reason for doing it, but Google's recommendations made sure that unwanted content is now mixed into a sea of necessary assets loaded from separate domains.
I don't know what recommendations you're speaking of, but there are actually very good security reasons for using separate domains wherever possible. The Same Origin policy implemented by all modern browsers enables the use of domains as client-side content sandboxes of a sort. You can safely load content, including scripts, from one domain with good reason to believe it cannot access or manipulate content from another domain.
And, yes, Google does this extensively with its own web properties, using different domains to carefully separate components unless the components have specific and valid reasons to interact. Not because Google thinks that one of its components might be malicious, but because subtle and unanticipated interactions can cause unexpected problems and leaks.
And we also know that when the planet has rapidly transitioned between climactic periods, it's been associated with mass extinctions.
It appears more likely that dramatic climate change is one of the biggest drivers, if not the biggest driver, of speciation. I expect that over the next few centuries or millenia humans will develop various techniques to stabilize the climate, and that will make the Holocene extinction permanent. Earth will never again see tremendous natural diversity; we're killing off a huge number of species and then we'll prevent climate change from jump-starting an explosion of new speciation. We'll begin introducing new species ourselves, but they'll be designed rather than the Monte Carlo approach taken by nature.
To reiterate, the issue is not that the planet is changing, but how fast the planet is changing. Life takes time to adapt.
The stronger the pressure, the faster the adaptation. It tends to be rather hard on individuals and on less-flexible species, though.
Boron is also needed by all complex life, but that doesn't mean we should be digging up huge amounts of it and dumping it into our air, either.
Well, if increasing diversity in the next 100K years is what you want to do, that might be a good strategy. But the reason we don't want to dump lots of boron into the air is because it would make the planet uncomfortable for us. Our goal isn't to maximize speciation, it's to maximize our own comfort -- including the fact that having plenty of certain kinds of plants and animals around is pleasant for us.
* Does absolutely nothing to prevent ocean acidification
The fact that one technology doesn't address all the problems doesn't make it worthless.
* Provides only masking - if they ever stop (lack of funding, discovery of profound negative consequences, or whatever), all the warming that they've been hiding comes rushing back
Nonsense. Decreasing insolation doesn't "hide" warming, it reduces energy input into the system. Sure, when you stop blocking the energy you'll begin warming again, but the energy you reflected away will not come "rushing back". Vacuuming my floor only keeps the floor clean as long as I continue doing it regularly, and when I stop the dust and dirt will begin to accumulate -- but the crud I removed is gone and not coming back.
Artificially and temporarily boosting the albedo isn't a permanent solution -- but there is no permanent solution. The climate is not stable even without geoengineering, intentional or unintentional. If we want it to remain comfortable for us, we're eventually going to have to take a hand in it, and any technique we use is going to be temporary in nature. Actually, I'd argue that's a feature, not a bug; less chance of a runaway effect.
* They're just as likely to increase temperatures by increasing IR reflectance as they are to decrease it by increasing albedo. The least well understood aspect of the planet's climate, by a large margin, is clouds; they make up the vast majority of the error bars in the IPCC projections.
That just increases the value of studying it.
* There's a whole raft of staggeringly huge potential downstream disruptions, many of which could increase the problem - for example, reduction of photosynthesis.
Again, that just means we need to study it rather than guess. You can acquire scientific knowledge through careful passive observation or through active experimentation but the latter is much faster and more effective.
I'm actually a moderate to slightly pro-geoengineering. But this is one of the dumbest geoengineering ideas out there. No, I don't think it's worth even wasting the money to try, that money should go to other more worthwhile projects.
That's an argument I could buy. However, I don't see anyone else actually proposing to do anything. What we should be doing is funding many different areas of research. More promising avenues should get more funding, but we shouldn't dismiss anything that is potentially useful out of hand.
One caveat to this is that - even though they're disabled as in not currently running - they will update in the Play Store if you have auto-updates turned on (and sometimes after doing so become enabled again).
No, if updates to a disabled app are being downloaded, that's a bug. On what device do you see this?
So, any apps that are supposed to be present on a factory-default configured device have to be installed on the read-only/system partition. Putting them on/data would mean they disappear during factory reset, unless there were also copies stored elsewhere which could be reinstalled, but that would just double the space they consume.
As you said users can't read and write from the system partition anyway. Also apps typically have a small disk space footprint compared to data they cache. I see no problem with your solution of providing a copy in the system partition for those apps. ESPECIALLY since the whole point of this is that many users don't want to install them all.
That's achieved just as well by putting a single copy on/system and allowing the user to disable the app, which is what Android does.
This is a model used by a lot of off the shelf PCs. There's a recovery partition which contains everything needed to factory reset the device, and I see no reason why this model can't be adopted by all but the absolute cheapest of smartphones. 30 seconds of video footage recorded from the front camera takes up more space than all the pre-installed junk on my phone.
Disk space is much cheaper than flash. Particularly on older devices with smaller internal storage spaces, every last MB is precious. And, of course, today's monster storage will be small in a few years. Software tends to grow to fill all available space.
Actually the "recovery partition" strategy is fine now, but when it first began a decade or so ago, it was pretty obnoxious. It was common for users to wipe the recovery partition to regain the wasted space (and then have to find some other way to reinstall if they ever needed to). I always did. Still do, actually, but less for the space than because I know I'll never use it.
I think the complaint is that it should never have been installed in the system partition in the first place. Instead, it should have been installed in the user partition at the factory and placed on a list of apps to automatically reinstall when the user first connects to Wi-Fi after a reset.
Except the feature to do that didn't exist in the platform until Lollipop.
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FWIW, I'm a Google engineer. I'm 46. Many members of my previous team were in their 50s and 60s, and the median age there was probably around my age. That team was working on complex internal enterprise systems, where decades of experience with complex business logic was at a premium. My current team is younger... but I'm not the oldest.
Rumor has it the selection process happens through your Google search history over a long period of time, so you're not going to be able to just spam Python jargon at the search engine and get in tomorrow.
Do you keep yourself logged in with a google account when you search? I specifically try to avoid Google tracking my searches to the extent that I can control. This whole thing is kind of creepy to me, and I never ever log into a google account unless I'm in a VM, though I am sure there are still ways to track me.
Out of curiosity, what are you concerned that Google is going to do with your search history?
FWIW, my approach is that I stay logged in all the time, with web history enabled (so Chrome sends a log of every page I visit to Google for storage, not just my searches) and open an incognito window when I'm doing something I don't want recorded. I try not to do that much, though, because I get a lot of value from being able to search my own web history (web history allows you to search in all the stuff you've looked at, so when you find yourself thinking, "I know I read that on some site..." you can typically find it pretty easily).
While there probably is stuff that I'd rather not share with the world, I really have no concern about sharing it with Google, because no one is ever going to see it. Unless there's a warrant or a subpoena for my information, but that seems pretty unlikely, and even more unlikely that any warrant or subpoena wouldn't get more from my e-mail, bank records, etc.
In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I'm a Google employee, but this post really isn't about trying to convince you that you're wrong. I'm just curious.
Dude got nerd sniped. I wouldn't be able to resist. An interesting puzzle mysteriously shows up? Yes please. Basically how I got into programming and math in general.
Of course all they're going to get are people who aren't savvy enough to use ad/tracking blockers and duckduckgo...
Heh. Google Foobar popped up for me last week. I blew two hours solving problems before I pulled myself away and got back to work.
I set to work and solved the first problem in a couple hours. Each time I submitted a solution, foo.bar tested my code against five hidden test cases." After solving another five problems the page gave Rossett the option to submit his contact information
Curious: what prompted Max Rossett to spend hours solving programming puzzles before being even given the opportunity to submit contact information for a job consideration?
The same thing that prompts people to spend hours solving Project Euler or Top Coder or similar puzzles, with absolutely no expectation of return beyond the joy and satisfaction they derive from solving the problems.
Whether or not the sort of person who does is what Google needs is an open question, but it's definitely the sort of person Google hires. The interview process is composed of a series of programming puzzles, and one of the things interviewers look for is people who not only handle that sort of challenge, but who clearly enjoy it -- largely because the interviewers and all of their co-workers like such puzzles, and anyone else who does is very likely to fit in.
It makes perfect sense; the recruiting tool selects for exactly the sort of person who is likely to get hired, and to fit into the culture.
I know AM tried to sell itself as a classier place, not just for hookups, but "Life is short, have an affair"?
And with a close up picture of a woman's full red lips. Mostly advertised on porn sites, whose viewership skews male.
They did not place ads with a picture of a hot dude on pintrest.
So, what you're saying is that while AM claimed to be marketing heavily to women, that claim was just part of their actual marketing to their actual target demographic: lonely, unhappy men.
I could buy that.
This is not true. Assisted GPS doesn't rely on cell networks, it makes use of cell networks for faster fixes. They still work fine without service, but they do take much longer to get a fix. This is evidenced by the fact that you can put your phone in airplane mode and hold it near the window of an airliner and still get a 10-satellite fix.
This is correct. There are a number of signals that GPS receivers use to improve their performance and accuracy. They use both cell-based network location and detection of nearby Wifi access points to get a very fast, rough idea of the location. That enables the system to know what GPS satellites should be in view, which means the GPS receiver doesn't have to wait for as much data from the satellites to get a good location.
They also use Wifi triangulation to fill in gaps in GPS coverage, when they don't have a clear line of sight to the sky. For this reason mobile phones often work much better than dedicated GPS units in cities where the rows of tall buildings reduce visibility of the sky.
They also use the GPS WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) when available to help make the GPS location fixes more precise. This system is primarily designed for use by aircraft but it can help ground-based receivers as well.
But you can shut off all of the other stuff, and you phone's GPS will still be able to get a location, as long as it can receive signals from the sky. It'll take longer and may not be as precise, but it will work.
That doesn't sound right. I expect that the men completely outnumber the women, and that the 'women' are largely fake, but only 12,000?
With all the advertising that AM has done, and with the huge number of women online (consider pinterest for heavens sake), and the huge number of women that have affairs, it seems unlikely to me that only 12,000 actual women signed up.
I made the same point to my wife. She said she wasn't surprised.
Her explanation is that although there are plenty of unhappy women interested in affairs, she thinks women are more cautious and, more importantly, far less likely to be looking for sex rather than a relationship. If you want to find a relationship instead of a hookup, web sites aren't as good as real-world meetups (bars or whatever), and sites specifically focused on affairs aren't as good as general dating sites. I know AM tried to sell itself as a classier place, not just for hookups, but "Life is short, have an affair"?
When I first started paying for it, everyone else thought it was too expensive and I was the only one on it. It was fast enough then. But others got on and it slowed down. And FWIW, I wouldn't care if it was $50. It would be worth it. I wish they'd raise the prices so fewer would use it.
Jesus. Sometimes "on the plane" means you're on a fucking plane, and can't do some things.
Which just means you have to do them later. Why waste the time? Personally, when I traveled a lot I tried to schedule tasks for when I was on the plane. It was a great opportunity to get a block of interrupt-free time. Better for reading than typing, though, so not great for coding. Unless I knew I was going to be in first class.
It's a great gig!
...But I didn't think having system-level permissions was enough to root a device....
It is, I don't know if you're familiar with that "rooting the device" actually means, but it's putting the su binary into /system/, that's it.
True, but system-level permission isn't sufficient to allow you to remount the /system partition as read-write and install su. You need to find a privilege escalation attack that allows you to obtain root first. However, once you have system-level permission you have access to an enormous attack surface for priv escalation attacks. Odds are you can find a way to do it.
Also, even without rooting an attacker with system-level privileges has enormous power to get the data from your device.
I like Marshmallow quite a bit. It's actually been so long since I ran Lollipop (since February or so) that I'm not always sure what's new and what's not, though.
I have a Nexus 6, though I'm sure I'll upgrade to a new device shortly. I get the build from Google's internal build servers, except when I build it myself. I'm an Android engineer. :-)
Cool. Feel free to e-mail me if they re-enable themselves. I'm interested.
The CEO's whole job is being responsible for the actions of his underlings. If they do something wrong that he didn't know about, he's responsible for not knowing about it.
So, Obama is responsible for Hillary's email server?
I think maybe you didn't read the fourth sentence of my post.
She hid it from him and there's no way he could reasonably have known. He can prove that, and identify the person responsible. So he gets a pass. Mostly.
"Mostly" because he appointed her. That's somewhat unfair, but it comes with the job.
Of course, if it turns out he did know about her private mail server, and that she was using it for government business and didn't order her to stop, then the entire burden of responsibility shifts to him. That's what it means to be the boss.
then the CEO claims he can't be blamed for the actions of his underlings
Anyone who accepts that argument from the CEO is responsible for whatever they get. The CEO's whole job is being responsible for the actions of his underlings. If they do something wrong that he didn't know about, he's responsible for not knowing about it. If they do something wrong and he did know about it, then he's responsible for it. In rare cases he gets a pass when they do something wrong and actively hide it from him, well enough that it's not reasonable to expect that he could have known about it... but in that case he'd better be able to prove that's what happened and identify the person who was responsible.
Of course, it's hard to distinguish that last case from an incompetent CEO who's good at finding scapegoats... but that's why smart underlings recognize the nature of such a boss and keep documentation to prove that he really did tell them to do the wrong thing.
Galaxy S5. They don't auto-download (as I've got auto-update disabled) but they're keep prompting to do so in my list of updates.
That's bizarre. If you search for the app in the Play Store app, what do you see? The button that is normally labelled "Install" or "Open" should be labelled "Enable". If you don't enable it, Play will never offer you an update.
Just to be sure I wasn't misremembering, I both checked the code and tested on my Nexus 6. To test, I disabled the pre-installed Gmail app (which I don't use, since Inbox is so much better) which removed an update from /data, leaving just the factory Gmail app on /system. In Play, I see the app listed as Disabled and if I touch on it, I see the "Enable" button. No updates are offered, even though one is available.
Something is weird on your device. Mine is running Marshmallow while yours is Lollipop, but this is behavior that hasn't changed in a long time.
Sounds like it might be a good time to get back into the security consulting business.
OTOH, I like my soul.
I'd like to see a reasonable publication out of the FTC first. Bank-like security would cripple most shops.
"Bank-like security": I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
I spent ten years as a security consultant in the financial industry, and bank security sucks. Large tech companies do a better job. Google, where I work now, is dramatically better than any major US bank, and although I haven't been behind their curtains it appears to me that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc., are very good as well.
I think what it boils down to is that while banks know they need security they tend to be dominated by bankers, not the sort of technical people who know how to build secure systems. Big tech companies, on the other hand, may or may not actually need as much security but they have lots of geeks, among them a number who understand how to think about I/T security. Well, somewhat. Banks do tend to have a better understanding of the notion of risk mitigation, especially non-technical mitigation; techies tend to think in more absolute terms and about automated solutions. That absolutist, automated view allows fewer compromises, though, and more comprehensive and proactive analysis, where banks tend to be more reactive.
Anyway, I think you'd find that actual bank-like I/T security is not what you imagine bank-like I/T security to be, and wouldn't be particularly onerous.
Anyone trying to use this extremely common words combination will have to pay royalties? This is way past ridiculous. It's just like microsoft trying to trademark the word "Windows"...
No. Royalties are a patent and copyright thing. They have nothing to do with trademarks. And, no, it's not the case that anyone trying to use these words will be restricted. Only other people in lines of business that are sufficiently close to Swatch's that their use of the words might confuse people, might make people think that the other product was from Swatch.
So, if you make brightly-colored, trendy watches and try to use "One more thing" in your advertising, you may get slapped with lawsuit to force you to stop, and maybe pay damages.
If you make anything other than trendy watches, you're almost certainly fine to use the phrase.
You can thank Google for that. They tricked the majority of web masters into using third party domains for essential parts of the web site, so blocking all third party content is no longer feasible. There is no good technical reason for doing it, but Google's recommendations made sure that unwanted content is now mixed into a sea of necessary assets loaded from separate domains.
I don't know what recommendations you're speaking of, but there are actually very good security reasons for using separate domains wherever possible. The Same Origin policy implemented by all modern browsers enables the use of domains as client-side content sandboxes of a sort. You can safely load content, including scripts, from one domain with good reason to believe it cannot access or manipulate content from another domain.
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8264/why-is-the-same-origin-policy-so-important
And, yes, Google does this extensively with its own web properties, using different domains to carefully separate components unless the components have specific and valid reasons to interact. Not because Google thinks that one of its components might be malicious, but because subtle and unanticipated interactions can cause unexpected problems and leaks.
And we also know that when the planet has rapidly transitioned between climactic periods, it's been associated with mass extinctions.
It appears more likely that dramatic climate change is one of the biggest drivers, if not the biggest driver, of speciation. I expect that over the next few centuries or millenia humans will develop various techniques to stabilize the climate, and that will make the Holocene extinction permanent. Earth will never again see tremendous natural diversity; we're killing off a huge number of species and then we'll prevent climate change from jump-starting an explosion of new speciation. We'll begin introducing new species ourselves, but they'll be designed rather than the Monte Carlo approach taken by nature.
To reiterate, the issue is not that the planet is changing, but how fast the planet is changing. Life takes time to adapt.
The stronger the pressure, the faster the adaptation. It tends to be rather hard on individuals and on less-flexible species, though.
Boron is also needed by all complex life, but that doesn't mean we should be digging up huge amounts of it and dumping it into our air, either.
Well, if increasing diversity in the next 100K years is what you want to do, that might be a good strategy. But the reason we don't want to dump lots of boron into the air is because it would make the planet uncomfortable for us. Our goal isn't to maximize speciation, it's to maximize our own comfort -- including the fact that having plenty of certain kinds of plants and animals around is pleasant for us.
* Does absolutely nothing to prevent ocean acidification
The fact that one technology doesn't address all the problems doesn't make it worthless.
* Provides only masking - if they ever stop (lack of funding, discovery of profound negative consequences, or whatever), all the warming that they've been hiding comes rushing back
Nonsense. Decreasing insolation doesn't "hide" warming, it reduces energy input into the system. Sure, when you stop blocking the energy you'll begin warming again, but the energy you reflected away will not come "rushing back". Vacuuming my floor only keeps the floor clean as long as I continue doing it regularly, and when I stop the dust and dirt will begin to accumulate -- but the crud I removed is gone and not coming back.
Artificially and temporarily boosting the albedo isn't a permanent solution -- but there is no permanent solution. The climate is not stable even without geoengineering, intentional or unintentional. If we want it to remain comfortable for us, we're eventually going to have to take a hand in it, and any technique we use is going to be temporary in nature. Actually, I'd argue that's a feature, not a bug; less chance of a runaway effect.
* They're just as likely to increase temperatures by increasing IR reflectance as they are to decrease it by increasing albedo. The least well understood aspect of the planet's climate, by a large margin, is clouds; they make up the vast majority of the error bars in the IPCC projections.
That just increases the value of studying it.
* There's a whole raft of staggeringly huge potential downstream disruptions, many of which could increase the problem - for example, reduction of photosynthesis.
Again, that just means we need to study it rather than guess. You can acquire scientific knowledge through careful passive observation or through active experimentation but the latter is much faster and more effective.
I'm actually a moderate to slightly pro-geoengineering. But this is one of the dumbest geoengineering ideas out there. No, I don't think it's worth even wasting the money to try, that money should go to other more worthwhile projects.
That's an argument I could buy. However, I don't see anyone else actually proposing to do anything. What we should be doing is funding many different areas of research. More promising avenues should get more funding, but we shouldn't dismiss anything that is potentially useful out of hand.
One caveat to this is that - even though they're disabled as in not currently running - they will update in the Play Store if you have auto-updates turned on (and sometimes after doing so become enabled again).
No, if updates to a disabled app are being downloaded, that's a bug. On what device do you see this?
So, any apps that are supposed to be present on a factory-default configured device have to be installed on the read-only /system partition. Putting them on /data would mean they disappear during factory reset, unless there were also copies stored elsewhere which could be reinstalled, but that would just double the space they consume.
As you said users can't read and write from the system partition anyway. Also apps typically have a small disk space footprint compared to data they cache. I see no problem with your solution of providing a copy in the system partition for those apps. ESPECIALLY since the whole point of this is that many users don't want to install them all.
That's achieved just as well by putting a single copy on /system and allowing the user to disable the app, which is what Android does.
This is a model used by a lot of off the shelf PCs. There's a recovery partition which contains everything needed to factory reset the device, and I see no reason why this model can't be adopted by all but the absolute cheapest of smartphones. 30 seconds of video footage recorded from the front camera takes up more space than all the pre-installed junk on my phone.
Disk space is much cheaper than flash. Particularly on older devices with smaller internal storage spaces, every last MB is precious. And, of course, today's monster storage will be small in a few years. Software tends to grow to fill all available space.
Actually the "recovery partition" strategy is fine now, but when it first began a decade or so ago, it was pretty obnoxious. It was common for users to wipe the recovery partition to regain the wasted space (and then have to find some other way to reinstall if they ever needed to). I always did. Still do, actually, but less for the space than because I know I'll never use it.
I think the complaint is that it should never have been installed in the system partition in the first place. Instead, it should have been installed in the user partition at the factory and placed on a list of apps to automatically reinstall when the user first connects to Wi-Fi after a reset.
Except the feature to do that didn't exist in the platform until Lollipop.