While the idea that the iPad is "just a large ~$1000 iPodTouch" seems like a turn off - there actually is a real benefit here that won't be matched by Linux Pads or dedicated e-book readers. Why? Well, I got my mum an iPhone when they first came out so she could more easily learn her way around her first cell because it was a variation on her computer, an iMac. It's been like 3 years, and she's still only comfortable with a fraction of it's features.
For moms, the primary benefit of the iPad is that it *is* just a large version of their cell phone. So they already know how to use it, it just finally got a screen big enough for older eyes to read. Yeah, I'm getting one for myself first - but part of what made the buying decision easier was knowing that even if I don't like it - that can be the one I give to her.
I know it doesn't seem like in the middle of a slashdot thread on Linux iPads - but trust me, the vast majority of the rest of the world doesn't think technology is a fraction as interesting as most of us do. To them, it either make something they already do (read books, listen to music, watch movies) easier - or it's just a pain in the ass they don't need. However else you feel about Apple, they've got a pretty good track record of meeting that standard.
The "disaggregation" effect came about because record companies supported the "one song sells the record" model of A&R development and marketing. Albums used to be works unto themselves by default. You listened to the whole thing not just because it you couldn't just get one track (45's sold just fine thank you very much), but because the record companies signed bands capable of producing a whole album of good songs, and gave them the support to do so. Now they still try to push that one catchy song on the whole album, and complain that their customers look for ways to avoid getting burnt by buying 9 filler songs to hear it. Boo freakin' hoo.
But without getting into the myriad of differences between today's movies and albums, from production to distribution, the parting of ways between the music and movie industries is primarily in the passion of the people running them. At the executive level, the people who make movies at least *care* about movies. As in, they actually enjoy watching them. The CEO's of record companies increasingly don't. Go into the offices of the presidents of major music companies and they look just like the offices they had when they ran their previous business, as in, there isn't a stereo anywhere in the room. When the President of Jive records or BMG goes home and does listen to music, it's usually classical - not the genre's they sell. Perhaps rap has done better than it might have because the President of Bad Boy Records at least consumes his own product.
The time and effort it takes to pirate a movie these days is no more than it was to pirate an album in the 24,000 baud Napster days. And if most movies consisted of one neat 3 minute scene you saw in the preview along with 97 minutes of garbage, all of which was targeted to 14 year olds, then pirating would probably be as big of a threat to movie studios as it was to music studios.
Since we're all techies here, it should also be pointed out that the original lossy MP3 format wouldn't have taken off in the first place if the majority of music was so good that the sound quality was a deal breaker. I might listen to a Taylor Swift song in a low bit rate, or watch Ernest Goes to Camp at 320x200 if it's free - but I'll buy the Dark Side of the Moon on CD, and Blade Runner on Blue Ray. They still try to make movies as good as the Blade Runner. Dark Side of the Moon? Not so much.
The one thing we can be certain of, is that String Theory is still just a theory. Which is why we demand that mathematic departments give equal time to our "Intelligent Variable" theory, and let the children decide for themselves.
but don't human soldiers, at their best, pretty much just follow algorithms - a combination of training and orders - already?
The big difference, is that human soldiers are taught to defend themselves - whereas that wouldn't really fly with robots. If the guys at the checkpoint slaughter a family of five because they didn't stop, they get investigated and it's determined that - sad but true - killing everything that doesn't do what you say is the only way to protect the troops (short of removing them from other people's countries, which apparently defeats the point of having soldiers). If a robot did that though - they'd be considered "flawed", and recalled. Can't get much sympathy with "but our *machines* could have been in danger!!!". So you wouldn't give them that order.
Plus, it's really the supplier who gets to decide how deadly to make these things. While the government that buys them might rather have non combatants killed that even risk losing multi million dollar robots, the supplier who sells them to the government would *much* rather have to sell them more rather than risk the fallout from a wrongful death incident.
Yes, soldiers mess up, as will robots - but experience with both men and machines has so far shown me that when humans mess up they're more likely to hurt something, and when machines mess up they just stop working.
So as counter-intuitive as it is, as long as the culture still considers robots potential evil killing machines (eg, using the skynet tag on this article), it seems we'd all actually be better off using robots over humans. Well, until they become self-aware and enslave all - which is something a human army would *never* do!
This can be fixed with "white words" - certain things that are unique enough to the type of email that you might get to be considered a pre-confirmation. This is particularly important for getting electronic receipts - as the servers sending those out aren't going to participate in a challenge response. But they're pretty likely to have used something like your name, zip code, or other piece of text you don't find in Spam very often.
Likewise, using a subject line code word can allow humans to send more general email with no challenge response. These can be put in email links too, until email harvesters start recording those subject line words, and update them as often as you update yours.
But most importantly, the "Reply to this challenge email" only works until more than one person on earth builds such a system. As I quickly found out when my Challenge Response system got email from an email account with a BoxTrapper behind it - which either results in false confirmation (reply alone is accepted as proof), or an endless loop of challenges between the two systems(reply must contain a certain word in the subject, but is only mentioned in the body). Which is why my challenge is not to do something a computer is apt to do anyway.
Seriously, it's ridiculously easy to figure out if some communication is coming from a human. Like those new alternatives to captchas that just ask people to perform incredibly easy tasks (eg. "type the answer to one plus one in the box below"). Yes, there are people who are so dumb even *they* couldn't pass a simple Turing Test... but do your really want get emails from people like that?
1. Get a reseller account on a web host (~$20/month). 2. Buy a bunch of book-piraty looking domain names. 3. Copy the site and nav code from existing book pirates, and build decoy pirate sites which "offer" your books. 4. Upload "pirate" copies of your book to them, which have the first chapter, and *polite* instructions on where the whole book can be obtained for the low, low price of $__.__. Put a coupon code in the pirated version if your resellers support it. 5. Just for laughs, put the decoy book on as many instances of p2p programs some slow computer you have lying around can run, so that it winds up sitting in other people's p2p directories. Do it on bit torrents as well. 6. Now try to pirate your books yourself, and keep seeding until the first few hits are always decoys. 7. Be content that anyone who tracks down, downloads, unzips, and examines 3 or more decoys in an attempt to not pay for your books... wasn't going to pay for them anyway.
The idea is just to make it marginally more work to casually steal your book than to casually buy it, and gently redirect the impulse to read it for free into one to read it for a just few bucks more than free.
Would that include speaking disapprovingly of negative comments about the company? Or natural and man made disasters?
Seems to me you protest that you simply can't in good conscious refuse to NOT say anything bad about either 9/11, or your supervisor's tragic and daily bouts with STD's. But you *will* cheerfully agree to their terms when they give you a specific list of things, actions, situations, ideas, and adjectives about which are not to say negative things about - and given you adequate time to commit the list to memory.
But he was laughing at another man, holding a sign.
It read, "Duke Nukem Forever Is Near - Upgrade!".
That's when I started to suspect I'd never see this game finished.
But ya know... I learned something today: Never accept behaviour in yourself, that you would have fired someone else for years ago. Like refusing to set and meet development milestones.
If you truly cynical, you'd realize that companies price things as high as they can regardless. The only "pass the cost onto consumers" factors are ones where companies think they can use it as an excuse. But saying, "We're in two wars in the Middle East so of course gas cost more!" is a hell of a lot easier to pitch than "The government won't let us blatantly abuse the tax code anymore!" (though, it's fun watching them try).
Ya know those GPS displays they put in back seat? How about puting them in the front seat?
You know... where the person who's actually trying to figure out where they are and where they're going is. Or at *least* add a translation program from English to whatever language the driver speaks so I can tell him what directions the GPS is giving to me for some reason.
I've certainly had worse *gigs* (ie. consulting for Microsoft etc), but the worst *working conditions* I ever had to write code it was Citibank's near freezing server farm. There were two monstrous cooling units directed right towards the desks they had us on for some reason. It was the middle of Summer in New York, and I was working in a suit, sweater, full length winter coat, and wearing a stocking cap and ski gloves with the fingers cut out so I could code. The only heat came from the occasionally fried NT box. I suppose the situation was made somewhat worse by the fact that I had been mistakenly hired as an engineer when I was a programmer - though that was somewhat alleviated by the fact that the gig (automating the roll out of about 10,000 workstations) was complex enough that it did in fact require the work of a programmer (at least according to the 5 engineers they'd hired previously who had been trying to do it with a batch program. But to run the whole shebang off of a CD but still have a GUI, I had to do most of it in VB3. This was in like 1998.
Noise pollution is the bane of most urban dwelling situations I've been in. Almost regardless of cost, sound simply leaks from one apartment to the next. I'd love to see flat speakers configured, not to produce sound, but to cancel it out. Granted, this would involve a decent amount of processing power to get them to produce inverse sound waves for sound waves coming at them; but I bet that the cost of that approach will drop a hell of a lot quicker than the current sound proofing techniques which just involve strategic layering of (ridiculously expensive) materials.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem is usually through floors, and delicate, powered materials would be much more difficult to incorporate into flooring.
Without even getting into a cost-benefit analysis of *any* form of medical care - it's astonishing how many people die from diseases that can be treated with substances like... food, clean water, even clean air.
Yes, that's right - every Flintstones chewable you give your kid *could* have been money spent on iodine which saves some other kid from life long brain damage.
So let's not kid ourselves into thinking that "survival of the fittest" is a primarily a biological test for mankind anymore. It's an economic one. You're alive and reading this, not because you're the pinnacle of human health and fitness (lol, this *is* slashdot); but more likely because you avoided dying of poverty. Just like me (though I certainly had some close calls).
If we really wanted to, we could save hundreds of millions more people from dying just using the technology we already have. Heck, if we'd been doing that since the dawn of man - I bet we could have overpopulated ourselves right out of existence by now. We may yet.
Instead, we let hundreds or thousands die to gain the ability to save one. Yeah, sometimes it's Dick Cheney, but sometimes it's Stephan Hawkings.
Food gets eaten, medicine gets used up, research budgets get spent - but knowledge and discover remain. There's your cost benefit analysis.
And I write this as both someone who's spent the last year not getting properly treated for a spine injury because my insurance company decided pain pills were cheaper, and who has a sister who's dying of an unprofitably rare disease. But of course, both of us would have died in childhood anyway if it weren't for medical discoveries that didn't exist in our parents generation.
Ya know what else decreases naturally with age? Our inclination to participate in low paying studies.
Test the same people as they age and see a trend: fine. But pit people who still need beer money in their early 20's, against people who haven't progressed beyond that a decade later... no. Hell, even if you stayed in the seven year study the whole time out of sense of duty, I doubt your heart would still be in it.
This reminds me a bit of the way really successful musicians usually have their "best years" at the beginning of their career. Yes, there might be some physical, as-of-yet-undetectable degradation of their brains - but it could just as easily be that living life with millions of adoring fans, piles of money and next to no responsibility eventually leaves you with precious little left to bitch about.
1. Download/Pirate/Share/Whatever the music you want. 2. Send the artists who made what they would have made (from about $1 to 20 cents) if you'd bought it. 3. The artist have now been paid and, unlike residuals, the record company can't keep the money to pay off "marketing costs".
If people did this as a matter of course, bands would flourish and record companies would perish... at least as distributors and marketers - two services artists don't need but are forced to pay for. The few things they do well, getting a producer, or getting the artists a loan (ie. the advance), can still be done; but at the discretion of the artists who now have the power because people pay them directly.
My friend and I started a site which let people look up artist contacts where they could send money, but then I got high and sort of wandered off...
A lot of people seem instinctively disturbed about advertising, or at least it details. Yup, advertising involves collecting as much information about you as possible, by any means, to sell you as much stuff you wouldn't otherwise buy. It doesn't involve rooting for or against the downfall of society or privacy or anything. It's not immoral, it's amoral. Which is always a little creepy to hear about. But if you think that's bad, trying learning the hoary, gory details about your favourite food.
But like food, it's kind of important. Without advertising, *effective* advertising - there's no web, guys. Thank your lucky stars for that tiny, tiny fraction of surfers who've been clicking on un-targeted ads all these years, and thus providing the rest of us with free information, entertainment, and in many cases, jobs. I'd thank them publicly, but they're also the same dolts who respond to unsolicited email...
Yes, we should resist attempts by advertisers (or anyone) which involve violations of our privacy for any reason. As many have pointed out, Google isn't looking at anything you haven't let them. And for the others, keep in mind that on the whole, you're just not that freakin' interesting, OK? You know how much work it takes to figure out what the hell you did just last week - imagine how much money it takes a Carnivore like company. You're not worth it. Nor am I.
Of course, if someone wants to stalk you, or black mail you - well, there's plenty to be worried about. But it ain't cookies.
Slashdot Mirror
While the idea that the iPad is "just a large ~$1000 iPodTouch" seems like a turn off - there actually is a real benefit here that won't be matched by Linux Pads or dedicated e-book readers. Why? Well, I got my mum an iPhone when they first came out so she could more easily learn her way around her first cell because it was a variation on her computer, an iMac. It's been like 3 years, and she's still only comfortable with a fraction of it's features.
For moms, the primary benefit of the iPad is that it *is* just a large version of their cell phone. So they already know how to use it, it just finally got a screen big enough for older eyes to read. Yeah, I'm getting one for myself first - but part of what made the buying decision easier was knowing that even if I don't like it - that can be the one I give to her.
I know it doesn't seem like in the middle of a slashdot thread on Linux iPads - but trust me, the vast majority of the rest of the world doesn't think technology is a fraction as interesting as most of us do. To them, it either make something they already do (read books, listen to music, watch movies) easier - or it's just a pain in the ass they don't need. However else you feel about Apple, they've got a pretty good track record of meeting that standard.
Prior Art: "Roshambo"
The "disaggregation" effect came about because record companies supported the "one song sells the record" model of A&R development and marketing. Albums used to be works unto themselves by default. You listened to the whole thing not just because it you couldn't just get one track (45's sold just fine thank you very much), but because the record companies signed bands capable of producing a whole album of good songs, and gave them the support to do so. Now they still try to push that one catchy song on the whole album, and complain that their customers look for ways to avoid getting burnt by buying 9 filler songs to hear it. Boo freakin' hoo.
But without getting into the myriad of differences between today's movies and albums, from production to distribution, the parting of ways between the music and movie industries is primarily in the passion of the people running them. At the executive level, the people who make movies at least *care* about movies. As in, they actually enjoy watching them. The CEO's of record companies increasingly don't. Go into the offices of the presidents of major music companies and they look just like the offices they had when they ran their previous business, as in, there isn't a stereo anywhere in the room. When the President of Jive records or BMG goes home and does listen to music, it's usually classical - not the genre's they sell. Perhaps rap has done better than it might have because the President of Bad Boy Records at least consumes his own product.
The time and effort it takes to pirate a movie these days is no more than it was to pirate an album in the 24,000 baud Napster days. And if most movies consisted of one neat 3 minute scene you saw in the preview along with 97 minutes of garbage, all of which was targeted to 14 year olds, then pirating would probably be as big of a threat to movie studios as it was to music studios.
Since we're all techies here, it should also be pointed out that the original lossy MP3 format wouldn't have taken off in the first place if the majority of music was so good that the sound quality was a deal breaker. I might listen to a Taylor Swift song in a low bit rate, or watch Ernest Goes to Camp at 320x200 if it's free - but I'll buy the Dark Side of the Moon on CD, and Blade Runner on Blue Ray. They still try to make movies as good as the Blade Runner. Dark Side of the Moon? Not so much.
I don't want all you slashdotters debunking the one thing I know about how to end a drought if you happen to have a virgin and a volcano handy.
The story of Red-Eye, who battles evil by hoping they'll nod off before he does.
The one thing we can be certain of, is that String Theory is still just a theory. Which is why we demand that mathematic departments give equal time to our "Intelligent Variable" theory, and let the children decide for themselves.
"Bing!"
That means your business model is still alive!
but don't human soldiers, at their best, pretty much just follow algorithms - a combination of training and orders - already?
The big difference, is that human soldiers are taught to defend themselves - whereas that wouldn't really fly with robots. If the guys at the checkpoint slaughter a family of five because they didn't stop, they get investigated and it's determined that - sad but true - killing everything that doesn't do what you say is the only way to protect the troops (short of removing them from other people's countries, which apparently defeats the point of having soldiers). If a robot did that though - they'd be considered "flawed", and recalled. Can't get much sympathy with "but our *machines* could have been in danger!!!". So you wouldn't give them that order.
Plus, it's really the supplier who gets to decide how deadly to make these things. While the government that buys them might rather have non combatants killed that even risk losing multi million dollar robots, the supplier who sells them to the government would *much* rather have to sell them more rather than risk the fallout from a wrongful death incident.
Yes, soldiers mess up, as will robots - but experience with both men and machines has so far shown me that when humans mess up they're more likely to hurt something, and when machines mess up they just stop working.
So as counter-intuitive as it is, as long as the culture still considers robots potential evil killing machines (eg, using the skynet tag on this article), it seems we'd all actually be better off using robots over humans. Well, until they become self-aware and enslave all - which is something a human army would *never* do!
This can be fixed with "white words" - certain things that are unique enough to the type of email that you might get to be considered a pre-confirmation. This is particularly important for getting electronic receipts - as the servers sending those out aren't going to participate in a challenge response. But they're pretty likely to have used something like your name, zip code, or other piece of text you don't find in Spam very often.
Likewise, using a subject line code word can allow humans to send more general email with no challenge response. These can be put in email links too, until email harvesters start recording those subject line words, and update them as often as you update yours.
But most importantly, the "Reply to this challenge email" only works until more than one person on earth builds such a system. As I quickly found out when my Challenge Response system got email from an email account with a BoxTrapper behind it - which either results in false confirmation (reply alone is accepted as proof), or an endless loop of challenges between the two systems(reply must contain a certain word in the subject, but is only mentioned in the body). Which is why my challenge is not to do something a computer is apt to do anyway.
Seriously, it's ridiculously easy to figure out if some communication is coming from a human. Like those new alternatives to captchas that just ask people to perform incredibly easy tasks (eg. "type the answer to one plus one in the box below"). Yes, there are people who are so dumb even *they* couldn't pass a simple Turing Test... but do your really want get emails from people like that?
1. Get a reseller account on a web host (~$20/month).
2. Buy a bunch of book-piraty looking domain names.
3. Copy the site and nav code from existing book pirates, and build decoy pirate sites which "offer" your books.
4. Upload "pirate" copies of your book to them, which have the first chapter, and *polite* instructions on where the whole book can be obtained for the low, low price of $__.__. Put a coupon code in the pirated version if your resellers support it.
5. Just for laughs, put the decoy book on as many instances of p2p programs some slow computer you have lying around can run, so that it winds up sitting in other people's p2p directories. Do it on bit torrents as well.
6. Now try to pirate your books yourself, and keep seeding until the first few hits are always decoys.
7. Be content that anyone who tracks down, downloads, unzips, and examines 3 or more decoys in an attempt to not pay for your books... wasn't going to pay for them anyway.
The idea is just to make it marginally more work to casually steal your book than to casually buy it, and gently redirect the impulse to read it for free into one to read it for a just few bucks more than free.
Would that include speaking disapprovingly of negative comments about the company? Or natural and man made disasters?
Seems to me you protest that you simply can't in good conscious refuse to NOT say anything bad about either 9/11, or your supervisor's tragic and daily bouts with STD's. But you *will* cheerfully agree to their terms when they give you a specific list of things, actions, situations, ideas, and adjectives about which are not to say negative things about - and given you adequate time to commit the list to memory.
If only we'd had some sort of machine that could have detected metal knives.
They meant to charge him with "whacking".
It read, "The End Is Near - Repent!".
But he was laughing at another man, holding a sign.
It read, "Duke Nukem Forever Is Near - Upgrade!".
That's when I started to suspect I'd never see this game finished.
But ya know... I learned something today: Never accept behaviour in yourself, that you would have fired someone else for years ago. Like refusing to set and meet development milestones.
If you truly cynical, you'd realize that companies price things as high as they can regardless. The only "pass the cost onto consumers" factors are ones where companies think they can use it as an excuse. But saying, "We're in two wars in the Middle East so of course gas cost more!" is a hell of a lot easier to pitch than "The government won't let us blatantly abuse the tax code anymore!" (though, it's fun watching them try).
PLEASE don't let it be this one!
Ya know those GPS displays they put in back seat? How about puting them in the front seat?
You know... where the person who's actually trying to figure out where they are and where they're going is. Or at *least* add a translation program from English to whatever language the driver speaks so I can tell him what directions the GPS is giving to me for some reason.
I've certainly had worse *gigs* (ie. consulting for Microsoft etc), but the worst *working conditions* I ever had to write code it was Citibank's near freezing server farm. There were two monstrous cooling units directed right towards the desks they had us on for some reason. It was the middle of Summer in New York, and I was working in a suit, sweater, full length winter coat, and wearing a stocking cap and ski gloves with the fingers cut out so I could code. The only heat came from the occasionally fried NT box. I suppose the situation was made somewhat worse by the fact that I had been mistakenly hired as an engineer when I was a programmer - though that was somewhat alleviated by the fact that the gig (automating the roll out of about 10,000 workstations) was complex enough that it did in fact require the work of a programmer (at least according to the 5 engineers they'd hired previously who had been trying to do it with a batch program. But to run the whole shebang off of a CD but still have a GUI, I had to do most of it in VB3. This was in like 1998.
Noise pollution is the bane of most urban dwelling situations I've been in. Almost regardless of cost, sound simply leaks from one apartment to the next. I'd love to see flat speakers configured, not to produce sound, but to cancel it out. Granted, this would involve a decent amount of processing power to get them to produce inverse sound waves for sound waves coming at them; but I bet that the cost of that approach will drop a hell of a lot quicker than the current sound proofing techniques which just involve strategic layering of (ridiculously expensive) materials.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem is usually through floors, and delicate, powered materials would be much more difficult to incorporate into flooring.
"They make the computer go faster"
Without even getting into a cost-benefit analysis of *any* form of medical care - it's astonishing how many people die from diseases that can be treated with substances like... food, clean water, even clean air.
Yes, that's right - every Flintstones chewable you give your kid *could* have been money spent on iodine which saves some other kid from life long brain damage.
So let's not kid ourselves into thinking that "survival of the fittest" is a primarily a biological test for mankind anymore. It's an economic one. You're alive and reading this, not because you're the pinnacle of human health and fitness (lol, this *is* slashdot); but more likely because you avoided dying of poverty. Just like me (though I certainly had some close calls).
If we really wanted to, we could save hundreds of millions more people from dying just using the technology we already have. Heck, if we'd been doing that since the dawn of man - I bet we could have overpopulated ourselves right out of existence by now. We may yet.
Instead, we let hundreds or thousands die to gain the ability to save one. Yeah, sometimes it's Dick Cheney, but sometimes it's Stephan Hawkings.
Food gets eaten, medicine gets used up, research budgets get spent - but knowledge and discover remain. There's your cost benefit analysis.
And I write this as both someone who's spent the last year not getting properly treated for a spine injury because my insurance company decided pain pills were cheaper, and who has a sister who's dying of an unprofitably rare disease. But of course, both of us would have died in childhood anyway if it weren't for medical discoveries that didn't exist in our parents generation.
Ya know what else decreases naturally with age? Our inclination to participate in low paying studies.
Test the same people as they age and see a trend: fine. But pit people who still need beer money in their early 20's, against people who haven't progressed beyond that a decade later... no. Hell, even if you stayed in the seven year study the whole time out of sense of duty, I doubt your heart would still be in it.
This reminds me a bit of the way really successful musicians usually have their "best years" at the beginning of their career. Yes, there might be some physical, as-of-yet-undetectable degradation of their brains - but it could just as easily be that living life with millions of adoring fans, piles of money and next to no responsibility eventually leaves you with precious little left to bitch about.
1. Download/Pirate/Share/Whatever the music you want.
2. Send the artists who made what they would have made (from about $1 to 20 cents) if you'd bought it.
3. The artist have now been paid and, unlike residuals, the record company can't keep the money to pay off "marketing costs".
If people did this as a matter of course, bands would flourish and record companies would perish... at least as distributors and marketers - two services artists don't need but are forced to pay for. The few things they do well, getting a producer, or getting the artists a loan (ie. the advance), can still be done; but at the discretion of the artists who now have the power because people pay them directly.
My friend and I started a site which let people look up artist contacts where they could send money, but then I got high and sort of wandered off...
A lot of people seem instinctively disturbed about advertising, or at least it details. Yup, advertising involves collecting as much information about you as possible, by any means, to sell you as much stuff you wouldn't otherwise buy. It doesn't involve rooting for or against the downfall of society or privacy or anything. It's not immoral, it's amoral. Which is always a little creepy to hear about. But if you think that's bad, trying learning the hoary, gory details about your favourite food.
But like food, it's kind of important. Without advertising, *effective* advertising - there's no web, guys. Thank your lucky stars for that tiny, tiny fraction of surfers who've been clicking on un-targeted ads all these years, and thus providing the rest of us with free information, entertainment, and in many cases, jobs. I'd thank them publicly, but they're also the same dolts who respond to unsolicited email...
Yes, we should resist attempts by advertisers (or anyone) which involve violations of our privacy for any reason. As many have pointed out, Google isn't looking at anything you haven't let them. And for the others, keep in mind that on the whole, you're just not that freakin' interesting, OK? You know how much work it takes to figure out what the hell you did just last week - imagine how much money it takes a Carnivore like company. You're not worth it. Nor am I.
Of course, if someone wants to stalk you, or black mail you - well, there's plenty to be worried about. But it ain't cookies.
I don't understand...
When did groupies become inadequate motivation to learn guitar?