We've had private insurance with no genetic testing for a long time how.
How is keeping the second condition going to mandate the end of the first? It's ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous, it's just that the summary really, really sucks. What the summary author is trying to say is that if the consumer can use GT to decide if/when they should buy insurance, but the insurance companies can't use it to determine rates/coverage, then the insurance companies will no longer be able to keep their margins up, and will ultimately fail.
Of course, that's only true in a world where insurance companies don't adjust rates to reflect their actual profit/loss AND the primary reason that people get insurance is for genetically predisposed diseases. In fact, the primary reasons that most people get insurance is in case of serious and unforeseeable events such as communicable diseases and accidents and of course simple aging-related conditions.
Ask 10 people if they would not get insurance if they had a guarantee that they would never get a heart attack or diabetes. I'm quite certain they'll say that they still would.
So, the summary makes sense as far as it goes, but almost certainly doesn't map to reality.
Not only is it a distortion to say that you can't improve Linux software, but the statement makes these additional distortions:
* It represents gratis as "free software" which is not the common usage in the software field these days * It represents Microsoft's gratis software as "improvable" which it is not * It represents truly free software as non-commercial and/or non-profit which is very much untrue
Overall, it's just an amazing pile of horse droppings. Not far from what I expect of MS.
They ship both 2 and 3. I think they anticipated that 3 would be out of beta before release, but even if it's another month or two, it's probably worth having version 3 available as a primary choice.
Yes it does. What's more, since it's a fair bet that everyone reading that knew exactly what was meant, and that many did not know the Aristotelian or modern meaning related to the construction of logical arguments, it's safe to say that the language has simply changed.
Welcome to the 21st century. You can pick up your curmudgeon name-tag on the 3rd table to the left.
I'm talking about Slashdot. How shall we kill it? I've been wondering that for years. Is there a FF plugin to do it? I've never seen this on Slashdot, but I'll take your word for it. I'm wondering if Firefox is just mis-reporting (e.g. neither the download from Slashdot nor Google is complete, and it just happens to have the Google info in the status bar since it was most recent).
Care explaining how it's a stupid idea? It works for Nethack, it works for a variety of MUDs, it worked in almost all pencil-and-paper RPGs. (Well, maybe not permanent-permanent but at least with actual effort required beyond respawning.)
It works in Counter-Strike and to a degree in other FPSes.
So why not in WoW? It would prevent the game from getting stale and solve the grind problem. No, dying permanently would not solve the grind problem. It would make it much, much worse, as you would be constantly re-grinding to reach a "reasonable level."
I've played EQ (for quite a few years) where dying meant you lost XP, and WoW does a much better job of making players feel like their effort is rewarded and not just temporarily.
Permanent death is fun for short, one-off events (like EQ did for a bit on a contest server), but for a long-term sustainable game your players need to feel invested in their characters.
i mean i hear all the time how easy 60-70 is, supposedly, but man it's a pain if you're a casual player like myself. It's easy, but it's very time consuming. It's supposed to be, and that's OK. There's no destination in WoW, just many signposts along the way.
Or, to look at it another way, if you don't enjoy leveling, you're not going to enjoy reaching 70. It's just more of the same, really.
Through Doubleclick, Google's the most evil online entity. Yahoo's taking a step in that direction though. Doubleclick was an annoying company that cared nothing for its actual users and only for their paying customers, true (though now that Google has purchased them, it's pretty clear that they're simply being dismantled for people and customers). Yahoo! has been turning in Chinese political dissidents. I'm having a hard time drawing an ethically parallel line between those.
When a company says that their guiding principle is not to be evil, perhaps it's not the best use of our time to seek out evil in everything they do. Perhaps we could continue to treat them like any other company and judge them on their deeds?
The best way to compete with Google Analytics would be to set it up somehow so that I never see "Waiting for Google Analytics" in my browser while a page is blank, stalled and not loading. That's just a terribly designed site that should be put to death mercifully. If Google's service is tar-pitting your page rendering, then you've done it wrong (probably loading lots of data as XML and then rendering it using JavaScript after the page is fully loaded. Good sites simply don't do this.
Well, yes and no. I think Google has done an excellent job on the stats-display end. For a small site, the service is free, and I really get quite a lot out of it.
Since 9/11, every goddamned thing is considered terrorism. Shoot a gun downtown? Terrorism. Drink someone's milkshake? Terrorism. I haven't heard any such references.
Ship cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. Yep, terrorism. Now, you're dealing with something altogether different, and I think you need to acknowledge the current administration's authority on this matter. When they say that it's terrorists shipping drugs, they don't mean that shipping drugs is a terrorist act, they mean that it's being used to finance terror. GWB should know this all too well, given that it's exactly what his father arranged (for those who don't know, when GHWB was VP, he was involved to an as yet unrevealed depth with the trading of drugs cash for Iranian guns for Nicaraguan terrorists in a fiasco known as Iran Contra; being the former CIA chief, it was always assumed that GHWB was at the very least kept appraised of the operation as VP). GWB knows exactly how this is done, and no one can better apply the label of terrorist to those who would use such tactics.
Installing Linux on the computers of unwitting Windows users may be a dumb plot, but it's hardly terrorism. If it were, every goddamned user on Slashdot would be a terrorist for trying to wrest Windows from Granny's warm, wet hands. There's a difference between trying to install an OS and subverting national infrastructure in order to force a conversion. The latter could easily be seen as a terrorist act.
I have no access to the upcoming Iron Man issues, so perhaps I'm painting the wrong mental image, but this sounds like the kind of plot that you'd see in a modern, mainstream superhero comic.
The nature of social apps is that they are, well, social. Meaning that the biggest draw will always be the sites and services that are most inclusive and with the farthest reach. You can rationalize all you like, but I know that there's a large ground-swell of young people who are convinced that if they want the latest and greatest tools, they need to be running Linux. In many cases, I think they're wrong, but that doesn't really matter. It's the perception of the thing that's driving them.
I'm interested to see what happens to IM especially in the next few years. It's been dominated by AOL, but Google has forced open the field, and is allowing users to communicate with anyone (all of AOL and Google Talk (including the Jabber cloud) can inter-operate freely), which makes Google Talk the largest IM network in the world, all of a sudden.
What growth curve? To quote your source:
We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. So, they're aggregating Web logs from a self-selecting group of Web sites.
My personal experience has been that more and more mainstream folks (especially under the age of 25) are using Linux because it's where the social apps are changing fastest.
There's a breaking point when it comes to adoption of both Linux and MacOS (though Mac has more potential) No, no there isn't. There, that was as easy to say as the reverse. Let's look at your points in more detail and see why you think that:
Linux will slowly bring over the technical crowd, That was last decade's news. The news today is that an increasingly large number of younger folks are finding that their friends are using "the latest thing" under Linux, and there's a certain chic in using it. Ubuntu and the various "social apps" have really pushed this envelope.
The next wave has begun, and that's the push to create highly market-specific Linux desktop offerings. You've already seen this in the "just mail, IM and Web" boxes that have been sold recently by large corporations. There are already offerings in the digital film-making arena, and then there's the mobile world which you may or may not conflate with the desktop world, depending on how you see things merging or not.
MacOS has made great strides in woo'ing the "stylish elite", and the "wealthy cool kids". More and more, the people I see using Mac laptops are the young and upwardly mobile that fall pretty much smack in the middle of the demographic space. They're not wealthy, but they've had their first taste of financial success. This is where Mac laptop purchasing has been exploding, at least in the social circles I've been observing.
but they still lack a wide selection of applications EH?! You haven't used a Linux or MacOS system recently have you? It's not the selection that limits their adoption. There's a gigantic selection, and in some domains (e.g. digital media for Mac) the selection is broader than other platforms. The limiting factor is and always has been Microsoft's proprietary application suite. If you've ever tried to get Office for Mac to read a file from Office for Windows and been thwarted, you know exactly how Microsoft keeps their market share.
People don't want "selection," they want the apps that "everyone else uses."
the price-point that would convert the "average web surfer". No one avoids Linux for the price-point. There are $200, fairly nice boxes at your local WalMart running Linux.
Macs are more expensive, but they have a brand loyalty that's hard to contend with.
The year of Linux on the desktop was probably 2004 or 2005.
If you're waiting for Linux to wipe out the competition, it's not going to happen. It's just going to be a long, slow growth curve as both MacOS and Linux suck up increasingly large chunks of Microsoft's market share.
Yeah, P4P is a buzzword for "pennies for packets."
It's this magical idea that they'll find a way to charge more money for providing the same service without having to lose market share due to raising the prices on their customers' statements. Why not charge EVERYONE is their idea... doesn't matter who you are, or where you are on the 'Net... you can pay Comcast for "premium" service.
You do use email, don't you? This is where I stopped.
I configured my first MTA in 1988 and bought my first domain in 1995. The implications of public access to email are not lost on me, and that doesn't change anything in our previous discussion, as you well know.
I don't see this conversation moving forward, and I seem to have work to do.
Good luck, and here's hoping that your house has a flattering picture on Google Street View.
I think Linus said it best in the Open Voices podcast (part 2 of the Linus Torvalds interview): Microsoft is a giant company with many competing motivations. Some of that company is willing and ready to embrace open source and treat the community with respect. Part of the company is not. When you hear from the part that wants to treat us well, you tend to wonder, "has something changed?" It probably has not. It's just that you're hearing from a different head.
I'm just pointing out that it's a bit like saying "if you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I look at you as I pass you on the street."
If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I photograph you as I pass you in the street, and post that to the net.
You did realize that that was a trap, right?
It's the most obvious retort, but it's also the most deeply flawed. If Google were posting pictures of PEOPLE, then we'd have another issue entirely, and I *do* expect them to have a QA process that, at a minimum, looks for people. It's almost impossible to eliminate the people from some places (Times Square comes to mind), but they do an excellent job in every shot I've seen (which I assume they mostly take on off-hours).
To re-cap. Your statement is absurd, as you meant it to be. We know that. If you come up with an analogous statement that actually bears on the matter at hand, let me know.
Pretty much everyone has something to hide, legitimately.
Of course, as I stated. You're arguing a point that I already made. I think you're just confused about what I'm saying, or just defaulting to the argument you WANT to have.
I'll point out that totalitarian governments world-wide would laugh at this conversation in awe that a society could be so paranoid as to fear someone taking a picture of your house and putting it up on the Web with a clear and easy to use way to have it removed.
You have to know that it's being done, first. Maybe 1% of the population knows that Google's street view exists.
Moot point. They've made a gesture, which is frankly more than they need to. Pictures of your street just aren't something that you have any expectation to privacy for, nor have you had any for decades. There are hundreds of books full of nothing but street pictures in your local library.
Here's an odd point: do you have the right to recuse your house from such works? You're limiting the ability of others to communicate directions via landmarks. That seems to me to be an abuse of the commons. I'm not sure I want to offer you that right, and I'm pretty sure you don't have it now.
Of course, Google made it possible, so it's moot for now, but you can bet that the next guy to come along will think about it, and might well NOT. Bravo, I say.
They should make it easy to report actual mistakes (e.g. you took a picture of my family in the front yard). It's a matter of unavoidable fact that mistakes will happen, and some won't get caught by the company doing it. I'm fine with providing a way to point them out.
Right now, it's only Google's Street View.
NO, it's not. Did you not read what I wrote? This is old-school. On the Web it's at least 5 years old as a commercial service. Google just made it free.
Ah... but you respond to that later on... perhaps you're just not re-reading what you wrote?
They're not making them public the way Google has,
Yes, they are. I've used the services.
except in some cases for people who have actually put their home on the market,
Nope.
and even then they're not broadly searchable the way Google's database is.
I searched for my address. I got a picture of my house. Oddly enough it also showed the license plate number on my car. Your point, sir?
And your analysis of the risk involved in someone's garage door being available on the Web for "searching" is...?
You're STILL mixing up separate issues. I'm not going to do that. There's two issues here:
1. What are the boundaries of what kind of things people doing things like Google need to follow. Trespassing in the course of gathering the information is probably one boundary that needs to be maintained.
I think Google's procedures have, thus far, been excellent. I don't see the issue, here. They've made some small mistakes, and those SHOULD be cor
Actually, I find that a bright green-on-black with a slightly textured background (I used 80% opacity in a Gnome terminal with a simple background) is best. The slight texture gives my eye something to work with, and the green-on-black was long ago demonstrated to be the most soothing match over the long term (though that doesn't equate to reduced eyestrain).
My concern is the fact that anybody considers "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?" as some kind of serious response to anything. But I don't. I'm just pointing out that it's a bit like saying "if you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I look at you as I pass you on the street." It's a null statement that bears no value. If I say, "if you have nothing to hide, then you'll let me look through your wallet," that's another egg entirely.
I mean, you're just asking for me to invoke Godwin's Law. You know that Have at it. I'll point out that totalitarian governments world-wide would laugh at this conversation in awe that a society could be so paranoid as to fear someone taking a picture of your house and putting it up on the Web with a clear and easy to use way to have it removed.
But to get down to specifics:
* In the case of the Borings, the Google van went down a private road (not a public street) to photograph the Boring's backyard. Yes, it basically turned around on a private road, and the images were not deleted (remember, this isn't some guy pointing a camera and saying, "gotcha!") I agree that the images should be deleted. It's a woops. It's not a "OMG Google is teh evil!!1"
* In the case of the McKees, the Google van went onto their property (not a public street). Ditto.
The fact that mistakes like these are inevitable doesn't mean that they should be dismissed. OF COURSE NOT! They're mistakes. You fix your mistakes. You don't go off and sue someone for invading the privacy of your your home when all they did was take a picture of your front yard. It's just money grabbing and what's sad is if this were a story about any other company, we'd be up-in-arms about the abuse of the legal system, but we've got this need to beat up Google, fed by Slashdot's discovery that Google bashing brings ratings to their beleaguered site.
Whatever the cause of these mistakes, Google needs to deal with them and have a better policy than individual "opt out" for these cases. I'm not sure what mechanism you're proposing for discovering these issues. You're literally talking about a few seconds of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the driver may not have even known that he snapped the shots.
* The issues of having to opt-out of a relationship with every company that might want to have a relationship with you (however tentative) when the magnifying power of the Internet is involved should be obvious to everyone who has an email address. There's a vast difference, here. You're not talking about "opting out," you're talking about being allowed to remove your house's image from only one of the dozens of databases in which it exists and is made public to one degree or another. Or were you not aware that services have been selling this service to real estate companies for years? Problem is that those services aren't Google and so no one's sitting around trying to come up with ways to claim that they're the next *Godwinning of thread censored for public interest*
* The effects of making previously obscure information publicly available and electronically searchable are also well known. And your analysis of the risk involved in someone's garage door being available on the Web for "searching" is...?
If we're in the Transparent Society already, well, it may be unavoidable and it may be better than the alternatives but we need to have a public dialog about how to deal with it. This article is part of that public dialog. That dialog is an excellent one to have. This article is mindless Google bashing and bears no resemblance to that conversation.
This "Google is evil" meme needs to end. Crushing competition, violating anti-trust laws, turning political dissidents over to China and turning over search records to the DoJ without warrant or hesitation. That's evil, and those are just some of the combined misdeeds of the two companies that are about to merge and become the largest search, news and mail portal on the Web. Hint: neither one is Google.
Just a guess, but are you using Google Gears? One of its features is the ability to turn the browser into a mobile-device-like application platform, and that kind of behavior is exactly what you would have installed Gears for. Don't worry. If you don't agree to share your contacts, the site in question won't get access to them (they might not even if you do agree, depending on how it's written).
I'm only guessing here, but this sounds like something Gears would do.
Slashdot Mirror
1. The Web is 90% noise
2. 99% of statistics are lies
3. This is a case of statistics based on the Web
Thus we have a 99.9% certainty that this article is a noisy lie.
We've had private insurance with no genetic testing for a long time how.
How is keeping the second condition going to mandate the end of the first? It's ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous, it's just that the summary really, really sucks. What the summary author is trying to say is that if the consumer can use GT to decide if/when they should buy insurance, but the insurance companies can't use it to determine rates/coverage, then the insurance companies will no longer be able to keep their margins up, and will ultimately fail.Of course, that's only true in a world where insurance companies don't adjust rates to reflect their actual profit/loss AND the primary reason that people get insurance is for genetically predisposed diseases. In fact, the primary reasons that most people get insurance is in case of serious and unforeseeable events such as communicable diseases and accidents and of course simple aging-related conditions.
Ask 10 people if they would not get insurance if they had a guarantee that they would never get a heart attack or diabetes. I'm quite certain they'll say that they still would.
So, the summary makes sense as far as it goes, but almost certainly doesn't map to reality.
Not only is it a distortion to say that you can't improve Linux software, but the statement makes these additional distortions:
* It represents gratis as "free software" which is not the common usage in the software field these days
* It represents Microsoft's gratis software as "improvable" which it is not
* It represents truly free software as non-commercial and/or non-profit which is very much untrue
Overall, it's just an amazing pile of horse droppings. Not far from what I expect of MS.
They ship both 2 and 3. I think they anticipated that 3 would be out of beta before release, but even if it's another month or two, it's probably worth having version 3 available as a primary choice.
No, it doesn't. There. Got that out of the way.
Yes it does. What's more, since it's a fair bet that everyone reading that knew exactly what was meant, and that many did not know the Aristotelian or modern meaning related to the construction of logical arguments, it's safe to say that the language has simply changed.Welcome to the 21st century. You can pick up your curmudgeon name-tag on the 3rd table to the left.
It works in Counter-Strike and to a degree in other FPSes.
So why not in WoW? It would prevent the game from getting stale and solve the grind problem. No, dying permanently would not solve the grind problem. It would make it much, much worse, as you would be constantly re-grinding to reach a "reasonable level."
I've played EQ (for quite a few years) where dying meant you lost XP, and WoW does a much better job of making players feel like their effort is rewarded and not just temporarily.
Permanent death is fun for short, one-off events (like EQ did for a bit on a contest server), but for a long-term sustainable game your players need to feel invested in their characters.
i mean i hear all the time how easy 60-70 is, supposedly, but man it's a pain if you're a casual player like myself. It's easy, but it's very time consuming. It's supposed to be, and that's OK. There's no destination in WoW, just many signposts along the way.
Or, to look at it another way, if you don't enjoy leveling, you're not going to enjoy reaching 70. It's just more of the same, really.
When a company says that their guiding principle is not to be evil, perhaps it's not the best use of our time to seek out evil in everything they do. Perhaps we could continue to treat them like any other company and judge them on their deeds?
Well, yes and no. I think Google has done an excellent job on the stats-display end. For a small site, the service is free, and I really get quite a lot out of it.
I have no access to the upcoming Iron Man issues, so perhaps I'm painting the wrong mental image, but this sounds like the kind of plot that you'd see in a modern, mainstream superhero comic.
I'm interested to see what happens to IM especially in the next few years. It's been dominated by AOL, but Google has forced open the field, and is allowing users to communicate with anyone (all of AOL and Google Talk (including the Jabber cloud) can inter-operate freely), which makes Google Talk the largest IM network in the world, all of a sudden.
Nice article on what H.26x is at ddj: http://www.ddj.com/201203492
I had no idea how tangled the standards were... ugh.
My personal experience has been that more and more mainstream folks (especially under the age of 25) are using Linux because it's where the social apps are changing fastest.
The next wave has begun, and that's the push to create highly market-specific Linux desktop offerings. You've already seen this in the "just mail, IM and Web" boxes that have been sold recently by large corporations. There are already offerings in the digital film-making arena, and then there's the mobile world which you may or may not conflate with the desktop world, depending on how you see things merging or not. MacOS has made great strides in woo'ing the "stylish elite", and the "wealthy cool kids". More and more, the people I see using Mac laptops are the young and upwardly mobile that fall pretty much smack in the middle of the demographic space. They're not wealthy, but they've had their first taste of financial success. This is where Mac laptop purchasing has been exploding, at least in the social circles I've been observing. but they still lack a wide selection of applications EH?! You haven't used a Linux or MacOS system recently have you? It's not the selection that limits their adoption. There's a gigantic selection, and in some domains (e.g. digital media for Mac) the selection is broader than other platforms. The limiting factor is and always has been Microsoft's proprietary application suite. If you've ever tried to get Office for Mac to read a file from Office for Windows and been thwarted, you know exactly how Microsoft keeps their market share.
People don't want "selection," they want the apps that "everyone else uses." the price-point that would convert the "average web surfer". No one avoids Linux for the price-point. There are $200, fairly nice boxes at your local WalMart running Linux.
Macs are more expensive, but they have a brand loyalty that's hard to contend with.
The year of Linux on the desktop was probably 2004 or 2005.
If you're waiting for Linux to wipe out the competition, it's not going to happen. It's just going to be a long, slow growth curve as both MacOS and Linux suck up increasingly large chunks of Microsoft's market share.
Yeah, P4P is a buzzword for "pennies for packets."
It's this magical idea that they'll find a way to charge more money for providing the same service without having to lose market share due to raising the prices on their customers' statements. Why not charge EVERYONE is their idea... doesn't matter who you are, or where you are on the 'Net... you can pay Comcast for "premium" service.
Not the worst idea ever, just a contender.
I configured my first MTA in 1988 and bought my first domain in 1995. The implications of public access to email are not lost on me, and that doesn't change anything in our previous discussion, as you well know.
I don't see this conversation moving forward, and I seem to have work to do.
Good luck, and here's hoping that your house has a flattering picture on Google Street View.
I think Linus said it best in the Open Voices podcast (part 2 of the Linus Torvalds interview): Microsoft is a giant company with many competing motivations. Some of that company is willing and ready to embrace open source and treat the community with respect. Part of the company is not. When you hear from the part that wants to treat us well, you tend to wonder, "has something changed?" It probably has not. It's just that you're hearing from a different head.
Paraphrase mine.
I'm just pointing out that it's a bit like saying "if you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I look at you as I pass you on the street."
If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I photograph you as I pass you in the street, and post that to the net.
You did realize that that was a trap, right?
It's the most obvious retort, but it's also the most deeply flawed. If Google were posting pictures of PEOPLE, then we'd have another issue entirely, and I *do* expect them to have a QA process that, at a minimum, looks for people. It's almost impossible to eliminate the people from some places (Times Square comes to mind), but they do an excellent job in every shot I've seen (which I assume they mostly take on off-hours).
To re-cap. Your statement is absurd, as you meant it to be. We know that. If you come up with an analogous statement that actually bears on the matter at hand, let me know.
Pretty much everyone has something to hide, legitimately.
Of course, as I stated. You're arguing a point that I already made. I think you're just confused about what I'm saying, or just defaulting to the argument you WANT to have.
I'll point out that totalitarian governments world-wide would laugh at this conversation in awe that a society could be so paranoid as to fear someone taking a picture of your house and putting it up on the Web with a clear and easy to use way to have it removed.
You have to know that it's being done, first. Maybe 1% of the population knows that Google's street view exists.
Moot point. They've made a gesture, which is frankly more than they need to. Pictures of your street just aren't something that you have any expectation to privacy for, nor have you had any for decades. There are hundreds of books full of nothing but street pictures in your local library.
Here's an odd point: do you have the right to recuse your house from such works? You're limiting the ability of others to communicate directions via landmarks. That seems to me to be an abuse of the commons. I'm not sure I want to offer you that right, and I'm pretty sure you don't have it now.
Of course, Google made it possible, so it's moot for now, but you can bet that the next guy to come along will think about it, and might well NOT. Bravo, I say.
They should make it easy to report actual mistakes (e.g. you took a picture of my family in the front yard). It's a matter of unavoidable fact that mistakes will happen, and some won't get caught by the company doing it. I'm fine with providing a way to point them out.
Right now, it's only Google's Street View.
NO, it's not. Did you not read what I wrote? This is old-school. On the Web it's at least 5 years old as a commercial service. Google just made it free.
Ah... but you respond to that later on... perhaps you're just not re-reading what you wrote?
They're not making them public the way Google has,
Yes, they are. I've used the services.
except in some cases for people who have actually put their home on the market,
Nope.
and even then they're not broadly searchable the way Google's database is.
I searched for my address. I got a picture of my house. Oddly enough it also showed the license plate number on my car. Your point, sir?
And your analysis of the risk involved in someone's garage door being available on the Web for "searching" is...?
You're STILL mixing up separate issues. I'm not going to do that. There's two issues here:
1. What are the boundaries of what kind of things people doing things like Google need to follow. Trespassing in the course of gathering the information is probably one boundary that needs to be maintained.
I think Google's procedures have, thus far, been excellent. I don't see the issue, here. They've made some small mistakes, and those SHOULD be cor
Actually, I find that a bright green-on-black with a slightly textured background (I used 80% opacity in a Gnome terminal with a simple background) is best. The slight texture gives my eye something to work with, and the green-on-black was long ago demonstrated to be the most soothing match over the long term (though that doesn't equate to reduced eyestrain).
My concern is the fact that anybody considers "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?" as some kind of serious response to anything. But I don't. I'm just pointing out that it's a bit like saying "if you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I look at you as I pass you on the street." It's a null statement that bears no value. If I say, "if you have nothing to hide, then you'll let me look through your wallet," that's another egg entirely. I mean, you're just asking for me to invoke Godwin's Law. You know that Have at it. I'll point out that totalitarian governments world-wide would laugh at this conversation in awe that a society could be so paranoid as to fear someone taking a picture of your house and putting it up on the Web with a clear and easy to use way to have it removed. But to get down to specifics:
* In the case of the Borings, the Google van went down a private road (not a public street) to photograph the Boring's backyard. Yes, it basically turned around on a private road, and the images were not deleted (remember, this isn't some guy pointing a camera and saying, "gotcha!") I agree that the images should be deleted. It's a woops. It's not a "OMG Google is teh evil!!1" * In the case of the McKees, the Google van went onto their property (not a public street). Ditto. The fact that mistakes like these are inevitable doesn't mean that they should be dismissed. OF COURSE NOT! They're mistakes. You fix your mistakes. You don't go off and sue someone for invading the privacy of your your home when all they did was take a picture of your front yard. It's just money grabbing and what's sad is if this were a story about any other company, we'd be up-in-arms about the abuse of the legal system, but we've got this need to beat up Google, fed by Slashdot's discovery that Google bashing brings ratings to their beleaguered site. Whatever the cause of these mistakes, Google needs to deal with them and have a better policy than individual "opt out" for these cases. I'm not sure what mechanism you're proposing for discovering these issues. You're literally talking about a few seconds of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the driver may not have even known that he snapped the shots. * The issues of having to opt-out of a relationship with every company that might want to have a relationship with you (however tentative) when the magnifying power of the Internet is involved should be obvious to everyone who has an email address. There's a vast difference, here. You're not talking about "opting out," you're talking about being allowed to remove your house's image from only one of the dozens of databases in which it exists and is made public to one degree or another. Or were you not aware that services have been selling this service to real estate companies for years? Problem is that those services aren't Google and so no one's sitting around trying to come up with ways to claim that they're the next *Godwinning of thread censored for public interest* * The effects of making previously obscure information publicly available and electronically searchable are also well known. And your analysis of the risk involved in someone's garage door being available on the Web for "searching" is...? If we're in the Transparent Society already, well, it may be unavoidable and it may be better than the alternatives but we need to have a public dialog about how to deal with it. This article is part of that public dialog. That dialog is an excellent one to have. This article is mindless Google bashing and bears no resemblance to that conversation.
This "Google is evil" meme needs to end. Crushing competition, violating anti-trust laws, turning political dissidents over to China and turning over search records to the DoJ without warrant or hesitation. That's evil, and those are just some of the combined misdeeds of the two companies that are about to merge and become the largest search, news and mail portal on the Web. Hint: neither one is Google.
Just a guess, but are you using Google Gears? One of its features is the ability to turn the browser into a mobile-device-like application platform, and that kind of behavior is exactly what you would have installed Gears for. Don't worry. If you don't agree to share your contacts, the site in question won't get access to them (they might not even if you do agree, depending on how it's written).
I'm only guessing here, but this sounds like something Gears would do.
http://gears.google.com/