Unless you also use a proxy such as Tor or Relakks, Google et'al will typically be able to piece together that you're you by looking at your IP address or network. A VM by itself won't do squat for your privacy.

If you have a dynamic IP which changes all the time, then it will take a bit longer (more clicks) through the web before "Google" can associate your current surfing session to the "file" they have on you.

So Tor/Relakks + short surfing sessions - logging into any site should hopefully keep your surfing somewhat private.

Just to be clear, Google's customers are the advertisers. We the users are their products.
But yes, if their products evaporate it will be a might challenge to sell anything to their customers and the nickle-and-dime folks at Google will feel that.

I put more faith in the article they referenced than the one in context.

From the first grade to 5th, I was a bit of the timid type that "played well with others" and tried to keep a somewhat low profile.

At 6th grade and through the rest of the school years I developed a "I don't give a rats *ss what anyone things"-attitude and I always said what was on my mind since I'd come to hate double speak and "political intrigue". The rationale was that it would be better if people knew that what I said was what I meant and thus know me based on that, rather than having to guess hidden agendas and conjecture their own ideas of who I was or what my intentions may had been.
    Or as I would have then thought of it "Why would anyone say something they don't mean? That just makes stuff unnecessarily complex and it is therefore a stupid thing to do."
I also had the impression that most people were fools because they couldn't see the obviousness and patterns in situations that I could (rather arrogant I admit) and said so when "stupid things" were said and done. Not appreciated by some, why, I didn't understand then.

The first four years after graduation, I came to realize that this "open and frank" attitude didn't really work too well in the corporate world and I tried hard to suppress my outer voice and instead try to find different angles to what people were saying and how they were saying it. This provided a new realization that there probably were less fools around than I had previously thought. After yet a couple of years, it had turned my view of the world and people in general completely 180 and since then I believe that most people have a lot of valuable ideas and valuable which I could learn and benefit from. My personality had returned to the personality which "plays well with others".

Now this evolvement from one type to another and the return to the original shows that personalities can indeed change with or without effort, as postulated by the article I linked. However the outcome of my little anecdote, if used in the study under discussion, would have supported that theory as well, which would obviously have been a false positive.

I don't know if it is common that people change personalities during their youth and then regress to an initial personality or if my example was just a fluke, but since the article in question claims that personalities would remain the same into adult life, I simply felt obliged to provide a counter example to negate that theory.

You mean download advertisements collections?
That's the only content legal for downloading. I read it on the internet and also heard it on Fox News.

Hint: If the Ad collections you torrent aren't rar-ed and have nfo files you shouldn't trust the commercials.

Why bother with trying to link a MAC to a public IP address and how would you even do that? Provided the GP uses some NAT box, like take-your-pick model of a home router/wifi-AP combo at Best Buy, all the MAC will tell the storm troopers is that some machine with a MAC got an internal IP address from the router. It does not tell the troopers that this NATed IP actually downloaded a given torrent.

However, if the troopers find a file with the same message digest on one of the drives confiscated from the GP's home, then it'd be pretty darn hard to sell the court the tale that "John Doe with his MadWiFi skillz passed by the window and is the culprit you should be looking for". MAC addresses have nothing to do with it.

I'd appreciate a 3:4 display such as my first monochrome monitor for my Atari ST, since my region's defacto document format is A4, a format with more height than width.

A high-res 4:3 screen which can be rotated 90 degrees would be perfect for reading documents and a "killer device" for our corporate laptops.

I really don't need a "cinema display" at work since like most people, I'm not in the movie or television industry.

Good thing then that Ubisoft isn't focusing on strategy nor RPG games.
For their kind of titles, an in-game tutorial works rather well.

"Crouch, Jump, Point and shoot. Now play".

What the T-series really needs is a boost to per-thread performance since it will otherwise remain a specialty processor only suitable for certain workloads.

The T2 core has more than enough parallelism for most apps out there. What isn't appreciated though is that it pushes the server *implementation details* all the way up to the app-developers, which causes them grief when they need to target different hardware or when they utilize "junior" developers. It also causes a lot longer performance tuning phases than on our previous platforms (SPARC and Intel).

This situation is fine for A-list developers but causes major grief for the multitude of companies whose developers don't have experience in massively parallelized systems. Companies in that situation unfortunately are most out there.

Our local SUN.. I mean Oracle drones always point out that our servers are able to handle so much in parallel, but that means squat if we can't meet our SLAs.

If I have a response time SLA of 1 second, then it does me little good if I can service 10 times the number of requests of a competitor's server if each request takes 3 seconds and the competitor's hardware actually allows me to reach the SLA!

Also, if there is any kind of locking going on, the server will more or less halt and whopty doo there goes the parallelism.

We won't be buying another T2 since event the PHBs can read the productivity charts and risk reports handed to them by external consultants. The cost of performance tuning of apps has climbed a lot and cost us a small fortune and continue to do so. Hardest to cope with in this space are legacy and third party apps where hardly anyone dare update the decayed code (or receive funding to do so) or in the latter case can.

However, we're seriously contemplating buying a bunch of Nehalem-EX servers and would perhaps have bought the Power7 if we were an IBM-shop since both those companies "Get It", get what customers as us need in contrast to Oracle.

Advice to Oracle: Add a bunch of cache and allow for higher clock speed in the T3 to really start competing with Intel and IBM. I don't care if you add a thousand more threads if each thread still incur a latency three to four times longer than your competition.

Finally, yes I realize I come across as a sour grape but the amount of time and cost *wasted* as a result of our PHB buying these servers (based on spec-mark figures) without contemplating the intended workload has really put a dent in my department's work atmosphere.