Yeah, if they wanted to game it, they could do a much more transparent job. They are the one tallying the votes and storing the names, after all.

Easy, buy from the Nexus line :)

Otherwise, Googling can tell you, but it can be painful. However note that Samsung did hire Cyanogen himself.

Sorry, but no, not everything the government has should be open for anyone to obtain and peruse. Take this as an example, or several other blunders made by the UK government or its contractors. This has some data and discussion on the US. Personally, I'm more concerned with the general lack of responsibility for these kind of breaches in both the public and the private sector.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with your ideal. But ideals can rarely if ever become reality. And they're not always the blessing that they would seem to be.

Yep, I love pwdhash. It's portable without worrying about leaving a password database on a thumbdrive or in the cloud, it can generate long, site-unique passwords while using the same base password. Pwdhash is pretty nice in that it is sensitive to stupid websites that don't allow special characters, too - if you put a special in the password you supply, it very likely (but not necessarily) include one in the password it generates. If you don't put specials in the user-supplied portion, the output is just alphanumeric. Of course, there are still the stupid websites that want passwords to be 12 characters or less, and/or have to start with a letter, and/or other asinine rules. A downside though is that there is a maximum length for the passwords pwdhash generates, 22 chars if I remember correctly, but at this point, I don't think that's really an issue.

Still don't recommend actually using the same base password for everything, of course.

The other cool thing about pwdhash (and potentially, similar services too) is that they don't have to be used on websites. You can use it to generate passwords for, say, your wireless. Do something like the SSID in place of the website, then supply your part of the password.

Pwdhash

And the majority are optional. The only one I find that concerning is the info sent back by the Updater, but then, I don't use Window or OS X so it doesn't affect me.

That said, always be skeptical.

That's shorthand, it's GeV/c^2, which is in fact a mass.

Goodness, I should hope that's obvious for anyone who looks at the linked complaint. An excerpt:

"...and Charles Carreon went biserk [sic] and irate on me and took my bowl of oatmeal and threw it in my face, Tara Lyn Carreon was originally using her feet under the table and secretly massaging my groin with her toes while mr. [sic] Carreon was trying to blackmail me, so after oatmeal splattered my face, then Tara Carreon kicked me in the groin under the table, everything swelled. Mr. Carreon also poured hot mrs. butterworth [sic] maple syrup on my head to humiliate me..."

Yeah, totally believable. The only person "going to jail for this one" could be the nutjob who actually filed it.

Many people think it's silly because of the odds involved.

And the fact that we could be wasting a huge sum of money on something that is expected to give no benefit is not made better or less silly by the fact that other projects have larger budgets. No matter your feelings on SETI, that is a silly notion.

It's really probably not an unreasonable claim, if you look at the probabilities and the rate of search.

Sure, it's not never in absolute terms, but it's never in practical terms. I wouldn't be shocked to see that the expected timescale for us to find life greatly outscales what might be expected for the timescale of human existence. Kinda like playing the lottery every day. Sure, someone is going to win, but with one in a million odds, any given person can only expect to win once every 2,740 years.

Suffice to say, I think the odds of SETI finding something are orders of magnitude beyond one in a million.

Thanks for pointing this out, hadn't heard of the group.

But they really don't seem to be as veiled as you say, after all, this is in their mission statement:

Parts of our beautiful country now resemble Third World communities in Latin America, Africa and Asia. White people are already a minority in many cities and counties, along with several states, both large and small. Without constructive political action, within a few decades we will become a minority across the entire country. Enough is enough!

(Emphasis mine.)

Oh, you're the employee?

Please, tell us more.

Per an Ars article, amusingly, some of the appeals work will go back through Judge Alsup's court. So for Oracle, one is one too many :)

Based off the link you posted above, from an article submitted three years ago?

People change. People's opinions change, especially with articles like this that illuminate the different methodologies and reasoning. Different people exist on the website.

Not to mention that there could be entirely valid reasons why the StatCounter stats could be entirely correct in this case and still be flawed in the determination of the OS share.

I'm not sure why you're trying to create doubt and controversy here.

If it makes you feel better, that would consolidate two posts per week into one!