Maybe because they haven't heard the fairly simple definition of those terms. In weather jargon, "watch" means that the event has been actually been seen and reported somewhere. A "warning" means that conditions are right for an event to happen, but it hasn't yet been actually reported. That's a fairly simple distinction that most people should easily understand.

But the people talking to the public would need to occasionally repeat the definitions, or people won't have any idea what they mean. After all, this is really a case of "technical jargon", since the "actually observed/reported" isn't inherently a part of the definition of the common English words "watch" and "warn(ing)".

Maybe, but well over 99% of the people born before computers and software existed have in fact died.

(Ain't statistics wonderful?)

Actually, if you were paying attention, you'd have noticed that google documented and discussed their mapping problems quite openly. They did this especially around the time they started up their fleet of "google vans" that have been remapping the world. Their explicit, stated reason for this was the ongoing problems with the bad data they were getting from their map sources. These were ultimately the thousands upon thousands of local maintainers of the the maps for their jurisdictions, combined with the sloppiness and incompetence of the few companies that aggregated the local maps into larger-scale maps. The folks at google finally decided that the millions of $$ it'd cost to do it all over was worth the price, because there was no sign that the existing mapping system would ever fix its notorious, glaring problems.

Lessee, it's been maybe a decade at the most since this project was started? (When did they start? I tried googling it, and didn't find it. ;-) That's not much time to correct centuries of accumulated low-quality maps that are often missing changes made years ago.

I'm more impressed by how good a job they do, given the crappy maps that they started out with. I'm also impressed by how much Apple's maps have improved in just a few years. But I do sorta agree that they should have waited a bit before foisting them on their users as the default app. If they'd kept google-maps as the default and used the google "beta forever" scheme to tell their customers "We'd like you to try this and inform us of problems", we probably wouldn't be laughing at their incompetence so much. Mapping is a non-trivial problem, and if you admit the problems up front, you'll have much better relations with your users than if you pretend you have a New! Improved! product that fails as spectacularly as Apple's maps have failed.

OTOH, I'm typing this on a somewhat new Macbook Pro, which has Apple's maps installed. I played with it a bit, then went back to using google maps, which works just fine in any browser. But google did make that big switcheroo last week, which I haven't yet quite figured out how to use efficiently. This may convince a lot of us to try Apple's map tool a bit more, so maybe it was a mistake on google's part. If there were a straightforward, simple way to switch rapidly between the old and new google maps, it might help a lot. And the new scheme could be better documented. (I did finally stumble across a way to get the "terrain" feature back, but I'm still unclear on how I did it, and googling it doesn't help. ;-) I wonder if there's a forum with friendly help for people trying to use this new, possibly-improved setup?

When the topic is computer/communications security, talking to legal authorities is very risky anywhere in the world right now, but especially in the US. The usual reaction is to classify anyone with knowledge of security issues a "hacker", which is synonymous with "criminal" to most non-geeks. Demoing a security issue almost always leads to charges against the person doing the demo, not to fixes.

This is a lot of why our computer and communication systems are so insecure now. The people who are knowledgeable and competent to fix the problems tend to understand (typically by being burned) that working on such topics entails a high risk to one's own freedom or career, so they find jobs in other areas that don't entail working with the security aspects.

Actually, people have been discovering this and writing about it for decades. And it's not just an American problem; pretty much everywhere in the world, it's not possible for a mere human to follow all the laws.

For lots of explanations of why, you can ask google about "everyone is a criminal" or "no one is innocent". This does get you lots of mere complaints similar to what we've been reading here, but it also turns up a lot of detailed explanations.

It's common for writers to find funny examples of such situations. Thus, some years back, I lived in Florida for a few years, and when this issue came up in the media, one investigator presented a fun local case: The state of Florida has an old law banning "nude bathing", clearly intended to apply to beaches, but not actually saying so. It turns out that the wording of the law covers taking a bath (and quite likely also a shower) in the privacy of your own bathroom. OTOH, if you're in Florida and don't take baths (or showers?), there are a number of public health laws that you can be arrested for violating. Probably nobody has ever been arrested for bathing at home in Florida, but this doesn't change the fact that you could be if some official wanted to make your life difficult for a few days.

In a city where I once lived, a similar story pointed out that there was a local law banning the possession of "gambling instruments" without a license, clearly intended to control unlicensed gambling organizations. If you know any of the various coin-matching games that children sometimes play, or the similar games with paper money, you'll understand that having currency in your pocket makes you in violation of this law. But if you don't have any currency, your local "vagrancy" laws apply, and you can be arrested and held for the maximum legal time on that charge.

There's no shortage of such conflicts in local laws, and usually there are far too many laws on the books for even a trained lawyer to know (much less understand) them all. So no, you're probably not innocent, wherever you live, and you are probably in violation of several laws at this moment, no matter what you are (or aren't) doing.

To your knowledge. But unless you have the source code, you don't really know what either is tracking or who they're selling the information to.

It's more likely that google is just more open and honest about how they use the information they have about you. They admit openly that the main reason for their success is their "marketing" ability. Customer/client information is a valuable commodity, and the marketers at any corporation you deal with would be fools to not monetize the information they manage to collect.

Thinking differently in this case is simply naive.

Me neither, so I googled "abortion breast cancer link" (minus the quotes, of course). The first page's 10 (out of 1.7 million) hits were mostly about the studies debunking the idea, but a couple of them were links to comments on a recent Chinese study supporting the idea. A quick scan of the 2nd page's 10 hits shows roughly the same.

So it's a real thing. But granted, it can be difficult to keep up with all the misinformation that's flying around among the general population.There are probably a lot more such bogus "health risks" that neither of us knows about.

But it does; reading astrological "information" wastes lifespan that could have been used to read something informative and increasing your knowledge of the world. That's time that you can't ever get back.

While reading your comment, I just saw a UFO myself. It flew through the leafless maple maybe 10m away, but it was in my peripheral vision, so I couldn't identify it. And it was very likely to have been an actual alien, since the most common flying things in this suburb of Boston are English sparrows, and starlings. But I can't say that for sure, since it could have been a native flyer such as a grackle, cardinal, or one of those pesky robins (the American kind, not the European) that no longer bother migrating south in winter because the winters here are now warm enough for them. Actually, it probably wasn't one of our neighborhood cardinals, because I'd likely have noticed the red color even though I didn't see it clearly. But it was definitely flying, I can't identify it, and it's unlikely that anyone was watching it from any of the neighbors' houses, so we'll probably never know what it was.

The robins are especially useful when people complain about all the aliens moving north and taking up residence here in the US, displacing the natives. And we can even tie in a comment about global warming, to further confuse the issue. "When did the robins arrive this year? They didn't; they never left."

(Hey, do you think we can make a connection between mobile phone transmissions and global warming?)

Well, that's good news. I use FF, Opera, Safari, and a few others on my Macbook (but no Safari on my linux box ;-). Both Opera and Safari sometimes update the images when I haven't visited the site, and sometimes keep the same image for several days. I don't know what their trigger for refreshing them might be.

For Firefox, I can't tell, because I can't get it to show me the array of little pictures for my "home page". Anyone know where they hid the setting to enable it? It'll let me pick a page, or show me the "default" google home page, but I can't find any other options in the Preference windows.

It used to be that Safari updated the array of images every time you opened a new window. I guess some people complained about this flooding their slow home Net connection, so they got a bit more subtle about it.

Or in hard facts. ;-)

After all, there's no shortage of hard-science support for the evolutionary process. And you don't need to be an atheist to understand how a god (or team of gods) might build a universe that works that way. Scientists do it all the time: Set up a test environment and initialize it to some state, then sit back and watch what happens.

More than one science-fiction writer has written stories based on such scenarios. Of course, to make the story interesting, it usually turns out that the "gods" (aka technologically advanced aliens) do interact with our world, and do so during the story.

Earlier, /. had a story similar to this, about the situation with the wolves and moose in Isle Royale. That's a semi-isolated "system" that has been strongly affected by human activity, but for half a century or so has had only a tiny human population that cares for and studies the wolf-moose-forest ecosystem and how it develops.

It's not difficult to imagine that our world might be a similar study that has been running for a few billion years. Maybe the researchers sometimes land and "interfere", or just visit to do a bit of personal data collection. Or maybe they just vacation here, perhaps disguised as humans (or mice or gnats).

Or maybe not.

Even more fun is that, in both of the most-recent major election years, numerous surveys turned up the result that the people who watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report were also best at accurately answering questions about the various candidates. This led to a lot of humor.

Of course, it's not obvious in this case which is the cause and which is the effect. But it did lead to a lot of accusations about the mainstream media's news in general and their coverage of the election campaigns in particular. How is it that a bunch of professional comedians specializing in satirical coverage seem to be more informative than the "serious" news agencies?

One bit of commentary I ran across argued that the general failure of the media to educate the public is primarily the result of their being mostly funded by advertising, and the marketers don't generally like a well-informed public. But, the explanation goes, it seems that the companies that advertise in the Daily Show and the Colbert Report do in fact support educational content. Why this might be isn't clear.

Well, Mozilla probably won't give your IP address to anyone, but your browser will. It's in the header of every IP packet sent to anyone, because without it, they can't reply to your request. Note that the "tiles" usually contain a small image of each site's main page, and to display that, the browser must send a request to each site, and each request contains the site's IP address and your IP address. That's how the IP (Internet Protocol) works. So every time you open a blank window or tab, no matter what browser you use, that sort of display of your "favorite" sites informs every site on the page that they're on your favorites list.

(It's possible that some browsers may not refresh those little tiles for every new page. That would make sense, to save time and network bandwidth. But if you see any of the images change, that implies that they are being requested each time a tile is drawn.)

I've installed (or helped others install) firefox on a few new machines lately, and noticed that they always fill new windows/tabs with that google search page. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's a bit redundant, what with the search widget at the upper right. So we've tried to get it to produce that "tiling" of favorite/frequently-visited sites like you see in Opera, Safari, and some other browsers. And we've failed.

I just tried in this firefox that I'm typing this to, installed about a week ago on a new Macbook Pro. I can't find it. The "General" settings page lists "Use Current Page", "Use Bookmark" and "Restore to Default" (which gives the google search page). The "Tabs" settings page doesn't deal with the topic. Under "Content" there's nothing about initial content for new windows/tabs.

So what are we missing? Where is this particular setting now hidden? I expect that it is there somewhere, but I can't guess what they call it or how it's classified in the Preferences/Settings tree of little windows.

You'd think they'd make this the default in a new install, but that doesn't seem to happen. One of the first things I did on this Macbook was fire up Safari and download Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and a few more browsers. Firefox's first window after the initial "greeting" window showed the google search page.

(Yeah, I did try googling it. That doesn't work too well if you don't know what it's now called, and every browser that has this feature seems to call it something different. This is, of course, a well-known problem with many topics. ;-)