I'm really not sure what you're on about.

Yes, Google knows you clicked, because they use that to track advertising effectiveness statistics, and, I assume, as a signal that the ad is for something you're interested in. Normally, of course, a web site doesn't know about clicks on links to other sites. When you click a search result or an ad, you're actually hitting a link to Google, which then redirects you to the destination. This is done so that Google knows you clicked. For both search results and ads, that's an important signal to Google that lets them know they ranked results/ads well and showed you what you were looking for.

Yes, the advertiser's web site knows you clicked, just like any web site you visit. Slashdot knows you viewed this article, and posted, and what you posted, etc. If you use a site, the system and therefore its operators know you did.

I don't see what about all of this upsets you, or what you think someone is trying to hide from you.

But do you want a computer where someone else can replace your OS with three minutes and a screwdriver without you being able to tell that they did so?

Yes, if you click a link that takes you to the advertiser's site, they know you did so. It's no different than if you typed in their URL, except that they see a referer header from Google, and find out what search terms you used to find them. Google didn't give them any of that information, though, YOU did.

If you opt out of personalized ads, there's no value to Google in tracking you.

in London, you get in a fight and you get a broken arm or a broken nose

in New York City, you get in a fight and you get a body bag

whenever the homicide rate of the USA is compared to other Western countries, NRA propagandized morons change the subject and counter about *violence*. as if *violence* is the same as *homicide*

frankly, i'd love the violence rate in the usa to go up and the homicide rate to go down. because a broken arm is not a body bag

and you get that with better gun control

but too many of my fellow americans of the low iq and propagandized variety believe for some fucking ignorant reason that every little misunderstanding or conflict has to escalate to death

and that's exactly what we get:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

rape? robbery? violence? about the same as our social and economic peers

easy guns do not protect us from those things. they just mean tens of thousands of extra body bags every year

if anything, owning a gun increases the chance of mortality for you and your loved ones, because you've raised the stakes in every little act of confusion/ misunderstanding/ anger/ accident/ etc. to death

like what? child porn? incitement to murder? sure. i live in the West and i support suppression of that

like political criticism? religious satire? no. i do not support that

the country that limits a few vicious topics is not at all like the country that locks down all political speech threatening the political status quo

the former is very much a free country, the latter very much not a free country, and the difference is substantive and real and very serious

if you think a country that censors child porn is exactly the same as one that censors political speech, you're only announcing yourself as a moron who doesn't understand the topic

no, ask most english speakers what 50 cents means and they think Curtis James Jackson III born July 6, 1975

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5...

you really do have to spread the word about astroturfers paid by the chinese government to vomit propaganda on social media, most english speakers really are not aware of them

you've listed a bunch of red herrings, tangential topics, and pointless observations to say nothing valid or interesting at all on the topic

it's as if you lack the capacity for critical thought... or you are demonstrating a weak timid mind taught that to approach certain taboo topics and verboten observations leads to punishment

hmmm...

so here we see the mediocre fruitless mental quality of someone raised in a walled garden of a "harmonious" society of cotton headed propaganda tools

so you're saying that criticism of the chinese government is ok, as long the chinese government approves the criticism

do you even listen to yourself? how propagandized and/ or braindead do you have to be to not see how stupid that sounds?

The news at 11, of course, is that said serial port access is provided via TCP on a public IP, on a known port, with no password.

Yes, you can, at least with Google. Google provides opt-out tools, and they work. I know some of the engineers who work on opt-out and they're quite serious about ensuring that nothing identifiable gets stored about users who present an opt-out cookie. Any team that tried to work around opt out would be in trouble... and would get Google in trouble during its regular FTC privacy audits, pursuant to the consent decree Google signed.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above represents only my personal opinions.)

This is a common misunderstanding of Google's business model. Google doesn't sell information. At least, not very much. I think there are a few minor products that involve selling aggregated, statistical information, but they're an insignificant part of Google's revenue stream. Where Google makes money isn't by selling information about users, it's by using information about users. Google doesn't deliver information to advertisers for them to decide who to advertise to, Google accepts ads from the advertisers and uses the information it has to decide which ones to show to which users. Advertisers don't see the user data and have very little control over the targeting of their ads, which is fine with them because Google is better at the targeting than they are anyway.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above is all public information.)

I think hybrid laptops are going to become more ubiquitous in the future, and some of them may even be as large as 17 inches.

But have you ever seen a family use a all in one pc device? Even though most of us find it easier to use a mouse/keyboard,I've sat and watched family members who bought one of those larger 21 inch all in one gateways sit at the desk, use the keyboard or mouse to open up their email, then flip over to a web page and start flicking their way through links by touching instead of using the scroll mouse.

When Intel's UWB wireless monitors hit mainstream I think we'll even see more of this - you might pick up that monitor off it's cradle and sit in the comfy easy chair across the room and use it as a giant 20 inch tablet. Not to mention artists who might lay it flat to draw on it. I think the next unsaid interim step for that will be the kinect for windows. Late last year Kinect they started talking with manufacturers about building kinect into monitors & tv's for Windows 10. We might see those designs by christmas or early next year. I don't want an xbox but I wouldn't mind having a kinect interface with the TV for accessing channels and such ala a tivo or roku interface.

Wait --- your argument has turned into how iOS and Android are doing more with smaller less resource hungry systems?

Tell that to the plethora of users with phones less than two years old who can't run iOS 8 or the newest Android builds because of changes to the underlying OS. This also includes the tons of apps that companies are making that won't run on older versions of their OS's and are growing in size.

There are plenty of things to bitch about with Microsoft's decisions but I don't think their decision to use the same underlying OS is one of them. In fact, running windows 8.1 on an old machine works better than running windows 7 on an old machine because they've been optimizing the system to work well with less memory.

Microsoft has found that the market doesn't want ARM machines because there's a chance that they want to run xyz old software that they are familiar with. I say good for them! Adapting that internal app that has worked for 25 years to a tablet is great for xyz company who is not primarily an IT company.

It comes down to this:
Microsoft is a large company who wants to protect their income stream, which is office and lately, the cloud.
Apple is a large company who wants to protect their income streams in both the app store and keeping a constant hardware upgrade cycle intact.
Google just wants your eyeballs and to know everything about you, which means they need to have cheap and easy to use software that can be implemented by everyone as their main focus.

Everyone has their own motivations, and THAT competition is good for the rest of us.

bragging is when you go "i did {x}"

he is saying "if you don't want to be caught, do {y}"

he's giving advice that doesn't implicate him in anything, in an on topic comment

he doesn't owe you anything, so say "thanks"

or say nothing

or reveal the only real character defect in this thread, which is not being a bragging dipshit, but yours: loudmouth asshole begging for a pointless fight

and that pointless fight will find you someday. you'll mouth off like you just did, because you wrongly think it makes you superior, to the wrong character, and depending on how badly you lose the resulting conflict, you'll probably be thinking:

"should have just kept my mouth shut rather than cast unnecessary hate and i could have avoided this"

good luck kid