Personal data almost always isn't stored on cookies. You give your personal data to a company. They probably don't even link that data up with what you do on the website via cookies. If that company then sells that information on to someone else or uses it for reasons that aren't ethical, that isn't down to cookies. That is down to the company being crap.

So how are you going to do this usability testing? Are you going to assume that everyone arrives at the home page and then navigates through your site? This is 2009, wake up to the real world. Most sites have 60%+ visits coming from Google in the middle of the site, to do any usability testing they need to know where they arrived to focus that usability. To get this information you need to have cookies. If you don't, you'll end up with a really nice home page, pointing to your good bits of content and you'll ignore most of your user base. This is the attitude that makes Murdoch think he can get away with putting all his content behind pay walls. It'll fail. If all EU content has to follow the new cookies rule, it will fail too and the only option you'll have in an EU country is to access non-EU content.

In the UK, fortunately you have a nice little website that tells you all about how to take ideas you have and turn them into money.

Fortunately, they also have a section on protecting your intellectual property that tells you how to do that as well (in terms of patenting, NDAs, Trademarks and Design right). I'm sure the processes aren't quite as straightforward as they look like they are here, but you get the point.

On a personal note - the question of whether to patent is a difficult one. In the internet era it would seem easier to exploit the innovation yourself before anyone else can come up with a similar, but slightly different idea that they then make a shed load of money out of.

Disclaimer: I work for BusinessLink

Let's not get overwashed with this - water is just one thing that we need for life. Other things are just as equally important. Not least a stable temperature that is condusive to growth. Things like the moon can be ruled out becasue of the large differences in temperature due to the lack of atmposphere. As the poster above says, with the new ion rockets that are available, we should be looking for deeper space planets that are more likely to be able to host life because of their constant temperature (where water is actually water and not ice or steam or whichever other state it can be in).

Wow - that is important then. I wondered how the publishing companies were going to make people pay for their content if they hid it behind a barrier. Micropayments don't work if everyone has to do them seperately on every single site and every single time you want to pay for content - you need a one click payment system. Google can provide that, because they are large and they are trusted. Moreover this gets around the issue that Publishers had that users won't be able to find their content - they'll still give Google access to it for indexing, you'll just have to pay to view it. I wonder how much Yahoo! and Microsoft are pooing their pants right now.

I recently tried to install an old discworld noir that I had from ages ago but hadn't completed. It wouldn't work, I can't make it work and now I want to play it more than anything in the world. Damn the company that made it going bust. Remake it. Please won't someone remake it.

... get turned into a Kestrel? Is this the earliest example of dumbing down?

I was trying to persuade the missus (yes really) that WoW was just really an extension of the rogue and Angband games I used to play but with the ability to play real time instead of turn based and actually play with/against real people.
She looked at me blankly and claimed that she didn't know what Rogue and Angband were. When I showed her, she laughed and claimed that it was completely different because of the graphics.
I maintain the similarities are there - certainly with the stats and so forth. But obviously it is a bit more advanced. As you'd expect in twenty years.

I for one welcome our new @ symbol overlords.

I read this comment on the bottom of a Guardian blog yesterday and it rings true:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/apr/06/google-wallstreetjournal "Most newspapers would prefer a fraction of their current traffic in exchange for a core set of engaged, frequent, transacting users."

I'd argue that the 'would' should be a 'should'.

It's probably not what Google wants to hear, but more visits and ad views doesn't necessarilly help most newspaper sites as they won't sell out their ad inventory anyway. What the newspapers need to do is focus on building up a bigger core audience (through building authorative links to informative, well written articles) who are more likely to interact with the site and add value based on however the newspaper sees its business model. The real trouble is that they don't really have detailed business models at the moment apart from putting ads on the pages. However if you don't sell all your ads, then more page views does not equal more money.

In other words if Tevatron discovers it first, then LHC can get on with finding more useful stuff rather than trying to prove god exists/doesn't exist because of one particle (yes I know that this particle doesn't prove that god exists or doesn't exist).

It must die.

Until it Google (/Yahoo!/MSN/AN-Other-Search-Engine's spider) starts being able to index it (and 'pages' withing it). Which will never happen.

So we'll have to stick with the standard ASCII pages, so that people who search for the thing in Google will be able to find it.

I've heard that now the iRack is much more stable than it was a couple of years ago and they are ready to release it. There are still some doubts about whether it can stand alone on its own though.