So there is something to be genuinely concerned about. I'm not sure if you can turn this off or not in chrome and really, it probably doesn't matter anyway since there are other ways to track you such as this one. But that unique id makes it very easy for google and its partners to track you and hence bug you with ads.

Um... yes. Unfortunately it is very difficult/near impossible to make it that far.

There, fixed that for you.

The company I work for uses a third party (bazaarvoice) for our reviews so we cannot do such shenanigans. Since we don't just sell one brand we actually want the customer to know which product is the best so that they continue to buy from us. I'm sure this is how all resellers operate so what I suspect actually happened is that the review did make it to the site but the manufacturer probably had someone log in as a bunch of separate users and mark the review as objectionable so that it was taken down.

As others have already mentioned; you can't trust reviews. My personal policy with this is ignore the 1 star - "was broken when I got it" and the 10 star - "changed my life" reviews since they don't actually have any useful information. Also, a lot of sites track user submissions so you can guess that if a person writes an unusually long review about how great their new $30 vacuum is but they've never written another review that it's probably bogus.

But a tool like this is only going to be as good as the people who use it.

I understand your pain at work since I have the same email problem as you. People use email as a substitute for a meeting and try to come to a consensus all while constantly asking everyone else for input. So you end up with an email chain 50 replies long with more questions than you started with and somehow you have to decipher what people meant when they said, "yeah, let's do that."

Our signal to noise ratio probably won't be any better with Google Wave but at least everything will be in one place so if you have a project manager they can hopefully moderate the discussion in a meaningful direction.

I shudder to think of the bandwidth pipewise and processorwise that this protocol will take and am sufficiently awed at Google's sheer audacity to do such a deed.

Perhaps they meant the fix was easy...

if (password == account.password);
logUserIn(account);

I'm guess the other 99% of people were just as, if not more bored than you were. Plus, just mentioning that percentage when you're agreeing with a system where no one would be ranked like that isn't very unschoolish of you.

Okay, the parent linked article says FUD, you say FUD, and the article you link to says FUD. I admit there's uncertainty and doubt but where's the fear?

The simple truth is that Theroa has a lot of catching up to do which is completely fair since it's up against a codec family which has been in constant development for, well, ever. In my experience it has a hard time keeping up with motion which is not something which can be shown with single frames like your linked article does. I don't think we'll see the Internet embrace Theroa until its quality is truly comparable to h.264 or when h.264 starts charging for use. Just saying we should use it without any compelling reason other than that it's free isn't going to win any converts since it is always going to be free for the client.