Google shows targeted ads, without revealing or transferring your information to questionable ad networks, nor do they serve ads to show you ridiculous popups and resource hogging flash. Compare that to other major players in the market, and what they offer users, and you'd see they pan out as being much more responsible in how they support the cost of providing services.

They've also fought for more transparency in government information requests, so the public knows exactly what the government is demanding from Google.

When they discovered oppressive governments were hacking their services to obtain information in political dissidents, Google took steps to correct the problems.

They've made a few missteps along the way, but overall they've taken positive initiatives they didn't have to.

For $150 you can get a SSD with plenty of space for the vast majority of desktop roles, and it will beat out HDD by at least 10 times or more on speed, heat, power consumption, and noise.

The only thing HDD is king of, is being slow. King of maybe certain roles that require a very large amount of cheap space.

And if you want to argue capacity needs for servers, you need to start talking about enterprise HDDs, and their $/gb is not as high as consumer HDDs, and it gets worse when you factor in power consumption and cooling costs(yes HDDs generate heat even though they don't need heatsinks, and in data center cooling costs you $). By the time you factor that in, the $/gb of a enterprise drive gets close to SSDs.

You said: "The article writer mist be smoking some amazing shit to come to such a wacky claim."

Are you referring to the article summary, or one of the specificly linked articles? Because summary says: "Oh, and price. We'll have to wait and see on that."

So they are not making any claims about price. It seems maybe you are the one smoking too much?

Anyhow, there are only a few niche roles where a desktop needs that much space. Give me a 240 GB SSD with 10 times faster IOPs, 10th of the heat and power consumption, zero noise, and no moving parts. That's plenty.

HDD's still have there place for certain use cases, but SSDs beat them by an order of magnitude on just about every factor except price per gigabyte. $/gb is not as relevant when you realize $150 will get you enough of space on an SSD for most desktop roles, and way more than you need on an HDD.

Yes, but they employ alot of techniques to mitigate this. The endurance is so high that unless you are recording audio/video almost constantly, it will usually not become an issue. There's plenty of literature on it so not going to be redundant.

Yeh, a bit of throwing the baby out with the bath water. They gave up because they couldn't make renewables cheaper than coal. However, if you really want to help mitigate(I emphasize mitigate based on the article's information, RTFA) CO2 output, you might be willing to pay more for renewable energy and not have to suffer the economic loss of climate change impact later(that of course being a whole different argument).

It was a business venture, and they knew it wouldn't succeed based on morals alone. It'd have to be cheaper than coal to be viable, and coal is dirt cheap, cause there's a ton of the stuff. It's alot more available than oil is, it's just not the nicest stuff to burn on the same planet you happen to live.

Normalize your data and use rates, or GTFO

"to enrich himself"

This is what really sets him apart from other copyright cases. He knowingly hosted massive amounts of copyright content, regardless of how it got there, and created a system that gained him massive revenue from it.

HTML5 is not capable of capturing your screen. You could write the client in HTML5, but then you wouldn't have the option for clients to occasionally share their screen.

I know NPAPI wasn't exactly the most elegant thing, but at least it was supported by a few major browsers. Are there any good plugin API alternatives that are cross browser? Or is everyone having to implement a version of the plugin for each browser using whatever API that browser has decided to support?

Chrome 64bit didn't support NPAPI and so WebEx didn't work for me, but in last couple weeks they recently completely redid WebEx plugin and now it works. I assume they now have a non-NPAPI dependant plugin. I may be mistaken though.

They certainly misplaced their trust. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for these individuals either. But I would never say they deserve it unless they entered the market with malicious intent. Maybe they were selfish to try and capitalize on the currency, or perhaps they just believe in it from a philosophical standpoint and wanted to support it.

The logic of they-deserved-it-so-its-justified-because-they-let-it-happen is a worn fallacy I'm tired of hearing. If we all believed in such logic, we'd all wear a helmet at all times, otherwise anyone who caves your skull in from behind with a rock would be perfectly justified and socially acceptable. There would be no crime because everything would be legal. Anything you propose as being illegal would be dismissed on that same logic. Oh someone robbed you at gunpoint? Too bad, shouldn't have been outside carrying valuables unarmed. You will probably reply that "anyone who is too weak or goes out unarmed deserves to whatever happens to them, let the weak be weeded out", but even the most well armed and prepared could, and eventually would, find themselves in a situation where they didn't see their assailant in time. Children are pretty uninformed of many of the dangers of the world. Sometimes the best lessons learned are those that are learned the hard way, but there are certainly some terrible things that happen to the uninformed which they didn't by any means deserve. It would be chaos.

"Erm what do you mean 'if'? "

If you don't understand what a conditional statement is then you're an idiot. I'm sorry, I started that with "If" so you aren't going to understand that sentence either, so let me rephrase. You're an idiot.

"They DO have their own CA's added to all browsers. Lots of governments do."

I've never seen a major browser delivered with a known government CA. There have been cases where it has appeared that a CA began issuing fraudulent certificates, and it appeared to be under the influence of a government entity. You might claim those are one and the same, but a legitimate independent CA is indistinguishable from a CA that is acting on behalf of a government entity until it starts issuing fraudulent certificates.

"A signed cert by any one of those is equally good for any site, unless you are also checking known signatures..."

What you are describing is what I already described via method #2. If and only if they are able to add their root public key to the user's computer will their fraudulently issued certificates successfully validate. Once it's added, then yes they can issue a fraudulent cert for any domain, and that user's browser will validate it.

"Have you seem the list of CA root certs in a normal browser install these days? Its in the dozens, if not hundreds."

Yes, so if you want to pursue method #1, you only need compromise any one of these CAs. Some CAs are going to have worse security than others, perhaps giving too many employees access to the private key, and some may reside in countries where governments or criminal elements leverage more control over the CA.

Some browsers have been more aggressive in removing CAs that have had issues where they were found to be issuing fraudulent certificates. It's kind of a moving target.

This new organization isn't necessarily immune to any of this. If they aren't secured well and their private key were compromised, then the same issues apply to them.

Anyone, even you and I, can have their own certificate authority and issue certificates. That is not enough for them to compromise the security of your SSL.

Keep in mind for them to use issue a certificate for your domain, and have your browser successfully validate it, the fraudulent issuer would need either of:

1) The real CA's private key, so that they can generate a certificate that validates against the CA's public key.
OR
2) Somehow maliciously insert their own public key onto your computer such that your browser sees certificates signed by the fraudulent party as valid.

#2 would be more likely if they are targetting some specific person or organization. If they managed to access a organization's network and deploy their own public key so that everyone's browsers will see the fraudulent CA as a valid CA.

#1 would be more likely if they compromised the real CA and stole their private key, were able to brute force or through some other method crack the real CA's private key(crack is probably the wrong word), or used a court order/raid to "steal" the private key. Keep in mind the fist two happens with malicious parties other than government entities. If you look through past stories there are cases of CA's being compromised and they have to revoke all of the certificates issued from that particular private key.

Yes, even with lots of data you'd probably have a hard time showing that some manufacturers are significantly more reliable, due to lots of factors that will create a large deviation within each manufacturer.

I heard a story of someone seeing a shipping container full of hard drives get dropped accidentally, and they just hooked it back up, put it on the ship, and sent them on their way. That probably generated a lot of the "I bought 3 SuchBrand drives, and they all failed in the first month".