Funny. You took me seriously! Obviously I understand. Text parsing anyone? Its simple, isn't it? Mu query, are these page view impressions logged and associated with my GMail account? Is google sharing my personal info with these impressions to big companies? Selling and profiting from this marketing data? I bet they are! I wasn't forcefully presented with the GMail EULA. I never bothered looking either. Did you?

Can we say it is time for a new company to emerge that takes the End User seriously and doesn't stick it to them whenever they can? I am sick and tired of worrying about Google stealing my ideas. From disappearing docs on Google Docs, to strange ads showing up on Google Ads while viewing Gmail (my companies top competitors), to Google Chrome's Browser recording my every move, to my YouTube videos featuring advertisements from my company's competitors, to Google Search recording my every search. Where the hell is it going to end with this company? You do not have my permission to take all of my personal info and stuff it into a database somewhere and then threaten to send it to the American Government if asked for! I don't live in your country and you Google are not abiding my countries laws and not respecting your users globally. I have no guarantees that my information is protected in shape or form and this isn't hearsay, we have a Google Exec telling us they provide a cloud for everyone so if you use the cloud your info is not safe with us. For the average Joes to chatter about Tiger Woods and Paris Hilton all day this isn't a big a deal for them. The odd picture emailed of their kids 3rd b-day party is not really worth worrying about because when hes four he will be posting them on Facebook himself but for everyone else that is involved in things deeper than that they should GET OFF GOOGLE NOW! International Google Boycott for professionals that want to keep their data private, anyone?

Google still can't get the POP3 protocol to work correctly in Gmail and here they are playing with bind. You know Microsoft must giggle when they hear Google setup their own DNS servers for the public. Give me a break Google hype machine. I feel like going and looking for another search engine.

Honestly, I don't even like using Gmail. Leaving all my email on my Gmail account makes me fringe a bit. I've always had local copies of everything. I can back to 95 and look at whatever crap I had then. Including emails! Now here we are using shared web services to store all of our work. Look at these idiots. Store your graduate thesis on Google? Come on! Talk about educated idiots. All this could disappear tomorrow. When it comes to retained knowledge I am afraid of what all of these "services" are really doing to humans.

You mean this intellisense IDE I use almost everyday makes me a weenie? I rarely read something on slashdot that makes me irritated but this does. I started with C then moved to C++ then I learned BASIC then Visual Basic then Perl then more C++ then PHP then C#. I'm sure theres a bzillion C like languages I've learned in between learning the languages that make me money. Sometimes I find myself writing bare bones stuff, usually on *nix platforms. It takes me twice as long to write the same routines in that type of minimal environment then without a full featured IDE. I write win32 C++ using the latest VS and even mix mode libraries where I've bridged unmanaged code to work with managed code - no com required. When I want high performance I will switch back to the bare bones approach but when I need to get a job done quickly I am very thankful for modem advancements in programming sciences. These Microsoft programmers might very well be the elite of the elite but for the rest of us not writing operating systems - we don't really care.

Friend of mine had some raunchy photos posted of him drunk at a bar with some rather young looking women. There were photos of him "feeding" them alcohol and "undressing' with them in the rather dark club. When he went for his interview a few weeks ago the chief hauled out photos of himself printed directly from a private facebook page. He said they made no effort to hide where the photos came from. It was a direct print off of Facebbook. He couldn't explain him very well and was asked to not apply to the force again and they would be adding these documents for future interviews in other jurisdictions. He has been on a campaign since that interview to find more people like him. He told me that he has found another person that lost his job because of something someone wrote on his wall about an incidental that occurred when he was underage and he threw a guy off a high school stage and caused him brain damage. Scary shit this social networking crap. Young kids just post whatever crap they want on Facebook. Having seeing my younger cousins profile I was shocked that he had posted some of the things he had and I warned him about posting about his mischief online. "Its just kids stuff" sure but does he want it following him around when hes in the job market in 15 years? No!

Man I hate that toolbar. Google took a page out of Ask's annoyware?

$50,000/year is not piss poor money for most of the working class. Teachers also have the best benefits and also 2+ months off per year. Most teachers either have lesson plans handed down to them by retiring teachers or they develop the plan and don't update it for years. Most recycle tests and exams over and over as well and kids that obtain older copies tend to do better in their classes than kids that don't of the same level of intelligence. There jobs are stressful don't get me wrong but playing the poor mouth isn't washing very well.

You realize most people don't even know what an ISO is right? Microsoft is faced with the same situation our company is faced with right now releasing a large product to the internet and making it as less complicated as possible for the village idiots.

So true!

Looks like plenty of /.'ers have beat me to posting on this hot button topic but I figure I will throw my two cents in anyways. Ironically, I tend to agree that US/Canada IT graduates are NOT ready for the working world and either are most graduates for that matter. Most freshly schooled folks don't usually have the opportunity to home their skills if they don't put serious initiative into learning the glory details of tech and development which does not usually include any sunshine and lollypops. However, to argue to that India's graduates with limited access to subpar technology and weaker institutional standards are better than US graduates is a total farce. The truth is that the employee from India has likely been "thrown" into more situations than the US graduate before, during, and after graduation and therefore are more likely come up with some type of hackjob response faster than a fresh US grad. Most Indian graduates are working during their academic career and freelancing at ridiculously cheap rates to gain experience in the real world with real North American clients. So when time comes for them to enter the job market they already have experience working professionally that US graduates don't. I work both professionally and in academia and most of the time the people I meet with the same degree as me (either BSc. or MSc.) makes me ashamed that they have the same degree as me. It is a well known fact that its not the degree that makes the professional but its how they use it. I don't have a computer science degree, infact I have an Environment Sciences MSc. and a BSc. in Biology. However, I can score an IT position faster then someone with a PhD in computer sciences because I have real life experience working with clients, government, and organizations which are dependent on qualified developers and techs. When I am not working in IT I follow all of the latest technologies and languages and work well beyond that typical 40 hours a week in open source and online development projects (as a hobby!). If you are not totally immersed in your field you are only there for the pay cheque. Most grads I know were and are still only interested in the bottom line and unfortunately for those people their dream job just doesn't exist right now.

When our species encountered another intelligent sister species of near identical genetic code we obviously annihilated them off the planet. We really don't have much basis or fact to say with 100% certainty that the reason we don't co-exist with another intelligent species on Earth is because of our own doing. Humans instinctively parasitize and conquer everything in sight. If a highly intelligent species were to greet us even as friendly beings in the soul interest of simply learning about our primitive ways our ego would explode and we very likely would turn on this species like we have done to so many others extinct and living on good ole earth. The greetings may very well be friendly at first but as soon as that alien being turns his back to us - look out.