I'd rather have adverts that are targeted to my personal interests and 'likes' than be bombarded with irrelevant crap that I'm not at all interested in. Do I want to have farmville adverts showing up on my FB page? No - I'm not a teenage girl. Do I want to be notified when ebuyer or have a sale on? Yes. What's more relevant to me; A band I like is playing a concert in my area, or, A rapper who makes my ears bleed is doing a gig in a different country?

Say what you want about Facebook - but I like how their adverts quite often for something I'm genuinely interested in. IMO, that's what ALL advertising should be like. No matter how many times I see the Always adverts on TV - I'm never going to buy sanitary pads.

This isn't advertising, it's reporting the news.

Should /. not report on new Windows releases? Should it not report on major Linux distro releases? A tech news site not reporting on new tech releases would be a pretty crap site.

But AIM wasn't that popular over here in the UK, and I suspect the same situation in most other countries.

Facebook/Myspace/etc are used much more widely than AIM ever was.

Every result in [search engine of your choice] will be "You need enable cookies to use this website, yay or nay" because search engines won't be able to index the website's content without themselves accepting cookies.

A much better way to implement this unnecessary cookie law would be to put the responsibility on browser vendors instead of website owners. Something along the lines of "This website wants to set cookies which may be necessary for it to work correctly, do you want to allow this? yay/nay". Someone/"they" could even make a standard that allows websites to explain to browsers the reasoning behind each cookie set. Of course, this has the problem that too many people don't update their browsers - but those people bring it on themselves and should therefore not be "protected" by this law.

The accomplishment is nonetheless pretty damn impressive. I wonder how long it took to stitch all those photos together.

From the summary; "months" (:

Wikipedia lists more than a couple linux viruses.

I don't know where you got the notion of me being on the "*nix is just as vulnerable as Windows" bandwagon, at no point did I say anything along those lines. Anybody who assumes that *nix platforms have no native viruses aside from rootkits is utterly naive. Yes, *nix viruses aren't as widespread as their Windows counterparts, but they do exist, they can cause significant damage and *nix platforms are not inherently immune.

It would be relatively simple to write a script that would send itself to everybody in a user's address book and then execute "rm -fr /" with root permissions without even having to exploit some hole in the kernel or whatever. Never underestimate the end user's stupidity. A lot of Ubuntu (for example) newbies don't really understand why many operations prompt them for a password and a malicious script could abuse this by posing as something harmless but ask for root permissions. Many desktop Linux newbies are the same people that turn of Windows' UAC prompts because they're annoying.

An OS can be as secure as you want on paper, but no OS is 100% secure if it's got any human interaction.

This is exactly why antivirus software for Linux already exists, they probably catch a couple of Linux viruses too, but the majority of their definitions are Windows viruses.

I've set up ClamAV on my Linux mail server to catch most dodgy stuff before it reaches my Windows PC. I also recently installed it onto my Linux Netbook to scan a friend's external hard drive for a Windows virus. I haven't been following the latest security news, so didn't particularly want to risk plugging it into my friend's or my Windows machine to scan it.

So I agree, there definitely is a use for Linux-based anti virus software...even if my own uses are mainly concerned with protecting Windows machines.

A machine using another machine to make coffee? Should we really be teaching robots to be slave drivers?

If you hear the same rumour from 2 different people/sources, it's true. This also holds true for rumours that you yourself started - if you hear it back from 2 different people, it must be true.

Here's the actual article.

This seems like a very expensive way to not destroy a hard drive.

Forensics buffs could probably restore a lot of the data on a hard drive that's just had a hole put it in.

Beating it senseless with a hammer & chisel will have a similar efficiency, but will be a lot cheaper.

I'd guess they're dropping Vista support to speed along their release cycle. IE is still very integrated with the operating system. Windows gets all of it's code that deals with internet communication from whatever IE version is installed. Therefore, updating IE is not the same as just updating a standalone browser like FF or Chrome - it's also making changes to a lot of stuff behind the scenes.

There probably is no technical reason why IE 10 couldn't work (to some degree) on Windows as far back as XP. But, given the timeframe (which is short due to the new release cycle), MS cannot develop and test OS-level code across so many platforms.

IIRC, the gov's target was 2Mbps broadband to every household. It's pretty good going if Google can give 1Gbps in the same budget.

You would need to be some sort of mechanical or engineering background information, however, to determine if party B's mechanical system is different enough from party A's mechanical system to rule on some sort of patent issue between the 2 parties. To one person, an engine is an engine. They don't care if it's petrol, diesel or rocket fuel. It's the loud bit that makes vehicles move.

Someone determining whether or not the latest engine by VW (for example) is too similar to an engine previously made by Alfa Romeo is going to need to know more than "an engine is the loud bit that makes vehicles move" - somebody is going to have to explain the details behind the mechanics. Based on this information, they might decide that the engine as a whole isn't a rip-off, but maybe the odd way the valves are set up is suspiciously similar. It would be unfair to make a judgement without the extra technical knowledge.

"...every Google employee..." -- Really?

If the projects I was working on at Google had absolutely nothing at all to do with +1, I'd be pretty pissed if my bonus was riding on whether or not somebody else's project did well.