I would have said Androids, but then I got married :-D. Now I just want us to visit other worlds.

My wife is a geneticist (PhD) and she insists that corn is very cool. Did you know that corn has about the same number of genes as a human (in the 25000 - 35000 range)?

So the next time you think you're smart, just remember that you're about as complex as corn.

Acronym is just a homonym for euphemism.

So Cracklib is garbage. That was easy.

Seriously, if your criteria for a good password is merely that it lacks repetition then "fffffffffiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee99999999222222llllllllaaatttt" is a terrible password. In practice, it's at least as good as 9 character password made up of completely random characters.

Anyone care to check my math? (hint: it's 8 groups of letters, all letters being identical within a group and chosen from lower case letters and numbers, the length of each group being a random integer between 3 and 11)

There are a ton of Google services. I think the ones that would
surprise most people are:

• Google Health
• Google Trends
• The Google Pack
• Aardvark

Then of course, there's their non-Web site features. For example,
they have a VC group called Google Ventures; a whole series of public
policy and government-related initiatives such as their work with enabling
public Q&A and CitizenTube, YouTube's public
policy blog about "developing trends in the use of YouTube by news
organizations, activists, politicians, and governments."

They're also a major developer of FOSS. Sometimes this takes the form
of giant systems like Android or Chromium, but just as often, it's
little things like their new Image format, WEBP (my
analysis of WEBP for screenshots, here).

Google does so much that they really do have to mercilessly kill
things like Wave and GOOG-411 when their either outlive their planned
purpose (like the latter) or don't achieve critical mass (like the
former). Otherwise they'd be buried under an avalanche of
half-finished products.

I bet the server's IP address is untraceable.

Is that meant as humor? Lessee.. against the rejections of a large chunk of their software suite including latitude and voice (voice, BTW offers the same features now offered across several other iPhone apps that were approved). Against the painfully slow process of getting Apple to update the Google maps app on iPhone. Against the continued taunts of Apples CEO.

And really, that's just the stuff we see. Google has its own platform, and yet the continue to try to bring their tools to Apple's platform as well, and over and over again Apple rejects them without providing replacements that have even remotely comparable functionality.

Not a bad idea, really. You just need a way for the fighter to establish a high bandwidth link between the target and a few backbone providers, then post the target IP address in a link on Slashdot and viola! Instant DDOS, Slashdot style ;-)

Realistically, Slashdot's "effect" is fairly week these days compared to, say, showing up on Google Trends or having your URL tweeted by a celebrity.

No, you're incorrect. It will always remain hidden. You can change your location, but the distance to the horizon created by the interaction between the speed of light and the expansion of the universe wouldn't change (unless one of those two parameters is changing). WHAT you can see will change, but you'll never be able to see anything past the horizon.

Sometimes it's worth a reality check. Some companies are sexist asses, true, but that actually doesn't put them on the same playing field as a country that stomps on the freedoms of their citizens the way China does.

Granted, Godaddy didn't do this out of the goodness of their little, black hearts, but it's worth thinking about the relative scale of douchitude in the world, from time to time.

Re-read what I wrote. Here, I'll quote it for you:

Yes, your son had fun with it. I'm sure there are hundreds of people who've played around with GE, but that doesn't exactly explain why it's a Google product that they guard the protocols for jealously, which was the original line of inquiry to which I responded.

The answer to that question is that GE isn't intended for typical end-users, cute though it may be. It's intended for commercial applications.

For the most part, GE is not useful for typical end-user activity. It is mostly used to provide a tool for commercial applications of the Google maps data. For example, if you've seen a movie that did the zoom-in or -out between the globe from space and a single house, everything from 100 feet up and further was probably Google Earth. It's also used by law enforcement, NGOs planning access routes to remote locations, real estate, site surveys, etc. See their business use cases for Google Earth for more info.

You could always whitelist ads on sites that you want to support while turning off JavaScript (e.g. using noscript). Most ads will still display (unless they're flash, and then it really was their choice, wasn't it?)

That's what I do. I even leave Slashdot's ad opt-out checkbox unchecked.