According to wikipedia at least, there is only one fully non-optional point at which chrome contacts its masters, and that's a unique token generated during install to count unique installs. After that you can avoid any info being sent back to google by turning off settings for instant search, not agreeing to send crash reports, not using google search, disabling auto-updates, and never mistyping a page name and getting a server not found error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Usage_tracking

It is more effort than is required with FF, and although they've _promised_ not to be evil it is wise to be wary of evolving intentions and what will become of all the info they collect. But note that use of instant google search and auto-suggest and the safe-search settings send info to google when using FF as well, so that's not much different.

Well said...in 114 characters.

Umm, a moving camera just has changing dead angles over a span of time. If that was the concern then using more cameras would be a better and cheaper solution.

A better question is to ask what evidence is there that it is surely safe? Let's consider those facts with the opposing bias:

1. - Frequencies used in security applications have a water penetration depth of on average 0.3mm. While this should result in damage mainly to surface layers of skin, the damage caused by further penetration when individual and localized exposure exceeds the average, or from repeated and long-term exposure is unknown.
2. - A purely mathematical model suggests that photon energies involved have a potential to break bonds in the localized sites of the DNA helix which may interfere with RNA transcription. No practical experiments have been done to show this is safe or desirable.
3. - The probability of these photon interactions is non-0 and represents a risk that is likely small, but nevertheless uncertain.
4. - While your body is exposed to orders of magnitude more radiation cosmic and terrestrial sources daily, there is no rational necessity to add anything to that exposure merely to satisfy demonstrably ineffective security theater.

But can you avoid steam during activation too? I'd like to play skyrim, I don't want to pirate it, I'd like a legitimate copy that I can patch etc. But I don't want to create a steam account or run steam software, even for installation. Is that a possibility?

The spoons/shovels thing is just a reductionist argument. In the end we want both 'canals' and jobs don't we---both products, productivity, and the means to distribute the resulting goods, services in a way that scales to the contribution given in creating them. Too much in either direction is silly.

The problem here is that someone needs to organize these things. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, buy and run the servers, spend effort soliciting reviewers, run the reviewing software, respond to questions, request ISBNs, submit the work to indexing sites, etc etc etc..

Open access journals address this by having a publication fee, or by advertising, or by seeking volunteers and asking for charity. Paying for publication gets blurry with vanity press, and advertising ends up sucking up to the advertisers. Volunteering and charity seem wonderful, but have to compete with lots of other worthy causes.

In CS, most of the major publishers allow you to post a copy of your paper on your personal website (as long as you also link to the official version). Finding papers outside of the paywalls is only difficult when the authors are in industry (but those aren't the publicly funded papers you're talking about anyway).

Yes, yes there is. The purpose of an educational assignment is voided if you think of it as a game---the point is to do it and learn from that experience, not just "pass" it. If your professors are encouraging you to do that they are fools, and if you think learning is about achieving an "adequate percentage of work done" you do yourself (and your future employers) no service.

It's just supply and demand. About 1/3 of the people I see on my daily commute have headphones on, and most of them are almost certainly too loud. This has been going on since the walkman appeared in the mid/late 80's, so those early adopters are now leading the pack in early adoption of hearing aids.

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Maybe, but that's offset by 100k apps worth of support paid for by $0 in income. From TFA, in their case, 300 emails/day, and no subsequent increase in sales.

They can't be that satisfied if they want a new one.

Partly. There are also too damned many of them. Every pissant site seems to require a login/passwd, it's best to keep them all distinct, and the difficulty of remembering all these passwords is in a continuum with their complexity.

Well, ensuring everyone is doing the same thing has direct benefits for locusts.

Are you sure your mom is qualified to teach CS?

Ok, maybe too harsh, that might be fine for HS. But most university CS curricula start by teaching you a programming language---how to do structured program, incrementally adding features and complexity. I don't see why HS should be so different, it's not like it's difficult if you're remotely suited to the topic. Why not give your siblings a leg up on the competition, check out major university CS programs and start from there---from experience, even grade early HS students can master these concepts in small enough doses.