I'm a multiplyer. I set up my PC, my gf's PC, my parents' PC, my steppatrnts PCs... whatever I do will affect a number of people.

Many PCs are configured by multiplyers like me. We pushed the use of firefox over that of IE in Germany. And we implement adblockers.

Now, why do we do that? It's not because we were asked for it. The people whom we help don't know that ads can be blocked before we tell them. No, we want to have less work.

How do we minimise our workload for administration of relatives' PCs? We secure them. Part of securing a PC is to make sure that only intended content is executed on it. That's why we install adblockers on so many PCs.

One or two years ago, a web-advertising company called "Falk AG" in germany got hacked. They had their banners on all sorts of resprctable sites like major newspapers. Suddenly, when you were visiting the websites of the leading German magazines, your PC would be hacked through manipulated ads served by Falk.

Again, we want to reduce the time we have to spend on those machines, therefore we want to keep them as clean as possible, therefore we make them block ads. What type of ad? Flash, animated gif, static image? I don't care. If it's not loaded into the browser, it cannot exploit a weakness.

Now for google.

If something needs to be found, it will be searched for, most likely using google. If all other ads are blocked, only the text-ads served by google on the google result-page will ever be seen. It increases their value.

Why would google care about banners on other people's sites?

And even if Chrome would not allow adblocking, what if a user actually found something in an ad he likes? He wouldn't have to google it. Google loses.

So, I'm actually surprised it's not google themselves who provide an adblocker for Chrome.

In its attempt to make google look bad and to discourage usage of the plugin, Microsoft looks at it with great scrunity, possibly examining it in greater detail than their own software.

This is a good thing because it means that more errors are found more quickly and solved more timely.

At the same time, the error sounds less severe than what's in IE right from the start anyway...

I've read numbers 1 through 8. It's the Mac OS X dialog you see when you need sudo-rights plus a graphical icon for Admin-acounts.

I'm absolutely stunned how novel and non-obvious this slight modification to Apple's OS is, how innovative and worthy of a 20 year monopoly on implementation of such an astounding improvemant over what Apple ships for years.

Granted, but let's be honest:
- have you ever done this?
- would you know how to debug the application?
- do you believe that you'd be able to just debug the kernel or some complicated framework, understand the coding, write a fix and be sure that it won't break all other applications because your fix breaks some other expected functionality?

I agree that with colsed source, you just can't do it. But let's be honest, for most of us, we still wouldn't do it if we (technically) could because we lack the skills and the knowledge about the underlying layers of software.

This comes from a software developer currently doing development support (that means fixing bugs in our applications). If something goes wrong in someone else's coding - hand the issue to them, don't touch it; chances are you'd break something you didn't understand.

Without the CCTVs, it's not really that different from homes for the elderly.

Except it's "non-negociable2 meaning "forced on families" and highly invasive to their lifes. I'd challenge it in the european courts for breach of human rights in a heartbeat. Thankfully, the united kingdom is part of an organization that does recognize those.

Sometimes I'm lazy too. So on vacation, when downloading the photos of the day onto my old PowerBook, I started iWeb to select a few of them and write something about the picture and where it was taken, so I could host it for my parents to look at them.

I used iWeb because I wanted something simple at the end of a long day.

The result is absolutely W3C-valid - no errors, no warnings. Renders well in Firefox and Safari, I have no idea about IE6, but I think that renders it correctly as well. Sorry, what was the issue with incorrect HTML and WYSIWYG-editors again?

For the start of "recorded history", I on the other hand tend to look at the oldest written (and translated) documents preserverd until today. Which is mesopotamia and more like twice the 3K years postulated by GP.

You're so right! We did it! Humanity has achieved what supervolcanoes with all their CO2-emissions failed to achieve - massive positive feedback loops! Unstoppable!

For 4.5 billion years, earth might have maintained its fragile balance between supercold and Venus' twin brother engulved in heat and acid rain. It's completely beyond me how that could have lastet so long - no, it must be our special state of being the first intelligent living things, the first walking non-animals (clearly an abomination that has to be punished by nature) which tipped the scales. Now we're heading the Venus-way.

Of course this is bullshit.

Earth is currently relatively cool. It used to be a lot warmer most of the time. Whatever we do, the best we can hope to achieve is to heat it up to relatively warm and to do so quickly enough to cause mass extincion of plants and animals, opening massive ecological niches for new species to conquer.

We're possibly endangering human civilization in the process with it being undescided if the species will survive this or not. But the odds are, that we're positioned pretty well. We can eat both plants and meat and we've proven to be formidabely adoptable to various climates. Anyhow, even a complete breakdown of civilization will be unlikely to push us further back than rural africa, native americans in the rainforests or natives to australia in the outback.

So no, we're not destroying the planet. That's something completely impossible for us and quite unimaginable even for the future (if you define earth as a roughly ball-shaped lump of mostly rock floating around the sun).

No, we're not destroying life on earth. Life has endured worse than us and most of the biomass of the planet is presumably living underground anyway (as in bacteria with very slow metabolism capable to "feed" on the energies released by natural radioactivity found in very deep deep mines in south-africa, to name just one example.)

No, we're propably not destroying humanity either. Would be quite hard to achieve, given how far spread it is and how well adjusted to how many climates. And how it was so before the modern age.

But yes, we might endanger gouvernments, civilization as we know it and so forth. And Venice, of course, unless the dutch take over Italy. But why would they?

This came up when they introduced iTunes plus ages ago. It's been discussed back then. Yes, the info is there. You can simply look it up, no problem. Your ID3-Tag-Editor might not be able to chanxge it since we're not talking MP3 here. That's it.

Just use a different editor, clean out the information and start the copyrightinfringement-frenzy you seem to have been waiting for for so long. Oh no, you already do that, I guess.

Or, if you don't like finding an editor that can delete the info, just go to a record store and steal the CD.