Unfortunately Google is too big. It is certainly bigger than Larry or Sergey or any group of like minded engineers. Any one person can be removed and the company will continue to do what it does, against the wishes of that person and the interests of the public. Larry or Sergey can either get with the program (bad) or not (and be replaced with someone who will). The incentive overall is always there, because as a single entity with a de facto monopoly on enormous quantities of information about people is a treasure too big to ignore for the power hungry.

What needs to happen is that Google must be broken up, deliberately, into sufficiently small pieces that they will compete and interfere with each others businesses, thus benefiting consumers, and at the same time preventing grand plans of world domination. Any company that collects a too big war-chest of information must be broken up.

ChromeOS does everything we've ever wanted to do on a small machine.

Soo not true. All *I* ever wanted to do on a Chromebook was have an xterm running off my headless box. With X11 forwarding. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so (*)

(*) I'm not talking about replacing the OS with Linux or doing a crouton hack. I don't want to flip desktops constantly, just simply run my X apps on Aura.

The flip side is the rights of say Blogger users. If I post photo X as a blogger user, it should be up to me to decide if I want to take it down or not, not Google (except maybe in extreme cases, of which this doesn't seem to fall into).

Uhm, no. That's not how it works, and this isn't a new problem either. Every author in the history of mankind has faced a choice on how to publish their work.

Blogger is the publisher of the blog posts, and can decide to publish them or not. This includes removing the posts from their servers at any time. The correct response is to tell the blog author to not be a cheapskate, and if he wants to have complete control over his blog he should publish it himself, on his own server. Then Blogger can't do anything about it, and the legal takedowns have to go to him. None of this is rocket science, and moreover there's plenty of Free Software to help people set up their own blogs.

This is the flipside of putting stuff in the Cloud, you're no longer the owner of your own stuff. Nothing to see here, guy makes a bargain with the devil, then regrets it later.

fairly readable to me. A list per-service might be theoretically useful, but I doubt a normal human would read through each of them.

Isn't that the whole point of this suggestion? People don't like to read impersonal legalese, their eyes glaze over as soon as things get too abstract. But a clear personal document which says "Hey Joe, you bought those slippers for your wife yesterday, and we've passed this information to the following companies: Nike, Kmart, and Kink.com. Nike has bought an ad to show you a pair of women's tennis shoes at $99.95 tomorrow night when you're reading CNN, Kmart has bought your online purchasing history for the last two weeks, which includes the groceries you bought, the 50m of rope you got last sunday, and the timings of your drive home every monday. Kink has subscribed to your google account update feed, which includes realtime alerts any time you buy bondage related products in the next 6 months, because we told them about the 50m of rope and the average amount you spend monthly on non-essentials.

The beauty of this particulary suggestion is in fact that Google are working very hard already to do personalization, it's just that they want to exploit you via this information. So it shouldn't be difficult for them to show you everything, if forced to do so.

You may not have noticed, but we speak a language into which thousands of words have been imported and bastardised.

To say that you speak it (which implies mastery) seems rather debatable, as the thread so far demonstrates. While we all agree I think that "professor emeritus" is indeed imported into English and used correctly as a phrase such as it is, the modification to "emerita" is not. Rather, the latter is an example of non-mastery, and your defence of it is, so far, ineffectual. Its use arises out of ignorance and repetition, which is not uncommon for other phrases on this site, viz. "I could care less". In this case, a poor attempt at imposing feminine endings yields a botched result.

What I find particulary fascinating though is the insecurity apparent in perhaps a large number of readers who prefer to defend and repeat a corrupt usage from someone who may not have known better, lest their own competency in English be considered. It is also puzzling, given the importance correct use of language has in the technical fields most of us here occupy ourselves with, how quickly any incorrect use can be justified as bastardization, as if that label puts it beyond questioning.

That is utter drivel unrelated to my point, which merely shows your own ignorance of the issue. Please allow yourself to be educated.

"Professor" is a Latin masculine noun, and as such is correctly paired with the adjective "emeritus". As I said in my post, if you want to refer to a woman as a "professor", which I have zero objection to, then use the correct adjective, namely "emeritus". If you want to refer to a woman by the latinized "professora", then by all means "emerita" is correct as well. However, "professor emerita" is anglicized pig-latin bullshit which merely serves to mark those who use it as wannabes, who never studied Latin but wish to use an exotic phrase to aggrandize themselves in front of their peers.

Now that you know, please feel free to use whatever phrase you prefer, in full knowledge of the various probable consequences.

Please use the proper endings when trying to impress the ladies that read slashdot: Either write "professor emeritus" or "professora emerita", depending on wheter you believe females' titles are required to be in the masculine or feminine form. Mixing gender endings just makes you look like a poseur.

Don't waste your time with these Old Testament languages, the New Testament is C++11: "And on the seventh day, after writing the new C++ Standard nonstop, Chuck Norris rested and was well pleased, for it was good..."

Yeah, but if Debian gets updated and the other distros don't, then pretty soon everyone will switch to Debian's more secure system. World Linux Domination!

Ah, who am I kidding? Debian's bash version is so ancient it probably doesn't even support environment variables yet....

That's exactly what I want to use my computers for, too. But frankly, systemd and its devilspawn cousin pulseaudio just get in the way. But I'm not going to talk about that since others already do this well. What riles me most these days is X forwarding failures. I have a headless computer I want to do computations on and edit text documents in Emacs/LaTeX. For stupid reasons I shan't get into, I want to do this on a chromebook (I said it was stupid!).

So what, you say, just use an ssh client to log on and voila. Well, the state of ssh + terminal emulation on chromebooks (and android too!) is abysmal. They don't pass all keyboard combinations correctly, they all have issues or fail to implement everything correctly, and worst of all, there's no X forwarding to a decent X server. All I want to fracking do is type "plot" on the server and see a picture on my screen. Or type $\int f$ and see a typeset symbol. Without going through a third party "cloud" server which runs through a browser, takes ages to return data, tries to force me to use braindead keyboard combinations on their cloud "editor/IDE" wet dream which doesn't even handle the simplest regexes and knows a grand total of 2.5 syntactic highlighting modes. And without running a slow as molasses rdp/vnc style remote desktop, or screen switching constantly to a crippled Linux workstation installed on the hard drive.

Now, what has any of this to do with you? Fair question. The answer is that the sophisticated computing system we've had for 20 years is being eroded by imbeciles who think that anything old must be replaced, that new replacement software only needs to implement the tiny subset of features that the programmer actually understands, and under no circumstances can anything which said programmer is ignorant of, or fails to adequately appreciate, be important. And that's where the new stuff like chromeos, android, systemd, pulseaudio, etc is going. And people like you try to convince us that in fact this is great and as it should be, since you're tired of tweaking your systems and have given up control for peace of mind. Well it's ok to give up if you want. I'd rather you didn't attack the complainers though, because they haven't given up yet. They're the ones who just *might* do something, unlike you by your own choice. And they're the ones who, in complaining, share the old knowledge to everyone before the imbeciles wipe it all off the earth.

Why? Isn't the principle of contract law that any form of communication can be deemed legal? Who's going to regulate a face-to-face conversation? And why does any kind of communication that is deemed to be legal necessarily need to be regulated?

IANAL but that seems like a crazy American legal principle to uphold. At the very least, any third party that handles the communication between the courts and the recipient mustn't distort or modify the message. If you serve papers through Facebook, how does anybody know that an exact copy of the message was delivered? Maybe a word was changed or added. This also applies to other situations, ie if you serve to a 7 year old kid, will the message get delivered in one piece or at all? Even a face to face conversation doesn't have a reliable record of the actual message transmitted.

Not all root servers are in the US. Not all root servers are controlled by US companies/government agencies.

You're being naive. As we saw from the leaks last year, if the *hardware* is American, then it's controlled by the US govt. The NSA forces US companies to include hardware modifications into the products they sell, to enable spying and control even through an airgap.

So yeah, maybe that root server isn't physically in the US, but it's obviously critical strategic infrastructure, and you can assume that the US has hidden controls inside some of the chips to help take over the network if they want to.

Actually, I block ads because I *can*.

This whole idea that seems to be pervasive on the net that I should find a "legitimate" excuse to block out the commercial crap that ad companies want to stick down my throat is insidious. l don't need an excuse like "it's malware", I reserve the right to filter out any and all information I don't like. I reserve the right to pick and choose the fonts, to pick and choose the colours, to pick and choose the pictures, and to pick and choose the bits of content of every web page that's offered to me.

I don't accept package deals. I don't care about the experience the content provider wants me to have. I don't care that companies have stupid business models where they try to sell ad space, or try to collect my data to make their ends meet. It's not my problem, and I'll ignore it just because I feel like it. The fact that I'm also blocking malware is just icing on the cake. And if I'm bored, I'll teach others how to do all that too. Just because I'm bored.

I'm not some guest on somebody else's net, where I'm supposed to stay inside a walled garden of bullshit and I need permission to sit down on a chair. It's as much my web as everyone else's, and I'll do what I please with the bits going through my section of tube, malwaew or no malware.

By analyzing the light in the background of a video you can see what is reflected there (the people behind the camera). If someone in the background of a terrorist vid is talking about their next terrorist strike- I'd want to know what he was saying.

That's ridiculous. If you can lip read the reflection in a terrorist vid, then you can see the person's face, and you don't need to know what he's talking about, you can arrest him for being an accessory. If you can't see the person's face, try using Photoshop's ENHANCE plugin to erase the blaclava from the picture.

Not really. You're making too many unfounded assumptions, such as: given a state of the chess board, can both sides win if they each play optimally? That's wrong, sometimes one side cannot win or draw at all, just lose.