What bothers me most about this is that in order to "opt-out" you have to give them some additional way of tracking you so your opt out persists. Which means they increase the base of people they are tracking even more.

For a second there I thought /. finally implemented the ability to moderate the stories themselves.

"How would you land on Earth's Moon?"

Option 1: Safely
Option 2: A dramatic (though painless) ball of fire, visible from earth

What most of us want is NO ADS. They're annoying, distracting and whole purpose for being is to manipulate people.

If we are in the market for said product we'd go shopping. There has yet to be a commercial that has moved me with their... oooh, shiny...

CAPTCHA: cringe

Hope I'm not giving away the ending of the first part for anyone, but... the lake you mention is frozen by the beating of Satan's wings. Other parts of the inferno are plenty hot depending upon the punishment, as in the case of the sodomites wandering on the burning sand with flames falling on them like rain.

Oh, and since I'm on a roll, Snape kills Dumbledor ;)

In other news, sources have learned that Amazon.com deleted George Orwell's 1984 from Kindle owners libraries because they were correcting a mis-categorization. 1984 has now been moved to the non-fiction section.

Google Voice is not VOIP, at least not on the front end like Skype is (which in contrast is still available in the App Store). When you use GV on AT&T, the calls still go over the cell towers as a normal not as a data stream like Skype would. So it still eats your minutes.

Here's an interesting blog post that spells out much of the things that AT&T has on offer which Google Voice does better and for free.

Some of us refuse to pay outrageous fees for packets that are being sent betwwen the phone and towers anyways and have SMS fully disabled. Besides, from my experience, it was more of an additional avenue for SPAM than a useful communication channel.

Good point, but it fails to account for the fact that I can make international calls with several other apps that they did not pull, such as Skype. Granted they limit you to only being able to do that when you are on wifi, but still; free wifi is common enough to come by.

Also, while they may have pulled the plug on these GV apps, I can still make GV calls from my iPhone, it's just a little less less convenient and "pretty". In fact, come to think of it, Skype also has a call back function to make international calls that works just like GV does only to initiate the call you call a particular number and select an entry from a predefined list when prompted or enter the number you want to call manually.

Wireless Power gives everyone a warm fuzzy feeling... oh, wait...

Have you considered going through one of the online sites that are supported by Stanza and/or other ebook readers that are already available on the iPhone/iTouch platform?

Personally I think the idea of having a seperate app on my springboard for each book is stupid and regardless of any level of interest on part for your book, if that's how you want to sell it, I won't buy it that way anyhow.

"Where do you want to go today?"

*sigh* I really shouldn't feed the Trolls, but one that uses the word "dumb" in almost every sentence in their post, obviously has an affinity for the word and needs some help.

In some instances, users are the "audience" (e.g. adware, phishing, etc) but that's only secondary, their systems are still the target. Unless the malware/virus writers start programming in AminoAcid++, they can't "target" a user, only their systems. And when someone's system is infected by a botnet and that botnet then launches a DDoS on, oh, let's say whitehouse.gov, is that user the target? No. Is Obama the target? No. Is the whitehouse.gov webserver the target? Yes.

So I'd be careful about telling someone that they said something dumb when you follow it up with a clueless statement of your own. But, perhaps you already knew that, since you posted anonymously.

You obviously missed both the point of logic and the point in general.

I won't try teach you logic, but I'll reiterate the larger point. Malware doesn't target windows because that's where there are "dumb users", it targets windows because that's where the "security" is dumb.

I've met plenty of "dumb users" using OSX, but they aren't getting infected, nor will they ever be to the same extent that their windows brethren are even if MS folded tomorrow and Apple spiked to a 90% market share. Why? Because *NIX security is not inherently flawed like Win* is.

First off, there are plenty of smart people out there who use Windows and I don't fault them their choice. It's there's to make after all. It's not like they can't afford an alternative or anything.

Secondly, your personal attacks/slights do not add anything positive to the image of our community and in fact, do us a great detriment. Calling the other side dumb is stupid, calling them stupid is asinine and calling them asinine is vacuous. So please stop doing that. We want to be welcoming, not scare them off with psychobabble.

That being said, you can be as smart as you want, keep your system patched, use a firewall, use antivirus and only visit a handful of known and respected sites run by big companies and while all of that effort might make you "less vulnerable", it won't make you invulnerable. At some point, some well crafted packet is going to come in on that wire and it's going to 0-day exploit your up-to-date system. Or one of the few sites you visit is going to have their server compromised, either through a 0-day or because they aren't as carefull as you and when you visit their site tomorrow IE is going to happily hand your system over to a botnet via ActiveX or some other nice friendly hook MS left exposed for such nasty things.

They might try to tailor their junk for these environments, but it's like the difference between a normal car (windows) and a car coated with teflon with a motion sensing machine gun on top (OSX/Linux), with the worms/viruses/malware being a type of graffiti paint.

Graffiti will stick pretty well to a normal car (and if you tend to stop in the more seedy parts of town than others, you have more of a chance of having your car "tagged" too), but it's not going to be very effective on the teflon coated ones and the owner is going to have to be silly enough to log in as root to disable the guns so the criminals can get close enough in the first place.

The argument that the reason why windows is being attacked is because it has a majority share is an ass backwards way of thinking about the issue.

Windows is targeted because it's "security" is inherently flawed, it's security isn't flawed because it's being targeted. The fact that it has a majority share is just an added bonus for these people, but it has nothing to do with the underlying problem, (though it certainly does help the problem grow by orders of magnitude).

I'm reminded of Dan Dennett's Ted Talk where he insightfully points out that, we don't like chocolate cake because it's sweet, it's sweet because we like it.

Another way of looking at it is like this... Houses aren't unoccupied, unalarmed and filled with artwork, expensive stereos and silverware because someone wants to break into them, someone wants to break into them because they are unoccupied, unalarmed and filled with artwork, expensive stereos and silverware.

If OSX or Linux took a majority share of the desktop, the problem wouldn't shift like you are thinking it would. Granted, there would be an uptick in attempts and there will inevitably even be a few holes to patch up that were previously unknown, but there certainly won't be an equivalent to the 100,000+ viruses that exist for Windows.