For those interested in higher security and willing to accept responsibility, Google should offer an option (confirmed by entering your password) to turn off account resets and only allow resets to be enabled again by entering the password. They could also use this password generate a private key, not stored by them, to decrypt the email on demand. This would mean that if you lose your password, your account is essentially gone but security would be much improved.

As others have pointed out, they [Google] routinely ignore support requests and a real person almost never answers the support line. Some might think that this is a bad thing, but actually there's a silver lining. If you cannot call Google or contact support to reset your account then it's likely that an attacker will also fail to get through. Combined with the fact that no domain registrar is going to reassign gmail.com to some random caller and you actually have a fairly decent security situation. Hard to social engineer due to poor customer service and practically impossible to get the gmail.com domain MX record reassigned, especially over the phone.

Selling weapons, whether the traditional kinetic kind or the more modern software kind, tends to attract the wrong sort of attention. Unless you're under the protection of a government, either as an employee or a contractor working for or with them, I would advise against it. Making powerful enemies requires powerful friends to avoid unpleasant consequences the likes of which are better left to the imagination.

Doesn't Google share at least part of the blame here for not allowing users to opt-out of automatic updates once an extension is installed? As the article points out, it's precisely this ability to automatically "push update" thousands or tens of thousands of users without recourse, combined with lax enforcement by Google of update rules, that makes this situation attractive to the advertisers. Why not instead allow users to decide what the update policy will be on their device, as in Firefox?

That didn't seem to help Wile E Coyote, somehow the Road Runner always got away.

Too bad Obama didn't get that memo. Instead, he wasted precious time on disastrous health care reforms, idiotic foreign policies (aka the "Russian Reset"), inappropriate forays into racially charged domestic news events and a host of other non issues that were either much less important than the worst economy in a generation or simply not important at all. The President should have been focused on the economy from day one in 2008, but instead he took his eye off the ball and fiddled while Rome burned. He was far more interested in ramming through health care reforms quickly, during the brief period of time that his party controlled Congress, regardless of how crude or ill considered, than he was about plight of the American middle class. Obama will be remembered by future generations as the President who presided over the destruction of the middle class, paralyzed by his own ineptitude and blinded by delusions of grandeur. The only consolation is that the people who voted for him, the young, will live long enough to regret it as they face diminished prospects and a bruising fall down the economic ladder climbed in previous generations by their parents and grandparents.

Given the state of public education and debate in the United States today, it's not difficult to see how or why many Americans have a great number and variety of misunderstandings concerning not just debate, but civics and even basic science too. It's quite discouraging actually.

In fairness even many non-technical adults get this wrong. Because they don't understand how technology actually works they fail to understand that "privacy controls" don't actually control anything. This is true because the data, whether "deleted" or not, continues to exist in the company's databases which are likely copied and backed up in many places. As the parent said, if you gave it to them once they have it forever. It should also be remembered that when a company is bought or sold, the new owners might decide to sell the data or use it for affiliate marketing or for other purposes. Your data is their coin and once they have it they never give it back.

The range on these is about 120 feet, or 140 feet without the baffle, so In a large free standing store with a parking lot or a private mall, it would not be difficult to keep the audible range within the property boundaries. As for the notice, I doubt that it would a problem. Notices are generally required only when the area is under surveillance and video or audio are being recorded and even then not all places require that.

I'm no accountant, but I don't remember the depreciation schedule for computers being quite that generous. I think that you would probably have to spread it out over more than 5 years, at least here in the United States.

After. The bankruptcy was a Chapter 11 reorganization, so the new shareholders were motivated both to prevent a repeat performance and increase the value of their equity going forward. I think that after looking at the stock performance since the reorganization, you'll agree that the effort was largely successful. In fact, a chapter 11 bankruptcy often provides a good opportunity to pick up a quality reorganized company at an attractive price, especially when the underlying business is still good in principle. Unfortunately for us average investors these deals often involve the company being taken private for a time before re-emerging as a new IPO which means that the best returns usually go to the private equity guys. Even so, a company that continues to grow after the post-bankruptcy IPO can still deliver outstanding value to an ordinary investor, especially when the company is later acquired by another company at a premium to the appreciated share price.

Perhaps, but I wonder how much they're really spending. For example, here in the United States the Six Flags corporation, which operates themed parks around the country, used to market heavily to teenagers until they realized three things. First, unruly teenagers scare away families and especially families with young children. Second, they tend to break things. Third and finally, they don't spend as much as you might think. In response to these realizations, they reduced the marketing to teenagers, kicked out the troublemakers and their profits improved. Coincidence? I think not.

You're free to take your business elsewhere. I believe that's why they call it a free market economy.

It's called private property and the police cannot seem to be bothered with "low priority" calls these days. Indeed, their priority on a loitering complaint, short of rioting and looting, is generally somewhere between barely interested and not their problem. What's a business owner to do about unruly packs of young people driving away paying customers when banning them from the premises is either not practical or not enforceable as a matter of law?

That depends upon your point of view. There's a certain satisfaction and confidence that comes from knowing that your skills are a cut above the rest. Employers also tend to notice these things which is why graduates from highly ranked and competitive programs are more sought after and receive better initial offers from companies hiring them. A graduate of these institutions can also be reasonably well assured that the value of their degree will not be diluted over time by a host of lesser quality graduates who benefited from reduced standards that damaged the reputation of the institution in subsequent years. Now, I do think that students ought to be told up front what will be expected of them, but I don't agree that grading on a curve is a bad thing, either educationally or culturally. Quite the contrary, it's my belief that such programs produce superior graduates who are better equipped to handle the challenges of the working world and that that's worth far more than a high GPA from an average school.

Well, without giving away where I attended school, suffice it to say that the numbers were not equal, neither in an absolute sense nor as a percentage of the population at large. However, two things were true: nobody in the class cared about these things enough to say anything and there was at least one person from each of those racial groups present in the graduating class. I think you'll find that the situation is similar in the science and engineering departments of most American universities. The science majors are there to learn, not to protest or party or be politically active. We left that to the idiot fraternity jocks and the touchy-feely intellectual types in the liberal arts colleges.