You spelled 'pain' wrong.

Someone here had a sig that was "Java is to Javascript as Car is to Carpet".

... but most of us could not care less.

Out of curiosity, why does it bother you? I consider it a great feature (the single account, not the nagging). I don't imagine it makes much of a difference to Google one way or the other with respect to information collection.

It really wouldn't bother me ... I want something, I fund it. I'd actually prefer if something I funded went directly into the public domain after a very brief period of time. I get the product I wanted, the producer gets paid, and society benefits.

Price fairly, make things available early. Make it easy for people to do the right thing. Remember that pirated copies are almost never lost sales. Maybe in the future, things like crowd-funded software and open-source will take over if it isn't profitable enough ... same for entertainment. Perhaps live theatre will make a comeback.

Likewise. They also have a significant number of them that are available for Linux.

Education would have at least some mention about the public domain and its advantages, and the fact that copyright is a privilege, not a right.

Actually, yeah ... that would be handy quite a frequently. I was going to say that I should patent it, but I think I've actually seen them.

If you use Linux, it's actually quite easy to turn on DNSSEC, which I assume would help mitigate this problem.

I detect the odour burning trousers.

No need to get targeted ads into Reader for the benefit. The important part if what you get _out_ of it to display with searches, mail, etc. I'm quite sure it would have been easy to get a few ads displayed in Reader if they wanted though.

Keep in mind that this is like a Windows person moving to OSX. It's a completely different OS and you need to realize up front that things are going to be different. Not even necessarily better or worse, just different.

McCain is a first class weasel to begin with. I remember watching one of the presidential debates, ranting about how the government had paid 40K$ or something for a lightbulb, not mentioning that it was for a planetarium projector.

They do seem to be one of the few that doesn't regularly leak user data. They've got a pretty decent record of keeping your private data private.