In the non-digital world, this is a feasible approach. Opening a store and stocking merchandise are both expensive acts- a shopkeeper can't keep reopening his or her store repeatedly. Changing your name or moving doesn't help with this.

In the digital world, this is far harder. You have no stock. You have no manufacturing costs. Changing your name / the location of your store is a trivial matter ranging from completely free to taking back a few loads of bottles for deposit and buying a new dev license.

I can't stand incorrect usage of your/you're. Which pub are you going to? Perhaps we can meet up.

Argh. OK, you are technically correct, and I humbly bow to your knowledge. I misspoke and was only trying to use the word "ancestor" to help differentiate various primates. I used it in the wrong way.

The problem with implicit agreements is that both parties can have their own versions. Which is what we have here.

Personally, I view the stuff like G+ suggesting people involved in previous searches just part of the service that Google is providing. I don't use it, but I can easily see how others could. It's not much different from the ability that Facebook has to suggest people based on various criteria, and I've never seen anybody get up in arms about that. Although granted, that is facebook, and this is a search engine.

It all comes down to personal taste., and the price we are wiling to pay for Google's services. You have reached the point where you're no longer willing to pay their asking price, and that's fine. I guess I'm still OK with the price I'm paying. Another year from now... who knows.

However, I still think you're deluding yourself about the changes in Google. There are no changes; they've just gotten better at what they do. And that is to consolidate all the various bits of information you choose to give them, compile it, and use it as part of their services that you are consuming.

I wonder, does anybody know how other primates handle sleep? If it's ingrained as they say, one would think our ancestors would also display the same tendencies.

I'm not sure I totally agree with you. Google has always been about advertising and trying to serve up the most relevant ads. I don't view that as being evil, personally. Evil is selling my personal info to marketers and/or spamming me.

I'm making a big assumption here, but I'm just guessing that running a search engine is a HUGE task, requiring an obscene amount of resources. The agreement with Google has always been "I trade you a bit of my personal info for you providing this service" and I'm mostly OK with that because frankly, they provide a great service. Also, they tell me straight up how they'll be using it, instead of burying it in 50 pages of legalese or just lying about it outright. I appreciate that.

Anyway, the point is that until you start paying for access to a search engine service (do those even exist any more?) you might as well get used to it. Or, if you value your privacy that much, start using Tor or some other form of anonymizing service.

You say you don't want Google to spy on you without your express permission, but you are already giving them your express permission by using their service. That has always been the case.

Damn you, forcing me to undo mods with this post... but I can't help it.

Just how in the fucking hell do you expect Google to remember to not remember you if there isn't some place it can store that preference? And don't say cookies.

So, your claim is that software can never improve?

I tend to think of it rather like mice. (The furry kind.)

Yes, I could spend countless hours and money trying to stop the occasional mouse from getting into my home and maybe even be successful. Or I could just take the simple preventable measures like not leaving food around, and just spend an infinitely small fraction of my resources to exterminate them when they appear.

Besides that, it could easily be said that the animal still suffers, even with a perfectly executed shot. Yes, it's impossibly brief, so brief you could probably make an argument they don't even feel the pain before they die, but something tells me ethical vegans might not be the type to listen to scientific reasoning from "the guy who wants to kill bambi".

That's fine if you only browse the web a couple minutes a day. Me, I prefer to spend more time consuming the content of the page I navigated to than tinkering with whitelists and blacklists to get the site to even function.

I could see this may be important if you spent a lot of time on warez / porn / other fishy sites, but I don't and see little reason to bother with the annoyance.

How so? Are you claiming Double Fine is a bully in the video game industry? I could presume you meant Steam, but since the whole point of this article is that DRM-free options will exist, I am back to being confused again.

Fair enough. I would place keyboard-centric as just another tool, however. It's good to have options.

GUIs and CLIs are both tools like any other, and some tools are better suited at some tasks than others. I don't think either will go away, nor should they.

True, expertise may not be required to prescribe a vaccination. Expertise really comes into play when you have to know when NOT to prescribe a vaccine due to various reasons.