wait - how is this different from selecting the "on startup ... continue where i left off" (which, i gather, you're already doing anyway), choosing "exit" from the menu (as opposed to closing all the windows) and then restarting? for me, chrome restores all the windows and tabs when i do that.

relaxen und watchen der blinkenlights.

No.

...except that the report linked from the article examines the problem of gold embrittlement of the tin-lead (63% Sn - 37% Pb) alloy. go figure.

re: arabic vs farsi - aw, that's embarrassing. thanks for the correction.

re: explanations as to why bing was left out - AC below suggested that bing was left out simply because it's just not popular enough. i don't know, it's still a major search engine which is bound to become popular real fast if it's not blocked when two of its competitors are. what do you think?

This seems inconsistent.

So, of the three search engines only Google will actually use SSL, even if you go to http://google.com/ the form is submitted over https. The other two not only won't do that, they will *downgrade* you to http even if you explicitly navigate to https://yahoo.com/ or https://bing.com/. Iranians can easily use DPI to spy on Yahoo and Bing users, only Google presents a problem. So I'm not surprised Bing didn't get blocked, it's not clear to me why Yahoo did.

The only explanation i see is that Iranian gov't is stupid - DPI is too hard, let's hijack the domains or blackhole a couple AS and go shopping (or shooting, or praying to almighty allah, or whatever). As to why Bing was left out, it's either
a) Iranian gov't is stupid, they were just unaware of Bing's existence. Unlikely.
b) Bing just doesn't work well enough in Arabic for the gov't to care. Also unlikely, given that Yahoo is powered by Bing and it got banned.
c) they contacted Microsoft and reached some kind of a deal where Microsoft bends over backwards but doesn't get banned. getting caught dealing with Iranian gov't is a big risk for Microsoft, but the potential reward of being the only game in a not-so-small country of 75 million people (mostly young and active adults) is just too high.

hmm...

no. you were modded down because you made a sweeping statement ("virtually anyone") and then provided data for exactly one - yourself.
one != anyone, that's all.

> Oh, you're living in a total fantasy land if you honestly think that when you delete a profile from Google it really goes poof!

oh, and you must have some sort of proof of the opposite, right? like, an example where deleted data was disclosed by Google - lawfully or otherwise.
finally, we have someone who's not just speculating but can actually put some substance behind their words. that must be refreshing!
go ahead, enlighten us.

no, really, all you need to migrate off GMail is IMAP and it's right there. if Hotmail doesn't let you import via IMAP, it's their problem.
if they really want to go after GMail's users, they should implement it and write instructions on how to do it, including how to enable it in GMail - which takes exactly 4 clicks (Settings -> Forwarding, POP and IMAP -> IMAP = Enabled -> Save Changes).
IMAP makes it possible to migrate messages *and* folder structure.
what else do you expect Google to do? write a document on how to migrate off GMail? don't be silly!.. well, in fact, there is such a page. http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail

have a look at http://www.dataliberation.org/ in general. Google goes above and beyond anyone else in the industry with respect to providing ways to export data from its services.

could android's design have been influenced by information leaked from apple? of course it could. but you'll have to add some substance to that claim. i cannot prove the opposite, of course, but here's why i think it wasn't. first, we know that the android project - to develop a touch-screen phone - was already underway in 2005, with some key decisions - e.g. to use java - already made (see court filings in oracle v google). second, android and iphone are actually significantly different so as to eliminate direct substantial copying (unless you take "using grid of icons" as evidence). third, back then there wasn't any evidence that apple was doing it right - the thing wasn't market-tested yet! it could well have been something like appletv - an ok product but not a runaway success by any means. and finally, do you think there is any chance that apple wouldn't be suing google's ass if there was any evidence of pre-release information having been leaked and used by google? yet, even as android is becoming more and more of a threat, we only see indirect patent attacks and nothing against google itself.

regarding free vs open, you are basically saying that device manufacturers will put on their phones whichever OS they can get their hands on as long as it's cheap or, best of all, free and they don't care if they can change it or not - as long as it works. and if MS gives away its OS, they will flock to it.
that is wrong. first, MS will never give their OS away as long as their business model continues to rely on license fees. right now they have no alternative, so even if they do end up giving WP away out of desperation, nobody will believe that it's anything other than the "bait" round in a bait-and-switch game. they have no other credible alternative to charging license fees, whether now or later, because the rest of their business works like this.
second, the strongest evidence that manufacturers do care about the "open" part of android is what they did to it, given the chance. all of the major phone makers, given a working and completely functional OS by google chose to make their own changes to it. now, that is not really about "open", that's about being able to make changes, and i'm sure they'd be satisfied with just obtaining a source license from google, even for a fee, but of "source code, for free" first was a very sweet cupcake and the second made for a really nice cherry on top. just look what all of them shipped with their phones. HTC, for one, certainly went well beyond simple reskinning. we can argue whether the changes they made were good or bad individually and whether they were beneficial or harmful to the android as a while (causing fragmentation), but nevertheless, they took the source it and ran with it, choosing to make quite extensive changes to an already good enough base. all in the name of making their handsets different from each other (something, btw, MS is absolutely adamant on *not* letting happen -- which, i believe, is why manufacturers are not at all excited by it).

i'm saying that before iPhone came out there was nothing to copy, and when it did, Android's design process was already in the final stages.

i'm not arguing it matters to consumers, but i'm pretty sure that "open source under permissive licence" was (and is) a major factor for the device makers. i'm pretty sure that Google had much easier time putting together the OHA when they said "we'll give you the platform, the source and the right to do anything you want with it". full year before any hardware was due to come out they already had HTC, Samsung and Motorola as well as Sprint and T-Mobile lined up and publicly committed to the platform. i haven't heard any reports of money changing hands (i.e. Google bribing device manufacturers). now contrast that with Microsoft's WP7, for which i cannot help but notice complete lack of manufacturer enthusiasm - it's basically Microsoft twisting their arms with patent suits, bribing or installing their man at the head and all but taking over (see Nokia). so yeah, it does matter. it matters a lot, in fact.

> That's more android, they started by basically cloning the iphone but then went with more diverse handsets and more open store.

you do realize that Android development started in 2005 and was nearing final stages(*) when iPhone debuted in 2007, don't you?
that "more diverse handsets and more open store" was there since the platform's inception, right?
that more open everything, including the source, was the whole freaking point, the major selling point, the single reason it got adopted so widely?

(*) the beta SDK was released on 5 Nov. yes, v1.0 and the first device came a year later, but the changes between beta and 1.0 were relatively minor.

hey Meg, can you spell F-U-D? that's right, good girl!

no, this is genuine. it has been steadily gaining popularity over the past several years.
nginx is being developed by a russian guy who up until recently was working (as a sysadmin, apparently) for one of the major russian web portals where nginx originated as an in-house project first but was open-sourced. the guy has now left the company (which has been slowly dying anyway) and incorporated an llc or something, focused on nginx. it was already quite popular in russia 5-6 years ago (when i was still living there).

nginx is an efficient event-driven front-end server, quite often used for loadbalancing in front of traditional apache or tomcat or whatever other backends, but in a simple case of a LAMP server it can be hooked up directly to PHP via FPM or FCGI.
config syntax is quite expressive, with quite advanced uri / header - based rewriting capabilities. there is even a built-in Perl interpreter for more advanced use (which tends to be abused by people who forget what being an event-driven server means by sticking logic in there... oh well, people use things like node.js too *shudder*).

> Firefox has a much, much better spec on nearly every level, is open source, has the adblock extension available....

one thing it does not have, though, is H.264 support so this move actually brings Chrome on the same level Firefox is.