Completely hiding the Google bar is not the best idea: You can't log out, you can't navigate to Gmail or other application settings, and you can't see your notifications. But you can change the Google bar to have a white background and black text with just some simple CSS changes:

#gbx3, #gbx4 {
    background-color: white;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #DDD;
}

#gbz .gbzt, #gbz .gbgt, #gbg .gbgt {
    color: black!important;
}

I don't know how you put these on top of Google's CSS with Greasemonkey, but if you can find a way, it should look how you'd like.

HTML manuals can do all the things accused of PDFs, and you won't even know about half of them! Your browser automatically sends your operating system and locale preferences on every request. The hosting site doesn't even need Javascript to access them. But if you did have Javascript enabled, your HTML documentation could also read and write to Flash and HTML5 offline storage databases, often without your consent or direct knowledge! The horrors!

"Wolf said that the document format is also full of other surprises. For example, it is reportedly possible to write PDFs which display different content in different operating systems, browsers or PDF readers -- or even depending on a computer's language settings."

Amazing -- totally unbelievable!! This should be wholly forbidden. Who would want to read documentation that knew what system you were running, or what language you could read, and tailored the display to make it more relevant to you? Text files don't let you do these things! Adobe is clearly going too far.

The constitution and its amendments specify certain inalienable rights that cannot be violated by state and national laws. Strictly speaking, the Congress can pass any legislation it wants, and the president can sign or veto any of that legislation, regardless of constitutionality. It is the federal courts, and usually the Supreme Court, that then enforce the constitutionally of laws through the federal appeal process. If they find that certain pieces of legislation violate the rights granted to the people by the constitution, they can invalidate them and remove them from law.

In my humble opinion, this is the tug and pull that makes the United States still livable. Without it, the United States would still have segregation, abortion would be illegal, most schools would teach Christianity, people accused of crimes would have far fewer rights, and the press would likely be very tight-lipped. Though, on the other side, the 2nd Amendment has caused many very noble-intentioned gun control laws to become invalidated.

The security problem is easy: How about your phone just asks you whether you accept the charges, and you click "Yes". Of course there will always be fraud wherever there's money, but such a confirmation system seems much more secure than existing US-style credit cards.

And you should have more faith in humanity that FB updates won't automatically go out whenever you buy something. We've learned that's a bad idea. But maybe people can choose specific purchases to publicize... like if you buy concert tickets, that'd be fun to have friends know. But the mass market would never install something that broadcasts every purchase; they'd just stick to credit cards instead.

On the bright side of things for him, it's less than a gigadollar.

Full disclosure, I work for Google. But I have no say in these kinds of things. Normally I wouldn't comment on such an article, but do I think it's enlightening to hear Google's side of the story. Therefore, here are CEO Eric Schmidt's recent comments on this topic:

"People get confused about Net neutrality," Schmidt said. "I want to make sure that everybody understands what we mean about it. What we mean is that if you have one data type, like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. It's OK to discriminate across different types...There is general agreement with Verizon and Google on this issue. The issues of wireless versus wireline get very messy...and that's really an FCC issue not a Google issue."

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20012723-56.html?tag=mncol;txt

Basically, it's important for VOIP to have a certain quality of service for clear voice calls, but different QOS rules may make sense for other data types. For example, downloading raw data files can be bursty. Precaching future web pages or Javascripts doesn't have to always succeed. But, "you don't discriminate against one person's [data] in favor of another".

I do the same thing with my penis. You can never be too careful.

We haven't put it to the test in the last 100 years or so, because we learned the lesson the first time. The industrial revolution in Britain and the United States was a free-market wet-dream. No minimum wage, no worker safety, no anti-competitive status, and no child labor laws.

What happened was that industry found the sweet spot where they were just a hair better than staying on the farm (which also had none of those restrictions) so that they could run their machinery with a constant stream of new-arrivals. The result was sweat shops, child labor, company towns, tenements, slums, the reduction of the middle class (skilled workers), and massive environmental damage - all for the benefit for a few ultra-wealthy "captains of industry" like Rockefeller, Carnagie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt.

Ironically, communist China is in the process of repeating our free-market mistake.

More FUD. Go read the laws on the books. The US Government does not distinguish between Credit Cards and other EFT Transfers. It's all under the same law. The dispute process you are referring to is something set forth by Visa, not the Federal Government. The Federal Gov't just dictates what the financial institutions can and cannot do.

No, you shouldn't be free to defraud people out of their money. The only reason he is getting people to pay for whatever he is selling is through fraudulent claims.

I agree that not all discrimination is bad; however, the original poster is clearly referring to agism by young programmers as a bad thing, then following up with sweeping statement that all young programmers are worthless right after graduating.

I am not trying to argue that experience has no worth or that older workers have don't issues getting jobs due to age; however, I am stating that the original poster is spewing as much crap about young programmers as the young programmers he is referring to spew about old programmers.

Remember the very obvious maxim of Dykstra: testing can only tell you there ARE errors, it can't tell you there AREN'T errors.

Randomly poking at data only find you the very dumbest errors. It takes some real thinking and mulling to realize, hey, if a xml field crosses this buffer boundary, and the last 4-byte Unicode code was cached, it's going to get bashed by the next 3-byte escape code. Or 255 bytes of code-page Yen symbol (255) followed by a 254 will lead to sign-extension and access to an address in the kernel trampoline DLL. Those kind of combinatorial errors are not going to be discovered by random poking at the data.

So they're going to (and have) given everybody a false sense of security, when the basic method can do nothing of the sort. it can only fin errors of the most trivial sort. It can't find errors that thousands of unemployed Russian hackers can dream up of testing for, and it can only FIND errors, not tell you there aren't an unlimited number of remaining errors.

I'm currently reading The Emergence of a Scientific Culture by S. Gaukroger. My interest stems from past readings in epistemology as a study of the methodology of science, and, my interest in Mediterranean death cult religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism as patriarchal control mechanisms, not unlike induced schizo-affective disorders, that come into play in agrarian societies with controlling oligarchies (monarchies) ensconced in developing urban centres. It's my own take on things that's evolved from trying to understand to what extent corruption is fundamental and necessary to democracy. I'm throwing it out in this thread because I think U.K. libel laws are symptomatic of a transition from class structured, shame-face saving patriarchal societies to modern democracies that have successfully tested empirical findings and common law and are putting aside almost Shamanistic believes that words are effectively magical or Gospel.

Cleisthenes in Ancient Greek history is said to have instituted the first democracy. Sketchily put he did it by breaking up the political clout of existing clans by creating voting blocks that abstracted away from the clan bases and instituted time limits on political offices. He also, IIRC, enforced political participation. I'm sure that somewhere in the Federalist Papers there are presumptions that all of us are corrupt, or subject to corruption, and, the American Founding Fathers instituted articles and laws to form a democracy that reflected their belief in the fundamental corrupt character of us all. I'm trying to formulate a view of modern democracy from the underlying idea that as a political institution democracy best addresses corruption. This sort of links up to Churchill's famous dictum that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others because it best addresses the citizenry and politicians of modern democracies as the worst of all peoples except for all the others, and, this because it best addresses our corruptible natures.

I believe modern democracies with universal suffrage given majority and capacity on the part of it's citizens are the most viable forms of modern government because they've stood the test of history in transitioning from agrarian to post industrial urban societies. British libel laws and things like hate laws have considerable merit but reflect a more industrial/agrarian society where class structure and "face" reflect more primitive belief systems wherein words carry magical import. Going into language goes to far afield but mentioning the "debate" between Newton and Leibniz over the discovery of the Calculus and the tribal wars of industrializing Europe give some character to where I'm trying to go with this stuff.

Archeology has in it's body the idea of a three generation window for viewing past cultures. A generation is somewhere between 20 and 30 years. Three generations give a vivid insight into a culture because grandparents, parents and offspring are a highly sympathetic and even empathetic cluster that transitions cultural values. The U.K., like all viable modern democracies, is transitioning to a new perspective that has as it's foundation empirical findings in Science and tested wisdom in law but still has to deal with the fundamental corrupt nature of our kind.

je m'amuse

I wonder if you've thought that through. So it's wrong to hate a thing that is not easily changed, but okay to hate a thing that the person can change. If this is your guiding principle, what you end up with is a uniform society of conformists. They'll superficially look different (skin color, attire, etc) but any meaningful diversity will end there, because any real diversity of ideas, worldviews and philosophies is now on the "acceptable hatred" list. That's the problem with this notion, and more generally the problem with all of this focus on group identities instead of individuality.