mayanksinghal

And with that, I agree. Actually FB is providing some level of data movement. I was just replying to my parent comment that was indicating that data should be not be given to Google but to FB because the former will put ads on it.

As compared to Facebook that will index and put ads on them. There is no lesser evil here - not in principle at least. All firms seem to be in the same business of selling advertisements. Facebook might be able to do better display advertisements as compared to Google and they seem less intrusive to users - a viewpoint that I subscribe to. But other than the extent of intrusion, both Facebook and Google are using the data you provide for targeted advertisements.

[Edit: Typos]

There was an option to turn it off, at least it was there 4 years ago. You could make your visits invisible - but you were then unable to see who visited your profile. Seems fair to me.

For me (India) it actually had chosen Bing already, I was asked to confirm the choice and I could select others if I wanted to.

> That's one of the reasons to ditch Google. Collecting data, no privacy, down to the tiniest details....

I don't think THIS is an example of privacy invasion at any level. In fact this is an example that shows that not all data collection is, excuse me for my abuse of the phrase, _evil_. All these browsers are provided by Google, the user is free to not associate Google accounts with them - they work really well even without them. There is no major loss of utility if you don't. Installing a third party addon to sync bookmarks across varies installations (as I used to do in FF) is trickier, wasteful and unnecessary.

If I have to browse something that I don't want Google to know or associate persistently to my account, I use Incognito Window. It works really well for the purpose it was designed for.

> Did the OP get it at all?

May be you are right, Google is a company that deserves no respect and no users; but when you phrase your sentiments that way, you basically call the other person an idiot who cannot understand even a bit of the most easiest of concepts. And when someone like me, who shares the same views as the OP, reads these opinions we are alienated. Just like you swayed from a largely-neutral position to make your point, we sway even more to counterbalance and what we get eventually is a flamewar. And no I don't get it and may be I won't (probably the OP would feel the same way). I infer that I respect my privacy much less than you do to yours and mine. So even if this was a legit case poor privacy practice on Google's part, but if I (and the OP) feels that it isn't than either you should respect my (and OP's) opinion or give a little more verbose explanation while assuming I will be educated enough to read and understand your opinion.

Didn't know that idea is already used, I was just throwing a possibility!

> anti-camcording technologies [http://torrentfreak.com/movie-spy-cameras-attack-the-dying-a...]

This is largely off-topic but I was wondering if there are any other popular anti-camcording technologies?

Also could a large IR lamp facing the viewers (or aimed at screen) be used to disrupt the usage of camcorders? This will be additionally beneficial as a large part of the world requires heating solutions during significant part of the year.

Actually, I think it might end up being cheaper than F1. No celebrity driver to pay millions to and no very-high safety concerns! Although given that most of the human population will probably not relate (or out-rightly reject the idea) to the sport because of the lack of driver, there might be less money in it.

> the real work and research is done by graduates of other universities 9 not 10 Indians have been honored by Nobel Price, out of which only 4 are for sciences. Out of these 4 only CV Raman did his research work in India and that too before IITs were even conceived[1]. So no, if Nobel prices are the criteria for your judgement, you are wrong. And I am offended, you are insulting my work and that of my peers and professors. May be you have done groundbreaking research in your life or have seen that happening in other institutes, it is most definitely true. I do not wish to say that IITs are the only institutes in India. If you check my last comment you will notice that I have explicitly mentioned that IISc has a better Core Sciences curriculum.

If you believe that we do not do real work and research, either back your claim or keep your prejudice to yourself. IITs are involved in research work[2] and we do not do fictional/worthless work. I have no idea what qualifies as real research work for you, but I am sure you will find a lot of decent research work happening in IITs if you are willing to shed your prejudice.

[And I do not believe that this is the right place to discuss this. We can discuss it here if you wish to continue, you can leave a comment on my profile: https://plus.google.com/112310425433589490684/posts]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_of_India [2]: List of papers by just IITB Academic Community: http://www.ircc.iitb.ac.in/IRCC-Webpage/DisplayResearchPaper...

> conditions should be encouraging to instill the passion in students

There are attempts already being made to do this. In past 5 years at IITB I have seen: Student Satellite Project, RaceCar (BAJA) Project, Some very neat summer projects for freshmen, BioFuel project and others. Enthusiastic faculty is now trying on their own time to reach out to students and motivate them. And this was across departments not just CSE or Electrical Engineering.

I didn't make that generalization - I was commenting on the sweeping generalization that was made in the movie. I know some very great teachers who do not teach at IITs. My parents are college professors and at least 4 aunts/uncles of mine are also in teaching profession. While I agree that a lot of educational institutes in India suffer from under-qualified or uninspired teaching - I do not believe that it is the core reason of all that is wrong with the education system. My being an IITian actually contributes less to this belief of mine than my school teachers in a small town. It did get reinforced here but I have always had some great teachers.

Not sure if you are trolling or you really believe that IITs should be producing Nobel laureates. Nobel prizes are given for: Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics and Medicine, not engineering. IITs are engineering institutes - famed largely for their Undergraduate program. IISc has a much better core sciences program than any IIT.

I actually hated that movie. While the message that 'One should pursue his/her own dream' was neat, the portrayal was bad. It showed that Engineering education in India sucks largely because of orthodox bad teachers who lack vision. It portrayed it is alright to play bad hurtful pranks (though a joke, but unfortunately immaturity is still prevails in college students). The professors were shown in such bad light and without any emotions that even suicides don't make them change their facial expressions. They really took it to the extreme, it was sad because it might have demotivated some people.

Teaching, I suppose. Which IIT?

[A current Dual Degree Student (5 year UG+PG program) here, will be graduating in June] To be fair you are talking about Undergraduate students here, the very best of these go for post graduation in US universities. I know this, because I couldn't get it and a lot of my friends are currently there. And as far as I have been told undergraduate programs in US universities face a similar challenge when a significant chunk of bright students go for Financial and Consulting jobs (There was an article on HN that I am quoting; can dig it up if you want).

As much as I would have want to do research with full rigor and motivation, I find myself not as bright as those who I have seen being very successful. I still try to do as much as I can, hoping that my efforts will be enough. And I know that there are many many others who don't have a zeal for their research projects at all and I can give their point of view as well. IITs are the best place to for Undergraduate programs, they are very popular among parents and high-school students alike. If a student is not 100% sure about what he/she wants to do in life or if the parents are not open enough to let him try extreme things (in the Indian sense of occupation) like acting, fine arts etc, you give JEE and you go to IITs if you can. A lot of students find engineering to be just what they were looking for, a lot of others don't and do something else. As of research work, keeping aside the fact that IITs do lack the infinite resources that US universities have, we lack industrial connections and a research oriented culture for undergraduates. Not sure if US universities face the same kind of issues with their UG students or not, but I think it is unfair to expect a lot from UG students.

Now coming to PG curriculum and research there: I like my research project. I feel proud whenever the simulation ends and when my modeling results match my simulation results, and sad when they don't. Proper PG students (ie not DD students like me) in IITs work harder, much harder, than UG students. The lack of research output may be because the brightest of UG students get into US universities where there are better research groups and opportunities. Or may be because other engineering colleges from where the PG students have completed their Undergraduate programs didn't offer as much as IITs (or US universities do).

It is unfair to compare IITs with other institutes, there are a lot of factors at play. Sure, we want high paying jobs - but if they are available who won't? Think about the socio-economic pressure on the students as well. For a middle income family most salaries that are offered to IIT graduates will bring about a significant change in lives of these students as well as their families. It might be a different case in US (and other countries) but a lot of us face these issues. I was lucky that I don't, but I know many students with parents who will feel happier if their child settles down with a high paying job and not pursue higher education for another 2 - 5 years.

If you really feel so strongly about the issue, I really suggest you give back to an IIT (or your own alma-mater) in some way - donations (you can decide where exactly is your money spent), visits to share experiences and even research projects. I just did 2 Research and development projects in last two semesters - one was in collaboration with an external company. They were great fun!

I did't have my headphones on, didn't even realize there was something playing This makes it so much more cool! Just one question: Youtube provides API to just get the audio?

I am not really clear on what this does, but if I have to guess, you can search songs and artists on pintunes - it picks thumbnails from Youtube and links to songs on itunes. Am I correct? The links don't seem to work - but that may be because I am on Ubuntu.

I would really suggest an About page or a README on the github repo and also a go-back-to-home link :)

I don't think that most people here would want to replace their college education with self-learning because the latter is inherently harder. I agree that one can learn nearly everything on his/her own but that takes a lot of willpower and motivation which would result in higher dropout rates.

I am , in fact, going to graduate in a few months and cannot think of a better place I could have spent the last 4 and a half years. I could have spent it in a better way: read more, do more, try more and procrastinate less, but there is no way I could have learnt as much as I have (educational things as well as life lessons) so easily.

Additionally User penetration is referring to percentage of Internet Users not Total Country Populations - I got confused and had to refer to original documents.

Because I don't really listen to Apple as much as to my own experience. Well to be fair I have used an iPhone (3S) only for a couple of hours and have been living with an Android phone (HTC Desire S) for 8 months now. May be an iPhone would have made me happier, but to think of it objectively I don't see much difference in utility and ease. I would even make a hypothesis that the extra happiness is largely because of sociological factors.

> steal While I understood the sentiment of distrust that many put in giving more information to Google that they can _use_ to show targeted advertisements, usage of the verb _steal_ makes me angry.

What I am not sure about is whether I am being irrational because I am biased towards Google (while also using, loving and respecting Dropbox) or everyone else here seems to have the same sentiment because (1) Dropbox is YC backed (2) It is a little-guy vs big-mafia war.

I started off with Dreamweaver but very quickly had to move to Text Editors because the I had very little control over the generated HTML. While it was great for cases where I am mixing static HTML pages with little design, but whenever there was JS, decently complicated CSS or Server Side Scripting involved DW became largely useless as I had to modify generated source and at times, rewrite it.

Results for me:

Psychedelic Browsing Chrome 19.0.1081.2 dev-m gives 5983 Revs per minute IE 9.0.8112.16421 gives 1815 revs per minute

Wriggly Words 10K words Chrome 11425 ms IE 19746 ms

Not sure what you are saying is correct.

a) I think, depends on the level at which the document is shared. If it is public, anyone can find using search and edit it. If it is accessible to anyone with the document link, then anyone who can discover the document can edit it. If it is shared with a list of people (or a group) then you need to login to authenticate yourself. The last is, I believe, the only solution to the problem.

I don't think there exists a ubiquitous solution for sharing printable-well-formatted documents that require no special skills for formatting. .DOC will require the person on the other end to have MS Word and .ODT Libre Office (which is no way good enough for anything ATM). There are also other replacements to Google Docs, I haven't tried any as Google Docs fulfilled most of the requirements of my minimal collaborative editing but I am told that Zoho works really well.

Is this is an acceptable convention in US: http://omgpop.com/drawsomething says that the app is available at .99 cents (Get it now: .99 cents)?

When I was a kid, I used to have very vivid dreams or hallucinations whenever I suffered from high fever. Nearly always the same dream, very frightening - very real to me when I was having them. What was amazing is that the dream was weird: I remember me being small. Too small for my mind - it was as if I (as in the thinker/narrator) was where the mind was and the rest of the body was so small that I couldn't fit it. My mind was floating around my head, like an aura or a chakra. The feeling, some part of it I have lost by now, was truly disturbing. The surroundings where white - marble I think. And there were huge white pillar, 100 times my size - and they were falling. And they wouldn't break when they do - they would simply fall without noise, without rubble. I was always scared to death, always running. The dream was short and sometimes I would have my parents with me in my dream. Although they were my size, I don't feel any emotion or have a though about their size, just my own.

A couple of times, I would feel that my limbs are getting bigger and bigger, while my head (possibly my mind) remains the same. I was observing it just outside my head. Not too far away, possibly from my own eyes but outside my head as my mind though still at the same position, has disconnected itself from the head. I knew I was in bed, I was arguing my own self about the feeling being unrealistic. But I remember I couldn't reason out, I felt as if I will be crushed by my own body - slowly and painfully. There is no physical pain that I could feel, just an intense fear of that it will come.

I don't think that these were near death experiences - possibly just hallucinations. Unfortunately, they were so real to me that to this day, I am in a way, still scared of them. On the other hand, I want them back because they were so real and so scary - because at no living moment in the rest of my life have I felt a similar emotion, a real fear of that magnitude. I am sharing this because I cannot believe that a psychological/mental experience can be more real than what I had felt; that NDEs is more real - that they need afterlife.

Religious theory is amazingly complete with scope to explain everything, may be with inconsistencies but still everything. Existence of God would explain everything - because he is omnipotent. The power of religion on the other hand is reducing because after so many years of scientific experiments we are able to experimentally verify alternative theories that explain much of what was unexplained before. We don't need God for minuscule things, not anymore. As of NDE today, sure physiological and psychological theories cannot explain everything about NDEs, but I believe that they will in future.

I didn't understand the reasoning behind the retort.

>Are you aware that Google runs an entire ad network?

Which would mean that they would want to keep such third party sites interesting, fast and high quality as well. Chrome, Analytics and their other similar products/services are hence justified.

Search engines were never a content discovery tool for me. I use HN, Twitter, Facebook for that. Some others use Digg, Pinterest and Reddit. When I search on a search engine, I am looking for a solution to a question that I have.

I think you misinterpreted my response. When you ask the question "What is wrong with words?" in conjuncture with "X should be text based"; you are either genuinely asking for a reason for why would a designer chose images instead of text or you are being sarcastic.

I assumed you were genuinely asking the question; because assuming sarcasm would have meant it was more or less useless for the thread. Hence, I pointed out both pros and cons of using image icons. Additionally I was also replying to the root comment and to those who were agreeing to the sentiment.

Why do you assume that if someone wants to use a image, something has to wrong with words?

Icons have replaced plain-text at a lot of places. The browser that I am using (and probably on your browser too), icons would have replaced: Back, Forward, Refresh. Probably because they save space or probably because they are language independent. Of course, one might have to hover on them for a second to realize what they do, the first time you try them - but next time onwards, those with a decent memory (and I am telling a limitation of icons, not discarding importance of those with poor memory), can remember what they are meant to do even when they use much lesser screen space.

The central question is that what is wrong with images (and now an option to change them to text) if it is serving a much larger audience or serving the same audience better? And at what point did it became Gmail team vs Gmail users? "Haha, they lose because they gave us the option we wanted". Mind you, for each one of us who demand something, there probably are thousands who either don't care or like the new interface. Even at this thread, I can see two people using comfortable white-space setting. Even I hated the change from classic themes to Compact; now I am comfortable. Since when did we become to averse to change?