mibbitier

The point is that you can work as many hours as you choose.

I very much doubt they make 5 bucks a month per user. Maybe 5c.

Am I the only one that finds appeals to donate actually more irritating that adverts?

FWIW, It's better to stick to the facts rather than spreading even more FUD - "sell it's users searches to amazon"

Ubuntu is not "selling" your searches to amazon. Ubuntu will only get paid any money if you click through, and purchase something from Amazon. Ubuntu is sending your searches to Amazon which may or may not be 'right', but they only get paid if you buy stuff.

I'd guess Ubuntu are desperate for revenue and have run out of other ideas.

Also FWIW, the number of people who use these desktop search things seems likely to be tiny. Particularly amongst those who use linux.

Do people here use desktop search on any OS?

Outside hospital workers, you'd be hard pressed to find many in the UK that even know what a pager is, let alone someone who has one.

A simple nokia from 10 years ago or so will run for a week on a charge. It's only modern phones with massive screens, GPS, etc that eat battery.

They also use pagers. Crazy.

It's surprising your comment hasn't been down-voted to oblivion. It's so factually incorrect.

No, because most cellphones/iPods etc will be subject to scammers.

These devices are absolutely simple for scammers to work with. They're high value, cheap to post, and can easily be swapped with phoney/broken identical devices.

One bad incident out of millions doesn't set a precedent.

For the UK there's http://www.envirofone.com/ or http://www.mazumamobile.com/ or http://www.fonebank.com/ amongst others.

I've used the first 2 with excellent results. Obviously you get slightly less than selling on the open market, but you don't have to deal with scammers, and get the cash quickly and without issues.

Odd. I'm using google DNS, so maybe they're "blocking" it via dns.

> " If youre thinking of selling an expensive item on eBay, think again. "

I would say, this type of fraud is exclusively targeted at cellphones, ipods, netbooks etc. If you're selling something like an antique grandfather clock, you should be fine. Of course anything that requires collection, or couriering is going to be more traceable and secure.

I have sold hundreds or maybe thousands of items on eBay. The only one I ever had a problem with was trying to sell an old iPod. As soon as it was listed the scamming started by fraudsters.

FWIW, I'm on BT and it's not blocked here.

I expect us (UK) to withdraw from the EU in the next few years, so hopefully it'll become irrelevant.

The worst implementations "drop down" a message at the top of the page to tell me they're using cookies. This invariably happens just as I'm clicking on a link. The link moves, and I click on some link I didn't want to click on.

There are no words strong enough to describe how shitty that is, and it's incredibly common, on big, widely used websites.

I want advertising. It tells me about things I might like.

You're perhaps one of the very very few people who dislike being told about things, but thankfully you're in the minority.

The whole "do not track us" idea is ridiculous and a 'moot' issue. Cookies aren't really necessary, you can track people server side based on their browser make up, and they won't know they're being tracked. 99.9% of browsers are completely unique and identifiable back to the computer.

If you really don't want to be tracked (<0.01% of users), then use TOR, lynx, adblock, disallow cookies, etc etc etc

Look also at the recent EU cookie laws, and how ridiculous and needlessly cumbersome they have made websites that have addopted it. Endless clicking confirmation boxes / dropdowns to say it's ok for them to store a cookie. We do not need more of this madness.

You could say the same about IE6 users.

Realistically it's probably <0.01% of users.

This is a horrible misfeature.

Often, I select bits of an email, to copy and paste elsewhere to check things. Then I hit reply, and wonder why only the currently selected text is there.

There should be a way to turn this "feature" off.

Wouldn't it be fairly trivial to have an automated system to call the caller back (Verify that they aren't spoofing the caller ID)?

eg

  1. Caller phones in
  2. System looks at caller ID, and says "We will now call
     you right back to verify you are who you say you are"
  3. Caller hangs up and has to wait for call.

Surely that system would need a much higher level of hacking to be able to intercept the call.

Because there's a sucker born every minute.

> "The fact that they had an idea, built it and executed their vision successfully enough that another company bought them out are the bits that matter."

As far as I remember, it was a "buy the team, shut down the company" deal.

The very fact that people in this thread are mistakenly saying that eBay bought the company, shows how well the spindoctoring worked.

IMHO you might want to reassess your idea of success. Having a great family life, bringing up children, enjoying each day. Those are good measures of success.

Central London is a massive city. Obviously there's a shit-ton of CCTV there. It's in no way typical of the UK though.

As I say, we've had widespread CCTV in shops in the UK since the 80s. In the last 30 years nothing has particularly changed.

I take your point, in theory an evil genius prime minister could install some mass surveillance system. But what the hell would be the point? And the chance of him not getting found out and called out by the media is negligable. Add to that the utter incompetence of government to do anything IT related, and I think we're pretty safe.

That's right. Because the number of instances of "My life was ruined by the state who monitored my every move", or "My love life was ruined when my wife was able to bribe the CCTV operator to find out about my affair"... they don't happen do they.

If CCTV was a problem for people, we'd hear about it. But it's not, so we don't.

The fact I visited a certain shop is on record for 2 days on a crappy VHS tape.... why do I care?

Some tourist probably also took my photograph, but I'm not going to stress about that either.

You're once again believing the ridiculous notion that somehow all CCTV cameras feed into a central state monitored control station. They don't.

What do you think they're doing with the CCTV?

They're almost certainly recording to a VHS tape, which cycles every couple of days.

IF some crime or vandalism happens on the playground, they will then grab the tapes, and check them. The chances of a conviction will be far higher with video evidence.

It's not "numbness to surveillance", because it's not really surveillance.

If you want to be free to take videos and photos of random places/things without being arrested, you should also allow that same freedom to owners of property who want to reduce crime.

Please don't peddle the "UK CCTV" bullshit. It's simply not true.

CCTV in the UK is widespread in large cities, but operated by individual shop owners, and has been since the 80s when cameras became cheap enough. There is no big government CCTV operation. Closest thing is probably the London congestion charge cameras, or individual towns who decide to install their own to cut down on crime.

And if you go out of the cities, you can go forever without seeing a CCTV camera.