You can do that with ANY search engine.

I really don't want to insult but if someone posts personal info on the net than that's what happens. Price you pay for submitting personal info online. As an example I'm pretty sure I can dig up personal details on you as well Starkers.

As for the ads it's funny. I see no Google ads anywhere I go except a small handful of sites. And only one small one line ad in my Gmail.

Does your paranoia have no end?

No. I agree with you starkers. That its not right for Google to use personal information to advertise. But its not against the law.

The problem is as soon as you post information on a public network it then becomes public viewing. Anyone can have access to this info, its just Google is clever enough and have the infrastructure in to use/abuse this for their own gain.

Your former brother-in-law went to sites who cared little about his private information and I am afraid is now paying the price. Maybe thats the problem, internet users don't know what they should put into the public domain.

I suppose the one thing you can expect is that the Google OS will have advertising on it and no doubt if your brother-in-law gets it. It will have ads about sex toys.

Which Law_S exactly?

Trans-National CRC checks on packet received *and* flying by?

It's not FOR the Laws either... catchy, isn't it.

Ok, analogy time.

Linux is the smart kid in the back of math class who plays with his calculator all day, just so you can't use it

Apple are the "cool" artist-like kids who think they're are better than everybody else

MS are the everyday high school kids, they have issues, but there are a lot of them

Google is the creepy kid who lets you cheat off him, but you can really see him becoming a stalker one day...

Google!=good

Google==parasite

MS advertises MS products, surprise surprise. Google advertises ANYTHING that will get it money, and it uses everything it can find on YOU to target those ads. Google earns over 5 billion dollars a year and its services are predominantly free, so it makes up the cost of mantaining all its sites, and then 5B on top, and all that money comes from you.

Starkers is right people

Google then took the information he was told . . and passed it along to other people that asked. 

Sometimes he offered other services . . like drugs. 

You didnd't have to take the drugs of course. 

But the truth is, that the more you talked to Google, the more specialized his drug offers were to you. 

He knew about yoru hard home life and your nut allergy and could hook you up.  Cheap.

Don't hate Google.  Just know the risks of talking to him.  Do the same with Linux and MS and Apple.

That I find hard to believe... unless you've swallowed a few lines of AdBlock Pro code and your eyesight has been affected.

Yup.... leesten to starkers... he's words of wisom are your salvation from the anti-Christ known as Google.  Repent and give up your wicked Google ways... repent I say.  It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a Google user to enter the kingdom of Microhoo and partake of the Bing, so repent and say: "Get thee behind me, Google"

About the only nut allergy I'm aware of is the one I think I'm developing for nuts who think Google is the bees knees.

If you make enough source changes or dig through archaic settings, sure. But how many people really want to spend hours setting up an OS before they start using it?

I'm still wondering why, by default even on the Ubuntu distro, KDE isn't doing simple things like open the K menu when you hit the Start/Windows key, and why you can't even map it to open the menu in the GUI key mapping utility.

Linux has its strengths - it's focused very strongly on developers and on power users. If you love tweaking, then Linux is great. But if you want something anybody can use, if you want to just sit down and start working - Linux just isn't there yet.

Linux is still very unpolished. It still feels likean unfinished work in progress. Sure, is can do everything, but with more work than with Windows or MacOS. It doesn't have a polished interface out of the box, even with distros like Ubuntu.

In any case:

This Google OS looks like it may be a minimalist browser based OS, possibly with a simple application launcher.  Okay, so that's gonna work for smaller devices and for a lot of people who just don't do much on their computers except the basics.

But - for people who do more than the basics, and for those who tend to buy the more expensive, more powerful machines, I don't think that will work. They'll want something more like Windows.

Of course, that is merely guesswork - there's really not much information about the new OS right now.

. . . and yes, Google advertises everywhere it can. It is, quite frankly, an advertising company. That's how they make their money.

. . . and frankly, I'm getting sick of people who take a one-size-fits-all approach to computing. Especially the "oh, everything is moving to the web" crowd. No, not everything is moving to the web. Yes, it's a great mew medium with a lot of promise. No, it won't work for everything. One size does not fit all, and there are many things that do not fit the web model. Sure, you can shoehorn anything onto a web page, but my experience is that isn't really ideal for things like games or documents or multimedia.

Here are some things that drive me crazy about web based applications:

• Offline storage and computing. Either it's completely unavailable, or it's stored in some temporary cache that may or may not be there when you unplug.
• Feature sets have never, in my experience, matched non-web apps. Pegasus Mail and Thunderbird and Outlook and other non-web email clients are still far more powerful than Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Hotmail. Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org are still more powerful than Google Docs.
• Everything either grinds to a halt or starts throwing error messages when the network gets congested. How responsive the web app is depends completely on whether or not your neighbor is doing something that hogs bandwidth, like downloading video.
• 90% of the time, if I'm watching video, I frankly just download it. Streaming is a pain. It only takes a couple of dropped packets to kill the video, and it's annoying having frames stutter or switch to low-res every few seconds.
• This applies to anything realtime. It's far better to use local resources where you don't have to worry about the status of the network.
• I've seen web based games, and frankly they're no different from non-web games. This is an example of something just being shoehorned into a browser just because they can do it, and not because it's it's better in a browser.
• Frankly, the browser chrome isn't always needed or desireable. Do I really need all that in all of my applications?
• As a developer - web development is language soup. This may work well for large developers like Google, but for small developers and hobbyists, it's just too much to learn. I'd much rather work in one or two languages than in a dozen or so.

In conclusion: Just because you can do something in a certain way doesn't mean it's ideal, and IMHO even though the web has its place, I don't think it would be ideal to webify everything.

I don't believe that one size fits all. I don't believe that moving everything onto the "cloud" or the "web" or the "internet" is ideal for everything in our lives.

Oh yeah, and on this bit....

If it's not against the law, then it should be!!!   My former bother-in-law's posting things on a 'closed community' forum for certain community members was not exactly making them available for the greater public.  Just because that forum happened to be on the internet doesn't make... or shouldn't make a member's personal profile/correspondence within that community fair game for parasites like Google to exploit. 

If my former brother-in-law had written those things in a letter to those people it would have been against the law for Google to intercept that mail and/or rifle through the recipients belongings to read it... and so it should be for rifling correspondence intended for specific people on a not so public forum.  One has to become a member to read and/or post, so anything posted there was/is not intended for the general public.

My former brother-in-law was highly pissed that Google had used his personal information to create a 'profile' of him, and then used it to derive profit from associated advertising.  However, being a 'nobody' with little or no clout or influence, Google ignored his protestations and requests to have the page removed.  Last I heard it is still there/added to.

And no, I won't be posting a link... he's enough of a somebody to still sue me.

I keep telling you ANY search engine can do the same thing. Google isn't the ONLY one you know.

One bad experinence and they think the sky is falling down...

And I hate to say it . . . but kona is right. 

posting a letter and posting on the internet, apples and oranges, not even able to compare.

Thing is, I was there and Yahoo produced no such results... none relating to his other children or criminal record, just a couple of references to his employment, etc.  That suggests to me that Yahoo has better standards and is more selective regarding the use of information it discovers.

Ok, so it's not the mail, I know that.  However, he was a paying member to a site for members only... where the business end of things happens behind closed doors, so to speak.  To access anything behind the front page and various teasers, one has to become a member.  So in effect, then, he was posting within a closed community to certain individuals, yet his information there was somehow accessed and made (more) public.  Moreover, Google added ads for sex toy and sex services to the page, and this helped create a less than flattering profile for viewers of that page by sexualising it.  Yup, he was pretty ropable.

I remember it well because there was an almighty row a couple of days later.. he didn't want my niece knowing those things about him and wondered how she came by the information. He was told and then he revealed to us that his personal data/profile at this particular dating site must have been accessed as it was the only place on the net he had posted those details.

Oh well, I didn't like the bastard anyhow... but it is the principle of the thing.  Just because it is there, it doesn't make it right to use somebody elses personal information to turn a profit.... particularly without consent.

So by this you are saying that Google is supposed to access peoples personal lives and make them available to the wider public??

It is not a matter of whether they can access and use it publicly to seek profit (just because it happens the be there) but if they should, and from a moral and ethical standpoint, they should NOT.  It's no different to somebody on a public street finding a letter you wrote to a colleague, relative or even an illicit lover and posting it in your local newspaper.  Sure it was found in a public place... BUT, it is your information to an intended recipient, not the wider community.

Orright, let's put it another way!  If I download a cracked version of WindowBlinds from a warez site simply because it is there on the internet, does its 'being there' make it right???  Of course not.  Forget about patents and copyrights, it is somebody else's property and not mine to take... just as my ex-brother-in-law's memoirs, bragging whatever were not Google's property to take.

I make no apologies for not liking Google... non whatsoever!  I think Google is lower than pond scum and has far fewer morals and scruples than a devil worshippiing adulterous murderer who sacrifices virgins and small children.

Starkers, I don't mean to sound rude or anything like that, but you are totaly off topic from the very begining of this thread, so either make a comment about Google Chrome OS or Windows (that's what this thread is all about) or don't comment at all.