figure8

Furthermore, based on a quick estimate based on my current Firefox cookies, Google is (through Google Analytics) aware of 80%-90% of my browsing activity.

Thanks. This was helpful.

In theory, I see your point about Google not having direct access to a site's first party cookies, but Google is clever. If you monitor the requested resources when you visit any site with those cookies, you'll notice a request to http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif? followed by parameters sending the values of those cookies to Google. So, they are tracking said cookies.

Does my accepting Google's new privacy policy allow them to link information possibly gained via Google Analytics (using their ubiquitous cookies like _utma, _utmb, _utmz) to my other Google product activities?

There are many people who want to have power and control, but don't have the skills or experience to do anything concrete and exceptional. There is an entire management advice industry around finding tools and psychological tricks which allow those people to appear high-minded, visionary, and strategic. Eric Ries may not be one of these people, but his 5-why's lecture presents one of those tools. Anyone managing a team of ditch diggers needs some hard-to-criticize collection of platitudes which can be uttered to avoid either joining the diggers and/or being identified as completely useless.

Can this kind of molecular dynamics simulation by done on a simple desktop machine? What system and software do you recommend if I want to experiment with simulation, starting with this "hello world" project? Do you recommend starting from scratch or using some specialized framework? (For context, I'm a professional programmer and mathematician by training.)

Seeing that 70% decline in number of developers (on SO) from age 30 to age 40 and assuming they are still working, what do the older "has-been" developers do now and what titles do they have? Perhaps they have never heard of SO? Or they have stopped needing and/or using SO? Statistics based on educational website usage seem to always skew younger.

Analogously, if I measured academic skills and availability by time spent in libraries and time spent teaching, I'm sure we'd see a similar peak in 20's because grad students spend so much time doing both these things and productive professors need this less.

I completely agree with you. There will always be a contingent of developers who believe enforced standards trump simplicity. As we see here, when the CORBA then SOAP crowd realized they'd lost that fight, their ilk started judging other projects by adherence to strict API structural definitions like formal "REST". That said, I do believe this constant dialog between ad-hoc simplicity and rigid standards is good for the industry; in each area, accepted practice evolves to meet the needs of its current application.

blog.jess3.com/2010/11/wikipedias-crowdsourced-ab-ad-testing.html