Two Chaps, One Dog

“On Toobin, this is a treat for minds of a certain cast:”
That reminds me of the old Punch caption competition. Someone used to enter every week with “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday”, the actual caption to a Paul Crum cartoon from 1937.
I think that was rather the point, in fact. The absurdity of Crum’s gag means that it can be applied to almost any picture. It occasionally won the competition.

I spent an awful lot of the play devising scenarios where that would have been possible (for instance, Cordelia being the daughter of a second wife) rather than being caught up in the action.
I’m with you Sue Simms. There are times when I’ve gone into the theatre already confused by the proposition but found my concerns to be unfounded and other times when I’ve spent the play distracted by the implications of the changes. For example, one of the best versions of the Tempest I’ve seen had Prospero played by a woman. While one of the worst versions of A Midsummer’s Night Dream that I’ve seen had both marriages done as gay marriages with the leads played by black and white actors. It was a change that just didn’t work in a play that is already filled with twists.

Engineer Dhruv Mehrotra built a virtual private network, or VPN
Okay. I’ll break it down for you.
Let’s start here. Buy a brand new laptop. Take it home, plug it in, go through the setup.
Now there’s an 85% chance you’ve just bought a Windows laptop. So that laptop is running Microsoft Windows, not Android. No Google so far.
Fire up the default web browser. Notice that you’re using Edge, not Chrome. Again, no Google.
Perhaps you’d like to search the Internet for something? Type your query into the search bar. You’re not using Google, are you – you’re using Bing, the default search engine for every version of Windows (and the XBox, if you care about that sort of thing).
In fact, in order to use Google at all on your new laptop, you have to take deliberate action to install a Google product on your system. Fun fact – this is exactly what Microsoft was sued for by the DOJ back in 2001!
Google is a behemoth when it comes to maps.
No argument there. But there are lots of companies that don’t use Google’s Maps API at all because it doesn’t offer the specific features they need (I work for one of them) or – ironically – because it doesn’t work in China.
In some cases, the Google block means apps won’t work at all, like Lyft and Uber, or Spotify, whose music is hosted in Google Cloud.
So two apps which are absolutely dependent on a Maps API – okay – and an extreme outlier app that happens to run its back end services in GCP, unlike 94% of the market using cloud hosting.
The article you’re referencing is deliberately cherry-picking its examples to make Google look more inescapable than it is.
Most of the websites I visit have frustratingly long load times because so many of them rely on resources from Google and get confused when my computer won’t let them talk to the company’s servers. […] Airbnb […] New York Times […]
…so she’s using an adblocker, then? This has little to do with Google specifically and everything to do with the dysfunctional ad-supported web business model. Sites like Airbnb and the New York Times deliberately design their sites to fail if you’re using an adblocker so that you’ll turn it off, thus ensuring they get their ad cash. Sites that aren’t ad-supported design their front-ends to be tolerant of individual components being blocked. Sites that are ad-supported are ad-supported because they don’t have a functional business model in the first place. Or are you proposing that Airbnb has put Trivago, Expedia and Hotels.com out of business?
Here’s the intro that you didn’t include:

I’m apprehensive about entirely blocking Google from my life because of how dependent I am on its products; the company has basically taken up residence in my brain somewhere near the hippocampus.
Google Calendar tells me what I need to do any given day. Google Chrome is how I browse the internet on my computer. I use Gmail for both work and personal email. I turn to Google for every question and search. Google Docs is the home of my story drafts, my half-finished zombie novel, and a running tally of my finances. I use Google Maps to get just about everywhere.

Alternate Headline: Person Who Chose to be Completely Dependent on Free Google Services Finds Not Using Free Google Services Any More Kind of a Pain. Also, the other four articles in the same series talk about the same experiment being run with Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. They all have the same breathless “OMG It ruined my life” tone, which is a strong indicator you’re looking at clickbait (since the gizmodo headline wasn’t enough indication). I might point out that if there are five big companies all competing in the same space, by definition that means none of them have an inescapable monopoly.

Google Docs is the home of my story drafts, my half-finished zombie novel, and a running tally of my finances.

This is not a typical person. This is not a serious person.
Banning a person from YouTube is like old AT&T cutting your long distance and removing your leased-phone.
This is ludicrous hyperbole and you know it. There are dozens of alternative video/livestreaming hosting services, and anyone can set one up themselves from scratch with a modicum of technical knowledge. What it won’t be is free; instead of Google paying you for your unboxing or makeup tutorial videos, you’re going to have to pay for the storage space and bandwidth costs yourself. That’s what people are really shrieking about; their free stuff’s being taken away and they don’t like it.
Again, the fundamental problem here is that the people shrieking about Big Social do not understand how the Internet works, and do not want to learn.
There is, in fact, a very serious problem with Big Tech, but it isn’t this drivel. It’s the collusion between dozens of disparate companies that don’t operate in the same market to deplatform people like Andrew Torba. Torba has been on the receiving end of more Big Tech oppression than anyone, and he doesn’t think regulation is the answer.

. A black English kid is no less ‘appropriate’ in the role of Peter Pan
The problem is that there’s no such thing as ‘Black English’. England, which literally means ‘Land of the English’, was brought into being over a thousand years ago when the first King, Alfred, was crowned as the homeland of the English people. Being English is not a club one can join, it is decided by who your ancestors were. Africans, Asians and Middle-Easterners are not English – even if they were born in England.

Being English is not a club one can join
In that case very few of us qualify as being “English”, starting with the royal family. The people of England are descended from a long series of immigrant “invasions”. The English are a mixed race, and, indeed, the “English” of King Alred’s time were themselves a mix of immigrant origins. Does the description Anglo-Saxon ring any bells?
@ Alex
Given the numerous changes of dynasty since 1066, I would very much doubt there is any Norman blood in the present royal family.

If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me, top left, and I’ll rattle the spam filter. Which is again being capricious.

The Celts come from “a small area in Northwest Europe”? They were spread across the continent. The Galatians, for example, were of Celtic descent, and they lived in Turkey.
As for “the Romans left no genetic trace here,” try https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/11/did-romans-leave-genetic-legacy-britain/, where at least in southeast England they did.

Fire up the default web browser. Notice that you’re using Edge, not Chrome. Again, no Google.
Except that Edge is now based on Chromium for website compatibility. Oops. Nice try, though.

Daniel Ream
Nginx is based on v1.3 of Apache and yet somehow they’re two different companies competing for the same market niche.
Interesting non-sequitur, it is irrelevant to the fact that ALL modern browsers are built on the chromium core, and not all use the switch that removes googles tracking and reporting code from the body.
The pretense that because there is no google software loaded on ones computer, means that google is not involved in the use thereof is a bit thin.
What modern computer user does not immediately begin browsing the internet? And when doing so was stated,blocking google cripples a majority of websites, because they use all the “free” tools that google provides. Those tools being provided so that google can track the users browsing habits.
You arguments are built on a computer usage pattern that has not existed since the early 90’s. People are often looking for passive consumption of media, and the revenue model for such is, and has been, ad driven.
Sites that do not directly market a service, are almost entirely supported by ad revenue, and the largest revenue system for ads is the Alphabet entities.

RIP Spencer Davis