@kartal
Ignorance is not a pejorative term. It is synonymous with uneducated, and of course there's no shame in not knowing something, especially something that's obscure. I am totally ignorant about how to write programs in LISP. This doesn't mean I'm stupid (unable or unwilling to learn) nor that I'll always be ignorant of this subject (although I think I probably will.)

@nosh
The "view a friend's history" thing is some social engineering/sleight of hand. They don't offer to let you peek into other people's browsers. They offer to let you send YOUR OWN browser history to a friend. When you do this, you are giving your browser permission to send the information it has collected to startpanic.com, which seems to me further evidence that they are not collecting this info behind the scenes.

BUT - once you send your browser history off somewhere - THROUGH THEM - they then have access to the information you provided them. They can then store it and show it to your friends, should they request it. If they can trick your friends into sending them this info as well, then they can store it and show it to you.

But there's still nothing technically sneaky going on here. Your browser collected some information, then offered to let you send that information on to a third party. If you do this, the third party (startpanic.com) is collecting information with your permission, since you had to actively do something to send it to them.

Once they have your browser history, you might claim that they shouldn't store it and show it to other people, but they did kind of tell you that's what they were going to do, although not in so many words.

@rgdot
Yes, there are hacks that may trick the browser into leaking information. But such a thing isn't needed to do what this site is doing. In fact they seem to be using a very mainstream JavaScript library. If this is a hack, I'd say it's purely a social engineering one.

It's true that an obnoxious sense of entitlement does seem more prevalent these days, although how universal it is I wouldn't even hazard to guess. Certainly the one obnoxious person grabs our attention a lot more than the 50 people around him who aren't being obnoxious.

I think parenting styles do have a lot to do with it. This generation has grown up hearing "Good job!" for every tiny step it takes. You drew a circle with a crayon? "Great job!" You can spell C-A-T? "Good job!" Employers are now finding that they have to hand out a lot more "attaboys" just to keep their workforce moving forward. The idea of just doing your job because it's your job has gone out of fashion.

And people conform to what their culture puts out as the ideal. How many decades of non-stop "entertainment" featuring utter baseness, shallow selfishness, naked greed and lowest-common-denominator cruelty did we think we could consume before people started thinking that was actually the way to behave? Have our leaders taken the high road on this, or have they led the charge into the pit with a "we're always right because we say we're right" attitude?

But one final note: my wife has a book called "Generation Of Vipers" that describes the current generation as selfish, lazy, almost pathologically self-obsessed, hedonistic and unmotivated. The author forecasts a grim future when this good-for-nothing rabble comes of age and takes the reins of society. But the "current" generation when the book was written was the one born in the wake of World War I. This "generation of vipers" grew up to fight WWII, then build the post-war society that came to be regarded as the American golden age. Decades later, another book would be written about this generation, only this time the title would be "The Greatest Generation."

So I guess I prefer surly teens over surly record company execs after all. Because teens eventually grow up.

As I was reading through this thread, an interesting idea occurred to me.

File streams are a little-known feature of NTFS, but basically they let you store the contents of one file within another. (See http://tinyurl.com/cl7yfj which links to Microsoft's article on them.)

It seems like with a little extra effort, the text files could be attached to the files they describe as an alternate stream. Then you'd avoid having two files for each file you wanted to describe, the notes would always move along with the file (provided you stuck to NTFS and didn't copy the file onto a FAT32 thumb drive.)

It should also allow you to attach notes directly to a folder, as Skooter1121 asked about.