He wanted to take back everything he had previously given us. That's a bit unusual.

It's not about us, it's about himself.

I relate to what he did because I did it myself a while back. Let go of my personal domains, email accounts, self-hosted blogs and online image archives etc. I'm still on the net, obviously, just under a completely reorganized identity. I'm now much more careful about separating personally identifiable information from general romping across the net.

Why? Because I had reached a point when I looked back at everything that could be tied to me online and it wasn't me anymore. The blogs contained some useful information but also a lot of it was outdated and some misguided or naive, or worse. Luckily, I have a common name and I've had the insight to mark all my pages "noarchive" so there's no cache in search engines or archive.org. So I just let go and moved on.

People are not perfect, they change and sometimes grow up. But the Internet remembers everything and never lets you forget it. In real life you mostly get the benefit of forgive and forget because human memory is imperfect, but bring a perfect memory into the game and it gets ugly. People look at stuff you did or said 10 or 20 years ago and treat you like you're the same person you were back then.

Besides, if some of the stuff Mark, or me, put online was really useful then someone will have a copy somewhere and will recover and share it. You can't expect the guy to live forever or his descendants to keep maintaining his website forever. At some point that site would either stop working or the information would become obsolete anyway.

I realise that Slashdot and PCMag are US-oriented but I'm getting a bit tired of articles written as if what happens in the US affects the whole world. Where is Apple suing HTC and Samsung? In the US. That kind of patent bullshit does not fly everywhere in the world, and HTC and Samsung are not even mainly US-based. Granted, the US is a big important market, but it's not everything.

So ok, worse case scenario, they win and the US is taken over by Apple alone. Frankly, I doubt Microsoft will let that happen, 'cause it needs hardware to put their OS on, and we all know Apple will never let them put it on theirs in a million years. But ok, let's say for the sake of argument.

So? Why should the rest of the world care? I'm seriously asking. How will the rest of the world be affected by a decision given in one country, that's the host of a fairly atypical, malformed and out-of-control patent system? Will they be able to replicate this feat elsewhere in the world?

All Facebook has to do is make it more streamlined[...]

The question is, will they? And by that I mean, will they even care? Will the users?

I'm skeptical. If Google+ were to prevail it would have by now. We would see reports counting tens of millions of registered users, not "visitors". If it hasn't so far, it probably won't gather enough momentum.

And I'm not exactly sorry. Call it Facebook, Google, whatever, they're all the same. Their bread and butter is our private information and they are slowly throwing away all pretense they even try to protect it. Their latest statements re. eliminating anonymity are proof. If Google thinks that paying lip service to privacy and a different interface will make a difference, they might as well not even bother -- still Facebook in sheep's clothing.

What we need is a FOSS engine, something cheap and flexible that any geek can deploy on their own website (or on public services a la GitHub), and his/her non-geek friends can start using very easily and hook up into a larger, grassroots, distributed social network. Something that no corporation will be able to mine or control.

Frankly, I'm surprised no such solution has appeared so far. Oh, I don't doubt there may be plenty "social network" FOSS projects out there, but the only one that made any waves so far was Diaspora, and that was shortly before it died. ('Cause it did, right? A viable software project of any kind should put out a beta in 6 months from inception and have a working version in a year tops, and they're long overdue.)

If you're running the GNOME desktop environment, why would you want to run the KDE System Settings application?

To deal with settings for the odd KDE app you might be using. Such as K3B, which I prefer over any of the Gnome burners.

go get a early pentium4 with 512 megs of ram

Where and why?

The data 'seen' at the time is not 4th amendment violating, but the storage and persistence of said data *should* be a 4th amendment violation.

The problem is that without storage and persistance of data, police activity becomes a lot less effective.

Example: a live policeman sees a car while on patrol and remembers its details, including location, occupants, license plate etc. Later on, when a call comes in regarding a crime, he puts those things together, realizes that car or its occupants were involved and is able to provide details.

A fully automated system would be able to deal with this much better than a live policeman. But not if you only allow it the ability to recognize live details while denying the ability to store and relate to them later on. This way, the tech becomes usable only for encounters that happen after the call comes in, which drastically limits its efficiency.

It is unclear to me why people consider it ok for stuff to be stored indefinitely in a live policeman's brain but not on his HDD.

It's especially ironic since, when the situations are reversed, the same people cry foul. Example: people argue it's ok to photograph anything you can also see with the naked eye and remember with your brain; have a policeman interfere with this and everybody's up in arms about it.

The question is, have those people (well, us) learned anything from the Facebook fiasco? (Can I call it that already?)

If they did, Google+ will never reach the same size that Facebook did, and Facebook will have been the last of its kind to swell to such magnitude.

What am I talking about? Privacy. I see satisfaction surveys saying that people really hate Facebook. Makes me hope they finally figured out that going all out and entrusting your whole life to a website (heck, anybody) ain't the smartest thing you can do.

Granted, as long as we have big daddy corporations providing the social network, mining the data goes with the territory. What we need is a FOSS engine, working from seeds that any LAMP site owner can host, forming a network nobody can control and mine. I was hoping Diaspora was to become that, but there's still opportunity for another if they fail.

What's a "true democracy"?

This doesn't really apply to shooters. Unlike MMOs, which need a complex environment to be maintained server-side, shooters lend themselves well to simple LAN play. Cutting the ability to play over LAN for completely arbitrary reasons, and when it would require no resources from the company -- that's the kind of stupidity that hurts.

[...]they (as far as we can tell) are extremely fucking profitable.

I wouldn't call a few tens of millions profit "extremely fucking".

And there's a huge discrepancy between the $700-800m revenue with a low few tens of millions margin, and the unofficial "valuation" of Facebook at a high few tens of billions.

I'll be the first to admit I'm crap at economics but in my simple world I use simple math. If the yearly profit you can expect from a business is N, where does the valuation as 20xN come from? What's worth 19xN? The brand? Fixed assets? Potential for expansion? We're talking figures that (on paper) are starting to approach a trillion. Come, now.

The IPO, if and when it happens, will give us actual figures. But I can't help noticing that Facebook, Zynga et al. keep postponing them IPO's over and over.

Taken at face value, the excuses presented are silly. Simple math will show you that the cost of outfitting the entire place with Windows 7 and Office licenses alone would cover quite a bit of training and driver development. Not to mention how they seem to be focused on just desktops while leaving servers alone? What unsurmountable obstacle suddenly appeared, after they seemed to have been using OO, Firefox and Thunderbird for so long?

Not saying it's completely implausible, but I'd like to see some cold hard figures and facts for both scenarios.

I don't see what technical people working on Symbian have to do with the decisions that shape the direction that Symbian takes. They are mostly executants. If there's fault anywhere, it's at management level.

These people's reaction strikes me as the anger of someone who did all they could, even probably advised against management's poor choices, only to be ignored and finally discarded. They end up being the ones thrown out while the management keeps their jobs and gets a new toy to play with.

That is one of the weirdest aspects of the deal. Why choose an OS which has yet to prove itself? Shouldn't they have waited a little to see how Windows Phone 7 does? Is that 4% marketshare it got so far so amazing to make you say "wow, this is just what we need to take on Apple"? Not to mention their strange obstinacy when it comes to avoiding Android. Not that Meego is any more proven than Phone 7, in fact Meego is even more of an unknown factor. But it just feels that of all the possible choices the had they went with the worst possible one. Of course it begs the question what's the weight that has tipped the scales that we're not seeing yet.

The market for low end voice/text-only cell phones will get taken over by low end smart phones[..]

I wouldn't be so sure. It depends a lot on what people want. And so far only about a fifth of mobile phone owners want a smartphone.

Are you so sure that the smartphone form factor is such a universally desired one? Not everybody wants the "Jack of all trades, master of none" that is the smartphone. I for one see perfectly good cases to be made for combination of a dumb but reliable phone (you know, that makes and recieves calls and does it well) with other devices: MP3 or video players, tablets, netbooks, laptops, PC, gaming consoles, portable gaming devices etc.

And let's not forget that the so call "dumbphones" are not exactly dumb, they're really "feature phones". They have added functionality that serves their owners perfectly well. Actually, what these people are holding back from is not the whole smartphone experience, it's certain things they see as drawbacks: all-touch interface, big [fragile!] screen, low battery life, permanent connectivity, big price tag. Are these going to change? Some will, some won't.

Why is Symbian dying? Last I checked the smartphone adoption was something like 20% at global level. Much less that that in individual countries. What are the 80% dumbphones of the world running? Aren't most of them running Symbian?

If you mean "Nokia is [i]killing[/i] Symbian" then ok, but that's a whole different bunny.