Wow, that's really too bad. In 1978 our high school computer class heavily lobbied our teacher to acquire an Apple II, since at that point we were programming on DecWriters connected to the public school district's single DecSystem-20. We learned how to program in 6502 assembly in order to access the 4-color high-res mode of the Apple II and write simple interactive games. To us kids this was a huge step up from writing boring FORTRAN and SNOBOL programs on line-mode printing terminals.

It's hard to imagine an Apple II, at that time, sitting around as a paper weight in the classroom. Maybe elementary school was too early, but for those of us in high school back then we had to maintain a sign-up sheet for access to it, and many of us stayed after class to get more time on it, on into the evening.

NSA's PRISM program and Google's business model are quite similar in many ways. They both collect huge amounts of data on people and mine the resulting social graph in order to target them, and they both rely on secrecy and an apathetic public. The one thing they didn't take into account was the idealism, intelligence, and courage of people like Edward Snowden.

Trust neither the government nor Google. Instead, prohibit the mechanisms that allow them to abuse their power, and support whistle-blowers and truth seekers.

If Google really wants to Do No Evil, they could stop collecting and retaining all the information that they do. If they didn't store your search terms, what videos you watched, where you went, who your friends are, what music you listen to, and what you bought, then they wouldn't be able to harm you by giving that information to the Government.

Actually, it appearz that Facebook is one of the most hated companies in America:

http://247wallst.com/2013/01/09/the-10-most-hated-companies-in-america-2/2/

My wife says she gets phone calls all the time from people claiming to be Google, trying to sell her adwords for her business that she promotes from her blog. But it's hard to tell if they're really from Google or not... is Google really that aggressive and unpleasant to potential customers? They don't stop calling and apparently they use different phone numbers, so they are hard to block.

The web site is totally useless with Firefox 17.0.5 (latest ESR). If there are videos there, I can't see them, just a bunch of badly laid out text and play buttons that bring you back to the top image on the page.

I loved that film. Quite a head trip at the end.

I think that for a time "cyberspace" really was a different realm. It was not a commercial venture in the early days; it was more like a research project that escaped the bounds of academia and the military. The .com TLD was vastly outnumbered by .edu and .mil. The first commercial Usenet spam provoked alarm and outrage, and the first advertising banners on the Web were seen as an unwelcome exploitation of a public resource. Due to its immediacy, richness, interconnectedness, and interactive nature, it really did feel like a separate "space" back then, as opposed to paper, telegraph, or radio.

The posted article comes across as a diatribe by an industry frustrated that they haven't completely taken over and owned this new space yet despite over a decade of their best efforts. They probably will eventually anyway, as most pockets of freedom succumb, so the tone of the article seems strangely vindictive. Yet I and others still entertain a nostalgia for the original dream of an open, creative, peer-to-peer interconnected network unmediated by the demands of profit-hungry corporations focused on monetizing their intellectual property and all the personal data they can scoop up and sell to marketers and advertisers.

I support the efforts of organizations such as the EFF and encourage others to do so as well. It's not often that a frontiers like the Web and Internet open up in one's lifetime, and it would be a shame for it to devolve into a slightly better version of the cable TV system.

There are few things harder on a car than a Northeast winter.

And what's with the parking brake not releasing without a charge? That's an amazing oversight.

If you get to know the the people who own and run your corner store, you can often ask them to stock the stuff you want.

Back when I smoked cigarettes, I asked them if they would stock a particular luxury brand (Sherman's Naturals), for which I normally had to make a special trip to the tobacco shop to purchase, and they readily agreed in order to get my business. And they actually sold it to me cheaper per pack than I was paying from the specialty shop!

Since then, my wife and I got them to stock the organic granola and oatmeal brands we prefer, eliminating another special trip we used to make, again at a lower price.

That's the kind of service and responsiveness that supporting your local business provides.

I was very worried to read that you fell ill at a conference in Barcelona this past year (http://www.fsf.org/news/richard-stallman-speech-in-barcelona-canceled) and paramedics had to be called. How's it going? Are you doing anything special since then to improve your health and fitness that you'd like to share?

It always makes me a little ill to see judges campaigning. Judges are supposed to interpret the law, not set policy. With all the money going into elections it is even more important that judges are impartial. We don't want judges to make decisions based on popularity or political interests that would affect their electability; they need to be non-partisan and insulated from special interests.

The Founders had it right: maintain the separation of powers so that the judiciary acts as a check on the powers of the executive and legislative, and keep the power of the executive to appoint judges and the power of the legislature to confirm them as checks on judicial power.

For most of us here on Slashdot, space exploration is cool, exciting, motivating, and instills a sense of pride and adventure in ourselves as humans.

But I get so tired of this idea that space travel is important to the future of our species. Even if the only way we could survive would be through an exodus to other worlds, how does that solve the problems that would lead us to such an exodus? Until we become more enlightened here on Earth and make some progress in the nature of the human heart, we will only bring those problems with us.

What the heck is so important about the survival of our species anyway? Hopefully we'll involve into something more than we are now, but if we die out, that won't be so unusual as far as species go. Do we consider it a tragedy that the dinosaurs evolved into birds? Compared to the vastness, mystery, and awesomeness of the Universe as a whole, we're really insignificant.

I doubt that we're the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, let alone the entire Universe; there are probably many more to fulfill whatever purpose we have, if any, as sentient, self-aware, curious observers and participants in the evolution of the Universe. If they've managed to solve the problem of interstellar travel, they're probably praying that we'll become more civilized before we escape the bounds of our planet.

Funny thing for me... I found Facebook difficult to figure out.

Like any geek, I normally have no problem exploring a program or an interface and learning how to use it just by poking around and trying stuff. But with Facebook, maybe because of my social anxiety, I was paralyzed... the UI is pretty dense, and I worried about accidentally posting something I didn't mean to post, or leaking private information, or breaking some social protocol...

I ended up actually asked one of my wife's friends how to post a comment, even though it was fairly obvious (much to her amusement). Now I know how some of my tech-phobic friends feel when they face their fear of learning a new program.

It's remarkable how many phones copy that lame icon grid from iOS. The first reaction I have whenever I see a phone like that is how dense and cluttered the screen looks, and how little information it actually provides.

You have to at least give Microsoft credit for coming up with a distinctive UI that doesn't look anything like Apple's.