I'm incapable of curing cancer, and the only thing I do with orphans is sacrifice them to Cthulhu, so do you really want me to stop reading your post?

These "German authorities" asked to audit Google's data, but nothing in there says that they ordered Google to publicize the findings or issue an apology. We'd need to know more about what happened there. Also, we don't know whether they ordered Google to let them review the data, or they simply requested it and Google said "yes."

Like the kind that cause a bridge to collapse, or a space shuttle to blow up shortly after launch?

As far as I can tell, Google posted this message without being forced to by any government. Most companies would keep this kind of thing quiet, or lie about it, especially if privacy advocates got wind of it. Google, within a few days of finding out about the issue, posts an APOLOGY for doing something that MIGHT have possibly damaged a few people, IF the information they collected had been leaked.

Unless we have reason to believe otherwise, Google screwed up, and as soon as they were aware of the mistake, took steps to rectify it and then went public about the mistake. If we get evidence that Google is lying about this, that's another story, but has there been any such evidence yet? I'm all for raking corporations over the coals when they make mistakes and don't own up, but how often do you see a giant corporation blurting out "mea culpa" like this?

Also:

It's not remotely silly. A week ago I discovered a DB table at my (multinational media conglomerate) company that had been silently logging data for -- wait for it -- three years. It wasn't any personal info, or data we needed, but everyone had forgotten about it. The idea of Google making a similar mistake is not "silly" at all.

You might be stupid for leaving your network open, just as you might be stupid for leaving your house door open, but it's still not okay to use either one of them without permission. I won't have a lot of sympathy for you, but I'm not going to let the intruder off the hook, either.

Facebook has 400 million active users (their own claim). That leaves 6.4 billion people who are not on Facebook, and I imagine most of them aren't toddlers or 70. :)

(Yes, I realize there are other social networks out there, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of humans are not using social networking websites.)

And yet, somehow people managed to be social back in the day before we had shared communication spaces like Facebook. If you wanted to hang out with your friends, you called them to see what they were doing and made plans.

Until Facebook is the only way people are willing to communicate, you still have the choice of not using it. (And even then, you can still choose not to use it, because no matter how pervasive it becomes, there's still going to be a substantial number of people who don't use it. We think of these things as universal, but that's usually because people tend to know people like them, and so if you use Facebook, so do the people you know. There are entire disconnected graphs of non-Facebook-users out there.)

Translation: "It's new and different, and I'm frightened by it."

In theory, you're right. In practice, are there any substantial number of cool apps that don't have an iPhone OS version? I have no idea, but I imagine that that's not the case. ("Cool" doesn't mean what you think is cool; you're a computer nerd and, like me, are uncool by definition :))

I'm not saying its popularity somehow makes it a better device; I know better than that. What I'm saying is that earlier you pointed out that it doesn't support Flash, as if to indicate that Apple made a mistake or doesn't know what they're doing. To me it seems fairly obvious that Apple does know what they're doing, even if what they're doing is being walled-garden assholes.

I agree; I love my Android phone (G1) but I really wish it prioritized user input response over everything else. I'll gladly sacrifice some processing power in order to ensure that it always responds to my UI actions immediately.

Well, for one thing, you're talking about netbooks, not laptops ;-) And for another, I don't think most Linux distros have a self-destruct feature where they randomly lose inodes for no reason. That probably isn't the reason Linux isn't taking over the desktop...

Hey, Sulking Manchild is playing the side stage at Coachella this year!

To me, it seems far more likely that the author wants to present a particular narrative, rather than that he's honestly reporting misunderstood statistics. Keep in mind that all journalism is the work of humans, who inevitably bring their biases into play, no matter how hard they try to be objective and neutral.

It's entirely possible that they misunderstood the statistics, or it's possible that they know that this article will stir shit up and get them more pageviews (and ad revenue) than it might otherwise.

True, but it's a part that Apple is okay with their users being cut off from. When I think about what Flash is used for, mostly I think of games; and the iPad already has, by virtue of the app store, thousands of games available. iPad owners aren't going to miss it much. Besides games, the other big app for Flash is video. I honestly don't know where the iPad stands with respect to video, so I can't comment on it, but I'm under the impression that most of the big-name places on the web that provide video also provide H.263 or H.264 streams that iPhone OS can play natively? Or something like that?

Dude, most people don't care. Maybe it would be better if everyone had the same concerns about OS openness that we do, but they don't, and that's unlikely to ever change. The underlying OS and internals of tech are not interesting to the overwhelming majority of people, no matter how interesting they are to you and me.

For the record, I despise the walled garden that is Apple and have never once given them any money. Their products are not for me, and I don't like their corporate behavior. But to act like they don't know what they're doing is ludicrous.

As I understand it, certain Unicode characters are not allowed in IDNS (Internationalized DNS) names. If there's nine versions of the letter 'e' then the only one that's allowed is U+0065; any other version of that character will get normalized into an 'e'.

There's more to it than that, of course, but there has been plenty written about this; here's a starting place.