I doubt that will happen. Yes, the data can be quite valuable, but facebook would lose a very large number of users if that happened (devaluing the company).

It's too expensive for Google to roll out cables for a single home. Communities mean that the cables transferring the data are shared, and it is therefore cheaper for Google

There are many people who cannot upgrade (i.e. people from big companies who do not have admin privileges on their computers).

But what is a standard? Is it what some organization like Acid3 decides? Or is it what most browsers support? The reason that IE6 didn't fall for lack of standards was because it was the standards. IE6, the dominant browser for quite a while, was the most standard browser in existence because it was the dominant browser.

I disagree: http://xkcd.com/591/

What incentive does Microsoft have to be 100% standards compliant? It is the dominant browser. It can wright the standards. Whatever features Microsoft implements become the standards because web developers have to support IE.

Because that is illegal... the idea of this project is to get honest security researchers incentives to find bugs so that the people who would exploit them, cannot.

The US export laws were created to hurt the countries that have horrible diplomatic relations with the US. If the US and its allies don't trade with those countries, those countries' economies will fall (in theory) and they will have to negotiate with us. However, these laws don't really transfer well to open source software. Yes, the people in those countries should be allowed to access sf software. But the law is the law and there isn't much that sf can do. It would also be very difficult to try to reform these laws to account for open source software, since there would be a ton of loopholes. Also, this is not a first ammendment violation or any kind of censorship. These laws block exports of products to those countries. There is no problem allowing them to view your website or see information. But giving them software to download violates the export laws. For example, Wikipedia has no problems with the export law. It is allowed to teach the countries on the export list. But that is because Wikipedia is only giving them information, not software.

There are only 3 reasons why Google would ditch Mozilla in the future: 1. Nobody uses Firefox anymore (i.e. less than 1% share) 2. Mozilla is charging ridiculously high fees 3. There is a big scandal Google has lots of incentives to keep this deal. Users are by default, lazy. Most do not change any options. That is of course why IE is the dominant browser (pre-installed on Windows). Because Google is the default search engine on FF, many users will use Google instead of a competitor.

This has nothing to do with patents... Also, how can anything in the digital world survive without intellectual property laws? They are what makes pirating illegal. One company thinks of a brilliant idea, and suddenly all their competitors have copied it identically. There would be 0 reason to put any money into R&D. I agree with you that patent law needs help. But you can't completely get rid of all intellectual property rights. Most companies innovate to make money. There is no economic reason to innovate if your competitors will get the same benefits and not have to spend any R&D money/time.

They have a feature for this. In the top right of the contacts manager, there is a link titled "export".

Most non-tech people don't think that they need offline backups of what is in the cloud. Sure, they know that they need to backup their word documents, but most non-tech people don't think they need to back up things such as email or contacts.