Or send your shol'vas on a tangent?

Indeed. It's an OCD must-have.

The Nexus family is a completely different story. They're a joy to hold -- they (especially the 10) fit smugly into your hand. Feels light too.

I bought a Galaxy Tab 7, used it for a few months and ended up selling it. It's in the wrong place between tablets and smart phones. I always end up leaving it at home. Or I take my laptop or netbook.

Ouch. But I do agree with you.

I've played with the device quite a bit (I'm planning to buy one) and I think the Galaxy Note II would be about the limit for devices that need to fit into trouser pockets and can be held to the ear without looking like a clown.

Unless future fashion changes to accommodate "handsets" and handsets become more about the functions other than voice calls.

And the iceberg itself. I don't think I'll be comfortable in a recreation of a scenario that ends in people freezing to death.

Does that mean they strip my life's story of just my name, phone number, address and other similar identifying information or do they go so far as to obfuscate other pieces of information like hometown, company, college etc? Without that, the data is still probably enough to narrow me down to a single individual.

I don't put up a lot of things on Facebook, but if Google pulls keywords from my GMail to decide my preferences and sells *that* as data, I'd be very, very scared.

Tweetie and Sequester: How one bird reached across the aisle and averted the budget crisis.

They will find a way to sell it eventually. The data is worth so much money that the temptation is just too high.

The only way out is see is to make the data availability to marketers a *service*, rather than a product. Do marketers really want your *personal* information or is what they really want the ability to target advertising to you based on your demographics, interests and behaviors? Doing the latter does not necessarily mean you have to possess the former.

What if Google or Facebook only provided their customers (i.e. the marketers, not us) with a query interface? Such as, "tell me how many people with such and such demographic attributes who bought item x also bought item y". And then provide another interface to tell Google/Facebook to "show this ad to people with these demographic attributes who bought item x and ...." etc. This way Google/Facebook holds the private data and the marketers get most of what they want. Perhaps that's still evil, but it is a lesser evil.

Or is that what they're doing already?

More like:

Water purification:
is da process of removing bad stuff frm contaminated water.

Yes! They knew exactly how to take out a zombie. Massive cranial trauma.

My thought exactly. It would have been a lot cooler to have an actual planet named Vulcan.

And Shatner orbits Uranus.

It's not that bad, really.

The court will just sentence you to take three weeks of "copyright re-education classes".