You don't put your watch in a slip case, do you? Just give up your urge to protect, give in to your urge to just "use freely", and at most put a screen protector on your phone (like i do). No need to protect your phone so much.

I agree however you forget that Facebook has reached the point where even regular users don't share actual relevant life-updates, thoughts, etc, precisely because they have seen the pitfalls of others who do so (and seen how Facebook eats your privacy and backstabs you).

Thus, you are seeing the effect of people posting less and less useful, actual updates, and mostly just using the service as a photo update. Occasional status updates such as "I was here in ___" and "oh its raining i hate it" is about all I see nowadays. This might not hold true for the blue-collar folks who joined recently but for the upper educated class this is the trend.

Nerds are "socially disinclined" as well but popular belief tends to point to nerds as being "smarter". amirite amirite?

Everyone knows from civ2 that the fastest way to catch up when behind in tech is to send in scores of kamikaze diplomats to steal the tech....

Your point that, because he limited the userbase initially, he was not out to make money or make something big -- I disagree. Simply, he was the one who had the vision that he could grow a huge userbase by building upon tiers and tiers of *coolness* leveraged by hierarchies of "in" -- 1) harvard-in 2) ivy-league schools-in 3) stanford / berkeley-in 4) the rest, etc

I starting using fb about 3-4 months after its creation (#8 college i think) and the reason why *everyone at school* hopped on (as opposed to friendster which was already around) was *because* of its exclusivity -- we felt exclusive being in a college only type social network, and to boot, the top-10 colleges.

Things started becoming uncool when people from un college networks started joining, but that's a hard problem to solve when your userbase graduates every 4-5 years and becomes "uncool" pretty much after graduating.

ok, what does "rooting your phoen and tethering it mean" in your context of a 3g usb modem?

Nice post. Cool for an engineer (like me) who is about to begin his career. However, "Be useful to somebody; be a burden to no one." also works for engineering (I feel like you may be implying some service oriented industry). I think that's what engineers (hardware/software) ultimately find fulfilling: the promise of doing something cool that ultimately benefits thousands if not millions and allows them to derive joy from.. a series of if-else statements or some logic gates tied up in cool ways :) Maybe I'm being an ideologist and once I get into the actual industry (whether it be hw or sw) I will end up like those mentioned in the OP -- disgruntled and ruined. Lol?

Every day, facebook becomes worse and worse. The apps are pointless, and the site is slower and cumbersome (compared to its spritely version in 2004 when it came out). It is fun to be tagged in photos with your friends, and to post on each others' "walls", but that's about it. During college it was great to use, since everyone is growing up and want to meet new people. However, after college theres not as much use for it and I find myself barely using it.. its basically functioning as a "bridge" between when you just meet someone, to when you get their IM and you chat on IM instead.

The only thing keeping facebook going is that its achieved critical mass. I can see Google one day knocking out Facebook easily, since everyone now has gmail and eventually Facebook will need to move from "stupid, 3rd party, spyware apps" to real apps such as Calendars, maps, and such -- and google already has these features.

Zuckerberg should have sold for $750 million or whatever was offered.

I am a casual gamer and tech-average slashdotter, but what the heck is GLSL ???

"No good virtual desktop"

Best windows virtual desktop I found:

Virtuawin is your answer:

http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/

Don't worry: minimal footprint, doesn't install weird things in C:\WINDOWS (runs from app dir AFAIK), doesn't interfere with drivers.

I think they just wanted an excuse to use the Quake game icon...