Yes we need (better) laws for protecting our privacy and data.
Yes we need much greater awareness than there is currently.
But some politician will create a law above all privacy laws which allows the breach of our data/privacy because of national security. I wish Internet companies that live on data, posts, tweets would make people more aware of their privacy but then that would go against their whole business model.

I mean there are a limited number of people who really understand and care about privacy. The masses are happy tweeting and posting along, many of them are teenagers who couldn't care less.

So?

But what if your centmail account gets hacked and the hacker uses it to send millions of spam messages. If you credit card is on their file you will be down a $10,000. Of course you can feel good about donating that much to charity!

But then the state of the world isn't like this right? For example, a non-US Citizen cannot purchase US citizenship for even double the amount in taxes that you have paid over your life. But when one comes to realize that after all one is born on this earth as an equal, the boundaries of countries feel like a splinter in the eye.
Can we allow anarchy by erasing these boundaries? No, that is not the solution. I don't know what the solution to this is...yet.

I would take what you say a step further and ask the question "Who is someone to decide where on EARTH someone else chooses to work"? What has a citizen of a certain country done to lay his/her claim on a that country or to exclude someone elses' claim on a "piece of EARTH"? Do you really think that in the "Real Truth of Things" the earth belongs to one person more than the other? I question the whole premise of "Countries" being exclusive to citizens of that country. I reject the boundaries called countries made by men. I was born on the earth and the whole earth is mine to tread.

BS. Google for the same exact search gives much more relevant results.

1. Why Windows Vista and Office 2007 are so Expensive  The Firefox ...
2. Is Windows getting more expensive? - CNET News
3. Windows 7 to be âoemore expensiveâ than Vista, XP
4. Writing on the Wall: Why Windows is so expensive
.
.

The above results would be useful to anyone genuinely interested in the expensive-ness of Windows.

This is how everything works in 99.9 % of the world.

I agree, this whole thing is ridiculous. Too much information is as bad as too little. A lot of people are going gung-ho over the whole app-revolution thing, which I think, along with things like facebook/twitter is just a passing fad. Either teenagers or people who have nothing worthwhile to do will spend their time gawking at all these.

Well, how is a collaboration of MS and Yahoo and replacement of Yahoo as its default engine more competition? Isn't it *less* competition? Previously we had Yahoo as well as MSN (or Bing if you'd rather call it that) competing with Google (albeit they offered negligible competition), but now you might end up with *just* ... well...Bing!

I tried, "Barack Obama" and my own name. None showed any results. Yes I understand its because there are probably no RDF/RDFa formatted pages with these names yet. But as of now I'm not sure what to do with Sig.Ma

Isn't this simply "another level of indirection"...? :)

I think to answer your question, its not brilliance but the ability to step away from the norm and take a fresh look at established things that brings about such innovation. (IMHO)

It is your choice. Be larger than life or become mediocre. Greatness is NOT easy. That is why we don't have many great people. It isn't even within everyone's reach in their lifetimes. It is perfectly fine to not be great. At least you yearned for it. But if you want to be considered larger than life, life will ask of you a sacrifice.

It is your choice...It takes a certain kind of person to, for example, write open source for either the simple pleasure of writing it or for the simple pleasure of making things better. Not all of us are that person, and that's okay.

I prefer Google Docs to OpenOffice too. I find OpenOffice quirky and unreliable. It often crashes for me. In fact I think even Word (2003) is more usable than OpenOffice. Word 2007 on the other hand (and the whole of Office 2007) is a bloody mess where its even hard to figure the Menu Options - maybe I just need to sit down for a few mins and figure it out once and for all...but why??? I already did that a few years before and it was working quite well for me. I don't see the benefit of this UI Change. As for Google Docs - it has limited functionality - but its easy to use and it promises on what it delivers. So for simple documents I end up using it. One thing I would say is that MS Excel is a wonderful tool.