I write music for $squigglything, you insensitive clod!

FTA:

There are no current plans to sell any advertising alongside Google's tracking service, although analysts believe knowing a person's location eventually will unleash new marketing opportunities.

C'mon, Google income is totally based on advertising. You know they're going to use the info somehow. Maybe they won't advertise alongside the tracking service, but their other services may offer more intelligent ad targeting based on your location.

The saddest part is that in both robberies, the clerk recognized the weapon as not just unusual, but specifically Klingon. Geeks fer sure. Hey guys, are you on Slashdot???

I've wondered if it is because they don't want to see real violence or skin shown on TV, but the violence can be more easily faked. If an American TV show actually showed real people truly killing each other, or shooting each other, or whatever, it would be shut down immediately. (Boxing and football are violent but don't count.) But scripted, special-effect violence is fine. You can't (or don't) fake the sex stuff, so it offends people.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine tried to pay for our meals at Burger King with $2 bills. The kid at the register wouldn't accept them until the manager came over, who was at least aware that $2 bills existed (though she had never seen one before). Caused a minor stir. But I think that was the point, no?

I have some $2 bills but I am not going to spend them... semi-historical. I also have some Japanese pesos printed during their occupation of the Philippines...

You should not have to install a piece of software to use a fucking music store. Do you have to install eTunes to use eBay? Do you have to install amaTunes to use Amazon?

There is not a single thing wrong with installing a piece of software to accomplish a given task. Just try using the World Wide Web without a browser, and see how your day goes.

Windows wasn't the first OS or even graphical OS to market. ...Doing it right is more important than doing it first.

In fact, "doing it right" may have nothing to do with the concept, and everything to do with how you sell and license the concept. Windows is an excellent example of this.

There are a number of words in your post that the average consumer will not recognize, nor care about: FLAC, AAC, OGG, RockBox, Amarok, Magnatune, etc.

Until the masses care, most capitalists will not.

I don't suppose you've ever considered a third party solution?

After reviewing a number of options (Mozy, Crashplan, etc.) I ended up with JungleDisk too. I don't care about my music library, but I do have a photo library similar to yours -- just about 41gb. JungleDisk does incremental backups (only files that have changed) and can be configured to save X number of old versions for you. If you add their JungleDisk Plus service ($1/month) you get block-level and resumable backups, and web access to the files. But the thing that really sold me on JungleDisk was the bandwidth throttling -- during the day I could set it to something small (say 200kbps) so everyone else in the house can still do what they want online, while at night it has no limits.

I use local backups too, but for ten years of valuable photographs, I want offsite storage too, and this is more convenient than cycling drives or tapes offline. I'm not thrilled that Rackspace bought them, but at least JungleDisk is just software, and uses Amazon/S3 instead of Rackspace's servers.

My cousin came up to me during a holiday party and told me her web browser had become blurry ever since she plugged in a new mouse -- and she wondered if the new mouse (which needed no drivers) had installed some kind of virus.

Meanwhile, one of those great tech support videos (sound absolutely required).

Yeah, I can believe this happens elsewhere on a more regular basis. The emergencies were from exactly what you said: snapped trees, downed powerlines, etc. My neighbor had one 40-foot elm split down the middle and land on his roof, and a similarly-sized maple tree uprooted from the weight of the ice -- as it fell, it took out the transformer on a nearby power pole, then landed on his truck. Ouch.