Yes, the out-of-context issue is a very real danger, what with comments people make in one conversation taken out and presented in the context of something else, making it seem as if that person meant one thing when they really meant another.

I know this one well; it has been pulled on me many times.

Another "downside" to pervasive surveillance: a disturbing degree of fatalism.

The word "minority" has a pretty well established definition, and that isn't it. I think you mean "protected group", which is something altogether different.

Since you brought up Net Neutrality: can you give me one example of a small, innovative startup in the ISP business in the last 10 years?

No? Why not?

I'll tell you why not: it is not a competitive market. It's a de facto oligopoly, with barriers to entry that are far to high for the little guy to vault.

That's where government's legitimate role begins: by regulating or breaking up oligopolies and monopolies, so that there can be competition in the marketplace.

Don't expect market forces to fix a problem when there isn't a real competitive market in the first place. That's not very realistic.

And I'll answer my own question: the only "new" broadband ISP to make a name for itself in many years now is Google, and they can hardly be called a "little guy". They are one of the few groups that has the money and muscle to elbow its way in to a business that is very hostile to outsiders.

No, I mean like the Treo, exactly as I wrote before. The screen was 320x320, it had a chiclet keyboard, and did not come with Graffiti.

Yes. I didn't say it was high-resolution did I? But it has only been a relative few years that smartphones have had screens bigger than about 3.5". THAT'S MY POINT. Where's the argument?

No, we didn't. Not until a few years ago. Nothing you are saying (except that) has contradicted my point in any way. Size of the screen does matter, even if the resolution was not stellar.

I'll repeat my point since you don't seem to have gotten it: they shrunk the screen (compared to most Tungstens), added the Blackberry-style keyboard, and ditched the handwriting input. In other words, they were competing with THE OTHER CELL PHONE MAKERS of the day, rather than marketing the things that made Palm unique. They could have simply added a phone and left everything else alone.

I didn't try to claim the resolutions were the same as today. That would be ridiculous.

Google has been ever-more pissing me off with its "sponsored" results in which I am almost never interested... I have to go further down the page to get the things I want.

Related to this: Google's recent proposal to post "truthy" results before others. Just no. I don't want or need a nanny-search. I'll judge the results for myself.

As far as I am concerned, results "filtered" or sorted according to Google's idea of "truth" is little more than a rather transparent effort toward censorship.

If there were millions of users, how much would it COST to keep it operational? Figure that out, then add some reasonable profit percentage. Win-win.

Do you think you could run an operation like that for around $3.5M a year, given 1M users? Great. Charge $5 per year per user. I'd pay it.

In the U.S., women are 50.8% of the population. I'd hardly call that a minority.

Nonsense. Palm had the Tungsten. It was a perfectly good color handheld, with color touchscreen as big as a modern smartphone. I used to play Bejeweled on my Tungsten and IMO it was just about as good as Bejeweled 3 is on the desktop now.

Then came the Treo... their smartphone. They reduced the size of the screen to 1/2 or even less of what it had been before, added chicklet-style keyboard ala Blackberry, and dropped the Graffiti written input.

In other words, they were trying to copy Blackberry. They dropped the things that made them truly unique: a full-size color touchscreen, and Graffiti.

Now, finally, we have smartphones that match or best the Tungsten's color screen in size and resolution. We could have had that many years ago, if Palm had simply added a phone to their existing device, and left the rest alone.

Wow! We're back to what Palm did quite well 15 years ago! How wonderful!

Fact is, Palm had it made. The OS had shortcomings but they had a mini-computer in a handheld device, with adequate handwriting recognition.

They threw it all away to compete in the "mainstream" cell phone business, and producing "mainstream" cell phones, giving up all that made them unique at the time. What a waste.

Hint to future Palms: don't give up what you're good at, in order to compete in a market that is already doing all that other stuff, better.

Yeah, I'm in the Secret Service, and I'll just let good ol' Pres handle his own affairs while I'm on the shitter.

I wouldn't even call it "nationalistic". This is America, in which the citizen is sovereign.

I don't know about anyone else, but Barack Obama is about the farthest thing from MY "leader". In my honest opinion he has been a tremendous lesson in how NOT to be a good example of leadership.

You do make a good point. I didn't remember the email address, thought it was info@whitehouse.gov.

info@barackobama.com should not be expected to reach anyone of consequence, even if it went straight to the President's desk.

"One possible replacement that might fit the bill is a rival approach of data analysis called Bayesianism."

I did not mean to suggest it was the only alternative offered. But it was one, and I didn't see enough discussion of its shortcomings for my taste.

(1) Because a bomb landing on the White House lawn that was realistically large enough to physically harm the President (or the building), would be enormous.

Think inverse-square law. That's not exactly it, but it gives you an idea.