Linux is about choices, you have root and are free to customize as you see fit or go to another distro. (there are plenty that support vanilla GNOME and KDE Desktops) The move Ubuntu is making here is smart. Its about ease of use and design.

The "extortion" claims are way overblown. Yelp generally has very accurate reviews.

Trust me, Yelp is going nowhere. Zagat is a nice legacy brand, and there was a time when their ratings were good and relevant, but that time has passed. The biggest strength of Yelp is the community. People who review on Yelp are not going to switch to Google unless there is some compelling reason. As we've seen with the failure of Google Plus, its very hard to build community from nothing.

I found this post by following slashdot's Twitter feed. Twitter is completely misunderstood technology. I like to think of it as RSS + SMS. People have been dismissing Twitter for years, but yet it keeps on growing.

The automatic upgrade feature works really well. I painlessly upgraded from 2.x to 3.x through the admin interface. The only caveat is that the integrated update requires ftp/ftps. Bravo to the wordpress team for continually improving a great product.

The biggest problem with Tivo's current model is the fact that Tivo is entirely dependent on cable companies and satellite providers. I have a Tivo HD, its an awesome device, but I'm the only person I know who has one. When the cable company offers a crappy integrated "dvr," not many people are going to motivated to pay more, and go through more hassle (cable cards), just to have a Tivo. Tivo needs to cut out the middleman, and offer an iptv device. No cable cards, no contracts with satellite providers, just plug it in to your network.

The test that Landis "failed" was suspect at best, and administered by a lab that has been proven to be run in incompetent manner.

If I had mod points, I would mod this up. As much as I dislike Apple, you can't ignore the significance of them entering a new market.

Everything Google is doing now was done by a competitor before Google started doing it. Altavista, mapquest, hotmail, etc.

Its funny that Schmidt mentions that "Video didn't kill the radio star." Videos were a good promotion outlet for music, but the Internet effectively killed music videos on television.

Google news is an aggregation of news from various media outlet's websites. Its not going to kill newspapers, but Google news and Internet news in general is conditioning people to expect to get news for free.

In the past, newspapers were subsidized by advertising and subscribers. Unfortunately, Internet advertising is not nearly has effective as print. Sure, ads can be targeted to specific audiences, but they can be blocked, and many savvy Internet users are conditioned to ignore advertisements. Newspaper advertisements are unavoidable, and the randomly placed.

So if people expect to get news for free and the advertising is ineffective, tell me how the Internet and e-readers lead to a promising future for newspapers?

Its not about Malware, its about security risks in general. If a user installs an FTP server, thats a huge security risk. A signature on the package does nothing to negate the risk.

I really don't understand the basis for this move. From a desktop usability perspective, having the gui password prompt for an elevated privilege such as a package install works fine. Its seemless in Linux and OSX. Not prompting for authentication for signed package installs is insanely insecure and borderline insane.