The problem I see is that people use their personal devices for work or work devices for personal. It should be the individual's responsibility to separate their work life from their personal life. A company can't force you to use your personal property for work--so don't do it. If you are trying to be a cheapskate and use your work phone or notebook for your personal business, you are a) setting yourself up to be inundated with company communication during work hours and b) allowing your company to snoop on you because after all it is their phone. Go and buy a separate phone or notebook for your personal life that doesn't have your work communication associated with it. Then leave your work devices off. Problem solved. I think it is ludicrous that a company has to shut it's email servers down at night and weekends. There are different parts of a large organization that doesn't fit into the 9 to 5 mold. If I were the CIO at Volkswagen I would create an employee policy that requires employees to separate their work and personal digital lives. And it is the employee's responsibility to keep their personal and work life separate. Additionally, emails with company domains not be used for ANY personal communication of any kind. This protects the employee's privacy, it protects the company's reputation in regards to public blog posts and illicit websites, and it lowers the amount of spam/marketing emails the company email servers need to deal with. I worked for a large company with over 2000 employees and a clueless CIO. I managed the web development team and tried to convince them to have a stiffer work vs personal policy (also to use Linux and open source software, but that's another story). But corporate structures being the way they are, I could never get much traction.

"Dead fuel is free energy; its that simple." It's not FREE. Not even remotely. So are you telling me the environmental destruction from the Alberta Tar Sands is FREE? http://s.ngm.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/img/candian-oil-sands-615.jpg. Are you saying that the cancer causing elements that are spewed into the air from fossil fuels are FREE? http://www.epa.gov/air/basic.html. Your misnomer is one of the reasons we are in this situation. And there are a thousand other articles and studies that say that fossil fuels are harmful to you and me. If you want me to site them I will.

It's great that you made your argument on your opinion. But let me give you some information about alternative energy that is from reputable sources. From MSNBC (and others...FYI from a study funded by Google): "Clean, accessible, reliable and renewable energy equivalent to 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants in the U.S....What's more, the energy can be tapped with existing technology, according to the researchers. That's largely due the recent development of drilling techniques that make methods such as enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) possible." TEN TIMES what we get from coal on an annual basis without the mining destruction nor the carcinogens in the air. THAT IS FUCKING FREE ENERGY. http://futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/27/8509629-energy-from-hot-rocks-abounds?chromedomain=cosmiclog. Or CNET if you prefer: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20125837-54/geothermal-potential-reaches-coast-to-coast/

Or maybe you'd like to hear the opine of a nobel prize laureate in economics about the economic reality of solar power? Is there a Moore's Law to solar power? Actually there probably is, but if the fossil fuel industry has it's way it will probably be stymied....oh wait it already has. " In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year."--AND--"Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/krugman-here-comes-solar-energy.html?_r=1&hp.

So the question remains smarty are you with us or against us? Please give any sources that are not your opinion and actually sited to a reference to the contrary.

Thanks.

Look the point of the post and article is that if we don't get out shit together and soon there are going to be some tipping points that are not going to be reversed (i.e. no arctic ice to support polar bears, thus the end to them). But if get away from the fossil fuel industry by investing in solar, wind and my particular favorite geothermal we might be able to stem the tide and spread those technological innovations to 3rd world countries as a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels. Are you telling me that if we didn't have the best and brightest science people on green energy technologies that we wouldn't be able to get the cost of that energy down to below how much it costs for extractive fossil fuel energy? Please anyone have an argument that's counter?

If Dick didn't write it, it ain't Dick. This is a travesty. Although most of the adaptations smell of travesty (Hollyfuckingwood being what it is), this truly is.

I'm sure that MySpace thought that the upstart Facebook had no users in comparison. Now look where we are? I don't think that Facebook should take Google+ and Google lightly. I feel that Facebook's usability and function is more geared to college network (and hence where they cam from) opposed to one that is more adult. By default I don't want to have my posts go to everyone. I also don't consider everyone to be a 'friend'. Studies have been shown that the max amount of personal relationships a human can handle is about 150. So that means that if you have more than 150 give or take people in you network some of those people a bound to not be a 'friend'.

I see you are whacking it. Would you like me to download more bit torrent porn?

Yep, the Google official market is TOTALLY safe: Google recently removed at least 10 applications from the Android Market, all of which contained malicious code disguised as add-ons to one of the most popular apps of all time.

This guy isn't entirely out of luck there are surely 20-30% of people that won't use the offer. So he will get basically free money which will help cover the costs.

"Consumer Reports is also releasing its latest survey, which finds that 27 percent of gift card recipients have not used one or more of these cards, up from 19 percent at the same time last year. And among consumers with unredeemed cards from last season, 51 percent have 2 or more."

And opposed to a gift cards (well at least in California), coupons expire. Depending on the expiration date of the offer, it might not be that bad for him. I'm sure that a lot of people have the intention of using this coupon but because of scheduling they can't do it and the further it gets away from the date the less they will remember.

Here's the problem with Groupon and coupon people in general, you don't want them as clients. One generally they are a pain in the ass to deal with. These are the type of people that want something for nothing and push the bounds of the offer. They also tend to be very nit-picky. The best clients I've ever had paid top dollar, and let me do their job. In return I have often gone above and beyond and offer them services or products for no charge because you want to keep these people as clients. Consequently I generally keep clients for a long time and get great referrals. There is no loyalty among coupon people. As soon as you have fulfilled your end of the deal they are off to the next deal. Many coupon people are obsessively looking for the best deal, and will never use your products or services again. Here is another problem with coupons, since you are operating at a loss it's very difficult to give someone the type of customer service they need to become a long term client. Coupons also work better for commodity items. It's a lot easier to sell a $10 sandwich and receive $2.50 for it when the overhead of the business and employees are already accounted for. The only thing you have to pay for additionally is the extra inputs of bread, meat, cheese and lettuce. Something that is more labor intensive (particularly if it's your own labor) is going to cost you a lot more in comparison.

The tech media and politicians had their panties in a wad over the iOS/Android "tracking". Guess what? Sony's lack of security actually did allow the personal information for 77 million users to be exposed. You know, opposed to theoretically being able to access your approximate location. I wonder if there are going to be Congressional hearings about this? Oh wait, the dried up turds in Washington don't use the Playstation network. So what do they care? The hypocrisy of what people find important and creates media buzz opposed to what really is important makes me wonder sometimes.

Ha, ha, ha......this just makes me laugh.

to become a patent troll. He could of set up shop in East Texas.

I think you mean't "outwardly homosexual" as in not in the closet. It seems like it's always the conservatives politicians and activists that get into gay sex scandals: Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Bob Allen, Glenn Murphy Jr., Robert Bauman, the list goes on and on. Why is that?

I assume that you have never owned an iPhone. Turning off location services is pretty simple actually: 1. Navigate to the iPhone's home screen. 2. Locate and open the "Settings" app, the icon that looks like a gray set of gears. 3. Select the "Location Services" menu item, which is usually the fifth item from the top. 4. Turn off all iPhone location services by changing the "On/Off" switch next to "Location Services" to "Off." You can also fine grain which apps are allowed access to that info and which ones aren't. If someone hasn't owned an iPhone you wouldn't know the process of what permission is asked and when. By default location services is turned off and you are prompted to sign off that you understand what you are doing when you turn them on. If you choose to ignore what that means or bypass it, that's your fault. I'm not an Apple apologist, but don't state something as fact when it isn't.

Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam...
Waitress: ...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam...
Vikings: Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Waitress: ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY spam!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got spam in it!

Here is how things are radically different back in the day. What you are suggesting is a false analogy and I'll explain why.

One hardware. Touch screen pads and phones can not be repaired and/or built from scratch by you average advanced computer user. In my day, I built up many desktops and servers from parts. If the video card went bad, I just replaced it. Most can't do that with an Android pad/phone (I have replaced the screen on an iPhone and horribly botched it. The second time I got it right, but felt I should have just sent it in for repair. Those screws are just so incredibly tiny). Plus mobile carriers carry phones from major manufacturers. It's not like when you could go to a computer fair and buy a case, mb, processor, RAM, hard drive, peripherals and have yourself a computer.....home brew phones don't exist (well not for most people). So these devices are more hardware dependent--that has always been Apple's advantage. Mating specific hardware and software avoiding fragmentation. Consequently 1000x easier to support (hey remember when you installed your favorite flavor of Linux with a "Wangtech"--or whatever vid card was the cheapest from Fry's? Those were the days. I'd like to have that time back please). I think that people are going to avoid cheap build quality on these lower end products where the difference between a cheaply built Android pad from China that has support issues and only going to last a year before it craps out with one that is made from decent hardware is only going to be $100 or $200 to mostly avoid the headache. I know I have. I used to work on my own cars in high school and college, but once I could afford a mechanic (or a car like a BMW that has a maintenance free warranty for 3 years) I stopped working on my own stuff. Also it has to be pointed out that since Apple is one of the biggest single manufacturers of phones and pad devices that they get much better pricing than say Motorola from their vendors. If Apple wants to compete on price at anytime they can go lower than most manufacturers can break even on (assuming they are making decent hardware ie Motorola, Samsung, etc.) and still make money. Apple is in what is known as the cat-bird seat. And a lot of these relationships go back to the millions of iPods they sold. These suppliers are very different than those that supply parts for computer companies like Dell and HP. Apple has a huge advantage here (unlike back when they were making computers in the 80s).

Secondly Apple took a page right out of Microsoft's playbook and have supported and made things profitable for developers. Developers make money easier in Apple's walled garden than Android marketplace. Since Google has based their whole mobile premise on the open source movement people are expecting everything to be free. Well the origins of the open source movement was that of a community of people that came together to make software that was better than what you could get commercially because it was made for people that were advanced users. These are people that didn't mind getting down and dirty with config files as opposed to using a wizard. It was also expected that since it was open source that you were going to contribute to the software and this 'sweat equity' paid for other people's work. Plus your work on large open source projects could land you a great job and it paid off this way in spades for many open source developers. With phone and pad apps this open source community spirit is not there. Why would you spend hours and hours working on something that other regular people expect to download for free and 99% of these downloaders aren't going to contribute back. Where is the profit motive of open source software in Android that isn't supported by advertising (which is a whole other issue)? From my point of view, Google is expecting developers to keep up the spirit of the dawn of open source and work for free.

Thirdly, the way that Google is handling their apps is setting themselves up for a malware issue way above and beyond the issues that Microsoft has with Windows. There have been several trojans in the wild that have been installed on Android devices. Some even on their official Marketplace. Yet, Google is not doing much about preventing this from happening and only disabling apps after the fact. There are safeguards in the forms of checksums and signatures in place for downloading open source software say like MySQL. Most Android users are not going to pay attention to the safeguards and download what appear to be legitimate apps but have malicious code that is stealing their identity. Look when mom and pop in Topeaka Kansas gets their bank account cleared out by some Russian Mafia organization because their data was exposed from using an Android device....well it's not going to be very positive PR for Android or Google. This is of particular issue because Google is providing mobile payment gateways in which a person's financial information is now on the phone.....if a trojan is installed, they will be able to get that information too.