50 wrongs don't make a right. Consumers have always expected the manufacturers of their products to give them honest advice about how to care for their products and not to use their position as the manufacturer to force you into situations that actually harm your own interests. The fact that most businesses abuse that expectation does not make it any less egregious that Google has followed in their footsteps.

One of the best examples is Transmission oil... The differences between Manufacturer and After market brands is simply patented detergents the manufacturer refuses to license to after market suppliers. The viscosity, temperature expansion characteristics and ware modifiers are all identical, yet they'll void your warranty if you use them. The OEM brands sell from $12 to $50 a quart compared to $5 for an aftermarket, and are clearly a way to further gouge the customer. It's disgusting that these sorts of scams are allowed to continue, but they are, so the best we can do is call attention to them. At least with Google there are alternatives.

They have a monopoly over the search bar that's dead center at the top of phone that I'm not allowed to remove under penalty of law. So yes, they are.

I make a point to make this comment every time I see a story about this. The number of people from all across the internet that jump on me and freak out is insane. Mars One is a cult.

You can crack WPA-2 in a trivial amount of time. I've got a friend in school for security right now... he pulled an app off a public website, got it running on my computer in minutes and before we were done with dinner he had my wifi password. I knew it could be done, but I had no idea there were public tools for doing it, and it would take so little time. The tool even played a little "TaDa!" sound like vintage windows when it had the password. And this wasn't an easy password either. 12 characters, alpha-numeric, special characters, etc...

Don't record the advice videos like you've suggested you would. There are a number of stories about people who've done this and it's turned out badly. If you're just saying things like "I love you and hope you're doing well!" that's great... But advice? Advice needs to bend and twist with circumstances. You've no idea what situation your daughter will be in 20yrs from now, and how the video could appear to her. What if one of the videos is "Congratulations on the degree!" and she flunks out? She'd be fine and likely do well in life anyway, but that video would be painful.

My mother came from the deep south, and her advice about African Americans when I was a child likely would have been to stay away from them. But now, as an adult, my wife and I adopted an African American child, who is the light of my mothers life. They are inseparable and she's now an emesary of inclusiveness to her southern relatives. Circumstances changed all of us, and any static, unalterable message from 30yrs ago had my mother been terminal would have done nothing but cause us pain now.

Pass on your love and support. Leave the advice for the living.

No it's not. If I can copy the thing you're selling with a few clicks of a keyboard, you don't really have a product. I fully support inventors getting rewarded for their work, but that's NOT what the patent system does.

You don't seem to get it. No one wants the NSA. The American people have been polled, and overwhelmingly despise the NSA and what it does. Local and state governments have publicly declared their actions criminal, and Congress has overwhelmingly decried their activities. But they're still here and there's literally nothing we can do about it. That should tell you something.

It's like we're all in a coffee shop, and a man armed with a 12 gauge just barged in to rob the place and demanded we all act normally. Even the cashier is nodding and offering him a latte... but in reality we're all glancing at each other wondering who's going to be brave enough to clock him over the head with their coffee mug first. There's one feeling that I think we've all felt in this country over the past 10yrs or so, and I think that feeling is best described as "Unease"

This explains why Google came out with cardboard. To make it clear, just how stupid this patent is.

I agree for the most part. I did, however, have a small grant based on the school I picked when I went. I had to say "yes" or "no" to, etc... I could see myself calling them and telling them to give it to someone else, etc... I think it's rather unlikely any particular person would find themselves in a situation like that. But there were 800 affected people... the chances go way up once you see that.

Too be honest, it's been decades since I went to school, so I'm probably not the best resource in knowing how admissions are handled now-a-days.

There is no legal obligation to encrypt.
There is no culpability if the data is lost.
It costs time and money to secure it.

Why would they bother?

They'd send a couple of capsules the size of a nickle into our atmosphere from outside the ort cloud. They'd either be laced with a virus to kill us all, antimater or some other yet-to-be-discovered nastiness and it'd be all over in seconds. We'd have no idea if they didn't want us to have one.

I suspect those that turned down other university offers for this one, only to find out they weren't accepted and no have no-where to go have basis for a lawsuit. And what about those that had scholarships at other schools and lost them? Mistakes like this, and such a critical point in your life, affect the whole of the rest of your life. It could change the entire trajectory of your career.

I maintain a wiki used by 3000 non-techie people as you put it. You don't give people enough credit. Word is not exactly "East" to use. lol

Well, actually, the universe is infinite in all directions according most. They're basing their math here on a given volume, "The observable universe" which, makes sense given how relativity works. You know, it's the whole cat paradox. If you cannot observe it, it does not exist, etc...

No, they are basing it on Plank Length: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
A unit of measure derived specifically from universal constants, the speed of light, the Planck constant, and the gravitational constant.

So it's not some arbitrary unit of measure as you suggest. It's the universes unit of measure. (assuming our current model of the universe holds) It's the smallest unit of measure that has any meaning in the real world.