Their chat client is king in Asia. I have no idea how they make money on that though. I have gmail for personal/friends, but still use my yahoo mail for my business and spam accounts. The community games section seems popular too, again I have no idea how that makes money.

I still read slashdot in classic mode. Even got an email from them asking for commentary. I keep trying the 2.0, but it just isn't as good as the classic system.

OT: My login did that yesterday, now it is back to classic discussion again today.

I was really thinking of a 'Phone Home' system. I've been stuck with the task of licensing software before, and I had to be honest with management (showing them how many DRM systems have been broken before) that all licensing systems rely on security through obscurity in the end... since you have to give them the software/content to begin with. That was rather uncomfortable for me, but it was the honest truth. I didn't really have a comment regarding chip producers, so maybe I'm off-topic on that idea.

I presume mysidia was thinking of the concept of the 'One Time Pad' stored in a database:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad/URL

The Smoking Gun has been posting police photos since about 10 years ago already. That does not change any questions about privacy, but this is hardly 'news'.

It's a 'real-time' collaboration tool / toolkit. You could build forum software that leverages Wave functionality, however.

I'll second that - while I don't use a drobo - it's on the purchase list.

I'm highly technically competent - I use an opensolaris fileserver with ZFS and some terabyte drives - and sure, I can expand it and do all kinds of cool things - but in the end, I could get the same features I get there (the ones I actually use) out of a drobo, with less hassle.

With my fileserver I have to know a bunch of stuff about how to manipulate it to expand it... with a Drobo, you have to watch some blinkenlights and just pop in bigger drives when you need to grow. It locks dives when you shouldn't remove them, and is dead simple to use. From all my research, it's unparalleled in the ease of use department for joe average.

Seriously, they said it was invaluable? so if the SEC came down on your ass you couldn't get a number? Please.

I don't see what's wrong with an Apple employee, during an informal conversation with a police detective, saying that a prototype is "invaluable." The detective got him to agree that the phone was worth at least $8,500, which is the whole degree of precision necessary in that context.

In a different context, e.g. a lawsuit or, well, statements to the SEC, then yeah, you'd use some sort of model to produce a dollar-amount estimate of how valuable that phone is to the company. This is not that context.

You and the GP are both right, we should nether have private monopolies on telecom nor 50 companies trying to run wires through every easement. Monopolies are too frequently abused, and having multiple connections to each home is wasteful - duplication of effort + the inevitable human error/sabotage possibilities are both obvious wastes there.

What we should do instead is to have a single fiber run to each house and maintained as a public utility. The ISPs and cable companies could then lease time on the lines and sell their services to the various homes, competing on a cost/value basis rather than an "I have a wire there and you don't" basis. This is already being done in some communities, and is an elegant solution to the twin problems of needing market competition and efficient use of resources.

I last played DOOM online in 2010, DOOM was release in 1993. The online multiplayer was added later I think though.

I should go over to a British site with a majority British user base and complain all about them using metric units (sensible but un-American, damn it!) and using strange currencies like "Pounds" and see how far that gets me.

"WC?! So you hate America!?"

Again though - if they want to say "your app shall not consume more than ## battery units per ## time unit" then fine. if that outlaws most flash apps, that's fine too.

then
a) it should also outlaw things that aren't flash that have the same problem
b) if I DO make a flash/java/unity/whatever program that doesn't have this problem, then apple should be fine with it.

Well, I(nor does anyone right now, really) have no idea of the details of the trading platform being used (if, indeed, its even relevant). However, I've never seen (nor heard of, nor have the folks who I've talked to who have worked with institutional investing) a system where you type in the amount of stock you want and then put a letter after it.

Maybe we need a Top 10 Articles that IT Rags Rehash Endlessly...