http://xkcd.com/927/

I actually agree, sort of. It's not that I have anything against indie developers getting their stuff out there, but the problem is that I find myself less willing to splash out on it. With the Introversion bundle and HIB4 in the same month, I spent less than $25 on both, but with the original bundle, I spent $25 for that on its own.

By far my biggest gripe though is the "developer specific" humble bundles. Again, I don't have a problem with indie devs marketing their stuff, but the Humble Bundle was designed to be something special that gave obscure independent developers some coverage, and also do something nice for charity. With the advent of the Introversion and Frozenbyte bundles though, the whole thing just seems to become marketing noise (and I'm not even sure that Introversion needed the coverage, Darwinia was a fairly highly rated game back in the day).

I've got just the thing for what ails ya: Chrome OS

Why does it always have to be about the money? Let's do it because we can. I mean, lets face it, that's the only reason we've ever been to the moon. It cost a fortune, and many lives, but at the end of the day, we put a man on the fucking moon. Can we bring back the woolly mammoth? I'm sceptical, but let's go for it, because it's science, and the lessons learned along the way could have all kinds of medical benefits, and let's face it, it'd be awesome to see one.

Why is it that the east just seems to be so far ahead of the west with this sort of stuff? I mean, we just seem so reluctant to adopt cool new tech. This stuff is the future, but (in the UK at least) we just seem to be getting left behind!

The dastard! He plans to bring illiteracy to Gotham!

Technically you're still downloading. ;-)

So let me get this straight... The BBC is deceiving the content providers, to protect the rights of it's consumers?

Do hamburgers eat people in the UK too?

Does all this not just amount to counter-intelligence against your own people? I mean, if the people you serve want to know, let them know! I'm not naive enough to think that everything should be available, but a lot of the stuff that has leaked has been really quite important, and evidence enough that if you think you can hide it, people will commit the most attrocious acts in the name of "serving the greater good". We're living in a time that is a horrible cross between 1984 and V for Vendetta, yet the western world seems perfectly happy to bend over and take it!

I'd say that in a hundred years, people are going to look back on this decade as the dark ages of the information age, but we already know that now. Wikileaks was only the start.

It's not true for frogs, but it certainly is for humans. No other species falls for the same trick so many times!

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

This was one of the biggest problems in my opinion. Facebook, when it was in it's "beta stage" was exclusive only to university students, which was fine because many of a university student's friends are also university students. Google in their infinite wisdom decided that only certain people were allowed to use Google+ in the beginning, and there wasn't a specific demographic allowed to use it. So I could join, but none of my friends could until they got invited, by which point their fleeting interest had turned to distain, and they saw no reason to not leave Facebook, which had already accepted them. Google+ was basically an elitist product that only the fortunate few could access.

Google tried to treat it's social network like it's email service, which would be fine, but even when Gmail was invite-only, I could still send email to people that didn't have access.

There's no technical or mysterious reason why Google+ is falling over, Google screwed up their release strategy catastrophically. Even Microsoft weren't dumb enough to create an invite-only social network.

Incidentally, you could swap "Google+" for "Diaspora" and get the same story.

Never underestimate the number of people with excess cash that see the iPhone as more of a status symbol than a gadget.