Finland's official Pravda^W^Wleading newspaper had an article on this particularly American issue. The main thesis is that you guys have a lot of freedom to offend and beat up each other, because any government intervention would go against the natural freedom of free men to do unto each other as they like. Of course, the follow-up is reduced freedom for individuals in lots of ways. You guys have more freedom than us in certain ways, but as a result you have less freedom in some other ways. It's hard to say which way is right, but it sure sounds a lot like BSD vs. GNU.

Personally, I'm in for more freedom in some areas. Finland officially switched from the Eastern Bloc into the EU 20 years ago, but I'm yet to see the full effects.

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Finland is #1 at being average. We have full literacy at the expense of holding down anyone smarter than the average. The universities are bureaucratical sausage factories designed to produce set amounts of average masters and doctors. We simply don't have/tolerate the kind of variety and diversity that you see around the world.

If they can't afford someone to reply to the correct article, they can still afford a $5 wench.

Wow! That's the combination to the staple holding the energy source to my battery-powered equine robot -- the right one, not the wrong one.

Incidentally, the only reason I have a FB account is to coordinate art/music projects. However, FB chat is just too unreliable to use for anything too intense. I guess I could go back to the likes of ICQ, which I used to use with the less techy friends back in the day.

This wouldn't be an issue for the typical /.er, but it's hard to "sell" IRC with all its quirks when they see something like FB chat working without any extra config. Even basic IRC usage needs some setting up with the servers, and running the client on a separate shell account (aka 1960 tech, why would anybody use text terminals in the age of bling) would be rather hardcore.

Of course, the main problem is really about trust: you can receive messages offline only if you choose a third party like FB to store them. My non-techie friends basically need something more reliable than FB, so I guess I could go back to the likes of ICQ, or whatever is the closest equivalent today.

I haven't checked the latencies -- there's probably nothing wrong with SMTP itself, but the practical implementations are wildly different, due to different application realms. Email is more like a replacement for snailmail letters, and the infrastructure with multiple server routes and technologies (such as IMAP at the receiving end) is not optimized for simplicity and speed. Conversely, IM is closer to face-to-face talk, and the speed/simplicity is usually realized by minimizing different layers of software, at the expense of flexibility and independence (e.g. Facebook chat).

I guess you could make an email client with an IM-like interface and do some tweaks to minimize latencies, but there are good reasons why these are separate technologies.

I've never thought of Facebook messenger as anything more than a random web chat, a bolt-on feature of the whole antisocial media site. However, email isn't really a fair comparison, as it doesn't allow actual realtime chat. That's what IRC is for, and you get to keep your logs as you please on your own machine. I guess the same applies to any of the newer IM protocols, as long as it's an independent application you control.

BTW, what would you guys suggest to wean non-technical friends off FB chat, given that IRC might be a little too much hassle with all the servers and keeping their computer on all the time?

A collective entity is sometimes treated like a plural in sentences, as explained in The Economist style guide. I agree that Reuters should be singular, for several reasons, but it's understandable that people sometimes overshoot with the pluralization.

I guess "Reuters" looks explicitly plural, but it was founded by a chap called Reuter, and once called Reuter's Telegram Company, so the current name is probably just a typographical contraction. IMHO, it's obvious that a business entity should be singular, even if it represents a collective effort, that's pretty much the idea behind corporations.

(12) mine coins

(Seriously, what kind of a /.er uses unbalanced parentheses for lists? Please hand in your geek card at once.)