Re: The commentary portion, I agree, there was no benefit to either Wikileaks, or society. Most of the release was just gossip, and you can bet the diplomats of all the nations involved have similar commentary for the others they deal with. I'd love to see a comparison of China's private communications regarding North Korea. The difference being, I'd not put much stock in the life of the 'leaker' in that scenario. When the final blame is laid/verified on the current 'Leaker', at best, he'll have a chance to reflect on the wisdom of his actions while Julian gets rich and famous (warranted or not)

Makes a case for water-boarding him to find the leak. The personalities stuff is old hat if your brain isn't dead, but releasing national defense related information serves no purpose other than enable terrorist. Perhaps that's the real goal of wikileaks. The really sad part of all this, is it's damaging to the name 'WIKI' which has some superb concepts, such as Wikipedia. The common layman will not separate them.

Why can't humans grasp the concept that 'Maybe everything has always existed in some form'? We seem to like 'beginnings and ends, for some reason. Even though we are born and die, the basic building blocks for us were/are there before and after, just in different form.

How about my wasted money on Vista? My laptop (with Vista) would be useless, but for the fact I switched it to Ubuntu. It didn't even work well as an alternate boot option, so now I have a 'pure' Linux machine with regular upgrades for the asking. All W7 did was move the buttons in my opinion, but I'm not a geek.

Sure, if you are 10-40 years old, you can see/use the dinky buttons, screens, and learn the changing "apps" of small hand held devices. But as you age, you will appreciate the larger format devices, towers, laptops, 'real' key boards, and screens. Additionally, you will become more paranoid about all your lunch being stored/processed out on the 'cloud'. I'm betting on 'PCs' being around for a bit longer, albeit in a different box. Daffey

Simple, I stopped buying Sony a long time ago. ( with the copy right issue ( Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)) The best way to resist is with your wallet!

Technically savy people are missing the point. The average user doesn't understand 'how to install,understand messages, etc of all the security issues out there. (myself included) The average Joe is fearful of his security, but cannot negotiate the maze of security issues. They go to retailers for answers, and get soaked for software solutions, much of which isn't any better than the free solutions, etc. They are not"stupid/lazy/ or penny pincers". Some (probably most) are smarter than the geeks on the web, but just in other areas. Or were born before transistors existed, and Bakelite was the major synthetic insulator in electronics.

A physicist I'm not, nor mathematician, but 'TIME is CHANGE' in my book. No change- no time. What else can you measure it against?

There's a difference: We (the public) pay MS and Apple to give us Windows/leopard. (we're buying them lunch) Their (Intel, Oracle, IBM, Novell, and Redhat)support of Linux/open source, is buying us lunch. I like the second option better!