You're hilarious, really. Most big labels do it the other way around - musicians are allowed performance licensing rights for their own work, while the work itself is property of the label.

Because age discrimination is illegal in most western countries. And no one would use a HR company that would do it explicitly, because they'd look bad.

Source doesn't help you in GUI applications. Imagine compiling a GTK application from 10 years ago, w/linking to a modern release. Do you think it would compile without errors? I'd doubt that. Now image you're able to compile the required dependencies for your application, but you still need to have everyting else in your system tolerating 10-year old obsolete versions of libraries. Even stuff like libssl has gone trough some major changes.

Exactly like Linux How many linux providers do you know that give security updates for a 10 year period? I'm not talking "upgrade paths", I'm talking about actual patches. How well do you think 10-year old GUI software would run on a modern linux distro? And how about a 15 year old one? Try it.
Most distros won't even allow you to simply upgrade from a 10 year old version. (The most awesome unix SO in this regard I know of is FreeBSD, you can start with a 15-year old release and upgrade it to a modern version, and it would still work - but its not recommended). How many kernel developers you know that work actively with Linux kernel 2.2? And 2.4 pre-2.4.18? Well, 2.2 was quite popular when XP came out. Some of the most popular distros today didn't even have had a release with a 2.2 kernel. Now imagine having to maintain the full software stack in-house, and additionally, develop/troubleshoot drivers for specific hardware. In contrast, Windows "just works" and the communication is encrypted anyway and usually using dedicated links. Everything else security-wise is moot, because assumes access to the machine. If someone has access to the machine, you're already compromised. You'd be surprised by the amount of kiosks, ticketing systems and ATMs are still running Windows 2000...

Not where I live. You have a free market - at least an illusion of one.

Both Amazon & Ebay are not the top companies on their respective fields (TaoBao is bigger than both combined). Amazon's alternative is to skip the marketplace and buy on your local retailer (if available). If not, buy on a clone (Jumia, Lazada, Linio, etc). E-Bay alternatives start offline (newspapers).

I could say the same about programming. or life itself.

No, its about perception of cost. People see value in having an email. Providers like google see value in crawling user's emails (eg. to know the reach of certain promotions, key products, ordering info, etc - the kind of suff that makes sense once you're collecting data with Google Analytics, and convincing companies to spend money on AdWords).

So you're saying that Facebook loses when sells the daily answer to "what are guys between 20-25yr old that are male caucasian and like hot girls are buying"?

I'd generally agree with this, but I was the guy saying that 5 years ago. Everything has a peak, but it seems to be too soon to tell.

I really doubt that. Newsgroups are as old as the internet itself. And talkd and IRC are also quite old. Waaaay before Yahoo.

True.

This is EXACTLY what you want from a social network. Or you'd have skype, google talk and the remaining crap to talk with people. A niche network - the shit G+ was catering to when it was launched (by arrogant nerds for nerds) - will not fly. Internet IS NOT for the elite. And Facebook understands that.

Yeah. Except geocities, gopher, thematic webrings, personal home pages, personal gnome pages (wink wink gifs) and whatnot. And all of that required a browser, some html knowledge, a domain name (optional), some blink tags and the actual content. So you could congratulate your colleague in his newborn son (6 months old by the time you find out) as he's leaving the company (that's how you found out, he has a own domain email!). That appeals to the working class, why not? "Here, have some tech - in 6 months, you'll be able to barely update your friends on your cat pictures AND your cooking recipes by installing this 25 pieces of software"

I'd assume that you, AC, are followed with utter relevance.

Where the f*** did you read that in my comment?

So does your provider, and everybody else. What do I care that my music listening preferences are blasted into the world and data mined? Do you know what trends are? They are data-mined :). And as "social experience", I choose to have a life offline. Like most users do.

I'd argue that scientific american is neither a modern and an acccurate reference when talking about social networks. But I get a bit bitchy about details.

Brains process patterns. Proximity (specially multi-sensorial) is a pattern, much more fullfilling than online experiences.

Waaaay ahead of you :D Happy St Patrick's day from Portugal ;)