'This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,' Jobs said. 'Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.'"

I have five different grocery stores near my house -- I don't have any problem buying groceries. They all sell slightly different "stuff", which gives me more choice than if I have just one store. CHOICE IS GOOD.

The Android marketplace is competitive capitalism; Apple is one-size-fits-all, buy-what-we-say communism.

I'll take the chaos, thank you.

I'd love to believe it, but I don't. Yes, there may be vast numbers of solar systems containing rocky planets in approximately the right orbits. But "habitable?" That's a big stretch. I suspect what we'll find is more like Niven's "Known Space" series, where the "habitable" planets out there are weird, marginal, and possibly inhabited by hostile things.

Isn't this "study" a waste of energy?

I am a C/C++ programmer by trade; I'm not fond of PHP. Yet this "C++ saves energy over PHP" argument smells like more selfish politics to me. And selfish politics is what is bringing doom down on humanity's head -- the use of PHP vs. C++ is a sideline, a distraction, and only truly valuable for people who have a philosophical axe to grind.

You want to save a lot of energy? Shut down all the computers running MMOs. And stop wasting cycles looking for alien signals in cosmic radio waves. And get rid of banal YouTube videos... and... the list is endless. The science behind Global Warming is being used to further political and social agendas that have little or nothing to do with adapting our species from a potential environment change.

In the end, selfish politics will kill us all. We will become a footnote in history is we do not discover enlightened self-interest.

I have. For some time in the early 90s, I lived in the middle of Nevada, 50 miles form the nearest working gas station, no plumbing (other than a hole in the ground.) I also spent more than twenty years living in some of the more remote communities of Colorado, where you could by completely cut off from civilization for a week at a time by snow.

The reason those places are still wilderness is that it isn't possible to do much in those places. You can't grow enough crops for survival, for starters, and water can be a concern. Not being able to get FedX packages can be just as limiting as stoplight cameras at times...

The problem isn't being around other people -- it's people failing to live by the golden rule.

You seem to have a lot of stored up anger. Care to talk about it?

You're damned right -- I'm pissed off. A lot of people should be pissed off. Fundamental freedoms erode as people focus on symptoms, not causes. It's easier to slap a law on a symptom than it is to directly address the real problem.

Addressing causes isn't easy -- I've been fighting battles for quite some time now, doing the best I can with what I have. This is not the world I wanted to grow up in, and it sure as hell isn't what I want to leave my kids as a legacy.

"Quit trying to save me! You're killing me!"

Such was the comment from my 18yo daughter, directed at the psychiatrist in the original article. And she hasn't played WoW in 6 months!

Daughter like father -- I, too, am sick and damned tied of people telling me what I can do with my own body and life.

Until a hundred years ago, a person could simply pick up and go somewhere to get away from meddlesome, prying, and officious egotists who assume they have the only "right" answers. You could go to the "frontier", and be free of such stupidity and arrogance. But now the frontier is gone, there is nowhere to escape, and society is eating itself to death as more "do-gooders" try to "save" us.

YUCK!

Flash drives are a big no-no in the federal government and military. If something is so sensitive that it needs this kind of encryption wrapped in dynamite, then it should not be walking around on a USB drive. Dumb dumb dumb.

True... but not everyone who requires security is a government spook. For most of us non-spooks, this thing has merit.

I've used Subversion for years to sync my various systems. I have four different machines (2 Vista, 2 Linux) and 20GB of data that must be kept in sync.

Of course, there could be somethign much better out there. I'm just very comfortable with Subversion, and it works.

All knowledge is "in the air", whether printed on paper or stored magnetically or transmitted across the universe. Knowledge exists whther or not it has physical form; if all the math books in the universe disappeared tomorrow, 2 + 2 would *still* equal 4 and force would still equal mass times exceleration.

My daughters have educated themselves though physical and digital media; they are home-schooled, something that seemes near and dear to Bradbury's heart. The Internet gives them access to knowledge, ideas, and people they would *never* have encountered in a real library. The Internet EXPANDS our knowledge; it does not replace books, it COMPLEMENTS THEM.

Android uses Linux, but isn't Linux (no standard libraries, for example).

Android uses Java, but it isn't standard Java nor is it compatible with most Java apps.

Android is open source, except for certain fiddly-bits they keep private.

This is not the competition for Windows we've been looking for.

Star Trek (2009 edition) had a high-handed concept. It wasn't an officious legal drama, or a long-winded debate over morals, or the search for humanity.

The concept was "Destiny can trump fate."

Fate is what happens, outside our control -- the circumstances we must deal with.

Destiny is how we react to fate... we carve our own destinies, in spite of (or because of) fate.

In the case of Star Trek, the traditional crew of the USS Enterprise was destined for great things, time and space and crazed Romulans be damned. Kirk chose his destiny, even if fate had changed his circumstances.

Fun movie, great characters, and a new perspective on Trek. As someone who watched the original series in the 1960s, and whose career is inspired by Trek, I'm very happy with the movie.

Of course not. Song of the South is not being printed because Disney is afraid of old stereotypes, and not for any profit motive. That is entirely different than a national columnist downloaded an unreleased popular movie, and then bragging about it in his column for his own profit (i.e., page hits).

Motive matters. No one is making a profit from pirated copies of Song of the South. No one is is making a (significant) profit for themselves off publishing information to Wikileaks. In both cases, no one is losing any money via pirated copies, and therefore, it doesn't matter.

Long ago, in another life, I wrote programming books for a living. When a company in China put those books on a CD and tried selling it online with paying royalties, we pursued them (and got no money, but stopped the CD sales). On the other hand, I know of three colleges in third-world countries who use my books as classroom texts; they could not afford to buy copies, so after my publisher reverted rights to me, I GAVE AWAY my books in PDF form for people who needed them. The difference was in the motivation and intent of the "pirate."

Again: Motive matters.