Easy does not always mean better. The goal of a capitalistic endeavor is to provide a product/service at a price point more convenient than doing it yourself. In exchange for the cost and convenience, we may sacrifice certain qualitative considerations that we would have built in had we done it ourselves. This applies to many things... architecture, automobiles, food, fashion, consumer electronics, TV signals, and software.

In the case of cloud computing, most customers appear willing to sacrifice their privacy in exchange for some software convenience or feature. We simply don't know how this will turn out in the long run. It is conceivable that a few high profile privacy or security violations by a cloud provider will change everyone's perspective in the future. Perhaps next year, or perhaps in 20. But it isn't quite accurate to relate customer behavior with what will ultimately be the best model. I prefer to think of consumerism as herd testing, and sometimes prefer to stand on the sideline watching to see if the herd goes over the cliff or not. Remember how blood letting turned out?

So I agree with RMS, cloud computing without ironclad legal protections do not currently safeguard individual's interests for personal privacy.

Good luck creating architectural drawings. (IMAA)

It has been convention since the beginning of time to write everything in CAPs. Not that conventions can't change, but there is a whole system of communication in the construction industry related to the assumption that instructions and notations are always capitalized. Similar reason to why US construction is still Imperial, there is too much embodied energy in the current method to risk confusing it with a change to another system.

The case you point to has nothing with the police "standing by" and watching a crime occur. It absolves negligence as responsibility. Big difference between that and willfully watching a house burn to the ground. I feel certain that the Cranicks have a tort case that we'll learn more about in the following months and years.

The reason we have ads is because they are easy for advertisers to generate sales/revenue with them. They are a shortcut instead of actually providing a product we really need.

Face it, do we need much that is advertised? No. We also don't need much of the content we read. Advertising is this dance that occurs within non-critical content because we really don't have to watch TV or read entertainment news.

If products were so important, name dropping within actual content would be sufficient to generate sales commensurate with demand. Advertising is a way of increasing demand that wouldn't ordinarily exist (since we don't need it in the first place.

No Russians? Or at least an early Modernist, that's a pretty big gap between Chopin and Sinatra. :)

Great comments! I'm sure will not be moded up however--your insights are too conservative, supported with facts, and oppose the general liberal mentality here in the US these days where everyone is desperate to rid themselves of personal responsibility in favor of the government living our lives for us.

But don't you think we should learn from the stuff we've made that *has* survived? It isn't necessarily the cheapest or the most refined, but the design and manufacturing most appropriate to the function. Think Wall-E or the 1994 Honda Accord that I intend to drive for another 10 years with every single thing still working.