RIght... still sounding a lot like Dow Constantine.

For those who don't know or care enough to look it up, he's the County Executive in King County, WA (contains Seattle, Redmond, and a whole lot of places that aren't Seattle or Redmond). He was recently pushing for higher sales tax and $60/vehicle annual license fee increase to continue subsidizing the ridiculously cheap bus routes that mostly serve Seattle and Redmond. Also a fan of toll roads (upwards of $5 to cross a bridge) and other shenanigans.

The biggest reasons I hate it are 1) The "real name" policy and 2) The fact I'm basically forced to use it if I want to use any of the Goog's other services as a signed-in user (YouTube, gmail, etc.).

The fact that I think it's utterly pointless shite is besides the point - I think the same of Twitter but don't wish it death. I don't have any need or want to interact with it, therefore its existence doesn't bother me. The Goog on the other hand has other things unrelated to G+ which I /do/ wish to use, without being forced to use G+. Hence, I wish death to G+.

HTH.

'd like to charge you $100 per mile to drive on my roads.

Who are you, Dow Constantine?

Can it die now?

I expect by the time I die, McDonald's workers in the US will be able to become millionaires pretty quickly. Zimbabwe is full of millionaires, if you're talking Zim dollars. Of course, they burn their currency in the street to stay warm because it's cheaper than newspaper.

To be fair, give me an M1 Garand and I can empty a couple clips in 2 minutes. Same with my SKS. On my AR, each mag will hold 3 clips of ammo, so I guess I could go through 3 clips without ever changing the mag. But, most of my ammo wasn't shipped that way and I'm sure as heck not gonna waste my time reloading the clips I have. Those little clip-to-mag adapters are annoying to deal with, usually easier to just load the single rounds.

I wonder if the clips work better in cold climates, where people are more likely to be wearing cumbersome gloves?

And Steve Ballmer retired.

When I think "tech firm" in this context I don't think Facebook or Google so much as companies like Cisco and Juniper.

Aren't you the little expert... How is sunlight not relevant? Ever heard of "Seasonal Affective Disorder," aka seasonal depression? It happens to a lot of people I know (I live in the Seattle area, where we get about 9 months of grey-and-drizzly every year), myself included. Y'know what helps me snap out of it? Getting to a place with sun, even if just for a weekend now and then. Often that's simply heading east over the mountains for the weekend, or even a business trip down to California or Texas for a few days. All that to say, there's definite merit to getting enough sun, or good strong natural-ish light in its place (such as some of the daylight spectrum LED lights, etc).

Practically free? What world do you live in? Employee cost, opportunity cost - those resources aren't free at all. You either have to hire people to sift through all that crap, or you have to hire people to write code to sift through all that crap. Both of those are expensive as hell, for something that doesn't benefit the company at all. There's simply no reason to do it, and a cost of millions of dollars.

Do you honestly think they'd waste the resources to go hunting through the hotmail accounts of people who they didn't think (with good cause) were stealing from them?

Most likely this started with them searching the corp email account of the guy sending the stuff, and when they saw it going "to: suspect@hotmail.com" they followed the rabbit trail.

They don't seem to be mining emails for advertising content or other such, this was a very limited scope (and most likely completely manual) investigation due to what they found in an internal employee's mail.

You may have misunderstood - I think they're wretched bastards and I have no sympathy for them. I just think they're justified in their paranoia.

Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean we aren't out to get them.

An IM platform that hardly makes any money and, at the end of the day, is just an IM platform, gets bought for $19B, and then a promising startup doing something technologically new, exciting and different that hasn't been done 100 times before is only worth $2B, to the same buyer?

The only thing that makes sense is that said buyer is buying end users, without caring so much about the companies or technology. That, after all, is the only thing really valuable about WhatsApp - lots of people whose data can be sold and who can be marketed to.

Exactly. If I'm a Ukrainian soldier and I believe my death may help bring about a true end to Russian tyranny, it may be worth fighting. If I look at the numbers and say "we're screwed either way," then it's just a choice of which is better: to live with Russian tyranny in a neighboring territory (not where I live), or to be dead and have the same Russian tyranny in the same neighboring territory (where I can't live, because I'm not alive).

Easy choice, that.