What about those of us who live in Germany and like it just the way it is or was.

I lose if Facebook ceases to operate here. I have friends and family spread all over the world; Germany, Sweden, the US, India, etc. and it was always a lot of work to keep in touch with everyone. Facebook makes this easy.

I also lose if people started to use pseudonyms. Have you ever tracked down an old friend, or been tracked down by an old friend via Facebook?

I think you are partially right. I’ll presume that when the insurance company manages to rid itself of the bottom half of its driver pool, its payouts decrease more than its collected premiums. In effect, the insurance company is defecting against its competitors by sticking them with the higher cost customers.

People who refuse to do anything about a greater evil, lest they accept a smaller evil, piss me off. Suppose that the greater evil would win by one vote if you stayed home. Your choice in this case is to vote for the lesser evil, which is still evil, or not vote; which in this case is the same as voting for the greater evil. If Gore had been president in 2001, we’d not have had Dick Fucking Cheney using 9/11 to push the US into the Iraq war. Would we have had rendition? Torture? Since Cheney actively supported these things and was their biggest cheerleader, it made a BIG difference between having a smaller or bigger evil and in this case, we got the bigger evil.

Those people who voted for Nader in 2000, because “voting for the smaller evil is still evil” have the blood of the Iraq war on their hands!

i can write just fine in my utilkilt with no undies

So I guess valuing the (usually) smaller size of the archived xml marks me as clueless then.

Actually, from my perspective, there have been significant improvements in every version of Office. Then again, I'm also someone who writes a lot of VBA macros and the occasional c# .net plugin.

There is also a Green Party in the US. Interestingly, the Greens are classified as a "left libertarian" party and its platforms do overlap with the larger, but still insignificant, American Libertarian party.

There should be a moratorium on gesture patents. Right now, we're in a state where we can't say that any new developments would be non-obvious to an expert. You could make a list of a million gesture controls over a couple of beers.

Goodness gracious! I'll grant the hardware similarities, but that link is comparing an old feature phone's OS UI with a not-heavily skinned Android phone. Those icons and that layout are stock Gingerbread. Aside from that and the use of gestures, the usage paradigms for iOS and Android (at least as of 4.0) are quite different and "how things flow" is also quite different.

Samsung's best defense here is probably a quick rollout of a 4.0 update.

Wait! iOS 5 has usable notifications? You could have fooled me!

If I had mod points today, you'd get'em. This is the same thing that goes through my mind whenever I read someone lamenting that too many people are ignorant of some aspect of computing; e.g. security.

Oh and its not just Americans, but "people" in general.

Mod the parent up.

My smartphone“ (an iPhone in my case, but to be honest, something running WebOS, Android or Windows Phone would also work) is a lousy phone. My cheap Nokia work phone is far better. In fact, every cell phone I’ve ever owned has been a better phone. I don’t really care because I average 1 minute a day talktime and most of that is with my wife and kids; logistical syncing stuff. I was late to the smartphone bandwagon because I lived like the OP for many years; using an old clamshell with a dirt cheap voice only plan.

Holy cow! I’ll never go back!

I’m increasingly finding that my phone is replacing my laptop. Many tasks that I used to crack open the laptop for, I can do perfectly fine on the phone and for serious work, I’ve always preferred desktops for real work anyway. So basically, it’s a substitute laptop that fits in my pocket, has internet access wherever I go and a GPS built in. And that GPS has a standardized API, so many of the applications on my little pocket laptop are location enabled; from the useful (such as finding the highest rated restaurant within walking distance, or checking on traffic info) to the useless, but fun (such as finding out about that airliner flying overhead; which airline it is and where it is going).

I could even put an ssh terminal on it if I had need of one.

And I pay about €20 a month for it. Are service plans really so expensive in the US?

Yes, being able to display a google earth layer over the camera on my phone would be cool. In theory. The problem with AR is that it combines cheap in-phone GPS results with low quality solid state compass data. I’ve got an app called “go sky watch”. It’s really cool in that it can show me where constellation, individual stars, elliptic line and the current locations of the sun and moon are. Too bad that more likely than not, it thinks my phone is pointed to a different part of the sky than it actually is. Wikitude suffers the same problem and is most useful in overhead map mode, where it is reduced to being a not as good as google maps, google maps clone.

For the foreseeable future, AR is just going to be a gimmick that” will become the next big thing sometime soon”.

*TSA reach brouhaha?

"TSA search..." Perhaps I do need a right to be forgotten to hide my un-proofread comments. :)

Why does the GP owe it?

If I choose to post on this public forum with - for example - the pseudonymous ID that I've been using for a decade on slashdot, I've made the choice to associate those words with that persona; publicly. If I don't want to associate my user ID with those words, I check the AC box. If I feel that I may regret it sometime, then either I post as AC, but more likely I regards the statement as something not worthy of having been said in the first place and don't post it. It is not at all clear to me that I have a right to force someone else to have work to erase ill thought out comments on my part.

This right to be forgotten scares me because of how it can be misused. Remember the TSA reach brouhaha? That agency was deeply embarrassed by people posting videos of TSA agents going the neo-stazi route. TSA agents tried intimidation tactics in many cases to prevent those videos from being posted, or taken in the first place, but legally they were on the wrong side. Now suppose those agents could invoke their right to privacy and use that to force the erasure of the video. How does society benefit?

The GP's point is that both sides have to agree on each and every juror. If I was a lawyer doing jury selection, I’d certainly not allow the opposing side to stack it with people likely to be reflexively sympathetic to the their argument.