In a world where 20 seconds can mean keeping or loosing a customer, a decade is veritable eternity. And I agree with you wholeheartedly about Yahoo/MSFT and it being more about mail and other services. However, I see this as the one combination that is likely to give Google a run for its money. Google, IMHO, is a far greater evil than even the Borg collective. The Borg Collective is watched and monitored and known to be evil. Google purports to "do no evil" all the while your privacy is a vanishing memory. And who are they whoring all this data out to? We don't know. At least with the credit bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, etc.) you can find out. What happens to it after it gets shared? We don't know. What all is in there? We don't know.

And Google gets yet another stream of data on you. What products you're looking at... Comparison shopping by UPC... People are flat out willing ot sell their soul for a "free" service

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog entry entitled "Google - The New Mark of the Beast" and was fluffled off as an alarmist. Now the truth about Google is slowly seeping out. For those of you who don't do data mining, you just don't realize how sophisticated its become. Google doesn't do anything unless it gets them another stream of data on their user base.

Gmail - your email - subject -content - to and from
Google Chat - content and other people
Google Latitude - your physical location and cell #
Google Voice - your phone number (which can be trivially tied to real identity including your address) as well as the content from your phone calls and messages
Google Docs - Your documents, power points, and spreadsheets
Google Chrome & Toolbar - Your browsing History
Google Search - if you're logged in this gets stored if not, it can still be tied back to you via IP address

With Google DNS, they can see what you're requesting even if you're not one of their users and they can start to build a profile on you even if you haven't signed up.

Prolly is the default... Failure is not an option... it comes bundled with Windows. And the best fix for Windows... installing Ubuntu.

Every time I've seen them scanning osmeone its a hot chick with big boobs.... And all the guys are over looking at the screen... It's never Nanna or Billy Ray with his beer gut....

My personal feelings agree with you. However, I find this to be incredibly valuable as this is an area that I deal in quite a bit. A friend of mine runs a quite popular local web site that I write for as a reporter. Many of the artciles deal with political corruption; negligence, malfeasance, or just outright stupidity of elected officials; and now we're going after the school board for just plain being tards.

It's quite useful for us to have the ability to harvest comments off our news blog for further investgation. However, I'm going to put up a disclaimer and point people to a web form that will email me. Set up CAPTCA so that the bots don't drive me insane and we should all be good.

OMFG!!! They were *supposed* to have learned this stuff in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL...... How is that a failing of the teacher prep? It sounds like a failing of the public education system.

I have all you can use data and it's not on an iPhone and I actually pay less than some of the iPhone users I know with their iPlans. I have unlimited data, unlimited text messaging, and unlimited minutes. I get that for $99.00 a month from my current carrier. Yes, there is an iPlan for that amount but you have to pay extra for unlimited text messages (another $20/month) whereas mine is included. And the voice dialing is extra ($5/month) whereas mine is also included.

Since more than one carrier is offering such a plan, that tells me that they *have* to be making money at it.

I would think that they'd be trying to rope in more users, particularly older users that don't burn a lot of minutes.

The biggest issue is that many of the CMS developers lay the page out for you. They hard code all of these little boxes. This one goes here at the top left. Under that is a banner.

It's *not* up to the designer to decide what goes where or even if its appropriate for the site to have even a given little box. All the designer can do with it is to try to "deal with it".

Worse yet, to move them around or remove them becomes a hideously painful exercise in hacking someone else's code base.

It's not even that.... Most of the editing software is only going to run on either Mac or Windows. Depending on what your guys are used to using, they will need a platform that can support the way that they are used to working.

Given my choice, I'd prefer OSX. It's been absolutely seamless with every camera I've ever plugged into it. The OS comes with iDVD, which is hard to beat unless you do start getting into professional software. It also comes with Garage Band, which is good for all kinds of audio editing, not just music.

And Microsoft basically gives us Office. My personal copy is $6.

We already have diseases like Scarlet Fever that cause the body to attack itself. In the case of Scarlet Fever, a strep infection (like strep throat) causes the body to attack the the valves in the heart because the protien in the valves is similar to the one on the bacteria.

Now you want to start bonding things to stuff and seeing what you can get it to attack... Why am I seeing cancer, kidney, and liver problems in the futures of patients treated with this stuff??

I remember when we were big time because we had color. No movement... just more colors than amber or green. Whooo Hoooo! We were the shizzle!!! Especially with our 9600 baud modems!

Then we got movement too, not just pretty words on the BBS, because, yeah, that was before the "real" internet happened.

Put cameras on everyone's cats.... You'll get a lot more than a "street view".....