Hogwash. I've lived in CA for 25 years and the only thing I expect is the roads to be maintained and for public schools to be operated. Everything else I get is fee for service (utilities, trash pickup, etc). The only Californians I know of demanding services are people who don't pay jack shit into the system in the first place, just like everywhere else in this bankrupt country.

The article title reads: "Steve Jobs Questioned In iTunes Monopoly Suit". QUESTIONED??? This hasn't happened yet, so Jobs has not been questionED. Bullshit troll article title.

“A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future.” - Robert Heinlein

This is easily misleading. If Mr. Crupnick means "album buyers", he is more likely to be correct than if by "buyers" he meant total number of customers buying music. The fact that people can now easily purchase single songs when they previously were forced to buy entire albums in order to get only one or two songs they really wanted might have something to do with this. In fact, it might have everything to do with such a typically misleading music industry claim.

One thing is for sure: If they drop the URL bar, it will increase the use of search and, thus, increase the click through to ad-words sites. Nothing like a pretty fucking obvious money-making move on their part, eh?

This sounds like more zero tolerance police state crap. Have a look at this: http://www.lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead26.1.html

No 30 years ago, damn it.

It should come as no surprise that the Wall Street Journal would publish an article asserting that publishing the Pentagon Papers is "different" than what Wikileaks is doing. Why? To help set the stage for justifying the government resurrecting the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute Assange, and killing all dissent since we are supposedly "at war" (Iraq, Afghanistan, War on Terrorism, War on Drugs, etc. ad nauseum). Of course, there has been no formal Declaration of War by Congress, as required by Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. But since the U.S. Government doesn't actually seem to protect and enforce the Constitution any longer, WTF matters?

And you need a whole new OS for this? What about using *nix machines, setting the login shell to /usr/bin/firefox and limiting the network accessibility to the corporate LAN? You could have done this many years ago and wouldn't need a new OS to do it. As for thin client, ChromeOS is nothing more than what I just described with a specialized browser with customized hooks for Google's proprietary app world/framework. Bletch.

This makes perfect sense once you understand that the majority of the people working on ChromeOS (in Google's Kirkland offices) are Microsoft refugees. Since most people psychologically try to solve problems in their new jobs they were unable to solve at their previous ones, what better way to keep from having the most virus infested OS on the planet than to prevent anybody from ever installing or changing anything! I bet the colleagues they left behind at Microsoft are envious beyond belief.

So Google is appointing a Director of Privacy, Alma Whitten, from the UK, the country with more surveilance cammeras per person than any other country on the planet. She assures us that, "We are now strengthening our internal privacy and security practices with more people, more training and better procedures and compliance." Oh just wonderful! With all the Chinese programmers at Google, it really makes me feel really much more secure. China is such a bastion of personal privacy, what could possibly go wrong?

This story is old fucking news. Things must be pretty slow at Slashdot to stoop to posting this story again...

I thought the same thing, but I have consistently read in the last several weeks that the well that blew up was an exploration well not a production well. So there was no plan to take that well, as it was, into production.

Any chance they could use this stupidity to outlaw advertising? I mean, sound and lights that affect human behavior and all...

The amount of Ritalin consumed in America from 1990 to 1998 almost quadrupled (link to chart). Might that have something to do with it?