No, but there's 137 people who can each legitimately say "If I hadn't put my machine in the trash, I'd be $900k-ish richer". And I'm not sure how quick the value drops off but I doubt going from 63 to 200 machines (about 3x) would be worse than inverse square so (1/3)^2 * $900k = $100k/machine, that's also a nice chunk of cash.

utopia = ideal, perfect state
unicorn = magical, legendary creature

I think you'd roll your eyes too if Apple or Microsoft came out with OS X 10.10 "Magic Perfection" or Windows 10 "Magic Perfection", respectively. It's the kind of name that makes you go "Okaaaaaaaaay, are you overcompensating for something?"

Not a whole lot of people I knew and having your own hosting and domain costs a bit, most used third party blogs and forums anyway. And it all lacks authentication and aggregation. Sure, you could set up users and accounts and manage all that but people wouldn't bother to manage 100 separate accounts the way they have 100 friends on one Facebook login. And unless every site it set up with an RSS feed there's no easy way to aggregate lots of blogs and give you one dashboard of what your friends are doing. Nothing really unsolvable though, you could have self-hosted for yourself and third party hosted nodes for other people but there'd have to be a business model for the hosting companies. People generally won't pay when they can get a "free" account on Facebook so then most are really back to ads or data mining for most people anyway.

Diaspora needed more than a bit of polish, and that may have contributed to its lack of uptake. If you want to convince people to switch from FB to your network, you better have an amazing user experience. For the inexperienced user who isn't interested in setting up a server themselves, it needs to have the same ease of use as a centralized social network. And with those users now at least somewhat aware of privacy-related issues, you had better be able to offer them some assurances as to the safety of their data; most of them would still entrust their data to FB sooner than to some random guy or weird group of hacktivists. And if you give those assurances, keep in mind that they will not understand anything about encryption schemes.

The GUI part is relatively easy to address with a lot of hard work. The trust part is a lot harder... until you do convince enough people to come over and invite their friends in turn.

There's plenty of reasons I can think of why I'd prefer image recognition on my phone rather than the cloud. Privacy, for one. If you let FB tag your photos with the names of the people in it (after teaching it those names), what do you think happens to that data? You might not even want to share the photo or video stream with anyone... Another reason is that we still do not live in a world with ubiquitous and cheap mobile data. Travel abroad, and you'll find out quickly why cloud-based services like Waze aren't always a viable option.

They all have your data, they can do whatever the f... they want with it. Unless you're talking about a client backdoor to access all the other files you didn't want to share with the cloud, but I don't think any of the others are any better. If you want real control, it's ownCloud or no cloud I think...

More like you accuse someone of defamation and it's the difference between "He told people I'm an asshole" and "He told people I'm a child molester". Both are defamatory statements by definition "1. (Law) injurious to someone's name or reputation)" but only one is actually illegal. Even if you're selling a polished turd you can make a lot a objectively highly questionable praise, misleading statistics and lies by omission without actually incriminating yourself. Like the defamation example above, you usually have to be caught in a factual lie in order to be convicted. Every sales pitch strategy I've been involved in involved pushing our strengths and concealing our weakness, if that was illegal we'd have to put all of marketing and sales in jail. And every person who went on a date ever. Meaning /. won't change much, I guess.

Assuming the need is infinite, if your demands are satisfied you might turn to flexibility and convenience. Last quarter we here in Norway saw a tiny dip in fixed residential broadband for the first time ever, whether that's a fluke or not is uncertain but business lines have been on the decline for some time because small 1-5 man shops use 3G/LTE to check their mail rather than having a dedicated broadband line in the office. It's just an extension of that most "normal" people I run into use wireless now instead of wired networks because it's capped by their Internet speed anyway. And even if you gave them gigabit Internet, they'd probably still feel wireless was fast enough.

Looking at stuff and trying to apply it to the world isn't that obvious.
I remember a story my dad told about when he got to play with one of the first microprocessors: a (relatively) big, fragile and expensive piece of kit. The question most people would ask about this new technology is: "What can we use this for?". And most of them would try and answer that in terms of the situation they are presented with: i.e. they come up with applications for that processor that take its properties (big, fragile and expensive) into consideration. When my dad and his friend speculated about these processors being used in cars and washing machines, their professor famously told them "that'll never happen". It's one of those "I foresee a world market of perhaps 5 computers" remarks; the result of thinking in the context at hand.

A common trick of innovators is to try to think creatively, think outside the box by "moving the box", by thinking about what's in front of them in a new context. The best way of doing that is to ask the right questions, often ones that start with "why" or "what if". In case of the processor, good questions to ask would have been "Why can't we combine the processor and peripheral circuits into a single chip?", or simply "What if this could be had for $0.50?". Another common creative question "What if everybody had one of these?".

Back then, people generally wrote "his", "he" etc when writing about people, male and female, in general. They did not need to qualify every single reference to a person with (m/f), or write his/her instead of his, the way we do these days, verbally bending over backwards to avoid the dreaded accusation of misogyny.

This. Actual stamps is mostly a consumer thing, I just checked our commercial postal service and they recommend a "stamping" machine if you send more than 40 letters/week where you charge it up like a prepaid cell phone, same thing for packages except there they normally print to labels they slap on the package. And for the big companies you get bulk pre-printed envelopes with logo that are collected at your place of business and charged to your corporate account, we have those at work. The potential for abuse is small since you can't drop them off at a regular mailbox and it'd be obvious who you're using to pay for your postage. A lot of the consumer-to-business mail is prepaid and rolled into the cost of business too, the few times I use stamps is to other people but most of that is replaced by email since you don't need a formal signature on anything. I guess there's the odd package, but if it's too big to fit a mail box you're going to the post office anyway.

Of the "let's frame it and put it on a wall" more than "I want one in my pocket" variety. I'll always have fond memories of Nokia 3210 and the state of the art in 1999, but it's not selling a new phone and it's not quite up to collectible/antique standards either. And Elop's little stunt sure didn't help Nokia's reputation as a has-been either. Not to mention that Nokia running Windows Phone might have some of the same hardware but there's very little in common between "old Nokia" and "new Nokia" anyway. I think this was a pretty easy call of Microsoft and would have happened regardless, if they'd ponied up a little more they could have gotten the Nokia name for good as it matters more to consumers than the commercial market the remains of Nokia serves.

Because Facebook is really interested in their stock value and not kicking the DEA in the teeth? They're not going to win any favors with anybody for actively sabotaging a criminal investigation, even an illegally conducted one. They want to have the public on their side which is why we're hearing about this in the news, Facebook couldn't win an escalating conflict with proxies and whatnot. If this becomes a big enough PR problem for the police though, the practice might go away.

Give it time. Materials and printers are improving as is the design of printed guns. In a few years I expect to see a practical, single use printed revolver (6 shots), firing .22 rounds. Practical meaning that the gun will be fairly reliable if handled carefully, that the gun is safe to use, that it can be printed on the kind of hardware accessible to hobbyists, and can be assembled and finished by pretty much anyone. The last part is the most significant: it's possible to make better zip guns from pipe, wood and common parts, but they still require some skills to assemble. 3d printing will give anyone easy access to a gun.

Of course to actually use it you'll still need to get your hands on some ammo, which is the tricky part in countries with strict gun control.

A guy has a few beers and hits a pedestrian, and the police call it the results of DUI, yet sober people hit pedestrians all the time. Low levels of alcohol do not increase your chances much of causing an accident; they do more to decrease your chances of avoiding one, i.e. reacting adequately to an unusual situation. Not that I'm advocating drinking and driving here, but saying that even 1 drink is bad is silly. Our bureau for traffic safety stated (against popular political opinion, surprisingly) that lowering the current limit of 0.05 BAC (2 drinks or so) would do very little to directly reduce the accident rates. A lower legal limit may help in an indirect way, by emphasizing the negative effects of alcohol on driving abilities, and the idea that it's easier to say no to the first drink than it is to the third. (Which is why the legal limit for young drivers was in fact lowered to 0.02).

Oddly, Magic Mushrooms are legal in Japan...but for "appreciation purposes" only. So you can buy them but you're only supposed to look at them, I suppose.