An analogy with Windows:

People don't give a shit about Windows. Or, really, their programs. What they care about are:
(1) their data (which requires their existing software, which requires Windows), and
(2) the ability to do something (which means software, which -- on PCs -- is essentially only written for Windows.

That, and that alone is what maintains Microsoft's dominance.

Think: how popular would Firefox, Thunderbird & LibreOffice be if they only ran on Linux? And if LibreOffice only understood it's own file formats?

Google Docs is breaking the lock that MS Office has on people, but only because it can read and write .doc and .xls files. The ability to manipulate your data anywhere is only useful if you can access the tons of documents that you've already created.

It's also the reason that "we" who see monoculture a threat push so hard for open standards.

That's the pertinent question. My kids don't voluntarily use Facebook. But if they want to share something with adult ("hey, look at our vacation pics!"), they do.

Is there a Facebook API that allows users to access their pictures, tags, comment threads, everything posted on their walls, etc?

If so, then there's an opening for the competition. If not, it'll take a generation for Facebook to die, and a lot of memories will die with it.

Sure we thought that they'd always be the market *leader*. But the thing is that replacing an IBM PC AT with a Compaq DeskPro isn't traumatic *at all*. In fact, it was quite easy.

What was (and still is) impossible was replacing the h/w and s/w compatibility.

It's why the computer that I'm typing this on is the direct descendant of that 1981 IBM Model 5150 instead of on an Alpha, SPARC or MIPS workstation, or an ARM-powered PC, and 90% of PCs still run the direct descendant on MS-DOS 1.0.

Remember what Andy Tanenbaum wrote in 1992: "Of course 5 years from now, everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."

Must be, since we feed a family of 4 on $900, and that's on the high side...

Damn, you beat me to it!

You forget that the PC market -- for all the units sold each year, making Compaq the fastest company to $1Bn in sales -- was still t-i-n-y, with *lots* of room for clone competitors.

(I was there, too, and remember Compaq, Leading Edge, KayPro, Gateway 2000, an all the other brands sold in Computer Shopper.)

What's wrong with farmed algae?

FTFY.

34 years ago, the personal computer industry was t-i-n-y. Therefore, it was ripe for exploitation and expansion by *lots* of companies when IBM "validated" that single-user computers were worthy of use by the masses.

Social media was in (almost) the same situation 10 years ago: MySpace was used by a relatively small, but dedicated group, and there were competitors, one of which was Facebook.

It wound up dominating, and has locked up that domination of "the masses" just like Microsoft has.

It's easy enough to "clone" hardware and relatively software like MS-DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, etc.

Much more so to clone Windows, it's gargantuan API and wide range of end-user (Office), developer (Visual Studio) and Enterprise software (Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, etc).

Similarly, cloning those petabytes of user data in Facebook, plus it's API, plus convincing users that there's a reason to change is well nigh hopeless.

The first not-right thing that they did was to not realize that Facebook is a market force like IBM was in 1981, but without the downside of competitors being able to clone the petabytes of data that sheeple have willingly uploaded to Facebook.

Ambition is one thing, but ignoring reality is something completely different.

I'm trying to establish a chain-of-trust to the replicant project's files.

You have signed their key fingerprint, so if I can get a reliable .

I have 6781 9B34 3B2A B70D ED93 2087 2C64 64AF 2A8E 4C02 as YOUR (new) key fingerprint.

But MITM attacks could, in principle, have corrupted my downloading of that and/or could corrupt any handshake process I'm familiar with that we could reasonably accomplish over a Q&A over slashdot.

I'm in the silicon valley area. Is there any easy way to get in touch with you to confirm that fingerprint or obtain the correct one? Will you be appearing in person some time in the near future? Has it been painted as graffiti or a sign in a known place (and check periodically to be sure it's not modified)? Is there someone you know who is in the Silicon Valley area who is a public enough person to identify and who has your fingerprint and is willing to confirm it? Etc.

You can become violently allergic to practically ANYTHING. (The immune system, in each individual, creates a large number of clones of cells making different antibodies by pseudo-randomly editing the genome making the antibody, kills off the ones that recognize the infant body, and amplifies the clones recognizing new stuff that appeared at the same time the body experiences damage.)

A few bad reactions to a few particular foods got a lot of attention - and overreaction. Which ones got the attention was mostly a matter of chance. So now the clueless bureaucrats are taking extreme measures against the handful of allergens that got the press, and the rest are completely off their radar.

They have zero tolerance for peanuts.
  - Do they have zero tolerance for shellfish? (Restaurants in Silicon Valley were very careful about allergies when I first moved here - because one had been informed that a customer had a shellfish allergy, fed her something containing shrimp, and she died.)
  - Do they have zero tolerance for milk? (Some milk reactions are an enzyme deficiency, but some are an allergy, which can be deadly. Also: a protein in cow's milk increases the risk of Multiple Sclerosis).
  - Do they have zero tolerance for tree nuts?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for wheat?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for honey?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for corn? (It would be convenient for ME if they did - my corn allergy isn't QUITE to full-blown anaphylactic shock level, yet, but it IS to the "projectile vomiting" and "three days of flu-like symptoms" level. But I won't try to stop others from enjoying corn.)
  - Do they have zero tolerance for eggs?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for fish?
And that's just the COMMON food allergies.

If they had zero tolerance for every food allergen that had caused anaphyliaxis, they'd have zero tolerance for FOOD.

What if you just don't connect it to any network, ever?

How do you stop it from connecting? These days most laptops, at least, have WiFi, Bluetooth, BLE (really distinct from classic buetooth), and maybe other radio-networking capabilities (GSM, LTE, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, 6LoWPAN-over-Bluettoth-4.2) built-in. Also infrared and ultrasonic-capable audio interfaces with microphones and speakers. Even with the ones that DO have a switch to turn the radios off the switch normally just tells the software not to talk on the radio - which the software is free to ignore.

(Not to mention that the remote-administration hardware/firmware built into the chips by the major manufacturers can, and does, listen on the radios these days for remote-administration commands, comes in UNDER the OS, and can't be disabled.)

Then there's the question of what good the computer is to you if it's NOT connected to a network?

Actually, everyone should take a chill. All the charges should be dropped and these people should just work it out. The neighborly thing to do would have been to tell the neighbor not to fly over his property before shooting it out of the sky or anything like that. I think some partial compensation would be appropriate as a civil matter negotiated between the neighbors or in civil small claims court. The only reason that this is being given any attention is because "drone" has become the catch all word for a bunch of techno paranoia.

Trap shooters break clay pigeons.

A pidgin is a type of language that develops in places where two or more groups lacking a common language interact. How you'd make one out of clay is not clear to me.