I don't use Facebook, so maybe I'm not the best person to answer your question. But, I was there today and attended several sessions, so I saw a lot more about how they are thinking about this stuff. It is really slick. From a technical and UI point of view, it's a really nice combination of the existing Facebook and Twitter and Google+.

The abstract purpose of the timeline was made lucidly clear, and it's pretty obvious that, if you don't think too much about how it is appealing to essentially ones naturally narcissistic slants, it's totally great in many ways. However, exactly how it works was less clear. What other people see of your timeline was characterized differently throughout the day. This could be just poor communication, or internal confusion about how it works. It was mentioned that other people will get a magically generated view of your timeline that matches interests relevant to them. My take on this was that, eg, you, a sailing fan but not into technology, if you were to be friends with Larry Ellison, his timeline to you would be populated with tons of sailing stuff but nothing about Oracle. That was contradicted at other talks, so I'm not really sure. It seems kind of mushy either way. Perhaps the speakers were just mixing up pronouns...

If you are someone who has a decent attention to detail, and decent taste, and will carefully curate all your stuff, it seems like it will be great. However, I suspect that comprises about 0.5% of all facebook users. What will the "giant photo" be on the majority of timelines? Who will make sure that this giant single document containing years of data will be appropriately "shared"? What does it look like when something profoundly bad happens to someone (dealing with death, divorce, etc)?

It reminds me of Windows Metro -- In the absolute best case, it's beautiful and great and highly functional. How will the average case work, though? My prediction is, "far from great".

Aside: The keynote was completely lame. A large group of Facebook employees were laughing uproariously to the unfunny jokes, and applauding and cheering to slides before the slide even appeared. I've never noticed this at any other tech keynote, is it normally done this way?

Google apps is billed as:

And it costs real money. That hardly sounds like a pet project of individuals. I agree with OP, the support and feature parity does not live up to what a normal person would expect.

You make an excellent and valid point. I omitted that viewpoint in my statements.

But your point is not in contradiction to mine. The fact is that Lucas has removed the original from practical existence. He has intentionally literally destroyed all decent interpositives and internegatives of the original cut. He has literally destroyed all prints made for theatres. What exists of the original movie is a flawed print duplicated to VHS or Laserdisk, a paltry 400 lines of resolution, compared to a 4k or 8k scan that is normally used for archiving. He had, in his hands, a restored "original negative" of a fully restored and cleaned and re-timed version of approximately the original cut. This "original negative" was apparently stunning. He then destroyed that, in order to add Jabba to it.

Lucas can and should be able to do anything he wants to his forks of the movie. That's totally fine with most people, I think. But he should not be able to, for all intents and purposes, remove the original film, a film that is significant to millions of people, he should not be allowed to remove it from existence.

There is no way to watch the original Star Wars on anything better than youtube quality, and that is a crime against culture.

And, by the way, I do enjoy the "special edition" Empire Strikes Back. It is tastefully done, and it doesn't introduce new content or characters. If I take off my "original hat" and think about it, I would probably buy the Blu Ray set solely to have this movie.

The first laserdisk release was rehashed in the mid-2000s dvd release of "the originals", so you can get the original cut. However, it is taken from a badly damaged interpositive, and is not anamorphic, so it's missing a lot of information. There was a later laserdisk release of the "Special Edition" theatrical release, but the coloring was botched, and it is also not anamorphic, AFAIK. (I've never had a laserdisk player, but I think that's correct.)

Neither of these will do. FFS!, the negatives exist in some vault. All it would take is someone skilled with glue and a blade a couple weeks to re-assemble them and you'd have a fully restored 8k 4:4:4 copy of a film that is universally considered to be of significant cultural importance. Instead, we have zilch. It's a travesty.

I don't live in a basement. I am not a fanatic. But it's been pretty well documented that Lucas has grossly mishandled Star Wars et al. It's not about consumerism, or artistic qualities, it is about integrity. The issue is about how Lucas has destroyed a significant part of the culture.

As it has been said, "The only people who haven't seen Star Wars are the characters in Star Wars". It is sad that Star Wars is currently lost,

It's an important movie, I'm sure you will agree? It should exist in some form? It doesn't, due to solely to Lucas. The new movies -- love them or leave them. But it's a travesty that such a monumental work has been destroyed.

There is an exellent article outlining what Lucas has done to the original negative. tl;dr: in the 90's Lucas restored the negative of the original release, and then subsequently nearly completely butchered it while at the same time destroying all copies of the theatrical release (except privately owned vhs and laserdisks, of course). At this point the only thing that exists is a 1080p scan of the film. All of the restored negative does still exist, though. It's just not assembled into something that could produce anything. It is possible to re-assemble that restoration, which by all accounts is stunning.

Does HTC fare any better in this regard? Is anyone higher rated by Greenepeace, EPA, etc, than Apple? Is there some magical bamboo and seaweed phone that is in the ballpark of an iPhone? Is there a better (and feasible) way to do this? Do tell.

I'm not sure what your point is, but I'm not sure that a comparison between significant changes in their manufacturing due to direct criticism versus pulling a retarded game from their own app store helps your point.

Yeah, I know that's all possible, but I'm not going to do any of that. 1) I don't log or lock down their computer at all. It's in a common living space and they know the rules. They still make mistakes, though, and I help them through those. 2) I just don't have the time to do any of that. I can barely be bothered to check the "Parental Controls" box for their browser (mostly because I don't believe it will do any good, long-term). 3) Maintaining my own SIP network while I have a full-time job, multiple kids, as well as other important things going on? Forget about it.

It's not about trust, it's about allowing for the inevitable naive mistake without all of the dire or embarrassing consequences. It's about balancing communication capabilities against being confronted with new and challenging concepts. My kids know my phone number, they should be able to call me if they need help. I trust them to do that, and to not send inappropriate messages to others. But what if they get a creepy text from a peer? Or what if they send a poorly-phrased text to a peer who then misinterprets it?

I know I can cut off text, or simply not give them a phone at all. But the middle ground seems worth exploring, I'm just not sure how to do it. I really just wish I could give them a quarter, and trust that there is pretty much always a pay phone within an 1/8th of a mile. These days, it's "all" (iPhone) or "nothing" (crippled feature phone) or nothing (nothing). I'm not happy with any of those three.

I want to be able to send a 10-year-old out into the world (and I will most certainly do so anyway), but the concept that it's up to the parent to constantly monitor kids' activities and at the same time allow the kids to live in the real world seems to me to have an inherent logical flaw.

While I agree with this, it is easier said than done. When I was a kid, I always a quarter in my pocket which I could use to call home or my parent's work. Today, there are simply no pay phones anywhere where my kids spend time (a big city in the USA). My kids don't have mobile phones yet (because they can't reliably use them yet), but when they do, they will have them on their person all day. How do you monitor phone calls/sms/web browsing in this scenario? Not a glib question -- I try to do a lot to monitor my children's online/tv/etc time. There are no private TVs or computers in the house; we talk about what it means to enter an email address into a Club Penguin form; etc. But at some point, they are going to have to go out into the world on their own, and they are going to have to have a way to phone home when they are in trouble. Am I supposed to do a data dump on their phones at the end of each day and interrogate them about mysterious SMSs that I find? I'm not really interested in that for many reasons...

I think history disagrees with you. The first iPhone was 2G despite 3G radios existing and working in the wild. They didn't put a 3G radio into the phone until they were small enough and efficient enough. The tradeoff was low-bandwidth vs battery life, and Apple decided battery life was more important. There is nothing particularly cutting edge about any of the iPhone's hardware at all. They use solid parts with good specs, but they are never "the best" that is available at the time. They do this specifically to improve battery life and ensure basic functionality.

You can complain about the UI and App Store all you like, but I don't think Apple has ever made a phone that sacrifices coverage and battery life for the sake of wowing customers.

They are not public areas in the sense that the area behind the counter of the DMV is not a public area. In order for it to function, there must be rules. You and 50 of your friends cannot just walk into a DMV and hang out in the back office simply because it is run by the government. Have you been to a BART station in San Francisco? They are tiny and completely packed. There is no conceivable way to hold a protest on one of the platforms below Market Street without shutting it down. It's like insisting on holding a parade on the only 1-lane road that is used by 100,000 people an hour. It's not going to be allowed. Set up shop on the side of the road, or set up shop in the BART station, but not on the platform. These are all fine.

No, the statement is that the platforms and trains are not public spaces, and if you interfere with the trains, you are de facto trespassing and they will have you arrested. I support PETA doing their thing on the sidewalks and in the parks, but I would take action if they ended up in my living room or if they disabled my vehicle.

BART was pretty clear that they would have accommodated a protest. BART was attempting to prevent a shutdown of the system, which would be a major hassle for hundreds of thousands of people. This happened a couple weeks ago, it was chaos and there is no alternative to BART for the majority of its riders. I don't know whether shutting down some of their own equipment was effective, or outrageous, or appropriate, or what, but I am glad for everyone who was able to pick up their kids at camp or make other crucial appointments on that day.