no i said that for many people the outage of the internet would defeat the usefulness of email as a whole anyhow, and no that is the only time i have been affected personally, there may have been a second time at some point but i believe that outage in the US was in the middle of the night/very early morning.

what i was saying is some people think they may need it when the internet is out, but actually don't. It is something that needs to be looked at closely on an individual basis before making a decision either way is all.

for some companies yes internal servers are great, for some outsourcing is great.

Here we have me for all IT work and they are really cheap when it comes to any IT expenditures, most of our infrastructure needs to be replaced as it is, and for us the cost of moving to google apps was a great idea.

I understand for some it may not be, I am just saying that it should not be written off out of hand like it was. I have been using gmail since 2004 when you had to have an invite to get on and i tell you this is the first outage that has affected me at all, and it only affected use of the web interface, so its not too bad, and since we have an sla with google we got days added to our contract for free too.

possibly, but the only outage we have experienced was about 2 hours and was only the web interface, i have seen much more downtime on a local exchange server

you claim to be "its a free market they can do what they want. However, it is not a free market, the government has messed with the market and done things like patents and copyright and all kinds of stuff that mess with the market. Without the roadblocks the government has put in the market the restrictions on monopolies would be unneeded because it would not be possible for them to do the things they did.

if you can't communicate with your co-workers inside your office in any other way than email you have a bigger problem.

and it was only the web interface that was not available, if you were using pop or imap from a desktop client or cell phone then you did not notice any outage at all.

That is the first gmail outage that has affected me since 2004, and i was still able to use it because i use the web interface but also imap it to apples mail app and to my ipod touch

and microsoft had a monopoly in the operating system market, not the windows market, so yet the analogy was ok.

actually they did not make a superior product, go back and read all the findings. They did in fact use their position to destroy others before they could compete, which is fine, unless you have a monopoly.

Having your own email servers, if you loose internet you still can't send/receive email, so no big deal

You can always pop/imap your email from google and can use offline access with google email/calendar/docs.

We changed over to google apps here at work and the offline access has been good for us here.

what everyone needs to understand is business really does not pay taxes in the end, the consumers do. If a business has to pay more in taxes, it will only raise the prices of goods and services.

Do you REALLY think that shop lady and the customers singing a rolling stones song inside the shop should pay the rolling stones (cartel association they belong to) a "performance" fee? This isn't changing the subject, it is THE subject at hand in the article. I need no more than a yes or no. This is as short and on topic as I can make it then. It has nothing to do with your code or my landscaping arrangements, nor anything else, today, an exact happening, in the article, the shop lady/shop/customers singing a song inside the shop, and some fee that they allegedly owe because they violated some law and the law allegedly says they owe it. So, yes, or no?

Right. That's what this is. The changes are requiring the ads to *educate* the consumers regarding the strings attached to "endorsements". It's a really good thing, that will make it a little bit harder to lie or mislead people. Seriously, nobody is trying to take away your free speech or say that you can't endorse things all that you want. This is just about increasing the amount of truth in advertising.

Bingo!

As we all know, the authors of P2P software are generally very conscientious about following the law. Not to mention the fact that they all fall under US jurisdiction.

Furthermore, I would suggest that the faster an area of technology moves, the less it matters how long the patent term is. A patent in such an area will quickly become obsolete. It's actually stagnant technology where a long patent term on a rare innovation is most valuable.

A patent is a wall in front of progress. The faster the progress, the more the wall arrests. The whole point of patents is to encourage people to invent things so valuable that others would rather pay to be let through that wall than have to go around it.

Software patents are like being surrounded by walls, as if in maze with no guaranteed exit, and all the walls have blurry edges, and some of them will solidify to a razor's edge for sole purpose of cutting you as travel along a path that has been clear for decades.

Spyware violates electronic privacy laws that already exist.