The key to social network interoperability is the 'OStatus' suite of protocols and formats. Diaspora will be implementing this, but what really exited me the other day was the first open source implementations of OStatus communication between Status.net (wot powers identi.ca, etc) and itself (screencast is available via the link above) based on the Federated Social Web's SWAT0 test, and then shortly afterwards other systems (MiniMe). Work is under way to implement this in other systems such as ELGG, Drupal, WordPress, Google Buzz, Diaspora, etc. Some probably slightly out of date info on this can be found on the Status.net wiki.

a suite of protocols and formats have been developed over the years to achieve this. look for the Data Portability movement for one or the largest groupings of like minded folk, although the dev action is fairly distributed.

the current two interesting things to watch is the development of OAuth 2, for distributed apps, which will help with the sharing of the various open standards of profile information and the like, and the Google Buzz method of using Salmon and PubSubHubbub to aggregate comments to an article.

i'm looking forward to being able to connect WordPress, Drupal, etc, sites together to aggregate community content.

bah, maths is just applied logic.

ach, better yet; http://www.last.fm/music/Willi%2BBoskovsky%252FJohann%2BStrauss%2BOrchestra%2BOf%2BVienn/_/Strauss%2C+Johann+Ii%3A+Blue+Danube%2C+Op.+314

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4XUye-F_Rg

PiTiVi (wp) seems interesting, not tried it myself so far.

(apologies for the horrible personal pronoun usage there..)

How long before someone snuffs it on Facebook before their time?

I'm sure hundreds have already. I'd expect their friends and relatives would appreciate this service, but I wonder how they're going to deal with photoshopped obituaries. I'd expect they'd naturally try to contact the user directly, but what if they're AFK for a number of days or more?

I'll be celebrating Samhuinn by partaking in Samhuinn Fire Festival in Edinburgh, a modern retelling of ancient stories and myths regarding the transition between Summer and Winter, played out by an amazing community of volunteers and friends. I find this (the weeks of preperation and the event itself) a whole lot more satisfying in so many ways than other 'traditional' hallowe'en events.

(nitpick; it's a Celtic culture thing rather than tied to any one country.)

The existence of a file format to encompass an EP or LP style collection of files is a nice idea. There exists .cbr and .cbz for comic book files and other such container formats, so why not for music files? And yeah, throw in a menu and some info, why not, .mkv does this for video files for those who want to use that aspect of the format. But I'm surprised that music lovers/developers haven't come up with something like this before, and I find it kind of funny that now Apple has got in there first and there are complaints. How they manage iTunes aside, can't people who are interested in something like this get together and bash out an Open Format to do the same, either based on this format from Apple or something better? Sure it wouldn't impact the way many people use music files at first, but .png, .rss, and many more formats were in the same position when they came onto the scene.

"The alternative to a distributed system like a free market is a centralised system like a Government, which takes a large proportion of our earnings and then wastes them."

That's a bit of false dichotomy. There is a plurality of potential progressive political systems with features likes transparency, participatory and direct democracy, decentralisation, etc, that would work as checks and balances to avoid the bad aspects of "big government".

The problem is that it's only a pseudo-TAZ. Their rules do not trump US law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prosecution_Service

"The Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for public prosecutions of people charged with criminal offences in England and Wales. Its role is similar to that of the longer-established Crown Office in Scotland, and the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland. The CPS is headed by the Director of Public Prosecutions (currently Keir Starmer QC) who answers to the Attorney General for England and Wales (currently The Baroness Scotland of Asthal).

"The Crown Prosecution Service is responsible for criminal cases beyond the investigation, which is the job of the police. This involves giving advice to the police on charges to bring, and being responsible for authorising all but a very few simple charges (such as begging), and preparing and presenting cases for court, both in magistrates' courts and, increasingly, the Crown Court."

hah! yeah, like with Firewire on their current range of mp3 players..

oh, wait...