To any tech journalists upset that Apple isn't spoon-feeding them product news: Get out. Just leave the business. Please?

Seriously, if you don't know to do your own digging for a story or don't want to, you're in the wrong line of work. And there are plenty of other people who would gladly take your place.

You should know soon enough--although the administration doesn't want the recipients of NSLs getting too specific, the FBI has to cough up a yearly total. It provided a count for 2011 (16,511 NSLs, covering 7,201 people) on April 30 of last year, so if they stick to that timing we should get last year's total in another month or so.

Some smaller newspapers have switched to Facebook-only commenting (here's one example, the Fort Meyers News-Press) because their old systems allowed anonymity without accountability, and they felt it easier to hand the job over to Facebook than develop something better in-house. I think that's a mistake--if you want to outsource your comments system, you could use Disqus or other services that police spam but permit persistent pseudonyms--but it's a real trend, or at least a trendlet.

The original purpose of Facebook, AIUI, was to help Harvard students hook up. Its business model does, indeed, providing a large and defined audience to potential advertisers--but people's names are the least of it. To a marketer, somebody's name is less useful than their address, their household income, the car in the driveway, the phone in the pocket, etc.

As for G+, I think its real purpose at the moment is to peel people away from Facebook.

I spent about 17 years at the Post, not 10. But thanks for spelling my last name right. As for the rest... I've read your comment twice, and I still don't know what point you're trying to make. Maybe those IR classes fogged up my brain too badly.

- RP

If you read what the top executives at Facebook say--and if you then spend some time talking on background with some of them--it's clear that this company wants to become the layer of identity or authentication that it apparently feels should have been put into the Internet's original architecture. (I linked to that Vint Cerf interview because it has him explaining, at about 6:40 in, that the Internet needs identifiers but not fixed identities... oh, and because the video features me bantering onstage with Vint Cerf.) Facebook Connect logins and Facebook social plug-ins exist because they extend your Facebook identity across the rest of the Web--and at some sites, your Facebook identity is now the only way to leave a comment.

- RP

Hi, I'm the author of the Discovery piece (and yes, I'm posting under my real name). One detail I couldn't get into that post was the credit-card issue--at first, I thought that a Facebook or a Google+ could just query Visa or AmEx or whoever and get a name match. It turns out that it's not so easy. Neither of the two usual card-verification schemes actually confirm a cardholder's name:

* asking for CVV2 numbers just proves that the person has the card in their hand (or has memorized those digits);

* AVS, or address verification system, only checks the numbers in the billing address.

There are other services that claim to verify names nearly instantly--but as gurps_npc notes, the real reason neither Facebook nor G+ bothers is because they don't want to discourage people from signing up.

- RP

Even after the Flight Readiness Review officially sets the launch date, the liftoff can get scrubbed at the last minute (or, in the case of STS-134, at the 225th minute). You can schedule your travel to allow for a one- or two-day scrub, but then you might find out that it's been punted back a full week.

If you'll be coming from far off, you might want to see if you can't telecommute from the greater KSC area for a couple of weeks. If, OTOH, you're lucky enough to live somewhere with cheap flights to Orlando, wait until FRR to book--and then either get a no-change-fee or refundable fare or get a one-way ticket, buying the flight home once the shuttle launches.

IOW, it's kind of a pain to see a shuttle launch in person. And (speaking from my experience watching Endeavour lift off Monday from the press site) it's worth every bit of the hassle.

Thanks for the attention. One of NTP's PR folks just e-mailed a copy of the company's complaint against Google. There's a copy embedded after the jump of my post, and you can also read or download the PDF via Scribd. I encourage you all to give that document a careful read, then look through the patents claimed (I've linked to the relevant USPTO pages in the post as well).

- RP