I know it's hard to remember the first statement in a post by the time you get to the end, but I'd recommend trying before you write a snide reply.

I remember having a Quake directory that was 500MB, when the original game was about 50MB. 90% of it was user-generated content. This included a load of maps and a load of mods. I don't remember the names of all of the maps, but I do remember that almost all of the time we played was on third-party maps, not on ones that came with the game.

If your system uptime relies on individual nodes having high uptime, then you're doing it wrong.

I don't know why you've been modded troll. The problem isn't binary files, it's complex files. All of your log files are binary, the difference is that you have a load of small tools that can work with the ASCII / UTF-8 text ones easily. As long as there's a small program that can be statically linked and run from a recovery medium to turn the log files into something that other tools can handle (or, ideally, can search them faster) then there's no issue. The problem is systems where you need the entire GUI and a big chunk of the userland applications stack working to be able to read logs.

I'm in the UK, with a pre-pay plan that costs 3p/min for calls, 2p/text, 1p/MB for data. Most of the time that I want to use data, I'm near WiFi, so I very rarely use any of the data.

I'm trying to understand your post. Do you think that almost $20/month it a small amount for a phone bill? I don't have a landline, do have a smartphone, and between SIP calls from it and mobile calls, SMS and data, I spend a little bit more per year than you do per month.

Bennett has been posting these long ramblings since a very long time before Dice bought Slashdot. Unfortunately, I think that your complaints are not likely to be heard because Slashdot seems to have had a policy for a long time of not recruiting editors from people who regularly read the site...

You might want to read some news from the last decade. Microsoft started paying dividends in 2003 and has paid them annually. When they started, investors were unhappy because it showed that they no longer thought that the best thing to do to increase value was to invest the money in the company.

You're a decade out. Microsoft's initial success was Microsoft BASIC, which was actually pretty good, back in the '70s. IBM wanted them to port BASIC to the PC and, when their negotiations for CP/M as the OS fell through, asked MS to write them an OS too. MS bought QDOS and rebranded it (and there was a lawsuit later about this, so it's probably the first instance of interesting business practices by MS). They also sold MS DOS to PC clone makers, which helped cement them in the market. At the time, there were a number of MS DOS clones that were better, but they made their other products depend on their own version to force others out of the market. By the '90s, with Windows 3.0 only running on MS DOS, they were getting pretty good at it...

That's generally how Amazon operates. Lose money to establish a dominant market position, then start working out how to make that profitable. People used to comment that their business was to lose money on each sale, but make up for it in volume. It was a facetious comment, but with a grain of truth: Amazon couldn't afford to sell books the way that they did until they were selling enough that they could own a lot of distribution infrastructure and amortise the costs.

Ballmer isn't in any place to complain. The XBox and Zune followed the same model when he was MS CEO. It didn't work so well for the Zune, but the XBox spent years losing money before it had a sufficiently large market share to be profitable.

But if he'd had a loaded gun, then after shooting him in the back with a shotgun then the attacker would have been able to upgrade his gun to something military issue (as we've all done in FPS games) and would have been a much more convincing threat when he got to Parliament. This omission has caused a lot of extra work for the PR folks trying to garner public support for removing more freedoms from the general public and so needs fixing before next time.

Indeed. People have been complaining about Bennett for about 10 years. The real complaint is that the editors keep posting his ramblings, not that he writes them in the first place.

Unless you are part of a protest group (organised or not) with more than about 25K members, you probably won't. The Party knows that people blowing off steam are not a threat, but are easy to turn into people who are a threat.

I don't disagree with this, but I wonder why you think that this means it has more liberty. Unless you happen to be one of the ones that controls most of the capital, of course.

The problem is, social networks invariable involve sharing data with your friends. With most of the current models, that means that you need to trust the server that your friends are using. Even for email and XMPP that's a problem: if half of your friends are using GMail for both then there's a good chance that Google can get a big chunk of our email and your social graph. Privacy preserving protocols are an ongoing research area, but I've not yet seen anyone trying to integrate them into a well-defined standard with a good reference implementation.