“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”

So Julian Assange is succeeding in forcing conspirators (according to him) to increase the cost of carrying out their conspiracies and perhaps eventually turn on itself out of paranoid?

Actually, that also sounds like one of those "the terrorists have already won" arguments, depending on your perspective of Assange's agenda.

Given that the whole of Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, does Amazon even need to pay them for this?

It is 50 million and 30 years old. Problem solved. You can check my workings.

You are getting angry over something you did not even bother to understand. Google logs wireless access points with GPS data and signal strength in order to provide location-detection functions in Google Maps.

How else do you think an iPod touch magically figures out its location without a GPS receiver?

And Google is not even the first or only one to use Wi-Fi signals as a poor man's GPS. http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/

Yes. All rich people are rich because they worked hard and all poor people are poor because they did not. And yes, how much you earn is perfectly proportional to how much you contribute to society. This explains Wall Street, the best and brightest of your great nation, perfectly.

After all, it makes much more sense to let the country's infrastructure fall apart and the children of the working poor be left uneducated, than to pay taxes to invest in the country you live in. The tax money you save can be used to pay for a business class flight out of the country when it turns into shit. You can then retire and enjoy functioning infrastructure built with other people's tax money.

It really does make complete sense from an individual perspective. I guess progressivism fails because it assumes that people can actually care about anyone but themselves.

While Catcher in the Rye is the original source, Ghost in the Shell is the more relevant reference. In the series, everyone possesses cyberbrains that can be remotely hacked to modify the person's sensory data in real-life. The Laughing Man (think Anonymous of the future) used this to mask his face with a smiling logo containing the Salinger quotation above. Literally no one could ever see his face, except for homeless beggars who are too poor to afford cyberbrain implants.

The Eye Toy for PS2 is actually one of the most successful console accessories ever, selling 10.5 million units worldwide despite a slow start. Apparently it was actually novel and useful enough for its time to generate grassroot interest. The failure you are looking for is The Eye for PS3.

An embassy which was run basically as a CIA safe house plotting to sabotage the Iranian government. Citation: Legacy of Ashes

http://mora.jp/artist/80307744/80006846/?cpid=sony.co.jp

This example has a design no more complicated than an English website serving similar purpose (in this case, music retail). It mere appears to be more cluttered because the Japanese writing system is more complex.

A similar observation can be made with regards to Chinese, which is even more compact than Japanese due to the lack of a phonetic alphabet. Take a look at Yahoo:
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://www.yahoo.com.cn/
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/

The hanzi/kanji writing system simply does not lend itself to minimalistic designs in the same way that can be achieved by the Roman alphabet. This is partially why many modern brands in Japan make liberal use of English in their designs and typesets.

That said, it is also true that Chinese and Japanese web designers appear to follow a set of standards rather different from the Web 2.0 design philosophies. Many of them still like to use <TABLE> to format their layouts.

What's the use of all the private-insurer "efficiency" if they prefer to use it to screw you over for one more dollar?
And I say "efficiency" because health insurance companies in US already have one of the highest overhead costs in the world, so you can hardly called it efficient.

The next step is obviously to let PageRank select the Nobel winners and cut out the middleman.

Since it is way behind schedule, they are just making up for lost time.