You're pretty much a Greek in all but character encoding, as far as I can tell from your oral attachment to the public nipple.
And let me stipulate that I think that's perfectly acceptable as a choice. My chief gripe is the way MY tax dollars are taken to pour down the same little endless circular holes for the $18 trillionth time, while you are all on your high-horse about it.

The man is sane. Apparently this terrifies you, and you have to play some "appeal to authority" card.
That you have precisely zero (0) of substance to say on the man's actual words shouts the impotence of your argument.

Nah, I'm just repeating what I had in economics class. You've become markedly more caustic in the last couple of weeks. Can we explore why?

Social networking is actually a good idea I think, but not with the proprietary platforms we've had until now. Something like Diaspora, a decentralized platform, is what we really need; that way people can control what they share, with whom, and they control the platform itself (since you run it on your own webserver, or one you sign up for to have an account on, but your data is your own and is easily moved to a competing service).

Having everything all centralized on one site with no democratization is making it usable because there's no real consumer choice or control.

Because you have a choice whether you want to use Facebook or something else or nothing. No one is forcing you to use Facebook. Your dumb relatives posting stupid pictures of themselves is not a compelling reason to use Facebook; it's not like trying to be a computer professional and refuse to use email (which would prevent you from getting a job in the field) or normal job posting sites.

I use both; Google on my phone and HERE on my car's built-in nav unit. Being able to use the car's system where there's no or poor cell coverage is definitely a big plus. However, the HERE data is old and incomplete as far as businesses. If you know the street address of where you want to go, it's great. However, if you just want to look up all the Walmarts nearby and pick one to go to, it tries to direct me to one that's an hour away for some odd reason. And forget about finding some small restaurant; if it's been there for decades, it's probably on HERE, but if it's fairly new, forget it.

Google Maps' biggest strength is that it combines navigation with an up-to-date business directory. I can search for "Italian restaurant" within a certain area, see all the businesses that match that description, then look at them and immediately see peoples' Google and Yelp reviews, so I can avoid places that suck. Then I can just tap one button and have it navigate me to that place, without having to mess around with street addresses.

I wish my car's system could integrate the business-directory stuff from my phone (assuming I have coverage at that moment), and then switch me over to the car's navigation after it gets a street address.

GM engineers are famous for their complete incompetence. Just look at the ignition-key fiasco. There's no way in hell I'd buy a GM. I even thought about it once; I thought that a few decades was enough to forgive them for their past atrocities in automobiles, and that their new cars were worth taking a look at again, and then the ignition-key fiasco came up in the news. That was the end of that idea.

couldn't Microsoft reasonably anticipate that it would turn into a giant write-down?

I think people at our level have a hard time imagining just how much hubris these top-level corporate execs have. You don't usually get to that level without being some kind of egomaniac, sociopath, or both.

Ultimately FB primarily has turned into a conglomerate of a desperate small-business owners way to try to push their bad ideas on their friends, a place to post pictures of your children and a news aggregator. I don't think it has much of a future on its present vector either. It will simply last longer because it is slightly less dangerous.

I disagree. What makes you think that people won't always want a place to post pictures of their brats and other shameless self promotion ("look at the meal I ate tonight! we just watched [movie]! I'm listening to [song] now!")? Or that people won't want a news aggregator? Or that small-business owners won't want a forum to push their bad ideas on friends? FB can continue indefinitely just providing a place for all this.

Another thing I've seen on FB is political chit-chat: a lot of wackos use it as a de-facto blog to post all their dumb conspiracy theories and anti-Obama nuttery (not that Obama is great, but these people contend that FEMA is setting up concentration camps and similar nuttery), presumably because it's cheaper and easier than simply setting up a Wordpress blog. I guess if you're dumb enough to believe in FEMA concentration camps, then setting up your own website with Wordpress is simply too much to ask. Plus FB makes it really easy to share and get the word out with their "likes".

Facebook is still a slow cooker, so the frogs don't notice.

This is wrong, and insulting to frogs. Contrary to popular opinion, a frog will not allow itself to be boiled alive, and when the water temperature gets too hot, will simply jump out of the pot. It's an old wives' tale that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if you turn the temperature up slow enough.

It's only humans that are so stupid that they'll accept horrendous conditions if you make the change slow enough.

They knew where the shooter lived (because of camera and GPS). The shooter had no idea who the drone owner was until they drove up to his house.

As I said, they weren't "neighbors".

I cannot tell whether you're outing yourself as politically left of damn_registrars, or just trolling. Yours is a refined temper tantrum. I suggest you look at Greece, and ask yourself if your Nietzsche-Piven "Will to Diaper" is going to succeed in crying your way to a Socialist Paradise.
Your safety net is a false god, and your austerity an ersatz satan. But sheep are going to believe the lies of Socialists, and culture burned for political power, until the culture gets so weak it implodes completely.
Childish blame is the low road, rather than responsibility. By all means: take it.

So, the Senator who served in Iraq and has the Ivy league degree is a clown on the take. In contrast, the anonymous blowhard on /. is the straight shooter. I guess that such a scenario is possible. Can you elaborate on why you should be believed over the Senator, please?

That works well for 1-2 billion people and not so well for the remaining 5-6 billion. While we're working on that universal language, a few universal "hieroglyphics" are useful and there's no law against writing elevator next to the elevator sign. Like say these, these, these or these.

That said, allergens may be useful for store products but that's usually half the markings on a restaurant menu which typically can be stuff like vegetarian, vegan, hot, garlic and so on. And for many complete dishes many will contain lots of allergens, it's probably easier to use a negative marking like these. I don't quite see what existing use case these symbols are supposed to cover, yes it could be added to the ingredients list but you need to solve other issues like how do you prominently say no allergens and not unmarked?