The lesson "we" continually fail to learn is that not everything is a vindication of one's favorite economic-religious theory. Every time there is an increase in demand for something, investments pour into the relevant industries far in excess of that demand, and most of those ventures fail before a handful of them succeed and become the dominant players. There's nothing magical about either the market or subsidies. Subsidies are just market forces, like weather influencing crop prices or international trade policy influencing imports and exports. The theoretical free market in which prices are not "manipulated" does not and cannot exist in the real world because it is ultimately based on human beings, and humans manipulate everything they can. It doesn't matter whether the influx of cash comes from subsidies or sales: companies benefit while the cash flows in, and they suffer when it stops flowing. Money is money.

Email is simply not a medium I would even consider using for sending sensitive information precisely because there are countless places between me and my correspondents where a message could be intercepted. In such circumstances, encrypting my email would simply alert anyone watching that something sensitive is being transmitted. And since the only "anyone watching" that I'd worry about is the government, why bother attracting the attention? If they want to know what I'm sending, all they have to do is wait for me to go to work, enter my house, and install a keylogger on my box. It's not like they even need warrants nowadays for that crap.

If I was going to do something I wanted to hide from the government -- and let's face it, that would almost have to be a major federal felony -- and if I absolutely had to have documentation and accomplices, none of it would be in electronic form to begin with, never mind transmitted over the public internet. Encryption is useful for governments and major corporations that are basically above the law. It's not terribly useful for private citizens unless you're just trying to hide your porn folder from your roommate.

...but I stopped counting how many times the author recommended trying to cost people their jobs for actually doing them after the third time. I'd like to offer something more insightful in response, but I'm afraid I'm left with "What a smug asshole."

Same as every other war. Whenever the arms industry, the mass media, and whatever industries want the raw resources of the purported attacker manage to get the public frothed up enough that opportunists in the executive and legislative branches feel secure about being reelected if they start a war. There's not a lot of point in coming up with cover stories ahead of time.[1] There's always plenty of time between the campaign contributions and the actual deployment of the fleets to test ad campaigns and slogans with the focus groups.

[1] Unless you're a think tank or a private military contractor that's scored a nice, fat, no-bid contract to come up with lurid scenarios that can be used to drive news coverage to shore up public support for even more military spending.

That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.

I will credit Google with letting people retrieve their data, but its usefulness is greatly reduced without the applications it was designed for.

They call it the cloud because people have gotten wise to being offered low prices on the Brooklyn Bridge.

This is about as newsworthy as Ron Paul declaring that he plans to remodel my kitchen. Barring a long series of astronomically unlikely events, he's not going to get anywhere close to having the authority to do so. Providing passing entertainment on Slashdot during a slow news day may well be his high water mark.

As far as I can tell, we're hard-wired to derive pleasure from independence and self-reliance, probably because it's an advantageous trait in evolutionary terms.

Many years ago, I was into vintage Volkswagens for a while. As anyone who has owned one of these beasts can tell you, they're extremely unreliable and require more or less constant maintenance to keep running, and unless you're prepared to do it yourself, you'd better have a lot of money to hand to the dwindling number of mechanics who know how to work on the damn things. I had never worked on cars before or been particular interested in doing so, but I adapted to necessity, and after a while, I got good enough at it to keep my ancient VW running most of the time.

On one hand, it was annoying to have the thing break down by the side of the road, but on the other, there was a really quite profound sense of satisfaction in being able to open the engine compartment, figure out what was wrong, fix it, and pull back into traffic. In practical terms, this was pointless, of course -- my time and money would have been better spent on buying something more reliable, which I eventually did -- but the emotional payoff surprised me with its intensity. I've heard similar sentiments come from hobbyists of all kinds, farmers, craftsmen, etc.

All that said, I'm not sure it's the main factor in OSS evangelism. The type of person who programs for fun is generally attracted to exploring complexity and mastering it, and the parallel seems to be more like what puzzle fans of all kinds get out of their hobby. When someone tries to convince someone else to use a complex (if powerful) tool over the droolproof commercial product they're currently satisfied with, it has a lot more in common with trying to turn them on to a favorite hobby than with an expression of self-reliance.

There was way too much experimentation and innovation going on in the NoSQL world. This should help kill it.

This is like asking whether nose-picking is going to obsolete butt-scratching. I mean, sure, there's an answer ("probably not"), but even if it does, the only discernible effect will be the usual six-month lag before TV journalists catch up to whatever bit of jargon replaces "tweet".

I hate to hit you with this, but the whole "shadow of a [reasonable] doubt" standard applies to criminal cases, not civil suits. Even in criminal cases, we're talking about reasonable doubts, not the sort of infinitely elastic justifications that small, grouchy children in the back seat on road trips give about how they really didn't touch each other. In a civil case, the standard is the preponderance of the evidence which, even if it's on your side, will cost you an arm and a leg to prove, with the usual result being that you'll settle for an arm to be able to keep the leg.

Not that I would ever do such a thing -- cough, cough -- but if I was pirating mp3s and wanted to store them on a remote server under the control of someone else, which is not very smart to begin with, I sure as hell wouldn't pick a service run by the music industry or one of its primary partners like, just for the sake of argument, Apple.

Ergo, I read this story as an excessively wordy way to say that, yes, if you are dumb as a fucking rock, the odds that you'll get caught doing something illegal are higher than average.

Another disillusioned techie writes another anti-tech book about the way technology has made the general public dumber than it already is. Film at eleven.

People were, by and large, already dumber than rocks. This is, after all, the same species that wandered around in its current form for about 200,000 years before anyone noticed that seeds make plants, and only figured out in the last century or so that disease is caused by microorganisms and not evil spirits -- and still, a lot of people aren't convinced. The only thing that has changed is that people who previously did or said stupid things in private can now share them with the world on Facebook and YouTube.

That said, it's nice to see that the author is is a technology professional. Most of these books are written by liberal arts majors who are embittered by the presence of iPhones at their poetry slams.

Any time there's a story like this -- discounting the ones that are obviously bullshit, purely theoretical, and/or glaring violations of the Second Law -- there's a certain number of people who pile on with comments that boil down to, "It's not perfect for all possible applications, so screw it."

Get used to it. We've already done most of the easy, general stuff. We'll stumble across some more every great once in a while, but from here on out, most of it is going to be hard-won and highly specific, and when it seems like we've made a giant breakthrough, it's going to be the result of countless threads of research converging, not some singular Eureka! moment.

Of course, it's always been that way to some extent. People notice the first time something is accomplished -- the light bulb, powered flight, organ transplants -- but never hear about or pay attention to the innumerable incremental improvements that are made after the initial splash, even if our daily lives depend on them in ways too numerous to mention. And that still ignores the fact that the "initial breakthrough" is usually the result of years or generations of tireless work.

Yeah, it'll be great to have laser ignition in my engine, better mileage, lower emissions, yada yada yada. These are good things and would be tremendously beneficial, but I can think of a dozen applications off the top of my head that could use cheap, powerful lasers, most of which involve manufacturing, including desktop manufacturing. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a gazillion medical and scientific applications that would benefit as well.

Physical force is certainly entertaining, but it's a waste of effort. If you want to destroy any magnetic recording medium, all you have to do is heat it past its Curie point. In the case of hard drives, a decently hot fire will do nicely. A bunch of waste paper and cardboard in a steel drum will burn more than hot enough. If you're still bent on brute force, disassemble the drive and use sandpaper on the platter surfaces. Dropping them into hydrochloric acid will also do the trick -- the hardware store grade they call muriatic acid is good enough -- though you'll have more to clean up that way. Punching a few holes in the case and dropping it into a bucket of bleach will probably work as well, as will any strong oxidizer.

I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and the NSA are amused at the amount of paranoia they've been able to generate in this area.