Yeah... Microsoft's idea of having a background on something, an idea which they invented, and no one else had ever done before!

This one single study is quite fascinating! I can't wait to see other, corroborating studies. Until then, of course, I'm going to withhold acceptance of any conclusions claimed by the study.

Excellent characterization of the problem.

One must keep in mind though, that not every distributor/production company is part of the Hollywood cartel, or necessarily agrees with their views on copyright.

...and?

Look, just because you orcs don't know how to have fun doesn't mean the rest of us should have to suffer! Why don't you go play with a palantir or something?

I think we might want to pay more attention to how much not urinating will cost...

I'm incapable of curing cancer, and the only thing I do with orphans is sacrifice them to Cthulhu, so do you really want me to stop reading your post?

These "German authorities" asked to audit Google's data, but nothing in there says that they ordered Google to publicize the findings or issue an apology. We'd need to know more about what happened there. Also, we don't know whether they ordered Google to let them review the data, or they simply requested it and Google said "yes."

Like the kind that cause a bridge to collapse, or a space shuttle to blow up shortly after launch?

As far as I can tell, Google posted this message without being forced to by any government. Most companies would keep this kind of thing quiet, or lie about it, especially if privacy advocates got wind of it. Google, within a few days of finding out about the issue, posts an APOLOGY for doing something that MIGHT have possibly damaged a few people, IF the information they collected had been leaked.

Unless we have reason to believe otherwise, Google screwed up, and as soon as they were aware of the mistake, took steps to rectify it and then went public about the mistake. If we get evidence that Google is lying about this, that's another story, but has there been any such evidence yet? I'm all for raking corporations over the coals when they make mistakes and don't own up, but how often do you see a giant corporation blurting out "mea culpa" like this?

Also:

It's not remotely silly. A week ago I discovered a DB table at my (multinational media conglomerate) company that had been silently logging data for -- wait for it -- three years. It wasn't any personal info, or data we needed, but everyone had forgotten about it. The idea of Google making a similar mistake is not "silly" at all.

You might be stupid for leaving your network open, just as you might be stupid for leaving your house door open, but it's still not okay to use either one of them without permission. I won't have a lot of sympathy for you, but I'm not going to let the intruder off the hook, either.

Facebook has 400 million active users (their own claim). That leaves 6.4 billion people who are not on Facebook, and I imagine most of them aren't toddlers or 70. :)

(Yes, I realize there are other social networks out there, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of humans are not using social networking websites.)

And yet, somehow people managed to be social back in the day before we had shared communication spaces like Facebook. If you wanted to hang out with your friends, you called them to see what they were doing and made plans.

Until Facebook is the only way people are willing to communicate, you still have the choice of not using it. (And even then, you can still choose not to use it, because no matter how pervasive it becomes, there's still going to be a substantial number of people who don't use it. We think of these things as universal, but that's usually because people tend to know people like them, and so if you use Facebook, so do the people you know. There are entire disconnected graphs of non-Facebook-users out there.)

Translation: "It's new and different, and I'm frightened by it."

In theory, you're right. In practice, are there any substantial number of cool apps that don't have an iPhone OS version? I have no idea, but I imagine that that's not the case. ("Cool" doesn't mean what you think is cool; you're a computer nerd and, like me, are uncool by definition :))

I'm not saying its popularity somehow makes it a better device; I know better than that. What I'm saying is that earlier you pointed out that it doesn't support Flash, as if to indicate that Apple made a mistake or doesn't know what they're doing. To me it seems fairly obvious that Apple does know what they're doing, even if what they're doing is being walled-garden assholes.