But you know what you are looking for, confident that you know what you want and are willing to invest time to weigh all the pro's and con's.

A friend of mine asked about getting a new iPhone or a SGII yesterday on Facebook. After a host of replies he went out and got a SGII. He trusts the opinions of his friends more than the various reviews and technical specs he would find at Google and Amazon.

I do doubt this type of 'search' will impact Google's bottom line though, previously he would simply ask for opinions in person. But I can imagine it would be lucrative to place an iPhone or SGII advertisement next to such a question on Facebook.

Indeed, the providers aren't at fault. It could be said that they didn't put enough effort into the court case, but even that is unfair considering nobody besides BREIN expected this to happen.

You don't have a choice, a company (or person) must comply with a court order, no matter how crazy. The alternative would lead to huge fines and contempt of court. This is the way the law works.

Unless you're the likes of Microsoft of course. In that case a well-placed campaign contribution can help make the problems go away. But with all the faults of the Dutch justice system, I'm glad that bribes are more conspicuous over here.

There's still the high court. It's not a done deal.

This. The Wall is what gives users a reason to go back to Facebook. You don't want to call everyone every day, you choose the people you want to keep informed about, get a look into their lives and know what they are up to without having to bother them.

Of course, MySpace and Friendster had the same but Facebook has both the clean implementation and the reach to keep people hooked. Unless they do something stupid they will remain king of the social networks for quite a while.

concentrate on systems that encourage one time reasonable payment for good ideas that become free, or partially tax subsidize informational works by merit and by vote

I think that such positive (dare I say it) government-rewarded incentives are the only way forward when it comes to rewarding authors for their efforts.

Instead of subsidizing the poor and instead of harming ordinary people who simply share information freely, the government should encourage this sharing and reward the efforts by providing benefits to authors who have made works that all can enjoy. Of course, the question then becomes which authors may benefit from the tax-payers money, but this is a much more positive forward-thinking approach than using said tax-payers money to seek out and penalize individuals.

Marx would be proud, his vision of communism would only work an enlightened society where such a construction would be possible. A society without scarcity.

Not holding my breath...

There is no way that we can physically count hundreds of votes in 45 minutes. It would take several hours; now multiply this by our collective $41/hr salary ($11 for the chairman, $10 for each of the other three) and multiply that by the tens of thousands of election districts across New York State. Where is that money going to come from?

From the money saved by not buying e-voting machines? I doubt purchase and 'support' would cost less than a few hours of your time, evened out over a number of years/elections.

Another vote for Hamilton, the Void series was awesome.

I hate marketing stuff, I hate business stuff, and I really hate "networking" .. what I love is building software.

Hear hear!

I've been self-employed for quite a while now. It's brilliant in the good times and less so during the hard times, but overall I wouldn't ever want to be a wage slave. Each their own.

Marketing, networking... I'm terrible in it. Oh I try, and I see my fellow self-employed programmers try. I can fake it pretty well with clients, the suit and slides I can cope with. I've learned to deal with the bullshit and others enjoy my cut-to-the-chase mentality. But I'm terrible in anything with a large group or anything related to marketing.

I'm glad I know non-geeks that are much better in it than I am. For them, they enjoy giving presentations, networking and making folders. They do it with the passion that I have when I'm developing software, and it shows.

So, now I've partnered with one of those people and together we're building up a new business next to our own. It's still early, but we trust each other and we're doing well. There's still bullshit, but we both do the work we enjoy doing and are both prospering.

So for all you wage slaves: keep an open mind. If the corporate bullshit gets too much know that there are ways to do what you enjoy without going to the dark side.

And the reviewer's book has the same publisher as this book (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media). How blatantly obvious can a shill be?

At least Taco would have the decency to not state that the reviewer is also an author...

Perhaps people want to reinvent the wheel because they think it simply can be done better?

This is evolution in progress. New things come up, some live, some die. Some old things come back with a different purpose and thrive. The field as a whole keeps getting better and more efficient, sometimes taking a step back but later pushing forward again.

If fish complained that there were too many means of propulsion and everyone had to stick with fins we'd never have evolved.

The only alternative to evolution is stagnation. But I'll get off your lawn now.

There can never come a day when the US government cannot pay it's debts, because no matter how bad things get they always have the Option of Last Resort: Print as much money as they need.

Printing money and inflating currencies is the norm, but printing a couple of USD $1TB bills to pay off China would indeed piss off everyone having money. It would be a blessing for (people and countries) debt though.

This is also the reason why Greece doesn't have any options left and why the Euro-zone keeps bailing them out. It's less costly than inflating the Euro with multi-digit inflation rates, which was the pre-Euro way to escape debt.