Everything you say is true, but the tone is way too rude. Srsly.

Yes, if by "himself" you mean the present generation. Following generations might have a less positive perspective.

...but did I calculate correctly? Would the volume really fill a 7.7 by 7.7 km 2 m deep pool? Amazing how diligently man destroys the planet. I for one welcome our new extremophile overlords.

Since the article is creativecommonsed I took the freedom to post a German translation of it on my blog. Take a look if you like. Danke.

Only because three letter agencies do not have optimized there Hadoop instances yet does not mean your data will not get analyzed soon. There is only on reliant way of protecting your privacy and that is to not leave too many trails. Period.

The downside, my friend, is that advertisement has one single goal: To manipulate you into spending money you wouldn't normally spend. There is no such thing as good advertising. (Sometimes ads can be slightly informative and/or entertaining but that is merely a side effect.)

Funny, stumbled upon PLAYtern two weeks ago and found it cool. But what I wanted to do was posting videos of me playing Zork on YouTube so I wrote a PHP script that converts ttyrec recordings into a bunch of PNGs and an AviSynth script that generates a video (demo). Different TrueType fonts and much of the VT100 command set is supported but I haven't yet found the time to clean up the code. If you are interested voice yourself and maybe I make a release out of it.

Not that the area above lake Geneva was one of the most crowded airspaces in Europe or anything.

Still, I welcome our rain-making overlords.

What's the point in taking risks to blow a whistle if the guy you entrusted your information with can't be bothered to do anything with it?

There are two things an architect of a whistleblowing platform must never do: revealing the identity of informants and accepting submissions without publishing them. I despise Domscheit-Berg for keeping WikiLeaks from publishing that data. Who knows what risks were taken to get this information on that hard disk.

Because there are developments that require years and millions of $, think pharmaceuticals.

Software must not be patentable. Why? Because with software patents it is possible to monopolize mathematical concepts, see http://vimeo.com/11206098

What you are talking about isn't freedom but possibilities and a completely different matter. For beginners an idiot-proof user interface is the most important thing, for advanced users it is freedom. This is nicely reflected in iOS/Android sales.

"This video contains content from PIAS, SME und Kontor New Media. It is not available in your country." This is what Germans see when trying to watch the video. Just a reminder that Germany is a third world country youtubewise.

Please keep in mind that there is a difference between isolated data and data linked (or just linkable) to other data sets. And no, that's not "the same", it is a different quality.

Also, it's different if the data is collected on servers of someone who will never give it to someone else unless legally forced to or someone who will pass it on to certain agencies or even sell it to the highest bidder.