I think that "wiki" aspect of Wave was one of the things that made people who got it, like it, but there were so many other things like the way it would keep track of which bits of the wave you had read, draw your attention to new bits, allow you to embed active forms and gadgets, etc. And the ability to see all simultaneous edits, with no exclusive locking, was superior to most wiki software which will, if you are lucky, let you know if someone else is editing the page before you edit it yourself.

Etherpad was/is similar, and indeed, swallowed by Google to see what they could learn from it, but only worked with plain text and not all the more useful rich content.

I think of Wave as having great potential for collaboration ; an app that merges the ability to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously with both other humans AND automated processes.

You could say the same thing about soda containing phosphoric acid, or any of a number of other habits of western living. Correlation is not causation.

If they have a means of averaging all the different GPS tracks they receive to produce their data, that wouldn't matter so much. You could even crowdsource this ; have a task list for people who are registered as "Open Street Mappers" in a particular region to go and recollect given data points to improve their accuracy.

Chuck Norris doesn't recreate data, he roundhouse kicks the quantum fabric of the universe and it's probability waveform jumps into an excited state, then collapses into the state he desired.

Of course, this has only happened once. You may have heard that it made a Big Bang, but it was more like a Big Meaty Thwack.

Speak for yourself ; for my work, which has some fairly heavy data sets, I muddle through on a 64GB SSD. I'm tempted to upgrade to a 128GB model, because it's sometimes a bit tight and I'd like to have room for my music collection (12GB).

Games ; I currently have a 1TB partition devoted to game installs. It's not remotely full yet.

Video : this is the biggie. My HTPC currently has 1TB of storage as well. Paradoxically, I think it would probably be better if it had less storage - we just tend to accumulate a huge load of old crap that we're never going to watch. It might be nice to rip all my DVDs for instant access, but that's a pretty tedious task.

Backup : I don't back up my video, because it's not that critical to me (all being broadcast video, it came free, so I don't value it much). Because my work drives are small, I don't need much backup. My current 2TB external drive has more than half it's space free, and I'm not selective about what I back up, and have a 3 month retention time.

I have about 2.5TB of storage lying around on my desk not even wired to anything. Most of it is a single 1.5TB drive.

Now ; my backup strategy is not sufficiently paranoid. While most of my work is stored elsewhere in VCS repositories anyway, I could conceivably be inconvenienced by a failure. So I can see a need for a second backup device, which would need to be 500GB of storage. I currently have 5 times this lying around on my desk, so my problem isn't storage, it's apathy.

The people who do need all this storage, I'm sad to say, are probably torrenting a lot, because that's the only way a consumer accumulates that much data that they don't have a read-only media copy of already.

I'm more interested in knowing where he works that values programmers the same as managers... ok, it's not an accurate representation of their relative value, but managers get all sulky if you suggest they work for minimum wage and tips.

Austerity is a tool to move power and money into corporate hands. This is why the IMF always insists on it when they offer emergency loans.

They embark on a systematic program of fucking up public services until they collapse, then corporations can pick up the slack and start turning the screw.

It's a lesser distraction to not to have to focus on the UI, but I think even conversation with a person in the car can adversely affect your driving ; if spacial concepts come up for discussion, especially. I myself notice that my driving can waver when conversing with my wife.

I might be ok with passively consuming text messages, especially on some kind of HUD (maybe Google Glasses when they emerge), but I personally avoid initiating communications whenever possible if I'm driving.

I think he might take a more practical viewpoint, given that roughly 9% of the UK population use marijuana.

It's self-evident that sending all drug users to prison would reduce drug use, just by denying them access to supply. But it's simply not practical to do so. Our prisons are already overcrowded, so you'd have to divert quite a portion of the national economy into building, maintaining, and staffing prisons, and also suffer the removal of 9% of the population from the economy - currently, we have 0.001% incarceration rates.

So, given that incarcerating all drug offenders will essentially destroy the economy of the UK and turn us into an Island Stalag Luft, we have to ask the question, is there a less harmful way of dealing with the problems involved with drugs? Is it cheaper for the state to safely feed the habits of drug users, given the cost in social disruption and healthcare costs they cause through theft and the use of poor quality, unregulated product? Which solution causes the least amount of harm?

Whereas a politician stating that "Drug use is immoral and you should be locked up!" isn't providing any kind of justification. Pick one, he :

i) Hasn't thought it through. Should people who don't actually think about what they are saying actually be in charge of anything? Note that in this one I am including all the subspecies of not thinking things through, including religion, moral outrage, fear of a different culture, etc.

ii) HAS thought it through. Has a financial interest in the prison-industrial complex. Since 9% of the UK population is a drug offender, there is an effectively endless supply of "product" for the commercial prison system, since as we have already postulated, incarcerating all drugs users isn't actually possible given that it would probably plunge the country into revolution.

It makes far more sense to insist on locking up people who commit actual offences (other than just possessing drugs) to feed their drug habit. It makes even more sense to try and work out what causes drug habits and how to fix THAT.

Taking the software analogy further, I strongly believe that the law should be kept in Git, and amendments merged in, instead of the current practise of suffixing the text to the end of the bill, essentially making people run `patch amendment.diff` in their head.

In addition, you'd be able to `git blame` the right person for each part of the law, have thorough law amendment reviews, and spot the filibuster rammed between two paragraphs about providing more funds for kittens.