Not entirely representative, but on my Jabber roster about 30% are Google people, and about half of them are Google employees. I wonder how many Google Talk users have no non-Google people on their roster, and will be happy to learn that Google has just decided that they can no longer talk to them.

No, it's like how convicted pedophiles are not allowed to live or hang out near schools.

Obviously one has to draw a line somewhere, but comparing a computer to food is obviously not a rational comparison.

(And FYI, the analogy would be "People accused of lock picking are not allowed to have lockpicks". Which should be obvious.)

First off, £350 is probably not particularly out of line for the cost to process the records. If we were talking £350000 pounds, yeah, that would look like an attempt at censorship. But there's nothing pecular about £350. Secondly, if anyone in the media had felt it was even remotely newsworthy, they would have paid it. The media pays processing costs for records all the time. All that this means is that most news agencies consider Warg a non-story.

Warg's restrictions are special specifically because the crime his charged with is hacking. Banning a graphing calculator is probably overreach, but it's understandable why they'd want to keep him away from computers.

Sort of like the last leak, the "Kissinger Cables", that were publicly accessible data that journalists and historians have been making use of for years, which he downloaded, reformatted, and set on the Wikileaks site.

New slogan suggestion: Wikileaks: We Open Governments (by taking the data they've already released, running it through a couple python scripts, putting it on our site, and calling it something new)

Do you want to point out something that was wrong in my post, or are you just trolling?

Ripples occur when there are rapid stops. A very gradual slowing down should really minimize the downstream effects, providing other drivers are paying attention and not following so closely that they have to slam on their brakes when the speed of the car in front of them decreases even the slightest.

Everyone seems to believe that, but it's not really true. Here's what some Japanese researchers found (watch the video):

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/those-inexplicable-traffic-jams/

It's the idiots who accelerate to the last possible moment to close the gap with the guy slowing down in front of them who are causing the ripples.

A common misconception. Some Japanese scientists demonstrated, using several cars on a closed track, that even when people are trying their best to maintain a constant speed and distance ... they simply can't. Those "ripples" occur regardless of driver behavior when there is sufficient traffic.

If the problem is wealth inequality, then you don't make it an explicit cap, you make it a ratio. Say, no person should be able to control more wealth than 100 times the median. That would mean, today, that a wealthy person would be in a position to live comfortably and never have to work again, which sounds like it's sufficient incentive for the people whose only motivation for doing things that benefit society is collecting personal wealth (I've never met any such people, but according to posts above they exist). And, if someone really wants more, then the incentives are set up so that they can get a lot more by increasing the median wealth a small amount...

Uh, no. An API is not subject to copyright, and so you can't sue someone for writing code to an API or reimplementing that API. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can use a specific service in a specific way. Google could not stop someone else implementing the YouTube APIs on a different media hosting site.

I think Microsoft has been quite clever here. They're now in the situations where they're giving their customers something that they want, and Google is telling them that they can't. They can't really lose: if they can keep offering the app in the same format, then they can provide a better experience than other platforms. If they can't, then they have some good material for their next round of anti-Google adverts.

Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

I have a smartphone, and I have never paid for data on it. There is a single setting to toggle that says 'don't use data except on WiFi' and then I'm in the same situation as you but without having to carry two devices around. I'm not sure what the advantage of having two devices would be.

It's a distinction between a federated and a proprietary network. When you make a telephone call, your mobile operator may or may not be the responsible for the far end. They are selling you access to a world wide telephone network, parts of which are operated by many companies even within a single country. The rules for this network are defined in part by the ITU and in part by the national laws of the various participating countries. In most of the western world, these place limits on who is allowed to listen in to messages. In contrast, Microsoft is selling you access to a private network that is owned and operated entirely by them.

The laws apply to federated networks because you may not have a direct business relationship with the carriers for a potentially large part. They do not need to apply for non-federated private services, because you have a direct business relationship with the supplier, in this case Microsoft.

I very much doubt the law says that, if a person sends up to a service that will relay messages for them and explicitly states in the ToS that it may read those messages, that the service is not allowed to read the messages. It's not a service like the post or the telephone system that is regulated under common carrier legislation, it is a proprietary service that stores and forwards messages between subscribers.

It's an interesting thought experiment. You can see a lot of what happens from the current tax exemption rules for charities in the US: most people with surplus income give to things that will directly benefit themselves (educational trusts that run schools predominantly for wealthy people, heart disease charities, and so on). Of course, most people wouldn't donate anything. There's a reason why economists have the term 'the tragedy of the commons' and it's not because they invented a hypothetical scenario, it is based on large numbers of historical examples.