Having supported BB business users before and during a transition to iPhones, I can say that in most cases a user's satisfaction with BB was inversely proportional to their exposure to Android/iOS. In short, BB users may simply not know any better.

So what's your solution? The way you paint it, we're screwed if we're allowed to make decisions for ourselves and we're screwed if the rich white guys make 'em for us. Who is supposed to make the decisions?

If anything, I've always seen Facebook and Twitter as a distraction from reality (in the US). Perhaps the reasons too few people care about US foreign policy, Wikileaks information, and voting is because they're busy playing Farmville or catching up on the lasted Royal Wedding details.

I've made it a point to avoid Facebook over the years for a lot of reasons. Chiefly because of privacy concerns. I've recently found myself single, and with a pretty lacking social network. With Facebook being *the* place to build these networks, I've had to reconsider the downside to whoring out my personal data. Perhaps the question should not be how we keep the data out of the hands of government and advertisers, but how to adjust to an age (and adjust a government) where nothing is personal.

Did Slashdot take up trolling?

This is just one example of how innovation is stifled. Technology is perhaps society's most powerful tool. Yet the aged and uninitiated continue to dictate how and when we wield that power. It will be many years before technology is set free from the grasp of the ignorant.

I have all my emails backed up in a 4GB .pst!

Computers prompting user action in order to compute is never going to be the solution.

If the earth is 4.5+ billion years old, how can anyone be so blatantly ignorant as to assume that we can put stock in numbers like "the hottest decade on record" based off 200 years of climate history? I lean heavily toward environmental conservation, but for my own reasons. No one has ever been able to answer this question for me.