At about 75%, from what I read on the black hat forums.

There's a whole social spam ecosystem out there now, with tools and services for spamming Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Yelp, Tumblr, Youtube, random blogs, and for retro types, Myspace. It's not just a few people doing this. It's an industry with a supply chain. Read my "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" paper for an overview. If it feeds into Google search rankings, it's being spammed.

Most electronic payment systems have very short lives.

• Exxon Speedpass (1997-2004 for uses other than gas stations) Tried, then dumped by McDonalds.
• RFID chip embedded in arm (2004)Used in some nightclubs in Barcelona.
• i-Button (1994) A ring or fob mounted contact-type ID device. Used for bus ticketing in Turkey, and for login security elsewhere.
• EMV Contact-type smart cards. (1995-date) Popular outside the US, especially for stored-value applications.
• American Express ExpressPay (2005). Tried, then dumped by McDonalds. Still used by OfficeMax.
• T-Cash (2011) Send money from your cell phone. Tried in India.

France used to require government approval for children's names when registering births. This was a francophone thing, not a uniqueness thing. But it could have been expanded to use a uniqueness check. Corporation and D/B/A names have to be unique within their jurisdiction.

Names in China used to be disambiguated by asking "What is your village?" This is no longer very helpful.

Low usage by 18-24 year olds may be due to heavy unemployment in that group. Social networking is fine for getting people together to go out, but if you have to organize anything complex, you need a more persistent medium. Try organizing something more complex than meeting at a bar over SMS. Even trying to organize something over Facebook is tough. It's fine for casual chat, but the "everything scrolls off" approach is no good when there are actual tasks to do and track.

For big, complex, highly structured projects, there are decent collaboration tools. Open source projects have had forums systems coupled to bug trackers coupled to source code management for years. There are comparable systems for specific problems, like Autodesk Vault for mechanical engineers and Alienbrain for game developers. Tools for medium-sized loose collaboration have been built, but haven't developed big followings. (Google Wave was supposed to be usable for that.) Those still tend to be run via e-mail.

There's also the problem that single-source "cloud" services tend to go away after a few years. If you were using Google Wave for anything important, you were screwed. This sounds like a case for an open source project, but open source will never get "user friendly" right.

As one of the people who was active in TCP design back then (see my RFCs), this article sounds weird.

First, the ARPAnet was not "the Internet". The ARPAnet was a closed backbone network, with flow control and guaranteed delivery of packets. When hosts talked directly to ARPAnet nodes (IMPs), the backbone provided reliable transport. When Ethernet to ARPAnet gateways were created, the possibility of packet loss in gateways appeared, and congestion packet loss became a problem.

The TCP/IP implementation from Berkeley in BSD wasn't the first; it was about the fourth. We at Ford Aerospace used 3COM's UNET, which was a very early TCP/IP. I had to overhaul it, adding ICMP. UDP, congestion control (that's why I have those RFCs on network congestion), and checking for invalid packets. After that it could talk reliably over fast or slow links and to other valid implementations. We had a real "bit bucket"; all packets that didn't meet the spec were logged, and I used to check that every day and send out notes to other TCP implementers. Mark Crispin at Stanford was responsible for the PDP-10/DEC-20 implementation, and we talked a lot as we made two very different implementations play well together. I was impressed with Mark; unlike many developers today, he never blamed someone else when his end was at fault. I once sent a packet to Stanford which caused the implementation there to crash the mainframe, and I apologized to him. He wrote back that it was his fault if his mainframe crashed, not mine.

The Berkeley people had originally assumed that TCP/IP would use Ethernet as a backbone and didn't worry too much about interoperability with other TCP implementations. Berkeley UNIX up to 4.3BSD could barely operate over a slow or congested link, and interoperated badly with other TCP implementations. The initial release of 4.3BSD would only talk to DEC-20 implementations for 4 hours out of every 8, because the sequence number arithmetic in BSD had been botched. (I had to fix that, which was a painful 3 days.)

Van Jacobson was responsible for bringing the BSD TCP up to an acceptable level of behavior under heavy traffic. That was a few years later, around 1988.

3COM discontinued UNET in the early 1980s, since UC Berkeley, funded by the Government, was giving away a comparable product. Ford Aerospace got out of networking because they only did DoD work, and networking was going commercial. I left Ford Aerospace, and networking, in 1986 because a friend of mine had started up a little company to do CAD software, and it was becoming successful.

John Nagle

That's what peer review is for, to vet the reasoning process and therefore, the crux of the domain of the output and its veracity. My experience is that people that are trained in long hand-drawn proofs are more comfortable with that process, while those comfy with the limitations of various processors, languages, FPUs and modes of expression will use those.

Tools: mind first, medium second.

There is no reason to believe, as the research is scant at best, that Google even respects a robots.txt file. They are a vacuum hose attached to an analytic engine, easily metaphorized to Steven King's Langoliers.

...recent Western culture has shown that a higher percentage of men have become fathers in the past few generations than before that.

As more and more males become adjusted to the instant high of popular culture, we'll just return to the times when a tinier percentage of men were having all the babies.

Marriage is already on a decline, in some races good husbands are hard to find so women have more biracial babies, and the powerful men won't stop spreading their seed.

Does it matter to me if the weak male class doesn't have kids? Hell no -- and they make good employees, too. Maybe better ones.

As someone else pointed out, that's Moxie's other project, Convergence. The trouble with "web of trust" schemes like that is fake "people", i.e. dummy accounts. Dummy account generators have trashed Craigslist, turned Hotmail into a reply service for spammers, garbaged Gmail, filled Google+ with fake accounts, and created vast numbers of bogus Yelp reviews. See my paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social." for the details of who does that dirty work.

The trouble with crowdsourcing is that crowds can be outsourced.