Somebody should really quit drinking.

Oh, indeed! This student used the tube and got stinged!

... isn't the internet, and especially social networks and search engines, becoming something worse than communism, where eveveryone's life, not just their properties, belongs to everybody?

People, in their Internet-aholism, seem to care less and less about their privacy. Are we regressing on some level?

But what's even more amazing is that this seemingly endless source of revenue makes people think it actually enhances their lives, whereas the added value to their lives is doubtful, at best.

The Economist talks about the new tech bubble: http://www.economist.com/node/18681576, and this time, it seems like it's here to stay. All these new "technologies" look like they have something in common: depriving people of their freedom (the so-called "cloud", social networks, increasingly intrusive search engines...)

Will I eventually be proved wrong? I hope so.

Because it's a potentially endless source of revenue. It's really that simple.

The human species seems to be oddly obsessed with automating everything it can think of - and of course, it's always supposed to be in a good cause. Since there was much talk about commuting, why don't we go a step further and finish what we already started long ago: automate every possible kind of work humans can do. Then we won't need to commute anymore and the work environment should be much more efficient too. Thus, lower emissions. Then we can just sit around and maybe push one button or two every once in a while. But then, we might get very fat in the long run, if we just do nothing. And our own production of CO2 and other nasty gases ( ;) ) might eventually be a huge problem. Then again, maybe at this point, we won't need to exist at all anymore. Looks like a bright future, if you ask me.

Am I the only one who absolutely DID NOT understand your answer? How do you go from: 4+3+2 = 9 to: ( ) + 2 = 2 ? It makes no sense.

... of course, the user that got fined for not securing his network access could sue the Wi-Fi router manufacturer / his ISP / the Wi-Fi alliance / the ISO (while he's at it) for not making it obvious enough that not securing his wireless network access is, in the end, actually a law infringement. Jesus!! This is a masquerade of justice.

Yep, it's the most frequent kind of abuse. IT people making changes without prior warning nor any concern about how people work and use IT in their daily routine. They usually never even ask.

You may also mention Bluebottle (Oberon): http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/systems/bluebottlefolder

In soviet OS, everything is a persistant object.

Kidding aside, I see several major issues with this concept: the increased risk of losing valuable data, the slowness, the very low interoperability (how do you exchange data with other OS's?), the whole span of programming languages that are not supported (I don't want to be coerced into using Java or C#, what's that about?)

Another issue is that I think the "object oriented" paradigms that are in use today are flawed in some aspects, and instead of basing everything computing-related on that, maybe we need to work on the concepts first.