Much fewer people have my cell phone number than my e-mail. I don't check e-mail that often and I don't hear (and wouldn't want to hear) a "beep" each time when a new one is received. Also, I don't answer all e-mails, sometimes I don't even read too long ones - and most importantly - significant portion of my e-mail traffic is not personal or not directly addressed (just CC'd) to me.

SMSes, OTOH, come from real people in 99+% of cases (SMS spam is rarer in Europe than in US I believe), is directly addressed to me and requires immediate action. They are also short enough to be readable, and I get less than thousand SMSes per year, compared to roughly thousand e-mails per month.

E-mail isn't a good substitute for an SMS. Maybe IM would be better one, but IM market is heterogenous (and I appreciate it), so e.g. I have to use ICQ for Russian friends, Gadu-Gadu for Polish friends, Google Talk/Jabber for German friends and AIM/MSN for American ones.

You cannot actually replace SMS with any other existing service without losing some of its advantages.

While I can agree that not having a Facebook account is a rare thing (I do have a few, although not under my real name), not owning TV is quite common among people who moved for work (at least in Europe). Why do you need to buy one if you spend most of your time outside your flat (that you are renting) - and you read news online anyway?

Maybe in America it's hard to find a flat to rent that wouldn't have a TV (or two) in it, but in Europe you often rent flats from poor older people who are quite frugal.

Maybe if Linux was created by game developers... but currently, it's userbase are primarily Python-breathing geeks who like interpreted+GC'ed languages, don't care that much about performance on any particular machine and dread the thought of exposing direct access to raw hardware without introducing N layers of abstraction (preferably with network transparency).

We can either a) make all user mounts noexec by default b) get rid of setuid c) mix those two approaches by making user mounts executable, but ignoring dangerous flags.

That is why KDE and Gnome make this stuff easier. But there SHOULD be a way to do everything with shell commands, for users who are willing to learn them. Without that, I just don't have the feeling that I'm in control of the machine.

BTW, Windows actually has plenty of command line tools (made by Microsoft) which allow you to script much more than one might think without ever touching the GUI. Too bad a lot of the said tools aren't included by default and need to be searched for in various * Kit packages from Microsoft.

It theory you are correct, but practice was different. I actually worked in gamedev industry in Russia ten years ago, and our publisher sold our game (first one that was released in Russia in 2001, in the west in 2003) for 60 roubles ($2), the same price pirated Western games were sold at. Note that we weren't aware of pirated copies of our game on sale, but I don't know whether this needs to be attributed to anti-piracy policy of our publisher (not strictly legal) + software protection measures (Starforce) or affordable price, or both.

Anyway, my point is that there was a "flat rate" of 60 roubles/2 USD for game CDs back then set by pirates - they didn't go lower despite they probably could. Our publisher sold games it had rights to at the same price and didn't have much problems with piracy. It wasn't particularly profitable (like, our first game sold 300 000 copies in Russia for 2 USD each), but the budget for it was even smaller (I estimate it well below 100k USD judging by our salaries during making it - well, we were students anyway and were happy to see any money from making games, for most of us that was the first money we earned).

Ten years ago in Russia you'd have hard time finding a legal CD being sold. BUT - it wasn't matter of mindset, but of price. I.e. people still preferred to buy stuff (even if pirated), not copy it between themselves, because it was easy and affordable to go buy a $1-$3 pirated CD instead of bringing your HDD to a friend (broadband internet wasn't available back then). So I'd argue that if legal software were in the same price range in Russia, it would have been more popular than pirated copies.

I think you haven't actually tried using X windows over internet, let alone on a dialup connection.

I'm pretty sure that the future of the internet is hierarchically organized network with clear distinction who can serve and who can only consume content. That makes the most business, political and economical sense, to the detriment of user's personal freedom, but loss of said freedom aren't enough to keep that from happening - users are lazy and unorganized.

And their problem is? Do you realize that more than half of internet users (I would say 90+%) do not need a public IPv4 address? Video conferences work without that, so there's no economical reason to fix what isn't broken. There's even a counter-incentive NOT to solve that non-problem - lack of ability to serve stuff hinders P2P and similar user activities, so I can see why some companies may want to turn internet users into "internet spectators".