I can see that what you're saying comes from the right place. But the way you say it is far too broad and doesn't admit for the possibility of meaningful distinctions between types or degrees of social "problems" or that some issues are personal "issues" rather than "disabilities."

For example, we can probably agree that society should assist or support those with severe personality disorders. But what about different degrees of antisocial behavior that result in a person having no social contacts? In its most extreme case, does that mean that I'm entitled to welfare checks for being an asshole with no friends? And where do you draw the line?

This is something a lot of Slashdotters - especially the "privacy" tinfoil hat crowd, not that I'm saying that includes you - fail to grasp about the popularity of Facebook. The fundamental tradeoff of social networking sites is that you willingly give up some of your privacy - on the information you choose to make public - in exchange for making the information you consume from others less obtrusive.

For example: I use Facebook and have accumulated around 200+ friends, ranging from best friends to interesting people I met at a conference or my child's preschool. If each one of those people e-mailed me every time they had a photo to share of their lunch, or some cause they wanted to support, or some other piece of datum they felt like sharing with the world, it would be chaos. I would blacklist them all from my mailbox to avoid hundreds of spams a day and would only communicate with my very closest friends.

But with Facebook (or Google+ if anyone else I knew actually used it), people can post as much or as little as they like and I can consume that content as much or as little as I like. For you, the experience all depends on how often you want to check your social networking site. Many of my friends are Facebook-obsessed zombies, and they can check and post to FB all day, commenting back and forth all day on each others' cute cat pictures. For me, I check FB every week or so when I'm bored, and it will only show me updates from the friends I correspond with the most - but if I have time to kill and want to see what my freshman year roommate is doing, I can keep reading to see. Or if I'm going to meet a friend I haven't seen in a while, I can skim through their profile to catch up. At any rate, I have a feed of "social" information that I can pay as much or as little attention to as I like, and can easily keep in touch with a much broader range of people than I otherwise would have if I had to restrict the list to just the people I wanted to get regular e-mails from.

Clearly COBOL will never die. As I recall, the civilization of Battelstar Galactica had an entire religion devoted to the "Lords of COBOL." Not just the colonists, but I'm pretty sure I saw in one of the deleted scenes an older-model Cylon Raider trailing punch cards from a hull breach.

I don't understand. How do you verify that anyone has a right to work in the US without getting them to provide proof? Do you only ask people for proof if they have an accent or something?

[Citation needed]

I'm not arguing that most cellular contracts aren't overpriced but your assertion above has no basis in reality. Cellular companies (at least in the US) have to spend billions of dollars on new spectrum to deploy new technologies - e.g. the combined $12B AT&T and Verizon spent on 700 MHz frequencies for LTE, or the $2.2B Sprint is planning to spend on buying ClearWire's 2.5 GHz spectrum. On top of that, 2G => 3G => 4G means that you have to buy more wired backhaul to every single cell site - all thousands of them per carrier - to support the higher data rates.

Cell carriers definitely make more money on smartphones - but it's because you're using voice less (= higher margin) + data more (= bad margin on most unlimited plans but great margins on metered plans), not because the cost of their infrastructures have gone down at all.

RMS lost his credibility in trying to define anybody else's lexicon with his irritating, self-aggrandizing "GNU/Linux" campaign. You can use his approved NewSpeak if you'd like, but I think the arrogance of anyone trying to tell me "Words to Avoid" is more likely to make me reject their suggestions out of hand.

Well, thank goodness we finally have that sorted out. Has anyone informed the Supreme Court that "walterbyrd" on Slashdot has determined the root of this multinational, multi-claim nest of lawsuits involving hundreds of patents between Google/Motorola, Samsung and Apple is that "only Apple is to blame?" I'm pretty sure we can just put this whole thing to bed now.

Are you sure it's 200 billion? The author you cite seems to have thought it was $30 billion. Wait, no, it was $200 billion. Ah, sorry, now it's $300 billion. Maybe it's inflation?

Not saying that the American public wasn't shortchanged by the Baby Bells - back in the day when they actually existed, I never encountered a more anticompetitive group of oligarchists in all my career. But let's not necessarily keep repeating this "OMG telcos stole $200 billion" meme without a little more quantification and justification.

Why? Why would nobody buy the first game but suddenly decide to buy the second one? Why wouldn't they just keep pirating that game, and the next one, and the next one?

Also if you do something as a commercial venture - i.e. it's not just a PR stunt or promo, but you do actually want to get paid for it - and consider getting paid $0 a "resounding success," you may wish to get a refund from wherever you learned about business. Unless you paid them $0 and they considered that a success.

The point of advertising is to get people to buy something. Free advertising that gets more people to pirate your game is actually not good. How does that benefit the game maker? Or is the thinking here that someone will say to their friends, "hey, I downloaded this game for free and it's awesome. But you should go pay for it"?

The "right thing" is of course subjective, so whether it's good or bad will be an individual call. I'm basing my evaluation off the "golden rule" of "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you." On that count, I can honestly say that if I were the one making this game and setting a price for it, I would want people to pay me for it if they use it. So in my book, using it without paying what the creator asked for it is bad.

I say this as someone who downloaded more than my share of music, games etc. in my penurious post-college days. I did that a lot because I wanted to and I could, but I never tried to convince myself it was a "good" thing I was doing. Now that I have more money, I do try to pay for things even if I could get them for free because I think of it as the "right thing to do." Your mileage may vary.

Why is this meaningful? If I sneak into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying, it doesn't make it OK just because I would never have paid to see it. Sure my watching it doesn't "cost" the theater anything - I'm not really lost revenue for them - but that still doesn't legitimize my doing something for free that other people are paying for and in effect subsidizing.

You can persuasively argue that piracy by people who wouldn't pay for a product doesn't translate to lost revenue. You can't persuasively argue that it's "the right thing" to do, though.

Unfortunately not so much anymore. That is/was BlackBerry's whole problem. Five years ago, smartphones were purely business tools, and "BlackBerry" was a synonym for "smartphone." But after the iPhone arrived, consumers started buying smartphones. Now, not only is the consumer smartphone market bigger than the business market, BYOD behavior is pushing some businesses to accept the user's choice of devices - which is almost invariably not a BlackBerry.

BlackBerry's current woes all result from a classic strategic mistake - they kept building products to address their core market, then somebody went and changed the market dynamics on them. I remember reading an interview with a RIM engineer about how they laughed when the iPhone was launched. They said "this thing doesn't have a keyboard, battery life isn't great, there's no corporate administration capability built in... who will ever buy it?" They only realized belatedly that the dynamics had changed a couple years later, and then discovered that they were very poorly positioned to meet the new market's needs.

Not about what is true, about what things are named. Scientific truth is objective, names are not. Is it "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" or "North Korea?" "Denali" or "Mount McKinley?" "Strategic Defense Initiative" or "Star Wars?" "Gravina Island Bridge" or "Bridge to Nowhere?"

The moral of the story is that a thing is called what people want to call it. Even if your name is the "official" one, it doesn't matter much if everybody else calls it something else.