Yes. To the entities inside the simulation you are, to all intents and purposes, their God.

• * You created their universe
• * You created them, or you initiated the processes that resulted in them being created
• * You know everything about their universe
• * You know how and why their universe was created
• * You know how and when their universe will end
• * If you choose to, you can change the course of the simulation to benefit them in some specific way
• * If you choose to, you can change the course of the simulation to terminate their participation

That pretty much fits the job title of "Omnipotent entity that caused and controls everything", aka God.

Not just you, I can't get it to work either.

I agree it probably is a proof of concept with limited applications at the moment, but how about something like Hadoop, that was designed to work on a distributed set of cpus and discs.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/08/16/2343249/dremel-based-project-accepted-as-apache-incubator

The statistics seem to indicate that might not be true.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html

The Ghostery plugin http://www.ghostery.com/ does that, and more.

This is the important part, not now, but in the future. This is just a demonstration of what is possible, and how the mistakes that are being made now may effect all of us in the future.

From a recent talk by Cory Doctorow, http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

We need to change the way that the industry and the regulators think about these kind of devices. Security by obscurity is just not good enough.

As patients (now and in the future) we should require/demand that all of the software in these devices is open source or they won't get certified for use as implants.
Many people on this site have said something along the lines of "If I were designing these devices then I would use [xyz] to make them secure".
The important point is that geeks like us aren't designing these devices, and for the companies that are designing these devices security isn't a priority.

Good security is expensive, both in terms of employing extra staff with the relevant expertise, and in terms of developer time to implement and test it. Unless peer reviewed security is required by their customers or government regulations, then it is just not enough of a priority to justify the additional cost.

The worst result from this kind of research would be that our politicos jump at a sound bite solution and make it illegal to own or design a device that could intefere with implanted medical devices. Preventing the good guys from testing their own devices, while making it easier for the bad guys by allowing manufacturers to get away with poor security.

The best result from this kind of research would be that we make peer reviewed security and open source code part of the requirements for certification of implanted devices. But that won't happen unless we keep pushing to make it happen.

I did the same. I used to listen Last.fm a lot, and I discovered several artists that I hadn't heard of before, and bought quite a few albums as a result.

I had a monthly subscription, and I thought it was well worth the money. I wasn't that interested in the big name bands, what was interesting were the less well known artists from their huge database of music from around the world. But like you, I cancelled my subscription when they cut the "my loved tracks".

It was nice while it lasted, but .. the world moves on.

Missing option http://www.slicehost.com/

Excellent service, easy to use and reliable.
I've been using system for over 3 years and not had a problem.

That is absolutely essential.

First thing that occurred to me when I read the summary who controls the list .

Agree with you apart from the '.' in '.config'.

.... apps dumping hidden config files willy-nilly in my home is annoying as hell.

Not only is there no standard, but the convention of using hidden directories makes things worse.
Add to that the fact that many apps mix data (cache) and configuration (passwords) under the same hidden directory and it makes backing up the users settings a non trivial task.

Amazon don't store their inventory in the trucks. The trucks just collect the items that have been sold and deliver them to the consumer.

Amazon use large warehouses to store the inventory, large warehouses to store the data centers that coordinate the inventory, deliveries and purchases, and UPS use large warehouses to park the trucks when they aren't out delivering. All those warehouses will have nice big flat roofs - as opposed to the various sized odd shaped small roofs of all those individual brick and mortar stores.

I agree it would be good if the brick and mortar stores put up solar panels. But I don't agree that brick and mortar stores would somehow be better at providing solar power than online stores would. It would be better if the individual brick and mortar stores AND the large warehouses used by the online stores all used their roof space to generate some form of solar power.

Thank you. This is the first real evidence I've seen that the leaked documents do actually contain names.

Still not sure if the leak was good or bad. I'm working my way through the online documents myself, but this gives me a clue as to what kind of things to look for.