Exactly! In Canada, and I know for certain most nations as well, have a number which given to all citizens of the country. I'm a bit worried about this new proposal. What about all of the people out there with more devious criminal intentions than just SPAM. It seems to me that people will become very reluctant to share this number with others like people are with their government issued IDs. If you know someone's social insurance number, full name, birthdate, place of birth, and their parents names, you can become them! It seems to me that a an ID number that is associated with everything I do online (as well as the phone) is a freaking bad idea. What kind of password will be required to gain access to this number?

Soon dead? Life expectancy in Cuba is 78 years old. That is better than many countries. It is a bit offensive I agree but so is saying that our youth are suffering mentally because everyone in today's society is a bad parent. The subs came about more in the 50s and 60s. In the 40s people had much bigger things to worry about namely the threat of war. I believe military school or something like it (hell even our high schools lack a fitness program) for teens to better themselves in many ways including discipline and health. Kids the have obvious problems physically and mentally should not be placed in these types of environments but kids that can be should be. This is not a novel concept. If you look to many European and Asian countries, the concept of sending kids to military school (or boarding schools) is very common. The USA and Canada only seems to be worried about this practice when their national safety is at risk. This is seriously flawed. The current youth don't seem to have much respect for others. When an old couple gets on the bus, kids should give up their seats, not laugh at the old fools and crank up their IPods. Kids are not very thankful for what they have overall in North America and we need to address that with instilling a little bit of respect for each other and what we have. When that is realized so will our freedom and happiness.

Recently, I've taken a trip outside of North America to Cuba. A nation that receives some really bad vibes among the American capitalists, even today. While visiting Cuba we stayed at a 5 star resort which I have to say was one of the most beautiful resorts I have ever seen. The people work hard for what they have. They live in a socialist society there where everyone contributes back to the government which is suppose to equally disperse among the nation. People have literally nothing there for the most part. It intriqued me while driving from the airport to the resort watching people in the local villages so when I arrived at the resort I walked right back off of it and walked for 6 miles and I quickly realized that this simplistic "savage" life - as one British snob blond said, was actually a life that people appeared to be happy with. Life seemed very simple but pleasant among the children, youth, and adults. People obviously strive for more and there is more in a nation where the mega corporate empire above them has put down the movements of Cuba as a movement of the enemy. While I don't agree with the socialist movement in the way it was designed in Cuba, I can agree that the hungry mothers, with little or no processions, living in grass shacks with 6 kids appear less stressed than the imperialists soccer mom with 1 kid stressing over those SUV and $1 million dollar suburb payments. We need to reach a balance in North America where the chicken tastes great, the cellphones work well, and people live a little more simpler than we have been trying to do since WWII. Make a year of military school mandatory for all children, shut down the local grocery store for a day in a normal week, provide people with access to the land like we once had, stop encouraging everyone to live in NYC, and just maybe people will realize what they already have and appreciate it a little more and stop stressing over wanting more, more, more.

Funny. You took me seriously! Obviously I understand. Text parsing anyone? Its simple, isn't it? Mu query, are these page view impressions logged and associated with my GMail account? Is google sharing my personal info with these impressions to big companies? Selling and profiting from this marketing data? I bet they are! I wasn't forcefully presented with the GMail EULA. I never bothered looking either. Did you?

Can we say it is time for a new company to emerge that takes the End User seriously and doesn't stick it to them whenever they can? I am sick and tired of worrying about Google stealing my ideas. From disappearing docs on Google Docs, to strange ads showing up on Google Ads while viewing Gmail (my companies top competitors), to Google Chrome's Browser recording my every move, to my YouTube videos featuring advertisements from my company's competitors, to Google Search recording my every search. Where the hell is it going to end with this company? You do not have my permission to take all of my personal info and stuff it into a database somewhere and then threaten to send it to the American Government if asked for! I don't live in your country and you Google are not abiding my countries laws and not respecting your users globally. I have no guarantees that my information is protected in shape or form and this isn't hearsay, we have a Google Exec telling us they provide a cloud for everyone so if you use the cloud your info is not safe with us. For the average Joes to chatter about Tiger Woods and Paris Hilton all day this isn't a big a deal for them. The odd picture emailed of their kids 3rd b-day party is not really worth worrying about because when hes four he will be posting them on Facebook himself but for everyone else that is involved in things deeper than that they should GET OFF GOOGLE NOW! International Google Boycott for professionals that want to keep their data private, anyone?

Google still can't get the POP3 protocol to work correctly in Gmail and here they are playing with bind. You know Microsoft must giggle when they hear Google setup their own DNS servers for the public. Give me a break Google hype machine. I feel like going and looking for another search engine.

Honestly, I don't even like using Gmail. Leaving all my email on my Gmail account makes me fringe a bit. I've always had local copies of everything. I can back to 95 and look at whatever crap I had then. Including emails! Now here we are using shared web services to store all of our work. Look at these idiots. Store your graduate thesis on Google? Come on! Talk about educated idiots. All this could disappear tomorrow. When it comes to retained knowledge I am afraid of what all of these "services" are really doing to humans.

You mean this intellisense IDE I use almost everyday makes me a weenie? I rarely read something on slashdot that makes me irritated but this does. I started with C then moved to C++ then I learned BASIC then Visual Basic then Perl then more C++ then PHP then C#. I'm sure theres a bzillion C like languages I've learned in between learning the languages that make me money. Sometimes I find myself writing bare bones stuff, usually on *nix platforms. It takes me twice as long to write the same routines in that type of minimal environment then without a full featured IDE. I write win32 C++ using the latest VS and even mix mode libraries where I've bridged unmanaged code to work with managed code - no com required. When I want high performance I will switch back to the bare bones approach but when I need to get a job done quickly I am very thankful for modem advancements in programming sciences. These Microsoft programmers might very well be the elite of the elite but for the rest of us not writing operating systems - we don't really care.

Friend of mine had some raunchy photos posted of him drunk at a bar with some rather young looking women. There were photos of him "feeding" them alcohol and "undressing' with them in the rather dark club. When he went for his interview a few weeks ago the chief hauled out photos of himself printed directly from a private facebook page. He said they made no effort to hide where the photos came from. It was a direct print off of Facebbook. He couldn't explain him very well and was asked to not apply to the force again and they would be adding these documents for future interviews in other jurisdictions. He has been on a campaign since that interview to find more people like him. He told me that he has found another person that lost his job because of something someone wrote on his wall about an incidental that occurred when he was underage and he threw a guy off a high school stage and caused him brain damage. Scary shit this social networking crap. Young kids just post whatever crap they want on Facebook. Having seeing my younger cousins profile I was shocked that he had posted some of the things he had and I warned him about posting about his mischief online. "Its just kids stuff" sure but does he want it following him around when hes in the job market in 15 years? No!

Man I hate that toolbar. Google took a page out of Ask's annoyware?

$50,000/year is not piss poor money for most of the working class. Teachers also have the best benefits and also 2+ months off per year. Most teachers either have lesson plans handed down to them by retiring teachers or they develop the plan and don't update it for years. Most recycle tests and exams over and over as well and kids that obtain older copies tend to do better in their classes than kids that don't of the same level of intelligence. There jobs are stressful don't get me wrong but playing the poor mouth isn't washing very well.

You realize most people don't even know what an ISO is right? Microsoft is faced with the same situation our company is faced with right now releasing a large product to the internet and making it as less complicated as possible for the village idiots.

So true!