Dropbox offers a few advantages over rsync: It runs in real time and detects changed files, syncing them instantly without polling the filesystem. (using services like inotify). It has iPhone and Android clients. It's easy to install and doesn't carry other requirements like cygwin, and doesn't break in all kinds of odd corner cases like rsync on windows does. It offers central management of which computers sync which files and folders (well, SugarSync does this much better). It offers a web based view of your synced files for when you don't have your own computer. (This can be a plus or minus depending on your viewpoint). It keeps backup copies of your deleted and changed files.

You do know that Dropbox is already using rsync, right? Look at the code... it's available. They wrapped some service logic around it, but it's rsync (librsync) under the hood.

Don't worry, your friends and family will upload pictures of you and tag them for you so Facebook has photos of you to draw from.

One of the biggest flaws in the design of Facebook, was allowing other people to tag you in photos, without your approval.

What should happen, is you get tagged in photos, and for each photo you're tagged in, you have to approve it, before it goes live. Just like someone "friending" you on FB.

I'm shocked they let blind tagging of people happen like that.

Then there is the old standby "resisting arrest".

Uhm...you can't be arrested for resisting arrest. If that's the case, what were you arrested for in the first place, for which you were "resisting"?

I haven't used titlebars on any app in almost a decade (sawfish). I also don't use icons, docks, wharfs or menubars. I prefer my environment to be clean, fast, functional and uncluttered.

As long as the browser's default behavior remains the same, and the 'tabs-on-titlebar' is an optional feature that can be enabled, that's fine.

Changing the default behavior is always bad. Always.

How do you run their CloudOS while on an airplane? In a train tunnel? While disconnected from the Internet itself?

There's a growing, ignorant view that everyone has access to Internet all the time, and that's simply not true, and in fact, is growing in the opposite direction. Many people are taking their devices with them more and more, and finding that they have less connectivity than they thought they did.

Home? Yes. Work? Yes. Friend's house? Yes. But all the touch points in-between? No, not likely... so what then?

You seem to have forgotten what rights we really have in the US.

You're advocating giving up all of my freedoms and rights, so I don't sit in jail? How is that a viable solution?

Cooperating with a ridiculous requirement that outright violates the rights and freedoms this country was based upon, is never going to work. It's precisely this kind of cooperation that got us in the mess we're already in.

I refuse to waive my rights out of fear, rather than stand up and defend them.

Remember, WE give the government it's rights and power, they don't give it to us.

You can continue to sit, fat and happy watching your American Idol and playing your PS3, but just remember who stood up for you and fought for your freedoms and rights, while you sat back and did nothing.

I'll take the jail time, thanks. I'm not going to let the threat of jail time compel me to revoke my own morals or those of generations of people who will come after me. It's our rights we're standing up for here.

I wrote a post about this over 5 years ago, when it first happened: http://blog.gnu-designs.com/no-you-may-not-have-my-encryption-keys

What is this "Advertisement" thing you speak of? I haven't seen a single ad on the web in at least a few years, thanks to some intelligent, learning plugins and Javascript plugins that restrict/prohibit them from ever being displayed to my eyes. They might get blocked at the request level, or get stashed in the cache and neutered in my web interface, but I haven't seen ads in a long, long time now.

And that's just the way I like it.

The source you provide or link to must be the same source used to produce the binaries you're shipping on your device. In other words, if I take Google's source and build binaries with it, and those binaries differ from the ones shipping on your device, it's not the same source code, and does not comply with the license.

Pointing to a source for Android, is not the same thing as providing the source for the modifications to that source that you (as a vendor) have done to the source.

The only problem is that I cannot login to the websites on public computers, but I think that's an added security bonus. I have my Blackberry with me to check my email, which is what I really need to check on the road.

Sure you can... just install DropBox on your BlackBerry and/or use a password-accessible Dropbox URL that leads to your KeePassX.kdb file, and keep a copy of the portable KeePassX.exe file in there for those public terminals.

KeePassX also has a client for the BlackBerry, which I use all the time.

...Not to mention a firmware update that bricked 1.6TB of my data, in a completely unrecoverable way. I was running a Drobo v2 with v.1.31 and had rebooted it hundreds of times in the last 2 years. There was a new firmware update that claimed to fix some performance issues. I upgraded the firmware (using the approved Windows method).

The device never booted again. It's been bricked for months now, and my data, while still striped across the platters, is held hostage by the Drobo device. Downgrading the firmware isn't possible, because the moment the firmware is updated (before the initial reboot of the device), the disk pack itself is upgrade to that same firmware revision.

There is no going back... and DRI openly states that I'm screwed, and there's nothing they can do. They can't even give me the "Last Resort Firmware" that they hand out in cases just like this. I've opened plenty of cases with them about it, and their response is "Sorry, you should have had your data on another Drobo as a backup."

I will never use a proprietary, black-box data storage solution again, ever.

10 years of digital photos, dozens of system backups, thousands of scanned documents long since gone, my entire music collection, etc. all stored on a device that claimed to be completely safe to store it.

Avoid Drobo at all costs, if you care about your data.