What a great joke! You're so Wi-Di...

I kind of wish the poll had a few more options. I put zilch, but that doesn't have to be the whole story.

I work for a nonprofit, and I took a 40k a year pay cut to do so, so I could just say that, but in addition, I also give my time. There should at least have been one pole option for "My time, which is worth more to me than money"

I expect the new year to numerically one greater than the preceding year.

I've seen supposedly good pizza places in France serve what was basically an inch-thick slice of bread with a thin layer of tomato sauce...

I live in France, and what you describe is not pizza, but Bruschetta. While it's true that pizza quality/form varies a bit in France (each region usually adapts it to local cuisine), come down to Nice and get some of the best

I'm lucky enough to live in Nice, France, which has gone back and forth between Italy and France since it first got it's name (from the Greek for victory when the Greeks living in France captured it from Italy).

As such, you get the mix of French culinary devotion with the Italian cooking style that makes for some of the best pizza in the world. (And yes, I've been to Chicago, I used to live in New York, and I've traveled quite a bit, so I've had many different kinds)

In a world where 20 seconds can mean keeping or loosing a customer, a decade is veritable eternity. And I agree with you wholeheartedly about Yahoo/MSFT and it being more about mail and other services. However, I see this as the one combination that is likely to give Google a run for its money. Google, IMHO, is a far greater evil than even the Borg collective. The Borg Collective is watched and monitored and known to be evil. Google purports to "do no evil" all the while your privacy is a vanishing memory. And who are they whoring all this data out to? We don't know. At least with the credit bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, etc.) you can find out. What happens to it after it gets shared? We don't know. What all is in there? We don't know.

And Google gets yet another stream of data on you. What products you're looking at... Comparison shopping by UPC... People are flat out willing ot sell their soul for a "free" service

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog entry entitled "Google - The New Mark of the Beast" and was fluffled off as an alarmist. Now the truth about Google is slowly seeping out. For those of you who don't do data mining, you just don't realize how sophisticated its become. Google doesn't do anything unless it gets them another stream of data on their user base.

Gmail - your email - subject -content - to and from
Google Chat - content and other people
Google Latitude - your physical location and cell #
Google Voice - your phone number (which can be trivially tied to real identity including your address) as well as the content from your phone calls and messages
Google Docs - Your documents, power points, and spreadsheets
Google Chrome & Toolbar - Your browsing History
Google Search - if you're logged in this gets stored if not, it can still be tied back to you via IP address

With Google DNS, they can see what you're requesting even if you're not one of their users and they can start to build a profile on you even if you haven't signed up.

Forget everyday use, but on public wifi, I'm all about this!

On my desk, I run a Macbook Unibody connected to a Matrox TripleHead2Go with 24" 16:9 screens rotated 90 degrees.

In the end, I end up with an effective 31.5" screen, and two document sized screens.

I keep source code on the left, and documentation/web on the right.

I consider myself lucky to live in France and be married to a French woman with exceedingly good taste in movies.

It turns out that you take the best movies made in each country and watch them, you'll have a surprisingly large selection of great films that haven't been corrupted by the above process.

We've seen great films like Good Bye Lenin! (German) Lovers of the Polar Circle (Spanish), Italian for Beginners (Danish), Taken (French) to mention a couple of (mostly older) ones that were really good.

You'll have to get used to films with lower production quality then American films, which means the delivery is sometimes a bit more rocky, but a crappy movie with fantastic production has nothing on a great movie that's a little bit rocky in its delivery...

I don't have kids, and I haven't watched the show for 30 years, so why do I hear it in Cookie Monster's voice every time I read the phrase 'cookie policy'? (Coo-kie Po-li-cy!)

Prolly is the default... Failure is not an option... it comes bundled with Windows. And the best fix for Windows... installing Ubuntu.

Every time I've seen them scanning osmeone its a hot chick with big boobs.... And all the guys are over looking at the screen... It's never Nanna or Billy Ray with his beer gut....

My personal feelings agree with you. However, I find this to be incredibly valuable as this is an area that I deal in quite a bit. A friend of mine runs a quite popular local web site that I write for as a reporter. Many of the artciles deal with political corruption; negligence, malfeasance, or just outright stupidity of elected officials; and now we're going after the school board for just plain being tards.

It's quite useful for us to have the ability to harvest comments off our news blog for further investgation. However, I'm going to put up a disclaimer and point people to a web form that will email me. Set up CAPTCA so that the bots don't drive me insane and we should all be good.