I'd have to ask, why? A distributed model could be useful for load sharing (hosting files and such like) and for failover, yet for those to be of much there'd have to be some way of sharing the data across the network - same for the idea of the company providing backups and redundant services. Wouldn't this set-up undermine the notion of greater control and privacy?

Security and privacy may in fact suffer if the system is reliant on each user securing their own systems. The main advantage I can see of a decentralized system would be in terms of not being reliant on a company to keep the lights on. Overall though it seems to be a step backwards, to the era when people ran their own web and mail servers from home. It's fun for the more geeky types, yet not really something that the average social networks user is likely to want. I'm pretty geeky, and I appreciate the simplicity of Facebook - particularly the way in which it's made communication with less technical relatives far easier. I have decent enough privacy settings there, and I don't see how a distributed network would make much of a difference. Either way, the data are going to be flying around, and with both approaches, I can choose what I want to make public. Facebook are bound by data protection laws, although there'd be no harm in the US tightening things up a bit.

Apple and MS could try to get in to this market, but it'll be a tough fight. Ping, despite being tied in to the most popular legal downloads system, has hardly been a roaring success.

Regardless of Facebook's perceived hardware and software shortcomings, they have an amazing amount of momentum and social lock-in. A competitor is going to have to do something good to make a dent in that. I walk around town, and I see signs on a lot of businesses now inviting patrons to follow them on Facebook. This is pretty serious name recognition for an online service. Twitter too is big in this area.

Sure, the Islamists are perfectly happy to let us enjoy our lives, so long as we leave them alone. You're somewhat underestimating the Muslim capacity for butthurt and completely unjustified notions of superiority. The only way that Islamists will be content is when we either adopt Islam or agree to live under its rule. Even then, which version of Islam? Muslims have a rich tradition of killing Muslims who belong to different sects.

The Danes have a long history of charity and are hardly known for militarily throwing their weight around in the middle east, yet a few simple cartoons was enough to cause the Muslim world to erupt in to riots and the issuing of death threats. We can no more find accommodation with Islamists than we would be able to with 14th century Christians. Muslims will demand too much, and offer little in return. These are the people who happily see anti-semitic cartoons in their newspapers, yet will demand death for someone who'd poke fun at a dead schizophrenic with a hard-on for little girls. How about the "God bless Hitler" sign, and similar, that were being held by angry Muslims? Religion of peace, my arse.

There is no compromising with this mentality. We cannot reason with it, and we certainly cannot make it happy enough to leave us alone. Either we face it down, and preserver or values, or we allow these repressed bigots to impose theirs on us.

How common is this arrangement? The closest thing to this that I've seen is with home-based employees who pay for their Internet access, which of course is factored in to their salary. Contractors may be another case in point, but then the questions you asked should have already been answered in their contract. It's definitely not something to be ignored until things go wrong.

Much of this donation information is available, but not very visible to the average voter.

Require all elected officials to wear a cloak, on to which the total amount of money received in the last six months is printed, and have logos pasted on to represent donations received over x amount of dollars. It'd be cool, like NASCAR, but serving a purpose. Some of these guys are going to need cloaks longer than a royal wedding dress train.

The DMCA doesn't necessarily need to be overturned, but certainly it needs to be revisited. The DMCA provides a standardized method for handling alleged copyright infringement, allowing the host to avoid being caught in the cross-fire. This has been abused by infringers, and certainly by people wishing to censor. I've had both types of complaints, albeit not under circumstances covered by the DMCA. In the case of some guy trying to remove an embarrassing critique of some private messages in which he libeled me, I was fortunate to have had a hosting company who didn't just buckle for their own safety, and had the DMCA applied, the complainant could have sent a take-down, which I could have countered - leaving the host off the hook. I think it helped that the guy sending the complaint was clearly a whining bitch, demonstrating his fundamental lack of legal knowledge through his references to "Internet laws". The DMCA also poses problems for content owners who find themselves playing whack-a-mole with sites that repeatedly allow copyright infringement. I see that as a legitimate concern. I'm very much in favor of equitable copyright protection, the cornerstone of which should be severally shortened copyright terms. Things have clearly swung too far in favor of rights owners, with the bulk of the money appearing to miss the pockets of the producers themselves.

My main issues with the DMCA lie in how it interferes with the bypassing of DRM, and reverse engineering. Another problem though is that the DMCA introduced pretty stiff penalties for infringement, yet what happens when a media company, with the presumption that they have legal people who should know better, send pretty obviously frivolous take-down notices. In theory this is perjury, yet how many prosecutions do we see? Out of curiosity, should I receive a malicious take-down notice from an American entity, how would I get a prosecution rolling? Send a letter to the FBI, or would I instead need to engage a solicitor to begin civil proceedings?

McCain had a decent enough record and reputation prior to the 2008 race, which he tossed away by naming Palin as his running mate. It's neither nice nor rational to risk having that malicious, incompetent and proudly ignorant thing sitting in the Oval Office.

How do you measure and rate the application of intelligence among the populace? How has this application of intelligence changed in the past 10,20,40, or 100 years? Why do you think that TV is the primary cause in the "dumbing down" of western society? Please, no more dreary platitudes.

The verbal tics I mentioned are from urban culture and California and the south. You want me to list examples of every type of verbal tic for every "race"? That would be clumsily verbose, and I assumed from those two examples it was clear that anyone who wasn't a cock would be able to understand that this isn't racism. Disposing of eye contact in some situations is in fact a good idea. America's a big place, so I don't want to generalize here. Typically eye contact is important, because without it the speaker can appear nervous or insincere. However, just try employing the same level of eye contact you would with typically Japanese that you would with a Texan. How does that work out for you?

Small talk too varies depending on culture. Finns traditionally have fewer social niceties than one would expect in the UK. Nordics in general tend to be more straight to the point. Spanish speak quickly and articulate more with their bodies than northern Europeans would. Have you never listened to Italians or Spanish and thought that they're having an argument, when in fact it's just a discussion? Irish tend to invade body space more than Danish would, as another example.

Communications training is something I've done for over ten years, so I'm pretty confident here in suggesting that anyone who thinks I'm ignorant can go royally fuck themselves.

It's pointless to hire someone whose language (verbal or body) are not appropriate to the job. If hiring for a job that requires moderate technical ability, it's far easier to fix the technical shortcomings than it is to remedy communication issues.

Does the same language employed on an Ealing market stall work for a Norwegian looking for financial advice? Perhaps, but it's in fringe cases. It's more likely to be jarring and distracting to have someone near enough finishing each sentence with "all right?" or "not a bother". There we go, now we have English and Irish added to the list. Does that satisfy your need for a united nations of examples?

When communicating, it's important to ensure that the take away point is clear in the reader's mind. You are a reactionary cock, using reactionary straw man bullshit in lieu of having any experience or the ability to offer insight in to what is in fact a very interesting field of study.

Or Zed McGlunk from Police Academy. I am slightly aroused and worried.

Yup, and anyone whose speech is infested with irritatingly repeated phrases, such as "you know what I'm saying?" or "like, you know".

Anyone who can't get through a sentence without inserting this junk may just as well wonder why blowing a tin whistle or air drumming at the end of each sentence causes interviewers to quickly dismiss them as being unsuitable? It sounds retarded, and the vocal breaking thing is not sexy. A husky voice can be sexy, but not one where it's a woman attempting to impersonate Henry Kissinger yawning.

Yeah, and well rehearsed "duck face" poses used whenever a camera comes out. Really, if this becomes the common theme for women, I'd be hanging on to heterosexuality by my finger nails.

FileMaker Pro and Excel cover the bulk of small-scale tools and automation needs in the office. AppleScript and Automator bind them together to be able to build some pretty good systems. You may be romanticizing the old days. Just as now, most people had neither the ability nor the inclination to make things easier. HyperCard was powerful and relatively accessible. Let's not kid ourselves though that the average number cruncher or sales guy in an office is going to fire it up and quickly churn-out a CRM system that isn't a piece of shit?

It's mostly pot-luck if someone in the office has a hacker mentality or even enough of an interest to begin coding/scripting. Given how computing in general has changed, I'd suspect that a smaller percentage of people are coming in to today's workforce with a hacker mentality. How many people below the age of 30 would have begun with computers that dropped them straight in to BASIC? How many computer magazines these days publish code listings, compared to in the 80s?

I'd certainly agree that they lack a sense of humor when their sensibilities are being offended or challenged, and that's certainly not restricted to religious people. Strong emotional attachments lead lead to protective outlooks. Someone with a severely handicapped daughter is perhaps less likely to laugh at Down Syndrome jokes than someone who has never had to deal with this horrible condition. One man's solemn and ritualistic religious service is another man's LARP session run by obsessively compulsive bead-fondlers.

That's what I want to know. I can see two "positive outcomes" he could have hoped for.

1) After signing his employment contract with Marriott he would dismantle his backdoors in their systems and Marriott would obviously be stuck with him because the contract.

2) He would keep his backdoors in place, to use as leverage should Marriott attempt to fire him or change the brand of coffee in the office to one that is not to his liking.

No-one above the age of six should consider his plan to be anything but hopeless lunacy.

Keeping habits is a pretty key point there. Whether it's college courses or work, it's preferable to allowing people to slip in to the demographic that has been so long out of the workforce (or never been in it to begin with) that they become unemployable. A friend was headed this way, adopting a nocturnal existence and being content to live on welfare. He thankfully picked-up college and got back in to regular routines. The work should not be intentionally demeaning - this isn't a chain gang. The intention here must be to help people back in to employment. Of course some work may be seen as demeaning, but who hasn't worked a shitty job at some point for the sake of having a job?