Actually, a ton of people use it. It's just that everything is private by default, so it can look empty to a newcomer.

I think a lot of people are coming over from Facebook, because I see more and more stupid shit every day.

No, they don't listen to *you*. They do listen to the general public which makes up 99.44% of their user base.

For instance, *you* probably think Google Search should just be the world's most expensive grep, while the other 99.44% want it to figure out what they mean, without them having to spell out every little keyword.

Google/Motorola Mobility is asking the same rate of Apple that they ask of everyone else.

Only valid, verified notices that result in material being removed will count in the page rankings.

The only notices that are used in the page rankings are the notices that complete the entire process and result in material actually being removed.

Google's tool bar only does this for Google searches, not for searches performed by other companies.

Only valid requests are considered, which means that they have to go through the entire takedown process and result in material actually being removed.

No. Google is going to tweak the rankings based on how many "valid" notices it receives. The requests must go through the *entire* DCMA process before they are considered as signals for page ranking.

You are quoting a killer who wanted to overthrow the government?

The real costs are for Discovery. Now you are talking about tens of millions. A huge amount of effort goes into producing information for the other side. It is used as an attack tool to consume the resources of the opponent.

Because it is not a valid patent. It is not a novel idea and it's implementation is obvious to any programmer. It was just basically a landgrab by Apple, and that's not a valid reason to grant a patent.

There isn't really an algorithm in the patent. Just a description of the idea.

And this is not something that is non-obvious to a normal practitioner of the art.

Apple filed the patent in 2000. I'm guessing it had something to do with Spotlight.

Google Desktop Search came out in 2005, I think. Just before the Apple patent was finally approved.

It's still a bogus patent. It's even short enough to be readable, despite the legalese. It basically says, you enter a query into a box, and the "machine" looks in several different places for the answer.

There is an economy of scale with the cooling systems. You can also purchase electricity more cheaply in bulk. You only have to pay once for the security system. And resources not in use by one client can be used by another client.

Like I said, it was not to collect personal data. That data was picked up as extra payload. The data was just part of an experiment to see what the distribution of traffic was like on WiFis these days. The data was never used for any commercial purpose. Everything in that article backs up what I said, except for the wild speculation on the part of the author. Just because it was transferred to the Oregon datacenter for storage doesn't mean it was used commercially. It was just in the engineers files. You say things like "embarrassing findings", when the fact was that they didn't want personal names released to the public.

Yeah, I sorry, but it is not that simple. In a huge system like Google's, thing are marked for deletion, and then overwritten later on when the space is needed. There is no point in zeroing out anything, since the data is all encrypted anyway.

So, you are saying that it was not a mistake? That they did it intentionally? That there was some motivation for them to, what was it, reveal status messages to peoples' contacts?

No, it was a stupid oversight. It slipped by.