Maybe if this was based on an open standard defining how to implement the same services on a non-Google platform, this would all be more palatable.

I'm not worried. We are pretty soon going to have a bunch of people that are heartbroken about their data from 10 years ago being lost. The travel photos, the e-mailed love letters, the brilliant blog posts. And these people will create demand for longer-term storage and data collection techniques we don't have now. Why should it happen in the near future if it hasn't already? Because we first needed a generation of people that use computers and the internet as the primary way of expressing their life. Nobody was in that boat ten years ago. Now anybody reading this is. So consumer-grade "lifetime" storage options will enjoy a more prominent place on the market. And if you can get some old data to stick around for a half century or more, the value of it bumps up to "time capsule" status. Which means somebody might think to archive your mess of media around the time you die. Maybe some younger cousin of yours will take care of it. Heck, funeral parlors might offer data archival as a service 20 years from now.

That is an interesting question. As a US engineer working with Japanese engineers, I am constantly comparing things they do to how we do, and wondering where general differences are and how they came about.

• Here is a map of the Tokyo rail system: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Greater_Tokyo_rail_network.png
• And here is a map of the London rail system: http://www.tandrag.com/images/uploads/London_Rail_Animation_thumb.JPG

You may notice that the London map is heavily organized around separate lines. The Tokyo map is much more interconnected, like they threw that slime on the ground and planned it out by nature. It may be that the Tokyo engineers were allowed to use a purer approach than the Londoners, less confined by politics. In Seattle, I know that when we talk about where our fledgling light rail system is going to go or not go, it is done piecemail with major battles fought over a single line at one time. I.e. We connect from downtown Seattle to the airport, hitting these neighborhoods. The concept of the route has to be simple enough to be explained in one sentence for it to succeed on a ballot. If some engineers rolled in to town promising some system that maximizes coverage of all points in most efficient way, etc., that goes down in flames. When your bosses are grumpy, cheap, and have a short attention span--then rail networks get built piecemeal without the advantages of overall planning.

It's a little sad that somebody, in pursuit of an audience, had to angle the story towards "we could be using mold to make design decisions." Your mass transit planners are not going to call in a consultant with a suitcase full of mold, obviously. The paths chosen for rail have so many political factors that the "most efficient" model has little relevance.

But just stop thinking of utility for a moment. Look at those pictures of the mold growing to reach all points and form little roads between them. That is fantastic! "Because you could then plan light rail and freight logistics and--" STOP! No, don't jump on to the practical applications yet. Take a moment to think about that simple little organism doing that complicated thing and how cool that is. Those pictures are breathtaking.

And after that, maybe try to write a matching algorithm to see if you can predict which paths will form by the slime. And then see if that algorithm offers something that the human-designed ones don't have already. And then maybe integrate and devise new algorithms based on what was learned. And then see what practical applications there are for these algorithms. This is what the scientists and engineers will actually end up doing if it is possible. Can we stop acting like bored little brats that every scientific observation isn't immediately useful?

Yes, you could use Sikuli to fire up a text editor, individually press the keys to write all the lines of code, launch the compiler/linker/whatever. So it meets your weird definition of completeness. However, I suspect you could not use Sikuli to write a program that writes a Sikuli program to write Sikuli. I could be wrong, though.

Come on, let's cut through the default Slashdot snark. The image capture aspect of Sikuli is brilliant! I don't like the tagline "program anything with Sikuli" because 99% of software should be written in something else. But think of writing test scripts that can use the image matching features. If the software works as advertised, then you could throw together UI test cases way faster than anything else I've seen. System administration tasks should be a good match too. The resulting code would be brittle and hard to maintain, but for quick one-off scripts, sure... I can see it.

I think I get what you're saying... When someone casually lists some heinous action in a list of considered options, it makes it seem like that person is nearly ready to do that heinous thing. I.e. if I say, "stomping on babies is logistically impractical," then it sounds like I'm morally ambivalent about babystomping, right? Still, you have to consider the tone of voice that people use when writing papers for their academic peers. If you want to be taken seriously and get your paper published, you don't voice your moral opinions in the paper. And in social sciences, knowledge is probably advanced more easily if the moralizing is left out. That's for something for Mr. Sunstein to do on a PR visit to the Colbert Report or Daily Show, I suppose. It's all about context.

Don't let yourself get bent out of shape over this. Read the paper which is being quoted by the article before you start believing nonsense and posting your own. The Klein article misrepresents and quotes out of context. For example, here is the Cass Sunstein quote that Aaron Klein picks and edits to his liking:

"We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories."

Sounds really scary right? Okay, here is the full paragraph from Sunstein's paper, available online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 :

What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).

Note the last sentence. Sunstein leaves the 2 points quoted by Klein out of the recommendation. The paper itself is somewhat insightful and worth a skim. There are things to disagree with perhaps, but this isn't some civil liberty crushing maniac.

I'm asking this seriously, not rhetorically.

They have a budget of $7.2 billion for grants. It seems like they could wi-max a bunch of major cities, but not the whole US. Or maybe they just want to make the internet "affordable"--not necessarily free. Subsidize people's ISP service? Ugh. I don't want to pay for my neighbor to download Zombie Strippers off the internet.

I do like the emphasis on making things competitive. There are a lot of us that have just one practical choice for broadband, either the phone or cable company. And then there is maybe some not-really-high-speed 3G/GPRS solution available. But without knowing details, I don't see how they encourage competition when there is a monopoly on wired or wireless access.

Seriously, what useful thing can the FCC do here?

Here is my plan: Make sure all the schools and libraries have got broadband-equipped computers to match demand. Let people that can't afford home internet ride the bus down to the library or stay after school. This is probably 90% covered already. It's too boring and unambitious of a plan to be very interesting, but it would do just fine. You'd have plenty of change left over from that $7.2 billion--go stimulate something else more useful with it, i.e. education, mass transit. We don't need to make sure every person is connected to a high-speed multimedia wonderland all the time for free. The emphasis should be on education and basic needs like typing up resumes, checking your e-mail, etc.

If Oracle takes MySQL in a bad direction, doesn't the open source community have the opportunity to maintain its own version of MySQL derived from the previous open source releases? It seems the worst thing you'd have to fear is a subtle lack of support from Oracle, where a minimal effort is made to maintain MySQL--just enough to keep anyone outside of Oracle from being motivated to start a fork project. Am I wrong? What exactly are people afraid of happening here?

You have to go try it yourself, giving or receiving, whichever is appropriate. If you hit the spot right, and the subject can feel it, then it is usually really obvious to the person getting stimulated. Subjective reports shouldn't be the basis of a scientific study, which is part of the problem here. From a man's point of view, you have to know the woman well enough to judge her reactions and how much you can trust her recounting of an experience. From a woman's point of view, you just have to be able to judge what physical actions cause your orgasm. These subjective things don't translate into a scientific study well, but that is plenty for an individual to figure out for him or herself if a form of sexual stimulation is legitimate or not. There are many things that you can form a reasonable individual opinion about that are hard or impossible to evaluate through the scientific method.

The funny thing is that T-Mobile offers a pretty decent plan with 3G data for $50/month which would be my first choice. But if you buy the subsidized phone, you get the spendy $80/month plan which doesn't really have good value to warrant the extra cost, IMO. Difference seems to be just more minutes and unlimited SMSs. So I could see buying the unsubsidized phone, and just getting the cheaper T-Mobile data plan separately.

Also, T-Mobile is one of the major carriers that refused to turn over customer information to US officials without a warrant. And they got KZJ, who is much sexier than the "Can You Hear Me Now" guy.

Just buy it with a credit card. And pay the debt off at $20/month or whatever is convenient. You'll be better off in the long run, because we'll get the carriers to start competing as big dumb pipes. The emphasis will be on coverage/speed for the buck, instead of some wacky chase after the latest "It" phone. We should all stop being scared off by upfront costs and letting phone carriers handle our financing through subsidies.

Exactly.

Companies and orgs already barrage newspapers with press releases in hopes of favorable coverage. And they often rely on writers and editors to be so rushed that they will carry their advertisements without working for the benefit of their readers to verify facts and judge value of the content. Posting misinformation on wikileaks anonymously is just a logical and painfully rational extension of marketing.

Look at it another way: even if real, honest, factual content is posted anonymously on wikileaks, with no sources available, all an implicated individual or institution has to do is deny the content is true in some vague way. And the flakier our news reporting gets, the harder it is to convince anyone that anything is true. In the end, we will just wander around cynical and unconvinced of anything, but also unwilling to act since no information seems actionable.

We need old-fashioned journalists that report facts with verifiable sources. Not the cheap, Web 3.0, crowdsourced crap.