I work as a software engineer for an affiliate networking advertising company. Our business wouldn't exist if we couldn't track a click from a publisher (affiliate, like a deal blog or a search engine) to an advertiser (merchant, somebody selling stuff). I am extremely familiar with how we handle customer data, and we have no use for it. Our tracking technology aggregates the majority of the information related to sales fairly early on in the data pipeline and discards a lot of it after a relatively short time (hours). We have external and internal auditors that check up on the methods we use to clean personally identifiable information (PII, as they always call it). Even something as relatively benign as our own client's e-mail addresses are secure. When it comes to the likes of our actual advertisements, our company culture is nearing paranoia about NOT storing PII because even an accidental leak would reflect poorly on our clients and be devastating to our business. I really hope the other advertising companies see the risk of collecting this information as expensive as we do and take as much effort to avoid letting it be traceable back to individuals.

I have to say this: the opinions and statements are my own and not those of my company in any way.

Actually, that's not what happened. In fact the Congress has been implementing more wind subsidies because the market has been shrinking otherwise. What happened to wind market was a combination of two things: back in 2008 debt markets and natural gas prices collapsed almost simultaneously. Debt markets have recovered, but natural gas prices have not. Today it's much cheaper to build natural gas power plants than it is to develop wind farms. Really, though, Pickens should've seen it coming 2 years ago (and privately he did - he's been trying to sell all those GE turbines for a while now).

Collective bargaining is another word for collusion. The head of lettuce analogy only holds if all of the grocerie stores get together and decide how much lettuce will cost in some dark back room. It's possible, but illegal.

The vast majority of applications you COULD write would work just fine as web applications. If you want to reach the largest audience with the least API-lock-in, think HTML/Javascript. Frameworks like Sancha, Worklight, Sproutcore, Phonegap, Rhodes, and jQueryMobile are providing an extremely good API that allows you to target the web browser so that you not only can have users on iOS and Android, but also Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, webOS, and any other touch-based web browser.

These frameworks allow you to take advantage of the new features of HTML5 such as local/offline SQLight storage, canvas, drag/drop, OpenGL, etc. The main downsides are that you DON'T get listed in the various markets, you don't have access to many platform-specific features - notifications are still a little tricky, but I'm sure that there will be an open source app to handle web-based notifications in a multi-platform way in the future.

I wish most of the apps in the Android/iOS Markets would just go away and become web sites, because they have no purpose as downloaded apps, including many games.

Before the printing press, the duplication of data was a tedious, expensive and error-prone process. Burning books represented the destruction of knowledge. Countless volumes of data have been lost to all time at the hand of ancient book burnings. Today, we look back on every book burning as an act of ignorance. While I agree with the bulk of the comments that state, "who cares, it's just a book", I still feel upset when I see people exercising their right to destroy their own property (and whatever permanent knowledge it contained) even though I know there are an infinite number of copies of that knowledge now contained in digital media.

I just hope we don't reach a time where the mass-destruction of knowledge becomes possible again.

You can buy the RadioTime app for something like $4 that will give you most of your local radio stations and almost any streaming station from around the world.

Sorry for replying to my own post; the revenue growth in question is actually around 25% year over year as can be gleaned from the financials released by Skype.

Dear Slashdot (and TechCrunch for that matter), please don't switch to financial analysis just yet. The statement "But a big portion of that was from interest income." is both misleading (why focus on this portion of the financial statement as opposed to the operational part?) and incorrect (net financial result is actually a loss of about $4.3M). Additionally, when you say that "this isn't exactly a new business", that implies that there is lack of growth and the 3% return on revenue is somewhat indicative of future potential, while in the very next sentence you show that there was over 50% growth in revenue.

You're absolutely correct! Planned economies are far more efficient at enslaving their people and slave trade.

You're right. Or, as a large corporation, I would have a HUGE incentive to grease whatever wheels I can to make sure that:

1. My technology doesn't become an official open standard but remains an unofficial one.
2. My competitors technology DOES become an open standard to drive him out of business.
3. My technology DOES become an open standard, but some essential tooling to use my technology remains outside the standard and very costly.
4. Some really poor technology becomes the open standard so that I can achieve #1.

The result of a government policy of taking property (even patented inventions) from the ultra successful for the benefit of the common always provides an incentive for the ultra-successful to take it's business elsewhere. This is why countries that frequently practice such a policy of radical socialism or communism tend to grow at a slower pace in the long run than more capitalist oriented countries in terms of GDP, or any useful quality of life measurement.

Any economist I know would tell you that the greatest benefit to the people is to allow the successful to enjoy the fruits of their labour so long as they don't stifle competition more than to allow them to make a modest profit from their hard work. And, the political discussion then can surround what exactly is a "modest profit", and how do we keep from stifling competition "too much". You've stepped outside that argument with complete disregard for the rightful owner of property under the auspices of "the good of the people" which has been shown in the real world, at least until now, to be a failed philosophy due to the fact that determining "the good of the people" never actually happens better by some governing body when a free and open market is available (which isn't always the case: sanctioned monopolies, military, health care, fire/police, etc).

If what you're saying were true, then the markets would've never recovered. The facts show otherwise, though: the markets recovered within 10 minutes of the glitch.

What makes you think that high frequency trading made it worse? If anything, HFTs are the reason the markets recovered so quickly.

The G1 originally shipped with Android 1.0. It was upgraded to 1.5 which provided for an on-screen keyboard and bluetooth audio, and then to 1.6 with navigation and other useful features.

iPhone OS, on the other hand, is just now getting multitasking, something that has been around since the 1.0 version of Android.

What was once Android playing catchup to iPhone has quickly become iPhone playing catchup to Android, and now that the 3GS is being brought to the level of Android 1.6, then we can't really compare upgrade paths of the two phones in terms of time.