Seems to me like the time to go out and patent my method of not charging for "non-gift" purchased items until delivery, and allowing of canceling the order prior to delivery.

Even better, after you patent math *on a computer*, I can turn around and patent math *on a mobile device* AND math *on the internet*!

Granted I think I've only used Thunderbird or Outlook in recent history (with some Eudora thrown in) but I've never found the conversation threading in any of the desktop clients to be as good as Gmail's. Maybe I'm missing something...

So Facebook is going to buy Opera and then build a phone? These both seem like desperate moves to stay relevant and even then I don't know if I'd call either of those ideas *good*. Why not focus on making a mobile app that doesn't suck first? All the news around Facebook lately seems to revolve around them realizing they need to have some sort of future plan to remain profitable, relevant, and grow at the same time. And it's like they're just realizing this newfangled mobile thing is going to take off.

Agreed. I just went back to Linux after a quite awhile on Windows 7. I was getting into some web development projects and it's just easier for me to get up and running and set things up on Linux. I went with Ubuntu since I had worked with that before, but Unity was all screwed up - specifically some quirks with Chromium tabs on it and I just didn't like it. I set up the Gnome3 stock PPA and used that for awhile. I liked how it looked but it just got to be too much work to use. Maybe it's because I'm on a laptop but with running everything full screen I found it tedious to keep alt-tabbing back and forth between browser, editor, and command prompt to do anything. Throw in a file explorer window or two and it was a mess. And with no taskbar I had little idea what all was running. I could spend a ton of time tweaking it and customizing it but why? Why spend all that time and work to get things to where they should be? So then I installed Cinnamon and have been using that for a few weeks. It's OK, but still has it's quirks. The taskbar font is ugly as hell, too small, and I can't seem to find a way to make it look cleaner. I've run into the "start" menu shifting like above, and some weird quirk where the locations of the open window tabs rearrange themselves when coming back from a lockscreen. I dunno, I guess it does work for the most part, seems to be better than Unity or stock Gnome3, but maybe I'd just be better off going back to classic Gnome.

Windows 7 wasn't that bad - I actually really like the UI. I just found myself wanting/needing a bunch of the command line stuff from Linux, plus this time around I didn't want to mess with activations, etc.

Is it really too much to ask for a Linux desktop that isn't half-assed complete but also looks and acts a bit more modern than Windows 95? Maybe that's why Microsoft and Apple have the big budgets, to get the little details. But coming from Windows Gnome3 and Unity seem like a completely wrong direction (Unity) and half-implemented (Gnome3). And everything else just seems dated. Sigh...

What's funny is that I actually moved to Chrome fully *because* of Linux. I used to use Firefox all the time, everywhere. But Firefox on Ubuntu was slooooow. Not necessarily the page loading or script performance, but the UI just seemed laggy and ugly, especially compared to using Firefox all day on Windows at work. But Chromium in Ubuntu was *fast*, UI was fast to respond, fast to load pages, fast everywhere. So I eventually switched to Chrome on Windows and Chromium on Ubuntu so I'd have the same UI across the board.

So far the tax advantages of marriage seem to be only geared toward single-income families, couples where one person makes the majority of the income, or families with children. As two professionals with no kids (DINKS!) we repeatedly got screwed over on our taxes. Maybe this was partially because of the complexity of the withholding system or something, but all I know is that in the end we've ended up owing a ton almost every time.

Because Facebook doesn't work well enough? How do I find a historical post someone made on Facebook without scrolling endlessly through their page until I find it? Not to mention searching public profiles/feeds/whatever for some topic of interest. Facebook's mobile apps suck. They suck hard. You'd think the largest social web company in the world would be able to hire some developers to put together mobile apps that blow you away. But they're barely serviceable. The Instant Upload feature of the G+ apps makes getting media to Google+ (videos and photos) light years easier than Facebook.

I think Google+'s major flaw is the comparison to Facebook in the first place. To me, it's more a direct functional replacement for Twitter, but with much better ways to handle interaction and conversation. (For that matter, how do you search Twitter for historical stuff?) And then it can accomplish what Facebook does, too.

I'm on Ubuntu 12.04, using Gnome3 from the PPA. I tried Unity but was getting weirdness with Chrome's tabs not tearing and reattaching correctly and I didn't really like the Unity interface. I'd played with Gnome3 awhile back and have been using it since. I like the style but find it clumsy to manage multiple windows. I dunno, maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I've got my editor, browser, and terminal open and it seems clumsy switching from one to another. But I'm on a laptop and working with everything fullscreen is a pain, but the interface doesn't seem to work well with working with smaller windows, either. I dunno, maybe I need to adjust to it, go downstairs and use a second monitor for that work.

But how does Cinnamon compare? Would it be worth looking at the PPA for that and using it?

When you're beside them they tend to get you dirty. No one wants that.

I'm quite happy with my Galaxy Nexus on Verizon, and wouldn't change it for any AT&T Android phone at the moment.

Thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for!

After reading a few articles, here's what I still want to know:

If you want to pay for the service, can you opt for a year-long contract or something? It seems like a reasonable price, but I'd rather not have yet another monthly charge.

How does the space work compared with whatever allocated space your other Google services have? Right now I've got some amount of Gmail space, some amount of Picasa space, unlimited (?) Google+ space for images and videos (which still show up in Picasa web but don't apply to the quota?), and then the Google Docs space. Will there be any consolidation of this? Do I want there to be?

Will we be able to use the GDrive app on my phone to store something like a keepass password file (encrypted) and access it from multiple devices? I can do that with Dropbox right now.

Anything? Does Instagram have any sort of lock on "Implementing digital image filters on a mobile phone" or something that would explain a $1 bil valuation? Seeing how there's a ton of ripoff apps I wouldn't think so but you never know. Couldn't Facebook have made something in-house and have it automatically Just Work for their existing users, most I assume who are a cross section from the Instagram users?