When it takes a good 10 minutes of trawling TFA and Wikipedia just to find out what ETI and PDI stand for and what a datamart is, you know that the product is hyped up just enough to be worthless.

Every patent issued effectively blocks off a segment of a market to competitors, creating a micro-monopoly. We are rapidly approaching a time where, due to patent trading large corporations are coming close to total ownership of a particular market.

America is the major culprit in all this patent absurdity. Behind the friendly face of enterprise and free capitalism lies a very different reality. Corporations with vast resources and political lobbying power apply for patents shotgun-style to prevent any form of competition, so that they can profit by driving down production costs giving consumers overpriced, low-quality products.

From the abuse of patent law comes state-sanctioned monopolies, which is reminiscient of Soviet communist economic practice.

China, a formerly Communist nation is far more capitalist than America these days.

Posting from the UK.

This was covered less concisely further up by BountyX, here are a few uses:

1. Using the personal data of the compromised accounts to make a person-specific dictionary to guess passwords and/or secret questions of other websites, including internet backing, eBay, Amazon etc.
2. Using the personal data of friends of compromised accounts to accomplish much the same thing as 1.
3. Sending spam to the email address associated with the account that are crafted to look like they're from friends.
4. Social Engineering 'hacks' such as IMing someone pretending to be their friend on a different IM account.
5. Grabbing pictures of beautiful girls from the photo album of the compromised account and friends. Think teenage girls. 4Chan will love this.

Which means, even if your account hasn't been owned and you change your password, you're still not safe from the wider ranging implications of this hack/security leak.

According to the Facebook statistics page the average account has 130 friends. If 1 in 300 accounts are compromised and you have circa 130 friends then the odds are quite high that the personal data you have "only available to friends" is going to become available to some fairly unfriendly people shortly.

Reminds me of the evertrue saying 'play with fire and you'll get burnt'. I have always been mindful of the threat FB poses to my privacy and have completely closed down my account several times, but keep giving in and going back due to peer pressure from family & friends. This time I'm killing it off for sure. No organization, be it governmental or corporate should have control over so much of an individuals personal data.

New species discovered on planet in hitherto insignificant Sol system!

Zarglwellian explorers discovered a species of egotistical bipeds with limited intelligence on a planet orbiting the Sol star yesterday morning. First contact was made in the Earth town of Lamesa, Texas, where intrepid Apheliousian space explorer Taivarg Artxe beamed down to the surface of the planet to be met by a collection of adorable beings armed with what appeared to be unsophisticated projectile weapons.

After initial greetings were exchanged, Taivarg explained to the bipeds using universal heiroglyphics that he was on an interstellar quest to find new and exciting crusine to offer to customers of his francise of fast food resturants. He announced to the collected bipeds that he had intended to eat them, and if they were sufficiently tasty, round up and cull his species before sending their remains to resturants around the universe, but he instead thinks that there's more profit marketing the human species as novelty pets for the children of Aphelion, and they should be thankful that their species will be used to bring happiness to billions of Aphelion's children instead of used for food.

So children, look out for new bipedal hooman pets, coming soon to a pet shop near you!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Act_of_1790