...John C. Dvorak were no longer paid to write lame articles?

What if somebody inserts your email address into their AAC files before sharing them with the world?

No, not like that, the Google-Apps (writer, spreadsheet, etc.) are downloaded to your PC and you use them from there. So it's still the same mini-office suite that it is on-line and you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference (that is; the move from on-line to off-line mode is seamless). Or you can still just use them through a browser from any PC like you always did. MS/OO/3rd party tools don't come into it.

Well, I don't work for the IT dept, but generally it seems that most faults get caused by the air-con malfunctioning and then several machines overheating before the auto-graceful-shutdown mechanisms come into play. Maybe bigger organizations could duplicate everything and switch between mirrored systems, but for whatever reasons we don't quite have that. Our networks are also MS-DFS/Sharepoint based which I suspect leads to a lot of minor oddities/lost/changed files, corrupt DNS entries, etc. that occur from time to time. If I were King for a day, I'd like to try out a *nix back end for file-servers and name-servers as I'm pretty sure they'd be a lot easier to setup, maintain and be a lot more reliable.

Yes you can, Gears will sync the two whenever the link becomes available again - meaning you can edit your docs on the plane, bus, with or without connectivity, etc.

Not quite. If you're to compare like for like, then it only has to be more reliable than your companies IT infrastructure. I don't know what the average is, but we probably have 4 or 5 serious network meltdowns per year that leave most staff twiddling their thumbs for a couple of hours or more.

You are aware that all Google Docs can be backed up locally with Google Gears and also converted into a number of popular formats?

Don't Panic! Once all the work has gone to the East, our salaries will in turn become lower than those in the East and the factories will return. I wonder if a global economy will ever stabilize where most regions are broadly similar?

I would. On the interviews of the 'Led Zeppelin' DVD Jimmy Page politely states that he has a respect for the Beatles but also that they (the Beatles) are doing their thing and LZ are doing theirs - with no overlap and little common heritage. This stems from the fact that the Beatles were originally a skiffle band whereas LZ have a true rock and blues heritage and is likely the reason why every Beatles album has at least one lame track (Octopus' Garden, Revelution #9, etc) whereas LZ never put a foot wrong. Granted, Lennon/McCartney had their fair share of brilliance as tune-smiths, but not in the same league as the staggering improvisation, writing/playing ability and live touring schedule as LZ. The Beatles deserve to be in the Top-10 bands of all time, maybe even the Top-5 - but they don't deserve the undisputed #1 slot that their popular sales have secured them.

I think the point is that unless your neighbours had steamed open your letter and carefully re-sealed it then they didn't get to see your current balance and account number. Also, there's a good chance that the two families which live either side of you would not be tempted to commit crime in the small number of instances that your postman makes a mistake in delivering your mail to wrong house each year - as apposed to the potentially large number of anonymous and largely untrackable entities which may exist in the pipe-line between the banks mail server and your in-box who are actively seeking this traffic for malice for every single communication.

Because statements sent from Bob to Alice would likely be intercepted by Carol who could use that information to the detriment of Alice. What we need is encrypted email, but since the majority of users don't care/couldn't decrypt it anyway, it won't happen until the process is made totally seamless which is up to us engineers. But since the banks are more often passing on the cost of fraud back to the customer and charging twice to insure an already safe bank account against identity theft - why should they care enough to spend the big bucks to do a proper job?

I remember borrowing the Cuckoo's Egg back in '95 on my sandwich year - whilst more of a thriller (all be it true one) than a programming book, it is a fascinating and well written account of a true story and a niece piece of 70s history with plenty of refs to important non-work aspects of the time, such as the Grateful Dead, etc.

Kind of reminded me of another great computing story (totally fictional this time) which was Bugs by Theodore Rozak - imagines a near-distinct future where minuscule bugs breed and thrive within IBM System/360s and other hardware of the time, eventually leading to disastrous results for society. Apparently the book was inspired by a true case of un-explained bugs found within the servers and terminals at AT&T that caused irritation to VDU users - though I sometimes wonder whether this wasn't just thunder-flies and a few sickies..

Well, my property developer advised me that they're not making any more earth - so I should snap up as much as I can now. He did seem quite sure.

Not quite. At least, not yet. Google Docs is only available through the browser so you need a signal (mostly OK I guess since the service is unlimited data), but then the Docs are read-only (except for Notebook is writable but with cut down functionality). Before the G1 I had a Windows Mobile phone - the interface was hideous but you did have a choice of editors from Notepad, Pocket-Word and even Emacs/Xemacs. It was pretty useful to be able to take notes whilst reading on the way into work. So far the Android Market only has a few paltry notepad-like demos - I'm hoping a port of Emacs will find its way there sooner or later.

Yeah, it's a shame that the G1 didn't have any native support for Google Docs along with Gears for off-line working during flights or whatever. Maybe they're working on it (along with Gears for Notebook)?