OK, let's break it down.

Option 1: You want nobody to see your pictures. So, you make them private.

Option 2: You want anyone to be able to see your pictures who would want to. So, you make them public. If you're on Google+, maybe they get re-shared.

Option 3: You want your friends to be able to see your pictures, but no one else. Even if you use Google+, you use the Picassa "only those with the URL" privacy setting, and don't post the link to Google+.

Option 4: You want to share your photos with only your friends, but no one else, via Google+, but the privacy settings don't allow for that. You post to Slashdot about how horrifying this discovery was, and declare that you have decided not to join the service for this reason alone.

G+ will automatically link your Picassa account to your G+ account, yes. But it WON'T go and change the settings on all your albums to automatically share them. Those that are currently private will remain so; those that are currently public will remain so, but also be visible via G+.

Now go take off that tin-foil hat before pictures of you wearing it appear all over Google+.

There was also a Canadian federal election yesterday, with many surprising results which were all reported in this exact time slot. I know that's not as exciting as a bunch of commandos shooting a guy, but if we're going to talk facts, let's get them straight.

Availability is only half the problem in Canada. I'm paying extra for an Internet plan that only gets me 60 GB/month. That maxes out pretty quickly with anything HD!

Speed is all well and good, but it's not my main bottleneck anymore. You could make my connection 100x faster tomorrow, and it would only be frustrating because of my bandwidth cap. With that faster connection, I could hit my monthly cap within 5 minutes instead of 8 hours!

You both have a point, but sharing and using knowledge takes energy. Without the cheap energy of oil (or an alternative which has yet to take over) all that knowledge won't go very far or even last very long.

You sound unimpressed with "stuff", so don't buy "stuff". Buy experiences. Take them to the zoo, or a children's show, or a good hands-on science museum. It'll cost the same, they'll get more out of it, and there'll be that much less plastic sitting around your sibling's house.

In other words, engineers don't get laid enough. Promise them an afterlife full of virgins, and the next thing you know....

That's only true for monoculture fed by petroleum-based fertilizers. As soon as you talk in terms of sustainable farming, with crop rotations and even mixed fields, traditional farming has productivity levels that monoculture can't touch.

It's a moot point, though. Petroleum-based monoculture cannot be sustained indefinitely. Traditional agriculture has been and--unless we continue to destroy our soils--will be.

Wait, they want to turn the International Space Station into a national lab? What about all the other countries with a stake in this real estate?

Alas, Sony has no out there either. Users can no longer play their current games online, which is definitely an advertised feature. The user loses functionality no matter what they do.

We need to make manufacturers calculate mileage averages from the total vehicles they sell, not the total vehicles in their lineup. This is just going to result in more abominations like the PT Cruiser, which was designed to lower the average mileage of Dodge's truck line rather than to be a useful (or even safe) passenger vehicle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pt_cruiser#Overview

I see two ways out of that:

1. Cost of living varies regionally. Of course, as soon as you inject money the cost of living changes, so you have to do it gradually.

2. Economics is not a zero-sum game.

To some extent, we do need to grow our way out of poverty... but that only works if we commit ourselves to sharing the wealth to a reasonable degree. I'm not advocating Communism. I just don't think the highest incomes should be thousands of times the size of the lowest.

Could we, even? At what point would it be cheaper to just relieve the world of poverty than establishing an impassible fence three miles from every American border?

The system is broken: even the experts realize that. Should we be playing with the algorithm, or throwing the whole system out?

If racial profiling doesn't work, what do we do next? Do we keep going with the security theatre, building a divide between "us" and "them", or do we start attacking the causes of terrorism rather than pretending we can do anything about the effects?