I've had a few pages deleted for being "non notable". While that may be true on a large scale, burying obscurities is never a good thing.
One page about a particular spyware was scrubbed completely (no history) and redirected to the general page for "Spyware" - all that work people put together on it was gone and the aspies at wikipedia refused to revive even the historical info.

Unfortunately, nuclear bombs don't produce useful energy. We've had nuclear bombs for decades, but other than a deterrent against enemies, they're really not very useful devices.

What we need is something that creates useful energy, energy that can be harnessed and used for useful purposes, namely generating electricity. That means you need a controlled reaction, something we haven't achieved yet (to my knowledge) in a way that produces more energy than is required to sustain the reaction.

Imply that this means that the Mac is now just as serious a gaming platform as Windows is. :D (I've already gotten a couple of people with Apple Derangement Syndrome pissed off at me for that one.)

. If you look at the health care bill that they just passed (supposedly necessary because of evil Big Pharma and evil Big Insurance), among its biggest supporters was Big Pharma and the big health insurance companies/organizations.

Half right. The politicians made a deal with the hospitals and the pharmaceutical companies. The insurance companies would have preferred to have the status quo, as evinced by their relentless ad campaigns on the news channels in the months leading up to the healthcare vote.

Certainly you can be. But I was looking more at how this ideal ends up (generally how it works) in practice...

Sure, who cares how people waste their time. But what when they start to waste your time?

Shit on your customers for a while and alternatives will pop up, it's inevitable.

. . . . unless you're a legislated or legislatively protected monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly/trade-group in your market, (like AT&T(et.al), the FED, the AMA, the RIAA, the MPAA, intel, Microsoft, Clear Channel, - heck, I even think PayPal has some sort of legal protection) -

WRT social networking, I'm not actually aware of any nasty patents or vendor lock-in tricks that Facebook has going on, other than the fact that, for a while, they actually kicked ass. And, I suppose, if they sucked-up to their press competition a little more, and gave away more mindshare, they might not be suffering as much negative press over their privacy policies.

Yes, I'm thinking, they would be "getting away with it" if they weren't somehow playing hardball with potential advertisers. Yes, their mistakes, and their surreptitious policy changes have been horrible. But I think the newsmedia has made a lot more noise about it than they otherwise would have - if they didn't view Facebook as a media COMPETITOR, rather than a partner. (ie. I can join a CNN group, and allow CNN to promote their junk on my Wall, and when I get sick of them, I can HIDE their noise. My guess, is CNN doesn't want me to be able to shut them up so easily).

I do agree that over the past 3-4 months, Facebook's activity/appeal has dwindled. This started to happen independent of the privacy concerns. Most people don't understand or care about the issues beyond a vague sort of - "ooh, that sounds scary". But I think the real issue going on is that they've simply jumped the shark.

That's not exactly a good thing. I know a few friends that say the hours can be pretty brutal, especially around crunch time and you get paid on contract, so no overtime or pay if things go past their due date. I.e. you have to be extremely passionate about it because your quality of life will suck.

They know they won't stop everyone but it is dead easy to pirate DS games. Most people probably wouldn't bother if it required a bit of effort and Nintendo would be happy in just cutting the numbers in half. It's a shame too that people have ruined one of the most open gaming consoles ever.

Nintendo Takes On Pirates: IN 3D!

Currently, the patent office is required to review prior art submissions from outside parties for 60 days. The
patent is visible in the system for 60 days, and then they can throw your notice of prior art in the garbage.

2 months is not a lot of time. If they want to reduce the backlog, then crowdsource the problem. Open that
duration up. Even create some incentives to get people to read the patent applications. A little education
on what constitues prior art. Maybe even a hall of fame which says, "Hey, this guy helped us out by finding
something we didnt know about", patent denied.

Its much better to stop a patent (and the expensive process) in the beginning, then defend against an established
patent in court. By crowdsourcing the patent prior art review system, everything would work better.

There's a problem with the after fees, but in the other way. If the PTO makes money off of calling something bad, why would they ever call something good?

... you always sleep better knowing you've invested wisely .. :D

Obviously, the biggest use of Flash on the web is embedded video, but this is hardly the only use, and those are seldom mentioned in the HTML5 v. Flash discussions. With Scribd converting to HTML5, the field seems to be opening up (though their use of Flash always struck me as being an anti-copying measure more than anything else).

So far as I know, HTML5 isn't suitable for things like graphical configurators or 3D models (allowing the user to rotate them) -- or is it? There's QTVR for 3D stuff, but it's always seemed clunky to me. And I haven't seen anything but Flash used for configurators. Are there actually reasonable alternatives to Flash for this sort of thing?

Pretty soon, you'll be able to play Crysis without a computer!

PS2 also. I'm still seeing new games coming out for it.