The difference, of course, being that when the original authors (or the maintainers of the original metaserver) go to the dark side, it's not hard for a nonprofit benevolent geek to open up her own server, and allow users to migrate their data over to the new server and remain on the same network, keeping all their connections intact. At that point you're basically moving your website (your social network "node") to a new host (another Diaspora server), while remaining on the same network!

Right now, if you're fed up with how Facebook is handling your data, you have to quit Facebook. With Diaspora, if you're fed up with how your Diaspora server is handling your data, you switch servers, or even start your own.

Furthermore, the whole thing is going to be free software, so in the event of the original authors trying to slip nasty stuff into the code, a) we can know about it and b) it won't be hard to fork the project into a compatible non-evil project.

This is radically different from Facebook's philosophy of "we own all your data and you're stuck with us." My only hope is that the Diaspora guys can make their stuff easy to use.

Coming from a Catholic tradition, we don't believe that all of the Bible is literal truth, but rather all of it is spiritual truth. Of course there are contradictions and inaccuracies - it's a compendium of books written by dozens of authors over the course of centuries. The goal in reading it is not to merely read the words - it's to seek a deeper spiritual truth through meditation and prayer.

I won't speak for other spiritual texts, but you can't read the Bible in the same way as you do a textbook.

And killing off Arrested Development, Futurama, and back-when-it-was-funny-Family-Guy aren't further proofs of Fox's incompetence as a network? Cancelling Firefly may be their biggest sin, but it's far from their only one.

It's naivete in the extreme, bordering on intolerance, to lump everyone on earth into "Christians" and "reasonable people."

Sure, some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature.

Something tells me your attitude would be a lot less casual if it was you or your loved ones who were wrongfully detained, indefinitely, without warrant and without trial, in the name of "security."

The real naivete is assuming that only the bad guys are the victims of misuse of power.

Ban jailbreakers from the app store. Then you don't get the 30% cut of the apps they would be legitimately buying anymore, and instead they'll just be forced to learn how to pirate the apps they want.

If there's consensus about what the Founders meant when they said something, there should not be difficulty in amending the constitution if its language is thought to be ambiguous. If there's no consensus, then it must be assumed that the Constitution means what it says. So yes, nuclear weapons are "arms." If you want to amend the constitution to forbid citizens from owning nukes, it should not be difficult to do so, since it's likely there's popular consensus on that matter.

I don't know how a religion is of any value unless it has opinions about how society should be. I don't know how you can express opinion about how society should be without saying how society should govern itself.

Saying "religions should not express views about political matters" is tantamount to saying "religions should not inspire their followers to do anything," and that's certainly prohibitive of the free exercise of religion.

If the Founders had meant that the militia had the right to keep and bear arms, why didn't they say "the right of the militia to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"?

As a native, I can say with authority that a $30K/year pay cut isn't the worst part about living in Cincinnati.