RDF is nice and there are various different syntaxes for it (including various triples formats), and promises, if it can be built, deployed and trusted(!!!) to make the web ever so much more searchable. This will depend though on people writing good ontologies (not easy) and using them correctly (even less easy).

RDFa and microformats look, on the surface at least, to be nice ways to manage RDF type information in HTML. But I'm a bit more dubious - they don't, in many cases, have careful ontologies built around them - when they do (RDFa, mostly) they seem to be very resource intensive (a heavily RDFa annotated HTML page is likely to balloon to several times the same page without RDFa), and the uses of them I've seen have been less than convincingly correct. This doesn't mean that they're useless, just that they're not doing the job at the moment, or they're doing the job poorly.

The solution that seems to be favored by the semantic web types is to present RDF pages as an alternative to HTML pages when RDF is requested. This looks, by far, to be the best way to work this, but does require site builders (and CMSs and web frameworks), and content authors, to be able to build correct RDF pages that represent the information presented, often at the same time as they present HTML pages to human readers (and non-RDF search engines). This is going to be a major problem.

While random order would be nice, it is hardly likely. More likely will be IE first, Opera second (after all they have money to spend to put it there), then Chrome (Google has money too) and then Firefox, with other low penetration browsers following.

It seems to me that this service will be a very pretty target for hats of various sorts :

• Black Hats - may try to break in to get the information for their own uses
• Grey Hats - may try to break in to show they can (knowing it is a target)
• Ivory Hats - might decide that the presence of this information on the network is a bad idea and try to break in to delete or change it
• Orange Clown Wigs - might break in just for the lulz

Not only does their site pretty much yell out "We want to make money from everyone.", they even say in their "Vision" that they want to be an all inclusive monopoly :

Just what we need, yet another money-sucking trade group with an interest in perpetual copyright and the power and money to bribe lawmakers into granting them exactly that.

Actually, I think it is more like 95% of the time So it's not so bad after all.

It would probably go more like :
Phone says : I hear that you're brushing your teeth.
Pause for connection.
Crelm toothpaste with the miracle ingredient, Fraudulin! Choose Crelm toothpaste!
To order Crelm toothpaste with the miracle ingredient, Fraudulin, press the "Buy" button now.

At every level. See the Curry Howard Lambek Correspondence (mentioned also above). The math doesn't look like arithmetic, but then most math doesn't.

I started getting much more unfiltered spam. Lots of it looks like this (a real example) : Subject : acceptant accelerometer abysmal abusive accession accolade So, no website, no valid return address. Just random words. I'm wondering if either there's a bug in the spam generator (I get others that start with a line of similarly random words, but then continue for a page or so and are followed by an ad), or if they're trying to confuse spam filters.

There's another variant that looks more like english text with a number of errors in spelling so only a few of the words are real.

This instance of firefox (sometimes I have more than one running at once) has 45 tabs open and it is that low because I just pruned them down this morning. I often end up with about 80-100 tabs open, but that is usually only for a short time while I'm problem solving or trying to figure out some specific topic at which point I usually drop back down to the 40 or so range. Often at this point I need to restart firefox (because of the memory issues).

My current minimum (tabs I always open in every browser instance and keep open) is 8, but has been as large as 12. I could cut this down to 4, but would end up reopening a few and keeping them open, so it seems pretty stable.

Short of shutting down the network a nicely distributed service could be very tough to disrupt. And while communications to the rest of the world are undoubtedly important, for the Iranians right now, internal communications are likely to be much more important.

Currently to do shared chat/video chat/audio/documents... most systems are dependent on servers of one sort or another. Making something that could work on a more peer-to-peer level would be very useful indeed as it would help alleviate (though probably not entirely eliminate) the reliance on servers that are often under someone else's control. If you doubt the usefulness of this, just look at what is happening in Iran right now.

Perhaps "we" should not intervene, if by "we" you mean the governments of the US, UK....

But if you mean we should not help the Iranians to build network and communications connectivity, which is one of the things requested, I think you're mistaken. We should help everyone we can with whatever expertise we have to establish communications amoung the people in Iran and between them and the rest of the world. One of the first things repressive governments try to do is clamp down on communications and the more we can help people communicate the harder it is for such governments to gain and maintain power. Of course, this is not the only factor, but it is a big one.

You missed the cable channels that consist of a couple of hours a day of programming and then many hours of ads and infomercials. And the "all-shopping-all-the-time" channels.

But I suspect that a-la-carte programming would leave me paying more than I'm paying now for the same few channels I watch, so I'm a bit ambivalent about pushing for it.

The wow factor of "It hit me then hit the ground" is also much better than "It hit the ground and a piece of ground hit me." Given a choice, I know which story I'd go with.