Yeah, I only know of women having legally guaranteed rights to property and real estate as recently as the Code of Hammurabi in the 18th century BC. While the Code of Ur-Nammu (21st century BC) and the Code of Urukagina (ca 24th century BC) both give some property rights to women, I haven't seen any laws specifically giving them concrete, irrevocable ownership.

I know of a company that wrote a system that will run a visio flow chart back in the 90's, so they could run programs from managers "who didn't know how to program." It's probably still in use. My 6 year old is playing with logo on her birthday by moving some code blocks around. GUI based programming is useful because it brings programming to more people.

However, these people would never be able to write something as complex as Google's PageRank. People who can solve complex computing problems can probably type code into a good editor faster than they can manage a cumbersome GUI, especially as program complexity grows and requires you to navigate more code. In my opinion, the speed of keyboard input is a big part of what is keeping the terminal programs so popular in Linux, despite many years of decent or good file managers and other GUI's, so I doubt traditional program editing will go away either, since programmin is more open-ended, making a good GUI-only system more difficult.

The ToS state that they have the right to use this data to improve their services and the right to republish the data to promote their services. I cannot imagine this being outside the terms of service.

We are allowing people to sue because they don't like their contract on a free service.

The problem these companies are facing is that the laws and regulations are so complex that the government can tie any company up in red tape and choke them out of business, if they aren't friendly enough towards government spying. On top of that, failure to comply with the NSA can be considered treason.

To round things off, the government make Google face charges of violating wiretapping law and charges for people being too stupid to read their terms of service.

Facebook uses a NoSQL database (HBase) for their messaging system, and some related tech for data analysis (Hadoop). They also have custom photo serving software (haystack) for their photo storage. The main data (status updates, friends, likes, etc.) is in MySQL with memcache in front of it. There is also a cache layer (varnish) in front of the web servers. They said NoSQL isn't ready and point to the smaller messaging system needing more staff.

Does Oracle even sell support for custom forks of MySQL for Facebook to buy?

Remember their motto of "move fast, break things." Go look at their data load some time. I doubt they're running a version close enough to stock that Oracle would be able to support it if they wanted to. Their backup/recovery system alone is insane, and they host 2 custom branches of MySQL on GitHub. When was the last time a software vendor supported a client's custom patches?

Keep in mind that Facebook employs more than 10x as many people as MySQL, and has multiple MySQL teams. It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook has a bigger MySQL dev effort than the company. Either way, they handle all database support internally.

Facebook is a lot more open than Google about their hardware, so I will use them. Facebook has a hadoop cluster that holds 250+ PB and a cluster for pics/video that holds 100+ PB. That puts them at having 80,000+ drives. Based on average write speeds from Tom's Hardware Guide, it would take under 6 hours to fill a 3TB drive, and Facebook needs at most 5 batches. 30 hours is within the time period mentioned, and at 70 hours instead of 40, is still slightly faster (assuming the microSD was the original data location and didn't need to be copied there).

However, the article neglects both 100GB Ethernet and bonded ports, making this still useless.

.... CDs....

Old people and their ancient technology ways...

Isn't this used in setting up web encryption? What other options are there?

Sometimes whale specifically means the suborder of mysticeti (baleen whales), and others it includes all cetacea (namely odontoceti or toothed whales, which includes dolphins). I'm no expert, but I would consider toothed whales as whales, which is how I've typically seen it classified.

So you're telling me there is a chance they might be wrong when they say prehistoric animals lost their spine when evolving into whales, and that I shouldn't necessarily trust them?

They have orders from NSA and Prism was a state secret. Failure to comply is an act of treason, and after enough resistance from a company they would probably seize all the computer equipment (Internet without Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.). Of course, they would run the proper propaganda campaign first, so we don't execute the politicians for treason ourselves.

Companies have been fighting in unhelpful courts instead. What they should also do is run disturbing political ads against all incumbents in Congress who are supporting the NSA (e.g. "Big Brother is watching you" billboards, with the politician's face), and start the campaigning before the politicians do.

I would accept a compromise of gutting software patents to 5-7 years. It would be much easier to get large companies and patent trolls to agree to it, and cause much less damage.

I can't count the times I had to ship Windows code to Linux in order to sort out an error in compiling. Also, bunch of vim windows is much more powerful than the MS IDE, not to mention all the command utilities and ease of scripting.