Dude here punched his boss in the face and they were unable to fire him

Something tells me there's more to this story...

"social networking is ultimately a marketing vehicle"

Social networking is quickly becoming a commodity, which makes it a prime target for an open source challenge. With a distributed network, a single site with under 10 users can operate within a larger network, which overcomes the network effect that centralized social networks require.

... that they'd be willing to kick down some money for open source, distributed social networking projects (like, Appleseed :)

They may not get any return on their investment, unless you count sweet, sweet revenge.

You're right, now it ends in 3 days.

Most definitely. There was a Federated Social Web Summit in Portland in July, 2010, and more on the way. There's a federated social web mailing list, and now the beginnings of a W3C working group that many of us will be working together on. I can't say for sure how it will shake out in the end, because we're all taking different approaches to see which one sticks, but I can guarantee you that a common protocol is part of the process.

Appleseed, on that note, is built to be somewhat protocol agnostic, so we can support upcoming protocols, as well as multiple protocols simultaneously.

Appleseed is open source, distributed social networking, built on a commodity stack, and installs in a few minutes on any LAMP compatible host.

Code is available here:
http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed

Appleseed has a main beta site, appleseedproject.org, and approx. 150 test nodes out in the wild. If you'd like an invite, just email invite@appleseedproject.org. It's still in beta, but new features are added regularly.

We've also been fundraising, if you'd like to donate, our fundraising ends in only 4 days, but every little bit counts:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking

Here is our roadmap for the future:

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/

Diaspora is also available, here is their github. They are running on Ruby + Rails, and they were MongoDB based, but recently switched to MySQL.

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Yeah, but it is perfectly fine precedent for WikiLeaks to judge that they aren't putting anyone at risk.

Less than 1% of the cables have been released. Wikileaks is working with around a dozen news services from around the world to sift through the data. Wikileaks gave The Pentagon the option to redact sensitive information, and they refused.

There has not been a full dump of the 250,000 cables, they have been slowly releasing them alongside the news agencies they're working with (New York Times, The Guardian, etc). What we've seen so far is only a small fraction of the cables.

The idea that Wikileaks has been indiscriminate with releasing the cables is simply not true.

U.S. federal government documents are not covered under copyright, so when you're talking about "ownership", there's no legal basis for this argument. Those documents, now leaked, are in the public domain. Wikileaks "owns" them just as much as anyone else.

Also, this part:

Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.

Is a really dangerous precedent for Amazon to set for themselves. If you're going to cancel members accounts based on not just the potential danger of known information held within, but on the possibility that information not yet discovered could potentially put someone in danger, that's making a decision based on an extraordinary amount of hypotheticals.

Does this mean that directors actually have to focus instead on character development, plot, and pacing?

I want to be able to read my RPGs like a book sometimes.

All I've ever wanted was the option to keep the voice acting in Japanese, with English subtitles. It would go a long way to making modern RPG's more enjoyable, since I don't speak Japanese, and can't accurately gauge whether Japanese voice actors are as terrible as I'm sure they are.