I think he's referring to the experience of having Internet access almost anywhere you go. For me, the #1 use case of a smart phone is the ability to get walking directions. I am terrible at figuring out where I'm going, and being able to pull out Maps.app without WiFi and get directions is awesome.

The original Facebook had this incredible classmate finder feature. I could input all the courses I was taking, and it would tell me who else was in them. Definitely one of the most useful features Facebook has ever had. Once they added 3rd-party app support, they dropped the classmate finder feature, explaining that they expected someone else to create a better one (the logic doesn't make sense to me, but whatever). Of course, with multiple non-ubiquitous classmate finders competing, no one could ever find more than a couple of their classmates, so they were all useless.

That's a pretty wide net you're casting there. Feel the same way about Python? Ruby? Perl? PHP? Not saying you're wrong (I do think you're wrong, but that's a separate issue); just want to make sure that you have the same problem with all interpreted weakly-typed languages.

3 trillion dollars spent on matters that are in some way related to some subjects that may indirectly be connected to Bin Laden or people he has spoken to at least once in the past.

Those are some pretty strong words to use without backup, specifically with regards to Rails. Last I checked, Rails was more popular than ever, with loads of high-profile web apps and increasing enterprise adoption rates. If you'd like to provide some evidence of people "going back to proven technologies" in significant numbers, I would love to see it.

companies such as Google should allow the data to degrade over time

Phrasing like this pisses me off. If Google's data degraded over time, it's not that they'd be "allowing" it to degrade, they'd have to do extra work and write extra code to force it to degrade. Saying "allow" implies that degrading is what data do naturally, and that Google is somehow artificially preserving it.

You invalidated your entire comment in the parentheses. Google isn't crying "Foul!" over Apple's foray into online advertising, they're crying "Foul!" over Apple's hardware restrictions.

That's going to be difficult to do, as they change frequently (and the fact that these ones were in a Superbowl commercial will probably make them change even faster).

I want to see the TV quiz show that asks "Why are black people so loud?"

The folks modding this "Informative" are in for a major disappointment.

If China really wanted them gone, why wouldn't they just kick them out?

A color eBook reader is something that will really appeal to my girlfriend (who has many art books and comic books). I, on the other hand, use my Kindle to read novels and programming books. There might be a little colored syntax highlighting in my programming books, but that's the extent that color would affect my eBook-reading experience. I'd much prefer a higher-contrast greyscale eBook reader. Currently, the contrast on my Kindle (and, from what I understand, the Nook and the Sony readers) is about the same as that of a dirty newspaper (about 8:1 I believe). It doesn't bother me, but I'd buy one that has paperback book contrast (about 50:1) in a heartbeat.

You're right, but it amounts to the same thing: "I don't care about privacy because I don't think a lack of privacy could negatively affect me." You should only be willing to give up privacy after considering the potential consequences.