Google knows that facebook is sitting on a treasure trove of data. How does google make its money -- through advertising. Part of the social networking is to get users to divulge more personal information which google can use to target advertisements. Being that mobile advertisement clicks incur less revenue than desktop browser clicks, it is only natural for google to look other places I agree with you. Facebook has won the social networking war and nothing (aside maybe an antitrust suit from the DOJ) is really going to change it. Perhaps in the way future facebook will go the way of myspace but as we have seen with Microsoft Windows, sometimes things just don't go away.

and yet, many of these defects are things that joe baggadonuts windows user doesn't care about.  As for computer virii, there is the local kid everyone knows whom you pay $20 and he/she cleans the computer out.  The other option is to just take it to best buy.  If it's not on the sales floor, the average person doesn't care.

I still will be purchasing the PS4. To me, Microsoft has already demonstrated that they are willing to push boundaries on DRM. I do not applause Sony for their DRM strategies either but I feel I am choosing the lesser of two evils. To be sure though, even though they have removed the E.T. restriction, they still will have this unused code/system. We know from GTA games what happens to unused code. I don't trust them not to update the software in the future with incremental DRM updates that may someday resemble what they just pulled. Instead of doing it all at once though, they would take the incremental "improvement" approach much like apple.

Other considerations would be if someone figured out a way to fry themselves with it You don't need to worry about walking on it with rubber sole sneakers but someone would touch it. Would the system be the equivalent of the third rail fryings we see in nyc? The article does not seem to go into detail on the system and I am at present searching for more information on the topic. The other curiosity would be frictional wear and tear on both the track and the plate. I agree with the parent in that this would be expensive and impractical. I'd rather see the extra money that could be foreseeably dumped into this project for work on a small high capacity ultracapacitor. If you could have such a device, you could charge your car in the matter of seconds and cruise.

I think that the regular postal mail is still protected from the NSA. They have to have a really good reason to open that otherwise the postal service gets real touchy. The nice part about electronic communication is that it is so easy to tap. in addition, I think as we have seen over in Iraq and Afghanistan that the SneakerNet approach does work. In this, someone creates a document or multiple documents, places them on a flash drive, and then either hand delivers or uses a courier. While most likely impractical for common documents in the united states, if someone was up to something that they truly wanted to keep secret they could employ this approach. Or be somewhere where the pneumatic tube system was still intact. Those things were so cool, I kinda miss them.

I believe already that we have hardware that can function faster than the user can respond (tetris anyone). At what point does the hardware and software get to the point where interactions are instantaneous and any further development would just be unnecessary. I know that there are probably going to be some futuristic answers along the lines of HAL or SkyNet, but in reality at what speed would Joe Baggadonuts think that additional speed unnecessary. This being said, I think Joe would also go for Ultraband internet speeds before going for raw computational output as long as the computer could handle that amount of data which i think most desktops are.