I went to Facebook to get away from the BS that was all over MySpace. It's funny how things come full circle. All that BS helps Facebook make money. Maybe, luckily for us, Google has other streams of revenue and G+ will be an means to those ends, and not the other way around.

Your analogies aren't apt at all, and privacy is something that is greatly misunderstood in the age of social networking. There isn't any kind of "right" to privacy, our private information is valuable, it is important to protect our privacy, and it is no one's job but our own to protect ourselves. The sooner we, as a society, understand this, the sooner stories like this will thin out.

You say it is important to snap at the researchers for this. I agree with you there, however I disagree that you imply that only the researchers are in the wrong. It is just as important to let the students in this dataset know "this is what you get for putting this information about yourselves out there," so that they think twice about possibly compromising their private information in the future as well.

"...was alienated by being able to kill female prostitutes in GTA."
Quick heads up: you can kill everyone in GTA III.

"My "needs and wants" are fewer rape jokes and less T&A in the games already produced"
Also, it would be kind of hard to change the games already produced. I'd prefer that you (and game developers in general) focus on making future games better.

"Would you play completely through a game that had half naked men and only men that were half naked in it?" If it was good, yes. One of my favorite characters in Street Fighter III: Third Strike is Urien, A muscle bound man in a thong (the other is Makoto, a conservatively dressed woman).

Implying that they don't watch together...

Where did you hear this from?

I read a report that the guy who found the phone tried to tell someone who worked at the bar he found a phone & saw who was logged into Facebook on the phone, and that employee couldn't find the phone's owner, so he took the phone home. The next day, the guy who found the phone saw that the data on the phone was gone, care of MobileMe, at which point he went to sell it to the highest bidder.

However, if a password is compromised, the attacker only has a limited amount of time to access the account. If passwords never expired, an attacker will always be able to access the account. Security is always a trade off. I feel like the risk of (potentially) weak passwords is not worth the trade off of an attacker having a potentially unlimited amount of time to work with. Weak passwords can be mitigated with a strong password policy. If your systems are such that if an attacker breaks in once, then you are right, it doesn't matter. But if having access for a longer time means an attacker can do more damage, then why not expire passwords?

It's all about the trade off. There is no one "right" way to do it.

or LL Cool J...

I think it is fine, if, at the end of the day you can put that $10-15 toward the purchase of the full game and also use the save data from the demo in the full game. I would never replay the first few hours of a game, and I would also never pay for the same content twice.

However, I might pay for a "try before you buy" type of deal where you really do get to try the game, and not just play 5-10 minutes.

For a lot of my tasks, electronic records are better because you can attach metadata to documents to more easily search, sort and drive workflow. This then makes my tasks easier, quicker and less error-prone.

I feel like this is more of an issue with people not understanding what metadata is and what it can do for them rather than an issue of people liking paper.

You don't know what the program is about. Regardless of anyone's feelings on sex, letting semi-nude pictures of yourself get transmitted digitally is a bad idea, as is transmitting them, and these teens might not understand that.

I'm all for giving credit where credit is due. If an artist is dead or retired, shouldn't their work be released into the public domain, or should a record label be able to profit in this situation?

You'd probably like The Dark Knight Returns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_Returns

While Batman can't match Superman's strength, he makes up for it in cunning.

You can send and receive Tweets from your (non-smart) phone without needing a data plan.

That's why Twitter has the character limit (it is the same limit for SMS messages). That's why people started using and continue to use Twitter.

If you had your Google Profile set up to be public, then people could find the information that is in the Google Profile. Buzz just gave people a link directly to your Google Profile, more or less. What it all comes down to: if you don't want the public to know something, don't post it in a public profile.

If people are actively avoiding Google accounts, why wouldn't they also be actively avoiding accounts on social networking sites? I assume the reason for avoiding Google is that people don't like the fact that stores stores personal data. Name one social networking site that doesn't.

The point being that people who avoid Google probably wouldn't be using Buzz anyway (because they wouldn't want a central database storing the fact that they shared certain content).