if the cover version didn't suck big butts...

They are going to pry my analog phone from my cold, dead hand.

In 20+ years, my analog phone has never not worked. Power goes out, cable goes out, DSL went out routinely (when I had it before cable). Cell coverage is a pathetic joke, and I live 1 mile outside the DC beltway. The voice quality on mobile technologies is beyond pathetic due to over-compression and crappy connection quality.

I haven't switched to FiOS because they'll take away my copper loop if I do.

It's not that I'm a luddite. It's that I expect the phone to work, all the time, with reasonable quality. Is that too much to ask?

Or - you could try actually reading the linked abstract:

which is a pretty reasonable statement. The fact that the post author paraphrased the abstract doesn't mean the researchers are making stuff up.

Of course, reflexively bashing Microsoft is SOP, right?

Google is Microsoft 2.0.

Look at Google's shares of the search & search advertising markets, domestically and internationally. They are clearly a monopoly. The question is whether or not they go so far as to be an ILLEGAL monopoly. It is pretty straightforward that they are using their market dominance in one market (search/search advertising) to attempt to leverage entry into other markets (Google Analytics being one of the most striking examples). This is one true test of abuse of monopoly power.

There is no question that they Yahoo deal needed to be blocked. They didn't even pretend that customer pricing wouldn't rise - they just lamely tried to argue "but you'll get more for your money". They would have had > 90% share in the US and closer to 100% in many parts of the Western world had that deal been allowed.

As to privacy - Google's data retention policies are outright consumer-hostile. If any of you are old enough to remember Microsoft's abortive Hailstorm initiative, Google's policies on data retention are worse than anything that would have happened with Hailstorm. Where's the uproar?

People trust Google far too much for their own good.

Except, well, no.

After more than 2 years, AOL and Google finally implemented the interop that was announced when Google invested $1B in AOL at the end of 2005.

AOL has been working on SIP and XMPP gateways for years; their SIP gateway has been used for enterprise messaging products since like 2004ish.

Most probable explanation for why this is happening now? The very senior executive who most strongly advocated against opening up AIM is finally gone, as of the last round of layoffs at the end of last year.