Partly because we can see spectacular violence (9/11, for example) on TV, we tend to overestimate the violence of our times.
When Rome conquered Gaul, roughly one-sixth to one-third of the population was killed, about the same number enslaved, and the rest spared. And this sort of thing was the norm rather than the exception. Today that would be like 50-100 million people in the US being killed, another 50-100 million enslaved, and the rest spared. Despite WW1 and WW2, the 20th century really was the least violent in human history, and weird as it seems, we really are headed towards world peace!
Steven Pinker has more on this here [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html].
You're just reinforcing his point.
Google Docs was born as Writely and then bought by Google.
Google Voice was born as Grandcentral and then bought by Google.
Android was born as Android and then bought by Google in 2005 (and never mind that Intel and Nokia were experimenting with Linux-based phones too).
Will it eventually be possible to have a social-networking standard so that anyone can run their own server, just as with email? In that case it wouldn't matter if one friend uses facebook, another myspace, a third linkedin; they would all adhere to the same standard and so which particular social-networking service you use would become irrelevant.
PS: I apologize for being lazy but I haven't thought about this at all, so there could easily be some glaring reason why it can't possibly work.
If you want to see a sample calculator policy you can find one here.
(Yes, if you have 10,000 students passing through the math department every year, you need a department-wide "calculator policy"
A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. -- D. Gries
