There are many apps that do exactly what the article says. I used one on my iPod touch years ago. I also have a device attached to my home phone line that also uses Google voice for calls.
This may be news for some, but not news for the vast majority of readers of this site.
This is third party software. This is just like Talktatone (and others) on iOS, a third party app to map to Google voice. An iPod touch is a better device for this, because of the form factor. I refuse to call a 7" tablet a phone, maybe a telephony device.
If this was native Android software, it may be news. A cell manufacturer releasing software that reduces the stranglehold on minutes and all that and pushes the carriers to be dumb data pipes would stir up a lot of noise in AT&T and Verizon board rooms. Google's motto is "don't be evil" - but until they push back on the carriers, the motto may as well be "don't be evil, but working with certain levels of evil is ok"
Other than the mousewheel, which was supported in Office 97, i'd be perfectly happy with Office 95.
I had Office 2007 on my Windows box. I would doubleclick a doc, Office 2007 Word would attempt to load. I'd realize my mistake in letting bad Office 2007 do anything, Id re-open the doc in Offce 97, perform my simple edit, close the file, and Office 2007 Word wouldn't even finished loading yet.
Yeah, my machine was "underpowered" - 1GB RAM, 1GHz Pentium 4 something, but realize that I still did everything I needed to in Office 97. The features in Office 2007 meant nothing to me, other than the misfeature of not lbeing able to load in less than several minutes.
No one person is. The financial crisis was built by a huge number of people.
But he did contribute. Part of the financial crisis is the lack of regulation in the industry. The London Whale incident proved we're not quite past it. Mr. Dimon sure as hell lobbied for less regulation.
I liken regulation to maintenance on your heart. The parallel is... your heart rhythm is surprisingly similar to the general market health. There are inputs (you're sick, you're running you're sleeping... vs. general economic news, P/E ratios, etc) and even feedback. It works most of the time. I wouldn't want to be on an EKG all day. You're not gonna put a pacemaker in me to regulate my heart-rate for the odd chance i may need it some day. Its a waste of the machine and my time.
But... every once in a while a heart can get out of whack. You get arrhythmia, and you need to shock it back to normal. My grandmother has a pacemaker. She'd be dead now if it wasn't for that. She also had a heart attack, luckily enough she was in the hospital when it happened, so she's ok. By the "never regulate" crowd's wisdom, they'd say "well, there are so many people's hearts that work fine that a pacemaker is never needed, it a complicated surgery that just gets in the way" she'd not have a pacemaker, and they'd assume she'd magically adjust.
So, we need to strike the balance. Too much regulation/heart shocking kills the market/patient. But, many people see the normal market/healthy heart and say "hey, we'll never need regulation, it's wasted money". They say, don't even have the doctor, don't even have the defibrillator. Well, then when the market shock comes, they're unprepared, and we all die. Or in this case, we came in in the last minute with the shock, too late, and the patient has limped along. And half the country states that the problem was the defibrillator, that somehow the heart attack patient would have magically come back all on their own.
I think we all assume massive malware failures on Microsoft. That's a statement, though you can read that as a troll/joke, which is kind of scary in it's own way - MS is so bad that the joke is you assume its the bad one.
Mac OSX is getting enough inroads to make it commercially viable to produce malware, but in a weird way I think people will skip it and move more quickly to Android/iOS.
It was named back when it was XBox only. Now that it has many targets, it's pretty much just XBMC. Can you imagine some guy confused "wait, does it turn my Apple TV into an XBox?"
They'll track anyway, and if they get busted, they'll call out the lawyer brigades and nothing will fucking happen.
More like:
They'll track anyway, and if they get busted, they'll say "Oh, that was an accident, we didn't do that on purpose, really". A couple people will sue, they'll throw a couple million to shut them up, while they count the tens/hundreds of millions of ad money they got for 'targetted ads'. Then they'll stop for a bit. Then they'll track anyway,... and if they......
Bitcoin fails one of the fundamental rules of a currency - store of value. Yeah yeah, you can talk about hyper-inflation of 'real' currencies, but even with hyper-inflation you have stability of direction. Bitcoin can halve or double on any given day. By that token, it has failed. You can't use it as an investment - your exchange risk (FX risk) outweighs any kind of interest you'd get.
Now, in certain particular instances, its advantages (anonymity) makes the failure of store of value less critical. If I convert to bitcoin right before a purchase, and the seller converts to local currency right after the sale, you minimize the window of FX risk. But then you are not using this as a conventional currency.
.... "Oh! I read this really terrible review about Longhorn, I'm not putting that on my machine. What's this? Vista! Well I haven't read anything bad about that I'll give it a try!"
Luckily for Microsoft, people eventually found reason to hate Vista on its own merits, not because of any hatred with the attachment to LongHorn.
Jokes aside, I'm not sure how much that flies for the consumer market. I'm sure I could take a poll of my family and pretty much everyone would think of Longhorn as a football team. Windows 95 was code named Chicago, which is cool name, but that was changed before release. Some internal stuff (.ini files, Win32 version calls) showed WIndows 95 as 4.0 or 3.95 depending on how you called it. It's very fluid.
2) pre installation of all available certs by the manufaturer (now guess for how many reasons manufacturers aren't going to auto install keys for all available linux/HURD/bsd distros, yep there are many).
It will be difficult to boot the Hurd on these machines? Think of the poor 4 people this will inconvenience...
My apologies: this is going to come out harsher than I intend, but your blanket assertions annoy me more than they should for some reason. Maybe because I've seen them too often before.
Free means never being at the mercy of someone else's business plan.
Unless you're a subsistance level farmer - that you buy nothing, and sell nothing - you will be "at the mercy" of someone else's business plan, someplace. Since you're using a computer with an Internet connection, powered by some power source you probably didn't create, running a browser you probably didn't code, you are now "at the mercy of someone else's business plan" a few times over.
It's actually possible that choosing a Mac (or Windows for that matter) is a rational choice, and one not having to "drink the kool-aid". A multitude of interface choices (or many situations with many choices) are not universally good, nor wanted. Sometimes a good default is better than having to analyze between a hundred choices. When you mention "I could fork..." you just separated yourself from 99.999% of the people out there, and made this a diatribe about pretty much just yourself. Even those with the skill to fork a UI would have a hard time by themselves keeping their code workable and compatible against a changing world.
There is no such thing as infinite freedom - there are always opportunity costs. If you choose a road other than MacOS, Windows, Gnome, fine. But don't mistake your inability to think as others think as some kind of superpower where you know better than others what's good for them. Their choices and how they weigh costs are different than what you do, but that doesn't necessarily make them less valid.
Jokes aside, when Henry Ford gave his workers raises, he was labelled a socialist. Even though his workers were much more efficient, and made Ford rich, when Hank gave even a part of that money back to the workers, he was labelled socialist.
The trick is, Ford new that he needed a work force that was paid well to buy his cars. The payroll that you call an expense is actually the wages that can purchase someone else's product. And then the payroll that goes to those workers can buy someone else's product. All a virtuous cycle. Pardon the car reference, but some times money is like oil in a motor - it only does it's work when it circulates and when it stands still the motor seizes.
Sadly most CEOs now don't have that foresight. We've been taught so much "make it someone else's problem" and "the only people you think of are the stockholders" that we've lost any vision. We're taught that unions are evil. Though they've seriously lost their way, they had use where they forced wages for everyone above some point so that the cycles can continue, and payrolls are squeezed to where we can't afford anything.
In general, human beings are horrible about judgment and filtering - ask McCain about Mrs. Palin. We look for any tips to be able to filter for our choices. Why do you think brands matter so much? "Ahh, but I don't care about brands." Yes, you may not, but most people do.
We live in a world much more complex than our monkey brains can carry us. "There's a tiger, what should I do? RUN" is a much easier choice than "there are 100 resumes, which ones should I pick".
Lets think of MBA (or any accreditation) as a brand. What does it mean, as a filter? It means you managed to get into a school, managed to finance it, and managed to complete some level of coursework over a period long enough to attain a degree. It may not mean you're smart, but it does mean you accomplished at least some milestones, jumped some hurdles. HR people generally don't have enough skill to truly filter on technical details (or they'd probably not be in HR) so they look for the "brands". I may be able to learn something off of youtube, but I didn't jump any of the acceptance, finance, or grading hurdles.
I remember one interview I performed. I'm a UNIX guy, but as "crosstraining" I interviewed a Windows guy. He mentioned some ActiveDirectory migration. I know what AD is, but I have no idea if what he did was hard. Was it a 2 minute "click and AD does the rest" thing, or did it involve planning, rolling upgrades, coordinating logouts and logins to the new controller. No idea. So I had no easy way to filter. Luckily I know enough that I was able to figure he was a script monkey. But what if I didn't know AD at all? All i have is this "brand", a certificate from a good school or class.
Yeah, it sucks. In the real world, we'd all be able to test everyone and a brand wouldn't matter. But that's a world without humans, because we all use brands and guesswork to fill in insufficient data.
The FreeBSD folks never had an issue. When Apple brought the code in, they didnt like EDOOFUS, and changed it to something else. My apologies for bad description - it should have read "Apple controversy over FreeBSD's EDOOFUS"
I do kind of agree it's sexist, but it's so infantile, i almost say ignore it. I mean, boobs exist, some are big, some are small, some are medium. Guys have big boobs too, and some are big too (I already see Balmer references in this discussion). I almost say, pull the phrase, and let it die, and not be any worked up about it.
Facebook not only at the upper bounds of people, but they are now forced to "monetize new revenue streams". People may not quite get that FB going public means they need to grow revenue models and get more money per user, but they do get when new advertising shows up on their FB page. I don't think this is the beginning of the end of FB - hell even MySpace has a use for band promotion. But it may dent the "everyone has to be there" model.
And people talk about Google+, but what about all the other services for contacting people? Hell, people even ask me for my Kik, a service i never heard of 3 months ago. My wife splits between email, iMessage, Facetime, Skype, and Line to talk to her mom and sister. There are alternatives.
WebOS was HTML5, that didn't light a fire with developers. I don't see any tablet maker outside of maybe Samsung with more pull than HP, so the issues with hardware will be even worse.
iOS used to be webapps only, until people realized that touchscreens and HTML weren't a good match. I'm not sure if HTML5 is so much of a leap to make them that much better. I still prefer Mail.app to GMail and GMail uses some of the cleverest HTML ive seen. Even on a phone which guarantees a network card, you can't guarantee a network presence 100% of the time. Local storage will be interesting.
At one point the NT kernel was on i386, Alpha, and PowerPC. Later ports had AMD64 and Itanium support. With Windows CE/Windows Phone, and the Zune OS, MS has a lot of experience with multiple chipsets. I don't think they would have as much of a problem as you think.
Though I kind of agree with this, I think the difference between MS and Apple goes much deeper than that. Steve Jobs just doesn't mind mixing things up and totally restructuring when he wants. MS is just Windows Windows Windows.
Yeah, when Steve came back, Apple was a mess. But there was a time where it was a profitable Mac selling operation. But, Apple didn't stop there. Unlike MS's house of Windows, they did not become the house of Mac. They added the iPod. They added iTunes for Windows, knowing being able to sync on Windows may mean a lost Mac sale, but they figured they'd make up on more ipods. The Nano was introduced replacing the very popular ipod Mini. The iPod touch probably cannibalizes some iPhone sales. The iPhone/iPod touch/iPad/macbook all inherit some continuum where they probably cannibalize other's sales somewhat. But, Apple is stronger overall.
Do you remember Windows CE? Yes, lets name our product Wince. Microsoft had a 10 year lead in smartphones. But, since it had to be Windows, people tried to get a Windows desktop interface in a small screen with no mouse and finicky styli. They couldn't think outside of Windows. Everything has to be Windows. And while Windows ruled, it was a good run. But now that thinking is the anchor around their neck.
This was a book, written by a man with a stroke. All he had control over was his blinking, so he had to blink for every letter. It was estimated that it took 200,000 blinks.
For some reason, when I read the story title, I thought about this guy... there are many people that would benefit from this tech.
It s not that Facebook is cool, it's that social networking is cool, and there is no other realistic alternative. If I (collective I, I personally don't use facebook) have something to share to a group, Facebook is the simplest and the widest audience.
Banking led to hubris. We know we have this fixed vig, but we want more. We have this set of deposits that earn basically nothing, so it's free money for us. We can lend to mortgages or businesses at 6-8%, or make 50% (*) as a hedge fund. The asterisk is (*) "unless you lose your shirt". Well, the government needs us, so we'll hold them hostage and we'll make the taxpayers buy us more shirts.
Its not retarded as much as "heads I win, tails you lose" and we lost big.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, "native Android software" was meant to be "built into Android OS"
Obviously this is Android, my point is this isn't released by Google. If Google released this, then it's news.
There are many apps that do exactly what the article says. I used one on my iPod touch years ago. I also have a device attached to my home phone line that also uses Google voice for calls.
This may be news for some, but not news for the vast majority of readers of this site.
This is third party software. This is just like Talktatone (and others) on iOS, a third party app to map to Google voice. An iPod touch is a better device for this, because of the form factor. I refuse to call a 7" tablet a phone, maybe a telephony device.
If this was native Android software, it may be news. A cell manufacturer releasing software that reduces the stranglehold on minutes and all that and pushes the carriers to be dumb data pipes would stir up a lot of noise in AT&T and Verizon board rooms. Google's motto is "don't be evil" - but until they push back on the carriers, the motto may as well be "don't be evil, but working with certain levels of evil is ok"
Other than the mousewheel, which was supported in Office 97, i'd be perfectly happy with Office 95.
I had Office 2007 on my Windows box. I would doubleclick a doc, Office 2007 Word would attempt to load. I'd realize my mistake in letting bad Office 2007 do anything, Id re-open the doc in Offce 97, perform my simple edit, close the file, and Office 2007 Word wouldn't even finished loading yet.
Yeah, my machine was "underpowered" - 1GB RAM, 1GHz Pentium 4 something, but realize that I still did everything I needed to in Office 97. The features in Office 2007 meant nothing to me, other than the misfeature of not lbeing able to load in less than several minutes.
The Grandparent post was a Simpson's reference, more specifically Silent Bob's "Die Bart Die" tattoo.. not a Godwin one.
No one person is. The financial crisis was built by a huge number of people.
But he did contribute. Part of the financial crisis is the lack of regulation in the industry. The London Whale incident proved we're not quite past it. Mr. Dimon sure as hell lobbied for less regulation.
I liken regulation to maintenance on your heart. The parallel is... your heart rhythm is surprisingly similar to the general market health. There are inputs (you're sick, you're running you're sleeping... vs. general economic news, P/E ratios, etc) and even feedback. It works most of the time. I wouldn't want to be on an EKG all day. You're not gonna put a pacemaker in me to regulate my heart-rate for the odd chance i may need it some day. Its a waste of the machine and my time.
But... every once in a while a heart can get out of whack. You get arrhythmia, and you need to shock it back to normal. My grandmother has a pacemaker. She'd be dead now if it wasn't for that. She also had a heart attack, luckily enough she was in the hospital when it happened, so she's ok. By the "never regulate" crowd's wisdom, they'd say "well, there are so many people's hearts that work fine that a pacemaker is never needed, it a complicated surgery that just gets in the way" she'd not have a pacemaker, and they'd assume she'd magically adjust.
So, we need to strike the balance. Too much regulation/heart shocking kills the market/patient. But, many people see the normal market/healthy heart and say "hey, we'll never need regulation, it's wasted money". They say, don't even have the doctor, don't even have the defibrillator. Well, then when the market shock comes, they're unprepared, and we all die. Or in this case, we came in in the last minute with the shock, too late, and the patient has limped along. And half the country states that the problem was the defibrillator, that somehow the heart attack patient would have magically come back all on their own.
I think we all assume massive malware failures on Microsoft. That's a statement, though you can read that as a troll/joke, which is kind of scary in it's own way - MS is so bad that the joke is you assume its the bad one.
Mac OSX is getting enough inroads to make it commercially viable to produce malware, but in a weird way I think people will skip it and move more quickly to Android/iOS.
XBox Media Center
It was named back when it was XBox only. Now that it has many targets, it's pretty much just XBMC. Can you imagine some guy confused "wait, does it turn my Apple TV into an XBox?"
They'll track anyway, and if they get busted, they'll call out the lawyer brigades and nothing will fucking happen.
More like:
They'll track anyway, and if they get busted, they'll say "Oh, that was an accident, we didn't do that on purpose, really". A couple people will sue, they'll throw a couple million to shut them up, while they count the tens/hundreds of millions of ad money they got for 'targetted ads'. Then they'll stop for a bit. Then they'll track anyway, ... and if they......
See Google, see Facebook - over and over again.
Bitcoin fails one of the fundamental rules of a currency - store of value. Yeah yeah, you can talk about hyper-inflation of 'real' currencies, but even with hyper-inflation you have stability of direction. Bitcoin can halve or double on any given day. By that token, it has failed. You can't use it as an investment - your exchange risk (FX risk) outweighs any kind of interest you'd get.
Now, in certain particular instances, its advantages (anonymity) makes the failure of store of value less critical. If I convert to bitcoin right before a purchase, and the seller converts to local currency right after the sale, you minimize the window of FX risk. But then you are not using this as a conventional currency.
And "virtual" currencies were proven in the real world. Check out Planet Money's coverage
.... "Oh! I read this really terrible review about Longhorn, I'm not putting that on my machine. What's this? Vista! Well I haven't read anything bad about that I'll give it a try!"
Luckily for Microsoft, people eventually found reason to hate Vista on its own merits, not because of any hatred with the attachment to LongHorn.
Jokes aside, I'm not sure how much that flies for the consumer market. I'm sure I could take a poll of my family and pretty much everyone would think of Longhorn as a football team. Windows 95 was code named Chicago, which is cool name, but that was changed before release. Some internal stuff (.ini files, Win32 version calls) showed WIndows 95 as 4.0 or 3.95 depending on how you called it. It's very fluid.
2) pre installation of all available certs by the manufaturer (now guess for how many reasons manufacturers aren't going to auto install keys for all available linux/HURD/bsd distros, yep there are many).
It will be difficult to boot the Hurd on these machines? Think of the poor 4 people this will inconvenience...
My apologies: this is going to come out harsher than I intend, but your blanket assertions annoy me more than they should for some reason. Maybe because I've seen them too often before.
Free means never being at the mercy of someone else's business plan.
Unless you're a subsistance level farmer - that you buy nothing, and sell nothing - you will be "at the mercy" of someone else's business plan, someplace. Since you're using a computer with an Internet connection, powered by some power source you probably didn't create, running a browser you probably didn't code, you are now "at the mercy of someone else's business plan" a few times over.
It's actually possible that choosing a Mac (or Windows for that matter) is a rational choice, and one not having to "drink the kool-aid". A multitude of interface choices (or many situations with many choices) are not universally good, nor wanted. Sometimes a good default is better than having to analyze between a hundred choices. When you mention "I could fork ..." you just separated yourself from 99.999% of the people out there, and made this a diatribe about pretty much just yourself. Even those with the skill to fork a UI would have a hard time by themselves keeping their code workable and compatible against a changing world.
There is no such thing as infinite freedom - there are always opportunity costs. If you choose a road other than MacOS, Windows, Gnome, fine. But don't mistake your inability to think as others think as some kind of superpower where you know better than others what's good for them. Their choices and how they weigh costs are different than what you do, but that doesn't necessarily make them less valid.
Jokes aside, when Henry Ford gave his workers raises, he was labelled a socialist. Even though his workers were much more efficient, and made Ford rich, when Hank gave even a part of that money back to the workers, he was labelled socialist.
The trick is, Ford new that he needed a work force that was paid well to buy his cars. The payroll that you call an expense is actually the wages that can purchase someone else's product. And then the payroll that goes to those workers can buy someone else's product. All a virtuous cycle. Pardon the car reference, but some times money is like oil in a motor - it only does it's work when it circulates and when it stands still the motor seizes.
Sadly most CEOs now don't have that foresight. We've been taught so much "make it someone else's problem" and "the only people you think of are the stockholders" that we've lost any vision. We're taught that unions are evil. Though they've seriously lost their way, they had use where they forced wages for everyone above some point so that the cycles can continue, and payrolls are squeezed to where we can't afford anything.
Just because the CEO skipped his salary doesn't mean it goes to the workers. It may be a dividend, etc.
In general, human beings are horrible about judgment and filtering - ask McCain about Mrs. Palin. We look for any tips to be able to filter for our choices. Why do you think brands matter so much? "Ahh, but I don't care about brands." Yes, you may not, but most people do.
We live in a world much more complex than our monkey brains can carry us. "There's a tiger, what should I do? RUN" is a much easier choice than "there are 100 resumes, which ones should I pick".
Lets think of MBA (or any accreditation) as a brand. What does it mean, as a filter? It means you managed to get into a school, managed to finance it, and managed to complete some level of coursework over a period long enough to attain a degree. It may not mean you're smart, but it does mean you accomplished at least some milestones, jumped some hurdles. HR people generally don't have enough skill to truly filter on technical details (or they'd probably not be in HR) so they look for the "brands". I may be able to learn something off of youtube, but I didn't jump any of the acceptance, finance, or grading hurdles.
I remember one interview I performed. I'm a UNIX guy, but as "crosstraining" I interviewed a Windows guy. He mentioned some ActiveDirectory migration. I know what AD is, but I have no idea if what he did was hard. Was it a 2 minute "click and AD does the rest" thing, or did it involve planning, rolling upgrades, coordinating logouts and logins to the new controller. No idea. So I had no easy way to filter. Luckily I know enough that I was able to figure he was a script monkey. But what if I didn't know AD at all? All i have is this "brand", a certificate from a good school or class.
Yeah, it sucks. In the real world, we'd all be able to test everyone and a brand wouldn't matter. But that's a world without humans, because we all use brands and guesswork to fill in insufficient data.
The FreeBSD folks never had an issue. When Apple brought the code in, they didnt like EDOOFUS, and changed it to something else. My apologies for bad description - it should have read "Apple controversy over FreeBSD's EDOOFUS"
Vaguely reminds me of the EDOOFUS "controversy" in the FreeBSD kernel.
I do kind of agree it's sexist, but it's so infantile, i almost say ignore it. I mean, boobs exist, some are big, some are small, some are medium. Guys have big boobs too, and some are big too (I already see Balmer references in this discussion). I almost say, pull the phrase, and let it die, and not be any worked up about it.
Facebook not only at the upper bounds of people, but they are now forced to "monetize new revenue streams". People may not quite get that FB going public means they need to grow revenue models and get more money per user, but they do get when new advertising shows up on their FB page. I don't think this is the beginning of the end of FB - hell even MySpace has a use for band promotion. But it may dent the "everyone has to be there" model.
And people talk about Google+, but what about all the other services for contacting people? Hell, people even ask me for my Kik, a service i never heard of 3 months ago. My wife splits between email, iMessage, Facetime, Skype, and Line to talk to her mom and sister. There are alternatives.
WebOS was HTML5, that didn't light a fire with developers. I don't see any tablet maker outside of maybe Samsung with more pull than HP, so the issues with hardware will be even worse.
iOS used to be webapps only, until people realized that touchscreens and HTML weren't a good match. I'm not sure if HTML5 is so much of a leap to make them that much better. I still prefer Mail.app to GMail and GMail uses some of the cleverest HTML ive seen. Even on a phone which guarantees a network card, you can't guarantee a network presence 100% of the time. Local storage will be interesting.
Good luck.
At one point the NT kernel was on i386, Alpha, and PowerPC. Later ports had AMD64 and Itanium support. With Windows CE/Windows Phone, and the Zune OS, MS has a lot of experience with multiple chipsets. I don't think they would have as much of a problem as you think.
Though I kind of agree with this, I think the difference between MS and Apple goes much deeper than that. Steve Jobs just doesn't mind mixing things up and totally restructuring when he wants. MS is just Windows Windows Windows.
Yeah, when Steve came back, Apple was a mess. But there was a time where it was a profitable Mac selling operation. But, Apple didn't stop there. Unlike MS's house of Windows, they did not become the house of Mac. They added the iPod. They added iTunes for Windows, knowing being able to sync on Windows may mean a lost Mac sale, but they figured they'd make up on more ipods. The Nano was introduced replacing the very popular ipod Mini. The iPod touch probably cannibalizes some iPhone sales. The iPhone/iPod touch/iPad/macbook all inherit some continuum where they probably cannibalize other's sales somewhat. But, Apple is stronger overall.
Do you remember Windows CE? Yes, lets name our product Wince. Microsoft had a 10 year lead in smartphones. But, since it had to be Windows, people tried to get a Windows desktop interface in a small screen with no mouse and finicky styli. They couldn't think outside of Windows. Everything has to be Windows. And while Windows ruled, it was a good run. But now that thinking is the anchor around their neck.
This was a book, written by a man with a stroke. All he had control over was his blinking, so he had to blink for every letter. It was estimated that it took 200,000 blinks.
For some reason, when I read the story title, I thought about this guy... there are many people that would benefit from this tech.
It s not that Facebook is cool, it's that social networking is cool, and there is no other realistic alternative. If I (collective I, I personally don't use facebook) have something to share to a group, Facebook is the simplest and the widest audience.
Banking led to hubris. We know we have this fixed vig, but we want more. We have this set of deposits that earn basically nothing, so it's free money for us. We can lend to mortgages or businesses at 6-8%, or make 50% (*) as a hedge fund. The asterisk is (*) "unless you lose your shirt". Well, the government needs us, so we'll hold them hostage and we'll make the taxpayers buy us more shirts.
Its not retarded as much as "heads I win, tails you lose" and we lost big.