I'd refer you to the history of Eritrea and Ethiopia, Uganda, or countless others. It's not uncommon for regimes, or even benevolent governments to have priorities different from the populace (this even happens in North America, but since we're talking about 'developing').
No doubt, government decision makers can have different ideas of what is useful than the people, and even when they don't, both government decision makers and the people can be wrong at the time they make decisions and those decisions can be misguided and resented by the people at the time they bear fruit, however much they were in accord with the desires of the people when made.
Nevertheless, other than the abstract possibility that such a disconnect could be occurring here because it has occurred in the past, no real reason has been presented for believing that the participation of specific governments in the XO project is such a disconnect.
And if you don't think governments can be coerced into buying specific products through purely economic methods, you haven't been paying attention.
Since I specifically discussed the possibility in the post you are responding to, and discussed why I didn't think it was likely to be a factor in the OLPC project, I don't think you should be accusing other people of not paying attention.
Where governments maintain populations that can't eat adequately, that itself generates quite a bit of resentment. The marginal resentment resulting from giving those same people computers would probably be small.
Which is my point to start with.
That's odd, since its directly contrary to the point you offered that it was in response to. I think you mean "it presupposes one of my points", to wit, your idea that these will largely be going to starving people. It meant to do that, illustrating how your resentment point was overstated even presuming the point underlying it was true. I also addressed the misguidedness of that underlying point.
Spending -any- money on a computer for someone that doesn't have access to food or water is ridiculous.
So? Access to food and water isn't a problem for the vast majority of the people for whom these computers are being purchased.
Imagine watching your son die from hunger and the next day getting a lovely plastic computer - for free! How would that make you feel?
Why should I imagine that? How is it relevant?
Spend the money on food or water first.
Insofar as food and water (and electricity, healthcare, roads, physical structures for schools, etc.) are problems in the target areas, most of the countries involved are spending resources to address them already. In many cases, there is a point of diminishing returns where there is a limited amount that can be done efficiently at a time, and you have to complete that before moving on to the next project. These problems can't just absorb more resources efficiently to cut down the time to solve them.
Then maybe on basic healthcare, or classrooms with at least pencils and paper so kids and adults can learn to read and write.
Uruguay has a 98% literacy rate. Argentina about 97%. Libya, Brazil, and Peru above 80%. Getting "classrooms with at least pencils and papers so kids and adults can learn to read and write" is quite simply not a fundamental pressing need in most of countries that are involved in the OLPC.
Also, these types of projects have a history of being abused or counted towards 'aid' commitments.
Aside from the clear opportunity for people, government and corporations to take advantage of good intentions, there's a consistent theme of imposing western/northern hemisphere values for the wrong people place/application.
No one in the developed world is forcing developing nations governments to choose to spend their own money to buy into the OLPC project. It's not like the US Marines are landing on the beaches of Brazil and distributing XOs at gunpoint.
All OLPC does is work with countries that decide they like the idea to meet their needs, and sell them computers. If they don't want them, they don't have to buy them. And since its a nonprofit and therefore its not like Nicholas Negroponte has stock to skyrocket or derive dividends from, I doubt they are going to be corruptly influencing government officials to buy into the project the way a for profit vendor might.
(OTOH, I'd say that, compared to the XO, the ClassMate certainly seems to have some of that first-world priority, wrong-tool-for-the-job character for some of the OLPC target countries, but its probably a better choice for some of the more developed and/or industrialized areas that have not been interested in the OLPC per se but might be interested in something vaguely similar.)
It's not unlike the good intentions that led to rebuilding of "better" houses in Sumatra for instance after the great Tsunami. Modern, western style housing just doesn't make sense there. It uses and demands much more freshwater than traditional homes and no-one can afford to run them. As a result the population has typically abandoned the new homes, which remain unoccupied, in favour of traditional homes.
Actually, I think that's exactly how the XO is not like that kind of housing project (though, again, I suppose the ClassMate might be.) While frequently derided in forums like slashdot (and, for that matter, by competing hardware projects and software vendors for whom the XO is a poor fit) for not meeting the expectations of a modern, western-style computing device, the XO (and the specs for the OLPC projects other devices like the school servers) are very carefully designed for the environment and role planned, in consultation with the people who would be using them.
In fact I would argue that corporations (and governments who use money to buy these computers) will likely breed more hostility and resentment than anything by disseminating computers to people who can't afford three squares a day.
Where governments maintain populations that can't eat adequately, that itself generates quite a bit of resentment. The marginal resentment resulting from giving those same people computers would probably be small. But, anyhow, governments whose main problem is starving populations aren't generally participating in the OLPC project. A few really crushingly poor countries might get the OLPC early on as a result of Libya's exploration of purchasing the OLPC not only for its own schoolchildren, but also for those in some poorer African countries,
The OLPC concept is good, but seriously I think we have more pressuring issues to deal with.
Then deal with them. The OLPC project will continue without you, I'm sure.
Not everyone has to be involved in everything done by every private charity on Earth.
But at the same time I feel like it's a waste of money compared to better causes, like I dont know, FEEDING or MEDICINE for kids.
Please, feel free to give to organizations providing those, instead.
Granted I grew up poor, and I wish I had a laptop when I was in high school and younger would have been able to kick start my career even earlier. But even then if it came to me having a free laptop, or seeing the kid down the street who eats government peanut butter on bread (no jelly) every day and no medical insurance.
Yeah, I've been that kid eating the government food, in high school. I wouldn't have traded (manifestly, as I could have and didn't), the broken old PC I had or the brand new full retail boxed version of Turbo Pascal 5.5 Professional (when it was "the latest and greatest") someone bought for me to have a little more or slightly better for a while.
From a small thinking perspective this project is great, from the big picture it's just diverting funds that could have been better used.
I think you have that backwards. From a naive and shortsighted perspective, its diverting funds that could be better used. From a broader perspective, its lowering the cost of education in developing countries, reducing the pressure, in the long-run, for them to have to choose between basic education for the whole population and providing essential services to the worst-off populations. And most of the funds "diverted", either in private charity dollars that actually go to the OLPC project or government education expenditures on the project by the recipient countries, would not have gone to the "better" uses you suggest if they didn't go to OLPC, they'd go to other, perhaps less cost-effective, education programs in the recipient countries or to other programs that interest the kind of people who would be interested in the OLPC project in the case of the private donations of money, programming effort, etc., to the project.
That is actually a proper statement because 'something' is that software, more properly, that specific released version of that software. So it is a true statement, once that version is releasesd under the GPL, that version stays under the GPL.
Even if you just look at that part, its still not true as written. The GPL is a license, and, as such, it is not something that attaches itself mystically to the copyright of the work. Once you acquire the copyright, you can stop offering it under the GPL. That doesn't stop people who have already received a valid license from redistributing it under the terms of the GPL, or creating derivative works and distributing them under the GPL, because they have already received those rights, so in practical effect it is similar to what you describe, but not exactly the same.
But that wasn't the important error that I was responding to: the important error was the suggestion, in the sentence following the portion you quote, that any modifications and additions by the new copyright holder must be released under the GPL as well, which is flat out wrong. Works created by the copyright holder incorporating the code formerly released under the GPL, with or without new modifications, can be released under any licenses the copyright holder chooses, and there is no requirement that they be released under the GPL, whether exclusively or as one of the set of under which they are released.
By the way this is why I'm also against "gun control" and Shrubya. ANYONE who gives up essential liberty for the sake of "convenience" or "security" does not deserve any of the three and weather this anti freedom, bill creating, rate inflating scheme is called "network computing" (Sun Microsystems) or the "net cloud" (Micro$oft) it is simply another sheeple herding, wallet emptying ripoff of basic liberty and money.
Nice rant, but what basic liberty is given up by choosing to use thin client services?
Now that everyone has a digital camera? I can tell you that backups are important to EVERYONE, though some don't realize it until the inevitable HD crash.
Backups were only one of the concerns raised, I asked how many home users worry about most of those. Updates are largely worry-free, and most home users, I would bet, don't even know what "revision control" is, much less worry about it. Backups, I'll agree, a fair number of people do worry about, at least after the fact.
If I (or the phone company) shut off the phone service, I've lost nothing save the ability to place a phone call with that vendor, and they have nothing sensitive of my data aside from common billing information. If a thin client relationship ends (by me or them), the vendor has all of my data, and I've lost the ability to use any of it which hasn't been backed up locally.
You make a good point that a "thin client provider" is different than a TV or phone service provider; the kind of relationship is more like the one a client has with a bank.
OTOH, while that certainly calls for more caution, scrutiny, and controls in how individual clients, and probably also law and government, relate to such service providers, I don't think it necessarily means they are a bad idea. After all, many people find banks preferable to keeping their money stuffed in their mattress.
Home users and small business simply should not have to worry about maintaining firewalls, patches, backups, revision control, document sharing services, and all the other mess that comes with typical PC use.
How many home users worry about most of those now?
Software isn't like Cable TV, Phone, or similar home services. After all, I don't put my personal data into any of those, and I certainly don't use them to store my own files.
Really? You don't communicate sensitive personal information over the telephone?
Most people I know were doing that before the Web existed, and before internet service was something anyone would consider a "home service".
Slashdot editors make it look like the administrative assistants, custodians, and assembly line workers are evil or something.
Um, the "employees" bit is a direct quote from TFA, so if someone is distorting something by calling them that, its not "Slashdot editors".
Call it like it is: try "agents".
The involved employees in the part quoted were apparently from an analytical support unit that did not have the authorized power to conduct its own investigations; it is not at all clear to me that "agents" is a proper description of the employees involved.
Once something is GPL2, it stays GPL2. You can not take it back, even if you own the copyright. And any code you add, is also GPL2.
Wrong. Through the GPL, the copyright holder imposes obligations on other creators of derivative works. But, if you acquire the copyright to all of the code (as Apple did in this case), you are the copyright holder, and can do whatever you want with it and release it and derivative works under any terms you wish. If Apple wanted to release future updates (including all of the existing code plus any of their changes and additions) of CUPS as purely proprietary software, or under the BSD license, or into the public domain, they could.
Anyone who has already received the code under the GPL retains all the rights in the GPL to the existing code, including the right to create derivative works and distribute them under the GPL. But you, as the copyright holder, are not bound to use the GPL in any future works you make incorporating the code you own.
Not sure why anyone would want to work on something that relies on multiples of an indefinable number
Pi is irrational, but it is rather clearly defined. Its rather natural to use in pure mathematics, though in many applications degrees or points or some other units are more natural for the domain.
Type in =SIN(30 degrees) if you want degrees. I'm sorry, Excel doesn't pander to high school students.
The UI of Excel is not the issue.
The issue is the specification of the OOXML format.
The fact is there are many different units used for measuring angles (radians, degrees, grads, points, etc.), and radians aren't the only one. The argument is that the format specification should specify the unit if correct and consistent implementation requires a particular unit.
Every programming language I know accepts arguments for trig functions as radians.
IIRC, most dialects of Logo and some of BASIC accept arguments for trig functions as degrees.
Not that what programming languages accept is particularly relevant to what the format specification should specify, since presumably OOXML implementation behavior on this point should not be unspecified and dependent on the programming language used in the implementation.
Someone failed the math class where they explained that an angle is a "dimensionless derived unit" [wikipedia.org].
No, an angle isn't a "dimensionless derived unit", the "radian" is an SI unit which is a "dimensionless derived unit", but you still need to know which unit is being used when angles are specified. Angles are, in different contexts, expressed in a wide variety of different units (radians, degrees, gradians, and points, among others.)
Explaining, short version for the clicky-impaired: angles are the ratio between two measurements of length -- the length of an arc and the radius of said arc.
Actually, no. The radian is a measure of an angle which is the ratio between the length and the radius of the arc. There are other measures of angles besides the radian. You are confusing the definition of a particular measure with the thing measured, and probably shouldn't talk about other people failing math classes on the subject when they are right and you get it all wrong.
Generic containers like Atom and microformats are useful, but we really lack an interoperable medium for conveying managed data - ie. Stuff that's been normalized for manipulation and integrity. Not that it should be the only form for all data, but that most data should be able to be gleaned into something like RDF.
Right. RDF is for relationships a lot like what XML is for structure of data, a common way of expressing things so that tools that don't need to know or care about the ultimate use of data can process it, enabling common infrastructure and tools.
Unfortunately, the tools and infrastructure currently available for RDF are pretty limited and spotty right now, so its often just as easy and productive in the short-term to do things in some less-generic way; but that was true of XML for quite a while before it really took off, too.
The trouble with the Semantic Web is that TBL is always talking about the end goal. The end goal seems unobtainable to many people.
Is this really a problem with the Semantic Web?
Seems to me that its a problem with the people that are reacting emotionally to TBLs descriptions of the ultimate goal without paying attention to the progress in that direction, and with the people who think that the Semantic Web is somehow all or nothing such that if the vision is less than entirely acheived, the effort toward it is completely wasted, whereas in reality "semantic-ness" of the web is a continuum.
Decent ORMs do nothing but map object operations into SQL statements. SQL from an ORM tool is not going to magically work more faster or slower than a hand-written one.
As I understand it, a procedure in an application making a series of SQL calls to a database to achieve some result may in certain circumstances be much slower than a a single SQL call to the database which executes a stored procedure which does all the work.
But I don't think the size of the database (or table, which seems to be the real issue GP is getting at with row counts) should normally be the issue, though I could be wrong, I'm not a database expert.
Even if Google's ratings drop (I'm somewhat skeptical if that's true overall, as Google has lots of sticky applications—Gmail, YouTube, etc.) will this really hurt Google all that much? Sure, Google sells ads, but they aren't just displayed on Google's own sites.
For all of my enthusiasm for the semantic web (I have had RDF meta data on my web site for many years), there are some tough problems, including: 1. trust: how do we keep people from publishing purposefully wrong meta data?
We don't. RDF triples are claims about specific resources, including other websites, data sources, or even specific other RDF triples. No reason you can't used signed RDF to make accountable claims about the trustworthiness of resources (metadata sources at any level of specificity down to specific RDF triples), and users can then select which sources to "trust", with any degree of control of what uses they are trusted for, including delegating trust the accountable claims made by providers of metadata that makes claims about the trustworthiness of other metadata or sources of metadata.
2. how do we reason with a web's worth of data?
Most likely you don't, and the challenge is identifying the right subset to apply to any given "exploration" (query, application, etc.)
3. tension between formal standards and "grass roots" bottom up approaches that work, but may not scale.
I'm not sure this is really a "tough problem" so much as the normal source of innovation in any area.
Of course, it took MS quite a while to achieve this in the reasonably constrained environment of office automation, and even then it was a huge achievement that many companies failed hideously at. Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
I dunno about "impossible": web browsers, MIME types, and helper applications have done quite a bit of it for a lot wider variety of disparate types of linked information than MS Office has. I'm not sure that metadata expressed through RDF is a good general approach to a more expressive, "semantic", web, but certainly that kind of web is the direction the Web has pretty clearly been heading for some time, though in fits and starts.
With all the patching Automatic Update does, I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't all over a neutral net. They may have to pay a fortune to ISPs.
They can afford to pay a fortune to ISPs, especially if it means competitors (like every Linux distro that is gratis as well as libre) that can't instantly suffers a major disadvantage in pushing updates.
Go ask 10 non-technical people if they would consider using Linux as an OS, and 9 will look at you like you just spoke Greek to them.
And—though I think 9 out of 10 is a bit high, unless you use a very narrow definition of non-technical—those 9 (or however many) people aren't really a barrier to adoption. Those people don't have a real clear idea what either Linux or an OS is, and will use whatever OS is easiest to get for their hardware (presumably, whatever comes bundled) and be suffer whatever constraints it imposes.
The trick is getting the people that care about OS's to prefer Linux, and to get make it worthwhile for hardware vendors to bundle Linux.
And the key to the second is, in large part, the first, particularly when it comes to corporate purchasers.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the concrete terms of the GPLv2 suit your beliefs and interests adequately for the software you are making.
Releasing software under the GPLv2 (or even v3) is not a lifetime pledge to become a blind follower of RMS. Maybe they'll add that term in v4.
No doubt, government decision makers can have different ideas of what is useful than the people, and even when they don't, both government decision makers and the people can be wrong at the time they make decisions and those decisions can be misguided and resented by the people at the time they bear fruit, however much they were in accord with the desires of the people when made.
Nevertheless, other than the abstract possibility that such a disconnect could be occurring here because it has occurred in the past, no real reason has been presented for believing that the participation of specific governments in the XO project is such a disconnect.
Since I specifically discussed the possibility in the post you are responding to, and discussed why I didn't think it was likely to be a factor in the OLPC project, I don't think you should be accusing other people of not paying attention.
That's odd, since its directly contrary to the point you offered that it was in response to. I think you mean "it presupposes one of my points", to wit, your idea that these will largely be going to starving people. It meant to do that, illustrating how your resentment point was overstated even presuming the point underlying it was true. I also addressed the misguidedness of that underlying point.
So? Access to food and water isn't a problem for the vast majority of the people for whom these computers are being purchased.
Why should I imagine that? How is it relevant?
Insofar as food and water (and electricity, healthcare, roads, physical structures for schools, etc.) are problems in the target areas, most of the countries involved are spending resources to address them already. In many cases, there is a point of diminishing returns where there is a limited amount that can be done efficiently at a time, and you have to complete that before moving on to the next project. These problems can't just absorb more resources efficiently to cut down the time to solve them.
Uruguay has a 98% literacy rate. Argentina about 97%. Libya, Brazil, and Peru above 80%. Getting "classrooms with at least pencils and papers so kids and adults can learn to read and write" is quite simply not a fundamental pressing need in most of countries that are involved in the OLPC.
What "type"? Examples?
No one in the developed world is forcing developing nations governments to choose to spend their own money to buy into the OLPC project. It's not like the US Marines are landing on the beaches of Brazil and distributing XOs at gunpoint.
All OLPC does is work with countries that decide they like the idea to meet their needs, and sell them computers. If they don't want them, they don't have to buy them. And since its a nonprofit and therefore its not like Nicholas Negroponte has stock to skyrocket or derive dividends from, I doubt they are going to be corruptly influencing government officials to buy into the project the way a for profit vendor might.
(OTOH, I'd say that, compared to the XO, the ClassMate certainly seems to have some of that first-world priority, wrong-tool-for-the-job character for some of the OLPC target countries, but its probably a better choice for some of the more developed and/or industrialized areas that have not been interested in the OLPC per se but might be interested in something vaguely similar.)
Actually, I think that's exactly how the XO is not like that kind of housing project (though, again, I suppose the ClassMate might be.) While frequently derided in forums like slashdot (and, for that matter, by competing hardware projects and software vendors for whom the XO is a poor fit) for not meeting the expectations of a modern, western-style computing device, the XO (and the specs for the OLPC projects other devices like the school servers) are very carefully designed for the environment and role planned, in consultation with the people who would be using them.
Where governments maintain populations that can't eat adequately, that itself generates quite a bit of resentment. The marginal resentment resulting from giving those same people computers would probably be small. But, anyhow, governments whose main problem is starving populations aren't generally participating in the OLPC project. A few really crushingly poor countries might get the OLPC early on as a result of Libya's exploration of purchasing the OLPC not only for its own schoolchildren, but also for those in some poorer African countries,
Then deal with them. The OLPC project will continue without you, I'm sure.
Not everyone has to be involved in everything done by every private charity on Earth.
Please, feel free to give to organizations providing those, instead.
Yeah, I've been that kid eating the government food, in high school. I wouldn't have traded (manifestly, as I could have and didn't), the broken old PC I had or the brand new full retail boxed version of Turbo Pascal 5.5 Professional (when it was "the latest and greatest") someone bought for me to have a little more or slightly better for a while.
I think you have that backwards. From a naive and shortsighted perspective, its diverting funds that could be better used. From a broader perspective, its lowering the cost of education in developing countries, reducing the pressure, in the long-run, for them to have to choose between basic education for the whole population and providing essential services to the worst-off populations. And most of the funds "diverted", either in private charity dollars that actually go to the OLPC project or government education expenditures on the project by the recipient countries, would not have gone to the "better" uses you suggest if they didn't go to OLPC, they'd go to other, perhaps less cost-effective, education programs in the recipient countries or to other programs that interest the kind of people who would be interested in the OLPC project in the case of the private donations of money, programming effort, etc., to the project.
Even if you just look at that part, its still not true as written. The GPL is a license, and, as such, it is not something that attaches itself mystically to the copyright of the work. Once you acquire the copyright, you can stop offering it under the GPL. That doesn't stop people who have already received a valid license from redistributing it under the terms of the GPL, or creating derivative works and distributing them under the GPL, because they have already received those rights, so in practical effect it is similar to what you describe, but not exactly the same.
But that wasn't the important error that I was responding to: the important error was the suggestion, in the sentence following the portion you quote, that any modifications and additions by the new copyright holder must be released under the GPL as well, which is flat out wrong. Works created by the copyright holder incorporating the code formerly released under the GPL, with or without new modifications, can be released under any licenses the copyright holder chooses, and there is no requirement that they be released under the GPL, whether exclusively or as one of the set of under which they are released.
Nice rant, but what basic liberty is given up by choosing to use thin client services?
Backups were only one of the concerns raised, I asked how many home users worry about most of those. Updates are largely worry-free, and most home users, I would bet, don't even know what "revision control" is, much less worry about it. Backups, I'll agree, a fair number of people do worry about, at least after the fact.
You make a good point that a "thin client provider" is different than a TV or phone service provider; the kind of relationship is more like the one a client has with a bank.
OTOH, while that certainly calls for more caution, scrutiny, and controls in how individual clients, and probably also law and government, relate to such service providers, I don't think it necessarily means they are a bad idea. After all, many people find banks preferable to keeping their money stuffed in their mattress.
How many home users worry about most of those now?
Really? You don't communicate sensitive personal information over the telephone?
Most people I know were doing that before the Web existed, and before internet service was something anyone would consider a "home service".
That would seem to be the very definition of "vaporware".
Um, the "employees" bit is a direct quote from TFA, so if someone is distorting something by calling them that, its not "Slashdot editors".
The involved employees in the part quoted were apparently from an analytical support unit that did not have the authorized power to conduct its own investigations; it is not at all clear to me that "agents" is a proper description of the employees involved.
They probably did. A lawsuit is usually not the first step in dispute resolution between businesses.
Wrong. Through the GPL, the copyright holder imposes obligations on other creators of derivative works. But, if you acquire the copyright to all of the code (as Apple did in this case), you are the copyright holder, and can do whatever you want with it and release it and derivative works under any terms you wish. If Apple wanted to release future updates (including all of the existing code plus any of their changes and additions) of CUPS as purely proprietary software, or under the BSD license, or into the public domain, they could.
Anyone who has already received the code under the GPL retains all the rights in the GPL to the existing code, including the right to create derivative works and distribute them under the GPL. But you, as the copyright holder, are not bound to use the GPL in any future works you make incorporating the code you own.
Pi is irrational, but it is rather clearly defined. Its rather natural to use in pure mathematics, though in many applications degrees or points or some other units are more natural for the domain.
The UI of Excel is not the issue.
The issue is the specification of the OOXML format.
The fact is there are many different units used for measuring angles (radians, degrees, grads, points, etc.), and radians aren't the only one. The argument is that the format specification should specify the unit if correct and consistent implementation requires a particular unit.
IIRC, most dialects of Logo and some of BASIC accept arguments for trig functions as degrees.
Not that what programming languages accept is particularly relevant to what the format specification should specify, since presumably OOXML implementation behavior on this point should not be unspecified and dependent on the programming language used in the implementation.
No, an angle isn't a "dimensionless derived unit", the "radian" is an SI unit which is a "dimensionless derived unit", but you still need to know which unit is being used when angles are specified. Angles are, in different contexts, expressed in a wide variety of different units (radians, degrees, gradians, and points, among others.)
Actually, no. The radian is a measure of an angle which is the ratio between the length and the radius of the arc. There are other measures of angles besides the radian. You are confusing the definition of a particular measure with the thing measured, and probably shouldn't talk about other people failing math classes on the subject when they are right and you get it all wrong.
Right. RDF is for relationships a lot like what XML is for structure of data, a common way of expressing things so that tools that don't need to know or care about the ultimate use of data can process it, enabling common infrastructure and tools.
Unfortunately, the tools and infrastructure currently available for RDF are pretty limited and spotty right now, so its often just as easy and productive in the short-term to do things in some less-generic way; but that was true of XML for quite a while before it really took off, too.
Is this really a problem with the Semantic Web?
Seems to me that its a problem with the people that are reacting emotionally to TBLs descriptions of the ultimate goal without paying attention to the progress in that direction, and with the people who think that the Semantic Web is somehow all or nothing such that if the vision is less than entirely acheived, the effort toward it is completely wasted, whereas in reality "semantic-ness" of the web is a continuum.
As I understand it, a procedure in an application making a series of SQL calls to a database to achieve some result may in certain circumstances be much slower than a a single SQL call to the database which executes a stored procedure which does all the work.
But I don't think the size of the database (or table, which seems to be the real issue GP is getting at with row counts) should normally be the issue, though I could be wrong, I'm not a database expert.
Even if Google's ratings drop (I'm somewhat skeptical if that's true overall, as Google has lots of sticky applications—Gmail, YouTube, etc.) will this really hurt Google all that much? Sure, Google sells ads, but they aren't just displayed on Google's own sites.
We don't. RDF triples are claims about specific resources, including other websites, data sources, or even specific other RDF triples. No reason you can't used signed RDF to make accountable claims about the trustworthiness of resources (metadata sources at any level of specificity down to specific RDF triples), and users can then select which sources to "trust", with any degree of control of what uses they are trusted for, including delegating trust the accountable claims made by providers of metadata that makes claims about the trustworthiness of other metadata or sources of metadata.
Most likely you don't, and the challenge is identifying the right subset to apply to any given "exploration" (query, application, etc.)
I'm not sure this is really a "tough problem" so much as the normal source of innovation in any area.
I dunno about "impossible": web browsers, MIME types, and helper applications have done quite a bit of it for a lot wider variety of disparate types of linked information than MS Office has. I'm not sure that metadata expressed through RDF is a good general approach to a more expressive, "semantic", web, but certainly that kind of web is the direction the Web has pretty clearly been heading for some time, though in fits and starts.
They can afford to pay a fortune to ISPs, especially if it means competitors (like every Linux distro that is gratis as well as libre) that can't instantly suffers a major disadvantage in pushing updates.