If you don't want friends and colleagues knowing that you are a secret leather fetishist (or whatever) at night, you should probably set-up an entirely separate profile...no risk of accidentally clicking the wrong box, or sharing with the wrong list.

Both the Pixies and Joe Pugg used / are using a middleman ...Topspin. Topspin is not free. The musician pays between 5% and 20% per transaction, which varies based on the price of the item being sold. In addition, the musician must also pay credit card fees and bandwidth charges. The musician would (obviously)consider these transaction fees before setting the ticket price...either way the concert goer is going to pay.

How will the French government force its citizens to install this spyware?

Real Muslims (and Christians for that matter) don't look at porn...why do they need a filter? The answer (quite obvious), from the NY Times article, "The filter would begin with pornography and would later be expanded to other undesirable sites." Even if they can scrape together a list of sites to block, circumvention is literally child's play.

I doubt that offshore companies, that are operating tax-free and probably legally in the jurisdictions where they are based, are overly concerned whether or not the US gives them a license!

Google should build a true social networking application - one that lets us follow or "friend" anybody on any platform, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn- "walled garden" social "networks" seem to be a contradiction in terms.

One of these days, we are all going to be using mobile phones powered by Android and simple computing devices powered by Android / Chrome OS. The applications we will rely on will be powered by the Google cloud (already the case for millions of people). Current search advertising revenue will look like small change. The real threat to Google is not Facebook or the next fad, it's government (as it was with Microsoft and IBM before them).

>>>>OMG! It's like the people at "The Times" have been living in a bubble ... ...a pay-bubble!

I very much doubt that you are going to get the full answer from Homeland Security. And even if they did give an answer, would anyone actually believe it?

I suspect that the real reason the US did well in the 1950's and 1960's was the fact that they did not have any real competition - Europe and Japan were still rebuilding after being devastated by WW2 and large parts of Asia were either genuinely trying to be Communist or involved in messy conflicts. From the late 1960's onwards, many of these issues started to reverse and the US started to experience competition and trade deficits...downhill ever since.