I think the genius part of this idea is that every time a consumer send a Pepsi to a friend, Pepsi captures that mobile phone number and can then send their own marketing alerts to that person.

It's a great idea for Pepsi, but outside of the novelty of sending a Pepsi to someone by SMS, I don't really see this becoming very popular. Maybe in Middle Schools?

By virtue of the fact that we can recall the tool, means that it still has some cultural relevance. Any tool named on this list is an argument for the tool still "living". The examples we should be citing are tools used in 79 A.D. of which there are no records, and no remembrance of. Those tools have truly "died" but we will never know what they are.

That was my first instinct. It seems like it's pretty easy to trip the eFUSE, how hard would it be to write a virus, wrapped up in a free app that tripped it? Seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

I've encountered a lot of malware and more than half of it exists solely to exploit bad design just like this.

I don't ever mod my phones, but I wouldn't buy a Droid X for fear of having someone brick it for me.

Agreed.

The issue is that with an actual in person conversation, there is no ongoing record of that conversation and the content of that conversation are heresay. It's one person's word against the other, and without a tape recorder, no way to know what was actually said. With the various forms of new communication (of which I'll even include The Web), there are varying degrees of permanence. I can post a bad share price to my website for 15 minutes, and then correct the error, if someone buys a share of my company based on that price, I am obligated to honor that. However, without proper record keeping, how can either party prove what was on the site when the purchase was made. As such, there are regulations in place that specify that Web content must be discoverable, so that those answers can be determined. It's complex, but not overly complex, because I own the servers on which the information gets published. I simply save a copy of every version of a file, every time it's published and save a state of the database. Presto magic.

Things start to get really complicated when I no longer own the infrastructure. If I post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slashdot, or wherever and misquote a shareprice, then that information is controlled by somebody else. It's still considered public communication by the legal and regulatory entities, but I can't reproduce it. I can't even be sure that it's retained and could be reproduced by the site on which I left the remark. This is no different than the environment that has existed since the days of BBC forums and the comment sections of blogs. The issue now, is that the form of communication now has a name: Social Media. As such, many of these issues are actually making their way to the individuals who manage risk at these heavily regulated industries and the questions are being asked.

I don't deny that the regulations are outdated and were written for a time when the printed page was the primary method of communication, but in the space between the current rules and the new ones, there is a tremendous risk for those organizations who have to comply and a huge opportunity for an industry of service providers to step in and put their minds at ease.

The same debate raged when email hit the scene. Seems silly now, but that's just the way things go.

It's also really frustrating that Cuil does not provide language options. When searching for people on Cuil, I tend to get a lot of foreign websites that I can't understand. It would be nice to be able to specify "English Only" websites, if that's what I was after. The only options Cuil has is Safe Search and Typing Suggestions.