Some people get caught up in designing their own parade, and then on feedback from those who shit on it, realize they might prefer to spend their time elsewhere because they hadn't thought of the critiques that others provided them.

"Shitting on people's parades" is part of the corrective, stabilizing force of sociality. People who never talk to other people often think they've figured out all the answers, and then they go tell everyone else (as in this case) that everyone else should follow their solutions. In what world does it not make sense for some people to shit on some other people's poorly-thought-out-in-a-social-bubble parades??

Positive feedback is also part of this system, but since you're only shitting on the parade of shitting on parades, I'm only addressing the negative.

I'm with you on spending money on healthcare of all kinds, but the AMBER stats I'm finding are nowhere like what you're claiming. They look pretty effective from http://www.statisticbrain.com/amber-alert-statistics/ and http://www.chp.ca.gov/amber/ - do you have some sources for the stats and studies you're citing? It would be most helpful.

The flip side of this is the common anarchist and/or anti-capitalist comment I've heard, that "if all the physicists had to do mining or garbage collecting now and then, we'd quickly have robots to do all that labor." Of course it's a bit silly, but there's a nugget of truth buried in there.

Yeah - the answer isn't decentralization, it's interoperability... which yields a sort of decentralization.

Someone pointed out when ISPs offered email, but now (almost) everyone uses GMail, Yahoo, or Hotmail. But those three biggies all interoperate because email is a standard system.

It'd be nice if basic elements of social networking could somehow have standards, such that content I share on G+ was visible to G+ friends with Facebook accounts on their Facebook page, and vice versa ... but I suspect there's too much incentive to keep these services walled gardens, and any sort of open social network adoption is a decade off, perhaps.

If you're reading fiction, get a Kindle or other e-ink device, because these guys have the advantage of being lightweight, have long battery lives, and "disappear" when you're reading. You just read and read and can enjoy yourself.

If you're reading non-fiction, especially non-fiction with charts, graphs, and the like, get a tablet. They support more advanced features with ePub.

Finally, the device in many cases also ties you into a store. If you're just interested in loading up your own PDFs, you have free reign to select any tablet. If you want to read books from the iBookstore, you have to go with the iPad. If you like the Kindle store or the Nook store, you can choose most tablets OR their own tablet offering.

"A content-filled and freely-accessible Internet is a resource that the whole community benefits from"

Yes, yes it is. And would still be without adblock. People like to create and share. It need not be monetized.

When it comes to the web and web browsers, a shared grammatic space, you're not engineering anymore, you're growing. Good luck resisting. Authors of dictionaries gave up long ago.

It's how the human mind & language work... Just sayin'.

Most of the things you want them to notice don't seem to be the case so far.

This assumes the inevitability and longevity of the concept of the nation-state, which has only been around a couple hundred years and is arguably (anthropologically speaking) not at all inevitable as a social entity.

Ultimately, would you just give out TLDs for whatever social entity you chose to recognize as some sort of homogenous group? How arbitrary are you prepared to be?

That seems to me to be the ultimate problem with TLDs. They are always already arbitrary. Just leave them so instead of imagining there's some sort of rationality (such as country-codes) which will just inevitabley be wiped away or need to be modified to fit some new scheme someday.

I believe that is the point -- people are choosing to use other forms of messaging and finding that they're as good, if not better, among their contacts compared to SMS. As such, they are saving themselves the unlimited texting fees.

An unlimited texting plan on AT&T is $20/mo, and on Verizon, the $5/mo tier only gets you 250 messages. The $10/mo plan gets you mostly unlimited texting. So, people are deciding "hey, everyone I text is on FB, and I can ping them on their phone the same way. Plus I can ping people who don't even have phones and are sitting at home."

So, it's more flexible, and it's cheaper. People then drop their unlimited data plans (which are add-ons and not part of the contract structure), which eats into the planned revenue for the carriers. What's worse, the carriers have no plan to recoup this fee once it's gone. They'll need to make up the shortfall by increasing data plan costs.

What's neat is that you've found a great use for the device even without a lot of the things that make it really uniquely different from desktops and laptops. Personally, I think of tablets as an incredibly social computer. Look how many people easily pass around iPads, or will hold one and poke at it while another person is standing or sitting right there. And with the screen, there's no question of weird viewing angles, unlike many laptops, so it actually feels like a shared experience.

What I think is even more neat is how a single device can play multiplayer games. That's unheard of in the current PC/Laptop marketplace, where you can put a computer on a table and have 2-4 people playing the same game. Part of it is the ergonomics -- it's much easier to share a single "slate" compared to a folded laptop -- but it also has to do with the new OS. That's the real reason that the iPad and non-Apple Tablets are succeeding at all; they're not trying to be laptops. They're saying "I am a device you poke at, and that means I do different things. Therefore, I will have a different interface, different applications, and different outputs."

That's really neat! And it's what was needed all along to create a thriving tablet marketplace. Not just "Windows with touchscreen support," because, honestly, no one gave a shit about touchscreen support. That's why all previous Windows tablets failed.

"In the last ten years, the mass uptake of the Internet is certainly a socially and culturally significant invention..."

Evidence, please. From what I can see, people still have sex, make babies, raise said babies, and capitalism still rules the world. Not much has changed in 400 years, let alone 100, let alone the last 20. Even our cultural beliefs about those things have barely changed if at all.

Also unchanged: our desire to believe everything is significantly different than it was 20, 100, or 400 years ago. I don't buy it. People may be talking more, but about less. Or, at least, about the same stuff: sex, babies, and how to make money since that's seen as the road to happiness.

If anything, the one thing that has changed in the last 200-400 years, but remained pretty constant since it came about, is the construction of increasingly rigid gender roles, the segregation of "women's labor" from "real labor," and a corresponding decrease in possible modes of human relationships.