Hi and thanks for your comment. We strive for accuracy at this blog and the author had in fact mixed up the units and they should be bits instead of bytes. We sincerely hope this confusion did not totally ruin your assignment.

The actual theoretical data transfer rates should be:
0G: Size of data packet was limited by what your carrier pigeon could handle
1G: Depends if you used 1st or 2nd class stamp.
2G: 9.6 kbits/s or so.
2.5G (GPRS): 56 - 114 kbits/s.
2.75G (EDGE): up to 560 kbit/s
3G (UMTS): up to 2 Mbit/s
3.5G (HSDPA): 1.8 - 14.4 Mbit/s
4G: Whatever the marketing department dreamed up last night.

Tech IT Easy regrets the error.

On software side of robotics, Microsoft has been busy building a software development platform for robots, which is interesting. Probably so that T-1000 can run Windows, and so we'll know how to BSOD it.

If anyone has access, I recommend Gates' article on Scientific American on robots. It's from 2006, but it's still quite relevant. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=...

I think this album proves that NiN's approach with Ghosts was better (fixed cost, lots of stuff) than Radiohead's name-your-price-scheme. That's quite interesting, but proves the point that you usually make profitable business if you can price your stuff right.

As for publishing your own music on the various sites on the net, I think TuneCore ( http://www.tunecore.com/ ) seems to be quite straightforward and it comes with a quite good testimonial from Trent Reznor himself =) However, I think the question about how an unestablished band can make good money with these schemes remains unanswered.

Okay, so I was wrong about how quickly Nokia surrendered..Looks like Nokia threw the towel in when it comes to smartphone innovation and services. This was probably a big victory for the hardware guys at Nokia. Then again, hardware has been Nokia's strength.

There are many more happy faces at 1 Infinite Loop and at Mountain View, though. Time will tell if Vanjoki was right.

I think I should let you be my editor for my blog posts. You captured the points I tried to make without spending better part of an hour researching oil platforms, suicides off the Golden Gate and weather at North Sea.

No doubt there are such cases, but without any evidence I'm really hard pressed to believe that they make any dent in the numbers. We're talking about tens of thousands of people even in smaller countries and I'm quite sure that there are more facebook profiles for dogs than for sexual predators.

Yeah, I didn't have time, but it would have been quite easy to add broadband penetration rate / internet usage by population numbers in the chart and I would assume they correlate heavily with Facebook penetration.

The internet is the best thing ever for stats junkies like me.

Your first point stands when talking about general purpose social networks, but I'm just worried about when companies see social networks as a marketing tool and want to enforce similar controls on the message like previously. Also, what I issue I was trying to tackle wasn't exactly censorship, but more that limit the ability to interact. Sure, continuing my own example, they'd probably not let me put up an Android banner at the Apple Store either.

You're right that the social network service usage on the net doesn't translate to offline, and because of the inverse that's a good thing. I'm quite certain we wouldn't have the web we have today, if it wasn't for socially inept geeks who sought other likeminded geeks. And I'm afraid this is disappearing, at least in my personal experience I haven't really formed many new friendships on these new web 2.0 social networks. I have made some through a couple of forums and irc-channels, so I might be in this "when things were simpler" group. I feel that the focus has shifted from talking with like-minded people to talking with friends (not included, must be bought separately).

Maybe I just need a hug.

As for your first point, I was talking about how we are only able to interact on certain social objects with a limited set of interactions, in Ping's case artists and songs. The social object isn't the place, but the whatever we are talking about (interacting with). In real-life social environments we're free to talk about anything. Sure, I can't strip naked or do other things that are against the norms of that environment, but we can talk quite freely about Android phones at an Apple store if we want. In other words, I wasn't talking about the environment as the limiting factor but the "topics of our discussion".

As for the other, you're right. I can tag pictures and videos on Facebook and more non-textual interactions are something I would like to see more. I decidedly left out games, because they offer so entirely larger amount of creativity and interaction in virtual reality. Farmville farms and Minecraft creations are some examples. It's easy to see why people want things like Second Life to succeed, but I think SL aimed a bit too high. In most games, there's very little textual interaction and instead games are able to allow people to share experiences, while few social networks services are able to do that. sofanatics.com is an exception here.

As for your conclusion, I agree totally, Facebooks and Twitters are just tools and should not be confused with the social networks per se and the whole idea to use them is that they'd add value to the interaction. By rant was against simplistic "share a status and maybe a pic" social networks that feel like afterthoughts than actual things and also the strange idea that the web wasn't social before. (and the paradox that since social networks, we might interacting more with friends and less with strangers. I think I linked a TED talk about this to you some long time ago.)

I'm not for a one true massive social network, because that's essentially what this universe already is. What I'm criticising is calling everything social. Facebook, Twitter et al are examples of somewhat successful social network services that seem to help people to be social with another. However, neither can capture the nuances of human social behavior as we have seen both stumble with their concepts of friend groups.

I'm surprised you were able to write so long post while desperately browsing through a dictionary... =)

Nitpicking about terminology again, but I'd like to point out that piracy probably just signals about the marginal cost of production of digital goods (ie. really close to zero). However, it's quite certain that most digital goods have a real value greater than zero and the challenge for the market is how to capture that consumer surplus with effective price discrimination.