Google moved quickly to contain a firestorm of criticism over Buzz, its new social network, taking the unusual step of announcing changes to the product over the weekend to address privacy problems.

Late Saturday, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post that Google had decided to alter one of the most vehemently criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends that Buzz gives new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts. Now, instead of automatically connecting people, Buzz merely suggests to new users a group of people that they may want to follow or want to be followed by. [Emphasis added]

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/google-alters-buzz-to-tackle-privacy-flaws/

I think we'll probably see these ebook readers hit, say, the $99 dollar price range…maybe a bit lower. (Buy one reader!! Get the second one at half-price!! And if you order within the next 20 minutes….!) Even though technology prices do drop over time – with a concomitant increase in quality – there does reach a point where the price is too low and the quality is, well, not really there.

There was a very perceptive comment in another blog that concerned Goldman Sachs and its veiled antipathy toward the Volcker rules and banking/investing regulation in general. (You'll see the tie-in to the current subject in a moment. Hang in there.) The Volcker rules, or principles, can be summarized as follows:

"The most straightforward and appealing application of the principles behind the Volcker rule is: Do not allow financial institutions to be too big to fail; put a size cap on existing large banks relative to G.D.P., forcing these entities to find sensible ways to break themselves up over a period of three years." Source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/bett…

Okay…so now the interesting comment.
"It seems we are witnessing the end game of the chess match started in the 80’s by Ronald Reagan and his minions. His spectral presence hovers around this like stink on s**t. The “left”, liberals, Democrats, whichever you choose to use, have been outmaneuvered (or complicit) in every political and economic move of the last 30 years that has brought us to the edge of this precipice."
Source:
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/02/05/goldman-sa…

So…how does this tie into the current discussion about Google? Well, this really goes back to Gina's comment about our ignorance of history. The thread that ties the Reagan Revolution to the current crisis is apparent to anyone who REMEMBERS history. But to remember history requires learning about that history, requires remembering that history, requires…well…a human mind. Google is of no help here other than as a tool to verify the accuracy of one's memory. (If you don't read history, if you don't remember history…you won't know what you need to Google.) However, our mass delusion is that since we have facts so readily available to our fingertips via Google…we MUST be smarter. If anything, we're probably dumber. Imagine if someone said, "Look at all those digits you have access to. They are all around you and easily accessible. You must be a great mathematician." The folly of this statement is real obvious but how many times have we heard people claim that we are "smarter" because Google allows us ready access to lots of facts? (http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/15-how-googl… and here is the counter-argument: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google )

I feel helpless and frustrated, when the people with the power to send our brothers,sisters, and children to die for something that only these people with power can control. We are only given the imformation that they think will be accepted by us. Then later we find out we had only been told an edited version of the imformation. “Better late than never” is not good in this case, and won’t be I fear, when the whole truth about this Google use of information is reveiled. But I won’t stop hoping that a Change will come about before it is too late and can never be healed,

I didn't use the library for many years, for the usual ADD reasons, but then I moved to Rhode Island, which offers an easy online interface with the state library system. A few taps of the keyboard and I know what I have out, and when it's due. At any one time I'll have 15 or more books out, and thanks to the emails sent from the library (your book is overdue), my fines are modest ones.

Information will always be pliable and manipulated. It will always be available for modification and nefarious uses. The digital age goes deeper, but it also provides deeper access for the common citizen — when the government or big business commits a crime, we're in a better position to catch it. I think of the rising tide analogy, the lifting of all boats. The powerful are more powerful, but so are the citizens.

Check out this prediction from…1967!!
"But such a Data Center [i.e., massive computer data centers] poses a grave threat to individual freedom and privacy. With its insatiable appetite for information, its inability to forget anything that has been put into it, a central computer might become the heart of a government surveillance system that would lay bare our finances, our associations, or our mental and physical health to government inquisitors or even to casual observers."
See: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/31/the-nat…

I actually do listen to my husband, and he makes good points. Technology's gifts to me personally have been immense.

But that doesn't mean I don't see the mixed bag. And he tends not to see that "darker" side of things technological, perhaps because studying the larger societal issues Jeff touches on here was not really a focus of his hard-science education. As a Mass Communications/print journalism major in college, I did study these issues., and as a journalist they were often at the core of my work. It's not that he's not well-educated or well-read; he certainly is. But his first impulse, though, is always to admire the technology.

Maybe, too, I am just better at predicting consequences — at seeing down the road.

I remember a road trip where we visited Arcosanti, probably 1993, when we'd just started dating. We were sitting in this dump of a diner, having a protracted conversation predicting the Internet's effect on news.

He predicted all good things. I predicted some good things but also the dangers of any knucklehead with a keyboard posting "news" (this was before Matt Drudge), the "lifting" of newsstories, the propensity of the American public to prefer free to paid (and largely lacking the critical-thinking skills to know the difference in content), and all the rest.

Many geeks just get so excited by the technology, I think, that they are blinded to the tedious after-shocks. That's the view from Silicon Valley, anyway.