"If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? [...] If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?"
Whenever I try to explain the importance of privacy (online and in real life) to family or friends, not surprisingly, the most common retort to this is: "I have nothing to hide". When I counter this argument and explain why privacy matters, usually by giving them instances from day-to-day life where they want their privacy respected but don't think about it that way, the message gets across quite clearly. There is this paper [0] "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" which dives deeper into countering this argument; it's a very interesting read.
The last paragraph mentions this: "We’ve reached out to Apple to see whether a licensing arrangement has been reached for this graphic…but we doubt it.".
Any particular reason that you believe the alleged rape allegations more than the fact that they may _actually_ have been politically motivated? I mean, it's difficult to take sides without knowing what did transpire.
With the tutorial, you just need to read till Chapter 9 as the continuing chapters handle the stdlib which serves more of a reference once you know the language. Point being, you start writing Python with the official tutorial much earlier as compared to any introductory book because the tutorial teaches you what you _just_ what you need to know.
I really wonder why no one mentions the official Python tutorial (http://docs.python.org/tutorial/). That is by far, the most concise and easiest to understand Python tutorial I have ever come across. For those who run after multiple sources and 400 pages books, give the official tutorial a read. You will not even feel at looking at another Python introductory book again. I speak from personal experience and based on the feedback from the people I recommended this -- they simply love it. As talk is cheap, don't listen to me and go ahead and give it the first few pages a read. You won't regret it.
If you have never met before but can exchange data physically -- why not! The requirements of this (summarized) are: 1. Common content, 2. Ability to exchange data physically. And if you are in a LAN, not even that.
By the word social (and now I think it can mean different things in different context), I meant that it is based on the concept that there is content which is common to a given 'social' group -- let's say with your friends who use Linux, you can use it to download a 10 GB distro. The set of those friends forms a social group that will participate in downloading the distro. You are right about the 'geo-aware' part but then there is no geo-awareness; it's all manual.
That is correct. But to keep things simple, I didn't go into that. My main intention was to see whether people actually feel the need for this and how it would scale.
Yes that is correct. Geographical proximity can mean anyone who wants the same data you want and you are in a position to exchange it physically. So it can a friend you meet in college everyday or your neighbor even.