gaika

There are several time arrows, expansion of the universe, entropy increase, and your perception of future and the past. The last two are not independent at all, as your perception of the past is based on the memory which in turn is a chemical process that follows entropy increase. So the answer to "why things do not happen backwards in time more often" is that because your perception of direction of time is always aligned with the entropy increase.

According to them dogs do not have free will but people do. Probably talking about ethics and moral side of "free will" question, not physical or religious. But even there "free will" is just an illusion in your mind.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

For example JS-Kit.com generates 10G-100G worth of data a day. They had to create an equivalent of Amazon's Dynamo to handle it. Easily half of their resources are dedicated to maintaining and extending this infrastructure. Now imagine if they could just use Cassandra and focus on their core? I do not know what Disqus or FriendFeed are using (probably mysql?), but they can benefit from it too once they grow.

That could affect Google too, there will be more competition from smaller startups like webmynd or cuil because of it. And if startups adopt Facebook's tools instead of Google's, that would make them less attractive to Google as an acquisition target.

When your server fails, you know how to fix it. When the cloud fails, you hope that somebody will be able to fix it soon. When p2p fails you're probably out of luck for a long time.

How is Google going to respond to it? Should we expect BigTable opensourced any time soon?

That way you can list your subscriptions, modify, delete in a very consistent way, without a need for "POST /actions/modify_subscription" and such.

Sending email is best mapped to POST (create), not PUT (update), and the URL doesn't change for POST.