I hate you! More seriously git is super easy to begin to use, and even more so for small projects and / or projects with a small number of contributors.
Setup? git init; git add . (if no unwanted binary in the tree)
Something interesting has been done? git commit -am "rock more"
New source file? git add file; git commit -m "new foobar module"
What value does it bring? Great revert capability, bisecting bugs, and so over. I agree most of the time I don't need it, but well, when I do it is handy. It is like being insured.
Yet you just made no argument for why his arguments are weak, while yours are: jobs create consumers and consumers create jobs, but in your equation absurdly rich people and increasing inequality does not seem to be needed...
Yet, with those rights, Google are able to (worldwide) ; create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
I mean "publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content", how on earth can you formulate that so broadly for a service intended to store private files??? And how after reading that can you qualify it as "Complete FUD"?
In depth analysis are interesting and everybody here understand that google is not going to be THAT evil in the short term, but the fact this _is_ formulated like that is very interesting and not fud at all.
By your very own definition, "In theory" means "we have a model that makes good predictions in some circumstances."
If I let "some circumstances" be "non critical use with no attacker" and the model be "very very very very very very very very very very very very very low probability of collision when applied on pre-existing files", I don't see any problem.
The problem is that you were commenting the article using an absurdly geek point of view, interpreting each sentence as it had a very strict mathematical meaning.
In the real world, peoples sometime do misuse the language a little with the resulting sentences being easier to understand for everybody. That is generally not a call for a smart people to point out that when translated word by word (i.e. when poorly translated) using quantifiers, the statement is mathematically false. Especially when everybody on earth understand that use of "in theory" in the first place.
If Jeff wanted to make a mathematical article, he probably had written mathematical statements in the first place.
If every time you see the world "theory" you are feeling you should correct the one using it by telling him about corner cases he very probably already knows about their existence in the first place, you will loose a lot of time for a lot of non-constructive comments.
If people are willing to give up their privacy to use facebook and find value in using facebook, i'm fine with that and i won't enter a jihad to make them stop using facebook, although when i can i try to make sure they are a minimum informed about what they are giving up (while trying not to be too insistent, just providing information).
As for you can roll your own facebook, this is absolutely false. Facebook tries to get the whole planet registering with them, and don't have and probably will never have a protocol letting a fully featured "facebook bis" integrate with them (except maybe if legally bound to).
e-mail is a completely distributed service. People using gmail are not segregated from the others.
Now I'm also not pretending that facebook is evil for all that. I was initially reacting at your comparison between facebook and e-mail, which made little sense.
It does not allow infinite string compression, because you obviously have to store the original data. For hashes of good length and quality, the theory stands. I would even use MD5 and say the theory stands for non-critical every day uses given there is no attacker.