From TFA:

"After careful consideration, we have decided to temporarily suspend ads on Logan Paul's YouTube channels," a spokesperson said to TechCrunch in an emailed statement elaborating on the Tweet. "This is not a decision we made lightly, however, we believe he has exhibited a pattern of behavior in his videos that makes his channel not only unsuitable for advertisers, but also potentially damaging to the broader creator community."

If Mr. Paul is as much of a douchebag as TFA's summary of his recent videos implies, I don't see how a slap on the wrist is near enough.

Reading between the lines, it seems like this spokesperson for YouTube has a sense of decency and their contempt for Logan Paul is seeping through, but unfortunately they are in a position of articulating and defending a gutless, token penalty decided on by the suits.

Well, according to Einstein, you could simulate mass with a whole lot of energy. Oh wait. That would actually be mass. I think the only way to simulate mass would be by promising things that never actually go on the rocket.

Can you elaborate on what was wrong with DuckDuckGo's results? I have been using it for years. Certainly it's very different from Google's results but to me that is a benefit -- I am fundamentally offended by a company trying to control what information I find based on 1) what the unwashed masses seem to want and 2) what Google's predictive analytics have determined is the best approach for their customers to attempt to separate me from my money. If I wanted to consume whatever slop was put in front of me by the corporations, I'd watch TV.

</rant> I know it's hard to characterize what counts as "better" search results, but I really would like to know what the usage model is where Google's results count as "good." Is it that you have a specific question in mind and you want to find an answer? Because my approach is totally different: I have a specific topic in mind and I want to see the range of what has been written about it so I can decide which source is the least stupid, biased, and evil.

Yeah, I can tell from all the people on Slashdot saying we are better off being tracked. Not.

It ain't over till it's over.

I think the idea Cook is advocating is that Swift isn't just a "toy" language to be used for kids' classroom projects.

I've taken an interest in human factors lately and realized in my reading that human limitations such as working memory are a big part of why programming is difficult, and an abundant source of programming errors. Those limitations can't be wished away. Neither is it necessarily a wise allocation of labor to demand exceptional working memory as an entry condition to the career of programming.

I haven't tried Swift myself but I'm open to the idea that the last 30 years since Java was developed have taught us a thing or two about patterns and abstractions that can make the complexity of software tractable.

At first my reaction was to dismiss Cook's position as "dumbing down" a fundamentally complex task. Then I realized that one could view C as a "dumbed down" version of assembly language. I do not enjoy programming in assembly and I feel no shame in admitting that it would not be my first choice of language to implement a smartphone app. Therefore I probably shouldn't judge someone who says the same thing about Objective-C or Java.

Andrew Carnegie didn't invent steel, or even the crucible steel process. He just made it commercially successful and founded an industry. Was that innovation? It depends on your definition.

The cultural decline you're describing is attributable to television, or more generally, to an advertising-supported business model for media.

What passes for innovation these days is "technology" like Uber, which is just an unlicensed taxi service loosely connected by a smartphone app. Or credit default swaps, there's an American innovation for you. The innovation two generations ago invented digital computers and sent men to the moon.

Oh, I hate the ribbon bar as much as the next person! But once I started working with LibreOffice heavily its shortcomings became clear -- lack of basic reliability in things like applying a text style and having it affect the selected text, and only the selected text, consistently. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the more I used MS Office the more I came to grudgingly accept it, while the more I used LibreOffice the more I cursed it for odd little glitches and stability problems.

And here I thought it was like a dog park for autonomous vehicles, so they can get together and play.

I don't think the subscription model has to be consumer-hostile. It's keeping the storage formats as trade secrets that's the problem. If you respect the consumer's right to migrate their data, for example by providing a gratis migration tool or, better yet, making your file format open to begin with, I don't see the problem.

Why would someone keep paying for your software if you weren't holding their data hostage? The same reasons they chose to adopt it in the first place! Functionality, usability, performance, productivity. If you keep delivering benefits, I guarantee you will keep receiving revenue. (You may not grow revenue as much as your money-grubbing hedge fund shareholders demand, but if you're willing to screw your customers to hit a quarterly growth target, you deserve what happens when they wise up.)

In other words, secret data formats are not a consumer benefit and consumers don't want them. That's the consumer-hostile part of the business model: not the subscription per se.

This is just an extreme case of vendor lock-in, which has been a known risk of using proprietary software for decades. Vendor lock-in was one of the primary motivators for the free software movement.

Frankly, I do think proprietary software such as MS Office, PhotoShop, AutoCAD, etc. often offers a better user experience than free and open-source (FOSS) alternatives. I have been willing to bottle my FOSS sympathies and shell out cash for productivity software for a long time for that reason. When the UX is better, that's worth paying for.

Once the vendor starts blocking me from access to my own intellectual property, that's a deal-breaker. First it's a moral outrage. Second, for people who won't factor morals into their business decisions, it's an extreme and unacceptable business risk. Now that we have a word for "ransomware," we can call this subscription model what it is.

I know people will say "Adobe will never kill PhotoShop." Never is very long time. People used to say General Motors would never go bankrupt, or Lotus would never kill Lotus 1-2-3.

No deal. Even if the subscription were "free." I'm looking at you, Google.

That's a pretty accurate description of what the labor market is doing to some people. A filing clerk gets displaced by automation and retrains to a higher-skilled service job, like ... librarian. Then reasonable Web searches come along, and the demand for reference assistance dries up overnight. Just one example of a career res-kill.

Listen to parent. There plenty of applicable laws; it's justice that is in short supply. Remember Aaron Schwarz.

Are passwords that hard to remember?

Once you start requiring them to be 12 characters long, and contain at least one uppercase character, one lowercase character, one numeral, and one Egyptian hieroglyph they are.

By the way, those complexity rules have been officially withdrawn by NIST. In fact, TFA is an instance of the very problem that drove the rule change. Now all we have to do is spend 20 years undoing the damage of the old, stupid, complexity rules.