Google gets to decide what's relevant in the rankings on their site, but not what's relevant for other search engines. If they do a bad job of picking good ranking criteria, it gives other engines an opportunity to provide better service. This is a somewhat coarse mechanism for demanding more relevant criteria, I suppose, but you'd better believe that Google takes it very seriously. They have a lot of other signals that help them decide whether users are well-served by the top-ranked hits, and if something like preferring HTTPS damages that, it'll almost certainly lose.

I'll give you my answers to your questions. These answers are based on little to no real data, mostly just reasoning about how Snowden's flight most likely went down, and a (reasonable, I think) assumption that he's a fairly ordinary guy, not a brilliant and nefarious planner. I also doubt that he extracted much, if any, data prior to his big grab-and-run, because it would have been too risky. So I don't think he had much time to do things between getting the dump and hightailing it.

None. This would have required more planning, and probably more time, than is evident. Any place he might have tried to drop data in the cloud would be too risky because the NSA's tendrils are too widespread. Physical dead drops are more feasible, but they'd have to be in the US, and probably not too far from Snowden's normal stomping grounds. They'd also have to be fairly easy to locate (since he'd have to provide instructions, which he'd have to be able to remember accurately), but also well-hidden enough not to be found accidentally. That's not impossible, but it's harder than it appears, as anyone who's tried to place geocaches knows.

Of course, he could have done something like left the supposed additional, unrevealed data, or the location of the data, with an attorney or other trustworthy person. But again, the NSA has long arms, and has undoubtedly pulled out all the stops to trace his steps before he ran.

Nope, I think taking time to drop data between grabbing the dump, delivering it to the news agencies and running would have been too risky and require too much planning, so I doubt he did it.

Very little that's useful. I doubt it's all that difficult for them to gather information about NSA policies, and the really valuable stuff was all turned over to the Guardian and has been published anyway.

I doubt Snowden knows much about that. He was a SharePoint admin, remember, not an operational guy. The data he collected may contain quite a bit on that, but I strongly suspect he doesn't have that data. I certainly wouldn't have kept it on my when I took off... much safer to deliver it all to a news agency and travel without it.

Nothing, unless the Russians are stupid, which they're not. Nothing that we've learned about the NSA's surveillance methods were at all surprising. The only surprising things were (a) the scope, (b) the fact that they weren't being careful about targeting US citizens and (c) that they were actively working to undermine security systems, in direct violation of one of their two missions. If you had asked the computer security community "Hypothetically, supposing the NSA decided to take the gloves off, ignore the law and ignore their responsibility to ensure the strength of US security technology in both public and private sectors, what would they do?", the answer you'd have gotten would have been a pretty accurate description of what they've been doing. The "what" and "how" are quite obvious.

Oh, and while I'm at it:

I don't think they could use it as leverage to get more information, because I don't think he has any more information. As for influence, well, I suppose, but what would they be influencing him to do? Just giving him a place to live accomplishes a significant goal for them, that of poking the US in the eye. I suppose they could try to convince him to strengthen their PR play, by taking Russian citizenship and denouncing the US, but I don't think they'd get anything out of that. The old USSR would have done that, and been thrilled about it, but the USSR was playing an ideological game, trying to convince the world (and themselves) that communism was superior to capitalism as an economic and social structure. Putin's Russia doesn't have that motive.

I don't know about the accuracy of your SCOTUS result-picking algorithm, but you and mwvdlee have a good algorithm to get modded up on slashdot: Just express deep cynicism about the system. Doesn't have to be true in the slightest.

FWIW, I watch SCOTUS pretty closely, and I'd say their bad decisions are fairly rare. I'm unhappy with the outcome in a larger minority of cases, but it's not very common that upon reading the opinions and dissents that I find myself ultimately in disagreement with their conclusions. And in most cases I think they not only make the right legal call, but the right call for the citizenry (though that isn't, and shouldn't be, their primary focus).

Of course, you and I may well disagree about some of the decisions.

That's a rather bold assertion. Care to support it?

My question was about technical advantages/disadvantages. Since the target audience is people who don't use anything, relative popularity doesn't matter.

Well, after three hours the suit battery is dead.

Hmm. I haven't experienced the issues you describe with Hangouts -- and I use it for hours every day, on many different devices (most of my business meetings are via Hangouts). Not sure if I'm just lucky or what. I guess I do see disconnects, once in a blue moon.

Why is it better than a good Android tablet with Google Hangouts? Serious question, looking for a serious answer. I'm wondering if there really is anything that Apple has done here that's significantly better, or if it's just a question of inertia/bias.

There is no difference between a share with a comment on G+ and a comment on YouTube. They are the same thing. I think there's an argument to be made that shares without any comment are noise on YouTube... of course, I think they're largely noise on G+ as well, so maybe the solution is to find a way to encourage people to write something when sharing.

Further, if you read Google's document they indicate that in the case of data protection removals they inform the webmaster of the URL that has been de-listed, with no information about the details of the request or the requester. This seems like a sensible and serious attempt to balance the right of the webmaster to know that his content is no longer being indexed (for some searches) with the right of privacy of the person requesting removal.

It also seems to be the cause of the hoopla a few weeks back which put Google in the crosshairs of many who claimed the company was trying to sensationalize the removals. Google had removed the link when the searched topic was the name of a commenter on the article (who asked for it to be removed), but not when the searched topic was person the article was about, or other relevant terms. The webmaster saw that the URL had be de-listed for some searches and the paper wrote an article about how the URL had been removed entirely, even though it was obviously in the public interest, asserting that Google was intentionally removing things that weren't justified under the law in order to provoke a backlash against it. The assumption that it had been removed entirely was incorrect, of course, but Google couldn't provide information about the rationale or scope of the removal without violating the privacy of the requester.

I, personally, think the "right to be forgotten" is ridiculous, but it appears to me that Google is trying very hard to comply with it, letter and spirit.

(Disclosure: I'm a Google employee, but I have nothing to do with any of this and know nothing about it beyond what I read in the press. Also, I'm not a company spokesperson of any sort; they pay me to sit at a desk and pound out code.)

+1 Insightful.

Given the German peoples' repeatedly demonstrated ability to be an economic powerhouse even against severe odds, that's a really telling point.

I don't know, I drove through portions of former East Germany not too many years after unification, and from what I saw, it worked *exactly* as well as you'd expect. The difference between west and east was stark and startling. In the west, there were occasional items in need of maintenance and modernization, just as you'll find anywhere, but by and large everything was well-built, well-maintained... and cheerful. The last bit is hard to explain, but it was more than just the use of bright colors on stores and signs, it was just an overall feeling of energy and exuberance. In contrast, nearly everything in the east was poorly-built, in need of maintenance, and drab. The roads were narrow, rough and full of holes. The bridges were rickety-looking and clearly needed maintenance. Many, many of the buildings had sagging rooflines, especially the farmhouses and barns. Much was unpainted, rusting steel, or unpainted, drying and spitting wood and what was painted was clearly painted only to make it last longer because it was all gray and black.

It strikes me that that's *exactly* what I'd expect a culture that habitually pretends to work to fool the planners to produce. No energy, no motivation, no reason to innovate.

From what I understand, it has been a huge burden on western Germany to drag their eastern fellows into the 21st century. The other thing I noticed when driving through east Germany, both that first time and even more a few years later, was that it seemed like they were rebuilding the entire country at once. And I know my west German friends grumbled often about the taxes for reconstruction, though they seemed generally to think that it was a price worth paying.

I prefer to arrive late and leave early to make up for it.

Not "partly as a result". The things you mention are cultural issues, and problems, but not related to electronic enablement of 24x7 work.

I think it's safe to assume that all of the data you put into Google services is fair game. I suspect (but don't know), that Google isn't actually able to make the kind of detailed, nuanced use of the data that is often speculated, but the privacy policy says they collect the data you put into their services, so I'd assume that all of it is collected.