What has changed that's relevant? The existence of mobile devices? Bah.

Political correctness is new since 2005? Ummm, let me guess, you're under 30, aren't you?

Which was also true before 2005.

Also true before 2005.

I'll stop here, but nothing you mention was any different previously.

This exact same complaint was common before it was shown that Wikipedia is on par with dead tree encyclopedias. What makes it more true now than it was then?

I'll bet your text prompt is displayed on a GUI, nearly all of the time. Mine certainly is.

Does it? I don't think so. The omnibox makes me more productive, not less. The difference is tiny, granted, but it's non-zero.

Of course the company would know the legal limits. They have attorneys.

That they might not care I addressed in the second paragraph.

NSLs can't do that. The law is quite specific about what an NSL can request. Not only can't it demand pro-active measures like backdoors, NSLs can't even demand the content of communications that the recipient already has. NSLs are limited by law to demanding communications metadata only.

Well, I suppose a letter can be issued that demands anything at all, and companies may choose to comply, but they don't legally have to if the letter specifies more than what is allowed by law.

They've applied for and received (been delegated) both.

https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1429

https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1430

Clearly they're important, and will be whether or not people see or use them. To the degree we can build infrastructure that hides the technical details and provides people with more human-friendly interfaces, we've made progress. Of course, the security engineer in me worries about the attack surface provided by these additional layers of abstraction.

A few years from now you'll be glad that you need them rarely. Even with zero-compression, IPv6 addresses are unwieldy for humans.

It will be interesting to see what direction we go.

Why? Why not just type without bothering with the tab and let the machine figure it out? That's my whole point.

Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.

In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.

Damn straight. It's like all these stupid GUI interfaces. I mean, I can see using a graphical interface if you're editing photos or something, but for reading and writing text? It's ridiculous and just makes it so that stupid people can do it without having to understand anything.

It all started with visual text editors, you know? Line editing was good enough, heck, you could argue that it made things too easy, too. What was really good was when we used toggle switches to enter data and read the output from a sequence of lights. If you can't mentally translate binary to ASCII you don't deserve the power of computation.

</sarcasm>

I think this is just a further extension of the location bar vs search bar change.

I remember when I first saw the Chrome omnibox. It offended me. Mildly, but still. I know the difference between a search and a URL, and I am perfectly capable of clicking into the correct bar. Then I actually used the omnibox for a while (because Chrome was so blindingly fast compared to other browsers at the time) and found that when I jumped back to Firefox I got annoyed at the mental effort required to use the split location/search fields, even though it was trivial.

The fact is that low effort is not the same as zero effort. I like the omnibox because I just click and type, no need to spend a millisecond deciding which box I should click into.

I can see what you describe as the next step, so people don't have to bother understanding, or thinking about if they do understand, the difference between "cnn" and "cnn.com". Or I suppose those who type slowly may prefer to omit the last four characters purely for that reason.

But much higher velocity, which can be combined with frequent runs to create high capacity.

That would provide massive throughput, but higher latency.

(I'm a Google employee)

Internal backlash was massive, and as far as I can tell hugely stronger than the fairly mild complaints outside the company. The strength of the internal opposition took me by surprise. I understood that while Google doesn't wish to censor the web it also doesn't wish to be the entity serving up sexual content. That seems like a reasonable position to me. I thought the 30-day notice was a bit short, even though the terms of service only offer 14 days, but other than that it seemed reasonable to me, basically bringing blogger into line with the policies in place for YouTube, etc., for years.

Many of my colleagues, however, vehemently disagreed, calling it censorship, application of one region's values upon the world and generally declaiming it as the beginning of the end for Google as a force for openness and access to information. Many called the decision deeply inconsistent with Google's stated mission, "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The internal memegen system was awash in anti-censorship memes, and one of the memegen team went further and more or less shut the system down in protest, replacing it with a complaint about the blogger shutdown. Eng-misc, a high-volume internal mailing list for random discussions of, well, anything, was overrun with threads complaining about it. The founders got hammered with questions and complaints in the weekly company-wide TGIF meeting (which is actually held on Thursday these days, so more Googlers around the world can see it live).

It's been quite the storm.

As soon as the internal reaction started I expected the reversal, though it went further than I expected. I thought the result would just be more notice, maybe 90 days. But I suppose that's because I thought the basic decision was reasonable, and only the short notice unreasonable. Many others felt differently, obviously.

It's going to be interesting to see if this provokes re-examination of the YouTube and G+ policies. I doubt it, but I was wrong about the nature of the reversal, too.