Try Modern Warfare 2's airport massacre scene and the controversy that erupted in the US / UK after.

All I can see from the article and comments is that as no standard exists for this type of interaction (the whole labels instead of folders thing) google chose to implement it their own way.

From the article the actual mail standards IMAP or "(shudder POP)", shouldn't be used as "you get a severely compromised experience". Instead google should reverse it's decision to drop active directory support for free users. This seems to be mainly driven by the fact that the mail standards can't handle your contacts or calendars and that they are not "instant" (saw something about PUSH notifications from the server that you got new mail), only folks I know that "need" to get e-mails that fast are businesses (if my family needs my attention that fast I get a call not an e-mail).

This also gets to the paid vs free users, author writes "Google had licensed EAS in 2009 because its enterprise customers demanded it." followed by "Outlook on Windows and on the Mac still has to connect to Gmail via IMAP, and there's no way (short of buying a third-party add-on or paying $50 a year for a Google Apps for Business account) to get all of your Gmail/Google Apps data into Outlook.". Maybe I'm overlooking something but this seems like simple business sense to me, why pay another company to cover your entire user base for a feature that a particular segment of your user base wants? If recieving your e-mail 5 minutes later will cost you that much then spending less than $5 a month sounds like a cheap sacrifice.

I don't particularly care for the current state of affairs, but I find it hard to blame google in this case. They should have gotten their modifications to IMAP standardized, Am I going to hold that against them? Not really, a standard takes allot of time to get finalized and at the end of the day they are a business that needs to keep running in the mean time. Also I find it odd that one one hand the author is bashing google about open standards yet pushing active directory's sync. I'll end with this question, instead of creating active directory sync why didn't microsoft extend IMAP and build a better standard that we could all use?

Given that we are talking about charging ports I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you also think standard electrical plugs should also have been left to the market and are consumer-unfriendly?

You've never been in a plane with kids I'm guessing...

Let one of them get bored / cranky and its like a nuclear reaction...

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I'm not following this argument, what difference does it make who helped invalidate the patent?

Now your competition knows what you are doing (whether they helped invalidate the patent or not) and especially if the patent is denied they can move to mess with your market by releasing a competing product:
- The patent application will show them how your proposed device works
- The fact that it was denied means you can't sue them for copying.

I think the market of Chinese knock offs showed how effective this tactic is, quality won't have to be sacrificed for a lower price than you on the basis of you have R&D costs to re-coup, they don't.

The end result I can see is companies will only file when they are quite certain that the patent will be issued, which should put an end to the "shotgun" approach we see now.

This is still a very important first step, at the very least if we can reduce the number of new patents at some point the old patents will expire (or be invalidated) and the pools will dry up.

First step of getting yourself out of a hole, stop digging.

Would it really matter if they hid the patent-invalidation activity behind shell companies?

If the end result is a patent that shoundn't be issued ending up not being issued do we really care if its some shell company or the parent?

Businesses will just become batter at tearing down the layers of shell companies to determine who the parent is, assuming they are remotely interested in that information.

Indeed, even if the hard drive contains state secrets could they just keep the hard drive but give you everything else? The donor can decide if to destroy or how they want the data erased (hopefully they can be convinced to just scrub it a whole lot and then give it to you anyway).

Much less wastage that way, eBay has 80GB velociraptors going for $20-30 bucks (yes I know this is overkill), will increase the price of your $50 PC to $80 but I think that's still reasonable.

As a side note to all of this, wouldn't / shouldn't such data be held on a central server and not on the local hard drives of the various office users? I would completely understand treating the server's hard drives differently (at least there should be far fewer of them), but I'm sure the normal user's hard drive isn't protected by raid or something similar (next power fluctuation = bye bye secret documents).

Then can the browser vendors at least look at the fucked up work arounds they had to do to get jquery to even work and fix them?

That way the implementations are at least somewhat consistent? Things are much better than they once were but it still sucks.

My view on the matter is anyone who is criticizing Jquery / Dojo / and is suggesting vanilla javascript is completely ignoring the fact that the reason allot of these frameworks exists is the base implementations are horribly, horribly broken and the effects of a piece of javascript can be inconsistent even within the same browser.

HTML & CSS suffer from the same problem though thankfully to a lesser degree.

Compiled library vs interpreted library, not really a fair comparison.

Look at the glibc source and it will probably be a bit smaller than that 1.3MB.

Here's a question I would put to you why I would still think electric may make sense outside of France & Sweden.

If I have a gallon of gasoline will I get more energy in the end (include the losses associated with transmission of the electricity) by giving it to a power station or by putting it in someone's car?

I'd hazard a guess the efficiencies gained just by running consistently would be quite large, some existing data on this point would be to compare highway mpg vs the city mpg of a car. The benefits of running at large scales should increase this difference even more. Also my meager understanding is that by law the power station will produce much less emissions per gallon than any car (way the fuel is burnt, much more filtering to remove particles from the output before being released into the air, etc).

I agree with your point that today having everyone move to electric may not make economic sense I guess we are all waiting for that time when it does.

I'm assuming you mean HAS been the drug of choice.

Theres my daily dose of laughter and loss of faith in humanity,

One of my suggestions was "attorneys are doctors"!

The funny one was "attorneys aren't us" (a play on alcho annonomous)

Coming to a train station near you.