The threshold doesn't have to be high though -- it only has to be higher than the opportunity cost for spamming. Once you hit that point, going further does little or nothing to help your cause but can negatively impact additional legitimate edge cases.

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for Steam to add an "or registers a code from a boxed game" alternate qualification if this became a huge problem. Of course that would depend on boxed game codes not being terribly easy to forge, but I'm assuming that's the case anyway for pure business reasons.

There's a bit of a practicality issue there. Static pages are very well defined in terms of how they're requested and shown.

Dynamic pages are all over the map. There's a handful of popular frameworks, a larger handful of less popular frameworks, and a huge number of roll-your-own solutions. I mean sure to some degree there should be enough commonalities to make a best effort attempt but its never going to be perfect and frankly, Google's more important to your site than your site is to Google so its not surprising that the onus is on you to make your site work with Google rather than the other way around.

Ugh. Yes this so much!

Also those "answer" sites that are all just word-for-word carbon copies of each other. Even if there's useful answers on the page, we only need one copy of each answer set.

I have no idea how Google could manage that (more from a legal perspective than a technical one) but its certainly freaking annoying from a user's perspective.

Wow. That was a terrible article. Their example is searching for a person's name and then claiming the results didn't give them the information they wanted.

Except they don't tell you what they were wanting! They mention songs, stories, history.. well you could add those terms if that's what you're looking for and get results that are a lot more specific to what you want.

Bringing up the Wikipedia page is probably the _best_ possible option given how vague the query is. Sure the first 3 lines that get turned into the blurb may or may not say anything useful, but everyone knows what Wikipedia is and how it works. If you're just looking for random information about a topic, that's a great place to go as it will have at least a little bit of all of those categories mentioned above and you can go redo your search with more specific terms once you've decided what you're interested in.

And OK sure you can pull up countless examples of when somebody somewhere made a troll edit to the Wikipedia page.. but what on earth makes the author think that the (usually completely unreviewed and uncurated) articles from "way way down the list" will more accurate in any sense?

Same with the news stories. How is Google supposed to know if you're interested in the most recent news or the most controversial news over time?

If you don't even know what you're looking for, how the hell do you expect Google (or any other search engine) to know? A "story" is fine, but if all I'm looking for are concert dates, I just want a damned list of dates and cities I don't want a whole bloody "story," whatever that even means given the lack of context.

Wikipedia has a few million pages, all within their domain and (ultimately) under their control, the majority of which have minor or no controversy involved.

Google has many billions of pages that they have no control over at all, almost all of which are controversial (even if the controversy is "I want to be above my competitor in the results.) Human auditing would be immensely impractical, and crowd-sourced human auditing would be even worse due to the fact that the people most invested in breaking the system are generally the ones who can afford to put the most time/money towards doing so.

So they're relegated to using automated systems. And honestly, Google in particular has been really good at coming up with algorithms to beat overly aggressive SEO. Sure they sometimes fall behind a bit (its an ongoing battle after all,) but overall not bad.

Google's primary failures in the past few years have been their not-nearly-as-accurate attempts to outsmart their users' search terms. "Having" "to" "double" "quote" "every" "word" and still seeing your top result with a "Missing terms:" disclaimer is immensely frustrating.

The trouble is, it does affect searching. When it works its helpful (but not required.) When it doesn't work its horribly frustrating.

To take your example, what if a popular singer releases a song called "What's your phone #?" Suddenly Google is "helpfully" readjusting your "Where is my phone" query and you end up the top 14 pages of results being about a song you're not interested in. Similarly, if a movie is released with a main character named "Euraud."

Now, if you're lucky, the search engine will provide useful ways to tell it to stop trying to outsmart you, and the onus is now on you to figure out all of the necessary hoops and jump through them in order to get a simple search to just bloody work.

And if they don't even provide hoops (or the hoops get too overridden by advertisers and SEO?) Now you're stuck trying to manually search through dozens or hundreds of irrelevant results and just hoping that the information you're actually looking for is obvious from the first 3 lines of blurb.

Sandboxing solves pretty much all other problems. Sure there are situations where a sandbox isn't a practical solution, but again that's not really limited to being Turing-complete. Any language that allows a client to modify data risks the ability to modify it in unfortunate ways.

Certainly more complex languages will have more possible avenues of attack but they also provide more (legitimate) capabilities and sometimes the benefits outweigh the risks, especially in these days where patching a previously-unknown risk can be done relatively easily via internet distribution once it becomes known.

When did I say it was? I said the government should be preventing them from harming TinyIndieSite.com, with the additional (ok somewhat implied) restriction of unfairly.

When did I say it did? I was talking about cell phones (or cable packages or other mono/duo/small ogliopolies.) T-Mobile takes Pandora. Verizon takes Spotify. Make your other matchups as you will. Where does TinyIndieSite.com fit in now? They don't have the clout to take on Pandora or Spotify..

If they were able to charge $1/mo for their small selection they might be able to get some business against an $8 or $10/mo Pandora (I don't know what the real prices are, adjust as necessary) but they sure as hell can't compete with a $0/mo Pandora. And Pandora's getting front page advertising as part of their deal to boot.

Can and should. The only reason they don't (or that it isn't big news if they are) is because Netflix is already the market leader by a large margin and don't have to worry about being shut out by the exclusionary practices of third parties.

In fact up here in Canada, Netflix is currently one of the biggest proponents of fair laws in the media industry at the moment. Because while they've certainly have huge public support (and income from us all,) they're still not the incumbents and situations like Bell preferentially streaming their own services is a huge detriment to Netflix. I fully trust that should Netflix achieve a large enough status that they'll switch to being apathetic (or even outright malicious -- corporations can never be fully trusted) but for the moment their underdog legal position combined with an assuredly not-underdog bank account has put them in a position to make some positive changes in our media system (or at least help prevent negative changes.)

if (took too long) { throw TookTooLongException(); }

Problem solved. Undecidability is only an issue when "running forever" is actually possible.

Defining what "too long" is may be difficult in some scenarios to be sure, but when you're dealing with something like a game that inherently requires responsiveness, "too long" can be defined fairly strictly without too much negative impact -- anything (even completely legitimate) routines that take more than a few fractions of a second per game loop is going to "break" the game.

Things like SQL are another story. A query that takes an hour to run may well be legitimate in certain large-data scenarios. You could have a configurable max query duration I suppose but there's certainly no globally valid duration. But of course you really shouldn't be giving unrestricted query access to untrusted clients in the first place (which is any client you don't have 100% control over!)

Also, being Turning-complete is sufficient but not necessary to have this problem -- any language that provides an unrestricted looping mechanism can loop forever even if it doesn't have all of the other necessary features to be Turing-complete (in particular, to be truly Turing-complete an unlimited tape aka storage capacity is required.)

Which is among the many reasons I refuse to use Apple products, but there's still a distinction between the levels of "Safari doesn't support it" vs "You must use Safari in some manner."

Of course if its "Safari doesn't support it specifically because we want to block sites that use it" then you're getting into the territory of mixing the two issues. But as long as Safari's lack of support is simply due to lack of time/money/motivation, you can't really associate maliciousness with that particular aspect of it.

That's pretty much the catch right there. Spotify in particular is probably big enough to perhaps do something, but what about TinyIndieSite.com? On top of not being well known in the first place, they're also competing against a subsidized service.

And given how tied these services are to the phones they run on, not to mention the contracts that you usually have to enter in order to obtain the phone in the first place, means that you can't easily just "go to another company."

The only reason this isn't immediately obvious as an anti-trust issue is because they're two separate companies rather than two branches of the same company. Would your opinion change if Pandora was owned by T-Mobile? Why? Does it make any difference to you or the market in general whether the subsidy payments fall under internal or external expenditures?

As I mentioned, its a hard one to justify stopping because it seems on the surface to be a good deal.. but if you try to look at it in the context of long-term effects on a market, the outlook gets quite a bit dimmer.

Says who? We may not have all of the knowledge necessary to do it (and perhaps we never will.. biology is hard!) but I'm pretty sure there's somewhere around zero evidence that its fundamentally impossible.

Bell up here in Canada just got slapped by the government for doing something similar.

Its definitely hard to toe the "stop giving things away for free" line, but business models like that are absolutely horrible for any vague semblance of a free market. If Pandora is effectively subsidized and thus essentially free to the end user, while Spotify is going to cost $20/gb or whatever the stupidly high rate is these days, guess which company isn't going to be able to compete for long?

Any government in the world that even pretends to care about free markets should be stamping out this "some services are free but others aren't" model as fast as they can.

In Bell's case they were giving away their own service. I'm not sure if they would have been slapped had they chosen to give away a third party service like Pandora, so even that recent ruling up here in Canada may not mean a whole lot in the larger picture unfortunately..

This conclusion is wrong. Poorer people tend to be far more likely to be suckered into scams, whether its due to general wealth mismanagement, poor education or what have you.

Its true that they won't likely be seeing ads for BMWs and Rolexes, but there will be no end of mortgage scams, pyramid schemes and similar cons that tend to preferentially target people who don't really understand how horribly low "get rich quick" (or even "get out of debt quick") scores on the probability meter.