They are certainly hacking the law. It would be way more expensive to set up their business there, than to do so somewhere on land. Why else would they do it if they weren't exploiting a loophole in the law.

I'm not saying bad nor good, just saying that the sole reason for doing what they are doing is because our immigration laws were designed with the assumption that those outside of the US borders do not have particularly easy access to our major places of business.

I agree that they are like AOL, but don't agree that social networking will "die down" anymore than "getting online" would ever die down.

Facebook will eventually be replaced (or be made relatively irrelevant) by an open solution that works better and fosters innovation, just as the web as we know it made AOL's proprietary environment irrelevant.

...if you are allowed to have complex raw materials.

Fire self replicates. Fallen-down dominoes self-replicate. The line between "chain reaction" and "self replication" is very blurry.

Because it actually does it?

(and its a reasonable guess that it works as advertised, because Apple has a pretty good track record of waiting until the time is right, and releasing something that is not half-baked)

Well some office environments have a lot of people talking on phones, I don't see why this is so much worse, especially if it works well enough that people don't have to over-enunciate and constantly correct it.

So there are environments where it isn't appropriate to use, just as there are environments where its not appropriate to talk on a phone, use a smartphone, etc. So?

Yeah well they are google, I think they can put someone on that task.

The whole point is to make it appropriate for complex apps.

And you really think google would make it so you have to tweak it for IE?

Well Dart is coming out in a couple days.

Although I'm not sold on the "use the best language for the job" mentality, I have better things to do than learn new languages and port my code from one to another. I see no reason why a single language can't do everything from user scripts to systems development, while maintaining elegance and expressiveness. Not saying that language has been invented yet (or will be any time soon), but still.

I mean, rat's are cheap. If its brain functions are going bad, get a new rat. This is what is wrong with science, they have no clue as to real world problems.

Geez.

And, of course, MS and Apple won't adopt it--making it real useful, just as long as all your visitors happen to be using Chrome or some future version of Firefox.

So make it compile to Javascript for browsers that don't support it natively.

Personally I think it would be pretty sweet if Google made V8 support Coffescript natively, both in Chrome and Node.js. But if they were also to build in some of what they've got with Closure, they've got something.

...they should open source it and let another organization do something with it. Mozilla would be a prime candidate, since that's basically what they did with the remains of netscape.

WebOS has a lot going for it, in the sense that its main API is based on Javascript/Html5, which lends itself well to being opened up. Android may be open source, but building it on java resulted in it being less than open.

Well they can always do the same thing by creating pages that do such things. Link to a bunch of tech sites, then put a link to the dating site.

Google is very good at detecting this sort of insincere promotion, and compensating for it. That's probably the the hardest problem, and the one most core to its business, that Google addresses. For someone to actually game the system, they end up having to work pretty hard to make good content and appear sincere, and in the end, they might actually be making a more positive than negative impact.

I see no reason why Google can't apply the same expertise they apply to links on pages, to +1's. The nice thing is that they end up with so much more data, that it becomes even harder to game it because each individual has such a tiny influence.

I mean, what's at the outer edge? A wall?

No, despite Poundstone's conclusions, range voting is terrible. A smart (i.e. strategic) voter in a range system would simply vote 0 or 100 for every candidate (giving 100 to all candidates that they prefer to the one they feel is most likely to win, zero to the others). But then all those good people trying to vote "honestly" would have less influence.

Approval is a very good system, as it doesn't really offer an choice between honesty and strategy. You vote strategically by default.

(although Condorcet systems such as Schulze are better, because you don't even have to think about how others are likely to vote, except in extremely contrived cases)

Maybe initially, but over time a system like this would erode the two party system. There is little reason for two parties if you don't have the vote splitting effect that we have in our current system. Their power would go away since centrist candidates would have the advantage in a system with approval voting.