• Google fesses up to it's mistake, Microsoft fights. If it was not for Google owning up to the error, no-one would have known, while Microsoft tried hard to keep quiet comments like "Knife the Baby".
• Google made no financial advantage from this while Microsoft made a whole business by killing competitors using it's monopoly advantage.
• Google did not intend to breach privacy laws, Microsoft knew and were warned on previous occasions that they were to stop the practice.
• It's not really clear that Google really breached the law, the information they collected was in the clear, i.e. if you go yelling you account numbers and passwords from the rooftops and someone with taking a family video records inadvertently, I suggest that it's hard to prove that the cameraman is at fault. Microsoft was found guilty and convicted of its crime.

... just to point out a few, I can go on if you like.

I think it's important to compare like cases if you don't want to be marked a troll.

Real estate agents in Australia are a cowboys compared to the agents I dealt with in the US and yes, I have experience with both.

That's only copyright cases, not patent cases. Patents are free to be read and researched and in fact it is encouraged. That's the basis of patent law, to promote innovation. Copyright on the other hand is for limiting the right to copy and hence extends to the demand to destroy existing copies. The remedy in patents is usually to prevent from using or selling infringing product.

The source code is available on e44.us/1.

You can "log in" with your gmail account so one day you can edit your short links.

Anyhow, it's a simple app for now but if there is interest in a "community" OSS project, we can add cool features like, make personalized forms of the app (urls like e44.us/fred/1) or even your own domain (which you can do now with a Google Apps account), optimize it for mobile phones, validate access to URL's etc etc. If you're interested, let me know.

I don't write template code every day, but that's kind of the point. Templates can eliminate most ugly repetitive code and allow you to model it closer to the abstraction you're most comfortable with.

The project I'm working on at the moment is Java and the generics in Java are so far away from templates and so it limits the usefulness of it dramatically.

Yes, you need to get into templates to understand them, they are a new programming language, not unlike Prolog in some ways.

No real reason except perhaps ease of wiring. (i.e. easier to bend and twist a smaller wire.)

Also colours of wires become interesting. Black wire is usually neutral and the red (in AU, white in the US) is active, green is ground (sometimes bare wire in US).

3 phase is even more interesting... Red, Blue and Yellow are the usual "active" colours in Oz.

You may have been capable of wiring a light fixture but did you know how load affected the temperature of the wire and how to the length of the wire may require different types of wire?

It's not very hard to learn this stuff, however if you use words like "positive" when talking about a mains feed, you give yourself away.

I thought he did. Anyway, these are some thoughts. It handles large numbers of emails much faster than TB. It puts all emails of a thread into one logical thread no matter what folder they're in so you see the whole context every time. It's search is fast. It has a "label" instead of "folder" model for organizing messages. It does not need "installing" ...