I don't understand this mindset.

Sit your average consumer down in a rental car where every single knob, button, and dial on the dashboard audio and environmental controls are completely different, and they will have no trouble taking a moment to work out how to turn on the AC and find something on XM radio. Even the displays in the dashboard are completely non-standard, and it often takes me a minute to work out which dial is the speedometer and which is the gas gauge. No one screams that every company must build their cars with exactly the same user interface. They just expect differences and deal with it.

But place this same consumer in front of a computer where a single icon has changed color and they flip out. They complain that it's too different, that they will never be able to find what they need.

Is this a function of the Microsoft monoculture, or is it based on the level of complexity of the system? Honest question.

I wouldn't be surprised. This article is very old and exists all over the internet.

I have no idea where it originated, but I would love to find out.

We tried saying that to the internet service providers, too, and they responded by throttling bittorrent and changing their contracts.

It has been done. There is a search bar right there next to the address bar in all modern browsers.

Search engines are the next layer of routing protocol. They are so high level that the hierarchy system seems quaint (web directories are *so* 1996), and has been replaced instead with a sophisticated popularity/usefulness algorithm, navigated by semantic expressions, not addresses. This is the evolution of the internet toward (dare I say) the cloud, where entry and exit locations are meaningless, and everything is interconnected not just by links but by semantic similarity. Two pages may be "next to" each other in Google's rankings, even though the servers are in Shanghai and Sheboygan.

The early internet used (and still does, to a certain extent) a "location" metaphor for finding information, based on the idea that the information was on a server that physically existed in space, and we think of domain names and IP addresses as places. But as the internet grows more interconnected with things like aggregators, with more high-level routing protocols like search engines tossed on top, the "where" of information starts to matter less and less, and the location metaphor breaks down. People trying to grasp these decidedly unintuitive concepts make up buzzwords like "cloud" and "virtual" and "mesh" to try and make sense of an information system that is several orders of magnitude removed from our evolutionary experience, as navigation on the internet moves from a physical location metaphor to a semantic navigation system.

Given the topic of this article, your sig just got rather scary.

I am actually disappointed that Google settled at all. I was hoping this issue would end up going to trial, where we could have had a frank examination of the absurd copyright system. If the purpose of copyright is to provide incentive to creators, than orphaned works should logically fall into the public domain, since their creators no longer need incentive from them. This is actually no different than the property model we use for copyright: abandoned property (such as a shipwreck) no longer has ownership and can usually be claimed by someone else.

But instead, Google opted to settle. This was the smart business move, since they can now move forward with their database, and it may yet prove valuable as a public perception precedent, but it did nothing to solve the underlying problem of unfair copyright enforcement.

The people complaining are the university libraries, who previously had the monopoly on this material. These books will not only be available in Google's database, they will also be available in dead tree format at your friendly neighborhood library.

Google is not creating a monopoly, they're breaking one up.

That may be true, but the hope is that this settlement can be pointed to in future cases, streamlining the process of getting a license. A new company XYZ, Inc. can negotiate a license from the publishers more easily by pointing to Google's license as a template, allowing XYZ, Inc. to go scan orphaned works. Or university libraries, who have paper copies of the books in question, can more easily negotiate licenses to scan them and make them available on the university website.

Google is big enough, with enough muscle, that they can push the legal system in this country pretty hard. Considering where they stand on copyright and making information available to the unwashed masses, I would say only good can come out of their efforts in the long run.

While I am typically a CLI mplayer guy (even if opening a movie from a graphical file manager to fullscreen), I have to say that SMPlayer is a fantastic front end GUI. I recommend SMPlayer to even my most clueless Windows user friends.

You're not "surrendering your data" any more than you would be if you hired Acme Outside Contractors, Inc. to run your infrastructure.

Businesses using GMail would actually be using Google Apps, which operates contractually the same as any other IT contractor, with all the legal requirements for non-disclosure that entails and an enterprise-level SLA.

This is not a free service, because of the aforementioned legal/SLA requirements. But it is certainly cheaper than running your own Exchange server and gives your employees more features and better usability than Outlook. If your only reason for opposing it is some vague aversion to storing your data on iron you don't own, then you need to come join the rest of us in the 21st Century, where outsourcing, contracting, and offsite storage are the norm and contractual requirements for proprietary data storage are built into every vendor agreement. Google Apps is no different in this respect; it's just another contracted vendor, albeit a vendor with kick-ass software and 3 nines uptime.

Does it count as an April Fools' story if it's just reporting on someone else's April Fools' joke?

The philosophical question of the day...

Yeah, but the flood theory does.

*rimshot*

The computer you're typing on, the principles behind the electricity and the circuit boards and the plastics and the manufacturing... are all products of the scientific method. Every single human advance that allows you to spend your days doing something other than sitting in the jungle naked waiting to be eaten by a big cat are the result of the scientific method.

The scientific method produces theories that make correct predictions about the world around us. Theology does not. Simplistic philosophical talking points like "Truth" have nothing to do with it, and maintaining that robust scientific theories that make such correct predictions are just "opinions" is hand-waving at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

The fact that you and I are even able to converse about this subject over an electronic network is a direct result of the discoveries of science. Theology may give emotional comfort, but it is not, and never will be, in the same realm as science. Don't drag rational thinking people into the navel-gazing fairly tale world of theology.

Yes, my mistake, it was the Babylonians/Sumerians.

The meter has been based on many things, each as arbitrary as the last, including the circumference of the Earth, the length of a pendulum with a 1 second period, two different prototype bars (one of brass, one of platinum), the wavelength of a krypton-86 atomic emission, and the speed of light in a vacuum.

And yes, Anders Celsius created a reversed scale which was promptly set straight upon his death. The term "centegrade," although used interchangeably by some people with Celsius, is considered obsolete by the Bureau of International Standards. The correct term is "degree Celsius," and has been since 1948.

None of this changes how arbitrary all of these measurement units are, making a holy war about whether Imperial or Metric measurements are better all the more wearying.

Cow tipping just got a whole lot more interesting.