Also, while small towns are subject to hearsay just like any other social group, if someone's reputation is unjustly being damaged they will have a much greater chance to set the record straight, or at least make clear that they dispute an allegation involving them so everyone knows there are at least two sides to the story.

On the Internet, it doesn't work the same way. I made this argument here once before. In a nutshell, the fredom of speech argument might cover putting something on a web site and linking to it from popular sources, but it doesn't guarantee to put it in context. It also doesn't guarantee that if a negative piece of information is later updated to reflect changing circumstances then everyone who saw the original negative comments will also see and understand with equal weight the subsequent changes.

These imbalances are fundamentally unfair to the victim, and this principle has been recognised by professionals for a long time. Courts famously seek "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". In journalism, a basic principle is that if you're writing a piece criticising someone you also give them a right to reply, including actively inviting them to comment. But in the mob rule world of the Internet, no such professional ethics necessarily apply, and that is why it may be necessary to adopt new strategies so that technologies such as search engines can be stopped from (deliberately, maliciously, innocently, accidentally or otherwise) amplifying any damage.

Actually, that's exactly the way life works, right up until some multi-billion-dollar megacorp decides to step in with technology that never forgets and that makes information (potentially including partial, inaccurate or misleading information) available more easily and to a much wider audience than would otherwise be the case.

<kneejerk>Sure it will, right up until the police turn up at Google's European workplaces and start arresting their corporate officers for contempt of court.</kneejerk>

That possibility may or may not be hyperbole, of course.

However, one certainty is that US corporations are playing with fire if they attempt to circumvent the spirit of European court rulings based on technicalities. I do wonder whether, sooner or later, some European judge is going to make an example of someone, even if it's not in this particular case. And in practice there may be little that person can do to defend themselves if a judge does decide to throw them in jail for a few days for contempt just to make their point abundantly clear.

Also, given the US government's much-discussed powers to compel organisations to do things and keep quiet about it, clearly these organisations are aware of the possibility. And given that the entire point of the original court ruling in this case was the remove what the court considered inappropriate attention, it's not as if any search engine is going to get much sympathy claiming they didn't understand what they were being told to do or why.

This is one of those problems a free market can solve. It might lead to better games, if some games do well at higher prices while others have to lower theirs.

Many pundits have written that. It's been a subject of intense debate in military circles, and you can read some of the debate in publications like Parameters, the U.S. Army War College journal. Worth remembering, though, is that insurgency is an early phase of a conflict. If the insurgency succeeds, the conflict becomes territorial and more conventional. That happened in Vietnam (the final offensive against South Vietnam involved hundreds of tanks), and it's happening now as ISIL moves from an insurgency to a nation-state. Ukraine is more of a proxy war, but it's about territory. Remember that Russia has already taken over Crimea.

Most of the potential wars in East Asia are straight nation-state conflicts. Taiwan/China, N.Korea/S.Korea, and China/Japan have no insurgent components.

Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold Election Systems, was a top fund-raiser for George Bush in 2004. He wrote in a fund-raising memo that "he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." He did.

Perhaps, but any such exploration and the resulting tools have to beat the baseline of a decent text editor, a decent version control system, a decent scripting language, and starting to write code within a minute of deciding the project is ready to begin.

For a long-running project with many developers and other contributors performing repetitive or error-prone tasks, maybe it will be worth investigating, selecting and adopting some external tools to automate some of that work, at some stage in the project when you know where the pain points are. But if your development team aren't newbies, they will be perfectly capable of building their code manually at first, they will surely already know their universal Big Three tools very well, and importantly, they will just code up any basic automation on the fly as the project grows and the needs become apparent.

IME, that turns out to be a surprisingly tough standard to beat. I've seen many, many projects get bogged down in their own infrastructure because they felt they should use some type of tool and forced themselves to do it, not because they necessarily needed that tool or found it useful in practice. Of course good tools can be useful, and of course sometimes it is better to bring in help from outside the project rather than being too NIH about everything, but it's important to stay focussed on the goal and not to forget that tools are only means to an end.

Visual Studio/Xcode casts Summon Spirits.
Spirit appears.
Spirit appears.
Spirit appears.
Spirit attacks Real Programmers.
Real Programmers attempt to save against arrogance... and fail.
Real Programmers have been frozen in time.

Amusingly, we now know, from USSR files revealed in the 1990s, that there were a lot of communist sympathizers in the State Department passing info to the USSR. KGB Moscow Central found them useless. They wanted spies in the military and in the military contractors doing advanced R&D on aircraft, missiles, electronics, and nuclear weapons. What the State Department was doing mostly wasn't secret and wasn't militarily important.

That's correct. The whole "anti-war movement" was about not getting drafted. It was driven by self-interest.

one might ask the same question of companies that sell industrial mining equipment.

I think it's important to remember that the court ruling that started all this did not say that anyone should be able to require information to be removed just because they didn't like it. The outcome relates to information that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive". Also, it was explicitly stated that such determinations would need to be made on a case-by-case basis, balancing the individual's private life against the public interest.

In other words, what the ruling actually said, as distinct from the hype around it in the media or the frequent misrepresentations in on-line debates since then, isn't a million miles from the kinds of issues you raised there.

Interesting observation about the other phone. I wasn't aware that anyone else had actually made it fully to market prior to Apple on that score.

As for the iOS vs. Android situation, I'm not sure we disagree as much as you suggest, but I do think perhaps we are talking slightly at cross-purposes. For example, I agree with just about everything you said about which apps are and aren't successful on the iOS platform today. As I think I mentioned right back in my first post to this thread, I don't see the wildly successful iOS app developers leaving the platform any time soon. However, I suspect those represent only a very small minority of the overall iOS developer population.

My point there is that simply in terms of the popularity of the platform -- hardware sales, in short -- Apple seems to be losing momentum, while Android devices are gaining market share. I'm not necessarily suggesting that this will result in native Android apps becoming a better market for developers. I don't think I've suggested anything at all like that anywhere in this discussion, and if I did appear to imply that then it was entirely accidental. I'm just suggesting that those iOS developers who haven't either hit the big time in the initial gold rush or carved out a niche where they can stand out and charge sensible money seem to be starting to give up and look elsewhere, wherever that might be.

Personally, I do have my (and my businesses') bet firmly on web apps being the way forward for a lot of general informational/basic interactive apps for the near future. These work portably across all the main mobile devices and of course desktops as well, they have no lock-in or tax, and most importantly, they don't come with the preconception that something good that cost a small fortune to develop should still be sold for peanuts, which means you can viably invest enough time and money to offer something well polished and comprehensive/innovative/otherwise interesting. We could have built similar things as native apps on each mobile platform, but we saw little if any advantage to doing so.

The fact that Google seem to be betting the same way, and applying their considerable resources to further that end, and slowly capturing market share from Apple (whether as a consequence or coincidentally for other reasons doesn't really matter) just makes the prospect of developing such projects as iOS apps that much less appealing in the long run.

As a final point, while there certainly are premium apps out there, typical B2C apps on the App Store are not among them. Sure, prices might be up from 5 cents to 6 cents this year, but based on the stats that have been floating around in various on-line discussions this week, it appears that I already pull in more revenue per month from a side project web app that isn't complete yet and has had almost no advertising than the average (mean) app on the App Store. We appear to have reached the point where anyone who doesn't win big fairly quickly can't actually sustain a viable business writing iOS apps, and any way you look at it, that surely can't be promising for the future of the platform.

And meanwhile, as you worry about a hypothetical threat from your government, real people with real lives are really having them destroyed by people who put themselves above the law through the mechanism of anonymity. The big bullies are a concern, but so are the small ones, and it's far from clear which is overall the more dangerous threat to quality of life in the western world today.

I'm happy for you that you're comfortable with a black and white view where there are absolute rights that are the only important things and where any unintended harmful side effects can be explained away somehow, but in my world there are shades of grey and no such easy resolutions to these issues.