It remains the case that either my original statement is true, meaning a counter-example for the reliability of fact-based ranking has been identified, or my original statement is false, in which case the statement itself becomes a counter-example because it is widely repeated but incorrect.

Of course we have. The response was deliberately paradoxical. Think about it.

Erm... It was intended to be ironic. Well, paradoxical, technically. Compare my final sentence

with the classic "This statement is false".

If my statement were true, it would illustrate a problem with Google's proposal.

But as my statement is false, it is itself a demonstration of the problem, because it perpetuates a myth sufficiently popular that it even has its own Wikipedia page. I was a little surprised that I couldn't also find it on Snopes.

Anyway, it's disappointing that no-one seems to have noticed that. Were none of you even a little suspicious about a post that in one paragraph said "Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct" and then repeated one of the most popular myths there is? Really?

Ah, yes, an excellent follow-up, presented with great subtlety: any writing that makes its point through hyperbole, analogy, figurative imagery, or indeed any other style that isn't literally, objectively, factually, 100% correct could also suffer. Well played, fellow Slashdotter.

"Fact optimization" is already behind more than one multi-billion dollar industry: advertising, political lobbying...

And this is why I fear this initiative, no matter how well intentioned, is doomed to failure. Just because something gets repeated a lot, that doesn't make it factually correct. Moreover, censoring dissenting opinions is a terrible reaction to active manipulation and even to old-fashioned gossip, because it removes the best mechanism for correcting the groupthink and promoting more informed debate, which is introducing alternative ideas from someone who knows better or simply has a different (but still reasonable) point of view.

Remember, not so long ago, the almost-universal opinion would have been that the world was flat.

It had better hope so, because giving entire TLDs to specific big companies could easily be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of the rest of the world accepting US-led administration of the general Internet. There's plenty of scepticism already, but organisations like ICANN are tolerated because frankly no-one has much of a better idea or wants to take on the responsibility. However, it is not difficult to think of a better idea than letting big businesses rewrite the established rules in arguably the most important address space in the world today for their own benefit.

Domain squatting is over. I, for one, welcome our new entire TLD squatting overlords. </sarcasm>

Religions served to concentrate wealth, historically. Furthermore, several of them offered strong reasons to tend the sick, investigate the natural world, and so forth -- probably more so than a typical local lord would have.

Religions also served to unite farflung lands. A researcher in Isfahan could correspond with one in Marrakech. A monk studying flowers in Edinburgh could share his findings with a nun in Osel. Without religions, you need another set of well-funded institutions with a tradition of correspondence and interaction to provide the same benefits. Today we have universities and research organizations like Oxford and Brookhaven National Labs. The concept of a university grew out of the Muslim monastic tradition, though, starting with the University of al-Qarawiyyin, founded in the 800s.

Of course, you can still get the same benefits without religions. But we have no reason to think we'd be even this advanced without the monastic traditions of Islam and Christianity.

I tend to agree about the icons, but I do think flat design is particularly bad in this respect. By its nature, it removes tools that could otherwise be used for distinguishing different types of content, establishing hierarchy, and directing the user to important details.

The Microsoft style of flat as seen here isn't as bad as the more extreme "monochrome line art" version that is plaguing web sites at the moment. Even so, all those subtle lighting-based effects we used to see, and even the not-so-subtle styling of say Apple's older metallic or aqua looks, could serve practical purposes as well as creating a signature style for a platform.

The thing that really hit me about the screenshot was how crowded it looks. The example is presenting information with a clear underlying structure (a file system) and a small number of actions I can take, and probably half the area of that window is empty space. And yet, my immediate reaction is that there's no clear structure to tell me where to look, and the design desperately needs more visual hierarchy and better use of whitespace.

Of course, this is a recurring problem with the current trend for flat designs, bright colour schemes with limited contrast, and very rectilinear graphics and layout. It's still disappointing that Microsoft seems to be chasing Apple and Google down that blind alley, though, instead of coming up with something more interesting, distinctive, and most importantly, usable.

Here in the UK, our journalism professional doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in its ability to police itself. As you may be aware, we just had a long and very public judge-led enquiry into press behaviour, including some of the outright criminal actions that some parts of the media engaged in to get their stories. At least one newspaper collapsed as a result, and several industry heavyweights are doing jail time. So I'm not sure appealing to journalistic ethics over the law of the land is any better as a strategy for promoting the responsible use of protected speech.

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that if you are actively claiming a certain level of protected qualification, you should actually have it.

This is quite orthogonal to the issue of anonymity, which IMHO is a much harder one simply because someone who can't be identified is self-evidently immune from prosecution but as you rightly point out anonymity has also been a positive influence on many of the most significant breakthroughs in recent history. There are clearly both genuine pros and genuine cons to anonymous speech.

It's true that if we allow anonymity then someone could claim false qualifications even if doing so is illegal. However, I think we are slowly learning as a society not to trust everything we read on the Internet when we don't know the source, and this somewhat mitigates the damage.

Here are a few places where a degree of censorship might be morally justifiable -- not saying it necessarily is, but there's enough of an argument for reasonable debate:

Protection of individual privacy

Innocent until proven guilty

Operational details of genuine military/security activities

Advertising aimed at minors or other vulnerable people

Advertising prescription-only medication to non-prescribers

Political advertising by artificial legal entities (businesses etc.)

As a matter of law, various first world jurisdictions do in fact take different positions on some of these issues today.

Once again, I don't think anyone here is disputing that censorship is fundamentally a nasty and potentially very damaging idea. I think the rational debate is about whether things like spreading misinformation, infringing privacy, and taking advantage of the vulnerable are worse.

That seems a reasonable principle, which is probably in the interests of justice. But how is it not a restriction on free speech? Is this not just another form of censorship? I haven't brought this situation up myself, but if I'd been pushed for more examples of free speech vs. privacy issues and why I believe privacy should be given more weight in our modern, highly connected world, this would have been one of the first examples I would have given.

Are we back to on-line discussions again now? If so, then I haven't proposed any general limitation on who may comment, only that when doing so people shouldn't be able to claim protected qualification or authority that they do not legitimately possess.

To me, that is still a restriction on absolute freedom of speech, but a justifiable one. I see no general need to protect malicious liars from the harmful consequences of their actions under colour of defending free speech. Others here seem to feel this isn't a freedom of speech issue but more a matter of fraud, which to me just seems like quibbling over semantics, but maybe their views and mine aren't so different after all and we just frame the argument in slightly different ways. Perhaps protecting speech yet punishing its consequences is a particularly US way of looking at the issue, like framing the debate in terms of the First Amendment rather than any specific moral, ethical or practical motivation?

The qualifications are awarded by peers through an open, transparent process. As I commented elsewhere, that is the best system I know of for recognising any particular qualification or authority. It's not perfect, but to defeat it you have to corrupt the entire expert body in a field, and if you can do that then the field has no value anyway.

But that controlling entity doesn't have to be part of the government, any more than we have courts that make determinations of guilt or innocence based on the whim of the Powers That Be rather than people being tried by juries of their peers.

I'm not so sure. Censorship is a very dangerous thing, and if you said that free speech should only be obstructed when it is necessary to protect other fundamental principles, I'd be the first to agree.

But I don't accept your premise that anything resembling censorship is automatically a bad thing in any context. People lie, with damaging consequence. Even when they aren't lying, you can't force people to tell the whole truth, and a half-truth may be worse than saying nothing at all. You also can't give everyone the power to speak with an equal voice, but otherwise reasonable arguments about defeating negative speech by countering rationally with a more positive alternative tend to assume a right to reply exists, which of course it doesn't in practice. Unless you're going to physically compel everyone to provide such a right of reply, which you can't because it's completely impractical, you have only traded one form of censorship for another anyway.

Consider those things in the context of, say, modern political systems, and you can immediately explain much of the corruption we see in the world today. Consider them in the context of a specialised profession like medicine, and you can immediately explain a lot of problems in the US healthcare industry.

That may be true as a technicality, depending on how your local laws are written, but what difference does it make in practice? Either you are free to say something defamatory about someone else or you are not. If you will be punished for saying something fraudulent, you are still not free to say that thing without legal consequence.

An interesting example. In Europe, we tend to favour individual privacy over free speech to a greater degree than the US does, perhaps because in Europe -- and particularly in countries such as those you mentioned -- we still have living memory of what can happen if privacy is not sufficiently protected.