But the could structure the deal differently. A basic fee of say $20 a month and then a minor fee of $0.50-$1 per GB. It would take a lot of downloading to reach an exorbitant charge.

to take issue with Fox, which is no more ore less biased than msnbc, et al...

Sorry, but Fox is the only news organization that has explicitly told its reporters that it is ok to lie.

This "everyone does it" business is just not true anymore. It used to be, but for the last decade or so Republicans and their supporters have taken the lead in uncivil discourse.

and western culture seems to revel in tearing down anyone successful for the most pety things

nah, this is just an affectation from people on the left.

Red necks compare the size of their gun collections, holier-than-thou leftists compare the size of their outrage to minor social transgressions, as in:

- What, you used the word "seminal"? aren't you aware of its 5th century B.C. possibly sexist origins?? Shame on you!

- Oh yeah? Well I think he should resign.

- Well, I think he should resign _and_ all his writings should be expunged from the historical record.

They routinely go beyond that,

You might be right. However, I looked for previous change pages on the web site, but couldn't find them.

That's a simple statement of fact,

If you had better examples you should have sent them. Don't blame me for your crappy examples.

that doesn't change the fact that their measurements are crude

That has never been in discussion. We all agree that the signal is crappy. My only objection was with the statement that was "absolutely meaningless".

The other problems, which you haven't addressed are:...

It's pretty much the other way around. You need to argue why those changes are significant enough to matter. It's not like search engines one day give one count of popularity and the next a completely different one. So why should we believe that regular maintenance would radically change the results, particularly in ways that affect the ranking?

Maybe you don't see it because you've got blinders on?

Or maybe that is an irrelevant fine tuning of the method in regards to other languages.

I'm not interested in arguing with people that won't admit the most basic errors in their positions.

Lower your caffeine intake dude. I was ready to admit an error when I went to look at the changes pages, thinking I would see major shifting in methodology. Instead I saw one rather irrelevant change for an aberrant language (in terms of name) called Go.

You give bad evidence, I won't change my mind, you give good evidence and I change my mind.

TIOBE rankings can go through wild swings from month to month as they change their methodologies.

It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages. Thus the self-consistency claim. You are saying that they change that?

It's akin to placing a single temperature sensor near the AC in a huge warehouse

Excellent example. When you see the sensor suddenly go down, this means the AC just went on, hence the warehouse was hot. On the other hand when you see the sensor start going up, this means the AC just switched off, which means it just finished cooling. So there you go, I just showed you how it indeed reflects the temperature of the warehouse, but through an inverse and intermittent relation.

In other words - if they were checking 20 other search terms, such as 'foo development, 'foo developers', 'foo language', etc. - and averaging them out - then maybe it has some sort of a meaning.

No it actually wouldn't, unless you have a reason to believe that Java programmers would type Java programming more frequently that Lisp programmers would type Lisp programming.

And even then we could still recover a signal from the measurement. Say, for the sake of the argument Lisp programmers are 10x less likely to type "Lisp programming" than Java programmers. Still an increase in the number of such queries reflects an increase in the interest in Lisp.

It is clear you have no experience extracting information from noisy sources, and you confuse your inability to do such an extraction with an absence of information on the source itself.

The way it is now, I stand by my comment that it's absolutely meaningless.

I didn't expect otherwise. The way you wrote your hyperbole in all caps suggests that you are the type of person who lets their emotions override their rational thoughts.

ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS

You overplayed your hand. Had you said "not very meaningfull", you would have been right, but you went for hyperbole and end up being wrong. Even a noisy signal carries quite a bit of information.

For one, since the methodology is self-consistent, a change in relative position even in this flawed ranking is with very high probability paralleled by a move (though not necessarily a swap) in the actual ranking in the actual index with the proper absolute rankings.

By the way, around here, at a puerly anecdotical level, we've seen a raise in interest on C/C++ and a relative drop on Java.

Also, B12 production does not necessarily require animal protein. If that was the case, herbivores would be screwed.

This is a specious argument. Herbivores are equipped with a completely different digestive system. For example, they can thrive on grass whereas we humans can't.

So no problems there. Just make sure your diet has some fortified foods (get some vitamin D as well to be on the safe side) and you're done.

Which is exactly what I said. A vegan diet is deficient on certain nutrients and thus needs to be supplemented.