I prefer the metric assload, because it's a bit bigger than a "regular" assload.

You mean, if Open Source isn't magic, it's bullshit? Way to straw man.

Almost - you forgot fat people.

From the linked Reuters article:
> The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the
> funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify
> Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18
> months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created
> nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.

I thought the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was trying to *help* children, not *sell* them.

+1 Internets for you, sir.

Hear, hear. Good old CALL -151. Once in a great while I still fire up AppleWin and bask in its Garden of Eden-like 24x40 ALL UPPER CASE wondrousness.

Kind of late, but... Agree totally. I meant that Google's move, not MegaUpload, was evil. Although after spending time with the new image search, it seems more douchey (not showing the source page) than evil (which would be pretending that there was no source page). The UI makes it plain that the image is coming from somewhere else and gives you the option to see the page or go directly to the image, so while I'm not thrilled, I'll stand down from my earlier comment.

It's obvious, right?

Google just turned every other web site on the planet into MegaUpload. Sort of. "Don't, be evil" indeed.

It would be more responsible to give users a choice on the matter. Especially for those using Macs for work, teleworking, etc where not running Java may not be an option. Fine, disable it by default to be safe, but give an option to re-enable it besides Googling for random XProtect plist hacks.

Yeah. Just like C++.

+1 for that. Plan 9's code, written in C, has a clean, minimalist aesthetic throughout that makes it dead easy to navigate, skim, or analyze in depth. Files, lines, and functions all tend to be short. Code within functions is often times linear with simple conditionals or loops; there's still complex logic to be found, but far less than other software; more than 4 levels of indentation is uncommon. Even the makefiles are simple and clean.

File, type, and function names are usually short and unambiguous. Variable names average 1-2 letters: r for Request, f for File, to and from for strings. Comments are used sparingly; when present, they give you the salient facts without unnecessary detail. They, too, are mostly short, but longer where more explanation is called for.

With all this brevity, you might expect the code would be cryptic or cramped, but it is extremely easy to follow, with a very "clean" and "natural" feel - easy on the eyes, with plenty of space. You can dive in at any random point and easily understand what is going on and why.

One may, of course, argue that the limited number of hardware platforms supported (half a dozen or so?) and operating systems (one) freed the authors from a huge amount of complexity and allowed them to keep their code simple. Could be. gcc's headers make my eyes bleed, but between POSIX and portability to every hardware and OS known to humanity, it's hard to fault them for it.

Overall, Plan 9's code is the cleanest, the easiest to understand, and possibly the most "beautiful" that I've seen.

+1 to you guys for picking a great project name :-)

Accidentally dropped the date from the article snippet, but it was this June - 6 months ago. In only 6 months Google stopped being alarmed at government censorship requests, and started preemptively applying their own.

Also forgot to say Fuck you, Google!

(CNN) -- Western governments, including the United States, appear to be stepping up efforts to censor Internet search results and YouTube videos, according to a "transparency report" released by Google.
"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post on Sunday night.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/tech/web/google-transparency-report/index.html