It would be the obvious choice, but it'd be the wrong one. It would be questioned, as you have, possibly spurring a deeper investigation that reveals India was a scapegoat. If I were doing it, my final leg would be somewhere like China, who would be most likely to assist in an investigation, that reveals my next-to-last leg in the United States, starting an international political mess. Only when the madness of diplomacy settles down will they work back to the drone in India, which by that time has been thoroughly damaged so as to hide any evidence of the attack. Pakistan blames India, while China and the US are both annoyed at having to roll out their diplomatic weaponry.

Ah, I remember Geocities. I actually was quite involved in the community there, and the biggest problem was that they did update the property. Where a vibrant community had grown up around a "neighborhood" metaphor, Yahoo replaced it with a top-down dictatorship. There were no more Community Leaders, no neighbors, and no humanity that made Geocities a friendly place to be. Members were no longer people, but rather just usernames, eventually reduced down to an email address.

This was, of course, about a decade before "social media" became a buzzword. Yahoo had a community, and could have turned it into something bigger and better. Instead, they turned it into meat for advertisements.

And what would the media be without shills adding to the mud-slinging and muckraking?

Tolerable.

It's time for Sarten-X's semi-weekly anti-media rant.

The reason the news stories you read about are always us-vs.-them is because you're reading news stories. It's not what's really going on. In a newspaper, the story about the big technology company donating millions of dolalrs in products and support to a third-world country takes a nice little corner on page 12. Meanwhile, the front-page big headline is a story about the company that sues another company for just as much.

People love controversy, and the media is happy to supply it. It doesn't matter how good your company is or what your corporate charter's stated mission is, you're still portrayed as a Big Evil Company that's out to greedily gather money and decimate your adversaries. On the off chance that you keep your dealings clean enough to not get sued (and don't sue others), you can bet that the media will invent an adversary for you, combining the markets of your closest competitors into a shady conspiracy, just for the sake of a story.

Sorry, Larry Page: News-media viciousness is here to stay.

Keep digging that hole deeper.

Yes, let's require the victim to file a few thousand individual lawsuits against anonymous defendants who posted offensive YouTube comments... then we can also disparage him for engaging in a mass lawsuit campaign like the RIAA.

Or we can just remove the biggest offenders in continuing the libel. Get rid of YouTube, Facebook, and Google listings connecting his name to the video, and the most reputable sites left in search results will be the news articles explaining that he's innocent. Potential employers won't be nearly as discouraged from hiring him, and he doesn't have to worry nearly as much about being the punching bag of the Internet. There will still be libelous statements out there, but the damage won't be as substantial. It's not perfect, but it's as close to justice as we can get.

Further analysis of the theory by the author suggests a feasible mechanism for curbing such abuse. All we need to do is add consequences. Unfortunately, requiring the victim to file separate lawsuits for each libelous commenter is unjust in itself. Google could simply release the personal profiles of such posters, but that runs afoul of people's sense of privacy. This raises an interesting dilemma: Why should Mr. McKeough lose his privacy for having done nothing wrong, but we protect the privacy of stalkers?

The GIFT is not a by-product of a free Internet. Indeed, examples of similar behavior have been noted back to ancient Greece. What's apparent is that when people have no concern for consequences, they are abusive, but the consequences don't need to be as severe as legal punishment. We can still have an Internet full of free expression, but with restrained offense. Consider this conversation, for instance. You and I have diametrically opposed viewpoints, yet can still respectfully express our arguments. The only consequence for us launching into a tirade of profanity-filled ad-hominem attacks is that we lose respect among our peers, but that's enough.

Perhaps a better solution to this problem is for Google, et al. to replace the video with a nice montage illustrating the harm that's come from Internet vigilantism. Show the financial damage of a DDoS, show the death threats, and show the victims of harassment who committed suicide. Let's add some consequences.

...Or he's perfectly correct.

Since the defendants in the suit (the big companies hosting the video and comments) are operating in his court's jurisdiction, he has the legal right to order them to remove the lies and obviously-false information linking McKeogh to the crime he didn't commit. Since those lies and false accusations are causing unjust harm to McKeogh, the judge has the moral right to order them removed, as well.

How well would that work, though? By now, the comments on the videos apparently have McKeogh's home address, phone number, and other personal details. A small note of sanity won't stop the self-righteous asshats of the Internet from making this man's life hell. Even through this discussion, there's already many commentors promising to perpetuate the man's suffering, just out of spite for being told that not to libel others.

The problem is the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Someone's personal life has been severely harmed by the information these companies continue to publish. When they're asked to stop publishing such lies, the schmucks crawl out to protest this affront to their ability to screw up others' lives, and they promise to just screw up the man's life even worse than before.

This is not civilization. This is unbridled sadism masquerading as vigilantism.

Sure, the obvious spin the summary evokes is that the judge is one of those numbskull government bureaucrats, who thinks the Internet has a central authority that can respond to such requests. Let's all laugh at the silly judge and reinforce our anti-government hivemind.

On the other hand, the judge likely ordered that the video be taken down, knowing perfectly well that it's impossible to be removed completely. However, those big companies make up the majority of the video's audience, so if they take down the video (and its associated accusation of Mr. McKeogh), the effect is to substantially reduce the harm to Mr. McKeogh's reputation... which is exactly the goal. Since the ruling is in Ireland, where those companies keep their double-Irish tax avoidance entities, the companies will of course want to stay in the good grace of the Irish courts.

What's interesting is the pedantic point that right or wrong, OpenJDK's right. Sure, it's horribly broken, but by being the reference implementation, it's right by definition. This is indeed similar to Microsoft's mistreatment of the Office Open XML format. Upon release, the official spec was demonstrably not the format Office actually used. For making a program compatible with Microsoft Office, Microsoft's spec was nearly useless. For making a JRE compatible with Oracle's Java, Oracle's spec is nearly useless. In both cases, it's an anticompetitive maneuver to force the open-source competitors to do more work, not only implementing the spec faithfully for the correctly-written programs, but also reverse-engineering the closed-source offerings to figure out the expected incorrect behavior.

Hairyfeet called for an open-source Java implementation:

My point is that there already is an open-source replacement. It's plagued with constant FUD from the ever-present threat of Oracle's legal team, so it's not nearly as popular as it should be for a reference implementation. In a vicious cycle, that means the bugs and not-as-expected parts (the aforementioned incompatibilities, but again that's the wrong term for a pedant like me) don't get enough attention to be fixed.

Android's Dalvik VM is not a feasible solution. It's even more wildly different than OpenJDK. While the Java specification declares that Java VMs are stack-based machines, Dalvik is register-based. Some classes can be converted automatically, but the majority of existing Java code will require extensive manual conversion, and that means fully retesting every part of everything.

In my opinion, the right solution is to forcibly free Java from the tyranny of Oracle's stewardship, and put it in the hands of a benevolent company or foundation that can be expected to care most about having a stable and secure platform rather than making a big profit. From there, the OpenJDK project can get programming assistance with legal indemnity while focusing on cross-platform perfection, and the official JVM can continue to support the full integration features that OpenJDK lacks (because they're not finalized enough to be in the spec).

Maybe that benevolent company, the source of all Java's warm fuzzy goodness, could even be named after the benevolent energy source that powers this planet...

Humans aren't evolved for philanthropy. Our brains care most about our own situation. When we hear "Millions of people suffer from this condition", we shrug and move on. It's just vocal cords, or it's just a stroke, or it's just depression. Once a particular condition affects us personally, we become fully aware of just how bad it really is. That's when we realize how much we take our voices for granted, or how difficult our life is without even a small part of our cognition, or how crushing sadness can affect our daily lives. That's when our brain now only allows us to donate time or money, but compels us to do something in the hope of getting relief. This is why so many nonprofits have awareness campaigns. The average person is utterly unaware of how bad life can be, because our brains aren't built for empathy.

It's not the programmers that matter. Programmers can write Java and compile it with any JDK they please, and it should run on any JRE, including OpenJDK and its companion JRE project. I don't know how well they patch compared to Oracle, but it's an open-source replacement, which works pretty well in my experience.

Yes, I did write that. And yes, the stigma is still pervasive in areas dominated by the old ideology, including law, medicine (sadly), religion, and news media. Fortunately, mental health awareness is indeed spreading through the public. Help agencies are advertising suicide hotlines and informal discussion groups, and hanging up posters saying that "mental illness is an illness", highlighting how it's a condition affecting an otherwise-normal person. Then there are the many more popular artistic works like next to normal that are ever-so-slowly highlighting the fact that mental illness is a daily part of millions of lives, and only very few ever reach the point of seriously considering harming others.

It took a century after the Civil War for America to recognize that African Americans are regular people, and there's still some holdouts. We're only about 20 years into this fight.

It's a pretty crappy headline. My apologies for the length and tangential nature of this post. This is a very personal subject for me.

The problem is that we really don't have a decent understanding of the brain (or its abnormalities) at all. We have collections of symptoms appearing in varying severities with varying results, and we have treatments that alter those symptoms. As far as medicine goes, that's really about it.

The problem with a diagnosis is that it's a label. Someone who says "I'm bipolar" can expect that every action will be judged harshly as to whether it's actually their intended "normal" action, or the manifestation of their depression or mania, whichever happens to be the case that day (or hour). A child who's inattentive in school may just be bored, but the diagnosis of ADD opens the door to differently-structured classes that may help - as well as opening the door to ridicule for being different. Sometimes, yes, it's better to stay undiagnosed, and sometimes it's better to get the diagnosis and do nothing with it.

On the other hand, diagnosis is necessary for any treatment. Someone can understand "I'm sad all the time, and don't like it", but without the term "depression", it's very difficult to find information about how to improve. I've met several people who, in the 90's when depression was highly stigmatized, had traumatic experiences that they couldn't talk about and couldn't do anything to recover from, partly because they wouldn't consider the possibility of actually being "depressed".

To make matters worse, there are still an enormous number of people who simply deny the existence of any mental illness. They assume that kids with ADHD are just being active children, or people with depression are just sad, or people with bipolar disorder are just moody. The illness isn't what's visible from the outside, though. The illness is what's happening in the brain to cause the outward symptoms. The ADHD child can't calm down and focus - his mind always jumps to doing something else. The depressed people can't cheer up - even happy times are often plagued by a sadness that's always present in their minds. The bipolar person can't control their mood - the emotions are overwhelming.

What's happening now, albeit slowly, is that the stigma is being countered by awareness programs. This story is in a similar vein to the one a few days ago decrying DSM-5 for not being valid regarding mental health. As our understanding and openness about mental illness improves, we're starting to recognize that typical Western medicine may have done some serious harm to our society. A recent Broadway musical explored this question well.

In next to normal, a woman who grieved four months for a dead child was diagnosed as "depressed", and began 16 years of treatment. One of the questions explored is whether her illness was really because of the loss, or whether it was because of the trauma of ongoing treatment. There is no answer. There is no happy ending. There's only the promise of a next-to-normal life, where everything is perfect except for when it isn't, and there's always some new treatment to try.

That's the ongoing problem with our current handling of mental illness. We have collections of symptoms, and drugs that treat them, but we don't really understand how. The DSM-5 is so vague and imprecise that a particular symptom is painted with a wide brush to be a whole set of disorders. With no testing for suitability, medications are tried that aren't fully understood, in the hope that it's the right drug to set everything right quickly. When it doesn't work, another regimen is proposed, also with little or no testing for suitability. As the patient's treatment drags on, whole classes of drugs are ruled out for their side effects, then brought back because they were better than alternatives.

What would be better is to avoid diagnosis labels (or use only more specific labels) until we can understand and test for the neurological conditions that lead to the symptoms of mental illness. We could differentiate "depression due to low $HORMONE" from "depression due to physically-damaged $STRUCTURE", and "low levels of $CHEMICAL" from "high levels of $OPPOSITE_CHEMICAL". From there, drug treatment can be centered on solving specific problems, rather than just brutally shoving the mind in a particular direction. Once the underlying neurology is a bit closer to "fixed", therapy can be more effective at helping the patient cope with their chronic condition.

Nobody's perfect. All we can do is help people get a little closer, until they can be satisfied with their next-to-normal lives. The DSM-5 doesn't help that as well as it could, so mental-health professionals are avoiding it.