In theory, yes, but for all the talk about how "second amendment is there to ensure that all the others apply", I don't see it actually happening, despite the rapid encroachment on other freedoms over the course of the 20th century, and especially in the last few decades.

No, it hasn't been blocking third party cookies for years. This is the core of why such policies are a bad idea. It says it blocks third party cookies, but there are actually lots of exceptions to that rule in order to avoid as the summary says "false positives". You can read about what really happened with Google on Lauren Weinstein's blog, it's very different to how you paint it (there was no "trying to circumvent" involved).

The only thing 3rd party cookies are useful for is tracking you. Anyone who says otherwise makes their living out of stripping you of your privacy.

Reading fail! The summary itself says the policy is being delayed because of false positives, ie, things that they are blocking that is causing users to complain.

This is exactly what happened with Safari. Somebody decides that "privacy" can be viewed exclusively through the lens of particular technologies, that advertising is bad and they will "save the users" from targeted advertising that's wrecking the web (or relevant advertising that funds the web, depending on your perspective). Then they discover that 3rd party cookies are not exclusively used for advertising, and start punching holes in the policy, until it gets to the point where any site that wants to can set a third party cookie by writing their code in a different way. Then some company offers their users a feature they can opt in to that requires third party cookies, so the documented workarounds for the blocking policy are used to make it work, then there's a big media story about how said company is "working around privacy protections".

For example, this happened with Facebook and Safari. The Safari guys got bug reports that their users were being randomly logged out of Facebook but not when other browsers were used. After a long time, they tracked it down to third party cookie blocking interacting badly with the Like button, which is the sort of thing that uses them. So they added yet another heuristic to try and distinguish "good" stuff such as Like buttons from "bad" stuff such as adverts, and ended up making the policy so weak it could even be triggered by accident!

Google does not use stack ranking in the sense you are referring to it (the form that promotes competition between employees to avoid being in the bottom X% that gets fired or top Y% that gets promoted).

(usual disclosure: I'm a Google engineer).

Those are all really bad examples.

Retiring ActiveSync for consumer accounts is not "trying to prevent Windows Phone from syncing calendar and contact data". Not even close. ActiveSync is a Microsoft-specific protocol which is so heavily protected by the patent system it requires fees. There are open equivalents for all its functionality. Perhaps if Microsoft doesn't want to implement CalDAV or CardDAV like its major competitors do and would rather its competitors pay them per-user license fees for the privilege of using a crappy syncing protocol, they should not be surprised when support for said protocol goes away. They can catch up with everyone else and support the non-licensed calendar and contact syncing protocols instead. For corporate users, well, they pay so the costs of ActiveSync can just be passed straight through.

By "hindering the development of a YouTube app" you actually mean requiring Microsoft to obey the terms of service, right? The sort of co-operation Page was talking about doesn't mean Microsoft can do whatever they want, demand whatever they want, and everyone gives it to them on a plate for nothing. It means cooperating to find a reasonable solution that works for everyone. In this case, there's already an HTML5 website Windows Phone users can access, and if WP becomes popular enough then probably Google would make a native app that follows content creators requirements and allows the site to be funded. Or maybe provide the access they need to build a proper app that does follow the ToS. After all, that's what happened with the iPhone app despite the iPhone being Android's biggest competitor (it started out written by Apple and later moved to being written by Google).

The sort of thing Microsoft does here is exactly what Larry was talking about. They must have known when they were developing the YouTube app that the features they added were not allowed - because it says so right in the YouTube ToS. So what was their goal here? Apparently to try and confuse people and try to score points when they got inevitably told to stop. And it's working on you, isn't it? It's exactly the same kind of immature behaviour they're pulling in so many other ways. This is not co-operation. It's playing politics instead of building better technology. Larry isn't the only one that's sick of it.

It's worse than that. While cops were going door-to-door in Boston, taking house occupants out at a gunpoint and searching them and their homes (without any warrants, I must add), many the people who were watching that from the windows were cheering for it as an example of government working efficiently to "keep them safe". This, more than anything, has convinced me that a police state is perfectly viable in US - you just need some enemy, real or imagined or concocted, for a convenient scapegoat, and you can do practically anything in the name of security, with cheers from the crowd.

One of the benefit of them getting democracy later in the game is that they could learn from your mistakes. And 200+ years of US democracy include slavery, genocide of Indians, a civil war, witch hunts for communists, and Japanese internment camps, so there's plenty to learn from.

Also, I wouldn't diss Hungary on the grounds of little experience with liberty. After all, they were the only country in the Soviet bloc that had a country-wide armed popular uprising against their Soviet government - even if that ultimately failed.

If you count stairs as well, then more people have died from falling off stairs and ladders in 2001 than in 9/11.

Yeah, I thought about that, but the meter had a screen on the front that counted down the amount of time remaining. When you point coins in, the time goes up. Pretty simple actually. So I am not sure how I could have been accidentally cited for that either because there was over an hour left on the meter when I left. I suppose there could have been some other infraction I'm not aware of, though.

I had two weeks to file an appeal, only one of which I was going to be in the country. That's filing, it doesn't mean it's resolved within two weeks. Also, unfortunately I only noticed the ticket under the wipers after driving off. So I didn't take a photo of where I was parked. Apparently the guy who issued the ticket is supposed to take a photo, but I have no idea how to see it (probably can't).

There doesn't seem to be any online appeals process. I was told I'd have to send them a letter by the post. If there was an online process I might have been tempted to use it. The City of Santa Cruz website only has the ability to pay tickets, not file an appeal or complaint.

Last I checked, MS haven't sued, or otherwise complained about, OpenOffice using "undocumented APIs" to parse .docx files on all their target platforms, even though Microsoft also ships the official OpenXML SDK (which is, of course, only available on Windows).

You realize that the "API" in question is basically just a bunch of URLs, right? Are you really willing to argue that by opening a website in your browser you're agreeing to its ToS?

I don't think it's just Florida that's abusing traffic citations for profit. I visited Santa Cruz, CA on Sunday and parked by the beach. There were cars on either side of me, white space dividing lines and a meter right in front of the space where I parked. I got a $48 citation for "parking in a red zone". So I called them up and asked what this meant, it means "no parking at any time under any circumstances". That means the ticket was quite obviously wrong as no-parking zones don't have parking meters in them.

I don't see any way this can be an honest mistake. You can't write out a ticket saying a car parked in a no parking zone whilst standing next to a meter with plenty of time left on it.The ticket itself, their contact line and their website all make the appeals process rather prominent so apparently they get a lot of appeals. Unfortunately you only get two weeks to appeal, I'm not staying in California, I'll be on vacation next week and then I return to my home in Europe. So I'll probably just pay the $48, there's no way it makes sense to appeal a parking ticket for a rental car from the other side of the world whilst on vacation.

This whole incident leaves a bad taste, it appears to be open and unchecked corruption on the part of municipal governments. The kind of thing I expect in a banana republic, not America.

Interesting but Apple developed iPhone over ~2 - 2.5 years. Depending on when the key players sat with Intel that likely would have been enough time to develop a first generation chip.

Remember, Intel was THE LEADER in cutting-edge ARM chips until they sold the ARM division to Marvell in June 2006. They even introduced high-end feature like Mobile MMX and SpeedStep, and pushed clock speeds higher than any of their competitors.

That's absolutely in the time-frame of iPhone development, plus a year into Paul's tenure. The fact that they sold the ARM division and decided to start back at square one with Atom (not exactly a power miser in the first revision) shows that they had no intention of going "high volume, low price" like Steve Jobs was asking.