Google did the right thing. There is no legitimate ethical or legal ground for restricting free speech in such a case. I would have been quite disturbed if they had taken the opposite stance.

It is no more the state's duty to educate everyone than to provide shoes for everyone. The private sector is much more capable of providing much better quality education for everyone and at lower costs. Nor does the money of a corporation belong to the state it happens to do business in. The idea that besides the value it offers in its products and besides all the benefits that derive from it being in existence in the the state, that somehow it also owes more to the state is utterly absurd, it is hideously parasitical. What on earth makes you believe a corporation or anyone else owes you a damn thing?

First of all, the WTO has no means to order any country to sell anything at what it determines is a "fair price". Second, China does not have a monopoly on rare earths. They exist is many many countries. Those countries may not be actively pursuing them and exporting them to the same degree but that is not China's fault.

I have no Windows boxes. Only rarely will I find something that causes me to run it in a VM. I just don't like it at any level. Never have. Oh, I have tried to have a Windows machine many times. But after the first or second time I have to nearly rebuild the damn thing due to registry screw-ups, malware or just bit rot they tend to get scrapped completely and replaced with Linux.

I am mega-creeped by this trend that the OS and/or hardware vendor somehow gets to tell me what I am allowed to run on my own machines and gets paid usurious rates to do so. This is not remotely in keeping with the Computer Power to the People meme that set myself and so many on fire back in the 70s and 80s. It is as if the government via the corporations are herding the sheeple into the slaughter chute. Especially combined with such near open declarations of war as SOPA.

You can't retrain most construction and manufacturing line workers to do something like programming. It is more than a matter of IQ although that is not an inconsiderable part of it. I don't know any decent programmers that are less than 1 sigma from the mean and the majority are 2 sigma or more how the IQ curve. But even with the raw intelligence there are plenty of people that just can't program. It is a bit of a mystery as to what that something is that is required.

It is not the job of a company to "spread the wealth". It is the job of a company to create value, things that are valued much more than the value consumed to produce them. That is all. It is not there job to employ people just for the sake of employing them. If the people cannot add to producing more value in the sole judgment of the company then they will not and should not be hired. Until we learn that we will see more companies move more of their operations offshore.

It is not the government's job to be involved in this or to "care" either way. They are not your nanny and protector. If you don't think the loans are reasonable then don't take them. Why is this hard? But you are right that the government, by being involved at all, creates the same kind of moral hazard if not guarantee of very bad outcomes as occurred in housing.

Government has absolutely no right to determine what is taught or who takes it. If the people of the US forget this then the America is dead.

First they said X amount at worse in 100 years. Now they claim irreversible change in five years. This presumes first of all that there is any such thing as irreversible change in a dynamic system using any possible means including ones not yet inventent. Second of all it implies the changes are utterly horrific without sufficient evidence. Third of all it presumes there is a workable remedy within 5 years which there clearly is not. If we stopped all human CO2 producing activities, for instance, on a dime (of course we can't), it still would not reduce CO2 already in the air even a single percentage point. So this is alarmist crap - not science and sure as hell not engineering.

Firefox has been less and less dependable ever since Firefox 4.x. Every other day it seems like I get some update pushed at me that breaks some or all of my extensions, some of which are actually pretty important to my workflow. On an update all extensions I had loaded should be reloaded if at all possible. Period. Firefox doesn't get to make decisions whether I mean what I already decided in the previous version. That is parternalistic crap to hide the fact they have managed to define an extension API they can manage to keep from breaking almost every release. I have even started using Safari again on my Mac to get away from Firefox. They both get slower and slower the more tabs you have opened and don't recover regardless of how many of them you close. On linux I use chrome when at all possible. Who is making decisions on the Firefox team, Microsoft employees?

I view it as a 99% clue free display of angst and anger. The majority of the protesters mouth slogans without hardly any depth of political, economic or ethical knowledge. Many of those slogans are profoundly anti free-market which is a profound mistake. First because what we have had for a long time is not remotely free-market or capitalism. It is a government run kleptocracy, a fascist economic state. Most of the economic disaster is not from business or even Wall Street but from political attempts to make a Big Lie seem doable. The Big Lie is that government can make a chicken magically appear in every pot, that it can make it so everyone has a nice and easy life whether they do or produce anything or not. Government cannot do this - ever. Yet the demands of the protesters are largely that government do whatever it takes to make the impossible seem real. In this they are idiot children or worse.

We all know that the Apple walled garden has many deleterious effects and quite possibly will have many more in the future. This is not a surprise as as much has been said by many people here and elsewhere, not just or even primarily Richard Stallman. Yes, Steve Jobs and company had bad as well as good effects on personal computing. Does anyone really deny this?

I signed up for unlimited back years ago. Not for unlimited with limits that reduce speed. This is an arbitrary change of contract.

It requires Mathematica 8 (very expensive for non-students) to create such a document. So I doubt it is going to be real popular.

Firefox ever since 3.x something has been sucking more and more on my Mac. It eats tons of CPU after being up even a short while and stops responding. Various addons break on each of the numerous releases. Even Safari now has better characteristics on the Mac. Chrome is working fine and fast becoming my browser of choice. That it is fast until it bloats or otherwise screws up is not an improvement.

1) The problem of finding actual peers. Not everyone on a team is capable of meaningfully, much less efficiently, reviewing the code of everyone else.

2) Our tools for spelunking code and thus for its presentation to another person and ad hoc exploration are generally woefully inadequate. This makes code reviews much much less efficient than they could otherwise be. This is a general complaint with the state of tools. In Symbolics and in Smalltalk in the 80s I had better code walking tools than I have on the supposed state of the art IDEs today. It is quite possible to make much better code exploration tools but it never seems to happen.

3) I have had even very good people miss glaring errors so I am not a big believer in this process for elimination of many errors. It has other useful features but this in my experience is not one of them.

All of that said, review with a true peer can be very useful. It is most useful when reviewing bug fixes as compared to initial code in my experience.