Yeah, but most of those people are probably joking because Sergey and his company have "come to Jesus" on this issue a little late to be claiming the moral high ground.

While I do applaud Google for finally realizing that promoting freedom (the real kind, not the jingoistic hoo-rah kind) is the only profitable path long-term, I must also remain cognizant of the fact that Google seems to have run down every other blind alley before finding the right one.

So now Sergey is "following his conscience" after considering childhood experiences, eh? Good. I hope that's true. It would've been better, though, had he done so from the outset.

As an aside, I've always wondered in Brin's family's case how a gifted mathematician just waltzes out of Soviet Russia in 1979, only to resurface in Maryland out of all the 50 states, and his wife with a US Government job, at that! Somehow, I doubt this is "just how it worked out". (Cue the Yakov Smirnov jokes in 3....2....1....)

So yeah, Sergey, Larry, and Dr. Strangelove could've considered not cooperating/collaborating with the Chinese a long time ago, and that would've been alright with me. Odd that it took him so many years to remember what living under an oppressive regime felt like. I didn't know money caused amnesia.

......just not between corporate entities.

No, the competition will be between various wiki-weirdoes over who can be first to enshrine their peckers forever by putting video of it on the articles for "Penis", "Herpes", and any other genital or sex-related article on that site....of which there are no small number.

.....your banker doesn't do the other obvious sci-fi play and shave your interest off at regular intervals (the "Superman III scam") or a precipitous decline in fertility prevents your ever being thawed ("Children of Men"), or you're launched into space on a sleeper ship, and wake up to find not only wildly different economics (ST:TNG "The Neutral Zone") or that you're under the "command" of a psychotic genetically-engineered madman (ST:TOS "Space Seed", "Wrath of Khan").

I'd personally say that that this is a door that should neither be fully opened nor fully closed by law in and of itself; but rather, decided on a case-by-case basis with other, more established legal precedents and laws being the deciding factors.

In this case, TFA doesn't get into the specific nature of the comments made; I see that some enterprising commenters have found additional details, but we still don't have the fullest possible context to this story. There could be additional comments that were libelous, or simply hateful and abusive. In the US (your jurisdiction may vary) there is a certain additional protection in these situations afforded to persons who are not public figures. (In other words, if the article or story being commented on was ABOUT the teen in question, the level of protection is lesser; on the other hand, if the teen in question was not the subject of the piece, then the level of protection granted is somewhat greater.)

In short, the internet is not, nor should it be, an open-ended platform to abuse people for no reason other than a desire to abuse. By the same token, where there is a clear public interest in commentary concerning public figures that may or may not be deemed "abusive" to the supporters of those figures, the protections for anonymous commenters should be protected to the fullest extent of the law.

All that said, if the nature of the comments could be boiled down to "Hey don't attack my mom" followed by "you're an idiot", then if I were the judge, I'd have to err on the side of protecting free speech and privacy rights. If we have the full context here, this is not a question that deserves to have a federal case made of it.

That'll be the day. You could kiss gmail and all the photo-upload sites goodbye immediately, as well as a TON of other sites....and as noted below, this site as well.

This issue serves to raise some legitimate concerns, but it should not be used to further an ideological "anything other than HTML/CSS is bad" mentality. And with all the interests arrayed against such a mentality, it wouldn't happen in any case.

The average user isn't going to associate the words "javascript exploit" with "Oh, I need to change settings in my browser". Even the user base of reddit, tech oriented as it is, isn't going to change basic settings and habits to avoid such a problem. Instead, Reddit will patch its hole, and everyone will get on with their day.

Case in point, I'm simply going to avoid Reddit for the rest of the day. Simple problem, simpler cure....

That'd make me LOL, to be sure, especially if it worked.

Reading my own words, I been clearer.

Looking at it from a global top-down kind of view, I think Linux is definitely building positive associations as an alternative server/desktop/laptop OS. Slowly, but surely.

Windows, in turn, is being harmed by its own negative associations, and by the fact that more and more people are owning smart phones that help show them that they really can free themselves from the Microsoft ecosphere without foregoing any "benefits".

At this point, those perceived benefits mostly amount to "We need Windows because it's what everybody else uses." It's interesting to see just how entrenched the incompatibility problems of the 80's and early 90's have become in the "consumer" mind.

It's taken decades now for Mac and Linux combined to carve out a
That said, I meant my comment to specifically apply only to the markets such as the ones being discussed, where people really don't interact with the actual OS, but rather with a limited-functionality UI that's grafted on top of it.

And in that sense, I doubt branding such devices with Linux would be terribly beneficial from a marketing perspective, because it's nearly impossible to convey the benefits Linux brings to such a device within their limited context.

....more like, he's a marketing guy, evolved a bit from a sales drone, and oftentimes there's just no need to overcomplicate the sales and promotion process.

Is Linux a selling point to this guy's customers? Probably not. And certainly not as it would be to people on this website.

Thus, no need to get into it.

The real question is "has Linux even pervaded the public's consciousness sufficiently to where it *could* be a plus or minus?" And I'd have to argue no, at least not outside the tech crowd.