I guess all those millions of BMWs I see on the road must be a figment of my imagination then.

BMW has been making cars since 1916. How long has Google been making them? How hard is it for established manufacturers to get the tens of thousands of parts in a road car 100% correct at design time? Google is not infallible. If they do indeed decide to mass manufacture their own cars (which I doubt) it will take years and billions of miles to iron out all the issues. Engineering isn't software.

Say you're BMW's favourite kind of customer: you buy new, all the gimmicks, change your car for another BMW every 4-5 years and have been doing so for 20 years. Are you going to start buying Google's plastic toy car that's only been in production for 2 years instead? You might buy one to go with your BMW, especially if you live in a city, but you're still going to buy the BMW.

Presumably they'll do what Google, Apple, FB and the rest of the tech-cartels do when they want to muscle in on something: buy it in.

Actually, having said that, I very much doubt BMW will be competing with Google for car sales anyway, because I very much doubt Google will be retailing their cars. They will either operate the fleet themselves or sell them to other fleet operators or just sell the software.

Why not simply use a weighted combination of rating and age (well, youth) for the ordering algorithm? Turn the knob for rating down to nearly zero and you get nearly the same behavior as Twitter has today. Then you can slowly turn it up if you want a slightly different kind of community. This is basically the approach taken by Reddit, Hacker News, and many other aggregation sites -- they may differ on the exact formula, but it's always some weighted combination of age and rating.

> Does anyone have replacement recommendations for people who used these services?

For those from outside the US, your best bet is probably to use small, local players who might not yet have had pressure applied to them. For those inside the US, I have one recommendation: run for Congress.

If your bank is adjusting your balance downward without explanation, there are several places you can report it and get action. The local police are not one of them.

It could be a case of someone inside the bank committing fraud, in which case the management of the bank would LOVE to know about it and have the chance to act (I know... I work for a bank). It is even possible (although unlikely) that the bank officers are in on it and are attempting to defraud consumers. In the first case, reporting it to management will resolve the problem, and probably VERY quickly and politely. Search your bank's website or other documents for the name of the bank's COO or CEO and send a letter to that person. If you truly believe that the bank's management is "in on it" then you can report them to the banking regulators (http://www.sec.gov/answers/bankreg.htm gives contact info in the USA). They will certainly follow up (and afterward I can assure you that your bank will hate you... but they'll also treat you fairly since they know the regulators are watching).

Of course, it is also possible that the bank was right and your own records were wrong. Be prepared to discover that you were wrong and apologize if that turned out to be the case. Don't let fear of this prevent you from following up if you feel cheated, just keep an open mind.

The irony is that with noscript enabled you simply don't exist for 95% of sites (log crunching is SO 1999). You might think that you like it that way but it's extremely shortsighted: you can hardly expect people to develop content that appeals to you if they don't know you exist.

Yeah, but that async code has only existed for a couple of months. Until recently analytics code was the bottleneck on most sites, making it a bit rich for google to be claiming to have sped up the internet.

Yeah, I know... I've been trying. Ever since 2 years into Bush's term, I've been contributing money AND TIME to national campaigns. But so far it isn't working... well, at least Obama's election was better than Bush so maybe it is STARTING to work? I hope?

Dear Rest-of-the-World:

I realize that you have already had to deal with an invasion of Iraq to eliminate imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" and a world-wide financial collapse (although, to be fair, you bear some of the responsibility for that one... after all YOU believed our our uncritical rating agencies). And we're still stumbling around on that ruining-the-planetary-climate issue. So I know it's a big favor to ask, but would you please, PLEASE restrain my country's insane leaders?

Thanks...
-- A Sane American.

The point is not what YOU think of the quality of the apps. It's not what PALM thinks of the quality of the apps. The point is that the author of the software must jump through ridiculous hoops and beg permission of someone before they can give their app to people who want it. And if the someone says "No", then no one can have it.