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> "Why is it that the folks defending copyright always pull out the "But then creators will take their balls and go home!" card? That's such a repugnant, faithless argument. Numerous examples exist of people creating in spite of the system--and even making a living doing the same!"

Your logic is faulty - just because some people will continue to create in spite of the system does not mean all can continue to. Yes, indie game developers can continue to make games, but what about larger undertakings? You can't spend millions of dollars and employ large teams to devote themselves fully to creating a game like, say, Diablo 3, without some way to support those deveopers, artists, etc. A world with only indie games is less rich than a world with both indie and commercial games.

> "Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way."

I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.

Yes, of course individuals or small groups will still create art in their free time.

You can't deny however that any massive undertakings would be effectively killed. No one will invest millions of dollars to produce a video game, or hundreds of millions to produce a movie if it can be freely copied.

It's great that you can make a game or movie on a small budget, but isn't it better to live in a world where we can have both? Does the cost of copyright really outweigh the benefits of living in a society where creative people can devote all of their time producing content?

Google Analytics won't have the queries either: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-sec...

It sounds like you're not very familiar with the industry.

One of the reasons Google's advertising programs are so successful is that they are measurable. A site can compute return on investment and know that for every $X spent on Google ad clicks they are generating $Y in sales.

Would you be skeptical of a chess player above a certain age as well?

For a lot of people, not having their mom switch will be considered a feature.

He must not have noticed, but in the new UI you can minimize the "Mini Calendar" on the left side.

For someone with such a packed calendar the mini calendar is useless, and with it minimized you can view even more calendars than you could in the old UI.

Hah, I had the opposite reaction. Finally a social network where I don't have to accept friend requests from my relatives =)

I sense some confusion here. Those parameters are also used by Google Analytics which the author is using on that very page.

The utm parameters allow a site to track campaign information and replace much more annoying techniques like setting up unique landing pages or redirects. There's no relationship between these parameters, which have been around for nearly 10 years, and URL shorteners.

I had this exact experience about four years ago. Spent way too long dealing with their buggy code, wrote our own in a few weeks and everything was much easier from then on.

That's what correlation is, no need to put it in quotes.

I probably use 'git checkout' 50-100 times a day, which I imagine is typical when you're working on several branches at once.

The mental load only lasts a day or two. After that it's all muscle memory.

Same price as a windows laptop but much cheaper to support.

For anyone who's the the family tech support guy, it's almost worth buying these for your relatives just so you don't have to deal with cleaning up their malware infected, bloated PCs every 6 months.

Most of the appeal for me is not the features that Go has, but rather the features that have been intentionally left out.

Yes, that would be the easier route to take for a large company with pockets as deep as Google's.

I think this move is smarter than that though. Google has a knack for picking fights that not only help their own immediate cause (landing this govt. deal) but also aim for the greater good (fighting corruption, ensuring the better technology wins.)

Whether it's genuine or just a show is impossible to tell, but if you don't have a vested interest in either side then you can't help but root for Google.

> I wouldn't say it was obvious, mainly because this was something Google did specifically to cause this

There is a subtle point that many posts like this are overlooking. Google didn't run this experiment to cause bing to show bogus results, they did it to confirm the rise in suspiciously similar results produced by bing.

Most sites are very happy to have traffic from Google. Those that aren't can simply configure robots.txt.

It's in the blog post: "Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature"

Close, but you didn't understand it quite right. Google knowingly submitted info to Microsoft to confirm a suspicion that Microsoft was using google.com search results from other users to populate bing results.

IE will send this data even without the toolbar.

Yes, they're both based off the open source WebKit Web Inspector (as mentioned in the second sentence on that page.)

"To be clear, this trial is completely separate from our community selection process for Google Fiber, which is still ongoing"

Just click "show search options" and enter "Fred" in the from box and "Friday" in the date box.

Much easier than scanning through pages and pages of messages.

Google is a big company - There's probably people working on both simultaneously.

"Android is no more open the BlackBerry or Windows Mobile"

Huh??? There are hundreds of thousands of phones out in the wild running Android builds not blessed by Google. If you design a new phone you can install Android on it and sell it. You can download the source. If you try to do any of that with BB or Windows Mobile you'll be sued and/or imprisoned.

Totally agree, this author is missing a critical point: shaving a second of a search doesn't just mean that Google feels faster - it also means that everything else suddenly feels slower in comparison.

Ironically, the type of sweeping changes made to News are exactly the kind of "brilliant design solutions convert people over time" that this article is proposing.

If your assertion that "you'd be challenged to find a single person on the internet who prefers the new Google News" is true, than more testing is exactly the right approach - which again is the opposite of the advice in this article.

Keep in mind you're comparing an off-the-cuff quote to a carefully worded marketing slogan.

I don't follow the argument either. My understanding is:

Before agreement: - wired: unregulated - wireless: unregulated.

After agreement: - wired: net neutrality - wireless: unregulated but reviewed yearly

We all benefit from wired NN. Google didn't gain any special privilege here.