zmimon

This is why I think we shouldn't count MSFT out. They've had it so easy for 10 - 15 years that they have turned to competing among themselves for something to do. Once a real sense of fear and external competition sets in we may see a very different beast.

> Mr Gane said he was confident that the Federal Government would now review the laws surrounding copyright infringement

Ominous.

Will be there - great to see there are enough startup oriented Melbournites to make this a possibility!

This is a point I always have trouble impressing on people. They do a simple benchmarks on a tiny code base that pulls some data from the database, spits out some data, and they compare and PHP seems to be lightning fast.

The problem is that because it's interpreted at some point PHP slows down in proportion to the size of your code base. A small app runs really fast, a big app with 100,000 lines of code will kill your server unless you modularize it really really well - which harder than it seems, because the more modularized you make it the more separate "includes" you end up with in different files and then you come to realize that including a lot of files itself is a problem. And the nature of PHP's very loose coupling tends to lead to code that is nearly impossible to do large scale refactoring on once you have gone too far down the path.

I work on an application that has a very thin PHP layer that performs some simple web services that are the back end for a pure Java web app. Amazingly, when we load test it, the PHP part is the bottleneck, burning CPU like crazy just parsing all our files ... over ... and over ... and over. The java code meanwhile, while theoretically doing far more "work", is completely bored. We will probably look at using an accelerator of some kind or maybe just rewriting all the PHP in another language.

I reckon there's a whole bunch pushing non-unicode and not knowing it, but declaring UTF-8 anyway. Since the current versions of PHP don't even support unicode (at least, without going to very special pains) I suspect there are an awful lot of web sites just shoving out content in non-unicode formats, calling it UTF-8 and wondering why every now and then they see a funny question mark in someone's name etc.

I don't know exactly what mortgage contracts look like in the US, but the ones I have seen in my country don't say you can walk away. They say you can not walk away. The bank getting the house is just one consequence that happens if you violate the contract and do walk away.

> Disney removes all other copies, but allows access to the original.

But they don't have to - they could banish Mickey from the world if they chose to. Copyright allows them to do it. Is that wrong?

I think it's more about who created the information - copyright is about controlling things you yourself create. Censorship is about controlling access to things other people created.

I think arguing against all censorship is doomed because people will always come up with examples that are very hard to argue with. For example, "what if someone puts detailed plans to make a nuclear bomb on the internet"? Would you really argue nothing should be done to prevent that?

What is really the problem here is the method. We can usually all agree that censorship must be an exception, not the rule. In fact, we can usually agree that in a democracy we have a set of important principles without which the pillars that support the democracy itself and the freedom of people within it will break down:

a) We try as hard not to censor as we can.

b) We try everything except censorship before we try censorship

c) Even then, we censor only when such censorship has a provable chance of preventing the serious harm that we have identified must be prevented

Filtering the internet fails all of these.

Yes, after deploying it on 2 sites I'm thinking of taking it down and "doing my own thing" because it's just going to baffle non-Australians.

> While you can’t get code into your templates, it’s easy to get UI into your code, which is (almost) just as bad.

I looked at Lift a year or two ago and this was the showstopper for me. While there's a cleanliness and purity to rigidly enforced templating I have never developed a web app where I didn't need some kind of creative "UI" logic somewhere. If you can't put it in the templates then it doesn't go away ... it goes into your core code where the poor schmuck looking at the template has no hope of doing anything with it. For me, putting what is otherwise pure UI logic in the UI layer is a lesser evil than having it permeate back to the middle tier or "view" code layer.

> does Australia have constitutional or otherwise legally protected free speech

No. Australians have no direct freedoms at all. What rights they have are "implied" indirectly from other things such as that the federal government shall not restrict trade between the states (it's hard to trade if you can't talk ...). People talk from time to time about strengthening individual rights, but most Aussies couldn't care less and due to mandatory voting those that don't care will vote down just about any constitutional amendment making it extremely difficult for such reform to ever happen.

The answer is b). I suspect they fully know how stupid their policies are (Stephen Conroy has pretty much admitted it on live TV). What they are attempting is classic 'wedge politics': pick an issue on which your opposition is passionately divided 50 / 50 and take an extreme position on one side or the other. The internal damage it causes in the other side far outweighs any damage it causes to your own.

You would want to be extremely careful - despite all logic against it, the US Dollar spikes when just about any international crisis takes hold. The dollar's decline might well occur afterwards, but that would be a longer term consequence.

I've never understood why America outsources so much half way around the planet for cheap labor when it is available on her doorstep - a short flight, easy transport, same time zone , reasonably stable, friendly democracy ... what's not to like?

> it doesn't look like Google offers synchronization so its utility as a backup environment is quite limited.

Actually, my beef with all these services is the opposite: they rarely provide support to mount plain old drives under windows. It's always some crappy web interface or custom client that synchs stuff around which makes it non-interoperable with every other program I use that just wants to save something to the file system and know that it got to the cloud. I really don't get it - Windows supports WebDAV - what is so freakin hard about this?

I really wish they would just give me a network drive to save to and let me worry about finding some synchronization software to mirror stuff there if that turns me on.

This is amazingly bold. Not because they are shutting down operations or even stopping the censoring - they could have done that in a hundred ways that would save face and leave the door open for them to come back in at any time - but because they have come right out and said it, cut the BS, they consider the human rights actions of the Chinese government unacceptable.

I do wonder how wise this is as a business decision - I would fully expect they will never make a cent in China again, possibly even other countries increasingly dependent on China might get pressure to be more 'hostile' to Google.

Congrats to them on such a brave stand!

The app would have to be signed by someone who presumably would have paid the $99 to get the developer account with Apple and thus there would be a way to trace (somehow) the app to some real person. Now, the identity used to get the account could be faked, but that's no longer trivial, assuming Apple has done things properly.

I don't quite understand however why this does not also apply to the Android app market - surely whoever put this up there has a known identity. If not, the whole point of the market place is undermined. All this has no bearing on the "evilness" factor - Apple's market place is evil because it is a self-enforced monopoly. The Android market place could have policies controlling their apps ten times as fascist as Apple's and they would not be as evil, because we can always go elsewhere (and maybe will, if this continues to be an issue).

> as the encrypted cookie can be sniffed, and replayed to the server

I think the whole article is premised on requiring a level of security that would presume TLS is being used.

Sure ... but I think Apple has a way of redefining the "high end". Smart phones were already considered expensive when Apple launched the iPhone.

Well, it's not trying to be a "tablet", so it's not lying around the living room. 95% of the time it's sitting in your pocket when not in use, very safe and comfortable.

So how do you explain the iPhone? The smart phone market was well and truly catered for when Apple entered there. Apple's primary method of business is to price themselves in a tier above everyone else but to provide a (perceived or real) value proposition that makes people buy it anyway.

Point taken. I would say that satisfying point 3 relieves the need to satisfy point 2 (if I can replace it for less than $50 then I can handle the possibility of coffee getting poured on it). So paper works.

It seems to me that the right approach should always have a significant random element, not as a deterrent, but as a check on how well the non-random component is working. The random part will examine in depth to find anything that should have been found in the non-random part but wasn't (say, body searches to find large metal objects making it through the x-ray screen at the airport). Without that you would be blind to defects in the system.

I think the tablet has plenty of uses, but it's the flaws that hold it back. We actually have a tablet at home and it was very useful on the couch and in various other roles. However there are a couple of features that are a must for such a device that I can't see being able to be provided easily:

1. I must be able to drop it from 6ft onto a hard surface and do zero damage

2. I must be able to pour a whole cup of coffee on it with zero ill effect

3. It must be able to be stolen with a cost to me of less than $50

These are the killer problems for me that make it an unsuitable thing for 'casual' use. If I have to treat it with kid gloves, watch it like a hawk whenever I put it down in public, assume a posture of paranoia about food and drink while I'm around it .... then it's just a failure at its main purpose.

Do you have evidence that they are?

I suspect that libraries are filling important niches today that are extremely hard to replace with technology, but their use for some purposes such as repositories for reference information is all but obsolete.

We use our local library intensely - but only to borrow about 20 books a week for our 2 year old. Otherwise I would not have gone there in 10 years.

Nice read, but this is a bit shameless:

>In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in.

Convenient, huh? Open just happens to win except for the part that strategically keeping closed makes Google gazillions of dollars. And claiming search is highly competitive? Google has more than 4 x the market share of their nearest competitor.

The nice thing about Google Calendar is it supports iCal and various other standard protocols to get your calendar out. You can even import it to Windows Calendar. So you are not limited to relying on Google for updates, just set up synching with any service or application that supports iCal and configure that application to give you alerts.

> From what I've read, the new updates default to share with "everyone" only if you have NOT modified your privacy settings in the past.

I have set all my privacy settings to very private settings in the past and my defaults are all to share with everyone. So at least for me, this is NOT the case.

> Most, but not all. When I went through, there was only one option up at the top that was not set to "Friends Only"

I'm staring at the screen in question right now. I hate Facebook and have set it to not let anybody see anything in the past. NOW THE DEFAULTS FOR ALL THE TOP ITEMS ARE SET TO SHARE WITH EVERYONE. ie. Family and Relationships, Work and Education, Posts I Create (includes photos, etc.) and About Me are all set to share with everyone.

I find it disgusting.

50% of users selecting something other than defaults tells me that Facebook did act against the vast majority of it's users wishes and choose default settings that were not appropriate. Considering a substantial percentage would have just clicked through you probably have 2/3 of people NOT wanting the changes they made. How is that ethical?