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Google's core business is advertising. Google likes to do stuff with the data that passes through its systems. Google has explicitly and pro-actively taken sides in fight against copyright violations instead of remaining a neutral party.

And they've been less than steadfast on Net Neutrality, which is a big red flag for a company that wants to be an ISP.

This is not about Google being "evil", but I do not want a company with that mindset and those interests to be my ISP. It's going to be very tough, if not impossible to separate those.

I know this is already common practice in the US, with many of the major (cable) ISP's being part of companies that having a direct stake in copyright exploitation, advertising etcetera.

So ask yourself: how's that working out for you so far? Would Google really be any better?

Fortunately, we live in a democracy first and the free market is just a tool, not our form of government.

In a democracy, the people hold the power through their votes, not consumers through their (very unevenly distributed) wallets. Those are very different choices made for very different reasons.

Sounds healthy. I'm certainly not alone in being a city person who wouldn't want to live anywhere that doesn't have everything in walking/cycling distance, good public transport and all the other features of a dense urban setting.

I wondered how long SV could continue to bitch about talent shortage whilst ignoring such a major portion of the population. Especially young and ambitious talent tends to gravitate towards the lifestyle of major cities, and has been for generations. Why would tech be an exception?

I'm guessing a lot of young people currently employed in Silicon Valley consider living there a (minor) sacrifice rather than a perk.

It all depends on what your standards are. The working conditions at Amazon warehouses as reported repeatedly by the press would be completely illegal in most Western countries outside the US.

If people accept it without complaining, it works exactly as intended.

Let's not assume the people implementing these measures are complete morons. There's power to be gained and money to be made from a submissive, unquestioning people.

Setting up a huge collection of straw men (all geeks are fanboyz), and then beating your own chest at not being one of them. Seriously?

Every time when people get to rule their own kingdom and get to decide what's Right(TM) and Wrong(TM) this is what happens.

It doesn't matter if it's informative, useful or, oh horror of horrors, entertaining, all that matters is that it is Right(TM) or Wrong(TM) in the eyes of those high on their power trip, and there is no point in debating it.

And no Jeff, most communities don't just tend towards increased strictness over time, they tend towards death and abandonment, no matter how big they were at the height of their popularity. Stifling the natural development of a community because it doesn't match your "vision" rarely works out well, both online and IRL.

The primary target audience for hacker-to-hacker Postgres evangelism is MySQL users. Because let's face it, the choice for DBs like Oracle is usually made upstairs, and for very different reasons.

So why do Postgres advocates insist on dissing MySQL with false and misleading arguments? The usual target is some default settings, when obviously there are three kinds of MySQL users: the ones that actually have a reason to want less strictness, the ones that know how and when to change the settings, and the ones that just don't give a fuck.

You're not going to convince the latter until you are #1, and you're insulting the intelligence of the first two, whilst also making them question whether the arguments in favor of Postgres are actually true, since you're not being particularly honest in your criticism of MySQL.

And you're wondering why Postgres doesn't get any more love?

Most MySQL users are well aware that Postgres is technically a better DB. They mostly (right or wrong) feel MySQL serves their needs sufficiently, and are not particularly attracted to an open source community with such a douchy attitude.

If even Oracle doesn't scare people of sufficiently to jump ship and switch to a better, free and open database, you've got a serious image problem. Stop blaming it on other people's "stupidity".

Wuala, http://www.wuala.com (by LaCie) deliberately keeps it's storage out of the US and inside Europe.

I find this kind of odd. I wouldn't store anything valuable on my own systems either unless I held the encryption key.

When it comes to accidental data loss, I trust cloud services a lot more than my own little server. Ditto as far as security is concerned (in that I assume neither of them are safe from being compromised).

If you encrypt it yourself, Dropbox is an excellent place to store anything valuable. Just make sure it's not the only place you store it.

Some copywriter at Apple is going to have lot of fun with this. Expect the quotes from the judge to appear prominently.

I wouldn't be to happy about this part of the verdict if I were Samsung.

So Microsoft is peeking into private folders, and judging the contents based on political and religious values not inscribed in any law? And completely terminates all Microsoft service to anyone found wanting to obey by these fundamentalist directives?

The warning should not be "watch what you store on SkyDrive", the warning should be "stay the hell away from Microsoft".

If you are shocked by the "blatant manipulation of the mob", the advertising you see all around you every day, everywhere must put you in a permanent state of catatonia.

How come the combination of internet and activism is suddenly "dangerous", and not the pervasive and misleading propaganda we've been subjected to for generations?

Shell can no longer drown out the opposition with millions of dollars and now it's a problem?

So why are pro-copyright judges never expected to keep their bias a secret?

Are in fact allowed to not just voice an opinion, but to actually be activists and or paid lobbyist for the copyright industry, and still preside over copyright related cases.

This is a one way street, and the judge has accurately formulated why many think this is the case. We have met the enemy of our freedom and our judicial system.

Every time someone comes up it with a "cool" way to deploy via Git, it turns out their definition of "deployment" is nothing more than dumping something on a server. It completely ignores every aspect of deployment other than putting the files somewhere else, which is 5% of the work and 1% of the complexity of deployment.

That's not even a sufficient professional scenario for anything but the simplest of non-essential website. Hell, this won't even do for the simplest of WordPress sites.

BTW, who on earth still uses FTP?

Sure. I have a Google+ account, two even, because they are both attached to my private and business Google accounts. Same goes for almost everyone I know, they all have at least one Google+ account.

Only nobody I know, ever, ever uses Google+.

I'm guessing many visits I make to Google applications whilst logged in count as Google+ usage. In reality, I haven't used it since after the first month or two, and that is pretty much reflected by the people around me.

After the whole IPv6 story, I'm surprised the author ignores the political dimension of designing a new protocol. As Mitch Kapor said "Architecture is Politics". It's not just about what solution is best from a technological perspective, it's about what we want our future to look like.

The internet has become way more important than back when these protocols first became standard, and every time a protocol or standard is up for debate, political and commercial forces try to influence it in their favor. Some of the concepts they tried to shove into IPv6 were downright evil, and would have killed the internet as we know it. Personally, I'm relieved all that is left is a small, un-sexy improvement which albeit slowly, will eventually spread and solve the only really critical problem we have with IPv4.

I really dread subjecting HTTP to that process. Although I fully agree with the author's critique of cookies for instance, the idea of replacing them with something "better" frankly scares the crap out of me. Especially when the word "identity" is being used. You just know what kind of suggestions some powerful parties will come up with if you open this up for debate, and fighting that will take up all of the energy that should be put towards improving what we already have.

As techies we should learn to accept design flaws and slow adoption and look at the bigger picture of the social and political impact of technology: HTTP may be flawed, but things could be way, way worse.

Although I agree with you on principle, most Moroccans in Europe identify as Moroccan first and French/Dutch/Belgian second.

Also, since they are not "allowed" to disavow their Moroccan nationality, virtually all Moroccans remain Moroccan, even in later generations.

I have a problem with the constant "blaming the tools" in this article. Blindly relying on the framework is one of the major causes of security issues. Exploits will always be one step ahead of the frameworks, blaming the tools breeds the wrong king of mindset when it comes to security.

Yeah, it's really annoying that those foreigners don't clearly state that something doesn't take place in the US.

Or isn't that what you actually meant?

Funny enough, I came here to argue more or less the opposite.

In many countries, the standard payment problems have been largely solved locally, at least for the local markets. In the Netherlands, a wide selection of payment providers will give you the ability to receive payment through virtually any method.

Merchant accounts are easy to get, and the most popular local form of payment, iDeal (direct "my bank to your bank" payment), is supported by all banks and can be easily implemented without the need for any payment provider. The vast majority of all only transactions in NL go through iDeal.

Most payment providers also offer multi-currency support, but it's only a very small part of the market that needs that. The use of PayPal is very rare and becoming rarer by the day. It's about as old school as seeing a "made for Netscape" button on a website.

There's only one area where PayPal is easier and more accessible, and that is very low budget private stuff like donations on a small software project. But given the constant horror stories about PayPal, any solution that targets that market effectively will wipe PayPal away in a matter of months. And then PayPal will be history in the Netherlands.

Am I the only one who thinks that even though it made for a nice source of anecdotes and mystique, this part of Jobs' influence on Apple was actually not particularly relevant to Apple's success? Not everything he did was perfect.

I know some may consider it blasphemy, but I'm hoping certain aspects of Apple will improve now Jobs is gone, especially in the realm of open and honest communication.

Nobody killed Digg. Digg committed suicide by telling it's original, loyal user base to go fuck themselves in it's quest for more money and a broader audience. Digg became too greedy.

But it was pretty obvious much earlier on that Digg had zero respect for its users. In many ways, Digg had a very old school broadcast attitude: the users were merely part of the product, only the advertisers mattered.

One hour still beats same day delivery on every front except having to put on pants and leave the house. People for whom that isn't a barrier form a considerable market (albeit that they may be underrepresented on HN...)

But also, same day delivery is logistically near impossible and quite expensive in exactly those cities for exactly the same reasons. The density doesn't make them car friendly, and certainly not delivery van friendly.

I suspect it's partially in American thing. In most European cities, the shops are around the corner. There's little effort involved, so Amazon doesn't sufficiently offset the advantages of instant gratification and being able to physically see stuff to make such a dramatic impact. Also, the different European attitude towards regulation has resulted in many cities actively protecting the kind of independent stores that make local shopping different from anonymous shopping malls full of the same franchises.

There are plenty of areas in which brick-and-mortar shops will take a hit from online competitors, but I suspect the impact in Europe will be considerably smaller than in the land of strip malls and Wal-Marts, where commercial efficiency has already trumped the "user experience", and Amazon is simply a better option with few disadvantages.

I think most people get that reference (and I don't know shit about poetry).

It just makes it all the more confusing and misplaced, so I'm guessing the one person that doesn't get it was the author...

Methinks there's a big difference between private crime and public corruption.

Besides, Britain is not falling apart because of the Barclays scandal, and unlike Greece, it isn't the entire country that is in on the scam.

Well, that's more or less how it works. The vacation bonus of 8% percent of your salary is reserved each month, it's just common to pay out at the start of the summer.

But paying out once a year is the legal minimum, you can agree otherwise. At my previous job, we switched to twice a year at the request of the snowboarders that needed the money for the winter vacation...

It's a cheap challenge, because he knows it will never be answered.

He'll be lucky if the DOJ gives some generic statement about the quality of justice in the US, but most likely it will be ignored completely. Even acknowledging this challenge would be stepping into a minefield, and the DOJ is not that stupid.

Funny enough this suggest that the judge understands the subtleties of design better than the tech-heads at Engadget, who like so many others regularly claim competing products match the design quality of Apple products.

It always irks me when people, especially professional critics and reviewers, call it a matter of taste just because they can't spot the difference. It isn't. Personal preference is a matter of taste, but the difference in design quality between Samsung (or HTC, or Dell, etc) and Apple is objectively observable. Just like there is a clear difference between a TV set designed by Samsung and one by Bang & Olufsen or Loewe.

(Which is exactly why I believe Apple should stop suing second rate look-alikes. If people want to buy Samsung they were never potential Apple clients in the first place, and if Apple wants that market too they should just build products for it.)