They probably don't care, per se, but their customers do. Their customers don't get all their marketing data exclusively from Google (although Google would probably like that). They want to be able to link the data from Google to data from other sources and a real name is one of the better keys (but by no means sufficient by itself) for making that connection.
The last i heard, Google doesn't sell our (specific) data to other companies, that's what Facebook does. Google is in the business of selling ads, so they want to keep our data to themselves. Do you have any evidence to suggest that Google is in fact selling our names to their customers?
No, it's pretty bad for the customer. They've paid three times for an ad to the same person. If you can't see why Google's customers would be unhappy about that then you don't understand business. This alone might be a good argument (from the customers POV) for insisting Google gets their user's real names, or at least, some unique identifier.
Have you been on the internet lately? Or rather, have you been on the internet without adblock recently? If you do, you will see the same ads over and over and over and over again. You can watch a video on some service (not just YouTube, though YouTube is certainly one of the biggest culprits) and have to watch an ad beforehand. And if you then refresh the page (or even just hit the "replay" button sometimes) as often as not you'll have to watch the exact same ad again. If there's any kind of pressure from the companies paying for the ads to not have the same ad shown to the same person twice (or three times, or a dozen times) it's certainly not having any apparent effect, even when the people selling the ad space know damn well it's the same person sitting there.
The same thing will happen on tv. You will often see the same commercial more than once during the same program, despite the fact that it's pretty certain the same people are watching both ads. You'll certainly see it more than once during the same block of programming, despite the fact that a large percentage of the same people are watching the same ad.
There's perfectly valid research showing that repeated viewings of an ad makes it "stick" better. Companies would certainly rather have more people see their ads, but to a certain extent they're also happy to have the same number of people see the ad more times.
If all Google cares about is collecting and marketing my data, why the hell should they care if i use a pseudonym or not as long as they know who i am?
In fact allowing pseudonyms and multiple accounts would only help Google in that regard. If i've got three active accounts, UserA, UserB and UserC, then Google can sell ads to me three different times, and to the company paying for the ads it will look like Google put marketing material in front of three different sets of eyes. So that's good for me (in terms of letting me use pseudonyms) good for Google (in terms of selling ads) and actually pretty neutral for the company buying the advertising (realistically, they'd probably rather have the ad shown to three different people, but gods know they never had and problem with showing the same ad to the same person over and over and over again and hoping it will stick that way.)
Re:Don't care for it, but...
on
The Next Firefox UI
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· Score: 2, Informative
Ahh, yes, i was misunderstanding you, but personally tabs in the title bar is even worse. Putting tabs above the other bars just breaks my mental image of how tabs work. Putting them in the title bar actually harms usability for me.
I've been using Chrome for... a year? Maybe longer? (How long has Chrome been out at this point anyways?) And i _still_ keep missing when i try to grab the window and move it, especially if there's another window behind and just above it that does have a title bar. Or even worse i'll try and close Chrome and actually close the window behind it because the little "x" isn't where i'm expecting it. Over a year using it and i _still_ haven't gotten used to the difference. Maybe that's because Chrome is the only program that lacks a title bar, but i don't think mixing things up even more with a title bar-less Firefox is going to help. Title bars are visually distinctive, they provide a little bit of useful information (ie the name of the program or document or web page or whatever) and they provide a reasonably big target to grab. (Even when i do remember ahead of time that Chrome doesn't have a real title bar, the area you can grab it by seems rather small and hard to hit, even though it doesn't work out to a huge difference when you count the pixels.)
And when it comes down to it, even when "restricted" to 1024 pixels of vertical space i really don't feel so desperate for more room that i need to remove things like the title bar and menu bar. If other people feel that claustrophobic and need some kind of solution that's great, but please don't force it on the rest of us. So far Firefox has been reasonable about that. Even if they're catering to people like you they still allow people like me to do what we want. Just so long as they don't copy Chrome's attitude of "we know what's best for you and you're going to do it our way whether you like it or not."
First, why does everyone say tabs on top gains you vertical screen space? The last time i tested it, moving the tab bar above the other bars didn't actually gain any space, in fact i think it even lost a pixel or two.
I've also never had any trouble figuring out that the UI elements were going to affect the tab i was currently viewing, and having them below the tab just seems stupid. My mental image is that the tabs are at the top of a folder that contains the webpage, just like the metaphor where the tab is at the top of a folder that holds documents. Inserting UI elements between the tab and the thing the folder contains just breaks the mental metaphor for me.
Well according to the publisher of Forbes the price of 3d printers has fallen by a factor of ten in the last five years, which seems to fall pretty squarely within Moore's Law and hardly seems to be "behind the curve of technological process."
Sadly i can't seem to find any exact timelines of price/performance. (Does anyone else know of one?) I don't want to just appeal to authority, but he at least actually provided figures while all you've done is trash talk the technology. So until i can find some figures to confirm or deny the claim, or unless you can refute his figures, i'm going to have to go with... you're incredibly wrong.
I noticed the same point being brought up in the recent feed page when the first story was submitted, yet the editors didn't seem to pay any attention to it. Then a day or two later a different story gets posted with the same information.
Uncharitable interpretation: The editors aren't doing their job.
Charitable interpretation #1: A large group of people voted for the first submission, while a different large group of people voted for the second submission. The editors are just being agnostic and giving us what we (collectively) ask for.
Charitable(?) interpretation #2: The editors know that climate stories get lots of discussion, so they figured two different stories on the subject means we get to have twice as much "fun" yelling at each other about it.
Well according to wikipedia about 8 million passenger cars were sold in the US in 2006. Also according to wikipedia the Prius went on sale in the US in 2001 and just hit 1 million sold in April of this year. (Compared to 2 million in the world sold by last September.)
So using some very rough math, the Prius has sold about 100,000 cars a year compared to the 8 million total sold per year, or about 1.25% of the total cars. Unfortunately i have no idea if that's a high or a low number for a single model of car. I can certainly say that a lot of those 1 million must have been sold in California given the number i see on the freeway every day. It can be kind of fun to see how often you can spot a Prius in every lane of the freeway, and bonus points if they all manage to line up across the road.
Of course i have to admit that i'm contributing to the "problem" since i decided to get a Prius after my Rav4 was totaled about two years ago.
The application of the name may be fairly recent, but the idea of social networking sites has been around forever. (In fact you could easily make a case for including Slashdot in the list on the basis of the friends/foes system and journal posts.) And very few of them have required the use of "real" names, and even fewer of those have actually tried to enforce it on a serious basis.
I've been talking about this with some friends, and we all agree that it's kind of odd. However we've come up with two reasonable scenarios.
1: Nintendo is lying and it's really just a timed exclusive.
2: Nintendo is planning on using these games for various promotions. They'll be available as prizes for various contests, as a reward for a certain number of Nintendo Club points, etc. That wouldn't technically break their promise not to make them available for sale on the eShop, so this seems like the most likely option to me.
Hmm, i said "price" or "price cut" six times and "price point" once. That one usage so offended you that you immediately had to respond and complain about my grammar, and i'm the pompous idiot?
Hmmm, according to the Department of Transportation the average person drives 13k miles a year. (I assume that's out of reported drivers, not averaged over everyone in the country.)
I think that cars that get poor but horrible mileage in the US are around the 20-25 mpg range. Currently a Prius gets 45-50mpg, and the new standards will push the average up to 55, so that seems to fit in with figure of reducing gas consumption by 40%.
But let's go with the slightly simpler figured of comparing 25mpg to 50mpg, a reduction of 50%. 13k miles at 25 mpg means 520 gallons a year. Currently average gas prices are a little over $3.50. So assuming prices don't go down significantly, someone who switches to a 50mpg car and only uses 260 gallons a year will save $910 a year. So if that car cost $2-4k more then it would take them 2.2-4.4 years to make up the difference in price. So forcing people to buy more efficient cars may not really be that much of a financial burden in the long run.
That is of course assuming that the $2-4k difference accounts pretty exactly for the hybrid system and that your could pop such a system into any other kind of car for the same price. I'm sure reality is more complicated than that, but like most other tech i expect hybrid systems (and other forms of improving mileage) will get cheaper as we produce more of them and invest more in research.
Sorry, when i made the submission thursday morning that page was freely available, i didn't realize it was going to get moved behind a paywall less than 24 hours later.
However here's an alternate source from Bloomberg with most of the same details. And one from cnet.
As one of those early adopters, i have to say that i knew what i was getting into when i chose to wait in line to get my hands on a 3DS the first day. Anyone who does so without considering the possibility of an initially slow release schedule and possible price cuts is a fool. (Not to mention first run hardware bugs and in rare cases the possibility that the device will bomb in the market completely and be discontinued.)
And i, like many other people, was expecting that Nintendo was going to have to cut prices before the holiday season in order to compete effectively with the unexpectedly cheap Playstation Vita.
However i do have to admit that i wasn't expecting the price cuts to be this deep and this early. Maybe $250 was a little high, and $170 certainly doesn't seem like an unreasonable point for competing against the $250/$300 Vita, but it seems like perhaps two separate price cuts would have been in order. One down to $200 or $210 now, and then another price cut announced right before the release of the Vita.
But before too many other early adopters start complaining about how they're getting ripped off, remember that Sony had some pretty tough times in the early months (years?) of the PS3 launch, and at the time people were lambasting them for not cutting the price of the PS3. So which do you want? A company that responds when market conditions seem to warrant it, or one that sticks to the initial price point come hell or high water? (And all the trolls going on about how this means Nintendo is clearly doomed, note that Sony did eventually recover from those early problems. Nintendo certainly isn't out of the game yet.)
The abbreviated list Ars Technica is quoting is straight from Nintendo, so i don't think anyone knows what the full list will end up being. However i'm amused by the number of people who thought that pointing you at Wikipedia's complete list of 3DS games was somehow appropriate =P
The Jobs/MW measure isn't useless, but it's not very useful by itself. Wages per MW is a better figure, and as you say you need to know $/MW in order to determine efficiency. However given an equal $/MW value it's perfectly reasonable to prefer a project that has a higher Jobs/MW or Wages/MW value. If the total cost is the same i'd rather have that money going towards people than towards materials. Presuming there's no offshoring involved (which doesn't seem like it would be the case with installation and maintenance of solar panels) money spent on jobs will go directly towards my local community and thus in the long run benefit me. For money spent on materials, some of it will go towards the local community, but most of it will go to who knows where. Not to mention that when talking about the other big competitors for the production of electricity, some of the money spent on materials will be literally burned up and then make it's way into the environment and possibly your lungs.
Personally i think there are also cases where a small inefficiency in $/MW might be acceptable in exchange for a higher Jobs or Wages/MW ratio, but that's certainly a case that can be argued either way.
And not just reboots! You know how some summers we get two movies about an asteroid crashing into the earth, and another year we get two movies about volcanoes?
Did you realize that next summer there are twodifferent Snow White movies coming out?
Yes, you can see where this is going. It's a little more difficult in this case because of trademark issues, but i'm sure the movie industry will find a way! They could always license something like "Soon I Will Be Invincible". The book is an awesome deconstruction of superhero tropes, but that doesn't mean it can't be misused by the movie industry! And in cases where there aren't already direct parodies they can just create their own version!
2013: "Superman: The Reboot" vs "CoreFire"
2014: "Batman: The Reboot" vs "Blackwolf"
2015: "Iron Man: The Reboot" vs "Armor Guy"
2016: "The Avengers: The Reboot" vs "The Champions"
2017: "Spider-Man: The Reboot 2" vs "Beetle-Boy"
How much of that -1 trash is by Anonymous Cowards, something that wouldn't show up on G+ even if pseudonyms were allowed? Anyone who acts like the ACs do here will quickly get their account suspended by Google. Sure, the really dedicated spammers and trolls will then just create another new account, but requiring something that looks like a "real" name isn't going to stop that. "John Smith" can spam and troll just as easily as "IDidUrMom37" or "BuyReplicaWatchesNow".
And who's to say Google can't or shouldn't implement filters? I think filters would end up being necessary anyways, both because of the continual supply of new spammer/troll accounts and due to people who use real and verified names but who are still assholes in real life.
Other people have pointed out that what's important is communicating with people who share your interests, not knowing the real identities of the people your communicating with, but here's some facts to go with the theory.
How many of those sites require or even encourage the public use of real names? I don't know exactly myself, but i do know that it is _far_ from 100%. In fact i'm guessing that social networking sites that require real identities are actually in the minority. I've been using social networking sites since 2000 (yes, they did exist before Facebook made the term popular) and Facebook is the only one i ever used before G+ came along that even attempted to make me use a real name.
Exactly what you said, but also the fact that G+ is in Beta right now. The idea that users shouldn't request changes they want is ludicrous at the best of times, but when a service is in limited trials to the public explicitly for the purpose of trial and feedback suggesting that people shouldn't actually give feedback about the service is especially dumb.
"As for second place, as far as the hardcore market is concerned, I'd say PS3 is a strong contender for that position"
As far as the hardcore market is concerned (at least the hardcore console market anyways) the PS3 is a strong contender for _first_ place, along with the 360.
If you're going to restrict things down to the hardcore market the Wii hasn't clearly won anything. I own a Wii, i'm quite happy with it, but i'm not going to pretend it's leading the hardcore charge. The Wii has some great hardcore games you can't get anywhere else, but it certainly doesn't have all or even most of the hardcore games. (And apparently given the recent debacle over Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower, the Wii has some great hardcore games that you can't even get on the Wii itself.)
You're mostly right, but the timeline is important.
From an article about the offer: "Robert Van Nest, Google's attorney, said yesterday at a hearing in federal court in San Francisco that the proposed $100 million three-year "all-in" deal in 2006 was for a technology partnership to jointly build Android, rather than for just a patent license."
The quote praising Android/Google is from late 2007. So Sun offered a license for Java, Google considered it but then said no thanks, we'll build our own, and then Sun's CEO praised them for their work. That strongly implies that Sun (or at least the CEO) didn't see anything wrong with Google doing their own clean room implementation, especially since they'd offered a license for Java _before_ that.
It's a good thing they're forcing people to use real names in order to prevent abuse of the system!
...wait, you mean it's _not_ stopping people determined to exploit the system or make a nuisance of themselves, it's just harming the people interested in maintaining a long term presence on G+? Say it ain't so!
Slashdot Mirror
They probably don't care, per se, but their customers do. Their customers don't get all their marketing data exclusively from Google (although Google would probably like that). They want to be able to link the data from Google to data from other sources and a real name is one of the better keys (but by no means sufficient by itself) for making that connection.
The last i heard, Google doesn't sell our (specific) data to other companies, that's what Facebook does. Google is in the business of selling ads, so they want to keep our data to themselves. Do you have any evidence to suggest that Google is in fact selling our names to their customers?
No, it's pretty bad for the customer. They've paid three times for an ad to the same person. If you can't see why Google's customers would be unhappy about that then you don't understand business. This alone might be a good argument (from the customers POV) for insisting Google gets their user's real names, or at least, some unique identifier.
Have you been on the internet lately? Or rather, have you been on the internet without adblock recently? If you do, you will see the same ads over and over and over and over again. You can watch a video on some service (not just YouTube, though YouTube is certainly one of the biggest culprits) and have to watch an ad beforehand. And if you then refresh the page (or even just hit the "replay" button sometimes) as often as not you'll have to watch the exact same ad again. If there's any kind of pressure from the companies paying for the ads to not have the same ad shown to the same person twice (or three times, or a dozen times) it's certainly not having any apparent effect, even when the people selling the ad space know damn well it's the same person sitting there.
The same thing will happen on tv. You will often see the same commercial more than once during the same program, despite the fact that it's pretty certain the same people are watching both ads. You'll certainly see it more than once during the same block of programming, despite the fact that a large percentage of the same people are watching the same ad.
There's perfectly valid research showing that repeated viewings of an ad makes it "stick" better. Companies would certainly rather have more people see their ads, but to a certain extent they're also happy to have the same number of people see the ad more times.
If all Google cares about is collecting and marketing my data, why the hell should they care if i use a pseudonym or not as long as they know who i am?
In fact allowing pseudonyms and multiple accounts would only help Google in that regard. If i've got three active accounts, UserA, UserB and UserC, then Google can sell ads to me three different times, and to the company paying for the ads it will look like Google put marketing material in front of three different sets of eyes. So that's good for me (in terms of letting me use pseudonyms) good for Google (in terms of selling ads) and actually pretty neutral for the company buying the advertising (realistically, they'd probably rather have the ad shown to three different people, but gods know they never had and problem with showing the same ad to the same person over and over and over again and hoping it will stick that way.)
Ahh, yes, i was misunderstanding you, but personally tabs in the title bar is even worse. Putting tabs above the other bars just breaks my mental image of how tabs work. Putting them in the title bar actually harms usability for me.
I've been using Chrome for... a year? Maybe longer? (How long has Chrome been out at this point anyways?) And i _still_ keep missing when i try to grab the window and move it, especially if there's another window behind and just above it that does have a title bar. Or even worse i'll try and close Chrome and actually close the window behind it because the little "x" isn't where i'm expecting it. Over a year using it and i _still_ haven't gotten used to the difference. Maybe that's because Chrome is the only program that lacks a title bar, but i don't think mixing things up even more with a title bar-less Firefox is going to help. Title bars are visually distinctive, they provide a little bit of useful information (ie the name of the program or document or web page or whatever) and they provide a reasonably big target to grab. (Even when i do remember ahead of time that Chrome doesn't have a real title bar, the area you can grab it by seems rather small and hard to hit, even though it doesn't work out to a huge difference when you count the pixels.)
And when it comes down to it, even when "restricted" to 1024 pixels of vertical space i really don't feel so desperate for more room that i need to remove things like the title bar and menu bar. If other people feel that claustrophobic and need some kind of solution that's great, but please don't force it on the rest of us. So far Firefox has been reasonable about that. Even if they're catering to people like you they still allow people like me to do what we want. Just so long as they don't copy Chrome's attitude of "we know what's best for you and you're going to do it our way whether you like it or not."
First, why does everyone say tabs on top gains you vertical screen space? The last time i tested it, moving the tab bar above the other bars didn't actually gain any space, in fact i think it even lost a pixel or two.
I've also never had any trouble figuring out that the UI elements were going to affect the tab i was currently viewing, and having them below the tab just seems stupid. My mental image is that the tabs are at the top of a folder that contains the webpage, just like the metaphor where the tab is at the top of a folder that holds documents. Inserting UI elements between the tab and the thing the folder contains just breaks the mental metaphor for me.
Well according to the publisher of Forbes the price of 3d printers has fallen by a factor of ten in the last five years, which seems to fall pretty squarely within Moore's Law and hardly seems to be "behind the curve of technological process."
Sadly i can't seem to find any exact timelines of price/performance. (Does anyone else know of one?) I don't want to just appeal to authority, but he at least actually provided figures while all you've done is trash talk the technology. So until i can find some figures to confirm or deny the claim, or unless you can refute his figures, i'm going to have to go with... you're incredibly wrong.
Standards
Just rename it "Dice Edge"!
Oh... wait, that won't work either.
I noticed the same point being brought up in the recent feed page when the first story was submitted, yet the editors didn't seem to pay any attention to it. Then a day or two later a different story gets posted with the same information.
Uncharitable interpretation: The editors aren't doing their job.
Charitable interpretation #1: A large group of people voted for the first submission, while a different large group of people voted for the second submission. The editors are just being agnostic and giving us what we (collectively) ask for.
Charitable(?) interpretation #2: The editors know that climate stories get lots of discussion, so they figured two different stories on the subject means we get to have twice as much "fun" yelling at each other about it.
Well according to wikipedia about 8 million passenger cars were sold in the US in 2006. Also according to wikipedia the Prius went on sale in the US in 2001 and just hit 1 million sold in April of this year. (Compared to 2 million in the world sold by last September.)
So using some very rough math, the Prius has sold about 100,000 cars a year compared to the 8 million total sold per year, or about 1.25% of the total cars. Unfortunately i have no idea if that's a high or a low number for a single model of car. I can certainly say that a lot of those 1 million must have been sold in California given the number i see on the freeway every day. It can be kind of fun to see how often you can spot a Prius in every lane of the freeway, and bonus points if they all manage to line up across the road.
Of course i have to admit that i'm contributing to the "problem" since i decided to get a Prius after my Rav4 was totaled about two years ago.
Take a look at Wikipedia's list of social networking sites.
The application of the name may be fairly recent, but the idea of social networking sites has been around forever. (In fact you could easily make a case for including Slashdot in the list on the basis of the friends/foes system and journal posts.) And very few of them have required the use of "real" names, and even fewer of those have actually tried to enforce it on a serious basis.
I've been talking about this with some friends, and we all agree that it's kind of odd. However we've come up with two reasonable scenarios.
1: Nintendo is lying and it's really just a timed exclusive.
2: Nintendo is planning on using these games for various promotions. They'll be available as prizes for various contests, as a reward for a certain number of Nintendo Club points, etc. That wouldn't technically break their promise not to make them available for sale on the eShop, so this seems like the most likely option to me.
Hmm, i said "price" or "price cut" six times and "price point" once. That one usage so offended you that you immediately had to respond and complain about my grammar, and i'm the pompous idiot?
Hmmm, according to the Department of Transportation the average person drives 13k miles a year. (I assume that's out of reported drivers, not averaged over everyone in the country.)
I think that cars that get poor but horrible mileage in the US are around the 20-25 mpg range. Currently a Prius gets 45-50mpg, and the new standards will push the average up to 55, so that seems to fit in with figure of reducing gas consumption by 40%.
But let's go with the slightly simpler figured of comparing 25mpg to 50mpg, a reduction of 50%. 13k miles at 25 mpg means 520 gallons a year. Currently average gas prices are a little over $3.50. So assuming prices don't go down significantly, someone who switches to a 50mpg car and only uses 260 gallons a year will save $910 a year. So if that car cost $2-4k more then it would take them 2.2-4.4 years to make up the difference in price. So forcing people to buy more efficient cars may not really be that much of a financial burden in the long run.
That is of course assuming that the $2-4k difference accounts pretty exactly for the hybrid system and that your could pop such a system into any other kind of car for the same price. I'm sure reality is more complicated than that, but like most other tech i expect hybrid systems (and other forms of improving mileage) will get cheaper as we produce more of them and invest more in research.
Sorry, when i made the submission thursday morning that page was freely available, i didn't realize it was going to get moved behind a paywall less than 24 hours later.
However here's an alternate source from Bloomberg with most of the same details. And one from cnet.
As one of those early adopters, i have to say that i knew what i was getting into when i chose to wait in line to get my hands on a 3DS the first day. Anyone who does so without considering the possibility of an initially slow release schedule and possible price cuts is a fool. (Not to mention first run hardware bugs and in rare cases the possibility that the device will bomb in the market completely and be discontinued.)
And i, like many other people, was expecting that Nintendo was going to have to cut prices before the holiday season in order to compete effectively with the unexpectedly cheap Playstation Vita.
However i do have to admit that i wasn't expecting the price cuts to be this deep and this early. Maybe $250 was a little high, and $170 certainly doesn't seem like an unreasonable point for competing against the $250/$300 Vita, but it seems like perhaps two separate price cuts would have been in order. One down to $200 or $210 now, and then another price cut announced right before the release of the Vita.
But before too many other early adopters start complaining about how they're getting ripped off, remember that Sony had some pretty tough times in the early months (years?) of the PS3 launch, and at the time people were lambasting them for not cutting the price of the PS3. So which do you want? A company that responds when market conditions seem to warrant it, or one that sticks to the initial price point come hell or high water? (And all the trolls going on about how this means Nintendo is clearly doomed, note that Sony did eventually recover from those early problems. Nintendo certainly isn't out of the game yet.)
The abbreviated list Ars Technica is quoting is straight from Nintendo, so i don't think anyone knows what the full list will end up being. However i'm amused by the number of people who thought that pointing you at Wikipedia's complete list of 3DS games was somehow appropriate =P
The Jobs/MW measure isn't useless, but it's not very useful by itself. Wages per MW is a better figure, and as you say you need to know $/MW in order to determine efficiency. However given an equal $/MW value it's perfectly reasonable to prefer a project that has a higher Jobs/MW or Wages/MW value. If the total cost is the same i'd rather have that money going towards people than towards materials. Presuming there's no offshoring involved (which doesn't seem like it would be the case with installation and maintenance of solar panels) money spent on jobs will go directly towards my local community and thus in the long run benefit me. For money spent on materials, some of it will go towards the local community, but most of it will go to who knows where. Not to mention that when talking about the other big competitors for the production of electricity, some of the money spent on materials will be literally burned up and then make it's way into the environment and possibly your lungs.
Personally i think there are also cases where a small inefficiency in $/MW might be acceptable in exchange for a higher Jobs or Wages/MW ratio, but that's certainly a case that can be argued either way.
And not just reboots! You know how some summers we get two movies about an asteroid crashing into the earth, and another year we get two movies about volcanoes?
Did you realize that next summer there are two different Snow White movies coming out?
Yes, you can see where this is going. It's a little more difficult in this case because of trademark issues, but i'm sure the movie industry will find a way! They could always license something like "Soon I Will Be Invincible". The book is an awesome deconstruction of superhero tropes, but that doesn't mean it can't be misused by the movie industry! And in cases where there aren't already direct parodies they can just create their own version!
2013: "Superman: The Reboot" vs "CoreFire"
2014: "Batman: The Reboot" vs "Blackwolf"
2015: "Iron Man: The Reboot" vs "Armor Guy"
2016: "The Avengers: The Reboot" vs "The Champions"
2017: "Spider-Man: The Reboot 2" vs "Beetle-Boy"
And etc, etc, etc.
Also, and more appropriately, Vernor Vinge's True Names.
How much of that -1 trash is by Anonymous Cowards, something that wouldn't show up on G+ even if pseudonyms were allowed? Anyone who acts like the ACs do here will quickly get their account suspended by Google. Sure, the really dedicated spammers and trolls will then just create another new account, but requiring something that looks like a "real" name isn't going to stop that. "John Smith" can spam and troll just as easily as "IDidUrMom37" or "BuyReplicaWatchesNow".
And who's to say Google can't or shouldn't implement filters? I think filters would end up being necessary anyways, both because of the continual supply of new spammer/troll accounts and due to people who use real and verified names but who are still assholes in real life.
Other people have pointed out that what's important is communicating with people who share your interests, not knowing the real identities of the people your communicating with, but here's some facts to go with the theory.
Wikipedia's List of social networking website
How many of those sites require or even encourage the public use of real names? I don't know exactly myself, but i do know that it is _far_ from 100%. In fact i'm guessing that social networking sites that require real identities are actually in the minority. I've been using social networking sites since 2000 (yes, they did exist before Facebook made the term popular) and Facebook is the only one i ever used before G+ came along that even attempted to make me use a real name.
Exactly what you said, but also the fact that G+ is in Beta right now. The idea that users shouldn't request changes they want is ludicrous at the best of times, but when a service is in limited trials to the public explicitly for the purpose of trial and feedback suggesting that people shouldn't actually give feedback about the service is especially dumb.
"As for second place, as far as the hardcore market is concerned, I'd say PS3 is a strong contender for that position"
As far as the hardcore market is concerned (at least the hardcore console market anyways) the PS3 is a strong contender for _first_ place, along with the 360.
If you're going to restrict things down to the hardcore market the Wii hasn't clearly won anything. I own a Wii, i'm quite happy with it, but i'm not going to pretend it's leading the hardcore charge. The Wii has some great hardcore games you can't get anywhere else, but it certainly doesn't have all or even most of the hardcore games. (And apparently given the recent debacle over Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower, the Wii has some great hardcore games that you can't even get on the Wii itself.)
You're mostly right, but the timeline is important.
From an article about the offer: "Robert Van Nest, Google's attorney, said yesterday at a hearing in federal court in San Francisco that the proposed $100 million three-year "all-in" deal in 2006 was for a technology partnership to jointly build Android, rather than for just a patent license."
The quote praising Android/Google is from late 2007. So Sun offered a license for Java, Google considered it but then said no thanks, we'll build our own, and then Sun's CEO praised them for their work. That strongly implies that Sun (or at least the CEO) didn't see anything wrong with Google doing their own clean room implementation, especially since they'd offered a license for Java _before_ that.
It's a good thing they're forcing people to use real names in order to prevent abuse of the system!
...wait, you mean it's _not_ stopping people determined to exploit the system or make a nuisance of themselves, it's just harming the people interested in maintaining a long term presence on G+? Say it ain't so!