Here in the UK this kind of story comes up quite frequently - people posting "happy slapping", i.e. abusive, bullying videos online, and the stories always centre around the technology and how sick it is people are sharing this content on their phones/posting it online, very rarely does it centre on how sick it is that we live in a society where this kind of bullying is commonplace. I quite often get the feeling the people in power would be much happier to just ban such videos and go back to ignoring the problem (the way the schools have been doing for at least the last 30 years - hey, if we don't see it, it's not happening).
More likely they'll just get someone to write an auto-decline script for everything that's not a pre-approved government release. You're not thinking government enough.
Except it's not the search engine that's being attacked, or whose competition would benefit, but the video service. Now, I'm not one to spread conspiracy theories, but doesn't someone quite far up in their government have some media connections...?
No, GP is right. The reason we have stupid laws is because we have stupid and/or corrupt politicians. The judge in this case isn't necessarily either stupid or corrupt - quite often an astute judge who recognises a stupid law will set up a trial case (preferably by finding against someone big enough to take care of themselves like Google) which they know will almost certainly go to appeal. Once it goes to appeal, any precedent set is more binding on the lower courts. This is one of the most powerful ways in which the judiciary can use the legal system to highlight unjust laws, and I have respect for those judges who do because they take an incredible amount of flak from the man in the street who just sees a stupid decision.
That's not to say, of course, that the judge in this case wasn't just stupid and/or corrupt (there's definitely a non-zero chance of that), GP is just advocating that we perhaps, you know, get all the facts before decrying him. Generally the wording of the judge's decision will show his intent, if he speaks a lot about being bound by the letter of the law then he's doing this to get the law discussed and perhaps reconsidered. If he mainly talks about the culpability of the defendents then he's likely dumb or getting a brown envelope bonus in this month's salary.
That's quite simple - enrichment of society as a whole. If we held these companies accountable to such a huge degree, society would suffer the loss of tools which currently enrich us all, since it would be economically unfeasible. At the very least it would severely limit the content that could be shared to the point that it would be useless.
Imagine you're a fledgling movie maker trying to get your work recognised via Youtube, can you seriously be expected to get the written permission of everyone at, say, a train station or a busy market place where you're filming? What if you're filming a documentary exposing corruption in a war torn part of the world, not only would it be impractical, it might even be dangerous for the people involved to identify themselves through consent. Similarly for whistleblowers against high power corporations/governments.
The only sensible approach is to have opt-out rather than opt-in, allow the content (so long as it's not overtly criminal) and allow the people involved to reject and have it removed (with certain checks and balances in place to ensure that content in the public's interest still gets through).
What do you expect? Someone at Google has to watch and individually approve each and every video ever posted? How is that respecting the rights of the individual? Not only is it impractically expensive, it would be violating the right to free speech that many countries allow.
While I largely agree with you, I've seen this same statement a few times in this thread now and I have to say, I'm not sure the right to free speech is the same as the right to use a particular technology to enable that free speech (especially when other means are available - maybe the point could be stretched to say someone who has no other way of expressing their opinion would be covered). By that logic ANY website that doesn't allow me to post whatever I damn well like on their pages would be suppressing my right to free speech (and there are many, many websites who already do pre-authorisation on content before they allow it to appear on their sites).
It doesn't excuse the fact that the outcome of this case is absurd, but we need to argue the right points or we end up diluting something as powerful as free speech.
I wonder if it's not just that people (mostly, there are always a few moral crusader exceptions) just become desensitised to their outbursts and so each one has to be more rabid than the last to have any impact. They probably start out reasonably enough, saying maybe we could use this medium as a forum for making education fun, or something, and by the end they're storming developers' headquarters with flaming torches and pitchforks.
Considering the massive hype around this game, I'd be surprised if it didn't generate huge sales. Better to watch the sales of the slew of "me-too" games that are bound to follow, as these will be a better indicator of whether people actually enjoyed the experience or just bought into the hype.
I have to say, from the few videos I've seen (and they're now running ads on the TV, the before the watershed version showing a peaceful resolution to an in-game situation, the post watershed not so much) it just looks like a Dragon's Lair type affair with better graphics, which doesn't really appeal to me. I'm all for an engaging storyline but I have to feel that my investment in it is more than making random A-B choices at various intersections and retrying until I get the right combination. That's probably massively unfair, as I said I've only watched the videos online, but it's not something I'd be rushing out to buy.
If you contrast, for example, the Romance in FF-10 with say the potential romance between Morrigan and the main-character in Dragon Age Origins, you can't help but conclude that the latter is more mature. Not primarily because there's sex (there is, but it's not the main focus), but also because the characters behave like, you know, ADULTS with adult issues, stuff you'd NEVER see in Final Fantasy.
I can't comment on FF10, but take away the sex in DA:O and it's certainly not what I would call a good example of adult relationships. Characters who only "like" you if you do sidequests for them and bring them a ton a presents? Yes, a cynic might say that's true enough but it doesn't go any way towards describing the true complexities of adult relationships. Without the sexual connotations the relationships here are exactly how you would expect kids to behave - I'll only be your friend if you buy me those new shoes, or I won't be your friend if you talk to her. And the fact that you can only progress these relationships by certain staged points after big in-game set pieces just makes the whole thing feel even more stilted.
Aside from that, and apart from two or three key points where a character might leave your party if you made the wrong choice at point X in the game, the only affect the character's feelings towards you have on gameplay is a new skill boost when they reach a certain level. There's no feeling that a character who loves you deeply will throw themselves in the line of danger to protect you, nor will a character who despises you refuse to offer aid, preferring to save their own skin if you're in danger, which renders the whole thing just another stat levelling exercise.
Don't get me wrong, I love DA:O; have already played it through as a rogue and a warrior and looking at maging it next, but for me the relationships are just something you have to micro-manage to get the most out of your characters, they don't add to the tapestry of the story in any significant way (Morrigan's being the most significant, but as far as I can tell the only difference to the storyline is a scripted one where you get to choose the outcome regardless of whether she likes you or not), if anything they detract from it.
Exactly right, it doesn't matter how much you argue as a peon, if the directors don't like having to remember passwords then you're stuck. Add to that the fact that governments are massive, sprawling entities, where no one department has clear visibility of what others are doing, and you end up in the situation where the highly skilled IT department is bypassed by the clueless manager who gets in a clueless contractor to throw up a website.
This is modded funny, and it is, but it's also most likely true. Having been in the same situation with a prominent UK gov site I can confirm that it was frequently the practise to put unpublished URLs live without authentication so that the high-ups could access them (we had dev and test environments but their firewalls were locked down and their IT guys wouldn't open them up, they were loathe to open them even for the people who needed them for development and testing!).
Eventually after the URLs escaped and got in front of the wrong people a few times, they consented to basic authentication, and then proceeded to email around the username and password (they wouldn't let us create them unique ones!) to everyone so they, too escaped. We'd have to change the authentication every 3-4 weeks and suffer the high-ups sending around condescending emails telling everyone not to share the login details, even though we all knew it was them letting them slip.
For me it's about enhancing the feeling of immersion. The story doesn't have to be revolutionary (and that's just as well, because they're almost always not), it just has to be enough to encourage suspension of disbelief and give some level of empathy with the character(s). You're never going to get a story that comes close to the best of the written word because the two media are playing to their own strengths. In a game, you have to have the "game" parts which obviously detract from the story parts - Hamlet wouldn't be so good if five out of every six pages was just dedicated to Hamlet beating waves of enemies in sword combat, or exploring locations for health/ammo pickups.
Bioshock did this really well, IMHO - sure the main plot was nothing we've not seen before, but that's not where the feeling of immersion came from. It was more from the information you discover and piece together on your own, exploring and finding journals, tracking the journeys of characters you never actually meet in the game, discovering the origins of the characters you do fight/help in the game, it made the game world feel more real (dispite the slightly silly delivery mechanism of tape recordings dotted everywhere, which made if feel like these people experimenting with prototype tweeting). I know people who played through the game as a straight FPS without exploring this rich back story, without even realising it was there, and that's fine if the FPS experience is all you're after, but for people who want to feel a bit more involved with the game there was a much deeper experience to be had.
A lot of early games are actually MORE fun with "god mode" or "infinite lives" because the lives element was included only to suck quarters into an arcade machine. Bubble Bobble for example, gives almost the same feeling of achievement for completing it with infinite lives as without.
Fun as the game is regardless of lives, I'm not sure anything beats the feeling of being a teenager and beating the game on a single 10 pence playthrough (and having it loop after level 100 IIRC, so you get to do it all again). Not to mention the kudos from fellow arcade dwellers:)
That's true - not everyone likes the changes on/. but at least if you choose to turn off the JavaScript wizziness it still works just fine (well, it still works just as it did before:)), and it's also true that a lot of sites get this part horribly wrong and fail to work without JavaScript/Flash and really they should be fixed. Unfortunately, that's an empty argument to a user who just wants a site to work on his phone.
We all know Apple bans Flash because it would allow third party apps that don't have to forfeit 30% of revenue to Apple. Plain and simple. All other explanations are just someone's absurd mental gymnastics to justify Apple's stupid and shortsighted iPhone OS policies.
People keep talking like the appstore is hugely profitable for Apple: Do the math, it's quite likely not. I'm not saying it's irrelevant but hardware sales dwarf the appstore revenue by such a wide margin that the appstore just cannot be anything but an additional business for Apple.
I might accept your argument if you exchange profit for the lock-in angle: Apple wants native apps so people "can't" move to other platforms.
Tell me this, how many iPhone ads have you seen lately explaining how wonderful the hardware is? Now how many have you seen explaining how wonderful the apps are? YMMV but I can say that for at least a couple of years the adverts I've seen have been exclusively about the apps available (aside from the introduction of 3G, but even then it was all about how you can do stuff with the apps faster) - the "there's an app for that" tagline is the major part of their marketing. If the software is a major selling point that drives the hardware sales then it's slightly disingenuous to say that the software doesn't generate the money but the hardware does, because that fails to take into account how much less hardware they'd sell without the apps to drive it. There's much more to this than a pound for pound (or dollar for dollar) comparison of sales figures.
Hover, like any tool, can be used poorly. It can also be used well. The best example is a sufficiently complex site with thousands of pages of content, where hover can provide a convenient shortcut to pages buried in the site hierarchy without cluttering up the navigation. So long as you provide a non-hover equivalent to click through to the same content (e.g. a site map or hierarchical landing pages) then hover enhances the user experience.
I'm not sure if you're new here, or to the web in general, but people do whine about IE, at great length, all the time, and of course it's fully justified - personally it's one of the great banes of my life, so I know whereof I speak. The problem is that, while so many users are stuck with IE, we have little choice but to develop for it, and of course any technology which is then incompatible, or fails to use the same legacy technologies we have to implement for IE, creates an extra overhead which it is hard to justify to the customer. I'm sure almost all developers would prefer to be working exclusively with the new bleeding edge technology and standards, unfortunately few of us have the privileged ability to turn away users and still make money.
In an ideal world I'm sure we'd all be supporting that viewpoint. Unfortunately we're never going to be able to move to a HTML5/no-flash world while we have to support the last few versions of IE (and particularly IE6), and companies are not going to want to double their spend to provide two solutions, one for modern browsers/phones and one for IE6. The cold harsh reality is they'll likely say, in light of the fact that a tiny minority of their visitors are on iPhone, they're the ones who will not be supported. Apple's stance, therefore, whether justified or not, only hurts their users - flash is not going to die out on desktops just because a minority smartphone doesn't support it. This will continue to be the case at least until IE6 is dead (and at that point we'll have to see what the adoption rate for IE9/10 is over IE7/8 to see whether it will still be an issue).
Disclaimer: my own view is that the quicker IE6 and flash both die the better, but I also have to live/develop in the real world and so know the likelihood of this happening in the short term.
Apple wouldn't be forfeiting anything because developers still want to make money off their work. No one pays money to use flash apps, and relying on advertising for revenue, especially in a recession, doesn't make anyone except the biggest players rich. Getting 70% of $1 app sales is really good if you sell 1 million copies. It's even better if it's selling well at $5.
The point is you can implement your payment model via the flash, so the user still has to pay that $1 or whatever, but instead the whole amount goes to the developer, by-passing Apple's cut.
Maybe because there's a big difference between "killing" and "giving a huge bag of money and a job and the potential to integrate the app into the google codebase", regardless of how the Register/Slashdot try and spin the story title?
If only that were true - I don't know what the situation is in the US, but over here most of the newspapers switched from investigative journalism to barely informed gossip a couple of decades ago (facts are expensive, gossip is cheap, if you want to cut your costs you just boost the noise to signal ration some more). For them to now argue that they're better than blogs because of the high quality of their journalism is laughable.
Of course, none of your examples explain what to do in the case of the possessive "its", and since the point of the sig is to help people understand the different between "its" and "it's", that would seem to be a noteworthy omission. Instead of saying, "look at its flameworthy post", I guess you would have us say "look at the flameworthy post of it"? That doesn't (sorry, does not) exactly flow.
Let's wait and see how many newspapers successfully follow that model - especially considering the ones who take the plunge and go first will suddenly lose all the influx of traffic/advertising revenue that Google was previously sending their way. If they're big players they might survive, otherwise there's a good chance they'll quickly disappear and someone else will step up to offer free news in their place.
And yes I know about the argument "online does not need to be delivered", which is true, but MOST of the cost of running a paper comes from reporters' wages, not a few dollar spent on gas, so the savings is minimal.
And most of the revenue from newspapers comes from advertising. The price of a physical copy is meant to offset the actual cost of the delivery mechanism as opposed to generating profit (and in many cases the cost to print and distribute is more than the revenue generated by the cover price, but they take the hit to increase circulation and boost advertising revenues). Therefore it's entirely reasonable to ask for a discount for a delivery mechanism which costs next to nothing, so long as they're still selling advertising space.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the UK this kind of story comes up quite frequently - people posting "happy slapping", i.e. abusive, bullying videos online, and the stories always centre around the technology and how sick it is people are sharing this content on their phones/posting it online, very rarely does it centre on how sick it is that we live in a society where this kind of bullying is commonplace. I quite often get the feeling the people in power would be much happier to just ban such videos and go back to ignoring the problem (the way the schools have been doing for at least the last 30 years - hey, if we don't see it, it's not happening).
More likely they'll just get someone to write an auto-decline script for everything that's not a pre-approved government release. You're not thinking government enough.
Except it's not the search engine that's being attacked, or whose competition would benefit, but the video service. Now, I'm not one to spread conspiracy theories, but doesn't someone quite far up in their government have some media connections...?
No, GP is right. The reason we have stupid laws is because we have stupid and/or corrupt politicians. The judge in this case isn't necessarily either stupid or corrupt - quite often an astute judge who recognises a stupid law will set up a trial case (preferably by finding against someone big enough to take care of themselves like Google) which they know will almost certainly go to appeal. Once it goes to appeal, any precedent set is more binding on the lower courts. This is one of the most powerful ways in which the judiciary can use the legal system to highlight unjust laws, and I have respect for those judges who do because they take an incredible amount of flak from the man in the street who just sees a stupid decision.
That's not to say, of course, that the judge in this case wasn't just stupid and/or corrupt (there's definitely a non-zero chance of that), GP is just advocating that we perhaps, you know, get all the facts before decrying him. Generally the wording of the judge's decision will show his intent, if he speaks a lot about being bound by the letter of the law then he's doing this to get the law discussed and perhaps reconsidered. If he mainly talks about the culpability of the defendents then he's likely dumb or getting a brown envelope bonus in this month's salary.
That's quite simple - enrichment of society as a whole. If we held these companies accountable to such a huge degree, society would suffer the loss of tools which currently enrich us all, since it would be economically unfeasible. At the very least it would severely limit the content that could be shared to the point that it would be useless.
Imagine you're a fledgling movie maker trying to get your work recognised via Youtube, can you seriously be expected to get the written permission of everyone at, say, a train station or a busy market place where you're filming? What if you're filming a documentary exposing corruption in a war torn part of the world, not only would it be impractical, it might even be dangerous for the people involved to identify themselves through consent. Similarly for whistleblowers against high power corporations/governments.
The only sensible approach is to have opt-out rather than opt-in, allow the content (so long as it's not overtly criminal) and allow the people involved to reject and have it removed (with certain checks and balances in place to ensure that content in the public's interest still gets through).
What do you expect? Someone at Google has to watch and individually approve each and every video ever posted? How is that respecting the rights of the individual? Not only is it impractically expensive, it would be violating the right to free speech that many countries allow.
While I largely agree with you, I've seen this same statement a few times in this thread now and I have to say, I'm not sure the right to free speech is the same as the right to use a particular technology to enable that free speech (especially when other means are available - maybe the point could be stretched to say someone who has no other way of expressing their opinion would be covered). By that logic ANY website that doesn't allow me to post whatever I damn well like on their pages would be suppressing my right to free speech (and there are many, many websites who already do pre-authorisation on content before they allow it to appear on their sites).
It doesn't excuse the fact that the outcome of this case is absurd, but we need to argue the right points or we end up diluting something as powerful as free speech.
I wonder if it's not just that people (mostly, there are always a few moral crusader exceptions) just become desensitised to their outbursts and so each one has to be more rabid than the last to have any impact. They probably start out reasonably enough, saying maybe we could use this medium as a forum for making education fun, or something, and by the end they're storming developers' headquarters with flaming torches and pitchforks.
Considering the massive hype around this game, I'd be surprised if it didn't generate huge sales. Better to watch the sales of the slew of "me-too" games that are bound to follow, as these will be a better indicator of whether people actually enjoyed the experience or just bought into the hype.
I have to say, from the few videos I've seen (and they're now running ads on the TV, the before the watershed version showing a peaceful resolution to an in-game situation, the post watershed not so much) it just looks like a Dragon's Lair type affair with better graphics, which doesn't really appeal to me. I'm all for an engaging storyline but I have to feel that my investment in it is more than making random A-B choices at various intersections and retrying until I get the right combination. That's probably massively unfair, as I said I've only watched the videos online, but it's not something I'd be rushing out to buy.
If you contrast, for example, the Romance in FF-10 with say the potential romance between Morrigan and the main-character in Dragon Age Origins, you can't help but conclude that the latter is more mature. Not primarily because there's sex (there is, but it's not the main focus), but also because the characters behave like, you know, ADULTS with adult issues, stuff you'd NEVER see in Final Fantasy.
I can't comment on FF10, but take away the sex in DA:O and it's certainly not what I would call a good example of adult relationships. Characters who only "like" you if you do sidequests for them and bring them a ton a presents? Yes, a cynic might say that's true enough but it doesn't go any way towards describing the true complexities of adult relationships. Without the sexual connotations the relationships here are exactly how you would expect kids to behave - I'll only be your friend if you buy me those new shoes, or I won't be your friend if you talk to her. And the fact that you can only progress these relationships by certain staged points after big in-game set pieces just makes the whole thing feel even more stilted.
Aside from that, and apart from two or three key points where a character might leave your party if you made the wrong choice at point X in the game, the only affect the character's feelings towards you have on gameplay is a new skill boost when they reach a certain level. There's no feeling that a character who loves you deeply will throw themselves in the line of danger to protect you, nor will a character who despises you refuse to offer aid, preferring to save their own skin if you're in danger, which renders the whole thing just another stat levelling exercise.
Don't get me wrong, I love DA:O; have already played it through as a rogue and a warrior and looking at maging it next, but for me the relationships are just something you have to micro-manage to get the most out of your characters, they don't add to the tapestry of the story in any significant way (Morrigan's being the most significant, but as far as I can tell the only difference to the storyline is a scripted one where you get to choose the outcome regardless of whether she likes you or not), if anything they detract from it.
Do I get to do an obligatory xkcd here?
Exactly right, it doesn't matter how much you argue as a peon, if the directors don't like having to remember passwords then you're stuck. Add to that the fact that governments are massive, sprawling entities, where no one department has clear visibility of what others are doing, and you end up in the situation where the highly skilled IT department is bypassed by the clueless manager who gets in a clueless contractor to throw up a website.
This is modded funny, and it is, but it's also most likely true. Having been in the same situation with a prominent UK gov site I can confirm that it was frequently the practise to put unpublished URLs live without authentication so that the high-ups could access them (we had dev and test environments but their firewalls were locked down and their IT guys wouldn't open them up, they were loathe to open them even for the people who needed them for development and testing!).
Eventually after the URLs escaped and got in front of the wrong people a few times, they consented to basic authentication, and then proceeded to email around the username and password (they wouldn't let us create them unique ones!) to everyone so they, too escaped. We'd have to change the authentication every 3-4 weeks and suffer the high-ups sending around condescending emails telling everyone not to share the login details, even though we all knew it was them letting them slip.
For me it's about enhancing the feeling of immersion. The story doesn't have to be revolutionary (and that's just as well, because they're almost always not), it just has to be enough to encourage suspension of disbelief and give some level of empathy with the character(s). You're never going to get a story that comes close to the best of the written word because the two media are playing to their own strengths. In a game, you have to have the "game" parts which obviously detract from the story parts - Hamlet wouldn't be so good if five out of every six pages was just dedicated to Hamlet beating waves of enemies in sword combat, or exploring locations for health/ammo pickups.
Bioshock did this really well, IMHO - sure the main plot was nothing we've not seen before, but that's not where the feeling of immersion came from. It was more from the information you discover and piece together on your own, exploring and finding journals, tracking the journeys of characters you never actually meet in the game, discovering the origins of the characters you do fight/help in the game, it made the game world feel more real (dispite the slightly silly delivery mechanism of tape recordings dotted everywhere, which made if feel like these people experimenting with prototype tweeting). I know people who played through the game as a straight FPS without exploring this rich back story, without even realising it was there, and that's fine if the FPS experience is all you're after, but for people who want to feel a bit more involved with the game there was a much deeper experience to be had.
A lot of early games are actually MORE fun with "god mode" or "infinite lives" because the lives element was included only to suck quarters into an arcade machine. Bubble Bobble for example, gives almost the same feeling of achievement for completing it with infinite lives as without.
Fun as the game is regardless of lives, I'm not sure anything beats the feeling of being a teenager and beating the game on a single 10 pence playthrough (and having it loop after level 100 IIRC, so you get to do it all again). Not to mention the kudos from fellow arcade dwellers :)
That's true - not everyone likes the changes on /. but at least if you choose to turn off the JavaScript wizziness it still works just fine (well, it still works just as it did before :)), and it's also true that a lot of sites get this part horribly wrong and fail to work without JavaScript/Flash and really they should be fixed. Unfortunately, that's an empty argument to a user who just wants a site to work on his phone.
People keep talking like the appstore is hugely profitable for Apple: Do the math, it's quite likely not. I'm not saying it's irrelevant but hardware sales dwarf the appstore revenue by such a wide margin that the appstore just cannot be anything but an additional business for Apple.
I might accept your argument if you exchange profit for the lock-in angle: Apple wants native apps so people "can't" move to other platforms.
Tell me this, how many iPhone ads have you seen lately explaining how wonderful the hardware is? Now how many have you seen explaining how wonderful the apps are? YMMV but I can say that for at least a couple of years the adverts I've seen have been exclusively about the apps available (aside from the introduction of 3G, but even then it was all about how you can do stuff with the apps faster) - the "there's an app for that" tagline is the major part of their marketing. If the software is a major selling point that drives the hardware sales then it's slightly disingenuous to say that the software doesn't generate the money but the hardware does, because that fails to take into account how much less hardware they'd sell without the apps to drive it. There's much more to this than a pound for pound (or dollar for dollar) comparison of sales figures.
Hover, like any tool, can be used poorly. It can also be used well. The best example is a sufficiently complex site with thousands of pages of content, where hover can provide a convenient shortcut to pages buried in the site hierarchy without cluttering up the navigation. So long as you provide a non-hover equivalent to click through to the same content (e.g. a site map or hierarchical landing pages) then hover enhances the user experience.
I'm not sure if you're new here, or to the web in general, but people do whine about IE, at great length, all the time, and of course it's fully justified - personally it's one of the great banes of my life, so I know whereof I speak. The problem is that, while so many users are stuck with IE, we have little choice but to develop for it, and of course any technology which is then incompatible, or fails to use the same legacy technologies we have to implement for IE, creates an extra overhead which it is hard to justify to the customer. I'm sure almost all developers would prefer to be working exclusively with the new bleeding edge technology and standards, unfortunately few of us have the privileged ability to turn away users and still make money.
In an ideal world I'm sure we'd all be supporting that viewpoint. Unfortunately we're never going to be able to move to a HTML5/no-flash world while we have to support the last few versions of IE (and particularly IE6), and companies are not going to want to double their spend to provide two solutions, one for modern browsers/phones and one for IE6. The cold harsh reality is they'll likely say, in light of the fact that a tiny minority of their visitors are on iPhone, they're the ones who will not be supported. Apple's stance, therefore, whether justified or not, only hurts their users - flash is not going to die out on desktops just because a minority smartphone doesn't support it. This will continue to be the case at least until IE6 is dead (and at that point we'll have to see what the adoption rate for IE9/10 is over IE7/8 to see whether it will still be an issue).
Disclaimer: my own view is that the quicker IE6 and flash both die the better, but I also have to live/develop in the real world and so know the likelihood of this happening in the short term.
Apple wouldn't be forfeiting anything because developers still want to make money off their work. No one pays money to use flash apps, and relying on advertising for revenue, especially in a recession, doesn't make anyone except the biggest players rich. Getting 70% of $1 app sales is really good if you sell 1 million copies. It's even better if it's selling well at $5.
The point is you can implement your payment model via the flash, so the user still has to pay that $1 or whatever, but instead the whole amount goes to the developer, by-passing Apple's cut.
Maybe because there's a big difference between "killing" and "giving a huge bag of money and a job and the potential to integrate the app into the google codebase", regardless of how the Register/Slashdot try and spin the story title?
If only that were true - I don't know what the situation is in the US, but over here most of the newspapers switched from investigative journalism to barely informed gossip a couple of decades ago (facts are expensive, gossip is cheap, if you want to cut your costs you just boost the noise to signal ration some more). For them to now argue that they're better than blogs because of the high quality of their journalism is laughable.
Of course, none of your examples explain what to do in the case of the possessive "its", and since the point of the sig is to help people understand the different between "its" and "it's", that would seem to be a noteworthy omission. Instead of saying, "look at its flameworthy post", I guess you would have us say "look at the flameworthy post of it"? That doesn't (sorry, does not) exactly flow.
Let's wait and see how many newspapers successfully follow that model - especially considering the ones who take the plunge and go first will suddenly lose all the influx of traffic/advertising revenue that Google was previously sending their way. If they're big players they might survive, otherwise there's a good chance they'll quickly disappear and someone else will step up to offer free news in their place.
And yes I know about the argument "online does not need to be delivered", which is true, but MOST of the cost of running a paper comes from reporters' wages, not a few dollar spent on gas, so the savings is minimal.
And most of the revenue from newspapers comes from advertising. The price of a physical copy is meant to offset the actual cost of the delivery mechanism as opposed to generating profit (and in many cases the cost to print and distribute is more than the revenue generated by the cover price, but they take the hit to increase circulation and boost advertising revenues). Therefore it's entirely reasonable to ask for a discount for a delivery mechanism which costs next to nothing, so long as they're still selling advertising space.