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Smear campaigns are, in fact, standard. Swift boat veterans, Birthers, Abortion doctors as baby killers, comparing homosexuals to pedophiles are all examples of exactly this sort of behavior on the right. Similar examples exist on the left, but you can look them up yourself.

It is a new meaning. It has appeared in numerous publications, and has achieved a pretty wide spread. The fact that it was started as a "propaganda tactic" is immaterial.

Advocating pedophilia? I don't know why I'm feeding such an obvious troll. A group of people called someone who they had a (justified) dislike for a bad name and it stuck. Santorum has compared gay sex to bestiality and pedophilia, I think both of those associations are far worse than being associated with the "frothy mix". Giving someone an insulting nickname is a bit childish, but it's harmless and in this case, a response to Santorum using essentially the same tactic to attack the gay community.

You may disapprove of these tactics, but they are more or less standard. Applying labels to one's political opponents is a huge part of politics.

I fail to see what is particularly sick about this tactic. The new meaning of santorum is fairly disgusting, but I don't think it's anywhere near as sick as attempting to brand one's opposition as traitors, conspirators, terrorists, baby killers, etc.

I especially fail to see how one's opinion on this particular word re-definition has anything to do with whether a new employee is worth hiring. Being amused by a childish bit of humor doesn't strike me as a particularly good way to judge either aptitude or character.

Sadly, I don't think there's any way to make the public really care about this. For one thing, it's a sufficiently rare pain in the ass that virtually no one worries about what the latest nonsense from the TSA is on a day to day basis.

I also suspect many people actually do believe it makes us safer. Many others probably don't care one way or another, but if a politician were to seriously attempt to end the TSA, they would be branded as soft on terror so fast their head would spin.

Well yes, if the users don't want the product then nothing else matters, but I don't see what that has to do with innovation.

I have no problem with your argument that Google+ will need to be useful in some sense to be successful, but originality is hardly necessary for that to be the case.

If what they're going for is "Like Facebook, but better!" then they certainly are going to have a difficult time convincing many users to switch, but I wouldn't say it's anything approaching impossible.

Innovation isn't the only thing that leads to success, not by a long shot. Polish, ease of use, a large feature set, security, and any number of other factors can have just as big an impact on users as innovation.

People don't use Google search because it's innovative, and people don't use Facebook because it innovated and people won't make their decisions on Google+ based on its innovations.

If your criteria for failure is that the company is more interested in making money than you, personally, then there isn't a successful product on the face of the earth.

Of course Google is trying to use Google+ to make ad revenue. You know, exactly like Twitter and Facebook, who you hold up as opposition to Google+.

If Google fails here it will be because they didn't make people want to use their product, plain and simple. Not because the people ultimately paying them aren't the people using their product. If that were the case, half of the web wouldn't exist.

The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player.

Facebook wasn't the first social networking site.

Google wasn't the first search engine.

Windows/Mac/Unix weren't the first operating systems.

Taking ideas from competitors and improving upon them is a fundamental part of business. No one actually thinks that coming up with a product concept is the same as delivering a product that users actually want.

Why would it be surprising to see him on there? Dogfooding is a good idea, but in this case, there's nothing stopping someone from using both Facebook and Google+. He'd be foolish to not be on Google+, how else is he supposed to know where he's winning and where he might lose users.

In general, a shop that wanted to make very much money off of interns would have to have them work on new code(any sizable code base is going to take a while to get up to speed on), and/or hire only excellent students (though in this case they wouldn't have the option of not paying, good programmers never have to work cheap).

I don't think that's necessarily any better. Ever played Telephone?

This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.

Worse, honestly, the value of your wasted time is almost certainly higher than that of the person on the other end of the call.

It's not necessarily a matter of them being cheap, good developers are hard to find, and the only people who can tell the difference are/were good developers themselves.

This is doubly true with security. There is no cosmetic or usability difference between a secure application and a nightmare that leads to thousands of leaked passwords. So companies that don't already have a good group of developers are screwed when hiring, and companies that don't consider their existing team's decision as the most important factor when hiring are asking for trouble.

That's not the point. It's possible what he did should be protected by fair use. It's also possible that it shouldn't be and that he owed money. The point is, there was never a trial to decide it one way or another, he had to settle, not because he thought his case was weak, but because it was cheaper than if he did take it to court, win or lose.

The problem is that attempting the fair use defense results in an "I win or you lose" case, where either the defendant wins the case and loses some money, or the defendant loses the case and loses some more money.

I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly stuff that's going to go over most readers' heads. The efficiency of a new device like this is pretty much the most important information about it. At 0.4% efficiency, this is currently just going to make your devices heavier and marginally more efficient. If it were more efficient it might make things heavier and significantly more efficient.

Of course Google can't read minds, that does not mean they should ignore information that they have when deciding which results to show or what order to show them in. Sufficient data to provide a better filter for a given user is not the same as mind reading.

You are absolutely right that more criteria should be used if a user is interested in better results, but I fail to see why a deterministic base case is superior. If I never click on news links and always click on travel links, it makes perfect sense for Google to assume that my search for "Egypt" is looking for information related to travel to Egypt. If I am not following my usual search patterns, I can look on the second page, or I can disable personalized search, or I can search for "Egypt News" all of which would give me better results.

Why is it preferable to always make everyone clarify their searches when there is sufficient information to narrow the search down somewhat without requiring additional intervention by the user? This is usability 101 right here.

I cannot see a problem here. Who exactly is being hurt by the "filter bubble"?

The end user is fine - they are more likely to see results they are actually interested in. If a user doesn't trust a source and won't click on their links, they'll soon not have to bother scrolling past them.

The sites themselves actually benefit as well. Sure, they may be bumped from the first page of results for users that are unlikely to visit their site, anyway, but the tradeoff is that they get a higher position for the users who may actually visit their site. It's an ideal trade for those being filtered.

I suppose that leaves the idea that the end result is a "biased" internet. I don't buy it. Google is not removing sites that disagree with them, they are re-ordering them for different users. If your profile wasn't factored in, then what options do they have?

They could order on popularity, but biasing towards popular opinion isn't any better than biasing towards my opinion.

They could randomize the order, this would be without bias, but absolutely useless to anyone.

They could judge the objective truth of sites, but that's far more biased than any of the other options.

Any filter at all will result in a "Filter Bubble" as defined here (except, I suppose, returning a randomly sorted list of all sites on the internet). Whether the filter is personalized or not doesn't change that fact. What is the actual benefit of everyone getting the same search results when looking for a particular term? Search engines are not news sites or research papers: biasing towards relevant results is not a bad thing.