Your logic is faulty - just because some people will continue to create in spite of the system does not mean all can continue to. Yes, indie game developers can continue to make games, but what about larger undertakings? You can't spend millions of dollars and employ large teams to devote themselves fully to creating a game like, say, Diablo 3, without some way to support those deveopers, artists, etc. A world with only indie games is less rich than a world with both indie and commercial games.

> "Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way."

I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.

You can't deny however that any massive undertakings would be effectively killed. No one will invest millions of dollars to produce a video game, or hundreds of millions to produce a movie if it can be freely copied.

It's great that you can make a game or movie on a small budget, but isn't it better to live in a world where we can have both? Does the cost of copyright really outweigh the benefits of living in a society where creative people can devote all of their time producing content?

One of the reasons Google's advertising programs are so successful is that they are measurable. A site can compute return on investment and know that for every $X spent on Google ad clicks they are generating $Y in sales.

For someone with such a packed calendar the mini calendar is useless, and with it minimized you can view even more calendars than you could in the old UI.

The utm parameters allow a site to track campaign information and replace much more annoying techniques like setting up unique landing pages or redirects. There's no relationship between these parameters, which have been around for nearly 10 years, and URL shorteners.

For anyone who's the the family tech support guy, it's almost worth buying these for your relatives just so you don't have to deal with cleaning up their malware infected, bloated PCs every 6 months.

I think this move is smarter than that though. Google has a knack for picking fights that not only help their own immediate cause (landing this govt. deal) but also aim for the greater good (fighting corruption, ensuring the better technology wins.)

Whether it's genuine or just a show is impossible to tell, but if you don't have a vested interest in either side then you can't help but root for Google.

There is a subtle point that many posts like this are overlooking. Google didn't run this experiment to cause bing to show bogus results, they did it to confirm the rise in suspiciously similar results produced by bing.