> Passengers aboard a Turkish Airlines flight from Oslo overpowered a man who tried to hijack their flight to Istanbul on Wednesday. > > Police said the man was a Turk who had demanded that the plane return to Norway. Once again, we see that security measures are never 100% full-proof, but it doesn’t matter, because passengers are now prepared to defend themselves.

Now can we all please stop having to take our shoes off?

> Searching Google is now like asking a question in a crowded flea market of hungry, desperate, sleazy salesmen who all claim to have the answer to every question you ask. Great quote from Marco Arment, who has now also joined in the “Google Search has become unusable” fray. The list is growing.

> As for development time and cost, the group seemed pleased. The developers noted that Apple has made it easy to re-use code for a native Mac app. The panel reported that port time was less than four weeks, and that adjustments like the keyboard and HD support took most of that time. Additionally, the developers had created high-resolution graphics for the iOS apps, and were able to make them work with their Mac counterparts with minimal fuss. As Markus points out, the quick development turnaround contributed significantly to the 1:1 pricing model. I’m glad that porting iOS apps over to the Mac seems to be relatively easy for many developers, but I think that the iOS development community is continuing to sell itself short with this race to 99 cents. And that attitude is going to force good Mac Developers into a fight for perceived value in their apps as the Mac App Store gets flooded with low-cost iOS ports.

I’m completely convinced that most iOS apps are underpriced out of the mistaken belief that people won’t pay more than a dollar for anything. Several developers have proven that wrong. (Take a look at the Highest Grossing top apps on the iPad, and you’ll see what I mean.)

It’s all about perception. People pay $3 or more for their morning coffee drinks. The message you send to people when you sell your app for 99 cents is that your app is worth less than a coffee. If you tell people that, they’ll believe it.

Apple keeps trying to set expectations with its own apps in these stores. With the iWork apps on the iPad, they charge $10 each. For the Mac App Store, they seem to be charging just under what the retail box copy set would cost. Some developers have gotten the message, and iPad apps are generally a bit more expensive as a result. But for the most part, everyone looks at Angry Birds and assumes that all that success was due to price.

I guarantee if Angry Birds had been $3 instead of $1, it would have sold nearly as many copies. Because it’s a great game, and in the end, people pay for great products, and they tell their friends. Who better to turn to than Apple for that lesson?

If you apply a little logic, you immediately see that the 99-cent price of Angry Birds must have had little or nothing to do with its success, since there are literally hundreds of thousands of other 99-cent apps that didn’t sell one one thousandth as many copies.

Yet ironically, App Store Developers keep running to the bargain basement in hopes of striking it rich with volume. Well, if every developer does that, genius, how’s your 99-cent app going to stand out from all the others?

Like PC manufacturers making Windows boxes in the early 2000s, iOS developers are going to learn the hard way that only one company benefits from a price war. (Microsoft, in the PC case, Apple this time with iOS.)

I’m not saying you can charge $70 for an iOS fart app. I’m just saying that most apps are certainly worth more than 99 cents. Angry Birds would probably not have succeeded to this degree if it had been $30. But $5? Who knows? I would have paid it.

Mac Apps, even more so than iPad apps, should be priced higher than their iPhone/iPod Touch equivalents. Because they shouldn’t be equivalents. It’s fine to make a Mac version of your iPhone app; just make sure you take advantage of all the benefits of being on a full desktop OS while you’re at it. Don’t do a lazy port; add value to the app, and you won’t have to charge the same as you do on the iPhone.

> [Mark Twain](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Mark_Twain) wrote that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” A new edition of “[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn)” and “Tom Sawyer” will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with “slave” in an effort not to offend readers. > > Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with [NewSouth Books](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/NewSouth_Books) in [Alabama](http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Alabama) to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in “Huck Finn” and four times in “Tom Sawyer.” He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those “which people praise and don’t read.” I don’t know whether to be sad, offended, or outraged about this. Maybe I’m all three.

Anyone who reads Mark Twain and doesn’t immediately get that he was way ahead of his time, MAKING FUN of racist ignorance in the deep South doesn’t deserve the gift of literacy. Seriously. Go home and shoot yourself. You’re not contributing anything positive to planet Earth.

This is the worst kind of Political Correctness gone berserk. We’re literally whitewashing our history and destroying one of the few truly worthy pieces of literature to come out of this country for what, exactly? To make some people feel better by pretending that no one ever used that word? Pretending that people still don’t use that word?

This has nothing whatsoever to do with not offending African Americans, by the way. This is about lying in order to diminish white guilt. Plain and simple. Turn a blind eye and pretend it never happened. Great way to ensure that it keeps happening.

Notice the guy publishing the book is white? Notice the parent groups who always want to ban Huck Finn are predominantly white? See a pattern here?

You don’t reduce racism by pretending it doesn’t exist. You diminish it by bringing it to the light, forcing people to face it, starting an uncomfortable conversation about what those words mean to different people and why they’re so offensive.

Huck Finn is the best tool we have in American Literature to teach about this incredibly important period in our history. It’s literature, history, politics, sociology, and child psychology, all rolled into one. It’s the thing you put into the space capsule and blast into the next universe as a symbol of what mankind is capable of producing. That’s exactly why the book has been a staple of public education for so long in this country.

And this dillweed gets to defile it? And no one is stopping him?

For God’s sake, why must America continue to run at full speed toward the biggest idiots on Earth prize? We won. A long time ago. No one is catching up anytime soon, believe me. We can stop now.

> Despite the semi-positive resolution, I was disturbed. If these dime-store scrapers were doing so well and generating so much traffic on the back of our content – how was the rest of the web faring? My enduring faith in the gravitational constant of Google had been shaken. Shaken to the very core. > > Throughout my investigation I had nagging doubts that we were seeing **serious cracks in the algorithmic search foundations of the house that Google built**. But I was afraid to write an article about it for fear I’d be claimed an incompetent kook. I wasn’t comfortable sharing that opinion widely, because we might be doing something obviously wrong. Which we tend to do frequently and often. *Gravity can’t be wrong. We’re just clumsy … right?* > > I can’t help noticing that we’re not the only site to have serious problems with Google search results in the last few months. In fact, the drum beat of deteriorating Google search quality has been practically *deafening* of late: > > - [Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/) > - [Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.html) > - [Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php) > - [On the increasing uselessness of Google](http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google......html) > - [Google, Google, Why Hast Thou Forsaken the Manolo?](http://shoeblogs.com/2010/12/20/google-google-why-hast-thou-forsaken-the-manolo/#more-13002) > > Anecdotally, my personal search results have also been noticeably worse lately. As part of Christmas shopping for my wife, I searched for “iPhone 4 case” in Google. I had to give up completely on the first two pages of search results as utterly useless, and searched Amazon instead. It looks like the first few articles posted on this topic have started a bit of an avalanche. Which means lots of people have been thinking along these lines for a long time, but were afraid to speak up.

Google is going to have to do some house cleaning and PR work, if this keeps going.