I never used Google Maps Engine myself, so I'm not really familiar with it. But it looks like Google was trying to consolidate and improve its paid maps offerings, not discontinue them:
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2015/01/google-maps-...The move should be seen as Google transitioning customers to already existing alternative products, especially Google My Maps (formerly Maps Engine Lite) which has come of age and now has most of the important features of Google Maps Engine
A better example would be if Google were to discontinue its paid Google Maps API?
What popular paid service has Google terminated? Any?
We built our recommendation engine for Recent News (https://recent.io/) on Google App Engine in Python. There was some tricky engineering involved in making sure that it would work inside that particular environment, but it's paid off in terms of scalability. We're not worried about Google shutting down App Engine; in fact it's being continuously improved.
Quite right. It's true that if you don't have a background using the native libraries it's going to be difficult, so one approach would be talking to developers who do and doing research like reading blogs and discussions like this one...
If you're going cross platform, the key is to know in detail the limitations of this approach, even if it takes longer to make that initial decision about what path to take.
Different cross-platform tools have different approaches, but as a concrete example take Corona SDK. You need no native platform knowledge and your app runs inside the Corona runtime, which makes some difficult things easy but some easy things -- third-party SDK integration, install source tracking -- difficult. And if the creator of the cross-platform environment has chosen not to support certain things, you're out of luck (and you're probably always going to be lagging even for things that are supported). On the other hand, you have only a single codebase to maintain and single-click builds for a lot of platforms.
As for Cordova, we spent some time testing if the performance was sufficient when building an early version of Recent News (https://recent.io -- v1.0 just released three days ago!). We concluded it was not. Boot times were slow, the UI felt very non-native, and overall performance didn't meet our requirements. Now that was a while ago and Cordova may have improved, and hardware performance certainly has improved, so maybe it's a better option today.
> There's no exercise at all: They'd get pilloried for it in the very same media
Unfortunately you only get a C+ on this exercise. :)
The short answer is that portions of the Espionage Act likely violate the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech if the EA were used to prosecute journalists who obtained the materials over the transom. (Whether this applies to Wikileaks is a different story. Different facts.)
The slightly more detailed answer is that the modern jurisprudence relating to the First Amendment is far more speech-protective than it was when the EA was codified a century ago. And DOJ doesn't want to risk having parts of the EA declared unconstitutional. So Glenn Greenwald and other reporters were (properly) not indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a federal felony to publish classified NSA SIGINT or cryptographic material.
I posted a five-part response on Twitter to Marc A, which he just retweeted (it doesn't mean he agrees with me, of course, but at least is a signal that he read it):
> act to make the question of suing the NYT, WaPo, etc. not as easy as you make it sound
No, not "suing" the NYT, WashPost, etc. The Espionage Act is armed with felony criminal sanctions. The nuclear option would be for FedGov to indict the news organization, do no-knock raids on the homes of their reporters and editors involved in the story, seize computers (ala GCHQ), etc. The reason FedGov has not is left as an exercise to the reader.
But more broadly, you're attributing views to me I do not hold. I wrote about the Espionage Act at some length here -- this may set you straight (I don't have time or the inclination to do it here):
http://www.cnet.com/news/wikileaks-could-be-vulnerable-to-es...
Marc Andreessen is a smart fellow who doesn't mind saying controversial things; I often find myself agreeing with him. But I wonder here if he saying something controversial for the sake of the controversy.
I especially wonder if Marc has thought through the implications of his "textbook traitor" line. Let's say he's right that Edward Snowden violated the Espionage Act, which is what I take his comments to mean (the definition of "treason" is "levies war against them or adheres to their enemies," which is arguable at best). 18 USC 798 makes it a felony for anyone to "publish" or "make available" any "classified information" relating to:
- the "nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government" OR
- or "concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government" OR
Those are Boolean OR statements above; you only need to hit one to have an all-expense paid trip to Club Fed. Snowden hit all three!
But if Snowden violated the Espionage Act, then didn't the small number of reporters he gave the NSA docs to? And the larger number of reporters who reproduced them? And anyone forwarding a Glenn Greenwald article with embedded PDFs? And sites like HN that "make available" classified documents by allowing links to the docs to be posted here?
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2015/01/google-maps-... The move should be seen as Google transitioning customers to already existing alternative products, especially Google My Maps (formerly Maps Engine Lite) which has come of age and now has most of the important features of Google Maps Engine
A better example would be if Google were to discontinue its paid Google Maps API?