It's PHP, it's already a band aid measure.

Adding goto just incremented the keyword count, nothing more. Bad coders will still keep on writing bad code, with or without the help of goto.

If I was Google, I would have been really annoyed too:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustybrick/3607264237/

Am I the only one sypathetic to Google here? It seems to me that this guy's self-righteousness is based on a serious misunderstanding:

After pointing out that in the United States of America, the accused are generally given the right to know both the crimes they are being accused of, and the identities of their accusers, Mr. C. responded by saying that such thinking did not apply to Google's terms of service. Effectively, Google's position was that it was above the law, and if not any law in particular, then at least the spirit of the law. Irked, I decided to find out if such a position was tenable.

Well, he found out, through the appeals court, that his position was not tenable. The rights of those accused of crimes have no bearing on the TOS, a contract he agreed to, which clearly states that his account can be cancelled for any reason. His whole lawsuit was predicated on the fact that he didn't think the reason they gave-- that his account "posed a significant risk to [..] AdWords advertisers"-- was good enough.

Now, based on this, why would Google let a lower court ruling stand? It's not the $761, it's the precedent.

What did Google expect of this? Did they think they would fight this guy, and suddenly he would give up writing about this case?

I feel like they got a pyrrhic victory here.If your customer is getting his answers in the form of evidence at a hearing, you're doing something wrong, regardless of whether or not he was actually in violation of the terms of use.

Anyway, thanks for adding this. It's good to read how it all ended up.

On earth, humans cheer wildly when they see things they like. This could be anything from a man throwing a ball into a net, to a useful new operating system feature. It's considered a way to express approval, especially when gathered in a crowd, where shouting words would be less effective.

See also: booing.

He was a domain squatter with text directing people to click on the google ads. He's violating the TOS at the time in multiple ways, and clearly isn't providing any value.

Spending time holding the hand of every pissed off squatter/spammer isn't in Google's interest.

Have you read the backstory for this?

I know the guy that did this posts here. So this is to him: I am calling you out.

What you did was wrong. As a geek you should know this. People that squat on domains hoping that people typo a URL and land on your page covered in ads is a cancer on the DNS.

NOT ONLY is it a cancer on the DNS, it steals money from people who are legitimately trying to promote their own products.

I have a little social news website that my friends and I post on. Yeah it is tiny, yeah it is worthless, yeah it is probably a complete and total mess of code that is wide open to any number of vulnerabilites, but you know what? It's my baby.

I'm broke. I'll admit that. I don't make a lot of money. But ONCE, I decided to splurge a little bit on some google ads. Yeah, it was $50, yeah it was stupid and pointless and I'm not going to recoup it, but this is my hobby and I think it's fun.

I cannot even imagine how absolutely blindingly infuriated (not to mention heartbroken) I would have been if I would have found out that this small ammount of money that I decided to "invest" in my little project had been squandered on some asshole leeching money from people with a landing page.

Those clicks are expensive. That $700 or whatever you earned came from people like ME.

You violated their terms of service and you deserved everything that you got as a result of it.

I know we're supposed to be civil here, but honestly man, fuck you. What you did was very barely (if at all) above a pyramid scheme.

And those rights / obligations are listed in the Terms of Service, where he was explicitly told he didn't have the "right" to an explanation. He may deserve one in our eyes, but he has no legal ground to demand it as a 'right'.

The more conclusive your tone, the less valuable is your argument. Many great programmers are excellent communicators.

I dunno. This bit:

"This is what I tried to explain in my opening arguments. Despite Google's objections to what they perceived to be technical violations of their AdSense terms of service, they also had an entirely separate (but confusingly similar-sounding) program called AdSense for Domains, which handled the exact problem I was trying to solve--that of using advertising to profit from "parked," or unused, domain names, much like putting a billboard on a vacant lot."

strikes me as his saying that he was actually quite aware why Google objected and terminated his account.

That, coupled with his arguing in court that Gee whiz, he was totally following the terms of service for a completely different service that he wasn't actually paying for just kills my sympathy for him.

Yes, Google should tell people why it terminates these accounts. On the other hand, this guy comes across as a domain-squatting asshat.

> Am I the only one sypathetic to Google here?

Legally, I think they're right. Morally? Not really.