Google vs. Evil

wideangle writes "'The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business. Take Brin's decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin's morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It's a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public.'"

Comments

Re:Activism

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Put this in your gun control pipe and smoke it:

• The mass killings you allude to are the exception. In spite of what you hear on the news, violent crime has been on the decrease for the past 10 or 20 years, most likely due to an increased standard of living.
• The heavily circulated canard about acquaintance murders is deceptive - most of these murders can be explained as turf wars in inner cities.
• Guns are used to prevent far more crimes than they are used to commit.
• A gun and a small amount of training put a small woman, a bodybuilder, and an old man on a near-level field. This tends to reduce the amount of sexual assault as evidenced by statistics pointing to the large number of assaults prevented by guns.
• Should you succeed in removing guns from everybody who shouldn't have them, you will remove this equalizer; most likely, thnumber of violent crimes will increase, as young athletic men now have a decided advantage.
• What happens in reality is that you only disarm those who follow the law. Criminals can still get guns, and now they know that their victims will be unarmed. Why do you think the murder rate is so high in Washington DC?

Guns are a fact of life. Hysterical raving won't help anyone.