IIRC that turned out to be dead-code detection noticing what was effectively a delay loop and removing it as it did no useful work. The changes people made that stopped it skipping that part just confused the dead-code detection enough that it wasn't sure the optimisation was safe.
FYI: I'm no fan of Internet Explorer and I know who I trust least between MS and FF, but please don't spread anti-IE FUD. It only makes others look as bad as them (for using their tricks), and good god there is plenty of real crap to throw without having to resort to the less concrete stuff.
It does not inherently conflict with all DRM, by my understanding.
It only conflicts with DRM affecting anything covered by the license - i.e. the code and anything compiled from it or any other code derived from it. It does not cover data that might be used by the compiled code, so it does not conflict with applying DRM to protect content like media files.
Right now they won't want you there unless you are a trained rescue worker or other useful volunteer. Right now most people over there have far more important things to worry about than taking money off rubber necking tourists.
In a few months time though the emergency will be over, the repair+rebuild operations will be in full swing, the dead will have had relevant ceremonies performed for them and the injured will be working towards recovery. An important part of the repair operations will be attempting full resumption of the tourist industry and the money it brings into the economy - so by that time I should think they (or at least their economy!) will be most grateful for your visit. If you do end up getting hotel rooms and such cheaper due to lack of demand as other people are staying away, you can satiate any guilt by spending the extra cash in other ways (perhaps buying more presents for people back home than you otherwise would, or just donating to local relief charities what will still be providing help to the worst affected). Just be aware that you won't see everywhere at its best as it will take a long time to get everything back to its usual condition after this event, and take care about how you mention the situation if you do as people's emotions will not doubt still be a little more raw than usual and you could accidentally cause upset or offence. And definitely be careful not to patronise - I don't know about anyone else but that would certainly annoy the hell out of me if I were them!
tl;dr: In a few months time? Go. Have fun. I've never been myself but plan to at some point and friends who have visited tell me it is a most interesting country to experience first-hand.
Some suggest that our computers are supposedly derived from tech inspired by analysing the crashed ship, which while not really believable it is slightly less difficult to suspend disbelief.
What really kills the film is basic physics. Even if the aliens had some tech that somehow mitigated the mass of the mothership initially and stopped it ripping the earth apart at the seams, and even if that remained active (or was a passive tech) once the ships were disabled, them crashing into the Earth at the end would have finished pretty much finished us completely.
Yes, but accidentally doing a little right in amongst a pile of wrong doesn't make the wrong any less wrong.
They'd never survive just going after just those sites that are genuinely , as most are based in countries they can't arrange any jurisdiction over and and/are run by people who difficult to trace.
You'll note that they aren't going after many large organisations: just those that are likely to just settle because they can't afford the case or can't afford the chance of losing far more if they lose the case.
Re:I think my first ARM device was a Gameboy Advan
on
Pocket Wars and Cores
·
· Score: 1
Aye, I remember the Beeb range well. I still have the old Master Series machine (that model had a slightly updated CPU, a 65C12 IIRC) in a draw under my bed. It still works too, though many of the old floppy disks don't (I powered it on a few months ago for a nostalgia hit - the Elite disk still seems healthy and I "wasted" an hour or two with it). I cut my programming teeth on that machine (BBC Basic and 6502 family assembler).
Re:I think my first ARM device was a Gameboy Advan
on
Pocket Wars and Cores
·
· Score: 1
IIRC ARM was a spin-off or Acorn (initially an internal research team working on the CPU that would power the Archimedes line, that chip being the great great granddaddy of the current ARM designs) rather than the other way around.
The loophole is that they do not state "unlimited bandwidth". If asked to defend the use of "unlimited" they define it as "unlimited access". You have unlimited access in that you can access the service 24/7/365.25 if you want/need to, but they are very careful not to state (or imply in such a way the legal department doesn't think they can claim it wasn't a deliberate attempt to imply) that the word "unlimited" applies to bandwidth or any other specific resource.
"Why use the word at all then?" is a question many people ask, as they assume all services are unlimited in that sense. But that has not always been the case - all but the most expensive dial-up providers have limits on most accounts regarding how much time you could spend online in a given period, to avoid needing one modem per customer at their end.
Except that they're a BT reseller, so your service is dependent on a third party
Unfortunately just about every ISP selling to home users is, aside from virgin and the few other cable providers if they are available in your area. You could pay for a fibre line that bypasses BT completely but that ain't going to be cheap! They have their own backhaul though, so their users (myself included) haven't experienced some of the issues users of other ISPs have over recent years.
they subscribe to the IWF, so your service is filtered
This is an irritation, when there are significant false positives on the blacklist. IIRC their implementation is purely DNS based though, so easy to avoid if it causes you issues by using an external DNS provider (like Google's).
and their FUP lists all the ways they don't allow you to use the service, for example spamming
I have no problem with that: they are up front about what you can and can not do. Similarly with Virgin's current traffic shaping (I know people who use their service, and there is at least a page fully documenting how much you can use in a given time before rate limits start to be imposed and it is nice definite numbers not some unknown values so you don;y know what to expect).
I have no problem with them, I'm with a similar BT reseller, but don't delude yourself about what you're getting.
Aye. They are not perfect. And they are more expensive then most of the less perfect options. But I've been pretty happy with the service they have provided over the last ~3 years.
My paranoia is more seated in thoughts of what would happen if my data was lost (or unavailable for a long period) rather than simply unavailable for a short time. While it is highly unlikely that Google would lose data (data management essentially being their raison d'etre you would expect so, and as you imply their track record shows that expectation to be correct thus far) it is not impossible.
I can't say any of my personal data and services are such that I'd be massively buggered if any of it were unavailable to me for a few hours, or even a few days (heck, most of it could die completely and all would be well with the rest of my world!) - I keep multiple copies for backup purposes rather than availability. In my professional position though, a good chunk of our info/data and services like mail do have potential to be that availability-sensitive, though that could never be hosted on a 3rd party (even Google) for compliance reasons laid down in the contract terms required by some of our clients.
Yes, but it wouldn't stop MS giving the license like that and the F/OSS projects deciding whether to use it or not (and whether to change license as needed) depending on license compatibility.
This puts the onus on the F/OSS projects to be very careful about licensing of course, but that is no different from the due diligence requirements we expect of closed source providers using open source code.
Even if this were the case (IIRC the other are correct in suggesting it isn't) there is an easy way out: if you find a F/OSS project using the patent just give them license to use it as long as the project remains F/OSS (and possibly non-commercial (where commercial/non-commercial would need to be defined quite finely)). OSS wins, MS loses nothing to Apple/Sony/other. Heck, add a stipulation that they could use the code in their own products under a non F/OSS license if they want and they potentially gain quite a chunk (though that part would definitely need the attention of an expensive lawyer to pick the right words, and managing who owns what and which parts require copyright re-assignment to maintain compliance may be a nightmare for the F/OSS project).
I was on the Dole in the UK for about 6 months, it was an easy way to live and could very easily get to become a way of life.
I know people on the dole here and it is only an "easy" way of live if you set your standards that low and so do the people around you.
I remember telling the clerk I could not sign on at my allotted time in a few days because I had an interview, he told me they would cut my benefit and I'd have to reapply if I went.
When was this? There were times, when things were not as bad economically as they are now, when the service seemed entirely populated with that sort of jobsworth, but I don't get the impression it is the case now (though I can't speak from personal experience in either case). They will as for proof (a letter confirming your interview or doctor's appointment or such) of why you are not planning to turn up to the appointment where you "sign on" for the period as there are some people who will make up any excuse not to go in when they can't be bothered, but one of my close friends has had no trouble what so ever skipping such appointments when there is good reason (including an interview). Not that this has helped him find permenant work, of course...
How do people that naive get all that money in the first place?
Because the world is far from a meritocracy. Or an any-thing-most-people-in-their-right-minds-would-consider-worth-measuring-ocracy. Power, riches, and related trappings are not distributed by fairness or intelligence, nor does the gullibility required to lose this sort of money preclude the chance to obtain it by some means deserved or not.
And before anyone points it out: I'm well aware that I'm comfortable compared to many in the world by luck of birth rather than personal worth. Yes it is working out OK for me, thanks for asking (though I don't have $200,000 to my name, never mind $200,000 to blow!).
The expectation is that the 3rd party (Google in this case) are doing the backing up for you.
Which is part of my point. You expect them to not have single points of failure, you expect them to have suitable well tested backup regimes, and in both cases your expectations are probably correct (though we'll see for sure when this current mess is/isn't resolved. But they are a single entity as far as you are concerned and therefore should, unless you have audited their procedures, be considered a single point of failure if you have any mission critical (or otherwise important) information stored on their systems. Yes they may have backups, but *you* can't access them. If something drastic were to bring the system down for a whole day or more you would be without both your live service and your archived data - at least if you had your own backup regime using resources elsewhere you would have your current (at the time of the incident) and archived mail even if you don't have incoming mail until the situation is fixed.
If Google are both your active service and your backups, then they are a single point of failure for you. I don't mean this as a slight against Google (in fact I'd trust them more than most companies I could mention): it applies to any and every hosted service especially if you don't have a strong set of SLAs with heavy payback (enough cover inconvenience, which could include loss of business, not just a refund for service prorated based on down-time) due to you in instances of non-compliance with those SLAs.
Does Google ignore the content on here rated 0 or below? It should.
I doubt it, and I'd say it shouldn't (at least not by their own hand).
They wouldn't want to waste time interpreting slashdot pages as they are indexed, the time writing the code to do that would be wasted as it is a moving target (they'd have to re-engineer the code if slashdot makes changes to the layout, and getting it working reliably in the first place would take quite some testing time) and they'd have to do the same for every significant site with a ranking system.
Much better to just request the page and hope that the default settings combined with reasonable moderation stops the links appearing in a way that is significant to the indexing algorithm.
While there are not (as yet, as far as I've seen) any people yelling and shouting for heads to role because some of their precious data is lost, I expect it to start soon.
There are far too few people who understand the danger of having only one copy of information, and people seem even more naive when that copy is help by another party (they assume that someone else is dealing with it, and seem to expect there will be some sort of come-back if the service they pay nothing for loses some of their info).
I'm not sure how we'd go about it, but the general public really needs to be hit around the head with the clue-stick on the matter. It probably needs to start in schools. I'm pretty sure from talking to younger family and friends (the conversation usually starts with something like "my cheap USB stick isn't working, can you read my document off it for me?) that good backups is not something covered in IT lessons at school (or if it is taught, it isn't drummed in hard enough) and it should be.
People need a better appreciation of how many things can cause damage or loss of data, and how easy it can be to protect yourself from the worst side-effects of that damage/loss simply by looking after your information properly.
You might be right. I look forward to the estate issuing a full apology, publicly promising that this action will not be repeated in future, and chastising the attorneys accordingly. Conversely, if they let it lie then they are at very least complicit and my initial reaction stands.
Congratulations to the Tolkien Estate, on ensuring that I will never again spend money on anything that has the slightest chance of putting a penny in your grubby mits.
unvetted GPS data wouldnt cut it if it were my decision.
As it didn't in this case, what counted was lack of proof from the other side.
I imagine that the GPS did help though, in giving the defendant some good reassurance that no mistake was make on their part (incorrectly maintained speedo in the car giving wrong results or some such) implying that the problem (i.e. the difference between how he perceived events and how the cop recorded them) lay with the radar equipment or the cop. Otherwise he may have just paid the fine out of not being conclusively sure enough to put up a good argument in his defence.
I think you are missing the point of Google's business model. Their core product is our attention, which they sell to advertisers by various means. In order to maintain their product, that is: keep our attention, they need to keep their search results relevant and useful (or at least as relevant and useful as the competition). Pushing the aggregators/copiers/similar further down the search results than the original good content sites helps to keep my attention and that of many other people (who would prefer to see, say, the original StackOverflow page instead of a copy that has 613 advert slots added), so this helps them maintain that sector of their product. And if those sites give up and concentrate on getting a high rank at Bing or somewhere else instead then that will not harm Google (they won't, of course, the listings war will continue battle after battle).
Google won, over AltaVista and others of the time, in part because the results were better - because AV's algorithm couldn't screen out the less useful results as well. They also won by just being a search engine rather than spending countless $ on becoming a "portal" when people didn't actually want a portal they wanted a search engine - perhaps AV would have done better if the $ that went into the portal thing went into improving their search functionality instead? Of course Google's keep-us-interested schemes involve much more than just the search engine these days so they could potentially fall into the same trap eventually, but unlike AV their other tools are just that: other, by which I mean that they compliment the search engine product (and the more general "information location and management" focus) or are not even related to it rather than trying to replace it.
Even though I trust the kernel (except brand new features: I let the early adopters get scalped there) and the protection I have setup (everything of consequence RAIDed and in regularly tested backups online/onsite+offsite+offline), hardware errors still happen and bugs are still going to be present. Call it being overly paranoid if you will but I'd rather check everything is OK every now and then than just trust that it is. The fact that most setups default to running a fill fsck on start every X days (even with no unclean umounts) implies I'm not the only one who thinks this isn't a bad idea.
As for "just a guy with root": I'd not go that far, but I'm perfectly happy to admit I'm far from an expert admin. I do consider myself to have more knowledge+experience than many people who do claim to be experts though!
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC that turned out to be dead-code detection noticing what was effectively a delay loop and removing it as it did no useful work. The changes people made that stopped it skipping that part just confused the dead-code detection enough that it wasn't sure the optimisation was safe.
FYI: I'm no fan of Internet Explorer and I know who I trust least between MS and FF, but please don't spread anti-IE FUD. It only makes others look as bad as them (for using their tricks), and good god there is plenty of real crap to throw without having to resort to the less concrete stuff.
It does not inherently conflict with all DRM, by my understanding.
It only conflicts with DRM affecting anything covered by the license - i.e. the code and anything compiled from it or any other code derived from it. It does not cover data that might be used by the compiled code, so it does not conflict with applying DRM to protect content like media files.
Right now they won't want you there unless you are a trained rescue worker or other useful volunteer. Right now most people over there have far more important things to worry about than taking money off rubber necking tourists.
In a few months time though the emergency will be over, the repair+rebuild operations will be in full swing, the dead will have had relevant ceremonies performed for them and the injured will be working towards recovery. An important part of the repair operations will be attempting full resumption of the tourist industry and the money it brings into the economy - so by that time I should think they (or at least their economy!) will be most grateful for your visit. If you do end up getting hotel rooms and such cheaper due to lack of demand as other people are staying away, you can satiate any guilt by spending the extra cash in other ways (perhaps buying more presents for people back home than you otherwise would, or just donating to local relief charities what will still be providing help to the worst affected). Just be aware that you won't see everywhere at its best as it will take a long time to get everything back to its usual condition after this event, and take care about how you mention the situation if you do as people's emotions will not doubt still be a little more raw than usual and you could accidentally cause upset or offence. And definitely be careful not to patronise - I don't know about anyone else but that would certainly annoy the hell out of me if I were them!
tl;dr: In a few months time? Go. Have fun. I've never been myself but plan to at some point and friends who have visited tell me it is a most interesting country to experience first-hand.
Perhaps. But I doubt that would be passive tech: as the ships powered down at the end there would be little left to crash.
And is was a big door.
Some suggest that our computers are supposedly derived from tech inspired by analysing the crashed ship, which while not really believable it is slightly less difficult to suspend disbelief.
What really kills the film is basic physics. Even if the aliens had some tech that somehow mitigated the mass of the mothership initially and stopped it ripping the earth apart at the seams, and even if that remained active (or was a passive tech) once the ships were disabled, them crashing into the Earth at the end would have finished pretty much finished us completely.
Yes, but accidentally doing a little right in amongst a pile of wrong doesn't make the wrong any less wrong.
They'd never survive just going after just those sites that are genuinely , as most are based in countries they can't arrange any jurisdiction over and and/are run by people who difficult to trace.
You'll note that they aren't going after many large organisations: just those that are likely to just settle because they can't afford the case or can't afford the chance of losing far more if they lose the case.
Aye, I remember the Beeb range well. I still have the old Master Series machine (that model had a slightly updated CPU, a 65C12 IIRC) in a draw under my bed. It still works too, though many of the old floppy disks don't (I powered it on a few months ago for a nostalgia hit - the Elite disk still seems healthy and I "wasted" an hour or two with it). I cut my programming teeth on that machine (BBC Basic and 6502 family assembler).
IIRC ARM was a spin-off or Acorn (initially an internal research team working on the CPU that would power the Archimedes line, that chip being the great great granddaddy of the current ARM designs) rather than the other way around.
The loophole is that they do not state "unlimited bandwidth". If asked to defend the use of "unlimited" they define it as "unlimited access". You have unlimited access in that you can access the service 24/7/365.25 if you want/need to, but they are very careful not to state (or imply in such a way the legal department doesn't think they can claim it wasn't a deliberate attempt to imply) that the word "unlimited" applies to bandwidth or any other specific resource.
"Why use the word at all then?" is a question many people ask, as they assume all services are unlimited in that sense. But that has not always been the case - all but the most expensive dial-up providers have limits on most accounts regarding how much time you could spend online in a given period, to avoid needing one modem per customer at their end.
Except that they're a BT reseller, so your service is dependent on a third party
Unfortunately just about every ISP selling to home users is, aside from virgin and the few other cable providers if they are available in your area. You could pay for a fibre line that bypasses BT completely but that ain't going to be cheap! They have their own backhaul though, so their users (myself included) haven't experienced some of the issues users of other ISPs have over recent years.
they subscribe to the IWF, so your service is filtered
This is an irritation, when there are significant false positives on the blacklist. IIRC their implementation is purely DNS based though, so easy to avoid if it causes you issues by using an external DNS provider (like Google's).
and their FUP lists all the ways they don't allow you to use the service, for example spamming
I have no problem with that: they are up front about what you can and can not do. Similarly with Virgin's current traffic shaping (I know people who use their service, and there is at least a page fully documenting how much you can use in a given time before rate limits start to be imposed and it is nice definite numbers not some unknown values so you don;y know what to expect).
I have no problem with them, I'm with a similar BT reseller, but don't delude yourself about what you're getting.
Aye. They are not perfect. And they are more expensive then most of the less perfect options. But I've been pretty happy with the service they have provided over the last ~3 years.
vi is hard.
Yeah. Rides a mean hog and carries his gun openly and everything.
My paranoia is more seated in thoughts of what would happen if my data was lost (or unavailable for a long period) rather than simply unavailable for a short time. While it is highly unlikely that Google would lose data (data management essentially being their raison d'etre you would expect so, and as you imply their track record shows that expectation to be correct thus far) it is not impossible.
I can't say any of my personal data and services are such that I'd be massively buggered if any of it were unavailable to me for a few hours, or even a few days (heck, most of it could die completely and all would be well with the rest of my world!) - I keep multiple copies for backup purposes rather than availability. In my professional position though, a good chunk of our info/data and services like mail do have potential to be that availability-sensitive, though that could never be hosted on a 3rd party (even Google) for compliance reasons laid down in the contract terms required by some of our clients.
Yes, but it wouldn't stop MS giving the license like that and the F/OSS projects deciding whether to use it or not (and whether to change license as needed) depending on license compatibility.
This puts the onus on the F/OSS projects to be very careful about licensing of course, but that is no different from the due diligence requirements we expect of closed source providers using open source code.
Even if this were the case (IIRC the other are correct in suggesting it isn't) there is an easy way out: if you find a F/OSS project using the patent just give them license to use it as long as the project remains F/OSS (and possibly non-commercial (where commercial/non-commercial would need to be defined quite finely)). OSS wins, MS loses nothing to Apple/Sony/other. Heck, add a stipulation that they could use the code in their own products under a non F/OSS license if they want and they potentially gain quite a chunk (though that part would definitely need the attention of an expensive lawyer to pick the right words, and managing who owns what and which parts require copyright re-assignment to maintain compliance may be a nightmare for the F/OSS project).
I was on the Dole in the UK for about 6 months, it was an easy way to live and could very easily get to become a way of life.
I know people on the dole here and it is only an "easy" way of live if you set your standards that low and so do the people around you.
I remember telling the clerk I could not sign on at my allotted time in a few days because I had an interview, he told me they would cut my benefit and I'd have to reapply if I went.
When was this? There were times, when things were not as bad economically as they are now, when the service seemed entirely populated with that sort of jobsworth, but I don't get the impression it is the case now (though I can't speak from personal experience in either case). They will as for proof (a letter confirming your interview or doctor's appointment or such) of why you are not planning to turn up to the appointment where you "sign on" for the period as there are some people who will make up any excuse not to go in when they can't be bothered, but one of my close friends has had no trouble what so ever skipping such appointments when there is good reason (including an interview). Not that this has helped him find permenant work, of course...
How do people that naive get all that money in the first place?
Because the world is far from a meritocracy. Or an any-thing-most-people-in-their-right-minds-would-consider-worth-measuring-ocracy. Power, riches, and related trappings are not distributed by fairness or intelligence, nor does the gullibility required to lose this sort of money preclude the chance to obtain it by some means deserved or not.
And before anyone points it out: I'm well aware that I'm comfortable compared to many in the world by luck of birth rather than personal worth. Yes it is working out OK for me, thanks for asking (though I don't have $200,000 to my name, never mind $200,000 to blow!).
The expectation is that the 3rd party (Google in this case) are doing the backing up for you.
Which is part of my point. You expect them to not have single points of failure, you expect them to have suitable well tested backup regimes, and in both cases your expectations are probably correct (though we'll see for sure when this current mess is/isn't resolved. But they are a single entity as far as you are concerned and therefore should, unless you have audited their procedures, be considered a single point of failure if you have any mission critical (or otherwise important) information stored on their systems. Yes they may have backups, but *you* can't access them. If something drastic were to bring the system down for a whole day or more you would be without both your live service and your archived data - at least if you had your own backup regime using resources elsewhere you would have your current (at the time of the incident) and archived mail even if you don't have incoming mail until the situation is fixed.
If Google are both your active service and your backups, then they are a single point of failure for you. I don't mean this as a slight against Google (in fact I'd trust them more than most companies I could mention): it applies to any and every hosted service especially if you don't have a strong set of SLAs with heavy payback (enough cover inconvenience, which could include loss of business, not just a refund for service prorated based on down-time) due to you in instances of non-compliance with those SLAs.
Does Google ignore the content on here rated 0 or below? It should.
I doubt it, and I'd say it shouldn't (at least not by their own hand).
They wouldn't want to waste time interpreting slashdot pages as they are indexed, the time writing the code to do that would be wasted as it is a moving target (they'd have to re-engineer the code if slashdot makes changes to the layout, and getting it working reliably in the first place would take quite some testing time) and they'd have to do the same for every significant site with a ranking system.
Much better to just request the page and hope that the default settings combined with reasonable moderation stops the links appearing in a way that is significant to the indexing algorithm.
While there are not (as yet, as far as I've seen) any people yelling and shouting for heads to role because some of their precious data is lost, I expect it to start soon.
There are far too few people who understand the danger of having only one copy of information, and people seem even more naive when that copy is help by another party (they assume that someone else is dealing with it, and seem to expect there will be some sort of come-back if the service they pay nothing for loses some of their info).
I'm not sure how we'd go about it, but the general public really needs to be hit around the head with the clue-stick on the matter. It probably needs to start in schools. I'm pretty sure from talking to younger family and friends (the conversation usually starts with something like "my cheap USB stick isn't working, can you read my document off it for me?) that good backups is not something covered in IT lessons at school (or if it is taught, it isn't drummed in hard enough) and it should be.
People need a better appreciation of how many things can cause damage or loss of data, and how easy it can be to protect yourself from the worst side-effects of that damage/loss simply by looking after your information properly.
You might be right. I look forward to the estate issuing a full apology, publicly promising that this action will not be repeated in future, and chastising the attorneys accordingly. Conversely, if they let it lie then they are at very least complicit and my initial reaction stands.
Congratulations to the Tolkien Estate, on ensuring that I will never again spend money on anything that has the slightest chance of putting a penny in your grubby mits.
unvetted GPS data wouldnt cut it if it were my decision.
As it didn't in this case, what counted was lack of proof from the other side.
I imagine that the GPS did help though, in giving the defendant some good reassurance that no mistake was make on their part (incorrectly maintained speedo in the car giving wrong results or some such) implying that the problem (i.e. the difference between how he perceived events and how the cop recorded them) lay with the radar equipment or the cop. Otherwise he may have just paid the fine out of not being conclusively sure enough to put up a good argument in his defence.
I think you are missing the point of Google's business model. Their core product is our attention, which they sell to advertisers by various means. In order to maintain their product, that is: keep our attention, they need to keep their search results relevant and useful (or at least as relevant and useful as the competition). Pushing the aggregators/copiers/similar further down the search results than the original good content sites helps to keep my attention and that of many other people (who would prefer to see, say, the original StackOverflow page instead of a copy that has 613 advert slots added), so this helps them maintain that sector of their product. And if those sites give up and concentrate on getting a high rank at Bing or somewhere else instead then that will not harm Google (they won't, of course, the listings war will continue battle after battle).
Google won, over AltaVista and others of the time, in part because the results were better - because AV's algorithm couldn't screen out the less useful results as well. They also won by just being a search engine rather than spending countless $ on becoming a "portal" when people didn't actually want a portal they wanted a search engine - perhaps AV would have done better if the $ that went into the portal thing went into improving their search functionality instead? Of course Google's keep-us-interested schemes involve much more than just the search engine these days so they could potentially fall into the same trap eventually, but unlike AV their other tools are just that: other, by which I mean that they compliment the search engine product (and the more general "information location and management" focus) or are not even related to it rather than trying to replace it.
Even though I trust the kernel (except brand new features: I let the early adopters get scalped there) and the protection I have setup (everything of consequence RAIDed and in regularly tested backups online/onsite+offsite+offline), hardware errors still happen and bugs are still going to be present. Call it being overly paranoid if you will but I'd rather check everything is OK every now and then than just trust that it is. The fact that most setups default to running a fill fsck on start every X days (even with no unclean umounts) implies I'm not the only one who thinks this isn't a bad idea.
As for "just a guy with root": I'd not go that far, but I'm perfectly happy to admit I'm far from an expert admin. I do consider myself to have more knowledge+experience than many people who do claim to be experts though!