A small nitpick with your comment, and a mistake I see too many people make. Hybrids (for the most part, there are a few exceptions) get better fuel economy in the city than on the freeway. That does not, however, mean that their highway fuel economy is worse than that of a comparable normal car.
I drive a very efficient non-hybrid '01 Civic HX CVT. It is rated at 34/40mpg, and I routinely average about 38. But the Prius is larger, and is rated 51/60mpg, with real-world averages around 45. So yes, it gets "only" 51mpg compared to the 60mpg it gets in stop-and-go driving. But 51 still trashes the mileage my trusty civic HX manages.
And the real-world 45 is a good measure better than my real-world 38, as well. I suspect I would see slightly higher than that in a Prius, since it's so incredibly flat here and I'm a conservative driver. I get a *very* high average compared to the normal real-world/EPA dichotomy for my car.
At any rate-- my own calculations differ somewhat from what I've been reading. Assuming $2.20 gas and ignoring tax deductions and credits, a Prius would be ahead of my current car financially in just 5 years. Now, perhaps I keep cars longer than most people-- but that doesn't seem unreasonable. I have had this Civic for four years, and I intend to keep it several more. And we all know that gas is over $2.20 and that starting next year, Uncle Sam will give you $3000 for buying a Prius.
It almost NEVER makes financial sense to replace a functional existing car, unless your fuel economy is very, very low, or you are an extremely heavy driver.
I'd love a copy for my Gamecube. I understand there is a DS version coming, but I don't have one of those either. Oh well-- if it doesn't ever make the jump, I'll do what I did with the dreamcast and ReZ and buy it and a PS2 (and maybe an eyetoy) when things are good and cheap.
It really does seem like a good fit for Nintendo, though.
Well, they can't be completely isolated if ships like Serenity drop by-- they're about as isolated as, say, rural Mexico. Tourist busses full of people with expensive cameras and phones roll through all the time, but many of the residents are poor. It's not a lack of access, exactly-- it's a lack of money. It's not like the incredibly poor can't hitch a ride or make the walk to the Best Buy equivalent two hours away, it's just pointless if you don't have any money.
There are plenty of people here on earth with absolutely no modern technology, and the appearance of spaceships is not likely to change that. In fact, I don't think I'm any more likely to have access to a spaceship of my own than I am to have access to my own airplane today.
Of course, without knowing *which* 15 minutes you saw, I have no idea. Absolutely no tech whatsoever is a bit unlikely, like you say. I remember the show a little differently-- things like ramshackle whorehouses in the desert covered in solar power fabric. The sort of high-tech artifact you might actually find in a backwater. The areas of the world that truly have no access are getting rarer, but they do still exist-- some of them by choice. I'm not entirely sure what the Amish would do with spaceships-- is hitching a ride to start your non-tech life somewhere else okay?
That's certainly true, and I can't speak for the gentleman you are replying to-- but one of the big reasons I *liked* Firefly was that it didn't suffer from the "perfect futurism" that too many sci-fi shows do. It's part of what made the original Star Wars so unique among movies... dirty desert huts and subsistence farming mixed in with dingy used robots and patchwork spaceships. *Much* more likely than the shiny-clean all-pervasive techno-future of Star Trek. Hell, we can't even manage to get everbody basic sanitation, let alone internet access.
A thousand years from now, someone will still be growing rice the hard way for a pittance.
It's the same malaise that affects technology companies everywhere. There is a massive, systemic disconnect between engineering and oversight. Management often has conflicting or changing goals due to external forces (government funding, etc...) that must be met, and they often have little to do with the core goals the engineers are trying to achieve.
Engineers' Goal: An effective space program.
Real-life Goal: Maintain funding by satisfying political interests through contracts granted not out of merit but by the district in which the work will happen, protect politicians who do not wish to be associated with having funded a failure by continuing to sink money into projects with suspect engineering and little hope of success, and maintain the current institutional power structure at all costs.
Yes, I do. Don't you think that giving one term two meanings is a little confusing?
Which is better, the confusion resulting from learning a new set of prefixes, or the confusion resulting from nobody knowing whether you meant 10^3 or 2^10 in a spec?
Before you answer that question, you should know that I have invented a second meaning for the word "better", but I'm not going to tell you which meaning I used.
Yeah, but they call it a "nautical mile". Or a "knot". It is abbreviated "nm" (although this can be confused with nanometer) or "nmi", rather than "mi". If we wanted to call it a "computational kilobyte" and abbreviate it "ckB" or something, it would be a fair analogy.
Heck, it might even be reasonably straightforward if all computer-storage things used the same convention. But we use kilo=10^3 for hard drives and kilo=2^10 for RAM.
As long as you're clear, I don't care which you use. But engineers can't afford ambiguity-- that's how we get little spaceships crashed into mars. I still use the 2^n version everywhere. But when it matters, I make sure I specify that.
I've had a yahoo account for years. I opened a gmail account when they first started up, and tried using it for a few months, but it lacked quite a bit of the functionality I had gotten used to. I can sync my yahoo contacts list and calendar with my treo, for example-- does gmail have any sort of sync yet?
As a pure email client, gmail is fantastic. But I'm still hooked on yahoo's sync.
Nobody's trying to impose restrictions on common-use language here-- this isn't one of those "hacker/cracker" debates. The situation we have here is one where the older, widely-used interpretation of an international series of prefixes for use with systems of measurement is getting two meanings, and a new standard has been proposed to prevent confusion. Does it really make sense that we measure hard-drive storage as powers-of-10, but RAM as powers-of-2?
Use them however you want in everyday speech, but when you need to put down proper specs as an engineer, it's best to be absolutely clear, whether you do it with the new prefixes or simply by making annotations indicating which interpretation you're using.
We all love being jerks. That's why I called you out on it. In fact, there's very little more satisfying than being a jerk to someone who is already being a jerk themselves-- you can understand my temptation to reply to your post, as you were doing the exact same thing to the jerk in front of you. This is the force that drives slashdot. We're all here to be pedantic jerks.
Agreed, which is why we have a new standard to use instead of mega/giga/kilo. You'll never get power-of-10 storage space from something that has power-of-2 storage locations. We should never have "borrowed" the prefixes in the first place, because now it's our own fault that we're angry every time we buy a hard drive that's got slightly less storage space than we expected.
As it stands, I just make sure it's clear which way I'm using "mega". Perhaps 20 years from now, enough kids will come through college learning the right way that I'll make the switch to "mebi".
He's actually right, you know. Kilo, Mega, and Giga meant exactly what he said-- powers of 10. We computer-folk have been mis-using them for years to refer to nearby powers of 2, and there are new prefixes we *should* be using to avoid confusion. The "new" prefixes were published by the IEC in 1998.
for this:
1GB = 1024 MB = 1048576 KB
you should be using:
1GiB = 1024 MiB = 1048576 KiB
Where the GiB, MiB, and KiB stand for Gibibytes, Mebibytes, and Kibibytes.
Do I use them? No. They sound funny, and like many programmers I'm cranky and stuck-in-my-ways. But you should be prepared to accept that the standard "power of 10" usage of the SI prefixes mega, giga, and kilo you were taught in college science classes is indeed correct, and that the way we've been using them is an awkward legacy kludge that grafts a second meaning onto a widely-used standard.
You aren't kidding. "Basicer than basic"... slashdot with only the top 5 comments becomes just another random blog. It's the huge nerd userbase and the trolls that make this place feel like home.
The great thing about light mode's compromise was that I could just leave it enabled and use it on both the desktop and the mobile device. Currently, I have the following options:
1. The whole shebang: all the functionality, all the bandwidth. 2. Light mode: no slashboxes, less bandwidth. It's not bad for mobile, but now that it's not full-functionality, I can't leave it enabled all the time. 3./palm mode: only shows the top 5 comments. hardly even qualifies as slashdot! Not a useful thing unless you're on a *really* stripped-down device.
What I'm missing now (a fire-and-forget way to get full functionality on the desktop but lower bandwidth and all the comments on the phone) can be fixed one of several ways:
1. A way to set my preferences to be different for mobile and desktop browsers. 2. A full replacement for light mode, with all the site functionality 3. A more complete mobile mode with all the comments present.
Reading through the comments, it seems there are some mobile modes I didn't know existed. They are not, however, what I would really look for, as they severely cripple the site. At a bare minimum, slashdot needs the articles, summaries, and comments to be slashdot-- the/palm version I tried has article titles (no summaries) that link to article summaries (no comments) that link to *only* the top 5 comments. That's not really worth bothering to use-- without all the comments, there really isn't much to slashdot.
I was hopeful there for a minute that there was some wonderful mobile mode I'd never heard of that I could now use instead of Light Mode, but that's sadly not the case.:(
Slashboxes were still appearing for me in Light Mode yesterday, and now they're all gone.:( Pretty please can we have them back?
I've been browsing in Light Mode for so long, I'd almost forgot slashdot looked like anything else. It was quicker to load and easier to use on my phone, which was nice because I could just leave it there and not have to toggle my user account back and forth between some sort of crippled "mobile" mode every time I got on my treo.
I noticed that some of the main-site functionality is now gone from the somewhat unattractive light version. I don't mind ugly-- obviously, I wouldn't still be reading slashdot after all these years if that were an issue. The new layout is cleaner, and I don't know how the size stacks up, so perhaps this is a non-issue. Personally, I would like to see the light mode split and go two directions:
1. Low-bandwidth mode:
All the functionality of the full site, less bandwidth, simpler layout. Possibly even using gzip to cruch the page size down further. Currently, light mode lacks the slashboxes and looks awful.
2. Mobile mode:
Stripped-down layout for absolute minimum bandwidth and very-small-screen displays. Articles and comments all present, but no unnecessary cruft by default unless enabled by the user.
Consider this a vote for *at least* a fully-functioning light mode!
That's an interesting way to use the phrase "accomplished nothing," but it does kinda describe what happens with a biofuel.
If you grow soybeans, they lock up CO2 from the atmosphere. When you burn them, it all comes right back out, putting you right back where you started. In terms of net CO2 in the air, you have indeed "accomplished nothing." A more common term for this is "carbon neutral."
Although it can't lower atmospheric CO2, it has the advantage over out-of-the-ground petroleum of not increasing the atmospheric CO2 at all. When you burn stuff we dug out of the ground, you're gonna raise the net CO2 level. When you burn stuff we got out of the air, you're gonna keep the level right where it is. I think this is what you were trying to say, but I wanted to clarify a bit.
As to making biodiesel-- where did you hear you needed oil or coal to make it? You need a small heat source while you stir lye and methanol into your veggie oil-- but that might as well come from your biodiesel as well. Same with energy needed to run the farm machinery. Now... if somebody can show me that the lifecycle energy cost of biodiesel is greater than the amount of energy in the fuel you end up with, that's a different story.
Perhaps you are missing that you can't vacuum so well on an airless rock, since the whole idea of a vacuum cleaner depends on there being some air pressure to work with.
It locked me out of single-player HL2 (and multiplayer, for that matter) for the better part of two days last year. The issue may be resolved now-- it had to do with the order in which they handled authentication. It would delete your cached authentication if it detected ethernet, without actually getting a new one from the server. So if the steam server was down, you couldn't play, even single-player, because steam helpfully deleted your offline authentication.
Like I said-- it could be resolved now. But that doesn't change the fact that without Steam, this wouldn't have been an issue for single-player gameplay.
I'm sure we all know that one person's story, pro or con, does not give us a good picture of the actual state of things. I'll add my anecdote anyway-- I quit going to movies in the theatre with any sort of regularity (I see 2-3 a year now) because of crap like this. Not that it was a great film, but the showing of "Hellboy" by my house was made more enjoyable by a gentleman who got more phone calls than I do in a week. At no point did he cease talking on the phone for more than a minute, and many, many times he answered his call waiting.
I haven't seen thrown food in a number of years, so my gut feel is that that's fairly rare.
Screaming babies added their own vocals to my viewing of "Crouching Tiger" to the point where some guy finally yelled at the parents and the crowd gave him an ovation.
It doesn't happen all the time, but it's probably about 2/3 of the time that I leave the theater pissed off by ringing phones, talking on phones, and screaming babies at non-kids movies. (A screaming kid at a kids' film is to be expected)
Toss in the fact that the sound is terrible and the prints so scratched that I really *do* get a better experience at home, and there just isn't that much reason for me to go anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
A small nitpick with your comment, and a mistake I see too many people make. Hybrids (for the most part, there are a few exceptions) get better fuel economy in the city than on the freeway. That does not, however, mean that their highway fuel economy is worse than that of a comparable normal car.
I drive a very efficient non-hybrid '01 Civic HX CVT. It is rated at 34/40mpg, and I routinely average about 38. But the Prius is larger, and is rated 51/60mpg, with real-world averages around 45. So yes, it gets "only" 51mpg compared to the 60mpg it gets in stop-and-go driving. But 51 still trashes the mileage my trusty civic HX manages.
And the real-world 45 is a good measure better than my real-world 38, as well. I suspect I would see slightly higher than that in a Prius, since it's so incredibly flat here and I'm a conservative driver. I get a *very* high average compared to the normal real-world/EPA dichotomy for my car.
At any rate-- my own calculations differ somewhat from what I've been reading. Assuming $2.20 gas and ignoring tax deductions and credits, a Prius would be ahead of my current car financially in just 5 years. Now, perhaps I keep cars longer than most people-- but that doesn't seem unreasonable. I have had this Civic for four years, and I intend to keep it several more. And we all know that gas is over $2.20 and that starting next year, Uncle Sam will give you $3000 for buying a Prius.
It almost NEVER makes financial sense to replace a functional existing car, unless your fuel economy is very, very low, or you are an extremely heavy driver.
I'd love a copy for my Gamecube. I understand there is a DS version coming, but I don't have one of those either. Oh well-- if it doesn't ever make the jump, I'll do what I did with the dreamcast and ReZ and buy it and a PS2 (and maybe an eyetoy) when things are good and cheap.
It really does seem like a good fit for Nintendo, though.
Well, they can't be completely isolated if ships like Serenity drop by-- they're about as isolated as, say, rural Mexico. Tourist busses full of people with expensive cameras and phones roll through all the time, but many of the residents are poor. It's not a lack of access, exactly-- it's a lack of money. It's not like the incredibly poor can't hitch a ride or make the walk to the Best Buy equivalent two hours away, it's just pointless if you don't have any money.
There are plenty of people here on earth with absolutely no modern technology, and the appearance of spaceships is not likely to change that. In fact, I don't think I'm any more likely to have access to a spaceship of my own than I am to have access to my own airplane today.
Of course, without knowing *which* 15 minutes you saw, I have no idea. Absolutely no tech whatsoever is a bit unlikely, like you say. I remember the show a little differently-- things like ramshackle whorehouses in the desert covered in solar power fabric. The sort of high-tech artifact you might actually find in a backwater. The areas of the world that truly have no access are getting rarer, but they do still exist-- some of them by choice. I'm not entirely sure what the Amish would do with spaceships-- is hitching a ride to start your non-tech life somewhere else okay?
You also weren't fast enough.
That's certainly true, and I can't speak for the gentleman you are replying to-- but one of the big reasons I *liked* Firefly was that it didn't suffer from the "perfect futurism" that too many sci-fi shows do. It's part of what made the original Star Wars so unique among movies... dirty desert huts and subsistence farming mixed in with dingy used robots and patchwork spaceships. *Much* more likely than the shiny-clean all-pervasive techno-future of Star Trek. Hell, we can't even manage to get everbody basic sanitation, let alone internet access.
A thousand years from now, someone will still be growing rice the hard way for a pittance.
It's the same malaise that affects technology companies everywhere. There is a massive, systemic disconnect between engineering and oversight. Management often has conflicting or changing goals due to external forces (government funding, etc...) that must be met, and they often have little to do with the core goals the engineers are trying to achieve.
Engineers' Goal: An effective space program.
Real-life Goal: Maintain funding by satisfying political interests through contracts granted not out of merit but by the district in which the work will happen, protect politicians who do not wish to be associated with having funded a failure by continuing to sink money into projects with suspect engineering and little hope of success, and maintain the current institutional power structure at all costs.
Yes, I do. Don't you think that giving one term two meanings is a little confusing?
Which is better, the confusion resulting from learning a new set of prefixes, or the confusion resulting from nobody knowing whether you meant 10^3 or 2^10 in a spec?
Before you answer that question, you should know that I have invented a second meaning for the word "better", but I'm not going to tell you which meaning I used.
Yeah, but they call it a "nautical mile". Or a "knot". It is abbreviated "nm" (although this can be confused with nanometer) or "nmi", rather than "mi". If we wanted to call it a "computational kilobyte" and abbreviate it "ckB" or something, it would be a fair analogy.
Heck, it might even be reasonably straightforward if all computer-storage things used the same convention. But we use kilo=10^3 for hard drives and kilo=2^10 for RAM.
As long as you're clear, I don't care which you use. But engineers can't afford ambiguity-- that's how we get little spaceships crashed into mars. I still use the 2^n version everywhere. But when it matters, I make sure I specify that.
I've had a yahoo account for years. I opened a gmail account when they first started up, and tried using it for a few months, but it lacked quite a bit of the functionality I had gotten used to. I can sync my yahoo contacts list and calendar with my treo, for example-- does gmail have any sort of sync yet?
As a pure email client, gmail is fantastic. But I'm still hooked on yahoo's sync.
I just can't help myself!
Nobody's trying to impose restrictions on common-use language here-- this isn't one of those "hacker/cracker" debates. The situation we have here is one where the older, widely-used interpretation of an international series of prefixes for use with systems of measurement is getting two meanings, and a new standard has been proposed to prevent confusion. Does it really make sense that we measure hard-drive storage as powers-of-10, but RAM as powers-of-2?
Use them however you want in everyday speech, but when you need to put down proper specs as an engineer, it's best to be absolutely clear, whether you do it with the new prefixes or simply by making annotations indicating which interpretation you're using.
We all love being jerks. That's why I called you out on it. In fact, there's very little more satisfying than being a jerk to someone who is already being a jerk themselves-- you can understand my temptation to reply to your post, as you were doing the exact same thing to the jerk in front of you. This is the force that drives slashdot. We're all here to be pedantic jerks.
Yeah, they sound ridiculous. It's actually Pebibytes, for whatever reason. My favorite is "Exbibytes."
I'm not sure that really adds any flames. You did, however, make the same mistake as the first time around. To reiterate:
IEC standard:
1 KiB == 2^10
1 MiB == 2^20
1 GiB == 2^30
SI prefixes:
1 KB == 10^3
1 MB == 10^6
1 GB == 10^9
Agreed, which is why we have a new standard to use instead of mega/giga/kilo. You'll never get power-of-10 storage space from something that has power-of-2 storage locations. We should never have "borrowed" the prefixes in the first place, because now it's our own fault that we're angry every time we buy a hard drive that's got slightly less storage space than we expected.
As it stands, I just make sure it's clear which way I'm using "mega". Perhaps 20 years from now, enough kids will come through college learning the right way that I'll make the switch to "mebi".
He's actually right, you know. Kilo, Mega, and Giga meant exactly what he said-- powers of 10. We computer-folk have been mis-using them for years to refer to nearby powers of 2, and there are new prefixes we *should* be using to avoid confusion. The "new" prefixes were published by the IEC in 1998.
for this:
1GB = 1024 MB = 1048576 KB
you should be using:
1GiB = 1024 MiB = 1048576 KiB
Where the GiB, MiB, and KiB stand for Gibibytes, Mebibytes, and Kibibytes.
Do I use them? No. They sound funny, and like many programmers I'm cranky and stuck-in-my-ways. But you should be prepared to accept that the standard "power of 10" usage of the SI prefixes mega, giga, and kilo you were taught in college science classes is indeed correct, and that the way we've been using them is an awkward legacy kludge that grafts a second meaning onto a widely-used standard.
Obligatory link.
You aren't kidding. "Basicer than basic"... slashdot with only the top 5 comments becomes just another random blog. It's the huge nerd userbase and the trolls that make this place feel like home.
The great thing about light mode's compromise was that I could just leave it enabled and use it on both the desktop and the mobile device. Currently, I have the following options:
/palm mode: only shows the top 5 comments. hardly even qualifies as slashdot! Not a useful thing unless you're on a *really* stripped-down device.
1. The whole shebang: all the functionality, all the bandwidth.
2. Light mode: no slashboxes, less bandwidth. It's not bad for mobile, but now that it's not full-functionality, I can't leave it enabled all the time.
3.
What I'm missing now (a fire-and-forget way to get full functionality on the desktop but lower bandwidth and all the comments on the phone) can be fixed one of several ways:
1. A way to set my preferences to be different for mobile and desktop browsers.
2. A full replacement for light mode, with all the site functionality
3. A more complete mobile mode with all the comments present.
Reading through the comments, it seems there are some mobile modes I didn't know existed. They are not, however, what I would really look for, as they severely cripple the site. At a bare minimum, slashdot needs the articles, summaries, and comments to be slashdot-- the /palm version I tried has article titles (no summaries) that link to article summaries (no comments) that link to *only* the top 5 comments. That's not really worth bothering to use-- without all the comments, there really isn't much to slashdot.
:(
I was hopeful there for a minute that there was some wonderful mobile mode I'd never heard of that I could now use instead of Light Mode, but that's sadly not the case.
Slashboxes were still appearing for me in Light Mode yesterday, and now they're all gone. :( Pretty please can we have them back?
I've been browsing in Light Mode for so long, I'd almost forgot slashdot looked like anything else. It was quicker to load and easier to use on my phone, which was nice because I could just leave it there and not have to toggle my user account back and forth between some sort of crippled "mobile" mode every time I got on my treo.
I noticed that some of the main-site functionality is now gone from the somewhat unattractive light version. I don't mind ugly-- obviously, I wouldn't still be reading slashdot after all these years if that were an issue. The new layout is cleaner, and I don't know how the size stacks up, so perhaps this is a non-issue. Personally, I would like to see the light mode split and go two directions:
1. Low-bandwidth mode:
All the functionality of the full site, less bandwidth, simpler layout. Possibly even using gzip to cruch the page size down further. Currently, light mode lacks the slashboxes and looks awful.
2. Mobile mode:
Stripped-down layout for absolute minimum bandwidth and very-small-screen displays. Articles and comments all present, but no unnecessary cruft by default unless enabled by the user.
Consider this a vote for *at least* a fully-functioning light mode!
That's an interesting way to use the phrase "accomplished nothing," but it does kinda describe what happens with a biofuel.
If you grow soybeans, they lock up CO2 from the atmosphere. When you burn them, it all comes right back out, putting you right back where you started. In terms of net CO2 in the air, you have indeed "accomplished nothing." A more common term for this is "carbon neutral."
Although it can't lower atmospheric CO2, it has the advantage over out-of-the-ground petroleum of not increasing the atmospheric CO2 at all. When you burn stuff we dug out of the ground, you're gonna raise the net CO2 level. When you burn stuff we got out of the air, you're gonna keep the level right where it is. I think this is what you were trying to say, but I wanted to clarify a bit.
As to making biodiesel-- where did you hear you needed oil or coal to make it? You need a small heat source while you stir lye and methanol into your veggie oil-- but that might as well come from your biodiesel as well. Same with energy needed to run the farm machinery. Now... if somebody can show me that the lifecycle energy cost of biodiesel is greater than the amount of energy in the fuel you end up with, that's a different story.
Perhaps you are missing that you can't vacuum so well on an airless rock, since the whole idea of a vacuum cleaner depends on there being some air pressure to work with.
It locked me out of single-player HL2 (and multiplayer, for that matter) for the better part of two days last year. The issue may be resolved now-- it had to do with the order in which they handled authentication. It would delete your cached authentication if it detected ethernet, without actually getting a new one from the server. So if the steam server was down, you couldn't play, even single-player, because steam helpfully deleted your offline authentication.
Like I said-- it could be resolved now. But that doesn't change the fact that without Steam, this wouldn't have been an issue for single-player gameplay.
I'm sure we all know that one person's story, pro or con, does not give us a good picture of the actual state of things. I'll add my anecdote anyway-- I quit going to movies in the theatre with any sort of regularity (I see 2-3 a year now) because of crap like this. Not that it was a great film, but the showing of "Hellboy" by my house was made more enjoyable by a gentleman who got more phone calls than I do in a week. At no point did he cease talking on the phone for more than a minute, and many, many times he answered his call waiting.
I haven't seen thrown food in a number of years, so my gut feel is that that's fairly rare.
Screaming babies added their own vocals to my viewing of "Crouching Tiger" to the point where some guy finally yelled at the parents and the crowd gave him an ovation.
It doesn't happen all the time, but it's probably about 2/3 of the time that I leave the theater pissed off by ringing phones, talking on phones, and screaming babies at non-kids movies. (A screaming kid at a kids' film is to be expected)
Toss in the fact that the sound is terrible and the prints so scratched that I really *do* get a better experience at home, and there just isn't that much reason for me to go anymore.
I think you misread that. They want google to communicate to them exactly how they should manipulate the public on google's behalf.
Essentially, "tell us how to manipulate them."
Although I can't imagine this isn't a fine example of sarcasm.