That's all well and good, until one considers that these devices are always connected to the internet and can be compromised by malicious actors who don't care about legal/PR issues, and want to blackmail/indict/rendition you or steal your personal information.
Sure, and that applies equally to all of the above-mentioned devices, not just smart speakers.
For the vast majority of US history, US military power has all been about projecting power around the world
Hmm. I got a little overenthusiastic here. The US has only been projecting power around the world, really, since the late 19th and early 20th century. At this point that does constitute a majority of the years of the nation's existence, but not a "vast" majority.
The failed jockstrap douche eating dirt on the other side of the planet is why your ass is still speaking English.
I support the troops. In fact I did eight years in the reserve myself, including getting orders to Kuwait during Desert Storm (though my unit and I didn't actually go; that's a weird story), and many members of my family serve and have served in active duty, guard and reserve roles, including in active combat theaters. On Memorial Day we raise full-sized, period-appropriate flags over the graves of all of my ancestors who were veterans, and there are a lot of them.
So I'm not disrespecting the military when I say that the quoted statement above is dead wrong.
There has been no serious threat of invasion of the sort that would result in a change of government and change of culture and language in the United States' entire history. Even in WWII there was no serious threat of invasion of the mainland. I suppose if the Axis had succeeded in taking the rest of the world they might have eventually decided to try a strike across the pond, but it would have been tough (less because of the bravery of the American soldier than the productivity of the American worker, but both would have been relevant -- as would the "rifle behind every blade of grass" as the apocryphal quote says). During the Cold War there was some risk of nuclear destruction of the US mainland, but not invasion.
For the vast majority of US history, US military power has all been about projecting power around the world, not defending the homeland. Yes, this has had benefits to people back home, but the benefits have been primarily economic. By encouraging the growth of liberal democracy around the world and an associated atmosphere of international openness, free trade and mutual support, we've made a better world for ourselves and most of the rest of the world. We've all gotten wealthier, happier, safer.
But there have been no threats to our choice of language or culture or form of government. Or our freedom. When people say that soldiers "defend our freedom", they're factually wrong. American soldiers often do defend other peoples' freedom, and always defend our national interests, including economic interests (and, BTW, defending our economic interest is a Good Thing, leftist whining notwithstanding). There's plenty to be lauded in the truth; no reason to make up lies.
No, the only threats to our freedom have been purely domestic. And we can largely thank activists and lawyers for the battles we've won there, not soldiers. And there have been no threats to our choice of spoken language at all. No, not even from immigrants.
I wonder if such ultrasound machines placed inside Congress might help some of the demented souls in there. Quite a few Parliaments 'round the world might give it a shot, too.
Demented, dementia, whatever.
I'd contribute to a kickstarter to install one in the Oval Office, that's for sure.
But still... even when understanding my query isn't an issue, I've found that typing/clicking is faster than talking for setting up most things - the exceptions being "set a timer" and "when I get home, remind me to...".
You must type faster than I do. When I have to use the hotword, my phone is already in my hand and the query is very short, speech is only marginally faster, I guess. When I don't have to use the hotword (e.g. on my Pixel 3, where I just squeeze the phone to activate the assistant), or if the query is long, speech is much faster. And, of course, the speech interface is usable when driving.
I'll admit that I'm a bit reluctant to talk to my phone in public, but at home or in the car I basically never type when I can just talk.
Sound drivers are user-removable, yes they are. You can verify non-function of the speakers and mic on most systems. Again, conflating phones, PC's and "smart" assistants is reductive in terms of actual security.
Well, it is for people who actually disable the microphones on their laptop and cell phone (which would make it not a "phone" any more, wouldn't it?). Do you do that? If so, your commitment to privacy is impressive. Also misguided, but impressive.
For the other 99.999% of the population, hawguy has a very good point. If you believe that companies are willing to violate their claims about what their devices do (which, note, is often illegal), then you have to assume that any and all of them might be listening to you. If you believe they're honest about what their devices do (and again, note that you don't have to believe in their honorable nature or good intentions to believe that, just their unwillingness to risk the legal and PR disaster that could result from lying), then smart speakers are fine, because they only record/transmit after their hotword is spoken and they let you review and optionally delete everything they recorded.
To make my evaluation of these risks clear, I carry a cellphone with multiple microphones and cameras, use a laptop with integrated microphone and camera and a desktop with an attached Logitech microphone/camera -- with drivers properly installed and the peripheral fully functional because I use it for video conferencing -- and I have eight smart speakers scattered around my house and I'm contemplating buying a ninth.
A friend of mine had one of his Youtube videos copied and put directly into the game. Not a dance move (I believe it is one of the dance moves as well), but his actual video. He kept getting looks from kids in the grocery store because they recognized him from the game. He was never contacted for permission.
How's that for proving intent. Not stealing just dance moves, but actual videos.
In case the latter, Debian is a pretty significant Linux distro in its own right, but if you include all of the distros that are based on Debian, it has a much larger installed base than all non-Debian GNU/Linux distros combined. We have to specify GNU/Linux because without the GNU part, the most popular Linux-based OS -- in fact the most popular operating system, period -- is Android, and the second most popular Linux distribution is ChromeOS.
One of the reasons to deposit a copy of a work in a large library (originally Oxford and/or Cambridge, Library of Congress in America) was so a copy was available after the work entered the public domain.
Lots of works have been lost, either accidentally or on purpose. Wiki has a huge list of lost films for example. Some were lost in fires and such and others were removed on purpose, to recycle the film stock or just to get rid of it.
In this day, digital copy is very easy to archive.
That's a valid point. Also, the archived copy can be archived without DRM. If anyone ever manages to build DRM that doesn't suck, we'll lose lots of works just because no one will be able to read them.
That said, I don't know that it actually makes sense to require the government to maintain the archives. Though I suppose that filing fees could be set high enough to cover archival cost.
I think the original idea of a fixed term, say 20 or 30 years, plus one 20 or 30 year renewal is reasonable.
I agree, but given that Disney will never be happy with that, which means that your proposal would meet extremely well-funded opposition, I think another good option is to allow many more renewal periods, each requiring payment of a small renewal fee. The fact that some formal process and payment of a fee is required to retain copyright beyond the first term would ensure that the vast majority of works quickly fall into the public domain. The fee could be increased with the age of the work, but I suspect that actually wouldn't matter.
The move to digital actually this a lot easier to manage. Copyright registration wouldn't need to involve sending a copy of the complete work (a burden on both copyright holder and government that motivated our current system of automatic registration), all it would require is a hash of the content. A 32-byte SHA-256 hash of each copyrighted work could be submitted. Note that the hash would be to establish ownership of the original. It wouldn't be the case that anyone could freely publish modifications just because they have a different hash; infringement would still be based on a comparison of the full possibly-infringing work with the original. The copyright holder would, of course, need to keep a copy of what they hashed. If you registered a hash but then couldn't produce a copy of the thing hashed, your copyright would be invalid.
Even paintings and similar could be registered with a hash of the photo of the work.
I do think automatic registration should continue to be used for the first term. It really is a good thing that anything you create is automatically copyrighted so it can't be stolen between when you made it and when you start exploiting it commercially. But if you're making money off of something it's no big deal to hash it and log onto to a government web site to submit your registration. They could even automatically email you when your term is approaching the end, so you can easily respond with your renewal request and fee payment.
Nice to know, but just to be safe you can always block the spider's IP address.
A more reliable way would be to examine the useragent header and return errors to the spider. But there's really no need; Google doesn't want to spider your data if you don't want it spidered, so robots.txt is perfectly effective and the simplest option.
...but we should add the personal websites under a single domain so people can go there to find them and search them easily. We could call it mypage.com or something.
Oh, and also it should be completely free to use, because people won't pay for it, and it can't require people to know anything about building a site, running a server, etc. So we'll need an ad-supported hosting system with a super easy to use content management system.
There are actually very good reasons why Facebook et al replaced personal web sites, you know.
google and bookface would totally honor things like robots.txt files on a personal website, especially if it's hosted on some garbage "cloud" social site.
If you want to see the US pushed towards a civil war, just start prosecuting the oppositions politicians when they leave office.
In general, no one should be above the law but in the current situation, pragmatism may have to win.
Especially on questionable charges like "campaign finance" violations that are near universal and normally handled through a fine.
This is bullshit. Campaign finance charges aren't "questionable", violations aren't "near universal" (not rare, but not common) and aren't normally handled "through a fine".
No, the evidence says "maybe". There's definitely lots of evidence of Trump campaign officials and Russians feeling each other out. What's unclear is whether they actually made some sort of agreement -- which could have been implicit, note. It's possible to reach a mutual understanding without anyone actually saying the words. That would make it harder to prove, though.
So, to all of those who've welded their asses to the "Impeach Impeach Impeach" train that's going "Trump woke up this morning! IMPEACH HIM NOW!" "Trump tweeted something I don't like! IMPEACH HIM NOW!" "Trump exists! IMPEACH HIM NOW!"?
Take a fucking chill pill. Because your crazy fucking behavior is destroying the Democratic Party and is going to keep the man in office until 2024.
While the Democratic party is perpetually self-destructing, I don't think there's much chance that Trump will win in 2020. He only barely eked out a win in 2016 because he (a) ran against one of the most disliked presidential candidates in history, (b) got help from the Russians, (c) got help from the FBI (Comey's October surprise), and (d) was the beneficiary of some pretty stupid campaign missteps by his opponent. You maybe could take away any one of (b), (c) or (d) and he'd still manage a win, but take away any two, or take (a) away, and he'd have been toast.
All the Democrats have to do to beat Trump in 2020 is to run a candidate who's less hated than Hillary Clinton. That's pretty much anybody. Well, they also have to hope Trump can't manufacture a plausible war next year. Americans love standing behind their president in wartime. Of course he'd probably screw that up by tweeting nasty and stupid comments about the generals, so maybe that's not such a big risk.
Unless Mueller comes up with something really compelling, though, I think Trump is safe from impeachment. The peculiar dynamics of Trump's base mean that an impeachment in the House without a corresponding conviction in the Senate would probably harden their resolve, which would hurt the Democrats in 2020. And I think we all know that if Trump ran naked down the 5th street murdering people at random while making the Nazi salute and shouting "Heil Putin!", the Republicans in the Senate would say, in the words of Orrin Hatch, "Okay, but I don't care".
I think Trump is at great legal risk after he leaves office, though, so he's going to be really desperate to stay in office in 2020.
Hold on, guys, this ride is going to get crazy. We ain't seen nothin' yet. It's possible that one of the best things the Democratic candidates for president could do for the country is to all take a pledge that they'll issue blanket pardons for Trump if elected. He'll still have to worry about state prosecution and civil suits, but removing the fear of federal prosecution could be hugely beneficial.
Actually most likely they will set the effort aside for some time. Management that still invested in it will recall who the loyalists were. Those folks will be promoted for being "team players".
Highly unlikely. Many of the signatories of the Dragonfly opposition memos, internal and public, were senior, highly-respected and highly-influential staff. People who have tremendous clout... clout based on their track records of delivering big, tough projects, which can't be erased.
Having solidified their support among middle management upper management will try again in a year or two.
Might work in other companies. Won't work at Google, not without significant cultural and structural changes. It's really not a normal corporation in many respects.
The got caught doing an unpopular (perhaps unethical) project, that project name is now tainted. So Google has only one recourse. Changed the name of the project, and bring in better marketing people to spin the new product more positively.
The other, and in this case far more likely, recourse available is simply to drop it. I'd bet good money that's the final outcome here. Oh, I'd guess the issue will be raised again in a few years, but I predict a similar outcome then as well.
I know it's more fashionable to be cynical, but that doesn't mean it's more accurate. There's fundamentally no way to keep this secret from employees, and no way marketing spin is going to be able to convince them it's okay. Barring a significant change in the corporate culture, this is never going to succeed at Google.
Labor is taxed at twice the rate of capital. Why is this? Why isn't it the other way around?
The theory is that taxing capital has a larger negative impact on the economy than taxing labor, since it discourages investment and encourages capital (which is more mobile than labor) to flee high-tax jurisdictions. Also, note that what you say is only true of long-term capital investment. Short-term investment is taxed at the same rates as labor, at least in the US. This is intended to encourage long-term investment which is seen as more beneficial to economic growth.
I'm not claiming to know if any of these theories actually hold water. You'd have to ask an economist about that.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all well and good, until one considers that these devices are always connected to the internet and can be compromised by malicious actors who don't care about legal/PR issues, and want to blackmail/indict/rendition you or steal your personal information.
Sure, and that applies equally to all of the above-mentioned devices, not just smart speakers.
For the vast majority of US history, US military power has all been about projecting power around the world
Hmm. I got a little overenthusiastic here. The US has only been projecting power around the world, really, since the late 19th and early 20th century. At this point that does constitute a majority of the years of the nation's existence, but not a "vast" majority.
The failed jockstrap douche eating dirt on the other side of the planet is why your ass is still speaking English.
I support the troops. In fact I did eight years in the reserve myself, including getting orders to Kuwait during Desert Storm (though my unit and I didn't actually go; that's a weird story), and many members of my family serve and have served in active duty, guard and reserve roles, including in active combat theaters. On Memorial Day we raise full-sized, period-appropriate flags over the graves of all of my ancestors who were veterans, and there are a lot of them.
So I'm not disrespecting the military when I say that the quoted statement above is dead wrong.
There has been no serious threat of invasion of the sort that would result in a change of government and change of culture and language in the United States' entire history. Even in WWII there was no serious threat of invasion of the mainland. I suppose if the Axis had succeeded in taking the rest of the world they might have eventually decided to try a strike across the pond, but it would have been tough (less because of the bravery of the American soldier than the productivity of the American worker, but both would have been relevant -- as would the "rifle behind every blade of grass" as the apocryphal quote says). During the Cold War there was some risk of nuclear destruction of the US mainland, but not invasion.
For the vast majority of US history, US military power has all been about projecting power around the world, not defending the homeland. Yes, this has had benefits to people back home, but the benefits have been primarily economic. By encouraging the growth of liberal democracy around the world and an associated atmosphere of international openness, free trade and mutual support, we've made a better world for ourselves and most of the rest of the world. We've all gotten wealthier, happier, safer.
But there have been no threats to our choice of language or culture or form of government. Or our freedom. When people say that soldiers "defend our freedom", they're factually wrong. American soldiers often do defend other peoples' freedom, and always defend our national interests, including economic interests (and, BTW, defending our economic interest is a Good Thing, leftist whining notwithstanding). There's plenty to be lauded in the truth; no reason to make up lies.
No, the only threats to our freedom have been purely domestic. And we can largely thank activists and lawyers for the battles we've won there, not soldiers. And there have been no threats to our choice of spoken language at all. No, not even from immigrants.
I wonder if such ultrasound machines placed inside Congress might help some of the demented souls in there. Quite a few Parliaments 'round the world might give it a shot, too.
Demented, dementia, whatever.
I'd contribute to a kickstarter to install one in the Oval Office, that's for sure.
What Google needs to do is hit someone that has a sense of ethics and a. moral code, and have them approve all other project concepts.
That's definitely not an internal hire though...
You don't think the people who publicly protested the Dragonfly project would qualify?
But still... even when understanding my query isn't an issue, I've found that typing/clicking is faster than talking for setting up most things - the exceptions being "set a timer" and "when I get home, remind me to ...".
You must type faster than I do. When I have to use the hotword, my phone is already in my hand and the query is very short, speech is only marginally faster, I guess. When I don't have to use the hotword (e.g. on my Pixel 3, where I just squeeze the phone to activate the assistant), or if the query is long, speech is much faster. And, of course, the speech interface is usable when driving.
I'll admit that I'm a bit reluctant to talk to my phone in public, but at home or in the car I basically never type when I can just talk.
Sound drivers are user-removable, yes they are. You can verify non-function of the speakers and mic on most systems. Again, conflating phones, PC's and "smart" assistants is reductive in terms of actual security.
Well, it is for people who actually disable the microphones on their laptop and cell phone (which would make it not a "phone" any more, wouldn't it?). Do you do that? If so, your commitment to privacy is impressive. Also misguided, but impressive.
For the other 99.999% of the population, hawguy has a very good point. If you believe that companies are willing to violate their claims about what their devices do (which, note, is often illegal), then you have to assume that any and all of them might be listening to you. If you believe they're honest about what their devices do (and again, note that you don't have to believe in their honorable nature or good intentions to believe that, just their unwillingness to risk the legal and PR disaster that could result from lying), then smart speakers are fine, because they only record/transmit after their hotword is spoken and they let you review and optionally delete everything they recorded.
To make my evaluation of these risks clear, I carry a cellphone with multiple microphones and cameras, use a laptop with integrated microphone and camera and a desktop with an attached Logitech microphone/camera -- with drivers properly installed and the peripheral fully functional because I use it for video conferencing -- and I have eight smart speakers scattered around my house and I'm contemplating buying a ninth.
A friend of mine had one of his Youtube videos copied and put directly into the game. Not a dance move (I believe it is one of the dance moves as well), but his actual video. He kept getting looks from kids in the grocery store because they recognized him from the game. He was never contacted for permission.
How's that for proving intent. Not stealing just dance moves, but actual videos.
Got a link?
Debian has never been relevant
Not sure if this is a troll or just cluelessness.
In case the former, you win :-)
In case the latter, Debian is a pretty significant Linux distro in its own right, but if you include all of the distros that are based on Debian, it has a much larger installed base than all non-Debian GNU/Linux distros combined. We have to specify GNU/Linux because without the GNU part, the most popular Linux-based OS -- in fact the most popular operating system, period -- is Android, and the second most popular Linux distribution is ChromeOS.
One of the reasons to deposit a copy of a work in a large library (originally Oxford and/or Cambridge, Library of Congress in America) was so a copy was available after the work entered the public domain. Lots of works have been lost, either accidentally or on purpose. Wiki has a huge list of lost films for example. Some were lost in fires and such and others were removed on purpose, to recycle the film stock or just to get rid of it. In this day, digital copy is very easy to archive.
That's a valid point. Also, the archived copy can be archived without DRM. If anyone ever manages to build DRM that doesn't suck, we'll lose lots of works just because no one will be able to read them.
That said, I don't know that it actually makes sense to require the government to maintain the archives. Though I suppose that filing fees could be set high enough to cover archival cost.
I think the original idea of a fixed term, say 20 or 30 years, plus one 20 or 30 year renewal is reasonable.
I agree, but given that Disney will never be happy with that, which means that your proposal would meet extremely well-funded opposition, I think another good option is to allow many more renewal periods, each requiring payment of a small renewal fee. The fact that some formal process and payment of a fee is required to retain copyright beyond the first term would ensure that the vast majority of works quickly fall into the public domain. The fee could be increased with the age of the work, but I suspect that actually wouldn't matter.
The move to digital actually this a lot easier to manage. Copyright registration wouldn't need to involve sending a copy of the complete work (a burden on both copyright holder and government that motivated our current system of automatic registration), all it would require is a hash of the content. A 32-byte SHA-256 hash of each copyrighted work could be submitted. Note that the hash would be to establish ownership of the original. It wouldn't be the case that anyone could freely publish modifications just because they have a different hash; infringement would still be based on a comparison of the full possibly-infringing work with the original. The copyright holder would, of course, need to keep a copy of what they hashed. If you registered a hash but then couldn't produce a copy of the thing hashed, your copyright would be invalid.
Even paintings and similar could be registered with a hash of the photo of the work.
I do think automatic registration should continue to be used for the first term. It really is a good thing that anything you create is automatically copyrighted so it can't be stolen between when you made it and when you start exploiting it commercially. But if you're making money off of something it's no big deal to hash it and log onto to a government web site to submit your registration. They could even automatically email you when your term is approaching the end, so you can easily respond with your renewal request and fee payment.
I can't think of anything, even the trivial things that are easy to take for granted, that humans ever got right on the first go.
The atomic bomb worked on the first try.
Only because they'd already tested the hell out of the subassemblies.
Google absolutely does honor robots.txt.
Nice to know, but just to be safe you can always block the spider's IP address.
A more reliable way would be to examine the useragent header and return errors to the spider. But there's really no need; Google doesn't want to spider your data if you don't want it spidered, so robots.txt is perfectly effective and the simplest option.
Google absolutely does honor robots.txt.
Nice to know, but just to be safe you can always block the spider's IP address.
I'd be surprised if it only uses one address, or even a particular block of addresses.
Google absolutely does honor robots.txt.
How about the Do Not Track header?
I don't believe Google sites pay attention to the DNT header.
...but we should add the personal websites under a single domain so people can go there to find them and search them easily. We could call it mypage.com or something.
Oh, and also it should be completely free to use, because people won't pay for it, and it can't require people to know anything about building a site, running a server, etc. So we'll need an ad-supported hosting system with a super easy to use content management system.
There are actually very good reasons why Facebook et al replaced personal web sites, you know.
google and bookface would totally honor things like robots.txt files on a personal website, especially if it's hosted on some garbage "cloud" social site.
Google absolutely does honor robots.txt.
Note that this article is about 4x8, not 4x10.
If you want to see the US pushed towards a civil war, just start prosecuting the oppositions politicians when they leave office.
In general, no one should be above the law but in the current situation, pragmatism may have to win.
Especially on questionable charges like "campaign finance" violations that are near universal and normally handled through a fine.
This is bullshit. Campaign finance charges aren't "questionable", violations aren't "near universal" (not rare, but not common) and aren't normally handled "through a fine".
Did the Russians interfere?
Yes? DUH?
Now. Did they connive WITH Trump to do it?
Evidence (or lack thereof) says "no".
No, the evidence says "maybe". There's definitely lots of evidence of Trump campaign officials and Russians feeling each other out. What's unclear is whether they actually made some sort of agreement -- which could have been implicit, note. It's possible to reach a mutual understanding without anyone actually saying the words. That would make it harder to prove, though.
So, to all of those who've welded their asses to the "Impeach Impeach Impeach" train that's going "Trump woke up this morning! IMPEACH HIM NOW!" "Trump tweeted something I don't like! IMPEACH HIM NOW!" "Trump exists! IMPEACH HIM NOW!"?
Take a fucking chill pill. Because your crazy fucking behavior is destroying the Democratic Party and is going to keep the man in office until 2024.
While the Democratic party is perpetually self-destructing, I don't think there's much chance that Trump will win in 2020. He only barely eked out a win in 2016 because he (a) ran against one of the most disliked presidential candidates in history, (b) got help from the Russians, (c) got help from the FBI (Comey's October surprise), and (d) was the beneficiary of some pretty stupid campaign missteps by his opponent. You maybe could take away any one of (b), (c) or (d) and he'd still manage a win, but take away any two, or take (a) away, and he'd have been toast.
All the Democrats have to do to beat Trump in 2020 is to run a candidate who's less hated than Hillary Clinton. That's pretty much anybody. Well, they also have to hope Trump can't manufacture a plausible war next year. Americans love standing behind their president in wartime. Of course he'd probably screw that up by tweeting nasty and stupid comments about the generals, so maybe that's not such a big risk.
Unless Mueller comes up with something really compelling, though, I think Trump is safe from impeachment. The peculiar dynamics of Trump's base mean that an impeachment in the House without a corresponding conviction in the Senate would probably harden their resolve, which would hurt the Democrats in 2020. And I think we all know that if Trump ran naked down the 5th street murdering people at random while making the Nazi salute and shouting "Heil Putin!", the Republicans in the Senate would say, in the words of Orrin Hatch, "Okay, but I don't care".
I think Trump is at great legal risk after he leaves office, though, so he's going to be really desperate to stay in office in 2020.
Hold on, guys, this ride is going to get crazy. We ain't seen nothin' yet. It's possible that one of the best things the Democratic candidates for president could do for the country is to all take a pledge that they'll issue blanket pardons for Trump if elected. He'll still have to worry about state prosecution and civil suits, but removing the fear of federal prosecution could be hugely beneficial.
Simple logic based on a badly flawed premise.
Actually most likely they will set the effort aside for some time. Management that still invested in it will recall who the loyalists were. Those folks will be promoted for being "team players".
Highly unlikely. Many of the signatories of the Dragonfly opposition memos, internal and public, were senior, highly-respected and highly-influential staff. People who have tremendous clout... clout based on their track records of delivering big, tough projects, which can't be erased.
Having solidified their support among middle management upper management will try again in a year or two.
Might work in other companies. Won't work at Google, not without significant cultural and structural changes. It's really not a normal corporation in many respects.
The got caught doing an unpopular (perhaps unethical) project, that project name is now tainted. So Google has only one recourse. Changed the name of the project, and bring in better marketing people to spin the new product more positively.
The other, and in this case far more likely, recourse available is simply to drop it. I'd bet good money that's the final outcome here. Oh, I'd guess the issue will be raised again in a few years, but I predict a similar outcome then as well.
I know it's more fashionable to be cynical, but that doesn't mean it's more accurate. There's fundamentally no way to keep this secret from employees, and no way marketing spin is going to be able to convince them it's okay. Barring a significant change in the corporate culture, this is never going to succeed at Google.
They dropped that a while ago.
Nope. It's still in the Code of Conduct. See the final sentence.
Labor is taxed at twice the rate of capital. Why is this? Why isn't it the other way around?
The theory is that taxing capital has a larger negative impact on the economy than taxing labor, since it discourages investment and encourages capital (which is more mobile than labor) to flee high-tax jurisdictions. Also, note that what you say is only true of long-term capital investment. Short-term investment is taxed at the same rates as labor, at least in the US. This is intended to encourage long-term investment which is seen as more beneficial to economic growth.
I'm not claiming to know if any of these theories actually hold water. You'd have to ask an economist about that.