Because MTP is better. I don't know why the OP was messing around with Android File Transfer. Any modern desktop OS should support MTP, which is plug and play and much cleaner than USB Mass Storage.
This is wrong. As is the use of the word "troll" in the summary/article. Trolls and shills are distinct, and the difference isn't whether they get paid. You can be a paid or unpaid troll and a paid or unpaid shill.
Trolls post messages written specifically to generate responses. The term derives from fishing where trolling means to drag something through the water to catch fish. Internet trolls post baiting comments trying to get people to respond to them. Flamebaiting is a subset of trolling, where the aim is to generate angry responses.
Shills post messages to talk up some product, service, etc., trying to make it look good and its competition look bad.
Both categories also assume that the writer likely doesn't fully agree with what he or she is writing. If two people write the same words but one believes them while the other doesn't, the former is not a troll or shill, but the latter may be.
Note that paid trolls are pretty common on the Internet, but they tend to write the articles (or, on/., the summaries) not the comments. "Clickbaiting" is almost the same as trolling in this respect, except that a clickbait article is to collect clicks, while a troll article is intended to generate comments.
Of course there's a lot of people who are highly paid. Chances are that those people are highly skilled, or at least have highly specialized skills as well.
FWIW, at least at Google it isn't about specialization. Google SWEs are expected to be generalists, able to specialize as needed.
In fact, it's generally recommended that SWEs change teams within the company every few years, and that they intentionally look for a change that requires them to learn new skills. The belief in the company is that this approach serves both engineers and teams, providing fresh perspectives and insights to both, and spreading knowledge across teams (by moving it) and within teams (by reallocating responsibilities).
There are exceptions, of course. Some skills are rare enough that people stay within that field, even as they move between teams. On the other hand, even those exceptions have exceptions. I won't mention his name, but Google employs a famous cryptographer who recently decided that after many years of breaking the world's encryption systems he wanted to work on image compression. So he is. Another engineer I know has a PhD in computational mathematics, with a specialty in image processing. After a few years extracting building details (exterior shape, mostly) from merged aerial and street view photography, he now works on UI frameworks.
The choice of when or if to move to another team, and which, is the engineer's. The destination team also has a say, but most teams are perpetually short-staffed. Unless the team in need of some deep skill (e.g. a PhD in computational mathematics with specialization in image processing), or unless the engineer hasn't been performing well in the previous role, they're unlikely to refuse. This is why apparently-odd moves aren't uncommon; people decide they'd like to do something different, so they do.
The courts found the bulk collection as "justified" under section 215 as unconstitutional and wholly illegal.
Utter nonsense. Please don't spread such misinformation.
Bulk collection may indeed be unconstitutional, but the court said nothing about that. What they said was that section 215 did not authorize bulk collection, so if Congress wants to authorize bulk collection they have to pass a law to say so. If Congress does that, then the court will eventually have to rule on constitutionality.
Without any programming experience it's not likely you'd get hired. While specific language doesn't matter, you have to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to have a detailed discussion about solving problems in software design and implementation, and prove that you can write clean, accurate code, and do it quickly.
My recommendation is that you first spend some time working through many of the problems provided by Project Euler, or the Top Coder challenges, or similar. Or maybe one of the coding interview books, like this one.
When you're comfortable that you can take on a not-completely-trivial software problem, design an algorithm to solve it, accurately characterize the big O time and space complexity of your solution (not prove it... though you should be able to prove it, given more time), explain why there aren't any more efficient solutions, code it up on a whiteboard, and explain how you'd go about testing it, all in the course of a 45-minute interview, then you're probably ready.
For C++ there is no standard answer, because every C++ shop uses a different subset of the language. There are probably a few things that all of them have in common, but it's unreasonable to expect that any entry level C++ programmer can be productive without support from senior programmers while they learn the local ropes. Even experienced C++ programmers will need a little time to get up to speed on the local style guidelines.
C++ doesn't have an extensive set of standard libraries, either, which means that every shop has its own set. So senior programmers have to expect that new people are going to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on those.
Finally, I think the question is fundamentally bad, because it implies a misguided expectation of immediate productivity. That's a common expectation (hope?) throughout much of the industry, but unless you're hiring contractors for six-month jobs, its stupid. What matters in the longer run isn't what your new hires know coming in the door, it's how well they learn, and think. Because whatever they know coming in is invariably inadequate in both short and long term. One of the things I found very refreshing when I joined Google is that they don't much care what you know in terms of languages, libraries and tool sets. It's assumed that capable people will learn what they need to when they need to learn it, and that any new project involves some ramp-up time before people are productive. On the other hand, given a little time to get up to speed capable people will become very productive. Much more so than the less capable person who happened to know the right set of things when hired.
Even the small payload becomes a big logistical challenge when you're looking at doing it globally, for large numbers of devices and want to make it fast (means having data centers in all regions), and make it reliable (means having redundancy, at multiple levels). Oh, and the "all the data is encrypted" bit may expose regulatory problems, too.
I really want an alternative to Android, but it's an even bigger challenge than I thought.
What specifically are you looking for? As an alternative, are there some ways that Android could be improved to alleviate whatever concerns you have? If your concerns are non-technical and primarily about insufficient ecosystem diversity (i.e. insufficient fragmentation), then there's probably not much to do. If your concerns are related to technical problems with Android, or privacy concerns about its relationship with Google, there may well be.
I'm an engineer on Google's Android Security team, and I'm actively looking for things that we can do to address security and privacy concerns. One of the ideas I've been kicking around is a "pre-encryption network tap"... basically, what if you could turn on a mode that logs a copy of everything your device transmits and receives? Most of that data is (and should be!) encrypted, but since most apps and all system services use the framework implementations (yes, plural... sigh) of SSL/TLS it should be possible to hook in and grab the plaintext. My goal here is to enable users to examine what their device is sending, and to whom, because I think right now it's too hard to tell, and because specifically I think there are a lot of erroneous assumptions that Google is receiving a lot of data from Android devices without user permission.
The downside, of course, is that adding such a hook into the system makes it a prime target for various sorts of attacks. So I don't think we would want to do that, not as stated, anyway. Though there may be some variant of the idea that isn't too risky.
Anyway, given a system like that, it should be possible to build an alternative ecosystem of apps and services that run on Android and don't use Google's infrastructure, and that would be much easier than building an entirely new platform. You'd still need to address the problems I mentioned at the top, but at least those could be the bulk of the challenge rather than just another piece of it.
As another alternative, I think if Google became more transparent about how it manages user data and what it does with it, many peoples' concerns would be addressed. But although I make that argument regularly, I don't have the same degree of influence there as I do over platform technology.
Or if you have other concerns, what are they, and do you have any ideas about how the platform could address them?
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement.
Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around. For Mozilla to build that they'd have to find some way to pay for it. Given that people are generally not willing to pay monthly fees for that sort of service, advertising is the obvious option. But to make the advertising effective, it needs to be targeted, so...
I have a better idea: Just use Android, only write a drop in replacement for Play Services. Pull an Amazon, only invite other OEMs to the party so that they sell your devices, and no walled garden.
How would this be attractive to OEMs? Google already offers an extremely well-developed open ecosystem. Amazon wanted to have their own walled garden, but you're assuming there are OEMs that don't want to do that, but want to have a different ecosystem, and want it enough to be willing to accept smaller sales numbers. What would make them want to do that?
I think unrealistic portrayals of sex create bigger problems than those other examples you cite -- though they are problems. The reason I think that is that the other unrealistic portrayals don't affect core human relationships to the same degree. I hope I'm wrong, actually. We'll know in a generation or so.
One more point: I find your choice of example to be odd, because the US charges against Hamsa have nothing to do with speech; they're about kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder. The UK's charges against Hamsa are largely speech-related.
Manning or Snowden would have been better examples.
Oh, I'm not claiming there are no problems. Clearly the US does have some big issues at present with some particular forms of restriction of free speech. I'm fairly confident that will get sorted out over the course of the next couple of decades, though. The pendulum is swinging that direction. Not that perfection will ever be achieved, but there really is a strong bias towards protecting freedom of expression.
Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest. Google's "coder shortage" seems completely imaginary. They're an advertising company whose greatest trick was convincing the world they are a software company.
I'm a Google engineer, and both of these statements are incorrect.
Taking the second one first, Google is not an advertising company. It's a software engineering company whose primary products are most effectively monetized via advertising. Or, sometimes I think it might be more accurate to say that Google is a data center company, since building, operating and utilizing enormous data centers at extreme efficiency is Google's true core competency. If and when Google gets serious about competing with Amazon in that space Amazon will have a tough time keeping up.
Google is moving fairly quickly away from advertising, diversifying into products which are sold directly. Note that nearly all of the speculative new projects that have come out of "Google X" are built around goods and services, more than the sort of low-value (on a per transaction basis) information services that are Google's current big products. No big winners have emerged from that effort, yet, but if one or more of them do "hit", you can expect to see it quickly replace advertising as the primary revenue driver. About 10% of Google's revenues these days come from non-advertising products. 10% seems small, but keep in mind that represents $5B annually, and is up from basically 0% just a few years ago. Non-ad revenues are growing faster than the ad revenues, so the percentage of Google revenue derived from advertising will continue falling even without a massive new business.
Further, culturally, Google never has been an advertising company. It's a thoroughly engineering-focused company, top to bottom.
The shortage of engineers is not imaginary. Google legitimately has a hard time finding enough software engineers of the caliber it seeks. Money isn't the issue; few people who receive an offer from Google reject it. In the context of this article, though, the big problem is that the engineers Google can find are overwhelmingly male, and either white or Asian. Mostly white. Studies done by many organizations, including studies done internally by Google, show that diverse teams are more creative and more productive. In addition, Google's culture is surprisingly idealistic, and people in the company consider it a legitimate problem that the company -- especially eng -- is not representative of the population as a whole.
I think part of that latter point derives from the fact that Google engineers are, if anything, too well-paid. Estimates I've seen put the "1%" line at about $400K annual income, and most senior Googlers -- including engineers, not just execs and managers -- are above that line. Getting paid that much tends to make decent people wonder if they should feel guilty at their luck and their privilege. At the same time, it's not like anyone is going to agitate to get paid less. So a better option is to say "Well, the real problem here isn't that I make too much, it's that not enough people have the opportunity to do the same". In particular, women and minorities.
That last paragraph is purely personal speculation, mind you. Laszlo Bock may not agree at all.
Friend of mine, his wife is a dentist, she's pulling in nearly 300k a year.
I make better than 300K per year as a software developer, when you include base, bonus and stock grants (which I view as variable cash bonuses, since I have them sold automatically the instant they vest). And I don't have to stick my fingers in peoples' mouths.
Whatever you think of the various sides of this argument, it's interesting to me to look at how different the sides are.
The US is, on average, far more concerned about pornography and other sexual issues than the UK, but there is not and never will be any significant discussion of government-mandated filters, outside of specific situations like government-run schools. The reason is our belief in the importance of free speech. Although there are plenty of Americans who would like to ban porn, no one at a national level says it out loud. No one seriously talks about it even at local, highly homogeneous levels, because everyone knows it won't fly.
The UK is somewhat less prudish than the US, but is perfectly willing to carve out large exceptions to free speech wherever it's convenient. Therefore, British pols do talk seriously about trying to ban porn, except for adults who opt out.
Europe (as a whole; there are exceptions) is even less concerned about free speech than the UK, but apparently considers porn to be something worth fighting for, to the degree that they're willing to invest at least a little effort in fighting to keep porn available to kids in the UK.
FWIW, I think porn is bad. Conceptually, there's nothing wrong with human sexuality, but porn presents an extremely distorted view of human sexuality. I think regular consumption of hardcore pornography, particularly by adolescents, skews expectations and perceptions in ways that have negative consequences. That said, I have no interest in trying to ban it. I do filter it on my home network, but that's a half measure which mostly serves as an early warning system (I get notified of attempts to get to porn sites) which offers a chance to talk the issues over if I find my kids looking for it.
All of which mostly says that I'm a fairly typical American parent: concerned about porn but unwilling to take the strong anti-freedom steps needed to effectively ban it:-)
Of course the owners of the bank take the hit when fines are levied. Who else would?
How about the individuals that committed the crimes?
That's certainly fine with respect to crimes that justify criminal punishment (e.g. prison). But if regulators choose a market-style punishment (fines), then they're just acting as a market force, and that's a consideration for shareholders as owners.
Do you know how corporate boards work? They're designed to shield the management level executives from any such governance by the shareholders.
Utter nonsense. Yes, in some cases that may be the effect, but it's certainly not the design. Your cynicism has gotten the better of you. By design, boards of directors are intended to serve the same role that elected political representatives do for citizens of a nation; to represent the interests of the voters. It's not feasible for every governmental or corporate decision to be voted upon by the whole body, so they choose representatives. A proper board of directors takes a dim view of executives acting against the interests of the shareholders, and boards that fail their jobs badly enough do get ousted.
Plus, the fines paid by the shareholders are only a tiny fraction of the money the corporation made from these illegal activities.
That just indicates that regulators are not making the fines large enough. If regulators want to use financial penalties, they have to make them large enough that bad actions are unprofitable.
You're assuming that simulating the structure of an organic brain is necessary to accomplish the same functions. That's like assuming that simulating legs is the only way to construct a self-moving machine, just because that's the way that nature has done it. Evolution produces workable schemes and fine tunes them; but it clearly suffers from the local maximum problem, while the scientific approach to generating knowledge is much less prone to that limitation. You're also ignoring the fact that the basic construction of our computers is orders of magnitude faster and more energy-efficient than the neurochemical processes that drive organic intelligence. That fundamental difference in materials has to make a difference at larger scales, I think. There are likely other questionable assumptions underlying your guess.
Your assumptions may be valid, but we have no way of knowing. I suspect they're not, myself. What is certainly true is that we won't know until we understand how intelligence works.
Remember, it's the shareholders that pay these fines. And no one in the bank corporation is held accountable.
What an odd thing to say. Of course the owners of the bank take the hit when fines are levied. Who else would? And it's up to the owners of the bank to decide how to hold their employees accountable.
No, this is clearly #1. The biggest existential risk, and the most promising opportunity. It all depends on what those 7 billion unusually intelligent apes decide to do.
Very well put. I came here to make this post, but now I don't have to.
One quibble, though:
nobody has any hardware that there is any reason to believe is within several orders of magnitude of being able to run one, etc.
We also have no reason to believe that we don't have hardware completely capable of running one, and haven't for quite some time. Until we have some idea how intelligence works and how to construct an AI, we really can't have any idea whether or not our hardware is sufficient.
That assumes that the business can raise prices without consequence, which is an invalid assumption.
Only if the competition can avoid the taxes. If all of the players in the market get hit with the same taxes, then all of them absolutely can and will raise prices, and there will be no consequences.
Taxes are a percentage of profits, and are not deductible from revenue when calculating profits. So if Amazon raises their prices (and, assuming no change in consumer behavior, their revenue) by 10%, they also increase the amount of taxes they owe by 10%. So now they have to raise their prices again to cover the additional tax, lather rinse repeat.
This is a standard financial calculation, and a trivial one. The tax is 10%, so the increase is 10%, but there's 10% tax on that, so 1%, meaning the increase needs to be 11%, continue ad infinitum (literally). In other words, the new price needs to be 11.1111...% higher than the old one to keep profit margins unchanged. More generally, the increase needs to be the sum of the infinite series with terms r^n. This series is convergent if r < 1, and converges to 1/(1-r). So for a 25% tax, the company needs to increase prices by 1-1/(1-.25) = 33.333...% to keep profit margins unchanged after accounting for the new tax.
Of course, it doesn't quite happen like that. In practice, companies don't instantly raise prices. They do take the hit for a while, where it gets absorbed by the investors, not the customers. Then they allocate a portion of the losses to employees, in the form of reduced raises, or benefits. Then they raise prices. But eventually they get back to a steady state of roughly the same return on assets that they had before the tax hike.
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So why can't Android just use fucking Samba?!
Because MTP is better. I don't know why the OP was messing around with Android File Transfer. Any modern desktop OS should support MTP, which is plug and play and much cleaner than USB Mass Storage.
are called shills.
This is wrong. As is the use of the word "troll" in the summary/article. Trolls and shills are distinct, and the difference isn't whether they get paid. You can be a paid or unpaid troll and a paid or unpaid shill.
Trolls post messages written specifically to generate responses. The term derives from fishing where trolling means to drag something through the water to catch fish. Internet trolls post baiting comments trying to get people to respond to them. Flamebaiting is a subset of trolling, where the aim is to generate angry responses.
Shills post messages to talk up some product, service, etc., trying to make it look good and its competition look bad.
Both categories also assume that the writer likely doesn't fully agree with what he or she is writing. If two people write the same words but one believes them while the other doesn't, the former is not a troll or shill, but the latter may be.
Note that paid trolls are pretty common on the Internet, but they tend to write the articles (or, on /., the summaries) not the comments. "Clickbaiting" is almost the same as trolling in this respect, except that a clickbait article is to collect clicks, while a troll article is intended to generate comments.
Except here, where the rule is "Don't Read The Article".
But really should be "Don't Read the Summary", since the summaries frequently get edited into incomprehensible trollishness.
I have mod points today, and I was really tempted to mod your post "Troll". Just because it would be funny.
Of course there's a lot of people who are highly paid. Chances are that those people are highly skilled, or at least have highly specialized skills as well.
FWIW, at least at Google it isn't about specialization. Google SWEs are expected to be generalists, able to specialize as needed.
In fact, it's generally recommended that SWEs change teams within the company every few years, and that they intentionally look for a change that requires them to learn new skills. The belief in the company is that this approach serves both engineers and teams, providing fresh perspectives and insights to both, and spreading knowledge across teams (by moving it) and within teams (by reallocating responsibilities).
There are exceptions, of course. Some skills are rare enough that people stay within that field, even as they move between teams. On the other hand, even those exceptions have exceptions. I won't mention his name, but Google employs a famous cryptographer who recently decided that after many years of breaking the world's encryption systems he wanted to work on image compression. So he is. Another engineer I know has a PhD in computational mathematics, with a specialty in image processing. After a few years extracting building details (exterior shape, mostly) from merged aerial and street view photography, he now works on UI frameworks.
The choice of when or if to move to another team, and which, is the engineer's. The destination team also has a say, but most teams are perpetually short-staffed. Unless the team in need of some deep skill (e.g. a PhD in computational mathematics with specialization in image processing), or unless the engineer hasn't been performing well in the previous role, they're unlikely to refuse. This is why apparently-odd moves aren't uncommon; people decide they'd like to do something different, so they do.
The courts found the bulk collection as "justified" under section 215 as unconstitutional and wholly illegal.
Utter nonsense. Please don't spread such misinformation.
Bulk collection may indeed be unconstitutional, but the court said nothing about that. What they said was that section 215 did not authorize bulk collection, so if Congress wants to authorize bulk collection they have to pass a law to say so. If Congress does that, then the court will eventually have to rule on constitutionality.
Without any programming experience it's not likely you'd get hired. While specific language doesn't matter, you have to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to have a detailed discussion about solving problems in software design and implementation, and prove that you can write clean, accurate code, and do it quickly.
My recommendation is that you first spend some time working through many of the problems provided by Project Euler, or the Top Coder challenges, or similar. Or maybe one of the coding interview books, like this one.
When you're comfortable that you can take on a not-completely-trivial software problem, design an algorithm to solve it, accurately characterize the big O time and space complexity of your solution (not prove it... though you should be able to prove it, given more time), explain why there aren't any more efficient solutions, code it up on a whiteboard, and explain how you'd go about testing it, all in the course of a 45-minute interview, then you're probably ready.
For C++ there is no standard answer, because every C++ shop uses a different subset of the language. There are probably a few things that all of them have in common, but it's unreasonable to expect that any entry level C++ programmer can be productive without support from senior programmers while they learn the local ropes. Even experienced C++ programmers will need a little time to get up to speed on the local style guidelines.
C++ doesn't have an extensive set of standard libraries, either, which means that every shop has its own set. So senior programmers have to expect that new people are going to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on those.
Finally, I think the question is fundamentally bad, because it implies a misguided expectation of immediate productivity. That's a common expectation (hope?) throughout much of the industry, but unless you're hiring contractors for six-month jobs, its stupid. What matters in the longer run isn't what your new hires know coming in the door, it's how well they learn, and think. Because whatever they know coming in is invariably inadequate in both short and long term. One of the things I found very refreshing when I joined Google is that they don't much care what you know in terms of languages, libraries and tool sets. It's assumed that capable people will learn what they need to when they need to learn it, and that any new project involves some ramp-up time before people are productive. On the other hand, given a little time to get up to speed capable people will become very productive. Much more so than the less capable person who happened to know the right set of things when hired.
Even the small payload becomes a big logistical challenge when you're looking at doing it globally, for large numbers of devices and want to make it fast (means having data centers in all regions), and make it reliable (means having redundancy, at multiple levels). Oh, and the "all the data is encrypted" bit may expose regulatory problems, too.
I really want an alternative to Android, but it's an even bigger challenge than I thought.
What specifically are you looking for? As an alternative, are there some ways that Android could be improved to alleviate whatever concerns you have? If your concerns are non-technical and primarily about insufficient ecosystem diversity (i.e. insufficient fragmentation), then there's probably not much to do. If your concerns are related to technical problems with Android, or privacy concerns about its relationship with Google, there may well be.
I'm an engineer on Google's Android Security team, and I'm actively looking for things that we can do to address security and privacy concerns. One of the ideas I've been kicking around is a "pre-encryption network tap"... basically, what if you could turn on a mode that logs a copy of everything your device transmits and receives? Most of that data is (and should be!) encrypted, but since most apps and all system services use the framework implementations (yes, plural... sigh) of SSL/TLS it should be possible to hook in and grab the plaintext. My goal here is to enable users to examine what their device is sending, and to whom, because I think right now it's too hard to tell, and because specifically I think there are a lot of erroneous assumptions that Google is receiving a lot of data from Android devices without user permission.
The downside, of course, is that adding such a hook into the system makes it a prime target for various sorts of attacks. So I don't think we would want to do that, not as stated, anyway. Though there may be some variant of the idea that isn't too risky.
Anyway, given a system like that, it should be possible to build an alternative ecosystem of apps and services that run on Android and don't use Google's infrastructure, and that would be much easier than building an entirely new platform. You'd still need to address the problems I mentioned at the top, but at least those could be the bulk of the challenge rather than just another piece of it.
As another alternative, I think if Google became more transparent about how it manages user data and what it does with it, many peoples' concerns would be addressed. But although I make that argument regularly, I don't have the same degree of influence there as I do over platform technology.
Or if you have other concerns, what are they, and do you have any ideas about how the platform could address them?
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement.
Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around. For Mozilla to build that they'd have to find some way to pay for it. Given that people are generally not willing to pay monthly fees for that sort of service, advertising is the obvious option. But to make the advertising effective, it needs to be targeted, so...
I have a better idea: Just use Android, only write a drop in replacement for Play Services. Pull an Amazon, only invite other OEMs to the party so that they sell your devices, and no walled garden.
How would this be attractive to OEMs? Google already offers an extremely well-developed open ecosystem. Amazon wanted to have their own walled garden, but you're assuming there are OEMs that don't want to do that, but want to have a different ecosystem, and want it enough to be willing to accept smaller sales numbers. What would make them want to do that?
It's HIPAA, not HIPPA.
What could possibly go wrong?
Normally, the implication of that question is that there are a bunch of blindingly obvious problems which are being blithely overlooked.
So, what are they?
I think unrealistic portrayals of sex create bigger problems than those other examples you cite -- though they are problems. The reason I think that is that the other unrealistic portrayals don't affect core human relationships to the same degree. I hope I'm wrong, actually. We'll know in a generation or so.
One more point: I find your choice of example to be odd, because the US charges against Hamsa have nothing to do with speech; they're about kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder. The UK's charges against Hamsa are largely speech-related.
Manning or Snowden would have been better examples.
Oh, I'm not claiming there are no problems. Clearly the US does have some big issues at present with some particular forms of restriction of free speech. I'm fairly confident that will get sorted out over the course of the next couple of decades, though. The pendulum is swinging that direction. Not that perfection will ever be achieved, but there really is a strong bias towards protecting freedom of expression.
Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest. Google's "coder shortage" seems completely imaginary. They're an advertising company whose greatest trick was convincing the world they are a software company.
I'm a Google engineer, and both of these statements are incorrect.
Taking the second one first, Google is not an advertising company. It's a software engineering company whose primary products are most effectively monetized via advertising. Or, sometimes I think it might be more accurate to say that Google is a data center company, since building, operating and utilizing enormous data centers at extreme efficiency is Google's true core competency. If and when Google gets serious about competing with Amazon in that space Amazon will have a tough time keeping up.
Google is moving fairly quickly away from advertising, diversifying into products which are sold directly. Note that nearly all of the speculative new projects that have come out of "Google X" are built around goods and services, more than the sort of low-value (on a per transaction basis) information services that are Google's current big products. No big winners have emerged from that effort, yet, but if one or more of them do "hit", you can expect to see it quickly replace advertising as the primary revenue driver. About 10% of Google's revenues these days come from non-advertising products. 10% seems small, but keep in mind that represents $5B annually, and is up from basically 0% just a few years ago. Non-ad revenues are growing faster than the ad revenues, so the percentage of Google revenue derived from advertising will continue falling even without a massive new business.
Further, culturally, Google never has been an advertising company. It's a thoroughly engineering-focused company, top to bottom.
The shortage of engineers is not imaginary. Google legitimately has a hard time finding enough software engineers of the caliber it seeks. Money isn't the issue; few people who receive an offer from Google reject it. In the context of this article, though, the big problem is that the engineers Google can find are overwhelmingly male, and either white or Asian. Mostly white. Studies done by many organizations, including studies done internally by Google, show that diverse teams are more creative and more productive. In addition, Google's culture is surprisingly idealistic, and people in the company consider it a legitimate problem that the company -- especially eng -- is not representative of the population as a whole.
I think part of that latter point derives from the fact that Google engineers are, if anything, too well-paid. Estimates I've seen put the "1%" line at about $400K annual income, and most senior Googlers -- including engineers, not just execs and managers -- are above that line. Getting paid that much tends to make decent people wonder if they should feel guilty at their luck and their privilege. At the same time, it's not like anyone is going to agitate to get paid less. So a better option is to say "Well, the real problem here isn't that I make too much, it's that not enough people have the opportunity to do the same". In particular, women and minorities.
That last paragraph is purely personal speculation, mind you. Laszlo Bock may not agree at all.
Friend of mine, his wife is a dentist, she's pulling in nearly 300k a year.
I make better than 300K per year as a software developer, when you include base, bonus and stock grants (which I view as variable cash bonuses, since I have them sold automatically the instant they vest). And I don't have to stick my fingers in peoples' mouths.
Whatever you think of the various sides of this argument, it's interesting to me to look at how different the sides are.
The US is, on average, far more concerned about pornography and other sexual issues than the UK, but there is not and never will be any significant discussion of government-mandated filters, outside of specific situations like government-run schools. The reason is our belief in the importance of free speech. Although there are plenty of Americans who would like to ban porn, no one at a national level says it out loud. No one seriously talks about it even at local, highly homogeneous levels, because everyone knows it won't fly.
The UK is somewhat less prudish than the US, but is perfectly willing to carve out large exceptions to free speech wherever it's convenient. Therefore, British pols do talk seriously about trying to ban porn, except for adults who opt out.
Europe (as a whole; there are exceptions) is even less concerned about free speech than the UK, but apparently considers porn to be something worth fighting for, to the degree that they're willing to invest at least a little effort in fighting to keep porn available to kids in the UK.
FWIW, I think porn is bad. Conceptually, there's nothing wrong with human sexuality, but porn presents an extremely distorted view of human sexuality. I think regular consumption of hardcore pornography, particularly by adolescents, skews expectations and perceptions in ways that have negative consequences. That said, I have no interest in trying to ban it. I do filter it on my home network, but that's a half measure which mostly serves as an early warning system (I get notified of attempts to get to porn sites) which offers a chance to talk the issues over if I find my kids looking for it.
All of which mostly says that I'm a fairly typical American parent: concerned about porn but unwilling to take the strong anti-freedom steps needed to effectively ban it :-)
How about the individuals that committed the crimes?
That's certainly fine with respect to crimes that justify criminal punishment (e.g. prison). But if regulators choose a market-style punishment (fines), then they're just acting as a market force, and that's a consideration for shareholders as owners.
Do you know how corporate boards work? They're designed to shield the management level executives from any such governance by the shareholders.
Utter nonsense. Yes, in some cases that may be the effect, but it's certainly not the design. Your cynicism has gotten the better of you. By design, boards of directors are intended to serve the same role that elected political representatives do for citizens of a nation; to represent the interests of the voters. It's not feasible for every governmental or corporate decision to be voted upon by the whole body, so they choose representatives. A proper board of directors takes a dim view of executives acting against the interests of the shareholders, and boards that fail their jobs badly enough do get ousted.
Plus, the fines paid by the shareholders are only a tiny fraction of the money the corporation made from these illegal activities.
That just indicates that regulators are not making the fines large enough. If regulators want to use financial penalties, they have to make them large enough that bad actions are unprofitable.
You're assuming that simulating the structure of an organic brain is necessary to accomplish the same functions. That's like assuming that simulating legs is the only way to construct a self-moving machine, just because that's the way that nature has done it. Evolution produces workable schemes and fine tunes them; but it clearly suffers from the local maximum problem, while the scientific approach to generating knowledge is much less prone to that limitation. You're also ignoring the fact that the basic construction of our computers is orders of magnitude faster and more energy-efficient than the neurochemical processes that drive organic intelligence. That fundamental difference in materials has to make a difference at larger scales, I think. There are likely other questionable assumptions underlying your guess.
Your assumptions may be valid, but we have no way of knowing. I suspect they're not, myself. What is certainly true is that we won't know until we understand how intelligence works.
Remember, it's the shareholders that pay these fines. And no one in the bank corporation is held accountable.
What an odd thing to say. Of course the owners of the bank take the hit when fines are levied. Who else would? And it's up to the owners of the bank to decide how to hold their employees accountable.
4. Unusually intelligent apes
No, this is clearly #1. The biggest existential risk, and the most promising opportunity. It all depends on what those 7 billion unusually intelligent apes decide to do.
Very well put. I came here to make this post, but now I don't have to.
One quibble, though:
nobody has any hardware that there is any reason to believe is within several orders of magnitude of being able to run one, etc.
We also have no reason to believe that we don't have hardware completely capable of running one, and haven't for quite some time. Until we have some idea how intelligence works and how to construct an AI, we really can't have any idea whether or not our hardware is sufficient.
That assumes that the business can raise prices without consequence, which is an invalid assumption.
Only if the competition can avoid the taxes. If all of the players in the market get hit with the same taxes, then all of them absolutely can and will raise prices, and there will be no consequences.
Taxes are a percentage of profits, and are not deductible from revenue when calculating profits. So if Amazon raises their prices (and, assuming no change in consumer behavior, their revenue) by 10%, they also increase the amount of taxes they owe by 10%. So now they have to raise their prices again to cover the additional tax, lather rinse repeat.
This is a standard financial calculation, and a trivial one. The tax is 10%, so the increase is 10%, but there's 10% tax on that, so 1%, meaning the increase needs to be 11%, continue ad infinitum (literally). In other words, the new price needs to be 11.1111...% higher than the old one to keep profit margins unchanged. More generally, the increase needs to be the sum of the infinite series with terms r^n. This series is convergent if r < 1, and converges to 1/(1-r). So for a 25% tax, the company needs to increase prices by 1-1/(1-.25) = 33.333...% to keep profit margins unchanged after accounting for the new tax.
Of course, it doesn't quite happen like that. In practice, companies don't instantly raise prices. They do take the hit for a while, where it gets absorbed by the investors, not the customers. Then they allocate a portion of the losses to employees, in the form of reduced raises, or benefits. Then they raise prices. But eventually they get back to a steady state of roughly the same return on assets that they had before the tax hike.