Climate Change is happening too fast for much life to cope.
The rest of your post was good, but this bit is silly. The earth has seen much faster climate change, many times, and not only does life "cope", there's some reason to believe rapid climate change has been one of the biggest drivers of evolutionary diversity.
With that said, although climate change might be good for biodiversity and a good counter to the Holocene extinction, it's likely inconvenient for us, so we should learn how to engineer the planet's climate and stabilize it, not only against anthropogenic changes, but against "natural" changes as well (the climate isn't very stable, and both ends of the typical range of extremes would be pretty uncomfortable for us).
The fact that we still don't have a long term solution for the waste is a concerning one. Yucca mountain was our best hope, and its dead.
Long-term storage is the wrong solution, at least for spent fuel. The right solution is to burn the spent fuel in breeder reactors. The result is waste that only needs to be stored for a couple of centuries.
" Linux can be anywhere from impossible to ideal for a less-clueful user, but it may require some knowledge to set it up, and the notion is intimidating to many. ChromeOS is... safe, reliable and easy."
ChomeOS is Linux...
Obviously. Though it's configured with a rather different userspace than most Linuxen.
It's at the ideal end of the spectrum... because someone knowledgeable set it up to be that way.
Actually Linux once setup can be very user friendly. Installing Windows can be just as big of a pain as Linux.
Normal users don't install Windows. They do have to manage the steaming pile of crap, though, or find someone else who will.
I really like the idea of ChromeOS. It is the right solution for the I want to use Facebook and email crowd.
I've never had a Chromebook, but it has to send stuff to the cloud in order to print on a local network?
Google Cloud Print (which works on Android devices and on any Windows/OS X/Linux machine with a Chrome browser) sends your print jobs to Google, which routes them to the cloud-connected printer you select. It's actually quite convenient in a lot of ways. It means you don't have to configure the machine you're printing from for the printer you're printing to. It also means you don't have to be in the same physical location as the printer to print... which seems less than useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper because you need it, but can be very useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper that someone else, who is located near the printer, needs.
ChromeOS doesn't include a native printing system (CUPS would be the obvious choice), and can only print via Cloud Print. IMO, ChromeOS should bundle CUPS with a reasonable set of printer configurations, for users who may not have a cloud-capable printer, or who may not have network connectivity, but the cloud solution actually works really well where it does work.
IMO Google needs to fix the print problem. Being able to print a document is an expectation of computers, and the "solution" they have is a crappy one.
I agree that Chromebooks need to be able to print to a USB-connected printer, but I disagree that Cloud Print is crappy. It's non-functional where you don't have net connectivity, but everywhere else, it's awesome. In my experience it's so much more reliable than ordinary Wifi printer connections, and even some USB printer connections that I always use Cloud Print first, if it's available. haven't even bothered to configure my laptop with drivers for my home printer. That approach is fiddly, while the cloud solution works every time with no setup. And it works from my phone, my tablet, etc.
In addition, it is occasionally *very* convenient to be able to print to a printer somewhere else. There have been several times when I've been traveling that I've printed something for my wife, on our home printer. Yes, I could send her the doc and she could print it, but only if she has the relevant application... it's so much easier just to text her to say "The document you need to sign and run up to the county office is printing in the kitchen right now".
I agree here, the cost of the Chromebook's savings will be negated by the "custom solutions" required to get it to do routine mundane tasks. Get him either a cheap Windows 8 device (HP has a couple in the CB's price range) or if the walled-garden/appstore is more his thing, an iDevice(TM).
The point of a Chromebook isn't cost savings, it's that it's maintenance-free. There's no malware to worry about and nothing to mess up. The same is pretty true of an iPad or an Android tablet, but presumably he wants a laptop form factor.
My mom wanted to get something and I encouraged her to get either a Chromebook or a tablet, but my dad insisted that those were crap and she should get a real computer, and he found a deeply-discounted laptop with Windows 8.1 on it, which was cheaper than most Chromebooks.
And two days later I was over at her house, cleaning off malware, installing AV, trying to fix configuration changes she'd accidentally made while trying to fix the problems she'd caused. I should have made my dad fix it, frankly. Windows is too much hassle. OS X isn't too bad, but Apple's premium prices are. Linux can be anywhere from impossible to ideal for a less-clueful user, but it may require some knowledge to set it up, and the notion is intimidating to many. ChromeOS is... safe, reliable and easy.
Except it can't print except via the cloud. That, incidentally, was the argument my dad used to insist on Windows for her. Google needs to add CUPS to ChromeOS, IMO. It's pretty much plug and play with most printers.
Twenty years from first publication might be reasonable, but it is still problematic for works of fiction, because it is a short enough period of time that a film studio wanting to make a movie would be sorely tempted to wait out the copyright rather than paying the author for the use of his or her work.
So what?
Answer this: Would the knowledge that no movie studio would pay you millions to license your novels have stopped you from writing them? You can argue that that possibility factored into your thinking, but that's not the point. The point is: If that possibility, and that alone, were completely removed, would you have chosen not to write?
You have to keep in mind that the purpose of copyright -- as envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, who provided the legal framework for it -- is to benefit society, not authors. It's to promote creation and publication. So, society should set the terms of the temporary copyright monopoly at the minimum level required to motivate authors to write and publish, and no higher.
Personally, I'm a fan of geometrically-growing copyright registration fees. Make it free for the first decade (from publication), $100 for the second, $10K for the third, $1M for the fourth, $100M for the fifth, $10B for the sixth, and so on. Each decade costs 100X what the previous decade did. Oh, and adjust the fees for inflation, too. The idea is to ensure that all works have 20-30 years in which the owner can attempt to sell it, and to hold out the promise of even longer for blockbusters with long-term financial viability, but to ensure that everything eventually falls into the public domain. The offer of longer terms for blockbusters, note, isn't to benefit copyright holders financially so much as it is to dangle a carrot, because hardly any work will justify $100M, and it's likely that nothing would justify $10B.
Your notion of basing it on gross revenue is interesting, but I think it would be too easy for big studios to game.
No corporation should own a copyright which outlives the creator(s) of the work plus a decade.
How does this work when there are hundreds of people working on a project, like a film? Does the copyright expire ten years after the first death, or the last? If the former, then pretty much any movie more than ten years old will be in the public domain. If the latter, I guess we're going to start seeing a few dozen babies somehow contributing to every new project, all of them selected from families who seem to live unusually long.
Also, what constitutes "death"? What happens if a member of the crew is cryogenically preserved and later brought back to life? Does copyright get reinstated? And what happens if people stop dying? It doesn't seem at all unlikely that within the next few decades we acquire the ability to keep a human body alive indefinitely (though I'm not sure if the brain is up to remaining useful for much longer)?
I think tying copyright to human lifespans is a bad idea. I prefer ever-increasing copyright maintenance fees. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollars a year to keep Mickey, fine. But for most works, the copyright owners will eventually decide that it's better to release it into the public domain.
Hehe. I had actually written that myself, but deleted it because nobody buys it. I think it's absolutely true, but it seems to be impossible for most people to believe that executives in a big corporation could actually want to do good for the world.
In the digital world, stores enforce my nationality. I can order a music CD or a movie on DVD from Amazon.com, but if I want to buy digital music or stream a digital movie I can't. The more we move towards digital content the more borders there are, paradoxically.
Do you not remember region coding of DVDs? This isn't new. In the VHS days region locking was accomplished by using different standards.
That is interesting stuff. A question for you, what's google's take on the dark web? things like iphones, facebook posts, apple maps, etc, where many people spend the majority of their internet time but google doesn't have a window in? does google see this as a threat?
Not so much a threat as a lost opportunity, for everyone, not just Google. Isolating large amounts of information in disconnected walled gardens means that the information isn't generally available to the world. With stuff like Facebook, at least some of the content is stuff that isn't really public, and shouldn't be searchable, but much of it is public and it would be good if the world could search for it.
From a competitive perspective, Facebook obviously competes with Google for ad revenue, and in some ways is a threat. I probably shouldn't go into detail about that.
the only answer is to hire really smart and passionate people, but in order to attract and keep them you need to give them really cool things to do. really smart and passionate people don't want to make bleeding edge technology to push more ads. So they have their "20% time" policy, along with their google x projects, which are just ways to keep their workforce engaged while they improve search and ad placement.
The problem with your argument is that very few of Google's engineers work on search or ad placement, and those that do, by and large, don't work on other stuff. As a Google employee, I'll readily admit that the coolness factor of Google's moonshot projects does give me warm fuzzies, but those warm fuzzies don't really affect me on a day-to-day basis -- and I don't really need them because the stuff I do work on is actually plenty cool all on its own. I know some search engineers and some ad engineers, and they're really engaged in what they're doing, too... in fact, I'd argue that your basic premise, that search and ads are boring, is completely wrong as well.
Search, for example, is a really, really hard problem, for many reasons. To start with, the web is huge and continues growing rapidly, so the architectures and algorithms needed to handle that scale are pretty fascinating on their own. Speed is another really interesting challenge; Google wants to serve results, end to end, in well under a second (the actual target is often-discussed, but I don't know if it's confidential so I won't mention it). This requires not just making Google's systems very fast, but demands research into optimizing the user's browser and the Internet itself. Then there's the problem whose initial solution made Google into a success: Given some search terms and given a corpus of scraped data, how you do provide the best results? And the only reasonable definition of "best" is "the ones the user wants". PageRank was a good first approximation, but if Google were to go back to simple PageRank today everyone would abandon it in a hurry because today's ranking algorithms are far, far better. But they're still a long way from done. Significant recent improvements have come from the Knowledge Graph project, which aims to enable the search engine (and other stuff) with some degree of semantic knowledge about the queries and the content. To really solve search, you actually need to fully understand all of the content on the web and also make high-quality guesses about what the user is actually looking for. Larry Page often says that search is about 5% done.
Ad serving is actually a very similar problem. You have a corpus of ads. You want to display ads that the user finds useful. Or, ideally, if you can determine that nothing in your corpus is really useful to the user, display nothing. The perfect ad-serving system will serve no ads most of the time, showing only ads for items that a user wants to buy, when they want to buy it, and you have relatively little contextual information to use to make that decision. There are other issues as well. For example you want to maximize ad revenue which means you need to take into account the advertisers' bids, but in the long run users will more often click on ads if they have good experiences with the ones they choose, so there's a vague sense of user experience value as well. Choosing not to display any ads sometimes is part of maximizing user satisfaction as well. Arguably, doing all of this perfectly is an even harder problem than search.
So... no. Google doesn't do all of its moonshots merely to keep its employees interested. If that were the reason, it would be both unnecessary and ineffective.
The real reason, I think, is pretty straightforward. Google is looking for the next $100B product. Google was built on one solution that became massively successful. At the time, it wasn't even obvious how to monetize it. What was clear was that there was a challenging problem to solve, and that the solution would be useful
If Google was blocked for not obeying Chinese law, but isn't blocked anymore... then what principles did Google compromise in order to get unblocked?
I'm sure Google changed nothing at all.
My guess is that this is just an escalation of the strategy of service degradation China has used against Google for a long time. Blocking access entirely provokes anger and spurs people to find workarounds, but if you randomly and intermittently make stuff fail the targeted service just seems crappy, which motivates people to find other services. As I understand it, that's exactly what happened here: China only blocked one of the IP addresses in Google's MX record. Since STMP is a store-and-forward protocol, with retries, the impact would be to introduce delays and degrade reliability. Just blocking it for a few days is another way of implementing this strategy, since it shows users that the service is unreliable. What happened once may happen again. Or worse.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but do not speak for Google and know nothing about this beyond what I read in the press. The information that only one of the MX IPs was blocked is something I read on Hacker News.)
Damn that Pope Gregory XIII. He should have left the calendar as it is. It would prevent any alchemists or astronomers born on January 4 from being praised on their birthday when it gets shifted to December 25. What was he thinking! So much for papal infallibility.
You've got that backwards. Before Pope Gregory's change the Julian calendar was used, and Newton's Julian birthdate was Dec 25. Thanks to the pope's change, his birthday became Jan 4, thus moving his birthday away from Christ's.
Guess the pope really is infallible... his change not only fixed up the alignment of the seasons but got that pesky alchemist off of Christ's b-day.
Oops, I forgot to include the disclosure/disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. They pay me to write code, not comment on privacy issues, and in fact they discourage me from making public comments about such things (though they stop short of telling me I can't, in most cases).
Looking at the actual text of the W3C doc, I think the author of the Times article got it wrong. The language defining "first party" does allow for multiple first parties on a page, but evaluation of "first partiness" is on an interaction-by-interaction basis. The idea is that if the user visiting slashdot, which happens to host Google ads, is actually intending to interact with Google on the slashdot page, then Google is a first party and can track the user. But clearly the user is not intending to interact with Google in that case, so Google could not track a user who had requested no tracking, and would have no advantage over smaller ad networks.
The exception would be if slashdot started putting Google+ "+1" or Facebook "Like" buttons on its articles. Then, by my reading of the text, the button provider would be allowed to track users who clicked on the relevant button. This would be an advantage over smaller ad networks, but it's one that already exists.
The terminology section of the doc makes all of this pretty clear, IMO.
A network interaction is a single HTTP request and its corresponding response(s): zero or more interim (1xx) responses and a single final (2xx-5xx) response.
A user action is a deliberate action by the user, via configuration, invocation, or selection, to initiate a network interaction. Selection of a link, submission of a form, and reloading a page are examples of user actions. User activity is any set of such user actions.
A party is a natural person, a legal entity, or a set of legal entities that share common owner(s), common controller(s), and a group identity that is easily discoverable by a user. Common branding or providing a list of affiliates that is available via a link from a resource where a party describes DNT practices are examples of ways to provide this discoverability.
With respect to a given user action, a first party is a party with which the user intends to interact, via one or more network interactions, as a result of making that action. Merely hovering over, muting, pausing, or closing a given piece of content does not constitute a user's intent to interact with another party.
In some cases, a resource on the Web will be jointly controlled by two or more distinct parties. Each of those parties is considered a first party if a user would reasonably expect to communicate with all of them when accessing that resource. For example, prominent co-branding on the resource might lead a user to expect that multiple parties are responsible for the content or functionality.
For any data collected as a result of one or more network interactions resulting from a user's action, a third party is any party other than that user, a first party for that user action, or a service provider acting on behalf of either that user or that first party.
A party collects data received in a network interaction if that data remains within the party’s control after the network interaction is complete.
A party uses data if the party processes the data for any purpose other than storage or merely forwarding it to another party.
A party shares data if it transfers or provides a copy of that data to any other party.
I do, actually. Well, they're more partners than customers, since we give them our code and they sell it. But, yes, I have a lot of meetings with outside parties. We convince about half of them to join our Hangouts from their laptops, the others we add to the meeting via phone. Outside of meetings, we communicate entirely via e-mail. Voicemail is still irrelevant.
At IBM, my role was entirely customer-facing. Voicemail was still fairly rare, though teleconferences were the norm. Most communication was, again, via e-mail or face to face.
At work, my extension is tied into my email. When someone leaves me a message, it's sent as a wav file to my email, and I can listen to it from my mobile device.
Where I work (Google), telephone calls are all but dead and voicemail is completely dead. Pretty much everyone lists their personal mobile number as their phone number in the directory (or a Google Voice number that forwards to their mobile), because getting business calls at home or whatever is a non-issue because no one makes phone calls for business. Communication is via e-mail (for formal communications, messages that don't seek quick response, or group distribution), instant message (for short, timely discussions) or face to face/video conference (Google Hangout). Some groups, especially SREs (Site Reliability Engineers -- sysadmins, more or less), also use IRC, mostly because it stays up when other stuff breaks.
Further, the etiquette is that nearly all non-email communication starts with an instant message. This is true even if the other party is sitting right next to you, unless you can tell by looking that they aren't deeply focused on something. There are only two times a phone is used, one rare, the other extraordinarily rare, and in neither case would voicemail even be useful.
The rare case is for a (generally informal) meeting when one party for some reason doesn't have access to Hangouts. The extraordinarily rare case is when something is on fire and someone's attention is needed at 2 AM Sunday morning. The latter has never happened to me, though I have called a couple of colleagues. Even then, a phone call is an unusual step; normally you wake people up via the pager system (whose messages are delivered via various means, sometimes including automated phone calls) and proceed to communicate via IM or VC.
It's not just Google, either. Prior to Google I worked at IBM which where communication similarly revolved primarily around IM and e-mail, though meetings were primarily via teleconference, not video conference.
From what I can see, voice is generally declining, and voicemail is leading the charge.
I used the phrase "thinkers", not "elites".
Those groups I "give credit" to are huge. I don't hesitate for a moment that there are members of those groups who have the intelligence at hand and the foresight to see where things are going and to prepare for them. Lumping everyone in those groups as either/or doesn't make sense.
Regardless, you still give them way, way too much credit.
he "thinkers" in govt, business and academia know this. The increasing militarization of the police, the complete disregard for the Constitution, the NSA monitoring everything, etc is getting ready for this.
You give the elites credit for way, way too much foresight, organization and discipline.
Slashdot Mirror
Climate Change is happening too fast for much life to cope.
The rest of your post was good, but this bit is silly. The earth has seen much faster climate change, many times, and not only does life "cope", there's some reason to believe rapid climate change has been one of the biggest drivers of evolutionary diversity.
With that said, although climate change might be good for biodiversity and a good counter to the Holocene extinction, it's likely inconvenient for us, so we should learn how to engineer the planet's climate and stabilize it, not only against anthropogenic changes, but against "natural" changes as well (the climate isn't very stable, and both ends of the typical range of extremes would be pretty uncomfortable for us).
The fact that we still don't have a long term solution for the waste is a concerning one. Yucca mountain was our best hope, and its dead.
Long-term storage is the wrong solution, at least for spent fuel. The right solution is to burn the spent fuel in breeder reactors. The result is waste that only needs to be stored for a couple of centuries.
In my mom's case, she installed a Solitaire game she found one the web somewhere.
" Linux can be anywhere from impossible to ideal for a less-clueful user, but it may require some knowledge to set it up, and the notion is intimidating to many. ChromeOS is... safe, reliable and easy." ChomeOS is Linux...
Obviously. Though it's configured with a rather different userspace than most Linuxen.
It's at the ideal end of the spectrum... because someone knowledgeable set it up to be that way.
Actually Linux once setup can be very user friendly. Installing Windows can be just as big of a pain as Linux.
Normal users don't install Windows. They do have to manage the steaming pile of crap, though, or find someone else who will.
I really like the idea of ChromeOS. It is the right solution for the I want to use Facebook and email crowd.
Exactly.
What?
I've never had a Chromebook, but it has to send stuff to the cloud in order to print on a local network?
Google Cloud Print (which works on Android devices and on any Windows/OS X/Linux machine with a Chrome browser) sends your print jobs to Google, which routes them to the cloud-connected printer you select. It's actually quite convenient in a lot of ways. It means you don't have to configure the machine you're printing from for the printer you're printing to. It also means you don't have to be in the same physical location as the printer to print... which seems less than useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper because you need it, but can be very useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper that someone else, who is located near the printer, needs.
ChromeOS doesn't include a native printing system (CUPS would be the obvious choice), and can only print via Cloud Print. IMO, ChromeOS should bundle CUPS with a reasonable set of printer configurations, for users who may not have a cloud-capable printer, or who may not have network connectivity, but the cloud solution actually works really well where it does work.
IMO Google needs to fix the print problem. Being able to print a document is an expectation of computers, and the "solution" they have is a crappy one.
I agree that Chromebooks need to be able to print to a USB-connected printer, but I disagree that Cloud Print is crappy. It's non-functional where you don't have net connectivity, but everywhere else, it's awesome. In my experience it's so much more reliable than ordinary Wifi printer connections, and even some USB printer connections that I always use Cloud Print first, if it's available. haven't even bothered to configure my laptop with drivers for my home printer. That approach is fiddly, while the cloud solution works every time with no setup. And it works from my phone, my tablet, etc.
In addition, it is occasionally *very* convenient to be able to print to a printer somewhere else. There have been several times when I've been traveling that I've printed something for my wife, on our home printer. Yes, I could send her the doc and she could print it, but only if she has the relevant application... it's so much easier just to text her to say "The document you need to sign and run up to the county office is printing in the kitchen right now".
I agree here, the cost of the Chromebook's savings will be negated by the "custom solutions" required to get it to do routine mundane tasks. Get him either a cheap Windows 8 device (HP has a couple in the CB's price range) or if the walled-garden/appstore is more his thing, an iDevice(TM).
The point of a Chromebook isn't cost savings, it's that it's maintenance-free. There's no malware to worry about and nothing to mess up. The same is pretty true of an iPad or an Android tablet, but presumably he wants a laptop form factor.
My mom wanted to get something and I encouraged her to get either a Chromebook or a tablet, but my dad insisted that those were crap and she should get a real computer, and he found a deeply-discounted laptop with Windows 8.1 on it, which was cheaper than most Chromebooks.
And two days later I was over at her house, cleaning off malware, installing AV, trying to fix configuration changes she'd accidentally made while trying to fix the problems she'd caused. I should have made my dad fix it, frankly. Windows is too much hassle. OS X isn't too bad, but Apple's premium prices are. Linux can be anywhere from impossible to ideal for a less-clueful user, but it may require some knowledge to set it up, and the notion is intimidating to many. ChromeOS is... safe, reliable and easy.
Except it can't print except via the cloud. That, incidentally, was the argument my dad used to insist on Windows for her. Google needs to add CUPS to ChromeOS, IMO. It's pretty much plug and play with most printers.
Twenty years from first publication might be reasonable, but it is still problematic for works of fiction, because it is a short enough period of time that a film studio wanting to make a movie would be sorely tempted to wait out the copyright rather than paying the author for the use of his or her work.
So what?
Answer this: Would the knowledge that no movie studio would pay you millions to license your novels have stopped you from writing them? You can argue that that possibility factored into your thinking, but that's not the point. The point is: If that possibility, and that alone, were completely removed, would you have chosen not to write?
You have to keep in mind that the purpose of copyright -- as envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, who provided the legal framework for it -- is to benefit society, not authors. It's to promote creation and publication. So, society should set the terms of the temporary copyright monopoly at the minimum level required to motivate authors to write and publish, and no higher.
Personally, I'm a fan of geometrically-growing copyright registration fees. Make it free for the first decade (from publication), $100 for the second, $10K for the third, $1M for the fourth, $100M for the fifth, $10B for the sixth, and so on. Each decade costs 100X what the previous decade did. Oh, and adjust the fees for inflation, too. The idea is to ensure that all works have 20-30 years in which the owner can attempt to sell it, and to hold out the promise of even longer for blockbusters with long-term financial viability, but to ensure that everything eventually falls into the public domain. The offer of longer terms for blockbusters, note, isn't to benefit copyright holders financially so much as it is to dangle a carrot, because hardly any work will justify $100M, and it's likely that nothing would justify $10B.
Your notion of basing it on gross revenue is interesting, but I think it would be too easy for big studios to game.
No corporation should own a copyright which outlives the creator(s) of the work plus a decade.
How does this work when there are hundreds of people working on a project, like a film? Does the copyright expire ten years after the first death, or the last? If the former, then pretty much any movie more than ten years old will be in the public domain. If the latter, I guess we're going to start seeing a few dozen babies somehow contributing to every new project, all of them selected from families who seem to live unusually long.
Also, what constitutes "death"? What happens if a member of the crew is cryogenically preserved and later brought back to life? Does copyright get reinstated? And what happens if people stop dying? It doesn't seem at all unlikely that within the next few decades we acquire the ability to keep a human body alive indefinitely (though I'm not sure if the brain is up to remaining useful for much longer)?
I think tying copyright to human lifespans is a bad idea. I prefer ever-increasing copyright maintenance fees. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollars a year to keep Mickey, fine. But for most works, the copyright owners will eventually decide that it's better to release it into the public domain.
they're in bed with the very government
Yeah, nothing says "in bed" like a 2.5 year court battle, followed by immediately notifying the target.
Hehe. I had actually written that myself, but deleted it because nobody buys it. I think it's absolutely true, but it seems to be impossible for most people to believe that executives in a big corporation could actually want to do good for the world.
Thanks for saying it.
So don't believe me. Read the document for yourself.
In the digital world, stores enforce my nationality. I can order a music CD or a movie on DVD from Amazon.com, but if I want to buy digital music or stream a digital movie I can't. The more we move towards digital content the more borders there are, paradoxically.
Do you not remember region coding of DVDs? This isn't new. In the VHS days region locking was accomplished by using different standards.
That is interesting stuff. A question for you, what's google's take on the dark web? things like iphones, facebook posts, apple maps, etc, where many people spend the majority of their internet time but google doesn't have a window in? does google see this as a threat?
Not so much a threat as a lost opportunity, for everyone, not just Google. Isolating large amounts of information in disconnected walled gardens means that the information isn't generally available to the world. With stuff like Facebook, at least some of the content is stuff that isn't really public, and shouldn't be searchable, but much of it is public and it would be good if the world could search for it.
From a competitive perspective, Facebook obviously competes with Google for ad revenue, and in some ways is a threat. I probably shouldn't go into detail about that.
the only answer is to hire really smart and passionate people, but in order to attract and keep them you need to give them really cool things to do. really smart and passionate people don't want to make bleeding edge technology to push more ads. So they have their "20% time" policy, along with their google x projects, which are just ways to keep their workforce engaged while they improve search and ad placement.
The problem with your argument is that very few of Google's engineers work on search or ad placement, and those that do, by and large, don't work on other stuff. As a Google employee, I'll readily admit that the coolness factor of Google's moonshot projects does give me warm fuzzies, but those warm fuzzies don't really affect me on a day-to-day basis -- and I don't really need them because the stuff I do work on is actually plenty cool all on its own. I know some search engineers and some ad engineers, and they're really engaged in what they're doing, too... in fact, I'd argue that your basic premise, that search and ads are boring, is completely wrong as well.
Search, for example, is a really, really hard problem, for many reasons. To start with, the web is huge and continues growing rapidly, so the architectures and algorithms needed to handle that scale are pretty fascinating on their own. Speed is another really interesting challenge; Google wants to serve results, end to end, in well under a second (the actual target is often-discussed, but I don't know if it's confidential so I won't mention it). This requires not just making Google's systems very fast, but demands research into optimizing the user's browser and the Internet itself. Then there's the problem whose initial solution made Google into a success: Given some search terms and given a corpus of scraped data, how you do provide the best results? And the only reasonable definition of "best" is "the ones the user wants". PageRank was a good first approximation, but if Google were to go back to simple PageRank today everyone would abandon it in a hurry because today's ranking algorithms are far, far better. But they're still a long way from done. Significant recent improvements have come from the Knowledge Graph project, which aims to enable the search engine (and other stuff) with some degree of semantic knowledge about the queries and the content. To really solve search, you actually need to fully understand all of the content on the web and also make high-quality guesses about what the user is actually looking for. Larry Page often says that search is about 5% done.
Ad serving is actually a very similar problem. You have a corpus of ads. You want to display ads that the user finds useful. Or, ideally, if you can determine that nothing in your corpus is really useful to the user, display nothing. The perfect ad-serving system will serve no ads most of the time, showing only ads for items that a user wants to buy, when they want to buy it, and you have relatively little contextual information to use to make that decision. There are other issues as well. For example you want to maximize ad revenue which means you need to take into account the advertisers' bids, but in the long run users will more often click on ads if they have good experiences with the ones they choose, so there's a vague sense of user experience value as well. Choosing not to display any ads sometimes is part of maximizing user satisfaction as well. Arguably, doing all of this perfectly is an even harder problem than search.
So... no. Google doesn't do all of its moonshots merely to keep its employees interested. If that were the reason, it would be both unnecessary and ineffective.
The real reason, I think, is pretty straightforward. Google is looking for the next $100B product. Google was built on one solution that became massively successful. At the time, it wasn't even obvious how to monetize it. What was clear was that there was a challenging problem to solve, and that the solution would be useful
If Google was blocked for not obeying Chinese law, but isn't blocked anymore... then what principles did Google compromise in order to get unblocked?
I'm sure Google changed nothing at all.
My guess is that this is just an escalation of the strategy of service degradation China has used against Google for a long time. Blocking access entirely provokes anger and spurs people to find workarounds, but if you randomly and intermittently make stuff fail the targeted service just seems crappy, which motivates people to find other services. As I understand it, that's exactly what happened here: China only blocked one of the IP addresses in Google's MX record. Since STMP is a store-and-forward protocol, with retries, the impact would be to introduce delays and degrade reliability. Just blocking it for a few days is another way of implementing this strategy, since it shows users that the service is unreliable. What happened once may happen again. Or worse.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but do not speak for Google and know nothing about this beyond what I read in the press. The information that only one of the MX IPs was blocked is something I read on Hacker News.)
Damn that Pope Gregory XIII. He should have left the calendar as it is. It would prevent any alchemists or astronomers born on January 4 from being praised on their birthday when it gets shifted to December 25. What was he thinking! So much for papal infallibility.
You've got that backwards. Before Pope Gregory's change the Julian calendar was used, and Newton's Julian birthdate was Dec 25. Thanks to the pope's change, his birthday became Jan 4, thus moving his birthday away from Christ's.
Guess the pope really is infallible... his change not only fixed up the alignment of the seasons but got that pesky alchemist off of Christ's b-day.
You're rather full of yourself. We can't "destroy" nature - we are nature.
That's actually implied by what the GP said.
Oops, I forgot to include the disclosure/disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. They pay me to write code, not comment on privacy issues, and in fact they discourage me from making public comments about such things (though they stop short of telling me I can't, in most cases).
Looking at the actual text of the W3C doc, I think the author of the Times article got it wrong. The language defining "first party" does allow for multiple first parties on a page, but evaluation of "first partiness" is on an interaction-by-interaction basis. The idea is that if the user visiting slashdot, which happens to host Google ads, is actually intending to interact with Google on the slashdot page, then Google is a first party and can track the user. But clearly the user is not intending to interact with Google in that case, so Google could not track a user who had requested no tracking, and would have no advantage over smaller ad networks.
The exception would be if slashdot started putting Google+ "+1" or Facebook "Like" buttons on its articles. Then, by my reading of the text, the button provider would be allowed to track users who clicked on the relevant button. This would be an advantage over smaller ad networks, but it's one that already exists.
The terminology section of the doc makes all of this pretty clear, IMO.
A network interaction is a single HTTP request and its corresponding response(s): zero or more interim (1xx) responses and a single final (2xx-5xx) response.
A user action is a deliberate action by the user, via configuration, invocation, or selection, to initiate a network interaction. Selection of a link, submission of a form, and reloading a page are examples of user actions. User activity is any set of such user actions.
A party is a natural person, a legal entity, or a set of legal entities that share common owner(s), common controller(s), and a group identity that is easily discoverable by a user. Common branding or providing a list of affiliates that is available via a link from a resource where a party describes DNT practices are examples of ways to provide this discoverability.
With respect to a given user action, a first party is a party with which the user intends to interact, via one or more network interactions, as a result of making that action. Merely hovering over, muting, pausing, or closing a given piece of content does not constitute a user's intent to interact with another party.
In some cases, a resource on the Web will be jointly controlled by two or more distinct parties. Each of those parties is considered a first party if a user would reasonably expect to communicate with all of them when accessing that resource. For example, prominent co-branding on the resource might lead a user to expect that multiple parties are responsible for the content or functionality.
For any data collected as a result of one or more network interactions resulting from a user's action, a third party is any party other than that user, a first party for that user action, or a service provider acting on behalf of either that user or that first party.
A party collects data received in a network interaction if that data remains within the party’s control after the network interaction is complete.
A party uses data if the party processes the data for any purpose other than storage or merely forwarding it to another party.
A party shares data if it transfers or provides a copy of that data to any other party.
You obviously don't work with customers.
I do, actually. Well, they're more partners than customers, since we give them our code and they sell it. But, yes, I have a lot of meetings with outside parties. We convince about half of them to join our Hangouts from their laptops, the others we add to the meeting via phone. Outside of meetings, we communicate entirely via e-mail. Voicemail is still irrelevant.
At IBM, my role was entirely customer-facing. Voicemail was still fairly rare, though teleconferences were the norm. Most communication was, again, via e-mail or face to face.
But I was assured that DRAM stays readable for minutes after they're removed from the machine?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...
Not if adjacent rows are being heavily, cyclicly read.
At work, my extension is tied into my email. When someone leaves me a message, it's sent as a wav file to my email, and I can listen to it from my mobile device.
Where I work (Google), telephone calls are all but dead and voicemail is completely dead. Pretty much everyone lists their personal mobile number as their phone number in the directory (or a Google Voice number that forwards to their mobile), because getting business calls at home or whatever is a non-issue because no one makes phone calls for business. Communication is via e-mail (for formal communications, messages that don't seek quick response, or group distribution), instant message (for short, timely discussions) or face to face/video conference (Google Hangout). Some groups, especially SREs (Site Reliability Engineers -- sysadmins, more or less), also use IRC, mostly because it stays up when other stuff breaks.
Further, the etiquette is that nearly all non-email communication starts with an instant message. This is true even if the other party is sitting right next to you, unless you can tell by looking that they aren't deeply focused on something. There are only two times a phone is used, one rare, the other extraordinarily rare, and in neither case would voicemail even be useful.
The rare case is for a (generally informal) meeting when one party for some reason doesn't have access to Hangouts. The extraordinarily rare case is when something is on fire and someone's attention is needed at 2 AM Sunday morning. The latter has never happened to me, though I have called a couple of colleagues. Even then, a phone call is an unusual step; normally you wake people up via the pager system (whose messages are delivered via various means, sometimes including automated phone calls) and proceed to communicate via IM or VC.
It's not just Google, either. Prior to Google I worked at IBM which where communication similarly revolved primarily around IM and e-mail, though meetings were primarily via teleconference, not video conference.
From what I can see, voice is generally declining, and voicemail is leading the charge.
I used the phrase "thinkers", not "elites". Those groups I "give credit" to are huge. I don't hesitate for a moment that there are members of those groups who have the intelligence at hand and the foresight to see where things are going and to prepare for them. Lumping everyone in those groups as either/or doesn't make sense.
Regardless, you still give them way, way too much credit.
he "thinkers" in govt, business and academia know this. The increasing militarization of the police, the complete disregard for the Constitution, the NSA monitoring everything, etc is getting ready for this.
You give the elites credit for way, way too much foresight, organization and discipline.