So what you are saying, if there is somebody else who can do the job, I should immediately give it to him, instead of even trying to do it myself?
If he can do it cheaper, or better, or faster, why would you not? If considerations other than who he is drive you to do it yourself, well and good. But if you're keeping it local merely because he's "other", that's tribalism.
Yes, tribalism. If you can get what you done need for $1 per hour, and get it done just as well/quickly/etc., you should do it, and invest the savings in other parts of your enterprise (whatever that may be). Choosing to pay more merely so you can pay the money to your own tribe is tribalism.
We're all humans, and no tribe is inherently more deserving than any other.
Don't people in other countries have a right to work, too? Tribalism, faugh.
Not that it doesn't make sense for a city to consider its larger picture... it certainly does. Tax money shipped to the US is gone. If they spend the same money locally, some of it will come back to the city, particularly when you include the ripple effects from that money flowing around the local economy. So the net actual cost can be lower, even if it's higher on paper... and if the outlays are smaller and local, then the city benefits from both effects.
But refusing to pay foreign workers just because their foreign, even when it does make more sense economically, is just tribalism and we should stop it.
So, what we learn is that ISPs believe they can build a gigabit infrastructure and make a profit charging only $65/month for service without having to subsidize it with an ad business (like Google can).
I don't believe Google really subsidizes Fiber. Sure there are capital investments, so having deep pockets (filled with ad money) definitely helps, but the Fiber business is being run as a standalone profit-generating enterprise. Actually, this is necessary in order for it to fulfill its primary mission, which is to convince other ISPs that they can make money in the gigabit business.
yeah, and they also have A LOT of internal and application traffic that takes priority over their baby ISP business on that fiber
But Google also has a LOT of fiber:-)
And, although I don't know and couldn't say if I did, I strongly suspect that ISP traffic is categorized at the highest priority for QoC purposes, alongside all other customer-facing traffic.
Well, why waste time and money gathering info if you're not gonna use it?
You're the one asserting that the information is gathered. From what I can see, the information gathered is exactly that required to provide the services, and anything else is discarded.
Does the FTC have access to all source code that runs in the company and do they go thru it line by line?
The auditors have access to whatever they ask to see, I suppose. I haven't been involved in an audit, and am not likely to be.
They could compile the info by scanning your data, send it to some remote location and nobody would know anything about it.
Someone would know about it, notably the engineers that implemented it, and those that support and maintain it, and those that manage the network traffic, plus everyone near any of those people.
It is is the pinnacle of outsourcing where the management (uber, airbnb) reaps the cream of the profits at little risk, while their "subcontractors", so to speak, take the burden of all the risks (legally and financially), while also having to shoulder maintenance and operating expenses.
Meh.
If the "subcontractors" find this arrangement onerous they're free to opt out and find or create another that fits their needs better.
I posit that there is no statement Google could make which you couldn't parse for loopholes, unless it comprised multiple pages of legalese.
I happen to know personally a lot of people on the Apps and Drive teams who would quit and blow the whistle if any of the abuses you posit were to happen, or even look like happening.
Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders.
This isn't true for Google, and in fact it's not true for many corporations.
What corporations are legally obligated to do is to fulfill the promises made in their articles of incorporation and in their statements to prospective shareholders during offerings (public and otherwise). Generally, these documents specify profit as the primary motive, but they often include caveats which allow the company to seek other goals alongside or perhaps even to the detriment of profits.
Google's documents, in particular, include a lot of such weaseling. The primary document to consider is the founders' letter to prospective shareholders during the IPO, in which they set the expectation for the shares people buy. That letter specifically announced the intention of the founders to maintain control of the company so that it does not have to be motivated entirely by profit motive, and particularly not by short-term profit motive.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and hold a small number of Google shares -- most received as part of my hiring bonus -- but I don't speak for Google. This erroneous notion that corporations are legally obligated to generate maximum profits is one that bothered me long before joining Google and indeed I made posts very similar to this one long before going to work for Google.)
This has that misfit stank all over it. Google will be all excited to get it out into the world. They'll let you play with it for a semester or 2 and then it'll get the axe or be absorbed as feature bloat into some other project.
Google Apps for education is already several years old, and going strong. Besides being a way for Google to "give back" at almost zero cost, it's a great way to encourage enterprise sales (a non-trivial and fast-growing component of Google's revenues), since it gets the future workforce comfortable with the tools. This is a minor extension which may or may not be truly specific to education. I'd say the odds of it getting axed are basically zero, unless schools that use Google Apps don't like it and don't use it.
Actually, a document isn't private unless you physically own it (hence, no "cloud" anything) and control the access to it (private links, self-destructing links, HTTP sessions, etc). Relying on an external walled garden means that you gave them ownership (either legally, or physically).
All of which is irrelevant to the vast majority of people, who can reasonably assume that the cloud provider is more interested in their business than in stealing their content.
To most, security here means "the people I want to give this to can see it, other people can't". The fact that some cloud server must have access to it, and that an employee of the company operating the cloud could get in there and see it doesn't matter, since it's reasonable to assume that a reputable cloud service provider has policies and procedures in place to detect and deter such abuse, and because it's in the interest of the provider to keep the data secure.
From an information-theoretic perspective, cloud security is a joke. From a practical perspective, it works pretty well and has for a very long time, well before computers were invented (storing sensitive data with trusted third parties is not new).
Why? Why is it not possible to simply accept that the climate will change and adapt to the new reality of a warmer planet? (And, yes, I'm perfectly well aware that warming won't be consistent everywhere, some portions may be colder, and climate patterns will change in all sorts of hard-to-predict ways. None of that affects the fact that what we're looking at is an overall warmer planet.)
2. it might be warmer on one side and colder on the other hence climate change not warming. but once the sea levels rise, a lot of the major important global cities could be under water as they are usually next rivers so it will cause havoc.
Yes, rising sea levels will mean massive displacement of populations. A large percentage of humans live within a few feet of sea level. Moving cities is a huge cost, certainly. How does it compare with the cost of hamstringing our industrial economy by massively reducing carbon emissions? Don't forget to include the impact caused by halting the progress of the developing world, which doesn't have the ability to support the more expensive approaches to energy generation and distribution which the wealthy world can (somewhat) afford. And in particular keep in mind that it appears that wealth creation is the very best way to halt population growth, so killing progress will end our hopes of stabilizing the population.
the question isn't hard, its getting the bone heads to understand the implication of not doing anything
It's also necessary to get the other boneheads to understand the implications of doing what's necessary to reduce emissions.
You illustrate my point nicely: There are two extreme choices, both of which are extremely costly. There are two camps, each advocating one of the extremes and ignoring the costs of their own extreme while jumping up and down decrying the costs of the other. The reality is that we are not going to do either of the extremes, what we are going to do is something in between, and making a sensible choice about what level of reduction to aim for requires data that we don't have and, as far as I can tell, aren't really trying to develop.
1. Dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas outputs.
2. Adapt to living on a warmer planet (with the accompanying changes in climate patterns, sea levels, etc.)
Either one will probably be drastic. I think the general assumption is that #1 will be less painful than #2. Is it? I don't know. Actually, it's a matter of degree in either case, because we're not going back to a few million humans living in grass huts, and for that matter I think it's likely too late to quickly reverse the change even if we did. So, the question is how much should we change our lifestyles in order to reduce the amount of climate change?
Meh. Implementation bugs can be fixed. It's designing for security and privacy that matters, and once we address the flaw that CAs represent, SSL is a pretty good design (and that fix is in the works). That said, I'm a lot less confident in the ability of math to beat guns than the GP. Technology can't work around policy problems, not directly. It can be used to raise awareness so that public opinion can then be used to fix the policy problems.
The real elephant in the room is conservation, but addicts don't want to give up their fix.
I sure as hell don't, and -- though you'll never admit it -- neither do you.
The sort of conservation that would actually make a difference isn't swapping out a few bulbs, tweaking the temperature on the thermostat a little and taking the bus to work. To seriously reduce energy consumption would require significant decreases in the standard of living in the wealthy world and -- even worse and even less likely to happen -- would require suppressing and even rolling back improvements in the developing world. The latter is particularly nasty because (a) it appears that developing economies more or less must go through a phase during which they pollute like crazy in order to lift themselves up to a level where they can start being a bit cleaner and (b) wealth reduces the birth rate, and getting population growth under control (which we're actually on track to do, assuming we don't go mucking with the socioeconomic forces too severely) is even more important than conservation on a per-person basis.
Conservation is good, and definitely worth a lot of attention, but it's only 20% of any realistic answer. We'll learn to live without polar ice caps rather than forgo all of the benefits of cheap, plentiful energy, so those who continue opposing the cleanest, safest form of energy production yet created are shooting themselves in the foot.
OTOH "change" is fairly value-neutral, while "disruption" is negative. From the perspective of someone who wants the public to be scared and be willing to accept the costs of preventing or mitigating it, disruption is a better choice.
Personally, I don't really care. I don't believe there's anything we can seriously do to alter what's going to happen so we're better off focusing on how we're going to live with the results.
That's actually a good solution. One of the concerns police have is a criminal disarming them (or just making a grab for their weapon). This would ensure that only an officer actually gets to fire the gun if the situation warrants it. If a suspect snags it from them in am altercation, it's useless.
Yep, and in spite of that police will refuse to accept this technology. Weighed against a gun grab, they'll vote for the weapon that is more likely to work for them when they need it. To combat gun grabs they'll continue to use retention holsters and train to defend their gun.
You may not know, but another technology in this vein (gun grab protection) is already in production and widely available. It's a more sensible and less risky approach... and by and large police officers don't like it. The technology in question is the "magazine safety". It blocks the trigger press unless a magazine is fully inserted. The idea is that if an officer ends up in a wrestling match they can reach down and hit the exposed magazine release, disabling their gun until the magazine is re-inserted. Seems sensible enough, but it still creates a small risk that the gun won't work when they want it to, so by and large police have refused to buy guns with the feature even though it was designed specifically for them.
Yes, if you're a pedant. However, a well-maintained modern handgun firing factory ammunition is unlikely to fail, and nearly all failures that do occur are transient and easily fixed. With a bit of practice, even type 3 malfunctions (double-feed) can be cleared in under a second and the gun restored to working order.
What we're talking about here is an additional failure mode, one that is almost certainly not repairable in a second, or even a couple of minutes. In a gunfight, a couple of minutes is likely to be a literal lifetime. Further, it introduces a failure mode which can occur even when everything is working perfectly. If for some reason you need to shoot with your off hand and cannot get your strong-side wrist in range of the gun, you'll be unable to shoot.
Police will absolutely refuse to use these, and civilians should also refuse to allow them to be imposed on us.
The numbers I've read are in the range of 95-98% efficient, but I can't find any links right now. In any case, whether it's 90% or 99%, the net is that a linear generator feeding an electric motor should be at least as efficient as a traditional ICE, as well as being lighter and simpler.
Why is not NOT OK to have a real choice, where people can choose a more open Android or a platform that ships with defaults that are vastly better for 98% of people that will own mobile devices?
That's a false dichotomy. Android is a platform that ships with defaults that are better for 98% of people that will own mobile devices. By default it only allows installation from the Google Play store.
That said, I have absolutely nothing against people having a choice between iOS and Android (and whatever else). I'd be very, very concerned if the walled garden were the only option, but it's not.
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So what you are saying, if there is somebody else who can do the job, I should immediately give it to him, instead of even trying to do it myself?
If he can do it cheaper, or better, or faster, why would you not? If considerations other than who he is drive you to do it yourself, well and good. But if you're keeping it local merely because he's "other", that's tribalism.
Yes, tribalism. If you can get what you done need for $1 per hour, and get it done just as well/quickly/etc., you should do it, and invest the savings in other parts of your enterprise (whatever that may be). Choosing to pay more merely so you can pay the money to your own tribe is tribalism.
We're all humans, and no tribe is inherently more deserving than any other.
Don't people in other countries have a right to work, too? Tribalism, faugh.
Not that it doesn't make sense for a city to consider its larger picture... it certainly does. Tax money shipped to the US is gone. If they spend the same money locally, some of it will come back to the city, particularly when you include the ripple effects from that money flowing around the local economy. So the net actual cost can be lower, even if it's higher on paper... and if the outlays are smaller and local, then the city benefits from both effects.
But refusing to pay foreign workers just because their foreign, even when it does make more sense economically, is just tribalism and we should stop it.
So, what we learn is that ISPs believe they can build a gigabit infrastructure and make a profit charging only $65/month for service without having to subsidize it with an ad business (like Google can).
I don't believe Google really subsidizes Fiber. Sure there are capital investments, so having deep pockets (filled with ad money) definitely helps, but the Fiber business is being run as a standalone profit-generating enterprise. Actually, this is necessary in order for it to fulfill its primary mission, which is to convince other ISPs that they can make money in the gigabit business.
yeah, and they also have A LOT of internal and application traffic that takes priority over their baby ISP business on that fiber
But Google also has a LOT of fiber :-)
And, although I don't know and couldn't say if I did, I strongly suspect that ISP traffic is categorized at the highest priority for QoC purposes, alongside all other customer-facing traffic.
(Google engineer here.)
A quick Google search (yeah, not exactly unbiased)
Google doesn't bias search results.
Well, why waste time and money gathering info if you're not gonna use it?
You're the one asserting that the information is gathered. From what I can see, the information gathered is exactly that required to provide the services, and anything else is discarded.
Does the FTC have access to all source code that runs in the company and do they go thru it line by line?
The auditors have access to whatever they ask to see, I suppose. I haven't been involved in an audit, and am not likely to be.
They could compile the info by scanning your data, send it to some remote location and nobody would know anything about it.
Someone would know about it, notably the engineers that implemented it, and those that support and maintain it, and those that manage the network traffic, plus everyone near any of those people.
Most Japanese homes use gas for heating. Not everywhere is like the US. Incredible, I know.
Most US homes in cold climates use natural gas for heating.
It is is the pinnacle of outsourcing where the management (uber, airbnb) reaps the cream of the profits at little risk, while their "subcontractors", so to speak, take the burden of all the risks (legally and financially), while also having to shoulder maintenance and operating expenses.
Meh.
If the "subcontractors" find this arrangement onerous they're free to opt out and find or create another that fits their needs better.
This one has already been running for more than two years.
Can you prove they don't use scan people's info for other purposes, such as creating detailed profiles of individuals?
Can you prove they do? And what makes you think the regular FTC privacy audits (from the Google Buzz consent decree) wouldn't catch it if they did?
I posit that there is no statement Google could make which you couldn't parse for loopholes, unless it comprised multiple pages of legalese.
I happen to know personally a lot of people on the Apps and Drive teams who would quit and blow the whistle if any of the abuses you posit were to happen, or even look like happening.
Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders.
This isn't true for Google, and in fact it's not true for many corporations.
What corporations are legally obligated to do is to fulfill the promises made in their articles of incorporation and in their statements to prospective shareholders during offerings (public and otherwise). Generally, these documents specify profit as the primary motive, but they often include caveats which allow the company to seek other goals alongside or perhaps even to the detriment of profits.
Google's documents, in particular, include a lot of such weaseling. The primary document to consider is the founders' letter to prospective shareholders during the IPO, in which they set the expectation for the shares people buy. That letter specifically announced the intention of the founders to maintain control of the company so that it does not have to be motivated entirely by profit motive, and particularly not by short-term profit motive.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and hold a small number of Google shares -- most received as part of my hiring bonus -- but I don't speak for Google. This erroneous notion that corporations are legally obligated to generate maximum profits is one that bothered me long before joining Google and indeed I made posts very similar to this one long before going to work for Google.)
This has that misfit stank all over it. Google will be all excited to get it out into the world. They'll let you play with it for a semester or 2 and then it'll get the axe or be absorbed as feature bloat into some other project.
Google Apps for education is already several years old, and going strong. Besides being a way for Google to "give back" at almost zero cost, it's a great way to encourage enterprise sales (a non-trivial and fast-growing component of Google's revenues), since it gets the future workforce comfortable with the tools. This is a minor extension which may or may not be truly specific to education. I'd say the odds of it getting axed are basically zero, unless schools that use Google Apps don't like it and don't use it.
Actually, a document isn't private unless you physically own it (hence, no "cloud" anything) and control the access to it (private links, self-destructing links, HTTP sessions, etc). Relying on an external walled garden means that you gave them ownership (either legally, or physically).
All of which is irrelevant to the vast majority of people, who can reasonably assume that the cloud provider is more interested in their business than in stealing their content.
To most, security here means "the people I want to give this to can see it, other people can't". The fact that some cloud server must have access to it, and that an employee of the company operating the cloud could get in there and see it doesn't matter, since it's reasonable to assume that a reputable cloud service provider has policies and procedures in place to detect and deter such abuse, and because it's in the interest of the provider to keep the data secure.
From an information-theoretic perspective, cloud security is a joke. From a practical perspective, it works pretty well and has for a very long time, well before computers were invented (storing sensitive data with trusted third parties is not new).
1. yes, has to be done anyway.
Why? Why is it not possible to simply accept that the climate will change and adapt to the new reality of a warmer planet? (And, yes, I'm perfectly well aware that warming won't be consistent everywhere, some portions may be colder, and climate patterns will change in all sorts of hard-to-predict ways. None of that affects the fact that what we're looking at is an overall warmer planet.)
2. it might be warmer on one side and colder on the other hence climate change not warming. but once the sea levels rise, a lot of the major important global cities could be under water as they are usually next rivers so it will cause havoc.
Yes, rising sea levels will mean massive displacement of populations. A large percentage of humans live within a few feet of sea level. Moving cities is a huge cost, certainly. How does it compare with the cost of hamstringing our industrial economy by massively reducing carbon emissions? Don't forget to include the impact caused by halting the progress of the developing world, which doesn't have the ability to support the more expensive approaches to energy generation and distribution which the wealthy world can (somewhat) afford. And in particular keep in mind that it appears that wealth creation is the very best way to halt population growth, so killing progress will end our hopes of stabilizing the population.
the question isn't hard, its getting the bone heads to understand the implication of not doing anything
It's also necessary to get the other boneheads to understand the implications of doing what's necessary to reduce emissions.
You illustrate my point nicely: There are two extreme choices, both of which are extremely costly. There are two camps, each advocating one of the extremes and ignoring the costs of their own extreme while jumping up and down decrying the costs of the other. The reality is that we are not going to do either of the extremes, what we are going to do is something in between, and making a sensible choice about what level of reduction to aim for requires data that we don't have and, as far as I can tell, aren't really trying to develop.
There are two options for said change:
1. Dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas outputs.
2. Adapt to living on a warmer planet (with the accompanying changes in climate patterns, sea levels, etc.)
Either one will probably be drastic. I think the general assumption is that #1 will be less painful than #2. Is it? I don't know. Actually, it's a matter of degree in either case, because we're not going back to a few million humans living in grass huts, and for that matter I think it's likely too late to quickly reverse the change even if we did. So, the question is how much should we change our lifestyles in order to reduce the amount of climate change?
It's a hard question.
I prefer a single-speed transmission.
Meh. Implementation bugs can be fixed. It's designing for security and privacy that matters, and once we address the flaw that CAs represent, SSL is a pretty good design (and that fix is in the works). That said, I'm a lot less confident in the ability of math to beat guns than the GP. Technology can't work around policy problems, not directly. It can be used to raise awareness so that public opinion can then be used to fix the policy problems.
The real elephant in the room is conservation, but addicts don't want to give up their fix.
I sure as hell don't, and -- though you'll never admit it -- neither do you.
The sort of conservation that would actually make a difference isn't swapping out a few bulbs, tweaking the temperature on the thermostat a little and taking the bus to work. To seriously reduce energy consumption would require significant decreases in the standard of living in the wealthy world and -- even worse and even less likely to happen -- would require suppressing and even rolling back improvements in the developing world. The latter is particularly nasty because (a) it appears that developing economies more or less must go through a phase during which they pollute like crazy in order to lift themselves up to a level where they can start being a bit cleaner and (b) wealth reduces the birth rate, and getting population growth under control (which we're actually on track to do, assuming we don't go mucking with the socioeconomic forces too severely) is even more important than conservation on a per-person basis.
Conservation is good, and definitely worth a lot of attention, but it's only 20% of any realistic answer. We'll learn to live without polar ice caps rather than forgo all of the benefits of cheap, plentiful energy, so those who continue opposing the cleanest, safest form of energy production yet created are shooting themselves in the foot.
OTOH "change" is fairly value-neutral, while "disruption" is negative. From the perspective of someone who wants the public to be scared and be willing to accept the costs of preventing or mitigating it, disruption is a better choice.
Personally, I don't really care. I don't believe there's anything we can seriously do to alter what's going to happen so we're better off focusing on how we're going to live with the results.
That's actually a good solution. One of the concerns police have is a criminal disarming them (or just making a grab for their weapon). This would ensure that only an officer actually gets to fire the gun if the situation warrants it. If a suspect snags it from them in am altercation, it's useless.
Yep, and in spite of that police will refuse to accept this technology. Weighed against a gun grab, they'll vote for the weapon that is more likely to work for them when they need it. To combat gun grabs they'll continue to use retention holsters and train to defend their gun.
You may not know, but another technology in this vein (gun grab protection) is already in production and widely available. It's a more sensible and less risky approach... and by and large police officers don't like it. The technology in question is the "magazine safety". It blocks the trigger press unless a magazine is fully inserted. The idea is that if an officer ends up in a wrestling match they can reach down and hit the exposed magazine release, disabling their gun until the magazine is re-inserted. Seems sensible enough, but it still creates a small risk that the gun won't work when they want it to, so by and large police have refused to buy guns with the feature even though it was designed specifically for them.
a gun that might not fire.
That would be all of them.
Yes, if you're a pedant. However, a well-maintained modern handgun firing factory ammunition is unlikely to fail, and nearly all failures that do occur are transient and easily fixed. With a bit of practice, even type 3 malfunctions (double-feed) can be cleared in under a second and the gun restored to working order.
What we're talking about here is an additional failure mode, one that is almost certainly not repairable in a second, or even a couple of minutes. In a gunfight, a couple of minutes is likely to be a literal lifetime. Further, it introduces a failure mode which can occur even when everything is working perfectly. If for some reason you need to shoot with your off hand and cannot get your strong-side wrist in range of the gun, you'll be unable to shoot.
Police will absolutely refuse to use these, and civilians should also refuse to allow them to be imposed on us.
The numbers I've read are in the range of 95-98% efficient, but I can't find any links right now. In any case, whether it's 90% or 99%, the net is that a linear generator feeding an electric motor should be at least as efficient as a traditional ICE, as well as being lighter and simpler.
Why is not NOT OK to have a real choice, where people can choose a more open Android or a platform that ships with defaults that are vastly better for 98% of people that will own mobile devices?
That's a false dichotomy. Android is a platform that ships with defaults that are better for 98% of people that will own mobile devices. By default it only allows installation from the Google Play store.
That said, I have absolutely nothing against people having a choice between iOS and Android (and whatever else). I'd be very, very concerned if the walled garden were the only option, but it's not.