That's a valid point, although it wasn't the sort of service that anyone really relied upon.
Picnik had premium features.
Which were all rolled into the Google+ image editor, AFAICT. Picnik premium users also got additional storage space, but since 100% of their premium fees were refunded to them they could easily use that money to buy more space on Google+/Drive.
Or more recently Google Message Filtering?
Hasn't been shut down. And the same filtering is present in Gmail so Apps users get it.
Postini Small Business Edition?
I'm not sure if that's actually been shut down. However, all of the same features are present in Gmail, so Apps users get them.
They are not being migrated to their Apps for Business platform.
They have a horrible, HORRIBLE customer service record.
In the past, yes, certainly. Actually, I'd characterize it differently: for much of Google's history, their customer service has simply been nonexistent, except for their big advertising customers (where it's been fairly good). Google's perspective has been that their target market was simply so huge that personal service was impossible. Recently, however, Google has been getting into areas of business that require customer service. It has taken them a while to figure out how to do it and to ramp up. But I recently had cause to call the customer service for Google Wallet and it was excellent. No wait and the person I spoke with handled my problem quickly and efficiently.
I happen to know that Google has also been putting a lot of effort into ramping up customer service in other areas as well, notably Google Fiber, where the goal is to provide an enjoyable customer service experience, in marked contrast with what most big ISPs provide.
So it's possible that you're correct, that Google Compute Engine support will be terrible, but I think there's good reason to expect it to be otherwise.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee. I'm just honestly reporting my observations, though, and the Google Wallet rep I talked with had no idea I was an employee.)
Given an upward limit of 100-300Mb/s from some suppliers
Not to mention the Google Fiber rolling out in KC. 1 Gbps, symmetric, no caps. Yeah, 3 Mbps is looking pretty anemic these days. Hell, Google is offering 5 Mbps free to anyone who gets their house connected.
wachovia got caught laundering drug money and made 230 BILLION dollars
they were fined 150 MILLION dollars
50%? try 00.06%
Cite? Everything I can find says that Wachovia laundered some $387B. In order to have made $230B, they'd have had to keep 60% of the money they moved, which seems highly unlikely. I haven't been able to find any estimates of their profits on the money they moved, but bank fees are typically a small fraction of a percent of the money that passes through. If they were able to actually hold that money for a period of time and use it to back loans they could have made more, but I still don't think it would be that high, even with the reserve lending multiplier.
I have no doubt that they paid less than they made, but it seems unlikely it was as bad as you described. Though if you can cite reliable sources for your number I'd be interested to see them.
I'm not an American, but my view about them (which is mostly from Slashdot) is that the most conservative and restrictive (i.e. the ones pushing various censorship acts) and the same ones who oppose gun control.
Nah. There is significant overlap between those two groups, but there are plenty of gun control opponents who are social liberals.
If printing your own weapons becomes possible, Americans won't allow shutting down the maker community simply because it's a form of gun control.
That I agree with. Most conservatives would oppose it as a form of gun control. Liberals would find themselves in a quandary and some would fall one way, some another. Libertarians and constitutionalists would oppose it on multiple grounds. Socialists would support it, by and large. The result is that those in favor would be a small, mix of particularly-fearful conservatives, strongly anti-gun liberals and socialists. And they'd be vastly outnumbered. IMNSHO, of course.
Gun shows require that all guns be unloaded at all times, and most even require zip ties or similar be passed through the actions and closed. There are lots of guns, and plenty of ammunition, but all of them are at least 30 seconds from being usable.
You also haven't paid any attention to the news reports of real-world experience with civilians responding to an active shooter. As far as I can tell there hasn't been a single case of a bystander being injured in such a situation. Police officers are an order of magnitude worse when it comes to safely ending such situations.
The fact is that very few gun owners are inclined to try to be "heros". In fact many are completely unwilling to use their firearms except to defend themselves and their families. Others are willing to try to protect strangers, but only when the situation is very clear-cut and they are sure they can do so without injuring others. Given that I teach concealed carry classes, I've had the opportunity to discuss these issues in depth with many prospective armed citizens. Hundreds of them. There have been a couple who seemed to have a hero complex -- both were pursuing Criminal Justice degrees with the intention to become police officers, and one of them was pissed when I refused to certify him because his attitude was too aggressive -- but all of the rest express varying degrees of concern about the many and serious risks involved in using a gun "for real" and would only do so at great need and with great care.
BTW, I believe that is the reason for the much higher rate of badly-aimed shots by police officers. It's not that they're less skilled with their firearms, in fact on average they're probably slightly better, and their skill range is not nearly as wide (among civilians you have everything from barely-ever-fired-a-gun to IDPA/IPSC champions, who are insanely good), but police are more likely to use their guns in marginal situations. Part of that, I think, is the duty they feel to respond, a duty civilians don't have, and part is the fact that the legal system and their departments will back them up in ways it will not do for civilians, so they have much lower risk.
I do grant that the students in a concealed carry class may be more serious about it than the random selection of people at a gun show, and the students may even be putting on a more serious face for the instructor (because I'm pretty damned clear about the seriousness of the topics), but in my opinion, as a person who's been around guns and gun owners my whole life, and who's attended more gun shows than I could count, and who's discussed these issues with perhaps thousands of others, the scenario you describe is vanishingly unlikely.
Give me a block of steel, a drill press and a.22 caliber drill, and in 20 minutes I'll make you a gun that's a hell of a lot more accurate and reuseable than anything you can print out with your RepRap. Give me a few more hours and a milling machine, and I'll make you one you wouldn't be ashamed to rob a bank with.
You could... but could your next-door neighbor? And his?
My grandfather could paint letter-perfect signs. I don't have anywhere near his skill, but I can create equally-perfect (or perhaps a bit better) signs with a color laser printer. Obviously his skill provided a level of flexibility I don't have -- a laser printer doesn't do too well putting an image directly on the surface of a brick wall, for example -- but using the laser printer requires very little knowledge or skill.
There's no doubt that a machinist with a machine shop can manufacture a gun, obviously. The question is, can a random Joe without special skills, but with access to a 3D printer do the same thing? If so, that is a significant change.
(I recognize that 3D printing can't, as yet, produce all of the components of a gun because plastic, or even sintered metal, can't withstand the stresses required of the chamber or barrel, but that may well change over time, and in any case there is clearly value in reducing the number of component that require the skills of a machinist.)
Satellite is why I included the latency requirement. 600 ms pings make VOIP or video chat almost impossible, any sort of interactive or real-time collaborative uses problematic (ever try collaborative editing of a Google Doc over satellite?) and even dramatically slows simple web browsing. I disagree that it meets the basic definition of broadband Internet. It's inadequate for whole classes of usage. I'm glad it's available for just the sort of occasional use that you described, but its availability shouldn't be considered when assessing the deployment of residential Internet.
Are we seriously calling anything under three megabit unacceptable?
Yes.
The Internet is increasingly becoming the transport of choice for video, not just text and occasional static images.
I think a bigger problem with the study is that it only sets a minimum bar for downstream bandwidth. They really need to consider upstream bandwidth, latency and maximum usage as well. I think a good minimum standard would be 3 Mbps down, 500 Kbps up, maximum round trip time to major Internet sites of 200 ms and a total usage cap (up and/or down) of no less than 100 GB per month.
Umm, that's not how I understand the situation at all. They're allowing other downloadable video chat apps to be used on their network, but blocking (except for users on limited plans) FaceTime because it's pre-installed.
I don't know anything about the actual net neutrality rules, but picking and choosing which apps are allowed to use their network seems like it certainly violates the intent, if not the letter, and Quinn seems to be accepting that they could not legally distinguish in this way if FaceTime were not pre-installed, which makes it abundantly clear that he's relying on hair-splitting legalisms to justify his position.
I'm a huge fan of being connected, but this experience has made me realise I truly value having connectivity available when I want it, rather than letting things rule me.
+1
I love my smartphone (Galaxy Nexus), tablet (Nexus 7) and highly-portable laptop (MacBook Air), and it's very convenient to have 24/7 access to my desktop at work via VPN, my work e-mail and IM on all devices, etc. I love the flexibility all of that provides. However, I also have my mail client (Gmail) on my phone & tablet configured not to provide any notifications at all for new e-mail in my work account, not even the icon in the notification bar and I keep my work IM account turned off except when I decide to use it to contact someone else. On my laptop, I use Chrome with two different profiles, one for work and one for personal, and I close the windows with the work profile when I'm not working.
I occasionally do decide to hack a little on my current project at work in the evenings when the family has gone to bed, because I have some idea I want to try out, or I hop on to check the monitors that show the transactions being processed by my recently-deployed-to-production project, or to check the exception-logging tool, and I frequently scan my e-mail priority inbox and my calendar before going to bed. But that's because I choose to do those things, and if I don't happen to want to, I don't. And if anyone tried to tell me that I should do those things, I'd tell them to take a flying leap. But no one has asked, and I don't expect it to happen.
I like the freedom and flexibility all of the tech gives me, but I'm not going to let it cause work to interfere with what's really important. It allows me to work extra hours when I want to, but imposes no requirements on me to do so -- and I will refuse to accept any such requirements without corresponding compensation.
Oh, and as for the other part of the article, yes, my devices are all locked down. In order to have my company e-mail on my cell and tablet, I have to install a device policy enforcement tool, which makes sure my devices are appropriately password-protected, encrypted and can be remotely wiped by the company. If I don't comply with policy, or remove the tool, the mail server won't talk to my devices. My laptop, of course, is company-issued, uses full-disk (full-SSD?) encryption and has its own policy enforcement tool.
I read the response to the question of whether AT&T's action violates net neutrality requirements... and any shyster lawyer would be proud of the crazy hair-splitting Quinn uses to justify his position that it does not.
His argument basically boils down to a claim that it's not a violation of net neutrality for AT&T to block the FaceTime traffic because -- get this -- the app comes pre-installed. He states that if the app were installed from the app store and AT&T were then to block it, that would be a violation of net neutrality. He even points out that there are other video chat apps available on the app store which can be used over AT&T's cellular network (though he refuses to mention Google+ Hangouts directly).
What makes it all really obnoxious is that he then tries to paint this lawyerly hair-splitting as a reasonable position. It is perhaps possible that he's actually right that AT&T's actions satisfy the letter of the FTC net neutrality regulation. But nobody with a brain can believe that it actually makes sense.
Are there OSHA regulations relating to viewing offensive content? Outside of issues around sexual harassment, I mean -- and those probably wouldn't be handled by OSHA anyway. There probably should be, but doubt there are.
On the topic of the article... I'm skeptical. The scenario described is very atypical of Google -- and while they don't get all of the advantages of regular employees, Google does treat their contractors very well. Comparing what I know firsthand about how Google treats its people (I work for Google) to this anonymous story just makes me skeptical of the story. It seems more likely to me that the story is an exaggeration by a contractor who is pissed that Google didn't decide to hire him for a permanent position, and wants to get back at the company. I'm not saying it's impossible that the story happened exactly as described, but it's out of character for Google to act that way, and very much in character for disgruntled ex-employees to anonymously libel their former employers if they think they can get away with it.
I should point out that I do not speak for Google, nor does Google speak for me. The above is my own opinions, nothing more.
The victim of rape should not be punished. And being forced to birth the child of your rapist is an unimaginably cruel punishment that wouldn't even be fit for a convicted criminal.
Better let the muslim world know. There are parts where the rapist can get off the crime if they marry the person they rape. Though in most cases the girl simply commits suicide.
Google re-indexed them in Search but did not include them in News
Please tell me they didn't include them in News because they'd modified their robots file to exclude the google news bot? PLEASE tell me Google didn't have to add an exception rule because these companies are too stupid to use the internet?
I don't know; the article didn't say. It did say they had started to make use of the standard technologies to control what was indexed and cached. But the other is also possible.
And the rest of the story is that after the companies complained that they only wanted to be removed from Google News, not Google Search, Google re-indexed them in Search but did not include them in News. Also, the companies in question began using the meta "noarchive" tag to instruct Google not to cache their pages, so there is no "Cached" link when you find them in search (caching had been a major part of their complaint and Google had previously pointed out to them that they could use "noarchive", but it apparently wasn't until they were removed from the index that they agreed to use it.)
It seems like the simple solution (from Google's perspective) is still effectively what many posters are saying. If sites insist that Google pay them to include snippets in the search results, then Google should simply omit the snippets for those search results. Given the way people rely on snippets to give them an idea about whether or not the link is to what they're looking for, the result will be almost the same as if Google simply didn't link to them. Further, since Google, like all search engines, uses result clicks as a key signal to compute rankings, the snippet-less sites will quickly drop off the first page of results.
The article discusses primarily the ways that coverage has gotten better/more complete since they instituted this program, but in my experience with the Mexican health care system in the early 90s, the biggest problem was the quality of the care. It was horrible. The doctors and nurses in the big public hospitals were overworked, underpaid, and by and large didn't care. Sanitary conditions weren't very good. As a result, the general populace viewed the public hospital not as a place you went to get better, but a place you went to die, and it was also generally expected that you had better take several family members with you to help keep you comfortable because the nursing staff, such as it was, would ignore you. Anyone who could afford it, or could get friends and family to help scrape up the cash, went to a private hospital.
I imagine the care has improved somewhat, along with the coverage, especially at the larger hospitals. But I'll bet it's still quite different from what many of us would consider the term "health care" to mean.
Actually, if you have lots of money it's even easier to avoid bank fees. There are lots of banks that offer not only zero fees but pretty decent interest, as long as you promise to keep at least $25K in your account at all times.
Exactly what I said, if you had LESS money, you'd have more fees.
Ah, sorry, I didn't read carefully. However, I disagree. I never paid any fees when I was a starving student, or when I was working my first low-paying jobs and struggling to make ends meet. It's not hard to avoid them, you just have to pay attention. Oh, and I don't qualify for any of the high-balance account types.
The launderers typically take a large percentage of the money they clean.
And when the launderer is a bank, it's called bank fees.
How do you launder money through a bank? That makes no sense.
I realize you have some sort of deep-seated anger at banks and their fees, and you're trying to find a way to connect that outrage here, but it really doesn't work.
If you had less money OR you needed the money you have laundered, you would face much more significant bank fees.
Actually, if you have lots of money it's even easier to avoid bank fees. There are lots of banks that offer not only zero fees but pretty decent interest, as long as you promise to keep at least $25K in your account at all times.
And for people getting their money laundered, bank fees are an irrelevancy anyway. The launderers typically take a large percentage of the money they clean.
Of course I've heard of bank fees. I very carefully avoid banks that charge them! The only bank fees I've in my life have been loan-related and wire transfer fees. I do buy checks occasionally, but I don't buy them from the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the page you linked. Exchange is supported, and users of those services are being migrated.
How about Google Answers?
That's a valid point, although it wasn't the sort of service that anyone really relied upon.
Picnik had premium features.
Which were all rolled into the Google+ image editor, AFAICT. Picnik premium users also got additional storage space, but since 100% of their premium fees were refunded to them they could easily use that money to buy more space on Google+/Drive.
Or more recently Google Message Filtering?
Hasn't been shut down. And the same filtering is present in Gmail so Apps users get it.
Postini Small Business Edition?
I'm not sure if that's actually been shut down. However, all of the same features are present in Gmail, so Apps users get them.
They are not being migrated to their Apps for Business platform.
Which features are not present in Apps?
They have a horrible, HORRIBLE customer service record.
In the past, yes, certainly. Actually, I'd characterize it differently: for much of Google's history, their customer service has simply been nonexistent, except for their big advertising customers (where it's been fairly good). Google's perspective has been that their target market was simply so huge that personal service was impossible. Recently, however, Google has been getting into areas of business that require customer service. It has taken them a while to figure out how to do it and to ramp up. But I recently had cause to call the customer service for Google Wallet and it was excellent. No wait and the person I spoke with handled my problem quickly and efficiently.
I happen to know that Google has also been putting a lot of effort into ramping up customer service in other areas as well, notably Google Fiber, where the goal is to provide an enjoyable customer service experience, in marked contrast with what most big ISPs provide.
So it's possible that you're correct, that Google Compute Engine support will be terrible, but I think there's good reason to expect it to be otherwise.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee. I'm just honestly reporting my observations, though, and the Google Wallet rep I talked with had no idea I was an employee.)
You know, for when they shut it down?
What paid service has Google ever shut down?
Given an upward limit of 100-300Mb/s from some suppliers
Not to mention the Google Fiber rolling out in KC. 1 Gbps, symmetric, no caps. Yeah, 3 Mbps is looking pretty anemic these days. Hell, Google is offering 5 Mbps free to anyone who gets their house connected.
wachovia got caught laundering drug money and made 230 BILLION dollars they were fined 150 MILLION dollars
50%? try 00.06%
Cite? Everything I can find says that Wachovia laundered some $387B. In order to have made $230B, they'd have had to keep 60% of the money they moved, which seems highly unlikely. I haven't been able to find any estimates of their profits on the money they moved, but bank fees are typically a small fraction of a percent of the money that passes through. If they were able to actually hold that money for a period of time and use it to back loans they could have made more, but I still don't think it would be that high, even with the reserve lending multiplier.
I have no doubt that they paid less than they made, but it seems unlikely it was as bad as you described. Though if you can cite reliable sources for your number I'd be interested to see them.
I think the company would be liable, not the individual.
I'm not an American, but my view about them (which is mostly from Slashdot) is that the most conservative and restrictive (i.e. the ones pushing various censorship acts) and the same ones who oppose gun control.
Nah. There is significant overlap between those two groups, but there are plenty of gun control opponents who are social liberals.
If printing your own weapons becomes possible, Americans won't allow shutting down the maker community simply because it's a form of gun control.
That I agree with. Most conservatives would oppose it as a form of gun control. Liberals would find themselves in a quandary and some would fall one way, some another. Libertarians and constitutionalists would oppose it on multiple grounds. Socialists would support it, by and large. The result is that those in favor would be a small, mix of particularly-fearful conservatives, strongly anti-gun liberals and socialists. And they'd be vastly outnumbered. IMNSHO, of course.
You have obviously never been to a gun show.
Gun shows require that all guns be unloaded at all times, and most even require zip ties or similar be passed through the actions and closed. There are lots of guns, and plenty of ammunition, but all of them are at least 30 seconds from being usable.
You also haven't paid any attention to the news reports of real-world experience with civilians responding to an active shooter. As far as I can tell there hasn't been a single case of a bystander being injured in such a situation. Police officers are an order of magnitude worse when it comes to safely ending such situations.
The fact is that very few gun owners are inclined to try to be "heros". In fact many are completely unwilling to use their firearms except to defend themselves and their families. Others are willing to try to protect strangers, but only when the situation is very clear-cut and they are sure they can do so without injuring others. Given that I teach concealed carry classes, I've had the opportunity to discuss these issues in depth with many prospective armed citizens. Hundreds of them. There have been a couple who seemed to have a hero complex -- both were pursuing Criminal Justice degrees with the intention to become police officers, and one of them was pissed when I refused to certify him because his attitude was too aggressive -- but all of the rest express varying degrees of concern about the many and serious risks involved in using a gun "for real" and would only do so at great need and with great care.
BTW, I believe that is the reason for the much higher rate of badly-aimed shots by police officers. It's not that they're less skilled with their firearms, in fact on average they're probably slightly better, and their skill range is not nearly as wide (among civilians you have everything from barely-ever-fired-a-gun to IDPA/IPSC champions, who are insanely good), but police are more likely to use their guns in marginal situations. Part of that, I think, is the duty they feel to respond, a duty civilians don't have, and part is the fact that the legal system and their departments will back them up in ways it will not do for civilians, so they have much lower risk.
I do grant that the students in a concealed carry class may be more serious about it than the random selection of people at a gun show, and the students may even be putting on a more serious face for the instructor (because I'm pretty damned clear about the seriousness of the topics), but in my opinion, as a person who's been around guns and gun owners my whole life, and who's attended more gun shows than I could count, and who's discussed these issues with perhaps thousands of others, the scenario you describe is vanishingly unlikely.
Give me a block of steel, a drill press and a .22 caliber drill, and in 20 minutes I'll make you a gun that's a hell of a lot more accurate and reuseable than anything you can print out with your RepRap. Give me a few more hours and a milling machine, and I'll make you one you wouldn't be ashamed to rob a bank with.
You could... but could your next-door neighbor? And his?
My grandfather could paint letter-perfect signs. I don't have anywhere near his skill, but I can create equally-perfect (or perhaps a bit better) signs with a color laser printer. Obviously his skill provided a level of flexibility I don't have -- a laser printer doesn't do too well putting an image directly on the surface of a brick wall, for example -- but using the laser printer requires very little knowledge or skill.
There's no doubt that a machinist with a machine shop can manufacture a gun, obviously. The question is, can a random Joe without special skills, but with access to a 3D printer do the same thing? If so, that is a significant change.
(I recognize that 3D printing can't, as yet, produce all of the components of a gun because plastic, or even sintered metal, can't withstand the stresses required of the chamber or barrel, but that may well change over time, and in any case there is clearly value in reducing the number of component that require the skills of a machinist.)
Satellite is why I included the latency requirement. 600 ms pings make VOIP or video chat almost impossible, any sort of interactive or real-time collaborative uses problematic (ever try collaborative editing of a Google Doc over satellite?) and even dramatically slows simple web browsing. I disagree that it meets the basic definition of broadband Internet. It's inadequate for whole classes of usage. I'm glad it's available for just the sort of occasional use that you described, but its availability shouldn't be considered when assessing the deployment of residential Internet.
Are we seriously calling anything under three megabit unacceptable?
Yes.
The Internet is increasingly becoming the transport of choice for video, not just text and occasional static images.
I think a bigger problem with the study is that it only sets a minimum bar for downstream bandwidth. They really need to consider upstream bandwidth, latency and maximum usage as well. I think a good minimum standard would be 3 Mbps down, 500 Kbps up, maximum round trip time to major Internet sites of 200 ms and a total usage cap (up and/or down) of no less than 100 GB per month.
Nonsense. I highly doubt that Apple ever noticed this particular narrow -- and almost certainly unintended -- loophole in the FCC's neutrality rules.
Umm, that's not how I understand the situation at all. They're allowing other downloadable video chat apps to be used on their network, but blocking (except for users on limited plans) FaceTime because it's pre-installed.
I don't know anything about the actual net neutrality rules, but picking and choosing which apps are allowed to use their network seems like it certainly violates the intent, if not the letter, and Quinn seems to be accepting that they could not legally distinguish in this way if FaceTime were not pre-installed, which makes it abundantly clear that he's relying on hair-splitting legalisms to justify his position.
I'm a huge fan of being connected, but this experience has made me realise I truly value having connectivity available when I want it, rather than letting things rule me.
+1
I love my smartphone (Galaxy Nexus), tablet (Nexus 7) and highly-portable laptop (MacBook Air), and it's very convenient to have 24/7 access to my desktop at work via VPN, my work e-mail and IM on all devices, etc. I love the flexibility all of that provides. However, I also have my mail client (Gmail) on my phone & tablet configured not to provide any notifications at all for new e-mail in my work account, not even the icon in the notification bar and I keep my work IM account turned off except when I decide to use it to contact someone else. On my laptop, I use Chrome with two different profiles, one for work and one for personal, and I close the windows with the work profile when I'm not working.
I occasionally do decide to hack a little on my current project at work in the evenings when the family has gone to bed, because I have some idea I want to try out, or I hop on to check the monitors that show the transactions being processed by my recently-deployed-to-production project, or to check the exception-logging tool, and I frequently scan my e-mail priority inbox and my calendar before going to bed. But that's because I choose to do those things, and if I don't happen to want to, I don't. And if anyone tried to tell me that I should do those things, I'd tell them to take a flying leap. But no one has asked, and I don't expect it to happen.
I like the freedom and flexibility all of the tech gives me, but I'm not going to let it cause work to interfere with what's really important. It allows me to work extra hours when I want to, but imposes no requirements on me to do so -- and I will refuse to accept any such requirements without corresponding compensation.
Oh, and as for the other part of the article, yes, my devices are all locked down. In order to have my company e-mail on my cell and tablet, I have to install a device policy enforcement tool, which makes sure my devices are appropriately password-protected, encrypted and can be remotely wiped by the company. If I don't comply with policy, or remove the tool, the mail server won't talk to my devices. My laptop, of course, is company-issued, uses full-disk (full-SSD?) encryption and has its own policy enforcement tool.
I read the response to the question of whether AT&T's action violates net neutrality requirements... and any shyster lawyer would be proud of the crazy hair-splitting Quinn uses to justify his position that it does not.
His argument basically boils down to a claim that it's not a violation of net neutrality for AT&T to block the FaceTime traffic because -- get this -- the app comes pre-installed. He states that if the app were installed from the app store and AT&T were then to block it, that would be a violation of net neutrality. He even points out that there are other video chat apps available on the app store which can be used over AT&T's cellular network (though he refuses to mention Google+ Hangouts directly).
What makes it all really obnoxious is that he then tries to paint this lawyerly hair-splitting as a reasonable position. It is perhaps possible that he's actually right that AT&T's actions satisfy the letter of the FTC net neutrality regulation. But nobody with a brain can believe that it actually makes sense.
Are there OSHA regulations relating to viewing offensive content? Outside of issues around sexual harassment, I mean -- and those probably wouldn't be handled by OSHA anyway. There probably should be, but doubt there are.
On the topic of the article... I'm skeptical. The scenario described is very atypical of Google -- and while they don't get all of the advantages of regular employees, Google does treat their contractors very well. Comparing what I know firsthand about how Google treats its people (I work for Google) to this anonymous story just makes me skeptical of the story. It seems more likely to me that the story is an exaggeration by a contractor who is pissed that Google didn't decide to hire him for a permanent position, and wants to get back at the company. I'm not saying it's impossible that the story happened exactly as described, but it's out of character for Google to act that way, and very much in character for disgruntled ex-employees to anonymously libel their former employers if they think they can get away with it.
I should point out that I do not speak for Google, nor does Google speak for me. The above is my own opinions, nothing more.
The victim of rape should not be punished. And being forced to birth the child of your rapist is an unimaginably cruel punishment that wouldn't even be fit for a convicted criminal.
Better let the muslim world know. There are parts where the rapist can get off the crime if they marry the person they rape. Though in most cases the girl simply commits suicide.
Doesn't the Bible have the same provision?
No.
Please tell me they didn't include them in News because they'd modified their robots file to exclude the google news bot? PLEASE tell me Google didn't have to add an exception rule because these companies are too stupid to use the internet?
I don't know; the article didn't say. It did say they had started to make use of the standard technologies to control what was indexed and cached. But the other is also possible.
And the rest of the story is that after the companies complained that they only wanted to be removed from Google News, not Google Search, Google re-indexed them in Search but did not include them in News. Also, the companies in question began using the meta "noarchive" tag to instruct Google not to cache their pages, so there is no "Cached" link when you find them in search (caching had been a major part of their complaint and Google had previously pointed out to them that they could use "noarchive", but it apparently wasn't until they were removed from the index that they agreed to use it.)
It seems like the simple solution (from Google's perspective) is still effectively what many posters are saying. If sites insist that Google pay them to include snippets in the search results, then Google should simply omit the snippets for those search results. Given the way people rely on snippets to give them an idea about whether or not the link is to what they're looking for, the result will be almost the same as if Google simply didn't link to them. Further, since Google, like all search engines, uses result clicks as a key signal to compute rankings, the snippet-less sites will quickly drop off the first page of results.
The article discusses primarily the ways that coverage has gotten better/more complete since they instituted this program, but in my experience with the Mexican health care system in the early 90s, the biggest problem was the quality of the care. It was horrible. The doctors and nurses in the big public hospitals were overworked, underpaid, and by and large didn't care. Sanitary conditions weren't very good. As a result, the general populace viewed the public hospital not as a place you went to get better, but a place you went to die, and it was also generally expected that you had better take several family members with you to help keep you comfortable because the nursing staff, such as it was, would ignore you. Anyone who could afford it, or could get friends and family to help scrape up the cash, went to a private hospital.
I imagine the care has improved somewhat, along with the coverage, especially at the larger hospitals. But I'll bet it's still quite different from what many of us would consider the term "health care" to mean.
Actually, if you have lots of money it's even easier to avoid bank fees. There are lots of banks that offer not only zero fees but pretty decent interest, as long as you promise to keep at least $25K in your account at all times.
Exactly what I said, if you had LESS money, you'd have more fees.
Ah, sorry, I didn't read carefully. However, I disagree. I never paid any fees when I was a starving student, or when I was working my first low-paying jobs and struggling to make ends meet. It's not hard to avoid them, you just have to pay attention. Oh, and I don't qualify for any of the high-balance account types.
The launderers typically take a large percentage of the money they clean.
And when the launderer is a bank, it's called bank fees.
How do you launder money through a bank? That makes no sense.
I realize you have some sort of deep-seated anger at banks and their fees, and you're trying to find a way to connect that outrage here, but it really doesn't work.
If you had less money OR you needed the money you have laundered, you would face much more significant bank fees.
Actually, if you have lots of money it's even easier to avoid bank fees. There are lots of banks that offer not only zero fees but pretty decent interest, as long as you promise to keep at least $25K in your account at all times.
And for people getting their money laundered, bank fees are an irrelevancy anyway. The launderers typically take a large percentage of the money they clean.
You've never heard of bank fees?
Of course I've heard of bank fees. I very carefully avoid banks that charge them! The only bank fees I've in my life have been loan-related and wire transfer fees. I do buy checks occasionally, but I don't buy them from the bank.