The question becomes what happens after Google reported it, and seemingly kept using that pump until it was properly calibrated.
You're making the "corporations are people" fallacy. Corporations are not actually, literally people. The people who work on Chrome and Webkit are almost certainly not the same people who work on Google+ and the like. They probably don't have any idea what the other is doing. It's not like every time anyone submits a patch to anything, they go running around to all the other departments to tell them about it.
On top of that, calling this a "vulnerability" or "exploit" is really pushing it. There is no obvious hard line between first and third party cookies. They have no obvious or official definition. Safari drew the line in a way that classified a lot of the borderline cases as "first party" cookies -- which actually makes a certain amount of sense, since they block third party cookies by default and over-blocking would break too many things.
So along comes, I don't know, everybody who uses cookies that would be blocked by Safari's defaults, and when they encounter Safari, they take steps to restore the original functionality. And since some (but not all) of those people are the sort of ad networks who track you in a way that made browser vendors consider an option to block third party cookies in the first place, Google submitted a patch to classify more of them as third party. Which breaks more legitimate stuff, because it's a trade off. It's not that the original default is bad, broken, or a vulnerability...it's that the line is a silly, ambiguous one to draw in the first place. What it's trying to accomplish is Do Not Track, but as a hack and consequently with a lot of collateral damage to legitimate features that everyone then scrambles to mitigate with work arounds like the one Google had been using.
So that happens, and along comes the Microsoft propaganda machine to point out that because Google is both a social network and an ad network, wouldn't it be nice to accuse the ad network of privacy violation as a result of a borderline cookie feature shared by all social networks? Give me a break.
Exploiting privacy vulnerabilities is bad, bad, bad.
That word...I don't think it means what you think it means.
Let me give you an example. If you want to jailbreak an iPhone, you have to find a security vulnerability. Like, a real one, not this "well if you submit a form then it isn't considered a third party cookie" grey area nonsense, a real root shell "exploit." Is the company that makes the jailbreak website then "exploiting privacy vulnerabilities" because having rooted the phone, the software could in theory then send all the user's pictures and web history to the jailbreak author and so on? No, not until they do something that actually impairs the user's privacy.
Adding a +1 button to a third party website doesn't exactly fall into the same category as stealing credit card numbers or turning on one's webcam without authorization.
It didn't break any Google functionality. This is just for ad tracking purposes.
Try Ghostery and see for yourself
You can't try it anymore because they've turned it off. But what had happened was that if you were signed into Google+, on third party websites it would check for that cookie and give you a +1 button. That doesn't inherently involve any tracking at all. The possibility exists that they were using the same cookies to also track you, but that happens on the server side, so there is no real way to know that -- all this noise about privacy violations is pure speculation.
The problem is: Apple created a default that protects the privacy of its users. Google wanted functionality that could only be implemented by either a breach of the user's privacy or by getting the consent of the user, so they decided to exploit a loophole and breach the user's privacy.
You're begging the question. The assumption you're making is that every possible use of third party cookies is inherently a privacy violation. If all they're using them to do is to see if you're logged into Google+ (so that they can give you a +1 button), how is that a privacy violation?
restrictions Apple claimed to have placed on their actions within the browser.
The user never decided anything. That's really half the problem: Apple created a stupid default that would have impaired significant functionality, and for the users who don't understand how to or are afraid to change browser settings, this was the only way to make that user-desired functionality actually work.
This would be a completely different thing if the default had been what it is in every other browser and it was being circumvented when the user had explicitly changed it, because in that case you have proof that the user knows how to change it and made a conscious decision. As it is they're just working around a bug in Safari that would otherwise break the functionality that users actually want.
Incidentally, do you see the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't problem here? Suppose they hadn't done this. So the functionality is broken in Safari, and for users who don't understand why or how to fix it, the easiest solution is to download Chrome. And the next thing you know they've got the antitrust authorities breathing down their necks because their service doesn't work with their competitor's web browser, even though there is a "standard" method of fixing it (namely the one they actually used) which is employed by various other similar websites.
The thing people are continuously forgetting about all of this is that the bug in question was in the open source Webkit, which both Safari and Chrome are based on, and Google had already submitted a patch to fix the bug before any of this even became an issue.
This all seems a lot more about this than any sort of legitimate complaint the government has about what Google is doing. If the government had literally done nothing, the problem had already been solved before they became involved -- but now we have a big dog and pony show. Cui bono? Microsoft.
That's not particularly useful since all of the modern trackers inject random fake IP addresses as seeds.
You're assuming they give the slightest damn about accuracy or false accusations. There's no oversight! Why wouldn't they just accuse every IP on the list whether it's fake or not? It doesn't cost them anything, and they're assholes.
Remember this? "Innocent" printers being accused of copyright infringement. The fun begins when anyone with half a clue realizes that they can now easily frame anyone else they want to and get them kicked off the internet. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if some asshats like Anonymous started framing large numbers of innocent people like that, just to be jackasses.
There is a reason this sort of thing is supposed to require due process and judicial oversight. (Not that "disconnecting people from the internet" is the sort of thing that should ever happen for any reason. Can you imagine what people would have said even fifty years ago if someone proposed prohibiting accused but not convicted book pirates from having pen and paper?)
That line of reasoning leads to catastrophic economic consequences. If large companies continue to innovate, they stay relevant and you get a consistent stream of innovation. If they sleepily milk the cash cow for dividends until some disruptive innovation makes them irrelevant, you suddenly have corporate titans who are desperate to staunch the bleeding, who make idiotic decisions backed by billions of dollars in accumulated assets.
Name any company on the downswing. SCO, Yahoo, Microsoft, the RIAA, any of them. They fail to innovate, they start to lose market share and then they go out and sue everybody. They lobby for protectionist laws to prohibit the innovation that takes profits that would otherwise go to the dinosaurs. Then billions of dollars and thousands of lives become dedicated to a complete and utter waste of human existence known as corporate litigation and lobbying. I don't know if you're aware of this, but lawyers start off as people. It is the process of litigating that turns them into soulless corporate vampires, because no one can countenance such an enormous waste of resources as spending ten thousand hours researching an argument against the invalidation of a series of patents that clearly should never have been granted, and it causes them to lose their humanity. No one can sue a single mother for millions of dollars without abandoning any semblance of a conscience. It is impossible to go to Washington, DC to buy protectionist legislation and come back as anything other than a cynical, emotionally bankrupt husk.
Yet these are what major corporations who fail to fund research and development produce. They produce soulless vampires who spread themselves throughout the world, sucking the life out of their victims, those who did the right thing and produced products people actually want.
That is not an acceptable outcome. Major corporations cannot be encouraged to die slowly. The must either die quickly or not at all. The argument that the pattern of neglect that leads to a slow, expensive, litigious decline is what ought to happen is not something anyone should be willing to accept.
So Alex Jones was actually correct when he said facebook and google were working with the government? Every time I heard him say that I was like, "Yeah sure alex." Wow. That blows my mind.
You're assuming it's true. Look closely at what happened: The NSA "could neither confirm nor deny" anything -- which is what they always say about everything. It's the stock spy agency answer to everything, because any alternative is an information leak. They can't even deny the rumors that are totally false. Because if false rumors get denied and true rumors all get "refuse to confirm" then you can obviously tell when a rumor is true. So instead, whether it's true or false, they always refuse to confirm or deny everything.
And then you throw in things like the spy agencies having developed some of the satellite technology which is used for Google Earth and you've got a bunch of conspiracy theorists running around speculating about nonsense.
That being said – of all the examples you mentioned – how much profit did AT&T make from these?
Can you see how having a closet full of transistor-based network switching equipment could be an advantage to them over an entire office building full of vacuum tubes? Or worse, human operators switching phone calls instead of a UNIX-based phone switch? Or how lasers (and thus fiber optics) may have been useful to them? Or information theory, i.e. data compression?
So how much profit did AT&T make from them? How about all their profit? I am not aware of anything AT&T currently does that doesn't depend on every single one of those things. And certainly anything related to the original, AT&T-as-telecommunications-company role does.
The question that I think the writer is asking is that Google is spending a lot money that belongs to investors on long term high risk speculative projects.
That money doesn't belong to investors. It belongs to Google. Google, in turn, belongs to investors -- but that isn't the same thing at all. You can't buy a hundred shares of Google and then walk into the bank and withdraw that proportion of the cash from Google's bank account, because it's not "your" money. The people the shareholders elect to run Google get to decide how that money is spent, and if you disagree with the holders of the majority of voting shares (i.e. Larry Page and Sergey Brin) how the company should be run, you're free to invest in something else.
Because that would apply, since Google is a suspect class, having an inherent and immutable characteristic that has caused them to be the subject of a history of invidious discrimination?
Right, you could get one of those things...if you don't mind it taking a lot longer and/or costing a lot more to get there. And if you don't mind walking the last three miles between the nearest bus stop or train station to your destination.
While Google may be doing pure research, it isn't evident based upon the projects that are publicly visible.
What makes you think it would have been for Bell Labs? I have some confidence that you don't get to UNIX (or a self-driving car) without a lot of fundamental research. The fact that they don't put the engineers in Central Park so you can watch them work isn't any excuse to conclude they don't exist.
R&D on fantasy projects often have higher capital expenses with nothing to show for it even if the project succeeds.
Like the space program, am I right? Those goons at NASA never invented anything useful, and not one penny was ever handed to Neil Armstrong by a single man in the moon. I mean who needs satellites and GPS, fuel cells, more efficient solar panels or any of that other crap.
Just waiting for a shareholder initiative to kill the 20% developer personal research time off. To soon be followed by demands of a new CEO that will outsource and reduce staff to improve sagging profits.
The interesting thing is that I'm pretty sure the employees own a large fraction of the company, maybe even a majority.
So what we're seeing now is the Wall St types who care more about looting a company in the short term than building something stable in the long term who are now wondering why Google is wasting all their "profits" on giving the company a long-term future when Wall St wants to have sucked Google dry and moved on to different victims by then.
But it's unlikely they can do that without the employees' votes, hence the whinging.
I hate to have to point out the cynicism, but the GP is not faulting Google with what they're doing.
And I think the concluding sentence is better written that "Google is at risk of not becoming another Lucent Technologies," which is the mediocre company that Bell Labs turned into after it stopped doing first-class change-the-world fundamental research.
The point is that asshats don't want another Bell Labs. Bell Labs wasn't about quarterly profits. They invented transistors, lasers, information theory and UNIX. None of that stuff was profitable within two quarters, was it? So obviously it was useless and they shouldn't have wasted the money developing any of it.
No, wait a minute, that makes no sense. The answer is "none". If the pirate option didn't exist the maker would still have zero sales, so they can't blame the piracy for that.
This is the same fallacy that leads to "piracy is costing us billions of dollars." There can be more than one but-for cause of a single event. In this case piracy is leading to lost sales both because piracy exists and because it is impossible to buy the legitimate offering. If either of those things was untrue, there would be more sales: If piracy did not exist then when the DVD is ultimately released it would have higher sales, because some of the people who were diverted to piracy by the previous lack of availability will no longer have satisfied their desire for the video and decide not to buy it. Conversely, if the video was available on DVD or internet streaming immediately, some of those pirates wouldn't have been pirates in the first place because they would have had the option of buying the DVD, and sales would be higher.
The key thing to understand is that those sales can therefore be captured either by stamping out piracy or by putting DVDs on sale sooner. And you may not be able to do anything about piracy, but you sure as hell can release the DVD sooner, which has the same result.
All true BUT if you could buy the new HBO episodes of Season 2; Game of Thrones the very first day, why would you subscribe to the channel? The answer is that you wouldn't.
And...? The existing HBO model is totally braindead anyway. What possible benefit is there in not offering HBO as a website like Hulu, for the same price as it costs as a cable channel? Then HBO gets 100% of that money instead of sharing it with asshats like Comcast, and customers get to subscribe to HBO without subscribing to Comcast TV. Problem solved.
The sole thing standing in the way of that is that grandpa doesn't understand how to plug the internet into the TV, so you still have to offer the channel with Comcast to get his money, and Comcast will explode in a rage of fury if you even conceive of such a thing as cutting them out of the loop. But selling DVDs of the whole season the day the first episode comes out gets you around that: Grandpa knows how to use a DVD. Moreover, to get it on the first day you have to pay like a hundred bucks, which more than makes up for the non-100% of people who cancel their $14/month subscriptions. And once the subscriptions get to be a sufficiently small portion of their business, they can tell Comcast to pound sand because at that point they can afford to walk away and stay in business, which lets them set up the streaming service (whether Comcast capitulates or not) and be in a position to keep 100% of the now-larger amount of money their content sells for.
Oftentimes cable channels like HBO want to play the show over-and-over several times (for subscribers) before releasing it to everyone else. Movie studios do the same thing (release to theaters first; DVD later).
Which is, of course, why they're idiots.
People are always talking about "justification" and "it isn't right" and similar moral indignation which ignores the simple fact that if someone can't buy the thing they want, they still have the option to pirate it. The answer to the question "how many sales are lost to piracy" when the product is not available for sale is always "all of the sales." Because you can't buy something you can't buy.
So here come the studios saying that they still make more from selling theater tickets to people who have to have it right away than they would get by selling the DVD sooner. Which is why they're still idiots. Nobody says you have to price the DVD at the same level while it's still in the theater or playing on HBO as you do a year later when you normally would have released it. Putting it for sale at a higher price gives people an option. And then some of those people will buy it. And some of them won't because it costs too much, so they'll either wait or pirate -- but since you never would have gotten those sales anyway, that doesn't matter.
The only sensible reason to not offer something immediately is that it would displace a different offering by the copyright holder which would have been more profitable. But that is not a reason for refusing to offer it at all, all it means is you should price the earliest DVD release so that you make as much on the DVD as you would by selling the number of theater tickets (or HBO subscriptions) that a DVD sale displaces. Hence, the studios are idiots. Completely regardless of the moral status of the pirates.
OK... so they're stupid (and therefore evil) because you don't like their brand names?
I mean I completely get how if you compare them to Apple by using Apple's rules they fall short, because they don't use an RDF. They don't design products in a secret lab with everything under NDA until they're fully polished and then announce them in a big showy display for people to drool over, they put a beta on the internet as soon as it compiles to see if anybody likes it or has any feedback.
But Google is not trying to be Apple. None of the things you're describing are new. They're basically the expected consequence of having 20% time and not having a culture of super secrecy. You get a bunch of engineers making a bunch of stuff and putting it on the internet, and some of it is brilliant and some isn't. And that isn't a problem for them, because you don't need every project to be a winner when the ones that are turn out like Gmail, Google Maps and Android. If Apple had half as many failures as Google they would be out of business, because they don't have 10% as many products -- but why is that a problem? It's just a different business model.
It seems like you're just expecting them to be something they're not. (And I still don't see how that makes them evil.)
Supply and demand right? Increase the pool of educated labor and the price goes down, which is exactly what I want.
No, fool, you're doing it wrong. The problem is you don't have enough supply. The way you fix that is to increase the price.
There is no way to increase "supply" other than by increasing demand (i.e. price) or by government subsidies and incentives. And the latter tends to work very poorly in the labor market because creating a glut of labor makes workers miserable (because they're either unemployed or underpaid), which cause the quality of their work to suffer. Moreover, subsidies cause a market correction as surplus workers seek alternative employment, even if they're "qualified" to be teachers -- because it pays better to be a truck driver or a retail store manager. Which makes the subsidy paid to train them to be teachers a deadweight economic loss and does nothing to solve the problem of a lack of qualified teachers.
No, you're talking about people who know history. It's full of documented false flag events, that's primarily how war is waged to gain public support, because generally most people are against going to war.
I've come to a conclusion about conspiracy theories: They don't matter. They don't matter if they're true, they don't matter if they're false, they don't matter if the aliens abducted you and changed the bits in your brain to make you think they're true or false. They don't matter.
Because it doesn't change anything. You're not going to convince anyone one way or the other. The conspiracy theorists will just make rationalizations and the government is never going to admit to a false flag operation until well after it stops mattering whether it was or not.
The problem is not false flag operations. The problem is that we're all so stupid that we allow ourselves to get manipulated into spending trillions of dollars on bombs and coffins as a result of bullshit propaganda. The War on Terrorism is a stupid failure of an idea. The War in Iraq is a stupid failure of a war. These facts do not depend on how the towers fell. The problem is not false flag operations, it is irrational overreactions to malicious instigators.
The next time some stupid halfwits manage to kill a large number of people in the same place, stop thinking about revenge, and never again say "Something Must Be Done." Just prosecute as many of them as are still alive and then get on with life. Because any other response is letting the terrorists win, whether the terrorists work for the government or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The question becomes what happens after Google reported it, and seemingly kept using that pump until it was properly calibrated.
You're making the "corporations are people" fallacy. Corporations are not actually, literally people. The people who work on Chrome and Webkit are almost certainly not the same people who work on Google+ and the like. They probably don't have any idea what the other is doing. It's not like every time anyone submits a patch to anything, they go running around to all the other departments to tell them about it.
On top of that, calling this a "vulnerability" or "exploit" is really pushing it. There is no obvious hard line between first and third party cookies. They have no obvious or official definition. Safari drew the line in a way that classified a lot of the borderline cases as "first party" cookies -- which actually makes a certain amount of sense, since they block third party cookies by default and over-blocking would break too many things.
So along comes, I don't know, everybody who uses cookies that would be blocked by Safari's defaults, and when they encounter Safari, they take steps to restore the original functionality. And since some (but not all) of those people are the sort of ad networks who track you in a way that made browser vendors consider an option to block third party cookies in the first place, Google submitted a patch to classify more of them as third party. Which breaks more legitimate stuff, because it's a trade off. It's not that the original default is bad, broken, or a vulnerability...it's that the line is a silly, ambiguous one to draw in the first place. What it's trying to accomplish is Do Not Track, but as a hack and consequently with a lot of collateral damage to legitimate features that everyone then scrambles to mitigate with work arounds like the one Google had been using.
So that happens, and along comes the Microsoft propaganda machine to point out that because Google is both a social network and an ad network, wouldn't it be nice to accuse the ad network of privacy violation as a result of a borderline cookie feature shared by all social networks? Give me a break.
Exploiting privacy vulnerabilities is bad, bad, bad.
That word...I don't think it means what you think it means.
Let me give you an example. If you want to jailbreak an iPhone, you have to find a security vulnerability. Like, a real one, not this "well if you submit a form then it isn't considered a third party cookie" grey area nonsense, a real root shell "exploit." Is the company that makes the jailbreak website then "exploiting privacy vulnerabilities" because having rooted the phone, the software could in theory then send all the user's pictures and web history to the jailbreak author and so on? No, not until they do something that actually impairs the user's privacy.
Adding a +1 button to a third party website doesn't exactly fall into the same category as stealing credit card numbers or turning on one's webcam without authorization.
It didn't break any Google functionality. This is just for ad tracking purposes.
Try Ghostery and see for yourself
You can't try it anymore because they've turned it off. But what had happened was that if you were signed into Google+, on third party websites it would check for that cookie and give you a +1 button. That doesn't inherently involve any tracking at all. The possibility exists that they were using the same cookies to also track you, but that happens on the server side, so there is no real way to know that -- all this noise about privacy violations is pure speculation.
The problem is: Apple created a default that protects the privacy of its users. Google wanted functionality that could only be implemented by either a breach of the user's privacy or by getting the consent of the user, so they decided to exploit a loophole and breach the user's privacy.
You're begging the question. The assumption you're making is that every possible use of third party cookies is inherently a privacy violation. If all they're using them to do is to see if you're logged into Google+ (so that they can give you a +1 button), how is that a privacy violation?
restrictions Apple claimed to have placed on their actions within the browser.
The user never decided anything. That's really half the problem: Apple created a stupid default that would have impaired significant functionality, and for the users who don't understand how to or are afraid to change browser settings, this was the only way to make that user-desired functionality actually work.
This would be a completely different thing if the default had been what it is in every other browser and it was being circumvented when the user had explicitly changed it, because in that case you have proof that the user knows how to change it and made a conscious decision. As it is they're just working around a bug in Safari that would otherwise break the functionality that users actually want.
Incidentally, do you see the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't problem here? Suppose they hadn't done this. So the functionality is broken in Safari, and for users who don't understand why or how to fix it, the easiest solution is to download Chrome. And the next thing you know they've got the antitrust authorities breathing down their necks because their service doesn't work with their competitor's web browser, even though there is a "standard" method of fixing it (namely the one they actually used) which is employed by various other similar websites.
The thing people are continuously forgetting about all of this is that the bug in question was in the open source Webkit, which both Safari and Chrome are based on, and Google had already submitted a patch to fix the bug before any of this even became an issue.
This all seems a lot more about this than any sort of legitimate complaint the government has about what Google is doing. If the government had literally done nothing, the problem had already been solved before they became involved -- but now we have a big dog and pony show. Cui bono? Microsoft.
That's not particularly useful since all of the modern trackers inject random fake IP addresses as seeds.
You're assuming they give the slightest damn about accuracy or false accusations. There's no oversight! Why wouldn't they just accuse every IP on the list whether it's fake or not? It doesn't cost them anything, and they're assholes.
Remember this? "Innocent" printers being accused of copyright infringement. The fun begins when anyone with half a clue realizes that they can now easily frame anyone else they want to and get them kicked off the internet. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if some asshats like Anonymous started framing large numbers of innocent people like that, just to be jackasses.
There is a reason this sort of thing is supposed to require due process and judicial oversight. (Not that "disconnecting people from the internet" is the sort of thing that should ever happen for any reason. Can you imagine what people would have said even fifty years ago if someone proposed prohibiting accused but not convicted book pirates from having pen and paper?)
in California there is a large rare earth mine still remain closed
Check again.
That line of reasoning leads to catastrophic economic consequences. If large companies continue to innovate, they stay relevant and you get a consistent stream of innovation. If they sleepily milk the cash cow for dividends until some disruptive innovation makes them irrelevant, you suddenly have corporate titans who are desperate to staunch the bleeding, who make idiotic decisions backed by billions of dollars in accumulated assets.
Name any company on the downswing. SCO, Yahoo, Microsoft, the RIAA, any of them. They fail to innovate, they start to lose market share and then they go out and sue everybody. They lobby for protectionist laws to prohibit the innovation that takes profits that would otherwise go to the dinosaurs. Then billions of dollars and thousands of lives become dedicated to a complete and utter waste of human existence known as corporate litigation and lobbying. I don't know if you're aware of this, but lawyers start off as people. It is the process of litigating that turns them into soulless corporate vampires, because no one can countenance such an enormous waste of resources as spending ten thousand hours researching an argument against the invalidation of a series of patents that clearly should never have been granted, and it causes them to lose their humanity. No one can sue a single mother for millions of dollars without abandoning any semblance of a conscience. It is impossible to go to Washington, DC to buy protectionist legislation and come back as anything other than a cynical, emotionally bankrupt husk.
Yet these are what major corporations who fail to fund research and development produce. They produce soulless vampires who spread themselves throughout the world, sucking the life out of their victims, those who did the right thing and produced products people actually want.
That is not an acceptable outcome. Major corporations cannot be encouraged to die slowly. The must either die quickly or not at all. The argument that the pattern of neglect that leads to a slow, expensive, litigious decline is what ought to happen is not something anyone should be willing to accept.
Bell Labs was never "Lucent Technologies".
Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent) owns Bell Labs, as I'm sure you know.
Bell Labs is still Bell Labs.
Well, it's still called Bell Labs. But you can't honesty tell me that Bell Labs under Lucent is the same caliber of operation as it was under Ma Bell.
So Alex Jones was actually correct when he said facebook and google were working with the government? Every time I heard him say that I was like, "Yeah sure alex." Wow. That blows my mind.
You're assuming it's true. Look closely at what happened: The NSA "could neither confirm nor deny" anything -- which is what they always say about everything. It's the stock spy agency answer to everything, because any alternative is an information leak. They can't even deny the rumors that are totally false. Because if false rumors get denied and true rumors all get "refuse to confirm" then you can obviously tell when a rumor is true. So instead, whether it's true or false, they always refuse to confirm or deny everything.
And then you throw in things like the spy agencies having developed some of the satellite technology which is used for Google Earth and you've got a bunch of conspiracy theorists running around speculating about nonsense.
That being said – of all the examples you mentioned – how much profit did AT&T make from these?
Can you see how having a closet full of transistor-based network switching equipment could be an advantage to them over an entire office building full of vacuum tubes? Or worse, human operators switching phone calls instead of a UNIX-based phone switch? Or how lasers (and thus fiber optics) may have been useful to them? Or information theory, i.e. data compression?
So how much profit did AT&T make from them? How about all their profit? I am not aware of anything AT&T currently does that doesn't depend on every single one of those things. And certainly anything related to the original, AT&T-as-telecommunications-company role does.
The question that I think the writer is asking is that Google is spending a lot money that belongs to investors on long term high risk speculative projects.
That money doesn't belong to investors. It belongs to Google. Google, in turn, belongs to investors -- but that isn't the same thing at all. You can't buy a hundred shares of Google and then walk into the bank and withdraw that proportion of the cash from Google's bank account, because it's not "your" money. The people the shareholders elect to run Google get to decide how that money is spent, and if you disagree with the holders of the majority of voting shares (i.e. Larry Page and Sergey Brin) how the company should be run, you're free to invest in something else.
Because that would apply, since Google is a suspect class, having an inherent and immutable characteristic that has caused them to be the subject of a history of invidious discrimination?
Microsoft competitors?
Right, you could get one of those things...if you don't mind it taking a lot longer and/or costing a lot more to get there. And if you don't mind walking the last three miles between the nearest bus stop or train station to your destination.
While Google may be doing pure research, it isn't evident based upon the projects that are publicly visible.
What makes you think it would have been for Bell Labs? I have some confidence that you don't get to UNIX (or a self-driving car) without a lot of fundamental research. The fact that they don't put the engineers in Central Park so you can watch them work isn't any excuse to conclude they don't exist.
R&D on fantasy projects often have higher capital expenses with nothing to show for it even if the project succeeds.
Like the space program, am I right? Those goons at NASA never invented anything useful, and not one penny was ever handed to Neil Armstrong by a single man in the moon. I mean who needs satellites and GPS, fuel cells, more efficient solar panels or any of that other crap.
Just waiting for a shareholder initiative to kill the 20% developer personal research time off. To soon be followed by demands of a new CEO that will outsource and reduce staff to improve sagging profits.
The interesting thing is that I'm pretty sure the employees own a large fraction of the company, maybe even a majority.
So what we're seeing now is the Wall St types who care more about looting a company in the short term than building something stable in the long term who are now wondering why Google is wasting all their "profits" on giving the company a long-term future when Wall St wants to have sucked Google dry and moved on to different victims by then.
But it's unlikely they can do that without the employees' votes, hence the whinging.
I hate to have to point out the cynicism, but the GP is not faulting Google with what they're doing.
And I think the concluding sentence is better written that "Google is at risk of not becoming another Lucent Technologies," which is the mediocre company that Bell Labs turned into after it stopped doing first-class change-the-world fundamental research.
The point is that asshats don't want another Bell Labs. Bell Labs wasn't about quarterly profits. They invented transistors, lasers, information theory and UNIX. None of that stuff was profitable within two quarters, was it? So obviously it was useless and they shouldn't have wasted the money developing any of it.
Is the sarcasm clearer now?
No, wait a minute, that makes no sense. The answer is "none". If the pirate option didn't exist the maker would still have zero sales, so they can't blame the piracy for that.
This is the same fallacy that leads to "piracy is costing us billions of dollars." There can be more than one but-for cause of a single event. In this case piracy is leading to lost sales both because piracy exists and because it is impossible to buy the legitimate offering. If either of those things was untrue, there would be more sales: If piracy did not exist then when the DVD is ultimately released it would have higher sales, because some of the people who were diverted to piracy by the previous lack of availability will no longer have satisfied their desire for the video and decide not to buy it. Conversely, if the video was available on DVD or internet streaming immediately, some of those pirates wouldn't have been pirates in the first place because they would have had the option of buying the DVD, and sales would be higher.
The key thing to understand is that those sales can therefore be captured either by stamping out piracy or by putting DVDs on sale sooner. And you may not be able to do anything about piracy, but you sure as hell can release the DVD sooner, which has the same result.
All true BUT if you could buy the new HBO episodes of Season 2; Game of Thrones the very first day, why would you subscribe to the channel? The answer is that you wouldn't.
And...? The existing HBO model is totally braindead anyway. What possible benefit is there in not offering HBO as a website like Hulu, for the same price as it costs as a cable channel? Then HBO gets 100% of that money instead of sharing it with asshats like Comcast, and customers get to subscribe to HBO without subscribing to Comcast TV. Problem solved.
The sole thing standing in the way of that is that grandpa doesn't understand how to plug the internet into the TV, so you still have to offer the channel with Comcast to get his money, and Comcast will explode in a rage of fury if you even conceive of such a thing as cutting them out of the loop. But selling DVDs of the whole season the day the first episode comes out gets you around that: Grandpa knows how to use a DVD. Moreover, to get it on the first day you have to pay like a hundred bucks, which more than makes up for the non-100% of people who cancel their $14/month subscriptions. And once the subscriptions get to be a sufficiently small portion of their business, they can tell Comcast to pound sand because at that point they can afford to walk away and stay in business, which lets them set up the streaming service (whether Comcast capitulates or not) and be in a position to keep 100% of the now-larger amount of money their content sells for.
Oftentimes cable channels like HBO want to play the show over-and-over several times (for subscribers) before releasing it to everyone else. Movie studios do the same thing (release to theaters first; DVD later).
Which is, of course, why they're idiots.
People are always talking about "justification" and "it isn't right" and similar moral indignation which ignores the simple fact that if someone can't buy the thing they want, they still have the option to pirate it. The answer to the question "how many sales are lost to piracy" when the product is not available for sale is always "all of the sales." Because you can't buy something you can't buy.
So here come the studios saying that they still make more from selling theater tickets to people who have to have it right away than they would get by selling the DVD sooner. Which is why they're still idiots. Nobody says you have to price the DVD at the same level while it's still in the theater or playing on HBO as you do a year later when you normally would have released it. Putting it for sale at a higher price gives people an option. And then some of those people will buy it. And some of them won't because it costs too much, so they'll either wait or pirate -- but since you never would have gotten those sales anyway, that doesn't matter.
The only sensible reason to not offer something immediately is that it would displace a different offering by the copyright holder which would have been more profitable. But that is not a reason for refusing to offer it at all, all it means is you should price the earliest DVD release so that you make as much on the DVD as you would by selling the number of theater tickets (or HBO subscriptions) that a DVD sale displaces. Hence, the studios are idiots. Completely regardless of the moral status of the pirates.
OK... so they're stupid (and therefore evil) because you don't like their brand names?
I mean I completely get how if you compare them to Apple by using Apple's rules they fall short, because they don't use an RDF. They don't design products in a secret lab with everything under NDA until they're fully polished and then announce them in a big showy display for people to drool over, they put a beta on the internet as soon as it compiles to see if anybody likes it or has any feedback.
But Google is not trying to be Apple. None of the things you're describing are new. They're basically the expected consequence of having 20% time and not having a culture of super secrecy. You get a bunch of engineers making a bunch of stuff and putting it on the internet, and some of it is brilliant and some isn't. And that isn't a problem for them, because you don't need every project to be a winner when the ones that are turn out like Gmail, Google Maps and Android. If Apple had half as many failures as Google they would be out of business, because they don't have 10% as many products -- but why is that a problem? It's just a different business model.
It seems like you're just expecting them to be something they're not. (And I still don't see how that makes them evil.)
Supply and demand right? Increase the pool of educated labor and the price goes down, which is exactly what I want.
No, fool, you're doing it wrong. The problem is you don't have enough supply. The way you fix that is to increase the price.
There is no way to increase "supply" other than by increasing demand (i.e. price) or by government subsidies and incentives. And the latter tends to work very poorly in the labor market because creating a glut of labor makes workers miserable (because they're either unemployed or underpaid), which cause the quality of their work to suffer. Moreover, subsidies cause a market correction as surplus workers seek alternative employment, even if they're "qualified" to be teachers -- because it pays better to be a truck driver or a retail store manager. Which makes the subsidy paid to train them to be teachers a deadweight economic loss and does nothing to solve the problem of a lack of qualified teachers.
"Daylight Savings Time is the equivalent of cutting off the bottom of a blanket and sewing it on to the top because your blanket is too short."
And then cutting off the top off the blanket and sewing it onto the bottom later in the year because the extra length is no longer necessary.
Another solution would be just specify the start of the work day relative to sunrise.
That solution is totally inane. In the winter you would end up in a windowless office the only 8 hours of the day that the sun is actually out.
You might as well do it the other way around if you're going to do it that way: Make work end six hours before sunset.
No, you're talking about people who know history. It's full of documented false flag events, that's primarily how war is waged to gain public support, because generally most people are against going to war.
I've come to a conclusion about conspiracy theories: They don't matter. They don't matter if they're true, they don't matter if they're false, they don't matter if the aliens abducted you and changed the bits in your brain to make you think they're true or false. They don't matter.
Because it doesn't change anything. You're not going to convince anyone one way or the other. The conspiracy theorists will just make rationalizations and the government is never going to admit to a false flag operation until well after it stops mattering whether it was or not.
The problem is not false flag operations. The problem is that we're all so stupid that we allow ourselves to get manipulated into spending trillions of dollars on bombs and coffins as a result of bullshit propaganda. The War on Terrorism is a stupid failure of an idea. The War in Iraq is a stupid failure of a war. These facts do not depend on how the towers fell. The problem is not false flag operations, it is irrational overreactions to malicious instigators.
The next time some stupid halfwits manage to kill a large number of people in the same place, stop thinking about revenge, and never again say "Something Must Be Done." Just prosecute as many of them as are still alive and then get on with life. Because any other response is letting the terrorists win, whether the terrorists work for the government or not.