Is that meant as humor? Lessee.. against the rejections of a large chunk of their software suite including latitude and voice (voice, BTW offers the same features now offered across several other iPhone apps that were approved). Against the painfully slow process of getting Apple to update the Google maps app on iPhone. Against the continued taunts of Apples CEO.
And really, that's just the stuff we see. Google has its own platform, and yet the continue to try to bring their tools to Apple's platform as well, and over and over again Apple rejects them without providing replacements that have even remotely comparable functionality.
Not a bad idea, really. You just need a way for the fighter to establish a high bandwidth link between the target and a few backbone providers, then post the target IP address in a link on Slashdot and viola! Instant DDOS, Slashdot style;-)
Realistically, Slashdot's "effect" is fairly week these days compared to, say, showing up on Google Trends or having your URL tweeted by a celebrity.
No, you're incorrect. It will always remain hidden. You can change your location, but the distance to the horizon created by the interaction between the speed of light and the expansion of the universe wouldn't change (unless one of those two parameters is changing). WHAT you can see will change, but you'll never be able to see anything past the horizon.
Sometimes it's worth a reality check. Some companies are sexist asses, true, but that actually doesn't put them on the same playing field as a country that stomps on the freedoms of their citizens the way China does.
Granted, Godaddy didn't do this out of the goodness of their little, black hearts, but it's worth thinking about the relative scale of douchitude in the world, from time to time.
Re-read what I wrote. Here, I'll quote it for you:
For the most part, GE is not useful for typical end-user activity
Yes, your son had fun with it. I'm sure there are hundreds of people who've played around with GE, but that doesn't exactly explain why it's a Google product that they guard the protocols for jealously, which was the original line of inquiry to which I responded.
The answer to that question is that GE isn't intended for typical end-users, cute though it may be. It's intended for commercial applications.
For the most part, GE is not useful for typical end-user activity. It is mostly used to provide a tool for commercial applications of the Google maps data. For example, if you've seen a movie that did the zoom-in or -out between the globe from space and a single house, everything from 100 feet up and further was probably Google Earth. It's also used by law enforcement, NGOs planning access routes to remote locations, real estate, site surveys, etc. See their business use cases for Google Earth for more info.
You could always whitelist ads on sites that you want to support while turning off JavaScript (e.g. using noscript). Most ads will still display (unless they're flash, and then it really was their choice, wasn't it?)
That's what I do. I even leave Slashdot's ad opt-out checkbox unchecked.
No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.
This is a radical over-simplification to the point of being nonsensical. There are dozens of flavors of anarchy, all of which have their own unique relationship to this statement. Of course, one could suggest that anarchies seek to weaken the rule of law, and thus afford the strong greater ease in subjecting the weak, and in some cases that's a reasonable claim, but that's not what you said.
In the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.
If that were sufficient definition of democracy, then prisons would be democratic. Everyone can yell into the central halls and all anyone can do to suppress your voice is to commit violence against you (e.g. shut you up physically), which is always an option in any situation where members of the social group have access to one another.
No, the definition of democracy hinges on a social contract whereby the society as a whole agree to be bound by majority decisions. The ability to partake in that process is only the first step. Open source projects rarely require such a social contract (some of the larger ones do). They are typically loose confederations which behave as benevolent dictatorships and whose resources the group is allowed to leave with, should they decide to disband.
The reason this is practical in the open source world is that the resources have no inherent cost other than time, and their value is not diminished by forking. This, of course, is not true of land, food and natural resources, which is why the open source model doesn't work in the real world.
You mis-read. The GP was saying that the fact that simple failure to comply escalates the charge to felony resistance is the absurdity which should be removed from the books. What makes it far, far worse is that his failure to comply was such a blindingly reasonable response to having been punched in the face merely for asking, "what's going on?" a point which appears to have been clearly established in the case.
No matter what happens, both officers really must be dismissed at this point. Their claims were shown to be false in court and they committed severe breeches of protocol in getting into the vehicle and beating the driver without any cause or notable resistance beyond his having been foolish enough to get out of the car to ask what was up.
It was shown, without resistance. The Prosecution originally wanted to show their own version (slowed down and with the timestamp edited out), but we ended up all agreeing to show the raw data instead. It was useful for establishing entrances and exits — and we had a PI on the stand who’d developed a forensic timeline, establishing that I was out of the car for less than 20 seconds total (things started getting physical at around the 10-12 second mark). But the footage was grainy and distant and frequently blocked by intervening semis passing through. It was not definitive.
As best I can tell from the jurors who have commented since, it came down to a simple question: did he, after being hit, seemingly only for having stepped out of his car and asked why he was being searched, comply with the demand that he get down on the ground. The answer was: no, he did not. Case closed, conviction handed down.
He's right that the law is awfully broad, here, and I agree with him that the law is likely to be shot down in the near future, but the jury really had little choice but to convict. I hope the sentencing is light on him, and I expect it probably will be.
So it seems that someone wanted to survey the names people use for wireless access points, but was too lazy to do the research, so they put up a Web site with some fake data and posted to Slashdot in the hopes that everyone would post their clever names as comments.
So, in short, in case you don't trust their intentions with your data,
What data? My data is safe and sound, thank you very much. Google's data consists of any information that I've chosen to allow them to collect.
What cookies I may or may not have associated with my browsers, JavaScript I've allowed to run and IP addresses I've elected to share (all of which I can subvert at the press of a button, should I choose, using private-mode browsing, cookie controls, Tor, privoxy, etc.) are my choosing, and I've never taken much stock in the idea that that information was mine in the first place.
Wow... I don't know how to respond. I think you need some perspective, here. We entered this conversation on a reasonable point of disagreement, but you have gone well past that into speculation and outright prosecution of Google.
Let me just take your last comment:
Blind trust is never a good thing
I think if you re-read everything I wrote you'll find that I've never advocated for that. What I advocate for is just giving a company enough room to show itself to be just or unjust without flying off the handle every time it turns out that someone who worked for (or in this case, didn't work for) Google says something questionable. Yahoo! and Cisco work hard to make the world a less pleasant place to live (you use China as an example... do you have any idea what those two companies do there?) Google, on the other hand does an awful lot to make the world a better place to live and to make sure that they will continue to have the option to do so in the future. DLF, their Open Source support and Citizen are just a few examples of how they've helped.
Does that earn them a free pass? Nope. But I do think it earns them the right to actually be judged on their actions and not the nightmare scenarios we can paint.
I'd like to object on the grounds that I never claimed that I agreed with anyone's definition of the world 'evil'
And yet, you felt that this story indicated that Google was willing to re-define it. How did you mean that, exactly?
As with Youtube, however, Google - which, I'd like to stress, is not a philanthropic organization and cannot guarantee its own benevolence
You're wrong, but also imprecise. "Benevolence" is as poorly defined a word as "evil," but you're wrong about the general idea that, as a for-profit, public corporation (keep in mind that it's the "public" bit that's important, here, not just the for-profit part), Google has no choice but to pursue the most profitable line of action, regardless of moral ruminations by the founders.
In fact, the grounds upon which many companies are sued for not maximizing shareholder value is the idea that they advertise a certain business model, and then failed to execute on it in a way that a reasonable investor would expect. The courts have, as I'm sure you're aware, supported this notion that reasonable investors can expect companies to ignore their executives personal moral values and instead pursue profits at all costs...
But Google did something unique, here. Their S1 has a really interesting section that explains to the SEC and their investors that they will NOT take actions that violate their core principle of "do no evil" and they spell out quite clearly that this means that their stock may never be worth what it might otherwise be worth to their shareholders, and they go on to outline how and why.
I believe that this is a brilliant way to end-run around the whole problem. Of course, it's no guarantee that they won't decide to behave immorally or define morality differently from anyone else, but to say that Google will be compelled to do whatever it takes to make more money for their shareholders is flat-out wrong.
I would say that Google's actual goal in creating its grand online library to extend their drive to index as much information as possible
Partially this is true, and is a stated goal. But, I think you're short-selling the desire that Google's executives have, here. They've worked very hard to establish the ability to increase access to information, and not just for the reasons you cite above (their Citizen projects and Data Liberation projects make this clear).
which in turn maximizes the value of their advertising services, increasing profits.
Of course. They drive their business through advertising, and most good things that they've tried to do has, I'm sure, been pitched in terms of "here's how we can do this thing, and here's how we drive that through advertising revenue."
Much of what Google does has no immediate return, of course (their Open Source donations in code, money and other labor, for example), but much of it does for sure. I just don't think that couching your good deeds in terms of good business negates their value or the kudos a company should receive for doing them.
That's because it's the best in the world.... A higher cost per capita is a GOOD thing.
Um... no. No, in fact that's exactly the opposite of the truth. Remember, it's the cost per capita of U.S. citizens, not COVERED U.S. citizens. That means that in order to cover a small fraction of our population, we're paying far more per taxpayer than other developed nations spend per taxpayer to cover everyone. It's obscene.
Moreover, it's not better healthcare on the whole. The U.S. has some of the best teaching hospitals and medical research organizations in the world. This is true, but that doesn't affect the overall quality of care as much as you'd think. This is because most healthcare doesn't involve these institutions, and our hospitals are a mess (nursing shortages, monetary problems, consolidation of ownership and many other factors have damaged them horribly).
Add to that that we consider many covered procedures in other countries to be "elective" here (e.g. in many countries such as Germany "spas" are covered as a periodic cost, allowing people to seek preventative therapies that involve exercise and relaxation).
Propaganda isn't just a 20th century thing - the nazis and americans refined it to an art in the 20th century
I'm sorry, but you just can't call out the Nazis and the United States for refining propaganda in the 20th Century and leave out the Soviet Union and China.
It's true that Western propaganda was heavily influenced by Viennese and American concepts and put to the test in the U.S. in order to push the country into World War I by Woodrow Wilson. However, that occurred in parallel with the development of Russian revolutionary efforts to sway the populace which would be enshrined as a central element of Soviet rule.
Google is all for "openess" with content.. as long as its not theirs..
Google doesn't let anyone use their search results, which they claim to be their proprietary content.
If Hollywood, the music industry and book publishers were half as open with their data as Google, I'd be a happy camper. I can re-publish Google's content (e.g. search results) to my heart's content a long as I do so using their APIs... can you please point me to the Time Warner API for re-publishing the just-released Hollywood blockbuster on my Web site? I'd like to do that.
Also, Google makes my own data available to me to extract and use as I will at any time across a large number of services from gmail to search history to profile settings to map data. The Data Liberation Front works hard to make sure that this data is made available to users so that they can migrate to other services, should they wish. That's something that the music industry makes easy for artists, right?
As noted in a previous post, you're wrong. Said quote a) comes from a YouTube executive who was, at the time, in no way associated with Google and b) it was essentially an IM bragging about how he was going to make the company look valuable, not about copyright infringement c) I have no idea how well his voice survived the transition to being a Google employee, but I'm not willing just assume that such an attitude was welcomed with open arms without some evidence.
I find it unlikely that Google considers this evil. After all, given their stance toward books and other literature... Google simply believes that it's above the law, and 'evil' can be conveniently redefined...
That has to be the single most abhorrent abuse of the word "evil" I've ever seen. Google believes that the contents of libraries should be made available of the Web. They have a strong point, and I think I actually agree with them, though I realize that the increased ease of access will cause problems for the current publishing business model. What you appear to be saying is that any attempt to increase the public's access to content that would damage an existing business model is inherently evil. I believe that to be nonsensical (though if you simply disagree, I take no exception to that... it's the demonization of the concept of an electronic library that I think is wrong).
Now, on to YouTube: YouTube is a tough nut, and I think we'll be doing the world a disservice if we resolve it as if it were a single issue in a vacuum. The core question reverses the library/business model issue. It is suggested by Viacom et al. that the ready access to information creates an environment in which the standard protections afforded to those who provide physical space for information (e.g. cork boards) are not acceptable online and that carriers of that information must be held liable for the use of those spaces. We're not arguing that Google is evil, we're arguing that they knew they were getting themselves into a legal morass which would likely result in Google defending their side of the case in court and shaping the laws of our land with respect to the Internet. That is actually quite the opposite of evil.
In both cases, I'm cheering for an outcome that happens to coincide with Google's interests, but I would be (grudgingly) rooting for the same outcome were it Microsoft or Monsanto being attacked for the same reasons.
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
Medicare and medicaid... will be expanded to cover something like 15-20 million additional Americans
Do you have a source for that?
Yep See the section labeled "Medicaid Expansion." I thought there was also a provision that would lower the age that Medicare and Medicaid automatically kicked in, but I don't see that here.
Everyone else gets mandated employer insurance
There's an individual mandate, but nobody has said that it has to be via your employer.
That's not correct, but neither was my original statement. The truth is between the two. All employers over 50 employees would be required to provide insurance for their employees or pay a substantial fine per employee over 30 ($8,200 x (# of employees - 30)).
Most people will be required to get insurance if they don't get it from their company, BUT, there will be exceptions (those now covered by Medicaid, those who file a waiver for religious reasons, etc.)
The religious reasons exemption kind of bothers me. I understand that there are those who don't want to seek medical care because they feel that their deity of choice doesn't approve. That's fine, but I don't get to opt out of paying for highways because I don't have a license... and I'm fine with that. It's just one of those infrastructure costs. If the fees for not getting insurance were about the same as the cost of insurance, then I wouldn't see any problem with removing the religious exemption.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Ah, welcome back to Slashdot. I attempt to formulate a valid debate and am immediately modded down as "flamebait" by someone who disagrees with the points I made. Is rational debate "flamebait?" I guess it is, but isn't that exactly the point of this post? Aren't we trying to elicit a higher quality of debate than the shouting match going on on TV? Is Slashdot so ill equipped to discuss politics?
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Is there anything about the proposed act that is government-run? If there is, I'd missed it.
That's right, you missed it. Medicare and medicaid (the largest expense our government has today, costing more per-citizen (not per covered citizen) than any healthcare system in the developed world, will be expanded to cover something like 15-20 million additional Americans. Everyone else gets mandated employer insurance. I'm not sure what the un- or self-employed get, but I believe that this is modeled on the Massachusetts option, and here in Mass. we are required to buy our own insurance unless our incomes are below the poverty line. In some of those cases, the government then provides subsidies for a private plan
As a non-U.S. resident you must have excellent healthcare. That renders your opinion biased and we can't accept what you have to say.;-)
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Full bill, but not the final bill. Deals are still being made. Even the CBO says that the numbers are preliminary. And frankly, 10 years of taxes and 6 years of benefits means they are cooking the books.
That's not true at all. If we had no healthcare costs in the U.S., then that would be reasonable. However, what we have is the single most expensive per-capita healthcare system in the world,, right now, so to analyze where we'll be in 10 years after we implement this plan 4 years out is entirely reasonable.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It disappoints me that this is the first comment I saw when I opened up this page. The point of this article is to discuss the reform in a constructive manner, not to bash entire ideologies just because they are not your own.
I think that a valid and healthy debate could be had around the topic of how bad Fox "News": is for America, not because they're conservative (they're actually not) or because of their ideology, but because they represent the worst and least productive form of debate, approximately equal to that of two schoolyard kids yelling, "am not," "are so," at the top of their lungs.
Want health care debate? If you watch Fox, you'll get "they're getting their shovels ready for grandma." Here's the conservative position (I won't say if this is my position, but I understand debate well enough to state it regardless of my position): this legislation represents an attempt to turn the health care industry into the airline industry. Regulating MPG ratings is easy for the government, but when it comes to industries that literally hold their customer's lives in their hands, we don't accept the concept of cost-benefit, and therefore we over-regulate until the industry cannot sustain itself. Then, we impose controls that prevent the industry leaders from failing in order to prevent our regulations from killing them. Eventually we have two choices: admit that we have socialized the industry or allow it to continue hemorrhaging money and treating its customers like cogs. This approach gives us the worst of all possible public healthcare options, even worse than what Fox has been calling it. Indeed, a government takeover of healthcare would be preferable, though it would sink our economy like a deadweight. Instead, we should be implementing controls that make the smallest possible changes to the healthcare system, yet improve its value to American citizens, while streamlining medicare and medicaid into something that doesn't bankrupt our nation, but continues to provide excellent care to our seniors and those who cannot (as opposed to will not) provide for themselves.
I am temporarily residing outside the U.S. at this time, and I haven't been paying attention to the argument.
Here's the problem: there is no argument. The argument is essentially: hey, we're going broke trying to provide healthcare and doing it radically worse with fewer covered than any other developed nation Vs. you're a socialist tyrant who wants to destroy our way of live, kill our elderly relatives and force all of our women to have abortions! That's not an argument, it's a reasoned position vs. a rabid chicken. Fox is the figurehead and spokesman for that rabid chicken and as such, we're not going to proceed to have rational debate in this country again until they're put out of their misery (preferably by declaring News Corp to be a political advocacy group and imposing the same controls on them as any other).
Slashdot Mirror
"google are fighting back"
Against what for fracks sake?!
Is that meant as humor? Lessee.. against the rejections of a large chunk of their software suite including latitude and voice (voice, BTW offers the same features now offered across several other iPhone apps that were approved). Against the painfully slow process of getting Apple to update the Google maps app on iPhone. Against the continued taunts of Apples CEO.
And really, that's just the stuff we see. Google has its own platform, and yet the continue to try to bring their tools to Apple's platform as well, and over and over again Apple rejects them without providing replacements that have even remotely comparable functionality.
Not a bad idea, really. You just need a way for the fighter to establish a high bandwidth link between the target and a few backbone providers, then post the target IP address in a link on Slashdot and viola! Instant DDOS, Slashdot style ;-)
Realistically, Slashdot's "effect" is fairly week these days compared to, say, showing up on Google Trends or having your URL tweeted by a celebrity.
No, you're incorrect. It will always remain hidden. You can change your location, but the distance to the horizon created by the interaction between the speed of light and the expansion of the universe wouldn't change (unless one of those two parameters is changing). WHAT you can see will change, but you'll never be able to see anything past the horizon.
Sometimes it's worth a reality check. Some companies are sexist asses, true, but that actually doesn't put them on the same playing field as a country that stomps on the freedoms of their citizens the way China does.
Granted, Godaddy didn't do this out of the goodness of their little, black hearts, but it's worth thinking about the relative scale of douchitude in the world, from time to time.
not useful for end-user activity?
Re-read what I wrote. Here, I'll quote it for you:
For the most part, GE is not useful for typical end-user activity
Yes, your son had fun with it. I'm sure there are hundreds of people who've played around with GE, but that doesn't exactly explain why it's a Google product that they guard the protocols for jealously, which was the original line of inquiry to which I responded.
The answer to that question is that GE isn't intended for typical end-users, cute though it may be. It's intended for commercial applications.
For the most part, GE is not useful for typical end-user activity. It is mostly used to provide a tool for commercial applications of the Google maps data. For example, if you've seen a movie that did the zoom-in or -out between the globe from space and a single house, everything from 100 feet up and further was probably Google Earth. It's also used by law enforcement, NGOs planning access routes to remote locations, real estate, site surveys, etc. See their business use cases for Google Earth for more info.
You could always whitelist ads on sites that you want to support while turning off JavaScript (e.g. using noscript). Most ads will still display (unless they're flash, and then it really was their choice, wasn't it?)
That's what I do. I even leave Slashdot's ad opt-out checkbox unchecked.
No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.
This is a radical over-simplification to the point of being nonsensical. There are dozens of flavors of anarchy, all of which have their own unique relationship to this statement. Of course, one could suggest that anarchies seek to weaken the rule of law, and thus afford the strong greater ease in subjecting the weak, and in some cases that's a reasonable claim, but that's not what you said.
In the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.
If that were sufficient definition of democracy, then prisons would be democratic. Everyone can yell into the central halls and all anyone can do to suppress your voice is to commit violence against you (e.g. shut you up physically), which is always an option in any situation where members of the social group have access to one another.
No, the definition of democracy hinges on a social contract whereby the society as a whole agree to be bound by majority decisions. The ability to partake in that process is only the first step. Open source projects rarely require such a social contract (some of the larger ones do). They are typically loose confederations which behave as benevolent dictatorships and whose resources the group is allowed to leave with, should they decide to disband.
The reason this is practical in the open source world is that the resources have no inherent cost other than time, and their value is not diminished by forking. This, of course, is not true of land, food and natural resources, which is why the open source model doesn't work in the real world.
You mis-read. The GP was saying that the fact that simple failure to comply escalates the charge to felony resistance is the absurdity which should be removed from the books. What makes it far, far worse is that his failure to comply was such a blindingly reasonable response to having been punched in the face merely for asking, "what's going on?" a point which appears to have been clearly established in the case.
No matter what happens, both officers really must be dismissed at this point. Their claims were shown to be false in court and they committed severe breeches of protocol in getting into the vehicle and beating the driver without any cause or notable resistance beyond his having been foolish enough to get out of the car to ask what was up.
From the author in question's recent blog post:
It was shown, without resistance. The Prosecution originally wanted to show their own version (slowed down and with the timestamp edited out), but we ended up all agreeing to show the raw data instead. It was useful for establishing entrances and exits — and we had a PI on the stand who’d developed a forensic timeline, establishing that I was out of the car for less than 20 seconds total (things started getting physical at around the 10-12 second mark). But the footage was grainy and distant and frequently blocked by intervening semis passing through. It was not definitive.
As best I can tell from the jurors who have commented since, it came down to a simple question: did he, after being hit, seemingly only for having stepped out of his car and asked why he was being searched, comply with the demand that he get down on the ground. The answer was: no, he did not. Case closed, conviction handed down.
He's right that the law is awfully broad, here, and I agree with him that the law is likely to be shot down in the near future, but the jury really had little choice but to convict. I hope the sentencing is light on him, and I expect it probably will be.
So it seems that someone wanted to survey the names people use for wireless access points, but was too lazy to do the research, so they put up a Web site with some fake data and posted to Slashdot in the hopes that everyone would post their clever names as comments.
Guess it worked... ;-)
So, in short, in case you don't trust their intentions with your data,
What data? My data is safe and sound, thank you very much. Google's data consists of any information that I've chosen to allow them to collect.
What cookies I may or may not have associated with my browsers, JavaScript I've allowed to run and IP addresses I've elected to share (all of which I can subvert at the press of a button, should I choose, using private-mode browsing, cookie controls, Tor, privoxy, etc.) are my choosing, and I've never taken much stock in the idea that that information was mine in the first place.
Wow... I don't know how to respond. I think you need some perspective, here. We entered this conversation on a reasonable point of disagreement, but you have gone well past that into speculation and outright prosecution of Google.
Let me just take your last comment:
Blind trust is never a good thing
I think if you re-read everything I wrote you'll find that I've never advocated for that. What I advocate for is just giving a company enough room to show itself to be just or unjust without flying off the handle every time it turns out that someone who worked for (or in this case, didn't work for) Google says something questionable. Yahoo! and Cisco work hard to make the world a less pleasant place to live (you use China as an example... do you have any idea what those two companies do there?) Google, on the other hand does an awful lot to make the world a better place to live and to make sure that they will continue to have the option to do so in the future. DLF, their Open Source support and Citizen are just a few examples of how they've helped.
Does that earn them a free pass? Nope. But I do think it earns them the right to actually be judged on their actions and not the nightmare scenarios we can paint.
I'd like to object on the grounds that I never claimed that I agreed with anyone's definition of the world 'evil'
And yet, you felt that this story indicated that Google was willing to re-define it. How did you mean that, exactly?
As with Youtube, however, Google - which, I'd like to stress, is not a philanthropic organization and cannot guarantee its own benevolence
You're wrong, but also imprecise. "Benevolence" is as poorly defined a word as "evil," but you're wrong about the general idea that, as a for-profit, public corporation (keep in mind that it's the "public" bit that's important, here, not just the for-profit part), Google has no choice but to pursue the most profitable line of action, regardless of moral ruminations by the founders.
In fact, the grounds upon which many companies are sued for not maximizing shareholder value is the idea that they advertise a certain business model, and then failed to execute on it in a way that a reasonable investor would expect. The courts have, as I'm sure you're aware, supported this notion that reasonable investors can expect companies to ignore their executives personal moral values and instead pursue profits at all costs...
But Google did something unique, here. Their S1 has a really interesting section that explains to the SEC and their investors that they will NOT take actions that violate their core principle of "do no evil" and they spell out quite clearly that this means that their stock may never be worth what it might otherwise be worth to their shareholders, and they go on to outline how and why.
I believe that this is a brilliant way to end-run around the whole problem. Of course, it's no guarantee that they won't decide to behave immorally or define morality differently from anyone else, but to say that Google will be compelled to do whatever it takes to make more money for their shareholders is flat-out wrong.
I would say that Google's actual goal in creating its grand online library to extend their drive to index as much information as possible
Partially this is true, and is a stated goal. But, I think you're short-selling the desire that Google's executives have, here. They've worked very hard to establish the ability to increase access to information, and not just for the reasons you cite above (their Citizen projects and Data Liberation projects make this clear).
which in turn maximizes the value of their advertising services, increasing profits.
Of course. They drive their business through advertising, and most good things that they've tried to do has, I'm sure, been pitched in terms of "here's how we can do this thing, and here's how we drive that through advertising revenue."
Much of what Google does has no immediate return, of course (their Open Source donations in code, money and other labor, for example), but much of it does for sure. I just don't think that couching your good deeds in terms of good business negates their value or the kudos a company should receive for doing them.
That's because it's the best in the world. ... A higher cost per capita is a GOOD thing.
Um... no. No, in fact that's exactly the opposite of the truth. Remember, it's the cost per capita of U.S. citizens, not COVERED U.S. citizens. That means that in order to cover a small fraction of our population, we're paying far more per taxpayer than other developed nations spend per taxpayer to cover everyone. It's obscene.
Moreover, it's not better healthcare on the whole. The U.S. has some of the best teaching hospitals and medical research organizations in the world. This is true, but that doesn't affect the overall quality of care as much as you'd think. This is because most healthcare doesn't involve these institutions, and our hospitals are a mess (nursing shortages, monetary problems, consolidation of ownership and many other factors have damaged them horribly).
Add to that that we consider many covered procedures in other countries to be "elective" here (e.g. in many countries such as Germany "spas" are covered as a periodic cost, allowing people to seek preventative therapies that involve exercise and relaxation).
Propaganda isn't just a 20th century thing - the nazis and americans refined it to an art in the 20th century
I'm sorry, but you just can't call out the Nazis and the United States for refining propaganda in the 20th Century and leave out the Soviet Union and China.
It's true that Western propaganda was heavily influenced by Viennese and American concepts and put to the test in the U.S. in order to push the country into World War I by Woodrow Wilson. However, that occurred in parallel with the development of Russian revolutionary efforts to sway the populace which would be enshrined as a central element of Soviet rule.
Google is all for "openess" with content.. as long as its not theirs..
Google doesn't let anyone use their search results, which they claim to be their proprietary content.
If Hollywood, the music industry and book publishers were half as open with their data as Google, I'd be a happy camper. I can re-publish Google's content (e.g. search results) to my heart's content a long as I do so using their APIs... can you please point me to the Time Warner API for re-publishing the just-released Hollywood blockbuster on my Web site? I'd like to do that.
Also, Google makes my own data available to me to extract and use as I will at any time across a large number of services from gmail to search history to profile settings to map data. The Data Liberation Front works hard to make sure that this data is made available to users so that they can migrate to other services, should they wish. That's something that the music industry makes easy for artists, right?
As noted in a previous post, you're wrong. Said quote a) comes from a YouTube executive who was, at the time, in no way associated with Google and b) it was essentially an IM bragging about how he was going to make the company look valuable, not about copyright infringement c) I have no idea how well his voice survived the transition to being a Google employee, but I'm not willing just assume that such an attitude was welcomed with open arms without some evidence.
I find it unlikely that Google considers this evil. After all, given their stance toward books and other literature ... Google simply believes that it's above the law, and 'evil' can be conveniently redefined ...
That has to be the single most abhorrent abuse of the word "evil" I've ever seen. Google believes that the contents of libraries should be made available of the Web. They have a strong point, and I think I actually agree with them, though I realize that the increased ease of access will cause problems for the current publishing business model. What you appear to be saying is that any attempt to increase the public's access to content that would damage an existing business model is inherently evil. I believe that to be nonsensical (though if you simply disagree, I take no exception to that... it's the demonization of the concept of an electronic library that I think is wrong).
Now, on to YouTube: YouTube is a tough nut, and I think we'll be doing the world a disservice if we resolve it as if it were a single issue in a vacuum. The core question reverses the library/business model issue. It is suggested by Viacom et al. that the ready access to information creates an environment in which the standard protections afforded to those who provide physical space for information (e.g. cork boards) are not acceptable online and that carriers of that information must be held liable for the use of those spaces. We're not arguing that Google is evil, we're arguing that they knew they were getting themselves into a legal morass which would likely result in Google defending their side of the case in court and shaping the laws of our land with respect to the Internet. That is actually quite the opposite of evil.
In both cases, I'm cheering for an outcome that happens to coincide with Google's interests, but I would be (grudgingly) rooting for the same outcome were it Microsoft or Monsanto being attacked for the same reasons.
Medicare and medicaid ... will be expanded to cover something like 15-20 million additional Americans
Do you have a source for that?
Yep See the section labeled "Medicaid Expansion." I thought there was also a provision that would lower the age that Medicare and Medicaid automatically kicked in, but I don't see that here.
Everyone else gets mandated employer insurance
There's an individual mandate, but nobody has said that it has to be via your employer.
That's not correct, but neither was my original statement. The truth is between the two. All employers over 50 employees would be required to provide insurance for their employees or pay a substantial fine per employee over 30 ($8,200 x (# of employees - 30)).
Most people will be required to get insurance if they don't get it from their company, BUT, there will be exceptions (those now covered by Medicaid, those who file a waiver for religious reasons, etc.)
The religious reasons exemption kind of bothers me. I understand that there are those who don't want to seek medical care because they feel that their deity of choice doesn't approve. That's fine, but I don't get to opt out of paying for highways because I don't have a license... and I'm fine with that. It's just one of those infrastructure costs. If the fees for not getting insurance were about the same as the cost of insurance, then I wouldn't see any problem with removing the religious exemption.
Ah, welcome back to Slashdot. I attempt to formulate a valid debate and am immediately modded down as "flamebait" by someone who disagrees with the points I made. Is rational debate "flamebait?" I guess it is, but isn't that exactly the point of this post? Aren't we trying to elicit a higher quality of debate than the shouting match going on on TV? Is Slashdot so ill equipped to discuss politics?
Is there anything about the proposed act that is government-run? If there is, I'd missed it.
That's right, you missed it. Medicare and medicaid (the largest expense our government has today, costing more per-citizen (not per covered citizen) than any healthcare system in the developed world, will be expanded to cover something like 15-20 million additional Americans. Everyone else gets mandated employer insurance. I'm not sure what the un- or self-employed get, but I believe that this is modeled on the Massachusetts option, and here in Mass. we are required to buy our own insurance unless our incomes are below the poverty line. In some of those cases, the government then provides subsidies for a private plan
Disclosure: not a U.S. resident.
As a non-U.S. resident you must have excellent healthcare. That renders your opinion biased and we can't accept what you have to say. ;-)
Full bill, but not the final bill. Deals are still being made. Even the CBO says that the numbers are preliminary.
And frankly, 10 years of taxes and 6 years of benefits means they are cooking the books.
That's not true at all. If we had no healthcare costs in the U.S., then that would be reasonable. However, what we have is the single most expensive per-capita healthcare system in the world,, right now, so to analyze where we'll be in 10 years after we implement this plan 4 years out is entirely reasonable.
It disappoints me that this is the first comment I saw when I opened up this page. The point of this article is to discuss the reform in a constructive manner, not to bash entire ideologies just because they are not your own.
I think that a valid and healthy debate could be had around the topic of how bad Fox "News": is for America, not because they're conservative (they're actually not) or because of their ideology, but because they represent the worst and least productive form of debate, approximately equal to that of two schoolyard kids yelling, "am not," "are so," at the top of their lungs.
Want health care debate? If you watch Fox, you'll get "they're getting their shovels ready for grandma." Here's the conservative position (I won't say if this is my position, but I understand debate well enough to state it regardless of my position): this legislation represents an attempt to turn the health care industry into the airline industry. Regulating MPG ratings is easy for the government, but when it comes to industries that literally hold their customer's lives in their hands, we don't accept the concept of cost-benefit, and therefore we over-regulate until the industry cannot sustain itself. Then, we impose controls that prevent the industry leaders from failing in order to prevent our regulations from killing them. Eventually we have two choices: admit that we have socialized the industry or allow it to continue hemorrhaging money and treating its customers like cogs. This approach gives us the worst of all possible public healthcare options, even worse than what Fox has been calling it. Indeed, a government takeover of healthcare would be preferable, though it would sink our economy like a deadweight. Instead, we should be implementing controls that make the smallest possible changes to the healthcare system, yet improve its value to American citizens, while streamlining medicare and medicaid into something that doesn't bankrupt our nation, but continues to provide excellent care to our seniors and those who cannot (as opposed to will not) provide for themselves.
I am temporarily residing outside the U.S. at this time, and I haven't been paying attention to the argument.
Here's the problem: there is no argument. The argument is essentially: hey, we're going broke trying to provide healthcare and doing it radically worse with fewer covered than any other developed nation Vs. you're a socialist tyrant who wants to destroy our way of live, kill our elderly relatives and force all of our women to have abortions! That's not an argument, it's a reasoned position vs. a rabid chicken. Fox is the figurehead and spokesman for that rabid chicken and as such, we're not going to proceed to have rational debate in this country again until they're put out of their misery (preferably by declaring News Corp to be a political advocacy group and imposing the same controls on them as any other).