That is why I suggested the facility should be implemented by the browser with a secure standardized interface. Then it can be written in C++ and be highly optimized. Furthermore, the browsers already utilize the GPU, so it could utilize that too. I could even imagine if the model were widespread that computer makers might try to differentiate themselves by providing special circuitry.
This is not something where we'd be looking to provide for $100 worth of mining time per month from every user to pay for expensive internet things like Netflix. Rather it is something that would provide a few cents to allow me to read an article without a paywall. It should provide revenues to the website on the same order of magnitude as advertisement revenues where it takes many thousands of viewers to create significant money.
The focus for me would be to actually reward the creator of a site I'm reviewing with a micropayment without ever having to see an advertisement.
It's not that I don't like how much it costs to pay as much as there needs to be an easy model where I can make micropayments for over 100 sites without actually having to track all of those payments. I shouldn't have to endure ads to see sites that are worth a few cents a month. I would like to have an ad-free internet and if that means that my internet payment comes via my electric bill - which is less than $60 / month right now with the crazy low $0.10 / kWH type rates we have in Florida - so be it.
This hack was clearly wrong, but is the idea of intentionally using a cryptocurrency miner to profit from the writing of an extension a wrong one?
I think it would be interesting for websites and extensions to expand to giving a choice of at least three ways of paying for premium access. We already have a choice between paying a monthly fee or accepting advertisements on many sites. If given a third choice of allowing some of my CPU time to be utilized by the site or extension for cryptocurrency mining - at least on my plugged in laptop - I would choose to allow mining as long as it didn't peg my CPU and it was good at backing off when I had real needs.
In fact, with many websites I would love to have the option of allowing cryptocurrency mining to pay for it. It would be great if an efficient miner was built into the browser that could be utilized via some standard and has solid permission protection.
A friend with family in Puerto Rico contacted three family members living in three different cities after this quote became public and all had power. Perhaps they rounded to the nearest 100%. That isn't to say it isn't bad. After having just spent eight days without power due to Irma, I feel for them.
I think this simple answer truly is exactly it. And the price being thrown around of a few hundred million is pocket change for Google.
The Pixel and Pixel XL were rated better than any other phone on the market including the iPhone they faced at introduction by many reviewers, but they didn't get the sales that rating deserved. Why? Simply because they couldn't make enough of them. I waited 6 weeks for my Pixel XL.
With the manufacturing in their hands, they should have more flexibility in using their cash and clout to expand production, compete for the limited supply of next-generation displays, etc.
The timing is a bit concerning. It makes you wonder if Google saw Pixel 2 production, which should be underway or getting underway by now, falling behind schedule like the Pixel did and had to take over.
You're right, the football teams get the money. That's why they charter real buses these days instead of taking the school buses. In fact, I've seen many cases in which they've done so because people complained about the school's resources being used for team travel.
The volume carried by these trains is a trickle relative to their population. And trips taken once or twice a year do not dictate needs for charging stations when a working train system exists. My point was that if you look at the total times they would use a charging station away from home as a portion of their charges, it will likely be very small. There have been many studies showing that the same would even be true in our country.
We have not yet adjusted our thinking to the idea that almost everyone can have their own equivalent to a gas pump at home when we change to EVs. This greatly changes the need to charge away from home.
In the past year, if I had had a 200 mile range EV, I would have required 6 charges away from home that would have occurred on one trip. If I lived in a place with a good train network, I likely wouldn't have required that because I wouldn't have drove.
I should have also said that I fully expect them all to have cars, just not to quickly transform the general structure of their cities so that their home is so far from work and shopping that they will actually have to drive those cars further than the distance that an overnight charge at home will take them on the vast majority of their days.
Even in America, we will not need to replace all of our gas stations with electric stations. Most charging will be done at home. We will only need enough stations to allow for the few that need to recharge at some point away from home.
I drive around 15K miles per year, but the last time I drove more than 100 miles in a day was just before Thanksgiving of last year.
A habit of not having a mobile society that is millennia long does not get changed in decades by the introduction of vehicles. It can take generations for the thought of living 50 miles from your work as many in America to not seem stupid. It's not about ability, it's about culture and culture has deep roots.
It is not good to think of China as communist when thinking about world trade and management matters.
At the national level, perhaps China is the ultimate capitalist competitor. They act in the self-interest of the nation of China - not in a communist-like belief that all of the nations of the world should be equal.
When you view nations as actors instead of people, there is zero communism in the way China trades as an entity. The international market is capitalist and China enjoys a greater ability to decisively manage their participation in that market because they are acting more cohesively internally. This leads to the ability to be more ruthless seekers of profits externally.
It is a travesty that we miss so many low-flying opportunities. For example, the US school bus fleet is huge and generally terminal based. They almost never refuel anywhere but at their terminal. There would be zero need for refueling stations away from the terminals for the vast majority of school buses. They should be well on their way to being fully electric already.
I was just noticing the same thing. There are a lot of suspicious aspects of the original article. The direction I was coming at it was to consider how many 50 kWH charges you could deliver (assuming that people aren't always on empty when they charge) - 20,000. So, on any given day, only 1/8th or so of the stations would be getting used even once.
That got me looking for the original article which I think may be this one.
It appears that around 40,000 of the claimed 167000 are SGCC's piles. The others are from the 17 cooperating station operators.
In any case, this is enough to make me think that they are talking real stations and not counting stations people have installed at home which was my initial suspicion.
The only explanations I can think of are that the numbers are wrong or the numbers are correct and the stations are there for the rare circumstance where someone is using an EV to travel between cities or didn't get a full charge at home.
My guess is that the latter is true. China has new EV sales of more than 40,000 vehicles per month and they have to be getting charged somewhere. That somewhere is likely at home with travel contained to the city.
This is a population that was almost exclusively riding bikes a couple of decades ago. They likely still organize themselves in a fashion that puts them a bike ride away from everything they do.
The strategy appears to be to lock in local producers for the bulk EV market while only letting foreign companies succeed at the high end and then to scale up quickly. Once they've achieved large scale production in the world's largest market, then they will seek to dominate the foreign markets. They will also have more of an excuse to use their own rare metals and charge higher prices to export them. Smart.
EV dominance will have side benefits in many other tech and energy spheres. It's an investment with potential similar to our Apollo investment half a century ago.
The CNET article was a bit more concise in its treatment of the Defenders question.
Netflix will keep the original Marvel TV series it produced, namely "The Defenders" and the four series focusing on each character, such as "Daredevil." As the Defenders are officially part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you may need both streaming services to keep up to date with the whole shebang.
In my case, this is all I care about. I see all Star Wars and Marvel movies at the theatre, and I almost never watch anything twice. So, I've never used Netflix to see one of those movies.
The original programming is a completely different story. I would have been very angry if the viewing time I'd spent on that were wasted (I'll never get a Disney service).
Because that number includes children and retired people, it doesn't allow a good picture of labor participation which is the percentage of people who are in the right age range to work that are working.
The labor participation is currently hovering around 62.5%. This is down a bit from the peak in the 1998 time frame of around 67%, but still well above the norm of just below 60% that we experienced prior to the 1970 time frame.
If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics site and change the "From" date to 1950, you get an interesting chart. Except for a bubble in the 2007-8 time frame caused by the banking industry fraud, labor participation has been steadily declining since around 1998.
Since labor force participation is as much or more an indicator of need to work than available work, this is an inverse prosperity chart. Unemployment is very low right now, millions of jobs are available, and labor force participation is not increasing. Thus the pay is not enough to draw people into working. People have enough that they aren't desperate.
There are currently about 155 million Americans working out of 326 million Americans or about 47.5%. The survey claims one in eight "workers" fear robots may take their jobs and then goes on to say 13% of "Americans". I guess that you're not American if you're not in the 47.5% that work. They could at least say "American workers". It matters.
Note that American total output and total employment are both at record levels. The dissatisfaction that people feel can be entirely attributed to the reduction in Americans working in manufacturing from over 20% to under 10% which, given that manufacturing output is also at its record levels, can be entirely attributed to efficiency increases that are mostly attributable to automation of one type or another.
This is not something that could happen. It is not theoretical. It is something that is already happening. The increases in these core middle class jobs have not kept up with the losses from automation since the '70s. It is the core fact behind the divergence in incomes.
If wind speeds could be fully and accurately determined by satellite, the hurricane hunters wouldn't be bothering to measure them. Doppler radar can measure wind speeds, but I don't know how long that has been deployed extensively and whether there is a land based station that can reach out to the distances from land at which this storm was just measured. I just spent a few hours looking at historical data and see that even Andrew in 1992 had to be reclassified years later because the data collected at the time was too sporadic to show it to be a Category 5. The GPS drop-sondes that give us the ability to get many data points at many levels without actually flying through them are relatively knew and have greatly enhanced our measurement abilities - even to the point of being credited with a 20% improvement in predictions.
My point is that the number and quality of measurements has been increasing over the years and even today we are far from having continuous measurement, especially when the storm is out of range of doplar radar. Between 1900 and 1966 it is believed that an average of two storms a season were completely missed. I just read through the historical accounts of storms in the early 70s and it is striking how many references there are to measurements being made by islands and ships they happened to pass over and how few measurements were actually attributed to hunter flights. I can't find a clear record of how many hunter flights there have been per storm and how far from landfall they were bothering to make them, but I have to conclude from what I did read that it is easily possible that storms have grown to 185 mph winds or higher while still completely out to sea and dropped back down without us having known it. This one may have done so.
To say that something is as high as has ever been measured may be as much of a tribute to the increase in measurement technology as to the storm.
How long have we been measuring winds in storms that are still this far out? Would we have known if a storm was this strong at its current location 50 years ago?
DACA was implemented because Congress wouldn't do their job.
Obama deported more immigrants than any other President in history and more than all of the Presidents of the 20th century combined. He was able to do so BECAUSE he prioritized who they went after - violent felons.
Given the limited dollars allocated by Congress to do the job, getting your numbers up requires going after the easy cases. Women and children are not generally the easy cases.
DACA saved money that was then used to implement the most effective deportation program ever by helping to concentrate the resources where they were most needed.
I predict that Trump will be less effective than Obama at deporting violent illegal immigrants. He'll eventually shift budgets that would have been spent on deportations to building a wall that will have no effect on stemming the tide. He'll use unrealistic numbers for how much the wall will reduce illegal immigration and Congress will turn those numbers on him by saying that in that case, you don't need all of this money to deport people who can't get in. They'll then scavenge enforcement to give more money to their construction buddies. Unless we have an economic disaster or our racial warfare increases to the point of making America too dangerous of a place to bring your family, the net result will be a gain in illegal immigrants during the Trump administration.
We would likely have a solar adoption rate higher than all but a few other states if it wasn't for whacked laws put in place to defend the utilities. A homeowner here can't sell energy back to the utility. Only those who can produce 24 hours a day on-demand can do so. Because of this, our solar penetration is lower than many northeastern states.
Until we either get a change in the law or the cost of battery storage drops enough to make solar + battery much less than utility provided electric, Florida will lag the developed world in solar (and some of the third world).
??? The plant in question was estimated to cost around $20 billion not counting finance and other unspecified costs (probably operational maintenance, fuel and disposal which can't be cheap) and was planned to produce 2200 MW, just a bit more than 3x 700 MW. So in what world does $6 billion equal $20 billion? If it's this one then please show me where I can go to trade up.
a kernel module whose sole purpose seems to be to inject advertisements into the user's unencrypted web traffic.
Wow. That's a heck of a sleeper statement. I wonder whether Google already knew this?
The ability to inject advertisements into HTTP traffic would be a minor tweak away from replacing advertisements that are already there. This could render the metrics from advertisement giants like Google worthless for HTTP traffic and become a large threat to their business model - even more so perhaps than ad blockers.
I wonder if this is part of what is in Google's thoughts in their push for HTTPS. Perhaps it isn't about our security but theirs. Imagine if Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, and others started replacing the ads going to their users with ones they've sold. Any ads not flowing via HTTPS could be replaced. That would be a big, big hit.
Interestingly, since the device closest to the user would win the battle, Google Wifi could be used to counter-attack such an effort, and I bet Google Home would be updated overnight to act as a mesh router. They might even start offering free Youtube Red or Google Play Music as an incentive to those using their mesh routing and enabling ad injection.
A friend in Missouri had an old Camaro stolen - almost certainly for a joy ride because it was old. He thought he'd get it back quickly because they are usually abandoned at the side of the road afterwards. He checked with the police several times to see if they had recovered it to which they responded in the negative. A few months later, he went ahead and bought a new car.
Nearly a year after the car was stolen, the police impound contacted him asking if he was the owner of a car they had. It was his car. It had been in the impound since the day after it was stolen. They actually asked him to pay the impound fee for all of that time.
Do not for a moment believe that police departments really care about recovering stolen vehicles unless, perhaps, the victim is influential. Do not use such trivialities to justify these databases. They will not be used for that. Too much paperwork for things covered by insurance.
Even if I touch "home", it's just to hold it and bring the assistant up without saying "OK Google". I then say "open xxxxxx" where xxxxxx is any app on my phone and it does it - even if it is nowhere to be found as it often is on my spouse's phone (who hates icons covering the background).
With the assistant, I do a lot now without even looking at my phone.
More complicated things like sending messages have become "text xxxx to yyyy" followed by answering "yes" when it verifies whether I'd like to send it - or "take me to xxxx". And with driving directions, I've found I can use common names almost all of the time now - addresses are rarely necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why I suggested the facility should be implemented by the browser with a secure standardized interface. Then it can be written in C++ and be highly optimized. Furthermore, the browsers already utilize the GPU, so it could utilize that too. I could even imagine if the model were widespread that computer makers might try to differentiate themselves by providing special circuitry.
This is not something where we'd be looking to provide for $100 worth of mining time per month from every user to pay for expensive internet things like Netflix. Rather it is something that would provide a few cents to allow me to read an article without a paywall. It should provide revenues to the website on the same order of magnitude as advertisement revenues where it takes many thousands of viewers to create significant money.
The focus for me would be to actually reward the creator of a site I'm reviewing with a micropayment without ever having to see an advertisement.
It's not that I don't like how much it costs to pay as much as there needs to be an easy model where I can make micropayments for over 100 sites without actually having to track all of those payments. I shouldn't have to endure ads to see sites that are worth a few cents a month. I would like to have an ad-free internet and if that means that my internet payment comes via my electric bill - which is less than $60 / month right now with the crazy low $0.10 / kWH type rates we have in Florida - so be it.
This hack was clearly wrong, but is the idea of intentionally using a cryptocurrency miner to profit from the writing of an extension a wrong one?
I think it would be interesting for websites and extensions to expand to giving a choice of at least three ways of paying for premium access. We already have a choice between paying a monthly fee or accepting advertisements on many sites. If given a third choice of allowing some of my CPU time to be utilized by the site or extension for cryptocurrency mining - at least on my plugged in laptop - I would choose to allow mining as long as it didn't peg my CPU and it was good at backing off when I had real needs.
In fact, with many websites I would love to have the option of allowing cryptocurrency mining to pay for it. It would be great if an efficient miner was built into the browser that could be utilized via some standard and has solid permission protection.
A friend with family in Puerto Rico contacted three family members living in three different cities after this quote became public and all had power. Perhaps they rounded to the nearest 100%. That isn't to say it isn't bad. After having just spent eight days without power due to Irma, I feel for them.
I think this simple answer truly is exactly it. And the price being thrown around of a few hundred million is pocket change for Google.
The Pixel and Pixel XL were rated better than any other phone on the market including the iPhone they faced at introduction by many reviewers, but they didn't get the sales that rating deserved. Why? Simply because they couldn't make enough of them. I waited 6 weeks for my Pixel XL.
With the manufacturing in their hands, they should have more flexibility in using their cash and clout to expand production, compete for the limited supply of next-generation displays, etc.
The timing is a bit concerning. It makes you wonder if Google saw Pixel 2 production, which should be underway or getting underway by now, falling behind schedule like the Pixel did and had to take over.
You're right, the football teams get the money. That's why they charter real buses these days instead of taking the school buses. In fact, I've seen many cases in which they've done so because people complained about the school's resources being used for team travel.
The volume carried by these trains is a trickle relative to their population. And trips taken once or twice a year do not dictate needs for charging stations when a working train system exists. My point was that if you look at the total times they would use a charging station away from home as a portion of their charges, it will likely be very small. There have been many studies showing that the same would even be true in our country.
We have not yet adjusted our thinking to the idea that almost everyone can have their own equivalent to a gas pump at home when we change to EVs. This greatly changes the need to charge away from home.
In the past year, if I had had a 200 mile range EV, I would have required 6 charges away from home that would have occurred on one trip. If I lived in a place with a good train network, I likely wouldn't have required that because I wouldn't have drove.
I should have also said that I fully expect them all to have cars, just not to quickly transform the general structure of their cities so that their home is so far from work and shopping that they will actually have to drive those cars further than the distance that an overnight charge at home will take them on the vast majority of their days.
Even in America, we will not need to replace all of our gas stations with electric stations. Most charging will be done at home. We will only need enough stations to allow for the few that need to recharge at some point away from home.
I drive around 15K miles per year, but the last time I drove more than 100 miles in a day was just before Thanksgiving of last year.
A habit of not having a mobile society that is millennia long does not get changed in decades by the introduction of vehicles. It can take generations for the thought of living 50 miles from your work as many in America to not seem stupid. It's not about ability, it's about culture and culture has deep roots.
It is not good to think of China as communist when thinking about world trade and management matters.
At the national level, perhaps China is the ultimate capitalist competitor. They act in the self-interest of the nation of China - not in a communist-like belief that all of the nations of the world should be equal.
When you view nations as actors instead of people, there is zero communism in the way China trades as an entity. The international market is capitalist and China enjoys a greater ability to decisively manage their participation in that market because they are acting more cohesively internally. This leads to the ability to be more ruthless seekers of profits externally.
It is a travesty that we miss so many low-flying opportunities. For example, the US school bus fleet is huge and generally terminal based. They almost never refuel anywhere but at their terminal. There would be zero need for refueling stations away from the terminals for the vast majority of school buses. They should be well on their way to being fully electric already.
I was just noticing the same thing. There are a lot of suspicious aspects of the original article. The direction I was coming at it was to consider how many 50 kWH charges you could deliver (assuming that people aren't always on empty when they charge) - 20,000. So, on any given day, only 1/8th or so of the stations would be getting used even once.
That got me looking for the original article which I think may be this one.
It appears that around 40,000 of the claimed 167000 are SGCC's piles. The others are from the 17 cooperating station operators. In any case, this is enough to make me think that they are talking real stations and not counting stations people have installed at home which was my initial suspicion.
The only explanations I can think of are that the numbers are wrong or the numbers are correct and the stations are there for the rare circumstance where someone is using an EV to travel between cities or didn't get a full charge at home.
My guess is that the latter is true. China has new EV sales of more than 40,000 vehicles per month and they have to be getting charged somewhere. That somewhere is likely at home with travel contained to the city.
This is a population that was almost exclusively riding bikes a couple of decades ago. They likely still organize themselves in a fashion that puts them a bike ride away from everything they do.
The strategy appears to be to lock in local producers for the bulk EV market while only letting foreign companies succeed at the high end and then to scale up quickly. Once they've achieved large scale production in the world's largest market, then they will seek to dominate the foreign markets. They will also have more of an excuse to use their own rare metals and charge higher prices to export them. Smart.
EV dominance will have side benefits in many other tech and energy spheres. It's an investment with potential similar to our Apollo investment half a century ago.
I can't wait to see them launching three at a time (Falcon Heavy)!!!!
The CNET article was a bit more concise in its treatment of the Defenders question.
Netflix will keep the original Marvel TV series it produced, namely "The Defenders" and the four series focusing on each character, such as "Daredevil." As the Defenders are officially part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you may need both streaming services to keep up to date with the whole shebang.
In my case, this is all I care about. I see all Star Wars and Marvel movies at the theatre, and I almost never watch anything twice. So, I've never used Netflix to see one of those movies.
The original programming is a completely different story. I would have been very angry if the viewing time I'd spent on that were wasted (I'll never get a Disney service).
Because that number includes children and retired people, it doesn't allow a good picture of labor participation which is the percentage of people who are in the right age range to work that are working.
The labor participation is currently hovering around 62.5%. This is down a bit from the peak in the 1998 time frame of around 67%, but still well above the norm of just below 60% that we experienced prior to the 1970 time frame.
If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics site and change the "From" date to 1950, you get an interesting chart. Except for a bubble in the 2007-8 time frame caused by the banking industry fraud, labor participation has been steadily declining since around 1998.
Since labor force participation is as much or more an indicator of need to work than available work, this is an inverse prosperity chart. Unemployment is very low right now, millions of jobs are available, and labor force participation is not increasing. Thus the pay is not enough to draw people into working. People have enough that they aren't desperate.
There are currently about 155 million Americans working out of 326 million Americans or about 47.5%. The survey claims one in eight "workers" fear robots may take their jobs and then goes on to say 13% of "Americans". I guess that you're not American if you're not in the 47.5% that work. They could at least say "American workers". It matters.
Note that American total output and total employment are both at record levels. The dissatisfaction that people feel can be entirely attributed to the reduction in Americans working in manufacturing from over 20% to under 10% which, given that manufacturing output is also at its record levels, can be entirely attributed to efficiency increases that are mostly attributable to automation of one type or another.
This is not something that could happen. It is not theoretical. It is something that is already happening. The increases in these core middle class jobs have not kept up with the losses from automation since the '70s. It is the core fact behind the divergence in incomes.
If wind speeds could be fully and accurately determined by satellite, the hurricane hunters wouldn't be bothering to measure them. Doppler radar can measure wind speeds, but I don't know how long that has been deployed extensively and whether there is a land based station that can reach out to the distances from land at which this storm was just measured. I just spent a few hours looking at historical data and see that even Andrew in 1992 had to be reclassified years later because the data collected at the time was too sporadic to show it to be a Category 5. The GPS drop-sondes that give us the ability to get many data points at many levels without actually flying through them are relatively knew and have greatly enhanced our measurement abilities - even to the point of being credited with a 20% improvement in predictions.
My point is that the number and quality of measurements has been increasing over the years and even today we are far from having continuous measurement, especially when the storm is out of range of doplar radar. Between 1900 and 1966 it is believed that an average of two storms a season were completely missed. I just read through the historical accounts of storms in the early 70s and it is striking how many references there are to measurements being made by islands and ships they happened to pass over and how few measurements were actually attributed to hunter flights. I can't find a clear record of how many hunter flights there have been per storm and how far from landfall they were bothering to make them, but I have to conclude from what I did read that it is easily possible that storms have grown to 185 mph winds or higher while still completely out to sea and dropped back down without us having known it. This one may have done so.
To say that something is as high as has ever been measured may be as much of a tribute to the increase in measurement technology as to the storm.
How long have we been measuring winds in storms that are still this far out? Would we have known if a storm was this strong at its current location 50 years ago?
We'll see how that works for him.
DACA was implemented because Congress wouldn't do their job.
Obama deported more immigrants than any other President in history and more than all of the Presidents of the 20th century combined. He was able to do so BECAUSE he prioritized who they went after - violent felons.
Given the limited dollars allocated by Congress to do the job, getting your numbers up requires going after the easy cases. Women and children are not generally the easy cases.
DACA saved money that was then used to implement the most effective deportation program ever by helping to concentrate the resources where they were most needed.
I predict that Trump will be less effective than Obama at deporting violent illegal immigrants. He'll eventually shift budgets that would have been spent on deportations to building a wall that will have no effect on stemming the tide. He'll use unrealistic numbers for how much the wall will reduce illegal immigration and Congress will turn those numbers on him by saying that in that case, you don't need all of this money to deport people who can't get in. They'll then scavenge enforcement to give more money to their construction buddies. Unless we have an economic disaster or our racial warfare increases to the point of making America too dangerous of a place to bring your family, the net result will be a gain in illegal immigrants during the Trump administration.
You would think. But...
We would likely have a solar adoption rate higher than all but a few other states if it wasn't for whacked laws put in place to defend the utilities. A homeowner here can't sell energy back to the utility. Only those who can produce 24 hours a day on-demand can do so. Because of this, our solar penetration is lower than many northeastern states.
Until we either get a change in the law or the cost of battery storage drops enough to make solar + battery much less than utility provided electric, Florida will lag the developed world in solar (and some of the third world).
??? The plant in question was estimated to cost around $20 billion not counting finance and other unspecified costs (probably operational maintenance, fuel and disposal which can't be cheap) and was planned to produce 2200 MW, just a bit more than 3x 700 MW. So in what world does $6 billion equal $20 billion? If it's this one then please show me where I can go to trade up.
a kernel module whose sole purpose seems to be to inject advertisements into the user's unencrypted web traffic.
Wow. That's a heck of a sleeper statement. I wonder whether Google already knew this?
The ability to inject advertisements into HTTP traffic would be a minor tweak away from replacing advertisements that are already there. This could render the metrics from advertisement giants like Google worthless for HTTP traffic and become a large threat to their business model - even more so perhaps than ad blockers.
I wonder if this is part of what is in Google's thoughts in their push for HTTPS. Perhaps it isn't about our security but theirs. Imagine if Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, and others started replacing the ads going to their users with ones they've sold. Any ads not flowing via HTTPS could be replaced. That would be a big, big hit.
Interestingly, since the device closest to the user would win the battle, Google Wifi could be used to counter-attack such an effort, and I bet Google Home would be updated overnight to act as a mesh router. They might even start offering free Youtube Red or Google Play Music as an incentive to those using their mesh routing and enabling ad injection.
A friend in Missouri had an old Camaro stolen - almost certainly for a joy ride because it was old. He thought he'd get it back quickly because they are usually abandoned at the side of the road afterwards. He checked with the police several times to see if they had recovered it to which they responded in the negative. A few months later, he went ahead and bought a new car.
Nearly a year after the car was stolen, the police impound contacted him asking if he was the owner of a car they had. It was his car. It had been in the impound since the day after it was stolen. They actually asked him to pay the impound fee for all of that time.
Do not for a moment believe that police departments really care about recovering stolen vehicles unless, perhaps, the victim is influential. Do not use such trivialities to justify these databases. They will not be used for that. Too much paperwork for things covered by insurance.
Even if I touch "home", it's just to hold it and bring the assistant up without saying "OK Google". I then say "open xxxxxx" where xxxxxx is any app on my phone and it does it - even if it is nowhere to be found as it often is on my spouse's phone (who hates icons covering the background).
With the assistant, I do a lot now without even looking at my phone.
More complicated things like sending messages have become "text xxxx to yyyy" followed by answering "yes" when it verifies whether I'd like to send it - or "take me to xxxx". And with driving directions, I've found I can use common names almost all of the time now - addresses are rarely necessary.