I'd like to second your notes and add to it that technology has been available for several years now to make CRTs a lot thinner and lighter as well as to even further increase the resolution. Combine that last little fact with studies performed by IBM a few years ago that showed quite unexpectedly that achieving much higher resolution was much more important for reducing eye fatique than higher refresh rates, and you could say that the rise of LCDs and the intentional sabotage of the CRT market by the manufacturers in order to protect the LCD market has done great damage to the state of the art in displays. I've been stuck with dual 1600x1200 21" CRTs for several years now when we should be pushing 3200x2400 at 21" with only about 10" of depth and still achieving a vastly lower price than a 21" LCD.
The root legal issue that has for a very long time needed to be raised and defended in the copyright argument is the right to remember. Recording devices are no more than memory enhancers. Because we don't yet have the ability to embed these devices within us, they are not yet seen that way, but that is very clearly the long term path. Eventually, we will be able to embed enough memory to be able to remember and playback whatever we see or hear. When that happens, once we've seen or heard something once, it will forever be replayable. So, the real legal issue is, is the right to remember something a fundamental right? I sure hope that the answer is obvious.
The most interesting study to make here would be why so many people jump to the conclusion that all correlations found by studies are causative.
I can think of dozens of possible explanations for this and the idea that the profession changes the outcome would probably be last in my list. Closer to first on my list would be the explanation that flows something like,,, we know that some people definitely have biological tendencies to produce more male offspring and others have biological tendencies to produce more female offspring. We don't know for sure what causes this. Perhaps there are other side effects to the particular mutations that do cause this that cause them to be better suited to certain professions. When looked at across a large sample set, you would see the evidence of those side effects in this way. Given that their is likely hormonal involvement in these mutations and that hormones determine a lot about personality and even how the brain works (especially the degree of connectivity,,, more of which causes a leaning to intuitive thinking and less of which causes a leaning to systematic thinking), I would place a theory along this or a similar line fairly high on the "should be investigated" list. Investigating this theory might be as easy as correlating the reproductive changes simultaneously across jobs and generations.
One effect of it having become almost impossible in modern times to fire anyone is that a longer term view has to be used to maintain the health of a large corporate workforce. At the same time, over the last couple of decades in America at least, the percentage of entry level recruits of high quality and strong work ethics has declined. It has always been true that some portion of those hired should not have been. That portion has now increased at a time when getting rid of them to try others has become far more difficult.
I've been through multiple large scale layoff cycles with corporations and, though some good folks were caught too and others who didn't understand that they were safe left due to needless fears, in general, the average quality of the employee pool was increased dramatically during the layoff period by the elimination of those who were dragging the good people down. And, in general, the job the good people had to do got easier as the net work output of the lower third or so of the labor pool was negative. Over another decade the work force built back up some and the pay has gotten vastly more competitive with other companies.
More interestingly though, I saw some people who had been coasting along and not trying get laid off and suddenly buckle down and make very good for themselves. Many have told me that getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to them.
In short, this is the cycle of life and it usually happens to have a good effect, at least when looked at from the overall statistical view that actions at this scale should be viewed from.
Excuse me, but do not confuse the open source movement with Linux. There is a very simple way for Microsoft to win this supposed war. All they have to do is provide more direct support for running GNU apps on the windows kernel in the Longhorn release. There have definitely been discussions of exactly that. Even without that, GNU/Windows already has a huge following via Cygwin, MingW and various other mechanisms. It would not surprise me in the least to find out that there are many GNU applications with a larger base of Windows users than Linux users. I personally have comfortably used GNU and other unix derived software on my Windows machine very heavily since the 80s. Its nothing new.
What a wonderful way to get a lot of people to waste their time and profit from it. Let's see if this can be rephrased for better comprehension...
Your Dream Job!!!
Gifted developer's needed to create DB conversion utilities to facilitate adoption of newly open sourced database. Simply put a team together and invest a year of your own time to develop a candidate project. If it happens to rise above the competition (perhaps a one in five chance if we don't get too many responses), you will actually be paid!!!
...
Thanks, but no thanks. I sure hope the world isn't so full of suckers that this approach becomes widespread. I like being able to feed my family.
Yes, they are a good indication, but perhaps that indication needs to be read differently to truly zero in on the popularity. Instead of the total number of downloads, I'm sure they could easily tell us how many downloads have occurred of each version. Given the serious nature of some of their flaws, most everyone truly still using FireFox rather than just downloading it to try should be downloading updates. If the number of downloads increases with each version, it is likely that Firefox is still growing. If the number of downloads decreases with each version, it is likely that the usage of Firefox is actually decreasing even though the total number of downloads is increasing.
Not true unless this is not a true ROM technology. ROMs are typically not burned but instead made with a mask that creates them fully programmed from the start. The manufacturing cost, at least for runs large enough to easily offset the cost of the mask, is thus much lower than more complex one time programmable technologies which require more area per cell for some type of fuse mechanism and require an additional manufacturing step to blow all of the fuses.
ROMs can be very cheap. If they get to 8Gbit and then put it in a multichip stack to get to 4 or 8 GByte capacities, it could possibly give the movies on DVD industry a run for its money. The bad side of that is that we've been benefiting heavily from the demand that that industry has created is responsible for providing cheap RO and later WO and RW DVD drives for our PCs. The movie industry would love this format because the WO and RW versions would always be way more expensive than the RO version. The cost equation of copying would change dramatically.
Actually, what makes this "faster" than "a proxy server" is that its not just "a" proxy server. Its Google. Google's extra fast response / low latency / fat pipe to virtually anyplace on the web combined with caching of almost everything visited with any meaningful frequency makes this like having all of the web a few milliseconds from your ISP. On average, their servers will almost always serve you vastly faster than the originals.
No, but with 250 GFLOPs on a single chip, for certain types of problems, it will be much more efficient than the same number spread across 96 chips. Also, in a week, I'll have a quad dual-core Opteron, that's 8 64-bit cores, on order with 32GBs of memory, 10GigE and I could easily equip it with a TB of disk though I don't care for that. When the PhysX cards come out later this year, it should beat this machine hands down. And when Cells on expansion cards become available, probably late this year or early next, I could hit a more general purpose TFlop with 4 expansion cards. The total price would be
The perhaps badly made point is, if your application is something simplistic like web or DB serving, this beast might not be too bad. But if you're looking for something to perform highly parallel numerical processing, this is not the most cost effective approach. Specialized processors working in conjunction with general purpose processors will yield far better price/performance.
Last I heard, they claimed a solid 250 GFLOP rating from the 9 core cell processor. So, a Playstation 3 should be able to beat this. Or, if you want to pay some more, one of the IBM workstations equipped with Cells that the Playstation 3 software will be developed on.
Another processor that may help in the classes of problems that these things hit would be the PhysX chip from Aegia, due this Christmas. I'm currently working a project that hopes to eventually be looking toward either PhysX chips or Cells on multiple PCI or PCI-E cards hosted in quad dual-core Opteron chassis for accelerating a simulation farm. Either way, Cell or PhysX, I'd expect a factor of 10 cost reduction versus this beast for even better performance on highly parallel problems, though more general purpose problems would go to the cluster.
Take it out to the max and you should see the problem (assuming you're reasonable). They just started a DARPA program to make vastly better legs and arms. From what I know of current technology, it is very possible that in 10 years, an amputee will be able to have a neurally controlled limb attached with strength and speed characteristics well beyond those of any modern athlete. So, should we allow all of those athletes who have their legs and arms replaced with "bionic" limbs to compete on an equal basis with those that don't? What do records then mean?
Another example is the bionic heart. Once they work out the problems, a heart that doesn't beat but instead just steadily pumps has already been proven to yield better overall performance than a natural one. Should Olympic marathoners with bionic hearts be allowed to compete?
Let's say I interface a small computerized dictionary that on the demand of a specific thought or movement spells a word that was just spoken to me or that I just spoke into an eye or ear implant so that I can see it. This would actually be possible today though it hasn't been done. Should I be allowed to compete in a spelling bee?
The end result of progressions like these is that sports become dominated by those who have the money to pay for the enhancements instead of by those that have worked hard to naturally improve what they were born with.
Just being able to program means nothing if you don't understand some domains. I personally don't believe that Computer Science or Software Engineering should ever be considered as a standalone major. At the very least, get into a Computer Engineering course that includes ALL of the CS courses and most of the electronics and microprocessor courses. You will program more effectively if you understand the machine and its communications fundamentals. But, you really shouldn't stop here. Most of the grads I've interviewed lately have double majors. Having knowledge in one or more application domains really puts the icing on the cake. A CS type writing financial applications won't be nearly as valuable as a CS who is a CPA doing the same thing. Just think of a field, go for the degree for that field, and add 30 hours of CS courses into it.
Thank you. I thoroughly agree. Sci Fi has often shown our society evolving to a largely underground one that frees much of the surface for our enjoyment as wilderness. I personally have quite a bit of relatively undisturbed land, but would enjoy it even more if it was totally without structures. The predicted machines to quickly melt away massive rooms and tunnels though require an energy infrastructure that we're not even close to today. We need to stop thinking of the insignificant leaps that can be had by conservation (all we could conserve is the tiny amount that we now use) and start considering how to multiply our energy capabilities by orders of magnitude and simultaneously eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels of all types. We need those for materials instead.
If they were to concentrate this work on Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy, they could likely achieve a success very quickly. It is caused by an unstable CTG sequence of DNA that expands in length when replicated. The progression of the disease is characterized by the number of expansions. Since it is an unstable sequence and of little use, simply cutting it out of all DNA should "cure" the disease. I put the "cure" in quotes because reversing the damage is likely not possible, but it could at least eliminate it from future generations and stop the progression.
Prior to setting the majority of your equipment down, set a robotic facility down that clears the dust from several acres. I'd imagine that you could create an electrostatic vacuum system that accelerates the dust enough to just fire it into neighboring areas. With no atmosphere to slow it, you might even be able to fire it all into a nice pile a mile away or so.
Really, I can't imagine that we'd put any moon settlement "ON the moon surface". If the dust doesn't get you, the bombardment that created all that dust will. For radiation shielding and other reasons, the bulk of the facility should be under the surface and trips to the surface would likely be limited. More than research on the dust, we probably need research on the structural, mechanical, thermal, and other characteristics of the bedrock material a few meters below the surface. As far as the dust goes, what would be cool probably is a way to just clear the whole site down to the bedrock and then keep it clear.
Am I the only geek that expected to see backgrounds that showed the insides of the monitors? Hardware is much more exciting than the wall or shelves behind the computer. I can think of some good joke possibilities too along the lines of things or statements that would be funny or shocking if they had been hidden inside your monitor.
The phone company doesn't have to do this because they don't have liability issues. The law assures that nobody that they pass the information on to can divulge the information. Imagine AOL's liability if they didn't have this statement and they eventually interfaced AIM to other IM systems and one of those other IM systems broke the agreement. Our stupid court system would pile as much blame on AOL as on the truly responsible party.
Anyway, if we want IM systems to eventually merge, we either need laws to protect the vendors from liability of sharing data or we have to accept statements like this and actually HOPE that they hold up in court. Otherwise, the vendors will not be able to afford the risk.
First everybody (really, mostly IT professionals trying to balance benefit of patching versus risk and cost of patching) berated Microsoft for releasing patches too often. So, Microsoft responds and releases them once a month. OF COURSE that means they are holding onto patches for up to a month. The number of ignorant posts here that seem to think that this is an announcement that they are going to START delaying patches is just unbelievable. The industry already made them do that.
This is just the natural next step in the social evolution of the situation. Now we've got the users who have a different benefit/risk equation demanding release of patches as soon as they are available. Its just the Air Force now, but it will eventually become a selectable option so that we can all choose our own poison.
Personally, I've never had a problem with applying a Microsoft patch despite having 100s of applications on my machines including several large suites and a large proportion of open source. The problems seem to come mostly to people using low quality drivers or applications from a few companies that have questionable SW design practices like replacing core DLLs. I'd like the Air Force's option and suspect I'll eventually get it.
Eminent domain was created at the behest of the biggest companies of the time, railroad companies. Other than that, I'd say you're at least on the right side. Having the government solve a government created problem rarely does anything except further reduce our rights. If we truly want reduced drug prices, all we have to do is eliminate the FDA's regulation of drugs. Everything would change drastically if people didn't have to go to a Dr. to get papers to buy what half the time they knew they needed and 95% of the time the pharmacist could have easily chosen. Deregulate all medicine, all licensing of Drs, and all diagnostic equipment,,, restore our freedom, and these problems will go away.
I don't know the details, but have heard that this trend, at least in the case of some things like Google News, is a legal ploy. Once they release and make money on the product, they open themselves to a wider range of lawsuits. On the plus side, this is also supposedly why we get to enjoy Google News sans advertisements.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to second your notes and add to it that technology has been available for several years now to make CRTs a lot thinner and lighter as well as to even further increase the resolution. Combine that last little fact with studies performed by IBM a few years ago that showed quite unexpectedly that achieving much higher resolution was much more important for reducing eye fatique than higher refresh rates, and you could say that the rise of LCDs and the intentional sabotage of the CRT market by the manufacturers in order to protect the LCD market has done great damage to the state of the art in displays. I've been stuck with dual 1600x1200 21" CRTs for several years now when we should be pushing 3200x2400 at 21" with only about 10" of depth and still achieving a vastly lower price than a 21" LCD.
The root legal issue that has for a very long time needed to be raised and defended in the copyright argument is the right to remember. Recording devices are no more than memory enhancers. Because we don't yet have the ability to embed these devices within us, they are not yet seen that way, but that is very clearly the long term path. Eventually, we will be able to embed enough memory to be able to remember and playback whatever we see or hear. When that happens, once we've seen or heard something once, it will forever be replayable. So, the real legal issue is, is the right to remember something a fundamental right? I sure hope that the answer is obvious.
The most interesting study to make here would be why so many people jump to the conclusion that all correlations found by studies are causative.
I can think of dozens of possible explanations for this and the idea that the profession changes the outcome would probably be last in my list. Closer to first on my list would be the explanation that flows something like,,, we know that some people definitely have biological tendencies to produce more male offspring and others have biological tendencies to produce more female offspring. We don't know for sure what causes this. Perhaps there are other side effects to the particular mutations that do cause this that cause them to be better suited to certain professions. When looked at across a large sample set, you would see the evidence of those side effects in this way. Given that their is likely hormonal involvement in these mutations and that hormones determine a lot about personality and even how the brain works (especially the degree of connectivity,,, more of which causes a leaning to intuitive thinking and less of which causes a leaning to systematic thinking), I would place a theory along this or a similar line fairly high on the "should be investigated" list. Investigating this theory might be as easy as correlating the reproductive changes simultaneously across jobs and generations.
One effect of it having become almost impossible in modern times to fire anyone is that a longer term view has to be used to maintain the health of a large corporate workforce. At the same time, over the last couple of decades in America at least, the percentage of entry level recruits of high quality and strong work ethics has declined. It has always been true that some portion of those hired should not have been. That portion has now increased at a time when getting rid of them to try others has become far more difficult.
I've been through multiple large scale layoff cycles with corporations and, though some good folks were caught too and others who didn't understand that they were safe left due to needless fears, in general, the average quality of the employee pool was increased dramatically during the layoff period by the elimination of those who were dragging the good people down. And, in general, the job the good people had to do got easier as the net work output of the lower third or so of the labor pool was negative. Over another decade the work force built back up some and the pay has gotten vastly more competitive with other companies.
More interestingly though, I saw some people who had been coasting along and not trying get laid off and suddenly buckle down and make very good for themselves. Many have told me that getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to them.
In short, this is the cycle of life and it usually happens to have a good effect, at least when looked at from the overall statistical view that actions at this scale should be viewed from.
Excuse me, but do not confuse the open source movement with Linux. There is a very simple way for Microsoft to win this supposed war. All they have to do is provide more direct support for running GNU apps on the windows kernel in the Longhorn release. There have definitely been discussions of exactly that. Even without that, GNU/Windows already has a huge following via Cygwin, MingW and various other mechanisms. It would not surprise me in the least to find out that there are many GNU applications with a larger base of Windows users than Linux users. I personally have comfortably used GNU and other unix derived software on my Windows machine very heavily since the 80s. Its nothing new.
What a wonderful way to get a lot of people to waste their time and profit from it. Let's see if this can be rephrased for better comprehension...
Your Dream Job!!!
Gifted developer's needed to create DB conversion utilities to facilitate adoption of newly open sourced database. Simply put a team together and invest a year of your own time to develop a candidate project. If it happens to rise above the competition (perhaps a one in five chance if we don't get too many responses), you will actually be paid!!!
...Thanks, but no thanks. I sure hope the world isn't so full of suckers that this approach becomes widespread. I like being able to feed my family.
Yes, they are a good indication, but perhaps that indication needs to be read differently to truly zero in on the popularity. Instead of the total number of downloads, I'm sure they could easily tell us how many downloads have occurred of each version. Given the serious nature of some of their flaws, most everyone truly still using FireFox rather than just downloading it to try should be downloading updates. If the number of downloads increases with each version, it is likely that Firefox is still growing. If the number of downloads decreases with each version, it is likely that the usage of Firefox is actually decreasing even though the total number of downloads is increasing.
Not true unless this is not a true ROM technology. ROMs are typically not burned but instead made with a mask that creates them fully programmed from the start. The manufacturing cost, at least for runs large enough to easily offset the cost of the mask, is thus much lower than more complex one time programmable technologies which require more area per cell for some type of fuse mechanism and require an additional manufacturing step to blow all of the fuses.
ROMs can be very cheap. If they get to 8Gbit and then put it in a multichip stack to get to 4 or 8 GByte capacities, it could possibly give the movies on DVD industry a run for its money. The bad side of that is that we've been benefiting heavily from the demand that that industry has created is responsible for providing cheap RO and later WO and RW DVD drives for our PCs. The movie industry would love this format because the WO and RW versions would always be way more expensive than the RO version. The cost equation of copying would change dramatically.
Actually, what makes this "faster" than "a proxy server" is that its not just "a" proxy server. Its Google. Google's extra fast response / low latency / fat pipe to virtually anyplace on the web combined with caching of almost everything visited with any meaningful frequency makes this like having all of the web a few milliseconds from your ISP. On average, their servers will almost always serve you vastly faster than the originals.
Should have used preview :-) That first paragraph should have "less than 1/3 that of this 96 processor beast." appended to it.
No, but with 250 GFLOPs on a single chip, for certain types of problems, it will be much more efficient than the same number spread across 96 chips. Also, in a week, I'll have a quad dual-core Opteron, that's 8 64-bit cores, on order with 32GBs of memory, 10GigE and I could easily equip it with a TB of disk though I don't care for that. When the PhysX cards come out later this year, it should beat this machine hands down. And when Cells on expansion cards become available, probably late this year or early next, I could hit a more general purpose TFlop with 4 expansion cards. The total price would be
The perhaps badly made point is, if your application is something simplistic like web or DB serving, this beast might not be too bad. But if you're looking for something to perform highly parallel numerical processing, this is not the most cost effective approach. Specialized processors working in conjunction with general purpose processors will yield far better price/performance.
Last I heard, they claimed a solid 250 GFLOP rating from the 9 core cell processor. So, a Playstation 3 should be able to beat this. Or, if you want to pay some more, one of the IBM workstations equipped with Cells that the Playstation 3 software will be developed on.
Another processor that may help in the classes of problems that these things hit would be the PhysX chip from Aegia, due this Christmas. I'm currently working a project that hopes to eventually be looking toward either PhysX chips or Cells on multiple PCI or PCI-E cards hosted in quad dual-core Opteron chassis for accelerating a simulation farm. Either way, Cell or PhysX, I'd expect a factor of 10 cost reduction versus this beast for even better performance on highly parallel problems, though more general purpose problems would go to the cluster.
Take it out to the max and you should see the problem (assuming you're reasonable). They just started a DARPA program to make vastly better legs and arms. From what I know of current technology, it is very possible that in 10 years, an amputee will be able to have a neurally controlled limb attached with strength and speed characteristics well beyond those of any modern athlete. So, should we allow all of those athletes who have their legs and arms replaced with "bionic" limbs to compete on an equal basis with those that don't? What do records then mean?
Another example is the bionic heart. Once they work out the problems, a heart that doesn't beat but instead just steadily pumps has already been proven to yield better overall performance than a natural one. Should Olympic marathoners with bionic hearts be allowed to compete?
Let's say I interface a small computerized dictionary that on the demand of a specific thought or movement spells a word that was just spoken to me or that I just spoke into an eye or ear implant so that I can see it. This would actually be possible today though it hasn't been done. Should I be allowed to compete in a spelling bee?
The end result of progressions like these is that sports become dominated by those who have the money to pay for the enhancements instead of by those that have worked hard to naturally improve what they were born with.
Just being able to program means nothing if you don't understand some domains. I personally don't believe that Computer Science or Software Engineering should ever be considered as a standalone major. At the very least, get into a Computer Engineering course that includes ALL of the CS courses and most of the electronics and microprocessor courses. You will program more effectively if you understand the machine and its communications fundamentals. But, you really shouldn't stop here. Most of the grads I've interviewed lately have double majors. Having knowledge in one or more application domains really puts the icing on the cake. A CS type writing financial applications won't be nearly as valuable as a CS who is a CPA doing the same thing. Just think of a field, go for the degree for that field, and add 30 hours of CS courses into it.
Thank you. I thoroughly agree. Sci Fi has often shown our society evolving to a largely underground one that frees much of the surface for our enjoyment as wilderness. I personally have quite a bit of relatively undisturbed land, but would enjoy it even more if it was totally without structures. The predicted machines to quickly melt away massive rooms and tunnels though require an energy infrastructure that we're not even close to today. We need to stop thinking of the insignificant leaps that can be had by conservation (all we could conserve is the tiny amount that we now use) and start considering how to multiply our energy capabilities by orders of magnitude and simultaneously eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels of all types. We need those for materials instead.
If they were to concentrate this work on Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy, they could likely achieve a success very quickly. It is caused by an unstable CTG sequence of DNA that expands in length when replicated. The progression of the disease is characterized by the number of expansions. Since it is an unstable sequence and of little use, simply cutting it out of all DNA should "cure" the disease. I put the "cure" in quotes because reversing the damage is likely not possible, but it could at least eliminate it from future generations and stop the progression.
Prior to setting the majority of your equipment down, set a robotic facility down that clears the dust from several acres. I'd imagine that you could create an electrostatic vacuum system that accelerates the dust enough to just fire it into neighboring areas. With no atmosphere to slow it, you might even be able to fire it all into a nice pile a mile away or so.
Really, I can't imagine that we'd put any moon settlement "ON the moon surface". If the dust doesn't get you, the bombardment that created all that dust will. For radiation shielding and other reasons, the bulk of the facility should be under the surface and trips to the surface would likely be limited. More than research on the dust, we probably need research on the structural, mechanical, thermal, and other characteristics of the bedrock material a few meters below the surface. As far as the dust goes, what would be cool probably is a way to just clear the whole site down to the bedrock and then keep it clear.
Am I the only geek that expected to see backgrounds that showed the insides of the monitors? Hardware is much more exciting than the wall or shelves behind the computer. I can think of some good joke possibilities too along the lines of things or statements that would be funny or shocking if they had been hidden inside your monitor.
This article isn't reporting news, its trying to make it. The NYT's model is the one that is dated. Good riddance.
The phone company doesn't have to do this because they don't have liability issues. The law assures that nobody that they pass the information on to can divulge the information. Imagine AOL's liability if they didn't have this statement and they eventually interfaced AIM to other IM systems and one of those other IM systems broke the agreement. Our stupid court system would pile as much blame on AOL as on the truly responsible party.
Anyway, if we want IM systems to eventually merge, we either need laws to protect the vendors from liability of sharing data or we have to accept statements like this and actually HOPE that they hold up in court. Otherwise, the vendors will not be able to afford the risk.
First everybody (really, mostly IT professionals trying to balance benefit of patching versus risk and cost of patching) berated Microsoft for releasing patches too often. So, Microsoft responds and releases them once a month. OF COURSE that means they are holding onto patches for up to a month. The number of ignorant posts here that seem to think that this is an announcement that they are going to START delaying patches is just unbelievable. The industry already made them do that.
This is just the natural next step in the social evolution of the situation. Now we've got the users who have a different benefit/risk equation demanding release of patches as soon as they are available. Its just the Air Force now, but it will eventually become a selectable option so that we can all choose our own poison.
Personally, I've never had a problem with applying a Microsoft patch despite having 100s of applications on my machines including several large suites and a large proportion of open source. The problems seem to come mostly to people using low quality drivers or applications from a few companies that have questionable SW design practices like replacing core DLLs. I'd like the Air Force's option and suspect I'll eventually get it.
Eminent domain was created at the behest of the biggest companies of the time, railroad companies. Other than that, I'd say you're at least on the right side. Having the government solve a government created problem rarely does anything except further reduce our rights. If we truly want reduced drug prices, all we have to do is eliminate the FDA's regulation of drugs. Everything would change drastically if people didn't have to go to a Dr. to get papers to buy what half the time they knew they needed and 95% of the time the pharmacist could have easily chosen. Deregulate all medicine, all licensing of Drs, and all diagnostic equipment,,, restore our freedom, and these problems will go away.
I don't know the details, but have heard that this trend, at least in the case of some things like Google News, is a legal ploy. Once they release and make money on the product, they open themselves to a wider range of lawsuits. On the plus side, this is also supposedly why we get to enjoy Google News sans advertisements.