I think it is a little unfair to say that they blew past evil. It is more of a case that they seem to have lost their drive to actively be good. Give the great power they wield, a neutral attitude towards good and evil will produce some evil results. Unlike MS or Apple who started out evil and have actively worked towards a goal of evil, Google started out good, and is sliding towards evil.
My one futile hope with Google is that they will end up as our Rosa Parks of Corporate abuse. Realistically I know it won't happen, but there is a small chance that some do gooder out there will sue Google for violating their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders by doing evil. Fiduciary responsibility is not the responsibility to make as much money as possible. It is the responsibility to use the persons assets in the persons best interest. Given Google's vocal statements of "Don't be evil", it would be perfectly reasonable to expect many shareholders to consider not being evil to be more valuable than a little increase in revenue.
That being said, this is why "The Cloud" is a disaster in the making. It leads to putting all your eggs in one basket. Services like Google's should only be used as a transitory service. Throw away email accounts, one off searches. Posting pictures that you want to supply to other people, and expect to have purged without notice.
The services ARE awesome. That shouldn't scare you. The scary part is the number of people that trust they will always have access to their data. The services Google offers don't inherently make them evil, but encouraging people to do something that will obviously cause them problems down the road is looking a bit like a passive evil.
All that being said, this particular guy has very little to complain about. He posted a picture of a naked 10 year old girl posed suggestively with the title Virgin Killers printed on it. The picture was already declared to be child porn in several countries, and the guy specifically stated that he wanted to see just how close he could get to child pornography without actually crossing the line. It is ridiculous for him to complain that someone else draws their line at a slightly different shade of gray.
Hopefully, this will be a good warning to people anyway in the dangers of losing control of your own data.
I got one for my kid at 3. Sure made our trip to Disneyland a lot less traumatic when he found an exit we didn't know about in the Tom Sawyer' caverns.
Yeah, only a non-programmer would think that software doesn't just "accidentally" record extra information that it wasn't programmed to...
Correct, because a programmer would realize that you often receive a lot of data, and then you filter out the stuff you don't want. Buffer overflows are a perfect example of someone not filtering enough on the incoming data. Of course, receiving a lot of data and then filtering out what you don't want isn't limited to programming. It is also done while driving, having a conversation in a crowded rooms, cooking, walking down the street, etc..
I disagree. The only thing that a person of average intelligence might have a problem with is dealing with a building department that has a bad attitude towards homeowners. Your example of PVC pipe is a perfectly good one. PVC is trivial to work with, and can be done to high quality standards with only the smallest bit of care. Your example of electrical wiring is another good example. Residential electrical wiring is incredibly simple. There just are not that many factors involved in it, and pretty much all scenarios have good simple instructions available on how to do it. There are only a few gauges of ware that are used in a residential home, and each of their uses are well defined. You are more likely to kill yourself or others cooking in the kitchen than you are by doing your own electrical work.
I would say the problem with contractors is more one of them not caring than them not having the knowledge. I had an electrical company rewire one room in a renovation I was doing, since I needed the breaker box upgraded, and they would have better access to PG&E for shutting off the power at the pole. I figured that since they were there already, I would have them wire the room that was gutted at the same time. My instructions were that I wanted all of the old electrical removed, and new wiring put in to the locations in my plans. Not only did they leave old wiring in a couple of places because they though no one would notice, but when the inspectors came, the work didn't pass. I had to go in and fix their mistakes. Yes, I could have had them come back out, but that would have been more effort than to just fix the problem myself. I ended up doing all of the rest of the wiring myself, and the only issue the inspectors had was when they saw that I used a separate GFCI outlet on each kitchen plug instead of only putting one at the beginning of the leg. A simple explanation that the extra cost was worth not making someone else down the line try to figure out why an outlet doesn't work was worth it to me, and everything was fine. The inspector was just used to people taking the cheap low quality route.
The likely reason for the hose bib attached to the hot water and only the hot water is because the hot water line needed a repair. Whoever did the repair put the hose bib on it for future proofing, but did not see the need to immediately tear into the functioning cold water.
I did an even more 'strange' plumbing system myself several years ago. I was replacing all of the rotting steel water pipes in my home with copper. the water lines T'ed off under one of the bedrooms on it's way to the kitchen and bathroom. On the leg that ran to the kitchen, I put in a huge S that ran from under the bedroom to under the kitchen, back under the bedroom and connected to the old steel pipe (via a dielectric union) under the bedroom. If I had sold my house at that point, the next person to look at it would have though I was insane.
In reality, there was a very good reason for running the pipes back and forth. The house did not have enough clearance for anyone but the absolute smallest humans to get underneath it. With there being a noticeable lack of qualified 45 pound 6 year old plumbers, the plumbing work needed to be done by ripping up the flooring on the inside of the house. Since the kitchen remodel was not going to be started until the bedroom was done, I put in a large S. When I moved on to remodeling the kitchen, I was able to cut off the S at the first loop, and connect up all of the kitchen plumbing without any strange loops. Not only did I not have to tear up the brand new bedroom floors to connect up the kitchen plumbing, but I was also able to put fewer holes in the the kitchen sub-flooring, since the new copper from the bedroom remodel extended 10 feet into the kitchen.
There was a good reason for the crazy S. The crazy S saved me a decent amount of money, and a LOT of trouble. But, as I said, if for some reason, I had not been able to get to the kitchen remodel before selling the house, someone later down the line would have thought it was incompetence.
That being said, there is a lot bad construction being done by homeowners and professionals alike.
If you really want to BUILD the house instead of just assembling it, first you must create a universe. Anything less and you are just assembling a kit.
More seriously, you are correct. It comes down to what shade of gray you want to draw your line across.
Apple secretly pulled data that was not being publicly broadcast from phones. Apple admitted this. Yes, they said it in a way that would make most people think the opposite, but they definitely admitted it, and they will surely pull out their statement when they get busted again.
Google collected publicly broadcast data. Googles problem is not in the single act of harvesting a single piece of data. It is in the scale of what they did. Much like hunting a single rabbit isn't a problem, while systematically hunting down every single rabbit on the planet certainly is a problem.
You can call me a Google apologist if you want, but much as I wouldn't call the ancient North American Indians evil for having wiped out virtually all of the mega-fauna on the continent, I would not call Google evil for over harvesting 'public' wifi data. I would chalk them both up to being ignorant of the ramifications of their actions. I would call the harvesting of that kind of data today evil. Just as I would call knowingly wiping out established species today evil.
Funny, Jobs says that they are using the data collected from iPhones to produce a traffic monitoring application. It's funny watching the iPhone fans talk about the tracking. Half of them insist that everything is OK because the iPhones sent no data back to Apple, and the other half insist that everything is OK because the TOS and Apples public statements clearly states that they are collecting data from your phone, so you agreed to it.
Your analogy prompts one of my own to answer your question. Grabbing 'public' wifi data is like killing and eating a wild rabbit. If the occasional person does it, there isn't a problem. Even if a lot of people do it, it isn't a huge deal. One a company comes in and systematically does it to virtually all of them, you have a problem.
So, if you go out and shoot a rabbit and eat it for dinner, you have done nothing wrong. If Hasenpfeffer Incorporated sends trucks around the nation to systematically shoot every single rabbit in the country so that they can sell the meat, then we have a problem.
Given Google's history, and the fact that no one has tried to do what they are doing before, I would be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt that they did not intend to be evil by collecting more data than they should have. The ignorance excuse does not extend forward though. If in six months, it comes out that they still gathering that kind of data, they don't get to claim ignorance.
This is really a big part of the problem. Fishing is the only massive worldwide food staple that relies on hunting/gathering. It is also in a place that the vast majority of people cannot see, so doing the equivalent of clear cutting to the fish stock doesn't leave the dramatic photo shoots that clear cutting redwoods does. Hunting/gathering is horribly anti-ecological. It was bad for the environment when Indians roamed the plains of North America, and it is bad for the environment now. Being hunter/gatherers only work for small populations.
Netflix does not throttle. They never have throttled. The reports of "throttling" by Netflix were universally people using a definition for "throttle" that does not exist in the English language.
If you want to see throttling. Sign up for Gamefly.
A corporation, by definition and law, must maximize profits
This is a myth that is only becoming a reality because people believe it, and don't know how to speak their native tongue. Corporations must meet their fiduciary responsibilities. This is generally presumed to be to make as much profit as possible. That is not inherently the case though. I would say that if I owned Google stock, Google would be failing it's fiduciary responsibility by doing evil acts. Given that they have touted their motto of "Do no evil", using my assets to do evil would be a miss use of them, as they entered into a fiduciary relationship with me under the premise that my assets would not be used for evil. The current status quo of claiming that they are required to earn maximum profits at all cost is no different than claiming a child who has taken fiduciary responsibility for an aging parent must make their parent living in the absolute cheapest way possible to maximize profits on their investments.
OK, just brainstorming here, but how about a wireless fob that the phone can request the password from. The fob could be stored on your key chain, so if you lose your phone, the phone reverts back to the manual password and is as secure as passwords are, and if you lose the fob, you can just cancel it in the phone and re-sync to a new one.
That is a troll. The big problem with the iPhones wasn't that it was storing data in plain text. It was that Apple was collecting the data without the users knowledge. Apple then used doublespeak to make their fanboys believe that no data was being sent back to the mothership.
No, but you might want to say, President [of the United States] or President [of Sony Entertainment]. If you plan on referring to the only one of them 99% of the time with the matching word being what the thing is called, using the "of" form would be the correct word order.
Are you seriously suggesting that "people" who commit crimes should not be punished if there are innocent people relying on them? That makes you a part of the problem.
It's not just parenting and fear of lawsuit. It is also the law. We now have laws that make it a crime to let your kid ride in the back of a pickup. If you teach your 8 year old kid learn how to take care of themselves by letting them stay home while you go to store, you very well may end up in jail, and your child taken from you. We live in an age where proper parenting is actually a crime.
It is not exactly a great thing from a biological point of view. At some point, that intermixing ends up as a single gene pool that has all the problems of a genetic monoculture. What you want is waves of isolation combined with reintegration. In a best case scenerio, you have this happining in multiple places with different groups so that you have a constant influx of groups that have been isolated for many generations.
You likely accurate assessment of where we will be in 200 years will bring short term benefits, but will make the human race more likely to be wiped out in a pandemic in the long run.
Of course people are crazy. Just look at how many of them anthropomorphize animals to the point that they no longer can identify them as no being human. Heck, our society has gotten to the point that they are offended by the idea of "buying" a dog, and instead want people to "adopt" them.
That is the most likely scenario. OS unification is a forward looking task. It requires planning for the future. I can remember a time when MS was unifying corporate and consumer code bases. It seems to have worked out pretty good.
99.999999999% of the US didn't care that houses were being sold for far more than they a healthy housing market could bear. They didn't care that selling their house at rediculous prices and taking part in a totally unsustainable market bubble. People are short sighted and greedy. They are happily take short term gains that screw themselves in the long run.
Claiming that proprietary drivers are better because they work better right now is exactly that kind of short sightedness. AMD's move to help get open source drivers working on their hardware is specifically to prevent situations like yours where you you got bit by obsoleting GPUs. Those drivers that run at 60-70 percent of speed means that while you might take a hit, you won't be left out in the cold again. I have been bit by obsolete drivers from both ATI and nVidia so I am cautious either way.
AMD is taking the sustainable long term approach. nVidia is taking the short term more profitable approach. AMD has acknowledged their problems and are working at fixing them. nVidia is still at the party and has not yet had to deal with the falloutl
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I think it is a little unfair to say that they blew past evil. It is more of a case that they seem to have lost their drive to actively be good. Give the great power they wield, a neutral attitude towards good and evil will produce some evil results. Unlike MS or Apple who started out evil and have actively worked towards a goal of evil, Google started out good, and is sliding towards evil.
My one futile hope with Google is that they will end up as our Rosa Parks of Corporate abuse. Realistically I know it won't happen, but there is a small chance that some do gooder out there will sue Google for violating their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders by doing evil. Fiduciary responsibility is not the responsibility to make as much money as possible. It is the responsibility to use the persons assets in the persons best interest. Given Google's vocal statements of "Don't be evil", it would be perfectly reasonable to expect many shareholders to consider not being evil to be more valuable than a little increase in revenue.
That being said, this is why "The Cloud" is a disaster in the making. It leads to putting all your eggs in one basket. Services like Google's should only be used as a transitory service. Throw away email accounts, one off searches. Posting pictures that you want to supply to other people, and expect to have purged without notice.
The services ARE awesome. That shouldn't scare you. The scary part is the number of people that trust they will always have access to their data. The services Google offers don't inherently make them evil, but encouraging people to do something that will obviously cause them problems down the road is looking a bit like a passive evil.
All that being said, this particular guy has very little to complain about. He posted a picture of a naked 10 year old girl posed suggestively with the title Virgin Killers printed on it. The picture was already declared to be child porn in several countries, and the guy specifically stated that he wanted to see just how close he could get to child pornography without actually crossing the line. It is ridiculous for him to complain that someone else draws their line at a slightly different shade of gray.
Hopefully, this will be a good warning to people anyway in the dangers of losing control of your own data.
I got one for my kid at 3. Sure made our trip to Disneyland a lot less traumatic when he found an exit we didn't know about in the Tom Sawyer' caverns.
But please, tell me how I can have an "objective" opinion?
That easy. Just agree with mine!
Yeah, only a non-programmer would think that software doesn't just "accidentally" record extra information that it wasn't programmed to...
Correct, because a programmer would realize that you often receive a lot of data, and then you filter out the stuff you don't want. Buffer overflows are a perfect example of someone not filtering enough on the incoming data. Of course, receiving a lot of data and then filtering out what you don't want isn't limited to programming. It is also done while driving, having a conversation in a crowded rooms, cooking, walking down the street, etc..
I disagree. The only thing that a person of average intelligence might have a problem with is dealing with a building department that has a bad attitude towards homeowners. Your example of PVC pipe is a perfectly good one. PVC is trivial to work with, and can be done to high quality standards with only the smallest bit of care. Your example of electrical wiring is another good example. Residential electrical wiring is incredibly simple. There just are not that many factors involved in it, and pretty much all scenarios have good simple instructions available on how to do it. There are only a few gauges of ware that are used in a residential home, and each of their uses are well defined. You are more likely to kill yourself or others cooking in the kitchen than you are by doing your own electrical work.
I would say the problem with contractors is more one of them not caring than them not having the knowledge. I had an electrical company rewire one room in a renovation I was doing, since I needed the breaker box upgraded, and they would have better access to PG&E for shutting off the power at the pole. I figured that since they were there already, I would have them wire the room that was gutted at the same time. My instructions were that I wanted all of the old electrical removed, and new wiring put in to the locations in my plans. Not only did they leave old wiring in a couple of places because they though no one would notice, but when the inspectors came, the work didn't pass. I had to go in and fix their mistakes. Yes, I could have had them come back out, but that would have been more effort than to just fix the problem myself. I ended up doing all of the rest of the wiring myself, and the only issue the inspectors had was when they saw that I used a separate GFCI outlet on each kitchen plug instead of only putting one at the beginning of the leg. A simple explanation that the extra cost was worth not making someone else down the line try to figure out why an outlet doesn't work was worth it to me, and everything was fine. The inspector was just used to people taking the cheap low quality route.
The likely reason for the hose bib attached to the hot water and only the hot water is because the hot water line needed a repair. Whoever did the repair put the hose bib on it for future proofing, but did not see the need to immediately tear into the functioning cold water.
I did an even more 'strange' plumbing system myself several years ago. I was replacing all of the rotting steel water pipes in my home with copper. the water lines T'ed off under one of the bedrooms on it's way to the kitchen and bathroom. On the leg that ran to the kitchen, I put in a huge S that ran from under the bedroom to under the kitchen, back under the bedroom and connected to the old steel pipe (via a dielectric union) under the bedroom. If I had sold my house at that point, the next person to look at it would have though I was insane.
In reality, there was a very good reason for running the pipes back and forth. The house did not have enough clearance for anyone but the absolute smallest humans to get underneath it. With there being a noticeable lack of qualified 45 pound 6 year old plumbers, the plumbing work needed to be done by ripping up the flooring on the inside of the house. Since the kitchen remodel was not going to be started until the bedroom was done, I put in a large S. When I moved on to remodeling the kitchen, I was able to cut off the S at the first loop, and connect up all of the kitchen plumbing without any strange loops. Not only did I not have to tear up the brand new bedroom floors to connect up the kitchen plumbing, but I was also able to put fewer holes in the the kitchen sub-flooring, since the new copper from the bedroom remodel extended 10 feet into the kitchen.
There was a good reason for the crazy S. The crazy S saved me a decent amount of money, and a LOT of trouble. But, as I said, if for some reason, I had not been able to get to the kitchen remodel before selling the house, someone later down the line would have thought it was incompetence.
That being said, there is a lot bad construction being done by homeowners and professionals alike.
If you really want to BUILD the house instead of just assembling it, first you must create a universe. Anything less and you are just assembling a kit.
More seriously, you are correct. It comes down to what shade of gray you want to draw your line across.
Apple secretly pulled data that was not being publicly broadcast from phones. Apple admitted this. Yes, they said it in a way that would make most people think the opposite, but they definitely admitted it, and they will surely pull out their statement when they get busted again.
Google collected publicly broadcast data. Googles problem is not in the single act of harvesting a single piece of data. It is in the scale of what they did. Much like hunting a single rabbit isn't a problem, while systematically hunting down every single rabbit on the planet certainly is a problem.
You can call me a Google apologist if you want, but much as I wouldn't call the ancient North American Indians evil for having wiped out virtually all of the mega-fauna on the continent, I would not call Google evil for over harvesting 'public' wifi data. I would chalk them both up to being ignorant of the ramifications of their actions. I would call the harvesting of that kind of data today evil. Just as I would call knowingly wiping out established species today evil.
Funny, Jobs says that they are using the data collected from iPhones to produce a traffic monitoring application. It's funny watching the iPhone fans talk about the tracking. Half of them insist that everything is OK because the iPhones sent no data back to Apple, and the other half insist that everything is OK because the TOS and Apples public statements clearly states that they are collecting data from your phone, so you agreed to it.
Your analogy prompts one of my own to answer your question. Grabbing 'public' wifi data is like killing and eating a wild rabbit. If the occasional person does it, there isn't a problem. Even if a lot of people do it, it isn't a huge deal. One a company comes in and systematically does it to virtually all of them, you have a problem.
So, if you go out and shoot a rabbit and eat it for dinner, you have done nothing wrong. If Hasenpfeffer Incorporated sends trucks around the nation to systematically shoot every single rabbit in the country so that they can sell the meat, then we have a problem.
Given Google's history, and the fact that no one has tried to do what they are doing before, I would be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt that they did not intend to be evil by collecting more data than they should have. The ignorance excuse does not extend forward though. If in six months, it comes out that they still gathering that kind of data, they don't get to claim ignorance.
This is really a big part of the problem. Fishing is the only massive worldwide food staple that relies on hunting/gathering. It is also in a place that the vast majority of people cannot see, so doing the equivalent of clear cutting to the fish stock doesn't leave the dramatic photo shoots that clear cutting redwoods does. Hunting/gathering is horribly anti-ecological. It was bad for the environment when Indians roamed the plains of North America, and it is bad for the environment now. Being hunter/gatherers only work for small populations.
Netflix does not throttle. They never have throttled. The reports of "throttling" by Netflix were universally people using a definition for "throttle" that does not exist in the English language.
If you want to see throttling. Sign up for Gamefly.
A corporation, by definition and law, must maximize profits
This is a myth that is only becoming a reality because people believe it, and don't know how to speak their native tongue. Corporations must meet their fiduciary responsibilities. This is generally presumed to be to make as much profit as possible. That is not inherently the case though. I would say that if I owned Google stock, Google would be failing it's fiduciary responsibility by doing evil acts. Given that they have touted their motto of "Do no evil", using my assets to do evil would be a miss use of them, as they entered into a fiduciary relationship with me under the premise that my assets would not be used for evil. The current status quo of claiming that they are required to earn maximum profits at all cost is no different than claiming a child who has taken fiduciary responsibility for an aging parent must make their parent living in the absolute cheapest way possible to maximize profits on their investments.
OK, just brainstorming here, but how about a wireless fob that the phone can request the password from. The fob could be stored on your key chain, so if you lose your phone, the phone reverts back to the manual password and is as secure as passwords are, and if you lose the fob, you can just cancel it in the phone and re-sync to a new one.
That is a troll. The big problem with the iPhones wasn't that it was storing data in plain text. It was that Apple was collecting the data without the users knowledge. Apple then used doublespeak to make their fanboys believe that no data was being sent back to the mothership.
No, but you might want to say, President [of the United States] or President [of Sony Entertainment]. If you plan on referring to the only one of them 99% of the time with the matching word being what the thing is called, using the "of" form would be the correct word order.
More likely it would just create more crazy people who have an even harder time understanding that a dog is not a human.
Are you seriously suggesting that "people" who commit crimes should not be punished if there are innocent people relying on them? That makes you a part of the problem.
It's not just parenting and fear of lawsuit. It is also the law. We now have laws that make it a crime to let your kid ride in the back of a pickup. If you teach your 8 year old kid learn how to take care of themselves by letting them stay home while you go to store, you very well may end up in jail, and your child taken from you. We live in an age where proper parenting is actually a crime.
It is not exactly a great thing from a biological point of view. At some point, that intermixing ends up as a single gene pool that has all the problems of a genetic monoculture. What you want is waves of isolation combined with reintegration. In a best case scenerio, you have this happining in multiple places with different groups so that you have a constant influx of groups that have been isolated for many generations.
You likely accurate assessment of where we will be in 200 years will bring short term benefits, but will make the human race more likely to be wiped out in a pandemic in the long run.
I think it makes the point. How fully you use the hardware is a point on a scale of grays.
Of course people are crazy. Just look at how many of them anthropomorphize animals to the point that they no longer can identify them as no being human. Heck, our society has gotten to the point that they are offended by the idea of "buying" a dog, and instead want people to "adopt" them.
That is the most likely scenario. OS unification is a forward looking task. It requires planning for the future. I can remember a time when MS was unifying corporate and consumer code bases. It seems to have worked out pretty good.
Wow. You think the proprietary AMD drivers are perfectly optimized to run at 100% of the hardware's limit? That is a lot of faith to put in AMD.
99.999999999% of the US didn't care that houses were being sold for far more than they a healthy housing market could bear. They didn't care that selling their house at rediculous prices and taking part in a totally unsustainable market bubble. People are short sighted and greedy. They are happily take short term gains that screw themselves in the long run.
Claiming that proprietary drivers are better because they work better right now is exactly that kind of short sightedness. AMD's move to help get open source drivers working on their hardware is specifically to prevent situations like yours where you you got bit by obsoleting GPUs. Those drivers that run at 60-70 percent of speed means that while you might take a hit, you won't be left out in the cold again. I have been bit by obsolete drivers from both ATI and nVidia so I am cautious either way.
AMD is taking the sustainable long term approach. nVidia is taking the short term more profitable approach. AMD has acknowledged their problems and are working at fixing them. nVidia is still at the party and has not yet had to deal with the falloutl