2. yes we have to keep it short so that rating can happen in this lifetime:-) I have put several tracks together for my own projects (just me doing the ratings, and using pre-recorded samples as well as evolved synths) - here's the best example.
Hey, I dig this. Also enjoyed Like Ani.
3. there are no constraints on harmonies or anything, however the "palette" of notes is defined once (all evolved from random) and then the notes are picked from the palette. Mutations to the palette are going to be rare (because defining it takes many fewer "genes" than defining all the music) - hence the good agreement between loops.
Huh, interesting. I'd be very curious to know how different, or similar, the palette of a second evolution would be. I don't know if the sentiment came across in my previous post, but I think this is a really neat project and I have a feeling that the results of the research will prove enormously popular.
The project was put on hold in 2008 while I got out of the Slashdot-posting basement and looked for a girlfriend. I finally got one around the end of 2008,
Wow... phrased like that, getting a girlfriend is like a side quest in the RPG of your life.
Well, the terminology is debatable. They're talking about the malware and botnet operators getting more organized and reselling their services as malware-friendly ISPs.
I work for a web hosting company, but the vast majority of our customers are resellers who simply rent a dedicated box with cPanel, toss up a web page, and presto, they're a web hosting company too.
Found myself with some time to kill, so I had a go at this. Here are my thoughts:
1. The original loop (linked to in the summary) has a recognizable beat, even if many of the accompanying tones sound dreadful together. I'll put it this way: generation 0 sounded way better than a lot of the stuff I've seen try to pass for "electronic music" on YouTube. The original loop already had a fair amount of complexity to start with. I'd be more impressed if they began with a loop that had several sine waves with completely random attributes and then evolved that into something resembling music, and then evolved that into something resembling good music.
2. Note that they're only generating four-bar loops, not an entire song. My guess is that after they consider the experiment finished, they'll take the best ones and paste them into a song. Which won't be difficult, as this music fits into the electronic genre after all, and there is not that much variation amongst the loops that I heard.
3. I'd be curious to know what the constraints on the evolution algorithm are. For example, in the loops that I heard, a mis-matched set of notes was extremely rare so I wonder if they have chords or progressions that the algorithm can select from when generating a new loop.
4. On the front page, there's a video where a professor argues that evolution drives all of human music. I strongly disagree with this on just about every level. Music styles are based on culture, individual expression, and the power of suggestion. Yes, there is a kind of selection at work, but it only occurs within genres and cultures, and very little about it is natural. On top of that, the power of persuasion is immense. People can be told what to like. Today, it's commercially engineered pop music. Two centuries ago, it was religious hymns. Stephen Colbert could screw up this entire experiment just by taking pity on the horrid-sounding loop 76 and giving it his famous "Colbert Bump."
5. The loops really sound like they were made with a Tenori-On, so maybe these "researchers" are just fucking with us about the whole "evolved music" thing.
Well, nothing in particular. But this experiment is about evolving electronic music, as opposed to mainstream music. I suppose it would be possible to "steer" the song towards a familiar tune, but it would be pretty difficult given that all of the loops I heard were comprised of elements of the electronic genre, and also because the individually-rated loops are so short.
I always hear about huge performance gains that can come from properly writing code to take advantage of SSE2,3,4,etc instruction sets. If Intel really wants to push their hardware, why not write such optimizations for the Linux kernel?
In general, SIMD extensions like MMX, 3DNow, and SSE are application-specific. You can't just sprinkle them into the kernel code and get a magical system-wide speed boost. In the case of both MMX and SSE, the additional instructions allow a programmer to execute certain kinds of code faster. Generally, this means graphics rendering, video games, or audio/video encoding/decoding. Many Linux applications already do take advantage of SIMD extensions when compiled for the x86 platform. MPlayer is the most obvious one that I can think of, but I'm sure there are others.
I also wonder if anyone who provides such open-source legal templates might be exposing himself to liability. Suppose someone uses such a template and it turns out to be incorrect, even by some minor technicality, and as a result that person has additional legal expenses or other damages. They just might try to sue the person who produced the template.
You can sue anyone for anything, it's getting the court to agree that's the hard part. In this case, no sane judge is going to agree with assertion that posting a document template or example form to the Internet constitutes bona fide legal advice.
The root problem here is that the submitter wants to be able to do all the things that a certified lawyer (or accountant, etc) is trained to do, but doesn't want to hire one.
Well, it's kinda like hard drives. There's a minimal cost to make the drive no matter how much space you make available on it. You pretty much never see a brand-new hard disk selling for less than $40, even if it can only hold some absurdly small number of gigabytes.
Same goes for computers. Even if you use old technology, you have to price the unit to cover the up-front costs of design and licensing as well as the ongoing costs of manufacturing and logistics. By the time you get your unit out the door, it's $150-$200 retail and most of your prospective buyers will look at it and say, "Heck, we can get second-hand Pentium 4 desktops for $99 a pop. No thanks!"
You make a good point, but I think what bugs the recording industry the most is this bit:
The difference, according to Capitol, is that not only has Vimeo not tried very hard to protect copyright owners,
They're just using the "lip dubs" lawsuit as a club. The thing that the recording industry is really complaining about here that Vimeo is not actively policing the copyrights of other companies. Let that sink in for a moment.
Think about all the recent copyright legislation and brouhaha that's been going on in the last few years: it's all been about the major content corporations trying everything they can think of to make someone else responsible for the enforcement of their copyrights. They already got YouTube to do it for them, so they can now legally go after every video-sharing site on the Internet and ask them, "What are you doing to protect our copyright interests? By the way, if the answer is 'nothing,' we'll see you in court."
It's part of a larger effort by McDonalds to reinvent their more metropolitan stores as a chain of coffee shops that happen to sell fast food also.
Besides, it always makes sense for a food service business to offer free wifi. For as long as McDonald's has been ubiquitous, the golden arches have symbolized two primary things to travellers: 1) cheap, mediocre food 2) relatively clean bathrooms. No reason why #3 can't be relatively stable wifi.
SkyGrabber (whose site is apparently down, either due to popularity or The Man) is seemingly an application that connects to fairly standard satellite equipment and "leeches" content off the downlink stream of a satellite Internet provider. This is actually a fairly old trick and it wouldn't surprise me if there already is some open source code out there that allowed this. The downlink stream contains all of the data for all of the service's customers and is usually broadcast in the clear. So everyone using the service receives everyone else's data, but each modem only forwards along the data sent to its specific MAC address. It's basically like a one-way space-borne Ethernet hub.
The implication, then, is that the drones are using standard, unencrypted, IP-over-satellite protocols to get the streaming video (and possibly other data) from their drones. It's extremely unlikely that the drone control signals and other sensitive information are this unprotected as well or we wouldn't have even heard about this news story.
A promise is not legally binding, right? TFA doesn't provide much detail but I'm a bit skeptical that the Moonlight EULA says anywhere in it, "we will not sue you for using this software."
Perhaps a legal-type person can shine some light (pun!) on the situation.
Do you have any legal reason for these claims or are you just pontificating?
Just pontificating. I don't need a legal reason to share my opinions on Slashdot.
In the case of the former, you're absolutely wrong (my terms of employment specify reasonable personal use of the telephone and computers for everyone from the janitor to the president). If you're just spouting off, the good news for the rest of us is that most people don't like to have an obnoxious absolutist relationship with their employer and so laws are unlikely to ever line up with your views.
Okay, my statements came across as a bit unyielding. What I should have said was something along the lines of, "use employer-provided devices for personal use if (and only if) you are willing to accept the consequences of doing so." For example, if I send personal emails at work, my employer has every right to the contents of those messages and can even use them to judge my performance, attitude, and work ethic. Many people, including the guy in TFA, don't want this. They want to use an employer's resources for free while also having their privacy protected and it just doesn't work that way.
Just guessing, you don't have kids, do you?
Yes, I do. And if I'm called at work due to an emergency, I'm perfectly fine with my employer knowing everything about that phone call.
A person in jail talking with their lawyer via telephone (whether closed circuit in person or to the lawyer's office) doesn't own the communications device or have property rights to the room they're in yet their conversion is and must be considered protected.
Because that's a completely separate situation. Attorney/client privilege is explicitly protected by law. The person in jail is obviously not in a traditional work setting, and the laywer is performing his job. No conflict there.
As would a private conversation between a husband and wife, even if they happen to have borrowed my car and are driving while conversing.
No employment is happening here, I don't think it applies to this case.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for communications privacy, but I don't think it's something that people are entitled to at work. If the employer wants to voluntarily grant personal use of their property to employees (be it personal phone calls, using facebook on a government laptop, or making a grocery run in the company truck), that's fine. But none of these are things that should be legally protected.
But there's still a way to measure the perceived loudness, correct? Even if it means the station has to decrease the volume of the commercial to match the average of the last n seconds of regular programming, there's a way to fix this.
Of course, I would prefer that TV makers simply build the functionality into their sets rather than create a law about it. But if the FCC can mandate what kinds of content can and cannot be broadcast on public airwaves, I guess its within their ability to set limits on content loudness (or at least changes in loudness).
Also, any rules or laws should be applied to the broadcast stations or provider issuing the signal, not the networks. The worst offenders with loud commercials are local advertisers.
I heard this on NPR this morning and the fact that they were using the phrase "grey area" astounded me.
Look, it's simple: if your employer owns a device, and allows you to use it, you are not to ever use it for personal reasons, nor should you ever expect even the slightest amount of privacy for communications using the device. Even (and probably especially) if they give you permission for personal use. That goes for cell phones, pagers, computers, slide rules, everything. That means you do not log into personal Facebook, Google, or Hotmail at work. You do not use the company phone to call home. If you do any of these, you've 1) probably violated the terms of your employment and 2) have given the company/government permission to peer into all personal communications made with your employer's equipment.
You have explicit rights (in most cases) to privacy and use of the property that you actually own. That's it, the line is drawn there. I can't believe there is any controversy over this.
Dunno about you, but I consider a hackable device to a be a nice thing.
One of the reasons I've been holding back on an ebook reader is because there hasn't been much success in opening them up despite the fact that they run open source software under the hood. Now that this has happened with the Nook (before it has shipped, even?), I'm pretty much set on buying one now.
All three console manufacturers suffered from the recession -- this year
All car manufacturers suffered from the recession. Is driving dying?
Not even Nintendo has escaped the financial plague either, with sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US, 60 percent in Japan and 47 percent in the rest of the world.
The Wii has been out for quite awhile too. Wii games (and therefore licensing) can continue to be massively successful, even if sales of the console peter out. You left out the fact that despite falling sales of the Wii (which can actually be a good thing if it indicates market saturation), Nintendo is actually the only one of the three that posted an overall profit.
In addition to reduced profitability, casual games and the rise of the iPhone further suggest the current model is not invulnerable."
Are you an idiot? The iPhone is not going to replace anyone's XBox, PS3, or Wii. Mobile phones, PC games, and console games all serve entirely different markets. None of these are going to take over the other in the foreseeable future. Stop trolling the easily-trolled Slashdot editors.
Take a look at the pics of that device. No, really: RTFA. That is one of the dumbest designs for consumer electronics gear I've ever seen. I looks like someone took a cube and hacked off about half of it at a completely random angle, and then laid it awkwardly on its cut side. I don't care what kind of multimedia experience this thing offers, I would not buy this thing simply for its stupid looks.
I wouldn't be caught dead with this thing in my living room and that's saying a lot since my entertainment center is a bunch of equipment stacked up on a fish tank stand.
I'm all for using science and research to improve safety, but this seems a little pointless to me. All helicopter crashes can be generally lumped into two categories: those in which control is lost at a relatively high altitude, and those in which control is lost only a short distance from the ground.
In the former case, no one survives. Once a helicopter pilot loses control of the machine, it has all the aerodynamics of a grand piano and will collide with the ground with much the same effect.
In the latter case, the biggest threat to life and safety isn't the collision with the ground, it's the two giant rotors spinning at an ungodly rate. In a crash, the rotors inevitably strike the ground or a nearby structure and cause all manner of high-velocity objects, material, shrapnel, as well as the rotor blades themselves, to go flying in all directions.
This flying airbag is only going to be of much help in only the best-case crashes where the bird is only a short distance from the ground, perfectly level, and a good distance away from any structures. Go watch some YouTube videos of helicopter crashes. Those kinds of videos completely cured me of wanting to be a helicopter pilot some day. There are lots of ways a pilot can survive even the most severe problem with a normal airplane. In a helicopter, even the slightest mistake can kill you and a lot of other people before you even realize a mistake has been made.
I'm very happy that Google is one of the most open source friendly, but most of their major open source work is relatively recent. Sketchup, Picasa, and Google Earth are all applications that would have gained serious traction had Google opened up the code and let volunteers port them to different platforms and improve the code. They are also the biggest single user of the Linux kernel but have contributed very little back to the mainline tree. (Admittedly, they actually want to now, but Google's kernel bears little resemblance to the mainline kernel at this point, so it's not really practical on a technical level. But it would have been a lot easier if they contributed their changes from the start.)
1. A deeply intellectual corporate cultural, with 70% of its workforce having PhDs (I don't know if this is still true.)
Pretty sure it's not. Google's business is advertising and almost all of their branch offices scattered around the world are filled with staff that support mainly that aspect of their business.
This includes the "20%" concept, whereby all Google staff is given free-reign to research what interests them 1 day out of 5.
Last I heard, "20% time" applied only to their engineers, the PhD types. And they're not given free reign, the projects have to have merit and get approved. The project has to have the potential to benefit the company somehow, even if indirectly.
5. The sense that they are moving the functions of the library into the 21st century.
Except that they tried to do this by force. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the publishing industry, but Google basically planned from the start to infringe on the copyright of almost every author/publisher with a book in the library and then negotiate forgiveness (in the form of an exclusive contract) later.
We need to be more skeptical and hold Google accountable for the considerable power they now possess.
Remember a decade ago when clueless users thought AOL was the Internet? Although it won't surprise me, I'm hoping that we never get to the point where people think Google is the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I dig this. Also enjoyed Like Ani.
Huh, interesting. I'd be very curious to know how different, or similar, the palette of a second evolution would be. I don't know if the sentiment came across in my previous post, but I think this is a really neat project and I have a feeling that the results of the research will prove enormously popular.
The project was put on hold in 2008 while I got out of the Slashdot-posting basement and looked for a girlfriend. I finally got one around the end of 2008,
Wow... phrased like that, getting a girlfriend is like a side quest in the RPG of your life.
Well, the terminology is debatable. They're talking about the malware and botnet operators getting more organized and reselling their services as malware-friendly ISPs.
I work for a web hosting company, but the vast majority of our customers are resellers who simply rent a dedicated box with cPanel, toss up a web page, and presto, they're a web hosting company too.
Found myself with some time to kill, so I had a go at this. Here are my thoughts:
1. The original loop (linked to in the summary) has a recognizable beat, even if many of the accompanying tones sound dreadful together. I'll put it this way: generation 0 sounded way better than a lot of the stuff I've seen try to pass for "electronic music" on YouTube. The original loop already had a fair amount of complexity to start with. I'd be more impressed if they began with a loop that had several sine waves with completely random attributes and then evolved that into something resembling music, and then evolved that into something resembling good music.
2. Note that they're only generating four-bar loops, not an entire song. My guess is that after they consider the experiment finished, they'll take the best ones and paste them into a song. Which won't be difficult, as this music fits into the electronic genre after all, and there is not that much variation amongst the loops that I heard.
3. I'd be curious to know what the constraints on the evolution algorithm are. For example, in the loops that I heard, a mis-matched set of notes was extremely rare so I wonder if they have chords or progressions that the algorithm can select from when generating a new loop.
4. On the front page, there's a video where a professor argues that evolution drives all of human music. I strongly disagree with this on just about every level. Music styles are based on culture, individual expression, and the power of suggestion. Yes, there is a kind of selection at work, but it only occurs within genres and cultures, and very little about it is natural. On top of that, the power of persuasion is immense. People can be told what to like. Today, it's commercially engineered pop music. Two centuries ago, it was religious hymns. Stephen Colbert could screw up this entire experiment just by taking pity on the horrid-sounding loop 76 and giving it his famous "Colbert Bump."
5. The loops really sound like they were made with a Tenori-On, so maybe these "researchers" are just fucking with us about the whole "evolved music" thing.
Well, nothing in particular. But this experiment is about evolving electronic music, as opposed to mainstream music. I suppose it would be possible to "steer" the song towards a familiar tune, but it would be pretty difficult given that all of the loops I heard were comprised of elements of the electronic genre, and also because the individually-rated loops are so short.
In general, SIMD extensions like MMX, 3DNow, and SSE are application-specific. You can't just sprinkle them into the kernel code and get a magical system-wide speed boost. In the case of both MMX and SSE, the additional instructions allow a programmer to execute certain kinds of code faster. Generally, this means graphics rendering, video games, or audio/video encoding/decoding. Many Linux applications already do take advantage of SIMD extensions when compiled for the x86 platform. MPlayer is the most obvious one that I can think of, but I'm sure there are others.
You can sue anyone for anything, it's getting the court to agree that's the hard part. In this case, no sane judge is going to agree with assertion that posting a document template or example form to the Internet constitutes bona fide legal advice.
The root problem here is that the submitter wants to be able to do all the things that a certified lawyer (or accountant, etc) is trained to do, but doesn't want to hire one.
Well, it's kinda like hard drives. There's a minimal cost to make the drive no matter how much space you make available on it. You pretty much never see a brand-new hard disk selling for less than $40, even if it can only hold some absurdly small number of gigabytes.
Same goes for computers. Even if you use old technology, you have to price the unit to cover the up-front costs of design and licensing as well as the ongoing costs of manufacturing and logistics. By the time you get your unit out the door, it's $150-$200 retail and most of your prospective buyers will look at it and say, "Heck, we can get second-hand Pentium 4 desktops for $99 a pop. No thanks!"
You make a good point, but I think what bugs the recording industry the most is this bit:
They're just using the "lip dubs" lawsuit as a club. The thing that the recording industry is really complaining about here that Vimeo is not actively policing the copyrights of other companies. Let that sink in for a moment.
Think about all the recent copyright legislation and brouhaha that's been going on in the last few years: it's all been about the major content corporations trying everything they can think of to make someone else responsible for the enforcement of their copyrights. They already got YouTube to do it for them, so they can now legally go after every video-sharing site on the Internet and ask them, "What are you doing to protect our copyright interests? By the way, if the answer is 'nothing,' we'll see you in court."
Equating geeks to crack addicts? Is that you, Darl?
It's part of a larger effort by McDonalds to reinvent their more metropolitan stores as a chain of coffee shops that happen to sell fast food also.
Besides, it always makes sense for a food service business to offer free wifi. For as long as McDonald's has been ubiquitous, the golden arches have symbolized two primary things to travellers: 1) cheap, mediocre food 2) relatively clean bathrooms. No reason why #3 can't be relatively stable wifi.
Buy? Yes.
Sell? Score:5, Funny
Excellent, more room for those of us who love working with and/or making the technology instead of merely subsisting off it.
I know your post was in jest, but...
SkyGrabber (whose site is apparently down, either due to popularity or The Man) is seemingly an application that connects to fairly standard satellite equipment and "leeches" content off the downlink stream of a satellite Internet provider. This is actually a fairly old trick and it wouldn't surprise me if there already is some open source code out there that allowed this. The downlink stream contains all of the data for all of the service's customers and is usually broadcast in the clear. So everyone using the service receives everyone else's data, but each modem only forwards along the data sent to its specific MAC address. It's basically like a one-way space-borne Ethernet hub.
The implication, then, is that the drones are using standard, unencrypted, IP-over-satellite protocols to get the streaming video (and possibly other data) from their drones. It's extremely unlikely that the drone control signals and other sensitive information are this unprotected as well or we wouldn't have even heard about this news story.
I've watched Primer three times. It's great, but I was wondering if you can PM me and tell me what it's about...
A promise is not legally binding, right? TFA doesn't provide much detail but I'm a bit skeptical that the Moonlight EULA says anywhere in it, "we will not sue you for using this software."
Perhaps a legal-type person can shine some light (pun!) on the situation.
Just pontificating. I don't need a legal reason to share my opinions on Slashdot.
Okay, my statements came across as a bit unyielding. What I should have said was something along the lines of, "use employer-provided devices for personal use if (and only if) you are willing to accept the consequences of doing so." For example, if I send personal emails at work, my employer has every right to the contents of those messages and can even use them to judge my performance, attitude, and work ethic. Many people, including the guy in TFA, don't want this. They want to use an employer's resources for free while also having their privacy protected and it just doesn't work that way.
Yes, I do. And if I'm called at work due to an emergency, I'm perfectly fine with my employer knowing everything about that phone call.
Because that's a completely separate situation. Attorney/client privilege is explicitly protected by law. The person in jail is obviously not in a traditional work setting, and the laywer is performing his job. No conflict there.
No employment is happening here, I don't think it applies to this case.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for communications privacy, but I don't think it's something that people are entitled to at work. If the employer wants to voluntarily grant personal use of their property to employees (be it personal phone calls, using facebook on a government laptop, or making a grocery run in the company truck), that's fine. But none of these are things that should be legally protected.
But there's still a way to measure the perceived loudness, correct? Even if it means the station has to decrease the volume of the commercial to match the average of the last n seconds of regular programming, there's a way to fix this.
Of course, I would prefer that TV makers simply build the functionality into their sets rather than create a law about it. But if the FCC can mandate what kinds of content can and cannot be broadcast on public airwaves, I guess its within their ability to set limits on content loudness (or at least changes in loudness).
Also, any rules or laws should be applied to the broadcast stations or provider issuing the signal, not the networks. The worst offenders with loud commercials are local advertisers.
I heard this on NPR this morning and the fact that they were using the phrase "grey area" astounded me.
Look, it's simple: if your employer owns a device, and allows you to use it, you are not to ever use it for personal reasons, nor should you ever expect even the slightest amount of privacy for communications using the device. Even (and probably especially) if they give you permission for personal use. That goes for cell phones, pagers, computers, slide rules, everything. That means you do not log into personal Facebook, Google, or Hotmail at work. You do not use the company phone to call home. If you do any of these, you've 1) probably violated the terms of your employment and 2) have given the company/government permission to peer into all personal communications made with your employer's equipment.
You have explicit rights (in most cases) to privacy and use of the property that you actually own. That's it, the line is drawn there. I can't believe there is any controversy over this.
Dunno about you, but I consider a hackable device to a be a nice thing.
One of the reasons I've been holding back on an ebook reader is because there hasn't been much success in opening them up despite the fact that they run open source software under the hood. Now that this has happened with the Nook (before it has shipped, even?), I'm pretty much set on buying one now.
No.
All car manufacturers suffered from the recession. Is driving dying?
The Wii has been out for quite awhile too. Wii games (and therefore licensing) can continue to be massively successful, even if sales of the console peter out. You left out the fact that despite falling sales of the Wii (which can actually be a good thing if it indicates market saturation), Nintendo is actually the only one of the three that posted an overall profit.
Are you an idiot? The iPhone is not going to replace anyone's XBox, PS3, or Wii. Mobile phones, PC games, and console games all serve entirely different markets. None of these are going to take over the other in the foreseeable future. Stop trolling the easily-trolled Slashdot editors.
Take a look at the pics of that device. No, really: RTFA. That is one of the dumbest designs for consumer electronics gear I've ever seen. I looks like someone took a cube and hacked off about half of it at a completely random angle, and then laid it awkwardly on its cut side. I don't care what kind of multimedia experience this thing offers, I would not buy this thing simply for its stupid looks.
I wouldn't be caught dead with this thing in my living room and that's saying a lot since my entertainment center is a bunch of equipment stacked up on a fish tank stand.
I'm all for using science and research to improve safety, but this seems a little pointless to me. All helicopter crashes can be generally lumped into two categories: those in which control is lost at a relatively high altitude, and those in which control is lost only a short
distance from the ground.
In the former case, no one survives. Once a helicopter pilot loses control of the machine, it has all the aerodynamics of a grand piano and will collide with the ground with much the same effect.
In the latter case, the biggest threat to life and safety isn't the collision with the ground, it's the two giant rotors spinning at an ungodly rate. In a crash, the rotors inevitably strike the ground or a nearby structure and cause all manner of high-velocity objects, material, shrapnel, as well as the rotor blades themselves, to go flying in all directions.
This flying airbag is only going to be of much help in only the best-case crashes where the bird is only a short distance from the ground, perfectly level, and a good distance away from any structures. Go watch some YouTube videos of helicopter crashes. Those kinds of videos completely cured me of wanting to be a helicopter pilot some day. There are lots of ways a pilot can survive even the most severe problem with a normal airplane. In a helicopter, even the slightest mistake can kill you and a lot of other people before you even realize a mistake has been made.
s/attack on the military/act of war/
I'm very happy that Google is one of the most open source friendly, but most of their major open source work is relatively recent. Sketchup, Picasa, and Google Earth are all applications that would have gained serious traction had Google opened up the code and let volunteers port them to different platforms and improve the code. They are also the biggest single user of the Linux kernel but have contributed very little back to the mainline tree. (Admittedly, they actually want to now, but Google's kernel bears little resemblance to the mainline kernel at this point, so it's not really practical on a technical level. But it would have been a lot easier if they contributed their changes from the start.)
Pretty sure it's not. Google's business is advertising and almost all of their branch offices scattered around the world are filled with staff that support mainly that aspect of their business.
Last I heard, "20% time" applied only to their engineers, the PhD types. And they're not given free reign, the projects have to have merit and get approved. The project has to have the potential to benefit the company somehow, even if indirectly.
Except that they tried to do this by force. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the publishing industry, but Google basically planned from the start to infringe on the copyright of almost every author/publisher with a book in the library and then negotiate forgiveness (in the form of an exclusive contract) later.
Remember a decade ago when clueless users thought AOL was the Internet? Although it won't surprise me, I'm hoping that we never get to the point where people think Google is the Internet.