Well... that would work if some of them didn't live near enough to me that they drive by and see my car in the driveway constantly. It wasn't so much the telling them as it was the getting it to sink in that "car in driveway, me at home =/= I have the day off to go play a round of golf." It took some repetition, that's all. What I meant in saying this was that work was actually less likely to call me on my off-hours than family/friends were to drop by/call on my on-hours.
Sure, gameplay is a little awkward - i mean really, bathroom breaks? 8 hours of just sitting there sleeping? grinding professions for 50 years if you want to reach max level?
But you have to admit, the graphics engine is amazing - the scenery is so lifelike!
Here's the first few things that spring to mind from my experience, working from home about 50% of the time:
1) Construct a sturdy firewall your work time and personal time. Don't allow family and friends to treat your work hours as "free time," and don't allow your workplace to say "since your workplace is your home, you're always at work!" Honestly for me, the hardest part was telling family and friends, "yeah, I'm working from home, but that doesn't mean I'm not working," and getting them to accept that they can't just pop by whenever.
2) Video- and/or voice- chatting can be super helpful, if you can get your coworkers used to communicating that way. Also, a consistent & constant instant message presence allowing people to reach out and get in touch with you quickly and easily can be helpful. You won't be in the office, but availability via other methods will help dilute the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon.
3) If you like a little social interaction during your day, investigate co-working setups - with people you work with, or at commercial/public co-working spaces. Or, find a coffee shop/library etc. that might allow you to set up camp for the day. A day like that now and then I find to be fairly energizing. Your mileage may vary.
Probably not, I don't have any complaint against him telling stories from across the industrial base of China to highlight awful working conditions there. As consumers, I'd hope we all care to SOME degree whether or not our cheap toys and comforts are created by people laboring in sweatshop conditions. However (always a 'but,' right?), if he wants people to respond emotionally, using the (real) name of a (real) company that people are familiar with is a dicey proposition.
He runs the risk of people hearing his message, and concluding, "this is journalism, and Apple is the only company (or at least by far the worst) engaged in these kinds of practices." It runs the risk of leaving people with the sense that *only Apple* needs to be punished for being this rapacious machine which is ruining lives, not that "this is standard practice in the electronic manufacture business, and Apple is just one example of the companies taking advantage of these conditions." And in fact, conditions might even be *better* at Foxconn than it is at many other factory complexes. I have no evidence other than the head of Fair Labor making a comment to that effect, so obviously, take with huge grain of salt: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/15/us-china-apple-idUSTRE81E1FQ20120215. But it certainly can skew perception of the scope, and nature of the problem if you take too many creative liberties with the story you're telling as part of your activism.
The problem with this "creative activism" is that activism by definition says, "There is a problem here, and we need to fix it. We need to apply pressure and bring resources to bear to right this wrong." Creativity in service of that - documentaries, fiction, photography, art, music, theater - can all help drive home to people that there *is* a real problem, and we *should* fix it. But when creativity starts crossing the line from "using creative means to advocate for fixing a real situation" and becomes "creating a fictionalized account of the problem we're advocating for," well - if you're fictionalizing some elements of the problem, well... where does drama end and truth begin? How bad *is* the problem, really? Is there even a problem? If you raise all these questions, and simply respond to those questions with a blanket assertion that "of course there's a problem, I'm just telling you a dramatized version of the problem to make you understand it," you're really not helping to define or connect people to the problem - you're asking them to just agree with you that there's a problem, while never clearly stating what the problem is.
The stories themselves are - generally - compelling enough in their own right. I think if you put a camera (or audio recorder) on people whose lives, health, and futures have been destroyed and ask them to tell their stories, you can pack an incredible emotional wallop. Flirting with dramatization and fiction in telling your story runs the risk of, as we see here, discrediting the very cause you're advocating for. See also the recent flak Invisible Children has caught for their Kony 2012 campaign, where all kinds of criticism has been levelled against Invisible Children for not telling "the whole truth."
All of that would be great, if people were simply criticizing him for "dramatizing" working conditions in China. But people aren't doing that. They're criticizing him for going on a national news show and representing his dramatization (and in cases, outright lies) as facts. You're defending him against the former, which does nothing to absolve him of the latter.
The fact that his show is "actually a dramatization, and dramatization is okay in creative activism," has no relevance to the fact (there's that word again) that he went on the national news, and delivered this dramatization as fact. He is to blame - and has stated as such - for not making it clear that his work was theatrical, not factual.
You say he has to "answer for misrepresenting his story," but in your very first post, you said, "Everyone involved here did their job, until it came to us." Now, unless his job description includes "portraying a dramatized monologue as journalistic fact," he did not do his job. In fact (that word! again!) he appears to have gone to some effort to avoid having his stories fact checked, instead of telling TAL "look, to be very clear, this is a dramatic monologue, not a journalistic story. I am trying to shed light on the atrocious working conditions in China by telling this story, and I have taken liberties with times and dates and places and companies. However, these abuses exist and are endemic to Chinese industry. If you'd care to report on the actual stories I'm using as my inspiration, then I'd love to help you build a piece that draws from all of those, and maybe spends 10 minutes talking about my work, and how it ties in."
In other words, he would have been given a whole new platform to highlight the abuses, and get people to "engage passionately" and care about correcting these problems. Instead, he decided to just "do his monologue," present it as fact, and brush off any criticism as a simple misunderstanding about what he does. And, whether you're a "creative activist" or a "journalist," the misrepresentation is inexcusable.
And if his "creative" work involves "creating" facts that are reported on national news as facts, that's okay?
And if Fox News decided to start calling Anne Coulter a "creative activist" - I mean, she writes books, that's creative! - you'd be okay with them reporting, "Anne Coulter says President Obama isn't even an American - he was born in Kenya, and he's a Muslim!" After all, she's creative, and an activist... TRUTH doesn't matter in the news, as long as it's for a "creative" cause, right?
I forgot what a lot of pedants you all are.
What you're calling pedantry is really just people calling you out for the ridiculous logical contortions you're twisting yourself into in order to justify Daisey's lies - presented as fact - "because they're activism for a good cause."
They asked him for the contact info for the translator he used so they could corroborate his stories. He refused to provide that info. If you don't want your stories fact-checked, don't present them to the world as fact.
Isn't Safari the one misrepresenting what the security settings do?
It's an unintended side effect of how Safari handles third-party cookies: Safari blocks third party cookies, but makes an exception for sites the user interacts with (i.e., if you click on an ad, it will allow that ad to install a cookie). So what Google is doing is basically loading a no-op form element in an iframe and automatically submitting it - this tricks Safari into behaving as if the USER submitted the form (thus interacting with the ad), allowing Google to set the cookie.
Safari WOULD block setting of the cookie without this workaround being coded & inserted into the ads being served up by DoubleClick... so it's not a case of Google being held to account for promises Safari makes, it's that Google is being held to account for intentionally exploiting a loophole in the software to abuse users. People keep trying to turn this into an "Google vs. Apple" issue, and the real issue (and where it's eroding trust in Google) is that it's a "Google vs. Users" issue. I can't trust Google to honor those settings in my browser, can I trust them to honor any other settings and preferences I set in my browser, or register with them?
There's no reason Google couldn't have instead put up a page saying "We notice you don't allow third party cookies... this will mean you can't +1 things, blah blah blah," and include instructions on changing the setting if the user wishes to enable +1's and other tracking, rather than simply disregarding the users' settings and exploiting the loophole.
Technicians apparently mis-entered the pattern enough times to lock the phone, which could only be unlocked using the phone owner's Google account credentials.
That the company fritters away a portion of it's revenue small enough to be considered insignificant when taken in the context of their overall balance sheet, does not detract from that.
According to their 2011 financial reports, they spent 14% of their total revenue on R&D in 2011, just over 5 billion dollars. That's a *significant* portion of revenue, we're not talking about petty cash here.
If they keep funding billions of dollars worth of projects that "go nowhere," then that takes away from the projects that COULD be making them more profitable. The 16 billion we're talking about here represents about 3 years worth of Google's R&D budgets. That's 3 years worth of R&D effort for which they have little or nothing to show, and for which some unspecified "long term" ROI may be possible.
If they think that billions of dollars invested will increase their profitability at some point in the future, that's one thing. But I fail to see any reasonable ROI horizon for "billions of dollars on driverless cars = we save a couple million a year on driver salaries." Or, "we save 30 million a year on energy from our wind and solar projects, and that justifies spending billions of dollars on them." These *are* questions that investors are going to ask of Google - and it's not necessarily borne out of a "short term profits uber alles" mindset. A 20 year ROI on a multi-billion dollar investment is a LONG term investment, and yet they're not even talking about how they expect that these investments today will benefit them in that sort of a timeframe. It's "well we wanted to do this, and it sounded cool, so we did it... and we don't know if it'll ever be profitable."
An assertion you have resoundingly failed to demonstrate proof of.
Gmail debuted in 2004. Webmail systems existed long before that - Hotmail debuted in 1996, and was purchased by Microsoft in 1997. Google+ debuted in 2011. Facebook debuted in 2004. Google Docs debuted in 2005 or 2006, and in this regard, they beat Microsoft and other vendors ONLY in "doing it on the web first."
What, exactly, is all their research money inventing? The answer: new ways & places to advertise. Google's profitable "research and development" investments mostly involve answers to the question of, "how do we keep users from going to other sites where they might see other people's ads, and not ours?" -- Gmail was a way of keeping webmail users looking at Google ads, the concept of webmail existed long before. -- Google+ (and before it, Buzz) was an attempt to keep Facebook users looking at Google ads, the concept of a social network site wasn't invented there. And in light of recent studies, it appears to have been a failure so far in terms of attracting and retaining users in a way that advertisers would pay substantially for access to them. -- Google Docs, admittedly brought word processing functionality to the web first, again, primarily as a way of keeping people using Google's free, ad-supported services - it's not as if they invented the idea of word processors or spreadsheets. In fact, their word processor was an acquisition, formerly Writely. -- Android certainly wasn't the first mobile phone OS, it was another acquisition into which Google integrated their services (and thus, their ads).
This is not to say that some of Google's services don't have value, and aren't useful. It simply means that their successful research projects seem primarily oriented on "finding new ways to advertise to people," not "breaking open new markets and categories unrelated to advertising." As such, it's unclear to me why investors should trust that Google will "eventually, at some point" find profitable businesses out of large expenditures in wildly unrelated markets such as self-driving vehicles, offshore wind farms, solar energy, and lunar exploration.
And you seriously believe the NSA is all that interested in protecting Google information systems?
I seriously believe that the NSA is downright giddy to be able to use data about and monitoring of attacks on Google's information systems from foreign sources to learn about the capabilities and methods of foreign intelligence agencies and non-governmental organizations who might be interested in gaining access to Google for illegal or unethical purposes.
I also seriously believe that Google's systems are increasingly used by an increasing number of government agencies, which makes their security very relevant to the agency tasked with securing the US government's information systems.
Seriously, I'm neither naive, nor do I work for the NSA. Seriously.
Also seriously, what sort of fucked-up metaphor is "can barely wipe their own ass without having the balls to admit wrong doing?" I'm struggling to parse that statement in a way that makes sense, and all I'm left with is a headache. I seriously believe that your tinfoil hat might contain lead, and is causing you irreversible brain damage. You should probably seek medical help.
Learn the difference between a textbook and real life, please.
I'm genuinely curious what you consider "textbook" about anything I wrote. By definition, being a publicly held company means that you offer to let people own a small amount (let's call it "holding a share") of your business, and in return, they get an oversight role in your company - they elect a board of directors, who in turn provides governance over the company's operations.
If a company doesn't like that arrangement, they're welcome to avoid taking their company public, and instead can structure private equity deals with individual lenders and investors, or fund the businesses all by themselves. But the fact remains: if you want to have your stock on a publicly traded market, your investors will take an interest in how you spend your money. This is as gritty a definition of "real life" as it gets.
Google claims they're doing "long term research," that will "someday be profitable," yet none of their "long term projects" have moved the needle at all in terms of their revenues: 96% of their revenues *still* come from advertising, which has always been their sole core business. So what's their time-frame on "long term investing?" Have they ever defined that? How long do I need to hold their stock to expect to see a return on that money, and how much money will they continue spending in the meantime? These are very relevant questions for any investor, and shouting "just trust them," isn't a good enough answer.
At some point, they run the risk of looking like they're flailing around in the dark, blind and incompetent. When that happens, shareholders either replace the board with a board that will provide better governance, or they simply (and quietly) sell off their shares and tank the stock price, which has a direct effect on the company's ability to raise money for future "wouldn't it be cool if...." binges.
Again - this is not theory, this is the way it *really* works, in the *real* stock market, in the *real* world. Many companies are privately held. Google's protestation that "people should just shut up and let us spend however we want because we're way smarter than they are and know what's best for them" is what sounds more high-falutin' theory than anything else.
Good thing Google operates many overseas & international businesses. Also, good thing that the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD), which is one half of the NSA, is tasked with protecting the information systems owned by the US government.
If companies don't like the influence shareholders have over their goals and priorities, they DO have the option of not going public, and remaining a privately-held company.
If you put yourself out on the market asking for investments, then you should expect that the people who loan you the money will be looking for a reasonable return on that investment, and will want to have some input into your priorities and goal-setting to make sure you're not taking their money and pissing it away on hookers and coke.
If you don't want a lot of other fingers in the pie, don't ask other people to fund your pie-making. It really is that simple.
And that's fine, and perfectly reasonable - but if you're truly making assumptions based on past performance, make sure you take note of the number of times that the NSA and other intel agencies have legitimately acted in America's security interests and "done the right thing" - not just the "Top 50 worst moments in American intelligence agency history, which prove they're all inherently, irredeemably evil because assuming that fits neatly with my biases."
In fairness to Google and the NSA, it's possible for them to be involved on projects together that *don't* involve assembly of a complete dossier of every citizen alive today, with realtime updates.
There are lots of people around the world - many of whom even live outside the US! - who might view Google's systems as an attractive (and critical) piece of infrastructure that would be valuable to penetrate; the NSA is tasked with monitoring and collecting foreign signal intelligence and other communications... it's entirely possible that their collaboration involves detecting, monitoring, and responding to foreign threats, even the establishment and monitoring of honeypots and the like, the existence of which would be confirmed by documents detailing the relationship. This would serve to tip off the organizations trying to penetrate Google's systems, and they could adapt and circumvent the monitoring Google & the NSA have put in place. Being able to monitor these penetration attempts lets the NSA collect data on the methods & capabilities of other intelligence agencies.
There ARE possibilities that don't require careful application of tin foil to your cranium. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be prudent with the use of Google's services, but a collaboration between Google and the NSA *need not* be solely for evil purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... that would work if some of them didn't live near enough to me that they drive by and see my car in the driveway constantly. It wasn't so much the telling them as it was the getting it to sink in that "car in driveway, me at home =/= I have the day off to go play a round of golf." It took some repetition, that's all. What I meant in saying this was that work was actually less likely to call me on my off-hours than family/friends were to drop by/call on my on-hours.
As I understand it, what happens at the end of the game depends on your faction rep, mostly. Now get to work on those dailies.
Sure, gameplay is a little awkward - i mean really, bathroom breaks? 8 hours of just sitting there sleeping? grinding professions for 50 years if you want to reach max level?
But you have to admit, the graphics engine is amazing - the scenery is so lifelike!
Here's the first few things that spring to mind from my experience, working from home about 50% of the time:
1) Construct a sturdy firewall your work time and personal time. Don't allow family and friends to treat your work hours as "free time," and don't allow your workplace to say "since your workplace is your home, you're always at work!" Honestly for me, the hardest part was telling family and friends, "yeah, I'm working from home, but that doesn't mean I'm not working," and getting them to accept that they can't just pop by whenever.
2) Video- and/or voice- chatting can be super helpful, if you can get your coworkers used to communicating that way. Also, a consistent & constant instant message presence allowing people to reach out and get in touch with you quickly and easily can be helpful. You won't be in the office, but availability via other methods will help dilute the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon.
3) If you like a little social interaction during your day, investigate co-working setups - with people you work with, or at commercial/public co-working spaces. Or, find a coffee shop/library etc. that might allow you to set up camp for the day. A day like that now and then I find to be fairly energizing. Your mileage may vary.
Probably not, I don't have any complaint against him telling stories from across the industrial base of China to highlight awful working conditions there. As consumers, I'd hope we all care to SOME degree whether or not our cheap toys and comforts are created by people laboring in sweatshop conditions. However (always a 'but,' right?), if he wants people to respond emotionally, using the (real) name of a (real) company that people are familiar with is a dicey proposition.
He runs the risk of people hearing his message, and concluding, "this is journalism, and Apple is the only company (or at least by far the worst) engaged in these kinds of practices." It runs the risk of leaving people with the sense that *only Apple* needs to be punished for being this rapacious machine which is ruining lives, not that "this is standard practice in the electronic manufacture business, and Apple is just one example of the companies taking advantage of these conditions." And in fact, conditions might even be *better* at Foxconn than it is at many other factory complexes. I have no evidence other than the head of Fair Labor making a comment to that effect, so obviously, take with huge grain of salt: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/15/us-china-apple-idUSTRE81E1FQ20120215. But it certainly can skew perception of the scope, and nature of the problem if you take too many creative liberties with the story you're telling as part of your activism.
The problem with this "creative activism" is that activism by definition says, "There is a problem here, and we need to fix it. We need to apply pressure and bring resources to bear to right this wrong." Creativity in service of that - documentaries, fiction, photography, art, music, theater - can all help drive home to people that there *is* a real problem, and we *should* fix it. But when creativity starts crossing the line from "using creative means to advocate for fixing a real situation" and becomes "creating a fictionalized account of the problem we're advocating for," well - if you're fictionalizing some elements of the problem, well... where does drama end and truth begin? How bad *is* the problem, really? Is there even a problem? If you raise all these questions, and simply respond to those questions with a blanket assertion that "of course there's a problem, I'm just telling you a dramatized version of the problem to make you understand it," you're really not helping to define or connect people to the problem - you're asking them to just agree with you that there's a problem, while never clearly stating what the problem is.
The stories themselves are - generally - compelling enough in their own right. I think if you put a camera (or audio recorder) on people whose lives, health, and futures have been destroyed and ask them to tell their stories, you can pack an incredible emotional wallop. Flirting with dramatization and fiction in telling your story runs the risk of, as we see here, discrediting the very cause you're advocating for. See also the recent flak Invisible Children has caught for their Kony 2012 campaign, where all kinds of criticism has been levelled against Invisible Children for not telling "the whole truth."
Oh, I see what you mean - we'll lose money per-unit, but make it up in volume! I'm on board with this plan.
Is this because an autonomous solar powered plane is cheap to build, launch, and manage?
Yeah, but as with just about everything, it's the "getting enough money" part that makes up the bulk of the "hard part."
$1000 server in the sky vs. $85k AIM-9 Sidewinder. Value proposition gets much more attractive.
$1000 server in the sky vs. $2-4 (per round) M61 Vulcan gatling gun (20mm x 120 mm): At prices like these, you can't afford NOT to shoot them down!
All of that would be great, if people were simply criticizing him for "dramatizing" working conditions in China. But people aren't doing that. They're criticizing him for going on a national news show and representing his dramatization (and in cases, outright lies) as facts. You're defending him against the former, which does nothing to absolve him of the latter.
The fact that his show is "actually a dramatization, and dramatization is okay in creative activism," has no relevance to the fact (there's that word again) that he went on the national news, and delivered this dramatization as fact. He is to blame - and has stated as such - for not making it clear that his work was theatrical, not factual.
You say he has to "answer for misrepresenting his story," but in your very first post, you said, "Everyone involved here did their job, until it came to us." Now, unless his job description includes "portraying a dramatized monologue as journalistic fact," he did not do his job. In fact (that word! again!) he appears to have gone to some effort to avoid having his stories fact checked, instead of telling TAL "look, to be very clear, this is a dramatic monologue, not a journalistic story. I am trying to shed light on the atrocious working conditions in China by telling this story, and I have taken liberties with times and dates and places and companies. However, these abuses exist and are endemic to Chinese industry. If you'd care to report on the actual stories I'm using as my inspiration, then I'd love to help you build a piece that draws from all of those, and maybe spends 10 minutes talking about my work, and how it ties in."
In other words, he would have been given a whole new platform to highlight the abuses, and get people to "engage passionately" and care about correcting these problems. Instead, he decided to just "do his monologue," present it as fact, and brush off any criticism as a simple misunderstanding about what he does. And, whether you're a "creative activist" or a "journalist," the misrepresentation is inexcusable.
And if his "creative" work involves "creating" facts that are reported on national news as facts, that's okay?
And if Fox News decided to start calling Anne Coulter a "creative activist" - I mean, she writes books, that's creative! - you'd be okay with them reporting, "Anne Coulter says President Obama isn't even an American - he was born in Kenya, and he's a Muslim!" After all, she's creative, and an activist... TRUTH doesn't matter in the news, as long as it's for a "creative" cause, right?
What you're calling pedantry is really just people calling you out for the ridiculous logical contortions you're twisting yourself into in order to justify Daisey's lies - presented as fact - "because they're activism for a good cause."
They asked him for the contact info for the translator he used so they could corroborate his stories. He refused to provide that info. If you don't want your stories fact-checked, don't present them to the world as fact.
It's an unintended side effect of how Safari handles third-party cookies: Safari blocks third party cookies, but makes an exception for sites the user interacts with (i.e., if you click on an ad, it will allow that ad to install a cookie). So what Google is doing is basically loading a no-op form element in an iframe and automatically submitting it - this tricks Safari into behaving as if the USER submitted the form (thus interacting with the ad), allowing Google to set the cookie.
Safari WOULD block setting of the cookie without this workaround being coded & inserted into the ads being served up by DoubleClick... so it's not a case of Google being held to account for promises Safari makes, it's that Google is being held to account for intentionally exploiting a loophole in the software to abuse users. People keep trying to turn this into an "Google vs. Apple" issue, and the real issue (and where it's eroding trust in Google) is that it's a "Google vs. Users" issue. I can't trust Google to honor those settings in my browser, can I trust them to honor any other settings and preferences I set in my browser, or register with them?
There's no reason Google couldn't have instead put up a page saying "We notice you don't allow third party cookies... this will mean you can't +1 things, blah blah blah," and include instructions on changing the setting if the user wishes to enable +1's and other tracking, rather than simply disregarding the users' settings and exploiting the loophole.
I heard what you are said. But in a seriously note, I think you needs struggles to avoid blowing you're top.
Interestingly, it seemed they will edited the summary to finishing with, "Another kick in the teeth as company struggles to avoid bankruptcy."
Maybe this been a new approach to editing, and they just randomly insert and words until something vaguely intelligible on the screen?
(Editors: please consider this post a writing sample for purposes of my employment as a member of the crack /. editing team.)
That's exactly what happened:
According to their 2011 financial reports, they spent 14% of their total revenue on R&D in 2011, just over 5 billion dollars. That's a *significant* portion of revenue, we're not talking about petty cash here.
If they keep funding billions of dollars worth of projects that "go nowhere," then that takes away from the projects that COULD be making them more profitable. The 16 billion we're talking about here represents about 3 years worth of Google's R&D budgets. That's 3 years worth of R&D effort for which they have little or nothing to show, and for which some unspecified "long term" ROI may be possible.
If they think that billions of dollars invested will increase their profitability at some point in the future, that's one thing. But I fail to see any reasonable ROI horizon for "billions of dollars on driverless cars = we save a couple million a year on driver salaries." Or, "we save 30 million a year on energy from our wind and solar projects, and that justifies spending billions of dollars on them." These *are* questions that investors are going to ask of Google - and it's not necessarily borne out of a "short term profits uber alles" mindset. A 20 year ROI on a multi-billion dollar investment is a LONG term investment, and yet they're not even talking about how they expect that these investments today will benefit them in that sort of a timeframe. It's "well we wanted to do this, and it sounded cool, so we did it... and we don't know if it'll ever be profitable."
An assertion you have resoundingly failed to demonstrate proof of.
Gmail debuted in 2004. Webmail systems existed long before that - Hotmail debuted in 1996, and was purchased by Microsoft in 1997. Google+ debuted in 2011. Facebook debuted in 2004. Google Docs debuted in 2005 or 2006, and in this regard, they beat Microsoft and other vendors ONLY in "doing it on the web first."
What, exactly, is all their research money inventing? The answer: new ways & places to advertise. Google's profitable "research and development" investments mostly involve answers to the question of, "how do we keep users from going to other sites where they might see other people's ads, and not ours?"
-- Gmail was a way of keeping webmail users looking at Google ads, the concept of webmail existed long before.
-- Google+ (and before it, Buzz) was an attempt to keep Facebook users looking at Google ads, the concept of a social network site wasn't invented there. And in light of recent studies, it appears to have been a failure so far in terms of attracting and retaining users in a way that advertisers would pay substantially for access to them.
-- Google Docs, admittedly brought word processing functionality to the web first, again, primarily as a way of keeping people using Google's free, ad-supported services - it's not as if they invented the idea of word processors or spreadsheets. In fact, their word processor was an acquisition, formerly Writely.
-- Android certainly wasn't the first mobile phone OS, it was another acquisition into which Google integrated their services (and thus, their ads).
This is not to say that some of Google's services don't have value, and aren't useful. It simply means that their successful research projects seem primarily oriented on "finding new ways to advertise to people," not "breaking open new markets and categories unrelated to advertising." As such, it's unclear to me why investors should trust that Google will "eventually, at some point" find profitable businesses out of large expenditures in wildly unrelated markets such as self-driving vehicles, offshore wind farms, solar energy, and lunar exploration.
I seriously believe that the NSA is downright giddy to be able to use data about and monitoring of attacks on Google's information systems from foreign sources to learn about the capabilities and methods of foreign intelligence agencies and non-governmental organizations who might be interested in gaining access to Google for illegal or unethical purposes.
I also seriously believe that Google's systems are increasingly used by an increasing number of government agencies, which makes their security very relevant to the agency tasked with securing the US government's information systems.
Seriously, I'm neither naive, nor do I work for the NSA. Seriously.
Also seriously, what sort of fucked-up metaphor is "can barely wipe their own ass without having the balls to admit wrong doing?" I'm struggling to parse that statement in a way that makes sense, and all I'm left with is a headache. I seriously believe that your tinfoil hat might contain lead, and is causing you irreversible brain damage. You should probably seek medical help.
I'm genuinely curious what you consider "textbook" about anything I wrote. By definition, being a publicly held company means that you offer to let people own a small amount (let's call it "holding a share") of your business, and in return, they get an oversight role in your company - they elect a board of directors, who in turn provides governance over the company's operations.
If a company doesn't like that arrangement, they're welcome to avoid taking their company public, and instead can structure private equity deals with individual lenders and investors, or fund the businesses all by themselves. But the fact remains: if you want to have your stock on a publicly traded market, your investors will take an interest in how you spend your money. This is as gritty a definition of "real life" as it gets.
Google claims they're doing "long term research," that will "someday be profitable," yet none of their "long term projects" have moved the needle at all in terms of their revenues: 96% of their revenues *still* come from advertising, which has always been their sole core business. So what's their time-frame on "long term investing?" Have they ever defined that? How long do I need to hold their stock to expect to see a return on that money, and how much money will they continue spending in the meantime? These are very relevant questions for any investor, and shouting "just trust them," isn't a good enough answer.
At some point, they run the risk of looking like they're flailing around in the dark, blind and incompetent. When that happens, shareholders either replace the board with a board that will provide better governance, or they simply (and quietly) sell off their shares and tank the stock price, which has a direct effect on the company's ability to raise money for future "wouldn't it be cool if...." binges.
Again - this is not theory, this is the way it *really* works, in the *real* stock market, in the *real* world. Many companies are privately held. Google's protestation that "people should just shut up and let us spend however we want because we're way smarter than they are and know what's best for them" is what sounds more high-falutin' theory than anything else.
Hoses are just flexible tubes. Ted Stevens was right.
Good thing Google operates many overseas & international businesses. Also, good thing that the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD), which is one half of the NSA, is tasked with protecting the information systems owned by the US government.
That's a simple matter of weight ratios, as Monty Python ably demonstrated.
To put it another way, a swallow-sized drone will never be able to carry a 500 pound JDAM coconut.
So he was saying that the internet really is a series of tubes?
If companies don't like the influence shareholders have over their goals and priorities, they DO have the option of not going public, and remaining a privately-held company.
If you put yourself out on the market asking for investments, then you should expect that the people who loan you the money will be looking for a reasonable return on that investment, and will want to have some input into your priorities and goal-setting to make sure you're not taking their money and pissing it away on hookers and coke.
If you don't want a lot of other fingers in the pie, don't ask other people to fund your pie-making. It really is that simple.
And that's fine, and perfectly reasonable - but if you're truly making assumptions based on past performance, make sure you take note of the number of times that the NSA and other intel agencies have legitimately acted in America's security interests and "done the right thing" - not just the "Top 50 worst moments in American intelligence agency history, which prove they're all inherently, irredeemably evil because assuming that fits neatly with my biases."
In fairness to Google and the NSA, it's possible for them to be involved on projects together that *don't* involve assembly of a complete dossier of every citizen alive today, with realtime updates.
There are lots of people around the world - many of whom even live outside the US! - who might view Google's systems as an attractive (and critical) piece of infrastructure that would be valuable to penetrate; the NSA is tasked with monitoring and collecting foreign signal intelligence and other communications... it's entirely possible that their collaboration involves detecting, monitoring, and responding to foreign threats, even the establishment and monitoring of honeypots and the like, the existence of which would be confirmed by documents detailing the relationship. This would serve to tip off the organizations trying to penetrate Google's systems, and they could adapt and circumvent the monitoring Google & the NSA have put in place. Being able to monitor these penetration attempts lets the NSA collect data on the methods & capabilities of other intelligence agencies.
There ARE possibilities that don't require careful application of tin foil to your cranium. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be prudent with the use of Google's services, but a collaboration between Google and the NSA *need not* be solely for evil purposes.