What cloud computing will do is to erase the advantage that one company has over their competitors. Take a company who has a 'better' business process and has built their in-house IT systems around it. Now, have them move to a cloud solution. The first things that must go are their custom data models and algorithms.
Why?
Existing cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon EC2) let you run any software in the cloud. You are confusing "cloud computing" (which is, insofar as you are using someone else's cloud, hardware as a service) with software-as-a-service, which is one application of cloud computing, but hardly the only one. While a company could buy an COTS solution hosted in the cloud rather than deploying their custom solution in the cloud, they could just as easily buy a COTS solution to run on hardware in their own datacenter instead of custom software. The value calculus of COTS vs. custom software doesn't substantially change between the cloud and the in-house datacenter, indeed, it is cloud computing in its "hardware-as-a-service" form that makes remotely-hosted, dynamically provisionsed, and internally-developed and supported custom applications a stronger alternative to remotely-hosted, dynamically provisioned, OTS SaaS solutions, allowing the scalability and flexibility of dynamic provisioning with the control provided by custom applications. And open source cloud computing software enables those benefits to be realized, within the overall limits of available hardware, in the company's own datacenter, as well.
What do you think "cloud computing" is, exactly? That's right... SaaS.
Cloud computing isn't exactly SaaS, at least as the term is generally used; its more like hardware as a on-demand service. Now, one of the applications of cloud computing is to enable SaaS, but its not the only application.
Do you think other companies that comply with the GPL do so because they like the license?
Yes, because (a) they prefer the terms, (b) they prefer access to an audience who intends to link with other GPL code, and/or (c) they prefer the ability to legally incorporate existing GPL code themselves. All three amount to reasons to like the license.
How are all proprietary licenses viral? If I use Visual Studio(or the command line compilers and linkers in.NET), Borland, whatever and compile statically against every possible Windows and.NET library, does my code/application become the property of MS to sell and distribute according to the terms of Visual Studio?
No, and if you use GCC and related tools and link statically against every possible GPL license, your code does not become the property of the FSF.
However, redistribution of "your" code that incorporates the MS-licensed code is subject to the licenses on those libraries, just as code the incorporates the GPL-licensed code is subject to that license. Naturally, the restrictions those licenses place on you in terms of what you can (or must) allow (or prohibit) downstream users from doing with the code are different, reflecting the different interests of Microsoft and the FSF.
Israel acquired nuclear technology from a variety of western sources, used it to build their own nuclear arsenal, and sold it to South Africa who used it in building their own nuclear arsenal; some of the scientists from the South African program have, since South Africa disarmed, gone on to work with the A. Q. Khan network out of Pakistan that has been the a major vehicle for the proliferation of nuclear technology to "rogue nations".
There are a number of conventional examples, as well.
Great Powers have nuclear weapons, so conventional wars aren't possible
Conventional wars against and between nuclear powers are not only possible, they have, in fact, occurred. (E.g., the India-Pakistan Kargil War of 1999.)
You can casually watch television shows on demand, on your phone. Which, BTW, is roughly analogous to the pocket communicators on the original series of "Star Trek", except that they couldn't watch shows or take video/pictures or blog or play solitaire on them.
OTOH, your phone can't send and receive FTL signals, which is the only thing substantially futuristic about Star Trek's communicators, even when the series was first filmed in the 1960s. (Communicators are FTL walkie-talkies; if you ignore the FTL part, they are only barely futuristic from the point of view of the 1960s.)
What the heck are you talking about? None of this is metaphysical, it's theoretically possible with good enough imaging tools to make a 1:1 copy.
No, its not even theoretically possible (in fact, it is theoretically impossible) to determine the information necessary to make a perfectly accurate copy down to the lowest level of the structure and state of the system.
It may be possible to make a good enough copy that it works, it may not; we don't know enough about how it works to know if such a copy is even theoretically possible or not. Even if it is theoretically possible, that doesn't make it practical; its theoretically possible to acheive FTL velocity relative to a particular reference frame by a number of mechanisms (e.g., frame dragging by a rotating black hole mass). That FTL velocities are theoretically attainable, however, would not make a claim of practical FTL travel in the next ten years that would transform society particularly credible.
It's a near perfect market, in the economic sense. The barrier to entry into the registration business is almost nil, it's all just some data processing. And as economics tells us, as a market approaches 'perfection', profit margins approach 0%. So it's not surprising that some registrars are resorting to shady business practices; the only people who can make money in the registration business are those who are willing to do a little lying and cheating.
Actually, you are illustrating that it quite far from a "perfect market". A perfect market requires perfect information (and, particularly, that the perceived utility that purchasers have when making purchase decisions perfectly aligns with the experienced utility they derive from purchases.)
In a perfect market, sellers could not resort to deception (either through dishonesty or simple omission) to manipulate purchase decisions.
Reading the title and summary would make you think that the entire program has been cancelled and the planes aren't going to be used by the US military. This is not the case. The Senate reduced the number of aircraft being produced such that no additional planes will be made.
And even that may be a bit misleading; the Senate eliminated funding for 7 additional F-22s that were proposed to be ordered, limiting the total run to 187, which includes not just planes which have already been delivered but also some that have previously been ordered which have not yet been delivered, so it is not the case that "no additional planes will be made", at least if by "additional" one means "additional to those that have already been made", rather than "additional to the ones already planned to be made".
After enjoying several years of popularity, music games seem to be drawing less and less interest from gamers lately. Guitar Hero and Rock Band titles have been conspicuously absent from a list of the 20 best-selling software titles in the past two months
Given the model those games use, I'd expect a big surge when a new core game + bandkit combo is released that would then taper off, and given that the controllers are largely compatible between versions and across franchises, you'd expect the percentage of sales that are high revenue per unit bandkit + core game combo sales to drop over time, with more purchases of just the game, or individual "instrument" controllers as isolated upgrades and replacements, even if the popularity (which isn't the same thing as $ sales volume) of the genre were constant.
Just think about the resources that could be brought to bear if all three of these groups put the savings they realize from adopting OSS into manpower and financial resources behind developing OSS further.
They are unlikely to realize substantial, direct short-term savings from adopting OSS; for the off-the-shelf software (things like desktop OS's and basic office software), short-term license savings will probably be consumed by increased support and retraining costs, for new development, open source requirements will probably not decrease the cost of new development.
In the long term, there should be efficiency improvements, but for the most part those aren't going to be redirected into OSS investments (though adopting OSS itself, insofar as those organizations pay for custom software development, will involve OSS investments), they'll be redirected into more funds going into the substantive work the organizations do, or less costs being passed on to students/taxpayers. The benefits to OSS will be the adoption itself, particularly in terms of custom development.
Let's try to go further than adoption and focus on creation and collaboration as part of the buy-in to the process.
For organizations that spend money on custom software, OSS adoption is OSS creation; you don't have to (nor is it usually consistent with the organization's mission to) also redirect "savings" into additional, gratuitous OSS development.
I'm afraid this is a common misconception. Copyright refers to, literally, the right to copy something. If I give everyone in the world, or even just one single person, the right to copy an image, then I have _effectively_ surrendered my copyright.
Copyright refers to a set of exclusive rights granted to particular people ("copyright holders") with regard to specific works (which works are covered, and exactly which rights are included, are matters of the differing laws of various nations.)
If I give everyone in the world, or even just one single person, the right to copy an image, then I have _effectively_ surrendered my copyright.
No, you have licensed your copyright. Unless this is part of a contractual exchange (in US law, at least) this license is revocable at will. Even if it is part of a contractual exchange, their right to copy the image (and their right, if any, to transfer that right), insofar as it is a use of your rights under copyright, extends only so far as you have provided for it to in the terms of the license. You have no more surrendered your copyright than you have surrendered your ownership of your home when you allow someone else to enter it.
No, its true, that you may give up the control that makes the copyright valuable to you if what you value is control and you give a license which include broad rights to sublicense. But that doesn't mean you have "surrendered" your copyright, even effectively. For some people, they want certain of their works to be widely distributed, but, e.g., they want credit for them -- and for them, distributing works under a license which creates broad rights for the licensee to distribute the work with attribution isn't "surrendering" their copyright, its leveraging it most effectively to serve their interests.
One would think, they want their pages to be printable and (re)publishable
Why?
Because (from the horse's mouth) "Wikipedia... is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project." The "why" not be the same for everyone involved in the project, for some "free content" may be an independently good, for others it may be an instrumental good, but whatever the reasons that individuals support it for, its part of the core Wikipedia mission.
However, in terms of the OLPC goal, they should of gotten on their knees and begged for Windows XP. Giving children all around the world laptops is the more important goal than spreading FOSS
Giving children all around the goal laptops was not the goal of the One Laptop Per Child )(OLPC) project, despite the name (the name referred to the means, not the ends). The goal was to enable a particular (constructivist) model of education using the laptop as the primary tool, and to do it in a way which didn't need to involve a lot of teaching about the computer itself, which support central management and security with users who were, in many cases, learning to read. WinXP's UI, security model,and, well, lots of its other features aren't really all that compatible with the actual goals of the project. The licensing model may have had problems, as well, but they aren't the only problems.
Stars meet and greet each other all the time. Could they not exchange cameras then snap away so that each person is then in possession of their own pictures?
Pictures of stars that are of a quality that the star is going to want them in public probably require professional photography (including retouching.)
If they were happy with the quality of casual snapshots, they wouldn't be complaining about what is on Wikipedia now.
We aren't finding massive new strikes of gold and invading neighbors and carting away slaves and jewelry.
We're not invading other countries over gold because its not fundamental to the economy (even late in the period where there was a notional gold standard, there were all kinds of mechanisms in place that weakened the influence of actual gold on the economy.
(OTOH, we do fight wars -- fairly frequently -- over control of resources that are important to the economy; reducing those to the ones that are fundamentally important rather than one's that we make important as an easily avoidable choice is probably a good idea; that's one major argument over tying currency closely to any particular resource.)
Given that we've just faced a crisis which almost destroyed the economy, I don't know how anyone can claim gold could be any worse. It would have prevented the runup.
No, it wouldn't. Speculative bubbles and other types of financial meltdowns with very similar (and, in many cases, more severe) effects than the current major recession are not prevented by having commodity-backed currency. The Great Depression happened while the US was on the gold standard (and not in as loose and notional a way as it was after the Depression up until the 1970s.) The same is true of the late 19th Century railroad bubble (in which the resulting crisis was exacerbated by factors related to the fact that the US had redeemable gold-backed currency), the wave of bank of failures in 1907, and a number of other major economic crises of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The argument that the present economic crisis is somehow proves that nothing could be any worse is amazingly historically ignorant.
Exactly! I'm part of a demographic of paying customers that doesn't care if a game is over in a month if the game was REALLY good! The fact that my demographic exists renders your proposed solution of making all games be replayable for greater than 3 months defunct.
I proposed no such solution. In fact, I didn't propose anything.
How would a more robust protective order have acted as a complete bar to asserting fair use?
If I understand GP, he isn't saying that the robust protective order would have been a bar to asserting fair use, he is saying that the appropriate sanction for failing to produce the required evidence would be to dismiss the case because, as the failure to produce the evidence within their control relevant to the defense asserted by the defendant, which defense would be a bar to plaintiff's action. (Note that I am not endorsing this position, only stating that I believe that is what GP was proposing.)
There are some absolutely GREAT games out there that cost a lot to develop with relatively low replay value past a month.
Well, "GREAT", particularly with an entertainment product, is subjective. IMO, if it doesn't have replay value for substantially more than a year, its not a "great" game, and probably isn't even a "good" game.
There are plenty of games (any SimCity title except Societies, any of the 'main' PC versions of the Sims [not the console or stories titles], any version of the Civ or CtP franchises, anything in the Total War series, anything in the Delta Force series, and lots more) that have enough replay value, for me, that I only stop playing them because a newer, better version with compelling new features comes along that fits in my budget, and I'd still enjoy playing the older ones.)
Yeah, tightly scripted games tend to either run out of gameplay or present inordinate frustration factors to stretch the gameplay. That's one reason, IMO, such games are generally worth less than more open-ended games.
It may feel like a rip-off to some, but you've got to admit that paying $30 for Gears of War 2 sure beats paying $60! Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them
Sure, there is; they can stop distributing physical media altogether, and use download-and-activate distribution exclusively. Sure, it can be less convenient for the user (especially if the game needs to "phone home" at launch), but its quite possible for game companies to give you nothing "used" to sell.
OTOH, its not clear to me that game publishers should be worried about used sales at all, sales of used games transfer funds from the price conscious buyers that aren't as concerned with getting the latest and greatest new to the people that want the best now, and thus give more money to the people who are buying new games in the first place. Killing used game sales might just result in the price conscious people only buying the "classic" games that have had their price dropped because they are old, while the people who are willing to pay full freight for new games won't have as much cash to do it, resulting in the game companies taking longer to pay off the development costs of new titles.
This, however, is not a clever way of "enhancing" web pages. We have the information we need, and we're satisfied. No need to put bells and whistles on it. If it were up to me (which it isn't), there would be no such thing as "web design". Web pages are not a fashion show, they're just means of sharing, displaying and publishing information.
Yeah, but a lot of glyphs that are useful for sharing certain types of information aren't in the most common fonts; being able to embed a font that you know supports well glyphs you need to communicate the information best to the audience you are targeting is a good thing for many specialized applications.
But, sure, it'll be abused a lot by people to use annoying fonts badly. Such is the way of the web.
Matching the growth (or shrinkage!) of the money supply based solely on the discovery, loss, or recovery of a particular natural resource hardly seems like a good plan for managing the economy.
Matching the growth or shrinkage of the money supply based on the whims of banks and legislators seems like a much worse plan.
Certainly, fiat currency its had more visible problems recently, but that's only because gold as currency is so much worse that its not used on a wide scale anymore, and when no one is using it, it can't have any visible problems.
Note that gold as currency is, as well as being inconvenient for small transactions, subject to most of the many of the same potential problems as fiat currency, while gold-backed representational currency, which deals with the convenience problems, is subject to all of the same potential problems, while both are subject to additional problems like being subject to the market conditions relating to a single commodity that is otherwise not that critical to the economy, increasing the ability of market fluctuations for that commodity to disrupt the entire economy.
So basically everything gets rerouted on a hot day.
Except that its not "everything", even on a hot day, its just that the total load at that center must be reduced (not eliminated) on a hot day.
And also, it seems odd that the cost of building a (hopefully redundant) datacenter that is this unreliable would be less than consolidating it with another one and using electrical cooling.
Google needs to have many data centers, and problems it has had in the past have shown that it needs to have the ability to seemlessly shift load between them anyway; so, for them, this is just another factor in the determination of where load should be shifted. It may not be more cost effective for other companies, whose baseline data center needs are different.
Slashdot Mirror
Why?
Existing cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon EC2) let you run any software in the cloud. You are confusing "cloud computing" (which is, insofar as you are using someone else's cloud, hardware as a service) with software-as-a-service, which is one application of cloud computing, but hardly the only one. While a company could buy an COTS solution hosted in the cloud rather than deploying their custom solution in the cloud, they could just as easily buy a COTS solution to run on hardware in their own datacenter instead of custom software. The value calculus of COTS vs. custom software doesn't substantially change between the cloud and the in-house datacenter, indeed, it is cloud computing in its "hardware-as-a-service" form that makes remotely-hosted, dynamically provisionsed, and internally-developed and supported custom applications a stronger alternative to remotely-hosted, dynamically provisioned, OTS SaaS solutions, allowing the scalability and flexibility of dynamic provisioning with the control provided by custom applications. And open source cloud computing software enables those benefits to be realized, within the overall limits of available hardware, in the company's own datacenter, as well.
Cloud computing isn't exactly SaaS, at least as the term is generally used; its more like hardware as a on-demand service. Now, one of the applications of cloud computing is to enable SaaS, but its not the only application.
Yes, because (a) they prefer the terms, (b) they prefer access to an audience who intends to link with other GPL code, and/or (c) they prefer the ability to legally incorporate existing GPL code themselves. All three amount to reasons to like the license.
No, and if you use GCC and related tools and link statically against every possible GPL license, your code does not become the property of the FSF.
However, redistribution of "your" code that incorporates the MS-licensed code is subject to the licenses on those libraries, just as code the incorporates the GPL-licensed code is subject to that license. Naturally, the restrictions those licenses place on you in terms of what you can (or must) allow (or prohibit) downstream users from doing with the code are different, reflecting the different interests of Microsoft and the FSF.
Israel acquired nuclear technology from a variety of western sources, used it to build their own nuclear arsenal, and sold it to South Africa who used it in building their own nuclear arsenal; some of the scientists from the South African program have, since South Africa disarmed, gone on to work with the A. Q. Khan network out of Pakistan that has been the a major vehicle for the proliferation of nuclear technology to "rogue nations".
There are a number of conventional examples, as well.
Conventional wars against and between nuclear powers are not only possible, they have, in fact, occurred. (E.g., the India-Pakistan Kargil War of 1999.)
OTOH, your phone can't send and receive FTL signals, which is the only thing substantially futuristic about Star Trek's communicators, even when the series was first filmed in the 1960s. (Communicators are FTL walkie-talkies; if you ignore the FTL part, they are only barely futuristic from the point of view of the 1960s.)
No, its not even theoretically possible (in fact, it is theoretically impossible) to determine the information necessary to make a perfectly accurate copy down to the lowest level of the structure and state of the system.
It may be possible to make a good enough copy that it works, it may not; we don't know enough about how it works to know if such a copy is even theoretically possible or not. Even if it is theoretically possible, that doesn't make it practical; its theoretically possible to acheive FTL velocity relative to a particular reference frame by a number of mechanisms (e.g., frame dragging by a rotating black hole mass). That FTL velocities are theoretically attainable, however, would not make a claim of practical FTL travel in the next ten years that would transform society particularly credible.
Actually, you are illustrating that it quite far from a "perfect market". A perfect market requires perfect information (and, particularly, that the perceived utility that purchasers have when making purchase decisions perfectly aligns with the experienced utility they derive from purchases.)
In a perfect market, sellers could not resort to deception (either through dishonesty or simple omission) to manipulate purchase decisions.
And even that may be a bit misleading; the Senate eliminated funding for 7 additional F-22s that were proposed to be ordered, limiting the total run to 187, which includes not just planes which have already been delivered but also some that have previously been ordered which have not yet been delivered, so it is not the case that "no additional planes will be made", at least if by "additional" one means "additional to those that have already been made", rather than "additional to the ones already planned to be made".
Given the model those games use, I'd expect a big surge when a new core game + bandkit combo is released that would then taper off, and given that the controllers are largely compatible between versions and across franchises, you'd expect the percentage of sales that are high revenue per unit bandkit + core game combo sales to drop over time, with more purchases of just the game, or individual "instrument" controllers as isolated upgrades and replacements, even if the popularity (which isn't the same thing as $ sales volume) of the genre were constant.
They are unlikely to realize substantial, direct short-term savings from adopting OSS; for the off-the-shelf software (things like desktop OS's and basic office software), short-term license savings will probably be consumed by increased support and retraining costs, for new development, open source requirements will probably not decrease the cost of new development.
In the long term, there should be efficiency improvements, but for the most part those aren't going to be redirected into OSS investments (though adopting OSS itself, insofar as those organizations pay for custom software development, will involve OSS investments), they'll be redirected into more funds going into the substantive work the organizations do, or less costs being passed on to students/taxpayers. The benefits to OSS will be the adoption itself, particularly in terms of custom development.
For organizations that spend money on custom software, OSS adoption is OSS creation; you don't have to (nor is it usually consistent with the organization's mission to) also redirect "savings" into additional, gratuitous OSS development.
Copyright refers to a set of exclusive rights granted to particular people ("copyright holders") with regard to specific works (which works are covered, and exactly which rights are included, are matters of the differing laws of various nations.)
No, you have licensed your copyright. Unless this is part of a contractual exchange (in US law, at least) this license is revocable at will. Even if it is part of a contractual exchange, their right to copy the image (and their right, if any, to transfer that right), insofar as it is a use of your rights under copyright, extends only so far as you have provided for it to in the terms of the license. You have no more surrendered your copyright than you have surrendered your ownership of your home when you allow someone else to enter it.
No, its true, that you may give up the control that makes the copyright valuable to you if what you value is control and you give a license which include broad rights to sublicense. But that doesn't mean you have "surrendered" your copyright, even effectively. For some people, they want certain of their works to be widely distributed, but, e.g., they want credit for them -- and for them, distributing works under a license which creates broad rights for the licensee to distribute the work with attribution isn't "surrendering" their copyright, its leveraging it most effectively to serve their interests.
Because (from the horse's mouth) "Wikipedia ... is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project." The "why" not be the same for everyone involved in the project, for some "free content" may be an independently good, for others it may be an instrumental good, but whatever the reasons that individuals support it for, its part of the core Wikipedia mission.
Giving children all around the goal laptops was not the goal of the One Laptop Per Child )(OLPC) project, despite the name (the name referred to the means, not the ends). The goal was to enable a particular (constructivist) model of education using the laptop as the primary tool, and to do it in a way which didn't need to involve a lot of teaching about the computer itself, which support central management and security with users who were, in many cases, learning to read. WinXP's UI, security model,and, well, lots of its other features aren't really all that compatible with the actual goals of the project. The licensing model may have had problems, as well, but they aren't the only problems.
Pictures of stars that are of a quality that the star is going to want them in public probably require professional photography (including retouching.)
If they were happy with the quality of casual snapshots, they wouldn't be complaining about what is on Wikipedia now.
We're not invading other countries over gold because its not fundamental to the economy (even late in the period where there was a notional gold standard, there were all kinds of mechanisms in place that weakened the influence of actual gold on the economy.
(OTOH, we do fight wars -- fairly frequently -- over control of resources that are important to the economy; reducing those to the ones that are fundamentally important rather than one's that we make important as an easily avoidable choice is probably a good idea; that's one major argument over tying currency closely to any particular resource.)
No, it wouldn't. Speculative bubbles and other types of financial meltdowns with very similar (and, in many cases, more severe) effects than the current major recession are not prevented by having commodity-backed currency. The Great Depression happened while the US was on the gold standard (and not in as loose and notional a way as it was after the Depression up until the 1970s.) The same is true of the late 19th Century railroad bubble (in which the resulting crisis was exacerbated by factors related to the fact that the US had redeemable gold-backed currency), the wave of bank of failures in 1907, and a number of other major economic crises of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The argument that the present economic crisis is somehow proves that nothing could be any worse is amazingly historically ignorant.
I proposed no such solution. In fact, I didn't propose anything.
If I understand GP, he isn't saying that the robust protective order would have been a bar to asserting fair use, he is saying that the appropriate sanction for failing to produce the required evidence would be to dismiss the case because, as the failure to produce the evidence within their control relevant to the defense asserted by the defendant, which defense would be a bar to plaintiff's action. (Note that I am not endorsing this position, only stating that I believe that is what GP was proposing.)
Well, "GREAT", particularly with an entertainment product, is subjective. IMO, if it doesn't have replay value for substantially more than a year, its not a "great" game, and probably isn't even a "good" game.
There are plenty of games (any SimCity title except Societies, any of the 'main' PC versions of the Sims [not the console or stories titles], any version of the Civ or CtP franchises, anything in the Total War series, anything in the Delta Force series, and lots more) that have enough replay value, for me, that I only stop playing them because a newer, better version with compelling new features comes along that fits in my budget, and I'd still enjoy playing the older ones.)
Yeah, tightly scripted games tend to either run out of gameplay or present inordinate frustration factors to stretch the gameplay. That's one reason, IMO, such games are generally worth less than more open-ended games.
Sure, there is; they can stop distributing physical media altogether, and use download-and-activate distribution exclusively. Sure, it can be less convenient for the user (especially if the game needs to "phone home" at launch), but its quite possible for game companies to give you nothing "used" to sell.
OTOH, its not clear to me that game publishers should be worried about used sales at all, sales of used games transfer funds from the price conscious buyers that aren't as concerned with getting the latest and greatest new to the people that want the best now, and thus give more money to the people who are buying new games in the first place. Killing used game sales might just result in the price conscious people only buying the "classic" games that have had their price dropped because they are old, while the people who are willing to pay full freight for new games won't have as much cash to do it, resulting in the game companies taking longer to pay off the development costs of new titles.
There seems to be a bug in your math.
175,000+ loc * (10 bugs / 1,000 loc) = 1,750+ bugs
Yeah, but a lot of glyphs that are useful for sharing certain types of information aren't in the most common fonts; being able to embed a font that you know supports well glyphs you need to communicate the information best to the audience you are targeting is a good thing for many specialized applications.
But, sure, it'll be abused a lot by people to use annoying fonts badly. Such is the way of the web.
Except that its not "everything", even on a hot day, its just that the total load at that center must be reduced (not eliminated) on a hot day.
Google needs to have many data centers, and problems it has had in the past have shown that it needs to have the ability to seemlessly shift load between them anyway; so, for them, this is just another factor in the determination of where load should be shifted. It may not be more cost effective for other companies, whose baseline data center needs are different.