Amazon is not allowed to broadcast videos outside of North America per the contract it signed with the Hollywood company, and as enforced by U.S. copyright law.
It is extraordinarily misleading to claim that this supports the claim that the US prohibits exports without the copyright holders permission. No "export" -- which would require a tangible good -- is involved here, and the only reason that copyright law might be involved (as opposed to contract law) is because what you call "broadcast" is actually electronic copying, not "export".
If you had a legally-purchased tangible object containing a copy of the data, the copyright holder's lack of permission to export it wouldn't be given any weight in the US.
What Google is doing will drive the creation of dozens of startup businesses, all aimed at gaming the Google system.
What Google is doing is being awarded a patent.
You seem to confuse that with actually using the invention described in the patent, which isn't at all the same thing.
Being awarded a patent gives you a legal right to exercise a certain degree of control over who uses the described invention, it certainly doesn't obligate you to go out and use it yourself.
But you would be invoking MAD if you file an injunction against any large company.
In case you haven't noticed, if one accepts your description, "MAD" has already been "invoked" -- for quite some time -- in important areas where Google is a player (both by Apple filing for injunctions against a variety of major Android device manufacturers, most notably in recent news Samsung, and by Google filing for damages, injunctive relief, and import bans against every current Apple mobile device.)
Therefore, the characterization that the fact that using a patent to prevent another major player from using the effected technology would be "invoking MAD" is quite certainly not a convincing argument that Google would not be willing to use the patent in that way, especially in the current environment.
If it sues anyone over this [...] except in self defense you have a case.
If we accept TFS's position that the mechanism covered by the patent is "evil", then wouldn't it be a public service for Google to use the patent offensively to prevent other people from using the descibed method, so long as they weren't actually using it themselves?
The headline sounds as if Google was interested in the national language of the country
The headline doesn't suggest anything about why the location was selected. It simply reports a fact about the location that was selected.
Why not call it the first South American server instead since it is located, you know, in South America?
Calling it the "first South American server" would be less accurate than calling it the "first Latin American data center", since while it is both in "Latin America" and in "South America", it is a data center, not, you know, a single server (and since the article doesn't indicate that its Google's first office in either Latin or South America, it quite likely doesn't involve Google's first server in either place.)
Latin America is bigger than (though not, as you note, a strict superset of) South America (including, as it does, virtually all of Central and South America), so its quite possible that the "Latin America" designation was chosen because its more significant, while still being shorter than "first data center in the Western Hemisphere outside of the United States", which would have also been accurate.
The U.S. doesn't allow exports of U.S. copyrighted works w/o permission of the owner.....
Huh. I'm looking at Title 17 of the US Code, and nowhere among the exclusive rights of copyright holders is "export" listed. So, I'm thinking, some kind of evidence supporting this claim would be nice.
and the UK government protects its local artists/authors by not allowing imports unless registered under UK copyrights.
This would suggest that the UK doesn't allow imports of anything that could be subject to copyright unless it had a registered UK copyright. Aside from the fact that this would be impossible to enforce (given the scope of things that are subject to copyright protection and how impossible it would be to verify that for every import it would apply to), this is, like the last, a pretty extraordinary claim for which some evidence would be welcome.
You know, if it were up to idiots like you, nothing would ever be accomplished.
I think you are very confused. What I said was is an open social network isn't likely to without attention to features that support mass, consumer adoption.
Now sit back and watch while history passes you by, chump.
If social networking was my thing -- which it really isn't right now -- I'd be working with the open distributed systems now, not withstanding a lack of expectation of any likelihood of them displacing the dominant closed system in the near term, even if the dominant closed system managed to make people angry enough to look for an alternative.
A lack of irrational exuberance about the near term mass market prospects isn't the same thing as a lack of vision.
So the geeks would be the early adopters, and everyone else would probably wait until Facebook inevitably turned the thumbscrews on the users enough for them to become dissatisfied.
And which point, "everybody else" would probably move to the #2 centralized social networking system, and the geeks would still be the only ones using the decentralized system.
Unless, of course, what looked to casual users like the #2 centralized system also used (as its core infrastructure, not just incidentally and with limited or one-directional functionality) the protocols of the decentralized system. In which case, yeah, the decentralized system might win. But the problem is convincing anyone that has the interest and skill to build a service that is attractive to Joe User to use the open infrastructure, and to get the people maintaining the specifications of the open infrastructure -- and the various implementations -- to build the features into the specification (and support them in the various implementations) that make the open infrastructure useful for consumer-attractive finished implementations. Otherwise, making the open protocol central is just a drag on attempts to make a service that will attract non-geek/ideologue users.
. My guess is that if it took off, it would have to be started as a side project by an established company that gave it name recognition, and which could possibly provide free hosting for the first wave of users. Google+ never gave most people a compelling reason to switch, but imagine if it had been released not as a website but as an open protocol, complete with an open-source implementation that could be installed anywhere.
Google actually introduced a number of open protocols to support social networking and federation of independent networks (some alone, some in coordination with other players), including reference implementations of many of them, long before introducing Google+ (Additionally, Google's gotten behind open protocols that were introduced by others.) Examples of protocols Google developed (alone or with others) specifically for or with application in the social space include OpenSocial and PubSubHubbub among others. Third-party open specifications in the space that they have promoted and leveraged in the past (some still currently) include OAuth, FOAF, and others.
So you don't need to imagine what would happen if Google produced and released open protocols instead of Google+, since they did that before Google+. What actually happened was...well, not quite nothing, but hardly an eruption of decentralized social networking systems displacing centralized systems.
Most applications don't scale well to 2 cores, let alone 1000.
Most applications are not ideal for Compute Engine and similar services which charge a premium for enabling dynamic server provisioning where you can rapidly change the number of servers available and are charged by the hour.
If I have a pretty popular website, I'd probably saturate my available network pipes long before the cpu power is a problem.
I'd be surprised if that's true on either Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine, which don't have fixed (either overall or per-instance) bandwidth caps, though its conceivably possible that the either the local network resources available to an instance or the total network resources available to the Amazon or Google server farm involved could become saturated. But, in any case, applications that aren't concerned about CPU scaling aren't really the motivating use case for these services. So assuming this statement is true with respect to sites hosted on EC2 or Compute Engine, all it means is that, if you are just looking for web hosting, you probably want to use a web hosting service, not EC2 or Compute Engine.
Let's say you are an somewhat obscure blog. You upload a video to your server that goes viral. How will Amazon solution scale so much better than the competition, if suddenly went viral (lets say 500k viewers)?
Neither EC2 nor Compute Engine is necessarily ideal for this. That's not the point of these services. There for scenarios where you need to spin-up/spin-down processing capacity in respect to demand, which is typical in apps that don't merely host content for consumption but do some heavy duty processing on data that they receive. You might also host the web servers providing the UI on the same service, but if all you are doing is boring hosting of web content without heavy processing, you probably want a service that is optimized for that kind of workload (or, at least, not one that is optimized for a very different kind of workload.)
You seem to complaining that a jackhammer makes a bad screwdriver. While this is true, the purpose of a jackhammer isn't driving screws, so its pretty much irrelevant to what a jackhammer is for.
Groklaw says that it's usual for a claim to be reduced, but that doesn't explain why he disallowed this particular cost.
This is addressed in the text of the order, which is presented in the Groklaw piece:
4. E-DISCOVERY COSTS.
Google's bill of costs seeks nearly three million dollars in fees incurred by e-discovery vendor, FTI Consulting, Inc. Oracle objects.
Pursuant to Section 1920, the Court may tax "fees for exemplification and the costs of making copies of any materials where the copies are necessarily obtained for use in the case." Our local rule has interpreted the statute to provide for "[t]he cost of reproducing disclosure or formal discovery documents when used for any purpose in the case." CIVIL L.R. 54-3(d)(2). However, "fees for exemplification and copying are permitted only for the physical preparation and duplication of documents, not the intellectual effort involved in their production." Zuill v. Shanahan, 80 F.3d 1366, 1371 (9th Cir. 1996) (quotations omitted). In Romero, our court of appeals held that the research, analysis, and distillation of data incurred in the preparation of documents (as oppose to the costs of physically preparing the documents) were not taxable costs. Romero v. City of Pomona, 883 F.2d 1418, 1427 (9th Cir. 1989).
The problem with Google's e-discovery bill of costs is that many of item-line descriptions seemingly bill for "intellectual effort" such as organizing, searching, and analyzing the discovery documents (see, e.g., Dkt. No. 1220, Exh. B at 1, 2-4, 8-10). Most egregious are attempts to bill costs for "conferencing," "prepare for and participate in kickoff call," and communications with co-workers, other vendors, and clients (see, e.g., id. at 2, 9-10, 14). These are non-taxable intellectual efforts.
Back to your post:
Electronic discovery is basically about using advanced software to do forensic analysis of discovery documents. I find it really interesting that Google spent three times as much on this as they spent on paying lawyers to actually argue the case.
A lot more than three times as much as they spent on paying "lawyers to actually argue the case". Per the court order on costs, the $1.13 million in Google's costs that Oracle was ordered to pay included, "nearly one million dollars in fees arising from the work of court-appointed expert Dr. James Kearl."
While the remaining costs aren't broken down further in the order -- and I will cop to being too lazy to dig up the costs Google filed to figure it out in detail -- it seems like the upper bound on the amount that was actually to pay "for lawyers to actually argue the case" was on the order of a couple hundred thousand dollars.
But none of this is surprising. As much as lawyers charge for their time, most of the cost associated with a trial isn't legal fees. This is rather normal.
TFS is wrong, starting with the most basic premise stated in the first sentence, to which the whole rest of the piece is a reaction (and a reaction which is completely pointless, since the premise it is reacting to is completely inaccurate.)
Nearly two years ago, the FCC outlined its rules for net neutrality. Notably absent were rules for wireless networks
This is false on several levels.
First: what the FCC did wasn't "outlining", it was publishing the actual rules (not an outline of the rules). Second: Wired/wireless wasn't something that was distinguished in the rules, it was fixed (which can be wired or wireless) vs. mobile (which, naturally, will only be wireless). Third: Rules for mobile broadband networks were included in the published rules, alongside the rules for fixed broadband networks; they were not "notably absent". The rules for mobile broadband networks did provide fewer consumer guarantees than those for fixed broadband, for which the rationale was provided in the Report and Order establishing the rules.
Now, if someone wants to have a discussion about the actual differences in the rules published for fixed vs. mobile broadband, and whether those differences are appropriate, there is probably a useful discussion that could be had. But starting with the completely false premise in TFS isn't a way to start that discussion.
Why would they, can you name a situation where google attacked with a patent?
There recent lawsuit and ITC complaint against Apple would be an obvious example.
So far I've only seen them used by google defensively.
The usual definition of "defensive" use of a patent is to assert infringement only in a counterclaim against a party claiming patent infringement against the "defensive" user. Google's recent use of its patents against Apple has been offensive by that definition. Its often construed as a special case of "defensive" use of patents because Apple's lawsuits against Samsung, HTC, and others related to their Android-using devices are painted as proxy attacks on Google, so the Google-initiated lawsuit is painted as analogous to a set of counterclaims against Apple though it, strictly speaking, is not.
Really, the offensive/defensive divide is rather artificial, anyhow. If you want to portray Google as different, its probably better to look at their repeated opposition to the present software patent regime as a whole rather than to how they use the patents they have.
It's not that the courts ignore prior art, but that they defer to the patent office.
Deferring to the patent office when the decisions of the patent office are being challenged on the grounds of evidence of prior art is ignoring prior art, so the distinction you make is one without a difference.
If the courts have to determine whether a patent is valid, what's the point of having a patent office?
If the courts aren't going to enforce the law, including acting to assure that acts of executive branch agencies like the Department of Commerce's Patent and Trademark Office conform to the law, what is the point of having courts?
At the personal level (not speaking of businesses here): AMD x8 FX-8150 3.6/4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD - DYI from all-new parts, no monitor - approx $750. Let's make it a full $1750 to allow for power delivered by "gilded electrons", "diamond optical fiber" supported internet access and a bouquet of flowers once a month for the "better half" to make it for the physical storage space. $1750 vs $175/month...10 month worth of VPS in Google's "compute" cloud (with 1 core with 4GB RAM).
If you are paying the premium that comes with a service that supports dynamic server provisioning and using it like you were just buying a VPS, you are doing it wrong.
You should be paying for a VPS, which is different. You'll note that VPS's tend to quote there server prices per month. Compute Engine's are charged per hour. If you are using them flat across the month without variation, you aren't really understanding what they are for.
Rackspace uses local hard drives on each machine - while Google use NAS network attached storage.
I'm pretty sure that the "local disk" (lifespan scoped to the instance) for each machine level on Compute Engine is, indeed, local disk; the optional "persistent disk" is probably NAS.
Right this very minute I can fire up eight cores with combined RAM of something like 14.5GB - notwithstanding the fact that we're talking six machines (four laptops (two dual core - one Atom, the other AMD E350, and two P4/2.0 and 1.6GHz), two desktops (one P4/2.66, the other an AMD Athlon64/2.4GHz), it's very scalable depending on what I'm doing and how fast I want it.
Can you scale up to 1,000 cores to meet a spike in demand and then back to 1 core when the demand drops, and how much does it cost -- not just operating costs, but hardware costs -- for the ability to scale up to that 1,000 cores.
That's what on-demand compute capacity like EC2 and Compute Engine is for. If you are using it to provide a fairly flat, consistent day-in-day-out processing capacity and don't have any need to do significant demand-based scaling, its probably less cost effective that just paying for fixed server capacity (whether on premise or remotely hosted).
That's fairly common when you are paying for things and not using them at all.
InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes an in-depth look at Google Compute Engine, the search giant's response to Amazon Web Services and Rackspace
Google Compute Engine isn't a "response to AWS and Rackspace".
Google Compute Engine is a the IaaS offering in Google's cloud services, which is a direct competitor (and arguably "response") to Amazon's EC2 (not AWS as a whole) and RackSpace's Cloud Servers offerings.
The closest Google has to an competitor to AWS as a whole (which is the umbrella under which Amazon offers EC2, SQS, SNS, S3, Elastic Beanstalk, etc.) is the Google Cloud Platform (which is the umbrella under which Google offers Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and some other services.)
Rackspace's list of services is a bit different, and while Google has offerings which compete with most of them on some level, there's no one Google umbrella (other than just plain "Google") that takes in the offerings that compete with Rackspace.
AIUI use of large ammounts of cash is very likely to draw unwanted attention from law enforcement. In the US at least banks are required to report all transactions of $10000 or more
That's an issue of using banks (and the notification requirement for large transactions applies whether or not the transaction uses cash) not an issue of using cash.
Koreans band all of Apples current products and only band Samsungs last models but not the S3 and their new tablet.
Well, except that didn't happen. Neither Apple nor Samsung had their current flagship phone or tablet (on Apple's side, the iPhone 4S and New iPad -- often referred to as the iPad3 though that's not its actual product name) banned.
The Democrats had solid majorities in every branch of government for two full years.
For a definition of "solid majority" which includes a majority to thin to actually pass any substantive measure through the Senate given the existence of the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote supermajority to cut-off debate and proceed to a vote.
During that time, not a single budget was passed.
Well, except for the budgets passed for FY 2010 in 2009 and FY 2011 in 2010.
Slashdot Mirror
I was questioning the idea that only defensive use would be good, not commenting on the possibility of any particular scenario.
I was basing the comment on Google's published list of data center locations, which does not include Toronto, Dublin, or London.
It is extraordinarily misleading to claim that this supports the claim that the US prohibits exports without the copyright holders permission. No "export" -- which would require a tangible good -- is involved here, and the only reason that copyright law might be involved (as opposed to contract law) is because what you call "broadcast" is actually electronic copying, not "export".
If you had a legally-purchased tangible object containing a copy of the data, the copyright holder's lack of permission to export it wouldn't be given any weight in the US.
What Google is doing is being awarded a patent.
You seem to confuse that with actually using the invention described in the patent, which isn't at all the same thing.
Being awarded a patent gives you a legal right to exercise a certain degree of control over who uses the described invention, it certainly doesn't obligate you to go out and use it yourself.
In case you haven't noticed, if one accepts your description, "MAD" has already been "invoked" -- for quite some time -- in important areas where Google is a player (both by Apple filing for injunctions against a variety of major Android device manufacturers, most notably in recent news Samsung, and by Google filing for damages, injunctive relief, and import bans against every current Apple mobile device.)
Therefore, the characterization that the fact that using a patent to prevent another major player from using the effected technology would be "invoking MAD" is quite certainly not a convincing argument that Google would not be willing to use the patent in that way, especially in the current environment.
If we accept TFS's position that the mechanism covered by the patent is "evil", then wouldn't it be a public service for Google to use the patent offensively to prevent other people from using the descibed method, so long as they weren't actually using it themselves?
The headline doesn't suggest anything about why the location was selected. It simply reports a fact about the location that was selected.
Calling it the "first South American server" would be less accurate than calling it the "first Latin American data center", since while it is both in "Latin America" and in "South America", it is a data center, not, you know, a single server (and since the article doesn't indicate that its Google's first office in either Latin or South America, it quite likely doesn't involve Google's first server in either place.)
Latin America is bigger than (though not, as you note, a strict superset of) South America (including, as it does, virtually all of Central and South America), so its quite possible that the "Latin America" designation was chosen because its more significant, while still being shorter than "first data center in the Western Hemisphere outside of the United States", which would have also been accurate.
Huh. I'm looking at Title 17 of the US Code, and nowhere among the exclusive rights of copyright holders is "export" listed. So, I'm thinking, some kind of evidence supporting this claim would be nice.
This would suggest that the UK doesn't allow imports of anything that could be subject to copyright unless it had a registered UK copyright. Aside from the fact that this would be impossible to enforce (given the scope of things that are subject to copyright protection and how impossible it would be to verify that for every import it would apply to), this is, like the last, a pretty extraordinary claim for which some evidence would be welcome.
I think you are very confused. What I said was is an open social network isn't likely to without attention to features that support mass, consumer adoption.
If social networking was my thing -- which it really isn't right now -- I'd be working with the open distributed systems now, not withstanding a lack of expectation of any likelihood of them displacing the dominant closed system in the near term, even if the dominant closed system managed to make people angry enough to look for an alternative.
A lack of irrational exuberance about the near term mass market prospects isn't the same thing as a lack of vision.
And which point, "everybody else" would probably move to the #2 centralized social networking system, and the geeks would still be the only ones using the decentralized system.
Unless, of course, what looked to casual users like the #2 centralized system also used (as its core infrastructure, not just incidentally and with limited or one-directional functionality) the protocols of the decentralized system. In which case, yeah, the decentralized system might win. But the problem is convincing anyone that has the interest and skill to build a service that is attractive to Joe User to use the open infrastructure, and to get the people maintaining the specifications of the open infrastructure -- and the various implementations -- to build the features into the specification (and support them in the various implementations) that make the open infrastructure useful for consumer-attractive finished implementations. Otherwise, making the open protocol central is just a drag on attempts to make a service that will attract non-geek/ideologue users.
Google actually introduced a number of open protocols to support social networking and federation of independent networks (some alone, some in coordination with other players), including reference implementations of many of them, long before introducing Google+ (Additionally, Google's gotten behind open protocols that were introduced by others.) Examples of protocols Google developed (alone or with others) specifically for or with application in the social space include OpenSocial and PubSubHubbub among others. Third-party open specifications in the space that they have promoted and leveraged in the past (some still currently) include OAuth, FOAF, and others.
So you don't need to imagine what would happen if Google produced and released open protocols instead of Google+, since they did that before Google+. What actually happened was...well, not quite nothing, but hardly an eruption of decentralized social networking systems displacing centralized systems.
Most applications are not ideal for Compute Engine and similar services which charge a premium for enabling dynamic server provisioning where you can rapidly change the number of servers available and are charged by the hour.
I'd be surprised if that's true on either Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine, which don't have fixed (either overall or per-instance) bandwidth caps, though its conceivably possible that the either the local network resources available to an instance or the total network resources available to the Amazon or Google server farm involved could become saturated. But, in any case, applications that aren't concerned about CPU scaling aren't really the motivating use case for these services. So assuming this statement is true with respect to sites hosted on EC2 or Compute Engine, all it means is that, if you are just looking for web hosting, you probably want to use a web hosting service, not EC2 or Compute Engine.
Neither EC2 nor Compute Engine is necessarily ideal for this. That's not the point of these services. There for scenarios where you need to spin-up/spin-down processing capacity in respect to demand, which is typical in apps that don't merely host content for consumption but do some heavy duty processing on data that they receive. You might also host the web servers providing the UI on the same service, but if all you are doing is boring hosting of web content without heavy processing, you probably want a service that is optimized for that kind of workload (or, at least, not one that is optimized for a very different kind of workload.)
You seem to complaining that a jackhammer makes a bad screwdriver. While this is true, the purpose of a jackhammer isn't driving screws, so its pretty much irrelevant to what a jackhammer is for.
Well, other than the fact that Chrome OS can certainly use a webcam.
This is addressed in the text of the order, which is presented in the Groklaw piece:
Back to your post:
A lot more than three times as much as they spent on paying "lawyers to actually argue the case". Per the court order on costs, the $1.13 million in Google's costs that Oracle was ordered to pay included, "nearly one million dollars in fees arising from the work of court-appointed expert Dr. James Kearl."
While the remaining costs aren't broken down further in the order -- and I will cop to being too lazy to dig up the costs Google filed to figure it out in detail -- it seems like the upper bound on the amount that was actually to pay "for lawyers to actually argue the case" was on the order of a couple hundred thousand dollars.
But none of this is surprising. As much as lawyers charge for their time, most of the cost associated with a trial isn't legal fees. This is rather normal.
It would be if "net worth" and "annual income" were the same thing, which they aren't.
TFS is wrong, starting with the most basic premise stated in the first sentence, to which the whole rest of the piece is a reaction (and a reaction which is completely pointless, since the premise it is reacting to is completely inaccurate.)
This is false on several levels.
First: what the FCC did wasn't "outlining", it was publishing the actual rules (not an outline of the rules).
Second: Wired/wireless wasn't something that was distinguished in the rules, it was fixed (which can be wired or wireless) vs. mobile (which, naturally, will only be wireless).
Third: Rules for mobile broadband networks were included in the published rules, alongside the rules for fixed broadband networks; they were not "notably absent". The rules for mobile broadband networks did provide fewer consumer guarantees than those for fixed broadband, for which the rationale was provided in the Report and Order establishing the rules.
Now, if someone wants to have a discussion about the actual differences in the rules published for fixed vs. mobile broadband, and whether those differences are appropriate, there is probably a useful discussion that could be had. But starting with the completely false premise in TFS isn't a way to start that discussion.
There recent lawsuit and ITC complaint against Apple would be an obvious example.
The usual definition of "defensive" use of a patent is to assert infringement only in a counterclaim against a party claiming patent infringement against the "defensive" user. Google's recent use of its patents against Apple has been offensive by that definition. Its often construed as a special case of "defensive" use of patents because Apple's lawsuits against Samsung, HTC, and others related to their Android-using devices are painted as proxy attacks on Google, so the Google-initiated lawsuit is painted as analogous to a set of counterclaims against Apple though it, strictly speaking, is not.
Really, the offensive/defensive divide is rather artificial, anyhow. If you want to portray Google as different, its probably better to look at their repeated opposition to the present software patent regime as a whole rather than to how they use the patents they have.
Deferring to the patent office when the decisions of the patent office are being challenged on the grounds of evidence of prior art is ignoring prior art, so the distinction you make is one without a difference.
If the courts aren't going to enforce the law, including acting to assure that acts of executive branch agencies like the Department of Commerce's Patent and Trademark Office conform to the law, what is the point of having courts?
If you are paying the premium that comes with a service that supports dynamic server provisioning and using it like you were just buying a VPS, you are doing it wrong.
You should be paying for a VPS, which is different. You'll note that VPS's tend to quote there server prices per month. Compute Engine's are charged per hour. If you are using them flat across the month without variation, you aren't really understanding what they are for.
I'm pretty sure that the "local disk" (lifespan scoped to the instance) for each machine level on Compute Engine is, indeed, local disk; the optional "persistent disk" is probably NAS.
Can you scale up to 1,000 cores to meet a spike in demand and then back to 1 core when the demand drops, and how much does it cost -- not just operating costs, but hardware costs -- for the ability to scale up to that 1,000 cores.
That's what on-demand compute capacity like EC2 and Compute Engine is for. If you are using it to provide a fairly flat, consistent day-in-day-out processing capacity and don't have any need to do significant demand-based scaling, its probably less cost effective that just paying for fixed server capacity (whether on premise or remotely hosted).
That's fairly common when you are paying for things and not using them at all.
Google Compute Engine isn't a "response to AWS and Rackspace".
Google Compute Engine is a the IaaS offering in Google's cloud services, which is a direct competitor (and arguably "response") to Amazon's EC2 (not AWS as a whole) and RackSpace's Cloud Servers offerings.
The closest Google has to an competitor to AWS as a whole (which is the umbrella under which Amazon offers EC2, SQS, SNS, S3, Elastic Beanstalk, etc.) is the Google Cloud Platform (which is the umbrella under which Google offers Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and some other services.)
Rackspace's list of services is a bit different, and while Google has offerings which compete with most of them on some level, there's no one Google umbrella (other than just plain "Google") that takes in the offerings that compete with Rackspace.
That's an issue of using banks (and the notification requirement for large transactions applies whether or not the transaction uses cash) not an issue of using cash.
Well, except that didn't happen. Neither Apple nor Samsung had their current flagship phone or tablet (on Apple's side, the iPhone 4S and New iPad -- often referred to as the iPad3 though that's not its actual product name) banned.
For a definition of "solid majority" which includes a majority to thin to actually pass any substantive measure through the Senate given the existence of the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote supermajority to cut-off debate and proceed to a vote.
Well, except for the budgets passed for FY 2010 in 2009 and FY 2011 in 2010.