I guess this is in response to the supposed Apple TV (as in, the physical device with a screen rather than the little streaming box they currently have) that Apple is allegedly working on, and Google sees the chance for some collateral sales when the inevitable marketing tsunami from Apple arrives.
Reports of Google's next iteration of GoogleTV and that it would be incorporated into TVs from more manufacturers instead of primarily as a standalone set-top devices (or integrated into other devices like blu-ray players) started before reports about the next generation of AppleTV; I would be hesitant to describe either as a response to the other, and even moreso to pick a direction.
I think the GoogleTV is more Google exploiting the fact that TV prices are dropping and manufacturers are looking for sources of value-added features to sell in higher-priced models, and that GoogleTV-supported streaming sources (including, and especially, YouTube) have acquired a lot more professional content than anything to do with AppleTV's plans.
The point is that MS still got hit by a successful anti-trust lawsuit because of Netscape. If Google were held to the same standard, it might also be in the same boat.
No, it wouldn't, since Google's share in any relevant U.S. market is nothing like what Microsoft's was in the desktop OS market.
A monopoly, at least for antitrust laws, means they have a completely dominant position over that market.
Which Google, with ~65% share, doesn't have with internet search.
Microsoft didn't force you to buy Windows either, but they were still fined for violating antitrust laws.
Microsoft had, IIRC, close to or above a 90% share in the desktop OS market when it was found to have (and have illegally leveraged) a monopoly in that market.
So now we won't be able to copy-paste a google search to someone to brag "AHAH ! First page, first result!" because everyone's result will be different.
Even before this, Google personalization information in ranking search results. This adds another source of personalization information, but isn't the start of Google providing personalized search results.
I'm not exactly thrilled about the idea of Google narrowing my world view for me
Then turn it off. You can do that.
but I suppose this is just an incremental step down a path we set out on long ago.
The more there is on the internet, the more tools are needed to narrow down to get what you want, separating the (subjective) wheat from the chaff. In many cases, I suspect that incorporating social graph information will enable mechanisms to improve search quality.
The difference is that Google Search dominates the market, while Fox doesn't.
A majority share isn't the same thing as a monopoly, and Google's ~65% search share is certainly the former.
I'm also not really sure that you can make an argument about tieing when neither the tied service nor the service to which it is tied are actually services that the company (or the alternative suppliers) sells, and they are -- from a commercial point of view -- simply vehicles for attracting eyeballs to advertisements (whether paid, or the company's own for its own for-pay services that leverage the same profiles but which are purchased separately from the services at issue.)
I guess they need to find some way to get people to use Google+...
Google has been up front from the beginning that the long-term plan for Google+ (and the reason for the name) was that it was going to be an integrated social layer that interacted deeply with the rest of Google's services, not a separate standalone service.
No it isn't. As I said elsewhere, governments provide services, with defense of the country and law enforcement being two of the more common ones. Merely providing a service to the population has nothing to do with socialism.
Actually, yes, it does. A government providing a service requiers it exercising practical control (whether exercised through ownership of compulsory power that isn't labelled "ownership")over the means of production of that service or good. One can reasonably argue over whether it ought to exercise control in this manner with regard to particular services, but not whether it does so when it elects to provide a service.
Calling medicare socialism is just an ideological driven lie by Fox to make people believe that any program that they don't like is socialist.
No, its not. Calling it socialist is an accurate claim being made for purposes of ideological propaganda (the socialist = bad equation is an emotional attachment that is reinforced when instead of saying "so what, its still the right thing to do" and arguing why, people respond to "X is socialist" by saying "no its not", thus validating the implicit premise that socialism is bad. Its actually a fairly common technique in ideological propaganda to make an argument where the buried premise is actually the more important propaganda technique in the hopes that your opponent will respond in a way which accepts the premise and thereby advances your propaganda.)
fact, the army which is directly contracted by the government with individual soldiers is more socialist than medicare yet Fox never calls the army socialist.
The socialists who created the terms "capitalism" to refer to the system they opposed and "socialism" to refer to the system they were proposing to replace it were largely criticizing systems which, in fact, relied rather heavily on state-owned-and-operated military forces, so it is extraordinarily inaccurate to say that such a force is inherently socialist.
Its true that such forces exhibit many of the features that socialism would propose adopting outside of the realm of the military, but that's a very different point.
If you read it, the theme is, "The government needs to spend a lot of money directly on research in order for research to happen". I don't believe that. I think the out-of-control patent system is what's messed up our research. The place where I work does things in specific ways in order to be within the realm of our patents and (as far as I can tell) outside others' patents.
If you are doing that, you are probably doing commercialization research, which, while it is research, isn't the basic research for which the report is discussing the role of federal funding.
While basic research sometimes results in patents, it at least as often is producing results which advance knowledge without providing immediately useful and patentable applications, which is then picked up by firms that do commercialization for further work on which patentable applications are based.
Basic research for the most part is very high risk, very long time to payoff, and very little certainty as to what market anything of value that is discovered will end up finding application in, all of which are factors which make it unattractive for private, profit-seeking investors. The benefits are diffuse and often go to people other than those spending the money to the work initially (you could change that by making facts patentable, rather than invention, but that's, I think most would agree, an even bigger source of problems than anything in the current patent regime.)
We should all be able to use the best system possible that we can think of, without getting sued by competitors who think of the same ideas.
Are you arguing for eliminating patents, or are you arguing for some kind of mandatory licensing regime? Either would serve the goal you describe, though the impacts on investment currently done where the expectation of patentable results would seem likely to be different.
So a license update to make the MPL simpler and *more* compatible with other open source licenses is somehow discouraging re-use? Do explain.
Its really simple. The MPL will be more compatible with other open source licenses (particularly, GPLv3 and ASL), but the software (particularly Firefox and Thunderbird) will only be licensed under the MPL, rather than triple licensed under the MPL, GPLv2, and LGPLv2.
Consequently, while the new license is compatible with more other licenses than the old MPL was, the software will no longer be licensed in a manner that is compatible with some of the licenses under which it was previously available. This has at least the potential for discouraging re-use of the software.
You are missing the point. I DON'T have to say anything, or prove anything, It is my right to be silent and to not incriminate myself.
The right to remain silent and not provide evidence against yourself applies only in criminal proceedings. (See, US Constitution, Amendment 5: "No person [...] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself".)
Breach-of-contract is not a criminal case.
If they refuse to pay without reason/facts, then i will sue them. End of story.
And if you sue them, you will bear the burden of proving that the circumstances that actually occurred obligate them to pay you. And they can put you on the stand and compel you testify under oath, even where that might be against your own interests.
Although polls show that that most Americans want socialism, they just don't want it called that. "Down with socialism, save medicare" is the cry of many Americans. Don't ask me how you explain to them that medicare is socialism.
Medicare, like many elements of a modern mixed economy, is arguably socialist, but merely having some socialist elements doesn't make a system socialism.
Every advanced country in the world has a mixed economy that has some elements that are socialist (indeed, many of the commonly-adopted elements were advocated in the Communist Manifesto) while the general structure is strongly grounded in private property and private ownership of most of the means of production.
While some people may reflexive equate Socialist with Communist with Soviet-style Communism and the Cold War, socialism was mostly a reaction to the fundamental horror for the common people under 19th century capitalism and while socialism, and the antithesis to capitalism, didn't become dominant, modern mixed economies are a synthesis of elements drawn from capitalism and socialism, with the former still being predominant (though the degree of this dominance varies considerably among modern mixed economies.)
Have you not noticed that newspapers have been going belly-up left and right over the last 10 years as people move to getting news on the internet?
No, I've noticed that newspapers have been going belly up and readership declining for closer to the last 30 years, a process largely driven by consolidation in the industry that focussed on cutting cost by corporate mergers, cutting the size of newsrooms at individual papers -- eliminating much of the local and investigative reporting in the process-- and relying on more content shared among newspaper chains, using slightly edited corporate and government news releases without substantial original research as news stories, and purchasing content from outside news services and sources of syndicated non-news content.
The rising popularity of the internet since the early-mid 1990s has accelerated this process, as users interested in unreviewed news releases can usually get them directly from the sources, there are a virtually unlimited number of internet sources readily available carrying the same wire service stories (including the wire services themselves), but the internet didn't trigger the decline, the newspapers did it to themselves.
If you have one missile cruiser with carrier capability and your enemy has 10 super carriers, you have zero carriers.
Aside from the US, there are a couple medium and a few smaller carriers and no large carriers in the world (last I checked, the carrier-borne combat force of the US Marine Corps was larger than every carrier-borne force outside the US combined, without even looking at the US Navy proper.) This makes medium -- and even smaller -- carriers extremly useful for power projection against any nation that isn't absolutely sure that the US will intervene on their side, which covers most of China's potential regional rivals.
Exactly one of China's potential rivals as any supercarriers, and deterring that rival from getting involved in any dispute China has with anyone else is a pretty big factor in why China has a strategic nuclear force.
Each user can install their own, complete copy into their home directory if the application is badly-designed like that.
I've run into plenty of poorly designed windows software like that that also doesn't give you a choice of where to install it, or even software that breaks if it is installed to a directory with a space anywhere in it (like, say, anything that starts with "C:\Documents and Settings".)
Obviously, your workaround works for software which is well designed except for the design choice of storing user data in the program's installation directory.
Yes, there is a little bit of hand-waving in ethics as far as the metaphysical question of where rights come from
In much the same thing as there is a little bit of water in the Earth's oceans.
however, if you undermine it you'll find that pretty much every system and scope pre-supposes it, if you take it away in all forms, you have anarchy
This combines two fallacies -- argument to the consequences of belief and false dichotomy. You can simply acknowledge that rights have no objective, factual existence and are subjective value propositions and still build whatever structure you want on top of the rights you believe in.
You, of course, lose the ability to argue that the structure you build on top of those ideas of rights is objectively superior to any other structure, but that's a false universalism built on, as you yourself note, handwaving.
Appeals to conscience aren't appeals to a sense that reports objective realities, they are appeals to a subjective sense akin to (arguably, a subset of) aesthetic sense that it is, in part, inborn and in part shaped by personal experience.
Just as there are some aesthetic expressions that are more or less popular, so there are moral/ethical propositions that resonate with more or fewer people.
Unless you shot the person in front of you in line in the back of the head this morning, because they were there, you aren't the type of anarchist that actually believes that
The absence of belief in an objective right of the person not to be shot does not equate to either the absence of a belief that is subjectively superior to not shoot the person, and, even moreso, does not equate to the belief in an objective obligation to shoot them. So, no, this argument doesn't hold water.
Rights are obvious
No, they aren't. Which is why there have been rather bitter disputes over whether rights exist, which rights, if any, exist, and who possesses the rights that exist throughout all of recorded history. If rights were, in fact, obvious, there wouldn't be an issue.
They've discontinued everything from the Google search API to Google Scholar.
Well, no. They haven't discontinued Google Scholar. They have deprecated the Google Web Search API in favor of the newer Google Custom Search API.
Wikipedia has a full list
It is less than full (it excludes things like the Google Web Search API), redundant (e.g., Google Desktop is listed at least twice), and misleading (a number of products are listed as discontinued which continued but which were renamed or merged into other products--such as Google Spreadsheets which became part of Google Docs.)
Likely to go: Google Fusion Tables, Google Refine, Trendalyzer, Correlate, Visigami, Sky Map, Speak to Tweet, Web Fonts, Open Social, and Web Toolkit. Those all have a limited audience.
Web Fonts I think is more important to Google than you think.
GWT is fairly widely used, especially by Google.
Open Social isn't actually a Google service to start with, though Google is one of the co-sponsors and users. Lots of big users, too.
Likely to become a pay service: Google Business Solutions (Google Docs, etc.), Google Voice.
The thing you are calling "Google Business Solutions" are actually called "Google Apps", and in addition to the free version, there already are paid premium versions (Google Apps for Busines, Google Apps for Education, Google Apps for Government, google Apps for Nonprofits.)
Google Voice is a pay service with free features (particularly, free calling within the US, and an initial $0.10 calling credit on your account.
"No customer data is captured and stored on the ATM itself."
The keypad is just there for show.
I suspect they are distinguishing inputs (and outputs) which transit through the device from data which is "captured and stored" on the device. If each keypress on the keypad is just passed to the remote server with nothing recorded locally, that's a lot different than if the you have a stored history of local events.
They're still restricting the OEMs and carriers ability to customize the theme's look by using the Android Market stick.
No, they aren't. Carriers and OEMs can still use different themes -- even provide them as the default theme. TFA (and this is even in TFS) explicitly notes that all Google is doing is requiring that the Holo theme be available on all Android 4.0+ devices with access to the Market.
They aren't requiring it to be the only option available, or even the default theme. And, in fact, TFA (and TFS) also highlights that Google is also improving the facilities that exist to allow apps to fit in with whatever theme is in use.
That's still good if it makes the UI consistent though, compared to iOS and WP7, the Android UI is all over the place.
And it still will be with this change, and that's, I suspect, intended. Google wants to guarantee that there is a common choice available to users, but still wants to wide range of freedom in how Android is used (by users, carriers, and OEMs), rather than tight monolithic control.
How come Netflix and Hulu+ have more liberal policies than Google?
Because Netflix and Hulu+ were able to get different terms from content owners. Some of that may be how much revenue the content owners get from Netflix and Hulu+, some of that may be how unfriendly content owners are to Google for other reasons, some of them may be due to the fact that Google Movie Rentals include the option to download and play offline while Netflix and Hulu+ are streaming-only services, and content owners may view the latter as less vulnerable (whether or not that is actually the case is less important than how they view it.)
Google has 20,000 employees and their primary business is advertising -- 98% of their revenue, many billions of dollars every year, comes from advertising. So why would Google need to hire another company to advertise their Chrome browser?
Google's primary business is delivering ads to users via the internet on behalf of other firms which create and manage advertising campaigns.
What Google paid another company to do was to create and manage an advertising campaign.
Both of these activities might be described as "advertising", but they are very much not the same thing, and competence at one is pretty much entirely unrelated to competence at the other.
What Google does -- and what radio stations, TV stations, billboard owners, and other "advertising delivery" companies do -- is not the same as what agencies that create and execute advertising campaigns do, although both classes of firms derive their revenue from "advertising".
But they *didn't accept responsibility*. They transferred the blame to elsewhere. It's even in the summary.
They accepted accountability, since they are punishing Chrome results in google search the way they would punish the results of other items promoted by paid-link campaigns.
"Responsibility" can be used to mean either "accountability" or "blame" or, well, lots of other things. But I think, in this context, accountability is the important thing.
Since corporations only exist due to special protections granted to them by the government
This somewhat understates the case. "Corporations" are direct creatures of government through law by which special privileges are granted to selected individuals, not independently-created entities that are merely encouraged by being given special privileges by government.
So it's Microsoft's fault that HP hasn't released a Win7 driver for your old discontinued printer?
GP didn't blame Microsoft. The question was "what is keeping you on XP?". Whether its Microsoft's fault or not is irrelevant to the question or GP's response.
Blaming MS in this case
...is something that no one is doing, so why are you complaining about it?
oops - deleted the second half as I posted... This is an appeals court for Florida so the precedent here is only for that portion of Florida that the appeals court covers, or maybe even all of FLorida, but to the rest of the country it means nothing at all.
Well, its only binding precedent on lower courts in Florida. Anywhere else, its merely persuasive precedent, which can be considerably more significant than "nothing at all".
Slashdot Mirror
Reports of Google's next iteration of GoogleTV and that it would be incorporated into TVs from more manufacturers instead of primarily as a standalone set-top devices (or integrated into other devices like blu-ray players) started before reports about the next generation of AppleTV; I would be hesitant to describe either as a response to the other, and even moreso to pick a direction.
I think the GoogleTV is more Google exploiting the fact that TV prices are dropping and manufacturers are looking for sources of value-added features to sell in higher-priced models, and that GoogleTV-supported streaming sources (including, and especially, YouTube) have acquired a lot more professional content than anything to do with AppleTV's plans.
No, it wouldn't, since Google's share in any relevant U.S. market is nothing like what Microsoft's was in the desktop OS market.
Which Google, with ~65% share, doesn't have with internet search.
Microsoft had, IIRC, close to or above a 90% share in the desktop OS market when it was found to have (and have illegally leveraged) a monopoly in that market.
Even before this, Google personalization information in ranking search results. This adds another source of personalization information, but isn't the start of Google providing personalized search results.
Then turn it off. You can do that.
The more there is on the internet, the more tools are needed to narrow down to get what you want, separating the (subjective) wheat from the chaff. In many cases, I suspect that incorporating social graph information will enable mechanisms to improve search quality.
A majority share isn't the same thing as a monopoly, and Google's ~65% search share is certainly the former.
I'm also not really sure that you can make an argument about tieing when neither the tied service nor the service to which it is tied are actually services that the company (or the alternative suppliers) sells, and they are -- from a commercial point of view -- simply vehicles for attracting eyeballs to advertisements (whether paid, or the company's own for its own for-pay services that leverage the same profiles but which are purchased separately from the services at issue.)
Google has been up front from the beginning that the long-term plan for Google+ (and the reason for the name) was that it was going to be an integrated social layer that interacted deeply with the rest of Google's services, not a separate standalone service.
Actually, yes, it does. A government providing a service requiers it exercising practical control (whether exercised through ownership of compulsory power that isn't labelled "ownership")over the means of production of that service or good. One can reasonably argue over whether it ought to exercise control in this manner with regard to particular services, but not whether it does so when it elects to provide a service.
No, its not. Calling it socialist is an accurate claim being made for purposes of ideological propaganda (the socialist = bad equation is an emotional attachment that is reinforced when instead of saying "so what, its still the right thing to do" and arguing why, people respond to "X is socialist" by saying "no its not", thus validating the implicit premise that socialism is bad. Its actually a fairly common technique in ideological propaganda to make an argument where the buried premise is actually the more important propaganda technique in the hopes that your opponent will respond in a way which accepts the premise and thereby advances your propaganda.)
The socialists who created the terms "capitalism" to refer to the system they opposed and "socialism" to refer to the system they were proposing to replace it were largely criticizing systems which, in fact, relied rather heavily on state-owned-and-operated military forces, so it is extraordinarily inaccurate to say that such a force is inherently socialist.
Its true that such forces exhibit many of the features that socialism would propose adopting outside of the realm of the military, but that's a very different point.
If you are doing that, you are probably doing commercialization research, which, while it is research, isn't the basic research for which the report is discussing the role of federal funding.
While basic research sometimes results in patents, it at least as often is producing results which advance knowledge without providing immediately useful and patentable applications, which is then picked up by firms that do commercialization for further work on which patentable applications are based.
Basic research for the most part is very high risk, very long time to payoff, and very little certainty as to what market anything of value that is discovered will end up finding application in, all of which are factors which make it unattractive for private, profit-seeking investors. The benefits are diffuse and often go to people other than those spending the money to the work initially (you could change that by making facts patentable, rather than invention, but that's, I think most would agree, an even bigger source of problems than anything in the current patent regime.)
Are you arguing for eliminating patents, or are you arguing for some kind of mandatory licensing regime? Either would serve the goal you describe, though the impacts on investment currently done where the expectation of patentable results would seem likely to be different.
Its really simple. The MPL will be more compatible with other open source licenses (particularly, GPLv3 and ASL), but the software (particularly Firefox and Thunderbird) will only be licensed under the MPL, rather than triple licensed under the MPL, GPLv2, and LGPLv2.
Consequently, while the new license is compatible with more other licenses than the old MPL was, the software will no longer be licensed in a manner that is compatible with some of the licenses under which it was previously available. This has at least the potential for discouraging re-use of the software.
The right to remain silent and not provide evidence against yourself applies only in criminal proceedings. (See, US Constitution, Amendment 5: "No person [...] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself".)
Breach-of-contract is not a criminal case.
And if you sue them, you will bear the burden of proving that the circumstances that actually occurred obligate them to pay you. And they can put you on the stand and compel you testify under oath, even where that might be against your own interests.
Medicare, like many elements of a modern mixed economy, is arguably socialist, but merely having some socialist elements doesn't make a system socialism.
Every advanced country in the world has a mixed economy that has some elements that are socialist (indeed, many of the commonly-adopted elements were advocated in the Communist Manifesto) while the general structure is strongly grounded in private property and private ownership of most of the means of production.
While some people may reflexive equate Socialist with Communist with Soviet-style Communism and the Cold War, socialism was mostly a reaction to the fundamental horror for the common people under 19th century capitalism and while socialism, and the antithesis to capitalism, didn't become dominant, modern mixed economies are a synthesis of elements drawn from capitalism and socialism, with the former still being predominant (though the degree of this dominance varies considerably among modern mixed economies.)
No, I've noticed that newspapers have been going belly up and readership declining for closer to the last 30 years, a process largely driven by consolidation in the industry that focussed on cutting cost by corporate mergers, cutting the size of newsrooms at individual papers -- eliminating much of the local and investigative reporting in the process-- and relying on more content shared among newspaper chains, using slightly edited corporate and government news releases without substantial original research as news stories, and purchasing content from outside news services and sources of syndicated non-news content.
The rising popularity of the internet since the early-mid 1990s has accelerated this process, as users interested in unreviewed news releases can usually get them directly from the sources, there are a virtually unlimited number of internet sources readily available carrying the same wire service stories (including the wire services themselves), but the internet didn't trigger the decline, the newspapers did it to themselves.
Aside from the US, there are a couple medium and a few smaller carriers and no large carriers in the world (last I checked, the carrier-borne combat force of the US Marine Corps was larger than every carrier-borne force outside the US combined, without even looking at the US Navy proper.) This makes medium -- and even smaller -- carriers extremly useful for power projection against any nation that isn't absolutely sure that the US will intervene on their side, which covers most of China's potential regional rivals.
Exactly one of China's potential rivals as any supercarriers, and deterring that rival from getting involved in any dispute China has with anyone else is a pretty big factor in why China has a strategic nuclear force.
I've run into plenty of poorly designed windows software like that that also doesn't give you a choice of where to install it, or even software that breaks if it is installed to a directory with a space anywhere in it (like, say, anything that starts with "C:\Documents and Settings".)
Obviously, your workaround works for software which is well designed except for the design choice of storing user data in the program's installation directory.
In much the same thing as there is a little bit of water in the Earth's oceans.
This combines two fallacies -- argument to the consequences of belief and false dichotomy. You can simply acknowledge that rights have no objective, factual existence and are subjective value propositions and still build whatever structure you want on top of the rights you believe in.
You, of course, lose the ability to argue that the structure you build on top of those ideas of rights is objectively superior to any other structure, but that's a false universalism built on, as you yourself note, handwaving.
Appeals to conscience aren't appeals to a sense that reports objective realities, they are appeals to a subjective sense akin to (arguably, a subset of) aesthetic sense that it is, in part, inborn and in part shaped by personal experience.
Just as there are some aesthetic expressions that are more or less popular, so there are moral/ethical propositions that resonate with more or fewer people.
The absence of belief in an objective right of the person not to be shot does not equate to either the absence of a belief that is subjectively superior to not shoot the person, and, even moreso, does not equate to the belief in an objective obligation to shoot them. So, no, this argument doesn't hold water.
No, they aren't. Which is why there have been rather bitter disputes over whether rights exist, which rights, if any, exist, and who possesses the rights that exist throughout all of recorded history. If rights were, in fact, obvious, there wouldn't be an issue.
Well, no. They haven't discontinued Google Scholar. They have deprecated the Google Web Search API in favor of the newer Google Custom Search API.
It is less than full (it excludes things like the Google Web Search API), redundant (e.g., Google Desktop is listed at least twice), and misleading (a number of products are listed as discontinued which continued but which were renamed or merged into other products--such as Google Spreadsheets which became part of Google Docs.)
Web Fonts I think is more important to Google than you think.
GWT is fairly widely used, especially by Google.
Open Social isn't actually a Google service to start with, though Google is one of the co-sponsors and users. Lots of big users, too.
The thing you are calling "Google Business Solutions" are actually called "Google Apps", and in addition to the free version, there already are paid premium versions (Google Apps for Busines, Google Apps for Education, Google Apps for Government, google Apps for Nonprofits.)
Google Voice is a pay service with free features (particularly, free calling within the US, and an initial $0.10 calling credit on your account.
I suspect they are distinguishing inputs (and outputs) which transit through the device from data which is "captured and stored" on the device. If each keypress on the keypad is just passed to the remote server with nothing recorded locally, that's a lot different than if the you have a stored history of local events.
No, they aren't. Carriers and OEMs can still use different themes -- even provide them as the default theme. TFA (and this is even in TFS) explicitly notes that all Google is doing is requiring that the Holo theme be available on all Android 4.0+ devices with access to the Market.
They aren't requiring it to be the only option available, or even the default theme. And, in fact, TFA (and TFS) also highlights that Google is also improving the facilities that exist to allow apps to fit in with whatever theme is in use.
And it still will be with this change, and that's, I suspect, intended. Google wants to guarantee that there is a common choice available to users, but still wants to wide range of freedom in how Android is used (by users, carriers, and OEMs), rather than tight monolithic control.
Because Netflix and Hulu+ were able to get different terms from content owners. Some of that may be how much revenue the content owners get from Netflix and Hulu+, some of that may be how unfriendly content owners are to Google for other reasons, some of them may be due to the fact that Google Movie Rentals include the option to download and play offline while Netflix and Hulu+ are streaming-only services, and content owners may view the latter as less vulnerable (whether or not that is actually the case is less important than how they view it.)
Google's primary business is delivering ads to users via the internet on behalf of other firms which create and manage advertising campaigns.
What Google paid another company to do was to create and manage an advertising campaign.
Both of these activities might be described as "advertising", but they are very much not the same thing, and competence at one is pretty much entirely unrelated to competence at the other.
What Google does -- and what radio stations, TV stations, billboard owners, and other "advertising delivery" companies do -- is not the same as what agencies that create and execute advertising campaigns do, although both classes of firms derive their revenue from "advertising".
They accepted accountability, since they are punishing Chrome results in google search the way they would punish the results of other items promoted by paid-link campaigns.
"Responsibility" can be used to mean either "accountability" or "blame" or, well, lots of other things. But I think, in this context, accountability is the important thing.
This somewhat understates the case. "Corporations" are direct creatures of government through law by which special privileges are granted to selected individuals, not independently-created entities that are merely encouraged by being given special privileges by government.
GP didn't blame Microsoft. The question was "what is keeping you on XP?". Whether its Microsoft's fault or not is irrelevant to the question or GP's response.
Well, its only binding precedent on lower courts in Florida. Anywhere else, its merely persuasive precedent, which can be considerably more significant than "nothing at all".