I say it because it is true. Google makes well over 90% of its revenue from advertising. Everything else they do is a rounding error from a revenue and profit perspective. What else would you call them? They might become something else someday but they ARE an advertising company. Virtually every product they make is based on enhancing or protecting their advertising business. Email, maps, search, etc are all about increasing context sensitive ad revenue. Android is a defensive play to keep phone makers (Apple & Microsoft especially) from locking them out of mobile platforms. Set top boxes? Same thing - a defensive play. If you don't see it then you aren't looking at the big picture.

Why not? You sit in a car that has fuel with 270 times the specific energy of batteries and FAR more Kgs of combustible material. You could increase the energy of your watch battery two orders of magnitude and still not get to gasoline.

A lithium air battery has half the specific energy of wood. I wouldn't worry too much about a better battery.

I've met, worked with and (unfortunately) employed many people who were decidedly clueless. If it wasn't laid out in black and white for them they would inevitably do something stupid even when you or I would think it was absurdly obvious that the action was a bad idea. I've seen people surf for porn at work, mass email sensitive documents, fall asleep in the front row of a company meeting, post sensitive company or customer information to public websites, etc. In most cases the person was "surprised" to find out their behavior was wrong. At hospitals I've seen people perp-walked from the building for HIPPA violations like looking up information about VIP patients and on a few occasions posting information about it to their facebook page. If you work for a big accounting firm you might get escorted from the building on a first offense for putting client information to Evernote because doing so violates several regulations. Defense contractors is an obvious one.

Short version, never underestimate how clueless some people can be. Hell, a big part of my job is writing bullet proof work instructions because if something isn't spelled out clearly to a 4th grade reading level then people will do it wrong.

Care to place a wager on that? Private enterprises force things on the public all the time. Sometimes with the blessing of government, sometimes without. Government can override a private enterprise but in the absence of government action private entities can largely do whatever they want. If they are powerful they can even influence government to do their bidding at times. See regulatory capture.

The range of things government does competently is a fair bit wider than most people give credit for. There is some truth in what you say but government is often the least worst way to do quite a lot of things. Health care, social safety nets, infrastructure, contracts enforcement, basic research funding, and more are often better handled by governments than private enterprise. Furthermore just because some people in the US have an apparently allergy against government doing anything doesn't mean they are correct in their assertion that government is always bad. Lots of countries utilize governments for much more than the US does (notably for health care) with great success. Doesn't mean we have to do it that way but just because we don't do something a certain way doesn't mean it cannot be done. I'm not overly trusting of government myself but I also don't axiomatically assume government to be incompetent.

That I would agree with. The problem is that we may have an honest disagreement about what constitutes a worst case scenario. Ask a libertarian or a conservative or a democrat and you'll generally get rather different answers.

Depends on the company and who their customers are. If your customer is the defense department (for example) then they might be pretty sensitive about you posting information to Evernote.

Google Glass is not made for bright sun (though they could fix that I guess) and they sure as hell aren't stylish. They look like the geeky research project they are.

If you have to wear glasses for a functional reason then it is fine to worry (a little) about how they look. Anyone who wears glasses purely for style without a functional reason is a douche.

Oh and bright sun = eyestrain. Seemed obvious to me...

Doesn't matter. The problem isn't really the electronics. The biggest technology problem is the battery. We simply do not have battery technology that is sufficiently advanced to make a lot cool ideas practical. Hell we can't even make a smartphone that lasts more than about a day or two of heavy use.

Partly. They aren't stylish nor are they useful enough to overcome that deficit. But that isn't really even among the biggest problems with Google Glass.

1) People who don't need corrective lenses don't generally want to wear glasses. I wore glasses for 17 years before I had lasik and there isn't a way in hell you would get me to wear glasses again except for safety, eye strain or vision correction.

2) People don't generally like to use voice interfaces particularly in public. You don't see a lot of people using Siri out in public so why should Google Glass be any different

3) People are creeped out by the privacy issues even if many of the critiques aren't really justified.

4) They don't fit gracefully into most people's lifestyle. Much of the functionality of Google Glass is already covered by smartphones. Why do I need this conspicuous and much more annoying device second device to do something I mostly already have? It doesn't scratch any itch I have.

5) The best uses for it are more industrial - particularly augmented reality uses. Think work instructions while building a complicated assembly. But Google seems to largely be ignoring these.

Only deluded ideologues think that the US health care system is privately run. Yes it has elements that are privately run but you cannot ignore Medicare or Medicaid because they are the 800lb gorilla in the system. Insurance companies generally follow whatever pricing Medicare sets. Our more conservative leaning citizens often like to live with the illusion that private always equals better (sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't) and that our system is a private system but in reality is it is a public/private hybrid system with the public parts (Medicare mostly) leading the private parts on pricing.

As for the "worst healthcare system" comment, that is nonsense. Most expensive? No argument. But expensive != worst at least not by itself. Guess where all that nifty technology that the rest of the world gets to use is developed? More often than not, right here in the US - and we incur a lot of the cost for it. The US healthcare system has economic problems but the actual ability to treat disease is second to none. While I certainly won't argue that the overall US health care system is the best in the world (it clearly is not) I would absolutely argue that it isn't the worst either.

Really? I'm not aware of a single Android device that gives you root access straight from the manufacturer. If you don't have root then you don't have complete choice regarding the height of the walls. If a jailbreak of the phone is ever required to do something then that is pretty much de-facto evidence that a walled garden exists.

Minimal barriers != No barriers. You might have some extra choices available to you but let's not pretend Android is FOSS.

If you don't have root access available to you straight out of the box and supported by the manufacturer then it is a walled garden pretty much by definition. The only question is how high the walls are. Saying the walls are lower than the one's Apple has is pretty much the definition of damning with faint praise.

Those devices invariably come with some phone vendor version of a walled garden that is even less attractive than Google's version. See Amazon Fire for a great example.

Who complained about that? I've no objection to having the option to buy a cheaper phone. That is objectively a good thing. I do object to said cheaper phone being a hot smelly barely functional mess. Cheap does not have to equate to bad quality. Fewer bells and whistles sure but there is not excuse for a cheap phone being a shitty phone.

What's with the pointless troll of Apple users? If they want to compare that's fine but why be a dick about it? If you like Android then use it. If you like IOS use that. Picking one or the other doesn't make one a better person but flinging monkey poo at someone who made a different technology choice doesn't speak highly of one's character. (yeah go ahead - insert "you must be new here" comment here)

Want to talk parity? Android is a walled garden too - just with different types of walls. There are countless Android devices that are locked by the manufacturer to older versions of Android, loaded with crapware which cannot be removed and otherwise effectively turned into a walled garden. Google does little to prevent this from happening and in fact largely facilitates this abuse of users via indifference. There are some great Android devices but there is a huge amount of complete shit too. Say whatever negative you like about Apple but the IOS devices they sell are almost always pretty good or better. (they should be given the price) Can't say the same about a lot of Android devices particularly many of the cheaper ones.

That would not solve the last mile problem for places with existing infrastructure. Even in places without it you'd need some specialized gear and the performance wouldn't likely be amazing. Furthermore it still doesn't explain why they needed to purchase an airfield lease for 60 years for a rather substantial sum when their business is advertising.

Riiiight... I wouldn't hold your breath for that to happen any time soon.

I think you are grossly underestimating the technical problems involved. Such a solution has most of the same problems satellite internet has. Internet service is two way which means that devices have to transmit as well as receive. A transmitter that powerful requires quite a lot of power so you are immediately eliminating a lot of mobile devices due to battery life problems. You would have to have a LOT of transmitters so there are spectrum issues. The latency is substantial. Weather is an issue. We don't have any drones that fit your description nor any near term prospects for getting them.

Not to mention that it's unclear how Google will achieve any ROI on any of this. I honestly cannot figure out what the heck Google is doing with all this work in robotics. Their investments are all over the map and if there is a common thread it isn't readily apparent. The only explanation I can think of is that it is some sort of defense against disintermediation but that's a bit of a stretch. Google is a public company and eventually they have to justify all this to the shareholders. Perhaps they can but so far they aren't being forthcoming.

Why are you so sure of that? You've taken a few research projects of Google and extrapolated. Google is an advertising company and you think they are going to start developing airships? If you can explain to me a (realistic) scenario whereby Google achieves a reasonable return on investment trying that I'll be deeply impressed.

This does not work at scale in places without mountains and dams. It's a fine idea but geographically limited.

The availability of hydro is geographically limited. It's great when it is available but it isn't available everywhere and it does have some pretty meaningful environmental consequences too.

The difficult engineering challenge in eliminating fossil fuels from the equation is how to use renewables in places where hydro or geothermal cannot provide the baseload. Out in the middle of the Great Plains or in most large cities hydro storage simply isn't a feasible solution.

People will do that ONCE and then they will bitch to their local politicians. The politicians, fearing that they will be voted out of office by a bunch of pissed off cold people, will bend over backwards to ensure that power is available regardless of the environmental consequences.