I guess it would take a litigator to notice this, but it's quite unusual that a preliminary injunction denial would be getting this kind of appellate attention.

In the first place, it was unusual for an interlocutory appeal to be granted from the denial of the preliminary injunction motion. In federal court usually you can only appeal from a final judgment.

Similarly, apart from the fact that it's always rare for a certiorari petition to be granted, it's especially tough where the appeal is not from a final judgment, but just from a preliminary injunction denial which does not dispose of the whole case.

This is like saying "mathematics is false, because no human being can know if a statement should be an axiom or not". In both cases the subordinate "because" clause is trivially true, but not logically related to the independent clause it pretends to justify. Mathematics is a tool for generating models, some of which are useful for approximating how the real world behaves; utilitarianism is a subtool within mathematics that's appropriate for generating models of the part of reality we call "human morality".

Every proposed moral system has been used to justify at least an atrocity or two at some point: utilitarianism, deontology, moral relativism, moral absolutism, every goddamn religion you care to name — even Buddhism! (What the hell, right?) The truth is that people choose an action, then they justify their action by creating a post hoc story that rationalizes why the chosen action was Right, and it makes no sense to blame the justification instead of the choice.

Morality itself is a pattern in the brain that shapes what one chooses — how one resolves the balance between conflicting goals — and it's not actually an object-level belief that one can directly observe with conscious thought. If you give people books to read about object-level moral beliefs, the readers don't become more moral or less moral, they just get better at crafting post hoc justifications.

(Also, as it turns out utilitarianism was not a great model for human behavior by itself, but it actually does pretty well if you extend it with uncertainty in the Bayesian sense. Moreso if you go the extra step and add causality to the model (fixing the edge cases that crop up in more nai:ve decision theories that treat actions as evidence). If the space of possible futures is small enough, you can even wrestle the conditional probabilities into submission, e.g. using Judea Pearl's causal networks, and get concrete answers that take that uncertainty into account — still a high bar, but more tractable than "noooo, it's not worth doing unless it's perfect". Many human behaviors that seem irrational in a Homo economicus utilitarian calculus suddenly look perfectly rational if you model the study participant as, say, a Pearlian estimator with a low computed probability for P(stranger will actually give $100|stranger says they'll give $100 if I were to do X AND I counterfactual-do(X)).)

It's really quite simple. A lot of Google projects started from a handful of people going "you know what would be a cool idea?" and doing it with very little approval or red tape (the fabled 20% time). That's certainly the only explanation I can think of for DART, at any rate.

Go is basically what you get when you hire a former Plan 9 developer, expose him to Google's internal hermetic build system (where a 100MiB binary is small), then let him build cool stuff to keep him from getting bored.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but do not speak for my employer. I don't work on any of the teams mentioned in your post. The information in this post is already available to the public in various places.

True, it does exist -- I've used it myself -- but it's incredibly awkward to use and has some real oddities when it comes to terminal emulation.

Only Goobuntu is available. It's Ubuntu Precise Pangolin plus some light policy customization (internal base-install *.debs; some Puppet stuff).

Google employee here (but I don't speak for my employer and I am basing this purely on anecdotal observation, not hard data).

I'm only familiar with my impressions from the engineering side, so I don't know much about the sales and marketing side of things, but nearly all of the engineers use Linux desktops (unless they're developing client software, like Chrome). Laptops are a different story. As a Bay Area-wide phenomenon, software engineers sure like their Macbooks, and this place is no exception. A few of us run Linux laptops, but my impression is that Macbooks outnumber Linux laptops plus Chromebooks combined. But the internal hardware requisition site is now offering the Pixel (indeed, recommending it instead of Macbooks), so this should change with time.

There's also the matter of hardware refresh cycles. The Pixel is not even a year old yet, and it hasn't been available for requisitions for its entire lifespan, so a good number of employees haven't yet had the chance to switch even if they want to. (Returned working laptops are refurbished and reused, so turning over the inventory will take longer than you might expect.) Also, lack of VPN or native SSH impeded the Chromebook's internal usefulness in the early days, but today hardly anything still requires VPN (it works now regardless) and the Secure Shell app is pretty workable (set it "Open as Window" so that ^W goes to the terminal). And... well, the early Chromebooks had anemic hardware specs, which is not true of the Pixel.

You mean Frank Henenlotter's 1990 masterpiece, Frankenhooker , of which Bill Murray said (and I quote) "if you see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker"?

Hitler had a pretty firm "babies good, homosexuals bad" policy for the common folk. Rohm was a party insider long before Hitler was elected Chancellor; in general, Hitler was pretty willing to give special treatment to party insiders, even ones less senior than Rohm. Even so, I'm not aware of any other SA leaders who got a pass for the same reason; care to name names?

For that matter, Hitler's family doctor Eduard Bloch was Jewish, and he got special treatment too (only Jew in Linz with special protection from the Gestapo, notes Wikipedia). Adolf reportedly had quite the soft spot for him after he did everything he could to treat Klara Hitler's rather horrifically advanced breast cancer, despite her financial hardship. Basically, Hitler was a giant hypocrite who tried to ignore the brutality of his own policies by shielding only the people he cared about and could personally see suffering from them.

I'm not a physicist, just a well-read layman, but...

It is more mysterious than that, but if you go with the Many Worlds interpretation it's not much more mysterious.

Basically, if you entangle letters A and B and send them in opposite directions, you're really creating two universes corresponding to the two possibilities: universe P (A here, B there) and universe Q (B here, A there). If you open the envelope to reveal A, for instance, then that copy of you in universe P now knows they exists in universe P, and likewise for B and Q. But unlike in classical physics, universe P is not completely separated from universe Q. P and Q still exist as a single mathematical object, P-plus-Q, and you can manipulate that mathematical object in ways that don't make sense from a classical standpoint.

Basically, it all comes down to one small thing with big consequences. The real world is NOT described by classical probability (real numbers in the range [0,1]). Instead, the real world is described by quantum probability (complex numbers obeying Re[x]^2 + Im[x]^2 = 1).

As it turns out, "system P-plus-Q has a 50% chance of P and a 50% chance of Q" is really saying "system P-plus-Q lies at a 45deg angle between the P axis and the Q axis". Starting from P-plus-Q, you can rotate 45deg in one direction to get orthogonal P (A always here), or you can rotate 45deg in the opposite direction to get orthogonal Q (B always here), thus deleting the history of whether A or B was "originally" here. (If P and Q were independent universes, this would decrease entropy and thus break the laws of physics.) Even more counterintuitively, you can even rotate P-plus-Q by 15deg to get a 75% chance A is here and a 25% chance B is here (or vice versa, depending on which quadrant the starting angle was in). Circular rotations in 2-dimensional probability space are the thing that makes quantum probability different from classical probability, and thus the thing that makes quantum physics from classical physics.

Classically, A is either definitely here or definitely there, and until we open the envelope and look we are merely ignorant of which is the case. Classical physics is time-symmetric, and it therefore forbids randomness from being created or destroyed; classical probability actually measures ignorance of starting conditions. In a classical world obeying classical rules, you can't start from "50% A-here, 50% B-here" and transform it into "75% A-here, 25% B-here" without cheating. The required operation would be "flip a coin; if B is here and the coin lands heads, swap envelopes", and you can't carry that out without opening the envelope to check if B is here or not. Quantum physics is also time-symmetric and also forbids the creation and destruction of randomness, but quantum probability (also called "amplitude") is not a mere measure of ignorance. In the Many Worlds way of thinking, physics makes many copies of each possible universe, and the quantum amplitude determines how many copies of each universe to make. At 30deg off the P axis, cos(30deg)^2 = 75% of the copies are copies of universe P, and you experience this as a 75% probability of finding yourself in a universe with "A here, B there".

(Or something like that. It'll probably make more sense once we eliminate time from the equations. At the moment not even Many Worlds can help us wrap our heads around the fact that quantum entanglement works backward the same as it does forward. The equations as they stand today imply that many past-universes containing past-yous have precisely converged to become the present-universe containing present-you.)

One last complication. If the information of A's location spreads to more particles than A and B, then P and Q become more and more different, and as a consequence the quantum probability rules become harder and harder to distinguish from the classical ones. If you open the envelope and learn "A is here", for instance, then P now contains billions of particles that are different from Q (at the very least, the particles in your brain that make up your memory) and it now becomes impossible-ish to perform rotations on P-plus-Q, because you would need to find each particle that changed and rotate it individually. (Not truly impossible, but staggeringly impractical in the same sense that freezing a glass of room-temperature water by gripping each molecule individually to make it sit still is staggeringly impractical. And both are impractical for the same reason: entropy.)

When so many particles are involved that we can't merge the universes back together, we call the situation "decoherence", but it's really just "entanglement of too many things to keep track of". Entanglement itself isn't really that special; what's special is limiting the entanglement to a small group of particles that we can keep track of and manipulate as a group.

THE RADIUM WATER IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Back in the U.S. robber-baron era (1870-1905) it used to be the case that it was your own fault if you put it in your mouth. It didn't matter if the seller marketed it as edible despite knowing or suspecting that the product was poisonous (such as radium water or formaldehyde-preserved milk). As the buyer you were supposed to know better, as summarized by the legal doctrine caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware"). It was only later that caveat emptor was _partially_ overturned by the invention of the "implied warranty", as federally formalized in the Uniform Commercial Code of 1952 (though the concept was kicking around decades earlier than that on a state-by-state basis). In the absence of a warranty (explicit or otherwise), the seller had made no promise to the buyer about the product sold, and with no promise to break there was therefore no fraud on the seller's part. No fraud, therefore no wrong and no restitution: no wrongful death damages, no medical bill expenses, not even a "satisfaction or your money back" refund guarantee.

To this day, there's still quite a bit of caveat emptor in the law. For example, cigarette smoke is poisonous at the intended dosage, full stop. Habitual smoking of cigarettes is known to inactivate hemoglobin by way of carbon monoxide, to reduce lung capacity by accumulation of scar tissue, to damage the cardiovascular system by hardening the arterial walls, and to dramatically increase the risk of lung and other cancers. But despite their documented toxicity, to this day tobacco companies are not held liable for selling them. They have been sued several times, but generally for their advertising, and many of the advertising suits have been for ads that played up false benefits or downplayed real drawbacks -- i.e. they made a promise (implied warranty of fitness) that was then broken (fraud). But so long as the buyer is duly warned (no false advertising, the Surgeon General's Warning is present), the situation reverts to caveat emptor and it's again the buyer's own fault if they put poison in their mouth.

Funny, I had the same reaction when I read it. He seemed like a salesman for Google or something.

Dear Prince Bernard, If you're talking about my bank account, you're barking up the wrong tree :)

Fair use cases are very fact specific. If you start monkeying with the facts, Judge Chin might not feel the same way about it.

I don't know but please hire me as your lawyer when you do.

Thatswhatappealscourtsarefor