Take great care in how you do this, though, and you'd better have a solidly-defined architecture before you do it. Conway's Law points out that however you set up your organizational structure, the architecture of the design will follow suit, so if you break the project up along the wrong lines you are dictating a dysfunctional system architecture.

I disagree.

If you use Gmail as your primary e-mail then your Google password is the crown jewel of your online identity, since every other site out there (including your bank) uses e-mail as the password reset channel. Sure it might be nice if the tool were more general-purpose (though that would require changing the hashing strategy, which intentionally uses relatively few bits as a security measure to protect against brute force), but if you can protect only one password, your e-mail password is the one.

For people who use not just Gmail but lots of Google services, it's even more critical. I store lots of important stuff in Drive, have my phone report my exact location, have my whole address book synced, etc., etc. It doesn't concern me to have so many eggs in one basket because I trust Google to maintain good security, but it can only be as good as my authentication. I use 2FA, but there's still value in being careful with such an important password.

My guess? It's because Uber wants external markers for advertising to grow the business, and their drivers dislike the idea enough that Uber doesn't want to be the entity mandating it. So Uber's lobbyists convinced legislators that this was a good additional "regulation", to give Uber what they want while simultaneously appearing to "crack down" on them. I mean, if everything in the bill was already being done by Uber it would be too obvious that it's just for show.

(Don't read the above as criticism of Uber. Smart businesses always try to turn regulatory oversight to their advantage. One of the downsides of having government big enough to tell businesses what to do is that businesses are then motivated to influence government.)

I think Uber actually already satisfies most of this. They need external markers on the cars (slap some magnetic signs on), and would probably need to do more safety inspections if MA doesn't already require annual inspections of all registered vehicles, and pay a license fee. They already have $1M insurance coverage and obviously have a list of drivers. I think they do background checks, too, though I'm not completely sure.

Frankly, this seems more like a minimal set of regulations to shut up people who are complaining about the unregulated taxi service. Now they technically won't be unregulated, even though the actual changes to their business will be negligible, assuming the license fee is reasonable.

Or to provide more highly-paid jobs for designers of robots to perform the task without human labor.

You should be a little careful with ideas like that... you may end up hurting the people you're trying to help. In many cases, they'd rather have the crappy, exploitive job than starve while watching the machines do what they used to. The machines will come eventually, but taxes like the one you describe will accelerate the process. In general, taxes and other regulatory inhibitors that are intended to fulfill some social goal are viewed by the market as damage, and routed around if at all possible. That doesn't make them useless, but it does mean that you have to step very carefully.

Courting isn't necessary to life, even though it may feel that way. And, actually, diamonds aren't necessary to courting, either. When I got engaged, I was poor and my wife had money, so she bought our rings, both of them. Diamonds are nice enough as long as they are only symbols. If they are more than that, you have a bigger problem.

Huh? This makes no sense. If they're Android, they can do an incredible variety of stuff. Being low-end, they might not do it well, but they should run pretty much every Android app out there. If they "can't do much to begin with", they're not Android.

To be fair, there *are* fixed costs to the power company in keeping you connected to the grid, in fact those costs are a fairly significant portion of the normal power bill. It's just that the current fee structure doesn't reflect it well.

By depreciating to zero in 10 years you're implying that a battery with 70-80% of its capacity is useless. That's hardly true.

Absolutely not. They're there for various very important reasons.

However, none of those reasons are the one you postulate. If you look at each of them individually, drop your bias, and think about what benefit there could be to the company in providing that service to employees... it's generally very obvious.

Where do you keep your toothbrush at work? Or don't you brush after lunch? Ick.

Attrition at Google is very, very low, and what there is is mostly people leaving to found their own companies. As for how it sounds to you... you really don't know what you're talking about. Go spend some time with some of said young employees and you'll see why they feel it's fantastic.

Nope, just another SWE.

Salary plus annual bonus and incentive stock. Yes it's the same for pretty much everyone. Why?

Not at Google. Engineers talk to each other a lot about what they ask in interviews, because one of the rules is that you must "calibrate" your questions, and the very best way to do that is by trying out your questions on your colleagues.

The goal, of course, is to select hires who are at least as good as you and you colleagues.

Actually there's an extremely good chance of Java. Google mostly runs on Java... infrastructure stuff like GFEs, borg, etc. is all C++, and search is C++, but nearly everything running on borg is Java.

This AC nails it. I'm also a Google SWE. And I have gotten yelled at (figuratively) for not disconnecting :-)