Wow... I don't know how to respond. I think you need some perspective, here. We entered this conversation on a reasonable point of disagreement, but you have gone well past that into speculation and outright prosecution of Google.

Let me just take your last comment:

I think if you re-read everything I wrote you'll find that I've never advocated for that. What I advocate for is just giving a company enough room to show itself to be just or unjust without flying off the handle every time it turns out that someone who worked for (or in this case, didn't work for) Google says something questionable. Yahoo! and Cisco work hard to make the world a less pleasant place to live (you use China as an example... do you have any idea what those two companies do there?) Google, on the other hand does an awful lot to make the world a better place to live and to make sure that they will continue to have the option to do so in the future. DLF, their Open Source support and Citizen are just a few examples of how they've helped.

Does that earn them a free pass? Nope. But I do think it earns them the right to actually be judged on their actions and not the nightmare scenarios we can paint.

And yet, you felt that this story indicated that Google was willing to re-define it. How did you mean that, exactly?

You're wrong, but also imprecise. "Benevolence" is as poorly defined a word as "evil," but you're wrong about the general idea that, as a for-profit, public corporation (keep in mind that it's the "public" bit that's important, here, not just the for-profit part), Google has no choice but to pursue the most profitable line of action, regardless of moral ruminations by the founders.

In fact, the grounds upon which many companies are sued for not maximizing shareholder value is the idea that they advertise a certain business model, and then failed to execute on it in a way that a reasonable investor would expect. The courts have, as I'm sure you're aware, supported this notion that reasonable investors can expect companies to ignore their executives personal moral values and instead pursue profits at all costs...

But Google did something unique, here. Their S1 has a really interesting section that explains to the SEC and their investors that they will NOT take actions that violate their core principle of "do no evil" and they spell out quite clearly that this means that their stock may never be worth what it might otherwise be worth to their shareholders, and they go on to outline how and why.

I believe that this is a brilliant way to end-run around the whole problem. Of course, it's no guarantee that they won't decide to behave immorally or define morality differently from anyone else, but to say that Google will be compelled to do whatever it takes to make more money for their shareholders is flat-out wrong.

Partially this is true, and is a stated goal. But, I think you're short-selling the desire that Google's executives have, here. They've worked very hard to establish the ability to increase access to information, and not just for the reasons you cite above (their Citizen projects and Data Liberation projects make this clear).

Of course. They drive their business through advertising, and most good things that they've tried to do has, I'm sure, been pitched in terms of "here's how we can do this thing, and here's how we drive that through advertising revenue."

Much of what Google does has no immediate return, of course (their Open Source donations in code, money and other labor, for example), but much of it does for sure. I just don't think that couching your good deeds in terms of good business negates their value or the kudos a company should receive for doing them.

Um... no. No, in fact that's exactly the opposite of the truth. Remember, it's the cost per capita of U.S. citizens, not COVERED U.S. citizens. That means that in order to cover a small fraction of our population, we're paying far more per taxpayer than other developed nations spend per taxpayer to cover everyone. It's obscene.

Moreover, it's not better healthcare on the whole. The U.S. has some of the best teaching hospitals and medical research organizations in the world. This is true, but that doesn't affect the overall quality of care as much as you'd think. This is because most healthcare doesn't involve these institutions, and our hospitals are a mess (nursing shortages, monetary problems, consolidation of ownership and many other factors have damaged them horribly).

Add to that that we consider many covered procedures in other countries to be "elective" here (e.g. in many countries such as Germany "spas" are covered as a periodic cost, allowing people to seek preventative therapies that involve exercise and relaxation).

I'm sorry, but you just can't call out the Nazis and the United States for refining propaganda in the 20th Century and leave out the Soviet Union and China.

It's true that Western propaganda was heavily influenced by Viennese and American concepts and put to the test in the U.S. in order to push the country into World War I by Woodrow Wilson. However, that occurred in parallel with the development of Russian revolutionary efforts to sway the populace which would be enshrined as a central element of Soviet rule.

If Hollywood, the music industry and book publishers were half as open with their data as Google, I'd be a happy camper. I can re-publish Google's content (e.g. search results) to my heart's content a long as I do so using their APIs... can you please point me to the Time Warner API for re-publishing the just-released Hollywood blockbuster on my Web site? I'd like to do that.

Also, Google makes my own data available to me to extract and use as I will at any time across a large number of services from gmail to search history to profile settings to map data. The Data Liberation Front works hard to make sure that this data is made available to users so that they can migrate to other services, should they wish. That's something that the music industry makes easy for artists, right?

As noted in a previous post, you're wrong. Said quote a) comes from a YouTube executive who was, at the time, in no way associated with Google and b) it was essentially an IM bragging about how he was going to make the company look valuable, not about copyright infringement c) I have no idea how well his voice survived the transition to being a Google employee, but I'm not willing just assume that such an attitude was welcomed with open arms without some evidence.

That has to be the single most abhorrent abuse of the word "evil" I've ever seen. Google believes that the contents of libraries should be made available of the Web. They have a strong point, and I think I actually agree with them, though I realize that the increased ease of access will cause problems for the current publishing business model. What you appear to be saying is that any attempt to increase the public's access to content that would damage an existing business model is inherently evil. I believe that to be nonsensical (though if you simply disagree, I take no exception to that... it's the demonization of the concept of an electronic library that I think is wrong).

Now, on to YouTube: YouTube is a tough nut, and I think we'll be doing the world a disservice if we resolve it as if it were a single issue in a vacuum. The core question reverses the library/business model issue. It is suggested by Viacom et al. that the ready access to information creates an environment in which the standard protections afforded to those who provide physical space for information (e.g. cork boards) are not acceptable online and that carriers of that information must be held liable for the use of those spaces. We're not arguing that Google is evil, we're arguing that they knew they were getting themselves into a legal morass which would likely result in Google defending their side of the case in court and shaping the laws of our land with respect to the Internet. That is actually quite the opposite of evil.

In both cases, I'm cheering for an outcome that happens to coincide with Google's interests, but I would be (grudgingly) rooting for the same outcome were it Microsoft or Monsanto being attacked for the same reasons.

Yep See the section labeled "Medicaid Expansion." I thought there was also a provision that would lower the age that Medicare and Medicaid automatically kicked in, but I don't see that here.

That's not correct, but neither was my original statement. The truth is between the two. All employers over 50 employees would be required to provide insurance for their employees or pay a substantial fine per employee over 30 ($8,200 x (# of employees - 30)).

Most people will be required to get insurance if they don't get it from their company, BUT, there will be exceptions (those now covered by Medicaid, those who file a waiver for religious reasons, etc.)

The religious reasons exemption kind of bothers me. I understand that there are those who don't want to seek medical care because they feel that their deity of choice doesn't approve. That's fine, but I don't get to opt out of paying for highways because I don't have a license... and I'm fine with that. It's just one of those infrastructure costs. If the fees for not getting insurance were about the same as the cost of insurance, then I wouldn't see any problem with removing the religious exemption.

Ah, welcome back to Slashdot. I attempt to formulate a valid debate and am immediately modded down as "flamebait" by someone who disagrees with the points I made. Is rational debate "flamebait?" I guess it is, but isn't that exactly the point of this post? Aren't we trying to elicit a higher quality of debate than the shouting match going on on TV? Is Slashdot so ill equipped to discuss politics?

That's right, you missed it. Medicare and medicaid (the largest expense our government has today, costing more per-citizen (not per covered citizen) than any healthcare system in the developed world, will be expanded to cover something like 15-20 million additional Americans. Everyone else gets mandated employer insurance. I'm not sure what the un- or self-employed get, but I believe that this is modeled on the Massachusetts option, and here in Mass. we are required to buy our own insurance unless our incomes are below the poverty line. In some of those cases, the government then provides subsidies for a private plan

As a non-U.S. resident you must have excellent healthcare. That renders your opinion biased and we can't accept what you have to say. ;-)

That's not true at all. If we had no healthcare costs in the U.S., then that would be reasonable. However, what we have is the single most expensive per-capita healthcare system in the world,, right now, so to analyze where we'll be in 10 years after we implement this plan 4 years out is entirely reasonable.

I think that a valid and healthy debate could be had around the topic of how bad Fox "News": is for America, not because they're conservative (they're actually not) or because of their ideology, but because they represent the worst and least productive form of debate, approximately equal to that of two schoolyard kids yelling, "am not," "are so," at the top of their lungs.

Want health care debate? If you watch Fox, you'll get "they're getting their shovels ready for grandma." Here's the conservative position (I won't say if this is my position, but I understand debate well enough to state it regardless of my position): this legislation represents an attempt to turn the health care industry into the airline industry. Regulating MPG ratings is easy for the government, but when it comes to industries that literally hold their customer's lives in their hands, we don't accept the concept of cost-benefit, and therefore we over-regulate until the industry cannot sustain itself. Then, we impose controls that prevent the industry leaders from failing in order to prevent our regulations from killing them. Eventually we have two choices: admit that we have socialized the industry or allow it to continue hemorrhaging money and treating its customers like cogs. This approach gives us the worst of all possible public healthcare options, even worse than what Fox has been calling it. Indeed, a government takeover of healthcare would be preferable, though it would sink our economy like a deadweight. Instead, we should be implementing controls that make the smallest possible changes to the healthcare system, yet improve its value to American citizens, while streamlining medicare and medicaid into something that doesn't bankrupt our nation, but continues to provide excellent care to our seniors and those who cannot (as opposed to will not) provide for themselves.

Here's the problem: there is no argument. The argument is essentially: hey, we're going broke trying to provide healthcare and doing it radically worse with fewer covered than any other developed nation Vs. you're a socialist tyrant who wants to destroy our way of live, kill our elderly relatives and force all of our women to have abortions! That's not an argument, it's a reasoned position vs. a rabid chicken. Fox is the figurehead and spokesman for that rabid chicken and as such, we're not going to proceed to have rational debate in this country again until they're put out of their misery (preferably by declaring News Corp to be a political advocacy group and imposing the same controls on them as any other).