Anything that happens inflates someone's bank account. If governments ban CFCs then people with CFC substitutes get a windfall. If governments don't ban CFCs then makers of sunscreen and skin cancer treatments get a windfall.

This is how capitalism works -- how it's supposed to work. Problems attract capital, which generates profits. But it's also how market solutions fall short. It's better for the public if someone makes a killing replacing CFC than if someone else makes a killing treating skin cancer.

It's a little late to be talking about averting global warming.

Google's core businesses would be seriously damaged if Apple obtained a monopoly on mobile computing. If it breaks even and prevents Apple hegemony it's as much of a success as it needs to be.

As for the supposed switching of Android users to iPhone, notice the tortured stipulations in this sentence: "the 'majority' of those who switched to iPhone had owned a smartphone running Android." It's also no doubt true that the majority of users who switched to new Android phone had owned a smartphone running Android in the past. The vast majority of smartphones out there are Android, and that's been true for years now, so it's not surprising that someone buying a new smartphone of any kind has previously owned *some* android handset.

Utter nonsense. Please don't spread such misinformation.

Bulk collection may indeed be unconstitutional, but the court said nothing about that. What they said was that section 215 did not authorize bulk collection, so if Congress wants to authorize bulk collection they have to pass a law to say so. If Congress does that, then the court will eventually have to rule on constitutionality.

Without any programming experience it's not likely you'd get hired. While specific language doesn't matter, you have to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to have a detailed discussion about solving problems in software design and implementation, and prove that you can write clean, accurate code, and do it quickly.

My recommendation is that you first spend some time working through many of the problems provided by Project Euler, or the Top Coder challenges, or similar. Or maybe one of the coding interview books, like this one.

When you're comfortable that you can take on a not-completely-trivial software problem, design an algorithm to solve it, accurately characterize the big O time and space complexity of your solution (not prove it... though you should be able to prove it, given more time), explain why there aren't any more efficient solutions, code it up on a whiteboard, and explain how you'd go about testing it, all in the course of a 45-minute interview, then you're probably ready.

Amtrak employees are NOT federal employees. Amtrak is a publicly subsidized private for-profit corporation with common stock held by four other railroad companies. The Federal government is an investor, but holds only preferred stock.

For C++ there is no standard answer, because every C++ shop uses a different subset of the language. There are probably a few things that all of them have in common, but it's unreasonable to expect that any entry level C++ programmer can be productive without support from senior programmers while they learn the local ropes. Even experienced C++ programmers will need a little time to get up to speed on the local style guidelines.

C++ doesn't have an extensive set of standard libraries, either, which means that every shop has its own set. So senior programmers have to expect that new people are going to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on those.

Finally, I think the question is fundamentally bad, because it implies a misguided expectation of immediate productivity. That's a common expectation (hope?) throughout much of the industry, but unless you're hiring contractors for six-month jobs, its stupid. What matters in the longer run isn't what your new hires know coming in the door, it's how well they learn, and think. Because whatever they know coming in is invariably inadequate in both short and long term. One of the things I found very refreshing when I joined Google is that they don't much care what you know in terms of languages, libraries and tool sets. It's assumed that capable people will learn what they need to when they need to learn it, and that any new project involves some ramp-up time before people are productive. On the other hand, given a little time to get up to speed capable people will become very productive. Much more so than the less capable person who happened to know the right set of things when hired.

Even the small payload becomes a big logistical challenge when you're looking at doing it globally, for large numbers of devices and want to make it fast (means having data centers in all regions), and make it reliable (means having redundancy, at multiple levels). Oh, and the "all the data is encrypted" bit may expose regulatory problems, too.

What specifically are you looking for? As an alternative, are there some ways that Android could be improved to alleviate whatever concerns you have? If your concerns are non-technical and primarily about insufficient ecosystem diversity (i.e. insufficient fragmentation), then there's probably not much to do. If your concerns are related to technical problems with Android, or privacy concerns about its relationship with Google, there may well be.

I'm an engineer on Google's Android Security team, and I'm actively looking for things that we can do to address security and privacy concerns. One of the ideas I've been kicking around is a "pre-encryption network tap"... basically, what if you could turn on a mode that logs a copy of everything your device transmits and receives? Most of that data is (and should be!) encrypted, but since most apps and all system services use the framework implementations (yes, plural... sigh) of SSL/TLS it should be possible to hook in and grab the plaintext. My goal here is to enable users to examine what their device is sending, and to whom, because I think right now it's too hard to tell, and because specifically I think there are a lot of erroneous assumptions that Google is receiving a lot of data from Android devices without user permission.

The downside, of course, is that adding such a hook into the system makes it a prime target for various sorts of attacks. So I don't think we would want to do that, not as stated, anyway. Though there may be some variant of the idea that isn't too risky.

Anyway, given a system like that, it should be possible to build an alternative ecosystem of apps and services that run on Android and don't use Google's infrastructure, and that would be much easier than building an entirely new platform. You'd still need to address the problems I mentioned at the top, but at least those could be the bulk of the challenge rather than just another piece of it.

As another alternative, I think if Google became more transparent about how it manages user data and what it does with it, many peoples' concerns would be addressed. But although I make that argument regularly, I don't have the same degree of influence there as I do over platform technology.

Or if you have other concerns, what are they, and do you have any ideas about how the platform could address them?

Well, speaking of Amtrak employee accountability, I have a story about that. A few years ago my family took a train ride across the country. When we changed trains in Chicago I noticed that the reading light in my sleeping compartment was stuck on, which of course was bad if I wanted to actually sleep. I found the friendly and helpful attendant and reported it, and her reaction was like watching a balloon deflate.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"If we report damage they take it out of our wages," she said.

"What! What do you mean take it out of your wages?" I asked.

"If a car is damaged under my watch I have to pay for it," she said.

"Well," I said, taking out my swiss army knife, "I guess there's nothing to see here."

I have to say that I've never encountered such a nice, enthusiastic, friendly group of people with such an abysmally low morale as the crew of a cross-country train. With passengers they're great, but all through the trip I'd see two or three congregated having low muttered conversations. It didn't take me long to figure out they were talking about management. And while the experience was wonderful, the equipment was in horrible shape. It was like traveling in a third world country.

With management that bad, more data doesn't equal more accountability and better performance. It means scapegoating.

Which is beside the point. Consensus isn't about truth, it's about burden of proof.

Suppose Alice and Bob both try to make a perpetual motion machine. Alice claims she has failed, but Bob claims he has succeeded. The scientific community treats Alice's claims of failure without skepticism but it automatically assumes that Bob has made a mistake somewhere.

Does that seem unfair to Bob? Well, imagine you're a rich guy and Alice and Bob are both applying to you for a job. Bob says you should give the job to him because he's your long-lost fraternal twin your parents never told you about and which the hospital hushed up for some reason. When you mention this to Alice she freely admits she is not related to you. You automatically believe Alice, so is it fair to Bob to be skeptical of his claims?

It's a case of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In either case Bob can prove his claim, it's more complicated and time consuming because he has to explain what went wrong with all the prior knowledge. Alice's claims in either case are consistent with what you reasonably believe to be true so you can reasonably assume she's correct.

Er, no. That's like positing science going off the rails because it replaced instrumentation with data.

Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around. For Mozilla to build that they'd have to find some way to pay for it. Given that people are generally not willing to pay monthly fees for that sort of service, advertising is the obvious option. But to make the advertising effective, it needs to be targeted, so...

How would this be attractive to OEMs? Google already offers an extremely well-developed open ecosystem. Amazon wanted to have their own walled garden, but you're assuming there are OEMs that don't want to do that, but want to have a different ecosystem, and want it enough to be willing to accept smaller sales numbers. What would make them want to do that?

It's HIPAA, not HIPPA.

Normally, the implication of that question is that there are a bunch of blindingly obvious problems which are being blithely overlooked.

So, what are they?