Of course Google will prefer their own brands.

The problem here is Google has over 75% of the search engine market and is pretty much the gateway to the Internet to many users. It should not be abusing that monopoly to unfairly promote their other non-monopoly services over that of their competitors' services.

As does Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and all the others which have complementary products and services

Maybe that's wrong. But Google search is a monopoly and the impact of abuse is greater.

If automated driving is so perfect, are you willing to fly in a pilot-less commercial plane? No? Remember, planes don't have deal with as much traffic as cars, and yet it not 100% automated. What does that tell you? If automated flying with little traffic is difficult, driving automation is not a fully solved problem, and won't be, for many decades.

Is this something people actually want, empty marketing rhetoric, or a frightening imminent example of 'manufactured consent'?

I definitely think this is manufactured consent. How many drivers complained they don't want to drive anymore? Maybe a few, but the vast majority of the drivers do enjoy driving. Being a passenger all the time sucks. For these people, self-driving cars are a solution to a non-existent problem.

What would be a lot of fun would be the rednecks encountering many state troopers a mile or so ahead. That's because these self-driving cars are made by Google so it will have all types of sensors up the wazoo. The second the car detects it's being "attacked," it will send a distress call over wifi, along with the license plates of the attackers.

This though, is the reason I don't like self-driving cars. The car manufacturer and the govt can track your every move. It's a ridiculous invasion of privacy.

Wait till there are 5 or 6 electric car manufacturers building cars similar to Tesla. At that point, do you one separate, unique showroom per brand? That seems like a waste of space, salesmen, and mechanics. A more practical solution would be 3 car brands per dealership.

But what if Apple, Microsoft and Google ban such apps from using NFC for payment or they have proprietary API not shared with app developers that you need to make an Apple Pay clone? After all, despite millions of apps, only 4 or 5 app stores exist in the mobile world and they belong to Apple, Google, Microsoft and other mobile OS vendors.

But what do you think about the blank space around keys? Isn't that kind non-user friendly and non-ergonomic? Does it use a mechanical switch or those ugly rubber dome key switches?

According to that graph, 5% more IE users are likely to quit compared to FF users. So hire only FF users to save money?

The target person's smile looks completely computer-generated and not natural at all. They are very far from a toothpaste smile. Real actors in movies need not fear Hollywood replacing them with no-acting-talent pretty faces.

As far as lunches go, I can and do get them cheaply by buying materials and making them myself.

I'm not talking about ordinary home-cooked meals, but tasty restaurant meals created by expert cooks. I'm willing to pay the cook for the ingredients + hourly wage + rent of his kitchen tools/or he can borrow my kitchen utensils.

My condition: the restaurant open sources all its recipes, so no we don't pay for any trade-secret IP.

Adding up these costs results in 1/5th the cost we pay at restaurants. Why should we pay so much for the IP and renting a table/chair for an hour or so?

No cost to anybody else involved. No noticeable use of scarce labor or materials.

But I specifically selected examples where labor or materials are not scarce. Cooking is thousands of years old, and cars, hundreds of years old. If I were to pay for all the materials and labor required to build cars, or prepare food the cost would be a tiny fraction of what we pay in retail. Why should we pay so much for non-digital IP? If you agree to apply the same low cost to physical products (which are simply, IP + raw materials), we can agree to reduce the cost of digital goods.

Why do you care about how a product is embodied: physical or digital? It requires the same cost structure (maybe more upfront costs than physical products), talent and genius to create both types of products. So why should you have the right to pay little for digital goods?

If you steal a car, you're depriving someone of a car. You're not taking $(labor + materials).

LOL, where did I say "steal the car?" The cost of duplicating an existing car includes cost of raw materials, machinery and labor. And I just want to pay for that only, not the other design and other IP costs, or marketing/advertising.

Raw material cost: paid
Machinery rent cost: paid
Labor cost: paid
IP cost: not paid
Marketing/Advertising/Branding: not paid

Because stealing IP is not stealing and is okay, according to many on slashdot, not paying for car IP should not be considered stealing.

If the value of a car to its makers were merely equivalent to labor + materials, the maker wouldn't have bothered making the car in the first place.

Right, and you think song makers should bother creating new music if you're just going pay them $10 and distribute it to millions for free?

If you want to have a consistent theory of property rights then intellectual monopoly has no place in it.

I'm sorry, did you or your ancestors create the song? No? Then what gives you the right to take it without permission, to enjoy the fruits of another person's labor? None, you have to right. The issue here is ownership, not monopoly. The person who created the song owns it. The person who did not create the song (eg: you) does not own it and has no rights to it unless he/she pays for it.

If it costs you millions of dollars to make something that I can do for $10 and customers determine they would rather have my product then you should lose business because you are wasting resources.

What exactly can you do with $10? Write a complete song? You're full of it.

A car and a lunch both require labor and resources that cannot be used on another car or lunch.

Fine. But suppose I were to pay for the resources and labor required to manufacture the car, can I have at just for that price (labor + materials)? The same goes for lunch at a restaurant.

If I were to pay labor + materials for both the lunch and the car, the price would be 1/5th to 1/10th the usual retail price. Please find me a place where I can buy lunch at 1/5th usual price or a new car at 1/5th retail price. Bet you can't find such a place. And yet you want to apply the same model to pure digital goods.

but it's abhorrent for the artist to ask people to pay a nominal fee for a copy of the music he/she has worked on?

Yeah, um, that's utterly absurd.

No, it's not absurd. It's the only way these former napster, current torrent users, which slashdot is full of, get to listen to your music for free. It's all about stealing control of music from its creators so the freeloaders don't have to pay that 99 cents to listen to their favorite song. Music will be freed from the tyranny of its creators. LOL.

So how exactly is your argument rational? Do you think paying $10 for piece of plastic for material that cost millions of dollars to create gives you complete rights over that material, including redistribution? In what world can you rationally obtain a millions of dollars worth asset for $10? Perhaps only in the world of pirates, nowhere else.