I'm hoping I'm not the only one who initially misread the headline as "Google to Kill Its Developers".

I realize that people have given up expecting "Do No Evil", but this is really doubling-down.

Okay, I was going to dump on this, because the TheVerge article sucks. The press release, however, actually does a good job discussing some of the signals they track and how this ties into them. They even have a nice visualization of student traffic which hints at some ways that they might be able to infer stuff from all of it.

As an aside, the article contains this horrible quote (I really hope there's some missing context):

I'm sorry, but I do not recall Amazon ever doing that. Quite frankly, I'd consider it really awkward to receive things in the mail based on what they thought I might need.

There is definitely symbolism and flowery language in the Bible, particularly in the prophetic books of the old testament, as well as in Revelation, however, I am far more interested in this:

1. Your hypothetical quote, given the Bible's propensity for reusing imagery, makes the story of Adam and Eve take a really weird twist.

2. I'm not Jewish, so I don't know all the rules, but the concept of a circumcision involving anything that needs to *uncoil* is terrifying to me. It just seems like it would be prone to issues.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't totally believe that. At least, not insofar as it implies a deep understanding of the true impact.

I think what they knew was that if people really liked the product, then they could get lots of people to engage with it and that they'd make lots of money. That's true of pretty much any product, and it's why we have marketing and the like. It's what every inventor and app-maker and whatnot wants, and it's not a bad thing to want to provide something so useful that everybody uses it regularly.

What I don't actually believe that they knew was that there would be a truly addictive (ie, no hyperbole) effect on millions of people, to the extent that they've legitimately ruined lives. I find it hard to believe that some of the deeper, more insidious aspects of this were as foreseeable going in as they are in hindsight.

Furthermore, and I realize this is me being an optimist, I'd like to believe that if they had a deep understanding going in of the impact it would have, they would have done things a little different - "We can make $100bln and destroy lives and burn villages to the ground, or we can make $75bln and reintroduce the now extinct unicorn."

So just because the article contains the word "hacking" (regardless of how aptly it was used), this is now News for Nerds / Stuff that Matters?

Unless there are some mitigating factors here to discuss, it looks like this is a very open and shut case of "Idiot knowingly accessed a system without authorization and stole his previous company's data to use in direct competition."

In other news, everyone's local police forces arrested a number of people for various offenses which they allegedly committed.

In an interesting example of Poe's Law, as someone who has never read Game of Thrones, but has a wife who watches the show (ie - I have a vague idea of the types of things that might be in that universe), the GP and parent's posts are indistinguishable as either a joke or an earnest indication of what could happen.

FTFY

Here's my conspiracy theory.

While they may see potential value for Mars, I see this as a way to acclimatize people to the idea that nuclear is a safe option. Where NASA is in the industry and previous accidents aside, the American public, as a whole, still regards NASA as being the same, awesome NASA that it was in the 50s.

That being the case, if this can bring nuclear into the public consciousness as something that's good and safe and useful, then it won't be about Mars, it will be about how we can "leverage what was learned from developing reactors usable in the harsh Martian landscape for use safely at home".

Excellent riposte.

I, too, frequently cite Bunny v. Fudd (1948), in which counsel for the defense provided the nigh invulnerable "I know you are, but what am I" defense.