I didn't think of this one. Google now wants to see everything you print too? George Carlin was right when he said we would eventually trade all of our freedom in exchange for new toys.

They cant rent it, or they would have to keep the prices the same. With "buying" they can lower the price later and screw existing customers. It feels a whole lot different to buy something and see the price go down than it does to pay higher rent than someone with the same toy.

I don't support it either way. Maybe we should be complaining about the cell phone towers and transmission infrastructure not being open instead.

I agree, ballsy. I say do the crawling anyway! It is obvious that the information has value, and is publicly available. In the intelligence world this kind of stuff is known as "open-source intelligence" and is where an estimated 80% of info is found. I hope the guy didn't sign the agreement. If so, he is probably the only person prohibited from doing the same thing again.

This book uses programmed learning that goes step by step through everything you will need and more. It is designed for self study. There is also a sequel book that goes into some much higher stuff. I used just this book as preparation for classes requiring calc 3 as a prerequisite.

I'm sorry for calling you a moron, but I wouldn't feel better calling you a novice. Is the little oatmeal homepage the site you are having trouble with? Well, how about some free advice so you don't have to deal with anymore SEO fraudsters. If you have 41k inbound links and you still have a pagerank of 0, I'll bet you have been blacklisted or sandboxed. Second, it doesn't really help your site to have the entire first page of your HTML consisting of ASCII art including profanity. Third, you have almost no meaningful text or alt text on your images. I don't blame you for being skeptical of professional SEOs, since most of them suck. How long are you going to blame Microsoft for your problems?

You sound like an absolute moron. Although it is a perfectly human reaction to support the search engine where you rank higher, you need to get a clue. I am a professional SEO, and hundreds of my client sites rank higher in Bing and Yahoo than they do in Google. Search engines are designed for different reasons, and Google is optimized for making money. This means that the advertising on Google gets a lot of click fraud. This still makes money for Google, so what do you expect? The sites above you on Bing might just be there for different reasons.

>> would likely set the standard, and that would drive widespread adoption as everyone scrambles to make their systems iPhone-friendly

Since when do people scramble for a new standard? Do you mean standards like 32 or 64-bit? How about C++ strings? When was the last time you received a dollar or half-dollar coin? You think people are going to upgrade their cars and home to work with a cell phone?

Who is going to build the cable-towing tripping mechanism? ATAT

Why is an honest opinion regarded as a troll? People have such illusions about the leaders of corporations! People probably called legitimate skeptics trolls before Enron, Worldcom, and "the credit crisis" too. Google is terrifyingly similar to those infamous situations right before things went wrong. A company with so many phds employed could never write a program to fudge advertising revenue numbers right? ;)

Yes, they could. You just have to pay taxes when you pay yourself a salary. Or, just as you described but more directly, give themselves stock options. We've all heard of those right? The only reason to give yourself a $1 salary is as a publicity stunt. It was a publicity stunt when Lee Iacocca did it 30 years ago at Chrysler too!

Sure, you can't just pay for 24/7 servants for yourself, right? (employees) You can't buy a skyscraper and give yourself an office on the top floor, right? You can't build a neverland-style research campus, right? When you own a controlling interest in a company you can buy anything "for-the-company" as long as it can arguably be called a business expense. Company cars, company JETS, etc. Are you suggesting that the owners of a corporation are required by federal law to pay themselves $1 salaries? That would be a fantasy world!

Good question! What are they planning to do with the money? Something that the shareholders of Google wouldn't approve of I think, since otherwise they would do it with Google money and not be forced to pay taxes.

Why don't we get real for a minute? If these guys were forced to live like they only earned $1 I would agree with you completely. They own the company you moron! They can pay themselves whatever they want without selling the stock. They can also buy anything they want in the name of Google and not pay any taxes on it.

And?... If they thought Google stock would be worth more in 5 years, why would they be making the decision and telling us about their plans to sell it now? 5 years is way longer than any insider transaction reporting requirements.

You know, unless they actually believe Google is about to fall apart, they wouldn't be selling. They are in a position to know whether or not Google really is the awesome and profitable machine everyone thinks it is. 6.4 billion in ad revenue in the latest reported quarter, almost 66% of it from Adwords on Google sites. Do you really think that many people use pay-per-click every three months? The Google story has "too good to be true" written all over it. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some serious money laundering going on.