SAABRE and the other booking systems are a bit too smart these days to actually make tickets available at some sort of pre-determined price.

Jet fuel costs four times what it did ten years ago. Fleets are getting replaced. You really think they're going to let the system release any $300 seats unless the load factor for that flight is low and converging with the flight day?

Still, it only costs about 30% more in actual dollars than it did in 1999 to fly cross country. That little fact doesn't exactly make me confident that the broken remains of what was once a diverse domestic air travel market are very concerned with the self-loading freight, if you get my drift.

Do no evil was never the operative motto for the company.

See also: aggressively pushing prescription drug ad sales Google knew were illegal years ago. Hood winking the folks at Ames research center into becoming "Larry and Sergey and Eric's Private Airport". Etc.

This is why Google's efforts lately have been received relatively poorly. People know that Google sees them as marks. There is no free lunch, and Google's products lately show a distinct lack of polish and execution needed to make it a one-stop-shop for "categorizing the world's information". People know Google is looking over their shoulders constantly, and their products aren't getting better fast enough to keep ahead of the free/utility versus 'leave me alone' curve for some.

When you are getting something useful for free, that's great. But the value for Google doesn't extend to actually creating consumer-driven, best-in-class products. It's obvious to a growing umber of people that Google's products for consumers exist solely to create value for the company by gathering, manipulating, and selling their behavioral habits

See G+(is that an echo in here?) or Google TV, which last I heard, might have shipped a few hundred thlusand units. See anything they've done in the consumer space over the past few years - it sucks and no one is using it.

Android - a product Google has to pay other companies for because if all the IP conflicts and agreements - is successful but looks to have some pretty big and increasingly worrisome problems with forking. Google could lose control of it. And more Android users I talk to are pissed - I mean pissed - that Apple supports a three-year old phone with the latest iOs, but Google doesn't give a ahit enough to work with carriers to make that experience more valuable - to the customer.

Read the article about Stanford's coziness with Valley companies to get some ideas why this brain rot is pissing actual customers off. Hint: MBAs and lots of smart kids who are pretty cocky have a lot to do with it.

Thank you for echoing what this silicon valley transplant has seen and felt during nearly 20 years here.

Stanford University is pretty much a "free hire" pass at many companies here. Based on many of the project and product managers I've met who graduated from there, that tendency has cost valley companies a lot of money, but at least the BMW dealerships and Coach stores are happy.

Exactly. Consensus hiring is Stanford voodoo clubhouse bullshit too - "we all thought you were awesome, but Arnie here wants to hire the girl with big tits who is almost as good as you, so...see you later!"

I live in Silicon Valley and most of the recent Stanford grads I meet are like West Coast Romneys: legacy kids, well-heeled by their own rich parents and friends, and already assured of that new 5-series or a spot at the VC table, no matter how stupid the idea is (paying 1 billion for Instagram...).

Yeah - I resent the hell out of the culture here. It's gone from what you know to who you know in 20 years. Now, instead of building things in Silicon Valley, we just reinvent the same scams to fleece money from consumers - thanks in part to your Stanford MBAs.

Credibility fail troll. You meant trojan, right? Because zero Mac viruses (self-spreading and replicating) exist. There's one widespread Mac trojan which masqueraded as a Flash installer with an Adobe logo - because, you know, Mac users are all stupid and clicking on shit like installers from major software vendors.

Malware "writters" must be busy doing something else, eh?

That's exactly the right analogy. The vast majority of Windows malware found on Macs is in filed e-mails from Windows users. Seriously. If you never do anything with the mail again, it's not even comparable to a dormant bacillus like anthrax because there is literally zero chance of infection of the host being infected, and a zero chance of infecting others unless direct action is taken by the "host".

Your values are not the same as those looking to make money by reselling audio content. I can assure you that various music distributors would have no problem at all working in the studio with their own or third-party engineers to produce "Mastered for iTunes" versions of a catalog if that's what they think will lure more buyers. Whether or not "Mastered for iTunes" involves a substantively changed version (for example, engineered toward smaller drivers with more bass cutover, increasingly popular these days).

Regardless of your opinion about how something should work, this kind of collaboration is an every day occurrence in the industry and never relies on "turning over" anything to Apple.

Half the US population will pretend that scientific consensus does not exist as they drive automobiles created with the fruits of science, the Chinese will fudge their numbers, and nothing will change.

God forbid we raise revenue to even 1999 rates. The poor little rich people might cry. And we might cut the deficit, too.

Probably because their disregard for human life and sloppy, fast and loose mining practices inevitably leads to huge accidents with hundreds killed...just last month. You should see the totals since 2005.

No biggie though! Yay China! More cheap electronics, please!

China is also the largest provider of toxic adulterants in exports. They build factories where people are given 15-minute breaks twice a day to urinate and defecate, and four hours to sleep. Western companies make a show of trying to police these factories, but when it comes down to brass tacks, there are simply too many factories, too many bodies, and not enough oversight for any of it to make a lot of difference. The solution to factory suicides in China? Bars on the windows.

Because we're apparently now a nation that simply consumes things made elsewhere - mostly China, it seems at times - it's easiest to just trust them when it comes to things like baby formula (melamine), pet food (more melamine), drywall (formaldehyde and H2S), paint on toys (lead)....and when your relatives get sick because they can't breathe due to the toxic wallboard, well, there's no one to sue for recovery of lost money, time, and health. Oh, well!

The Chinese culture does not define trust the same way Western societies do. Most of their factories are owned by former military generals. The standards being developed will come with lots of access to LBNL's own methodologies, networks, people, and other trusted entities, which China will be happy to use for their own benefit.

Trust me on this.

Yes, and well, too bad for all the tainted-beef-eating dead people's families. They can, however, rest easy knowing that the ShitBeefCo will go out of business and its employees will be destitute as soon as ShitBeefCo's CEO's golden parachute inflates over the Caymans, where his bonuses for improving profitbility at SBC are protected from lawsuits.

See? The market corrected itself; it killed the stupid little people, and rewarded the superior Randian Overlords who worked so hard to get through an MBA program while playing rugby and fucking Muffy in the BMW convertible!

Thank god for the invisible hand pimp-slapping us all...again. Because the market will automagically correct itself...SUCKERS.

I have friends who tell me Randroids like you seem to be are sociopaths. I'm starting to think they're right.

Oh - and I just moved my domains off of GoDaddy AND I wrote to my congresscritters. Have you?

Luckily I am friends with some people who worked there (2/3 have left since) and I'm thankful I didn't pursue the job.

Anything constructive to add? I maintain that they're wildly self-entitled based on their own 'cultural' guidelines, which led to bad decisions like Qwikster. They're just like Apple in the 90s.