Not really.

I'd say there's a good argument that all of the information I give Google actually exceeds what a personal assistant would know about me. The real difference (thus far) lies in the assistant's ability to understand human context which Google's systems lack. But that's merely a problem to be solved.

Note, BTW, that I'm not saying everyone should want what I want, or be comfortable giving any search engine enough information to be such an ideal assistant. That's a personal decision. I'm comfortable with it... but I'm not yet getting the search results I want.

I think systems built by man that knows a sufficient amount about me, my interests and my needs can. We're not there yet, certainly, but the question was what I want... and that's it.

Put it this way: Suppose you had a really bright personal assistant who knew pretty much everything about you and could see what you are doing at any given time, and suppose this assistant also had the ability to instantly find any data on the web. I want a search engine that can give me the answers that assistant could.

I want a search engine that searches for what I want, not what I type, and not even what I think I want.

Not really ISPs, at least as we traditionally think of them. Mobile network operators.

The MNO in question isn't the middleman, it's the service provider. It provides service to the balloons, which relay it to regions that are too remote to service now.

No, most of these regions aren't served because it's uneconomical. It's not that no one is willing to invest, it's that it's not an "investment" if you know up front that the ROI will be negative. Putting up a bunch of cell towers to serve remote African farmers, for example, doesn't pan out economically because there's no way the farmers can afford to pay high enough fees to cover the costs of all the infrastructure. Project Loon aims to fix this by radically lowering the cost of serving those regions, to a point where it is economical, so the fees the people in the region can afford to pay are sufficient to make serving them profitable.

As for why Google is partnering with MNOs rather than deploying their own connectivity? I don't know but I'd guess a couple of reasons. First, I expect it will be feasible to scale faster by partnering with entities who already have a lot of the infrastructure in place, particularly when you consider all of the legal and regulatory hurdles (which in many areas means knowing who to bribe, and how -- Google, like most American companies, would not be very good at that). Second, by working through local companies Google will avoid getting into power struggles with the local governments. Google is helping their local businesses to grow, not replacing them.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't know anything more about this than what I see/read in the public press.)

What if...

Instead of a stupid troll you were actually interested in the answers. Interested enough to either take some classes on the subject, or expend some effort educating yourself.

We live in an age where the vast majority of the world's information is available for little to no cost or effort, yet you actively choose to remain ignorant.

Step 1: Understand what science is. http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/whatisscience_01
Step 2: Take a class or look it up. http://space.about.com/cs/astronomy101/a/astro101a.htm
Step 3: Keep digging

Well, keeping you out of the public eye is an appropriate punishment when you're convicted of a political crime. But we shouldn't recognize political crimes.

If people want to pay attention to what this guy has to say because he gyrocoptered in restricted airspace, that's their business. Even though it's a pretty stupid reason, it shouldn't be a judge's role to sit in judgment of that.

THere's an important flip side to freedom of speech that is often overlooked: freedom of listening. As a citizen you should be able to hear what the government doesn't want you to hear, unless the government has a compelling reason, and even then the restrictions should be narrowly tailored. "That guy just pulled a stupid stunt," is not a compelling reason to intervene in what people choose to listen to.

You can't fire a faculty member because outside the scope of his duties he expresses an opinion you don't like -- even if it's a clearly crackpot opinion. If you could, Stanford would have kicked Linus Pauling out when he became a Vitamin C crackpot.

The difference, though, is that Pauling was a sincere crackpot -- brilliant people are often susceptible to crackpottery because they're so used to being more right than their neighbors. Dr. Oz is a snake-oil salesman; when he's faced with people who are educated -- not necessarily scientists but critical thinkers -- in a forum he doesn't control, he speaks in a much more equivocal fashion. That shows he knows the language he uses on his show and in his magazine is irresponsible.

So selling snake-oil isn't crackpottery, it's misconduct. But somebody's got to find, chapter and verse, the specific institutional rules of conduct Dr. Oz's misconduct violates. There will have to be due process, particularly if he's a tenured professor, which will probably require lesser disciplinary measures than dismissal be tried first.

Why wouldn't a randomized subsample from 10M people get funded? The required sample size doesn't grow as the population does.

I may be responding to a troll here, but, no, the GP is correct. P-values are about probability. They're often used in the context of evaluating a correlation, but they needn't be. Specifically, p-values specify the probability that the observed statistical result (which may be a correlation) could be a result of random selection of a particularly bad sample. Good sampling techniques can't eliminate the possibility that your random sample just happens to be non-representative, and the p value measures the probability that this has happened. A p value of 0.05 means that there's a 5% chance that your results are bogus in this particular way.

The problem with p values is that they only describe one way that the experiment could have gone wrong, but people interpret them to mean overall confidence -- or, even worse -- significance of the result, when they really only describe confidence that the sample wasn't biased due to bad luck in random sampling. It could have been biased because the sampling methodology wasn't good. I could have been meaningless because it finds an effect which is real, but negligibly small. It be meaningless because the experiment was just badly constructed and didn't measure what it thought it was measuring. There could be lots and lots of other problems.

There's nothing inherently wrong with p values, but people tend to believe they mean far more than they do.

Gee I guess this is so girls don't have to face the pressure of competing with boys. We all know that girls need special help.

I just do not know that this is really needed. I know lots of very smart women in STEM that are very bit as talented as any male. The issues of fair pay and frankly pop culture need to be fixed.

Potentially as replacements for text books.

"e Shopping, by promoting sites on its own Google Shopping platform over other sites, and doing so without indicating to the consumer that Google has an interest in those sites."

I googled iPhone.
On the right hand side, outside of search results, I see "Shop for iPhone on Google" and it has a sponsored marker on it! Did I mention that it was in a box on the right hand side as well?
Really? Just how is that not indicating to the consumer?

I seriously doubt it. I don't see how location reporting for a payment transaction in which location data is irrelevant could possibly pass Google's privacy policy review process. Collection of data not relevant to the transaction is not generally allowed[*], and if the data in question is personally identifiable (mappable to some specific individual), then a really compelling reason for collection is required, as well as tight internal controls on how the data is managed and who has access. I don't see what could possibly justify it in this case, and I can see a lot of risk in collecting it.

FYI, Google product teams have to develop privacy design docs for all new products, and the designs have to be reviewed by the privacy team (or their delegates) and pass the privacy review before they can be launched. Although Google set these processes up before the FTC settlement, I believe they became part of the consent decree and are now mandated by the FTC and validated in regular audits, so Google can't skip or violate them without potentially-significant consequences.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Google spokesperson and this is not an official statement. It is my personal perspective on the process and requirements. However, I'm a Google engineer who's been involved in launching privacy-sensitive products, so I think my perspective is accurate. I also do security reviews of Google projects, which sometimes touches on privacy issues (though privacy review is separate from security review, as it should be).

[*] Just to head off a likely riposte: No, StreetView Wifi collection and the Safari do-not-track workaround are not counterexamples. They predated the privacy review processes and, as I understand it, were part of the motivation for establishing the processes.