Google Cloud Print (which works on Android devices and on any Windows/OS X/Linux machine with a Chrome browser) sends your print jobs to Google, which routes them to the cloud-connected printer you select. It's actually quite convenient in a lot of ways. It means you don't have to configure the machine you're printing from for the printer you're printing to. It also means you don't have to be in the same physical location as the printer to print... which seems less than useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper because you need it, but can be very useful if you're trying to print a piece of paper that someone else, who is located near the printer, needs.

ChromeOS doesn't include a native printing system (CUPS would be the obvious choice), and can only print via Cloud Print. IMO, ChromeOS should bundle CUPS with a reasonable set of printer configurations, for users who may not have a cloud-capable printer, or who may not have network connectivity, but the cloud solution actually works really well where it does work.

I agree that Chromebooks need to be able to print to a USB-connected printer, but I disagree that Cloud Print is crappy. It's non-functional where you don't have net connectivity, but everywhere else, it's awesome. In my experience it's so much more reliable than ordinary Wifi printer connections, and even some USB printer connections that I always use Cloud Print first, if it's available. haven't even bothered to configure my laptop with drivers for my home printer. That approach is fiddly, while the cloud solution works every time with no setup. And it works from my phone, my tablet, etc.

In addition, it is occasionally *very* convenient to be able to print to a printer somewhere else. There have been several times when I've been traveling that I've printed something for my wife, on our home printer. Yes, I could send her the doc and she could print it, but only if she has the relevant application... it's so much easier just to text her to say "The document you need to sign and run up to the county office is printing in the kitchen right now".

The point of a Chromebook isn't cost savings, it's that it's maintenance-free. There's no malware to worry about and nothing to mess up. The same is pretty true of an iPad or an Android tablet, but presumably he wants a laptop form factor.

My mom wanted to get something and I encouraged her to get either a Chromebook or a tablet, but my dad insisted that those were crap and she should get a real computer, and he found a deeply-discounted laptop with Windows 8.1 on it, which was cheaper than most Chromebooks.

And two days later I was over at her house, cleaning off malware, installing AV, trying to fix configuration changes she'd accidentally made while trying to fix the problems she'd caused. I should have made my dad fix it, frankly. Windows is too much hassle. OS X isn't too bad, but Apple's premium prices are. Linux can be anywhere from impossible to ideal for a less-clueful user, but it may require some knowledge to set it up, and the notion is intimidating to many. ChromeOS is... safe, reliable and easy.

Except it can't print except via the cloud. That, incidentally, was the argument my dad used to insist on Windows for her. Google needs to add CUPS to ChromeOS, IMO. It's pretty much plug and play with most printers.

So what?

Answer this: Would the knowledge that no movie studio would pay you millions to license your novels have stopped you from writing them? You can argue that that possibility factored into your thinking, but that's not the point. The point is: If that possibility, and that alone, were completely removed, would you have chosen not to write?

You have to keep in mind that the purpose of copyright -- as envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, who provided the legal framework for it -- is to benefit society, not authors. It's to promote creation and publication. So, society should set the terms of the temporary copyright monopoly at the minimum level required to motivate authors to write and publish, and no higher.

Personally, I'm a fan of geometrically-growing copyright registration fees. Make it free for the first decade (from publication), $100 for the second, $10K for the third, $1M for the fourth, $100M for the fifth, $10B for the sixth, and so on. Each decade costs 100X what the previous decade did. Oh, and adjust the fees for inflation, too. The idea is to ensure that all works have 20-30 years in which the owner can attempt to sell it, and to hold out the promise of even longer for blockbusters with long-term financial viability, but to ensure that everything eventually falls into the public domain. The offer of longer terms for blockbusters, note, isn't to benefit copyright holders financially so much as it is to dangle a carrot, because hardly any work will justify $100M, and it's likely that nothing would justify $10B.

Your notion of basing it on gross revenue is interesting, but I think it would be too easy for big studios to game.

How does this work when there are hundreds of people working on a project, like a film? Does the copyright expire ten years after the first death, or the last? If the former, then pretty much any movie more than ten years old will be in the public domain. If the latter, I guess we're going to start seeing a few dozen babies somehow contributing to every new project, all of them selected from families who seem to live unusually long.

Also, what constitutes "death"? What happens if a member of the crew is cryogenically preserved and later brought back to life? Does copyright get reinstated? And what happens if people stop dying? It doesn't seem at all unlikely that within the next few decades we acquire the ability to keep a human body alive indefinitely (though I'm not sure if the brain is up to remaining useful for much longer)?

I think tying copyright to human lifespans is a bad idea. I prefer ever-increasing copyright maintenance fees. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollars a year to keep Mickey, fine. But for most works, the copyright owners will eventually decide that it's better to release it into the public domain.

Yeah, nothing says "in bed" like a 2.5 year court battle, followed by immediately notifying the target.

Hehe. I had actually written that myself, but deleted it because nobody buys it. I think it's absolutely true, but it seems to be impossible for most people to believe that executives in a big corporation could actually want to do good for the world.

Thanks for saying it.

Do you not remember region coding of DVDs? This isn't new. In the VHS days region locking was accomplished by using different standards.

Not so much a threat as a lost opportunity, for everyone, not just Google. Isolating large amounts of information in disconnected walled gardens means that the information isn't generally available to the world. With stuff like Facebook, at least some of the content is stuff that isn't really public, and shouldn't be searchable, but much of it is public and it would be good if the world could search for it.

From a competitive perspective, Facebook obviously competes with Google for ad revenue, and in some ways is a threat. I probably shouldn't go into detail about that.

The problem with your argument is that very few of Google's engineers work on search or ad placement, and those that do, by and large, don't work on other stuff. As a Google employee, I'll readily admit that the coolness factor of Google's moonshot projects does give me warm fuzzies, but those warm fuzzies don't really affect me on a day-to-day basis -- and I don't really need them because the stuff I do work on is actually plenty cool all on its own. I know some search engineers and some ad engineers, and they're really engaged in what they're doing, too... in fact, I'd argue that your basic premise, that search and ads are boring, is completely wrong as well.

Search, for example, is a really, really hard problem, for many reasons. To start with, the web is huge and continues growing rapidly, so the architectures and algorithms needed to handle that scale are pretty fascinating on their own. Speed is another really interesting challenge; Google wants to serve results, end to end, in well under a second (the actual target is often-discussed, but I don't know if it's confidential so I won't mention it). This requires not just making Google's systems very fast, but demands research into optimizing the user's browser and the Internet itself. Then there's the problem whose initial solution made Google into a success: Given some search terms and given a corpus of scraped data, how you do provide the best results? And the only reasonable definition of "best" is "the ones the user wants". PageRank was a good first approximation, but if Google were to go back to simple PageRank today everyone would abandon it in a hurry because today's ranking algorithms are far, far better. But they're still a long way from done. Significant recent improvements have come from the Knowledge Graph project, which aims to enable the search engine (and other stuff) with some degree of semantic knowledge about the queries and the content. To really solve search, you actually need to fully understand all of the content on the web and also make high-quality guesses about what the user is actually looking for. Larry Page often says that search is about 5% done.

Ad serving is actually a very similar problem. You have a corpus of ads. You want to display ads that the user finds useful. Or, ideally, if you can determine that nothing in your corpus is really useful to the user, display nothing. The perfect ad-serving system will serve no ads most of the time, showing only ads for items that a user wants to buy, when they want to buy it, and you have relatively little contextual information to use to make that decision. There are other issues as well. For example you want to maximize ad revenue which means you need to take into account the advertisers' bids, but in the long run users will more often click on ads if they have good experiences with the ones they choose, so there's a vague sense of user experience value as well. Choosing not to display any ads sometimes is part of maximizing user satisfaction as well. Arguably, doing all of this perfectly is an even harder problem than search.

So... no. Google doesn't do all of its moonshots merely to keep its employees interested. If that were the reason, it would be both unnecessary and ineffective.

The real reason, I think, is pretty straightforward. Google is looking for the next $100B product. Google was built on one solution that became massively successful. At the time, it wasn't even obvious how to monetize it. What was clear was that there was a challenging problem to solve, and that the solution would be useful to people. So Google's moonshots are all about trying to replicate that success... and it's fully understood that nearly all of them will fail, and that some that succeed won't be easy to monetize but if you attack enough important problems with enough smart people, you will find success.

Aside: lots of people look at Google's projects and think "How can they use that to get data to make ad serving better", but that really isn't how anyone at Google thinks; the expectation is that if you do something big that a lot of people use there will be some way to make money from it, and finding that way is the project that follows quickly after you solve the problem. There is no a priori expectation at Google that ads will be the right monetization approach. This point is why I often explain to people that Google is an engineering company, not an advertising company. It just so happens that Google's most successful projects are best-monetized with ads, so that's how it gets 90+% of its revenue.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google but I don't speak for Google. The above represents only my own opinions.)

I'm sure Google changed nothing at all.

My guess is that this is just an escalation of the strategy of service degradation China has used against Google for a long time. Blocking access entirely provokes anger and spurs people to find workarounds, but if you randomly and intermittently make stuff fail the targeted service just seems crappy, which motivates people to find other services. As I understand it, that's exactly what happened here: China only blocked one of the IP addresses in Google's MX record. Since STMP is a store-and-forward protocol, with retries, the impact would be to introduce delays and degrade reliability. Just blocking it for a few days is another way of implementing this strategy, since it shows users that the service is unreliable. What happened once may happen again. Or worse.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google but do not speak for Google and know nothing about this beyond what I read in the press. The information that only one of the MX IPs was blocked is something I read on Hacker News.)

You've got that backwards. Before Pope Gregory's change the Julian calendar was used, and Newton's Julian birthdate was Dec 25. Thanks to the pope's change, his birthday became Jan 4, thus moving his birthday away from Christ's.

Guess the pope really is infallible... his change not only fixed up the alignment of the seasons but got that pesky alchemist off of Christ's b-day.

That's actually implied by what the GP said.

Oops, I forgot to include the disclosure/disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. They pay me to write code, not comment on privacy issues, and in fact they discourage me from making public comments about such things (though they stop short of telling me I can't, in most cases).