It should come as no surprise that the Wall Street Journal would publish an article asserting that publishing the Pentagon Papers is "different" than what Wikileaks is doing. Why? To help set the stage for justifying the government resurrecting the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute Assange, and killing all dissent since we are supposedly "at war" (Iraq, Afghanistan, War on Terrorism, War on Drugs, etc. ad nauseum). Of course, there has been no formal Declaration of War by Congress, as required by Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. But since the U.S. Government doesn't actually seem to protect and enforce the Constitution any longer, WTF matters?

And you need a whole new OS for this? What about using *nix machines, setting the login shell to /usr/bin/firefox and limiting the network accessibility to the corporate LAN? You could have done this many years ago and wouldn't need a new OS to do it. As for thin client, ChromeOS is nothing more than what I just described with a specialized browser with customized hooks for Google's proprietary app world/framework. Bletch.

This makes perfect sense once you understand that the majority of the people working on ChromeOS (in Google's Kirkland offices) are Microsoft refugees. Since most people psychologically try to solve problems in their new jobs they were unable to solve at their previous ones, what better way to keep from having the most virus infested OS on the planet than to prevent anybody from ever installing or changing anything! I bet the colleagues they left behind at Microsoft are envious beyond belief.

So Google is appointing a Director of Privacy, Alma Whitten, from the UK, the country with more surveilance cammeras per person than any other country on the planet. She assures us that, "We are now strengthening our internal privacy and security practices with more people, more training and better procedures and compliance." Oh just wonderful! With all the Chinese programmers at Google, it really makes me feel really much more secure. China is such a bastion of personal privacy, what could possibly go wrong?

This story is old fucking news. Things must be pretty slow at Slashdot to stoop to posting this story again...

I thought the same thing, but I have consistently read in the last several weeks that the well that blew up was an exploration well not a production well. So there was no plan to take that well, as it was, into production.

Any chance they could use this stupidity to outlaw advertising? I mean, sound and lights that affect human behavior and all...

The amount of Ritalin consumed in America from 1990 to 1998 almost quadrupled (link to chart). Might that have something to do with it?

A teacher friend of mine told me the real reason why public schools push potential ADHD kids into Ritalin treatment, and its not about behavior. Its that once a child is diagnosed as ADHD and on medication, they are categorized as having a "learning disability" and the school gets more Federal funding.

Here in California, they've gotten rid of all that and the sports as well. The reason isn't to focus on teaching to the test (though, for sure, they do just that), but because the teachers' unions have maximized their pay rates and consumed what little public money existed for teaching only the basics. Its all about money, as usual. I volunteered as an art teacher in elementary school for 3 years just so my kids would have some art in school. And to be fair, more than half of the money spent on "teachers salaries" actually goes to administrators who never set foot in the classroom. Teachers are underpaid and a real minority in the "teachers union". The rest are paper pushers who suck the system dry of money for their salaries, health benefits, and pensions. The kids get screwed. California public schools are rated 46th in the nation today.

Pretty brutal. I searched to see if there was follow-up to the police beating. The person who was beaten, Duanna Johnson, was shot to death later the same year in Memphis. I wonder where the two cops in the beating video were on the night Johnson was shot? Here is a link to a follow-up story on the homicide.

Pretty brutal. I searched to see if there was follow-up to the police beating. The person who was beaten, Duanna Johnson, was shot to death later the same year in Memphis. I wonder where the two cops in the beating video were on the night Johnson was shot? Here is a link to a follow-up story on the homicide.

If anybody is laughing their ass off about this story, it would be Steve Jobs. If the apps removed were more or less harmless, what did Google really accomplish by deciding to "exercise our remote application removal feature", other than to teach users once again, that Google really can't be trusted?

Pushing 40, meaning you are what? 38? You are barely older than the most senior guy who interviewed me. All but one were less than half my age.

Nope. I have been self employed for 20 years. I am interviewed every time I get a contract, which is at least a few times a year. I am very experienced talking (politely) with both technical and business professionals. The interviews, all six of them, were entirely civil. All were interesting, and a couple of them were even fun. But Google's hiring process is the screwiest I have ever seen. The interviewers do not know whether you will be a co-worker of theirs or not. And you, the interviewee, do not know who would be your prospective co-workers. If you think this hardly matters, I heartily disagree with you. It matters a lot to me whom I will be working with. Despite Google's broken attitude about this, programmers are not interchangeable components, like light bulbs.

I don't mind a small shared office too much. But what I witnessed were large rooms with 10+ people and no partitions or privacy of any kind. Yuck!

Google doesn't hire older engineers precisely because they are culturally different than the new grads they prefer to hire. I doubt they have a policy of age discrimination, but when interviewers fill out their evaluation forms, they can shape and tilt their answers to disfavor people they would not prefer to work with. So when you have a culture that is predominantly new grads, hiring "old guys" is not likely to happen, even if there is no official policy of age discrimination, because people tend to hire people who are similar to themselves.

I interviewed with Google, answered all their dumbass 'programming puzzle' questions, and didn't get an offer. The most experienced guy who interviewed me had 10 years of experience. I have 30+. Out of the 6 interviewers I spoke with, their industry experience 10, 5, 5, 5, 3, and 1 years. In other words, I had more experience than all of them put together.

In the end, I was glad I didn't have to decide whether to accept an offer from Google because, after seeing their work environment, which resembled a college dorm room with no privacy whatsoever , I would not have been able to work for them anyway. While this is off topic, I was amazed that a company with so much money would drink some stupid management Kool Aid and eschew giving people decent offices within which they could concentrate to work.