It's funny when the nerds and geeks chastise the US for not being popular enough.

From my study of Catholic cultural intervention

Your knowledge of history seems pretty poor. You must have gone to public school.

The fact that Microsoft's cash register rings every time some "M$"-hating hipster buys a googlaphone because "It's Open and Free! Wheeee!" is friggin' hysterical.

Why does your pre-teen daughter have an e-mail account to begin with?

Why would you *ever* trust Google with anything "personal?" Google makes its money by *selling* people.

Which sort of makes the whole Google-account-for-a-pre-teen-daughter-thing not just bad parenting, but creepy as well...

Authors have nothing to do with this.

Authors have EVERYTHING to do with this, fool. The Author's Guild has been fighting this since day one.

Sorry, but you can't cry and whine that it's the E-E-E-E-E-VILLLL *IAA's/licensed distributors (who only rip-off the poor artists anyway) who are leading the fight against piracy this time. The authors are on the front line -- have been since the day Harlan Ellison first sued AOL back in the 90's

It is trivial today for the creator of a manuscript -- an author -- to put his book online, on his own website/blog, at his own pace. Sell a chapter at a time? Give away chapters, or the whole thing? Interact with readers in his own blog forum during the writing process? Add a Facebook and/or Twitter component to the self-promotion? Link his writing work to his speaking work, or other creative and possibly more profitable endeavors? The possibilities are near-endless, and an entire cottage industry to assist and advise authors with marketing their e-books (circumventing traditional publishing houses) is emerging. It's a wonderful, liberating time!

So why in hell would an author give away control over any of that to Google? Fuck Google and fuck Google's Greed! A smart author will put his book (or parts of it) online, and buy the appropriate Google ad words and do all the other SEO bullshit that puts money into Google's pocket for delivering eyeballs to his site. Google is already making money from someone else's creative work -- and that's fine, I get that. But scanning a book without the author's or publisher's permission because -- why? -- it gives them something additional to turn up in search results once indexed, something new to hang ads on? Just wrong in Oh So Many Ways.

Copyright infringement is not stealing. Look it up sometime.

Yeah, and "hacker" refers to a "computer hobbyist."

Now, look *this* up: "Language Evolves."

"Stealing" and "Piracy" are both perfectly equivalent terms for "copyright infringement" as it applies to digital media. But don't take my word for it, you can witness the evolution in the hundreds of thousands of blogs, newspapers, and other online sources that now drive the changes in language.

And since writers are the ones who dictate language evolution to no small degree, and since they're the ones being stolen from in this case, there's a certain... poetic justice to the whole thing, doncha think?

When a slashdotter thinks he is being funny but is only displaying his ignorance, then he is funniest of all.

I collect epub's, mobi's, azw's, lit's, pdf's, and even cbr's and read them all on my Nook.

How are those boots tasting? Lick harder, I want a good polish.

Spoken like a true cube-dweller wheel-cog who has never produced anything worth stealing in his wretched little life.

Further blurring the lines between paid advertising and legitimate content. This'll make snydeq's slashvertisements here for Info World look like highway billboards by comparison.

It's hardly "news for nerds"

It's not "news for nerds," of course, but it does cause the heads of the shallow-minded Church-hating/privacy&porn-venerating hipsters to explode, and that's always entertaining, so let it slide.

Yeah, that's part of the hilarity with these lulsec/anonymous kids. They keep picking fights with ginormously powerful entities which would not think twice about tossing them into small cells at the bottom of a deep holes, yet they seem to feel these Death Star Agencies and Corporations will back off due to the punks' mad skillz with internet servers.

In Chicago, they call that "bringing a knife to a gun fight."

What's new is that Google has found success (initially, at least; people seem to be wising up lately) among the self-proclaimed and self-absorbed digerati crowd that heretofore viewed themselves somehow above the Marketing that always suckered in the mere mortal consumers beneath them. The smug, sniffy, MS-hating, open source espousing, latte-drinking, Starbucks-frequenting hipsters with fifty-dollar haircuts all fell for the warm gooey spin that using Google products made them better people -- which would have been hilarious just-desserts if it hadn't had the unfortunate side-effect of increasing their market share so much.

is it a good idea to let them?

No, of course not. Obviously. It's kind of like a neighborhood that's had a spot of high crime deciding to let policemen with cameras station themselves inside each bedroom 24/7.

"Oh, gee, I dunno about that... but maybe it'll be okay if their badges are really, really shiny. I like Shiny...

...and not focusing on the huge footprint Motorola has in the cable set-top box market.

Will consumers be watching videos on their computers, or surfing the Web on their TVs more in years to come? By buying the Motorola hardware, Google doesn't have to guess, their bets are hedged: They are ensured of continued revenue selling your surfing/viewing preferences to advertisers and the NSA no matter how the "connected TV" market shakes down.