What you described is a middle-man. Google is a middle-man between users and authors. A middle-man pays the source and charges more than they paid. They provide some value-add like "search".

But that's not how Google works. They take the content for free then charge money for it (indirectly through advertising), giving nothing back to the source. They're a middle-man that never pays their suppliers.

People say that if Google had to actually pay for content they wouldn't make any money. That's not true at all. They just wouldn't make as much, but there would still be profit. Just as the net effect of advertisers competing is to raise the price of ads the net effect of content people competing would be to lower the price they charge. Creators that have really valuable content could get a larger price from Google, whereas junk sites or blogs would change less to get more visitors. But it wouldn't be zero universally, highway robbery, like it is now.

Paying newspapers and investigative journalism is *more important* to society than Google employees getting a free lunch.

There are literally shittons of emails talking about Google needing a license, trying to get a license, not doing clean-room because they were confident they would get a license, etc. To show it wasn't clean-room Oracle doesn't even have to show anything was copied, Google up and said it. 'Should we do this clean-room?' 'No, it'll be fine'.

Google now needs to prove to a jury not just that they didn't actually need a license, but also that all their top execs and engineers were wrong. If say in a police interrogation you admit to doing the crime a jury will still convict you even if there is absolute proof that you didn't do it. Human nature says if you admitted to it then you did it, so Google has a huge uphill battle to climb here with these emails. At this point they may be already planning the appeal, where the actual law matters.

On the other hand only Firefox is checked with static analysis tools before released, meaning that there are very, very few actual flaws in the browser (IE might be, Chrome certainly isn't). For instance when Chrome added a very basic memory checker to their test servers they caught dozens of bugs -- and that's just from the most basic of runtime checks. When people have run their commercial static analyzers on Chrome they've found several hundreds of potential flaws.

What does this mean in practice? The inner sandboxed code in Chrome is wide open to attack. They aren't even using serious methods to try to protect that code and are instead relying completely on the sandbox. This is the reason why you'll get random crashes in Chrome, and why they purposely try to keep you from using too many tabs (if a process is rendering more than one tab then when it crashes more of your tabs have to reload). On the flip side, this is the reason why in a years of running Firefox nightly it has never crashed once. Yes, there are errors in Firefox, but they are complex ones not the simple mistakes that crash Chrome left and right.

Personally I've never had a malware in dozens of years, so browser stability matters a whole lot more to me than security. A sandbox would be nice, but one that is relied on and causes random page crashes is worse than not having one but having far fewer crashes.

The possible threat is from mass panic and/or social unrest. Take somebody's whole lifetime of religious belief and pull the carpet out from under it and they'll react irrationally. Do that to the majority of people on the planet and you potentially have big problems.

I mean our fundamentalists already go crazy over basic science like evolution or climate change or conception, just imagine what they'd do if we weren't the Chosen planet, let alone how people in some place like the Middle East would react. You know for a certainty people would at least try to blow up the radio telescopes and cover up the knowledge. What else? Who knows, but the government having some time to plan and prepare before word got out would be valuable preparation.

Just get a USB optical drive. They use two USB ports to legitimately get enough power, although you can usually just use one plug. They're basically just a laptop optical drive in a box and work just fine for almost everything, even installing an OS from scratch usually works. And you don't need to have it inside the computer for the 99% of the time you don't need it.

Right, what he meant to say is that Android is having all sorts of patent problems because it's a complete rip-off of previous new work and designs by other companies (Apple and Sun). The real testament to Google's lack of innovation is they had to pay $12 billion for Motorola Mobility in order to get some patents of their own. If they had actually invented things themselves they wouldn't have needed to do that.

It's just sour grapes. Patents are supposed to 'skim off the top' if you're using somebody else's inventions. It's the "ripoff tax" and it's good for society.

If the opponent is basing their argument on their own self, like saying "god spoke to me" or "I know this is true" (ie trust me) or using the respect of their office then it isn't ad hominem to attack their person -- they opened the door by using themselves as their argument. Unfortunately there aren't very many compelling arguments for religion that don't boil down to 'trust me' or 'god spoke to me', but it isn't Dawkin at fault.

That's not really true though, is it. Apple also hadn't really been in the mobile/cell market either, but they came out with a phone with a ton of new inventions in it. The existing players couldn't sue Apple because they needed to look and work like the iPhone. Apple invents new things.

The real problem Google had entering the mobile device market is that they didn't add anything new at all. They just copied existing phones (iPhone). Google is like Microsoft, just improving and executing on other people's ideas. Search, email, maps, phones... I can't think of any actual invention Google's made. They are opportunists not inventors and that's why they have to buy patents.

Since I don't give blanket scripting access to google.com, gstatic, etc, now that google uses instant it often happens that I try to search on google and get no results because the site is broken without either all or no scripting enabled. Whenever this happens it reminds me to search on Bing instead.

The results on Bing are fine for the most part, and I like how they improved the search UI over the old Google (most of which Google copied, Google just went too far and made their copy over the top).

And how do you think ATI was able to be so good at its job? With help from AMD's engineers, patents, and processes. ATI's cards only started getting really good after the buyout, for instance their idle power dropped by huge amounts after integrating AMD power saving tech. It was years before nVidia had any decent cards with sub-50 watt idle power (let alone less than 10 watt), and it cost them market share. Avoiding a process disaster like nVidia's recall also was no doubt influenced from being part of AMD.

AMD was plodding along with good chips, but no dominated market segment. ATI was strong but failing. Now ATI is even stronger, and AMD has at least one segment where its chips dominate the market (netbooks, cheap notebooks). I really don't see how the buyout can be interpreted as anything but a huge success.

That's just another form of being guilty until proven innocent. Just because you can't prove somebody else did it doesn't make you guilty... it's the plaintiff's responsibility to prove to some standard that you did it.

Ironically DMCA protects you as an account holder from liability for people that use the Internet Service you Provide. Basically all you need is to inform your users they they'll get the boot if they are repeat infringers and "reasonably implement" that policy. Then the most the RIAA/MPAA can legally do is subpoena you to identify the real culprit, but even that's only "to the extent such information is available to the service provider", and get an injunction to make you actually cut the person off from the service.

Of course if you are a parent then while you won't be liable for infringement, if your children are found to have infringed copyright then you may be liable for their actions as their guardian. Or if you prove yourself as the infringer, like using your online banking username/password for kazaa...

When people usually talk about emulater speeds it's running the whole OS, virtual box style. But in this case the Windows OS and all the standard APIs would be running native ARM so it would only be the application code itself that was emulated. There are plenty of apps written in say Python that are maybe 1/30th the speed of a native app but still plenty usable.

Combine a native OS with the experts they have on JIT tech (CLR is really hard to JIT, so you know these people are wicked good) and tons of cores on future ARMs so each thread gets its own core... I don't know man I think it's totally possible.

Of course it matters. User feedback is extremely valuable input for a search engine, because knowing what users actually want from a couple search terms is an impossible task for an AI or data mining algorithm. Bing is getting this info from all searches (on their site, Google, portals specific search engines, etc), whereas Google is getting it mostly from their own site. This is the real issue Google is upset about, not the 'copying'.

Google is upset because Bing is doing a much better job of getting this valuable information, and the results are showing. Bing is a real competitor. If Bing were merely 'copying off the test' then Google would be ecstatic... Bing would be forever behind on the treadmill, always with out of date lesser results. But instead Google is worried that Bing will have better results, because what's valuable is not the URLs themselves but the user choices.

First you ignored Bing, now you're laughing at them. ... profit?

The question is not whether there is an astroturfing campaign on, because that's a given (Microsoft plays hardball). The question is, why is it working? For astroturfing to work there has to be some fire to fan.

For me, this campaign is working because over the last year or so google results for highly specific technical terms have gotten much, much worse. There's nothing more frustrating than searching for something related to some particular field name in a struct used in STREAMS in Solaris for instance and getting results without the specific terms I'm looking for. I put the term in quotes, say yes I really did mean this "misspelling", and then the cached page results say the term isn't even present. If you don't have anything in the database with that keyword then don't give any search results... then I can at least try something else instead of wasting time reading useless results.

So even though Google results overall may be better than before (how would you know?) they've been changing things a lot, and all the people who's searches used to work and now are frustrated are prime targets for an astroturfing campaign like this. And since it seems to be working so well I'd say Google has pissed off a lot of users.

And it was destroyed 10-to-1 by Atom on CPU-bound floating point (Whetstone, LINPACK). Of course A8 will be a simpler more power efficient design when it leaves off floating point.

Atom will be old news this year... ARM will need to be able to compete with AMD CPUs.

Unless the screen technology changes (one of the biggest power draws) I really don't see ARM's traditional strength of low power being a big deal. And with transistor sizes shrinking, having a simple design is of little benefit. I think they are in for a lot more competition than they are used to. The question is really how well RISC instructions scale to very complicated chips, and the history (all high-performance CPUs left are CISC) and parallels point to CISC scaling better the more complicated the chip is.