Most likely your offline backup script that rsyncs your changes over every night with you sleeping tight.

I guess compliments always get wrongly interpreted. Totally reminds me of Anglo - Dutch translation guide.

When I saw the list of names, I was positively surprised about the high number of women protecting our civil freedoms.

Using their previous Eyesis camera Elphel did the backpack thing last year. Now since wikipedia already states they are the original designer of the high resolution hardware Google used in Europe, it is not really surprising Elphel is already ahead with development of new stuff. While last year a 360 camera + Inertial measurement unit + backpack was offered, the current development offers a 120Mpix 4pi camera where the resolution is equal in every direction, so no fisheye on the top! ...and this is all done with open hardware.
While the camera of Google is indeed a new one, I wonder how it compares :-)

And this is was these guys do. "Guide their client to a completed transaction." And each following transaction and so on, your are a new client being guided through the transaction. This made me wonder about the 5 million for consultancy from GS, given that would imply something like financial council. As counsel one would expect to share the reasons why GS did not do anything with L&H theirselves. I agree with the Bakers, on the unethical part of the banking business, its difficult to explain to offer the same 'independent' services to three (not two!) competitors.

Now isn't exactly this kind of reasoning some system could be always prepared for, while the driver has need to make these kind of decisions in split seconds. Multiply this split second by not breaking, the number of choices for all parties to be safe is reduced. It would be even more interesting what would happen if two cars with this system could cooperatively "crash". Hereby saving a third party. A more complex choice would be preventing a lethal accident for multiple drivers, while in any other case all drivers would be lethally injured... now compute those chances.

Is this guy actually saying that the lobby has bought into the European Court system? And democracy doesn't count anymore?

Like the CDN had to be redone for the opendns stuff (non-geographic queries). And the HTTPS stuff had to be redone because Google thought FalseStart was a great idea :)

Doesn't this all remind us at the CompuServe times where typing just one word was enough to do exactly what is being sold now at a much higher price?

Maybe there is just a tippingpoint where the genius part of the brain has expanded that far that gets often out of bounds. Where the actual creativity is actually not a random set of neurons, but neurons primed for another task maintaining our common accepted singular personality.

So how can they, if all government produced works actually fall in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act?

They write on vehicle positions here: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime/vehicle-positions Now just wonder how polling a staticly generated file is going to help here.

Unless what any /. reader observes as realtime data, GTFS Realtime is just not realtime transit data. GTFS Realtime updates a GTFS feed with current information if a planned trip was canceled. It is in its current form not telling the actual positions of busses, their punctuality etc. If you want to look more into why realtime is not realtime, go to their usergroup and search for wave. A nice thread on why Google Wave (aka ProtoBuf combined with XMPP) does make sense here - but too complex for Google and their partners. Next to that its great that an inferior defacto presentation standard is send into the world as 'cool and amazing' but the only reason Google is pushing this is because it is simple. It is not like SIRI, NeTEx, Transmodel, etc. that every operator out there has running in their management systems. What Google did with GTFS was: lets materialize all possible data. Tell operators that their timetable generation is wrong. Let them fix timetable generation. Use timetable and a networkgraph to do some routing *advise*, not do trip planning.

So if Oracle is so happy with MySQL. Give us a TPC-H benchmark. Scalefactor: 100.