I actually agree with you, but not in the context of the article.

Someone at Google suggesting they shouldn't hire someone because it's good for the tech ecosystem, whatever that is, deserves to be roundly mocked. It is pretentious and silly to suggest that.

Google exists to make money. They have the "do no evil" motto and all that, but fundamentally they are a business and everything else takes a back seat to that goal.

Horowitz repeating that story tells me that they are simply running a PR campaign to clean up their image and make people forget about the fact that they're amassing frightening amounts of data about people and then selling it. How altruistic.

If they really believe in helping the proletariat, then they should all be in the peace corps instead. Horowitz (and his engineer) must really feel that the public is incapable of thought, since they assumed no one would figure out just what that statement implies about those not working at Google.

Wow.

It was humorous to hear about the "foxfire thing" from IBM, considering it was a linux job.

However I'm having a hard time believing this contractor "jumped through all the hoops" and then was totally and helplessly stopped because he didn't have IE. That's ridiculous.

Apparently this guru never heard of VMware or Virtualbox. He didn't even need a Windows license, he could have skated by on a 30 day unregistered install. He could have went to Kinkos and paid 10 bucks to rent a computer. He could have even paid for a copy with his "lucrative" contract.

Call a spade a spade, this guru was no better than the program manager who had never heard of "foxfire." A total lack of critical thinking on both sides.

This just doesn't add up.

I agree that all the various measures and checkpoints at airports are more formality than security, but is this really the best way to go about it?

Fighting hairbrained policies with hairbrained publicity stunts isn't going to cause anyone to change their mind, or even make folks reconsider. It just calcifies positions.

Amen, that was a breath of fresh air in a room full of "me-me's" instinctively chanting that Comcast is eating babies and setting villages on fire, and that anyone who disagrees is a corporate apologist.

To agree further...

If someone actually *needs* 250GB or more of data per month, and full-pipe speeds the entire time to boot, then as you said there is a plan available for that, called commercial or business class service. There *is* a distinction, and it's funny that they don't see the irony when they say "I want what I paid for."

I dropped my landline and cable television both, everything comes through my cable modem (and I stream Netflix heavily as well as Plex) without issue.

I don't think that Comcast implementing throttling is going to be like what Rome did to Carthage. The reality is that if you are downloading a massive multi-gig file it's going to take a while whether you are throttled or not. Any QoS or traffic management 101 class defines this as bulk or best effort traffic and puts it at the bottom - it's not interactive or particularly time sensitive. Why not make it livable for everyone else? And before everyone hits the reply button and complains that Comcast shouldn't have their upstream oversubscribed, please pause first to grab a clue and realize that every ISP oversubscribes. On top of that, cable plants were only really designed for one way downstream delivery of cable channels so upstream bandwidth will always be much more limited. The only way Comcast can make more upstream bandwidth available is by splitting a node, which means they are doubling their upstream bandwidth by doubling their cable plant. As you can imagine, this is very expensive and that cost ultimately gets passed along to the consumer.

I'm sure someone in the comments has couched this as a net neutrality issue. I also don't buy that argument since it's not targeted at a specific person or application.

So yeah, this sucks, but it was more or less inevitable.