Before the iPhone we were not primitives. They were smart phones years before the iPhone was released. The big players was Blackberry and a slew of windows mobile phones, and Palm. They had a keyboard you could browse the web you could even get apps, and watch videos. Android OS was in development. But the idea of smart phones were all centered around a full keyboard and some sort of pointing device. The key features where there. So it would make sense for Google to look for ways to improve bandwidth without the iPhone designed phone.

However after the iPhone was released it put the smart phone market in shock. It seemed that a larger screen was preferable, people picked up in using gestures quickly, and was willing to sacrifice a physical keyboard for it. This made all the other companies future plans obsolete thus giving Apple a two year lead.

But saying before the iPhone we wouldn't imagine trying to get faster mobile data is naive.

... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.

Exactly.

It's like they think people smart enough to work at google are dumb enough to believe that line.

Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.

What are you a yuppie from the 1980s or something!
For most cases unless the person was being malicious these problems happen due to a failure of the whole system not just one person.
The best of us probably had made a mistake or at lest was really close to one.
Human error is part of the game. If there is a problem you can act like adults and fix it, or act like kids and try to point to the person who can point any further.

All sounds good however... For a large organization such rules become impractical. To get full security there will be so much administrative overhead of approving access to a given area for so much time and back, that if you played by the rules you wouldn't get your job done timely. So you end up with "black market" IT where people will store backups of the data in say an access or excel files, and keep them hidden from the official system. Not because they have nefarious use of them, but because they will need to get their job done, and the official secure way is too impractical.

So let's say you were tasked to figure out if it was worth it it accept American Express, as AE charges a lot for its transaction. So you may need to figure out some numbers.
%of customers with AE
Average spending with AE
Average spending in total
Standard dev of spending with AE
Standard dev of spending total

Now because someone dropped the ball you will need this data quickly.
Putting a request to get this data may take days.

And there's the problem.

Who fits best with a team of 25 year olds?

It leads to a recursive situation where candidates with less experience or other negatives are chosen because they are young and not ugly.

And yet, right here on slashdot, I've had google employees swear in other discussions that google maintains a 45 hour work week when I said a friend declined due to work/life balance issues around her child.

The issue with the price, is your are paying for the Service and the Infrastructure.
I much rather have two bills.
One for the infrastructure, and one for the Service.
Much like in the old dialup days. We paid for the Phone Line, then we paid for the ISP.
We may have had limited options for the infrastructure, but you could choose ISP.

The problem is that We have both bundled together.

The crazy prior owner put in over 2' of blown in flock fill insulation in the attic. It will probably never pay for itself but holy crap I have low utility bills.

In another 10 years, those will be actual renewable system batteries. A lot of money is going into batteries now-- prices are dropping at microprocessor like rates. And they recently found a new technology around non-rare, non-explosive elements.

I greatly prefer conservation up front over power generation on the back end however.

But batteries are improving rapidly at this point while at the same time prices are dropping rapidly.

Fraud she certainly is, but the fraud was so transparent that clearly she's not right in her head.

While the financial aspect of this makes her culpable, building an outrageous fraud around readily disprovable details of your personal biography is a very bad idea in the long run if you're simply a con artist. Doing that suggests that there are short term needs that trump simple financial considerations. Perhaps she felt she deserved more sympathy, nurturance and nurturance than she'd gotten in life. That's common enough that there's name for it: Factitious Disorder.

Over the years I've read many stories of people who assumed false biographies. Most often this took obvious forms -- passing for white before the Civil Rights Era. But in some cases people chose to assume minority identities, particularly as American Indians in the early 20th C. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance was (by the terminology of the age) a negro with some Cherokee ancestry. He ran away to join a wild west show where he learned from Cherokee language from other performers, used that to get into Carlisle Indian School and later traded up his "Cherokee" identity for a Plains Indian one. Wenjiganooshiinh -- "Grey Owl" -- was an Englishman who was abandoned by his father in childhood then later adopted an Apache/Ojibwe identity.

What makes these two men relevant to this case is that they were both advocates of Indian rights. As outsiders, they understood what sympathetic outsiders wanted Indians to be better than an Indian would. And they would't have been able to pull it off if they weren't a little off their nut; if they didn't want to escape who they were for a more glamorous alternative.

If involves breaking the law -- not just some kind of namby-pamby administrative regulation but the basic stuff of civilization like like the prohibitions on assault or murder -- then I'll sure as hell tell what not to do.

If you're a veteran I'll gladly shake your hand and thank you for your service. I'd be honored to buy you a drink. But I won't hand you a get out of jail free card.

Have a little perspective. Yes it's wrong to impersonate a veteran, but it doesn't impugn the character of veterans. But claiming that all veterans will and should overreact to a breach of propriety with violence *does* impugn their character. Which is worse?

There are four things government is in a position to do better than anyone else: military defense, law enforcement, public works, and the erosion of liberty.

Well, the idea of copyright is to incent creators to create, not to reward them per se. So the sensible way of approaching is to ask how many years in advance a reasonable person would make economic plans for.

Corporations seldom worry about income streams ten years out; such future income is discounted to insignificance. On the other hand an artist planning on managing his own creations might very reasonable think about fifty years out. Seventy-five years is beyond the pale of reason if we're talking about incenting creation. So is any extension of pre-existing copyrights.

If we wanted to maximize the present value of future income to an artist contemplating creating or performing a song, I think a fifty year term would be reasonable, with the proviso that any assigned rights automatically return to him without encumbrance after ten or fifteen years. Such an arrangement would have no impact economic on his ability to sell the rights to his work immediately, and hold out the promise of getting a second bite of the apple in a decade or so.