Heh, another anecdote: I moved about 500 miles for my current job, and the company seems pretty happy with me... but after about two years, I'm going to move back home.

+1

I'm quite happy with my job in Colorado, but my family really wants to be in Utah (where we're from and where all the extended family is). So for the last year I've been trying to get various recruiters and jobs sites to look for stuff in Utah for me. There's lots of software in Utah, so it's not like opportunities should be hard to find, but all I get is (a) stuff in the Denver/Boulder metro area, where I live and (b) stuff for random locations everywhere else in the country.

Maybe I should send out some resumes with my dad's address (I actually still have a Utah area code phone number).

Actually, as it turns out it looks like I might be able to convince my current employer to let me telecommute (though likely on a different team), even though it's not generally allowed. If that works out it'll be ideal, so maybe all of those recruiters did me a favor by ignoring my requests.

Actually, that's Google Voice, not Google Talk.

And Chrome V8, Gmail, Google+ (including Google+ video Hangouts), Google Wallet, Google Offers, Google News, Google Books, Google Music, Google Now, Google Keep, Google Art, Google Cloud Print, Google Image Search, Google Video Search, Google Music Search, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Flights, Picasa, Google Translate, Google Knowledge Graph, Google Shopper, Google Currents, etc., etc., etc. (I got tired of copying entries from the Wikipedia page). And of course there's now all of the hardware -- various tablets and phones, Chromecast, Chromebooks, Google Glass, self-driving cars, and more. Oh, and Google Fiber. Plus a bunch of other Google X projects, most of which not even Google employees know anything about.

In addition, nearly all of the properties that began as acquisitions have been substantially, if not totally, rewritten to provide more features and to enable them to scale to massive volumes. For example, Google Maps was acquired when it was a standalone program written by two guys. It's unlikely that there is a single line of code remaining from that original app in the modern multi-platform, massively scaled system that incorporates many different data layers, including all of the StreetView imagery (another purely Google-originated endeavor).

Actually, even if Google had simply acquired everything, it would still take a lot of innovation to rearchitect it all so it can scale for a billion users. There's a lot of purely internal innovation that is required to make all of this stuff work, like Bigtable (and now Spanner), Borg, MapReduce (and now Flume), plus all of the libraries/dev tools -- including many which have been open sourced like Guava, protobuf, Gson, Gerrit, Keyczar, and many, many more.

"Google doesn't actually invent anything" is a popular /. meme, but it's completely untrue.

As for why this patent legislation matters to Google, Google has always hated the patent arms race; it costs software companies money and agility, and gives them basically nothing in return.

Google is a company of software engineers, right to the very top, and nearly all software engineers hate the ridiculousness of software patents, and the way patent trolls stifle extract cash from the people who are actually doing cool stuff to give it to worthless do-nothings. For a long time Google simply refused to play the patent game at all, until it got seriously burned. So then Google began lobbying hard for patent reform, spending millions per year, and this is just one piece of that large, multi-pronged effort. At the same time, Google realized that it had to get into the patent game itself to survive, and so purchased Motorola and some other large piles of patents, and began rewarding engineers for writing patents. But Google would really prefer to fix the system.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer.)

Senator: "What good is electricity in the house?"

Engineer: "Senator, in 20 years, you'll be taxing it."

In time, governments will try to tax and control it, perhaps even stopping colonization or private enterprise, probably even cheered on by some around here who, one presumes, were completely down with Europe looting the New World to feed their governments' voracious appetites for cash, dead-set against any colonies not their own, much less independence.

And if a doctor is asked to treat a tortured prisoner so that they may be healthy enough to be tortured more?

But DARPA pie-in-the-sky projects are but a drop in the bucket compared to the budgets and industries involved directly in "designing a missile system to kill lots of brown people on the other side of the world," including the number of engineers employed.

And you and your customers always agree who the "bad guy" is in all situations? Or do you try to avoid asking too many questions (and all mention of Wikileaks)?

And does your employer only sell weapons to customers you are morally comfortable with, or do those weapons end up being sold to just about anybody the government wants to placate at the moment?

Can you guarantee that the weapons you're designing are being deliberately used to threaten someone else's sleeping baby girls, if not your own outright?

And did those rough men design and build their own weapons?

Medical companies refuse to export drugs to the United States that they know are used in executions. But nobody will stop selling arms to someone else unless and until international law gets involved, and sometimes not even then.

It seems pretty clear that those in the field of medicine have a higher moral standard.

"State electrician" isn't just a euphemism.

Actually no, the Founding Fathers seemed more Dieist than Christians and there is a constitutional prohibition against the establishment of an official religion in the US. The number of Americans who are Christian by default far exceeds the number of Americans who are Christians by choise, many more Americans are Christians for Baptism, Wedding and Funerals than are continuously practicing.

Perhaps the point is that once you already own a tablet, "a bunch of crap to turn it into a desktop" is cheaper than a desktop.

Perhaps, but certain dosages, typically in the above 10Gy have a stupifing effect on people, which may mercifully reduce the awareness of the horrendous gastrointestinal reactions to the radiation.