houseabsolute

When men are in general an oppressed group, you can call me and I will be excited about questions like this.

All depends on whether what's come out so far is enough to convince a judge to issue subpoenas.

Haven't you heard of executive dating services? ;)

Seems unlikely that this case is going to set a precedent that redefines fair use in a jurisdiction that will be useful to you. Best not to copy whole articles in that case.

(That said, it is idiotic that you can sue someone for a copy of an article that a/ they did not post and b/ you never notified them of before suing them. THAT is broken. It should be illegal in general to utilize the courts for remedy before an equitable agreement is attempted outside the courts.)

> But $10/month per user probably wouldn't be enough revenue to match facebook's high valuation.

What, five billion a month would not be enough? Of course, no one is going to pay for Facebook, mostly because some people aren't going to pay for Facebook and when some people aren't there, no one is.

I'm aware of these concepts, but they don't defeat my objection. The question is still open whether Facebook is in that region or in the "grow by a factor of ten in the next year" region. Hard to predict the answer to that question.

> They'd have to double their revenue stream every single year to make it worth buying at that price within some reasonable payoff-time like 5 years.

That's not so ridiculous for an internet company dominant in a developing space. Minecraft seems to have doubled its revenue stream every single month for the last few months.

Only in the sense that any psychological issue stemming from abuse is self-inflicted.

OK, I see your point, and I think it is a fine one. Not very practical because of immigration policies and whatnot, but definitely of an idealism that I can subscribe to.

Unproductive labor (poor education, lack of human capital), few natural resources, zany state economic policies. These are my guesses.

I'm not trying to offend with this comment, but I surely will regardless. Those states that had those low numbers tend to be the ones where people on the whole would not choose to live unless they had a specific reason to do so. A job, for instance.

Maybe so. He deleted his comment, which leads me to believe he at least as some capability for shame. Anyway, it'll be nice to have that written down, though, so I can refer my non-troll conservative friends to it when the idiocy builds up. It can be hard being a Republican. :(

It always fascinates me that any given action by a business, when seen through various cultural lenses, may appear sinister which to me is of the most innocuous variety. Working for Google, these differences in perception affect my daily life with unfortunate frequency.

> Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach.

Is it really like that nowadays? I have heard this said before, but it doesn't match my experience a mere ten years past. When I was in school, sure, there was a general curriculum of the sorts of things we ought to learn in class. But the means and methods of conveying that knowledge did seem to be at the teachers' discretion.

Any teachers on this web zone care to comment?

While it may be true that Europeans are taxed more heavily than Americans, that does not necessarily mean that Americans being taxed more heavily is a good thing to happen. Your argument seems to boil down to, "You think that frying pan is hot? Join me in the oven then you'll really have good reason to complain." Thanks, but what if the best thing is to sit near the AC instead? I'm not claiming, by the way, that it would or wouldn't be better to tax American rich more, I'm just saying the argument you made is not a very good one.

> That's not petty either.

I don't really expect you to see it any other way. You too are part of the advantaged White race, and it's far easier to turn a blind eye to the advantages you receive over Black or Latino people than to recognize them and deal with the fact.

Of course, you may actually recognize those advantages and just choose to deal with them differently than I do. I also see nothing wrong with that. I'm not trying to say that all White people should behave the same as I do. I'm just offering up one possible reason why some do.

> . . . upper middle class sanctimonious bullshit.

Not necessary.

> Any other ethnic group would be up in arms

That is because the other ethnic groups are not the dominant ones in society, and are typically disadvantaged on the whole because of their race. My personal view as a White person is that I have enough advantages by my White male-ness that I do not need to demand more, or do anything to offset whatever minor inconveniences might arise from the same. Doing so would seem petty to me if I walked in another man's shoes.

Is this racist? Yes, I suppose. White privilege is real, though. A recognition of this fact requires some ability to discriminate between race when observing the state of society, so perhaps "racist" should not be the bad word. Instead, "racial oppressivism" might be a better thing to demonize.

We shouldn't. There's enough evil in the world already, and this man losing his job is not likely to make things better.

> Please tell me where things went wrong.

Among other things, you've failed to demonstrate that Obama believes Capitalism is inherently exploitative. Even if you'd managed that, you'd still need to prove that he also supports the other tenets of Marxism, like the one I called out in my comment.

A person is not automatically a Marxist merely for having some affinity to any part of the overall philosophy. Instead, one is a Marxist if the overall body of their philosophy matches. Obama has never advocated the a revolution of the proletariat, one of the core ideas of Marxism. There is also no evidence that he sees Capitalism as inherently exploitative, nor that he endorses the view that a person is exploited if they produce more than they consume. To the extent that he has supported policies to enhance equality of well-being, they have mostly been aimed at shoring up a necessary minimum level of well-being via taxes, not by transferring the means of production from the bourgeois to the proletariat.

For these reasons and many others, it is completely misguided to call him a Marxist. Say rather that he has implemented some economic policies that would be vaguely similar to a small subset of the policies that a Marxist leader might implement. Better still, say nothing at all; you have demonstrated that you are not qualified in either duty to truth nor possession of knowledge to comment.

As much as I sometimes differ with Obama's policies, you do not seem to understand what Marxism is at all and would do well to read up on it before trying to say who is or isn't a Marxist. You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism. See the part about the proletarian revolution? Not exactly something Obama is pushing for, among many, many other differences between his policies and Marxism.

Hopefully he will keep his job if he is good at it. No sense wasting that education when lawyers can learn good practice from him, even if his politics suck. You are basically advocating employer censoring of employees' private political opinions and expression, which is a dark road to advocate if there ever was one.

Drinking is very good, and not all office romance is sexual harassment, although it's true the article's examples are . . . unfortunate. I think the article's message is a sound one: Googlers talk about how much they love the ball pits, but I don't know anyone who's gone in more than once. However, we all enjoy the team bar in the hallway. There is something to the idea that "fake fun" is not as fun as "real fun" -- the kind people opt to enjoy when left to their own devices.

I do agree that fake fun is still better than no fun at all. But I think, as someone who works at one of these places that tries to make everything fun, that I enjoy the types of fun I have with coworkers that aren't engineered more than the types of fun that are.

I grew up in the '90s and early '00s. I really doubt that it is or ever will be a significant social disadvantage to only be allowed access to video games on the weekend.

In my family, the rule was no video games at all Sunday night through Thursday night. A little draconian perhaps, but it solved this problem.

Fine, paid for the cake to be baked, or bought it from whoever baked it, or financed the baking in return for some percent interest in the resulting cake's profits, if we must be technical. But this type of objection really, seriously doesn't add to the discussion.

There's something bigger that stands out about this whole episode to me. It's not just that they never stood a chance. It's that if they were smart enough to build an even half-way functional engine, they should have been able to see from long before launch how things were going to work out. I'm very interested in whatever organizational or psychological dysfunction lead them to releasing the product at all.

It doesn't compute to me that a feature you call a deal-breaker can be found in a device you already own, but ok.

Since that's not among the features of Google TV, why not just say FutureTV instead? Or indeed TiVo or your DirectTV set-top box? I'm sure this was not your intention but you might be unfairly giving the impression that GoogleTV is anti-user, when in fact there is no evidence that this is the case.

Must be some kind of miscommunication . . . I doubt either are lying about their perception of the situation.

> we don't modify it away from the native resolution ... 480x360 or 192x144

The iPhone 4's camera is 1280 × 720 though . . .?