Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.
SLNYT +
video.
posted by chavenet
on Oct 9, 2010 -
116 comments
"With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches," [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] said. "We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been.
We can more or less know what you're thinking about... We can look at bad behavior and modify it."
The Atlantic's editor James Bennet discusses with Schmidt how lobbyists write America's laws, how America's research universities are the best in the world, how the Chinese are going all-out in investing in their infrastructure, how the US should have allowed automakers to fail, and ultimately Google's evolving role in an technologically-augmented society in this
broad, interesting and scary interview (~25 min Flash video) [
via]
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Oct 4, 2010 -
55 comments
In August, Google added a feature to Gmail that lets you
make phone calls — for free, if you live in the US or Canada and you're calling someone in the US or Canada. When you make a call, your number shows up as 760-705-8888. Judging by the nine pages of complaints
found here, the service is often being used to prank, harass and scam people.
[more inside]
posted by defenestration
on Oct 2, 2010 -
60 comments
"With the midterm elections in the U.S. Senate just six weeks away, everyone is wondering how the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats will shake out after November 2." Wonder no more with Google's
2010 U.S. Election Ratings Map. Information can be filtered by state, type of race (senate, governor, house), and by source. A Google Maps
blog entry has more detailed info for those who want to dig deeper into the application. [via
TechCrunch]
posted by bayani
on Sep 21, 2010 -
20 comments
A Google engineer was recently fired for spying on several teens through their GTalk, Gmail, and Google Voice accounts.
He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back... In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer. Google
statement confirming the shenanigans.
posted by swift
on Sep 15, 2010 -
96 comments
Despite
very strong denials last week from Google and Verizon that they were not discussing ways around
Net Neutrality, Google and Verizon
held a conference today to announce their agreement to the establishment of price-tiered network services, dividing the current Internet into a "neutral public Internet" that remains "open" (and which preserves access to YouTube and other Google properties), and a set of paid, priority channels that Verizon and other telecoms can use to deliver certain other types of content at higher prices, particularly over cell networks and whatever future infrastructure the Internet will be carried over.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 9, 2010 -
224 comments
“If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be. ”
A Slate interview with Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Google's product development process.
[via]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Aug 7, 2010 -
20 comments
CSS3 Pie. Google's
Frame requires users to install Frame in order to get the benefits of CSS3 support (among other things). CSS3 Progressive Internet Explorer aims to bring support for CSS3 in IE versions 6 through 8 via a server side script. It's early days for the extent of supported properties but there are more to come. If it's ultimately functional and useful long term remains to be seen.
posted by juiceCake
on Jul 18, 2010 -
21 comments
Google makes Picasa, YouTube, Blogger, and Google Documents, Calendar, and Contacts available to command-line geeks with
GoogleCL, a new, official command-line tool. How to install:
Mac OS X,
Windows,
elsewhere.
Google's examples of what you can do; Lifehacker's "
five nifty GoogleCL tricks."
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Jun 29, 2010 -
26 comments
How to Save the News. "Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."
posted by chunking express
on Jun 1, 2010 -
64 comments
Conan@Google A 45 minute Q&A session Conan O'Brien at Google HQ. If thought the 60 minutes interview (
previously) wasn't funny enough, this is definitely for you.
posted by delmoi
on May 11, 2010 -
67 comments
