No excuse, simple theft. Google steals millions of dollars every year from AdSense 'partners' who have done absolutely nothing wrong. Google's AdSense forums are overflowing with stories where they've stolen from publishers over the slightest of infraction (and many cases in which absolutely nothing occurred).
Their method of AdSense theft is one of the greatest rackets in the history of the Internet.
Feel your pain. I had a nicely successful social media property built around Twitter. It had a very large semantic system as part of how it worked, but I had to write an extraordinarily elaborate language filter to span every common language in order to keep Google from slapping me for the smallest of inappropriate language violations. In the end, the site got blocked over the word "vagina" in dutch appearing one time on one page (out of millions of pages).
Google simply doesn't give a shit. When the government eventually busts their chops, there isn't going to be much sympathy to be found. Their attitude makes them seem like raging jerks.
What's the point of Android? Golly gee, how about we just have no competition in smart phones, and Apple can own everything. Everybody else should give up so we can have a smart phone monopoly. That way Apple can make $100 billion a year in profit by owning the entire market! Their stock would go to $1,700!
The point of Android is competition. Competition is good. It's that simple.
I wish it were just idiotic. The problem is that he's bought and paid for. This is Hollywood sponsored payback targeting Google and Facebook for their SOPA resistance.
I'm more inclined to believe that by the time articles like this are getting published, it signifies something closer to the peak of incubator mania.
Y Combinator will continue to succeed, but the herd chasing them will be trimmed down. Not many can replicate what Y Combinator has worked so hard to perfect. The other incubators are far more likely to vaporize lots of capital, show poor returns, and be shuttered.
It wasn't rude. The super rich in America control far less wealth today in proportion to the total economy than they did in 1900, when Rockefeller by himself controlled wealth equal to 1/45th of GDP. At his peak, Carnegie was even wealthier than Rockefeller. The ten richest Americans at the time controlled wealth equal to 1/20th of all GDP.
To accomplish that feat today, someone like Gates would need to be worth nearly $350 billion. The top ten would need to be worth $800 billion.
In the 19th century, private individuals used to fund wars, because they were more powerful and wealthier than the nation states going to war. The Morgan family, JP and his father Junius, funded wars by shuttling money through their banking empire on both sides of the Atlantic. Nation states had to borrow war funds from private banks & enterprises. The thought of that today is laughable, when the US military vaporized a trillion on the latest Iraq war alone.
In the panic of 1907, JD Rockefeller pledged his wealth to stabilize the system - specifically he offered JP Morgan a guaranteed backing that he could use to assist the US Treasury in stabilizing imbalances that threatened to crash the economy. That notion would be comical today, when the Fed prints a trillion every six to eight months depending.
The idea that the rich are richer today in relation to the economy, than the early industrial days of America, is an absurd myth that isn't backed up by any data. It's pure propaganda.
China has zero chance of competing for a high national standard of living. The math will never allow it.
They have 600 million people living on less than $2 / day.
Unless you can figure out a way to increase global consumption by ten fold, and figure out where all the raw materials will come from, and where you're going to put all the factories, and how you'd power ten times as many factories, and how that wouldn't result in an extreme ecological disaster that would wipe out their standard of living gains.
So if you figure all of that out, you might get those bottom 600 million up to a standard of living on par with Estonia today.
A working piston of this sort would generate extraordinary sums of energy in a relatively short period of time, you'd need a storage device so the energy could be distributed when needed.
Any breakthrough in output will need equal or greater breakthroughs in transmission and storage. Makes the whole equation that much harder: it's not enough to just crack one of them.
Electricity isn't expensive, we have a government that tends to make everything extraordinarily expensive.
Obama's trillion dollar stimulus shot could have built a hundred nuclear power plants in America. Or 50 plants, plus transmission to carry the juice. Except the runway from here to there is a minefield filled with lobbyist groups, endless regulatory hurdles, congressional reviews, lawsuits, etc. All of which are government failures tied to tort reform, lobbying reform, and bad regulations and bad processes related to regulation.
The rest of the world thinks America is a joke when it comes to energy. Canada understands energy; China understands energy; Japan understands energy. We can't even build a simple pipeline - until the next week, when Obama goes from claiming he's a protector of the environment, to bragging he has built enough pipeline to circle the world. Canada and China look at this and laugh.
I think it can easily be argued that America has the most ineffectual government among major economies. We spend the most, for the least results (which blankets most segments, including education).
As others have noted, that article is very wrong. Google did see that email was broken, and search was broken, and mapping was broken (old mapquest was horrible). They proceeded to attempt to fix them.
They did see that Excel was broken, it costs $120 normal retail. That's a broken business model. Spreadsheet interface attached to AWS = user cost of $0.25 per month, if that. They recognized the high price points of old software were doomed and ridiculous.
Google also spotted something wrong in the mobile market, and they bought Android to try to fix it. Agree or disagree with the results, Android is wildly successful (both in usage and spitting profit for Google).
Some googlers thought there was a better way to do browsers, and they proceeded to fix various flaws in that category. They were successful, they built a superior browser.
Apple didn't invent multi-tasking gestures. There's no reason they should hold any patents on that.
It's not novel because the natural option of manipulating content or a swipe upwards or downwards to load newer or older content with your fingers, on a touch interface, is obvious. What else would you use on a touch interface? Might as well claim you can't use your fingers to load content at all through any action.
I had the same problem for about four or five years in my early 20's.
I got really sick of being poor, that changed my behavior drastically. I had to start finishing things and making money off of them to improve my quality of life.
Fear of freezing to death and starvation are extraordinarily motivating.