I'm a little shocked to hear this, but I've had a similar fish story with Microsoft!
I interned at Microsoft my junior year of college. Toward the end, I interviewed with Google and got a competing offer.
But during the negotiation process, the recruiters had Chris Jones (Windows Live VP at the time) call me to try talking me into joining Microsoft. He told me his story about how at the start of his career, when he was comparing offers from a few companies, Microsoft (relatively unknown at the time) sent him a salmon from Pike Place Market --- and that gesture convinced him to accept Microsoft's offer.
Two days later, a package of smoked salmon on ice from Pike Place Market showed up at my door in Tucson, AZ.
(I went to Google for non-salmon-related reasons, but sending me food
mostly became a reminder that Google was offering free food as a perk!)
Other browsers support DRM too, but with different tradeoffs.
Chrome uses Widevine, but one of Chrome's philosophies is that you should be able to wipe a Chrome install, reinstall Chrome, and have no trace that before/after are the same person. That means no leveraging machine-specific hardware details that would persist across installs. "Software-only DRM", essentially.
Edge on Windows (and Safari on OSX) are able to leverage more hardware-specific functionality --- which from a DRM perspective are considered "more secure", but the tradeoff is a reduction of end-user anonymity (i.e. if private keys baked into a hardware TPM are involved).
Last I checked, Chrome/Firefox were capped at 720p content, Safari/Edge at 1080p, though it looks like Edge is now able to stream 4k.
I worked there for a similar length of time, but more recent (2012 - early 2019). The internal political discourse over that time definitely mirrored the rest of the world: becoming increasingly heated and divisive during 2016 and largely escalating since.
On the whole, it felt like it pushed the company in a positive direction --- internal discussions mirroring #metoo led to more visibility of sexual harassment and accountability for leadership. The discourse around the James Damore memo, as divisive as it was, felt like it still led to a broader understanding of the negative perspectives women in tech had to deal with constantly.
Most importantly (IMO), Google's product choices and politics are not inseparable --- Google is far too large and influential to pretend otherwise, and discussing these topics acted as a watchdog of sorts. Internal discussions about a potential censored search engine product in China resulted in pressure on leadership to change course, and pressure on Cloud bidding on the JEDI contract led to Google withdrawing from that bid.
Shutting off that political discourse feels like it'd be a huge blow to "oversight" from concerned Googlers --- particularly the ones who felt it was worth staying and using their influence internally to push Google toward creating a more just world.
NBA League Pass doesn't actually let you stream the playoffs (if you're in the USA), nor do you get to watch your local team. It's meant to be a supplement to a cable subscription, or a full subscription for international viewers.
I experienced the same, but have had little luck finding more data about it. Got any details on where they've indicated that firmware update is coming?
In my case, I set up dual-boot on my 13" Spectre. The Macbook USB-C charger has never once locked up the machine when I'm running Linux, but 100% when I'm in Windows, which makes me suspect a Windows driver issue.
There are also a couple contractors that came out of the healthcare.gov rescue (notably: Nava [1] and Ad Hoc [2]) trying to do the same kind of work. I recently left a long career at Google to work for Ad Hoc, and we get to work alongside the great folks at USDS trying to make things better.
Hit me up if you're interested in getting into this space!
See previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 .