Basically, the protestors are trying to keep Europe as we know it, but I don’t think they’ll succeed, so Europe (at any rate outside Germany and Scandinavia) is going to be rather different in future.

Another example of market-dominant minority phenomenon in progress.

The article mentioned 20,000 on strike, that’s not really that much. In Europe we’re used to much, much worse. I’m actually a bit surprised how little protests and strikes there have been the last year. Considering all the austerity plans.

Aphorism 406 of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human:

When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this women up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.

Personally, that’s what’s most endearing to me: the fact that they’re a massive corporation, yet still promoting open technologies. e.g.:
* Linux (through kernel contributions and various sponsorships, though I’d like to see a few more of Google’s Desktop apps, notably SketchUp, ported to Linux)
* WebM and various other HTML5-related tech
* V8 (Chrome’s Javascript engine, which indirectly [via competition] has boosted the performance of other browsers’ engines [even, *gasp* the upcoming IE9's Chakra], and is open source to boot)
* Google Web Toolkit
* Google Code Project Hosting (which is rivaled, IMHO, only by Canonical’s [the company behind Ubuntu Linux] Launchpad and perhaps GitHub [which arguably serves a subtly different purpose])
* Closure Javascript tools
* ….

Granted, most of the above directly or indirectly “improve” the web, which is in Google’s best interests given that, to a degree, the more successful the web is — and the more “open” it is (i.e., accessible to their crawlers) — the more money Google makes. Yet many of those same things benefit Bing and Yahoo just as well; moreover, they could have taken a much more closed route (see Facebook) in their business practices.

I will say, though, that the potential for vendor lock-in with Google Apps is a tad concerning. Sure, most of your data is portable in one way or another, but I’d like to see the process become more streamlined. My philosophy is that you should be confident enough in your product that you shouldn’t have to worry about your users downloading their data and running.

> SNL Digital short captures something essential about being a 20 year old male. NSF.

Wow, they got an NSF grant for that? Innovative.