Facebook "could" go the way of Myspace, but I'm guessing that their talent is significantly better than what Myspace had. By all accounts their engineering talent is on a similar level to Google. They're almost certainly not as good a buy as the Google IPO in 2004, where the search advertising market was still in its infancy, but look at Apple. All it takes is one amazing product that helps to spawn a brand new market and they can double their market cap. I'd guess that Facebook has as good a chance at doing that as Apple, Google, or anyone else. That said, I agree that until they actually are able to pull that off their stock is overpriced. It will probably also stay overpriced for a few years no matter what happens.
I don't think it's a good point at all. I think it's completely disingenuous. The analysis quoted assumes that the implementation of the rangeCheck function is on the critical path to shipping, which is preposterous in my opinion.
I think it was mentioned that this code was used in testing other code - when you're reverse-engineering, conformance testing is about as critical as you can get. You could start coding without it, but it's quicker to catch bugs early. [NB: I don't know whether it actually is used in testing]
He only copied it because he was planning to submit the code to the OpenJDK and writing his own would have led to unnecessary duplication of code. The copied code would no longer be needed when the new code was added to the same package.
Bashing it out cowboy style would have been faster and in no way harmed Android. It's Oracle's codebase he was spending time and energy improving with good engineering practice.
My point is that it's worse than nonsense, it's actually arguing the opposite of the truth. The "copying", rather than speeding up Android development to Google's benefit, actually slowed Android development in an attempt to help OpenJDK/Oracle.
That this is the only direct copyright infringement they could find is highly ironic, but I guess either the lawyers didn't understand the subtleties here, or thought the jury wouldn't as this argument wasn't made (except obliquely in Bloch's statements).
But to follow up on his point, if DDG were ever to become Google's size they would have little choice but to abandon their privacy approach as well... it's just not possible to make a profitable search engine with competitive quality without machine learning algorithms that use user data.
As a UW grad, I can tell you that most of the best talent from those universities does not go to RIM, and hasn't for a number of years. Sure they have a few really excellent people, the few who want to sacrifice better opportunities to stay local and don't find Google (who have a Waterloo office) appealing, but the majority of the people in my graduating class who went there aren't engineers I'd want to work with. And very few of the people they hire would make it through the hiring process of top companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.
This must be partly a team-specific culture issue, because my observations are different. In my area of the company there are quite a few women engineers who are highly regarded, extremely influential, and well-compensated. The gender ratio is still poor like most places in the industry, but I haven't seen any evidence of women doing worse in career advancement.
