Editorial
Final Perk
News of Google’s employee survival benefit surfaced recently, much to the amazement of bloggers, who were all out on the prowl for some tech news. In an interview with Forbes Magazine’s Meghan Casserly, Google Chief People Officer Lazlo Bock spelled out the terms. If a Google employee dies, the company will give a surviving spouse or domestic partner half the employee’s salary for up to 10 years.
Various commentators have referred to this policy as “Impressive,” “Awesome,” “Admirable.” Another Forbes contributor called it “awe inspiring.” Although Google should certainly be commended for offering this benefit, I wonder sometimes about the way news gets passed around in our high-velocity, zero-friction Internet economy. Lofty adjectives are fast and evocative, but numbers talk. I worry that what we call “news” today is little more than a patter of glorified re-tweets that get passed through the industry without anything close to the level of pre-press scrutiny they would have received 10 years ago.
Read full article as PDF:
003-003_Comment.pdf (107.18 kB)Tag Cloud
News
-
SCO Rises from the Swamp
Longtime litigator revives an ancient suit against IBM alleging Linux infringes on Unix copyrights.
-
UberStudent Project Releases UberStudent 3.0
Specialty distro keeps the focus on advanced learning.
-
openSUSE Conference Approaches
The openSUSE Conference will be held July 18-22, 2013, at the Olympic Museum in Thessaloniki, Greece.
-
Drupal.org Hacked
Security breached at home sites of the CMS project.
-
Oracle Takes Action on Java Security
Lead Java developer vows policy changes and more attention to fixing problems.
-
Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
-
Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
-
FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
-
Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
-
Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
