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Google provides colorful bicycles for its Mountain View area employees to ride. But hundreds of these bicycles go missing every week, and some have been found tossed in a local creek:
"The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle. Google doesn't really want non-Googlers using the bikes, "but it's OK if you do," Veach explained.
Google has hired 30 contractors using five vans to recover lost and stolen bikes, about a third of which are equipped with GPS trackers. The teams carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of creeks.
The company can't even confront people who appear to have stolen their bikes:
Ensuring that only company workers are riding the "Gbikes" is not particularly straightforward: some Googlers don't exactly fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techie. Company transportation executive Jeral Poskey told the paper he once took action when he saw what appeared to be a homeless woman on a commandeered Google bike. "If I could describe her, you would agree with me," Poskey said. "She looked all panicked, and then she showed me her Google badge."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @12:26PM (1 child)
"Piracy (or, as cutlass-wielding SN pedants will insist upon, copyright infringement of a work for immediate personal gain), and using a train without a ticket, are other such 'halfway sorta thefts'."
Your analagy is flawed still. A person riding a train for free is taking up space a paying customer could have taken. There's a real limit on how many sacks of water you can fit on there. A downloaded mp3 doesn't stop every other willing customer from buying their own mp3 from the limitless supply of ones and zeros.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Wootery on Monday January 08 2018, @03:24PM
As if on cue...
In your best David Attenborough whisper, if you please:
Note how the pedant is careful to imply that there is no analogy whatsoever to be drawn between copyright infringement, and conventional theft. To concede any such, would be the end of the pedant. That analogies are by definition inexact, is apparently of no consequence. One could just as easily nitpick the train-riding analogy, of course, but predictably, that analogy goes unchallenged.