I am utterly blown away at hoe often the government is willing to step in and save failing business models....Last time I checked, we live in a capitalist society
Why does it surprise you so much?
You must have seen the hordes of posters here who say that profit is the only lawful goal of corporations, and they are actually remiss in their duties if they do not {exploit children, dump pollution, etc.} in the pursuit of profits. I've seen apologia for almost anything.
These days getting laws passed to protect profits is just another business opportunity.
That's why it seems like the government is willing to step in. Some, the failing corporations are pressuring, and the others already think it's a great idea, after all they are essentially in the same class of moneyed interests.
Large corporations today have a "right" to profits - because they create the laws that say so.
If enough people switch to models that causes profits to fall the corporations will cause laws to get passed to restore them.
Witness the levy on blank media in Canada.
Witness the proposed tax on electronics to support the news conglomerates in the US.
Witness ACTA.
Someone will figure out a successful business model and will fill the void or a market that no longer needs to exist (hello buggy whips) will fade into the history books
These days that successful business model will simply be outlawed, or regulations written in such a way as to squeeze out the upstarts, or startup costs raised to the point that only heavy hitters need apply.
These days they would just create a law that every car must be fitted with a buggy whip for safety (or something).
The more powerful the industry, the more influence they have to pervert the system to make even more money, which incidentally enough buys more influence. It's a great positive feedback loop for those that can play the game.
Face it, if they have Power now they will most likely amass an increasing amount in the foreseeable future because this problem has become systemic.
We can only guess what information $PROPRIETARY_OS will suck up and report back to $VENDOR.
Except with a "normal" OS one can check what is in every single IP or other connection that $OS does that you did not request. Either they will be encrypted (which should surely raise some flags!) or if not, readily readable.
So no, in general we don't have to "guess".
However, if you upload $ANYTHING to someone else's servers (and this OS appears to store your data remotely) "they" have the ability (which does not connote legality) to do anything with it. Unless your data appears in an advertising campaign or is published in a book, you can only guess. If they sell some advertisers your prediliction for stuffed unicorns, or a psychological profile you'll never know it was based on that data.
If the person "selling" whatever it is sincerely believes it, then it can't properly be called a scam.
I believe you are incorrect.
You appear to be saying that innocent persons cannot be involved in a scam. So, if I'm great friends with a guy like Madoff (but who is still 'operating'), it's not a scam if I tell my friends to invest as well?
Hmm. Don't think so. It is still a scam. I may be innocent, but the scam is still there.
In fact, most really great scams have a few front facing layers of starry eyed innocents to give that aura of truthiness necessary to rope in more victims.
Problem is what constitutes a "business". For instance, i've inherited most of the family farms totally about 500 acres. I rent the farms to a farmer
Congratulations on your successful farm business. Since this rule seems only to apply if you're making +$20K off of it, if you don't want to do the record keeping for your business, you can probably outsource that as well.
We had a tree farm. We planted it on some of the land my grandfather owned before he and grandmother had to move into town (polio can be a bitch). I can still remember my dad behind the plow, planting seedlings. Every summer we would go, after the growing season and use shears to trim the trees (you don't think they really grow that way most of the time, do you?). Every winter we would have a cut-your-own sale. The first winter, we did it out of the back of my dad's suburban. Oooh, that was cold. Then, we built a portable shack. It was some money for college for us. But it was still a business.
Just because this is particularly targets your type of "not a business, really! I just get this check every month..." business doesn't mean that you were not exploiting a loophole in the tax code this attempts to fix. That "nice annual bonus" are the profits of your business. And if they are >$20K, then I don't see how you can claim it's not.
Oh, so TFA must have no references or quotes by Google in it, and must possibly not be connected at all.
Hmm. Sorry, nope. Google made a statement and it was in the article, therefore it's fair game.
The article was about the situation, and it appears that Google is indeed involved.
Want to take some shots at Microsoft next?
Nah, rather take some at you.
I'm sorry that you identify so much with Google that you need to defend them this way. Do you disagree with anything I said? Or are you just upset that your precious company is becoming just another faceless corp and I pointed it out?
Perhaps that's why you decided to be an anonymous coward. YOu ahve no point to make and the point you (appear to) wish to make shows you a sniveling corporate lap dog.
Hmm. Perhaps. It depends on where you place the mirror and you you angle the cut.
Even given the policy example that you did, there are a few interpretations of this.
I.e. - the "reverse" could also be to accept anything BUT plastic (including goats!), or only accept cash (as the OP said), OR to accept cash as well as credit.
Your interpretation could be argued as "correct", but then so could either of the other two. And probably more, as well, if one is willing to twist meanings and intentions a bit.
Somehow, I don't buy it, and it makes me sad that Google has gone this far down the path of Corporatism.
Now, they lie to us to our faces. I find it impossible to believe that Google did not know what was in the strings being sent to it.
Google is trying to tell us that they are so incompetent that they did not realize what all that information in the strings that were sent to it actually signified.
Right.
Either their hiring practices scrape the bottom of the barrel (which we know is not true), or they knew exactly what information was in all those strings, since that's their job. Collecting and analyzing information (of which those URLs are a subset).
Oh, I know. Since we are in a free market economy you can just not use Google at all! And any site that has adwords, or google analytics, or youtube, or refuse email of anyone that sends you email from a gmail address, or...
If enough people do this, we can show Google the error their ways./sarcasm
You're a China hater. You might be right about family being important in Chinese culture, but it's not worship, by any means. You make us sound like non-humans. I have to try not to get angry at your war mentality, but instead put forth my understanding.
And YOU are way way too oversensitive. Are you trying to tell me that there is no ancestor worship in China?
Google does not break laws, they are doing this legally, (at worst) in an unregulated area - collecting publicly available data on an industry scale.
Of course. No corporation breaks laws.
But you might want to actually check out Germany's laws. Capturing OTA broadcasts of things like emails is indeed illegal.
So, perhaps they are just breaking laws on an industry scale.
Unless an independent party verifies what indeed was collected, and how much, it is in question just how much they broke the law.
I presume from your standpoint that we should just trust whatever they tell us they did, let them destroy the evidence of their wrong doing, instead of getting an accurate accounting.
I hope that you never ever break ANY laws in your life. Ever.
Or:
I hope YOU has the shit raped out of YOU or be treated as the mentally retarded person unable to be responsible for his actions he claims to be. You can't have it both ways. Either you are free with responsibilities or you are not. Pick one.
Umm. Yeah. Just what else do you suppose is causing the speedup in compile times, based on the description of the experiment he gave?
Correlation may not imply causation, but it is a good starting point to look for it.
I get that you don't particularly care for multiple cores, but at least keep your complaints in the realm of the reasonable.
In this particular case quoting latin makes you appear stupid (even though you are probably not) since it is well proven that more cores cause compile times to be lower for many types of compliation (i.e., the "embarrasingly parallel" ones).
I see a ton of posts that point out the review said they came to the "correct conclusion" despite invalid methods.
Aren't we really trying to find out what the "correct conclusion" is?
As such, how can this panel know whether the results are indeed correct?
What is their Oracle for determining that the original research came to the "correct conclusion"?
It is axiomatic that you cannot prove an Oracle with itself. Of course it agrees!
There appear to be numerous serious issues with the underlying data sets involved, from the availability of the raw data used in the models, to the data transforms and justifications of ALL of those transforms, to the actual model they use.
If you care about science, I don't understand how one could just hand wave all that away.
You have possible garbage in, possible garbage heuristics. To top it off, the model produces the same result with noise.
From the outside this all appears technically incorrect. If they would release the raw data, their transforms and reasons for each of them in each step of the process, and their model we could put all this behind us and be on solid ground.
We could then debate the actual merits of the model and the data set used to generate it.
Without that, they may be doing science, but not the kind to base any Policy on.
The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum.
This sounds perfectly like most open source projects. I wonder what the exact percentage of dead to alive(and not in the parrot sense) projects there are on SourceForge, Freshmeat, et al. I wouldn't be suprised at least an 80/20 split.
You have stumbled upon one of the many paradoxes of our current Reality.
To wit: Freedom necessarily means complimentary restriction if there is any force opposing that freecom. In order to protect the greater freedoms, one must restrict entities from destroying those same freedoms.
Thus in this system, the reason why one cannot make derivative works closed is that doing so goes against a "higher" freedom involved.
There is a hierarchy of "freedoms", and some restrictions are necessary to support these.
It's like the 'right' to life or liberty. We support the freedom to live by restricting the freedom of liberty by jailing those who commit murder.
Using your definition of freedom, if I were to be pedantic I would have to say that any license you need to agree to whatsoever means that your freedoms are being curtailed in some fashion.
Of course, you knew all this already, as it has been discussed ad nauseum on this site and still choose to deliberately miss and misrepresent the point.
You are incorrect. The laws as they stand exists to seek monoploy rents and to encourage profits by corporations. It is totally irrelevant what the intent may have been, it is entirely relevant what the actualy effects of the laws are.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I bet that we could go on for quite a while listing examples.
My list certainly wasn't meant to be exhaustive or even particularly long.
I find the USA'S policy A BIT DISGUSTING as well.
Regards.
I guess I should read a bit more carefully.
I apologise for the unwarranted snark.
Regards.
Oh?
I had no idea that corporations lobbying for laws on their own behalf was the sort of thing she stood for.
I guess you learn something new every day!
Regards.
I am utterly blown away at hoe often the government is willing to step in and save failing business models....Last time I checked, we live in a capitalist society
Why does it surprise you so much?
You must have seen the hordes of posters here who say that profit is the only lawful goal of corporations, and they are actually remiss in their duties if they do not {exploit children, dump pollution, etc.} in the pursuit of profits. I've seen apologia for almost anything.
These days getting laws passed to protect profits is just another business opportunity.
That's why it seems like the government is willing to step in. Some, the failing corporations are pressuring, and the others already think it's a great idea, after all they are essentially in the same class of moneyed interests.
Large corporations today have a "right" to profits - because they create the laws that say so.
If enough people switch to models that causes profits to fall the corporations will cause laws to get passed to restore them.
Witness the levy on blank media in Canada.
Witness the proposed tax on electronics to support the news conglomerates in the US.
Witness ACTA.
Someone will figure out a successful business model and will fill the void or a market that no longer needs to exist (hello buggy whips) will fade into the history books
These days that successful business model will simply be outlawed, or regulations written in such a way as to squeeze out the upstarts, or startup costs raised to the point that only heavy hitters need apply.
These days they would just create a law that every car must be fitted with a buggy whip for safety (or something).
The more powerful the industry, the more influence they have to pervert the system to make even more money, which incidentally enough buys more influence. It's a great positive feedback loop for those that can play the game.
Face it, if they have Power now they will most likely amass an increasing amount in the foreseeable future because this problem has become systemic.
Regards.
Right, because what Blagojevich did TOTALLY absolves everyone else of anything they might do.
Perhaps you should judge people for what they do regardless of any other affiliations.
Regards.
I'm sorry, but that's not how it works anymore.
Now, large corporations have a right to profits.
If enough people switch to a model that causes profits to fall, the corporations will cause laws to get passed to restore them.
Witness the tax levy on blank media in Canada.
Witness the proposed tax on electronics to support the news conglomerates in the US.
Witness ACTA.
Face it, they have Power now and they will amass an increasing amount in the foreseeable future because the problem has become systemic.
Regards.
We can only guess what information $PROPRIETARY_OS will suck up and report back to $VENDOR.
Except with a "normal" OS one can check what is in every single IP or other connection that $OS does that you did not request. Either they will be encrypted (which should surely raise some flags!) or if not, readily readable.
So no, in general we don't have to "guess".
However, if you upload $ANYTHING to someone else's servers (and this OS appears to store your data remotely) "they" have the ability (which does not connote legality) to do anything with it. Unless your data appears in an advertising campaign or is published in a book, you can only guess. If they sell some advertisers your prediliction for stuffed unicorns, or a psychological profile you'll never know it was based on that data.
Regards.
If the person "selling" whatever it is sincerely believes it, then it can't properly be called a scam.
I believe you are incorrect.
You appear to be saying that innocent persons cannot be involved in a scam. So, if I'm great friends with a guy like Madoff (but who is still 'operating'), it's not a scam if I tell my friends to invest as well?
Hmm. Don't think so. It is still a scam. I may be innocent, but the scam is still there.
In fact, most really great scams have a few front facing layers of starry eyed innocents to give that aura of truthiness necessary to rope in more victims.
Regards.
Problem is what constitutes a "business". For instance, i've inherited most of the family farms totally about 500 acres. I rent the farms to a farmer
Congratulations on your successful farm business. Since this rule seems only to apply if you're making +$20K off of it, if you don't want to do the record keeping for your business, you can probably outsource that as well.
We had a tree farm. We planted it on some of the land my grandfather owned before he and grandmother had to move into town (polio can be a bitch). I can still remember my dad behind the plow, planting seedlings. Every summer we would go, after the growing season and use shears to trim the trees (you don't think they really grow that way most of the time, do you?). Every winter we would have a cut-your-own sale. The first winter, we did it out of the back of my dad's suburban. Oooh, that was cold. Then, we built a portable shack. It was some money for college for us. But it was still a business.
Just because this is particularly targets your type of "not a business, really! I just get this check every month ..." business doesn't mean that you were not exploiting a loophole in the tax code this attempts to fix. That "nice annual bonus" are the profits of your business. And if they are >$20K, then I don't see how you can claim it's not.
regards.
Oh, so TFA must have no references or quotes by Google in it, and must possibly not be connected at all.
Hmm. Sorry, nope. Google made a statement and it was in the article, therefore it's fair game.
The article was about the situation, and it appears that Google is indeed involved.
Want to take some shots at Microsoft next?
Nah, rather take some at you.
I'm sorry that you identify so much with Google that you need to defend them this way. Do you disagree with anything I said? Or are you just upset that your precious company is becoming just another faceless corp and I pointed it out?
Perhaps that's why you decided to be an anonymous coward. YOu ahve no point to make and the point you (appear to) wish to make shows you a sniveling corporate lap dog.
Regards.
Hmm. Perhaps. It depends on where you place the mirror and you you angle the cut.
Even given the policy example that you did, there are a few interpretations of this.
I.e. - the "reverse" could also be to accept anything BUT plastic (including goats!), or only accept cash (as the OP said), OR to accept cash as well as credit.
Your interpretation could be argued as "correct", but then so could either of the other two. And probably more, as well, if one is willing to twist meanings and intentions a bit.
As I said, English is a funny language.
Somehow, I don't buy it, and it makes me sad that Google has gone this far down the path of Corporatism.
Now, they lie to us to our faces. I find it impossible to believe that Google did not know what was in the strings being sent to it.
Google is trying to tell us that they are so incompetent that they did not realize what all that information in the strings that were sent to it actually signified.
Right.
Either their hiring practices scrape the bottom of the barrel (which we know is not true), or they knew exactly what information was in all those strings, since that's their job. Collecting and analyzing information (of which those URLs are a subset).
Oh, I know. Since we are in a free market economy you can just not use Google at all! And any site that has adwords, or google analytics, or youtube, or refuse email of anyone that sends you email from a gmail address, or...
If enough people do this, we can show Google the error their ways. /sarcasm
They didn't 'reverse' the policy, they ended it. A reversal would result in a new policy in which you may only pay with cash.
English is a funny language, isn't it?
If the policy was 'do not take cash'. Then the reversal would be "take cash" not only take cash.
It just so happens that the reverse policy fits nicely in with normal everyday transactions and so doesn't need to be called out.
Regards.
You're a China hater. You might be right about family being important in Chinese culture, but it's not worship, by any means. You make us sound like non-humans. I have to try not to get angry at your war mentality, but instead put forth my understanding.
And YOU are way way too oversensitive. Are you trying to tell me that there is no ancestor worship in China?
Then please explain http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=china+religion+ancestor+worship&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=/
Please explain to me how the Parent is a "China hater"?
Please explain how the Parent's post "make us sound like non-humans"?
Please explain how the parent's post has a war "mentality"?
Your statemenst seem to belie more about your own personal make up than the parent's.
Regards.
Google does not break laws, they are doing this legally, (at worst) in an unregulated area - collecting publicly available data on an industry scale.
Of course. No corporation breaks laws.
But you might want to actually check out Germany's laws. Capturing OTA broadcasts of things like emails is indeed illegal.
So, perhaps they are just breaking laws on an industry scale.
Unless an independent party verifies what indeed was collected, and how much, it is in question just how much they broke the law.
I presume from your standpoint that we should just trust whatever they tell us they did, let them destroy the evidence of their wrong doing, instead of getting an accurate accounting.
Regards.
So.
I hope that you never ever break ANY laws in your life. Ever.
Or:
I hope YOU has the shit raped out of YOU or be treated as the mentally retarded person unable to be responsible for his actions he claims to be. You can't have it both ways. Either you are free with responsibilities or you are not. Pick one.
Regards.
Perhaps you should try paying more attention the the substance of their actions rather than the window dressing that frames them.
Of course, one could say this about the majority of people.
As a note - whole countries seem to take these guys seriously enough, not to mention their corporate masters.
If 'seriousness' can be measured by the response of one's opponents, then you should take them very seriously indeed.
Regards.
No, he is lying, "technically".
The evidence that they were viewed is that the IT personnel said they viewed them. How else do you claim that you saw a kid taking drugs?
Regards.
Except if the scale is relevant to the analogy.
In many cases it is, because analogy makers use the difference in scale as a disortion factor to hide the fallacy of the analogy.
Of course, any analogy fails to hit the mark, simply by being about something else!
Regards
Or is that cue the queue of grammar Nazis?
No, it's not perfect, as in T(N) = T(1)/N, but it's certainly much stronger a correlation than "only a fraction."
May be true. But do not forget "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation .
Umm. Yeah. Just what else do you suppose is causing the speedup in compile times, based on the description of the experiment he gave?
Correlation may not imply causation, but it is a good starting point to look for it.
I get that you don't particularly care for multiple cores, but at least keep your complaints in the realm of the reasonable.
In this particular case quoting latin makes you appear stupid (even though you are probably not) since it is well proven that more cores cause compile times to be lower for many types of compliation (i.e., the "embarrasingly parallel" ones).
Regards.
I see a ton of posts that point out the review said they came to the "correct conclusion" despite invalid methods.
Aren't we really trying to find out what the "correct conclusion" is?
As such, how can this panel know whether the results are indeed correct?
What is their Oracle for determining that the original research came to the "correct conclusion"?
It is axiomatic that you cannot prove an Oracle with itself. Of course it agrees!
There appear to be numerous serious issues with the underlying data sets involved, from the availability of the raw data used in the models, to the data transforms and justifications of ALL of those transforms, to the actual model they use.
If you care about science, I don't understand how one could just hand wave all that away.
You have possible garbage in, possible garbage heuristics. To top it off, the model produces the same result with noise.
From the outside this all appears technically incorrect. If they would release the raw data, their transforms and reasons for each of them in each step of the process, and their model we could put all this behind us and be on solid ground.
We could then debate the actual merits of the model and the data set used to generate it.
Without that, they may be doing science, but not the kind to base any Policy on.
The reference code site is dead, the blog hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and no one from Microsoft responds to questions on the forum.
This sounds perfectly like most open source projects. I wonder what the exact percentage of dead to alive(and not in the parrot sense) projects there are on SourceForge, Freshmeat, et al. I wouldn't be suprised at least an 80/20 split.
Congratulations.
You have stumbled upon one of the many paradoxes of our current Reality.
To wit: Freedom necessarily means complimentary restriction if there is any force opposing that freecom. In order to protect the greater freedoms, one must restrict entities from destroying those same freedoms.
Thus in this system, the reason why one cannot make derivative works closed is that doing so goes against a "higher" freedom involved.
There is a hierarchy of "freedoms", and some restrictions are necessary to support these.
It's like the 'right' to life or liberty. We support the freedom to live by restricting the freedom of liberty by jailing those who commit murder.
Using your definition of freedom, if I were to be pedantic I would have to say that any license you need to agree to whatsoever means that your freedoms are being curtailed in some fashion.
Of course, you knew all this already, as it has been discussed ad nauseum on this site and still choose to deliberately miss and misrepresent the point.
Nice troll.
You are incorrect. The laws as they stand exists to seek monoploy rents and to encourage profits by corporations. It is totally irrelevant what the intent may have been, it is entirely relevant what the actualy effects of the laws are.
Regards.