It's not like they are being asked to censor the search results. They are being asked to be more prudent with their advertisments. There are two things that google can do:
(a) create legal verbage that you have to clock "I am not violating anyones trademark" when you submit an AdWord;
(b) when an adword is submitted, have your staff do a quick "check" to see if it is not an obvious violation of trademark (ie, allowing a site about presidents but not GM to put up adword for "Ford")
By taking proactive actions to protect trademark Google can make sure that it is not trampling on someone's hard work in establishing a business name. I think, unlike other "intellectual property" trademark is a *great* idea, and what is being asked here is _completely_ resonable.
I was struck by two things. First, he had a really bad recommendation:
It goes without saying, of course, that anyone running mission-critical systems should use the RELEASE branch rather than the CURRENT or STABLE branches.
This is exactly mixed up, RELEASE is a TAG not a BRANCH. Or am I mis-understanding how FreeBSD CVS works? And further, you _don't_ want to use 5.1-RELEASE on something mission criticial; instead you want to track bug-fixes in the current STABLE branch. This is the first thing that they try to get across on their web page, they call 5.1 new technology (CURRENT), while 4.8 (STABLE) is called production. There is a reason for this.
Second, he suggested, as his first recommendation to the FreeBSD group that they drop mailing lists and move to a web forum! Am I that old? If you've done any serious open source work you will see why this is a problem, or have times changed? I would hate to have to go to N forums on N sites (requiring that I actually be on the network) without the advantage of using procmail and other filtering/notify triggers! I cannot stand careless use of web interfaces, where most of them need a mouse instead of a keyboard (as most web forums suck when viewed via w3m or lynx).
I whole heartely agree. The government should never grant monopolies. It should build all monopolies itself and contract out as much of the work as possible to a competitive marketplace. This sort of "bandaid" competition is the worst possible case.
As for letting two companies lay redundant networks... well, this is just silly in most cases. It costs lots of money to lay and maintain wire, and this is usually only cost effective with a large number of users. The solution is to let a non-profit own the wires, and let companies contract its usage. Keep as much as possible in the competitive domain, while making sure that the "core monopoly" is a non-profit entity with local representation.
The problem here is that a for-profit entity was granted a monopoly (and usually given special government levys and sometimes even public bonds for funding) instead of setting it up as a non-profit "governmental" entity giving public ownership. This sort of stuff happens with the falacy that just because something is commerially owned that it will be competitive. Corporations in a non-competitive market are usually slower, less attentive, and more costly than government due to profit maximization... at least with government you can kick the ring leader out of office every few years.
On the flip side, government has no business being in a field where their could be competition. And thus even though a non-profit "governmental" organization may own the resource, this does not mean that everything should be done by the non-profit's employees. Within a monpoply are many potential competitive marketplaces, opportunities for capitalism to thrive -- laying the wire, maintaining the wires, content providers, maintainers of wires, etc. Thus, just beacuse a non-profit ("governmental") entity may own the resource does not mean that it should try to do everything internally. The distinction is actually quite clear; for a power company, the non-profit should own the transmission wires, while the power plans themselves can be for-profit (properly charged for polution they create to keep the playing field level).
Unfortunate when it gets all messed up like this, and then regulation is used like a bandaid to fix a more fundamental resource ownship problem. The overall goal is to maximize competition and thus efficiency; phone, energy, and cable companies rarely do this on their own -- the 9th circut is just doing its best to "encourage" a monopoly to be at least somewhat competitive. Ick. The courts would be better off forcing a sale of the "necessary public" aspects of the company to a non-profit and then having the maintanence of these resources open to public bidding. While this would be very painful up front... it would correct the core issue.
This kinda reminds me of the i386 release hype (in 1986) which allowed for "virtual x86 machines" -- DOS programs to be run from within Windows in its own "protected space".
by providing a backup "counting" mechanism which can be used to verify that the voting machine is working correctly. Open source will not solve it (although it will make it harder) as you still have many ways which the machine can be tampered with. Clearly the reporter disagrees with this view, and says:
"What about the value of a paper trail? I asked Selker. Just having a vote on paper is no guarantee that it will be correctly counted, he explained. He cited an example (again from Chicago) of an election commissioner who bragged about counting votes for a Republican candidate and then writing them down as votes for the Democrat."
While this is cute, and it is possible to mess with the paper ballots by mis-counting them -- the point of paper ballots is that you can re-count them under bright lights... and since someone _could_ be shown to have lied it makes catching evil election commissioners much easier. Recounting an electronic votes, however, well, is this even possible?
This reporter has an axe to grind and I think he is seriously playing games. Especially when he says "Before talking with Selker, I was squarely in the anti-DRE camp." How someone can be evern remotely informed about DRE and propose an "alternative" while not even mentioning a reference to and then completely mis-representing the adecemics and practioners who are in the "anti-DRE" camp [1]? This quote is just yet another stratigically placed logical flaw that his paper is riddled with.
The article starts out with a False Choice logical fallacy. The reporter asserts early on that we either have touch screens or paper -- to create tension and proport to show "another side" of the argument. But it is really a misrepresentation of the facts. The Verified Voting people went way out of their way to make sure that they wern't against paper ballots. What VerifiedVoting is For is a PHYSICAL verification of electronic voting.
I'm not concerned if the system is secure or not (well, I am, but it is a side point). What I'm concerned about is that I can't audit the computer system without a paper trail. This is the most important issue. One can have a "secure" voting system which purposefully gives the wrong results on election day. Also, just beacuse one hacker can't crack it doesn't mean that other hackers won't.
There are many "well meaning" people who would like to see Dean elected, are not part of his official campaign group, but are really not net savvy enough to understand the issue of spamming. Some of them may even think that this helps Dean and are just ignorant of the issue. Don't think for a moment that Dean controlls the actions of all people who are "participating" in his campaign.
As each state and locality implement their own variant, some requiring "ADV:" in the subject line, some requiring "ADULT:" and this one requiring "adv-adult", all a spammer will have to do is claim that he can't possibly satisfy all of the constraints. Why can't we have a header which marks spam as spam, such as "Solicited: no"? Or just require that all spam use "Precedence: bulk"?
Not that any of this will be effective... but if they have to legislate something...
and places where there can be competition should be privately owned.
Thus, the grid (a singleton) should be operated by the government so that we have internal competition, that is competition amoung contractors who do the actual work.
And power plants should be operated by private interests (regulated/charged appropriately and equally for pollution of public goods, such as the air or water, etc).
Companies should not run the grid beacuse there is no external competition, the only way to get competition is to have contractors competing on very small jobs/w oversight. In a complementary manner, since there can be competition between power plants, this should be let up to the market, if we need more power, corporate interests will build more plants, etc.
I'd like to add that misspellings were much more common in earlier times. I have books published in the 1800's which have a much higher mis-spelling rate than your average book of the shelf today.
Since it was the public that was harmed, the pay out should have been to a public facility, such as putting computers in public libraries or some other public expendature since the amount per person is so small it isn't worth applying for.
The lawyers sucked in this case, and they shouldn't even have collected their 20%
Kids right to privacy from their parents ends where the parents responsibilities to ensure their safety and well being begin.
And children are not qualified to judge where this line is. Anyone who thinks that children's privacy shouldn't be subject to parental discretion is not a parent.
Oh please -- like tracking children will magically enable good parenting. Good parenting starts early and often, if you have done your job as a parent you won't need, nor will you want to track your children. At some point they need to start thinking for themselves, preferably while you are still around to provide sound advice. Keeping your children on a leash is at best mis-guided. At worst, it will greatly exxaserbate the societal problem of child abuse (20% of the population is regularly abused by their parents or older siblings, often sexually). I say don't put your children on a leash unless you want to be on one. From another perspective you have to think about what kind of people you will create if they grow up on a leash... yes, perfect slaves. Be careful, or you may very well be seeding the enslavement of the next generation, by generating an expectation not of freedom and choice, but of restriction and survlence. And once they get into power, may they enslave you. No thank you.
I think the line that will have to be drawn here is that one may use DNA to confirm someone's presence at the scene of the crime, but should never be used to find a person. If it is used to "find" a person, then it really could turn up someone very innocent... who happens to be close to the DNA, as I recall DNA fingerprints are one in say 10 million... well, how many million in the United States, 250 million? Could be your half-brother who you never new you had, etc. This sort of usage could be very dangerous.
However, the use of DNA as evidence, like any other form of evidence should be permitted. No?
xI'm convined that Social Security is the biggest scam in the history of mankind. Think about it. What other scam has screwed hundreds of millions of people out of 15% of their life's income only to give them a piddly amount back if/when the retire?
Social Security is above all a "saftey net" so that children without both parents and those who are no longer productive (elderly) can be housed, clothed, and fed. It is really _not_ a retirement plan. It is a mechanism to prevent widespread poverty.
Social Security is a generational transfer, that is, you pay for the generation of your parents and grandparents (and disadvantaged children) for the society they have built. It has *nothing* to do with retirement, the money isn't locked in a box and isn't invested and isn't saved (although it is often used in the general fund as regular tax money...)
Social Security is an extra tax (15%) paid by the working class (after 80K you don't owe any more social security) so that the very wealthy don't have to shoulder the burden of those who are not yet (children w/o parent) or are no longer (elderly) productive members of society. In times where the take-in is very high and the pay-out is very low (the last 10 years), it is a *huge* boon to the very wealthy since the money collected goes directly into the treasury; with it in the calculation the average tax rate of your middle-income american is *far higher* than those in the million dollar brackets...
If one were to be fair about use of Social Security money, extra money should be used exclusively for the education of the children who later on will have to support you... ie, if you arn't spending it on those in retirement, it should be spent making sure that the next generation is educated enough to compete in the global marketplace so that they (collectivly) can provide the security net for you and your generation. Use of this money for the military and other general spending is a severe abuse of the whole idea.
So. I half agree with you. Social security is a scam to increase the effective tax rate of the middle and lower class with respect to the upper class. And that politicians talk about it as a "retirement account" is absolutely nonsense.
However, it has its purpose. And without social security really awful things would be common in our society... children w/o parents starving and those who have built our roads, infrastructure, and other societial assets being left in the streets to die... ick.
1. Social Security is meant as a humane way to handle those in society who are not yet productive (children/w missing parents) and who have past their productive stage (the eldery).
2. Social Security is a saftey net since
1. Social Security is nothing more than an extra 15% tax on those who make 80K or less Social Security is _not_ a retirement plan, money is not saved nor are you necessarly gaurenteed to get that money at any point; it is extra tax... tax that the wealthy don't pay.
The first thing to note is that Social Security is _not_ a retirement plan. The current generation pays for the previous generation.
Properly quoted but still mis-understood?
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
Jefferson believed that if there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artitsts would not create art.
Many founding fathers may have thought this, but definately not Jefferson. What suprises me is that you can get this so very wrong, even with Jefferson's own words below quoted oh so plainly.
Slashdot Mirror
and get my refund!
thanks! Your other post was also useful, especially the one about call/cc
Is fink running on 10.3
ie, Ruby does; Perl/Python do not
It's not like they are being asked to censor the search results. They are being asked to be more prudent with their advertisments. There are two things that google can do:
(a) create legal verbage that you have to clock "I am not violating anyones trademark" when you submit an AdWord;
(b) when an adword is submitted, have your staff do a quick "check" to see if it is not an obvious violation of trademark (ie, allowing a site about presidents but not GM to put up adword for "Ford")
By taking proactive actions to protect trademark Google can make sure that it is not trampling on someone's hard work in establishing a business name. I think, unlike other "intellectual property" trademark is a *great* idea, and what is being asked here is _completely_ resonable.
Clark Evans
I was struck by two things. First, he had a really bad recommendation:
It goes without saying, of course, that anyone running mission-critical systems should use the RELEASE branch rather than the CURRENT or STABLE branches.
This is exactly mixed up, RELEASE is a TAG not a BRANCH. Or am I mis-understanding how FreeBSD CVS works? And further, you _don't_ want to use 5.1-RELEASE on something mission criticial; instead you want to track bug-fixes in the current STABLE branch. This is the first thing that they try to get across on their web page, they call 5.1 new technology (CURRENT), while 4.8 (STABLE) is called production. There is a reason for this.
Second, he suggested, as his first recommendation to the FreeBSD group that they drop mailing lists and move to a web forum! Am I that old? If you've done any serious open source work you will see why this is a problem, or have times changed? I would hate to have to go to N forums on N sites (requiring that I actually be on the network) without the advantage of using procmail and other filtering/notify triggers! I cannot stand careless use of web interfaces, where most of them need a mouse instead of a keyboard (as most web forums suck when viewed via w3m or lynx).
I whole heartely agree. The government should never grant monopolies. It should build all monopolies itself and contract out as much of the work as possible to a competitive marketplace. This sort of "bandaid" competition is the worst possible case.
As for letting two companies lay redundant networks... well, this is just silly in most cases. It costs lots of money to lay and maintain wire, and this is usually only cost effective with a large number of users. The solution is to let a non-profit own the wires, and let companies contract its usage. Keep as much as possible in the competitive domain, while making sure that the "core monopoly" is a non-profit entity with local representation.
The problem here is that a for-profit entity was granted a monopoly (and usually given special government levys and sometimes even public bonds for funding) instead of setting it up as a non-profit "governmental" entity giving public ownership. This sort of stuff happens with the falacy that just because something is commerially owned that it will be competitive. Corporations in a non-competitive market are usually slower, less attentive, and more costly than government due to profit maximization... at least with government you can kick the ring leader out of office every few years.
On the flip side, government has no business being in a field where their could be competition. And thus even though a non-profit "governmental" organization may own the resource, this does not mean that everything should be done by the non-profit's employees. Within a monpoply are many potential competitive marketplaces, opportunities for capitalism to thrive -- laying the wire, maintaining the wires, content providers, maintainers of wires, etc. Thus, just beacuse a non-profit ("governmental") entity may own the resource does not mean that it should try to do everything internally. The distinction is actually quite clear; for a power company, the non-profit should own the transmission wires, while the power plans themselves can be for-profit (properly charged for polution they create to keep the playing field level).
Unfortunate when it gets all messed up like this, and then regulation is used like a bandaid to fix a more fundamental resource ownship problem. The overall goal is to maximize competition and thus efficiency; phone, energy, and cable companies rarely do this on their own -- the 9th circut is just doing its best to "encourage" a monopoly to be at least somewhat competitive. Ick. The courts would be better off forcing a sale of the "necessary public" aspects of the company to a non-profit and then having the maintanence of these resources open to public bidding. While this would be very painful up front... it would correct the core issue.
This kinda reminds me of the i386 release hype (in 1986) which allowed for "virtual x86 machines" -- DOS programs to be run from within Windows in its own "protected space".
by providing a backup "counting" mechanism which can be used to verify that the voting machine is working correctly. Open source will not solve it (although it will make it harder) as you still have many ways which the machine can be tampered with. Clearly the reporter disagrees with this view, and says:
"What about the value of a paper trail? I asked Selker. Just having a vote on paper is no guarantee that it will be correctly counted, he explained. He cited an example (again from Chicago) of an election commissioner who bragged about counting votes for a Republican candidate and then writing them down as votes for the Democrat."
While this is cute, and it is possible to mess with the paper ballots by mis-counting them -- the point of paper ballots is that you can re-count them under bright lights... and since someone _could_ be shown to have lied it makes catching evil election commissioners much easier. Recounting an electronic votes, however, well, is this even possible?
This reporter has an axe to grind and I think he is seriously playing games. Especially when he says "Before talking with Selker, I was squarely in the anti-DRE camp." How someone can be evern remotely informed about DRE and propose an "alternative" while not even mentioning a reference to and then completely mis-representing the adecemics and practioners who are in the "anti-DRE" camp [1]? This quote is just yet another stratigically placed logical flaw that his paper is riddled with.
[1] (VerifiedVoting).
s/paper ballots/electronic voting machines/
sorry
The article starts out with a False Choice logical fallacy. The reporter asserts early on that we either have touch screens or paper -- to create tension and proport to show "another side" of the argument. But it is really a misrepresentation of the facts. The Verified Voting people went way out of their way to make sure that they wern't against paper ballots. What VerifiedVoting is For is a PHYSICAL verification of electronic voting.
I'm not concerned if the system is secure or not (well, I am, but it is a side point). What I'm concerned about is that I can't audit the computer system without a paper trail. This is the most important issue. One can have a "secure" voting system which purposefully gives the wrong results on election day. Also, just beacuse one hacker can't crack it doesn't mean that other hackers won't.
it is not only wrong, but it leads your readers astray and allows others to draw wrong conclusions.
Thank you so much for a clear statement of your policy.
Thank you for the post. This is very helpful.
There are many "well meaning" people who would like to see Dean elected, are not part of his official campaign group, but are really not net savvy enough to understand the issue of spamming. Some of them may even think that this helps Dean and are just ignorant of the issue. Don't think for a moment that Dean controlls the actions of all people who are "participating" in his campaign.
As each state and locality implement their own variant, some requiring "ADV:" in the subject line, some requiring "ADULT:" and this one requiring "adv-adult", all a spammer will have to do is claim that he can't possibly satisfy all of the constraints. Why can't we have a header which marks spam as spam, such as "Solicited: no"? Or just require that all spam use "Precedence: bulk"?
Not that any of this will be effective... but if they have to legislate something...
and places where there can be competition should be privately owned.
/w oversight. In a complementary manner, since there can be competition between power plants, this should be let up to the market, if we need more power, corporate interests will build more plants, etc.
Thus, the grid (a singleton) should be operated by the government so that we have internal competition, that is competition amoung contractors who do the actual work.
And power plants should be operated by private interests (regulated/charged appropriately and equally for pollution of public goods, such as the air or water, etc).
Companies should not run the grid beacuse there is no external competition, the only way to get competition is to have contractors competing on very small jobs
I'd like to add that misspellings were much more common in earlier times. I have books published in the 1800's which have a much higher mis-spelling rate than your average book of the shelf today.
Since it was the public that was harmed, the pay out should have been to a public facility, such as putting computers in public libraries or some other public expendature since the amount per person is so small it isn't worth applying for.
The lawyers sucked in this case, and they shouldn't even have collected their 20%
Kids right to privacy from their parents ends where the parents responsibilities to ensure their safety and well being begin.
And children are not qualified to judge where this line is. Anyone who thinks that children's privacy shouldn't be subject to parental discretion is not a parent.
Oh please -- like tracking children will magically enable good parenting. Good parenting starts early and often, if you have done your job as a parent you won't need, nor will you want to track your children. At some point they need to start thinking for themselves, preferably while you are still around to provide sound advice. Keeping your children on a leash is at best mis-guided. At worst, it will greatly exxaserbate the societal problem of child abuse (20% of the population is regularly abused by their parents or older siblings, often sexually). I say don't put your children on a leash unless you want to be on one. From another perspective you have to think about what kind of people you will create if they grow up on a leash... yes, perfect slaves. Be careful, or you may very well be seeding the enslavement of the next generation, by generating an expectation not of freedom and choice, but of restriction and survlence. And once they get into power, may they enslave you. No thank you.
I think the line that will have to be drawn here is that one may use DNA to confirm someone's presence at the scene of the crime, but should never be used to find a person. If it is used to "find" a person, then it really could turn up someone very innocent... who happens to be close to the DNA, as I recall DNA fingerprints are one in say 10 million... well, how many million in the United States, 250 million? Could be your half-brother who you never new you had, etc. This sort of usage could be very dangerous.
However, the use of DNA as evidence, like any other form of evidence should be permitted. No?
xI'm convined that Social Security is the biggest scam in the history of mankind. Think about it. What other scam has screwed hundreds of millions of people out of 15% of their life's income only to give them a piddly amount back if/when the retire?
/w missing parents) and who have past their productive stage (the eldery).
Social Security is above all a "saftey net" so that children without both parents and those who are no longer productive (elderly) can be housed, clothed, and fed. It is really _not_ a retirement plan. It is a mechanism to prevent widespread poverty.
Social Security is a generational transfer, that is, you pay for the generation of your parents and grandparents (and disadvantaged children) for the society they have built. It has *nothing* to do with retirement, the money isn't locked in a box and isn't invested and isn't saved (although it is often used in the general fund as regular tax money...)
Social Security is an extra tax (15%) paid by the working class (after 80K you don't owe any more social security) so that the very wealthy don't have to shoulder the burden of those who are not yet (children w/o parent) or are no longer (elderly) productive members of society. In times where the take-in is very high and the pay-out is very low (the last 10 years), it is a *huge* boon to the very wealthy since the money collected goes directly into the treasury; with it in the calculation the average tax rate of your middle-income american is *far higher* than those in the million dollar brackets...
If one were to be fair about use of Social Security money, extra money should be used exclusively for the education of the children who later on will have to support you... ie, if you arn't spending it on those in retirement, it should be spent making sure that the next generation is educated enough to compete in the global marketplace so that they (collectivly) can provide the security net for you and your generation. Use of this money for the military and other general spending is a severe abuse of the whole idea.
So. I half agree with you. Social security is a scam to increase the effective tax rate of the middle and lower class with respect to the upper class. And that politicians talk about it as a "retirement account" is absolutely nonsense.
However, it has its purpose. And without social security really awful things would be common in our society... children w/o parents starving and those who have built our roads, infrastructure, and other societial assets being left in the streets to die... ick.
1. Social Security is meant as a humane way to handle those in society who are not yet productive (children
2. Social Security is a saftey net since
1. Social Security is nothing more than an extra 15% tax on those who make 80K or less Social Security is _not_ a retirement plan, money is not saved nor are you necessarly gaurenteed to get that money at any point; it is extra tax... tax that the wealthy don't pay.
The first thing to note is that Social Security is _not_ a retirement plan. The current generation pays for the previous generation.
Jefferson believed that if there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artitsts would not create art.
Many founding fathers may have thought this, but definately not Jefferson. What suprises me is that you can get this so very wrong, even with Jefferson's own words below quoted oh so plainly.