I just followed the link, read the article, and reviewed the discussion.
I don't see any relationship between Google's response to BMW's attempts to game Google's ranking system and Frau Spangenberg's attempts to leverage a nuisance suit into an international advertisement for her products through manipulation of Slashdot.
Seems to me that the first instance was a matter of BMW listening with an uncritical ear to what their "SEO experts" had to say about deceiving the search engines. BMW got conned by con men; nothing particularly new about that. The second instance looks more like Audrey trying to steal a page from Daryl's SCO play book. Makes me wonder if FirePond, which started out as a reputable software house working a niche market, is now facing its End Of Times (what with farmers not doing so many "buy or lease" decisions on tractors and combines, what with the market being like it is and all).
Firepond offers the only true multi-tenant configure, price, quote solution featuring our robust product configurator
They sell strings of buzzwords, and smoke and mirrors, evidently.
And it looks like they've found a way to leverage a "class action" lawsuit that seems to have little substance into a tool of self-promotion that is bringing them more international exposure than they could possibly afford to buy.
Maybe slashdot needs a "studentofdaryl" tag? Or "solikesco", which more slickly rolls off the tongue?
Win or lose legally, the 'FirePond' brand has suddenly gotten worldwide attention. That Audrey Spangenberg grrl-- she's one heck of a savvy entrepreneur:
File class action lawsuit against Google with name of company prominent in the heading of the suit
Leak the "story" to slashdot
....? Oh wait-- there is no step here. Just a short wait
Profit!!
Google is certainly within the law in showing advertising for competing products next to search results that include a targeted product. This is also good for the consumer.
That said, the courts maybe do have a role in determining whether Google can auction off the most prominent ad position to the highest bidder in this kind of situation. It seems to me that the fair thing to do would be to use the same ranking system in the advertising section as Google uses in the search section, so that the most appropriate ads according to the user's search criteria are on top. So if Google is selling off the top spots to the highest bidders (through bidding on keywords), it can be argued that it is stacking the deck for monetary gain in a deceitful way.
But then what do I know. I have trained my eyes to skip over the ad section of Google responses. As I bet most Google users have done.
Well, people buying the books out of goodwill, but also there are a lot of situations where a book is more convenient than a computer.
Like, if you've got an hour commute in public transport or a car pool. Or you think a great way to study a subject is while sitting in a rowboat in the middle of a lake with a fishing pole propped beside you.
I don't think there's any question that eventually most instruction will be by ebooks. But I'm pretty sure there will always be a market for deadtree books, too.
I just googled up a map of Franconia Notch State Park, since I haven't visited New Hampshire in 40 years and I wasn't sure how much had changed since I last hiked and skied that area. Not much, as it turns out.
The arial tramway could take people to the top of Cannon Mtn, and they could then do a half mile steep hike down the trail that comes closest to the Old Man. A new trail or tunnel or something would have to be constructed over the last quarter mile or so, blasting through granite features that were old before our ancestors climbed down from the trees. Of course you'd not be able to move heavy equipment or prefabbed structures by that route, so a very big landing pad for a very big (and loud) helicopter would need to be constructed. That would be necessary anyway, to remove the tourist generated trash, evacuate the visitors who sprain their ankles on the really rough trail, handle fire protection (I mentioned tourists, didn't I?) and deal with all the other support issues.
Alternatively, a road could be constructed to the new monument. It would have to be several miles of tight switchback turns to climb the mountain, through the cliffs and forests that New Hampshire in its wisdom has protected with the creation of Franconia Notch State Park. Would of course need a parking lot at the top. Maybe underground parking could be blasted out of the hard rock. The debris could be just shoved over the cliff face: it isn't like there are any burger joints or coffee houses under there.
I was playing around with 6502 assembly back in the day, and didn't really start paying attention to wintel stuff until the later, when the 386 was already old. What I remember was being told that the 80286 had some internal race condition problems when multitasking, related to the instruction pipelines. I did not have the engineering background then to know whether this made any sense, and I haven't learned anything relevant since then, either. My impression was that they generated a lot of non-reproducible bugs.
I do recall that Intel got into quite a huff over criticisms raised about the 80286, and introduced the scaled down 80386sx early since they were losing the low end market. The full blown 80386 machines were too expensive for secretary pools, inventory management stations, and point of sales terminals. IIRC, the 286 and 386sx both used inexpensive 8 bit memory while the full blown 386 required 16 bit memory-- an entirely different market and a much more expensive machine.
If IBM had gotten its shit together and gotten OS/2 out the door in the early 1990s as originally intended, Windows would have been known only as the GUI interface. Windows would have been to OS/2 as Gnome is to Ubuntu: a pretty front end to a powerful and secure operating system.
But OS/2 was crippled by infighting among the divisions of IBM, and was tilting at windmills in its pursuit of true multitasking on the Intel 80286 microprocessor. (One of the best quotes ever from Bill Gates was when he described the 286 as being "brain dead"). While IBM got itself all tangled up trying to do something never done before-- true pre-emptive multitasking on a microchip with all the appropriate security that would need-- Microsoft took advantage of an escape clause in its contract to develop Windows for IBM, and tied this GUI front-end on top of DOS, which could not do multitasking and had no security model at all. Micorsoft also jumped over the 286 and developed for the 80386 microprocessor (then backfilled to provide some limited capabilities on the 80286). Thus Win3.0 came on the scene, complete with "cooperative multitasking"-- which meant no true multitasking at all.
If OS/2 had been released even as late as 1992, Microsoft would have been unable to compete with its technical superiority. We would have OS/2 and not Windows. A lot of things would have happened very differently... the delay in OS/2 was a significant historical cusp.
You can't possibly reach therapeutic levels of Sn by the cranial absorption method, no matter how tightly you wrap it around your head. So even if your theory that Sn would improve your cognition is correct, you need another mode of delivery.
Is there any possibility that some of the RIAA lawyers have developed a concern that some of their client's activities are in violation of the law, and they need direction from the judge on how to proceed? I'm thinking in terms of their separate roles as defenders of their client, and officers of the court.
Other than finding themselves stuck between a rock and a hard spot concerning client privilege and their own potential culpability as an accessory to a crime, I can't think of anything that would cause this kind of one-sided court seal in a civil case. Of course, IANAL, and I don't know nothing.
It's probably a good thing that you found out that you and that cute girl had such major religious differences.
Myself, I recognise numerology as one of the elements of the set all things that I will not be able to rationally decide with anything I now know or am likely to learn as a human being. Other elements of this set include the why-ness of Pi's irrational value; whether the mathematical expressions on which the theory of thermodynamics rests are truly convergent; whether randomness is a fiction like centrifugal force; and whether the Universe is as fractal as it appears to be (and if it is, what exactly is my relationship as a sentient being to the self-similar sentience that would necessarily exist on levels above and below those I am aware of).
PS: please reply with contact information and astrological data of "cute girl".
Speaking from my nursing background here (20+ years as Registered Nurse in Intensive Care, Emergency Room, and medical wards).
Postural drainage and percussion (PD&P) are appropriate when the "fluid in the lungs" is in the bronchial tree, as in cystic fibrosis and some kinds of bronchitis. It will do no good in pneumonia and may cause greater harm.
In pneumonia the dangerous fluid is not within the lumens of the bronchial tree where it could be coughed out; it is the walls of the tree that are swollen with excess interstitial fluid that is the danger. The swelling increases the distance between the air sacs and blood vessels, and as it progresses, it collapses the air sacs. So you don't have gobs of stuff blocking the lungs; you've got less working lung area.
If you start to come down with the flu a good plan would be to avoid exercise or any activity that would increase your O2 demand and your CO2 production. Spend your awake time mostly sitting, and rest in a semi-recumbent position rather than flat in bed. Do deep breathing exercises every half hour or so to help keep airways open. Go with sedentary activities like reading, watching tv, working on improving your slashdot karma, and so on. And remember that the hardware of your mind is now compromised by the illness, so you are not as sharp as usual, your judgment may be bad, and there are going to be more bugs in your code and logic.
I, too, used GeoCities to learn how to use HTML effectively, in the days before Yahoo took it over. I also learned a lot about what does not work on a web site by browsing GeoCities' neighborhoods. I'm sure I put up my share of junk as well... there was a large animated gif of some 50-odd images that was not one of my better ideas...
At that time, GeoCities was a grand resource for those of us trying to learn web technology on Win3.11, with no possibility of setting up a local server or anything like that. And to have TWO MEGABYTES of online usage for nothing but putting up with an ad! Wow!
I had to give up my GeoCities a few months after Yahoo took over. I had a Yahoo account, and a GeoCities account, and somehow the two got fatally entangled, so that I lost effective access to either of them. That was sad. I had developed an interactive colorwheel thingee that would generate assorted palettes based on color theory that was fun and kind of useful. It developed fatal bit rot before I found another host for it. So sad.
...they may have thought that they had compelling arguments...
Yes. Potential legal arguments are often somewhat mutually exclusive: if you attempt to use them all at once, aspects of one can weaken another. Not to mention that time and effort are finite resources, and there is much to be said for choosing to put all your resources into fighting one battle rather than starting several different battles simultaneously.
If TPB had won on the basis of the argument they had used, it would have been a good, solid win that would have forced the Defenders Of The Sacred Copyright to confront the changes of the 20th century. (And even begin to think about entering the 21st century where most of us internet users live.) Claiming the judge was tainted is a good follow-on but would not have been a good opening strategy.
It's essentially impossible to have a situation in which something has utility but has 0 cost
That's bogus.
When I throw a small log across a washout in the trail to use it as a bridge and keep my boots dry, that has great utility. But it has no appreciable cost and I'm quite happy with leaving it in place for whoever comes after me to use. Maybe they'll even add some stepping stones on the approaches so the next time I come by, my boots will not only stay out of the water, but they won't even get muddy.
In FOSS, there is a lot of that going on. The original investment in work is seen as minimal for whatever reason, and when spread across all users the cost effectively becomes zero for each user. When enough of all the users contribute back to the common good (others make different improvements to the trail), everyone sees a great increase in utility but the cost to anyone remains zero. FOSS can even support an untold number of freeloaders who don't contribute back.
This is based on a kind of economics that is thousands of years older than capitalism, sometimes called "gift exchange economics". It turns out that capitalism didn't get all of its premises correct (which isn't surprising: it grew up as a belief system, not as a science).
How is open source a better solution when your only source of troubleshooting is Google?
Now that's funny!
Any more, even with the few times I'm still dealing with proprietary stuff (like when I've had to boot to WinXP to fuss with a screwed up mess of an MS Office document) I get to the answers I need faster through Google than through any other means. Forget phone support-- I can cover a lot of ground fast with Google where I'd be listening to "all our staff are busy with other calls" music on the phone.
Of course it might be that I've learned how to develop a well-focused query using search engines over the last 11 or 12 years. I suppose if I had never bothered to study how to filter information from raw data, I'd be in miserable shape if I couldn't find somebody with a proprietary interest in my wallet to take my hand and lead me down the path. Frankly, I can't afford the time for such foolishness, so I'm certainly not going to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just followed the link, read the article, and reviewed the discussion.
I don't see any relationship between Google's response to BMW's attempts to game Google's ranking system and Frau Spangenberg's attempts to leverage a nuisance suit into an international advertisement for her products through manipulation of Slashdot.
Seems to me that the first instance was a matter of BMW listening with an uncritical ear to what their "SEO experts" had to say about deceiving the search engines. BMW got conned by con men; nothing particularly new about that. The second instance looks more like Audrey trying to steal a page from Daryl's SCO play book. Makes me wonder if FirePond, which started out as a reputable software house working a niche market, is now facing its End Of Times (what with farmers not doing so many "buy or lease" decisions on tractors and combines, what with the market being like it is and all).
Firepond offers the only true multi-tenant configure, price, quote solution featuring our robust product configurator
They sell strings of buzzwords, and smoke and mirrors, evidently.
And it looks like they've found a way to leverage a "class action" lawsuit that seems to have little substance into a tool of self-promotion that is bringing them more international exposure than they could possibly afford to buy.
Maybe slashdot needs a "studentofdaryl" tag? Or "solikesco", which more slickly rolls off the tongue?
Win or lose legally, the 'FirePond' brand has suddenly gotten worldwide attention. That Audrey Spangenberg grrl-- she's one heck of a savvy entrepreneur:
Google is certainly within the law in showing advertising for competing products next to search results that include a targeted product. This is also good for the consumer.
That said, the courts maybe do have a role in determining whether Google can auction off the most prominent ad position to the highest bidder in this kind of situation. It seems to me that the fair thing to do would be to use the same ranking system in the advertising section as Google uses in the search section, so that the most appropriate ads according to the user's search criteria are on top. So if Google is selling off the top spots to the highest bidders (through bidding on keywords), it can be argued that it is stacking the deck for monetary gain in a deceitful way.
But then what do I know. I have trained my eyes to skip over the ad section of Google responses. As I bet most Google users have done.
Well, people buying the books out of goodwill, but also there are a lot of situations where a book is more convenient than a computer.
Like, if you've got an hour commute in public transport or a car pool. Or you think a great way to study a subject is while sitting in a rowboat in the middle of a lake with a fishing pole propped beside you.
I don't think there's any question that eventually most instruction will be by ebooks. But I'm pretty sure there will always be a market for deadtree books, too.
I just googled up a map of Franconia Notch State Park, since I haven't visited New Hampshire in 40 years and I wasn't sure how much had changed since I last hiked and skied that area. Not much, as it turns out.
The arial tramway could take people to the top of Cannon Mtn, and they could then do a half mile steep hike down the trail that comes closest to the Old Man. A new trail or tunnel or something would have to be constructed over the last quarter mile or so, blasting through granite features that were old before our ancestors climbed down from the trees. Of course you'd not be able to move heavy equipment or prefabbed structures by that route, so a very big landing pad for a very big (and loud) helicopter would need to be constructed. That would be necessary anyway, to remove the tourist generated trash, evacuate the visitors who sprain their ankles on the really rough trail, handle fire protection (I mentioned tourists, didn't I?) and deal with all the other support issues.
Alternatively, a road could be constructed to the new monument. It would have to be several miles of tight switchback turns to climb the mountain, through the cliffs and forests that New Hampshire in its wisdom has protected with the creation of Franconia Notch State Park. Would of course need a parking lot at the top. Maybe underground parking could be blasted out of the hard rock. The debris could be just shoved over the cliff face: it isn't like there are any burger joints or coffee houses under there.
I was playing around with 6502 assembly back in the day, and didn't really start paying attention to wintel stuff until the later, when the 386 was already old. What I remember was being told that the 80286 had some internal race condition problems when multitasking, related to the instruction pipelines. I did not have the engineering background then to know whether this made any sense, and I haven't learned anything relevant since then, either. My impression was that they generated a lot of non-reproducible bugs.
I do recall that Intel got into quite a huff over criticisms raised about the 80286, and introduced the scaled down 80386sx early since they were losing the low end market. The full blown 80386 machines were too expensive for secretary pools, inventory management stations, and point of sales terminals. IIRC, the 286 and 386sx both used inexpensive 8 bit memory while the full blown 386 required 16 bit memory-- an entirely different market and a much more expensive machine.
Look at the history.
If IBM had gotten its shit together and gotten OS/2 out the door in the early 1990s as originally intended, Windows would have been known only as the GUI interface. Windows would have been to OS/2 as Gnome is to Ubuntu: a pretty front end to a powerful and secure operating system.
But OS/2 was crippled by infighting among the divisions of IBM, and was tilting at windmills in its pursuit of true multitasking on the Intel 80286 microprocessor. (One of the best quotes ever from Bill Gates was when he described the 286 as being "brain dead"). While IBM got itself all tangled up trying to do something never done before-- true pre-emptive multitasking on a microchip with all the appropriate security that would need-- Microsoft took advantage of an escape clause in its contract to develop Windows for IBM, and tied this GUI front-end on top of DOS, which could not do multitasking and had no security model at all. Micorsoft also jumped over the 286 and developed for the 80386 microprocessor (then backfilled to provide some limited capabilities on the 80286). Thus Win3.0 came on the scene, complete with "cooperative multitasking"-- which meant no true multitasking at all.
If OS/2 had been released even as late as 1992, Microsoft would have been unable to compete with its technical superiority. We would have OS/2 and not Windows. A lot of things would have happened very differently... the delay in OS/2 was a significant historical cusp.
Where's my tin-foil hat?
Now that's just silly.
You can't possibly reach therapeutic levels of Sn by the cranial absorption method, no matter how tightly you wrap it around your head. So even if your theory that Sn would improve your cognition is correct, you need another mode of delivery.
Is there any possibility that some of the RIAA lawyers have developed a concern that some of their client's activities are in violation of the law, and they need direction from the judge on how to proceed? I'm thinking in terms of their separate roles as defenders of their client, and officers of the court.
Other than finding themselves stuck between a rock and a hard spot concerning client privilege and their own potential culpability as an accessory to a crime, I can't think of anything that would cause this kind of one-sided court seal in a civil case. Of course, IANAL, and I don't know nothing.
It's probably a good thing that you found out that you and that cute girl had such major religious differences.
Myself, I recognise numerology as one of the elements of the set all things that I will not be able to rationally decide with anything I now know or am likely to learn as a human being. Other elements of this set include the why-ness of Pi's irrational value; whether the mathematical expressions on which the theory of thermodynamics rests are truly convergent; whether randomness is a fiction like centrifugal force; and whether the Universe is as fractal as it appears to be (and if it is, what exactly is my relationship as a sentient being to the self-similar sentience that would necessarily exist on levels above and below those I am aware of).
PS: please reply with contact information and astrological data of "cute girl".
Speaking from my nursing background here (20+ years as Registered Nurse in Intensive Care, Emergency Room, and medical wards).
Postural drainage and percussion (PD&P) are appropriate when the "fluid in the lungs" is in the bronchial tree, as in cystic fibrosis and some kinds of bronchitis. It will do no good in pneumonia and may cause greater harm.
In pneumonia the dangerous fluid is not within the lumens of the bronchial tree where it could be coughed out; it is the walls of the tree that are swollen with excess interstitial fluid that is the danger. The swelling increases the distance between the air sacs and blood vessels, and as it progresses, it collapses the air sacs. So you don't have gobs of stuff blocking the lungs; you've got less working lung area.
If you start to come down with the flu a good plan would be to avoid exercise or any activity that would increase your O2 demand and your CO2 production. Spend your awake time mostly sitting, and rest in a semi-recumbent position rather than flat in bed. Do deep breathing exercises every half hour or so to help keep airways open. Go with sedentary activities like reading, watching tv, working on improving your slashdot karma, and so on. And remember that the hardware of your mind is now compromised by the illness, so you are not as sharp as usual, your judgment may be bad, and there are going to be more bugs in your code and logic.
I, too, used GeoCities to learn how to use HTML effectively, in the days before Yahoo took it over. I also learned a lot about what does not work on a web site by browsing GeoCities' neighborhoods. I'm sure I put up my share of junk as well... there was a large animated gif of some 50-odd images that was not one of my better ideas...
At that time, GeoCities was a grand resource for those of us trying to learn web technology on Win3.11, with no possibility of setting up a local server or anything like that. And to have TWO MEGABYTES of online usage for nothing but putting up with an ad! Wow!
I had to give up my GeoCities a few months after Yahoo took over. I had a Yahoo account, and a GeoCities account, and somehow the two got fatally entangled, so that I lost effective access to either of them. That was sad. I had developed an interactive colorwheel thingee that would generate assorted palettes based on color theory that was fun and kind of useful. It developed fatal bit rot before I found another host for it. So sad.
...they may have thought that they had compelling arguments...
Yes. Potential legal arguments are often somewhat mutually exclusive: if you attempt to use them all at once, aspects of one can weaken another. Not to mention that time and effort are finite resources, and there is much to be said for choosing to put all your resources into fighting one battle rather than starting several different battles simultaneously.
If TPB had won on the basis of the argument they had used, it would have been a good, solid win that would have forced the Defenders Of The Sacred Copyright to confront the changes of the 20th century. (And even begin to think about entering the 21st century where most of us internet users live.) Claiming the judge was tainted is a good follow-on but would not have been a good opening strategy.
It's essentially impossible to have a situation in which something has utility but has 0 cost
That's bogus.
When I throw a small log across a washout in the trail to use it as a bridge and keep my boots dry, that has great utility. But it has no appreciable cost and I'm quite happy with leaving it in place for whoever comes after me to use. Maybe they'll even add some stepping stones on the approaches so the next time I come by, my boots will not only stay out of the water, but they won't even get muddy.
In FOSS, there is a lot of that going on. The original investment in work is seen as minimal for whatever reason, and when spread across all users the cost effectively becomes zero for each user. When enough of all the users contribute back to the common good (others make different improvements to the trail), everyone sees a great increase in utility but the cost to anyone remains zero. FOSS can even support an untold number of freeloaders who don't contribute back.
This is based on a kind of economics that is thousands of years older than capitalism, sometimes called "gift exchange economics". It turns out that capitalism didn't get all of its premises correct (which isn't surprising: it grew up as a belief system, not as a science).
How is open source a better solution when your only source of troubleshooting is Google?
Now that's funny!
Any more, even with the few times I'm still dealing with proprietary stuff (like when I've had to boot to WinXP to fuss with a screwed up mess of an MS Office document) I get to the answers I need faster through Google than through any other means. Forget phone support-- I can cover a lot of ground fast with Google where I'd be listening to "all our staff are busy with other calls" music on the phone.
Of course it might be that I've learned how to develop a well-focused query using search engines over the last 11 or 12 years. I suppose if I had never bothered to study how to filter information from raw data, I'd be in miserable shape if I couldn't find somebody with a proprietary interest in my wallet to take my hand and lead me down the path. Frankly, I can't afford the time for such foolishness, so I'm certainly not going to pay for it.