Regardless of what you may believe about Steve Job's contributions to the world and to personal computing, you really can't deny that he's a pretty big asshole (maybe not a "total" asshole, but at least an 85% asshole). Here we have him simultaneously slinging some rather deceptive mud at Android while simultaneously lying totally.
Apple tracks you. There's a file. It's created. It keeps track of all the locations you've been to. That's tracking, Apple is doing it. Therefore, Apple is tracking you. End of discussion.
Now what Apple might NOT be doing is *collecting* the tracking information they gather. They may simply leave it to rot on your phone without gathering it to a central location and parsing it. That does not mean Apple is not tracking me; it just means Apple does not know where I am. There's a big difference there, but both things *matter*. If Apple is tracking me, that means the record exists -- whether Apple has it or not is the only point of concern. The mere fact that it exists means that it can therefore be used against me by LEA, malicious software, and thieves. The record should not exist, but it does, and Apple needs to own up to that mistake and fix it, or acknowledge it and make it public knowledge. If Steve Jobs says "Apple does not track you", then he is explicitly and blatantly lying. If he wanted to address Apple's intent, or practices, or whatever -- he could, but saying that Apple does not track me is tantamount to saying that the file does not exist -- which is provably false. In short, it's a lie.
Does Android track people? Sometimes. If you run maps, it forwards that location data to Google which is anonymized and used for traffic pattern analysis etc. It does not track me all the time. Latitude does, but that's opt-in. Without enabling latitude, there's no personally identifiable record to be stolen/subpoenaed/abused. Moreover, unlike Apple, we know Google does this because they say so. They do not hide it, they put it front and center, and explain why they do it and how to opt out of it.
How will adding an extra item to your bag get the weight down? Do you think that middle-school textbooks are available in e-book form? Most college text books still aren't . . .
It's actually really hard to find most textbooks in digital format, legally OR illegally. I mean there are torrent sites that specialize in them, but I'd say that even the majority of textbooks aren't available.
This is the same reason a lot of campus networks banned iPhones/iPads. The Android implementation of DHCP is actaully supposed to be a be less buggy than the iOS version, which is banned at more places (and I believe, based on other comments here, this includes Princeton). That said, for most users I doubt its a big a deal. Often the wireless carriers will set up free wifi of their own on college campuses, especially AT&T because there's so many iPhones on most campuses that they wouldn't be able to handle them all on 3g. So even if you can't use the Princeton WiFi network, you probably aren't out of options.
His speech, from the snippet I read, had more of a "The times, they are a changin'" tone rather than "Damn you steve jobs" tone. It's nuance. I don't think he's suggesting that we try to swim upstream on the river of change, merely that we might consider building a boat or something. But hey, I don't know the guy, I can only try to guess.
I suspect the judge believes that this woman just said ridiculous nonsense in an attempt to get out of Jury duty. The judge, angry that she's trying to subvert the system by lying to get disqualified, is making her sit the whole thing out despite not actually being a juror. In other words, he wants to send the message that you can't get a free pass out of jury duty in his courtroom simply by pretending to have every bias under the sun.
Crowdsource it. I'm a huge fan of podiobooks.com -- alot of the books presented there (for free mind you) often end up to proper book deals and the final version is often changed significantly as a result of feedback from the listener community.
My understanding is that the Nathan Lowell's and Scott Siglers of the world are doing fairly well for themselves by giving it away for free. It's not unlike the Freemium business model that companies like Evernote use: Free gets as many ears and eyeballs as possible and easy marketing. A certain percentage will recommend it to friends, since it was free and, hopefully, good. That gets you even more ears/eyeballs. A certain percentage of the overall will be such big fans they'll want to buy proper print copies or kindle versions or whatever and, even though you're giving it away for free, you end up selling more copies than you might have otherwise.
With regards to marketing junkets, this blog does cover that. Both authors state that they are convinced that the #1 best thing you can do market your books is to write another one. Each one catches a few new eyes and prompts new readers to go back and see what else you've written. The time spent in Book stores signing the occasional copy is time that could be much better spent writing. Not only is it more productive with regards to output, but with regards to marketing as well -- or so they believe.
Sounds good to me.
As for Libel/Defamation lawsuits, these are fiction writers we're talking about.
Occasionally they will have deals for things you would have bought anyways, and you end up paying less than you might have. It's still spending, but its a net savings, at least. The problem is, in that case, the business gains nothing. They aren't getting any new exposure or a customer out of it -- they're just basically giving a regular a discount for no real reason. This happens a lot and may be one of the reason why a large number of business that have offered Groupons have low satisfaction ratings with the whole experience. If I had money, I'd be shortselling the hell out of this stock -- but then again I wouldn't have bought Apple stock after they announced the iPod either, so what do I know?
I concur. I don't get this at all. I thought groupon was nuts not to take Google's offer, but this -- this is madness. They have a larger user base for sure, but their current business model does not support this valuation.
When you read that, what makes you think they actaully found anything at all? You've got a team of guys who go off into the mountains to look for Noah's Ark, which says something about their mindframe. They come back and say "yep, we found it and we totally Radiocarbon dated it and guess what, it's 4800 years old!"
And then everyone says "Uh-huh, we'll believe it when we see it" and then, a full year later, still nobody else has seen it.
And honestly, why would we? they're keeping the location a secret. The rest of us just aren't "ready", right? Give me a break. They're either deluded, lying, or both. They may have found a old dead tree that they convinced themselves must be the mast of a ship, but trust me, they didn't find a boat, let a lone one the size described in the old testament. They're hardly the first to make this claim, and nobody else has ever actually found squat.
Yes, the human brain is capable of the amazing mental gymnastics necessary to maintain a coherent sense of the world while having no logically consistency whatsoever. You could be an excellent Doctor and yet disbelieve in evolution.
Although, to my way of thinking, you don't really "disbelieve in evolution", you just believe that you don't believe in evolution. Christians like to say that there are no atheists in a foxhole, but I think more accurately there are no creationists in a hospital. Think about it, how much of our modern medicine comes from our understanding human genetics -- an understanding which is 100% wrong if anti-evolutionists are right. Our understanding genetics predicts evolution, and our understanding of evolution predicts genetics. If we're wrong on one, we're wrong on both -- no doubt about it.
You would have to be a complete and total fool to not believe in evolution but still trust yourself to the care of modern medicine -- at least if you were going to be logically consistent. Of course, humans are no such thing. We're not rational, we're rationalizers. It's one of our finest and most obnoxious qualities.
I've noticed recently that a lot of places have suddenly switched to the Facebook commenting system for their websites with that assumption that forcing people to post with their real names will cut down on trolling.
It may well do that, but it certainly comes with a cost to non-troll posts as well. I, for one, have stopped visiting Techcrunch as a result -- let alone stopped posting there. People censor themselves when they know their friends will read their comments. This is not always a good thing, this includes keeping valid and valuable opinions to themselves simply because they don't want to offend anyone. Not to mention the number of people who will simply choose to say nothing at all. What Techcrunch and anyone who switches to this new commenting system has done is throw the baby out with the bathwater, then pat themselves on the back for getting rid of that pesky bathwater. It makes me kinda sad. The Facebookification of the Internet is the death of the internet. Go down that road at your own risk.
The quoted section is not crediting Wikileaks, but rather crediting a general movement and then citing Wikileaks as another EXAMPLE of the sort of things happening in said movement. He's pointing out correlation moreso than causation -- that is to say, they share the same causation.
As if we were all waiting on them to do this? You do understand a) this is the second time they've done this and b) all previous malware "threats" were theoretical attacks and demonstration apps -- not "in the wild" maliciously-intended exploits? The last time they did it was to remove an app created by a security researcher that could theoretically do all sorts of malicious things just to see if people would install it despite the warnings.
Where does "finally", figure into this -- except by way of yellow journalism?
Remember when being a libertarian was synonymous with membership in the ACLU -- before the conservative movement hijacked the party? Remember when it actaully meant a strong belief in civil liberties rather than free-market fanaticism? Your civil liberties end where mine begin and while I believe you should be able to do anything that neither breaks my back nor picks my pocket -- there's good evidence that our current energy consumption rates are picking all of our pockets and its not merely within the government's right to craft policies which prevent this -- it's actually the reason government exists. Some entity must be the mediator between our selfish desires and our collective desires, and that is essentially what government is.
If you give me the option of paying a few bucks to help pay for a new road, and paying a few bucks to go see a movie -- I'd prefer the latter. After all, I may never drive down that particular road. But realistically, if we gave people that option, nobody would choose roads and so nobody would be able to go see movies. If you expect government to only do things you approve of, then you expect entirely too much.
CFl's are pretty much as cheap as Incandescent Bulbs now -- you can buy them at Walmart in packages that make them significantly less than $1 each for 60 watt equivalent bulbs. The fact of the matter is, this bill is merely hastening the inevitable, with good reason.
The market will choose the best bulb -- true enough -- and that means Incandescent Bulbs are screwed with or without this legislation. But the market doesn't work instantly -- it works at the speed of the dissemination of information and frankly consumers don't care enough to go find out the differences in their light bulbs. So how long before consumers overwhelmingly choose CFL and LED bulbs unless forced? As sure as I am that it would happen, I'm not at all sure how long it might take but my best guess is years.
Bottom line: Your "right" to choose which sort of lighting to buy wasn't going to last forever anyways. With CFL's dropping in price continuously as more and more people discover their benefits, it was just a matter of time before incandescents went the way of the dinosaur. Perhaps they might have lived on as a tiny niche product for people like yourself, but I honestly doubt it. At the end of the day, there was a compelling reason to kill them off and doing so is merely speeding the inevitable. It's just really not something to get upset over . . .
Is it illegal? I mean, I don't recall books coming with any sort of license agreement that would forbid you from digitizing them and allowing one person at a time to view said digital back-ups. I'm not a lawyer or anything, so I have no idea what law that would run afoul of -- but it certainly sounds like fair use to me.
He lied to the school to gain access to their kids.
Debatable. He probably didn't lie per se, but rather simply failed to volunteer some key details. "I'd like to come sing for the children" vs " I'd like to come sing for the children, and then edit the video to appear as though I sang a much less appropriate song for comedic purposes". IANAL, but both are true in the technical sense.
That is criminal trespass under almost any jurisdiction you could name.
Even if we were to conclude he lied, and what you say here is true -- two big if's -- it still wouldn't matter. Criminal Trespass is not what he's being charged with and it's not a crime which carries a 20 year prison sentence and listing on a sex offender registry.
Without permission, he used an empty classroom as a stage for his sexually explicit performance. That again is criminal trespass.
He had permission -- not necessarily from the school itself, but from an employee of the school who was his friend.
Without anyone's informed consent he edited videos of six and seven year old kids into his adolescent and obsene music video.
Poor judgment perhaps, but at *worst* this is a civil matter -- not a criminal one.
The video makes these kids part of the performance ---
and that is all that Michigan law requires for prosecution on the felony charge.
A court will decide that, but expect that if it agrees with you that another court will be asked to decide if the law itself can possibly be constitutional.
The video was posted to YouTube and played to a local comedy club. That looks less like a prank and more like commercial exploitation.
Irrelevant to anything. Again, if he's using people's likeness for a commercial gain, that might be a civil matter -- but never a criminal one.
The point was the search term wasn't passed directly in some sort of meta data. It had to be parsed out of the URL. Who the hell cares if the same parsing applies to multiple search engines? That was not the relevant point.
The important part was always this: someone had to write a bit of code that looks for ?q= and strip out everything before that up to the next ampersand. Whoever wrote that bit of code had to realize that this meant they'd be specifically looking at what their users searched for on Google and what the result they clicked on was. They could already do this directly from Bing itself -- since they always know both what someone searches for and what they ultimately choose to click on. Doing this, separately, could ONLY serve to spy on Google and other non-Bing search engines. That is a troubling notion to most people. It seems like you GET what the problem is, you just don't get why its a problem. Look to the results: If Google's search quality declines, Bing declines with it. If Google is not there, Bing performs worse. I'm not sure why you don't see how this is problematic.
It all seems rather innocuous and innocent until you look at what the net effect is. If your algorithm delivers better results when your competitors algorithm gives better results, that implies cheating. Your performance should be independent of theirs, or your doing it wrong.
And Google explicitly stated they don't do this in the original blog post.
I suppose it depends on what people thought of when they thought of a "viable tablet". Most people assumed to be viable, it had to be a proper computer -- not a giant iPod touch. Turns out giant ipod touch is good enough for most people -- but is the iPad cheap? Hardly. It's expensive for what it ended up being.
I don't care if it runs Android or iOS or Palm OS or whatever. If it's just going to be a toy for content consumption, then I'm not paying $500 dollars for it -- let alone more. I mean, let's face it. Nobody needs an iPad or any iPad competitor. Right now its just a fad -- people rarely buy one with a compelling use case. Maybe the form factor does have long term promise and it'll grow into something more than fad. But present day? Well, sure, its cool -- but it's just so unbelievably unnecessary.
That would be even worse, then, because the referrer URL contains the search term differently in each search engine -- which would mean that Microsoft would have had to explicitly code it to strip search terms from Google search URLs, rather than simply having the browser watch what people type into *any* search field. Regardless of the exact mechanism (which is still being speculated on, as far as I know, since Google said they couldn't quite figure it out -- only eliminate certain possibilities), the bottom line here is that Microsoft is benefiting from work that Google has done in significantly increasing the relevancy of results for "unique" search queries.
Could Google do the same thing with Analytics? Yes, but they aren't. Why would they? Ninety percent of the world's search traffic already goes through them. They already know what search results are doing best for what search terms. They do it the old fashioned way -- taking the data from their own users -- which is how they feel Microsoft ought to be doing it. I do not think any sort of reverse sting would catch Google's hand in the cookie jar as Microsoft's jar is noticeably bereft of cookies in the first place.
Look. Nobody thinks that Microsoft is "trying to reverse engineer their algorithm" from search results, but what they are apparently doing is harvesting user data from clicks. It appears that when a user searches from something, and clicks a link as a result of that search, the search term and site that the user found relevant is collected and used in their own search algorithm -- so they are, to some degree, piggybacking on Google here.
On the one hand, its good to know what link your user found relevant -- that's important data for your own search engine to have, on the other hand that's really the sort of thing you should be gathering from your own damn search engine. I'm sure that by now, enough people are using Bing that they can get this data on their own. The only thing getting it through the browser instead of through bing allows them to do is gather it from Google users as well, which is essentially allowing them to tune their own algotrithm on the back of Google's.
It's shady to say the least. Perhaps it was created with good intent -- as discovery tool for when users are on websites with internal search engines, but its obviously pulling in a lot more than that. If Microsoft continues to abuse that, they deserve any bad publicity they get as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of what you may believe about Steve Job's contributions to the world and to personal computing, you really can't deny that he's a pretty big asshole (maybe not a "total" asshole, but at least an 85% asshole). Here we have him simultaneously slinging some rather deceptive mud at Android while simultaneously lying totally.
Apple tracks you. There's a file. It's created. It keeps track of all the locations you've been to. That's tracking, Apple is doing it. Therefore, Apple is tracking you. End of discussion.
Now what Apple might NOT be doing is *collecting* the tracking information they gather. They may simply leave it to rot on your phone without gathering it to a central location and parsing it. That does not mean Apple is not tracking me; it just means Apple does not know where I am. There's a big difference there, but both things *matter*. If Apple is tracking me, that means the record exists -- whether Apple has it or not is the only point of concern. The mere fact that it exists means that it can therefore be used against me by LEA, malicious software, and thieves. The record should not exist, but it does, and Apple needs to own up to that mistake and fix it, or acknowledge it and make it public knowledge. If Steve Jobs says "Apple does not track you", then he is explicitly and blatantly lying. If he wanted to address Apple's intent, or practices, or whatever -- he could, but saying that Apple does not track me is tantamount to saying that the file does not exist -- which is provably false. In short, it's a lie.
Does Android track people? Sometimes. If you run maps, it forwards that location data to Google which is anonymized and used for traffic pattern analysis etc. It does not track me all the time. Latitude does, but that's opt-in. Without enabling latitude, there's no personally identifiable record to be stolen/subpoenaed/abused. Moreover, unlike Apple, we know Google does this because they say so. They do not hide it, they put it front and center, and explain why they do it and how to opt out of it.
How will adding an extra item to your bag get the weight down? Do you think that middle-school textbooks are available in e-book form? Most college text books still aren't . . .
It's actually really hard to find most textbooks in digital format, legally OR illegally. I mean there are torrent sites that specialize in them, but I'd say that even the majority of textbooks aren't available.
I doubt they have enough ip addresses for this, however. They're using real ones.
This is the same reason a lot of campus networks banned iPhones/iPads. The Android implementation of DHCP is actaully supposed to be a be less buggy than the iOS version, which is banned at more places (and I believe, based on other comments here, this includes Princeton). That said, for most users I doubt its a big a deal. Often the wireless carriers will set up free wifi of their own on college campuses, especially AT&T because there's so many iPhones on most campuses that they wouldn't be able to handle them all on 3g. So even if you can't use the Princeton WiFi network, you probably aren't out of options.
His speech, from the snippet I read, had more of a "The times, they are a changin'" tone rather than "Damn you steve jobs" tone. It's nuance. I don't think he's suggesting that we try to swim upstream on the river of change, merely that we might consider building a boat or something. But hey, I don't know the guy, I can only try to guess.
I suspect the judge believes that this woman just said ridiculous nonsense in an attempt to get out of Jury duty. The judge, angry that she's trying to subvert the system by lying to get disqualified, is making her sit the whole thing out despite not actually being a juror. In other words, he wants to send the message that you can't get a free pass out of jury duty in his courtroom simply by pretending to have every bias under the sun.
Crowdsource it. I'm a huge fan of podiobooks.com -- alot of the books presented there (for free mind you) often end up to proper book deals and the final version is often changed significantly as a result of feedback from the listener community.
My understanding is that the Nathan Lowell's and Scott Siglers of the world are doing fairly well for themselves by giving it away for free. It's not unlike the Freemium business model that companies like Evernote use: Free gets as many ears and eyeballs as possible and easy marketing. A certain percentage will recommend it to friends, since it was free and, hopefully, good. That gets you even more ears/eyeballs. A certain percentage of the overall will be such big fans they'll want to buy proper print copies or kindle versions or whatever and, even though you're giving it away for free, you end up selling more copies than you might have otherwise.
With regards to marketing junkets, this blog does cover that. Both authors state that they are convinced that the #1 best thing you can do market your books is to write another one. Each one catches a few new eyes and prompts new readers to go back and see what else you've written. The time spent in Book stores signing the occasional copy is time that could be much better spent writing. Not only is it more productive with regards to output, but with regards to marketing as well -- or so they believe.
Sounds good to me.
As for Libel/Defamation lawsuits, these are fiction writers we're talking about.
Occasionally they will have deals for things you would have bought anyways, and you end up paying less than you might have. It's still spending, but its a net savings, at least. The problem is, in that case, the business gains nothing. They aren't getting any new exposure or a customer out of it -- they're just basically giving a regular a discount for no real reason. This happens a lot and may be one of the reason why a large number of business that have offered Groupons have low satisfaction ratings with the whole experience. If I had money, I'd be shortselling the hell out of this stock -- but then again I wouldn't have bought Apple stock after they announced the iPod either, so what do I know?
I concur. I don't get this at all. I thought groupon was nuts not to take Google's offer, but this -- this is madness. They have a larger user base for sure, but their current business model does not support this valuation.
When you read that, what makes you think they actaully found anything at all? You've got a team of guys who go off into the mountains to look for Noah's Ark, which says something about their mindframe. They come back and say "yep, we found it and we totally Radiocarbon dated it and guess what, it's 4800 years old!"
And then everyone says "Uh-huh, we'll believe it when we see it" and then, a full year later, still nobody else has seen it.
And honestly, why would we? they're keeping the location a secret. The rest of us just aren't "ready", right? Give me a break. They're either deluded, lying, or both. They may have found a old dead tree that they convinced themselves must be the mast of a ship, but trust me, they didn't find a boat, let a lone one the size described in the old testament. They're hardly the first to make this claim, and nobody else has ever actually found squat.
Yes, the human brain is capable of the amazing mental gymnastics necessary to maintain a coherent sense of the world while having no logically consistency whatsoever. You could be an excellent Doctor and yet disbelieve in evolution.
Although, to my way of thinking, you don't really "disbelieve in evolution", you just believe that you don't believe in evolution. Christians like to say that there are no atheists in a foxhole, but I think more accurately there are no creationists in a hospital. Think about it, how much of our modern medicine comes from our understanding human genetics -- an understanding which is 100% wrong if anti-evolutionists are right. Our understanding genetics predicts evolution, and our understanding of evolution predicts genetics. If we're wrong on one, we're wrong on both -- no doubt about it.
You would have to be a complete and total fool to not believe in evolution but still trust yourself to the care of modern medicine -- at least if you were going to be logically consistent. Of course, humans are no such thing. We're not rational, we're rationalizers. It's one of our finest and most obnoxious qualities.
I've noticed recently that a lot of places have suddenly switched to the Facebook commenting system for their websites with that assumption that forcing people to post with their real names will cut down on trolling.
It may well do that, but it certainly comes with a cost to non-troll posts as well. I, for one, have stopped visiting Techcrunch as a result -- let alone stopped posting there. People censor themselves when they know their friends will read their comments. This is not always a good thing, this includes keeping valid and valuable opinions to themselves simply because they don't want to offend anyone. Not to mention the number of people who will simply choose to say nothing at all. What Techcrunch and anyone who switches to this new commenting system has done is throw the baby out with the bathwater, then pat themselves on the back for getting rid of that pesky bathwater. It makes me kinda sad. The Facebookification of the Internet is the death of the internet. Go down that road at your own risk.
The quoted section is not crediting Wikileaks, but rather crediting a general movement and then citing Wikileaks as another EXAMPLE of the sort of things happening in said movement. He's pointing out correlation moreso than causation -- that is to say, they share the same causation.
As if we were all waiting on them to do this? You do understand a) this is the second time they've done this and b) all previous malware "threats" were theoretical attacks and demonstration apps -- not "in the wild" maliciously-intended exploits? The last time they did it was to remove an app created by a security researcher that could theoretically do all sorts of malicious things just to see if people would install it despite the warnings.
Where does "finally", figure into this -- except by way of yellow journalism?
Remember when being a libertarian was synonymous with membership in the ACLU -- before the conservative movement hijacked the party? Remember when it actaully meant a strong belief in civil liberties rather than free-market fanaticism? Your civil liberties end where mine begin and while I believe you should be able to do anything that neither breaks my back nor picks my pocket -- there's good evidence that our current energy consumption rates are picking all of our pockets and its not merely within the government's right to craft policies which prevent this -- it's actually the reason government exists. Some entity must be the mediator between our selfish desires and our collective desires, and that is essentially what government is.
If you give me the option of paying a few bucks to help pay for a new road, and paying a few bucks to go see a movie -- I'd prefer the latter. After all, I may never drive down that particular road. But realistically, if we gave people that option, nobody would choose roads and so nobody would be able to go see movies. If you expect government to only do things you approve of, then you expect entirely too much.
CFl's are pretty much as cheap as Incandescent Bulbs now -- you can buy them at Walmart in packages that make them significantly less than $1 each for 60 watt equivalent bulbs. The fact of the matter is, this bill is merely hastening the inevitable, with good reason.
The market will choose the best bulb -- true enough -- and that means Incandescent Bulbs are screwed with or without this legislation. But the market doesn't work instantly -- it works at the speed of the dissemination of information and frankly consumers don't care enough to go find out the differences in their light bulbs. So how long before consumers overwhelmingly choose CFL and LED bulbs unless forced? As sure as I am that it would happen, I'm not at all sure how long it might take but my best guess is years.
Bottom line: Your "right" to choose which sort of lighting to buy wasn't going to last forever anyways. With CFL's dropping in price continuously as more and more people discover their benefits, it was just a matter of time before incandescents went the way of the dinosaur. Perhaps they might have lived on as a tiny niche product for people like yourself, but I honestly doubt it. At the end of the day, there was a compelling reason to kill them off and doing so is merely speeding the inevitable. It's just really not something to get upset over . . .
Is it illegal? I mean, I don't recall books coming with any sort of license agreement that would forbid you from digitizing them and allowing one person at a time to view said digital back-ups. I'm not a lawyer or anything, so I have no idea what law that would run afoul of -- but it certainly sounds like fair use to me.
Whatever plants they sprout can't be native to everywhere. This sounds like a great way to spread invasive species. Way to protect nature, jerk!
He lied to the school to gain access to their kids.
Debatable. He probably didn't lie per se, but rather simply failed to volunteer some key details. "I'd like to come sing for the children" vs " I'd like to come sing for the children, and then edit the video to appear as though I sang a much less appropriate song for comedic purposes". IANAL, but both are true in the technical sense.
That is criminal trespass under almost any jurisdiction you could name.
Even if we were to conclude he lied, and what you say here is true -- two big if's -- it still wouldn't matter. Criminal Trespass is not what he's being charged with and it's not a crime which carries a 20 year prison sentence and listing on a sex offender registry.
Without permission, he used an empty classroom as a stage for his sexually explicit performance. That again is criminal trespass.
He had permission -- not necessarily from the school itself, but from an employee of the school who was his friend.
Without anyone's informed consent he edited videos of six and seven year old kids into his adolescent and obsene music video.
Poor judgment perhaps, but at *worst* this is a civil matter -- not a criminal one.
The video makes these kids part of the performance ---
and that is all that Michigan law requires for prosecution on the felony charge.
A court will decide that, but expect that if it agrees with you that another court will be asked to decide if the law itself can possibly be constitutional.
The video was posted to YouTube and played to a local comedy club. That looks less like a prank and more like commercial exploitation.
Irrelevant to anything. Again, if he's using people's likeness for a commercial gain, that might be a civil matter -- but never a criminal one.
Embarrassed me? You only proved my point!
The point was the search term wasn't passed directly in some sort of meta data. It had to be parsed out of the URL. Who the hell cares if the same parsing applies to multiple search engines? That was not the relevant point.
The important part was always this: someone had to write a bit of code that looks for ?q= and strip out everything before that up to the next ampersand. Whoever wrote that bit of code had to realize that this meant they'd be specifically looking at what their users searched for on Google and what the result they clicked on was. They could already do this directly from Bing itself -- since they always know both what someone searches for and what they ultimately choose to click on. Doing this, separately, could ONLY serve to spy on Google and other non-Bing search engines. That is a troubling notion to most people. It seems like you GET what the problem is, you just don't get why its a problem. Look to the results: If Google's search quality declines, Bing declines with it. If Google is not there, Bing performs worse. I'm not sure why you don't see how this is problematic.
It all seems rather innocuous and innocent until you look at what the net effect is. If your algorithm delivers better results when your competitors algorithm gives better results, that implies cheating. Your performance should be independent of theirs, or your doing it wrong.
And Google explicitly stated they don't do this in the original blog post.
I suppose it depends on what people thought of when they thought of a "viable tablet". Most people assumed to be viable, it had to be a proper computer -- not a giant iPod touch. Turns out giant ipod touch is good enough for most people -- but is the iPad cheap? Hardly. It's expensive for what it ended up being.
I don't care if it runs Android or iOS or Palm OS or whatever. If it's just going to be a toy for content consumption, then I'm not paying $500 dollars for it -- let alone more. I mean, let's face it. Nobody needs an iPad or any iPad competitor. Right now its just a fad -- people rarely buy one with a compelling use case. Maybe the form factor does have long term promise and it'll grow into something more than fad. But present day? Well, sure, its cool -- but it's just so unbelievably unnecessary.
That would be even worse, then, because the referrer URL contains the search term differently in each search engine -- which would mean that Microsoft would have had to explicitly code it to strip search terms from Google search URLs, rather than simply having the browser watch what people type into *any* search field. Regardless of the exact mechanism (which is still being speculated on, as far as I know, since Google said they couldn't quite figure it out -- only eliminate certain possibilities), the bottom line here is that Microsoft is benefiting from work that Google has done in significantly increasing the relevancy of results for "unique" search queries.
Could Google do the same thing with Analytics? Yes, but they aren't. Why would they? Ninety percent of the world's search traffic already goes through them. They already know what search results are doing best for what search terms. They do it the old fashioned way -- taking the data from their own users -- which is how they feel Microsoft ought to be doing it. I do not think any sort of reverse sting would catch Google's hand in the cookie jar as Microsoft's jar is noticeably bereft of cookies in the first place.
Hey it's not like Microsoft is a client of the "Altimeter Group" and Google is not.
http://www.altimetergroup.com/disclosure
Oh? It's exactly like that?
Look. Nobody thinks that Microsoft is "trying to reverse engineer their algorithm" from search results, but what they are apparently doing is harvesting user data from clicks. It appears that when a user searches from something, and clicks a link as a result of that search, the search term and site that the user found relevant is collected and used in their own search algorithm -- so they are, to some degree, piggybacking on Google here.
On the one hand, its good to know what link your user found relevant -- that's important data for your own search engine to have, on the other hand that's really the sort of thing you should be gathering from your own damn search engine. I'm sure that by now, enough people are using Bing that they can get this data on their own. The only thing getting it through the browser instead of through bing allows them to do is gather it from Google users as well, which is essentially allowing them to tune their own algotrithm on the back of Google's.
It's shady to say the least. Perhaps it was created with good intent -- as discovery tool for when users are on websites with internal search engines, but its obviously pulling in a lot more than that. If Microsoft continues to abuse that, they deserve any bad publicity they get as a result.