Yeah, those things probably can kill occasionally. But so can kicking, punching, shooting, even restraining. I'd rather get tasered than kicked, punched, or shot, and if they didn't have a taser, those would be the alternatives.
On the other hand, I think if police use a taser or other electrical device, it should be treated just like kicking or punching by the legal system and needs to be justified accordingly. And I think it's wrong for the company to try to suppress these incidents. They are most likely real, we just need to debate whether they are acceptable.
Google can probably avoid a lot of this controversy by actually just identifying the results:
[official site] Tesco Supermarkets
[other site] Cheaper than Tesco!
This could work based on domain names, data mining, and/or a/trademarks.txt file on the servers.
Google could also allow personalization, letting people choose whether to see the official/competitor's sites and in what order, as well as letting users block lists of trademarks they never want to see (e.g., Coca Cola, Nike, Microsoft, whatever).
Come on, that's just not the same. That ad uses a trademarked name to misrepresent what people are getting when they click on the link. The UK dispute involves ads that don't use the trademarked name.
That ad should be OK in response to a search for "serious magic" if it said:
Special Effects Software fxhome.com/compositelab Special Effects On Your Desktop Simple Powerful Software. Try Now!
or even
Better than Serious Magic! fxhome.com/compositelab Special Effects On Your Desktop Simple Powerful Software. Try Now!
In our very early days we had a competitor of ours place a ads on searches for our company name, with the text shouting about similar services without mention of ours or the competitor's name.
I don't see the problem. Trademark law merely doesn't allow people to misrepresent the origins of goods and services. If people go to the web site and it's clear that it's not your company, how have your goods or services been misrepresented?
You seem to be operating under the false assumption that you own all the traffic that your trademark generates. You do not. If I put up a "[your trademark] sucks" web site, you don't own that traffic and you don't have a right to prevent people from finding that site.
We objected to Google, and they took the competitor's ads away.
That's because Google is careful and conservative. Legally, I don't think you would have had a leg to stand on. And in the long term, I think Google will also permit those kinds of ads.
Had I been the owner of the trademark, I would have been obliged to sue Google (and probably eBay, who is responsible for many of these) or risk losing the trademark.
You shouldn't sue Google, you should sue the company misrepresenting themselves.
The intent behind trademarks is consumer protection, not to give companies monopoly rights on a name. The only responsibility you have when using a trademark is that you don't misrepresent the origin of goods.
So, advertisting your product in response to a search for a competitor's trademark is in the public interest and falls within the intent of trademark law, as long as you don't misrepresent yourself as the trademark holder.
Regular pencils are graphite and clay, but lots of other pigment/binder combinations have been used for a long time. Dyes and mineral pigments make pencils non-conductive and colored. Wax is often used as the binder (crayons, wax pens) and avoids dust altogether. Pencils leads can be made break-proof (stenographer's pencils). The outer covering can be replaced with something non-flammable.
Most of the problems Fisher claims pencils had could have been solved by picking one of thousands of commercially available pencil variants. That's why I don't believe the Fisher story either. The Fisher pens probably are reasonable in space, but they were created probably not out of necessity, but because Fisher needed a marketing gimmick and was willing to pay for it. And I suspect astronauts still had wax pens anyway.
Phone calls are not all that expensive anymore, and most people who really need free calls just use VoIP.
I think GrandCentral needs to do a lot more to appeal to people. Right now, its model is that you give out its number to everybody and it then connects to your devices. I think that model is too rigid. They should offer different services (voice mail, forwarding, parallel forwarding, voice response, VoIP, etc.) and let the users decide how to connect those services to each other and to phone numbers.
Also, there are some really important pieces missing, like the ability to forward SMSs.
Yahoo! may have problems, but being taken over by Microsoft would have made things worse. Yahoo still has a lot of market share. I think their problem is that offerings like 360deg were confusing and bloated. They were trying to out-do Google by integrating too much stuff and the result was a mess. But many of their individual offerings (mail, games, chat, messenger, Flickr, delicious, etc.) are good and popular, and they can build on that. With Yahoo! move to OpenSocial and their new web platform, I think they have a good chance of gaining back a lot of what they have lost.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a real problem: they just can't get it together in the Internet world. Their OS has allowed them to drag a lot of people to Live and MSN and they have inherited a lot of users with Hotmail, but I can't think of a single big Web thing where Microsoft is the leader.
Kurzweil did not invent "voice recognition technology"; I can't even think of a significant contribution he has made to the field.
Uh.....I'd say the above are some pretty important inventions and scientific breakthroughs.
MIT graduates and MIT researchers have made significant contributions, and MIT deserves to be considered on of the top institutions in the world. But at the same time, institutions like MIT have a propensity for taking credit for inventing things that really many more people contributed to.
Except that the Snopes story itself doesn't make much sense: there are plenty of cheap "pencils" that you can buy at the corner store that don't use graphite and that don't create dust.
This was done already more than a decade ago at Xerox. It's probably one of the first ubiquitous computing applications and it's something that essentially started ubiquitous computing. It also doesn't work well.
The "MIT Lecture Browser" (keyword spotting in autio-visual data) that was also mentioned as being supposedly "innovative", has also been done many times before; it's just audio-visual keyword spotting. Putting lectures into an audio-visual keyword spotting system is about as innovative as putting your milk in the refrigerator.
Except for being somewhat more cumbersome to program and less parallel than previous hardware, there is nothing really new about the nVidia parallel programming model. And their graphics-oriented approach means that their view of parallelism is somewhat narrow.
Maybe nVidia will popularize parallel programming, maybe not. But I don't see any "shake up" or break throughs there.
They should just switch to hosted E-mail services with Google Apps:-)
Seriously, though: the White House should not be in control of White House IT services. An independent agency should be responsible for that. It's all part of checks and balances.
Why do you have to drag this bullshit sarcasm into this discussion?
For the record, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have open positions that they have a hard time filling with qualified people (so do Google, IBM, and most other high tech companies):
The H-1b caps indiscriminately keep companies from filling those jobs; they keep out US educated Ph.D.'s, they keep out foreign educated Ph.D.'s, and they are a huge problem for industry and US competitiveness. Even if there's some abuse of H-1b's, capping H-1b's to prevent that abuse is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. If those Ph.D.'s can't come to the US, they work abroad and found their startups there, pay their taxes there, and create jobs there.
So, stop that stupid sarcasm and get some of the facts, OK?
It's awkward that it's circumstantial, definitely. But with this much, I can easily see how a jury could find no reasonable doubt.
You're ignoring the other side: the wife's gold digger past, her wish to separate from Reiser (who can blame her?) and ability and possible desire to disappear again in Russia, the fact that the kids have disappeared in Russia, her boyfriend and his shady past, etc.
There is a reasonable possibility that those are related to her possibility, and that casts a reasonable doubt. Furthermore, the fact that the judge and jury just disliked Reiser also means that he may not have gotten a fair trial. His wife may just have wanted to go back to Russia and screw up Reiser's life in the process.
I think it's more likely than not that Reiser killed his wife, but I don't think it's "beyond a reasonable doubt".
The guy is a socially maladjusted geek. He thinks and acts differently from people around him. People consider him rude and arrogant and don't understand him.
None of that should be reason for conviction "beyond a reasonable doubt". There is reasonable doubt in this case whether the woman is even dead, let alone whether he killed her. This is a miscarriage of justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, those things probably can kill occasionally. But so can kicking, punching, shooting, even restraining. I'd rather get tasered than kicked, punched, or shot, and if they didn't have a taser, those would be the alternatives.
On the other hand, I think if police use a taser or other electrical device, it should be treated just like kicking or punching by the legal system and needs to be justified accordingly. And I think it's wrong for the company to try to suppress these incidents. They are most likely real, we just need to debate whether they are acceptable.
Google can probably avoid a lot of this controversy by actually just identifying the results:
/trademarks.txt file on the servers.
[official site] Tesco Supermarkets
[other site] Cheaper than Tesco!
This could work based on domain names, data mining, and/or a
Google could also allow personalization, letting people choose whether to see the official/competitor's sites and in what order, as well as letting users block lists of trademarks they never want to see (e.g., Coca Cola, Nike, Microsoft, whatever).
That ad should be OK in response to a search for "serious magic" if it said:
or even
In our very early days we had a competitor of ours place a ads on searches for our company name, with the text shouting about similar services without mention of ours or the competitor's name.
I don't see the problem. Trademark law merely doesn't allow people to misrepresent the origins of goods and services. If people go to the web site and it's clear that it's not your company, how have your goods or services been misrepresented?
You seem to be operating under the false assumption that you own all the traffic that your trademark generates. You do not. If I put up a "[your trademark] sucks" web site, you don't own that traffic and you don't have a right to prevent people from finding that site.
We objected to Google, and they took the competitor's ads away.
That's because Google is careful and conservative. Legally, I don't think you would have had a leg to stand on. And in the long term, I think Google will also permit those kinds of ads.
Had I been the owner of the trademark, I would have been obliged to sue Google (and probably eBay, who is responsible for many of these) or risk losing the trademark.
You shouldn't sue Google, you should sue the company misrepresenting themselves.
The intent behind trademarks is consumer protection, not to give companies monopoly rights on a name. The only responsibility you have when using a trademark is that you don't misrepresent the origin of goods.
So, advertisting your product in response to a search for a competitor's trademark is in the public interest and falls within the intent of trademark law, as long as you don't misrepresent yourself as the trademark holder.
Regular pencils are graphite and clay, but lots of other pigment/binder combinations have been used for a long time. Dyes and mineral pigments make pencils non-conductive and colored. Wax is often used as the binder (crayons, wax pens) and avoids dust altogether. Pencils leads can be made break-proof (stenographer's pencils). The outer covering can be replaced with something non-flammable.
Most of the problems Fisher claims pencils had could have been solved by picking one of thousands of commercially available pencil variants. That's why I don't believe the Fisher story either. The Fisher pens probably are reasonable in space, but they were created probably not out of necessity, but because Fisher needed a marketing gimmick and was willing to pay for it. And I suspect astronauts still had wax pens anyway.
Phone calls are not all that expensive anymore, and most people who really need free calls just use VoIP.
I think GrandCentral needs to do a lot more to appeal to people. Right now, its model is that you give out its number to everybody and it then connects to your devices. I think that model is too rigid. They should offer different services (voice mail, forwarding, parallel forwarding, voice response, VoIP, etc.) and let the users decide how to connect those services to each other and to phone numbers.
Also, there are some really important pieces missing, like the ability to forward SMSs.
Yahoo! may have problems, but being taken over by Microsoft would have made things worse. Yahoo still has a lot of market share. I think their problem is that offerings like 360deg were confusing and bloated. They were trying to out-do Google by integrating too much stuff and the result was a mess. But many of their individual offerings (mail, games, chat, messenger, Flickr, delicious, etc.) are good and popular, and they can build on that. With Yahoo! move to OpenSocial and their new web platform, I think they have a good chance of gaining back a lot of what they have lost.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a real problem: they just can't get it together in the Internet world. Their OS has allowed them to drag a lot of people to Live and MSN and they have inherited a lot of users with Hotmail, but I can't think of a single big Web thing where Microsoft is the leader.
Voice recognition technology - Ray Kurzweil '70
Kurzweil did not invent "voice recognition technology"; I can't even think of a significant contribution he has made to the field.
Uh.....I'd say the above are some pretty important inventions and scientific breakthroughs.
MIT graduates and MIT researchers have made significant contributions, and MIT deserves to be considered on of the top institutions in the world. But at the same time, institutions like MIT have a propensity for taking credit for inventing things that really many more people contributed to.
Except that the Snopes story itself doesn't make much sense: there are plenty of cheap "pencils" that you can buy at the corner store that don't use graphite and that don't create dust.
This was done already more than a decade ago at Xerox. It's probably one of the first ubiquitous computing applications and it's something that essentially started ubiquitous computing. It also doesn't work well.
The "MIT Lecture Browser" (keyword spotting in autio-visual data) that was also mentioned as being supposedly "innovative", has also been done many times before; it's just audio-visual keyword spotting. Putting lectures into an audio-visual keyword spotting system is about as innovative as putting your milk in the refrigerator.
Except for being somewhat more cumbersome to program and less parallel than previous hardware, there is nothing really new about the nVidia parallel programming model. And their graphics-oriented approach means that their view of parallelism is somewhat narrow.
Maybe nVidia will popularize parallel programming, maybe not. But I don't see any "shake up" or break throughs there.
hardware: $1m
Microsoft software licenses: $10m
the feeling you get living inside the container to keep rebooting machines after BSsOD: priceless
Think of the Bush administrations as the syzygy of incompetence and malice.
They should just switch to hosted E-mail services with Google Apps :-)
Seriously, though: the White House should not be in control of White House IT services. An independent agency should be responsible for that. It's all part of checks and balances.
also be less uppetity knowing that their green card depends upon them being employed with that company!
That's a nice theory, except green cards don't depend on the employer and never have. Even H-1b visas are employer-independent now.
Why do people like you feel compelled to comment on such a politically charged topic without even getting your facts straight?
Why do you have to drag this bullshit sarcasm into this discussion?
For the record, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have open positions that they have a hard time filling with qualified people (so do Google, IBM, and most other high tech companies):
http://research.yahoo.com/Job_Opportunities
http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/fulltime/default.aspx
The H-1b caps indiscriminately keep companies from filling those jobs; they keep out US educated Ph.D.'s, they keep out foreign educated Ph.D.'s, and they are a huge problem for industry and US competitiveness. Even if there's some abuse of H-1b's, capping H-1b's to prevent that abuse is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. If those Ph.D.'s can't come to the US, they work abroad and found their startups there, pay their taxes there, and create jobs there.
So, stop that stupid sarcasm and get some of the facts, OK?
It's awkward that it's circumstantial, definitely. But with this much, I can easily see how a jury could find no reasonable doubt.
You're ignoring the other side: the wife's gold digger past, her wish to separate from Reiser (who can blame her?) and ability and possible desire to disappear again in Russia, the fact that the kids have disappeared in Russia, her boyfriend and his shady past, etc.
There is a reasonable possibility that those are related to her possibility, and that casts a reasonable doubt. Furthermore, the fact that the judge and jury just disliked Reiser also means that he may not have gotten a fair trial. His wife may just have wanted to go back to Russia and screw up Reiser's life in the process.
I think it's more likely than not that Reiser killed his wife, but I don't think it's "beyond a reasonable doubt".
V7 userland and man pages are even more consistent than the hodgepodge of BSD utilities, but that doesn't make them better.
Consistency is a poor measure of real world utility. If it were, we wouldn't be using either BSD or GNU.
This guy is a real piece of work. Saying he's narcissistic is an understatement.
Reiser may be an annoying geek, and maybe he killed his wife for some obscure reason.
But it's people like you that are responsible for burning, crucifying, drowning, and gassing millions of people simply because they are different.
People like you are the real evil.
The guy is a socially maladjusted geek. He thinks and acts differently from people around him. People consider him rude and arrogant and don't understand him.
None of that should be reason for conviction "beyond a reasonable doubt". There is reasonable doubt in this case whether the woman is even dead, let alone whether he killed her. This is a miscarriage of justice.
That means it's as cumbersome to program in as Java and even slower than JavaScript. What more could you ask for?
Me too.
You mean like this?