In other news, Microsoft may:
* add image processing [to Skype]
* add remote document scanning [to Skype]
* add virtual machine technology [to Skype]
* add clustering capabilities for seriously big high definition video technology [to Skype]
I'm quite sure Microsoft has patents on all the above, but none are alarming enough to mention. This article is FUD. Absolutely no link has been drawn between the Skype product and this patent, except that Skype does voice transmissions and this patent is for a system that intercepts them.
Also, I believe Skype uses a peer-to-peer method for communicating between nodes, which would make it hard to apply this patent to Skype anyway. The peer-to-peer nature of Skype is why the last big outage took quite a while to resolve. They couldn't just "reboot their servers"; updated software had been deployed to the nodes (ie. you) and was malfunctioning.
As a software developer, the biggest risk you'll have is just wearing your hands/arms/wrists out. The "best" device of any kind should be the one which minimises the amount of strain.
For the mouse, the first thing is to avoid it as much as possible. Learn your keyboard shortcuts. Reaching for the mouse on a regular basis will only strain things. Placing 20 buttons on the mice will only encourage you to use it, when in reality your hands should be staying put on the keyboard.
The second thing is to get a mouse that places the minimum strain on your arms. I use an Evoluent Vertical Mouse, but I imagine you can find similar (and less extreme?) mice around. I spent a few hundred dollars on physio due to wrist pain, and it didn't go away. I spent $80 on the mouse and the pain evaporated in two weeks. That was the "best" hardware investment I ever made.
In my experience, "non-cooperative" is simply used to describe "a person who doesn't want to be found". It is a technical term used to distinguish "search and rescue" scenarios (where the subject of the search is cooperative and will be lighting flares and such) from "search and destroy" or "search and intercept" scenarios. Different search patterns would be used in the different scenarios.
It probably does NOT mean "hunting down a person who didn't answer a (police|military) officer's question". It is simply a technical term used in the research community to distinguish robotic search scenarios.
When I moved from Australia to Vancouver two years ago I started a blog to record my (personal) experience. A lot of my choices were exactly the same as the parent poster, but I've taken the time to detail some more of the US visa process and Canadian financial quirks:
Wouldn't it be a lot easier just to halt the global climate change... ? Whoa, slow down AC. Large waves like this have nothing to do with global climate change. As the summary says, random reports of these waves have been trickling in for centuries. Noone is suggesting (yet) that these waves have become more severe or more common in recent years - just that the scientific community finally took the reports seriously and did some analysis.
Um, if you read the summary, it explains that the second-half of the experiment involved a choice between blue or *green* M&Ms. You're right that the monkey has proven "red is safe" because it safely ate them. The monkey does not have any evidence that "blue is unsafe" at all, but when presented with a choice of blue or green, it consistently chose green. Why did it do that?
The theory is that the monkey eliminated "blue" as a possibility in the first half of the experiment, and so continued to eliminate it in the second half. This is despite the fact that the monkey has obtained *no* information on blue or green M&Ms at that point. Green could be utterly lethal, while blue was always safe. Simple evolution is not the reason the monkey kept choosing "not blue".
Actually, the problem is that you *can't* realistically have a Linux system without the GNU toolchain. Therefore, calling something a "GNU/Linux" system gives your audience no more information than just "Linux". Noone runs anything but "GNU/Linux".
People will say "Ubuntu Linux" or "RedHat Linux" or "Debian Linux" because, in doing so, they are providing more *information*. They are identifying a particular distribution. The distribution name provides a differentiator. You know what kind of system they're running.
It's a sad fact, but GNU's toolchain has become too pervasive. People are lazy, and won't add an extra three syllables to a two-syllable name unless there's some information provided by that and, unfortunately, there isn't.
To put it another way: the proper name is "GNU/Linux", but people are lazy, and so the "GNU/" is left silent. There's no doubting the importance of the GNU toolchain, and it is critical, but its not a differentiator among Linux systems.
Yeah, I read it. Section 52 is surprisingly brief.
The question I have is this: is Google being deceptive as part of trade or commerce? You can argue they are being deceptive toward us, the users of their search engine, but does our usage of their search engine count as trade or commerce? It could be argued that this section of the TPA does not apply.
On the other hand, the advertisements are being presented on *behalf* of another person, and are paid for. Therefore, at the time of presenting the advertisements to us, Google is performing a commercial act. By targeting (remember, they select advertisements that are appropriate to our search!) these deceptive advertisements at us, are they therefore involved in deceptive conduct as part of a commercial transaction?
Perhaps this is what the ACCC is claiming. Perhaps they will claim that *if* Google is going to selectively target advertisements at users, then they have an obligation to ensure those advertisements are not deceptive. I have no idea. But both sides are arguable.
I'm guessing that courtroom judges are stupid or crooked then. I mean, surely there is no benefit to a courtroom judge in bringing down judgements, right? Except, perhaps, that it is their job to do so?
The ACCC is known to Australians as the "consumer watchdog". It has the task of standing up for consumer rights. It is responsible for taking companies to court when they breach trade regulations in Australia.
For example, I believe it is legal in Australia to mod your PlayStation, and probably your DVD player. This is because "market protection" mechanisms are not permitted. Sony claimed that they needed market protection to help manage copyright infringement. ACCC took them on, on behalf of Australian consumers, and argued that "market protection" and "copyright protection" are different things. It was Sony's fault for linking the two things within the same chip, and so modchip-ing your PlayStation is legal.
(smart idea to allow for another option, by the way)
They are mainly seeking injuctions, declarations, and order. The only monetary request is for costs. You can argue that costs can be inflated, but this is still not a "fine them $x million" lawsuit that you see elsewhere in the world. The ACCC is looking for a change in behaviour from Google and, if proven right, money to cover the ACCC's expenses.
After reading that URL, I think you'll agree that the ACCC is in the wrong. But can we dispense with the "they're after the money" posts, please? The ACCC is requesting something similar to a newspaper retraction, not a fine. If someone finds information that they're seeking a fine, please post it.
I don't understand the point behind your "deep pockets" reference. This isn't some upset businessman suing Google. This is the consumer-protection arm of the Australian Government. They don't keep the money. There is no benefit to any employees, or indeed to the government itself. The ACCC is doing only what it believes is its job.
I'm not arguing the ACCC is right. But they're certainly not after the money.
Can we perhaps agree that Free Software is all about "not screwing your users in the long-term"? You can claim its an ethical thing, or its a practical thing, but the result is the same. "Free software" says that you should not use your creation in a way that places your customers at your mercy.
I'm coming very late to the discussion here, but if I were to pick China as an example, hasn't Google already tried to "use all legal means to resist demands for censorship". From what I can tell, there aren't any legal means for Google to resist censorship in China. For those of you claiming "this will force Google out of China", I think you will find you're wrong.
public class test {
public test()
{
List s = new ArrayList<Integer>();
List l = s;
l.add("foo");
} } harvey@clownfish:~$ javac test.java Note: test.java uses unchecked or unsafe operations. Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details. harvey@clownfish:~$ javac -Xlint:unchecked test.java test.java:9: warning: [unchecked] unchecked call to add(E) as a member of the raw type java.util.List
l.add("foo");
^ 1 warning
Please note that the grandparent said "family" not "parent". If you've been part of a large family, than you know that it often is "the resultant vector of [a number] of competing agendas and forces". The grandparent's point is that a family is simply the most local form of government, with the fewest number of vectors. You completely missed that point.
I agree that the government cannot care for a child - individuals care for children. The exact same thing can be said of a family. Children don't fare well if the family cares for them; they fare better if they have an individual (or more) caring for them.
Yes, I understand the principle: harness man's natural inclination to compete. But if there's no clear rivalry between the groups, or no other means to incite them to try harder, then they should cooperate. You cannot artificially force people to compete if there is no advantage to them to win.
The X-Prize worked well because individuals had a shot at glory (and the money). Each company knew they would get significant publicity by winning. Same with exploration of the Americas and the like; there was glory and riches. But do you really think that, nowadays, NASA cares about beating the Europeans or the Russians to the moon, or to Mars?
They want the information, but I don't think anyone in the world cares who has the biggest "rocket" to send the largest "payload" anymore. Rivalry doesn't drive these organisations anymore, because the politicians and the public aren't interested.
Somehow I don't think the free market concept of competition applies when there are no clear customers (government pays for exploration, and scientific community reaps the rewards), and the only apparent commodity is information (not even services!).
If you were talking about, say, satellite launches, then I agree competition is a good idea. But space exploration? Cooperation works much better. To put it another way, if the people who initially conquered Everest had cooperated with each other, would they have gotten to the top quicker?
Competition has its uses. But not in something like this, where there are no apparent paying customers. Feel free to correct me if there are.
Developers don't sell advertisements. While you can say "Google as a company sells advertisements", I can assure you that the developers don't sit in their cubicles, handling incoming data requests, selecting advertisements, and pushing them out.
What do Google *developers* do well? Write software to organise and parse information, making it fast and easy to access. That's what they're looking for when they're hiring. If I hand in my resume to Google, they will care what I've done with databases, not "I was a good door-to-door salesman". They're building up a lot of internal experience and know-how for handling huge amounts of information. Therefore, that is what they do well.
First, very few developers explicitly said "I wrote this on behalf of my employer" in the changelogs. I believe that is what the article is referring to - the difficulty of automatically determining who paid for what. The author of the article did not conduct a survey of kernel developers, and is not ignoring the statements of kernel developers; he simply didn't ask them for a statement, found none in the changelogs, so chose to use the email addresses as an indicator.
Second, I would think that most corporations would prefer that you use their company address only for company work. If the email address listed in the changelogs contains ibm.com, you can be pretty sure that the person was working on IBM's time and is authorised by their managers to present themselves as an IBM employee working on the Linux kernel.
Grandparent post has a good point. I'll see if I can add to it.
Most cyclists don't have rearview mirrors; they use their ears. They can tell a car is just-behind-and-to-the-left or riding-my-arse by the engine noise. You can hear that fool doing twice the speed limit well before he passes you, assuming you can hear. Now, yes, I agree: every cyclist needs to look around and be aware of the traffic around them, the same as a driver in a car. But would you drive a car with *no* rearview mirrors at all? By shutting off your ears as a cyclist you are doing the same thing.
Yes, I'm a cyclist. I ride in traffic. I don't wear my iPod unless I'm on a separate cycleway/path. I would use a rearview mirror if I could find one that actually works.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, Microsoft may:
* add image processing [to Skype]
* add remote document scanning [to Skype]
* add virtual machine technology [to Skype]
* add clustering capabilities for seriously big high definition video technology [to Skype]
I'm quite sure Microsoft has patents on all the above, but none are alarming enough to mention. This article is FUD. Absolutely no link has been drawn between the Skype product and this patent, except that Skype does voice transmissions and this patent is for a system that intercepts them.
Also, I believe Skype uses a peer-to-peer method for communicating between nodes, which would make it hard to apply this patent to Skype anyway. The peer-to-peer nature of Skype is why the last big outage took quite a while to resolve. They couldn't just "reboot their servers"; updated software had been deployed to the nodes (ie. you) and was malfunctioning.
And that's only if you pay in cash. If you pay with debit or credit, you will be charged the exact amount accurate to 1c.
As a software developer, the biggest risk you'll have is just wearing your hands/arms/wrists out. The "best" device of any kind should be the one which minimises the amount of strain.
For the mouse, the first thing is to avoid it as much as possible. Learn your keyboard shortcuts. Reaching for the mouse on a regular basis will only strain things. Placing 20 buttons on the mice will only encourage you to use it, when in reality your hands should be staying put on the keyboard.
The second thing is to get a mouse that places the minimum strain on your arms. I use an Evoluent Vertical Mouse, but I imagine you can find similar (and less extreme?) mice around. I spent a few hundred dollars on physio due to wrist pain, and it didn't go away. I spent $80 on the mouse and the pain evaporated in two weeks. That was the "best" hardware investment I ever made.
In my experience, "non-cooperative" is simply used to describe "a person who doesn't want to be found". It is a technical term used to distinguish "search and rescue" scenarios (where the subject of the search is cooperative and will be lighting flares and such) from "search and destroy" or "search and intercept" scenarios. Different search patterns would be used in the different scenarios.
It probably does NOT mean "hunting down a person who didn't answer a (police|military) officer's question". It is simply a technical term used in the research community to distinguish robotic search scenarios.
When I moved from Australia to Vancouver two years ago I started a blog to record my (personal) experience. A lot of my choices were exactly the same as the parent poster, but I've taken the time to detail some more of the US visa process and Canadian financial quirks:
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/03/mobile-worker.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/03/us-visa-process.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/02/canadian-coinage.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/03/fun-bank.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/03/even-minor-purchases.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/04/odd-sights_06.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/04/tipping-and-taxes.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/05/deeper-insight-in-banking.html
* http://harves.blogspot.com/2006/05/crossing-road.html
http://xkcd.com/164/
Um, if you read the summary, it explains that the second-half of the experiment involved a choice between blue or *green* M&Ms. You're right that the monkey has proven "red is safe" because it safely ate them. The monkey does not have any evidence that "blue is unsafe" at all, but when presented with a choice of blue or green, it consistently chose green. Why did it do that?
The theory is that the monkey eliminated "blue" as a possibility in the first half of the experiment, and so continued to eliminate it in the second half. This is despite the fact that the monkey has obtained *no* information on blue or green M&Ms at that point. Green could be utterly lethal, while blue was always safe. Simple evolution is not the reason the monkey kept choosing "not blue".
Actually, the problem is that you *can't* realistically have a Linux system without the GNU toolchain. Therefore, calling something a "GNU/Linux" system gives your audience no more information than just "Linux". Noone runs anything but "GNU/Linux".
People will say "Ubuntu Linux" or "RedHat Linux" or "Debian Linux" because, in doing so, they are providing more *information*. They are identifying a particular distribution. The distribution name provides a differentiator. You know what kind of system they're running.
It's a sad fact, but GNU's toolchain has become too pervasive. People are lazy, and won't add an extra three syllables to a two-syllable name unless there's some information provided by that and, unfortunately, there isn't.
To put it another way: the proper name is "GNU/Linux", but people are lazy, and so the "GNU/" is left silent. There's no doubting the importance of the GNU toolchain, and it is critical, but its not a differentiator among Linux systems.
Yeah, I read it. Section 52 is surprisingly brief.
The question I have is this: is Google being deceptive as part of trade or commerce? You can argue they are being deceptive toward us, the users of their search engine, but does our usage of their search engine count as trade or commerce? It could be argued that this section of the TPA does not apply.
On the other hand, the advertisements are being presented on *behalf* of another person, and are paid for. Therefore, at the time of presenting the advertisements to us, Google is performing a commercial act. By targeting (remember, they select advertisements that are appropriate to our search!) these deceptive advertisements at us, are they therefore involved in deceptive conduct as part of a commercial transaction?
Perhaps this is what the ACCC is claiming. Perhaps they will claim that *if* Google is going to selectively target advertisements at users, then they have an obligation to ensure those advertisements are not deceptive. I have no idea. But both sides are arguable.
You're right. I was too harsh. Yours just seemed the best response, so I chose to reply to it.
Apologies,
Peter.
I'm guessing that courtroom judges are stupid or crooked then. I mean, surely there is no benefit to a courtroom judge in bringing down judgements, right? Except, perhaps, that it is their job to do so?
The ACCC is known to Australians as the "consumer watchdog". It has the task of standing up for consumer rights. It is responsible for taking companies to court when they breach trade regulations in Australia.
For example, I believe it is legal in Australia to mod your PlayStation, and probably your DVD player. This is because "market protection" mechanisms are not permitted. Sony claimed that they needed market protection to help manage copyright infringement. ACCC took them on, on behalf of Australian consumers, and argued that "market protection" and "copyright protection" are different things. It was Sony's fault for linking the two things within the same chip, and so modchip-ing your PlayStation is legal.
(smart idea to allow for another option, by the way)
I would love it if articles would link to the sites of the people involved.
/ 792088/fromItemId/142
See http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId
They are mainly seeking injuctions, declarations, and order. The only monetary request is for costs. You can argue that costs can be inflated, but this is still not a "fine them $x million" lawsuit that you see elsewhere in the world. The ACCC is looking for a change in behaviour from Google and, if proven right, money to cover the ACCC's expenses.
After reading that URL, I think you'll agree that the ACCC is in the wrong. But can we dispense with the "they're after the money" posts, please? The ACCC is requesting something similar to a newspaper retraction, not a fine. If someone finds information that they're seeking a fine, please post it.
I don't understand the point behind your "deep pockets" reference. This isn't some upset businessman suing Google. This is the consumer-protection arm of the Australian Government. They don't keep the money. There is no benefit to any employees, or indeed to the government itself. The ACCC is doing only what it believes is its job.
I'm not arguing the ACCC is right. But they're certainly not after the money.
Can we perhaps agree that Free Software is all about "not screwing your users in the long-term"? You can claim its an ethical thing, or its a practical thing, but the result is the same. "Free software" says that you should not use your creation in a way that places your customers at your mercy.
I'm coming very late to the discussion here, but if I were to pick China as an example, hasn't Google already tried to "use all legal means to resist demands for censorship". From what I can tell, there aren't any legal means for Google to resist censorship in China. For those of you claiming "this will force Google out of China", I think you will find you're wrong.
Almost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_Massacre
What compiler are you using??
harvey@clownfish:~$ cat test.java
import java.util.*;
public class test
{
public test()
{
List s = new ArrayList<Integer>();
List l = s;
l.add("foo");
}
}
harvey@clownfish:~$ javac test.java
Note: test.java uses unchecked or unsafe operations.
Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.
harvey@clownfish:~$ javac -Xlint:unchecked test.java
test.java:9: warning: [unchecked] unchecked call to add(E) as a member of the raw type java.util.List
l.add("foo");
^
1 warning
Please note that the grandparent said "family" not "parent". If you've been part of a large family, than you know that it often is "the resultant vector of [a number] of competing agendas and forces". The grandparent's point is that a family is simply the most local form of government, with the fewest number of vectors. You completely missed that point.
I agree that the government cannot care for a child - individuals care for children. The exact same thing can be said of a family. Children don't fare well if the family cares for them; they fare better if they have an individual (or more) caring for them.
Ripal => April
Uno => One
Very cute.
Yes, I understand the principle: harness man's natural inclination to compete. But if there's no clear rivalry between the groups, or no other means to incite them to try harder, then they should cooperate. You cannot artificially force people to compete if there is no advantage to them to win.
The X-Prize worked well because individuals had a shot at glory (and the money). Each company knew they would get significant publicity by winning. Same with exploration of the Americas and the like; there was glory and riches. But do you really think that, nowadays, NASA cares about beating the Europeans or the Russians to the moon, or to Mars?
They want the information, but I don't think anyone in the world cares who has the biggest "rocket" to send the largest "payload" anymore. Rivalry doesn't drive these organisations anymore, because the politicians and the public aren't interested.
Somehow I don't think the free market concept of competition applies when there are no clear customers (government pays for exploration, and scientific community reaps the rewards), and the only apparent commodity is information (not even services!).
If you were talking about, say, satellite launches, then I agree competition is a good idea. But space exploration? Cooperation works much better. To put it another way, if the people who initially conquered Everest had cooperated with each other, would they have gotten to the top quicker?
Competition has its uses. But not in something like this, where there are no apparent paying customers. Feel free to correct me if there are.
Developers don't sell advertisements. While you can say "Google as a company sells advertisements", I can assure you that the developers don't sit in their cubicles, handling incoming data requests, selecting advertisements, and pushing them out.
What do Google *developers* do well? Write software to organise and parse information, making it fast and easy to access. That's what they're looking for when they're hiring. If I hand in my resume to Google, they will care what I've done with databases, not "I was a good door-to-door salesman". They're building up a lot of internal experience and know-how for handling huge amounts of information. Therefore, that is what they do well.
First, very few developers explicitly said "I wrote this on behalf of my employer" in the changelogs. I believe that is what the article is referring to - the difficulty of automatically determining who paid for what. The author of the article did not conduct a survey of kernel developers, and is not ignoring the statements of kernel developers; he simply didn't ask them for a statement, found none in the changelogs, so chose to use the email addresses as an indicator.
Second, I would think that most corporations would prefer that you use their company address only for company work. If the email address listed in the changelogs contains ibm.com, you can be pretty sure that the person was working on IBM's time and is authorised by their managers to present themselves as an IBM employee working on the Linux kernel.
Grandparent post has a good point. I'll see if I can add to it.
Most cyclists don't have rearview mirrors; they use their ears. They can tell a car is just-behind-and-to-the-left or riding-my-arse by the engine noise. You can hear that fool doing twice the speed limit well before he passes you, assuming you can hear. Now, yes, I agree: every cyclist needs to look around and be aware of the traffic around them, the same as a driver in a car. But would you drive a car with *no* rearview mirrors at all? By shutting off your ears as a cyclist you are doing the same thing.
Yes, I'm a cyclist. I ride in traffic. I don't wear my iPod unless I'm on a separate cycleway/path. I would use a rearview mirror if I could find one that actually works.