If you pay attention, you'll notice that the "brazen reposting" was done by the ACC, not Google.
And I don't see this as astroturfing. Posting anonymously is different from posting under a fake identity. Not to mention they're both tangential to whether or not Google has a point in their submission.
If they seriously wanted to erode away at the people's rights through these bogeyman "exceptions", why would they have introduced this bill in the first place?
The proposed bill makes exception for ISPs to manage traffic in reasonable cases Doesn't this one word pretty much negate your needless cynicism?
The point of the bill is to ensure that network flow happens in whatever way is most beneficial to the people instead of whatever way makes the most money for the ISP. Do you seriously think that there is no case in which the population experiences a gain from carefully exercised traffic shaping?
"They're going to distinguish an individual based on images with 256 to 1024 bits of data?"
No one said they were going to identify individual people with this. The main gist of this research seems to be efficiency (in both space and time, if I read it correctly). For instance, if one wanted to identify every face in a picture of a crowd, they could apply this algorithm to a low-res version of the image to quickly find the locations of every "face," and then use a more advanced face recognition algorithm to actually figure out who it is they're looking at.
Incorrect. First of all, in a CAPTCHA, you're trying to very rigorously inspect a single image. This advance seems to be more about taking quick glances at lots of images. Furthermore, in the article, they talk about recognizing flowers and cars. The fact is, computers already have no problem recognizing letters and numbers in images. We got that down a long time ago. The difficult things about reading a CAPTCHA image are removing distortion and splitting the whole image into the component characters. If you read the article, you'd see that this research has nothing to do with that.
Also you totally missed the point about the rights of the consumer in France, seeing your sig you are obviously from the US which is probably why you never heard of consumer rights. Consumer rights?
Here's the basic rundown of US consumer rights:
-You have the right to not be misled regarding what you are buying. -You have the right to refuse to buy something.
That's it (I don't think I've missed anything big). In addition to those, we have anti-monopoly laws, the basic gist of which is:
-You cannot, through monopolistic powers, interfere with the business of competitors.
For instance, you can't say (to a consumer) "I'll sell you my widgets cheaper if you agree to not buy widgets from Bob for the next year." You also cannot say (to a distributer) "I won't allow you to distribute my goods so long as you also carry Bob's brand of goods." The reason these things are are bad is that you are pushing Bob out of the market without actually competing with him. And that's the essence of these laws: competition.
Now the reason this French law seems stupid to Americans is because Microsoft is not preventing competition with anyone! Certainly if they are using their market power to keep ASUS from bundling with competitors (or, I suppose, selling an unbundled product), that's a problem; but really what the French law is trying to do is **preempt** the harmful act, and in doing so it is overly broad.
That for the interval covered by the (George W.) Bush administration, my browser was full of liberal (and Democratic) generated blogs vilifying him and anybody else connected with his administration. There probably were two or three thousand entries a day. For the prior eight years we had a Democrat in office, and I don't remember even a single conservative (or Republican) generated blog vilifying the Democrats. I'd almost have to say that if you observed my browser, Democrats and liberals love to blog and conservatives and Republicans don't.
Slashdot Mirror
If you pay attention, you'll notice that the "brazen reposting" was done by the ACC, not Google.
And I don't see this as astroturfing. Posting anonymously is different from posting under a fake identity. Not to mention they're both tangential to whether or not Google has a point in their submission.
If they seriously wanted to erode away at the people's rights through these bogeyman "exceptions", why would they have introduced this bill in the first place?
The point of the bill is to ensure that network flow happens in whatever way is most beneficial to the people instead of whatever way makes the most money for the ISP. Do you seriously think that there is no case in which the population experiences a gain from carefully exercised traffic shaping?
"They're going to distinguish an individual based on images with 256 to 1024 bits of data?"
No one said they were going to identify individual people with this. The main gist of this research seems to be efficiency (in both space and time, if I read it correctly). For instance, if one wanted to identify every face in a picture of a crowd, they could apply this algorithm to a low-res version of the image to quickly find the locations of every "face," and then use a more advanced face recognition algorithm to actually figure out who it is they're looking at.
Incorrect. First of all, in a CAPTCHA, you're trying to very rigorously inspect a single image. This advance seems to be more about taking quick glances at lots of images. Furthermore, in the article, they talk about recognizing flowers and cars. The fact is, computers already have no problem recognizing letters and numbers in images. We got that down a long time ago. The difficult things about reading a CAPTCHA image are removing distortion and splitting the whole image into the component characters. If you read the article, you'd see that this research has nothing to do with that.
Here's the basic rundown of US consumer rights:
-You have the right to not be misled regarding what you are buying.
-You have the right to refuse to buy something.
That's it (I don't think I've missed anything big). In addition to those, we have anti-monopoly laws, the basic gist of which is:
-You cannot, through monopolistic powers, interfere with the business of competitors.
For instance, you can't say (to a consumer) "I'll sell you my widgets cheaper if you agree to not buy widgets from Bob for the next year." You also cannot say (to a distributer) "I won't allow you to distribute my goods so long as you also carry Bob's brand of goods." The reason these things are are bad is that you are pushing Bob out of the market without actually competing with him. And that's the essence of these laws: competition.
Now the reason this French law seems stupid to Americans is because Microsoft is not preventing competition with anyone! Certainly if they are using their market power to keep ASUS from bundling with competitors (or, I suppose, selling an unbundled product), that's a problem; but really what the French law is trying to do is **preempt** the harmful act, and in doing so it is overly broad.
At least that's how Americans see it.
That for the interval covered by the (George W.) Bush administration, my browser was full of liberal (and Democratic) generated blogs vilifying him and anybody else connected with his administration. There probably were two or three thousand entries a day. For the prior eight years we had a Democrat in office, and I don't remember even a single conservative (or Republican) generated blog vilifying the Democrats. I'd almost have to say that if you observed my browser, Democrats and liberals love to blog and conservatives and Republicans don't.