Granted, that's why American currency is called the "dollar" (derivative of the German "tollar" or something) instead of the "pound," in spite of you guys from our revolution.
Not from spite; it was just practical business. When the US started issuing its own currency, it based in on the Spanish dollar (named for the Austrian thaler, with the "th" pronounced as "t" in German) because that's what was available. The British were effectively on the gold standard for a long time, which meant there was a chronic shortage of silver coins. Meanwhile, the Spanish had by far the world's largest silver mines, so they made a lot of silver coins. Spanish dollars were the most common currency through large parts of the world. That's why plenty of other former British colonies that left on more friendly terms- like Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong- also use currencies called the dollar.
Further, usually a traffic signal which has lost power completely is treated as an all way stop for all roads intersecting, but few people seem to realize (or care) about this rule.
Maybe they don't know or care about it where you live, but that's not universal. Where I live (Southern California) this rule seems to be well known and respected. I was amazed the first time I was around during a blackout. Everyone knew and followed the rules about what to do when the traffic lights were out. They were even polite about it; nobody was honking or trying to go before their turn.
It seems like every other day we either find out that the RIAA used some illegal practice or lost a case against a so called music pirate though they keep dishing out lawsuits. The RIAA train has derailed but it doesn't seem to be slowing any time soon.
You only hear about the people striking back because they're the rare counter-example. You don't hear about the thousands and thousands of people who settle to get the lawyers off their backs.
The RIAA train hasn't derailed. The function of the lawsuits isn't to make money. The goal is to scare people away from file sharing and back into the music store, either bricks and mortar or online. As long as the lawsuits stop the bleeding from file sharing, they only have to break even, or just avoid losing too much money, to serve the real goals of the RIAA.
Lawyers aren't the real problem, and getting rid of them isn't a solution. The underlying problem is that some people are anti-social jerks who have discovered that they can get their way by bullying others. Under our current system, the jerks hire lawyers to do their bullying for them. If you eliminate the lawyers, the jerks will just find a new set of bullies to do their dirty work.
The real solution is to give ordinary, decent people a way of striking back when the bullies get on their case. Counter-suits, like the one mentioned in this article, are a good way of doing that. If everyone who was wrongly accused by the RIAA decided to launch a nasty counter-suit rather than caving in, the litigation strategy would grind to a halt- or at least focus on the worst, most obvious real offenders rather than people chosen at random.
What I'm looking to do here is not disturb the originally discovered set of planets, not prevent adding to the list.
That's not very scientific of you. An important subtext in the argument about Pluto's planetary status is that scientific knowledge isn't set in stone. Science is about learning how the universe works, and scientists are going to make mistakes and false starts in that process. They have to be given the chance to go back and revise their ideas and definitions when they learn more.
The decision to call Pluto a planet was exactly that kind of mistake. The discoverers grossly overestimated its size and had strong political reasons for wanting to call it a planet regardless of whether doing so was accurate. (The observatory that found Pluto was set up specifically to look for a hypothetical ninth planet; when they found something they certainly weren't going to admit that it wasn't up to planetary standards.) We shouldn't be bound by the mistakes of the past when we know better today.
Well, how many objects that you would call an asteroid have formed themselves into spheres or oblate spheroids?
Ceres, for one. There's also some argument about several of the other large main belt objects, like Palas and Vesta. I'd rather have a definition that leaves out one object whose status as a planet has been in doubt for a long time than one that brings in many objects that have been excluded.
Not to mention that HIV is a retrovirus, meaning that its genetic code is stored in RNA rather than DNA. The process of converting RNA back to DNA is notoriously inaccurate, which is why it mutates so fast. If it were a DNA virus it wouldn't be nearly as difficult to make a vaccine.
Ok, so on the more general point of high capacity 3.5 inch drives, Does anyone really need these?
Everyone? No. Anyone? Yes. Joe Consumer, who mostly uses finished files that somebody else has generated for him, probably won't need a hard drive that big. Frank Producer, who makes his own stuff that Joe will eventually use, wants all the space you can provide and then some. Applications like digital photography and HD video can generate enormous quantities of data, even after using efficient compression schemes. Processing that data can chew up even more space than the original data files. Serious users always want more space, and if you give it to them they'll figure out new ways of using it.
It's also important to consider that the higher densities needed for those ultra-capacity disks can also help out other users. Maybe a 37.5 TB 3.5" disk is overkill for your application, but that same technology could be used to make a 10+ TB 2.5" drive or a 1+ TB 1" drive. A high capacity, ultra-small drive could be just the thing for the next generation of high portability laptops and tiny form factor desktops.
I know that the pages I visit on a regular basis were all suggested by a friend, referenced in an article, found through advertsing, etc.
I think that you're giving search engines too little credit. Times when you go to a page straight from the search engine are just the tip of the iceberg. If you follow a chain of recommendations, you'll probably find that the first person to visit a cool new site got there through a web search, not by random browsing. And most online ads these days are powered by Google or a similar provider that uses search-based technology to provide relevant ads.
Because there are still limits on the system. If you let each person, group, and event in the world have a page on Wikipedia, you'll have serious problems telling them all apart. As an example, there are 38 people on Wikipedia named John Smith, and more with some variant on the name, like Johnny or Jon. And that's after trying to eliminate nobodies. If they let anyone with that name have a page, it would be a nightmare to tell them all apart.
Then there's the problem of how to get an accurate entry on an unimportant topic. Wikipedia depends on collaborative editing to ensure factual accuracy, but that depends on having plenty of contributors. The fewer people there are contributing to a page, the more likely it is to have unrecognized factual or interpretive errors. A page with only one contributor can say literally anything about its subject, which is exactly how a number of serious errors have gotten into Wikipedia. A noteworthiness requirement is a reasonable way of guarding against that problem.
why are kernel devs concerned with a GUI element??
Presumably because that GUI element is to control a feature that has to be controlled through kernel space. The kernel people are the ones who are writing the shutdown, hibernate, sleep, etc. functions, so the GUI developers need to talk to the kernel devs to know which features are available in the first place. Why the kernel people should be involved in the detailed discussion of how the GUI presents those options is beyond me, though.
Traffic deaths do not take out 2,000 people in a single incident.
That's true, but the people killed in ones and twos in traffic accidents are just as dead as the people killed in the 9/11 attacks. And there are far more of them, every single year. That's the whole point of the original article-- that an occasional catastrophe draws more attention than a slow, steady series of tragedies, even if the latter does more damage in the long run.
In their defense, they have made the calculations to make sure that they have enough information to work with.
Not really. There are two big problems with their 4 Gpx claim:
Their MTF calculations are flawed. They calculate as though you can guarantee a given spatial resolution by ensuring that the MTF for each step is above the final desired value, when you really need to ensure that the combined contributions from all steps are above that value. To make an analogy, it's as though they were trying to design a 50% efficient car and used a design parameter that the engine, transmission, and final drive system should each be at least 50% efficient at the desired speed. In reality, if each part is only 50% efficient then the whole will be much less than 50% efficient.
All of their calculations were made with a 1 Gpx final image size in mind, but they've since arbitrarily bumped their scans to 4 Gpx. Even if their original calculations were correct, you can't do that. They may generate an image with more pixels, but there isn't enough information in the negative for the higher frequency scan to be worthwhile.
Either we trust the people running our elections or we don't. If we don't there isn't a technological measure possible to prevent fraud. If we do it is mostly a moot point.
The problem is that things aren't that simple. If you have a well designed system that includes good audits and controls- basically having people looking over the election officials' shoulders- then you can have non-trusted people in charge of the election and they won't be able to steal it even if they want to. If you have a badly designed system, one untrustworthy person can steal the election even though everyone else involved is honest.
Having honest people in charge is great, but it's hard to guarantee their honesty. A system that lets you check their work lets you be sure that they're honest, and can make dishonest people act honest because they're afraid of getting caught. As Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify."
Has anyone considered that it might actually be possible that Transmeta really does have valid patents, and Intel really might be infringing them?
Oh, come on. Next you'll be suggesting that Intel's patent violations might have had something to do with Transmeta's financial problems, as if patents were actually supposed to protect the little guy from having his inventions stolen by better funded competitors. You obviously need to be reminded of proper Slashdot grouptink. Remember: all patents are evil, and only patent trolls try to enforce them.
I don't think you will see even prosumer cameras much above 10 megapixels. Above that level, cameras become a bit harder to handle because you have to control for camera movement much better and you have to have at least middle of the road lenses to get the full impact of the capture size.
It's easy to exaggerate how hard it is to take sharp pictures with today's cameras. Yes, you won't take full advantage of a 10 MP sensor if you're taking casual snapshots, but it's not rocket science. If you have a good tripod and use your lens at something close to its optimum aperture, you can get sharp pictures even with cheap consumer-grade zooms. If you have a reasonably fast prime and good light you can challenge your sensor hand-held.
I think that you could probably get away with doubling today's pixel counts on APS-C sensors before things got completely out of hand. You'd definitely need good technique to take full advantage of those sensors, but it would certainly be possible with a good tripod, remote release, and a lens that was either a good prime or a zoom that was high-end consumer or pro quality. I think that the biggest worry would be that you'd start to see diffraction effects just past f/8, so most lenses- even good ones- would have a very limited range of useful apertures. I think that there would still be a good sized market for a camera like that, though. There are plenty of serious amateurs who already have gear that could take advantage of a ~20 MP sensor and would love the larger file sizes.
Digital camera makers need to work on dynamic range and low light capabilities more than just size - something that impacts every photographer on a regular basis.
I think that both concerns are overblown. Current sensors already have substantially better dynamic range than typical output media, either paper or screen. They have nasty characteristics when you blow out highlights, but that just means that you should expose to protect the highlights and use the DR to recover the rest of the scene. As for low-light ability, current generation DSLRs knock the daylights out of anything that film ever managed, and despite the complaints of pixel peepers, increased pixel counts aren't going to hurt in that area. It's true that smaller pixel sizes increase per-pixel noise, but the increased pixel count means that the resulting noise is finer grained. If you print at the same size, there's no obvious difference in noise levels. OTOH, the increased detail from the higher resolution sensor is apparent in prints when you aren't pushing the sensitivity. I'll take the resolution any day.
A bigger problem is that upping the pixel count won't help unless it was the limiting factor in picture quality before. Taking advantage of increased pixel counts requires good lenses and good technique. Even on a 6 MP camera you can easily get pictures where the limiting factor in quality is a bad lens, poor choice of aperture, or inability to control camera shake. Adding pixels in those cases just enlarges the blur. If the problem was camera shake, adding pixels will often make it worse by reducing sensitivity and giving an even slower shutter speed.
A big chunk of it is that they aren't paying that much in. New Mexicans paid $5717 per capita in federal taxes this year vs. a national average of $8050; the only states with lower per capita taxes were Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Combine that with a whole bunch of federal stuff- the feds own a large chunk of the state- and you wind up with lots of money coming in.
We may all think that $223 million on a bridge to nowhere is a waste of money, but Alaska voters, the guys who keep putting Stevens back in office, think it's not an altogether horrible way to work down Alaska's federal tax deficit (more money paid in federal taxes than received in federal benefits).
That might be true if Alaska had a federal tax deficit, but they don't. According to The Tax Foundation, Alaska paid a total of about $4.1 billion in federal taxes in 2004 but received about $8.4 billion in federal spending. The only state to get a higher return on its tax dollars was New Mexico ($9.2 billion out and $19.9 back). A lot of that, of course, is precisely because Alaska's Congresscritters are so good at bringing home the pork.
Remember, pretty much the only economic engines in Alaska are Oil and Government. Nothing else but a bunch of trees, rocks and the occasional brown bear.
I thought that there was a fair bit of fishing and tourism, too. All that Alaskan King Crab and Alaskan Salmon must come from somewhere.
The problem isn't one of Gerrymandering; after all, Stevens is a Senator and Senate seats can't be Gerrymandered because they cover the entire state. Besides, Gerrymandered districts should be less pork prone, since the representative in a safe district has less need to bribe voters with lavish projects than one in a competitive district.
The real problem is that voters can easily see the benefits of porkbarrel projects ("See! We got the highway/bridge/museum/defense contract/etc. that our district wants. Isn't that great!") while the cost of the pork for other districts is hidden in the general mass of government spending. The result is that legislators who bring home the pork to a better job of getting votes than ones who are good at cutting the fat.
Ninja Gaiden Black on the other hand is so hard that one wonders how they would do that sans cheats.
Which would only be relevant if there were some part of the game that was different in cheat mode from in regular mode. Remember, they're not playing the game for the fun of it, they're playing the game to judge the content.
A different problem is that "playing to completion" is only a sensible measure for games that have a linear plot. It doesn't really apply to a game like tetris, which you can theoretically keep playing endlessly. No matter how long they played, the raters couldn't be sure that there wasn't an Easter Egg buried in the code that would be triggered by some specific game situation that they hadn't encountered. And how could they possibly complete some of the on-line games where the creators keep adding content after the game is released?
You fool! Everyone knows that the St. James, Tennessee, and New York monopoly is the best. It has a very good ratio of construction cost to increased rent, and the properties are in the Jail->Go To Jail corridor that sees the most traffic. The various studies on Monopoly that I've seen say that it's the most visited of the developable monopolies.
A question, then: is it ever possible to incorporate a blacklist into an automated, objective measure and have it retain that status? Suppose that blacklist had very objective criteria: "people who are suing us". Would that pass the test?
AFAIK it isn't so important that the conditions be objective as it is that Google be upfront about them. For instance, Google also says that they'll block sites that in their judgment are trying to game the system. They try to come up with automated ways of figuring out when that's true- if only to avoid the effort of manually screening for it- but they reserve the right to block first and come up with automated tests second. As long as they're clear about that, they're likely to be legally in the clear.
That said, I doubt that "we reserve the right to block anyone who sues us" will look good in court. Trying to block sites because you think that they're gaming the ranking system is inherently reasonable because it's part of making the search engine better. Blocking sites because their owners sue you isn't reasonable because it's using criteria that have no relevance to end users. To a judge or jury it would look like crude indimidation and undermine Google's claim to objectivity.
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Not from spite; it was just practical business. When the US started issuing its own currency, it based in on the Spanish dollar (named for the Austrian thaler, with the "th" pronounced as "t" in German) because that's what was available. The British were effectively on the gold standard for a long time, which meant there was a chronic shortage of silver coins. Meanwhile, the Spanish had by far the world's largest silver mines, so they made a lot of silver coins. Spanish dollars were the most common currency through large parts of the world. That's why plenty of other former British colonies that left on more friendly terms- like Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong- also use currencies called the dollar.
Maybe they don't know or care about it where you live, but that's not universal. Where I live (Southern California) this rule seems to be well known and respected. I was amazed the first time I was around during a blackout. Everyone knew and followed the rules about what to do when the traffic lights were out. They were even polite about it; nobody was honking or trying to go before their turn.
I would guess that the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is in charge of the Gundam TV series and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is in charge of the much more profitable Gundam toys and models.
You only hear about the people striking back because they're the rare counter-example. You don't hear about the thousands and thousands of people who settle to get the lawyers off their backs.
The RIAA train hasn't derailed. The function of the lawsuits isn't to make money. The goal is to scare people away from file sharing and back into the music store, either bricks and mortar or online. As long as the lawsuits stop the bleeding from file sharing, they only have to break even, or just avoid losing too much money, to serve the real goals of the RIAA.
Lawyers aren't the real problem, and getting rid of them isn't a solution. The underlying problem is that some people are anti-social jerks who have discovered that they can get their way by bullying others. Under our current system, the jerks hire lawyers to do their bullying for them. If you eliminate the lawyers, the jerks will just find a new set of bullies to do their dirty work.
The real solution is to give ordinary, decent people a way of striking back when the bullies get on their case. Counter-suits, like the one mentioned in this article, are a good way of doing that. If everyone who was wrongly accused by the RIAA decided to launch a nasty counter-suit rather than caving in, the litigation strategy would grind to a halt- or at least focus on the worst, most obvious real offenders rather than people chosen at random.
That's not very scientific of you. An important subtext in the argument about Pluto's planetary status is that scientific knowledge isn't set in stone. Science is about learning how the universe works, and scientists are going to make mistakes and false starts in that process. They have to be given the chance to go back and revise their ideas and definitions when they learn more.
The decision to call Pluto a planet was exactly that kind of mistake. The discoverers grossly overestimated its size and had strong political reasons for wanting to call it a planet regardless of whether doing so was accurate. (The observatory that found Pluto was set up specifically to look for a hypothetical ninth planet; when they found something they certainly weren't going to admit that it wasn't up to planetary standards.) We shouldn't be bound by the mistakes of the past when we know better today.
Ceres, for one. There's also some argument about several of the other large main belt objects, like Palas and Vesta. I'd rather have a definition that leaves out one object whose status as a planet has been in doubt for a long time than one that brings in many objects that have been excluded.
Not to mention that HIV is a retrovirus, meaning that its genetic code is stored in RNA rather than DNA. The process of converting RNA back to DNA is notoriously inaccurate, which is why it mutates so fast. If it were a DNA virus it wouldn't be nearly as difficult to make a vaccine.
Everyone? No. Anyone? Yes. Joe Consumer, who mostly uses finished files that somebody else has generated for him, probably won't need a hard drive that big. Frank Producer, who makes his own stuff that Joe will eventually use, wants all the space you can provide and then some. Applications like digital photography and HD video can generate enormous quantities of data, even after using efficient compression schemes. Processing that data can chew up even more space than the original data files. Serious users always want more space, and if you give it to them they'll figure out new ways of using it.
It's also important to consider that the higher densities needed for those ultra-capacity disks can also help out other users. Maybe a 37.5 TB 3.5" disk is overkill for your application, but that same technology could be used to make a 10+ TB 2.5" drive or a 1+ TB 1" drive. A high capacity, ultra-small drive could be just the thing for the next generation of high portability laptops and tiny form factor desktops.
I think that you're giving search engines too little credit. Times when you go to a page straight from the search engine are just the tip of the iceberg. If you follow a chain of recommendations, you'll probably find that the first person to visit a cool new site got there through a web search, not by random browsing. And most online ads these days are powered by Google or a similar provider that uses search-based technology to provide relevant ads.
Because there are still limits on the system. If you let each person, group, and event in the world have a page on Wikipedia, you'll have serious problems telling them all apart. As an example, there are 38 people on Wikipedia named John Smith, and more with some variant on the name, like Johnny or Jon. And that's after trying to eliminate nobodies. If they let anyone with that name have a page, it would be a nightmare to tell them all apart.
Then there's the problem of how to get an accurate entry on an unimportant topic. Wikipedia depends on collaborative editing to ensure factual accuracy, but that depends on having plenty of contributors. The fewer people there are contributing to a page, the more likely it is to have unrecognized factual or interpretive errors. A page with only one contributor can say literally anything about its subject, which is exactly how a number of serious errors have gotten into Wikipedia. A noteworthiness requirement is a reasonable way of guarding against that problem.
Presumably because that GUI element is to control a feature that has to be controlled through kernel space. The kernel people are the ones who are writing the shutdown, hibernate, sleep, etc. functions, so the GUI developers need to talk to the kernel devs to know which features are available in the first place. Why the kernel people should be involved in the detailed discussion of how the GUI presents those options is beyond me, though.
That's true, but the people killed in ones and twos in traffic accidents are just as dead as the people killed in the 9/11 attacks. And there are far more of them, every single year. That's the whole point of the original article-- that an occasional catastrophe draws more attention than a slow, steady series of tragedies, even if the latter does more damage in the long run.
Not really. There are two big problems with their 4 Gpx claim:
The problem is that things aren't that simple. If you have a well designed system that includes good audits and controls- basically having people looking over the election officials' shoulders- then you can have non-trusted people in charge of the election and they won't be able to steal it even if they want to. If you have a badly designed system, one untrustworthy person can steal the election even though everyone else involved is honest.
Having honest people in charge is great, but it's hard to guarantee their honesty. A system that lets you check their work lets you be sure that they're honest, and can make dishonest people act honest because they're afraid of getting caught. As Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify."
Oh, come on. Next you'll be suggesting that Intel's patent violations might have had something to do with Transmeta's financial problems, as if patents were actually supposed to protect the little guy from having his inventions stolen by better funded competitors. You obviously need to be reminded of proper Slashdot grouptink. Remember: all patents are evil, and only patent trolls try to enforce them.
It's easy to exaggerate how hard it is to take sharp pictures with today's cameras. Yes, you won't take full advantage of a 10 MP sensor if you're taking casual snapshots, but it's not rocket science. If you have a good tripod and use your lens at something close to its optimum aperture, you can get sharp pictures even with cheap consumer-grade zooms. If you have a reasonably fast prime and good light you can challenge your sensor hand-held.
I think that you could probably get away with doubling today's pixel counts on APS-C sensors before things got completely out of hand. You'd definitely need good technique to take full advantage of those sensors, but it would certainly be possible with a good tripod, remote release, and a lens that was either a good prime or a zoom that was high-end consumer or pro quality. I think that the biggest worry would be that you'd start to see diffraction effects just past f/8, so most lenses- even good ones- would have a very limited range of useful apertures. I think that there would still be a good sized market for a camera like that, though. There are plenty of serious amateurs who already have gear that could take advantage of a ~20 MP sensor and would love the larger file sizes.
I think that both concerns are overblown. Current sensors already have substantially better dynamic range than typical output media, either paper or screen. They have nasty characteristics when you blow out highlights, but that just means that you should expose to protect the highlights and use the DR to recover the rest of the scene. As for low-light ability, current generation DSLRs knock the daylights out of anything that film ever managed, and despite the complaints of pixel peepers, increased pixel counts aren't going to hurt in that area. It's true that smaller pixel sizes increase per-pixel noise, but the increased pixel count means that the resulting noise is finer grained. If you print at the same size, there's no obvious difference in noise levels. OTOH, the increased detail from the higher resolution sensor is apparent in prints when you aren't pushing the sensitivity. I'll take the resolution any day.
A bigger problem is that upping the pixel count won't help unless it was the limiting factor in picture quality before. Taking advantage of increased pixel counts requires good lenses and good technique. Even on a 6 MP camera you can easily get pictures where the limiting factor in quality is a bad lens, poor choice of aperture, or inability to control camera shake. Adding pixels in those cases just enlarges the blur. If the problem was camera shake, adding pixels will often make it worse by reducing sensitivity and giving an even slower shutter speed.
A big chunk of it is that they aren't paying that much in. New Mexicans paid $5717 per capita in federal taxes this year vs. a national average of $8050; the only states with lower per capita taxes were Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Combine that with a whole bunch of federal stuff- the feds own a large chunk of the state- and you wind up with lots of money coming in.
That might be true if Alaska had a federal tax deficit, but they don't. According to The Tax Foundation, Alaska paid a total of about $4.1 billion in federal taxes in 2004 but received about $8.4 billion in federal spending. The only state to get a higher return on its tax dollars was New Mexico ($9.2 billion out and $19.9 back). A lot of that, of course, is precisely because Alaska's Congresscritters are so good at bringing home the pork.
I thought that there was a fair bit of fishing and tourism, too. All that Alaskan King Crab and Alaskan Salmon must come from somewhere.
The problem isn't one of Gerrymandering; after all, Stevens is a Senator and Senate seats can't be Gerrymandered because they cover the entire state. Besides, Gerrymandered districts should be less pork prone, since the representative in a safe district has less need to bribe voters with lavish projects than one in a competitive district.
The real problem is that voters can easily see the benefits of porkbarrel projects ("See! We got the highway/bridge/museum/defense contract/etc. that our district wants. Isn't that great!") while the cost of the pork for other districts is hidden in the general mass of government spending. The result is that legislators who bring home the pork to a better job of getting votes than ones who are good at cutting the fat.
Which would only be relevant if there were some part of the game that was different in cheat mode from in regular mode. Remember, they're not playing the game for the fun of it, they're playing the game to judge the content.
A different problem is that "playing to completion" is only a sensible measure for games that have a linear plot. It doesn't really apply to a game like tetris, which you can theoretically keep playing endlessly. No matter how long they played, the raters couldn't be sure that there wasn't an Easter Egg buried in the code that would be triggered by some specific game situation that they hadn't encountered. And how could they possibly complete some of the on-line games where the creators keep adding content after the game is released?
You fool! Everyone knows that the St. James, Tennessee, and New York monopoly is the best. It has a very good ratio of construction cost to increased rent, and the properties are in the Jail->Go To Jail corridor that sees the most traffic. The various studies on Monopoly that I've seen say that it's the most visited of the developable monopolies.
AFAIK it isn't so important that the conditions be objective as it is that Google be upfront about them. For instance, Google also says that they'll block sites that in their judgment are trying to game the system. They try to come up with automated ways of figuring out when that's true- if only to avoid the effort of manually screening for it- but they reserve the right to block first and come up with automated tests second. As long as they're clear about that, they're likely to be legally in the clear.
That said, I doubt that "we reserve the right to block anyone who sues us" will look good in court. Trying to block sites because you think that they're gaming the ranking system is inherently reasonable because it's part of making the search engine better. Blocking sites because their owners sue you isn't reasonable because it's using criteria that have no relevance to end users. To a judge or jury it would look like crude indimidation and undermine Google's claim to objectivity.