It hurts the adoption and acceptance of open source software when major projects start playing dumbass games like these with their version numbers. It does indeed create the so-called "FUD" for those who make decisions regarding the use of open source software.
Bah.
IT organizations who have the sophistication required to manage their own kernel versions and seriously think about tracking the Linux releases have the sophistication and focus to understand what's really in the releases, regardless of the version numbers. Everyone else just uses the kernel version provided by their distro of choice, so it's the distro version numbers they care about.
Copyright law does not allow you to arbitrary distribute code created by others unless you are given permission to do so.
In other words even if your part of the code is not legally a derivative work you cannot distribute the code that isn't your without permission. And if the GPL says you don't have that permission then you're down to copyright laws which pretty generally says you don't have permission.
But the GPL does provide blanket permission for arbitrary redistribution, with source, and Hamstersoft is providing source for the GPL code. The issue is that they're not providing source for other code that they dynamically link to GPL code. According to the GPL, that's not allowed... but it's not clear that copyright law considers combining via dynamic linking to be creation of a derivative work. If not (and I think it is, or should be, but it hasn't been determined), then Hamstersoft is able to use the GPL's permission to distribute the GPL'd code, with source, but has no legal obligation to avoid linking to their closed code.
Derivative works is one of these grey areas that are improved in v3.
Section 5.c of the GPL v3 states:
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this
License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This
License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7
additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts,
regardless of how they are packaged.
So even if you keep the original work in a separate DLL, the whole must still be released under the GPL3.
Besides, if you remove the DLL the whole doesn't do anything usefull anymore, so it's clearly derived, even by v2 standards.
Except that the license doesn't get to define the meaning of "derivative work". If the GPL were a contract, it could define whatever limitations it wanted, but it's not, it's a uni-directional license that provides specific exemptions from the exclusive rights defined in copyright law. This means that if copyright law permits a given usage of copyrighted material, the GPL can't remove that permission.
It's not clear whether or not copyright law considers dynamic linking to constitute creation of a derived work. If it does, then permission is required and the GPL can attach strings to that permission. If it doesn't, then no permission is required so Hamsersoft doesn't need the GPL's permission and therefore doesn't have to comply with its requirements.
One other thing: Can you verify your account language settings? Go to google.com/account and click on "language". Note that I think you have to be logged into an account with Google+; I don't see the language option on the non-Google+ account settings. Also keep in mind that this is NOT the stuff I work on in Google and my knowledge about how it works is strictly that of a user. Anyway, I believe your choice there should be reflected across all Google services, and if it isn't somewhere that is clearly a bug (which isn't that unlikely, Google is still in the process of really integrating its various services. Until fairly recently they were all essentially separate and there are still plenty of rough edges on the integration.)
If that doesn't work (and I suspect it won't, since you said you already looked through all of your settings), let me know and I'll file a bug report. In general, picking an appropriate language for a given user is a Really Hard Thing, because you can't necessarily trust geo-location data, because it's basically an informed guess, and you also can't necessarily trust browser settings, because so many users have no clue how to set them and have them wrong. So it's entirely possible that picking Korean for you is working as designed based on data which indicates that trusting the geo data for Korea is less likely to be wrong than trusting the browser.
But there clearly needs to be a simple and obvious way for you to override the auto-selected language choice.
Oh sorry, we were talking about Google and not about ISP.
Well, they do already store every email (even not when using Google services) information and web address where you go when you use your ISP services.
What your ISP can store about your use of Google services is pretty limited. Most Google services use HTTPS by default, and many of them use HTTPS exclusively.
With few exceptions, if the government wants information about you from Google services, they'll have to get it from Google. My guess (and it is a guess, based on my knowledge of how the company looks at things, rather than any specific knowledge of what Google does or doesn't do in this area) is that Google will provide the information in response to a subpoena, but won't otherwise, i.e. that Google tries to protect your privacy except where it would be illegal to do so.
"It is speculated, mostly by tech pundits, that considering the sheer amount of effort that itâ(TM)s putting into shoving Chrome down our throats, it would not be in Googleâ(TM)s best interests to re-sign with Mozilla."
Most of Google's revenue comes from advertising, not Chrome. To ensure that revenue, they need to remain the number one search engine. To that end, it is in Google's best interest to remain the default search engine on Firefox as long as Firefox has any significant market share, regardless of Chrome's market share.
"It is speculated, mostly by tech pundits, that considering the sheer amount of effort that itâ(TM)s putting into shoving Chrome down our throats, it would not be in Googleâ(TM)s best interests to re-sign with Mozilla."
Most of Google's revenue comes from advertising, not Chrome. To ensure that revenue, they need to remain the number one search engine. To that end, it is in Google's best interest to remain the default search engine on Firefox as long as Firefox has any significant market share, regardless of Chrome's market share.
Another, slightly less obvious but equally important oversight/misunderstanding is Google's goals for Chrome. The article assumes that Google wants Chrome to displace Firefox and believes that not paying Mozilla would further that goal. But that's not what Chrome is for. Google has publicly stated on many occasions that their intent with Chrome is not to make it the universal browser, but to create competition. Not because the browser market lacked competition, but because the browser makers were not competing in the areas that Google wanted browsers to improve.
Specifically, when Chrome was first introduced, Google really wanted it to do one thing: Motivate browser makers to speed up Javascript engines. V8 was the reason for Chrome. See, Google wants the web to become the computing platform making the underlying OS irrelevant (with some success), but to do that the web has to be an adequate platform for doing all of the stuff that desktop apps do. And that requires fast Javascript execution, HTML5, etc. Had Chrome never broken the 1% marketshare mark but succeeded in convincing Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, etc. to speed up their Javascript engines, Google would have considered Chrome a resounding success, even though pundits would have called it yet another Google failure.
Bottom line: Google likes Mozilla and Firefox, and not just for the search traffic sent to google.com -- though the revenue from that search traffic undoubtedly more than justifies the money Google spends. Google wants the web to become the platform, and truly cross-platform browsers like Firefox are important to that goal. In fact, to realize that goal, it's also important that Chrome not be the only browser. Google doesn't want the web to be "the Google platform", it wants the web to be "the platform". Because Google is convinced that it can outcompete anyone, given a standardized platform on which to compete. And, honestly, though many people will probably call me naive, or a shill, because Google thinks that making the underlying OS irrelevant is what's best for the world. Yes, that sort of idealism really is not only common, but the norm at Google.
(Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Google, but I don't work on Chrome, and with the exception of my comments on the ideology of people at Google, none of the above is any sort of inside information. It's all stuff I knew before joining the company.)
Until we stop hearing about mass data loss every other day in the headlines, why would I want to provide real data?
Basing your assessment of risks on headlines provides you with a very skewed sense of what those risks actually are. News, by definition, is the uncommon and the unusual.
I'm not saying the risks don't exist, but given that hundreds of millions of people do provide all that information to social networking sites without having their identities stolen should give you one clue. Reading the articles and seeing what data is lost and from where and what the results are should give you another. In practice, you should be far more worried about information you give to your bank, your credit card company, your on-line game service, etc. And even then, except in isolated cases the actual effects are minimal.
Of course, a handful of people do get really, thoroughly screwed. Small numbers of people have all sorts of horrible accidents that cause their deaths, too. Doesn't mean you shouldn't get out of bed in the morning.
OTOH, if you don't see any value in social networks, then why take even a small risk? But many people do derive value from them, making it well worth the miniscule risk.
In my experience, the wider anonymity of a pseudonym is no barrier to connecting with people one knows. I have no idea why you hold your stated beliefs.
Honestly? Everyone you knew in high school 25 years ago knows the on-line handle you use now? Everyone you've worked with knows your on-line handle? For that matter, all of your family members, including the cousins that you only see a couple of times a year know what on-line handle you use?
You're free to say that you aren't really interested in connecting with those people anyway... and that's just fine for you. But many, many people very much are interested in connecting with those people, and using their real name, plus providing information about where they've lived, where they went to school, who they've worked for, etc. is going to make it much easier for those connections to be made.
Google is not obligated to join you on whatever your crusade is, no matter how worthy. There are real plusses and minuses to anonymity, and it is reasonable for a social network operator to either allow or disallow pseudonymity.
Another concern for someone like Google is what if they allow pseudonyms but screw it up and someone's real identity is revealed?
This is a much bigger problem for Google than it is for, say, slashdot, because Google's reach into the typical person's web usage is so much more expansive. If someone relies on their Google account being pseudonymous but Google's extensive suite of products connected to that account results in the individual's real identity being linked to the pseudonym, perhaps in a way that neither the user nor even Google might have predicted, what is the potential impact? For the typical basement dweller who just likes to use a kewl handle, basically none. But what if someone who has a serious need to separate their real identity from their on-line actions gets "outed" through some oversight by Google?
Google has stated that pseudonyms will eventually be supported, but not yet. I wonder if, in addition to the spam minimization benefits of real names which Google has cited, there might not also be concern about the possibility of offering pseudonymous accounts and then screwing it up in some non-obvious and potentially problematic way.
Keep in mind that Google has had some previous high-profile privacy-related gaffes which have damaged their reputation. It may be far safer for Google to require people to use their real names just to ensure that everyone using the system understands that they are not anonymous, and to encourage people who need anonymity to avoid using Google+ and related services.
That has only changed this year though right? It used to be more like 3k before the whole economic crisis. Even at that higher price its half the average price in america and id say the total amount over 4 years might be less than one year in the high level american universities.
OTOH, lots of people go to American universities without paying tuition. I paid very little for my two four-year degrees... so little that I never borrowed a penny, or got assistance from my parents, or even had to work much.
I think lots of Europeans seriously overestimate the difficulty of attending a university in the US. The fact is that anyone who really wants to go can find a way. Those with the brains and the talent can even go to Stanford, MIT, etc. In fact many of the Ivy League schools effectively have a "funding guarantee" -- if you're good enough that they accept you, they will find a way for your tuition, fees and living expenses to be paid, and without graduating with a crushing debt load. I didn't graduate from an Ivy League school, so this is second-hand info... but it's from my brother-in-law who is a dean of students at Princeton and held a similar position at Harvard for a few years. He, by the way, got his Ph.D. from Princeton and not only never paid a penny for any part of his university education but was actually paid to go to school most of the time.
At the end of the day, university education in the US is somewhat like a progressive tax system: Only the wealthy pay full price, and the poorer you are the less you pay.
Well, unless you're dumb about it. And, granted, all too many students are, not bothering to look for the cost-effective way to pay for school and instead just loading up on debt. For some students the large debt load works fine, because their degrees ensure a large income which makes paying the debt easy. Others, though, screw their financial futures quite thoroughly.
Yes, they will always be able to sue you over patents that they own. But owning OR sharing them prevents you from some suits.
Owning patent A effectively prevents them from suing you over patent B, assuming they're engaged in business which could be construed as infringing on A. Shared ownership of A in no way limits their ability to sue you over patent B.
It's all about maximizing the detente effect. Shared ownership doesn't do that as effectively.
Jointly purchasing the patents would have provided far less protection than solely owning them.
And here's the point that I think most everyone is arguing over. Some, like you, believe this to be the case. Others, like Gruber, call bullshit on this line of thinking saying that owning patents is the same as sharing ownership of the patents
I don't see how anyone can argue that sharing ownership is the same as owning them... especially when the companies Google would be sharing ownership with are exactly the same companies Google likely needs to defend against. Jointly owning patents with Microsoft is of no use in defending against patent suits (based on other patents) from Microsoft. Of course, not owning the patents at all, shared or otherwise, opens Google to having those patents asserted against them.
So being able to sue is a better business strategy than not being able to be sued?
But it's not being able to be sued for those specific patents, while being able to countersue provides protection from a much larger pool of potential patent suits.
Jointly purchasing the patents would have provided far less protection than solely owning them.
Again, I reiterate that I have no internal knowledge of Google's patent strategy or rationale. It helps that I don't often make it to TGIF (Google's weekly all-hands meeting during which a lot of information about Google's products and strategy is laid out for employees).
I fail to see any hypocrisy and I re-read Gruber's blog post multiple times trying to follow his twisty logic.
It appears to me that Google, like many, many software engineers in the US but unlike many software companies in the US, doesn't see patents as particularly useful or valuable to the industry. Google seems to think that software patents inhibit innovation, not help it, and wishes that software patents didn't exist.
Does that mean that Google shouldn't buy patents or apply for patents? Of course not, because software patents do exist and it's suicide for a big software company to try to get along without them.
See, everyone who has been paying attention understands that 99.9% of software patents are utter crap. They don't represent real innovation, because they're simply obvious to anyone who happens to be working on the relevant problem. But actually going through the process of invalidating them, either by identifying the prior art or finding some way to demonstrate that they're obvious, is horribly time-consuming and expensive. And it's ultimately almost pointless because there are so many more patents out there which can be asserted once you've knocked down the first batch.
No, the way you defend yourself against bogus patent claims (or even the occasional arguably-valid claim) is by having plenty of patents so that you can countersue with a whole bunch of your own bogus patent claims. Then you and your attacker can negotiate a cross-licensing agreement. In practice, once you've got a sufficiently large pile of patents a form of detente sets in, where you and your commercial competitors don't bother to sue one another over patents because there's no point. No one would win but the lawyers anyway, and everyone knows it.
Google was perhaps a little slow to understand this patent landscape. More accurately, most of what Google did for years was harder to attack with patents so it wasn't so relevant and so Google didn't really bother. But Google is in the thick of it now, and fully understands the nature of the situation.
So, I don't see any hypocrisy. I think Google thinks software patents suck and should go away, but given that they're here Google is forced to play the game. But Google doesn't like the game, sees it as dirty pool and has decided to at least call its opponents on their dirty (if lamentably legal) tactics.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google software engineer, but haven't been one for long and don't know anything about Google's patent strategy other than what I read in the press.)
I'm on their cheapest 10Mb/s package, and I can easily get 1.1MB/s, which is about 8.8Mb/s. Not quite the advertised speed, but pretty close, especially when you include protocol overhead. Their customer support is horrible, but their network is pretty good.
Assuming cable modems have the same overhead as POTS modems (which they should, since they use basically the same encoding schemes), you should figure that each byte takes approximately 9 bits to transfer due to framing and error coding. Then there's also the (much smaller) overhead of IP and TCP. So I'd say that 1.1MB/s is pretty much exactly 10 Mb/s -- and maybe a little more.
4% of the moon's mass moving at 1600 meters per second would have a kinetic energy of 3.7e27 J, equivalent to 45 billion of the most powerful thermonuclear bombs ever detonated, and all of that energy would be delivered in a little less than 1/10 of one second. It would also accelerate the moon by 60 meters per second -- 134 miles per hour.
Prosecutors have immunity. Even when they knowingly break the law when trying to prosecute.
If we want crap like this to end, there need to be standards to revoke that immunity; either on a case-by-case basis or a blanket repeal thereof.
Can't the judge censure the offender? I thought judges could hand down fines and even jail time to attorneys who piss them off enough.
Google takes into account load times when ranking pages. If your site is served from the same datacenter then you'll have a better load time and therefore a better PageRank at the expense of everyone who doesn't pay for Google CDN. So, yes, this is anti-competitive.
I think it's highly unlikely that Google will fail to account for the same-data-center latency reduction.
The reason Google boosts the ranking of fast sites is because they want to provide a better experience for users (so users will keep coming back, so Google can keep showing ads to them). It does no good to favor the server in the other side of the building over one somewhere else if the Google server isn't also faster for the end user. I'm sure they have some clever ways of estimating the performance the user will see and adjusting their ranking based on that.
Of course, it's likely that an accurate measurement of user-perceived speed still favors the site cached by Google. But that's not anticompetitive, except in the sense that doing a better job than the competition is "anticompetitive".
The manifesto and the guy's ideas ultimately had little to nothing to do with his actions.
In the same way that if someone writes a suicide note, it's nothing to do with their death?
Similar. Both are the product of a common cause, but the note could have taken a different form, and contained different reasoning without affecting the other part of the outcome.
The memo could as easily have been a leftist screed. The point is that it makes no more sense to blame conservatives who happen to agree with some of the wacko's ideas for his actions than it does to blame environmentalists for the actions of eco-terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
It hurts the adoption and acceptance of open source software when major projects start playing dumbass games like these with their version numbers. It does indeed create the so-called "FUD" for those who make decisions regarding the use of open source software.
Bah.
IT organizations who have the sophistication required to manage their own kernel versions and seriously think about tracking the Linux releases have the sophistication and focus to understand what's really in the releases, regardless of the version numbers. Everyone else just uses the kernel version provided by their distro of choice, so it's the distro version numbers they care about.
Your uber-condescending post is drivel.
Copyright law does not allow you to arbitrary distribute code created by others unless you are given permission to do so.
In other words even if your part of the code is not legally a derivative work you cannot distribute the code that isn't your without permission. And if the GPL says you don't have that permission then you're down to copyright laws which pretty generally says you don't have permission.
But the GPL does provide blanket permission for arbitrary redistribution, with source, and Hamstersoft is providing source for the GPL code. The issue is that they're not providing source for other code that they dynamically link to GPL code. According to the GPL, that's not allowed... but it's not clear that copyright law considers combining via dynamic linking to be creation of a derivative work. If not (and I think it is, or should be, but it hasn't been determined), then Hamstersoft is able to use the GPL's permission to distribute the GPL'd code, with source, but has no legal obligation to avoid linking to their closed code.
Derivative works is one of these grey areas that are improved in v3. Section 5.c of the GPL v3 states:
So even if you keep the original work in a separate DLL, the whole must still be released under the GPL3. Besides, if you remove the DLL the whole doesn't do anything usefull anymore, so it's clearly derived, even by v2 standards.
Except that the license doesn't get to define the meaning of "derivative work". If the GPL were a contract, it could define whatever limitations it wanted, but it's not, it's a uni-directional license that provides specific exemptions from the exclusive rights defined in copyright law. This means that if copyright law permits a given usage of copyrighted material, the GPL can't remove that permission.
It's not clear whether or not copyright law considers dynamic linking to constitute creation of a derived work. If it does, then permission is required and the GPL can attach strings to that permission. If it doesn't, then no permission is required so Hamsersoft doesn't need the GPL's permission and therefore doesn't have to comply with its requirements.
Got it. I'll submit a bug on Monday.
One other thing: Can you verify your account language settings? Go to google.com/account and click on "language". Note that I think you have to be logged into an account with Google+; I don't see the language option on the non-Google+ account settings. Also keep in mind that this is NOT the stuff I work on in Google and my knowledge about how it works is strictly that of a user. Anyway, I believe your choice there should be reflected across all Google services, and if it isn't somewhere that is clearly a bug (which isn't that unlikely, Google is still in the process of really integrating its various services. Until fairly recently they were all essentially separate and there are still plenty of rough edges on the integration.)
If that doesn't work (and I suspect it won't, since you said you already looked through all of your settings), let me know and I'll file a bug report. In general, picking an appropriate language for a given user is a Really Hard Thing, because you can't necessarily trust geo-location data, because it's basically an informed guess, and you also can't necessarily trust browser settings, because so many users have no clue how to set them and have them wrong. So it's entirely possible that picking Korean for you is working as designed based on data which indicates that trusting the geo data for Korea is less likely to be wrong than trusting the browser.
But there clearly needs to be a simple and obvious way for you to override the auto-selected language choice.
Interesting.
I'll submit a bug report on Monday. Have you already sent feedback via the link on the Google+ page and/or brought up the issue in the relevant forum?
What services are broken for you by being logged into Google+?
No need to wait, it already does...
Oh sorry, we were talking about Google and not about ISP. Well, they do already store every email (even not when using Google services) information and web address where you go when you use your ISP services.
What your ISP can store about your use of Google services is pretty limited. Most Google services use HTTPS by default, and many of them use HTTPS exclusively.
With few exceptions, if the government wants information about you from Google services, they'll have to get it from Google. My guess (and it is a guess, based on my knowledge of how the company looks at things, rather than any specific knowledge of what Google does or doesn't do in this area) is that Google will provide the information in response to a subpoena, but won't otherwise, i.e. that Google tries to protect your privacy except where it would be illegal to do so.
"It is speculated, mostly by tech pundits, that considering the sheer amount of effort that itâ(TM)s putting into shoving Chrome down our throats, it would not be in Googleâ(TM)s best interests to re-sign with Mozilla."
Most of Google's revenue comes from advertising, not Chrome. To ensure that revenue, they need to remain the number one search engine. To that end, it is in Google's best interest to remain the default search engine on Firefox as long as Firefox has any significant market share, regardless of Chrome's market share.
"It is speculated, mostly by tech pundits, that considering the sheer amount of effort that itâ(TM)s putting into shoving Chrome down our throats, it would not be in Googleâ(TM)s best interests to re-sign with Mozilla."
Most of Google's revenue comes from advertising, not Chrome. To ensure that revenue, they need to remain the number one search engine. To that end, it is in Google's best interest to remain the default search engine on Firefox as long as Firefox has any significant market share, regardless of Chrome's market share.
Another, slightly less obvious but equally important oversight/misunderstanding is Google's goals for Chrome. The article assumes that Google wants Chrome to displace Firefox and believes that not paying Mozilla would further that goal. But that's not what Chrome is for. Google has publicly stated on many occasions that their intent with Chrome is not to make it the universal browser, but to create competition. Not because the browser market lacked competition, but because the browser makers were not competing in the areas that Google wanted browsers to improve.
Specifically, when Chrome was first introduced, Google really wanted it to do one thing: Motivate browser makers to speed up Javascript engines. V8 was the reason for Chrome. See, Google wants the web to become the computing platform making the underlying OS irrelevant (with some success), but to do that the web has to be an adequate platform for doing all of the stuff that desktop apps do. And that requires fast Javascript execution, HTML5, etc. Had Chrome never broken the 1% marketshare mark but succeeded in convincing Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, etc. to speed up their Javascript engines, Google would have considered Chrome a resounding success, even though pundits would have called it yet another Google failure.
Bottom line: Google likes Mozilla and Firefox, and not just for the search traffic sent to google.com -- though the revenue from that search traffic undoubtedly more than justifies the money Google spends. Google wants the web to become the platform, and truly cross-platform browsers like Firefox are important to that goal. In fact, to realize that goal, it's also important that Chrome not be the only browser. Google doesn't want the web to be "the Google platform", it wants the web to be "the platform". Because Google is convinced that it can outcompete anyone, given a standardized platform on which to compete. And, honestly, though many people will probably call me naive, or a shill, because Google thinks that making the underlying OS irrelevant is what's best for the world. Yes, that sort of idealism really is not only common, but the norm at Google.
(Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Google, but I don't work on Chrome, and with the exception of my comments on the ideology of people at Google, none of the above is any sort of inside information. It's all stuff I knew before joining the company.)
This.
Until we stop hearing about mass data loss every other day in the headlines, why would I want to provide real data?
Basing your assessment of risks on headlines provides you with a very skewed sense of what those risks actually are. News, by definition, is the uncommon and the unusual.
I'm not saying the risks don't exist, but given that hundreds of millions of people do provide all that information to social networking sites without having their identities stolen should give you one clue. Reading the articles and seeing what data is lost and from where and what the results are should give you another. In practice, you should be far more worried about information you give to your bank, your credit card company, your on-line game service, etc. And even then, except in isolated cases the actual effects are minimal.
Of course, a handful of people do get really, thoroughly screwed. Small numbers of people have all sorts of horrible accidents that cause their deaths, too. Doesn't mean you shouldn't get out of bed in the morning.
OTOH, if you don't see any value in social networks, then why take even a small risk? But many people do derive value from them, making it well worth the miniscule risk.
In my experience, the wider anonymity of a pseudonym is no barrier to connecting with people one knows. I have no idea why you hold your stated beliefs.
Honestly? Everyone you knew in high school 25 years ago knows the on-line handle you use now? Everyone you've worked with knows your on-line handle? For that matter, all of your family members, including the cousins that you only see a couple of times a year know what on-line handle you use?
You're free to say that you aren't really interested in connecting with those people anyway... and that's just fine for you. But many, many people very much are interested in connecting with those people, and using their real name, plus providing information about where they've lived, where they went to school, who they've worked for, etc. is going to make it much easier for those connections to be made.
Google is not obligated to join you on whatever your crusade is, no matter how worthy. There are real plusses and minuses to anonymity, and it is reasonable for a social network operator to either allow or disallow pseudonymity.
Another concern for someone like Google is what if they allow pseudonyms but screw it up and someone's real identity is revealed?
This is a much bigger problem for Google than it is for, say, slashdot, because Google's reach into the typical person's web usage is so much more expansive. If someone relies on their Google account being pseudonymous but Google's extensive suite of products connected to that account results in the individual's real identity being linked to the pseudonym, perhaps in a way that neither the user nor even Google might have predicted, what is the potential impact? For the typical basement dweller who just likes to use a kewl handle, basically none. But what if someone who has a serious need to separate their real identity from their on-line actions gets "outed" through some oversight by Google?
Google has stated that pseudonyms will eventually be supported, but not yet. I wonder if, in addition to the spam minimization benefits of real names which Google has cited, there might not also be concern about the possibility of offering pseudonymous accounts and then screwing it up in some non-obvious and potentially problematic way.
Keep in mind that Google has had some previous high-profile privacy-related gaffes which have damaged their reputation. It may be far safer for Google to require people to use their real names just to ensure that everyone using the system understands that they are not anonymous, and to encourage people who need anonymity to avoid using Google+ and related services.
That has only changed this year though right? It used to be more like 3k before the whole economic crisis. Even at that higher price its half the average price in america and id say the total amount over 4 years might be less than one year in the high level american universities.
OTOH, lots of people go to American universities without paying tuition. I paid very little for my two four-year degrees... so little that I never borrowed a penny, or got assistance from my parents, or even had to work much.
I think lots of Europeans seriously overestimate the difficulty of attending a university in the US. The fact is that anyone who really wants to go can find a way. Those with the brains and the talent can even go to Stanford, MIT, etc. In fact many of the Ivy League schools effectively have a "funding guarantee" -- if you're good enough that they accept you, they will find a way for your tuition, fees and living expenses to be paid, and without graduating with a crushing debt load. I didn't graduate from an Ivy League school, so this is second-hand info... but it's from my brother-in-law who is a dean of students at Princeton and held a similar position at Harvard for a few years. He, by the way, got his Ph.D. from Princeton and not only never paid a penny for any part of his university education but was actually paid to go to school most of the time.
At the end of the day, university education in the US is somewhat like a progressive tax system: Only the wealthy pay full price, and the poorer you are the less you pay.
Well, unless you're dumb about it. And, granted, all too many students are, not bothering to look for the cost-effective way to pay for school and instead just loading up on debt. For some students the large debt load works fine, because their degrees ensure a large income which makes paying the debt easy. Others, though, screw their financial futures quite thoroughly.
Yes, they will always be able to sue you over patents that they own. But owning OR sharing them prevents you from some suits.
Owning patent A effectively prevents them from suing you over patent B, assuming they're engaged in business which could be construed as infringing on A. Shared ownership of A in no way limits their ability to sue you over patent B.
It's all about maximizing the detente effect. Shared ownership doesn't do that as effectively.
Jointly purchasing the patents would have provided far less protection than solely owning them.
And here's the point that I think most everyone is arguing over. Some, like you, believe this to be the case. Others, like Gruber, call bullshit on this line of thinking saying that owning patents is the same as sharing ownership of the patents
I don't see how anyone can argue that sharing ownership is the same as owning them... especially when the companies Google would be sharing ownership with are exactly the same companies Google likely needs to defend against. Jointly owning patents with Microsoft is of no use in defending against patent suits (based on other patents) from Microsoft. Of course, not owning the patents at all, shared or otherwise, opens Google to having those patents asserted against them.
So being able to sue is a better business strategy than not being able to be sued?
But it's not being able to be sued for those specific patents, while being able to countersue provides protection from a much larger pool of potential patent suits.
Jointly purchasing the patents would have provided far less protection than solely owning them.
Again, I reiterate that I have no internal knowledge of Google's patent strategy or rationale. It helps that I don't often make it to TGIF (Google's weekly all-hands meeting during which a lot of information about Google's products and strategy is laid out for employees).
I fail to see any hypocrisy and I re-read Gruber's blog post multiple times trying to follow his twisty logic.
It appears to me that Google, like many, many software engineers in the US but unlike many software companies in the US, doesn't see patents as particularly useful or valuable to the industry. Google seems to think that software patents inhibit innovation, not help it, and wishes that software patents didn't exist.
Does that mean that Google shouldn't buy patents or apply for patents? Of course not, because software patents do exist and it's suicide for a big software company to try to get along without them.
See, everyone who has been paying attention understands that 99.9% of software patents are utter crap. They don't represent real innovation, because they're simply obvious to anyone who happens to be working on the relevant problem. But actually going through the process of invalidating them, either by identifying the prior art or finding some way to demonstrate that they're obvious, is horribly time-consuming and expensive. And it's ultimately almost pointless because there are so many more patents out there which can be asserted once you've knocked down the first batch.
No, the way you defend yourself against bogus patent claims (or even the occasional arguably-valid claim) is by having plenty of patents so that you can countersue with a whole bunch of your own bogus patent claims. Then you and your attacker can negotiate a cross-licensing agreement. In practice, once you've got a sufficiently large pile of patents a form of detente sets in, where you and your commercial competitors don't bother to sue one another over patents because there's no point. No one would win but the lawyers anyway, and everyone knows it.
Google was perhaps a little slow to understand this patent landscape. More accurately, most of what Google did for years was harder to attack with patents so it wasn't so relevant and so Google didn't really bother. But Google is in the thick of it now, and fully understands the nature of the situation.
So, I don't see any hypocrisy. I think Google thinks software patents suck and should go away, but given that they're here Google is forced to play the game. But Google doesn't like the game, sees it as dirty pool and has decided to at least call its opponents on their dirty (if lamentably legal) tactics.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google software engineer, but haven't been one for long and don't know anything about Google's patent strategy other than what I read in the press.)
I'm on their cheapest 10Mb/s package, and I can easily get 1.1MB/s, which is about 8.8Mb/s. Not quite the advertised speed, but pretty close, especially when you include protocol overhead. Their customer support is horrible, but their network is pretty good.
Assuming cable modems have the same overhead as POTS modems (which they should, since they use basically the same encoding schemes), you should figure that each byte takes approximately 9 bits to transfer due to framing and error coding. Then there's also the (much smaller) overhead of IP and TCP. So I'd say that 1.1MB/s is pretty much exactly 10 Mb/s -- and maybe a little more.
1-2 miles per second doesn't make a crater?
that's 4000-8000 miles per hour.
that's certainly crater-worthy.
No doubt.
4% of the moon's mass moving at 1600 meters per second would have a kinetic energy of 3.7e27 J, equivalent to 45 billion of the most powerful thermonuclear bombs ever detonated, and all of that energy would be delivered in a little less than 1/10 of one second. It would also accelerate the moon by 60 meters per second -- 134 miles per hour.
That seems like it'd make a crater to me.
Prosecutors have immunity. Even when they knowingly break the law when trying to prosecute. If we want crap like this to end, there need to be standards to revoke that immunity; either on a case-by-case basis or a blanket repeal thereof.
Can't the judge censure the offender? I thought judges could hand down fines and even jail time to attorneys who piss them off enough.
So is this Google VP really a geek, or is she using this new meaning of the word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer.
Reading that, I think it's safe to say she's really a geek.
Google takes into account load times when ranking pages. If your site is served from the same datacenter then you'll have a better load time and therefore a better PageRank at the expense of everyone who doesn't pay for Google CDN. So, yes, this is anti-competitive.
I think it's highly unlikely that Google will fail to account for the same-data-center latency reduction.
The reason Google boosts the ranking of fast sites is because they want to provide a better experience for users (so users will keep coming back, so Google can keep showing ads to them). It does no good to favor the server in the other side of the building over one somewhere else if the Google server isn't also faster for the end user. I'm sure they have some clever ways of estimating the performance the user will see and adjusting their ranking based on that.
Of course, it's likely that an accurate measurement of user-perceived speed still favors the site cached by Google. But that's not anticompetitive, except in the sense that doing a better job than the competition is "anticompetitive".
Besides which, how can anyone consider data which is broadcasted over public streets as anything but public? The whole thing is just silly.
The manifesto and the guy's ideas ultimately had little to nothing to do with his actions.
In the same way that if someone writes a suicide note, it's nothing to do with their death?
Similar. Both are the product of a common cause, but the note could have taken a different form, and contained different reasoning without affecting the other part of the outcome.
The memo could as easily have been a leftist screed. The point is that it makes no more sense to blame conservatives who happen to agree with some of the wacko's ideas for his actions than it does to blame environmentalists for the actions of eco-terrorists.
Google, which sells its users' eyes (and other personal info) to advertisers, or Oracle, who doesn't sell anything without an humongous price tag?
Cite? I've never seen any evidence -- or even any serious claim -- that Google sells user info to advertisers. Eyeballs, certainly, data, no.