"As many prior posters have quoted, the difference between Israeli citizens and Lebanese citizens is that "Israeli citizens are sleeping in bomb shelters; Lebanese citizens are sleeping with bombs."
Nice soundbite, it makes it sound like the children are complicit in missle launches, but of course they were just innocent victims. Did they choose or even know who was next door? You are using the vague phrase 'Lebanese citizens' to try to blanket transfer blame from SOME terrorists to A WHOLE COUNTRIES POPULATION.
This strategy can never work. Consider the case of the IRA in Northern Ireland. We faced their bombs regularly in Britain, yet we never did anything so foolish as to bomb huge sections of ireland in the hope of flushing them out. It would be counter productive, it would simply create more terrorism. In the same way this strategy can't possibly ever fix the problem Israel has with its northern border. It will simply increase the terrorism, and decrease their security.
You missed the part where Israels army accuses Palestinians of blowing themselves up to give the Israeli army bad publicity. Asymetric warfare I guess.
"You need to respect US patents if you intend to sell in the US. "
Pretty much everything infringes some patent in some interpretation, its not the goodwill of people checking the patents that stops them selling in the US, its lawsuits and the only lawsuits happening are against the big guys with cash to take. The best that happens is, that in clear cut cases, the US company gets customs to block the product arriving at the port.
For software, even that's not possible because port 80 is shared.
For business processes, well, how do you stop a vague idea for a business process from entering the country? Search everyones minds?
It's another reason why copyright shouldn't extend past an artists death.
Copyright is to encourage the creation of NEW works, not support the museums of OLD works. Google created a new work in the style of Miro and ARS are trying to claim some right over it, in effect using copyright to block creation of a new work. Meanwhile Miró is dead and dead artists don't paint much.
Why should copyright be inheritable, while possessions like money, have an inheritance tax slapped on them? What right does his family have to claim rights over his works?
"If search for BMW I must be looking for a dealership?"
The example query I chose from the page of words they removed was [bmw autohaus finden] = Find BMW dealership
On the page they blocked out was a bunch of phrases, when you arrived at the page you were redirected to the appropriate page on the BMW site. So [bmw autohaus finden] took you to the dealership finder for example.
"As to BMW's page full of graphics Google can't search, well, I didn't see the UN Convention on Human Rights talking about everyone's...If they use too many graphics for Google to be effective, then they have to take the consequences."
Let me help here, the only BMW dealership finder on the web [bmw autohaus finden] is
"evaluation represents well what a user would evaluate the page as if they read it."
*Read* it? You mean if they couldn't see the pictures, couldn't interact with the flash, and didn't know who BMW are, or have any understanding of language.
It's the basic reality of Google that is does not see what a user sees, it sees MUCH MUCH LESS. Only text, without context and without a full comprehension of language. BMW have a graphic heavy site, none of which Google can see. In that circumstance, it's not unreasonable for BMW to provide the corresponding text.
"Also, I disagree that BMW is the only good result when searching for BMW." Fair enough, show me an alternate BMW German dealership finder that isn't BMW? [bmw autohaus finden] (One of the phrases on that page).
"As to the capitalized sentence, that's just a detail. Google penalized them for skirting their system, not for being spammers."
Do the rules exist in isolation? Or do they have a greater purpose? If you accept that Googles spam rules are intended to make the search results better, I don't see how you can defend the application of that rule, that removed BMW from a bunch of searches for which it is the only good result.
"I think the idea of testing keywords for spam will only be as successful as testing email for spam. That is, less than 100% successful,"
We can discuss possible approaches till the cows come home, but I think the real fix is competition. I've seen this pattern before, more competition is always the fix for it, it drives new ideas and smart people to try harder.
"Google doesn't like you presenting different data to their search engine than the user would find if they visited. And I can easily see why. Sites would abuse the heck out of it."
Except it's a damn lazy proxy measure of spam. Instead of measuring "WHAT", (spam or ham), they measure "HOW", (how is this text delivered). If it's not visible to a user, it must be spam, if it is visible to user, its ham. Hoping that the user will verify the text for them.
I think the following sentence needs to be capitalized: THEY BANNED BMW FOR HAVING ONTOPIC BMW RELATED KEYWORDS ON THEIR SITE.
You can take their side in this if you wish, but I think they should collect invisible text, calculate the probability of that text being related to the on page text and either discard it or include it based on that calculation. i.e. let sites provide them with the missing information in meta tags, but test it for spam/ham.
That way, instead of having to put every related phrase to a site on a page, you can just tell the damn search engine what the page is about and the newspapers can continue to write text for their readers in the "Real Estate" section, while telling Google the section is about "Home Gardens Houses Condominiums Apartments Flats Chalets", or "Made for TV Movie 2002, Starring Jim Nabors, Nina West"
Yeh, but my point was stuff like this is better done via trade secrets (imagine that they hadn't gone down the route of patents, or couldn't go down the route of patents).
Its just not the same as the steam engine where selling the invention reveals how it works to the world.
Yet we had networks via IR & wireless in the early 80's and we had email like Compuserve then too), and presumably some of the email went over those network links.
So what's left, deleting the email from the server after its received? What?
"Also, as RIM tried to show to a jury that they were obvious and failed I would not buy your argument."
Not so, once it gets to court, the burden of proof required to overturn raises sharply. The court assumes the patent office judgement of 'obvious' has been done correctly.
Every single one of these guys can see the patent system is screwed up and loves the way it fails as long as it works in THEIR favour. Sure, they have no credibility. But does that mean the patent systems not screwed up?
"I personally am more against the extremely low standards for novelty and non-obviousness than anything, which is why RIM striking out against patents sticks in my craw."
I wish they'd take patents back to their original purpose. Inventions that:
1. cost a lot to research and develop to a working solution 2. are easy to copy once the invention is released 3. The time to copy means the first developer could never recoup the cost
Novelty and non-obviousness come under 3, if you're not the first developer, its not your costs to recover.
Software comes under 2, its not obvious how software works from releasing it, so its not easy to copy. This is why MS needs its arm twisted to reveal its interfaces.
Business processes come under 1 & 3, a ten minute back of the envelope 'buy now' idea costs nothing to recover because there are no huge research costs involved in those ten minutes.
Patent trolls would come under 1, they don't make the thing, so they haven't taken the risk to bring it to a working solution.
It's just f*cking dumb, that I would be forced to apply for patents and lose my ability to use trade secrets, when trade secrets work worldwide and patents only work in the country they apply to.
And so did I. The person name and title is at the top in big blue letters ("license compliance team") , the cartoon is there and the threat is taken from the text you linked to (top of the second column).
"The actual source of this information says that:"
Stop right there, what source, who said that?
"Supplying base systems, or 'naked PCs', is a missed opportunity, according to Michala Alexander, Microsoft's head of anti-piracy."
So the head of Microsoft anti-piracy unit said it, a title you omitted. What MS is trying is to equate selling blank PC with piracy in classic MS FUD styly.
It all the way through the paper, e.g. "we want to urge all suppliers not to supply naked PC's... it's a risk to your customers".
A risk to your customers?!
Even the cartoon makes it clear. "My Software license.....er the dog ate it".
"The US should never have gone down the road of allowing patents on software and business processes."
I think thats what they had in mind by setting the 'technical' requirement. I think the original framers of patent law looked around, decided which parts of industry 1) required huge investment, 2) could be easily copied once released, 3) took a long time to recoup the development costs, & 4) the time to recoup was longer than the time to copy. I think they had difficulty framing those limited conditions in a law, and so specified it as 'technical' inventions - the ones that had the problem they were trying to fix.
So business processes and software and any other thing with a 1) low investment, or 2) not easy to copy, or 3) easy to recoup the cost before copied, don't fit that and should never have been allowed.
I mean they're giving patents to people who make NOTHING but legalistic paper documents now. How *untechnical* is that!
"OK so what if I go out and patent queueing at a shop WEARING A HAT & or CAP checkout to pay for goods WEARING A HAT &/OR CAP, or paying for magazines to be delivered to your home on a monthly basis WEARING A HAT &/OR CAP, or, or........"
Find me prior art for that in a form the US patent office considers acceptable prior art proof. If you manage it, I'll simply tweak the condition to make it unique.
The core problem here is the US patent office grants obvious and non novel patents for non-technical things, in clear violation of its remit.
"Long after the oil has run out, after the banks called in their loans, on the deserted Anerican streets, the few stragglers scuttle about to Fortress-like McDonald's only accessible through the drive-in"
Nah, the Chinese will wake up to find they've go nothing but paper back by nothing but oil, without oil they've only got paper! We'll all be driving through the MacDonalds on our magic pink ponies, silly.
"I'll have a Big Mac, Large Fries and a Tinkerbell will have a bail of straw". "Trott up to the Window, Please Mr Taco" The pony in front lifts its tail and takes a dump. "Oh and add a chocolate milk shake to my order"
"While all that might be true, it doesn't change the fact there's some sort of contract between the two."
I would think it would affect the damages a hell of a lot. Since the monetary damage for using a trademark from a company nobody has heard from for decades must be nearly zero.
Maybe that should be another area of reform for Copyright/Trademark/Patent, namely a license to an IP right automatically doesn't extend beyond the IP right it licenses.
If it can't be independently verified then it is uncertifable.
The claim in previous elections is that it CAN be verified by running a trial ballot on the machines before the election. This is clearly false, since Diebold now asserts that this test will not detect this 'tinkering' you speak of.
Which means that any Diebold 'tinkering' cannot be detected either. Which means the machines can't be certified as accurate.
On the third hand, it is a clear confession from Diebold that third parties can't accurately verify their voting machines and that their voting machines can be rigged.
So any county that thinks it is verifying that the machine isn't rigged by runnig pre-ballot checks is wrong. They can point to this statement and say "IT ISN'T ENOUGH THAT WE VERIFY IT, BECAUSE DIEBOLD ADMITS THEY CAN BE RIGGED IN WAYS ONLY IT CAN DETECT".
Just so you know, The Beatles were a popular beat combo in the 1960's and 1970's, Apple was the name of their record label at the time.
'Records' were large black circular discs with grooves in them made from Vinyl, a metal needle would run over the disk and make sounds (mostly popping and scratching sounds).
Vinyl is a fragile black plastic that was popular at the time.
There were no video games back then, which is why music was so popular.
Slashdot Mirror
"As many prior posters have quoted, the difference between Israeli citizens and Lebanese citizens is that "Israeli citizens are sleeping in bomb shelters; Lebanese citizens are sleeping with bombs."
Nice soundbite, it makes it sound like the children are complicit in missle launches, but of course they were just innocent victims. Did they choose or even know who was next door? You are using the vague phrase 'Lebanese citizens' to try to blanket transfer blame from SOME terrorists to A WHOLE COUNTRIES POPULATION.
This strategy can never work. Consider the case of the IRA in Northern Ireland. We faced their bombs regularly in Britain, yet we never did anything so foolish as to bomb huge sections of ireland in the hope of flushing them out. It would be counter productive, it would simply create more terrorism.
In the same way this strategy can't possibly ever fix the problem Israel has with its northern border. It will simply increase the terrorism, and decrease their security.
http://209.67.212.138/~lebanon/
I don't have mod points for you, but I have Karma to burn.
Bush refuses to call for an immediate ceasfire.
You missed the part where Israels army accuses Palestinians of blowing themselves up to give the Israeli army bad publicity. Asymetric warfare I guess.
"You need to respect US patents if you intend to sell in the US. "
Pretty much everything infringes some patent in some interpretation, its not the goodwill of people checking the patents that stops them selling in the US, its lawsuits and the only lawsuits happening are against the big guys with cash to take.
The best that happens is, that in clear cut cases, the US company gets customs to block the product arriving at the port.
For software, even that's not possible because port 80 is shared.
For business processes, well, how do you stop a vague idea for a business process from entering the country? Search everyones minds?
It's another reason why copyright shouldn't extend past an artists death.
Copyright is to encourage the creation of NEW works, not support the museums of OLD works. Google created a new work in the style of Miro and ARS are trying to claim some right over it, in effect using copyright to block creation of a new work. Meanwhile Miró is dead and dead artists don't paint much.
Why should copyright be inheritable, while possessions like money, have an inheritance tax slapped on them? What right does his family have to claim rights over his works?
"If search for BMW I must be looking for a dealership?"
e x.html
The example query I chose from the page of words they removed was
[bmw autohaus finden] = Find BMW dealership
On the page they blocked out was a bunch of phrases, when you arrived at the page you were redirected to the appropriate page on the BMW site. So [bmw autohaus finden] took you to the dealership finder for example.
"As to BMW's page full of graphics Google can't search, well, I didn't see the UN Convention on Human Rights talking about everyone's...If they use too many graphics for Google to be effective, then they have to take the consequences."
Let me help here, the only BMW dealership finder on the web [bmw autohaus finden] is
http://www.bmw.de/de/interaktiv/dealerlocator/ind
and Google no longer finds it. Is that a bad consequence for BMW, or for Google and its users?
"evaluation represents well what a user would evaluate the page as if they read it."
*Read* it? You mean if they couldn't see the pictures, couldn't interact with the flash, and didn't know who BMW are, or have any understanding of language.
It's the basic reality of Google that is does not see what a user sees, it sees MUCH MUCH LESS. Only text, without context and without a full comprehension of language.
BMW have a graphic heavy site, none of which Google can see. In that circumstance, it's not unreasonable for BMW to provide the corresponding text.
"Also, I disagree that BMW is the only good result when searching for BMW."
Fair enough, show me an alternate BMW German dealership finder that isn't BMW? [bmw autohaus finden] (One of the phrases on that page).
"As to the capitalized sentence, that's just a detail. Google penalized them for skirting their system, not for being spammers."
Do the rules exist in isolation? Or do they have a greater purpose?
If you accept that Googles spam rules are intended to make the search results better, I don't see how you can defend the application of that rule, that removed BMW from a bunch of searches for which it is the only good result.
"I think the idea of testing keywords for spam will only be as successful as testing email for spam. That is, less than 100% successful,"
We can discuss possible approaches till the cows come home, but I think the real fix is competition. I've seen this pattern before, more competition is always the fix for it, it drives new ideas and smart people to try harder.
"Google doesn't like you presenting different data to their search engine than the user would find if they visited. And I can easily see why. Sites would abuse the heck out of it."
Except it's a damn lazy proxy measure of spam. Instead of measuring "WHAT", (spam or ham), they measure "HOW", (how is this text delivered). If it's not visible to a user, it must be spam, if it is visible to user, its ham. Hoping that the user will verify the text for them.
I think the following sentence needs to be capitalized:
THEY BANNED BMW FOR HAVING ONTOPIC BMW RELATED KEYWORDS ON THEIR SITE.
You can take their side in this if you wish, but I think they should collect invisible text, calculate the probability of that text being related to the on page text and either discard it or include it based on that calculation. i.e. let sites provide them with the missing information in meta tags, but test it for spam/ham.
That way, instead of having to put every related phrase to a site on a page, you can just tell the damn search engine what the page is about and the newspapers can continue to write text for their readers in the "Real Estate" section, while telling Google the section is about "Home Gardens Houses Condominiums Apartments Flats Chalets", or "Made for TV Movie 2002, Starring Jim Nabors, Nina West"
Yeh, but my point was stuff like this is better done via trade secrets (imagine that they hadn't gone down the route of patents, or couldn't go down the route of patents).
Its just not the same as the steam engine where selling the invention reveals how it works to the world.
If it's so difficult to understand from the patent, imagine you have big chunk of binary and are trying to figure out how it works from the binary.
This is a perfect candidate for trade secrets.
Yet we had networks via IR & wireless in the early 80's and we had email like Compuserve then too), and presumably some of the email went over those network links.
So what's left, deleting the email from the server after its received? What?
"Also, as RIM tried to show to a jury that they were obvious and failed I would not buy your argument."
Not so, once it gets to court, the burden of proof required to overturn raises sharply. The court assumes the patent office judgement of 'obvious' has been done correctly.
Why not let them judge for themselves:
1 7%2C592
% 2C436%2C960
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=patent+6%2C3
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=patent+5
Here's the last two patents in question.
Here's the two last patents in question. Read them, see for yourself then decide for yourself if NTP is a patent troll.
1 7%2C592
% 2C436%2C960
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=patent+6%2C3
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=patent+5
I think they're pure patent trolls and should have been rejected as obvious.
Every single one of these guys can see the patent system is screwed up and loves the way it fails as long as it works in THEIR favour. Sure, they have no credibility. But does that mean the patent systems not screwed up?
"I personally am more against the extremely low standards for novelty and non-obviousness than anything, which is why RIM striking out against patents sticks in my craw."
I wish they'd take patents back to their original purpose. Inventions that:
1. cost a lot to research and develop to a working solution
2. are easy to copy once the invention is released
3. The time to copy means the first developer could never recoup the cost
Novelty and non-obviousness come under 3, if you're not the first developer, its not your costs to recover.
Software comes under 2, its not obvious how software works from releasing it, so its not easy to copy. This is why MS needs its arm twisted to reveal its interfaces.
Business processes come under 1 & 3, a ten minute back of the envelope 'buy now' idea costs nothing to recover because there are no huge research costs involved in those ten minutes.
Patent trolls would come under 1, they don't make the thing, so they haven't taken the risk to bring it to a working solution.
It's just f*cking dumb, that I would be forced to apply for patents and lose my ability to use trade secrets, when trade secrets work worldwide and patents only work in the country they apply to.
"That's my source - and I quoted it."
And so did I. The person name and title is at the top in big blue letters ("license compliance team") , the cartoon is there and the threat is taken from the text you linked to (top of the second column).
"The actual source of this information says that:"
Stop right there, what source, who said that?
"Supplying base systems, or 'naked PCs', is a missed opportunity, according to Michala Alexander, Microsoft's head of anti-piracy."
So the head of Microsoft anti-piracy unit said it, a title you omitted. What MS is trying is to equate selling blank PC with piracy in classic MS FUD styly.
It all the way through the paper, e.g. "we want to urge all suppliers not to supply naked PC's... it's a risk to your customers".
A risk to your customers?!
Even the cartoon makes it clear.
"My Software license.....er the dog ate it".
"The US should never have gone down the road of allowing patents on software and business processes."
I think thats what they had in mind by setting the 'technical' requirement. I think the original framers of patent law looked around, decided which parts of industry 1) required huge investment, 2) could be easily copied once released, 3) took a long time to recoup the development costs, & 4) the time to recoup was longer than the time to copy. I think they had difficulty framing those limited conditions in a law, and so specified it as 'technical' inventions - the ones that had the problem they were trying to fix.
So business processes and software and any other thing with a 1) low investment, or 2) not easy to copy, or 3) easy to recoup the cost before copied, don't fit that and should never have been allowed.
I mean they're giving patents to people who make NOTHING but legalistic paper documents now. How *untechnical* is that!
"as there is clear prior art. "
Let me fix it for you:
"OK so what if I go out and patent queueing at a shop WEARING A HAT & or CAP checkout to pay for goods WEARING A HAT &/OR CAP, or paying for magazines to be delivered to your home on a monthly basis WEARING A HAT &/OR CAP, or, or........"
Find me prior art for that in a form the US patent office considers acceptable prior art proof. If you manage it, I'll simply tweak the condition to make it unique.
The core problem here is the US patent office grants obvious and non novel patents for non-technical things, in clear violation of its remit.
"Long after the oil has run out, after the banks called in their loans, on the deserted Anerican streets, the few stragglers scuttle about to Fortress-like McDonald's only accessible through the drive-in"
Nah, the Chinese will wake up to find they've go nothing but paper back by nothing but oil, without oil they've only got paper! We'll all be driving through the MacDonalds on our magic pink ponies, silly.
"I'll have a Big Mac, Large Fries and a Tinkerbell will have a bail of straw".
"Trott up to the Window, Please Mr Taco"
The pony in front lifts its tail and takes a dump.
"Oh and add a chocolate milk shake to my order"
"While all that might be true, it doesn't change the fact there's some sort of contract between the two."
I would think it would affect the damages a hell of a lot. Since the monetary damage for using a trademark from a company nobody has heard from for decades must be nearly zero.
Maybe that should be another area of reform for Copyright/Trademark/Patent, namely a license to an IP right automatically doesn't extend beyond the IP right it licenses.
IANAL
+5 insightful
If it can't be independently verified then it is uncertifable.
The claim in previous elections is that it CAN be verified by running a trial ballot on the machines before the election. This is clearly false, since Diebold now asserts that this test will not detect this 'tinkering' you speak of.
Which means that any Diebold 'tinkering' cannot be detected either. Which means the machines can't be certified as accurate.
"On the other hand - what if Diebold is honest? "
On the third hand, it is a clear confession from Diebold that third parties can't accurately verify their voting machines and that their voting machines can be rigged.
So any county that thinks it is verifying that the machine isn't rigged by runnig pre-ballot checks is wrong.
They can point to this statement and say "IT ISN'T ENOUGH THAT WE VERIFY IT, BECAUSE DIEBOLD ADMITS THEY CAN BE RIGGED IN WAYS ONLY IT CAN DETECT".
Just so you know, The Beatles were a popular beat combo in the 1960's and 1970's, Apple was the name of their record label at the time.
'Records' were large black circular discs with grooves in them made from Vinyl, a metal needle would run over the disk and make sounds (mostly popping and scratching sounds).
Vinyl is a fragile black plastic that was popular at the time.
There were no video games back then, which is why music was so popular.