Nevermind that an EULA being written doesn't have anything to do with it being enforceable - as in, just because it is written doesn't make it unchallengable, doesn't mean it is bonafide legal in relation to the laws.
Ah, but if they have a clause demanding arbitration, and given that the supreme court has upheld arbitration... well, then the enforceability of it falls into a venue of their own choosing.
Like I said, they will fuck you over, and they will have the deck stacked in their favor. In the end, the required arbitration will likely give you nothing of consequence, and do nothing to really punish them if they get it wrong. It will be a pro-forma process, which ends in nothing that actually does anything in your favor.
But, hey, if you'd like to believe something to the contrary, be my guest. I'd like to believe that too, I just find myself incapable of it anymore and my default position is to just assume they're asshats and get proven right. One of these days, I might even be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not holding my breath.
They've been stopped from doing the same thing many times in the EU.
Yes, and this story is about the US... where there seems to be no appetite for regulating business in this way.
So, while this may have been stopped in the EU... I don't expect the same thing to happen in the US. US laws (and lawmakers) have been bought and paid for by commercial interests.
Don't worry, this will eventually get put into something like ACTA as a treaty, and the EU will get to play too. This is just the dry run.
From the article: "In addition, subscribers can always still sue their ISP in court."
Until they amend the terms of services... or, it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars to fight.
Comcast "outright owns the ISP" only for works published by NBCUniversal. The other eight MAFIAA members (Sony, WMG, Vivendi, EMI, Viacom, Disney, Fox, and Warner) still have to follow the procedure.
And, they'll have a nice, cozy arrangement whereby they give each other a reach around.
I want you to be right in hoping/expecting consumers to have some recourse on this. But, recent history and a little bit of skeptical extrapolation tells me that they'll re-write the rules of the game in their favor, and at some point the ISPs will be the ones gathering the information the MAFIAA shills will use to sue their (now former) customers for trillions of dollars in lost revenue based on the inflated statutory damages they got the idiot lawmakers to grant them.
I'm just no longer convinced we're likely to see any sanity in this copyright issue... they'll sue us for trillions of dollars, but when they infringe by selling compilations with unlicensed songs, they'll settle for a few sheckles.
I'm still hoping for something spectacular like the end of Fight Club... a sudden, dramatic event which suddenly ends these corporations. Of course, that's just wishful thinking, and I now probably owe someone royalties for mentioning a movie. Fuckers.
I imagine that if one copyright owner establishes a pattern of getting disputes filed against its infringement notices, the ISP can ignore the copyright owner's later notices on grounds of unclean hands
Well, that ignores two things...
1) A good chunk of these ISPs are owned by copyright owners, and will likely take a default position on their side. 2) Unclean hands is a legal term... which is all well and good until you realize that no court is actually involved in this. They're under no obligation to apply such reasoning, and quite possibly won't.
These are arrangements between companies... what you and I want, and what would be the standard in a court of law is absolutely irrelevant in this context. And, it's either naive or wishful thinking to think that the dispute resolution of this will be held to any meaningful level of jurisprudence... I'm sure they'll have a "mandatory arbitration" clause in the terms of service.
Besides, in the case where the copyright owner outright owns the ISP... well, they will just use funny accounting to show even further how the fight against copyright infringement is costing them astronomical amounts of fictional money, just like movies with huge box office receipts "lose" money for accounting purposes.
Anybody who isn't an ISP or a media company gets fucked in this arrangement. It's nice to think of it in terms of legal terms and precedent... but it won't work that way.
Mod parent up, and to think I just spent my last point. Private companies are not entitled to act as judge, jury, and executioner.
Sadly, those are legal terms...
A lot of people will take the position that it's their network, and you use it according to their terms and their whim. The fact that the FCC hasn't decided to enforce net neutrality seems to confirm that.
I believe in this case, those private companies have given you their terms, and given you an EULA that says they can change those terms at will... so, yes, in this case they certainly can act as judge, jury, and executioner. Your alternative is to bugger off, and find another ISP if you don't like the way you treat them... if that's not actually possible because there's no competition, well, then your SOL.
Not saying I agree with what they're doing... but I don't see how anybody can stop them. Despite the fact that they have easements to run cable over private land, and the government seems to have granted them what is essentially a monopoly, they've also declined to regulate what they can do.
Welcome to a world in which private companies can screw you over any way they see fit, and you have no recourse. This will only get worse.
Nailing the music industry for patent infringement is difficult, given that they've resisted just about every relevant technological advance in the last century.
Except the ones that give them control over what we do... DRM, Root Kits, CDs which aren't conformant to the specs, IPs as personally identifiable information, co-opting of the legal system...
They just refuse to allow any technology which allows us to make decisions.
Quite frankly, at this point, even if they're not involved in this litigation, I'd be in favor of anything which just sorta side-swiped them for good measure to give them a friendly "screw you" from the rest of us.
The patents are being managed by Kevin Bermeister, of Altnet/Kazaa fame, who believes that the technology behind P2P music services has been commercialized by the music industry without license.
Oh god, that's just hilarious. I so want to see someone from Kazaa screwing over the music industry based on not properly licensing stuff.
But, really, de-duplification has been commercial use for some number of years... and identifying files by hashes and the like is hardly new... so I think from what I've seen in TFS, these sound like stupid patents.
If we could cause pain to the music industry and Microsoft, Oracle, and SCO out of this... I think it would be great. Can someone get on that?
Because, the Joker is/was an anarchist and a terrorist. His goal is/was to break down some of the things that keep society working, and generally mess up things that would cause as much discomfort to as many people as possible.
In a lot of ways, maybe some overlap in goals... though, with more randomness and chaos thrown in for good measure. Less intent to "create" anything or to bring about a specific goal, much more intent to disrupt as broadly as possible and generally make life miserable and scary.
It's a schemer who put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. Look where it got you. I just did what I do best-I took your plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple bullets. Nobody panics when the expected people got killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds!! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I AM AN AGENT OF CHAOS. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey. It's fair
Nihilism and chaos with a malicious streak and some cheap gags thrown in.
If this is the level of security paranoia they're pushing for, all passengers will be required to travel while naked, bound, and with a bag over their head.
I realize for some people, that's the sign of a really hopping Saturday night... but for the rest of us, it means that security has reached a level where commercial air travel involving the US is impossible.
Quite frankly, I can't see the rest of the world being willing to accept any more "enhanced tools"... as it is, I have no intention of getting into one of those scanners.
Allow me to laugh in the face of a software patent portfolio
Well, patent portfolios have allowed Microsoft to force a bunch of Android handset manufacturers to pay licensing fees on every handset.
The screeching herd of lawyers and legal precedent might make you reconsider that... as long as the courts uphold that patents as they stand carry legal weight, you'd be a fool to think you could write commercial software and not be aware of patents.
Now, as a coder, it might be best if you don't know about specific patents and then let the lawyers duke it out on the basis that you created it independently... but I don't know if your scoffing at the concept would actually do anything to protect you from someone like Microsoft deciding to give you a sound thumping.
You would need very thick layers and cables of copper at 5v, but it's feasible. I guess you mean 5VA, that would be a real achievement;)
Yeah... this is the part where I admit I know exceedingly little about the physical aspects of electronics other than my high school physics, which was over two decades ago.:-P
So... if you say so, then that must have been what I meant.;-)
Just because the design of an Apple product is distinctive doesn't mean that the product is automatically groundbreaking.
If they're based on components that nobody else has access to and won't for some time because only Apple is in the supply chain.
If nobody else had access to capacitive touchscreen, like they say in the article, nobody could come up with a product that does the exact same thing.
The article reads like it can actually give Apple several years of lead time to bring products to market using new, and ground breaking, technologies that rivals can't access because Apple paid for the initial manufacturing capacity.
Design here doesn't mean the external things that users see, but the actual design and manufacturing of the device...
One extraordinary example of this is the aluminum machining technology used to make Apple's laptops - this remains a trade secret that Apple continues to have exclusive access to and allows them to make laptops with (for now) unsurpassed strength and lightness.
doesn't mean that Apple is making the prettiest laptop cases, it means that nobody else can make a laptop case using the same techniques as Apple does. Which implies there's more behind the scenes than people realize.
As I read this, Apple is innovating new techniques, and paying to have them brought to market exclusively by them by actually building the manufacturing capacity for the technology in the first place.
If that's not groundbreaking and innovation... I'm not sure what qualifies.
I'm sure the start-up who wrote up the amazing summary and want investors' money also want us to believe that traditional memory will be all but dead when this comes to market. And that this is a total game changer for the entire memory industry. "Disruptive Technology" blah blah blah...
I think if you came out with technology using one million times less energy, all of that would be true, no? Hell, even a factor of 100 or 1000 I should think would be a rather huge gain.
When is a company that produces ANDROID-based phones going to stand up to MS and tell them enough is enough, ANDROID is Linux-based, and Linux is not Windows.
Sadly, if your Android based device is using stuff that is covered in patents Microsoft owns... the platform is irrelevant.
The problem has nothing to do with Linux, and everything to do with how utterly broken software patents are. There's so many of them that a 'skilled practitioner' (ie pretty much any programmer) could develop as being a fairly logical application of other things. In many cases, it's stuff that those of us who took CS in school were actually taught in class, or is stuff that other people had developed years before.
Being Linux doesn't give you a free pass from the suck that is over-broad patents.
What happened to Rumsfeld promising that we'd get Iraq's Oil, and it would pay for the war???
That was horse-shit fantasy from day one... did you really believe that Iraq was going to pay you for the troubles of overthrowing their government, and that they'd be beholden to you and sell you cheap oil for decades?
That was one of those purely bullshit things the previous administration was prone to saying (like "Mission Accomplished") that was so far detached from reality as to be offensive. Oh, sure, they'll give you billions of dollars in oil to offset your costs, and they might throw in a pony as well.
I find it hard to believe that anybody actually believed that the upshot of overthrowing Iraq would be cheap oil -- unless, of course, the whole invasion really was a pretext to try to grab the oil. Mostly, it's just another example of how Bush et al had their heads up their collective asses.
Close, it actually means "file servers". Without the plural you can't call it "cloud".
Maybe true, but given a large enough server, or a properly configured cluster... the term 'private cloud' is reduce-able to "what IT does now".
And, I'm not convinced 'cloud' precludes "one or more" from being in the definition, in which case we don't need plurals. The cloud could, in fact, be a single machine and it wouldn't make much difference.
To me, it's an utterly meaningless term, unless you actually build your own private cloud which is distributed across sites and actually has any of those characteristics. Otherwise, it's any server we've already been using.
Well, it's one thing to have a crappy update. But having a crappy update that locks out the people you're charging $20/month... well, that's pretty sad.
I wonder if the NYT fully realized what all is involved in maintaining software like this.
If I was paying $20/month, I'd be pissed at them if I was locked out for several days. Of course, I wouldn't pay that to access any site either.
It really is sad to see US and UK companies playing this territorial-creep card... oh well, maybe when their citizens start getting called for extradition to other countries they'll either explicitly acknowledge the double standard, or live with it and start making their citizens subject to laws from random places.
Mostly, I find it sad that copyright is the thing that these countries are most interested in protecting... who needs liberty and democracy when we need to be sure nobody is ripping off some lame boy band that Sony has decided needs to be protected by the full brunt of the us DoJ.
And, I guess the UK only require that they "feel" they have jurisdiction... that's a brilliant legal standard. Nice to know you can be extradited with a lower standard of proof for doing something which is entirely legal within your own country. The kid in question linked to stuff, and didn't even host it from what I read.
This is truly sad, and it means American laws have been totally taken over by corporate interests.
How is this going to help improve my sexual performance?
By monitoring you, and sounding an air-horn just before the critical moment... thereby distracting you enough that your, um, release is no longer quite so pressing and making you look like a stud.
Of course, your mother might wonder why there's always a horn blaring in the basement when you're down there alone for more than 20 minutes. If you ever brought a real girl, she might be a little startled by the noise.
Who are you to determine who or what someone else falls in love with? Sure, you may not be interested, but maybe you should leave determining what feelings are to the person who is experiencing them.
Because something which is neither sentient nor capable of actual emotions... well, that's essentially just a dildo. (And, no, don't tell me about how your first wife wasn't capable of emotions.;-)
I think if you're in "love" with the mechanical device you're humping, you likely have some serious social issues. I actually saw something on TV lately about some guys who claimed to be "in love" with his Real Doll -- that sounds like there is likely a clinical name for it. It's inanimate, get over it.
What will you claim next? That homosexuals are not really in love? That their love is eccentric, kinky, quirky... even obsessive and crazy? No? Then, by the same token, I say leave the robosexuals alone.
Well, when they can pass a Turing test, I'll grant you the 'robosexuals'... but until time it's deeper than falling in love with your refrigerator, I'm going to have to come down on the side of assuming that the described feelings can't really constitute "being in love".
I think we're a few years away from any machine which would even come close to the threshold I'd need to take this seriously. On the other hand, if it's sentient, old enough to consent, and anatomically compatible... run wild. Have a whole harem of blue space goats from P'Trax-4 if you want to and the space goats are on board with it.
I actually find this article a little on the creepy side.
Atlanteans had this tech back in the 10,000 BCs except they didn't bother with a tether, they just beamed their maser (that's Microwave amplified...) energy through crystals seated on top of large pyramidal buildings. We're so 20,000 years ago.
Well, that's the problem with marketing... sometimes "new and improved" means features everyone else has had for years.;-)
(And, as anybody who has ever worked on a project to replace something on a mainframe can attest... it'll be over budget, late, cost 10x as much as what you have now and require more compute resources, and never really do all that the current system does. It's amazing what people used to do with those things.)
And, slightly more on topic to your post, I honestly thought you were about to make a Stargate:Atlantis joke there.:-P
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Well, first, you have to be able to sue. Since SCOTUS said that forced arbitration is legal, how do you expect the EFF to get you into court?
Granted, this is specifically about class-action suits, but I fear the precedents of which you speak are already piling up not in your favor. :(
I'd like you to be right ... I really would. I just fear that it's already too late. And, yes, I do know that I'm a cynic. :-P
Ah, but if they have a clause demanding arbitration, and given that the supreme court has upheld arbitration ... well, then the enforceability of it falls into a venue of their own choosing.
Like I said, they will fuck you over, and they will have the deck stacked in their favor. In the end, the required arbitration will likely give you nothing of consequence, and do nothing to really punish them if they get it wrong. It will be a pro-forma process, which ends in nothing that actually does anything in your favor.
But, hey, if you'd like to believe something to the contrary, be my guest. I'd like to believe that too, I just find myself incapable of it anymore and my default position is to just assume they're asshats and get proven right. One of these days, I might even be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not holding my breath.
Doh! That's what happens when you spell something like that phonomonetically (and, yes, I do know that *that* is horribly mis-spelled).
Yes, and this story is about the US ... where there seems to be no appetite for regulating business in this way.
So, while this may have been stopped in the EU ... I don't expect the same thing to happen in the US. US laws (and lawmakers) have been bought and paid for by commercial interests.
Don't worry, this will eventually get put into something like ACTA as a treaty, and the EU will get to play too. This is just the dry run.
Until they amend the terms of services ... or, it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars to fight.
And, they'll have a nice, cozy arrangement whereby they give each other a reach around.
I want you to be right in hoping/expecting consumers to have some recourse on this. But, recent history and a little bit of skeptical extrapolation tells me that they'll re-write the rules of the game in their favor, and at some point the ISPs will be the ones gathering the information the MAFIAA shills will use to sue their (now former) customers for trillions of dollars in lost revenue based on the inflated statutory damages they got the idiot lawmakers to grant them.
I'm just no longer convinced we're likely to see any sanity in this copyright issue ... they'll sue us for trillions of dollars, but when they infringe by selling compilations with unlicensed songs, they'll settle for a few sheckles.
I'm still hoping for something spectacular like the end of Fight Club ... a sudden, dramatic event which suddenly ends these corporations. Of course, that's just wishful thinking, and I now probably owe someone royalties for mentioning a movie. Fuckers.
Well, that ignores two things ...
1) A good chunk of these ISPs are owned by copyright owners, and will likely take a default position on their side. ... which is all well and good until you realize that no court is actually involved in this. They're under no obligation to apply such reasoning, and quite possibly won't.
2) Unclean hands is a legal term
These are arrangements between companies ... what you and I want, and what would be the standard in a court of law is absolutely irrelevant in this context. And, it's either naive or wishful thinking to think that the dispute resolution of this will be held to any meaningful level of jurisprudence ... I'm sure they'll have a "mandatory arbitration" clause in the terms of service.
Besides, in the case where the copyright owner outright owns the ISP ... well, they will just use funny accounting to show even further how the fight against copyright infringement is costing them astronomical amounts of fictional money, just like movies with huge box office receipts "lose" money for accounting purposes.
Anybody who isn't an ISP or a media company gets fucked in this arrangement. It's nice to think of it in terms of legal terms and precedent ... but it won't work that way.
Sadly, those are legal terms ...
A lot of people will take the position that it's their network, and you use it according to their terms and their whim. The fact that the FCC hasn't decided to enforce net neutrality seems to confirm that.
I believe in this case, those private companies have given you their terms, and given you an EULA that says they can change those terms at will ... so, yes, in this case they certainly can act as judge, jury, and executioner. Your alternative is to bugger off, and find another ISP if you don't like the way you treat them ... if that's not actually possible because there's no competition, well, then your SOL.
Not saying I agree with what they're doing ... but I don't see how anybody can stop them. Despite the fact that they have easements to run cable over private land, and the government seems to have granted them what is essentially a monopoly, they've also declined to regulate what they can do.
Welcome to a world in which private companies can screw you over any way they see fit, and you have no recourse. This will only get worse.
Wow, did someone tear a rift in space-time?
The enemy of my enemy is apparently still a patent troll and an asshat.
Except the ones that give them control over what we do ... DRM, Root Kits, CDs which aren't conformant to the specs, IPs as personally identifiable information, co-opting of the legal system ...
They just refuse to allow any technology which allows us to make decisions.
Quite frankly, at this point, even if they're not involved in this litigation, I'd be in favor of anything which just sorta side-swiped them for good measure to give them a friendly "screw you" from the rest of us.
Oh god, that's just hilarious. I so want to see someone from Kazaa screwing over the music industry based on not properly licensing stuff.
But, really, de-duplification has been commercial use for some number of years ... and identifying files by hashes and the like is hardly new ... so I think from what I've seen in TFS, these sound like stupid patents.
If we could cause pain to the music industry and Microsoft, Oracle, and SCO out of this ... I think it would be great. Can someone get on that?
Because, the Joker is/was an anarchist and a terrorist. His goal is/was to break down some of the things that keep society working, and generally mess up things that would cause as much discomfort to as many people as possible.
In a lot of ways, maybe some overlap in goals ... though, with more randomness and chaos thrown in for good measure. Less intent to "create" anything or to bring about a specific goal, much more intent to disrupt as broadly as possible and generally make life miserable and scary.
Nihilism and chaos with a malicious streak and some cheap gags thrown in.
Oh, was that a rhetorical question?
If this is the level of security paranoia they're pushing for, all passengers will be required to travel while naked, bound, and with a bag over their head.
I realize for some people, that's the sign of a really hopping Saturday night ... but for the rest of us, it means that security has reached a level where commercial air travel involving the US is impossible.
Quite frankly, I can't see the rest of the world being willing to accept any more "enhanced tools" ... as it is, I have no intention of getting into one of those scanners.
Well, patent portfolios have allowed Microsoft to force a bunch of Android handset manufacturers to pay licensing fees on every handset.
The screeching herd of lawyers and legal precedent might make you reconsider that ... as long as the courts uphold that patents as they stand carry legal weight, you'd be a fool to think you could write commercial software and not be aware of patents.
Now, as a coder, it might be best if you don't know about specific patents and then let the lawyers duke it out on the basis that you created it independently ... but I don't know if your scoffing at the concept would actually do anything to protect you from someone like Microsoft deciding to give you a sound thumping.
Yeah ... this is the part where I admit I know exceedingly little about the physical aspects of electronics other than my high school physics, which was over two decades ago. :-P
So ... if you say so, then that must have been what I meant. ;-)
If they're based on components that nobody else has access to and won't for some time because only Apple is in the supply chain.
If nobody else had access to capacitive touchscreen, like they say in the article, nobody could come up with a product that does the exact same thing.
The article reads like it can actually give Apple several years of lead time to bring products to market using new, and ground breaking, technologies that rivals can't access because Apple paid for the initial manufacturing capacity.
Design here doesn't mean the external things that users see, but the actual design and manufacturing of the device ...
doesn't mean that Apple is making the prettiest laptop cases, it means that nobody else can make a laptop case using the same techniques as Apple does. Which implies there's more behind the scenes than people realize.
As I read this, Apple is innovating new techniques, and paying to have them brought to market exclusively by them by actually building the manufacturing capacity for the technology in the first place.
If that's not groundbreaking and innovation ... I'm not sure what qualifies.
I think if you came out with technology using one million times less energy, all of that would be true, no? Hell, even a factor of 100 or 1000 I should think would be a rather huge gain.
Bring on the 5v supercomputer!
Sadly, if your Android based device is using stuff that is covered in patents Microsoft owns ... the platform is irrelevant.
The problem has nothing to do with Linux, and everything to do with how utterly broken software patents are. There's so many of them that a 'skilled practitioner' (ie pretty much any programmer) could develop as being a fairly logical application of other things. In many cases, it's stuff that those of us who took CS in school were actually taught in class, or is stuff that other people had developed years before.
Being Linux doesn't give you a free pass from the suck that is over-broad patents.
That was horse-shit fantasy from day one ... did you really believe that Iraq was going to pay you for the troubles of overthrowing their government, and that they'd be beholden to you and sell you cheap oil for decades?
That was one of those purely bullshit things the previous administration was prone to saying (like "Mission Accomplished") that was so far detached from reality as to be offensive. Oh, sure, they'll give you billions of dollars in oil to offset your costs, and they might throw in a pony as well.
I find it hard to believe that anybody actually believed that the upshot of overthrowing Iraq would be cheap oil -- unless, of course, the whole invasion really was a pretext to try to grab the oil. Mostly, it's just another example of how Bush et al had their heads up their collective asses.
Maybe true, but given a large enough server, or a properly configured cluster ... the term 'private cloud' is reduce-able to "what IT does now".
And, I'm not convinced 'cloud' precludes "one or more" from being in the definition, in which case we don't need plurals. The cloud could, in fact, be a single machine and it wouldn't make much difference.
To me, it's an utterly meaningless term, unless you actually build your own private cloud which is distributed across sites and actually has any of those characteristics. Otherwise, it's any server we've already been using.
I always thought 'private cloud' meant 'file server', but new-hotness buzzword-compliant. ;-)
Well, it's one thing to have a crappy update. But having a crappy update that locks out the people you're charging $20/month ... well, that's pretty sad.
I wonder if the NYT fully realized what all is involved in maintaining software like this.
If I was paying $20/month, I'd be pissed at them if I was locked out for several days. Of course, I wouldn't pay that to access any site either.
It really is sad to see US and UK companies playing this territorial-creep card ... oh well, maybe when their citizens start getting called for extradition to other countries they'll either explicitly acknowledge the double standard, or live with it and start making their citizens subject to laws from random places.
Mostly, I find it sad that copyright is the thing that these countries are most interested in protecting ... who needs liberty and democracy when we need to be sure nobody is ripping off some lame boy band that Sony has decided needs to be protected by the full brunt of the us DoJ.
And, I guess the UK only require that they "feel" they have jurisdiction ... that's a brilliant legal standard. Nice to know you can be extradited with a lower standard of proof for doing something which is entirely legal within your own country. The kid in question linked to stuff, and didn't even host it from what I read.
This is truly sad, and it means American laws have been totally taken over by corporate interests.
By monitoring you, and sounding an air-horn just before the critical moment ... thereby distracting you enough that your, um, release is no longer quite so pressing and making you look like a stud.
Of course, your mother might wonder why there's always a horn blaring in the basement when you're down there alone for more than 20 minutes. If you ever brought a real girl, she might be a little startled by the noise.
Because something which is neither sentient nor capable of actual emotions ... well, that's essentially just a dildo. (And, no, don't tell me about how your first wife wasn't capable of emotions. ;-)
I think if you're in "love" with the mechanical device you're humping, you likely have some serious social issues. I actually saw something on TV lately about some guys who claimed to be "in love" with his Real Doll -- that sounds like there is likely a clinical name for it. It's inanimate, get over it.
Well, when they can pass a Turing test, I'll grant you the 'robosexuals' ... but until time it's deeper than falling in love with your refrigerator, I'm going to have to come down on the side of assuming that the described feelings can't really constitute "being in love".
I think we're a few years away from any machine which would even come close to the threshold I'd need to take this seriously. On the other hand, if it's sentient, old enough to consent, and anatomically compatible ... run wild. Have a whole harem of blue space goats from P'Trax-4 if you want to and the space goats are on board with it.
I actually find this article a little on the creepy side.
Well, that's the problem with marketing ... sometimes "new and improved" means features everyone else has had for years. ;-)
(And, as anybody who has ever worked on a project to replace something on a mainframe can attest ... it'll be over budget, late, cost 10x as much as what you have now and require more compute resources, and never really do all that the current system does. It's amazing what people used to do with those things.)
And, slightly more on topic to your post, I honestly thought you were about to make a Stargate:Atlantis joke there. :-P