So then cite the emails, exclude them and send the rest. What the fuck is the big deal? Chilling? Hyperbole.
If the requester has a problem, they go to court and the judge decides of the Buckley Amendment applies.
So, what's the rationale, here? Open records laws exist to promote transparency in the process of governing. As professors are not officials of the government (regardless of who signs the checks), they are not involved in the process of governing. Why should a professor (or, as someone else pointed out, earlier, a janitor) be required to disclose their communications? Certainly if a government official sent email to the professor, you could request the email from the official in question, but short of that, there is no reasonable excuse for needing the professor to disclose their communications.
Almost all open records act requests are political. They're mostly made by organizations with an agenda.
And that's fine. No one has a problem (or no one that I know of) with an organization making such requests in order to advance their cause. The problem is the target. Targeting a professor in order to squelch their political views is a clear abuse of the system.
If you're going to have an open records law then you don't get to make exceptions for political reasons.
I don't think that any reasonable rationale for an open records law could possibly justify applying it to a professor who is not otherwise engaged in the mechanism of government. Open records laws exist in order to make transparent the process by which a government governs, and a professor is, by default, not a part of that process.
The role of the professor in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is irrelevant. Everyone should be able to engage in all these things, and life would be even worse if only certain classes of people are exempted on account of being allowed to "think more freely" than others, or something.
You are missing the point. We don't argue for the exemption of the professor because they should be allowed to think freely. We argue for the exemption because it is their job to think freely. We ask them to explore the body of knowledge and thought that we humans have produced and to distill it for us in the form of research and education. We do not ask them to make laws that bind our citizens. We do not ask them to enact or enforce laws. We do not ask them to adjudicate laws. We do not ask them to carry out any of the roles for which open records laws exist. If the goal of open records laws were to allow us to publicly expose the private communications of everyone who espoused a political thought, then I think we should not limit them to government employees. They should apply universally to every citizen. If that's not the goal, then there's just no justification for this abuse of the system in order to score political points.
Yes we should, and the correct way to do that is to embrace a voting system that doesn't foster a two-party system. There are a number rated voting systems including my personal favorite, approval voting. Approval voting is the simplest way to replace plurality. All that's needed is a ballot with check-boxes, and instead of voting for one candidate, you vote for all candidates that you approve of for the job.
There are also a number of different ways of determining the outcome of the vote, but just changing the balloting process would undermine the lock that the two-party system has in the U.S.
My real problem with taking this stance is that they've pre-determined that constraining the distribution of their content is defined as, "winning." Of course, we know from the history of every type of media to touch the Net that this is absurd. The services that win (though it might take a decade or more) are those that are least constrained. The only problem is that of determining how to monetize that process.
I do feel for the networks, though. They are trapped. If the TV model dies and is replaced by the model where every device has equal access to ubiquitous data, they're screwed. There is absolutely no way that they will be able to maintain the kind of revenues that they've enjoyed on the initial distribution, which means that they need to rely on the secondary distribution to make up the difference.
It's a hard thing to be in a nearly century-old market that suddenly undergoes such a tectonic shift, and I'm certain that several companies that are pillars of the entertainment business today will be gone in 20 years as a result. We just need to remember that that's their problem, and not one that we should allow them to force the federal government into trying to resolve for them.
My point was literally that "Do no evil" is an impossible standard, whereas "Don't be evil" is a lot easier to live up to. I even called it a catch phrase, instead of insisting it was a motto or whatever.
As I've pointed out a number of times before, it's neither.
See their S1 filing with the SEC. It's actually a well defined bound on their business practices which they call out to investors in order to ensure that they can bring their business practices in line with that bound and not run afoul of stockholder lawsuits.
For practical purposes, the problem with Google's "don't be evil" is that they take it as a given in everything they do, thus they engage in a broad number of practices which appear to be dangerous precursors to the abuse of public trust. It's not that they are abusing that trust, it's just that they're putting themselves in a position where they could. I think the Google experiment is a fascinating one, and I really wonder how it will play out. If they continue to gather potentially sensitive user data and continue to shepherd it with user controls and transparency, Google could potentially serve as the model on which we develop (here, in the U.S.) our analog in the data world for the financial world's concept of "fiduciary responsibility." Other countries have begun to try to formulate this on their own, but the U.S. has been highly reluctant to place such controls on data.
I'd very much like to feel as comfortable giving Google every detail of my personal data as I feel in giving my life savings to, say, Fidelity Investments. I don't worry about what Fidelity could do with that money because we have about 300 years worth of law and precedent that have worked out what a fiduciary should and should not do. With data, we're just starting to walk down that path, so paranoia isn't a bad thing. it's just that we should keep in mind that the companies that are forging that frontier are no more our enemies than a bank or other fiduciary. Those institutions can do the wrong thing (as evidenced recently) as well, but we punish them when they misuse our money, not when they file a patent for storing or transferring it.
So it isn't Big brother that you need to watch out for but Uncle CEO.
The worse part is your not even in the will.
I'm still trying to reconcile this with "Do no evil."
Rather than just throwing out "Google evil Big Brother 1984 OMGBBQWTF!?!!" why don't we read TFA:
"rumors have some more tangible back-up in the form of a patent application..."
What this means is that Google has applied for a patent. Not surprisingly, their business strategy isn't strongly present in this application. That said, let's continue:
Payment systems generally [receive] from the merchant the authorization request for the total payment. Customers are not directly involved.
Under the system described in this filing, all information goes through the customer’s device to the broker, which now can keep a running tab of everything the person charges.
This is all based on the assumption that the patent describes an exact 1:1 mapping to the business model that Google plans to employ, and it also assumes that Google is the broker, and it also assumes that transactional details as presented to the device and the broker are the sort that would identify the details of the underlying purchase/service... all of these assumptions are being based on a patent.
It's time to put the swords down and stop calling the state department about that no-fly zone over Mountain View. This is just a speculative blog post by someone who should probably know better.
We'd be much further with nuclear if the environmentalists had gotten their heads out of their asses decades ago and stopped getting in the way of nuclear research and nuclear power development. Only now that the situation is starting to get desperate are they saying "oops, my bad". They still won't admit they were needlessly fear-mongering for years.
Yeah, that whole thing was a circus, and I wish we were mature enough as a nation to actually learn from the lesson. I wouldn't mind being decades behind Europe in terms of safe nuclear power and waste management, if it was because we spent that time learning how to have a rational discourse about a topic that sounded frightening. Sadly, now we're in the same boat. It's "drill, baby, drill," vs. "never again!" No one seems to want to have the rational dialog about what we can and can't do safely and where alternatives are economically viable and where they aren't.
Drill baby drill! We need a sane energy policy or our already struggling economy will take another dive soon.
Hurm... I'm not sure I buy this. Do you have some data?
Things aren't looking at all good given the unrest in the Middle East right now.
You're joking, right? When in the past 100 years has there not been unrest in the Middle East? I've lived through decades with many simultaneous wars going on there, depending on what you call "The Middle East" which can include or not include states such as Iran, Egypt, etc. depending on which definition you use. One fundamental constant: oil has a dollar value and someone's going to want to do that conversion.
More drilling sounds like a plan to me as long as basic safety procedures are followed.
Of course, and guaranteeing that takes time. Rushing the imposition of strong regulatory oversight because of an imagined crisis is reckless and irresponsible.
It took multiple violations for this well to fail.
I'd argue that it took one: prioritizing immediate returns over safety.
After Deepwater Horizon I'm sure all of the companies involved realize there's no net cost savings in skimping on safety
How many NEW buildings since 2001 have extra-wide stairwells, after seeing how many died in the twin towers because narrow stairs cause backups that prevent evacuation?
Sure, you sometimes hear of a success story in terms of companies smartening up, but it's usually in public-facing situations. For example, though the McDonalds coffee-in-lap suit is often made fun of because it sounds like a customer suing a company after doing something stupid, it's actually a great example of where a corporation tried to game profit/loss/safety and lost. What McDonalds did is they ignored dozens of cases where people were sent to emergency rooms because their coffee was too hot, a warning from the FDA that their coffee was too hot and produced and internal memo that was turned up during discovery that argued that the cost of law suits from burn victims was less than the cost of upgrading their coffee beans, which they would have to do in order to produce coffee that tasted good at lower temperatures.
When you think about companies "realizing" that there's no net savings in skimping on safety, think about the guy that wrote that memo. Think about the mentality that says, "I'll never get caught, and this will result in a small uptick in profit, for which I'll be rewarded."
Microsoft has interesting priorities... "Lets release a plug-in for a third party browser to fix a perceived short coming..." as opposed to "Lets fix the problems and short comings in our products". Slow clap for Microsoft.
To be fair, as you say, Google wrote the world's most secure browser and then offered you a way to insert it into the world's least secure browser. If Microsoft had made IE a paragon of customer satisfaction and choice and then written a plugin for Chrome that gave you some new toy, then I'd agree with you. They didn't. They just wrote a plugin that allows the perpetuation of the single most patent-encumbered "standard" I've ever seen. Bravo?
Second, what your friends send you a link to is kind of irrelevant. The Wikimedia family of sites exist to preserve knowledge and to provide a place for communities of contributors to build repositories of useful information from books to news to dictionaries to special-interest Wikis. Their scope and relevance is substantial, and because they're also extremely heavily trafficked, they are an important benchmark for any browser that wants to claim to support the Web.
H.264 is also a part of the Web, and Google is choosing not to support it. That's no different from a lack of support for ogg. What is different is that Google isn't supporting H.264 because it's a patent nightmare for which a consortium of rights holders had to be formed, just to make the collection of licensing fees practical. Not supporting that is actually doing the Web a favor.
This is nothing like the Google privacy violation at all, they "opted-in" to this search toolbar so all privacy violations about seeing everything you click on are now your problem.
1) What Google privacy violation are you talking about?!
2) Understand that no one is saying that Microsoft broke the law.
3) Also understand that any claim Microsoft had to being the better search engine just exploded in a hail LOLs.
4) I don't think grandma knew Microsoft was saving every search she ever did. It might not be illegal, but that doesn't mean it's moral, ethical or legitimate.
It is cheating if you have an OS monopoly and a browser that a very large piece of the internet-users use, while Yahoo and Ask,.... don't have that advantage.
While I think Google is in the right, here, and Microsoft deserves the egg they have on their face, the above is not a fair statement.
1) Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly any longer. To consider them a monopoly, you have to do some very bad math and ignore some very, very large market segments. Fact of the matter is, they're just the largest desktop operating system, and even that edge is shrinking and there are more market segments where that isn't true than ever before. Being the largest competitor does not make one a monopoly. If you look at the entire domain of "processors that run operating systems," Microsoft is actually hurting really badly.
2) Google isn't saying that the problem is Microsoft using information about Google searches, per se. Their concern is that Microsoft doesn't understand why they would want to use those results... they're just blindly saying, "this result is the best because Google says so." That's just re-selling Google's results. If Microsoft used search results that their users generated as a small weight in already-determined result sets for which Microsoft already had a pretty good idea of what was relevant, then I think Google's reaction would have been much more restrained.
3) The funny thing is that Microsoft HAS to change this. Right now, they're putting such a large weight on Google results that they're exposing themselves to all sorts of really absurd abuse by SEOs who will destroy their relevance, given half a chance. In fact, I'd expect Microsoft's results to become much less relevant in the coming weeks unless they fix this problem immediately.
It makes perfect sense for a search engine to look for things like this to help it decide what is relevant and what isn't.
No, it doesn't.
Search engines are for aggregating data from the Web. Search engines themselves hold only the data that they gathered and the data injected by their search algorithms (e.g. what links they think are most relevant). What Google is pointing out is that they've observed a long-term trend of Google's top results showing up on top of Bing's top results, even when that didn't make sense (e.g. the typo example that they give that started the whole thing). So, what Microsoft is indexing isn't relevance, it's just Google's weightings.
Google also looks at the links people click on in their results.
Google has the context to understand why those links are there in the first place, as evidenced by the sting, in which the clicks were clearly worse than useless. Also, Google does record clicks on some links by masking random links in their results with a redirect link through Google, but they use that data very sparingly as any SEO company can tell you, much to their frustration.
It isn't exactly a stretch to assume that every search engine would also want to know which links people are clicking on other search engines.
As evidenced by this result, it's actually worse than useless. It exposes you to poisoning of your data set by your competitors and it exposes you to public shaming.
I don't see the problem, it makes all of their results more relevant. That's not really a bad thing.
Only in cases where Google is more correct than Bing, and given the weight that Microsoft is applying to these links (I refer you to the Google article for more detail on the general population of results), we are left with very little option other than to assume that's an awful lot of the cases.
Can you guarantee that the Google toolbar doesn't collect similar information if you go to Yahoo or Bing and do a search there?
No one can make such a guarantee other than Google, obviously, and if you RTFA, you'll find that they've done just that. Any other questions?
Ok, so 5,585,838, "Program time guide" should be revoked, the patent officer that reviewed it fired and the lawyer who submitted it fined. Seriously, this patent is, in essence "TV Guide via software menus". Novel is not a word that can be used to describe that, period.
5,731,844, "Television scheduling system for displaying a grid representing scheduled layout and selecting a programming parameter for display or recording," is a patent on the TiVo, pure and simple. It was granted about a year before the first TiVo shipped, but I'd be curious to see if there isn't a publication that pre-dates it. I'm pretty certain it's going to be shown to be invalid based on prior art (I think MIT had a system in use on their Athena cluster of workstations that did something like this in the late 1980s).
6,028,604, "User friendly remote system interface providing previews of applications" appears to be a patent on cascading menus. See above for appropriate punitive actions.
5,758,258, "Selective delivery of programming for interactive televideo system" has a lot of claims, some of which overlap TiVo, and some of which don't. All of the claims that do are clearly covered by prior-art and would easily be shot down in court, IMHO, IANAL, YMMV, PDSM (Please Don't Sue Me).
Just my $0.02, but the only patent that seems to matter, here, is "5,731,844". That one needs to be shot down via prior-art, or the entire concept of a TiVo belongs to Microsoft.
I'm not hating at all. You're swallowing the kool-aid of an enormous post-clash push to give the public the concept that Schmidt's departure as CEO is a good thing.
Larry Page has little identity, where Schmidt was the 'face' of most of Google's public posture
Really? When I think of Google, I think of Larry and Sergey. I think of the brainy geeks that told us that the Web really could be sorted out by machine, and we didn't need pay-to-list schemes to get the best content to the top of a search result.
That being said, I'm sure that there are fights between the three of them, but I'm equally sure that the "clash" as you put it, wasn't that at all. I'm sure that Schmidt had some really firm ideas on how to monetize social networking and they didn't play out. That, combined with his China gambit just left him feeling as if he had no leverage to push future projects with the other two and the board. I'm sure that he'll continue to be a big part of what Google does.
No, the whole thing is a PR sham to make you believe that the change doesn't mean anything. Now, the 'good guys' are back in charge.
Puhleeze.
This is an over-capitalized corporation trying to convince the world that the stock price is ok, don't sell, don't short, believe in the magic, etc.
Um... you're not serious, are you?
"Don't be evil" was put into Google's S1 as a warning, and the document is very clear on the negative impact to shareholders as a result. If the shareholders had their way, Larry and Sergey would be sent to the R&D salt mines, a clone of Lee Iaccoca put in charge, and the new motto would be "don't be poor."
The last thing the average stockholder wanted to see was Page taking the reins from Schmidt! That's why, after reporting a great quarter, the stock price has tracked the market through the recent, short-term downward spike. What you're suggesting as a PR move for the stockholders is only slightly more effective than, "hey guys, it's OK. He only wanted his machete back!"
It would be vastly more efficient for me to shoot my neighbor and take his food, than have to go to work every day to earn my food.
No, it wouldn't. Even if you could bring enough force to bear to keep the police from putting you in jail, you would still have to expend a tremendous amount of energy in building up everything that society used to give you because you were willing to work within its parameters.
We obey the rules of society because we benefit from the social contract that we've entered into. What you're saying is that a sociopath who decides to forgo the benefits of that society and simply follow the short-term course of least resistance will be taking advantage of efficiency, but that's fundamentally wrong. They'll be hurting themselves. This is why we have so many sociopaths in our society and yet don't fall into anarchy. Only stupid sociopaths believe that its in their best interests to damage the social fabric that keeps them in donuts and heating fuel.
Why have 5 men do the work if it can be done by one robot?
A side-note on this: This statement assumes that replacing manual laborers results in unemployment. Since unemployment continues, today, to fluctuate in roughly the same high-to-low range that it fluctuated in when robots weren't the primary goods-producers that they are today, I'm going to have to say that this is nonsense.
To speculate, I'd say that employment is a complex system, but at its heart there's a balance. When a sufficient number of people are unemployed, new companies have a richer base of people to choose from, and thus can leverage the best employees and grow rapidly. We saw this in the 90s when layoffs happened in the early 90s and the best and brightest startups were able to snag people they wouldn't be able to grab in normal circumstances. In the early 00s the same thing happened after the dot-com crash. In fact Google is where it is because they were able to hire some of the best computer scientists from all sorts of failed ventures and bring their collective genius to bear.
So unemployment isn't always a bad thing. What's important to protect the free market is that we provide a safety net so that that process doesn't destroy people's lives AND we have to keep the largest corporations from locking down their industries and preventing the next Google from growing to fill a need.
This is why your understanding fails. There is no end.
Correct.
What is really so complicated by these simple examples:
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 3/3 = 1
And since 1/3 exactly equals 0.333... we have:
0.333... + 0.333... + 0.333... = 0.999...
And since the two sums are exactly equal, 0.999... equals 1. It's not really that magic, and your normal daily life will not be affected. It is, however, true.
I'm not sure that I buy that 0.333 repeating added to itself three times is 0.999 repeating. In fact, I'm not sure that I fully understand what addition means when you involve the decimal representation of a repeating fraction. I intuitively know the result because I convert this to 1/3+1/3+1/3 in my head, but how do I determine if there's a carry operation when doing this in decimal?
If you have a secure channel to transmit the one time pad, you could use that for the message instead and not need encryption.
That's not always practical. All secure channels I know of rely on either very close proximity or tremendously expensive physical security. As such, secure channels tend to be limited, while the locations from which one wants to send a secure message are numerous. Therefore, it makes sense to physically go to a secure channel, get a one-time-pad and then, when you need to communication, use it to send your message from anywhere, over an insecure channel.
Seriously, if your criteria for a good password is merely that it lacks repetition then "fffffffffiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee99999999222222llllllllaaatttt" is a terrible password. In practice, it's at least as good as 9 character password made up of completely random characters.
Anyone care to check my math? (hint: it's 8 groups of letters, all letters being identical within a group and chosen from lower case letters and numbers, the length of each group being a random integer between 3 and 11)
Then of course, there's their non-Web site features. For example, they have a VC group called Google Ventures; a whole series of public policy and government-related initiatives such as their work with enabling public Q&A and CitizenTube, YouTube's public policy blog about "developing trends in the use of YouTube by news organizations, activists, politicians, and governments."
They're also a major developer of FOSS. Sometimes this takes the form of giant systems like Android or Chromium, but just as often, it's little things like their new Image format, WEBP (my analysis of WEBP for screenshots, here).
Google does so much that they really do have to mercilessly kill things like Wave and GOOG-411 when their either outlive their planned purpose (like the latter) or don't achieve critical mass (like the former). Otherwise they'd be buried under an avalanche of half-finished products.
Slashdot Mirror
SMTP is unencrypted
You're doing it wrong.
So then cite the emails, exclude them and send the rest. What the fuck is the big deal? Chilling? Hyperbole.
If the requester has a problem, they go to court and the judge decides of the Buckley Amendment applies.
So, what's the rationale, here? Open records laws exist to promote transparency in the process of governing. As professors are not officials of the government (regardless of who signs the checks), they are not involved in the process of governing. Why should a professor (or, as someone else pointed out, earlier, a janitor) be required to disclose their communications? Certainly if a government official sent email to the professor, you could request the email from the official in question, but short of that, there is no reasonable excuse for needing the professor to disclose their communications.
Almost all open records act requests are political. They're mostly made by organizations with an agenda.
And that's fine. No one has a problem (or no one that I know of) with an organization making such requests in order to advance their cause. The problem is the target. Targeting a professor in order to squelch their political views is a clear abuse of the system.
If you're going to have an open records law then you don't get to make exceptions for political reasons.
I don't think that any reasonable rationale for an open records law could possibly justify applying it to a professor who is not otherwise engaged in the mechanism of government. Open records laws exist in order to make transparent the process by which a government governs, and a professor is, by default, not a part of that process.
The role of the professor in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is irrelevant. Everyone should be able to engage in all these things, and life would be even worse if only certain classes of people are exempted on account of being allowed to "think more freely" than others, or something.
You are missing the point. We don't argue for the exemption of the professor because they should be allowed to think freely. We argue for the exemption because it is their job to think freely. We ask them to explore the body of knowledge and thought that we humans have produced and to distill it for us in the form of research and education. We do not ask them to make laws that bind our citizens. We do not ask them to enact or enforce laws. We do not ask them to adjudicate laws. We do not ask them to carry out any of the roles for which open records laws exist. If the goal of open records laws were to allow us to publicly expose the private communications of everyone who espoused a political thought, then I think we should not limit them to government employees. They should apply universally to every citizen. If that's not the goal, then there's just no justification for this abuse of the system in order to score political points.
Yes we should, and the correct way to do that is to embrace a voting system that doesn't foster a two-party system. There are a number rated voting systems including my personal favorite, approval voting. Approval voting is the simplest way to replace plurality. All that's needed is a ballot with check-boxes, and instead of voting for one candidate, you vote for all candidates that you approve of for the job.
There are also a number of different ways of determining the outcome of the vote, but just changing the balloting process would undermine the lock that the two-party system has in the U.S.
My real problem with taking this stance is that they've pre-determined that constraining the distribution of their content is defined as, "winning." Of course, we know from the history of every type of media to touch the Net that this is absurd. The services that win (though it might take a decade or more) are those that are least constrained. The only problem is that of determining how to monetize that process.
I do feel for the networks, though. They are trapped. If the TV model dies and is replaced by the model where every device has equal access to ubiquitous data, they're screwed. There is absolutely no way that they will be able to maintain the kind of revenues that they've enjoyed on the initial distribution, which means that they need to rely on the secondary distribution to make up the difference.
It's a hard thing to be in a nearly century-old market that suddenly undergoes such a tectonic shift, and I'm certain that several companies that are pillars of the entertainment business today will be gone in 20 years as a result. We just need to remember that that's their problem, and not one that we should allow them to force the federal government into trying to resolve for them.
My point was literally that "Do no evil" is an impossible standard, whereas "Don't be evil" is a lot easier to live up to. I even called it a catch phrase, instead of insisting it was a motto or whatever.
As I've pointed out a number of times before, it's neither.
See their S1 filing with the SEC. It's actually a well defined bound on their business practices which they call out to investors in order to ensure that they can bring their business practices in line with that bound and not run afoul of stockholder lawsuits.
For practical purposes, the problem with Google's "don't be evil" is that they take it as a given in everything they do, thus they engage in a broad number of practices which appear to be dangerous precursors to the abuse of public trust. It's not that they are abusing that trust, it's just that they're putting themselves in a position where they could. I think the Google experiment is a fascinating one, and I really wonder how it will play out. If they continue to gather potentially sensitive user data and continue to shepherd it with user controls and transparency, Google could potentially serve as the model on which we develop (here, in the U.S.) our analog in the data world for the financial world's concept of "fiduciary responsibility." Other countries have begun to try to formulate this on their own, but the U.S. has been highly reluctant to place such controls on data.
I'd very much like to feel as comfortable giving Google every detail of my personal data as I feel in giving my life savings to, say, Fidelity Investments. I don't worry about what Fidelity could do with that money because we have about 300 years worth of law and precedent that have worked out what a fiduciary should and should not do. With data, we're just starting to walk down that path, so paranoia isn't a bad thing. it's just that we should keep in mind that the companies that are forging that frontier are no more our enemies than a bank or other fiduciary. Those institutions can do the wrong thing (as evidenced recently) as well, but we punish them when they misuse our money, not when they file a patent for storing or transferring it.
So it isn't Big brother that you need to watch out for but Uncle CEO.
The worse part is your not even in the will.
I'm still trying to reconcile this with "Do no evil."
Rather than just throwing out "Google evil Big Brother 1984 OMGBBQWTF!?!!" why don't we read TFA:
"rumors have some more tangible back-up in the form of a patent application ..."
What this means is that Google has applied for a patent. Not surprisingly, their business strategy isn't strongly present in this application. That said, let's continue:
Payment systems generally [receive] from the merchant the authorization request for the total payment. Customers are not directly involved.
Under the system described in this filing, all information goes through the customer’s device to the broker, which now can keep a running tab of everything the person charges.
This is all based on the assumption that the patent describes an exact 1:1 mapping to the business model that Google plans to employ, and it also assumes that Google is the broker, and it also assumes that transactional details as presented to the device and the broker are the sort that would identify the details of the underlying purchase/service... all of these assumptions are being based on a patent.
It's time to put the swords down and stop calling the state department about that no-fly zone over Mountain View. This is just a speculative blog post by someone who should probably know better.
We'd be much further with nuclear if the environmentalists had gotten their heads out of their asses decades ago and stopped getting in the way of nuclear research and nuclear power development. Only now that the situation is starting to get desperate are they saying "oops, my bad". They still won't admit they were needlessly fear-mongering for years.
Yeah, that whole thing was a circus, and I wish we were mature enough as a nation to actually learn from the lesson. I wouldn't mind being decades behind Europe in terms of safe nuclear power and waste management, if it was because we spent that time learning how to have a rational discourse about a topic that sounded frightening. Sadly, now we're in the same boat. It's "drill, baby, drill," vs. "never again!" No one seems to want to have the rational dialog about what we can and can't do safely and where alternatives are economically viable and where they aren't.
Drill baby drill! We need a sane energy policy or our already struggling economy will take another dive soon.
Hurm... I'm not sure I buy this. Do you have some data?
Things aren't looking at all good given the unrest in the Middle East right now.
You're joking, right? When in the past 100 years has there not been unrest in the Middle East? I've lived through decades with many simultaneous wars going on there, depending on what you call "The Middle East" which can include or not include states such as Iran, Egypt, etc. depending on which definition you use. One fundamental constant: oil has a dollar value and someone's going to want to do that conversion.
More drilling sounds like a plan to me as long as basic safety procedures are followed.
Of course, and guaranteeing that takes time. Rushing the imposition of strong regulatory oversight because of an imagined crisis is reckless and irresponsible.
It took multiple violations for this well to fail.
I'd argue that it took one: prioritizing immediate returns over safety.
After Deepwater Horizon I'm sure all of the companies involved realize there's no net cost savings in skimping on safety
How many NEW buildings since 2001 have extra-wide stairwells, after seeing how many died in the twin towers because narrow stairs cause backups that prevent evacuation?
Sure, you sometimes hear of a success story in terms of companies smartening up, but it's usually in public-facing situations. For example, though the McDonalds coffee-in-lap suit is often made fun of because it sounds like a customer suing a company after doing something stupid, it's actually a great example of where a corporation tried to game profit/loss/safety and lost. What McDonalds did is they ignored dozens of cases where people were sent to emergency rooms because their coffee was too hot, a warning from the FDA that their coffee was too hot and produced and internal memo that was turned up during discovery that argued that the cost of law suits from burn victims was less than the cost of upgrading their coffee beans, which they would have to do in order to produce coffee that tasted good at lower temperatures.
When you think about companies "realizing" that there's no net savings in skimping on safety, think about the guy that wrote that memo. Think about the mentality that says, "I'll never get caught, and this will result in a small uptick in profit, for which I'll be rewarded."
Microsoft has interesting priorities... "Lets release a plug-in for a third party browser to fix a perceived short coming..." as opposed to "Lets fix the problems and short comings in our products". Slow clap for Microsoft.
To be fair, Google has done that (in a much bigger way) for IE.
To be fair, as you say, Google wrote the world's most secure browser and then offered you a way to insert it into the world's least secure browser. If Microsoft had made IE a paragon of customer satisfaction and choice and then written a plugin for Chrome that gave you some new toy, then I'd agree with you. They didn't. They just wrote a plugin that allows the perpetuation of the single most patent-encumbered "standard" I've ever seen. Bravo?
I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever.
First off, I'm glad I could help.
Second, what your friends send you a link to is kind of irrelevant. The Wikimedia family of sites exist to preserve knowledge and to provide a place for communities of contributors to build repositories of useful information from books to news to dictionaries to special-interest Wikis. Their scope and relevance is substantial, and because they're also extremely heavily trafficked, they are an important benchmark for any browser that wants to claim to support the Web.
H.264 is also a part of the Web, and Google is choosing not to support it. That's no different from a lack of support for ogg. What is different is that Google isn't supporting H.264 because it's a patent nightmare for which a consortium of rights holders had to be formed, just to make the collection of licensing fees practical. Not supporting that is actually doing the Web a favor.
Citation, please?
This is nothing like the Google privacy violation at all, they "opted-in" to this search toolbar so all privacy violations about seeing everything you click on are now your problem.
1) What Google privacy violation are you talking about?!
2) Understand that no one is saying that Microsoft broke the law.
3) Also understand that any claim Microsoft had to being the better search engine just exploded in a hail LOLs.
4) I don't think grandma knew Microsoft was saving every search she ever did. It might not be illegal, but that doesn't mean it's moral, ethical or legitimate.
It is cheating if you have an OS monopoly and a browser that a very large piece of the internet-users use, while Yahoo and Ask, .... don't have that advantage.
While I think Google is in the right, here, and Microsoft deserves the egg they have on their face, the above is not a fair statement.
1) Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly any longer. To consider them a monopoly, you have to do some very bad math and ignore some very, very large market segments. Fact of the matter is, they're just the largest desktop operating system, and even that edge is shrinking and there are more market segments where that isn't true than ever before. Being the largest competitor does not make one a monopoly. If you look at the entire domain of "processors that run operating systems," Microsoft is actually hurting really badly.
2) Google isn't saying that the problem is Microsoft using information about Google searches, per se. Their concern is that Microsoft doesn't understand why they would want to use those results... they're just blindly saying, "this result is the best because Google says so." That's just re-selling Google's results. If Microsoft used search results that their users generated as a small weight in already-determined result sets for which Microsoft already had a pretty good idea of what was relevant, then I think Google's reaction would have been much more restrained.
3) The funny thing is that Microsoft HAS to change this. Right now, they're putting such a large weight on Google results that they're exposing themselves to all sorts of really absurd abuse by SEOs who will destroy their relevance, given half a chance. In fact, I'd expect Microsoft's results to become much less relevant in the coming weeks unless they fix this problem immediately.
It makes perfect sense for a search engine to look for things like this to help it decide what is relevant and what isn't.
No, it doesn't.
Search engines are for aggregating data from the Web. Search engines themselves hold only the data that they gathered and the data injected by their search algorithms (e.g. what links they think are most relevant). What Google is pointing out is that they've observed a long-term trend of Google's top results showing up on top of Bing's top results, even when that didn't make sense (e.g. the typo example that they give that started the whole thing). So, what Microsoft is indexing isn't relevance, it's just Google's weightings.
Google also looks at the links people click on in their results.
Google has the context to understand why those links are there in the first place, as evidenced by the sting, in which the clicks were clearly worse than useless. Also, Google does record clicks on some links by masking random links in their results with a redirect link through Google, but they use that data very sparingly as any SEO company can tell you, much to their frustration.
It isn't exactly a stretch to assume that every search engine would also want to know which links people are clicking on other search engines.
As evidenced by this result, it's actually worse than useless. It exposes you to poisoning of your data set by your competitors and it exposes you to public shaming.
I don't see the problem, it makes all of their results more relevant. That's not really a bad thing.
Only in cases where Google is more correct than Bing, and given the weight that Microsoft is applying to these links (I refer you to the Google article for more detail on the general population of results), we are left with very little option other than to assume that's an awful lot of the cases.
Can you guarantee that the Google toolbar doesn't collect similar information if you go to Yahoo or Bing and do a search there?
No one can make such a guarantee other than Google, obviously, and if you RTFA, you'll find that they've done just that. Any other questions?
The patents are 5,585,838, 5,731,844, 6,028,604, and 5,758,258.
Urg...
Ok, so 5,585,838, "Program time guide" should be revoked, the patent officer that reviewed it fired and the lawyer who submitted it fined. Seriously, this patent is, in essence "TV Guide via software menus". Novel is not a word that can be used to describe that, period.
5,731,844, "Television scheduling system for displaying a grid representing scheduled layout and selecting a programming parameter for display or recording," is a patent on the TiVo, pure and simple. It was granted about a year before the first TiVo shipped, but I'd be curious to see if there isn't a publication that pre-dates it. I'm pretty certain it's going to be shown to be invalid based on prior art (I think MIT had a system in use on their Athena cluster of workstations that did something like this in the late 1980s).
6,028,604, "User friendly remote system interface providing previews of applications" appears to be a patent on cascading menus. See above for appropriate punitive actions.
5,758,258, "Selective delivery of programming for interactive televideo system" has a lot of claims, some of which overlap TiVo, and some of which don't. All of the claims that do are clearly covered by prior-art and would easily be shot down in court, IMHO, IANAL, YMMV, PDSM (Please Don't Sue Me).
Just my $0.02, but the only patent that seems to matter, here, is "5,731,844". That one needs to be shot down via prior-art, or the entire concept of a TiVo belongs to Microsoft.
I'm not hating at all. You're swallowing the kool-aid of an enormous post-clash push to give the public the concept that Schmidt's departure as CEO is a good thing.
Larry Page has little identity, where Schmidt was the 'face' of most of Google's public posture
Really? When I think of Google, I think of Larry and Sergey. I think of the brainy geeks that told us that the Web really could be sorted out by machine, and we didn't need pay-to-list schemes to get the best content to the top of a search result.
That being said, I'm sure that there are fights between the three of them, but I'm equally sure that the "clash" as you put it, wasn't that at all. I'm sure that Schmidt had some really firm ideas on how to monetize social networking and they didn't play out. That, combined with his China gambit just left him feeling as if he had no leverage to push future projects with the other two and the board. I'm sure that he'll continue to be a big part of what Google does.
No, the whole thing is a PR sham to make you believe that the change doesn't mean anything. Now, the 'good guys' are back in charge.
Puhleeze.
This is an over-capitalized corporation trying to convince the world that the stock price is ok, don't sell, don't short, believe in the magic, etc.
Um... you're not serious, are you?
"Don't be evil" was put into Google's S1 as a warning, and the document is very clear on the negative impact to shareholders as a result. If the shareholders had their way, Larry and Sergey would be sent to the R&D salt mines, a clone of Lee Iaccoca put in charge, and the new motto would be "don't be poor."
The last thing the average stockholder wanted to see was Page taking the reins from Schmidt! That's why, after reporting a great quarter, the stock price has tracked the market through the recent, short-term downward spike. What you're suggesting as a PR move for the stockholders is only slightly more effective than, "hey guys, it's OK. He only wanted his machete back!"
It would be vastly more efficient for me to shoot my neighbor and take his food, than have to go to work every day to earn my food.
No, it wouldn't. Even if you could bring enough force to bear to keep the police from putting you in jail, you would still have to expend a tremendous amount of energy in building up everything that society used to give you because you were willing to work within its parameters.
We obey the rules of society because we benefit from the social contract that we've entered into. What you're saying is that a sociopath who decides to forgo the benefits of that society and simply follow the short-term course of least resistance will be taking advantage of efficiency, but that's fundamentally wrong. They'll be hurting themselves. This is why we have so many sociopaths in our society and yet don't fall into anarchy. Only stupid sociopaths believe that its in their best interests to damage the social fabric that keeps them in donuts and heating fuel.
Why have 5 men do the work if it can be done by one robot?
A side-note on this: This statement assumes that replacing manual laborers results in unemployment. Since unemployment continues, today, to fluctuate in roughly the same high-to-low range that it fluctuated in when robots weren't the primary goods-producers that they are today, I'm going to have to say that this is nonsense.
To speculate, I'd say that employment is a complex system, but at its heart there's a balance. When a sufficient number of people are unemployed, new companies have a richer base of people to choose from, and thus can leverage the best employees and grow rapidly. We saw this in the 90s when layoffs happened in the early 90s and the best and brightest startups were able to snag people they wouldn't be able to grab in normal circumstances. In the early 00s the same thing happened after the dot-com crash. In fact Google is where it is because they were able to hire some of the best computer scientists from all sorts of failed ventures and bring their collective genius to bear.
So unemployment isn't always a bad thing. What's important to protect the free market is that we provide a safety net so that that process doesn't destroy people's lives AND we have to keep the largest corporations from locking down their industries and preventing the next Google from growing to fill a need.
there's a 9 at the end
This is why your understanding fails. There is no end.
Correct.
What is really so complicated by these simple examples:
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 3/3 = 1
And since 1/3 exactly equals 0.333... we have:
0.333... + 0.333... + 0.333... = 0.999...
And since the two sums are exactly equal, 0.999... equals 1. It's not really that magic, and your normal daily life will not be affected. It is, however, true.
I'm not sure that I buy that 0.333 repeating added to itself three times is 0.999 repeating. In fact, I'm not sure that I fully understand what addition means when you involve the decimal representation of a repeating fraction. I intuitively know the result because I convert this to 1/3+1/3+1/3 in my head, but how do I determine if there's a carry operation when doing this in decimal?
If you have a secure channel to transmit the one time pad, you could use that for the message instead and not need encryption.
That's not always practical. All secure channels I know of rely on either very close proximity or tremendously expensive physical security. As such, secure channels tend to be limited, while the locations from which one wants to send a secure message are numerous. Therefore, it makes sense to physically go to a secure channel, get a one-time-pad and then, when you need to communication, use it to send your message from anywhere, over an insecure channel.
"Utt(001010&i!B" is a fine password
Cracklib begs to differ:
Utt(001010&i!B: it is too simplistic/systematic
So Cracklib is garbage. That was easy.
Seriously, if your criteria for a good password is merely that it lacks repetition then "fffffffffiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee99999999222222llllllllaaatttt" is a terrible password. In practice, it's at least as good as 9 character password made up of completely random characters.
Anyone care to check my math? (hint: it's 8 groups of letters, all letters being identical within a group and chosen from lower case letters and numbers, the length of each group being a random integer between 3 and 11)
There are a ton of Google services. I think the ones that would
surprise most people are:
Then of course, there's their non-Web site features. For example,
they have a VC group called Google Ventures; a whole series of public
policy and government-related initiatives such as their work with enabling
public Q&A and CitizenTube, YouTube's public
policy blog about "developing trends in the use of YouTube by news
organizations, activists, politicians, and governments."
They're also a major developer of FOSS. Sometimes this takes the form
of giant systems like Android or Chromium, but just as often, it's
little things like their new Image format, WEBP (my
analysis of WEBP for screenshots, here).
Google does so much that they really do have to mercilessly kill
things like Wave and GOOG-411 when their either outlive their planned
purpose (like the latter) or don't achieve critical mass (like the
former). Otherwise they'd be buried under an avalanche of
half-finished products.