Books are still around because we understand and have crafted them to exist in a particular, easy to transport, easy to trade form factor. Mass printed books have been around for almost 600 years at this point. We have thoroughly explored the technology.
Electronic format, on the other hand, has not been as thoroughly explored. It's still finding itself. There's going to be a good while before everyone becomes happy with it. Until such time, the printed book is not going to be replaced.
See, what Apple and Ireland are being accused of is of passing tax legislation that applies specifically and singularly to the Apple corporation itself. The EU commissioners are crying fowl on that part saying that it violates Ireland's treaty with them. From what I understand, Ireland can tax however it wants but that the tax law must apply to all corporations, equally. Apparently the "Double Irish" wasn't enough tax sheltering for Apple. They got some special deals on top of that.
As do I but the thing is FB can't turn the thing they were originally being used for into advertising dollars.
To turn all of our eyeballs into dollars, they need to show us "news" they've been paid to display given certain demographics. That's why this is happening. Why they've been upping the ante with adblockers. Why they added the autoplay feature to videos and every other stupid move they've made in the past few years. They know their conversion/interaction/bullshit measurement rate is bullshit and their advertisers and stockholders are calling them on it.
Expect it to get worse before it gets better. Or FB falls off that internet cliff that MySpace went over before them.
Always short sighted and thinking tomorrow will be the same as today.
What I'm afraid of is this business / investment / management continues to infect the rest of the world. I can't wait until all of the stock markets are controlled by algorithmic trading, with the next quarter's number the sole goal.
'Cause it really creeps me out that a coupon site is being used to confirm information. And aside from that aspect, which seems to be setup to prey on the poor and less fortunate, that the company
"...including young people who wouldnâ(TM)t be swept up in conventional databases...".
That says to me they're going after children under 18 and doing so on purpose.
Of course they'd not show an example to the reporter. That'd either expose some proprietary info or that they're full of shit. Either way, this thing should be shut down.
Considering it's pretty codable to create those headlines I have to wonder how long before someone comes up with a heuristic to write the headlines which get through the filter.
At which point FB will have to update to catch those which will cause a counter update and so on and so forth until no headline ever will get through, leaving us completely news free and ignorant!
I'm betting that the state DA is doing everything they're allowed to under the applicable laws. I greatly doubt that the Washington legislature gave the DA the ability to yank right-of-ways or anything of the like. That power either lies with a utility commission or with a legislative committee. Rightly so. I wouldn't want a DA to be playing politics with utility companies. I'd rather have them be as independent as possible.
If I lived in that state, I'd be calling and writing my rep and those on said committee and push there.
No, this is likely part one of an overall strategy.
If you noticed the blurb, they've been "working with" Amazon to tackle the issue. However Amazon is unable or unwilling or a combination of both to give them the tools they've been asking for. I'm guessing they'd want something like YouTube's ContentID to flag things. Of course, providing such a tool would be against Amazon's M.O. since it would likely cut into sales to a noticeable degree. Thus the move to get out of Amazon completely.
Next step is likely threatening letters between law firms. The content of which is something along the lines of "so-and-so seller on your marketplace is selling known bogus goods that infringe on our trademarks/trade secrets/fill-in-the-blank. we demand you remove them or face legal consequences". After a few months of this, either Amazon will start policing themselves better, producing the tools needed to remove the sellers OR Amazon will continue to not care. Either way, Birkenstock wins.
Either Birkenstock gets the tools needed to flag sales and they come back to Amazon OR they get to drag Amazon into court for facilitating trademark infringement. Birkenstock is going to have a nice paper trail of correspondence showing that Amazon doesn't care and plenty of other sellers who've been pushed out of the marketplace.
the farmers, should they have to sue, have precedent on their side. Car manufacturers were forced to open up their diagnostic codes for car owners and allow third party connections. That seemed to work out the best for everyone. Showing once again that short-sighted, for profit motivations may not be the best for the market.
It may well have been against the ToS but if they did nothing to revoke access after being told of it, they're still likely in a world of financial hurt. Their position isn't helped once it becomes clear that these items, while only cosmetic, do have a rarity to them that the gambling sites used.
I suspect that age verification is going to become a thing that Valve has to come up with and enforce if they plan on making out of the two current lawsuits without having state law enforcement crawling around looking at things.
is often the justification used when reality and the law strike each other head-on. There are many interpretations of the phrase but these days it's used to say that the laws cannot encompass everything that people throw at it. Which, to my mind, is chickening out. It is allowing fear to reign and decide for us the actions we take to protect ourselves from the world.
I believe that it can be agreed that all of us want to live in a safe, civil society. So we write our laws with that in mind. Not everyone agrees as to what "safe" or "civil" means and those bounds are constantly being tested, much to our greater benefit. Thus we want to protect that civility and that safety as much as possible. The problem, this tension in our current world comes from the fact that we know, with intuition and through demonstration that there is only so much we can do. Some of us sigh and accept that there will be those accidents, incidents, and attacks which cannot ever be prevented. That the cost of having a civil and safe society is one in which others, regrettably, will come to harm through no action of their own.
And then there are those who don't. Whose drive to protect has been left unchecked and has become diseased. Somewhere, somehow, these people with the best of intentions has had their perspective mutated to the point where they only see how much control they do not possess. Maybe some of these people see the opportunity to get greater wealth or personal power. Maybe they were never taught how to let go of things in life. Who knows? I certainly don't. I'm in the first group.
All of this was say that it is not against outsiders that we must protect ourselves. It it not the asylum seeker, the immigrant, nor the H1B visa holder that brings a single iota of threat to civility or safety. It is not the fear monger, the hate spewer, nor the yellow journalist. These may be pitied and reviled but never feared.
What we must do is to check our fear. We cannot help but feel it. Nature gave it to us for survival reasons and it did our ancestors well to listen. These are not those days, however, and we cannot fall back to acting as our ancestors did.
This "article" screams intern assignment. The premise is predetermined and everything that goes against it is ignored. There are so many part pickers and guides available through a single search it's frustrating and stupefying that someone would even try writing this.
Likewise, building a PC now is nothing close to what it used to take. How would have this person felt trying to configure their IRQ interrupts? Not well, I'm guessing.
All told, it is sad that/. even allowed this to be submitted. This is an article in search of something to be upset about.
They bought a company, not for it's technology, but for it's brand and then decided to run that brand into the ground. It's the same pattern they've had for years.
Nothing new to see here, just history repeating itself.
The programming isn't going to be perfect. I'd be surprised if it's even considered "good". At some point, the biometrics are going to fail and someone is going to be detained on a false alarm. Deus help Uber if that person gets hurt in any way. Or tased by the robot.
In that foreseeable situation who's at fault? The company behind the software? The company behind the robot? Uber for deploying the robot? Would Uber be smart enough for the contract to say that the robot-owning company has all of the liability in those situations? Would the robot-owning company be smart enough to say that Uber has it all?
I agree that this would be a just way of dealing with the problem. Especially in a regulatory environment that cable should be in. However, I feel the need to illustrate the sort of language you would encounter if this was proposed in legislation.
"Why do you hate American business so much? What have they done to deserve your ire? Why, without these businesses and their job creation you wouldn't even have the option for the sorts of entertainment options available to you. And now you want to punish them when they make a simple mistake? For shame!"
and it's need to have a machine-learning built into it. It's going to be like that stupid Inbox stuff Google tried pulling a few years back, isn't it? I don't need something to create rules and read my email for me to sort it out. I can do both of those tasks just fine. Doing that doesn't save me effort or mental expense; just the opposite. If I had it turned on, I'd be worried it was screwing something up.
With Allo auto replying for me, I'd be very concerned it would be handing out information to people I didn't want to know certain things in my life. Even though Google is likely going to indemnify themselves in the click-thru, I can't wait for the first lawsuit from someone who was stalked and assaulted because Allo told said stalker where they were.
We already know that the cable companies are trying to get rid of them. I'm certain they're trying to keep NetFlix from getting any more content before they do. There's plenty of interest in and resistance from Hollywood studios as well. They don't want to give everything away and probably want to grab it back as soon as possible so they don't lose out on DVD sales.
And then there's that Disney coup that's probably sticking in someone's craw thanks to the back-catalog access. Maybe Disney saw the future and maybe Disney saw the dollars. Could be a bit of both.
I got in on Google's at the very beginning of it's service, so I have the legacy price. I've yet to be able to stump it in terms of not being able to access my choice of music but that doesn't mean it has everything.
As for purchasing...those have always been few and far between for me. I've done more KS albums for smaller bands in the past few years (shout out to the DoubleClicks!) than I've purchased from any storefront.
Quite honestly I think the problem is they don't really have much to compete on. I mean its not like they don't all buy the same content and roll it into very similar packages. Assuming you are in one of the few places where you have a choice what makes ComCraps vs. IndirectTV vs. GIOS vs. MyVerse offerings much different.
Exactly. And the entire industry doesn't want to have to find terms on which to compete.
This is why they're going after NetFlix, YouTube, Twitch, etc. That is competitive content differences. Ones they don't know how to counter them save for dropping their prices. That's not an option in the CEO's mind because then their bottom line is going to be impacted and his salary is usually connected to that somehow.
It's not just cable cutters who frighten these companies. If it's not something they can put into one of their channels, they don't know what to do with it.
I've been thinking about this and I have to wonder if it isn't a way for Microsoft to repatriate some of their overseas cash in a way that doesn't hit many of the tax pitfalls that a straight up transfer would.
Why else do it in all cash? To me a stock swap make more sense, from a perspective of a shareholder of Microsoft or of LinkedIn. Any VCs still hanging onto their LI shares now have ones that they can immediately cashout without having to file a huge pile of paperwork or they can hang onto the shares for future projects. The MS stockholders can still pressure the board to give another dividend.
Otherwise it seems weird that such a astronomically huge amount of cash went to a company that was being valued at a fraction of it.
I don't like the idea of a computer inside my computer I don't have any control over.
I find the article a little on the high side of paranoia, however. Yes, it is possible to have unnamed people from unnamed places get in and get data from your system. The article does go out of it's way to point out that this isn't very likely. The firmware running the second CPU is heavily encrypted and hash-checked at runtime. Making it unlikely to be broken until the heat-death of the universe or we finally figure out the P=NP thing.
Conversely, I'd like to know what's going on under the cover Intel. If this is in the stuff I bought, I figure I have a legal right to be able to access it and run an audit on it. Without having to go through you. Conflict of interest and right of first sale and a few more things spring to mind as to why that's not a something I'd want to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Form-factor. Form-factor. Form-factor.
Books are still around because we understand and have crafted them to exist in a particular, easy to transport, easy to trade form factor. Mass printed books have been around for almost 600 years at this point. We have thoroughly explored the technology.
Electronic format, on the other hand, has not been as thoroughly explored. It's still finding itself. There's going to be a good while before everyone becomes happy with it. Until such time, the printed book is not going to be replaced.
That's part of the problem. The laws.
See, what Apple and Ireland are being accused of is of passing tax legislation that applies specifically and singularly to the Apple corporation itself. The EU commissioners are crying fowl on that part saying that it violates Ireland's treaty with them. From what I understand, Ireland can tax however it wants but that the tax law must apply to all corporations, equally. Apparently the "Double Irish" wasn't enough tax sheltering for Apple. They got some special deals on top of that.
That's what the EU is going after.
As do I but the thing is FB can't turn the thing they were originally being used for into advertising dollars.
To turn all of our eyeballs into dollars, they need to show us "news" they've been paid to display given certain demographics. That's why this is happening. Why they've been upping the ante with adblockers. Why they added the autoplay feature to videos and every other stupid move they've made in the past few years. They know their conversion/interaction/bullshit measurement rate is bullshit and their advertisers and stockholders are calling them on it.
Expect it to get worse before it gets better. Or FB falls off that internet cliff that MySpace went over before them.
Always short sighted and thinking tomorrow will be the same as today.
What I'm afraid of is this business / investment / management continues to infect the rest of the world. I can't wait until all of the stock markets are controlled by algorithmic trading, with the next quarter's number the sole goal.
To get some good privacy laws passed?
'Cause it really creeps me out that a coupon site is being used to confirm information. And aside from that aspect, which seems to be setup to prey on the poor and less fortunate, that the company
"...including young people who wouldnâ(TM)t be swept up in conventional databases...".
That says to me they're going after children under 18 and doing so on purpose.
Of course they'd not show an example to the reporter. That'd either expose some proprietary info or that they're full of shit. Either way, this thing should be shut down.
Considering it's pretty codable to create those headlines I have to wonder how long before someone comes up with a heuristic to write the headlines which get through the filter.
At which point FB will have to update to catch those which will cause a counter update and so on and so forth until no headline ever will get through, leaving us completely news free and ignorant!
Brilliant!
I'm betting that the state DA is doing everything they're allowed to under the applicable laws. I greatly doubt that the Washington legislature gave the DA the ability to yank right-of-ways or anything of the like. That power either lies with a utility commission or with a legislative committee. Rightly so. I wouldn't want a DA to be playing politics with utility companies. I'd rather have them be as independent as possible.
If I lived in that state, I'd be calling and writing my rep and those on said committee and push there.
No, this is likely part one of an overall strategy.
If you noticed the blurb, they've been "working with" Amazon to tackle the issue. However Amazon is unable or unwilling or a combination of both to give them the tools they've been asking for. I'm guessing they'd want something like YouTube's ContentID to flag things. Of course, providing such a tool would be against Amazon's M.O. since it would likely cut into sales to a noticeable degree. Thus the move to get out of Amazon completely.
Next step is likely threatening letters between law firms. The content of which is something along the lines of "so-and-so seller on your marketplace is selling known bogus goods that infringe on our trademarks/trade secrets/fill-in-the-blank. we demand you remove them or face legal consequences". After a few months of this, either Amazon will start policing themselves better, producing the tools needed to remove the sellers OR Amazon will continue to not care. Either way, Birkenstock wins.
Either Birkenstock gets the tools needed to flag sales and they come back to Amazon OR they get to drag Amazon into court for facilitating trademark infringement. Birkenstock is going to have a nice paper trail of correspondence showing that Amazon doesn't care and plenty of other sellers who've been pushed out of the marketplace.
the farmers, should they have to sue, have precedent on their side. Car manufacturers were forced to open up their diagnostic codes for car owners and allow third party connections. That seemed to work out the best for everyone. Showing once again that short-sighted, for profit motivations may not be the best for the market.
Especially considering the strong correlation between material wealth and quality of life & longevity.
See: http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct... and http://www.tennessean.com/stor... for just a pair of many studies showing this.
It may well have been against the ToS but if they did nothing to revoke access after being told of it, they're still likely in a world of financial hurt. Their position isn't helped once it becomes clear that these items, while only cosmetic, do have a rarity to them that the gambling sites used.
I suspect that age verification is going to become a thing that Valve has to come up with and enforce if they plan on making out of the two current lawsuits without having state law enforcement crawling around looking at things.
is often the justification used when reality and the law strike each other head-on. There are many interpretations of the phrase but these days it's used to say that the laws cannot encompass everything that people throw at it. Which, to my mind, is chickening out. It is allowing fear to reign and decide for us the actions we take to protect ourselves from the world.
I believe that it can be agreed that all of us want to live in a safe, civil society. So we write our laws with that in mind. Not everyone agrees as to what "safe" or "civil" means and those bounds are constantly being tested, much to our greater benefit. Thus we want to protect that civility and that safety as much as possible. The problem, this tension in our current world comes from the fact that we know, with intuition and through demonstration that there is only so much we can do. Some of us sigh and accept that there will be those accidents, incidents, and attacks which cannot ever be prevented. That the cost of having a civil and safe society is one in which others, regrettably, will come to harm through no action of their own.
And then there are those who don't. Whose drive to protect has been left unchecked and has become diseased. Somewhere, somehow, these people with the best of intentions has had their perspective mutated to the point where they only see how much control they do not possess. Maybe some of these people see the opportunity to get greater wealth or personal power. Maybe they were never taught how to let go of things in life. Who knows? I certainly don't. I'm in the first group.
All of this was say that it is not against outsiders that we must protect ourselves. It it not the asylum seeker, the immigrant, nor the H1B visa holder that brings a single iota of threat to civility or safety. It is not the fear monger, the hate spewer, nor the yellow journalist. These may be pitied and reviled but never feared.
What we must do is to check our fear. We cannot help but feel it. Nature gave it to us for survival reasons and it did our ancestors well to listen. These are not those days, however, and we cannot fall back to acting as our ancestors did.
This "article" screams intern assignment. The premise is predetermined and everything that goes against it is ignored. There are so many part pickers and guides available through a single search it's frustrating and stupefying that someone would even try writing this.
Likewise, building a PC now is nothing close to what it used to take. How would have this person felt trying to configure their IRQ interrupts? Not well, I'm guessing.
All told, it is sad that /. even allowed this to be submitted. This is an article in search of something to be upset about.
Are the percentages the same or different from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago? If they are different, is it a significant difference?
Articles like these are frustrating since without the above sort of analysis, it's hard to think of them as anything other than propaganda pieces.
Thank you! You even managed to make the analogy not hyperbolic. You are the hero we deserve today.
Would it kill the editors to cut through the BS and give us a blurb under the article that explains this in simpler terms?
It'd be nice to understand what the actual problem is without having to spend an hour looking up the TLAs.
They bought a company, not for it's technology, but for it's brand and then decided to run that brand into the ground. It's the same pattern they've had for years.
Nothing new to see here, just history repeating itself.
Here's a question: Who assumes the liability?
The programming isn't going to be perfect. I'd be surprised if it's even considered "good". At some point, the biometrics are going to fail and someone is going to be detained on a false alarm. Deus help Uber if that person gets hurt in any way. Or tased by the robot.
In that foreseeable situation who's at fault? The company behind the software? The company behind the robot? Uber for deploying the robot? Would Uber be smart enough for the contract to say that the robot-owning company has all of the liability in those situations? Would the robot-owning company be smart enough to say that Uber has it all?
I agree that this would be a just way of dealing with the problem. Especially in a regulatory environment that cable should be in. However, I feel the need to illustrate the sort of language you would encounter if this was proposed in legislation.
"Why do you hate American business so much? What have they done to deserve your ire? Why, without these businesses and their job creation you wouldn't even have the option for the sorts of entertainment options available to you. And now you want to punish them when they make a simple mistake? For shame!"
and it's need to have a machine-learning built into it. It's going to be like that stupid Inbox stuff Google tried pulling a few years back, isn't it? I don't need something to create rules and read my email for me to sort it out. I can do both of those tasks just fine. Doing that doesn't save me effort or mental expense; just the opposite. If I had it turned on, I'd be worried it was screwing something up.
With Allo auto replying for me, I'd be very concerned it would be handing out information to people I didn't want to know certain things in my life. Even though Google is likely going to indemnify themselves in the click-thru, I can't wait for the first lawsuit from someone who was stalked and assaulted because Allo told said stalker where they were.
It may not be the company's fault.
We already know that the cable companies are trying to get rid of them. I'm certain they're trying to keep NetFlix from getting any more content before they do. There's plenty of interest in and resistance from Hollywood studios as well. They don't want to give everything away and probably want to grab it back as soon as possible so they don't lose out on DVD sales.
And then there's that Disney coup that's probably sticking in someone's craw thanks to the back-catalog access. Maybe Disney saw the future and maybe Disney saw the dollars. Could be a bit of both.
I got in on Google's at the very beginning of it's service, so I have the legacy price. I've yet to be able to stump it in terms of not being able to access my choice of music but that doesn't mean it has everything.
As for purchasing...those have always been few and far between for me. I've done more KS albums for smaller bands in the past few years (shout out to the DoubleClicks!) than I've purchased from any storefront.
Quite honestly I think the problem is they don't really have much to compete on. I mean its not like they don't all buy the same content and roll it into very similar packages. Assuming you are in one of the few places where you have a choice what makes ComCraps vs. IndirectTV vs. GIOS vs. MyVerse offerings much different.
Exactly. And the entire industry doesn't want to have to find terms on which to compete.
This is why they're going after NetFlix, YouTube, Twitch, etc. That is competitive content differences. Ones they don't know how to counter them save for dropping their prices. That's not an option in the CEO's mind because then their bottom line is going to be impacted and his salary is usually connected to that somehow.
It's not just cable cutters who frighten these companies. If it's not something they can put into one of their channels, they don't know what to do with it.
I've been thinking about this and I have to wonder if it isn't a way for Microsoft to repatriate some of their overseas cash in a way that doesn't hit many of the tax pitfalls that a straight up transfer would.
Why else do it in all cash? To me a stock swap make more sense, from a perspective of a shareholder of Microsoft or of LinkedIn. Any VCs still hanging onto their LI shares now have ones that they can immediately cashout without having to file a huge pile of paperwork or they can hang onto the shares for future projects. The MS stockholders can still pressure the board to give another dividend.
Otherwise it seems weird that such a astronomically huge amount of cash went to a company that was being valued at a fraction of it.
I don't like the idea of a computer inside my computer I don't have any control over.
I find the article a little on the high side of paranoia, however. Yes, it is possible to have unnamed people from unnamed places get in and get data from your system. The article does go out of it's way to point out that this isn't very likely. The firmware running the second CPU is heavily encrypted and hash-checked at runtime. Making it unlikely to be broken until the heat-death of the universe or we finally figure out the P=NP thing.
Conversely, I'd like to know what's going on under the cover Intel. If this is in the stuff I bought, I figure I have a legal right to be able to access it and run an audit on it. Without having to go through you. Conflict of interest and right of first sale and a few more things spring to mind as to why that's not a something I'd want to do.