Actually, no. At the time Google's results were not particularly better, and were decidedly worse than some of the established search tools (I remember running some comparisons back when Google was the new kid on the block).
It took a couple years to peel me off the ones I'd been using, because it took that long for Google's results to catch up. And that was about the time the others went for the irritating "portal" interface, which was FAR too damned slow for those of us who were still stuck on dialup.
But Google worked in any browser and on even the slowest connection, and was never in-your-face like a portal. And perhaps most important, thanks to its simple interface Google was so fast, both to come up and for results, that if an initial search was useless you didn't feel like you'd wasted your time, you'd just try again.
And now Google has given up trying to give you better results, and is concentrating on trying to make money off of you by being everything you'll ever need... oh, wait. Haven't we seen this movie before??
Considering that Obama wants to dismantle part of our defense capability, notably our missile system, maybe this comes as a warning to the wise, no matter who sent it up.
Yep, that does cure most of what ails it. But 1) most people don't know how to do this, and 2) it's a damned nuisance even tho I can do it with one tick of a checkbox.
And then you've got to turn it back on to get any useful behaviour from Google Maps, tho they've become so cumbersome of late that I'd welcome suggestions of where I'd find something like it used to be, with the map, sat, and terrain views, but not every damned gadget in the world making it so damned slow that it's easier to go find my paper maps.
Dammit, all I want is simple search. I don't want previews, or weighted results, or guessing what I really meant, or a map and pictures and previews of everything that happens to come up in the list of results. Just give me the damned plain search and the naked results. Stop wasting my time with YOUR idea of what YOU think I wanted.
Oh wait, that should be "What your ADVERTISERS think I wanted". My mistake.
Google got popular because it was SIMPLE and FAST. It's a damned shame there's no competition left that believes in simple search, so now even Google feels free to tell us how WE want to search.
What the search world needs is a reset, back to what Google was like when it was new and still eager to collect more eyeballs, instead of the 800 pound gorilla that dictates how every web page is optimized and which ones we get to see when we go looking for something.
Same here. And my next thought was "Maybe there'll be a recall election...."
Okay, to be fair, it really wasn't any worse than some of the early FOSS efforts toward making a brand new windowed desktop. What used to get designated v1.0 now gets called v0.1 -- but is really at the same level of development.
Maybe not a shill, but certainly it's in the RIAA's best interest to make the case as visible and as scary to average people as possible. Making it into a gigantic spectre that repeats itself regularly is more effective than quickly-finished, soon-forgotten cases.
So contract with the filesharing networks on a per-download basis. There will always be free systems and freeloaders but make the subscription perks worthwhile, enough to pay a small royalty per file. Even a fraction of a cent per file would amount to a LOT of money run through the system. Probably more than from your scheme.
Of course, most of the payments would disappear into ASCAP or BMI or ???? never to be seen again, but they could no longer claim there was anything illegal about it.
Punitive damages are typically 3 times the value of the object that was stolen or destroyed. (Once for the value of the object, once for the owner's PITA, once to smack you upside the head for being a thief.) So if you steal a CD, you're punished for stealing *that* CD. You're not punished for each person who MIGHT have bought it if you hadn't stolen it first. But that's what these statutory damages do -- punish you for "preventing" wholly *hypothetical* sales.
Well, being anonymous does extend the time it takes til you're caught:)
But the sheer simplicity you describe goes to prove my original point: if there really were hordes of terrorists coming to get us, we should be drowning in such incidents, all too easily set up in all manner of public places (something the IRA certainly did in its heyday). No need to get all complicated about it, or to figure out how to breach anyone's security. Just use the public infrastructure same as everyone else!
This isn't so much a matter of the why, as that at a certain point it becomes intent to defraud. And that can go in your favour in court.
Of course it also depends on whether you take the default state-mandated approach, or pursue it like a civil suit. The rules are all over the map (literally).
Ah, okay, you're looking at the anonymity angle. I guess it depends on the level that you want the "recognition of your cause" and influence to happen. If local (a la street gangs), then it's okay for the shooter to be semi-identifiable (at least at the moment it happens). If you want to affect a broader spectrum, then being anonymous on the site of the shooting makes it seem like more of an "anyman, anywhere" event, totally out of anyone's control.
Coupled with appropriate notices to news outlets, just a few such units could cause all manner of chaos.
Another related trick might be scattering long-fuse grenades on the freeway, via a similar mechanism. By the time they go off, you're far down the road. Of course that requires access to better materiel, whereas sniping requires nothing beyond a cheap.22 rifle and the most readily-available ammo.
True, tho by that point it often also becomes about collecting evidence for divorce court.
As it happens I know a couple in just such a situation... she was cheating on him and wanted a divorce. He didn't know about the cheating but knew their relationship was over, and was amenable to giving her lots of divorce-settlement money, just to be nice. But some intuition that all was not as it seemed induced him to hack into her yahoo mail account... he learned she was not only cheating on him, but had also been using his habitual generosity to fund her plane trips (ostensibly for another purpose) to meet her boyfriend in another state!
Needless to say, his inclination to give her a nice settlement to make a new life with went away real quick. And now he has lots of evidence for divorce court, so she's going to have a tough time screwing him over to the degree she'd hope to achieve.
(Yes, she's a psycho bitch, but that's beside the point.)
As to other reasons why people hang on like this when it's clearly a dead issue... sometimes there seems to be a sort of internalized revenge factor, where if they can prove "you're guilty and I'm innocent" they feel better about the relationship going to hell, or at least feel vindicated.
Very rarely, this sort of spying can be about re-earning lost trust through verification, but that's pretty tough to accomplish. (Tho I do know someone who did it, and so far it looks like their marriage is going to recover.)
I think Google's point is that they don't want the legal liability, since with their very deep pockets they'd make a tempting target for an "invasion of privacy" lawsuit. Possibly predicated on the fact that in some states (Texas leaps to mind) this might put them in the position of needing a private investigator's license.
Yes. The husband/wife has a great deal more right to know what *their own spouse* is doing, than Google has rights to know what *everyone* is doing.
I say that even tho I object to spyware on principle, and figure if a relationship is already that devoid of trust, the *real* function of such spyware is to collect evidence for divorce court.
You got it. In the U.S., even a failed attempt with NO casualties gets tons of media hype, typically along the lines of "OMG!! What if XX and YY had happened and NN-many millions of people were killed??"
Of course this is really about selling our eyeballs to their advertisers, and panicked people are more likely to glue their faces to the boob tube.
Meanwhile, even the failed terrorist gets instant gratification: the public whipped into a frenzy.
Pretty much the same principle as the old-fashioned drive-by shootings (now passe in Los Angeles, dunno about elsewhere). Unpredictable death plus media hype equals panic among the masses. As you say it could be simple, inexpensive, and for all practical purposes, impossible to stop. And it doesn't really matter who or what their targets are -- people on the street, random front windows of homes, busy storefronts, schools -- the possibilities are endless.
(How are the cars modified? I don't see that as a necessity in this operation.)
"I don't know the number, but there have been at least 10 suicide bombers, doing their thing in afganistan in the last 3 years. What is to prevent them from buying a plane ticket and doing their thing here, instead?"
Aside from possibly lack of money to buy plane tickets:
1) Terrorism is largely about trying to be a big fish in a little pond (making the terrorist feel important). It's a lot easier to do when you've got a captive audience (lacking the resources to escape the situation), like most of Afghanistan.
2) America doesn't have quite so much of the mentality of "If I can't get my way, I'll blow shit up!"
Remember when the big fear was bombs in sports stadiums?? or bombs in the London subways?? It doesn't matter if it actually does enough damage to notice; it only matters that it makes a big splash in the news, which IMO is what most terrorists are REALLY after -- "See, I'm a big man, I make things happen, this proves it."
Hit a couple dozen Walmarts at random, all on the same day. You don't even have to kill anyone. Now the average consumer is afraid to go shopping, and a much larger economic disruption results than shutting down air travel. And you've got news that average people can made fearful by, even if they never fly.
That was the key in hitting buildings with planes, BTW -- it put it out where "it could kill anyone!" If they'd blown up the same planes at the airport, 9/11 would have had far less effect and been far less memorable.
Average terrorists don't blow up planes either. There are too many more readily-available targets that don't require putting up with a lot of boring security theatre.
Any Wal-Mart would do for a start. They're everywhere, they're essentially unguarded, and each one has a few thousand people and a whole bunch of combustables all in one handy place.
Wait, I don't see ay Wal-Marts blowing up... maybe the true answer is that there aren't actually enough terrorists to be worth worrying about, hmmm??
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. At the time Google's results were not particularly better, and were decidedly worse than some of the established search tools (I remember running some comparisons back when Google was the new kid on the block).
It took a couple years to peel me off the ones I'd been using, because it took that long for Google's results to catch up. And that was about the time the others went for the irritating "portal" interface, which was FAR too damned slow for those of us who were still stuck on dialup.
But Google worked in any browser and on even the slowest connection, and was never in-your-face like a portal. And perhaps most important, thanks to its simple interface Google was so fast, both to come up and for results, that if an initial search was useless you didn't feel like you'd wasted your time, you'd just try again.
And now Google has given up trying to give you better results, and is concentrating on trying to make money off of you by being everything you'll ever need ... oh, wait. Haven't we seen this movie before??
startpage.com only works in newish browsers, and duckduckgo.com requires CSS and JS. Neither had particularly good results.
So... nix on both of those, at least for me. :(
"Carter, I can see my house!"
Considering that Obama wants to dismantle part of our defense capability, notably our missile system, maybe this comes as a warning to the wise, no matter who sent it up.
Yep, that does cure most of what ails it. But 1) most people don't know how to do this, and 2) it's a damned nuisance even tho I can do it with one tick of a checkbox.
And then you've got to turn it back on to get any useful behaviour from Google Maps, tho they've become so cumbersome of late that I'd welcome suggestions of where I'd find something like it used to be, with the map, sat, and terrain views, but not every damned gadget in the world making it so damned slow that it's easier to go find my paper maps.
Same with Translate.
Dammit, all I want is simple search. I don't want previews, or weighted results, or guessing what I really meant, or a map and pictures and previews of everything that happens to come up in the list of results. Just give me the damned plain search and the naked results. Stop wasting my time with YOUR idea of what YOU think I wanted.
Oh wait, that should be "What your ADVERTISERS think I wanted". My mistake.
Google got popular because it was SIMPLE and FAST. It's a damned shame there's no competition left that believes in simple search, so now even Google feels free to tell us how WE want to search.
What the search world needs is a reset, back to what Google was like when it was new and still eager to collect more eyeballs, instead of the 800 pound gorilla that dictates how every web page is optimized and which ones we get to see when we go looking for something.
You gotta wonder how they let someone barely out of alpha testing onto the market like that... ;)
Same here. And my next thought was "Maybe there'll be a recall election...."
Okay, to be fair, it really wasn't any worse than some of the early FOSS efforts toward making a brand new windowed desktop. What used to get designated v1.0 now gets called v0.1 -- but is really at the same level of development.
Maybe not a shill, but certainly it's in the RIAA's best interest to make the case as visible and as scary to average people as possible. Making it into a gigantic spectre that repeats itself regularly is more effective than quickly-finished, soon-forgotten cases.
So contract with the filesharing networks on a per-download basis. There will always be free systems and freeloaders but make the subscription perks worthwhile, enough to pay a small royalty per file. Even a fraction of a cent per file would amount to a LOT of money run through the system. Probably more than from your scheme.
Of course, most of the payments would disappear into ASCAP or BMI or ???? never to be seen again, but they could no longer claim there was anything illegal about it.
Punitive damages are typically 3 times the value of the object that was stolen or destroyed. (Once for the value of the object, once for the owner's PITA, once to smack you upside the head for being a thief.) So if you steal a CD, you're punished for stealing *that* CD. You're not punished for each person who MIGHT have bought it if you hadn't stolen it first. But that's what these statutory damages do -- punish you for "preventing" wholly *hypothetical* sales.
Well, being anonymous does extend the time it takes til you're caught :)
But the sheer simplicity you describe goes to prove my original point: if there really were hordes of terrorists coming to get us, we should be drowning in such incidents, all too easily set up in all manner of public places (something the IRA certainly did in its heyday). No need to get all complicated about it, or to figure out how to breach anyone's security. Just use the public infrastructure same as everyone else!
This isn't so much a matter of the why, as that at a certain point it becomes intent to defraud. And that can go in your favour in court.
Of course it also depends on whether you take the default state-mandated approach, or pursue it like a civil suit. The rules are all over the map (literally).
Ah, okay, you're looking at the anonymity angle. I guess it depends on the level that you want the "recognition of your cause" and influence to happen. If local (a la street gangs), then it's okay for the shooter to be semi-identifiable (at least at the moment it happens). If you want to affect a broader spectrum, then being anonymous on the site of the shooting makes it seem like more of an "anyman, anywhere" event, totally out of anyone's control.
Coupled with appropriate notices to news outlets, just a few such units could cause all manner of chaos.
Another related trick might be scattering long-fuse grenades on the freeway, via a similar mechanism. By the time they go off, you're far down the road. Of course that requires access to better materiel, whereas sniping requires nothing beyond a cheap .22 rifle and the most readily-available ammo.
True, tho by that point it often also becomes about collecting evidence for divorce court.
As it happens I know a couple in just such a situation... she was cheating on him and wanted a divorce. He didn't know about the cheating but knew their relationship was over, and was amenable to giving her lots of divorce-settlement money, just to be nice. But some intuition that all was not as it seemed induced him to hack into her yahoo mail account... he learned she was not only cheating on him, but had also been using his habitual generosity to fund her plane trips (ostensibly for another purpose) to meet her boyfriend in another state!
Needless to say, his inclination to give her a nice settlement to make a new life with went away real quick. And now he has lots of evidence for divorce court, so she's going to have a tough time screwing him over to the degree she'd hope to achieve.
(Yes, she's a psycho bitch, but that's beside the point.)
As to other reasons why people hang on like this when it's clearly a dead issue... sometimes there seems to be a sort of internalized revenge factor, where if they can prove "you're guilty and I'm innocent" they feel better about the relationship going to hell, or at least feel vindicated.
Very rarely, this sort of spying can be about re-earning lost trust through verification, but that's pretty tough to accomplish. (Tho I do know someone who did it, and so far it looks like their marriage is going to recover.)
I think Google's point is that they don't want the legal liability, since with their very deep pockets they'd make a tempting target for an "invasion of privacy" lawsuit. Possibly predicated on the fact that in some states (Texas leaps to mind) this might put them in the position of needing a private investigator's license.
Yes. The husband/wife has a great deal more right to know what *their own spouse* is doing, than Google has rights to know what *everyone* is doing.
I say that even tho I object to spyware on principle, and figure if a relationship is already that devoid of trust, the *real* function of such spyware is to collect evidence for divorce court.
You got it. In the U.S., even a failed attempt with NO casualties gets tons of media hype, typically along the lines of "OMG!! What if XX and YY had happened and NN-many millions of people were killed??"
Of course this is really about selling our eyeballs to their advertisers, and panicked people are more likely to glue their faces to the boob tube.
Meanwhile, even the failed terrorist gets instant gratification: the public whipped into a frenzy.
Pretty much the same principle as the old-fashioned drive-by shootings (now passe in Los Angeles, dunno about elsewhere). Unpredictable death plus media hype equals panic among the masses. As you say it could be simple, inexpensive, and for all practical purposes, impossible to stop. And it doesn't really matter who or what their targets are -- people on the street, random front windows of homes, busy storefronts, schools -- the possibilities are endless.
(How are the cars modified? I don't see that as a necessity in this operation.)
An AC complains,
"I don't know the number, but there have been at least 10 suicide bombers, doing their thing in afganistan in the last 3 years. What is to prevent them from buying a plane ticket and doing their thing here, instead?"
Aside from possibly lack of money to buy plane tickets:
1) Terrorism is largely about trying to be a big fish in a little pond (making the terrorist feel important). It's a lot easier to do when you've got a captive audience (lacking the resources to escape the situation), like most of Afghanistan.
2) America doesn't have quite so much of the mentality of "If I can't get my way, I'll blow shit up!"
That's why you're not a terrorist. :)
Remember when the big fear was bombs in sports stadiums?? or bombs in the London subways?? It doesn't matter if it actually does enough damage to notice; it only matters that it makes a big splash in the news, which IMO is what most terrorists are REALLY after -- "See, I'm a big man, I make things happen, this proves it."
Hit a couple dozen Walmarts at random, all on the same day. You don't even have to kill anyone. Now the average consumer is afraid to go shopping, and a much larger economic disruption results than shutting down air travel. And you've got news that average people can made fearful by, even if they never fly.
That was the key in hitting buildings with planes, BTW -- it put it out where "it could kill anyone!" If they'd blown up the same planes at the airport, 9/11 would have had far less effect and been far less memorable.
Exactly. :( So long as we're busy strangling ourselves, why should any terrorists be arsed to do it??
And then we'll hear, "I went to the dead-drop to swap some files, but I couldn't get near the place because it was hip-deep in copyright cops!"
Sounds like something you should cry out just as the TSA dude's hands touch your jewels.
Average terrorists don't blow up planes either. There are too many more readily-available targets that don't require putting up with a lot of boring security theatre.
Any Wal-Mart would do for a start. They're everywhere, they're essentially unguarded, and each one has a few thousand people and a whole bunch of combustables all in one handy place.
Wait, I don't see ay Wal-Marts blowing up... maybe the true answer is that there aren't actually enough terrorists to be worth worrying about, hmmm??