...makes it sound like Apple was trying to purposely avoid paying FRAND
Yes; this is because that is what they were trying to do.
Just like they never paid Xerox for thieving their original GUI ideas 25 years ago; now they wont pay Samsung for thieving their 3G ideas too. They prefer to pay lawyers instead of innovators.
One of the purposes behind the MegaUpload action was to test the ability of of the Corporate states of Americas to gag anybody who gainsays them by proving that cloud services can be disrupted if attacked hard enough.
Another of it's purposes was sexual gratification; those NSA/NRA/GOP/MPAA/RIAA thugs get a stiffy when they see this much force being applied.
And yet another was it's use for the chilling effect of 'sending a message to our enemies' (ie people who have genuinely achieved free speech).....
There were many purposes..protecting copyright probably being the least of them.
Hummm.. Cursory research reveals, not a piece of scholarly research from Harvard, but a catalogue entry for a translation of a French book written to deceive.
Basically it says that everybody who has died in a non-capitalist country for any reason other than old age was 'murdered by communism'. And then totals those deaths up; does some 'statistics' to bump that figure even higher and presents this as a 'indisputable fact' to be regurgitated by Glenn Beck and Co..
MeaCulpa.. I just saw an example of it too; it's not great.. Kind of assumes you are reporting a gmail user; doesn't seem to afford anything for the google.com domain at all. And a whois on it does not reveal any addresses apart from their DNS admin account.
Searching 'Report google.com abuse' also just turns up pages of info on how to report gmail users or malicious apps; nothing to do with the network side of things.
Apart from anything else this is a foot-shoot for Google; it means that if you have a Google controlled IP address doing bad stuff, the fastest way to get their attention will be via complaining in a public arena.. even if it is something that could be dealt with directly and without fuss.
Unfortunately vivisection is an industry; and like all industries it is trying to grow; which means spending lots and lots on positive PR(*) and excusing every experiment; however marginal it's benefit.
As with War and our Economic Slavery; Greed and the Desire to profit at the expense of others know no bounds.
(*) Hi Guys! Welcome to slashdot with your preprepared accounts; this is where you earn your PR dollar at the expense of us dumb animals.
They probably used a multi-user shared login account into the database
I suspect that 'mediareps@*' had no password and very open privileges.
Like the US diplomatic papers the idea behind this sort of Db is that it's widely and easily accessible to those 'on message' but hidden and secret to 'enemies'.
this application allowed database access without a password
Nope, it doesn't.. not unless configured by a really clueless person, or (this being Holland) by someone who really couldn't give a f**k while being mis-managed by someone determined to spend as little as possible, or hopefully less.
(disclaimer; I'm a sysadmin who runs, amongst many other things, a MySQL server + PHPmyadmin for my company in the Netherlands, I do it properly but that's only because I care, nobody has ever checked..)
But what matters here is that Google is actively working to destroy competition.
Welcome to a capitalist economy; this is what companies do..
As I noted elsewhere here, there probably is (from what I have seen) a case to answer in the advertising sphere..
But search. No. And it's not just Bing of course, there is Baidu, Ask, Yahoo, even Watson. and many more.. As a search consumer I feel fully empowered and actively use multiple products from multiple companies.
"If Sears became a monopoly, and used its position to block competitors of its own products, then I suspect there'd be a problem too."
Care to elaborate; care to explain how Sears will stop you shopping at Macy's?
The mechanisms I can see would be by buying the land and closing the stores (or closing the road to the stores, or screwing with their supply chain, or attacking them economically/legally). All of which would scream 'red flag' and be very actionable.
However; I can type 'www.bing.com' in chrome and see the full Bing experience (same for Yahoo, ask, Baidu etc), and can even do the same on ChromeOS..
I have yet to hear of Google ever interfering with other companies web crawlers or hosting. Google have never prevented me accessing the competition, in fact they have assisted me in doing so at times (or have you never seen the Chrome search selector screen?)
And Google seem to be on the receiving end of lawsuits and the manipulations of paid-for lobbyists, politicians and activists; not the originators of them.
So; I fail to see any way your analogy works. In fact it looks quite dumb and designed to only appeal to gullible people.
I'm only talking about the search/web service space here; as an advertiser they do seem to have a aggressively maintained dominance driven monopoly.. But since I think of advertisers as second-class lifeforms I really cant get very worked up about it.
"You could say the same for the Microsoft monopoly."
Nope; I really cant.. Having brought and tried my first windows machine 20 years ago It was crap; but the cost to me of changing it for a mac would have been many hundreds of dollars and a fair amount of physical effort and re-learning stuff .
The cost to me of switching web search providers is trivial; in fact a good argument can be made that people generally start with a competitor and actively switch to Google to get a better product. And equally importantly can switch back instantaneously without any cost.. and indeed can use both Google and a Competitor at the same time on the same display.
Google is one company, and can distribute it's finances any way it wishes to within the company.. Just as I distribute my personal finances as I see fit.. An so long as I meet my basic obligations (tax, fishfood, I have no debts;-) ) I can use, for instance, money I earn working as a web admin to support my private websites etc..
If using profits from one branch of a business to promote another is 'unfair' then every company that's ever expanded has done so 'unfairly'
Once you have CHOSEN to go to the Google webspace then yes, you will see the whole Google portfolio; nothing wrong with that, you would not expect to see Macy's products advertised on Sears would you?
bing - four characters google - six characters
People take extra effort to use google; they actively select it. If you install windows and select the default/first option everywhere you end up with bing/MS on everything. and yet: PEOPLE ACTIVELY CHOOSE GOOGLE..
They do need controlling on their advertising dominance but to claim they abuse their search position is nonsensical. (or, given the speed and pre-written nature of your response, shows that it is a claim mostly made by the paid-for muppets of their rivals.)
No, poweroff (single word) is not a word people use very frequently to describe the event of shutting down their computers. So Google search would obviously return less results (obvious provided you know the ABC of how Google search works)
BZZZT: Google search is stemmed and expanded.. so that it gets these variations ("power-off" "Power Off" etc.). But if you knew the ABC of how Google search works then you'd know that.
However; searching for 'site:bugs.launchpad.net shutdown' produces far more matches; so maybe I was hyperboling there a bit; except that most of those issues actually relate to things other than the system shutting down ('webcam continually shuts down', 'application X wont shut down', 'application Y hangs and prevents the system from shutting down', etc). So I still stand by my argument; forcing suspend as the default action is silly because it is broken very badly on most installed systems.
I agree about win7; I'm Fedora based at work but run Win7 in KVM on the system; if it would suspend/resume properly it would make my life a lot easier. As for Apple devices; I should bl**dy well hope it works given the integration between iOSx and the hardware.
As a relative measure of the popularity of 'suspend' in kernel bug reports vs that of 'poweroff' I stand by this; It IS a real-world measure of the prevalence of defects related to suspend as compared to poweroff. Users DO have far more problems with suspending their machines than with powering them off. Poweroff should be the default; with suspend being an option users can enable in the unlikely event it works.
I'm not bothered by the fact is it changing (in fact I love it) or by the trade-offs (I dont see many anyway).
It's the dork defaults that I hate; starting with the hidden poweroff feature(*) and application switchers where users actually want application launchers.
(*) Dont tell me to use suspend; I have 3 current machines, with three industry-standard chipsets, none of them suspend then resume properly; neither did my previous thinkpad.. Suspend in Linux is basically broken at the kernel level for many common chipsets, and has been for years. It's obviously really obscure and hardware dependent, nobody knows how to fix it so the bugs get talked down in severity then marked 'wontfix'. Basically: Any Gnome 3 defender who assumes suspend works for everyone is a ludicrous fantasist; try the following google search: "site:bugs.launchpad.net suspend" and note how many results there are; half a million! FFS.. Now try the same for poweroff; under 8 thousand.
It's the way the Gnome3 devs are all working against each other that really sucks.
You have a half-incomplete tablet UI allied to a half-incomplete laptop UI both of which get on the tits of desktop users; - and my feeling of 'at least they are going somewhere different and interesting' has evaporated now I see Gnome 3.2 is identical to 3,0 in every single cockup. Only one of the real UI problems has been addressed; and more ill-considered and contradictory decisions have been imposed on us.
I've never understood why we are so damn eager to extract more substances from the Earth.
It's because capitalism is a one way process; it's not a system.(*)
It takes a finite resource (such as oil reserves, or coal, or iron) which belongs to all of us (we all share one planet) and assigns it to an owner (generally via opaque means rooted in corruption, even in the US). This owner then exploits it to produce a profit. Some of which might come back to us but most of which is shared out amongst an elite as part of their ongoing petty powergames. This is the same elite who have shaped our society for several hundred years now to believe that making profit is an unquestionable good and that growth is something that can happen infinitely.
The damn eagerness is just the effect of long-term greed; and while profit is king this process will continue until all the natural resources are depleted, and the human population falls or otherwise adapts to the level which renewable supplies can accommodate.
But I doubt if many come here for a lecture on Marxism.
(*) Economics, on the other hand, IS a system. - Capitalism is the dominant processes that currently operates in the economic system. Without a counterprocess to resupply it, however, it will inevitably run down as it's resources run out.
Circuits; code; cars.. they can -all- be reduced to a series of mathematical functions. But that means nothing and does not make them worthy of being patentable. Patents should only protect the big ideas; ideas such as making transistors on silicon; making wheels with inflated pneumatic tubes on them, using a quartz crystals to make tuned circuits (to use some very old examples).
The reason is that 99.9% of our modern 'patents' do not represent any real innovation; they only represent iteration; finding different ways to do something that has been thought of already. The top level ideas are the innovative steps that deserve to be patented; very little else is.
Eg; consider the concept of a patent on: 'this is how to search a relational database'. In reality the only two patentable ideas there are the originals of 1) a relational database and 2) searching a database; everything else, each stepwise 'improvement' on them is just an iterative step that maybe deserves copyright protection, but nothing more.
if next time you walked Walmart you were required to give them your birth certificate to verify your identity
Oh? has it stopped being a requirement to show ID when using plastic, or buying alcohol/firearms? It's many years since I went in such a place (ie. the USA) so I don't know how things are still being done your side of the pond. But if American shops and bars no longer routinely ask for ID then things have certainly come on a lot since I was there last. Because when I was there last my east German colleagues used to joke about how they were asked for their ID more often in the US than they ever were in the GDR.
Slashdot Mirror
...makes it sound like Apple was trying to purposely avoid paying FRAND
Yes; this is because that is what they were trying to do.
Just like they never paid Xerox for thieving their original GUI ideas 25 years ago; now they wont pay Samsung for thieving their 3G ideas too. They prefer to pay lawyers instead of innovators.
One of the purposes behind the MegaUpload action was to test the ability of of the Corporate states of Americas to gag anybody who gainsays them by proving that cloud services can be disrupted if attacked hard enough.
Another of it's purposes was sexual gratification; those NSA/NRA/GOP/MPAA/RIAA thugs get a stiffy when they see this much force being applied.
And yet another was it's use for the chilling effect of 'sending a message to our enemies' (ie people who have genuinely achieved free speech) .....
There were many purposes..protecting copyright probably being the least of them.
Sheesh. You and other sheeple will have no choice, but the rest of us will be just fine.
In the last 100 years, Communism killed about 100,000,000 people.
Hummm.. Cursory research reveals, not a piece of scholarly research from Harvard, but a catalogue entry for a translation of a French book written to deceive.
Basically it says that everybody who has died in a non-capitalist country for any reason other than old age was 'murdered by communism'. And then totals those deaths up; does some 'statistics' to bump that figure even higher and presents this as a 'indisputable fact' to be regurgitated by Glenn Beck and Co..
MeaCulpa.. I just saw an example of it too; it's not great.. Kind of assumes you are reporting a gmail user; doesn't seem to afford anything for the google.com domain at all. And a whois on it does not reveal any addresses apart from their DNS admin account.
Searching 'Report google.com abuse' also just turns up pages of info on how to report gmail users or malicious apps; nothing to do with the network side of things.
Apart from anything else this is a foot-shoot for Google; it means that if you have a Google controlled IP address doing bad stuff, the fastest way to get their attention will be via complaining in a public arena.. even if it is something that could be dealt with directly and without fuss.
I have no opinion about this.
Really; so you can confirm you are not the anonymous submitter of it then?
Is that a form letter with the correct contact addresses and url's in it by any chance?
Just askin...
A dictionary will give you a good definition too; and rather less manipulated by either side.
eg: merriam-webster
I certainly intended it in the 'broad' sense of: causing harm to animals in a scientific context.
Unfortunately vivisection is an industry; and like all industries it is trying to grow; which means spending lots and lots on positive PR(*) and excusing every experiment; however marginal it's benefit.
As with War and our Economic Slavery; Greed and the Desire to profit at the expense of others know no bounds.
(*) Hi Guys! Welcome to slashdot with your preprepared accounts; this is where you earn your PR dollar at the expense of us dumb animals.
They probably used a multi-user shared login account into the database
I suspect that 'mediareps@*' had no password and very open privileges.
Like the US diplomatic papers the idea behind this sort of Db is that it's widely and easily accessible to those 'on message' but hidden and secret to 'enemies'.
this application allowed database access without a password
Nope, it doesn't.. not unless configured by a really clueless person, or (this being Holland) by someone who really couldn't give a f**k while being mis-managed by someone determined to spend as little as possible, or hopefully less.
(disclaimer; I'm a sysadmin who runs, amongst many other things, a MySQL server + PHPmyadmin for my company in the Netherlands, I do it properly but that's only because I care, nobody has ever checked..)
But what matters here is that Google is actively working to destroy competition.
Welcome to a capitalist economy; this is what companies do..
As I noted elsewhere here, there probably is (from what I have seen) a case to answer in the advertising sphere..
But search. No. And it's not just Bing of course, there is Baidu, Ask, Yahoo, even Watson. and many more.. As a search consumer I feel fully empowered and actively use multiple products from multiple companies.
"If Sears became a monopoly, and used its position to block competitors of its own products, then I suspect there'd be a problem too."
Care to elaborate; care to explain how Sears will stop you shopping at Macy's?
The mechanisms I can see would be by buying the land and closing the stores (or closing the road to the stores, or screwing with their supply chain, or attacking them economically/legally). All of which would scream 'red flag' and be very actionable.
However; I can type 'www.bing.com' in chrome and see the full Bing experience (same for Yahoo, ask, Baidu etc), and can even do the same on ChromeOS..
I have yet to hear of Google ever interfering with other companies web crawlers or hosting. Google have never prevented me accessing the competition, in fact they have assisted me in doing so at times (or have you never seen the Chrome search selector screen?)
And Google seem to be on the receiving end of lawsuits and the manipulations of paid-for lobbyists, politicians and activists; not the originators of them.
So; I fail to see any way your analogy works. In fact it looks quite dumb and designed to only appeal to gullible people.
I'm only talking about the search/web service space here; as an advertiser they do seem to have a aggressively maintained dominance driven monopoly.. But since I think of advertisers as second-class lifeforms I really cant get very worked up about it.
"You could say the same for the Microsoft monopoly."
Nope; I really cant.. Having brought and tried my first windows machine 20 years ago It was crap; but the cost to me of changing it for a mac would have been many hundreds of dollars and a fair amount of physical effort and re-learning stuff .
The cost to me of switching web search providers is trivial; in fact a good argument can be made that people generally start with a competitor and actively switch to Google to get a better product. And equally importantly can switch back instantaneously without any cost.. and indeed can use both Google and a Competitor at the same time on the same display.
Google is one company, and can distribute it's finances any way it wishes to within the company.. Just as I distribute my personal finances as I see fit.. An so long as I meet my basic obligations (tax, fishfood, I have no debts ;-) ) I can use, for instance, money I earn working as a web admin to support my private websites etc..
If using profits from one branch of a business to promote another is 'unfair' then every company that's ever expanded has done so 'unfairly'
Oh; stop talking out of your arse.
Once you have CHOSEN to go to the Google webspace then yes, you will see the whole Google portfolio; nothing wrong with that, you would not expect to see Macy's products advertised on Sears would you?
bing - four characters
google - six characters
People take extra effort to use google; they actively select it. If you install windows and select the default/first option everywhere you end up with bing/MS on everything. and yet: PEOPLE ACTIVELY CHOOSE GOOGLE..
They do need controlling on their advertising dominance but to claim they abuse their search position is nonsensical. (or, given the speed and pre-written nature of your response, shows that it is a claim mostly made by the paid-for muppets of their rivals.)
No, poweroff (single word) is not a word people use very frequently to describe the event of shutting down their computers. So Google search would obviously return less results (obvious provided you know the ABC of how Google search works)
BZZZT: Google search is stemmed and expanded.. so that it gets these variations ("power-off" "Power Off" etc.). But if you knew the ABC of how Google search works then you'd know that.
However; searching for 'site:bugs.launchpad.net shutdown' produces far more matches; so maybe I was hyperboling there a bit; except that most of those issues actually relate to things other than the system shutting down ('webcam continually shuts down', 'application X wont shut down', 'application Y hangs and prevents the system from shutting down', etc). So I still stand by my argument; forcing suspend as the default action is silly because it is broken very badly on most installed systems.
I agree about win7; I'm Fedora based at work but run Win7 in KVM on the system; if it would suspend/resume properly it would make my life a lot easier. As for Apple devices; I should bl**dy well hope it works given the integration between iOSx and the hardware.
As a relative measure of the popularity of 'suspend' in kernel bug reports vs that of 'poweroff' I stand by this; It IS a real-world measure of the prevalence of defects related to suspend as compared to poweroff. Users DO have far more problems with suspending their machines than with powering them off. Poweroff should be the default; with suspend being an option users can enable in the unlikely event it works.
See the post from Sancho below..
I'm not bothered by the fact is it changing (in fact I love it) or by the trade-offs (I dont see many anyway).
It's the dork defaults that I hate; starting with the hidden poweroff feature(*) and application switchers where users actually want application launchers.
(*) Dont tell me to use suspend; I have 3 current machines, with three industry-standard chipsets, none of them suspend then resume properly; neither did my previous thinkpad.. Suspend in Linux is basically broken at the kernel level for many common chipsets, and has been for years. It's obviously really obscure and hardware dependent, nobody knows how to fix it so the bugs get talked down in severity then marked 'wontfix'.
Basically: Any Gnome 3 defender who assumes suspend works for everyone is a ludicrous fantasist; try the following google search: "site:bugs.launchpad.net suspend" and note how many results there are; half a million! FFS.. Now try the same for poweroff; under 8 thousand.
It's the way the Gnome3 devs are all working against each other that really sucks.
You have a half-incomplete tablet UI allied to a half-incomplete laptop UI both of which get on the tits of desktop users;
- and my feeling of 'at least they are going somewhere different and interesting' has evaporated now I see Gnome 3.2 is identical to 3,0 in every single cockup. Only one of the real UI problems has been addressed; and more ill-considered and contradictory decisions have been imposed on us.
I've never understood why we are so damn eager to extract more substances from the Earth.
It's because capitalism is a one way process; it's not a system.(*)
It takes a finite resource (such as oil reserves, or coal, or iron) which belongs to all of us (we all share one planet) and assigns it to an owner (generally via opaque means rooted in corruption, even in the US). This owner then exploits it to produce a profit. Some of which might come back to us but most of which is shared out amongst an elite as part of their ongoing petty powergames. This is the same elite who have shaped our society for several hundred years now to believe that making profit is an unquestionable good and that growth is something that can happen infinitely.
The damn eagerness is just the effect of long-term greed; and while profit is king this process will continue until all the natural resources are depleted, and the human population falls or otherwise adapts to the level which renewable supplies can accommodate.
But I doubt if many come here for a lecture on Marxism.
(*) Economics, on the other hand, IS a system.
- Capitalism is the dominant processes that currently operates in the economic system. Without a counterprocess to resupply it, however, it will inevitably run down as it's resources run out.
Circuits; code; cars.. they can -all- be reduced to a series of mathematical functions. But that means nothing and does not make them worthy of being patentable. Patents should only protect the big ideas; ideas such as making transistors on silicon; making wheels with inflated pneumatic tubes on them, using a quartz crystals to make tuned circuits (to use some very old examples).
The reason is that 99.9% of our modern 'patents' do not represent any real innovation; they only represent iteration; finding different ways to do something that has been thought of already. The top level ideas are the innovative steps that deserve to be patented; very little else is.
Eg; consider the concept of a patent on: 'this is how to search a relational database'. In reality the only two patentable ideas there are the originals of 1) a relational database and 2) searching a database; everything else, each stepwise 'improvement' on them is just an iterative step that maybe deserves copyright protection, but nothing more.
"What is the EU going to do if they merge in the US, prevent the new merged company from doing any business in the EU?"
DOH! Yes; Precisely that.
Isolationism does not just mean saying 'Fuck You' to your neighbors; It also means they shrug and say 'Fuck You Too' right back.
if next time you walked Walmart you were required to give them your birth certificate to verify your identity
Oh? has it stopped being a requirement to show ID when using plastic, or buying alcohol/firearms? It's many years since I went in such a place (ie. the USA) so I don't know how things are still being done your side of the pond. But if American shops and bars no longer routinely ask for ID then things have certainly come on a lot since I was there last. Because when I was there last my east German colleagues used to joke about how they were asked for their ID more often in the US than they ever were in the GDR.