Ruining someone's ranking because they are just an adfarm is ruining their ranking for good reason, though. Google does not guarantee rankings to advertisers and definitely not to indexed sites. They have a quality control mechanism in place for good reason: shit sites cost them (and their legit advertisers) users.
Bing is #3 for that search on Google. Maybe Google should be suing Microsoft for intentionally lowering its links in results... but then, there's Hanlon's Razor.
That's not prescriptive. It's proscriptive. You can make things illegal, but you can't control what people do when it's otherwise legal. Welcome to the common law.
Prohibitions on child porn and such are not stating what the content should be. They are proscribing what it can be. It can't be kiddie porn. It can't be a Ponzi scheme or fraud. It can't be credible death threats. Those are forbidden and illegal.
Outside of those proscriptions, it could be anything. You can't tell me what to return, just what not to. This is not Roman law. What is not forbidden under the common law is allowed.
As for Google ranking someone higher or lower because their site is great or their site sucks, that's editorial decision. That's covered under the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Child porn and Ponzi schemes are not protected speech. Search rankings are.
I think the plaintiffs have to prove their sites deserve those ranking positions they want and are being denied them maliciously. Being a competitor and getting a low search result ranking are correlative data points. They need to prove motive here, that one caused the other.
Those are going to be difficult things to prove when Amazon, Dogpile, Altavista, Bing, eBay, NewEgg, and Pricewatch and such show up well in different categories and they are much bigger competitors to Google's search than these companies nobody knows.
Hell, if you type "search engine" into Google right now, the unpaid search results on the first page are:
Dogpile
Altavista
Bing
Wikipedia's article on search engines
Ask
Google Custom Search Engine
DuckDuckGo
MetaCrawler
Lycos
Yahoo!
Google's little "news for..." blurb
Google's "books for..." blurb
The only "search engine" sponsored ad I got (these rotate, so YMMV) was Bing. Then I got two SEO companies for the "related search engine ranking" section for extra ads to fill the column up a bit.
The problem is people used antitrust to mess with Microsoft's business because Microsoft was using their market power to mess with other companies' business.
Google may be doing the same thing. If the allegations are actually coming from Microsoft I'd lean toward believing that it's all a Microsoft antitrust violation to accuse Google of one and interfere with Google's business. That's especially true if Microsoft is using its market power or cash bribes to get other people to make the allegations on its behalf.
I hope Google's not doing what is claimed, not because I want to be sand in Microsoft's shorts but because I want Google to be returning honest results. If they are being anticompetitive at their size and think they can get away with it, then I hope they get busted for it no matter who makes the allegations.
There are limited ads and search results on each Google page, with the ones nearer the top being more valuable. There are a limited number of page views (people rarely look at more than three pages of search results, and often only one), and ads or search results that show up on earlier pages are worth more.
If you sell or give a better slot to a noncompetitor (especially for less money) than to competitor simply because of their relationship to you, that's anticompetitive.
Charging whitebox PC vendors for MS OSes on every box they sell regardless of what OS actually ships on a given PC, so that the whitebox vendors can't afford to preload anyone else's (for example IBM's) OS is kind of an attack by proxy. They were bullying the PC vendors to fight IBM for them.
Per the article it's not nearly as biological as "plant-inspired" makes it sound.
They are using the photovoltaic effect to generate electricity on some set of proteins. Then carbon nanotubes conduct the electricity from the proteins to a common circuit. They are using phospholipids (whatever phospholipids are) along with the nanotubes to coerce proper alignment between the nanotubes and the proteins in the photovoltaic reaction sites.
The combination works pretty well (40% efficiency with sparsely populated functional structures in the solution for the prototype) until it starts to break down. The inspiration from plants is mainly that they can introduce a substance (a surfactant more specifically, although the blurb doesn't specify which) that breaks the stuff down fast, then filter the surfactant out through a membrane and the working portion self-assembles again at full efficiency.
It's this repeatable self-assembly that was biologically inspired, and it's probably necessary for high-efficiency photovoltaic solar cells since pretty much everything more efficient than silicon does break down over time. By not just accounting for the breakdown, but doing it early and often and performing a repair phase through self-assembly, it is hoped they can have high efficiency solar cells with long lifespans.
That's gleaned from TFA, which isn't much longer than what I wrote.
Automated testing of all the applications is pretty much a nonstarter. However, automated regression testing to make sure function calls with the same arguments in the same context don't give different results just because you debugged a different set of arguments or in a different environment are easy to do with a proper test harness. The hard part is mapping the applications to test cases, but that's not impossible, just time consuming and somewhat difficult.
ARM is one good example of a British tech company, but that's not a global market domination trend.
ARM doesn't really sell their tech. They license it to other parties who sell chips based on it in devices from the US, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China.
If ARM was suddenly to displace Texas Instruments, Freescale, Intel, AMD, Hitachi, Siemens, and the other competition in the embedded and mobile spaces, it certainly wouldn't be because of British music, either. It'd be because chips based on ARM's core designs fit a lot of processing power into a smallish footprint for a small power and money budget.
I can play music, British or not, on an OMAP, an Atom, a Neo, or an MPC-series. For that matter, I can do it on a Core, a Phenom, a POWER, or a Sparc.
ARM is an impressive company, but if I want to be really impressed by a British industry, I'll look at insurance, banking, securities trading, shipbuilding, textiles, or tabloid press.
Yeah I've heard of Tim Berners-Lee. That's the British guy who went to Switzerland where he rehashed hypertext, threw together a language for it from a degenerate subset of SGML, and started pushing it out over a stateless single-transaction protocol.
All of this he did on a computer and operating system developed by NeXT, which was a US company. NeXT's computer and OS were based around a Motorola (US company) chip and the American Telephone and Telegraph Unix OS. He did the development in Objective C, which was developed by the US company StepStone and then bought by NeXT. Objective C is based on C, which was developed at Bell Labs (a branch at the time of AT&T) along with Unix.
The UK has plenty of history (some recent) of great technical geniuses and achievements. Decent radar, the Bombe computer system, Alan Turing, Ada Byron Lovelace, Charles Babbage, ARM, the BBC Micro, Acorn, Psion, the guys making the PsiXpda in the spirit of the old Psion systems, and of course more.
Berners-Lee based his WorldWideWeb on the US's Internet technology. Telnet, NNTP, SMTP, Archie, Gopher, WAIS, and lots of software for using them already existed. Most of that was developed in the US. Many forum programs and BBSes ran all around the world before WorldWideWeb was developed. Some were on the Internet and some on other networks (including multi-node dial-in BBSes, also invented in the US).
The original WorldWideWeb was designed as a static publication and document retrieval system with no dynamically generated content.
The Common Gateway Interface was developed in the US at the NCSA at the University of Illinois. The first graphical browser was developed at the NCSA. The Perl programming language, which Slashdot's code is written in, was developed originally by an American. Slashdot was founded by an American, and is owned by an American company.
I think your statement is interesting, but what part of Slashdot is bringing the UK fortune and power in the world because Berners-Lee happened to grow up in the UK and went to Oxford?
Of course you do realize most of what ARM sells is licenses for other people to build chips around their IP. If ARM took over the whole mobile and embedded space tomorrow from Freescale, Intel, AMD, Via, Infine... I mean Intel, Siemens, and Texas Instruments, someone else would still be building most of the chips and selling most of the devices.
Also, if ARM took over the world tomorrow, it wouldn't be because British music dragged it there. It would be because it's a physically small core with performance for the money and per watt.
Of course there's not much common sense involved. HE's talking about British tech companies ruling the world, and on the backs of British music at that.
Pray tell, what is the biggest British-designed selling computer at the moment? The PsiXpda?
How about CE equipment? Sure, there's Chord and Cello. There are parts companies like Electronic Micro Systems. Companies from other countries make some of their stuff there for the UK market.
Is it really going to take off and take over Siemens, JVC-Kenwood, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Sony, Garmin, Sharp, Samsung, LG, Alpine, Kicker, Polk Audio, Bose, Denon, Bang & Olufsen, Apple, Nintendo, Gateway, Dell, HP, RIM, AMD, Intel, NVidia, Hitachi, Microsoft, Nokia, Daewoo, and all the other companies in the US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China for consumer electronics tech? Based on selling British music with British devices (which I'm guessing would need to be a proprietary format to enforce using only certain products from certain companies)?
Oh, make no mistake. Most of the actual artists still do make more money touring than selling albums. Their labels make the money on the albums, almost all of it, until the artists are very big names with clout to bargain.
A Brit pop starlet on every tabloid cover and a Psion Series 5 on every palm!
Damn, the British probably need a technology company that sells their own tech if they plan to do something about making it number one. I don't think it'll help in quite the way they plan if their "tech companies" are just reselling stuff from the US, Canada, Norway, Finland, Germany, Japan, China, and Taiwan.
I just skimmed both articles. It seems like they have submitted new data and analysis from the same long-running study. We'll need further analysis and a peer review cycle to be sure whether or not it qualifies as an actual dupe.
Well, you completely skipped over OS/2 and the intentional screwing of IBM on OS/2 and Windows 95 incompatibility. You didn't mention Microsoft dropping or threatening to drop reseller licensing for white box shops that installed any OS other than DOS or Windows. You didn't mention MS charging a license fee for every white box system sold by resellers, forcing them to charge for both Windows and some other OS if they preinstalled some other OS.
You didn't Microsoft funding SCO in their FUD campaign against Linux or Microsoft's own FUD against Linux. You didn't mention the almost 300 patents Microsoft claims are infringed by open source software -- patents it refuses to name and alleged infringements it refuses to cite.
You didn't Microsoft basically saving Apple by buying stock and putting out Office on Mac.
You didn't mention trying to subvert the Unix market by claiming POSIX compliance for NT even though it was a horrible hack of a compatibility layer that separated programs into "Windows programs" and "POSIX subsystem programs" that couldn't really interoperate through the OS.
You didn't mention Microsoft putting out office software that is tied to a multitude of undocumented OS calls it wouldn't give the competition the chance to use.
There's no mention in your post of stealing the Stacker technology for DoubleSpace disk compression.
Where's the information about Microsoft creating frameworks for their own OS that are targeted by their development tools but not documented well enough for Watcom, Borland, Portland Compiler Group, and others to target?
Do you really think Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook pushed out WordStar, WordPerfect. Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, Groupwise, Notes, and all the other competitive software on merit alone?
Listen up. If you think I've just "walked into" Slashdot, then you've not been paying much attention. The guy called me a liar, whether his tongue was in cheek or not. I guess you missed that post.
Also, I guess you missed the fact that a few tens of thousands of people took the opportunity to "walk into" Slashdot after I did and before you did.
Also, you obviously can't count to a hundred or are terrible at hyperbole. And if you think listing bluegrass and country earn "hip" points on Slashdot, I think you're a bit out of touch with your own geek community.
If you're such a geek, perhaps you should realize that "douche" is not a proper noun.
You're right it's not a troll, but obviously you don't know why it isn't. You see, a "troll" is something that casts widely waiting for someone to bite, like trolling for fish. You had a specific target, which makes your post flamebait. A real geek would know the difference.
These weren't copies of some man's creative work of fishes. They were fish. They came from the natural world. It's like saying that farmers can't raise food from seed.
Once again, if they take Jesus to be their God and God created the plants and animals in the first place, it wouldn't exactly be copyright infringement to copy his own intellectual creation. Convenient how you just responded to the part of the post in which that point wasn't made already.
You forget that Jesus was the son of God (or God himself, or a part of God himself, or some combination depending on who you ask) and that the IP on plants and animals belong to God.;-)
Besides, people gave Jesus the loaves and fishes. He made copies of his own loaves and fishes, not copies of someone else's.
Right and left in the US is a false dichotomy promoted by the two major parties. They both want to control what you do and to grow the government. It's just that one wants to grow it a little slower than the other, and has different priorities for which actions of yours to control.
The real differences in parties are among the smaller parties, but the Demolicans and the Republocrats keep reinforcing themselves and each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruining someone's ranking because they are just an adfarm is ruining their ranking for good reason, though. Google does not guarantee rankings to advertisers and definitely not to indexed sites. They have a quality control mechanism in place for good reason: shit sites cost them (and their legit advertisers) users.
Bing is #3 for that search on Google. Maybe Google should be suing Microsoft for intentionally lowering its links in results... but then, there's Hanlon's Razor.
That's not prescriptive. It's proscriptive. You can make things illegal, but you can't control what people do when it's otherwise legal. Welcome to the common law.
What results here are illegal, though?
Prohibitions on child porn and such are not stating what the content should be. They are proscribing what it can be. It can't be kiddie porn. It can't be a Ponzi scheme or fraud. It can't be credible death threats. Those are forbidden and illegal.
Outside of those proscriptions, it could be anything. You can't tell me what to return, just what not to. This is not Roman law. What is not forbidden under the common law is allowed.
As for Google ranking someone higher or lower because their site is great or their site sucks, that's editorial decision. That's covered under the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Child porn and Ponzi schemes are not protected speech. Search rankings are.
I think the plaintiffs have to prove their sites deserve those ranking positions they want and are being denied them maliciously. Being a competitor and getting a low search result ranking are correlative data points. They need to prove motive here, that one caused the other.
Those are going to be difficult things to prove when Amazon, Dogpile, Altavista, Bing, eBay, NewEgg, and Pricewatch and such show up well in different categories and they are much bigger competitors to Google's search than these companies nobody knows.
Hell, if you type "search engine" into Google right now, the unpaid search results on the first page are:
The only "search engine" sponsored ad I got (these rotate, so YMMV) was Bing. Then I got two SEO companies for the "related search engine ranking" section for extra ads to fill the column up a bit.
The problem is people used antitrust to mess with Microsoft's business because Microsoft was using their market power to mess with other companies' business.
Google may be doing the same thing. If the allegations are actually coming from Microsoft I'd lean toward believing that it's all a Microsoft antitrust violation to accuse Google of one and interfere with Google's business. That's especially true if Microsoft is using its market power or cash bribes to get other people to make the allegations on its behalf.
I hope Google's not doing what is claimed, not because I want to be sand in Microsoft's shorts but because I want Google to be returning honest results. If they are being anticompetitive at their size and think they can get away with it, then I hope they get busted for it no matter who makes the allegations.
There are limited ads and search results on each Google page, with the ones nearer the top being more valuable. There are a limited number of page views (people rarely look at more than three pages of search results, and often only one), and ads or search results that show up on earlier pages are worth more.
If you sell or give a better slot to a noncompetitor (especially for less money) than to competitor simply because of their relationship to you, that's anticompetitive.
Charging whitebox PC vendors for MS OSes on every box they sell regardless of what OS actually ships on a given PC, so that the whitebox vendors can't afford to preload anyone else's (for example IBM's) OS is kind of an attack by proxy. They were bullying the PC vendors to fight IBM for them.
Per the article it's not nearly as biological as "plant-inspired" makes it sound.
They are using the photovoltaic effect to generate electricity on some set of proteins. Then carbon nanotubes conduct the electricity from the proteins to a common circuit. They are using phospholipids (whatever phospholipids are) along with the nanotubes to coerce proper alignment between the nanotubes and the proteins in the photovoltaic reaction sites.
The combination works pretty well (40% efficiency with sparsely populated functional structures in the solution for the prototype) until it starts to break down. The inspiration from plants is mainly that they can introduce a substance (a surfactant more specifically, although the blurb doesn't specify which) that breaks the stuff down fast, then filter the surfactant out through a membrane and the working portion self-assembles again at full efficiency.
It's this repeatable self-assembly that was biologically inspired, and it's probably necessary for high-efficiency photovoltaic solar cells since pretty much everything more efficient than silicon does break down over time. By not just accounting for the breakdown, but doing it early and often and performing a repair phase through self-assembly, it is hoped they can have high efficiency solar cells with long lifespans.
That's gleaned from TFA, which isn't much longer than what I wrote.
Automated testing of all the applications is pretty much a nonstarter. However, automated regression testing to make sure function calls with the same arguments in the same context don't give different results just because you debugged a different set of arguments or in a different environment are easy to do with a proper test harness. The hard part is mapping the applications to test cases, but that's not impossible, just time consuming and somewhat difficult.
ARM is one good example of a British tech company, but that's not a global market domination trend.
ARM doesn't really sell their tech. They license it to other parties who sell chips based on it in devices from the US, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China.
If ARM was suddenly to displace Texas Instruments, Freescale, Intel, AMD, Hitachi, Siemens, and the other competition in the embedded and mobile spaces, it certainly wouldn't be because of British music, either. It'd be because chips based on ARM's core designs fit a lot of processing power into a smallish footprint for a small power and money budget.
I can play music, British or not, on an OMAP, an Atom, a Neo, or an MPC-series. For that matter, I can do it on a Core, a Phenom, a POWER, or a Sparc.
ARM is an impressive company, but if I want to be really impressed by a British industry, I'll look at insurance, banking, securities trading, shipbuilding, textiles, or tabloid press.
Yeah I've heard of Tim Berners-Lee. That's the British guy who went to Switzerland where he rehashed hypertext, threw together a language for it from a degenerate subset of SGML, and started pushing it out over a stateless single-transaction protocol.
All of this he did on a computer and operating system developed by NeXT, which was a US company. NeXT's computer and OS were based around a Motorola (US company) chip and the American Telephone and Telegraph Unix OS. He did the development in Objective C, which was developed by the US company StepStone and then bought by NeXT. Objective C is based on C, which was developed at Bell Labs (a branch at the time of AT&T) along with Unix.
The UK has plenty of history (some recent) of great technical geniuses and achievements. Decent radar, the Bombe computer system, Alan Turing, Ada Byron Lovelace, Charles Babbage, ARM, the BBC Micro, Acorn, Psion, the guys making the PsiXpda in the spirit of the old Psion systems, and of course more.
Berners-Lee based his WorldWideWeb on the US's Internet technology. Telnet, NNTP, SMTP, Archie, Gopher, WAIS, and lots of software for using them already existed. Most of that was developed in the US. Many forum programs and BBSes ran all around the world before WorldWideWeb was developed. Some were on the Internet and some on other networks (including multi-node dial-in BBSes, also invented in the US).
The original WorldWideWeb was designed as a static publication and document retrieval system with no dynamically generated content.
The Common Gateway Interface was developed in the US at the NCSA at the University of Illinois. The first graphical browser was developed at the NCSA. The Perl programming language, which Slashdot's code is written in, was developed originally by an American. Slashdot was founded by an American, and is owned by an American company.
I think your statement is interesting, but what part of Slashdot is bringing the UK fortune and power in the world because Berners-Lee happened to grow up in the UK and went to Oxford?
That's one good example.
Of course you do realize most of what ARM sells is licenses for other people to build chips around their IP. If ARM took over the whole mobile and embedded space tomorrow from Freescale, Intel, AMD, Via, Infine... I mean Intel, Siemens, and Texas Instruments, someone else would still be building most of the chips and selling most of the devices.
Also, if ARM took over the world tomorrow, it wouldn't be because British music dragged it there. It would be because it's a physically small core with performance for the money and per watt.
Of course there's not much common sense involved. HE's talking about British tech companies ruling the world, and on the backs of British music at that.
Pray tell, what is the biggest British-designed selling computer at the moment? The PsiXpda?
How about CE equipment? Sure, there's Chord and Cello. There are parts companies like Electronic Micro Systems. Companies from other countries make some of their stuff there for the UK market.
Is it really going to take off and take over Siemens, JVC-Kenwood, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Sony, Garmin, Sharp, Samsung, LG, Alpine, Kicker, Polk Audio, Bose, Denon, Bang & Olufsen, Apple, Nintendo, Gateway, Dell, HP, RIM, AMD, Intel, NVidia, Hitachi, Microsoft, Nokia, Daewoo, and all the other companies in the US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China for consumer electronics tech? Based on selling British music with British devices (which I'm guessing would need to be a proprietary format to enforce using only certain products from certain companies)?
Oh, make no mistake. Most of the actual artists still do make more money touring than selling albums. Their labels make the money on the albums, almost all of it, until the artists are very big names with clout to bargain.
A Brit pop starlet on every tabloid cover and a Psion Series 5 on every palm!
Damn, the British probably need a technology company that sells their own tech if they plan to do something about making it number one. I don't think it'll help in quite the way they plan if their "tech companies" are just reselling stuff from the US, Canada, Norway, Finland, Germany, Japan, China, and Taiwan.
I just skimmed both articles. It seems like they have submitted new data and analysis from the same long-running study. We'll need further analysis and a peer review cycle to be sure whether or not it qualifies as an actual dupe.
Steve Jobs is gonna be cross with you.
I miss playing Tetris during the installation on the system getting the installation done. It's a real shame Caldera went evil.
Well, you completely skipped over OS/2 and the intentional screwing of IBM on OS/2 and Windows 95 incompatibility. You didn't mention Microsoft dropping or threatening to drop reseller licensing for white box shops that installed any OS other than DOS or Windows. You didn't mention MS charging a license fee for every white box system sold by resellers, forcing them to charge for both Windows and some other OS if they preinstalled some other OS.
You didn't Microsoft funding SCO in their FUD campaign against Linux or Microsoft's own FUD against Linux. You didn't mention the almost 300 patents Microsoft claims are infringed by open source software -- patents it refuses to name and alleged infringements it refuses to cite.
You didn't Microsoft basically saving Apple by buying stock and putting out Office on Mac.
You didn't mention trying to subvert the Unix market by claiming POSIX compliance for NT even though it was a horrible hack of a compatibility layer that separated programs into "Windows programs" and "POSIX subsystem programs" that couldn't really interoperate through the OS.
You didn't mention Microsoft putting out office software that is tied to a multitude of undocumented OS calls it wouldn't give the competition the chance to use.
There's no mention in your post of stealing the Stacker technology for DoubleSpace disk compression.
Where's the information about Microsoft creating frameworks for their own OS that are targeted by their development tools but not documented well enough for Watcom, Borland, Portland Compiler Group, and others to target?
Do you really think Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook pushed out WordStar, WordPerfect. Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, Groupwise, Notes, and all the other competitive software on merit alone?
Listen up. If you think I've just "walked into" Slashdot, then you've not been paying much attention. The guy called me a liar, whether his tongue was in cheek or not. I guess you missed that post.
Also, I guess you missed the fact that a few tens of thousands of people took the opportunity to "walk into" Slashdot after I did and before you did.
Also, you obviously can't count to a hundred or are terrible at hyperbole. And if you think listing bluegrass and country earn "hip" points on Slashdot, I think you're a bit out of touch with your own geek community.
If you're such a geek, perhaps you should realize that "douche" is not a proper noun.
You're right it's not a troll, but obviously you don't know why it isn't. You see, a "troll" is something that casts widely waiting for someone to bite, like trolling for fish. You had a specific target, which makes your post flamebait. A real geek would know the difference.
Now hand in your card.
These weren't copies of some man's creative work of fishes. They were fish. They came from the natural world. It's like saying that farmers can't raise food from seed.
Once again, if they take Jesus to be their God and God created the plants and animals in the first place, it wouldn't exactly be copyright infringement to copy his own intellectual creation. Convenient how you just responded to the part of the post in which that point wasn't made already.
You forget that Jesus was the son of God (or God himself, or a part of God himself, or some combination depending on who you ask) and that the IP on plants and animals belong to God. ;-)
Besides, people gave Jesus the loaves and fishes. He made copies of his own loaves and fishes, not copies of someone else's.
That's what TLS is for.
Right and left in the US is a false dichotomy promoted by the two major parties. They both want to control what you do and to grow the government. It's just that one wants to grow it a little slower than the other, and has different priorities for which actions of yours to control.
The real differences in parties are among the smaller parties, but the Demolicans and the Republocrats keep reinforcing themselves and each other.
I saw the joke. I just wanted to tell the story of the girl. Wouldn't you?