Would you consider it entrapment if : An accountant put an flyer in your mailbox bragging about how much money he saves people. You respond by letting him do your taxes. And you discover he's a plant for the IRS?
Ain't much different. In fact, anything they're trying on the terrorists today will be used on the gun rights nuts tomorrow. Those mod your handgun to automatic kids could just as well be sold by the ATF.
In fact, the FBI kinda started that way. Hoover initially tasked the FBI with finding stolen cars. You see, stolen cars eventually turn up, meaning they'd close a case, meaning they could brag to congress about their closed cases. Yes, that's why some many federal police forces exist today, the FBI cheated to elevate it's closed cases ratio during it' early days.
As I understand it, all Islamic terrorists arrested inside the U.S. were put up to it by the FBI.
You see, the FBI prefers to train it's own terrorists because doing so is far easier than catching the real deal, who might be dangerous, or hard to find, or worse not exist at all. Don't you feel safer with the FBI making sure there are terrorists to catch?
As I note upthread, virtually all important programming languages originated in academic-like environments, even if they are officially corporate.
There are I think two revolutionary non-academic programming languages :
- Smalltalk was developed by Xerox PARC, but ultimately created object oriented programming, which certainly used academia to gain traction.
- C was developed by AT&T, but completely revolutionized our world. It's almost surely the most important language ever written. There had been structured languages before. I think Fortran and Cobal were developed by IBM. And academia had all it's research and teaching languages. Yet, it was C that brought structured programming and type-safty to system level programming, previously dominated by assembler. Imho, const is pure genius. C could not help but succeed with or without academia, but AT&T was still a fairly academic environment at that time.
In other words, your classification of generalized academic project doesn't include either afaik, but clearly both can fall under some generalized academia. You could not design C, and maybe Smalltalk too, without thinking deeply about languages from a hybrid academic and industrial perspective. If you pursue a blind industry perspective, you create garbage like PHP or VB.
Isn't the first one that comes to mind the world wide web? CERN is definitely academia. I'd imagine many other protocols originate in academia. Any idea about SMTP, Usenet, etc.?
BSD, X11, Mach, PostgreSQL, and SSH were all explicitly academic projects.
There is also a question about what qualifies as academia beyond simply universities and government labs. Linus Torvalds started Linux while a PhD student but later landed in industry. Bjarne Stroustrup worked at AT&T Research when he started C++ but he landed at Texas A&M shortly after.
Virtually all programming languages originate in or near academia : Lisp was MIT. Python was started at CWI. Haskell. OCaml. etc. Among the non-academic languages most originate within huge organizations who's research departments start to resemble academia : Smalltalk was PARC. Fortran and Cobal were IBM. C was AT&T. Erlang was Sony. etc. Java and Perl were seemingly further from academia, but academia's influences upon them abound.
Afaik, all computational libraries used for serious numerical programming, like stock trading, computational fluid dynamics, etc., were developed in academia.
Yeah, good luck with that, either hourly execution or funding research through taxes on trading. You're rich trading houses won't even lose out, they'll simply switch gears back to hiring Yale MBA assholes with powerful families. Instead, you'll wipe out the middle tear all-quant-algo trading houses who cannot retool. All those houses business will flow back to Goldman-Sacks and Morgan-Stanley, who'll widen the spreads and take an even bigger cut.
You know, I'd love seeing all good scientists get good paying research jobs, but 'power' never allocates resources like that. Do you think the soviet union would've fallen if they had? We're infinitely better off just giving the quantitative fields the economic power directly. And instituting an enormous inheritance tax that bleeds dry the really wealthy families like the Waltons.
You missed one criticism though, the claim that HFT is a "waste of talent". I'll cover that one for ya :
Is there really such a limited supply of talent in the world? Talent is created by intellect, motivation, and experience. We may ignore experience as it's self creating. If banks hire fresh math & physics PhDs with significant programming experience for $100k plus maybe a $50k bonus, that'll just creates more motivation to study math & physics.
We're therefore left with the claim that intellect is limited supply. Is this true? Yes and no. Intellect isn't in nearly such short supply as people imagine. It's also heavily impacted by people's motivation during their youth.
Conversely, there simply isn't enough money in research for all these people. You've seen these online discussions saying : For God's sakes, please don't do a PhD in the humanities!! If advertising and finance weren't slurping up all the excess scientists, then we'd be seeing the same discouragement levied at PhDs in the sciences. And that'd be extremely bad for our society!
Ideally, we want the quantitative fields and algorithms to take over more of the traditionally "powerful" professions, encouraging young people to think more quantitatively and algorithmically, and pushing our society forward.
As an aside, do you realize that anti-semitism was heavily influenced by Jewish bankers, like the Rothschilds, refusing to finance wars when they had interests in both wars? Ain't necessarily all love & roses for those that help society progress.
There is a problem that the mainstream cloud storage options like DropBox, SkyDrive, MobileMe, Google Music, etc. all store your data unencrypted, meaning eventually the MafiAA will sue your asses based upon the media that you've archived there. Wuala encrypts documents using the document's own SHA as the symmetric key for deduplication, meaning they cannot read your documents, but any MafiAA like party can still identify your documents.
Afaik, you still need command line tools like duplicity, git-annex, and jgit for encrypted cloud storage via Amazon S3 or others. Syncany might fix this.
Imho, we need an encrypted cloud storage solution that is resistant to even traffic analysis and offer social functionality. It might resemble the following :
Layer 1. Anonymized ad serving and/or payment via digital cash systems : An advertiser gives you a coin when your app claims you've showed an ad, you anonymize that coin and give it to the hosing provider, hosting provider redeems coin with advertiser, adjusting their payout based upon the advertisers identity. Ideally, the hosting provider and advertiser shouldn't be able to trace their relationship to you unless they violate the protocol by comparing IP address, which you may defeat by using a trusted anonymizing bank. Anonymized payments could be are handled similarly but might create issues with banking laws if the coins represent real currency. Tor, I2P, and Freenet could also use this layer help their users earn money.
Layer 2. Anonymized automated bitlocker based storage : Your application creates a 'thread' on a host by uploading a 8192 bit RSA public key, creating a symmetric AES 512 key to save alongside the private key. Threads contain three types of messages : unsigned public messages that applications will ignore unless they're encrypted using the symmetric key, signed public messages that may be unencrypted, like maybe deleting an old message or closing the thread, and private hello messages that applications will ignore unless they're encrypted using the private key. Hosts are federated allowing users to submit their signed messages through other hosts to prevent their preferred host from identifying the thread owners IP address.
Threads are identified by their public key's SHA512. You may grant anyone read & 'reply' access to a thread by giving them the threads id and symmetric key. You may hash identifying information like your real name or email using SHA512 and submit that plus a thread id to lookup servers. You're real threads should NOT however be available for lookup. Instead, your application replies to hello messages by sending some real thread, ala work, family, whatever.
Oh, all thread content is accessible by anyone, all privacy is accomplished through cryptography. It's actually a feature that all this data becomes public once quantum computers can break 8192 bit RSA keys, which'll happen long after your dead.
Layer 3. You're application provides a 'social versioned file system' using a hosting layer thread or ten and pays the hosting provider using the ad serving layer. Imho, the underlying file format should be packed git repository extended to offer quasi-instant messaging attached to objects, roughly like github's comments.
End result : People archive their photo, video, music, etc. collections online, grant their friends access, and chat with their friends in instant messages affiliated with the files, roughly like facebook comments. Of course, the whole system works perfectly for collaborative private projects, like university homework assignments. All users are just some collection of threads they control but nobody knows what threads do what.
They asked whether anyone has written a Javascript library that encodes AJAX requests as extremely suspicious looking emails, meaning every person visiting the site using it would show up as sending emails talking about drugs, islam, etc.
Not sure how many Mathematica cluster exist, but Sage has started eating their server side market. Sage's various backends are just way better designed for really intensive computational work, while Sage & Cython reduce the learning curve for each.
I hear that Wolfram's salaries kinda suck too, btw.
I've heard the distinction phrased as cash vs. stock before, but the issue is obviously whether the acquiring company issues new stock or buys it's own shares on the market, which spreads the tax hit out to day traders.
I'd imagine that well more than 70% of 'merger dollars' destroy real shareholder value, i.e. the remaining 30% are all small companies and mergers frequently replace real value by irrational valuations. And creating synergies and destroying value are obviously not mutually exclusive.
Yes, the acquired company will always seek the best price possible. Yes, the acquired company will put it's best foot forward. etc. All that's why acquiring doesn't beat investing in the S&P500, even under 'cash' conditions. If otoh the acquiring company is willing to overpay, meaning they're diluting shareholder value, then the acquired company can extract an unreasonably high price.
AT&T buying T-mobile isn't the first large monopolistic merger. Ain't such a rosy history for stockholders there. Yes, a duopoly might extract higher prices from consumers. Yet, monopolies often simply squander more resources internally, if only because they've eliminate all the trivially applicable business method innovation, hey think government.
Also, there will remain significant competition from competing technologies : You realize, higher income people spend very few hours away from their home or office wifi connections, right? Any who travel more know about tethering already too. AT&T loses spectacularly when the emerging tablet market develops using these other connectivity options. We should note that skype & sip are fully functional on modern phones too, making other connectivity options more directly dangerous to AT&T.
It's well established in the business literature that large stock mergers like this almost always hurt the acquiring company's stock holders, as well as employees and consumers. I'd imagine this even applies to the acquired company's stock holders.
As a rule, the only people that benefit from the acquisition are the executives of the acquiring company, who's power & compensation increase vaguely proportionally to the size of the company they run. In effect, the acquiring executives are devaluing their own stock holders investments to make themselves more important and force those stock holders to vote them more compensation.
Just fyi, cash mergers average out like investing in the S&P500. In a cash merger, the acquiring company's executives have real utility for cash on hand, so they negotiate a fair price or make better strategic decisions even when overpaying. In the stock merger, they simply acquire the largest company possible using other people's money.
Yes, jury nullification happens when the jury finds the law itself invalid. In this case, the police & prosecutor are clearly abusing the legal system to harass innocent people they simply don't like.
There aren't really any countries where average people adapt very successfully to changing economic needs. Only fairly exceptional people ever do so.
Europe handles this through a combination of massive welfare for the unemployable, major protections for existing economic needs, and professionalizing virtually every career, which helps keep workers up-to-date. Yet, they've created a systemic unemployment problem amongst the youth.
We'll probably eventually nationalize education and simply pay students to study what we tell them we need. At least then, all the unemployment can be blamed upon some government officials who're doing the bidding of lobbyist who want more unemployed cheap labor in specific sectors.
If you receive notice of copyright infringement, then you should halt the infringing activity or face penalties. Ain't no "revenge" here, just google avoiding infringing upon their copyrights. And that must include both snippets and titles since titles are copyrighted too. Ergo, there simply isn't anything left to link to the site.
Copiepresse's lawyers won a strongly worded injunction on behalf of these three papers. Google is making sure they don't violate it.
Ironically, the papers already had the ability to control how their content was displayed on google, through the nosnippets and nocache flags in metatags, google news' separate user agent id, etc. All they've achieved is : Now the papers must pay Copiepresse lawyers to make those changes slowly rather than paying their own technical people to make them quickly.
Any papers could exclude exactly the content they want excluded from exactly the google sites they want it excluded because Google's news indexer has a separate user agent.
If they get an injunction however, then Google must obviously read the injunction as broadly as possible to avoid fines.
Oops, there are two court orders here, one from yesterday and one from 2006.
If the current court explicitly order covers Google Index, well that's the second time the papers pulled this stunt this stupidly, which is just give the French more ammo for their Belgian jokes (hint : the French always joke about Belgians being stupid).
If the current court order only explicitly covers Google News, unlike the last court order, then Google is simply covering their ass by removing the content from Google Index too. Imho, that's the correct response until the courts have explicitly okayed some links.
In the long run, Google Index obviously generates it's news results using Google News, meaning a news site not indexed by Google News will never make the Google Index front page anyways. So the papers will never see any traffic even after the court okays Google Index.
I'm happy that Google takes the high road more often than not.
In this case, Google has done exactly what the court ordered, well according to this English translation:
Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000 per day of delay
If the court had issued a more detailed order, like banning Google News only but granting Google web search a fair use exemption, then I'm sure Google would've followed that order instead.
If the court had merely banned Google from displaying the pictures and text snippets, but explicitly permitted them to use the titles, then Google would likely still show the results in Google News, but ranked very lowly. Search results should obviously not be cluttered up by stupid links without summaries.
I'd guess the paper's layer obtained this strong language thinking they'd negotiate some licensing deal with google. Yet first, google must obviously implement the literal court order as written. duh! Second, any licensing deal is unlikely to benefit the papers much because the papers depend more upon google than google depends upon them. Why should google buy their text snippets when other good Belgian papers give text snippets about the same subject matter for free?
Linux's vaguely meritocratic approach has obliterated the BSD cliquish approach, period.
Does any other OS have multiple competing teams writing the scheduler? How could anyone possibly compete with that? Seriously!
Conversely, the LLVM will eventually obliterate GCC for the same reasons, multiple participants engaging in healthy competition. Oh, plus the LLVM simplifies writing compilers for virtually any language.
p.s. Does APL/K/J have an LLVM based compiler yet?
I'm afraid the 14th Amendment doesn't prevent default. Any constitutional scholar will tell you it merely prevents paying the confederate war debt while imposing the union's debts upon the south. And SCOTUS would eventually be forced to hand down exactly that ruling.
Yet, the 14th Amendment does buy Obama some wiggle room while the courts decide that issue.
Should Obama use this wiggle room to issue new debt? NO! I'm afraid that'll make him look weak, give the Tea party more power, and merely postpone the default until the courts are forced to order a default.
Instead, Obama should simply stop paying federal contractors in Tea party controlled states, especially military contractors, lay off TSA, DEA, ATF, etc. personnel, eliminate oil subsidies, etc., thereby forcing congress to the table while still paying federal debts.
Would the courts support this use if the 14th Amendment? Hell no! But they'd take their sweet damn time issuing that ruling because they know the Tea Party are idiots intent on wrecking the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you consider it entrapment if : An accountant put an flyer in your mailbox bragging about how much money he saves people. You respond by letting him do your taxes. And you discover he's a plant for the IRS?
Ain't much different. In fact, anything they're trying on the terrorists today will be used on the gun rights nuts tomorrow. Those mod your handgun to automatic kids could just as well be sold by the ATF.
In fact, the FBI kinda started that way. Hoover initially tasked the FBI with finding stolen cars. You see, stolen cars eventually turn up, meaning they'd close a case, meaning they could brag to congress about their closed cases. Yes, that's why some many federal police forces exist today, the FBI cheated to elevate it's closed cases ratio during it' early days.
As I understand it, all Islamic terrorists arrested inside the U.S. were put up to it by the FBI.
You see, the FBI prefers to train it's own terrorists because doing so is far easier than catching the real deal, who might be dangerous, or hard to find, or worse not exist at all. Don't you feel safer with the FBI making sure there are terrorists to catch?
As I note upthread, virtually all important programming languages originated in academic-like environments, even if they are officially corporate.
There are I think two revolutionary non-academic programming languages :
- Smalltalk was developed by Xerox PARC, but ultimately created object oriented programming, which certainly used academia to gain traction.
- C was developed by AT&T, but completely revolutionized our world. It's almost surely the most important language ever written. There had been structured languages before. I think Fortran and Cobal were developed by IBM. And academia had all it's research and teaching languages. Yet, it was C that brought structured programming and type-safty to system level programming, previously dominated by assembler. Imho, const is pure genius. C could not help but succeed with or without academia, but AT&T was still a fairly academic environment at that time.
In other words, your classification of generalized academic project doesn't include either afaik, but clearly both can fall under some generalized academia. You could not design C, and maybe Smalltalk too, without thinking deeply about languages from a hybrid academic and industrial perspective. If you pursue a blind industry perspective, you create garbage like PHP or VB.
Isn't the first one that comes to mind the world wide web? CERN is definitely academia. I'd imagine many other protocols originate in academia. Any idea about SMTP, Usenet, etc.?
BSD, X11, Mach, PostgreSQL, and SSH were all explicitly academic projects.
There is also a question about what qualifies as academia beyond simply universities and government labs. Linus Torvalds started Linux while a PhD student but later landed in industry. Bjarne Stroustrup worked at AT&T Research when he started C++ but he landed at Texas A&M shortly after.
Virtually all programming languages originate in or near academia : Lisp was MIT. Python was started at CWI. Haskell. OCaml. etc. Among the non-academic languages most originate within huge organizations who's research departments start to resemble academia : Smalltalk was PARC. Fortran and Cobal were IBM. C was AT&T. Erlang was Sony. etc. Java and Perl were seemingly further from academia, but academia's influences upon them abound.
Afaik, all computational libraries used for serious numerical programming, like stock trading, computational fluid dynamics, etc., were developed in academia.
Yeah, good luck with that, either hourly execution or funding research through taxes on trading. You're rich trading houses won't even lose out, they'll simply switch gears back to hiring Yale MBA assholes with powerful families. Instead, you'll wipe out the middle tear all-quant-algo trading houses who cannot retool. All those houses business will flow back to Goldman-Sacks and Morgan-Stanley, who'll widen the spreads and take an even bigger cut.
You know, I'd love seeing all good scientists get good paying research jobs, but 'power' never allocates resources like that. Do you think the soviet union would've fallen if they had? We're infinitely better off just giving the quantitative fields the economic power directly. And instituting an enormous inheritance tax that bleeds dry the really wealthy families like the Waltons.
You missed one criticism though, the claim that HFT is a "waste of talent". I'll cover that one for ya :
Is there really such a limited supply of talent in the world? Talent is created by intellect, motivation, and experience. We may ignore experience as it's self creating. If banks hire fresh math & physics PhDs with significant programming experience for $100k plus maybe a $50k bonus, that'll just creates more motivation to study math & physics.
We're therefore left with the claim that intellect is limited supply. Is this true? Yes and no. Intellect isn't in nearly such short supply as people imagine. It's also heavily impacted by people's motivation during their youth.
Conversely, there simply isn't enough money in research for all these people. You've seen these online discussions saying : For God's sakes, please don't do a PhD in the humanities!! If advertising and finance weren't slurping up all the excess scientists, then we'd be seeing the same discouragement levied at PhDs in the sciences. And that'd be extremely bad for our society!
Ideally, we want the quantitative fields and algorithms to take over more of the traditionally "powerful" professions, encouraging young people to think more quantitatively and algorithmically, and pushing our society forward.
As an aside, do you realize that anti-semitism was heavily influenced by Jewish bankers, like the Rothschilds, refusing to finance wars when they had interests in both wars? Ain't necessarily all love & roses for those that help society progress.
There is a problem that the mainstream cloud storage options like DropBox, SkyDrive, MobileMe, Google Music, etc. all store your data unencrypted, meaning eventually the MafiAA will sue your asses based upon the media that you've archived there. Wuala encrypts documents using the document's own SHA as the symmetric key for deduplication, meaning they cannot read your documents, but any MafiAA like party can still identify your documents.
Afaik, you still need command line tools like duplicity, git-annex, and jgit for encrypted cloud storage via Amazon S3 or others. Syncany might fix this.
Imho, we need an encrypted cloud storage solution that is resistant to even traffic analysis and offer social functionality. It might resemble the following :
Layer 1. Anonymized ad serving and/or payment via digital cash systems : An advertiser gives you a coin when your app claims you've showed an ad, you anonymize that coin and give it to the hosing provider, hosting provider redeems coin with advertiser, adjusting their payout based upon the advertisers identity. Ideally, the hosting provider and advertiser shouldn't be able to trace their relationship to you unless they violate the protocol by comparing IP address, which you may defeat by using a trusted anonymizing bank. Anonymized payments could be are handled similarly but might create issues with banking laws if the coins represent real currency. Tor, I2P, and Freenet could also use this layer help their users earn money.
Layer 2. Anonymized automated bitlocker based storage : Your application creates a 'thread' on a host by uploading a 8192 bit RSA public key, creating a symmetric AES 512 key to save alongside the private key. Threads contain three types of messages : unsigned public messages that applications will ignore unless they're encrypted using the symmetric key, signed public messages that may be unencrypted, like maybe deleting an old message or closing the thread, and private hello messages that applications will ignore unless they're encrypted using the private key. Hosts are federated allowing users to submit their signed messages through other hosts to prevent their preferred host from identifying the thread owners IP address.
Threads are identified by their public key's SHA512. You may grant anyone read & 'reply' access to a thread by giving them the threads id and symmetric key. You may hash identifying information like your real name or email using SHA512 and submit that plus a thread id to lookup servers. You're real threads should NOT however be available for lookup. Instead, your application replies to hello messages by sending some real thread, ala work, family, whatever.
Oh, all thread content is accessible by anyone, all privacy is accomplished through cryptography. It's actually a feature that all this data becomes public once quantum computers can break 8192 bit RSA keys, which'll happen long after your dead.
Layer 3. You're application provides a 'social versioned file system' using a hosting layer thread or ten and pays the hosting provider using the ad serving layer. Imho, the underlying file format should be packed git repository extended to offer quasi-instant messaging attached to objects, roughly like github's comments.
End result : People archive their photo, video, music, etc. collections online, grant their friends access, and chat with their friends in instant messages affiliated with the files, roughly like facebook comments. Of course, the whole system works perfectly for collaborative private projects, like university homework assignments. All users are just some collection of threads they control but nobody knows what threads do what.
Did you see the metafiler discussion?
They asked whether anyone has written a Javascript library that encodes AJAX requests as extremely suspicious looking emails, meaning every person visiting the site using it would show up as sending emails talking about drugs, islam, etc.
Anyone seen such a library?
To be more precise, Twitter offers a measure of anonymity that neither Facebook nor google+ do. People like their screen names. :)
Not sure how many Mathematica cluster exist, but Sage has started eating their server side market. Sage's various backends are just way better designed for really intensive computational work, while Sage & Cython reduce the learning curve for each.
I hear that Wolfram's salaries kinda suck too, btw.
I've heard the distinction phrased as cash vs. stock before, but the issue is obviously whether the acquiring company issues new stock or buys it's own shares on the market, which spreads the tax hit out to day traders.
I'd imagine that well more than 70% of 'merger dollars' destroy real shareholder value, i.e. the remaining 30% are all small companies and mergers frequently replace real value by irrational valuations. And creating synergies and destroying value are obviously not mutually exclusive.
Yes, the acquired company will always seek the best price possible. Yes, the acquired company will put it's best foot forward. etc. All that's why acquiring doesn't beat investing in the S&P500, even under 'cash' conditions. If otoh the acquiring company is willing to overpay, meaning they're diluting shareholder value, then the acquired company can extract an unreasonably high price.
AT&T buying T-mobile isn't the first large monopolistic merger. Ain't such a rosy history for stockholders there. Yes, a duopoly might extract higher prices from consumers. Yet, monopolies often simply squander more resources internally, if only because they've eliminate all the trivially applicable business method innovation, hey think government.
Also, there will remain significant competition from competing technologies : You realize, higher income people spend very few hours away from their home or office wifi connections, right? Any who travel more know about tethering already too. AT&T loses spectacularly when the emerging tablet market develops using these other connectivity options. We should note that skype & sip are fully functional on modern phones too, making other connectivity options more directly dangerous to AT&T.
It's well established in the business literature that large stock mergers like this almost always hurt the acquiring company's stock holders, as well as employees and consumers. I'd imagine this even applies to the acquired company's stock holders.
As a rule, the only people that benefit from the acquisition are the executives of the acquiring company, who's power & compensation increase vaguely proportionally to the size of the company they run. In effect, the acquiring executives are devaluing their own stock holders investments to make themselves more important and force those stock holders to vote them more compensation.
Just fyi, cash mergers average out like investing in the S&P500. In a cash merger, the acquiring company's executives have real utility for cash on hand, so they negotiate a fair price or make better strategic decisions even when overpaying. In the stock merger, they simply acquire the largest company possible using other people's money.
Yes, jury nullification happens when the jury finds the law itself invalid. In this case, the police & prosecutor are clearly abusing the legal system to harass innocent people they simply don't like.
A priori yes, but we fixed that by moving those charges to federal court where trials could be moved out of state.
http://thewashingtonfancy.com/2011/06/man-takes-viagra-wears-sweatpants-for-tsa-pat-down/
There aren't really any countries where average people adapt very successfully to changing economic needs. Only fairly exceptional people ever do so.
Europe handles this through a combination of massive welfare for the unemployable, major protections for existing economic needs, and professionalizing virtually every career, which helps keep workers up-to-date. Yet, they've created a systemic unemployment problem amongst the youth.
We'll probably eventually nationalize education and simply pay students to study what we tell them we need. At least then, all the unemployment can be blamed upon some government officials who're doing the bidding of lobbyist who want more unemployed cheap labor in specific sectors.
If you receive notice of copyright infringement, then you should halt the infringing activity or face penalties. Ain't no "revenge" here, just google avoiding infringing upon their copyrights. And that must include both snippets and titles since titles are copyrighted too. Ergo, there simply isn't anything left to link to the site.
Copiepresse's lawyers won a strongly worded injunction on behalf of these three papers. Google is making sure they don't violate it.
Ironically, the papers already had the ability to control how their content was displayed on google, through the nosnippets and nocache flags in metatags, google news' separate user agent id, etc. All they've achieved is : Now the papers must pay Copiepresse lawyers to make those changes slowly rather than paying their own technical people to make them quickly.
You get better beer than the rest of Europe though! :)
Any papers could exclude exactly the content they want excluded from exactly the google sites they want it excluded because Google's news indexer has a separate user agent.
If they get an injunction however, then Google must obviously read the injunction as broadly as possible to avoid fines.
Oops, there are two court orders here, one from yesterday and one from 2006.
If the current court explicitly order covers Google Index, well that's the second time the papers pulled this stunt this stupidly, which is just give the French more ammo for their Belgian jokes (hint : the French always joke about Belgians being stupid).
If the current court order only explicitly covers Google News, unlike the last court order, then Google is simply covering their ass by removing the content from Google Index too. Imho, that's the correct response until the courts have explicitly okayed some links.
In the long run, Google Index obviously generates it's news results using Google News, meaning a news site not indexed by Google News will never make the Google Index front page anyways. So the papers will never see any traffic even after the court okays Google Index.
I'm happy that Google takes the high road more often than not.
In this case, Google has done exactly what the court ordered, well according to this English translation :
Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000 per day of delay
If the court had issued a more detailed order, like banning Google News only but granting Google web search a fair use exemption, then I'm sure Google would've followed that order instead.
If the court had merely banned Google from displaying the pictures and text snippets, but explicitly permitted them to use the titles, then Google would likely still show the results in Google News, but ranked very lowly. Search results should obviously not be cluttered up by stupid links without summaries.
I'd guess the paper's layer obtained this strong language thinking they'd negotiate some licensing deal with google. Yet first, google must obviously implement the literal court order as written. duh! Second, any licensing deal is unlikely to benefit the papers much because the papers depend more upon google than google depends upon them. Why should google buy their text snippets when other good Belgian papers give text snippets about the same subject matter for free?
Linux's vaguely meritocratic approach has obliterated the BSD cliquish approach, period.
Does any other OS have multiple competing teams writing the scheduler? How could anyone possibly compete with that? Seriously!
Conversely, the LLVM will eventually obliterate GCC for the same reasons, multiple participants engaging in healthy competition. Oh, plus the LLVM simplifies writing compilers for virtually any language.
p.s. Does APL/K/J have an LLVM based compiler yet?
I'm afraid the 14th Amendment doesn't prevent default. Any constitutional scholar will tell you it merely prevents paying the confederate war debt while imposing the union's debts upon the south. And SCOTUS would eventually be forced to hand down exactly that ruling.
Yet, the 14th Amendment does buy Obama some wiggle room while the courts decide that issue.
Should Obama use this wiggle room to issue new debt? NO! I'm afraid that'll make him look weak, give the Tea party more power, and merely postpone the default until the courts are forced to order a default.
Instead, Obama should simply stop paying federal contractors in Tea party controlled states, especially military contractors, lay off TSA, DEA, ATF, etc. personnel, eliminate oil subsidies, etc., thereby forcing congress to the table while still paying federal debts.
Would the courts support this use if the 14th Amendment? Hell no! But they'd take their sweet damn time issuing that ruling because they know the Tea Party are idiots intent on wrecking the economy.