"I predict a loss for Google. Without documentation they can't prove they're not arbitrary. If they're arbitrary, they're acting like a monopoly and need to be struck down."
I think you misunderstand anti-trust law. "Arbitraryness" has nothing to do with it - it might even be a good defense. Anti-trust id designed to prevent companies from using their monopoly power to run competitors out of business. It has to be a conscious choice - they have to TRY to run someone out of business. But if a company goes out of business as a result of the way Google does business on an everyday basis, then they can't make the claim that they were specially targeted.
In addition, the complainer was both a competitor and a customer. Anti-trust law doesn't compel companies to make it easy on their competitors, only that they don't make it harder.
Lets take the classic trust, Standard Oil. If I run R2.0's fuel distributorship, and I buy gas at $4.00/gallon, run it through a filter, and then sell it back to Standard Oil at 4.25 gallon, Standard oil is under no compulsion to keep selling to me, or keep buying from me, just because there is a loophole in my sales and procurement practices.
All google has to say is "We believe link farms are bad for consumers and also competition; our algorithms discourage us doing business with ALL link farms, not just his" where's the problem?
"Because protecting political speech mostly wins over the resource issue. That's why telemarketing is mostly illegal, but political robo-calls aren't."
Not exactly. For instance on cellphones, where *I* pay for the call, I believe it IS illegal.
You CANNOT force people to support a political cause with their own resources - I believe there is caselaw regarding this regarding using union dues for political purposes.
"In that sense it's spam when a politician knocks on your door, but that's never going to be illegal. (So get rich and buy a gate and dog.)"
Sure about that? Because the analogy doesn't hold - a politician knocking on my door is identifying himself. If some guy knocks on my door, claims to be Barack Obama but is a fat, short, white girl, and KEEPS ON knocking over and over again, she'd be arrested. Hell, in some states she'd be shot - legally, since it's not too far a leap to suppose that anyone posing as someone else and not leaving you alone means you harm.
"Webmail + unlimited internet = no cost to me. Hell, filters do a pretty bang up job. And if you can't tell what's spam and what's not from the subject you're probably not meant to have an email account."
I'm guessing you never took an economics course, or read Heinlein. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH! You ARE paying for it, via the fees you pay for "unlimited" internet. Just because you don't see a line item on your bill for "bandwidth used to process spam" doesn't mean you don't pay for it.
Perhaps it's YOU who aren't meant to have an internet account.
If someone is holding out a piece of paper for me to take, I can say "no thanks"
If someone is shoving that piece of paper in my pocket, and doing the same to THOUSANDS of others simultaneously, he would be arrested for assault.
That's the problem - there IS no "real world" analogy that fits properly. The problem, in this case, is that handbilling is an even poorer analogy than most. Junk mail would be a better analogy, except for the fact that the costs are paid by the mailers, not the recipient. Probably the best analogy would be telemarketing calls to cellphones, where the user pays for a call that they don't want. Oh, wait - that's ILLEGAL.
And don't say that it doesn't cost the recipient anything. I pay for my connection, and that money goes to a number of different people to pay for bandwith, among other things. If spam were gone, bandwidth needs would lessen and my rates would decrease. So I AM paying for spam, just not directly.
If Publius sent the Federalist Papers via email to hundreds of thousands of people, it would BE spam. The Federalist papers were items that people VOLUNTARILY sought out - they weren't shoved into everyones mailboxes and under their door thresholds. If they were, they would have been ignored and thrown away just like junk mail is today.
Political freedom of expression is protected; what isn't protected is having ANYTHING shoved down my throat using my own resources.
An honest question - doesn't the scenario I proposed bother you? This is old school, low tech vote fraud - it's the same as ballot boxes disappearing in African elections. I'm not saying it's happening in Oregon per se, but there's so great a potential.
Step 2: how are you going to know if the system is designed "correctly"? Trust the company? I wouldn't.
Step 3: Where did I mention anything other than the arrest? The FBI is notorious for arresting people to great fanfare, only to drop the charges later - witness the Anthrax Letters and the Olympic Park Bombing. For that matter, look at Elliot Spitzer - he made a career out of blackmailing companies with threats of prosecution for corporate misdeeds, but he only ever took 1 case to court, and LOST. Hell, I'm a conservative and a Republican and I hold no illusions about the ambition of the FBI - they are perfectly capable of arresting hundreds of people when they KNOW the charges won't stick.
Step 1: Joe pervert is busted (legitimately) for kiddie porn. It is determined he stored some of it with this service. Step 2: Service is subpoenaed, and they give out all the user info for all the places where the bits of the files are stored. Step 3: Arrest hundreds of people, declare a major kiddie porn ring busted, receive promotion. Step 4: GOTO Step 1
"only on slashdot would someone just happened recently to have read an analysis of the prospect of launching things to space from the moon with a slingshot"
Huh, I had the dates mixed up - I thought oil was discovered THEN the borders were drawn.
My comment about "where we are today" wasn't blaming the US at all - the rest of the world, Europeans especially, have very convenient memories regarding how the Middle East and Southern Asia got that way. Oh, we're to blame for jumping right in the middle and taking advantage of it, and our relationship with Israel makes our lives harder. (Note that I support that relationship and believe it has been the right thing to do overall, but that doesn't make our lives any easier). But created the whole mess? Hell no.
"how often would you have to supply fissile material to a fusion reactor?"
I think you are missing a sense of scale. Nuclear fuel is INCREDIBLY energy dense. Commercial reactors refuel about a third of their rods every 18 months (I think - it's been a while since I worked at a plant), and that is after running balls to the wall, 24/7, at full output, which is up around 1000 MEGAwatts. Navy ships refuel only after YEARS of operation, and a carrier sucks up WAY more energy than a moon base would.
I imagine an initial fuel load for a moon based reactor would be designed to last the life of the base without refuelling, and the fuel load would not be that big.
"You realize the biggest theocracy (Saudi Arabia) existed long before anybody even knew there was oil there, right?"
No it didn't. Oh, the land existed, and the House of Saud existed, but the entity we call Saudi Arabia exists solely because of the oil under their feet. Read just a little Middle Eastern history and you can learn a lot about how we got where we are today.
"Anytime something undesirable in the world happens no one is able to learn anything from it? Or are you merely asserting no one can openly say they learned anything from it? Yep, science should take a back seat to sensibilities."
Actually, in some circumstances, that is correct. For instance, the results of Nazi concentration camp experiments are strictly verboten, even if they do have data that could be used for the betterment of the human condition. I don't believe that data from the WTC collapses qualifies, but sometimes data IS contaminated by the means of it's creation.
You have a chicken and egg problem here - you CAN'T invent a "fusion reactor" without the materials that can actually do the job. Sure, you can do theoretical models - hell, there's a great big fusion reactor about 93 million miles away we can use as a prototype - but it isn't a "reactor" until it is sitting in front of you in real life. And if the materials don't exist to make that happen, you have done nothing but a computer model. It's like getting laid in Second Life - it may be an accomplishment of sorts, but it doesn't have the same effect (and if it does, ewww)
Or there's the fable of the scientist that invented the most powerful acid in teh world and then spent the rest of his life looking for a material to use as a container.
"I hope that he can edit the lexicon some more and try to publish it again, this time without including the reference works that Rowling's put out and with more of his own words than hers."
Of course, he could have done that in the first place and avoided the whole mess - just like the OTHER authors of Potter oriented books did.
Biased viewpoint? Apparently not so biased, since the judge agreed.
"many of Rowling's statements about the case made it sound like she thought she had exclusive rights to all things Harry Potter."
That's because she DOES have those rights. She is the copyright holder; thats' what copyright MEANS. There are fair use *exceptions* to that rule, but fair use doesn't somehow transfer copyright.
She did like the website, and gave her permission for the website. That permission did not extend to a book - why should it? One was a volunteer effort, the other was a commercial enterprise. If you don't believe copyright holders can grant rights based on arbitrary criteria, better rip up the GPL.
Who acted in bad faith here? Rowling: "Great site - I love it, keep up the good work. Hey, would you e interested in editing the lexicon I'm going to publish?" Editor: "You mean there's a market for this in book form? Awesome! Thanks for the idea, Ms Rowling!" Rowling: "Whoa, not so fast there..."
"Mr. Judge, you suck too! Go back to law school and actually learn something about fair use, derivative works, and copyright law!"
Sigh. RTFJ - he DID cite caselaw and Supreme Court rulings regarding fair use, and in his "judgement" (you know, where the title comes from), this work failed to qualify. Something like 80% of the book was copied verbatim from the HP books - that's not a lexicon, it's a Reader's Digest condensed version.
Slashdot Mirror
"I predict a loss for Google. Without documentation they can't prove they're not arbitrary. If they're arbitrary, they're acting like a monopoly and need to be struck down."
I think you misunderstand anti-trust law. "Arbitraryness" has nothing to do with it - it might even be a good defense. Anti-trust id designed to prevent companies from using their monopoly power to run competitors out of business. It has to be a conscious choice - they have to TRY to run someone out of business. But if a company goes out of business as a result of the way Google does business on an everyday basis, then they can't make the claim that they were specially targeted.
In addition, the complainer was both a competitor and a customer. Anti-trust law doesn't compel companies to make it easy on their competitors, only that they don't make it harder.
Lets take the classic trust, Standard Oil. If I run R2.0's fuel distributorship, and I buy gas at $4.00/gallon, run it through a filter, and then sell it back to Standard Oil at 4.25 gallon, Standard oil is under no compulsion to keep selling to me, or keep buying from me, just because there is a loophole in my sales and procurement practices.
All google has to say is "We believe link farms are bad for consumers and also competition; our algorithms discourage us doing business with ALL link farms, not just his" where's the problem?
"Because protecting political speech mostly wins over the resource issue. That's why telemarketing is mostly illegal, but political robo-calls aren't."
Not exactly. For instance on cellphones, where *I* pay for the call, I believe it IS illegal.
You CANNOT force people to support a political cause with their own resources - I believe there is caselaw regarding this regarding using union dues for political purposes.
Reading is Fundamental - it's "Greek", NOT "Green".
One is a bunch of people that fuck others up the ass because it's fun.
The others live on a peninsula in the Mediterranean.
"Any chance they had a Trojan Horse at the ready?"
Maybe, but I think the prospect of penetrating a big, dark tunnel was too much of a temptation.
"In that sense it's spam when a politician knocks on your door, but that's never going to be illegal. (So get rich and buy a gate and dog.)"
Sure about that? Because the analogy doesn't hold - a politician knocking on my door is identifying himself. If some guy knocks on my door, claims to be Barack Obama but is a fat, short, white girl, and KEEPS ON knocking over and over again, she'd be arrested. Hell, in some states she'd be shot - legally, since it's not too far a leap to suppose that anyone posing as someone else and not leaving you alone means you harm.
"Webmail + unlimited internet = no cost to me. Hell, filters do a pretty bang up job. And if you can't tell what's spam and what's not from the subject you're probably not meant to have an email account."
I'm guessing you never took an economics course, or read Heinlein. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH! You ARE paying for it, via the fees you pay for "unlimited" internet. Just because you don't see a line item on your bill for "bandwidth used to process spam" doesn't mean you don't pay for it.
Perhaps it's YOU who aren't meant to have an internet account.
If someone is holding out a piece of paper for me to take, I can say "no thanks"
If someone is shoving that piece of paper in my pocket, and doing the same to THOUSANDS of others simultaneously, he would be arrested for assault.
That's the problem - there IS no "real world" analogy that fits properly. The problem, in this case, is that handbilling is an even poorer analogy than most. Junk mail would be a better analogy, except for the fact that the costs are paid by the mailers, not the recipient. Probably the best analogy would be telemarketing calls to cellphones, where the user pays for a call that they don't want. Oh, wait - that's ILLEGAL.
And don't say that it doesn't cost the recipient anything. I pay for my connection, and that money goes to a number of different people to pay for bandwith, among other things. If spam were gone, bandwidth needs would lessen and my rates would decrease. So I AM paying for spam, just not directly.
If Publius sent the Federalist Papers via email to hundreds of thousands of people, it would BE spam. The Federalist papers were items that people VOLUNTARILY sought out - they weren't shoved into everyones mailboxes and under their door thresholds. If they were, they would have been ignored and thrown away just like junk mail is today.
Political freedom of expression is protected; what isn't protected is having ANYTHING shoved down my throat using my own resources.
An honest question - doesn't the scenario I proposed bother you? This is old school, low tech vote fraud - it's the same as ballot boxes disappearing in African elections. I'm not saying it's happening in Oregon per se, but there's so great a potential.
Study Shows That Information Posted Online Gets Read By Other People!!
Full story, page 6.
I was going to try for a "Profit!" joke, but I thought it too lame. But instead, I gave you the straight line for a DOUBLE /. meme/cliche.
You owe me - where's my money?
Response:
Step 2: how are you going to know if the system is designed "correctly"? Trust the company? I wouldn't.
Step 3: Where did I mention anything other than the arrest? The FBI is notorious for arresting people to great fanfare, only to drop the charges later - witness the Anthrax Letters and the Olympic Park Bombing. For that matter, look at Elliot Spitzer - he made a career out of blackmailing companies with threats of prosecution for corporate misdeeds, but he only ever took 1 case to court, and LOST. Hell, I'm a conservative and a Republican and I hold no illusions about the ambition of the FBI - they are perfectly capable of arresting hundreds of people when they KNOW the charges won't stick.
DO? What's that?
Fortran 77 All The Way, Baby!
(and yes, I know I would have been marked down for the GOTO in ENGR 1)
Step 1: Joe pervert is busted (legitimately) for kiddie porn. It is determined he stored some of it with this service.
Step 2: Service is subpoenaed, and they give out all the user info for all the places where the bits of the files are stored.
Step 3: Arrest hundreds of people, declare a major kiddie porn ring busted, receive promotion.
Step 4: GOTO Step 1
"only on slashdot would someone just happened recently to have read an analysis of the prospect of launching things to space from the moon with a slingshot"
You're right - most of us read it YEARS ago.
[grumble...grumble...kids these days...)
I don't know - those little makeup brushes get lost pretty easily.
Or so my wife tells me.
Never mind.
Huh, I had the dates mixed up - I thought oil was discovered THEN the borders were drawn.
My comment about "where we are today" wasn't blaming the US at all - the rest of the world, Europeans especially, have very convenient memories regarding how the Middle East and Southern Asia got that way. Oh, we're to blame for jumping right in the middle and taking advantage of it, and our relationship with Israel makes our lives harder. (Note that I support that relationship and believe it has been the right thing to do overall, but that doesn't make our lives any easier). But created the whole mess? Hell no.
"how often would you have to supply fissile material to a fusion reactor?"
I think you are missing a sense of scale. Nuclear fuel is INCREDIBLY energy dense. Commercial reactors refuel about a third of their rods every 18 months (I think - it's been a while since I worked at a plant), and that is after running balls to the wall, 24/7, at full output, which is up around 1000 MEGAwatts. Navy ships refuel only after YEARS of operation, and a carrier sucks up WAY more energy than a moon base would.
I imagine an initial fuel load for a moon based reactor would be designed to last the life of the base without refuelling, and the fuel load would not be that big.
"You realize the biggest theocracy (Saudi Arabia) existed long before anybody even knew there was oil there, right?"
No it didn't. Oh, the land existed, and the House of Saud existed, but the entity we call Saudi Arabia exists solely because of the oil under their feet. Read just a little Middle Eastern history and you can learn a lot about how we got where we are today.
"Anytime something undesirable in the world happens no one is able to learn anything from it? Or are you merely asserting no one can openly say they learned anything from it? Yep, science should take a back seat to sensibilities."
Actually, in some circumstances, that is correct. For instance, the results of Nazi concentration camp experiments are strictly verboten, even if they do have data that could be used for the betterment of the human condition. I don't believe that data from the WTC collapses qualifies, but sometimes data IS contaminated by the means of it's creation.
You have a chicken and egg problem here - you CAN'T invent a "fusion reactor" without the materials that can actually do the job. Sure, you can do theoretical models - hell, there's a great big fusion reactor about 93 million miles away we can use as a prototype - but it isn't a "reactor" until it is sitting in front of you in real life. And if the materials don't exist to make that happen, you have done nothing but a computer model. It's like getting laid in Second Life - it may be an accomplishment of sorts, but it doesn't have the same effect (and if it does, ewww)
Or there's the fable of the scientist that invented the most powerful acid in teh world and then spent the rest of his life looking for a material to use as a container.
"I hope that he can edit the lexicon some more and try to publish it again, this time without including the reference works that Rowling's put out and with more of his own words than hers."
Of course, he could have done that in the first place and avoided the whole mess - just like the OTHER authors of Potter oriented books did.
Biased viewpoint? Apparently not so biased, since the judge agreed.
"many of Rowling's statements about the case made it sound like she thought she had exclusive rights to all things Harry Potter."
That's because she DOES have those rights. She is the copyright holder; thats' what copyright MEANS. There are fair use *exceptions* to that rule, but fair use doesn't somehow transfer copyright.
She did like the website, and gave her permission for the website. That permission did not extend to a book - why should it? One was a volunteer effort, the other was a commercial enterprise. If you don't believe copyright holders can grant rights based on arbitrary criteria, better rip up the GPL.
Who acted in bad faith here?
Rowling: "Great site - I love it, keep up the good work. Hey, would you e interested in editing the lexicon I'm going to publish?"
Editor: "You mean there's a market for this in book form? Awesome! Thanks for the idea, Ms Rowling!"
Rowling: "Whoa, not so fast there..."
"Makes me want to burn my dork card."
Just don't burn your dork - I've heard that REALLY hurts.
Unless you're into that sort of thing.
"Mr. Judge, you suck too! Go back to law school and actually learn something about fair use, derivative works, and copyright law!"
Sigh. RTFJ - he DID cite caselaw and Supreme Court rulings regarding fair use, and in his "judgement" (you know, where the title comes from), this work failed to qualify. Something like 80% of the book was copied verbatim from the HP books - that's not a lexicon, it's a Reader's Digest condensed version.