Unfortunately monopolies are rquired for many different function such as the organization of telephone numbers, assignment of domain names, ip addresses and so on.
Monopolies are required, to some extent, for the current implementation of telephone numbers, domain names, and ip addresses. But telephone numbers, domain names, and ip addresses are not required for communication.
At the same time, for this reason, as long as no one *forces* me to use ICANNs domain name system in order to communicate via TCP over the Internet, I really don't care who controls ICANN. The free market is already in place. If you don't like the ICANN monopoly, you are free to set up your own DNS system, or not use DNS at all.
You eliminate top domains, and then instead of having a different group responsible for managing each subset, you now have to give control of managing the ENTIRE domain space to ONE group.
the article does not provide any information about any checks and balances against these raises, save that they are below 7 per cent
The checks and balances are all the other TLDs. You don't *have* to have a dot com, after all. In fact, in the post-Google Internet, domain names really don't matter all that much anyway.
What helps for me is that I simply don't type longer stretches than 15 minutes.
15 minutes of straight typing? Does that really happen very often? I suppose if you're a typist it would, but I don't expect there are that many typists on this site right now.
i was under the impression that for in print books they were buying them and scanning them destructively (its almost certainly cheaper to pay for the book, cut the spine off and run it through a sheet feeder than to scan it in book form)
Hmm, I'm pretty sure they're not destroying the books. But then again, when I read an article about it last year I thought it was referring to the Google project. It's actually referring to the Internet Archive project.
As for which way is cheaper, I suppose it depends on how rare/expensive the book is.
Anyone have a reference one way or the other as to what Google is doing?
Lovely. So you can't comprehend that someone might disagree with other people.
Of course I can comprehend it. People make mistakes all the time.
I've been civil this whole time but if you can't respect that someone disagrees with you and you have to pull out the old, tired "Look, I'm not the only one who says what I think is the right answer!" card, I lose respect.
This isn't really an opinion. The statements your making have no basis whatsoever in law.
I'm done. Find another thread and a better sucker who will actually bend over for you to pick on, because I'm not going to be back.
Hey, I don't know why you bothered responding in the first place. You're wrong. Just face it and move on.
I suppose it's a little weird to imagine taking government entirely out of the business of guiding and rewarding technological creativity, but I have the feeling a decentralized system of rewards like this could prove to be the most powerful incentive to innovate the world has ever seen.
The thing is, if the government didn't get involved, why would the average Joe be willing to give away these "prizes".
Maybe we could make the government threaten people with fines and imprisonment if they don't give away enough prizes. But how would we determine what is "enough" prizes? I guess we'd have to let the person who creates the product to set their own prize.
Hmm, wait a second. This is starting to sound like a horrible idea.
Unfortunately it's the quarter-to-quarter traders who of course influence price.
I'm not sure that's really true. You could probably convince me I'm wrong there, though.
If you can't attract the quarter-to-quarter traders, the price will suffer greatly (they are the ones who will buy whenever a long-term investor is looking to cash out, such as for paying for a new home, retirement, liquidating some cash to diversify their portfolio, etc). As a result, it makes the stock less attractive to long term investors.
In the long term the company is going to become much less volatile, as it will have a long track record of historical earnings. In 15 years, when the stock is at $3500/share, Google most likely isn't going to be a high growth stock, and whether it is going to grow at 5% or 6% in the following year isn't going to affect the stock price all that much. It's certainly not something to worry about so early in the game.
I think at this point we're going to have to agree to disagree, because I think you're wrong, you think I'm wrong, and neither of us shows any signs of budging.
You could, of course, read the ruling. I'm sure the judge explained why you are wrong.
No, I can tell your ISP to pull your site under the law. THAT is the remedy that has been specifically made available to you in cases like this. It's called the DMCA -- surely, you have heard of it?
And surely you don't understand what it says. The DMCA provides protection from a copyright infringement lawsuit if your ISP takes down that site after receiving a takedown notice. It certainly doesn't provide protection from a copyright lawsuit for the person who intentionally violates copyright law in the first place.
And no, you can't order Google to remove someone else's site from the index.
Sure you can. And if that site is infringing on your copyright, Google is obligated by law to obey that order. What do you think it is that the Church of Scientology did?
Or are you proposing to hack someone else's server and install a robots.txt file?
The very high share price of BH doesn't mean that the company is inherently great, nor that witholding profit guidance is a good thing
You're right of course. But that doesn't change the fact that the company is inherently great, nor that witholding profit guidance is a good thing.
More on-topic: generally, there are two kinds of company that withold profit guidance. There are good companies, like BH, and there are companies that are trying to hide Very Bad News. The latter outnumber the former by a huge magin.
Are you talking about companies which consistently withhold profit guidance every single quarter. If so, I'd like to hear some examples of the latter.
But Google, because the site hosting the images did not declare via robots.txt that it was forbidden to enter, DID have permission to index the site in its database.
They had permission from some random criminal, not from the copyright holder.
The owner of a given site has to be the one to ask Google not to index; I can't tell them not to index your site if I for some reason don't like what you've got on it.
You can tell them not to copy and distribute my site if you own the copyright on my site!
Another analogy is that it'd be like prosecuting the innocent buyer of a stolen car who had no knowledge that the car was stolen.
You keep missing the fact that Google DOES have knowledge that "the car was stolen".
Car buyers don't have an obligation to check, nor do they have any kind of expectation that they are buying a stolen item. Prosecuting the buyer is just insane and makes you look like a jackass.
If you tell the buyer that the car is yours and they refuse to give it back to you anyway, then then the buyer very well should be prosecuted.
If the reviewer went to the libary, took out the book, scanned in the entire thing, returned it to the library, then used limited quotes from the scan in his review.
Otherwise, another analogy would be plain old Google. They take entire websites, copy them, and provide the end user with small portions of those copies. There is a major problem with this analogy, though. Websites are intentionally published for anyone on the internet to use for free (at least, the ones which Google indexes generally are). With books, this isn't the case.
I really think the Google Book Search case is going to be a tough one. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the Supreme Court and became one of the major precedents of copyright law. Then again, maybe I'm just being overly optomistic. One thing Google has going against it here is that the judge could take issue with the fact that Google hasn't actually purchased the books in question, they're only borrowing them. Format-shifting is one thing - borrowing, copying, and returning, is another one altogether.
I thought the crux of the Perfect 10 case was that it wasn't fair use because the entire work was reproduced (just smaller). I don't see how this can apply to Google Book Search unless they plan to reproduce each book in its entirety in the search results (which of course would be stupid and impractical).
Well, Google *is* copying entire books for its own internal purposes. The big difference (and it's a really big difference) is that they aren't distributing the entire books...at least not the whole thing to a single person...at least not intentionally.
But, as I have said in other posts, the search engine doesn't know what's supposed to be there and what isn't. That's not its job.
But they were specifically informed of these images, and chose not to remove them anyway.
The copyright holder needs to complain to the infringer.
Why must there only be one infringer? If Person B copies something from Person A without permission, and then Person C copies it from Person B, there are two copyright infringers (barring a defense such as fair use), not one.
This is not Google's fault. I know it's "cool" to bash corporations on Slashdot, but it's not always the Big Megacorp's fault that bad things happen.
While I believe Google does have a possibly legitimate argument that their distribution was fair use, they don't have a legitimate argument that their distribution was accidental. They knew about the images, and they explicitly chose to take on this case (which is really not much more than a test case) rather than stop distributing the images.
If you're going to nitpick, at least say something of substance. I'm fully aware of the fact that the stock market in general is not a zero-sum game. In fact, I was using that as an assumption as I was discussing the difference between trading and investing.
Actually 17% would work right about perfect as a flat tax, given zero deductions.
Well, the person I was responding to was talking about a 40K deduction for a family of four. But otherwise, I really don't think those low-income individuals who currently pay no income taxes (other than FICA) could afford to pay a flat 17%.
Also, just so that we're on the same page, what about capital gains and capital losses? Presumably you are talking about taxing capital gains, and not allowing net capital losses. Because, otherwise, it's really easy to rack up capital losses every year to offset all your income. And if you don't tax capital gains at all, 17% is probably nowhere near enough.
Yes people go all crazy with deductions for children, married vs single, standard deduction, graduated tax rates, all that jazz - but boil it all down and look at the real taxes you paid (assuming you had a real income, not on the bottom or top 3% of the scale making zero or millions) and I will bet that you paid somewhere in the very tight range of 16% to 18%, averaged across the last three years
No way. My wife and I paid about 3% this year (*). We're not in poverty, far from it. If I had filed separately I'd have paid nothing. 30% of people who file get a refund of everything they paid in. I'm a tax preparer, and while 17% might be the average, it's not the median. A large majority of my customers pay much less than 17%.
Not to mention it would make tax prep a total no brainer. No more loopholes, no more free rides, and no more 'book keeping errors / slight of hand' with the accounting.
Like I said in my other post, the graduation of the taxes isn't what makes it hard to prepare them. You could just as easily have a graduated system with a large standard deduction. Of course, the real complexity in the tax law is defining what is "taxable income" in the first place. If you think you've got a simple definition, I'd love to hear it.
You are doing it right, most of us are doing it right, and a hard flat 17% would bring all the fringers (guys making hundreds of thousands yet somehow escaping paying anything substantial) back into the game.
As long as there's an income tax, there will be people who figure out a way to get out of paying it. The current tax code closes thousands of loopholes, and yet people still come up with new ones every day. Drastically simplifying the tax code will make *more* loopholes, not fewer.
Enron lied to analysts, google won't talk to analysts. Both companies show very little respect for teh average stockholder. The only difference is that google's motto is "do no evil," so it isn't unreasonable to expect more from google.
And more is exactly what Google is giving. What's good for the analysts isn't necessarily what's good for the stockholders. And it's not like Google is the only company which refuses to provide financial guidance. Most likely they got the idea from a company you may have heard of called Berkshire Hathaway - a company whose stock has grown to over $85,000 a share.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately monopolies are rquired for many different function such as the organization of telephone numbers, assignment of domain names, ip addresses and so on.
Monopolies are required, to some extent, for the current implementation of telephone numbers, domain names, and ip addresses. But telephone numbers, domain names, and ip addresses are not required for communication.
At the same time, for this reason, as long as no one *forces* me to use ICANNs domain name system in order to communicate via TCP over the Internet, I really don't care who controls ICANN. The free market is already in place. If you don't like the ICANN monopoly, you are free to set up your own DNS system, or not use DNS at all.
You eliminate top domains, and then instead of having a different group responsible for managing each subset, you now have to give control of managing the ENTIRE domain space to ONE group.
Isn't that what ICANN does now anyway?
the article does not provide any information about any checks and balances against these raises, save that they are below 7 per cent
The checks and balances are all the other TLDs. You don't *have* to have a dot com, after all. In fact, in the post-Google Internet, domain names really don't matter all that much anyway.
What helps for me is that I simply don't type longer stretches than 15 minutes.
15 minutes of straight typing? Does that really happen very often? I suppose if you're a typist it would, but I don't expect there are that many typists on this site right now.
However, they can if you're sending something via media mail, which is a different price based on the content.
Of course, the USPS isn't a common carrier :).
So does this mean that some of the flamebait that appears on slashdot can have legal consequences?
Does Slashdot have significant ties to Canada? Here in the United States, we're protected by, of all things, the Communications Decency Act.
I thought you weren't going to be back.
i was under the impression that for in print books they were buying them and scanning them destructively (its almost certainly cheaper to pay for the book, cut the spine off and run it through a sheet feeder than to scan it in book form)
Hmm, I'm pretty sure they're not destroying the books. But then again, when I read an article about it last year I thought it was referring to the Google project. It's actually referring to the Internet Archive project.
As for which way is cheaper, I suppose it depends on how rare/expensive the book is.
Anyone have a reference one way or the other as to what Google is doing?
Lovely. So you can't comprehend that someone might disagree with other people.
Of course I can comprehend it. People make mistakes all the time.
I've been civil this whole time but if you can't respect that someone disagrees with you and you have to pull out the old, tired "Look, I'm not the only one who says what I think is the right answer!" card, I lose respect.
This isn't really an opinion. The statements your making have no basis whatsoever in law.
I'm done. Find another thread and a better sucker who will actually bend over for you to pick on, because I'm not going to be back.
Hey, I don't know why you bothered responding in the first place. You're wrong. Just face it and move on.
I suppose it's a little weird to imagine taking government entirely out of the business of guiding and rewarding technological creativity, but I have the feeling a decentralized system of rewards like this could prove to be the most powerful incentive to innovate the world has ever seen.
The thing is, if the government didn't get involved, why would the average Joe be willing to give away these "prizes".
Maybe we could make the government threaten people with fines and imprisonment if they don't give away enough prizes. But how would we determine what is "enough" prizes? I guess we'd have to let the person who creates the product to set their own prize.
Hmm, wait a second. This is starting to sound like a horrible idea.
I want a Tor virtual appliance!
There's nothing in the rules that says the thing has to run under VMware. So send in something that runs under Xen.
Shouldn't the same things run under both?
When you enter, you give up your stuff.
Give up your stuff? No, you just have to allow others to make copies of "your stuff".
Unfortunately it's the quarter-to-quarter traders who of course influence price.
I'm not sure that's really true. You could probably convince me I'm wrong there, though.
If you can't attract the quarter-to-quarter traders, the price will suffer greatly (they are the ones who will buy whenever a long-term investor is looking to cash out, such as for paying for a new home, retirement, liquidating some cash to diversify their portfolio, etc). As a result, it makes the stock less attractive to long term investors.
In the long term the company is going to become much less volatile, as it will have a long track record of historical earnings. In 15 years, when the stock is at $3500/share, Google most likely isn't going to be a high growth stock, and whether it is going to grow at 5% or 6% in the following year isn't going to affect the stock price all that much. It's certainly not something to worry about so early in the game.
I think at this point we're going to have to agree to disagree, because I think you're wrong, you think I'm wrong, and neither of us shows any signs of budging.
You could, of course, read the ruling. I'm sure the judge explained why you are wrong.
Or is the judge wrong too?
No, I can tell your ISP to pull your site under the law. THAT is the remedy that has been specifically made available to you in cases like this. It's called the DMCA -- surely, you have heard of it?
And surely you don't understand what it says. The DMCA provides protection from a copyright infringement lawsuit if your ISP takes down that site after receiving a takedown notice. It certainly doesn't provide protection from a copyright lawsuit for the person who intentionally violates copyright law in the first place.
And no, you can't order Google to remove someone else's site from the index.
Sure you can. And if that site is infringing on your copyright, Google is obligated by law to obey that order. What do you think it is that the Church of Scientology did?
Or are you proposing to hack someone else's server and install a robots.txt file?
No. I'm proposing you file a DMCA notice as outlined on http://www.google.com/dmca.html.
Google doesn't have to remove anything if it isn't asked to.
For the third time, it was asked to.
It sure didn't seem like you were fully aware of this in your original post. I was about to write the same reply to you.
Well, I never claimed to be an eloquent speaker. If you misunderstood me, I apologize.
But thanks for making us fully aware that you're an asshole.
LMAO, you're as bad as the other poster. If you're going to accuse me of being an asshole, maybe you could explain why you think that.
Why do I feed the trolls? Oh well...
The very high share price of BH doesn't mean that the company is inherently great, nor that witholding profit guidance is a good thing
You're right of course. But that doesn't change the fact that the company is inherently great, nor that witholding profit guidance is a good thing.
More on-topic: generally, there are two kinds of company that withold profit guidance. There are good companies, like BH, and there are companies that are trying to hide Very Bad News. The latter outnumber the former by a huge magin.
Are you talking about companies which consistently withhold profit guidance every single quarter. If so, I'd like to hear some examples of the latter.
But Google, because the site hosting the images did not declare via robots.txt that it was forbidden to enter, DID have permission to index the site in its database.
They had permission from some random criminal, not from the copyright holder.
The owner of a given site has to be the one to ask Google not to index; I can't tell them not to index your site if I for some reason don't like what you've got on it.
You can tell them not to copy and distribute my site if you own the copyright on my site!
Another analogy is that it'd be like prosecuting the innocent buyer of a stolen car who had no knowledge that the car was stolen.
You keep missing the fact that Google DOES have knowledge that "the car was stolen".
Car buyers don't have an obligation to check, nor do they have any kind of expectation that they are buying a stolen item. Prosecuting the buyer is just insane and makes you look like a jackass.
If you tell the buyer that the car is yours and they refuse to give it back to you anyway, then then the buyer very well should be prosecuted.
A reasonable analogy might be a book review.
If the reviewer went to the libary, took out the book, scanned in the entire thing, returned it to the library, then used limited quotes from the scan in his review.
Otherwise, another analogy would be plain old Google. They take entire websites, copy them, and provide the end user with small portions of those copies. There is a major problem with this analogy, though. Websites are intentionally published for anyone on the internet to use for free (at least, the ones which Google indexes generally are). With books, this isn't the case.
I really think the Google Book Search case is going to be a tough one. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the Supreme Court and became one of the major precedents of copyright law. Then again, maybe I'm just being overly optomistic. One thing Google has going against it here is that the judge could take issue with the fact that Google hasn't actually purchased the books in question, they're only borrowing them. Format-shifting is one thing - borrowing, copying, and returning, is another one altogether.
I thought the crux of the Perfect 10 case was that it wasn't fair use because the entire work was reproduced (just smaller). I don't see how this can apply to Google Book Search unless they plan to reproduce each book in its entirety in the search results (which of course would be stupid and impractical).
Well, Google *is* copying entire books for its own internal purposes. The big difference (and it's a really big difference) is that they aren't distributing the entire books...at least not the whole thing to a single person...at least not intentionally.
But, as I have said in other posts, the search engine doesn't know what's supposed to be there and what isn't. That's not its job.
But they were specifically informed of these images, and chose not to remove them anyway.
The copyright holder needs to complain to the infringer.
Why must there only be one infringer? If Person B copies something from Person A without permission, and then Person C copies it from Person B, there are two copyright infringers (barring a defense such as fair use), not one.
This is not Google's fault. I know it's "cool" to bash corporations on Slashdot, but it's not always the Big Megacorp's fault that bad things happen.
While I believe Google does have a possibly legitimate argument that their distribution was fair use, they don't have a legitimate argument that their distribution was accidental. They knew about the images, and they explicitly chose to take on this case (which is really not much more than a test case) rather than stop distributing the images.
If you're going to nitpick, at least say something of substance. I'm fully aware of the fact that the stock market in general is not a zero-sum game. In fact, I was using that as an assumption as I was discussing the difference between trading and investing.
Actually 17% would work right about perfect as a flat tax, given zero deductions.
Well, the person I was responding to was talking about a 40K deduction for a family of four. But otherwise, I really don't think those low-income individuals who currently pay no income taxes (other than FICA) could afford to pay a flat 17%.
Also, just so that we're on the same page, what about capital gains and capital losses? Presumably you are talking about taxing capital gains, and not allowing net capital losses. Because, otherwise, it's really easy to rack up capital losses every year to offset all your income. And if you don't tax capital gains at all, 17% is probably nowhere near enough.
Yes people go all crazy with deductions for children, married vs single, standard deduction, graduated tax rates, all that jazz - but boil it all down and look at the real taxes you paid (assuming you had a real income, not on the bottom or top 3% of the scale making zero or millions) and I will bet that you paid somewhere in the very tight range of 16% to 18%, averaged across the last three years
No way. My wife and I paid about 3% this year (*). We're not in poverty, far from it. If I had filed separately I'd have paid nothing. 30% of people who file get a refund of everything they paid in. I'm a tax preparer, and while 17% might be the average, it's not the median. A large majority of my customers pay much less than 17%.
Not to mention it would make tax prep a total no brainer. No more loopholes, no more free rides, and no more 'book keeping errors / slight of hand' with the accounting.
Like I said in my other post, the graduation of the taxes isn't what makes it hard to prepare them. You could just as easily have a graduated system with a large standard deduction. Of course, the real complexity in the tax law is defining what is "taxable income" in the first place. If you think you've got a simple definition, I'd love to hear it.
You are doing it right, most of us are doing it right, and a hard flat 17% would bring all the fringers (guys making hundreds of thousands yet somehow escaping paying anything substantial) back into the game.
As long as there's an income tax, there will be people who figure out a way to get out of paying it. The current tax code closes thousands of loopholes, and yet people still come up with new ones every day. Drastically simplifying the tax code will make *more* loopholes, not fewer.
(*) For all these figures, I'm ignoring FICA.
Enron lied to analysts, google won't talk to analysts. Both companies show very little respect for teh average stockholder. The only difference is that google's motto is "do no evil," so it isn't unreasonable to expect more from google.
And more is exactly what Google is giving. What's good for the analysts isn't necessarily what's good for the stockholders. And it's not like Google is the only company which refuses to provide financial guidance. Most likely they got the idea from a company you may have heard of called Berkshire Hathaway - a company whose stock has grown to over $85,000 a share.