Simply being a monopoly is a reason to be watching for anti-trust activity.
No. When competitors complain about misuse of monopoly powers, then there is a reason to start an investigation.
But if google removes your site from their results, for most people that would mean your site may as well not be on the web. As I said, there are millions of online businesses that live or die based on their pagerank.
That is their problem; you should NOT base you business model on a changing proprietary algorithm of another company. And there are still loads of other ways to get more market penetration. Having a good product helps, reaching the right blog-writers, and good ol' fashioned word of mouth works as well.
Explain to me how an online business can mitigate the risk that google will not list them, other than to 'trust google'.
Again: any company that relies on only 1 other company for customers puts itself in high risk; it is a very bad business model. Businesses simply should not do that. And there are other ways to get customers than through high rankings in a search engines.
(...) because the market no longer regulates how they operate, so manual regulation is required (...)
No. Investigation is only required when competitors have reasonable complaints. Regulation is only required when the investigation shows that a monopoly is abused. And stating that your reasoning only applies to corporations does not make it any less faulty reasoning: it is quintessential in western law that you cannot simply put tabs on a company (nor on a person) if there are no indications that that company has done something wrong. And having a very large market share is not by definition wrong.
Catchy one liner. I can use my ISP's mail, or yahoo mail, instead of google mail. I can use yahoo search, or live search instead of google search. I can use microsofts map solution instead of google maps. Google calendar? So many other options. Please explain how people are trapped in using google services.
Enough success to the point that they achieve monopoly power is a reason for anti-trust.
Wrong. Abuse of monopoly power is a reason for anti trust under US law (IANAL). Simply being a monopoly is not.
Nobody is accusing google of necessarily having done something nefarious or of cheating to get where they are, but the point remains that they are in fact where they are. They have reached a level of success, size, and influence now in some markets that normal market forces no longer really apply to them. As such, they now need to be watched closely.
2 problems here: you claim that 'normal market forces' do not apply to them, but fail to back that statement up. I say normal market forces still apply. I can take my advertising somewhere else on the web, or use television ads, newspapers ads, etc. Compare this to the microsoft os monopoly, where my hardware and software are tied together and I cannot simply switch over, because my business processes are at risk and it will cost me a lot of effort to switch.
Second problem: You say google has done nothing wrong, but because of what they can or might do, they need to be watched. That is faulty reasoning, because if you follow that same line you can come the conclusion that every company or every human being needs to be closely watched because of the possibility to commit a crime.
Are the masts for connecting to the network close enough on the Appalachian trail? It would kind of suck if your phone works and has all the juice it needs, but reception is 0%...
To be a little pedantic: the name was Web Beans; WebObjects is Apple's framework. JSR-299 now has the oh so sexy name: Java Contexts and Dependency Injection.
The situation is a bit more complex. For instance, there are few parts in the world where individuals will not gladly accept my euros as payment; there are even lots of parts where individuals rather get paid in euros than the local currency. And if someone wants to pay me in dollars (paper money), I (and a lot of other individuals) will accept that money, as long as the conversion rate is good enough. And no, the dollar is not legal tender where I live.
No, that is why I wrote "copyright law places restrictions on that ownership". One can resell a copyrighted work, burn it, cut it into pieces, add stuff to it, send it to the moon, modify it, do all sorts of stuff one can do with non-copyrighted stuff, except for selling copies.
And what if the EULA had in print that you should pay them more money for continued use, or not should ever buy (or license) products from competitors, or offer your firstborn?
What if the EULA says you cannot sell the product to someone else? What if the EULA says you cannot use the software on sundays?
Here in The Netherlands you DO own the software; copyright law places restrictions on that ownership, but the software IS yours.
IANAL, but the situation seems to be at least not clear-cut license-not-ownership in the US as you imply it to be (see for instance wikipedia for applicable court cases).
Maybe someone like NewYorkCountryLawyer can elaborate.
Government enforced monopolies are not "capitalism without boundaries".
You are right, but that was not what I tried to say; the grab-as-much-as-you-can mentality that the *IA* companies are displaying are for me signs of lack of boundaries.
If the local baker is bullying my friendly neighbour, I will stop buying from his shop. That is a boundary. When a sort of group of companies (RIAA) start bullying filesharers, almost no one stops buying from them. Lack of boundary because of a different scale and basic human characteristics.
Besides that, effectively all transactions are done with money that only has value by government decree.
No. Money has value because one knows that someone else will accept it in return for something. Governments can influence the value by manipulating the number of available currency units. Manipulating that number has its costs; governments can not simply dictate the value of money.
A free market would usually use gold, silver or some type of commodity for money. Market principles still operate but with central control of the money supply you don't have a free market.
A real and working totally free market is as much a mirage as real and working total communism; they are both doomed to fail because they both bring out bad traits in humans. What we need is a system that combines (among others) the incentive to work as found in 'capitalism' as well as the solidarity and equality from 'communism'.
But call it what you will, the current system is buckling and needs an overhaul.
The fundamental problem with this issue is that the business model is forced to work based on the good will of the buyers. In every other area of the economy, you don't get access to the goods and services until you pay for them or come to an understanding that allows you to get them for free. Why should this be any different?
Well...
One of the things we need to face up to here is that in another century or two, manufacturing technology will be advanced enough to allow people to fabricate complex physical goods from raw materials. What will happen when any good on the store can be replicated at the cost of materials?
You answer your own question. Why pay when the 'reproduction costs' are almost zero and one can make infinite identical copies?
I suspect that a pirate culture would end up meeting with utter disaster here.
I disagree. Copyright and patents did not exist until fairly recently, and yet world empires have been build by humans, and alongside them works of art and literature.
Money is not the only incentive for human beings. The drive to create things has given us Lascaux, the Iliad, numerous legends and folk tales, etc., etc., etc. Copyright has given us Brittney Spears.;-)
I would say that the most important conclusion is that the *IA*'s of this world are actively reducing the welfare/wellbeing of the people in order to make more profit.
Communism/socialism without bounds has been failing for some time now; I get the feeling that we can see more and more that capitalism without boundaries is also failing.
I got one of these living colours lamps (big one with remote), and I must say it does a pretty decent job of lighting my room. Granted, it's no TL, but the 4 LEDs in it are way to bright to stare right into if the lamp is set to maximum output.
Fact remains that there was a lot of ammunition on board (secretly put there) and the Germans put an advert in the New York Times calling people NOT to board that ship, because it could easily be targeted because of the war.
The sinking was used heavily in war propaganda.
I agree on your look on conspiracies, but that does not mean that they never happen. This one smells funny.
That would imply that there was 1 application running the whole ship. Is that true? I always assumed that the only 'app' that ran on the whole ship was the OS. Is seems rather silly to me to have 1 application doing a lot of different things on board. It would be known in advance to be error prone, hard to test and hard to maintain.
Actually, Das Boot was more than only a film. I saw the TV series and was impressed by both the acting and the story. It was the first time I could grasp both the ruthlessness and the futility of war.
1. GP does not sound psychotic at all
2. I see nothing irrational or excessive at all. The US has deliberately sent the Lucetania into a battle zone in order to enter WWI, disregarded intelligence that could have prevented Pearl Harbor, entered a virtual battle in Tonkin to enter Vietnam, and made up stories on WMD to enter Iraq. In that light an NSA backdoor does not seem more preposterous to me. And there havebeennewsitems on this, even from Bruce Schneier.
I think you owe GP an apology for your incorrect accusation.
Only on Slashdot can something so easily refuted be modded up to 'informative'.
I live in The Netherlands and know this to be wrong. Wikipedia gives numbers on differences between EU member states. There is no 'one scheme' for the whole of the EU. This is something that falls under the say of sovereign countries themselves. I for one would like to keep it that way.
Why can't we just agree that taxes in general are a bad thing?
Because that just is not the case; it is an oversimplification. From the rest of your post I take it you live in the US. A lot of US-ians never take the time to see if their mantra of "This Is The Best Country In The World" is actually correct by comparing their own country to other countries. When you compare the US to other countries you will see:
the US does not compare good when you look at how happy its inhabitants are.
Why am I bringing all of this up in a taxes related context? The end of Soviet Russia has proven that too much tax (everyone gets the same, in theory) did not work. There was not enough incentive. The total opposite, having as little tax as possible, which you sort of see in the US, is also not working correctly.
A lot of the countries that are higher on the happiness list (or lower on the crimes etc. lists) have way higher taxes than the US. This allows for instance the authorities here in NL to prevent or counter-act ghetto-forming by opening up 'buurthuizen' (neighborhood houses) in which people can follow courses etc. This leads to less crime and more people doing something useful in our society.
Is the government as productive with money as a private business? No. But there are things better left to government. Do I like paying tax? No. Would I rather pay less and live in a less pleasant environment? No. So I pay tax and I am glad for the system we have here in the Netherlands. But then again, our politicians seem to be a lot less corrupt ("campaign donations" here are frowned upon) and we have to reach consensus because we do not have a winner-takes-all system like in the US.
The bottom line: please look beyond your own country to see how taxes can add to the welfare of people paying those taxes. And then: please try and change your political system in a way that taxes are put to better use. Sorry if I seem to be patronizing, but I rather see the US turn into something good that something worse; and that makes me care.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply being a monopoly is a reason to be watching for anti-trust activity.
No. When competitors complain about misuse of monopoly powers, then there is a reason to start an investigation.
But if google removes your site from their results, for most people that would mean your site may as well not be on the web. As I said, there are millions of online businesses that live or die based on their pagerank.
That is their problem; you should NOT base you business model on a changing proprietary algorithm of another company. And there are still loads of other ways to get more market penetration. Having a good product helps, reaching the right blog-writers, and good ol' fashioned word of mouth works as well.
Explain to me how an online business can mitigate the risk that google will not list them, other than to 'trust google'.
Again: any company that relies on only 1 other company for customers puts itself in high risk; it is a very bad business model. Businesses simply should not do that. And there are other ways to get customers than through high rankings in a search engines.
(...) because the market no longer regulates how they operate, so manual regulation is required (...)
No. Investigation is only required when competitors have reasonable complaints. Regulation is only required when the investigation shows that a monopoly is abused. And stating that your reasoning only applies to corporations does not make it any less faulty reasoning: it is quintessential in western law that you cannot simply put tabs on a company (nor on a person) if there are no indications that that company has done something wrong. And having a very large market share is not by definition wrong.
No, people are getting trapped IN it.
Catchy one liner. I can use my ISP's mail, or yahoo mail, instead of google mail. I can use yahoo search, or live search instead of google search. I can use microsofts map solution instead of google maps. Google calendar? So many other options. Please explain how people are trapped in using google services.
Enough success to the point that they achieve monopoly power is a reason for anti-trust.
Wrong. Abuse of monopoly power is a reason for anti trust under US law (IANAL). Simply being a monopoly is not.
Nobody is accusing google of necessarily having done something nefarious or of cheating to get where they are, but the point remains that they are in fact where they are. They have reached a level of success, size, and influence now in some markets that normal market forces no longer really apply to them. As such, they now need to be watched closely.
2 problems here: you claim that 'normal market forces' do not apply to them, but fail to back that statement up. I say normal market forces still apply. I can take my advertising somewhere else on the web, or use television ads, newspapers ads, etc. Compare this to the microsoft os monopoly, where my hardware and software are tied together and I cannot simply switch over, because my business processes are at risk and it will cost me a lot of effort to switch.
Second problem: You say google has done nothing wrong, but because of what they can or might do, they need to be watched. That is faulty reasoning, because if you follow that same line you can come the conclusion that every company or every human being needs to be closely watched because of the possibility to commit a crime.
Are the masts for connecting to the network close enough on the Appalachian trail? It would kind of suck if your phone works and has all the juice it needs, but reception is 0%...
In essence, they let other companies do the R&D and market development, then move in to grab the cash.
To be more precise, they seem to be doing a lot of R&D themselves, but their r.o.i. on it is pretty low. But I agree, they do rely on others.
(...) through JSF 2 and WebObjects.
To be a little pedantic: the name was Web Beans; WebObjects is Apple's framework. JSR-299 now has the oh so sexy name: Java Contexts and Dependency Injection.
The situation is a bit more complex. For instance, there are few parts in the world where individuals will not gladly accept my euros as payment; there are even lots of parts where individuals rather get paid in euros than the local currency. And if someone wants to pay me in dollars (paper money), I (and a lot of other individuals) will accept that money, as long as the conversion rate is good enough. And no, the dollar is not legal tender where I live.
No, that is why I wrote "copyright law places restrictions on that ownership". One can resell a copyrighted work, burn it, cut it into pieces, add stuff to it, send it to the moon, modify it, do all sorts of stuff one can do with non-copyrighted stuff, except for selling copies.
And what if the EULA had in print that you should pay them more money for continued use, or not should ever buy (or license) products from competitors, or offer your firstborn?
What if the EULA says you cannot sell the product to someone else? What if the EULA says you cannot use the software on sundays?
EULA's are dodgy at least in the US: there is more info on applicable court cases here.
You don't own software now, you own licenses.
Here in The Netherlands you DO own the software; copyright law places restrictions on that ownership, but the software IS yours.
IANAL, but the situation seems to be at least not clear-cut license-not-ownership in the US as you imply it to be (see for instance wikipedia for applicable court cases).
Maybe someone like NewYorkCountryLawyer can elaborate.
Government enforced monopolies are not "capitalism without boundaries".
You are right, but that was not what I tried to say; the grab-as-much-as-you-can mentality that the *IA* companies are displaying are for me signs of lack of boundaries. If the local baker is bullying my friendly neighbour, I will stop buying from his shop. That is a boundary. When a sort of group of companies (RIAA) start bullying filesharers, almost no one stops buying from them. Lack of boundary because of a different scale and basic human characteristics.
Besides that, effectively all transactions are done with money that only has value by government decree.
No. Money has value because one knows that someone else will accept it in return for something. Governments can influence the value by manipulating the number of available currency units. Manipulating that number has its costs; governments can not simply dictate the value of money.
A free market would usually use gold, silver or some type of commodity for money. Market principles still operate but with central control of the money supply you don't have a free market.
A real and working totally free market is as much a mirage as real and working total communism; they are both doomed to fail because they both bring out bad traits in humans. What we need is a system that combines (among others) the incentive to work as found in 'capitalism' as well as the solidarity and equality from 'communism'.
But call it what you will, the current system is buckling and needs an overhaul.
The fundamental problem with this issue is that the business model is forced to work based on the good will of the buyers. In every other area of the economy, you don't get access to the goods and services until you pay for them or come to an understanding that allows you to get them for free. Why should this be any different?
Well...
One of the things we need to face up to here is that in another century or two, manufacturing technology will be advanced enough to allow people to fabricate complex physical goods from raw materials. What will happen when any good on the store can be replicated at the cost of materials?
You answer your own question. Why pay when the 'reproduction costs' are almost zero and one can make infinite identical copies?
I suspect that a pirate culture would end up meeting with utter disaster here.
I disagree. Copyright and patents did not exist until fairly recently, and yet world empires have been build by humans, and alongside them works of art and literature.
;-)
Money is not the only incentive for human beings. The drive to create things has given us Lascaux, the Iliad, numerous legends and folk tales, etc., etc., etc. Copyright has given us Brittney Spears.
I would say that the most important conclusion is that the *IA*'s of this world are actively reducing the welfare/wellbeing of the people in order to make more profit.
Communism/socialism without bounds has been failing for some time now; I get the feeling that we can see more and more that capitalism without boundaries is also failing.
I got one of these living colours lamps (big one with remote), and I must say it does a pretty decent job of lighting my room. Granted, it's no TL, but the 4 LEDs in it are way to bright to stare right into if the lamp is set to maximum output.
Sorry for the typing, should have looked it up.
Fact remains that there was a lot of ammunition on board (secretly put there) and the Germans put an advert in the New York Times calling people NOT to board that ship, because it could easily be targeted because of the war.
The sinking was used heavily in war propaganda.
I agree on your look on conspiracies, but that does not mean that they never happen. This one smells funny.
That would imply that there was 1 application running the whole ship. Is that true? I always assumed that the only 'app' that ran on the whole ship was the OS. Is seems rather silly to me to have 1 application doing a lot of different things on board. It would be known in advance to be error prone, hard to test and hard to maintain.
On the Lusitania: see this post. There is more info to be found on this, but I'm too lazy to search for that right now.
And isn't it common knowledge that Bush _ordered_ his intelligence offices to come up with proof of WMD's in Iraq?
But back to the original topic: stranger things than back doors have occurred, so there was no use in lyml calling HungryHobo paranoid.
On the Lusitania (I got the spelling wrong) sinking: the Germans actually placed an advert not to travel on that ship. Also, there was a lot of ammunition placed on board (secretly), probably to make it burn harder.
The sinking was heavily used as war propaganda.
And the licensees could also compile from this source themselves, using a compiler of choice?
If not, this is not security, this is security theater, which is far worse than no security at all.
Actually, Das Boot was more than only a film. I saw the TV series and was impressed by both the acting and the story. It was the first time I could grasp both the ruthlessness and the futility of war.
Not having input validation on a userland application should NEVER be the reason a whole OS goes belly-up.
Your suggestion could be interpreted that Microsoft was not to blame on the Yorktown debacle, which is wrong.
1. GP does not sound psychotic at all
2. I see nothing irrational or excessive at all. The US has deliberately sent the Lucetania into a battle zone in order to enter WWI, disregarded intelligence that could have prevented Pearl Harbor, entered a virtual battle in Tonkin to enter Vietnam, and made up stories on WMD to enter Iraq. In that light an NSA backdoor does not seem more preposterous to me. And there have been news items on this, even from Bruce Schneier.
I think you owe GP an apology for your incorrect accusation.
Only on Slashdot can something so easily refuted be modded up to 'informative'.
I live in The Netherlands and know this to be wrong. Wikipedia gives numbers on differences between EU member states. There is no 'one scheme' for the whole of the EU. This is something that falls under the say of sovereign countries themselves. I for one would like to keep it that way.
Why can't we just agree that taxes in general are a bad thing?
Because that just is not the case; it is an oversimplification. From the rest of your post I take it you live in the US. A lot of US-ians never take the time to see if their mantra of "This Is The Best Country In The World" is actually correct by comparing their own country to other countries. When you compare the US to other countries you will see:
Why am I bringing all of this up in a taxes related context? The end of Soviet Russia has proven that too much tax (everyone gets the same, in theory) did not work. There was not enough incentive. The total opposite, having as little tax as possible, which you sort of see in the US, is also not working correctly.
A lot of the countries that are higher on the happiness list (or lower on the crimes etc. lists) have way higher taxes than the US. This allows for instance the authorities here in NL to prevent or counter-act ghetto-forming by opening up 'buurthuizen' (neighborhood houses) in which people can follow courses etc. This leads to less crime and more people doing something useful in our society.
Is the government as productive with money as a private business? No. But there are things better left to government. Do I like paying tax? No. Would I rather pay less and live in a less pleasant environment? No. So I pay tax and I am glad for the system we have here in the Netherlands. But then again, our politicians seem to be a lot less corrupt ("campaign donations" here are frowned upon) and we have to reach consensus because we do not have a winner-takes-all system like in the US.
The bottom line: please look beyond your own country to see how taxes can add to the welfare of people paying those taxes. And then: please try and change your political system in a way that taxes are put to better use. Sorry if I seem to be patronizing, but I rather see the US turn into something good that something worse; and that makes me care.
I did not use a calculator.
You are right on maps; unfortunately GP was talking about a hash table, which lets you find an item in O(1).