While it appears inevitable that people are going to flame Google for doing this, if I were running a business I would do the exact same thing.
Google, whose philosophy was once "do no evil" falls off the wagon, and you say "good for them!" and you want to do the exact same thing? Where are your principles?
The current state of technology patents is dreadful.... Unfortunately, that is the way things are...for now.
Just give up the fight? Accept that things are wrong and need fixing?
If you are operating a business, it is in your best interest to try and patent everything you do. If you don't, someone else will and then sue you for infringing on their patents. Trust me, the cost of trying to file patents is nothing compared to the cost of being sued for patent infringement.
The collective cost of allowing this software patent crap to continue is far more than a few petty lawsuits. [Yes, I did pull that factoid out of my..., but I hope it is true.]
So don't blame Google or Microsoft or Amazon. For lack of a better euphemism, don't hate the player, hate the game.
I hate the game, so I'm gonna do my best to stop it, and in the meanwhile -- I'm not playing!
>> Do you thoroughly investigate the business practices of everyone you do business with? If you don't shop at places where they don't do everything completely ethically and above board, you're going to have to be self sufficient.
No, I do not thoroughly investigate the practices of everyone I do business with. However, when I do, if I find out they are doing something unethical, I modify my relationship with them accordingly, including boycotting if called for. You do nothing you say? So you would support a Mafia-owned business?
I don't know if you're trolling, but... If you are using your compiled code for yourself, and not distributing to others, you don't have to give the source code to anyone. Common GPL fallacy.
>> Use the BSD license if you just want your code to be useful to as many people as possible.
This is a short-sighted view, and can end with your code being less useful in the long run. With a GPL license your code will continue to propogate with other people's beneficial additions. With a BSD license, a significant fraction will "proprietize" the code, and redistribution will cease along those branches.
If I want my code to be useful to as many people as possible, I may very well choose the GPL.
Unless I've misunderstood you, you've got the facts wrong yourself. You claim: The GPL does not require that derivitive works be GPLed. and You can still use some other license for the derivitive code
If you distribute your derivative work, b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. [section 2b of the GPL]
That is indeed a security hole -- unless you want to claim that it's one of those extra features that differentiates Firefox from Safari and IE...
Except, of course, that it does not differentiate Firefox from IE, as the latest versions *both* have this vulnerability. (Just tested with Firefox 1.0.4 and IE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519. Seriously.)
1) So? In order to listen to a person's phone conversations, we require a court-ordered phone tap. I think that in order to find out a person's browsing habits on a computer, we should need a court-ordered "computer tap."
2) At the same time that you are creating an "anonymizing system," you are letting go of a "tracking system." The libraries are already expending extra effort keeping track of people and books. They could be expending less effort with an anonymous system.
Do you have any basis in fact that supports your claim that "The GPL sucks for businesses. That's why Stallman came up with it."?
Explain to me how the OpenOffice.org license sucks, but the Microsoft Word license doesn't? How does the Firefox license suck more for me than the IE license?
Would it be better or worse for businesses if Word was licensed with the GPL?
Yeah, but the $20 cover charge is payment for the fantasy that you're going to get laid. Ain't nobody got laid on Slashdot. (Screwed over, yes. Laid, no.)
...arguing with a 10 year old about politics is always a waste of time.
What a crock of shit! You are making a horrible generalization. How about "arguing with a libertarian is always a waste of time" or "arguing with a senior citizen is always a waste of time."
I know ten-year-olds who hold more intelligent opinions than many twenty-five year olds.
Your statement was blatently ageist and you should be rethinking it.
Typically a speaker is reading from notes. If this is the case, then the words are indeed copyrighted and fixed in a tangible medium and it is not legal to record them without the permission of the copyright holder.
It will come down to that. Is Google news really a review? I don't think so--it is a small size picture and the first few lines of the article. There is no "review" content that is being generated. And the only reason Google is doing that is to drive traffic through the Google site.
I'll play the devil's advocate: If you had a product, wouldn't you want to be able to control where it is advertised? Pretend you don't like Google, and think that it presents your product in a bad light (those tiny little images and all, right next to competitors' images.) Shouldn't you have a right to tell them to remove the ad?
"Technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git."
What about the deep Sahara desert? There are vast (almost) lifeless parts of the desert which could be "paved over" -- this might have a few benefits: 1) It could bring some much needed economic benefit to the continent, and 2) it much halt some of the unnatural (?) growth of the desert.
I need someone to blame. Who exactly are the bad people involved here? As long as we continue to talk about a nebulous organization, we can exert no pressure. A good article explaining which *people* have made which bad decisions would work wonders.
Article: "The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph."
badasscat: No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
Maestro4k: Except that statistics does show that over enough time the series will converge into equal numbers. It may take a million times, or ten million, but eventually you'll end up with almost exactly equal number of ones and zeros.
badasscat is right. Perhaps you misunderstood: If I flip a coin only once, the difference in the number of zeros and ones is tiny -- it is only a difference of 1. At ten million and one flips, I cannot possibly be any closer than that same difference. The OP was pointing out that the absolute difference gets larger even as the ratio of the number of ones to the number of zeros approaches 1.
I realize I'm adding this way late in the game, and that hardly anyone will ever read this, but I just felt the need to correct it for posterity.
Slashdot Mirror
While it appears inevitable that people are going to flame Google for doing this, if I were running a business I would do the exact same thing.
Google, whose philosophy was once "do no evil" falls off the wagon, and you say "good for them!" and you want to do the exact same thing? Where are your principles?
The current state of technology patents is dreadful. ... Unfortunately, that is the way things are...for now.
Just give up the fight? Accept that things are wrong and need fixing?
If you are operating a business, it is in your best interest to try and patent everything you do. If you don't, someone else will and then sue you for infringing on their patents. Trust me, the cost of trying to file patents is nothing compared to the cost of being sued for patent infringement.
The collective cost of allowing this software patent crap to continue is far more than a few petty lawsuits. [Yes, I did pull that factoid out of my ..., but I hope it is true.]
So don't blame Google or Microsoft or Amazon. For lack of a better euphemism, don't hate the player, hate the game.
I hate the game, so I'm gonna do my best to stop it, and in the meanwhile -- I'm not playing!
For those of you who don't get it -- zoom in to the max.
>> Do you thoroughly investigate the business practices of everyone you do business with? If you don't shop at places where they don't do everything completely ethically and above board, you're going to have to be self sufficient.
No, I do not thoroughly investigate the practices of everyone I do business with. However, when I do, if I find out they are doing something unethical, I modify my relationship with them accordingly, including boycotting if called for. You do nothing you say? So you would support a Mafia-owned business?
I don't know if you're trolling, but... If you are using your compiled code for yourself, and not distributing to others, you don't have to give the source code to anyone. Common GPL fallacy.
>> Use the BSD license if you just want your code to be useful to as many people as possible.
This is a short-sighted view, and can end with your code being less useful in the long run. With a GPL license your code will continue to propogate with other people's beneficial additions. With a BSD license, a significant fraction will "proprietize" the code, and redistribution will cease along those branches.
If I want my code to be useful to as many people as possible, I may very well choose the GPL.
Unless I've misunderstood you, you've got the facts wrong yourself. You claim: The GPL does not require that derivitive works be GPLed. and You can still use some other license for the derivitive code
If you distribute your derivative work, b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. [section 2b of the GPL]
That is indeed a security hole -- unless you want to claim that it's one of those extra features that differentiates Firefox from Safari and IE ...
Except, of course, that it does not differentiate Firefox from IE, as the latest versions *both* have this vulnerability. (Just tested with Firefox 1.0.4 and IE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519. Seriously.)
I don't get why people worry about remote possibilities when there are real threats just around the corner.
Same reason I drink Diet Coke with my cheeseburger.
1) So? In order to listen to a person's phone conversations, we require a court-ordered phone tap. I think that in order to find out a person's browsing habits on a computer, we should need a court-ordered "computer tap."
2) At the same time that you are creating an "anonymizing system," you are letting go of a "tracking system." The libraries are already expending extra effort keeping track of people and books. They could be expending less effort with an anonymous system.
This photo *clearly* shows that it is not Windows.
Do you have any basis in fact that supports your claim that "The GPL sucks for businesses. That's why Stallman came up with it."?
Explain to me how the OpenOffice.org license sucks, but the Microsoft Word license doesn't? How does the Firefox license suck more for me than the IE license?
Would it be better or worse for businesses if Word was licensed with the GPL?
Yeah, but the $20 cover charge is payment for the fantasy that you're going to get laid. Ain't nobody got laid on Slashdot. (Screwed over, yes. Laid, no.)
Nope. You're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
Take the infinite decimal number specified by 1/9. That's .1111111111...
You arent't going to find any 2's in that.
Just because something is infinite doesn't mean that anything can occur in it.
The plural of anecdote is not data. My page on Alexandre Dumas comes out first on MSN but second on Google, even though it is listed on a Linux box.
What a crock of shit! You are making a horrible generalization. How about "arguing with a libertarian is always a waste of time" or "arguing with a senior citizen is always a waste of time."
I know ten-year-olds who hold more intelligent opinions than many twenty-five year olds.
Your statement was blatently ageist and you should be rethinking it.
Typically a speaker is reading from notes. If this is the case, then the words are indeed copyrighted and fixed in a tangible medium and it is not legal to record them without the permission of the copyright holder.
It will come down to that. Is Google news really a review? I don't think so--it is a small size picture and the first few lines of the article. There is no "review" content that is being generated. And the only reason Google is doing that is to drive traffic through the Google site.
One word: Copyright. It doesn't matter that I let people see it: it's the right to make a copy that's being enforced here.
I'll play the devil's advocate: If you had a product, wouldn't you want to be able to control where it is advertised? Pretend you don't like Google, and think that it presents your product in a bad light (those tiny little images and all, right next to competitors' images.) Shouldn't you have a right to tell them to remove the ad?
Bingo! Sensible defaults would make it so you *could* launch a multi-user system with defaults. Would that be cool, or what?
Do what Linus does: don't read patents.
"Technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git."
What about the deep Sahara desert? There are vast (almost) lifeless parts of the desert which could be "paved over" -- this might have a few benefits: 1) It could bring some much needed economic benefit to the continent, and 2) it much halt some of the unnatural (?) growth of the desert.
I'm partly serious here.
You're lucky to have a cubicle! We used to have to work in t' corridor!
I need someone to blame. Who exactly are the bad people involved here? As long as we continue to talk about a nebulous organization, we can exert no pressure. A good article explaining which *people* have made which bad decisions would work wonders.
Article: "The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph."
badasscat: No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
Maestro4k: Except that statistics does show that over enough time the series will converge into equal numbers. It may take a million times, or ten million, but eventually you'll end up with almost exactly equal number of ones and zeros.
badasscat is right. Perhaps you misunderstood: If I flip a coin only once, the difference in the number of zeros and ones is tiny -- it is only a difference of 1. At ten million and one flips, I cannot possibly be any closer than that same difference. The OP was pointing out that the absolute difference gets larger even as the ratio of the number of ones to the number of zeros approaches 1.
I realize I'm adding this way late in the game, and that hardly anyone will ever read this, but I just felt the need to correct it for posterity.