"PepsiCo" is a company. YOU can make Cola. You can even make it taste like pepsi! But Pepsi is a single purposed actor. A region NEVER WAS.
If I travelled to the good city of Parma, rented some space, and produced something that for all intents and purposes would otherwise be known as Cheddar cheese (a product of Cheddar, UK, only!), would you call this "Parmesan?" No, you wouldn't. Nobody would. If they did, we'd have up to n * m names for cheese, where n is the number of places and m is the average number of cheeses produced in each. That's stupid, illogical nonsense. There is no common noun for "cheddar cheese" other than "cheddar." "Cheddar" describes something generic just like "cola".
If your product is so good that it can be branded, then do so and make a mint. Look at Brut Champagne.
Ergo, any idiot can realize that calling it parmesan refers largely to how it TASTES, not where it's from. Whether it's "largely" or "completely" is debatable, but that point is a minor one compared to the handwaving that you are trying to do.
while i agree that this has strayed off topic, your error is far more egregious.
you, like several others who have no good answers, simply insist that the us has "pretty much the same policy" as the EU when it comes to trade.
this is bullshit.
this is a complete and utter fairy tale that you use to console yourself because you know deep down inside that EU policy hurts more poor people throughout the world than the US policy ever could.
And please don't tell me to "learn a bit more." Provide some evidence or fuck off. At the very least, provide me some list of alleged US abuses that affect the poor of the world in anywhere near the same scale that the EU's does.
Hint: you can't. the best you can find is some ramblings about steel or boeing vs airbus or some poorly reasoned nonsense about cuba which igores the fact of its oppressive government which failed to produce a good economy despite being able to sell its goods to 95%+ of the world's populatio without restriction.
But you pot kettle me an order of magnitude worse by claiming that if the EU is protectionistic then the US et al are _equally_ protectionistic.
Talk about a massive oversimplification.
Yes, it's certainly fair to criticize the EU exactly as i just did -- not because I am ignorant to the fact that other countries engage in similar activities, but the fact is that the EU does it considerably more than anybody else that matters on the global scale and the EU's policies unquestionably have more negative effects on the poor peoples of the world than anybody else's (where US protectionism tends to be in more developed industries such as steel, the EU's is rooted in the CAP/agriculture.).
Champagnes vary amongst themselves as much as Cava and champagne varry. Ditto nearly every other GI product.
If the product produced is the same, then what's left when you peel away the GI onion is bald-faced protectionism. The error in your reasoning is that you are attempting to equate a region with a single entity... it is not by any stretch of the imagination so, except for a geographical accident of being painted the same color on some map. What you are essentially promoting is a sort of racism for products where all products may be equal, but some are more equal than others.
And that's bullshit.
Regarding your statement: "names of Euopean cheeses that have been around for generations", then that's exactly the frickin point: if somebody makes a cheese that is indistinguishable, regardless of where it is made, then it is the same cheese. The people in Hamburg who called some imported cheese "parmesan" cared about taste, not where the hell it came from.
Now, if you raise a stink about Kraft Parmesan, well, that's a product labelling issue, not a GI issue. I might take your side on that one--but it's for a court to decide whether the term "parmesan" has become a common noun effectively meaning "grated" (as it arguably has in the USA) (just like "philly cheese" has been genericized for any soft, spreadable white cheese) or whether kraft's calling it parmesan is an attempt to, effectively, sell an apple as an orange.
GI proponents like to confuse the issue by telling the Kraft Parmesan tale.. but really, that's a sidenote. The real story is not in the small few cases such as that which are really product labelling issues, but in more substantive ones such as Champagne vs Sparkling Wine (etc), basmati rice vs identical non-indian rice, etc.
this is the same protectionist EU which is absolutely drunk in love with GI (geographic indicators).
this link is a bit over the top, but not too far: http://www.kc3.co.uk/~dt/protectionism.htm
also: http://www.lymec.org/article.php?sid=117
Anybody who claims that the EU as a whole does not play machiavellian economic power politics with rulings and regulations is a fool. the EU's economic policies are the equivalent of the stereotype of the US's current military ones.. unilateral, self-serving, and ultimately deadly to innocents.
A) provides inspiration, something with is sorely lacking these days, B) Paves the way for more and better space exploration and C) Has incalculably valuable spinoffs that change our daily lives for the better. If that isn't a reason, I don't know what is.
A. It's the goal of the government to provide inspiration now? Whatever happened to being inspirted by clouds and trees? Why should US taxpayers subsidize the inspiration of the whole world?
B. This is a circular argument that could be used for anything.BR.
C. Spinoffs? Bullshit. Have you ever looked at any serious studies of the space program vis-a-vis spinoffs? The actual spinoffs that come from space have been MINISCULE compared to a) the cost of the program and b) other areas where "more, better" spinoffs have happened more predictably, such as in funding university science laboratories. Even "tang" and "velcro" are not actually from the space program, despite popular myths to the contrary.
I'm sure your approach makes sense in a junior-high-school logic world.
however, the point of a *settlement* is to avoid much larger possible damages that might occur if the case is brought to trial.
If you claim that you have no songs whatsoever on your PC and raise a bit stink about it, but the RIAA has probable cause to show otherwise and can use this to get your PC legally searched and then somewhere on your file system the remnants of those same "nonexistent" mp3s is found, then suddenly $3000 will start to look pretty minor.
Remember, the law is not based on absolutes--it is no more possible to prove that OJ killed Nicole than it is possible to prove in an absolute sense that other people actually exist and are not the product of your hallucination.. so the law is based on the best we can do--which means preponderance of evidence, likelihood, believability, etc. None of these are perfect proxies, but in order to have any sort of ordered society whatsoever, it's what we've got to work with.
I, for one, am for a society in which people who lie (as you, if I am understanding, suggest that people should do), get significantly stronger punishments than those who do not.
result in fewer infringers on p2p networks, thus substantiating the slashdot choruses of "go after the users, leave technology alone" and "p2p apps such as kazaa have many important non-infringing uses."
drive people to the newest pay-per-download service of the week. after all, a two years ago you couldn't log on to slashdot without seeing a "if they only charged 99c per song download there would be no need for things like kazaa" and "I'd gladly pay 99c per song so that i dont have to buy 'filler'")
by going after college students, the RIAA (or whoever) can't be after money, since they ain't got none. The riaa will doubtlessly lose more money in lawyer fees than they will collect in judgements. they MUST be about sending a message, therefore. this is a good thing, because that is the right message to send--copyrights (such as the ones that form the basis of the GPL, Britney's music, and the bulk of work done by software developers who visit slashdot) should be respected, completely anti-copyright idiot/zealots notwithstanding (bring on the flames).
but, of course, instead of responses consistent with the old slashdot argument of "leave the technology alone, go after the infringers", expect to see the regular carping and whining here about the RIAA.
Really? Tell me, who exactly is working at IBM, Apple, Ford, Xerox, Boeing, etc who is the single person responsible for making sure that the domain gets re-registered say 10 years from today? Such a person might lose his job and/or be easily lost in the system by that time. Constructing an internal system to keep track of this costs well more than $1000, and in fact it costs probably a minimum of $200 of people-time to do such renewals even in a medium-large sized company.
Frankly, for all the stupid and evil things that NetSol does, this is a brilliant marketing move and more power to them. Not only does it get them desperately needed up-front cash, but they get paid above the odds and lessen the chance of some embarassing squatter incident involving a medium-large company in the near future.
These analysts have an intangible they can't convert to numbers on the spreadsheet
Bullshit. Customer loyalty is an easily quantifiable figure. Car industry market predictions include factors of customer loyalty--why would computer sales be any different?
I hate to be the one to bring you into the real world via such "shock therapy", but building, measuring, and retaining customer loyalty is doubtlessly a highly spreadsheeted and engineered activity at apple, inc done largely by accountants and MBAs.
Yes, I hear there's big money in streaming pre-season baseball games over the internet. the ad-sales alone are probably worth dozens of dollars! dozens!
Except in the medical profession, where looking anything up is still considered a sign of weakness and the whole system runs by an obscene pledge system where if some now senior doctor had do do 30 straight 18 hour days while a resident, then, by golly, the new recruits have to do it too, even though it's neither safe nor sane.
I updated and fixed the numbers a bit and added another column for number of internet users and recomputed the scores.
While I don't want to claim that this sort of back of the envelope estimate is truly explanatory, it does suggest, for example, that Germany and the UK have been quite effective while other places have not. Again, the last column is a score, where lower is better.
1. United States 56.74% 294 518 186 328 2. Canada 6.80% 32 471 17 250 3. China (& Hong Kong) 6.24% 1327 21266 80 1,282 4. South Korea 5.77% 48 832 26 451 5. Netherlands 2.13% 16 751 11 516 6. Brazil 2.00% 166 8300 14 700 7. Germany 1.83% 82 4481 45 2,459 8. France 1.50% 60 4000 22 1,467 9. United Kingdom 1.31% 59 4504 35 2,672 10. Australia 1.21% 19 1570 13 1,074 11. Mexico 1.19% 95 7983 10 840 12. Spain 1.05% 41 3905 14 1,333
The third column is the one of interest (the second is population, in millions, the third is a sort of spam per person score, where lower a lower score is worse). Long story short, Canada is worse per person than the USA, and netherlands and sourth korea have nothing to be proud of, either, as their governments are doing statistically about an equivalently poor job of keeping the problem in check.
That said, hopefully this study (not my little humor below, the sophos study) begin to, ever so slightly, shut up those people who claim that spam laws are useless because they will just drive spammers from one locale to the next. while this is true at the margins, the fact is that spam, like all business, is foremost local.
1. United States 56.74% 280 493 2. Canada 6.80% 30 441 3. China (& Hong Kong) 6.24% 12400 198718 4. South Korea 5.77% 48 832 5. Netherlands 2.13% 16 751 6. Brazil 2.00% 166 8300 7. Germany 1.83% 82 4481 8. France 1.50% 60 4000 9. United Kingdom 1.31% 59 4504 10. Australia 1.21% 19 1570 11. Mexico 1.19% 95 7983 12. Spain 1.05% 41 3905
There are orders of magnitude diffence in what the artists and the **aas can realistically make under the current scheme compared to what they can make under the EFF scheme.
It's not enought to say "we have an alternative scheme." It's probably not even enough to say "we have an alternative scheme by which you can make equivalent money." Instead, you need to credibly be able to say "we have an alternative scheme by which you can make superior money." If you can't do that, you got nuttin.
If you want to really go after the Japanese on patents, at least get your facts straight.
Japan actually has one of the highest rates of corporate patenting ANYWHERE. This is caused largely by corporate guidelines that say "department x must have at least 3 patentable inventions per year."
As a result, Japan's books are filled with tens of thousands of patents for truly mediocre things.
That said this forms the basis of a series of "blocking patents" which are taken quite seriously.
Your claim that "... without such enforcement" is simply wrong.
the moderators who gave you "insightful" should be ashamed. I mean, you're 180 degrees wrong and were just speaking out of your ass out of some quixotic wishful thinking, not facts.
I dont know what idiot marked you a troll, but of course you're right. hence, my use of the term "fantasized." If i thought it would actually do any good, i'd do it.
First, a lot of people are giving this thread some "gee whiz" treatment for reasons that are undeserved. That it's a helicopter is a bit novel, but really the things most people are suggesting that are now possible with this thing have been possible for a long time with model airplanes rather than helicopters.
If you want to see something really cool, check out AeroSonde, an ultra-long-range model airplane.
I have fantasized about loading up a model with flyers and then leafletting north korea or some other freedom-of-information deprived hole.
It's been said that the gpl is weak because it's never been tested in court. Well maybe there's a reason. Maybe becuase fsf and the open source movement is gaining momentum and companies are trying not to gain new enemies from potential customers.
I think you've just undermined your own cheerleading. What you've just described above is known as a bubble... people foregoing rationality and prudence (ie going with a license that has not, as you point out, been tested in court) in order to be on the bleeding edge of a "wave" that's always "gaining momentum."
Google should IPO NOW, because if they don't, they are in serious deep doo-doo.
Why?
Because when you a value a company, you value them on what they actually have that's valuable.
What google has that is valueable is 1) a great indexing technology 2) lotsa eyeballs 3) lotsa community goodwill.
1) is imitable. sure, it will take some money, but if you paid the world's dozen top guys in this sort of thing 5m each to come up with an equivalent system, they would. add another say 20m for hardware and bandwidth and you have the beginnings of a reasonable google clone.. for FAR less than what google's current pie-in-the-sky valuation is.
2) is malleable. people WILL change their surfing habits when the next best thing comes along. this has been demonstrated many times over the years.
3) is slipping. at the risk of being labeled a troll, i don't like google very much any more. for one, while still better than everything out there, the searches are now heavily influenced by all sorts of nonsense. for example, since I live in the UK but do business in the USA, I often look for suppliers of things in the USA. I havent found a good way to get around google's georgraphic targeting of search results (linked to IP) and thus google results are incredibly useless. worse, it seems that half of google results these days are for sites that are themselves auto-generated stupid link pages of indeteterminate purpose (some guy making some money somewhere out there by 'beating' google).
I am also a google advertiser--I spend i think $50/day on google ads. While my site has always been the most popular in its field with enthusiasts, I noticed that it didn't show up highly in the regular search results until I started paying for paid ads. I found this disconcerting, to say the least, since my understanding is that such a link is denied.
I can't complain about the actual ad servcie, except that, again, its inimitable. if we had 4 or 5 good googles, which is technologically and economically plausible, we'd have price competition on ads and "bs" competition in terms of people going to less cluttered and more honest-ranking engines more.
So go google, IPO now.. before somebody else understands that it would really not take much more than USD $50M to pretty effectively replicate your "3 billion" dollar company.
if they don't have roads, how high up on their priority list should "Gigli" be?
data on disc is about the smallest thing you can imaginable. there is no place on earth with a digital projector to which such a disc can not be delivered along with whatever other items come in to the outside world. no exceptions.
at this particular state in time, should we really be cheering technologies that, however impressive the compression, actually deliver a lesser qualtiy image? how long will it take for the march of progress to make 5gb vs whatever the normal standard is seem as out of date as formatting 1.44mb floppy discs to 1.6mb or whatever that trick is that we used to play was..
Slashdot Mirror
"PepsiCo" is a company. YOU can make Cola. You can even make it taste like pepsi! But Pepsi is a single purposed actor. A region NEVER WAS.
If I travelled to the good city of Parma, rented some space, and produced something that for all intents and purposes would otherwise be known as Cheddar cheese (a product of Cheddar, UK, only!), would you call this "Parmesan?" No, you wouldn't. Nobody would. If they did, we'd have up to n * m names for cheese, where n is the number of places and m is the average number of cheeses produced in each. That's stupid, illogical nonsense. There is no common noun for "cheddar cheese" other than "cheddar." "Cheddar" describes something generic just like "cola".
If your product is so good that it can be branded, then do so and make a mint. Look at Brut Champagne.
Ergo, any idiot can realize that calling it parmesan refers largely to how it TASTES, not where it's from. Whether it's "largely" or "completely" is debatable, but that point is a minor one compared to the handwaving that you are trying to do.
while i agree that this has strayed off topic, your error is far more egregious.
you, like several others who have no good answers, simply insist that the us has "pretty much the same policy" as the EU when it comes to trade.
this is bullshit.
this is a complete and utter fairy tale that you use to console yourself because you know deep down inside that EU policy hurts more poor people throughout the world than the US policy ever could.
And please don't tell me to "learn a bit more." Provide some evidence or fuck off. At the very least, provide me some list of alleged US abuses that affect the poor of the world in anywhere near the same scale that the EU's does.
Hint: you can't. the best you can find is some ramblings about steel or boeing vs airbus or some poorly reasoned nonsense about cuba which igores the fact of its oppressive government which failed to produce a good economy despite being able to sell its goods to 95%+ of the world's populatio without restriction.
But you pot kettle me an order of magnitude worse by claiming that if the EU is protectionistic then the US et al are _equally_ protectionistic.
Talk about a massive oversimplification.
Yes, it's certainly fair to criticize the EU exactly as i just did -- not because I am ignorant to the fact that other countries engage in similar activities, but the fact is that the EU does it considerably more than anybody else that matters on the global scale and the EU's policies unquestionably have more negative effects on the poor peoples of the world than anybody else's (where US protectionism tends to be in more developed industries such as steel, the EU's is rooted in the CAP/agriculture.).
A region is not a person.
A region is not even a method of production.
Champagnes vary amongst themselves as much as Cava and champagne varry. Ditto nearly every other GI product.
If the product produced is the same, then what's left when you peel away the GI onion is bald-faced protectionism. The error in your reasoning is that you are attempting to equate a region with a single entity... it is not by any stretch of the imagination so, except for a geographical accident of being painted the same color on some map. What you are essentially promoting is a sort of racism for products where all products may be equal, but some are more equal than others.
And that's bullshit.
Regarding your statement: "names of Euopean cheeses that have been around for generations", then that's exactly the frickin point: if somebody makes a cheese that is indistinguishable, regardless of where it is made, then it is the same cheese. The people in Hamburg who called some imported cheese "parmesan" cared about taste, not where the hell it came from.
Now, if you raise a stink about Kraft Parmesan, well, that's a product labelling issue, not a GI issue. I might take your side on that one--but it's for a court to decide whether the term "parmesan" has become a common noun effectively meaning "grated" (as it arguably has in the USA) (just like "philly cheese" has been genericized for any soft, spreadable white cheese) or whether kraft's calling it parmesan is an attempt to, effectively, sell an apple as an orange.
GI proponents like to confuse the issue by telling the Kraft Parmesan tale.. but really, that's a sidenote. The real story is not in the small few cases such as that which are really product labelling issues, but in more substantive ones such as Champagne vs Sparkling Wine (etc), basmati rice vs identical non-indian rice, etc.
this is the same protectionist EU which is absolutely drunk in love with GI (geographic indicators). this link is a bit over the top, but not too far: http://www.kc3.co.uk/~dt/protectionism.htm also: http://www.lymec.org/article.php?sid=117 Anybody who claims that the EU as a whole does not play machiavellian economic power politics with rulings and regulations is a fool. the EU's economic policies are the equivalent of the stereotype of the US's current military ones.. unilateral, self-serving, and ultimately deadly to innocents.
A. It's the goal of the government to provide inspiration now? Whatever happened to being inspirted by clouds and trees? Why should US taxpayers subsidize the inspiration of the whole world?
B. This is a circular argument that could be used for anything.BR. C. Spinoffs? Bullshit. Have you ever looked at any serious studies of the space program vis-a-vis spinoffs? The actual spinoffs that come from space have been MINISCULE compared to a) the cost of the program and b) other areas where "more, better" spinoffs have happened more predictably, such as in funding university science laboratories. Even "tang" and "velcro" are not actually from the space program, despite popular myths to the contrary.
and no Cue:Cat jokes yet?
+1, funny.
however, the point of a *settlement* is to avoid much larger possible damages that might occur if the case is brought to trial.
If you claim that you have no songs whatsoever on your PC and raise a bit stink about it, but the RIAA has probable cause to show otherwise and can use this to get your PC legally searched and then somewhere on your file system the remnants of those same "nonexistent" mp3s is found, then suddenly $3000 will start to look pretty minor.
Remember, the law is not based on absolutes--it is no more possible to prove that OJ killed Nicole than it is possible to prove in an absolute sense that other people actually exist and are not the product of your hallucination.. so the law is based on the best we can do--which means preponderance of evidence, likelihood, believability, etc. None of these are perfect proxies, but in order to have any sort of ordered society whatsoever, it's what we've got to work with.
I, for one, am for a society in which people who lie (as you, if I am understanding, suggest that people should do), get significantly stronger punishments than those who do not.
FFS.
- free up bandwidth for us non copyright infringers
- result in fewer infringers on p2p networks, thus substantiating the slashdot choruses of "go after the users, leave technology alone" and "p2p apps such as kazaa have many important non-infringing uses."
- drive people to the newest pay-per-download service of the week. after all, a two years ago you couldn't log on to slashdot without seeing a "if they only charged 99c per song download there would be no need for things like kazaa" and "I'd gladly pay 99c per song so that i dont have to buy 'filler'")
- by going after college students, the RIAA (or whoever) can't be after money, since they ain't got none. The riaa will doubtlessly lose more money in lawyer fees than they will collect in judgements. they MUST be about sending a message, therefore. this is a good thing, because that is the right message to send--copyrights (such as the ones that form the basis of the GPL, Britney's music, and the bulk of work done by software developers who visit slashdot) should be respected, completely anti-copyright idiot/zealots notwithstanding (bring on the flames).
but, of course, instead of responses consistent with the old slashdot argument of "leave the technology alone, go after the infringers", expect to see the regular carping and whining here about the RIAA.Really? Tell me, who exactly is working at IBM, Apple, Ford, Xerox, Boeing, etc who is the single person responsible for making sure that the domain gets re-registered say 10 years from today? Such a person might lose his job and/or be easily lost in the system by that time. Constructing an internal system to keep track of this costs well more than $1000, and in fact it costs probably a minimum of $200 of people-time to do such renewals even in a medium-large sized company.
Frankly, for all the stupid and evil things that NetSol does, this is a brilliant marketing move and more power to them. Not only does it get them desperately needed up-front cash, but they get paid above the odds and lessen the chance of some embarassing squatter incident involving a medium-large company in the near future.
Bullshit. Customer loyalty is an easily quantifiable figure. Car industry market predictions include factors of customer loyalty--why would computer sales be any different?
I hate to be the one to bring you into the real world via such "shock therapy", but building, measuring, and retaining customer loyalty is doubtlessly a highly spreadsheeted and engineered activity at apple, inc done largely by accountants and MBAs.
Yes, I hear there's big money in streaming pre-season baseball games over the internet. the ad-sales alone are probably worth dozens of dollars! dozens!
Except in the medical profession, where looking anything up is still considered a sign of weakness and the whole system runs by an obscene pledge system where if some now senior doctor had do do 30 straight 18 hour days while a resident, then, by golly, the new recruits have to do it too, even though it's neither safe nor sane.
Trust me.
While I don't want to claim that this sort of back of the envelope estimate is truly explanatory, it does suggest, for example, that Germany and the UK have been quite effective while other places have not. Again, the last column is a score, where lower is better.
That said, hopefully this study (not my little humor below, the sophos study) begin to, ever so slightly, shut up those people who claim that spam laws are useless because they will just drive spammers from one locale to the next. while this is true at the margins, the fact is that spam, like all business, is foremost local.
It's not enought to say "we have an alternative scheme." It's probably not even enough to say "we have an alternative scheme by which you can make equivalent money." Instead, you need to credibly be able to say "we have an alternative scheme by which you can make superior money." If you can't do that, you got nuttin.
If you want to really go after the Japanese on patents, at least get your facts straight.
Japan actually has one of the highest rates of corporate patenting ANYWHERE. This is caused largely by corporate guidelines that say "department x must have at least 3 patentable inventions per year."
As a result, Japan's books are filled with tens of thousands of patents for truly mediocre things.
That said this forms the basis of a series of "blocking patents" which are taken quite seriously.
Your claim that "... without such enforcement" is simply wrong.
the moderators who gave you "insightful" should be ashamed. I mean, you're 180 degrees wrong and were just speaking out of your ass out of some quixotic wishful thinking, not facts.
I dont know what idiot marked you a troll, but of course you're right. hence, my use of the term "fantasized." If i thought it would actually do any good, i'd do it.
If you want to see something really cool, check out AeroSonde, an ultra-long-range model airplane.
I have fantasized about loading up a model with flyers and then leafletting north korea or some other freedom-of-information deprived hole.
I think you've just undermined your own cheerleading. What you've just described above is known as a bubble... people foregoing rationality and prudence (ie going with a license that has not, as you point out, been tested in court) in order to be on the bleeding edge of a "wave" that's always "gaining momentum."
Pop!
Why?
Because when you a value a company, you value them on what they actually have that's valuable.
What google has that is valueable is 1) a great indexing technology 2) lotsa eyeballs 3) lotsa community goodwill.
1) is imitable. sure, it will take some money, but if you paid the world's dozen top guys in this sort of thing 5m each to come up with an equivalent system, they would. add another say 20m for hardware and bandwidth and you have the beginnings of a reasonable google clone.. for FAR less than what google's current pie-in-the-sky valuation is.
2) is malleable. people WILL change their surfing habits when the next best thing comes along. this has been demonstrated many times over the years.
3) is slipping. at the risk of being labeled a troll, i don't like google very much any more. for one, while still better than everything out there, the searches are now heavily influenced by all sorts of nonsense. for example, since I live in the UK but do business in the USA, I often look for suppliers of things in the USA. I havent found a good way to get around google's georgraphic targeting of search results (linked to IP) and thus google results are incredibly useless. worse, it seems that half of google results these days are for sites that are themselves auto-generated stupid link pages of indeteterminate purpose (some guy making some money somewhere out there by 'beating' google).
I am also a google advertiser--I spend i think $50/day on google ads. While my site has always been the most popular in its field with enthusiasts, I noticed that it didn't show up highly in the regular search results until I started paying for paid ads. I found this disconcerting, to say the least, since my understanding is that such a link is denied.
I can't complain about the actual ad servcie, except that, again, its inimitable. if we had 4 or 5 good googles, which is technologically and economically plausible, we'd have price competition on ads and "bs" competition in terms of people going to less cluttered and more honest-ranking engines more.
So go google, IPO now.. before somebody else understands that it would really not take much more than USD $50M to pretty effectively replicate your "3 billion" dollar company.
much less your personal computing to a company that engages in this sort of nonsense?
data on disc is about the smallest thing you can imaginable. there is no place on earth with a digital projector to which such a disc can not be delivered along with whatever other items come in to the outside world. no exceptions.
at this particular state in time, should we really be cheering technologies that, however impressive the compression, actually deliver a lesser qualtiy image? how long will it take for the march of progress to make 5gb vs whatever the normal standard is seem as out of date as formatting 1.44mb floppy discs to 1.6mb or whatever that trick is that we used to play was..