At least Infinium understands why they're being mocked... understanding that there's a problem is the first step towards recovery from lawsuit addiction.
I agree that neither side is coming into the dispute with clean hands here. HardOCP's first edition of the article was not perfect, even they admited that there were several points that needed to be retracted. However, HardOCP handled their mistakes gracefully by retracting what they were proven wrong on.
Infinium thought they had weak prey, so they overreached and added a few threats that they wouldn't be able to follow through on either. They might have even been hoping that they could scare HardOCP into shutting down completely.
It's hard to run a news organization of any kind without at least having a laywer within reach. Whenever you say bad things about businesses, you'll eventually run into somebody who thinks thye have more lawyers than you can ever afford...
A little quick googling on the term Storm &Hemingway reveals that the law firms primary business is usually on the plantiff's side of copyright and trademark disputes... they're the guys who go after those who are infringing.
Nice to see that they can take a/. friendly position too...
Gotta ask... could this have been the result of enough adult sites trying to trick MSN's spider. Afterall, Google as a company doesn't exactly have a political stand on George W. Bush, but it was webmasters who got the "Miserable Failure" association made...
Which extended to databases means that the copyright on the database goes to the whomever assembled all the facts into a nice neat collection. Simply reformating that into another format is just a translation, which is not far enough away to escape the copyright.
You'd only have a lawsuit if the telemarketers hacked into your computer to get that info. If they say, license the database that the phone company is selling, you don't have a case. They didn't copy your DB, they discovered the info another way.
In order to prove a copyright violation, the accuser have to prove that the work being infringed on was actually copied and only slightly modified. If an author has read a compeitor's book and then released a very similar one, that's a lawsuit. However, If the author claims they've never heard of the accuser's book before the lawsuit, and definitely hasn't read it, then there's no possible copying.
The word "misappropiation" in the title of the bill is the key thing here. What the law is basically about is making sure databases have the same copyright protection as a dictionary, thesaurus, or atlas does on paper.
Paying a group of typists to type every phone number, name, and address in a phone book into your database should't be a legal way of assembling a database. Quoting person's entry is fair use, but using them all isn't fair at all.
The "new station in town" will usually operate at a loss for its first few weeks to establish themselves. Selling below cost is legal, it's only illegal if you are using the profits from a monopoly in another market to try to move into a market where there's competition.
Again, so long as the mutually-profitable prices come as a result of reading each other signs, it's legal. It's only illegal if they start spreading their price information to competitors before offering it to the public.
If you set a price lower than your competitor, you can be accused of "predatory pricing" Only if you enter a market with a price that's below cost with the intent of raising your prices once you've knocked out your competitors.
If you set a price higer than a competitor, it is used as evidence of an "abusive monopoly position" Huh? If you have a competitor, you can't abuse your monopoly because you don't have one.
If you set the same price as a competitor, it is evidence of "price fixing" Price fixing can't happen if the prices aren't even, but there's still more that needs to be proven. Is there an under the table agreement to keep the prices where they are? If so, that's price fixing, if not, then that's just the free market having agreed on a price... any player can try to deviate from that price if they want to, but moving up would mean less market share, and moving down would lower profits in a way that wouldn't be made up by the volume.
Prosecuters can't charge somebody with murder if they fail to actually kill the person. That's why there's another crime called "attempted murder' to cover the failed attempt.
This is in part why some business people would be able to get off the hook if they just cooperated with the investigations, but instead overcompensate and get charged for covering up the crime they thought they comitted even though they didn't quite make it.
This is also why airline prices move in some strange waves.
When there's going to be a price increase, one airline has to announce its increase to the world, they can't tell the competition first. Now, for a few hour, that airline is $20 higher than everybody flying the same route... who's going to buy tickets that route from that airline? Nobody. The ball is now in the court of all of the other airlines that fly that route... if they agree it's time for a price increase, they'll move their prices up to match. However, if a major player disagrees, they'll keep their prices where they are, and eventually everybody who raised their prices will realize this isn't going to stick, and the company that originally stated the fare hike will retract it.
Fare cuts move the same way. Once somebody announces a cut, everybody else has to either match it or wait for the airline who made the cut to get locked out of the market by filling up their planes.
That's how fair play happens without collusion. Those in charge of the prices have to guess what they other guys are going to do in the future, but once it's public information, everybody can use that info.
All media outlets, be they web sites, TV channels, radio stations, newspapers, or whatever else all have the same core business. They attract an audience using some form of content and then try to divert that audience to people who pay them called sponsors.
The key thing is, these two operations within the media outlet have opposing goals. The content side has to tell it like it is, while the sponsors want to use the outlet to get out their message. They're at odds with each other, they always have been and always will be.
The key thing is, the content people try to maintain that their image is more important than the income of the sales staff. That is to say, sometimes they want to publish information that the sponsors would rather not see published. A good media outlet has to do such a thing sometimes, it's about maintaining credibility.
Of course, the sponsors would want such stories spiked. And, they'd also like to blur the line between what is content and what is a paid ad as much as possible.
History has shown, that sometimes cash-crunched media outlets will agree to let their credibility be compromised in order to make some quick bucks from a sponsor. In nearly every case, such quick bucks come, but eventually the credibility loss gets to the point that there's no audience left, therefore nothing to sell to the sponsors, and the media operation is out of business.
So... it'll be interesting to see how well Yahoo is able to keep the paid inclusion system from corrupting its content of results.
Of course, Google has already made arrangements to crawl news sites more frequently than others, and even get into registration-requiring sites that would otherwise be inaccessable to GoogleBot. Froogle is Google's attempt to do the same for shopping sites. The key thing is, however, that Google is asking for no money to be included in Froogle, just maybe a little help in geting their bot past the doors.
Yahoo may see some short term money from this effort, but they'd better watch just what they're selling, otherwise they may end up killing what little of a golden goose they have left over there.
In addition to more frequent spidering is a first spidering for a page that might have otherwise never entered the index. For sites like Amazon.com that have a deep, deep, deep, database of pages, it's an advantage for them to be able to push their changes in rather than wait for the spider to stumble upon what changed.
Again, this is not a service for somebody who runs a small site, it's for the huge sites to attract traffic to their deeper pages.
"Yahoo" in the proper meaning of the term, never indexed. The original Yahoo was a directory rather than a search engine.
Yahoo has been charging for-profit ventures for a few years to be added to their directory. So, really, this is just the addition of a new feature in their "pay us to stand out" set. It's clearly further tarnishing Yahoo's reputation as a searcher... but Yahoo has never been anybody's primary search engine for years. Even Yahoo conceeded early on that some searches they just couldn't answer, which is why they've always had a partner like AltaVista, Inktomi, or Google to field failed queries.
Even Google conceeds that the way for a searcher to make money is to serve up targeted ads. The old GoTo.com who turned into Overture knew that in the late-90s too. But, the key is, Google has very solid lines between the content and the ads. However, some other search sites that use Google results and Google ads have allowed the line to become blured. Now, Yahoo's more or less offering a presentation format where the line will be absolutely invisible...
Be interesting to see if this works or backfires...
And of course, this all comes out on Super Tuesday, a day when newscasts will be filled with primary election results and therefore won't have time to mention a comparitively small-time business story. The 30-second mention this story might have gotten on mainstream stations drops to zero.
This is a classic case of releasing the bad news when as few people as possible looking.
The whole point of a lab environment is to try to take as many of the random environmental factors out of play as possible. Clearly, when you want a fair coin flip, you want as many random effects on the coin as possible.
This contributes to the theory that nothing is truely random, but the laws of physics are so complicated that there are things that we just can't understand and appear to be random.
The tosser of a coin is giving it a certain ammount of force that is going to cause it to rotate while it travels up in the air and down to the ground. Given knowledge of the force and angle at which it's applied, and the distance from the thrower's hand to the ground, it might be possible to solve for the result of the toss. However, since it's not so easy to measure that force and run those numbers while the coin is in the air, that's not going to be useful in calling the coin in most situations. Likewise, it's hard to control the throwing motion to make sure there will be a heads or tails result without making the toss look clearly unfair.
In fact, there's an address in Washington D.C. to which you could send the remains of destroied bills and they'll do their best to piece things together and redeem the value of the pile... yep, it really exists.
Nothing like a Slashdot post to jump to a conclusion.
Clearly, there's something funny going on with the microwaved bills... but stores don't have RFID scanners at the exits yet. They have an acousto-magnetic sensor that gets deactivated by a pad at the cash register so that paying customers aren't supposed to set them off. Big difference here is that the tags in a store system don't yet emit an identifying signal... they all emit the same reply. The store doesn't know what a shoplifter did to trip the alarm, just that they did trip it. There's not quite proof that each bill is emitting its serial number yet.
Also, having microwaved everything in a stack makes things a bit unclear. Did every eye burn on its own, or did just one or two bills in the middle of the stack catch flame which in turn burned all of the bills above and below in varying degrees. Notice that the top and bottom bills were unharmed. Could one bill alone be microwaved safely?
And, BTW, if you so much as put slightly crumpled tin foil in your microwave, you get a similar effect. Could there just be a small metal content in the bill designed so that somebody who has $1000 worth of $20 bills (rather than simply 10 $100's) in their wallet is sure to set off an airport security alarm until they show their wallet to make sure they get an extra security questions?
It's interesting, but I think more research needs to be done. Microwave carefully, people.
Slashdot Mirror
At least Infinium understands why they're being mocked... understanding that there's a problem is the first step towards recovery from lawsuit addiction.
I agree that neither side is coming into the dispute with clean hands here. HardOCP's first edition of the article was not perfect, even they admited that there were several points that needed to be retracted. However, HardOCP handled their mistakes gracefully by retracting what they were proven wrong on.
Infinium thought they had weak prey, so they overreached and added a few threats that they wouldn't be able to follow through on either. They might have even been hoping that they could scare HardOCP into shutting down completely.
It's hard to run a news organization of any kind without at least having a laywer within reach. Whenever you say bad things about businesses, you'll eventually run into somebody who thinks thye have more lawyers than you can ever afford...
A little quick googling on the term Storm &Hemingway reveals that the law firms primary business is usually on the plantiff's side of copyright and trademark disputes... they're the guys who go after those who are infringing.
/. friendly position too...
Nice to see that they can take a
Word has it that the Infinium console is going to be bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.
Gotta ask... could this have been the result of enough adult sites trying to trick MSN's spider. Afterall, Google as a company doesn't exactly have a political stand on George W. Bush, but it was webmasters who got the "Miserable Failure" association made...
Which extended to databases means that the copyright on the database goes to the whomever assembled all the facts into a nice neat collection. Simply reformating that into another format is just a translation, which is not far enough away to escape the copyright.
You'd only have a lawsuit if the telemarketers hacked into your computer to get that info. If they say, license the database that the phone company is selling, you don't have a case. They didn't copy your DB, they discovered the info another way.
In order to prove a copyright violation, the accuser have to prove that the work being infringed on was actually copied and only slightly modified. If an author has read a compeitor's book and then released a very similar one, that's a lawsuit. However, If the author claims they've never heard of the accuser's book before the lawsuit, and definitely hasn't read it, then there's no possible copying.
The word "misappropiation" in the title of the bill is the key thing here. What the law is basically about is making sure databases have the same copyright protection as a dictionary, thesaurus, or atlas does on paper.
Paying a group of typists to type every phone number, name, and address in a phone book into your database should't be a legal way of assembling a database. Quoting person's entry is fair use, but using them all isn't fair at all.
What about a DB that's published on a CD as part of software?
The "new station in town" will usually operate at a loss for its first few weeks to establish themselves. Selling below cost is legal, it's only illegal if you are using the profits from a monopoly in another market to try to move into a market where there's competition.
Again, so long as the mutually-profitable prices come as a result of reading each other signs, it's legal. It's only illegal if they start spreading their price information to competitors before offering it to the public.
Say what?
If you set a price lower than your competitor, you can be accused of "predatory pricing"
Only if you enter a market with a price that's below cost with the intent of raising your prices once you've knocked out your competitors.
If you set a price higer than a competitor, it is used as evidence of an "abusive monopoly position"
Huh? If you have a competitor, you can't abuse your monopoly because you don't have one.
If you set the same price as a competitor, it is evidence of "price fixing"
Price fixing can't happen if the prices aren't even, but there's still more that needs to be proven. Is there an under the table agreement to keep the prices where they are? If so, that's price fixing, if not, then that's just the free market having agreed on a price... any player can try to deviate from that price if they want to, but moving up would mean less market share, and moving down would lower profits in a way that wouldn't be made up by the volume.
Prosecuters can't charge somebody with murder if they fail to actually kill the person. That's why there's another crime called "attempted murder' to cover the failed attempt.
This is in part why some business people would be able to get off the hook if they just cooperated with the investigations, but instead overcompensate and get charged for covering up the crime they thought they comitted even though they didn't quite make it.
This is also why airline prices move in some strange waves.
When there's going to be a price increase, one airline has to announce its increase to the world, they can't tell the competition first. Now, for a few hour, that airline is $20 higher than everybody flying the same route... who's going to buy tickets that route from that airline? Nobody. The ball is now in the court of all of the other airlines that fly that route... if they agree it's time for a price increase, they'll move their prices up to match. However, if a major player disagrees, they'll keep their prices where they are, and eventually everybody who raised their prices will realize this isn't going to stick, and the company that originally stated the fare hike will retract it.
Fare cuts move the same way. Once somebody announces a cut, everybody else has to either match it or wait for the airline who made the cut to get locked out of the market by filling up their planes.
That's how fair play happens without collusion. Those in charge of the prices have to guess what they other guys are going to do in the future, but once it's public information, everybody can use that info.
All media outlets, be they web sites, TV channels, radio stations, newspapers, or whatever else all have the same core business. They attract an audience using some form of content and then try to divert that audience to people who pay them called sponsors.
The key thing is, these two operations within the media outlet have opposing goals. The content side has to tell it like it is, while the sponsors want to use the outlet to get out their message. They're at odds with each other, they always have been and always will be.
The key thing is, the content people try to maintain that their image is more important than the income of the sales staff. That is to say, sometimes they want to publish information that the sponsors would rather not see published. A good media outlet has to do such a thing sometimes, it's about maintaining credibility.
Of course, the sponsors would want such stories spiked. And, they'd also like to blur the line between what is content and what is a paid ad as much as possible.
History has shown, that sometimes cash-crunched media outlets will agree to let their credibility be compromised in order to make some quick bucks from a sponsor. In nearly every case, such quick bucks come, but eventually the credibility loss gets to the point that there's no audience left, therefore nothing to sell to the sponsors, and the media operation is out of business.
So... it'll be interesting to see how well Yahoo is able to keep the paid inclusion system from corrupting its content of results.
Of course, Google has already made arrangements to crawl news sites more frequently than others, and even get into registration-requiring sites that would otherwise be inaccessable to GoogleBot. Froogle is Google's attempt to do the same for shopping sites. The key thing is, however, that Google is asking for no money to be included in Froogle, just maybe a little help in geting their bot past the doors.
Yahoo may see some short term money from this effort, but they'd better watch just what they're selling, otherwise they may end up killing what little of a golden goose they have left over there.
In addition to more frequent spidering is a first spidering for a page that might have otherwise never entered the index. For sites like Amazon.com that have a deep, deep, deep, database of pages, it's an advantage for them to be able to push their changes in rather than wait for the spider to stumble upon what changed.
Again, this is not a service for somebody who runs a small site, it's for the huge sites to attract traffic to their deeper pages.
"Yahoo" in the proper meaning of the term, never indexed. The original Yahoo was a directory rather than a search engine.
Yahoo has been charging for-profit ventures for a few years to be added to their directory. So, really, this is just the addition of a new feature in their "pay us to stand out" set. It's clearly further tarnishing Yahoo's reputation as a searcher... but Yahoo has never been anybody's primary search engine for years. Even Yahoo conceeded early on that some searches they just couldn't answer, which is why they've always had a partner like AltaVista, Inktomi, or Google to field failed queries.
Even Google conceeds that the way for a searcher to make money is to serve up targeted ads. The old GoTo.com who turned into Overture knew that in the late-90s too. But, the key is, Google has very solid lines between the content and the ads. However, some other search sites that use Google results and Google ads have allowed the line to become blured. Now, Yahoo's more or less offering a presentation format where the line will be absolutely invisible...
Be interesting to see if this works or backfires...
And of course, this all comes out on Super Tuesday, a day when newscasts will be filled with primary election results and therefore won't have time to mention a comparitively small-time business story. The 30-second mention this story might have gotten on mainstream stations drops to zero.
This is a classic case of releasing the bad news when as few people as possible looking.
The whole point of a lab environment is to try to take as many of the random environmental factors out of play as possible. Clearly, when you want a fair coin flip, you want as many random effects on the coin as possible.
Which, for the common football field situation, a grassy field will do just fine at that...
This contributes to the theory that nothing is truely random, but the laws of physics are so complicated that there are things that we just can't understand and appear to be random.
The tosser of a coin is giving it a certain ammount of force that is going to cause it to rotate while it travels up in the air and down to the ground. Given knowledge of the force and angle at which it's applied, and the distance from the thrower's hand to the ground, it might be possible to solve for the result of the toss. However, since it's not so easy to measure that force and run those numbers while the coin is in the air, that's not going to be useful in calling the coin in most situations. Likewise, it's hard to control the throwing motion to make sure there will be a heads or tails result without making the toss look clearly unfair.
Talk about research into the useless...
If you have more than half a bill, your bank should accept it. However, if it's so bad the bank won't take it, these are the people who might.
And put some bigger fruits and vegitables in... and you've got the two patato clock!
In fact, there's an address in Washington D.C. to which you could send the remains of destroied bills and they'll do their best to piece things together and redeem the value of the pile... yep, it really exists.
Nothing like a Slashdot post to jump to a conclusion.
Clearly, there's something funny going on with the microwaved bills... but stores don't have RFID scanners at the exits yet. They have an acousto-magnetic sensor that gets deactivated by a pad at the cash register so that paying customers aren't supposed to set them off. Big difference here is that the tags in a store system don't yet emit an identifying signal... they all emit the same reply. The store doesn't know what a shoplifter did to trip the alarm, just that they did trip it. There's not quite proof that each bill is emitting its serial number yet.
Also, having microwaved everything in a stack makes things a bit unclear. Did every eye burn on its own, or did just one or two bills in the middle of the stack catch flame which in turn burned all of the bills above and below in varying degrees. Notice that the top and bottom bills were unharmed. Could one bill alone be microwaved safely?
And, BTW, if you so much as put slightly crumpled tin foil in your microwave, you get a similar effect. Could there just be a small metal content in the bill designed so that somebody who has $1000 worth of $20 bills (rather than simply 10 $100's) in their wallet is sure to set off an airport security alarm until they show their wallet to make sure they get an extra security questions?
It's interesting, but I think more research needs to be done. Microwave carefully, people.
Got some bad news here. I just checked my dictionary and there appears to be two definitions of "tomorrow":
tomorrow (n.)
1: the day after the present
2: future 1a
We know how SCO loves to catch us with these annoying second definiton meanings...