There is a law behind that. Google claims to present the unbiased results of its secret PageRank formula... if in fact they're presenting what the formula said plus the modifying decisions of their human editors, they're committing a basic fraud, promising one thing then doing another.
If you're too lazy to go to the courthouse, and also too lazy to check to see if other sites might be hosting the documents for less or free, then $20 is a reasonable fee.
$20 would be reasonable for getting court documents from a case at a far-away court house that don't exist online elsewhere. Too bad for SearchKing that isn't the case here.
It's a bit tacky, specifically to say that you can't use the documents you pay for to disparage the company. (Remember, we're talking about Google's filings in the case.)
Of course... you can get the same documents under a public domain license at the courthouse, or from what will be sure to be several websites that'll spring up to host PDFs that were obtained from scanning courthouse copies. So, if you're stupid enough to agree to a license on public domain work, so be it.
Actually, I think there's a decent case that needs to be talked about here...
Google should not have the right to decide what it "doesn't like" and have a "Google doesn't like these sites" list that has a negative PageRank impact. Simply put, PageRank should be unbiased, and apply all rules equally to all sites.
I think the big question here is if SearchKing was punished specifically by Google, or if SearchKing's behavior resulted in a tweak to the formula that'd punish a metaphoric SearchQueen, or any other site that tries to do what SearchKing did, the same way without any further changes to the system.
Of course, what we could do is simply turn back the clock to the mid-80s before 911 existed...
Back then, police and fire departments had "normal" phone numbers, and had to make an effort to distribute magnets and paint the numbers onto their vehicles. It wasn't quite as easy to memorize as 911, but many phones with autodial came with 1-touch buttons labeled with police, fire, and medical symbols. (Then came the laws about not testing those one-touch buttons...)
What Sirius wanted TechTV for TechLive, it's 9-hour all day tech news and tech stock coverage program. Well, one market crash later that idea didn't look so smart, and TechLive is now the name of a 30-minute primetime magazine show.
With the dramatic shift in programming diet, and the fact that TechTV doesn't own the radio rights to content it doesn't produce, I think all you can really expect is to find the audio half of Call for Help and The Screen Savers on a talk station eventually.
The law saw this one coming. DVD-in-the-car systems exist, but by law video screens must NOT be within the field of vision of the driver. No, you cannot watch TV while driving.
Re:Why so upset about this concept?
on
You Can't Link Here
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They're afraid of bad PR by association...
Remember how www.microsoft.com got associated in Google as the #1 return for "Go to hell" for a while. That's because even though that phrase was nowhere on Microsoft's homepage, an organized effort of people associated that phrase with www.microsoft.com, so Google picked up on that and declared Microsoft the net's leading authority on going to hell..
Now, that's a rather tame embarassment for a company that you could argue deserved it, but a lot of Men in Suits are affraid that they could be associated with even less desirable terms in a way that damages PR.
The only problem is, "don't link to us" is about as legally valid as "don't talk about our website" which just isn't gonna fly.
If the user does not already have a recent cookie from me, user gets my home page instead. If the referal in the header is from anything but me, user gets my home page instead.
There are plenty of stupid server tricks available to make it impossible to link from outside the site.
The IRS has made rumblings that unless the tax software industry gets their act together, the IRS will start work on an "official" tax product that would likely be impossible to compete with.
The state of MA has already done this, with an easy-to-use web interface (over HTTPS, of course) that puts the state edition of TurboTax to shame. MA doesn't have that complex of a tax code anyway, so there really isn't much for software to do in the first place besides data entry and transmission.
States have been stiff in cracking down on scanner-based systems, to the point now that where crackdowns have occured the scanner errors now are more often than not in the customer's favor.
The problem is, it'll take federal involvemnt to treat rebate errors as the small-scale frauds that they are, and seriously slap those who send false rejections with fines and penalites that make sure they become very sure about their rejections before they send them.
I once got rejected on a rebate for a compressed air blower product because I had sent in a hand written index card with the UPC number, as per the instructions, instead of sending the actual UPC which every other item on the rebate form required. Why was canned air the exception? Because the UPC was printed on the can itself, and cutting that can open is not a safe activity.
The books will cost $50-$75 dollars while they're being sold at university bookstores, then released free as soon as the course is over so that the resale value of the book is zero.
However, the free book will be useless for the next semester's courses, because a new edition will have been released to update the book for the changing technologies, of course.
See, it is possible to make big money with open source... although this wasn't what we had in mind.
Standards allow somebody else to build a web browser and/or web server.
If suddenly IE only worked with IIS powered servers, and IIS would refuse to send to anything that wasn't IE... there'd be no competitors to MS in those fields who could play the same game.... and you know what MS does once it gets a monopoly, don't you?
My plan was designed so that/. itself would never request the page more than once, and it would rely on the users to report a failure.
The problem is, 500 requests within a span of a few seconds can bring down some small servers, particularly if the page is dynamically generated./. could be accused of launching a DOS in the name of load testing.
The idea is to reduce the number of hits a weak server takes, not add 500 to the number/. is about to throw at it anyway.
2. They have no way of knowing if a site can't handle the load.
Here's an easy to automate solution...
1./. grabs a copy of the linked sites nanoseconds before posting the story, just in case. 2. Have a "report dead link" option next to new stories. (Those who abuse this feature can pay in karma.) 3. If too many users report the link as dead,/. starts substituing the mirror link for the next hour. 4. After time's up, the link reverts back to normal. If the complaint threshhold is reached again, the process repeats. 5. Once a link has survived 12 hours without need for the mirror, the mirror page can be deleted, because the worst is now over.
If anybody doesn't want that mirroring service,/. can honor the same robots.txt standard that keeps sites out of Google's mirror as well. Furthermore,/. can "whitelist" the freequently-linked commercial sites like CNN, Wired News, Washington Post, and etc. who should be big enough to handle things on their own, and therefore wouldn't want the mirror anyway.
They're not going to make enough money to pay back the costs of building an ISP-sized network in a month. They idea is that they'll lay out all that money, and then devote all of the usage fees from the next 24 months to paying the equipment off. For the next few months, they have little costs and the equipment loan is paid off... it's time to PROFIT!
Of course, eventually the equipment will come to the end of its lifespan and have to be replaced. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
This is kind of like the pricing of cell phones...
Your usage costs the provider the same no matter what pricing plan you're on. Providing you with 800 minutes of service over a month taxes their equipment exactly the same way whether you've prepaid for 250, 500, 750, or 1000 minutes per month. The cell towers don't know and don't care what plan you are on.
However, when it comes to billing, the user who uses 800 minutes will get punished badly if they were on the plan that allocated only 250 minutes to them. The user who has the 750 minute plan will feel only a mild sting, and the user who's on the 1000 minute plan is likely getting the best deal.
Why do the providers work this way? Because they 1. Want to encurage users to not use the service excessively and 2. Want users to to declare their intended useage in advance.
See, those extra minutes of airtime usually cost a very small incrimental cost when you consider those minutes alone. However, somebody's minute of airtime is going to be a very expensive incrimental minute... it's the minute that causes the cell tower to hit its limit, and it means expensive network upgrades need to happen or customers are going to start getting turned away.
The provider would rather people not unexpectedly increase their usage, and instead call them and warn them that they're going to increase usage by moving to a higher usage plan. When too many users are on the higher plans, the provider then knows it's time for an upgrade.
Moving back to bandwidth, it's the same thing just on much smaller units, bits instead of minutes are the measurement unit of choice.
Unlimited pricing models are simply unnatural, because it treats very light and very heavy users as if they're one and the same. Simply put, they're not. It's highly unlikely the provider really has the equipment to provide everybody with top-speed service at the same moment. So long as they have enough equipment to provide service at the moment of highest demand, it's good enough and nobody complains. If they don't, then whenever they break the limit of the equipment, everybody slows down. The provider gets a bad reputation, and either has to quickly upgrade, or drop the "unlimited" offer.
So really, the price of bandwidth has to be based on two factors. The bandwidth that is on the table that you can possibly use, and the bandwith that you're actually going to use. If you plan on eating everything on the table, be prepared to pay much more than the person who leaves most of it behind.
I think the problem lies in the fact that "BBC America" is packaged by Discovery Networks, who seem to make the network look like TLC with a british accent more than anything else.
They're packaging the block as "Beyond Tomorrow" because the timeslot is TW twice a week and B2000 the other three nights.
This arrangement just started this week.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, so long as that's what they claim to do. If Google wants to blacklist SearchKing and anybody who links to them, they should announce that.
Somehow, I think Google has just a little too much in that "black box" they call PageRank...
There is a law behind that. Google claims to present the unbiased results of its secret PageRank formula... if in fact they're presenting what the formula said plus the modifying decisions of their human editors, they're committing a basic fraud, promising one thing then doing another.
If you're too lazy to go to the courthouse, and also too lazy to check to see if other sites might be hosting the documents for less or free, then $20 is a reasonable fee.
$20 would be reasonable for getting court documents from a case at a far-away court house that don't exist online elsewhere. Too bad for SearchKing that isn't the case here.
Is it tacky? Yeah. Is it illegal? Nope.
It's a bit tacky, specifically to say that you can't use the documents you pay for to disparage the company. (Remember, we're talking about Google's filings in the case.)
Of course... you can get the same documents under a public domain license at the courthouse, or from what will be sure to be several websites that'll spring up to host PDFs that were obtained from scanning courthouse copies. So, if you're stupid enough to agree to a license on public domain work, so be it.
Actually, I think there's a decent case that needs to be talked about here...
Google should not have the right to decide what it "doesn't like" and have a "Google doesn't like these sites" list that has a negative PageRank impact. Simply put, PageRank should be unbiased, and apply all rules equally to all sites.
I think the big question here is if SearchKing was punished specifically by Google, or if SearchKing's behavior resulted in a tweak to the formula that'd punish a metaphoric SearchQueen, or any other site that tries to do what SearchKing did, the same way without any further changes to the system.
Of course, what we could do is simply turn back the clock to the mid-80s before 911 existed...
Back then, police and fire departments had "normal" phone numbers, and had to make an effort to distribute magnets and paint the numbers onto their vehicles. It wasn't quite as easy to memorize as 911, but many phones with autodial came with 1-touch buttons labeled with police, fire, and medical symbols. (Then came the laws about not testing those one-touch buttons...)
Actually... TechTV on Sirius is kinda aborted...
What Sirius wanted TechTV for TechLive, it's 9-hour all day tech news and tech stock coverage program. Well, one market crash later that idea didn't look so smart, and TechLive is now the name of a 30-minute primetime magazine show.
With the dramatic shift in programming diet, and the fact that TechTV doesn't own the radio rights to content it doesn't produce, I think all you can really expect is to find the audio half of Call for Help and The Screen Savers on a talk station eventually.
Let's point this out right now...
The law saw this one coming. DVD-in-the-car systems exist, but by law video screens must NOT be within the field of vision of the driver. No, you cannot watch TV while driving.
They're afraid of bad PR by association...
Remember how www.microsoft.com got associated in Google as the #1 return for "Go to hell" for a while. That's because even though that phrase was nowhere on Microsoft's homepage, an organized effort of people associated that phrase with www.microsoft.com, so Google picked up on that and declared Microsoft the net's leading authority on going to hell..
Now, that's a rather tame embarassment for a company that you could argue deserved it, but a lot of Men in Suits are affraid that they could be associated with even less desirable terms in a way that damages PR.
The only problem is, "don't link to us" is about as legally valid as "don't talk about our website" which just isn't gonna fly.
It's an easily enforceable rule...
If the user does not already have a recent cookie from me, user gets my home page instead. If the referal in the header is from anything but me, user gets my home page instead.
There are plenty of stupid server tricks available to make it impossible to link from outside the site.
The IRS has made rumblings that unless the tax software industry gets their act together, the IRS will start work on an "official" tax product that would likely be impossible to compete with.
The state of MA has already done this, with an easy-to-use web interface (over HTTPS, of course) that puts the state edition of TurboTax to shame. MA doesn't have that complex of a tax code anyway, so there really isn't much for software to do in the first place besides data entry and transmission.
States have been stiff in cracking down on scanner-based systems, to the point now that where crackdowns have occured the scanner errors now are more often than not in the customer's favor.
The problem is, it'll take federal involvemnt to treat rebate errors as the small-scale frauds that they are, and seriously slap those who send false rejections with fines and penalites that make sure they become very sure about their rejections before they send them.
I once got rejected on a rebate for a compressed air blower product because I had sent in a hand written index card with the UPC number, as per the instructions, instead of sending the actual UPC which every other item on the rebate form required. Why was canned air the exception? Because the UPC was printed on the can itself, and cutting that can open is not a safe activity.
On the other hand... let's notice that the IRS sent that taxpayer $320 he didn't even realize he was entitled to.
I hate to break it to you, I wasn't looking for +1 Funny this time... the parent post was serious.
This open-source "donation" is coming at the expense of the college student's textbook resale value... are we sure we want to cheer at this?
The books will cost $50-$75 dollars while they're being sold at university bookstores, then released free as soon as the course is over so that the resale value of the book is zero.
However, the free book will be useless for the next semester's courses, because a new edition will have been released to update the book for the changing technologies, of course.
See, it is possible to make big money with open source... although this wasn't what we had in mind.
I see several posts here claiming attempts to duplication have failed...
Is the original article B.S.?
Standards allow somebody else to build a web browser and/or web server.
If suddenly IE only worked with IIS powered servers, and IIS would refuse to send to anything that wasn't IE... there'd be no competitors to MS in those fields who could play the same game.... and you know what MS does once it gets a monopoly, don't you?
My plan was designed so that /. itself would never request the page more than once, and it would rely on the users to report a failure.
The problem is, 500 requests within a span of a few seconds can bring down some small servers, particularly if the page is dynamically generated. /. could be accused of launching a DOS in the name of load testing.
The idea is to reduce the number of hits a weak server takes, not add 500 to the number /. is about to throw at it anyway.
2. They have no way of knowing if a site can't handle the load.
/. grabs a copy of the linked sites nanoseconds before posting the story, just in case. /. starts substituing the mirror link for the next hour.
/. can honor the same robots.txt standard that keeps sites out of Google's mirror as well. Furthermore, /. can "whitelist" the freequently-linked commercial sites like CNN, Wired News, Washington Post, and etc. who should be big enough to handle things on their own, and therefore wouldn't want the mirror anyway.
Here's an easy to automate solution...
1.
2. Have a "report dead link" option next to new stories. (Those who abuse this feature can pay in karma.)
3. If too many users report the link as dead,
4. After time's up, the link reverts back to normal. If the complaint threshhold is reached again, the process repeats.
5. Once a link has survived 12 hours without need for the mirror, the mirror page can be deleted, because the worst is now over.
If anybody doesn't want that mirroring service,
IT equipment is usually leveraged...
They're not going to make enough money to pay back the costs of building an ISP-sized network in a month. They idea is that they'll lay out all that money, and then devote all of the usage fees from the next 24 months to paying the equipment off. For the next few months, they have little costs and the equipment loan is paid off... it's time to PROFIT!
Of course, eventually the equipment will come to the end of its lifespan and have to be replaced. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
This is kind of like the pricing of cell phones...
Your usage costs the provider the same no matter what pricing plan you're on. Providing you with 800 minutes of service over a month taxes their equipment exactly the same way whether you've prepaid for 250, 500, 750, or 1000 minutes per month. The cell towers don't know and don't care what plan you are on.
However, when it comes to billing, the user who uses 800 minutes will get punished badly if they were on the plan that allocated only 250 minutes to them. The user who has the 750 minute plan will feel only a mild sting, and the user who's on the 1000 minute plan is likely getting the best deal.
Why do the providers work this way? Because they 1. Want to encurage users to not use the service excessively and 2. Want users to to declare their intended useage in advance.
See, those extra minutes of airtime usually cost a very small incrimental cost when you consider those minutes alone. However, somebody's minute of airtime is going to be a very expensive incrimental minute... it's the minute that causes the cell tower to hit its limit, and it means expensive network upgrades need to happen or customers are going to start getting turned away.
The provider would rather people not unexpectedly increase their usage, and instead call them and warn them that they're going to increase usage by moving to a higher usage plan. When too many users are on the higher plans, the provider then knows it's time for an upgrade.
Moving back to bandwidth, it's the same thing just on much smaller units, bits instead of minutes are the measurement unit of choice.
Unlimited pricing models are simply unnatural, because it treats very light and very heavy users as if they're one and the same. Simply put, they're not. It's highly unlikely the provider really has the equipment to provide everybody with top-speed service at the same moment. So long as they have enough equipment to provide service at the moment of highest demand, it's good enough and nobody complains. If they don't, then whenever they break the limit of the equipment, everybody slows down. The provider gets a bad reputation, and either has to quickly upgrade, or drop the "unlimited" offer.
So really, the price of bandwidth has to be based on two factors. The bandwidth that is on the table that you can possibly use, and the bandwith that you're actually going to use. If you plan on eating everything on the table, be prepared to pay much more than the person who leaves most of it behind.
If you're a US-based viewer, it changed networks. It started Monday on TechTV.
I think the problem lies in the fact that "BBC America" is packaged by Discovery Networks, who seem to make the network look like TLC with a british accent more than anything else.
They're packaging the block as "Beyond Tomorrow" because the timeslot is TW twice a week and B2000 the other three nights. This arrangement just started this week.
The BBC logo that is displayed at the start of every episode that airs on TechTV should have been your first clue that show was "not from here".