in my opinion this kind of automated man-hunt should be forbidden.
If I may ask... why? What is the damage to you besides a handwavy "it freaks me out" type of statement? You are going to a free website. If these website owners have collectively figured out that showing you these particular ads is the best way to generate money from the free experience they are providing, why do you feel they should be forbidden from doing so?
Why are our elected officials spending any time on this? Is there *any* evidence that the data collected has ever been misused in any way? The online advertising industry is based on selectively targetting users with advertisements, and so far I see no compelling reasons for the government to interfere. Before the government starts regulating an industry, shouldn't there be evidence that the industry is in fact in need of regulating?
Disclaimer: I work in an advertising company developing the conversion rate models
Actually, I don't think this was a 20% project. Chrome had a team of engineers working on it, and at its core it has the V8 Javascript engine. You don't just wake up one day and say "Hey, why don't I write an optimized Javascript engine from scratch!" This is a project that fits in with Google's strategic vision, and it had the necessary manpower allocated to it.
The problem isn't the number of tabs - it's the pages that use Ajax a lot. Try leaving a couple of Gmail tabs, and a Google calendar tab up for over a day, and it'll grind firefox to a halt.
This is exactly right. I think a lot of the problems with the current system arose from people treating IP as physical property, which implies the ability of the owner to fully control it in perpetuity. After all, your ownership of physical property never expires, why should IP be any different?
As far as fixing the system is concerned I think the following steps would help:
1) Forced licensing for copyrights to be used in derivative works. Something like say 15% of profits. This will allow for innovation while still rewarding the original creator.
2) Actually, forced licensing for patents may not be a bad idea either. If you can't make a go of your idea with the advantages of being first to market and not paying licensing fees, then maybe you don't deserve to keep a monopoly on your idea.
3) Much stricter non-obviousness standards for patents. This one is tough, but I think in order to hold a patent you need to show that a top 5% professional in the field would not be able to reasonably come up with the same idea.
4) Repeal business patents. Business patents have a low enough development cost that being first to market should be reward enough in itself.
5) The point above also applies to software patents.
Democracy my ass.
Actually, there is no inherent reason why a democratic society should be any more tolerant than a dictatorship. We (the U.S.) keep focusing on the democracy part, and bringing democracy to the world, when in fact what makes the U.S. special is the constitution that protects the right to free speech and equal treatment by law. Without a well drafted constitution, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
And if I had the private number to Larry's and Sergey's yacht, I'd call them and give them a piece of my mind.
And you would say... what exactly? Google is doing nothing more than obeying the law. The law very clearly states that in order to have 'safe harbor' protection from copyright infringement lawsuits, Google must take down the content, and it's up to the person who put it up in the first place to challenge the DMCA notice.
I don't think Google could fight this particular battle even if they wanted to. I'm not entirely sure about this point, but I think DMCA is an all or nothing deal - you either don't monitor any content, or you monitor all of it, so if they don't obey this DMCA notice, they're liable for all the other copyrighted material they host/link to.
The point is, you don't like it - feel free to lobby congress to change the law, or start a defense fund so that the CoreAVC team can go to court and prove they're not infringing on anyone's copyrights. Just don't blame Google for obeying the law of the land.
This actually brings up a question that not enough people seem to be asking:
"Should we be trying to stop Global Warming or adapting to it?"
If it is in fact caused by the Sun, then stopping it is largely out of the question, and so we're forced to adapt. I suspect we will be able to do so, although I don't have any particular evidence to back this up. I would like to see some scientific projections on the costs of adapting to a 1C rise in global temperatures, and then compare these costs to the costs of changing to alternative energy sources.
I don't know if I agree. True, it probably doesn't create a lot of long term jobs. However, in the short term, it's a 600 million dollar infusion into the local economy. And they are paying for both the power and the water they use in the datacenter, so I don't see how these are negative effects. I'm sure that these considerations were taken into account when the deals were offered by the local governments - Google picked the best offer, but I'm sure that the local government is pretty happy with Google being there.
And just what kind of privacy laws would you like to have in place? Google provides you with a free service under specific terms of service. They also disclose exactly which data is being collected. If you are uncomfortable using their services, you're free not to do so. Where exactly do you see a place for government intervention? Where is this "invasion of privacy"?
You also mention limits on personally targeted marketing. Why? I think it would be great if every ad that I'm shown on the web was for something that I was interested in. Who exactly is harmed by personalized marketing to the extent that it requires government regulation?
The reason that Australia is not in the running is that this datacenter will mostly serve continental Asia, so it makes sense to put it in continental Asia. As a result, you guys are losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the local economy.
The ability to set a *minimum price* has nothing to do with this particular case, as the retailers are selling at above MSRP. At no point was the manufacturer allowed to set the maximum price for the product, so if Nintendo stopped shipping to the retailers that do so they'd have a price fixing suit on their hands.
Re:Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!!
on
Free IMAP On Gmail
·
· Score: 1
I really should have made this clear in the original post, but I'm not in any way representing Google - I just happen to work for them, and wanted to help the guy get the bug to the right people. I'm not on the Gmail team, and I don't know about any plans Google might have for new protocols, nor would I be able to say anything about them if I did. On the plus side, if you feel like telling me your ideas, I can definitely listen and then pass them off as my own:D
Re:Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!!
on
Free IMAP On Gmail
·
· Score: 1
Just to clarify, I'm in no way an official representative/spokesman for Google - I'm just one of thousands of software engineers that work there (not even on the Gmail team), so at most I can make sure the issue gets forwarded to the right people (or you can go to flynns' link and do so yourself - sorry for the bad link in parent). I'll pass the web interface issue along, although I'm sure they're aware of it if you already contacted them. For the IMAP issue, could you say which encoding/charset combination broke?
Barraketh
Re:Warning: Gmail IMAP support is ASCII only!!!
on
Free IMAP On Gmail
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I work for Google, so I know for a fact that we have not "fired all employees that know anything about character encoding issues". We have an internationalization team which works with most customer facing Google products. I personally have tried this with foreign emails written in KOI8-R, UTF-8, GB2312, and ISO-8859-1 charsets. Please go to here to contact the gmail team with this issue, or you can reply to me directly with more details (specifically which character set and content transfer encoding were used in the mangled emails), and I will forward your issue to the right people.
Isn't that how the DMCA supposed to work? That was the one good thing that came out of that law - it affirmed the right of web companies to display user content without screening it, and left it up to the copyright holders to defend their copyright. Now, I have no idea whether this applies to trademarks or not, but seems to make sense that Google will allow most things until someone complains about them.
I think this is an important distinction that has to be made, so I'm glad Ed Bott is making it. The provider is *choosing* to make his content only playable through an encrypted channel, and the consumer is again *choosing* to buy this content. Microsoft is merely providing the option to do so. Including the option of playing drm'd wma files in media player doesn't mean that your system suddenly won't play mp3s, and similarly this doesn't mean that Vista won't play regular h264 files over d-sub. Now, many slashdotters hate the entire idea of drm, and so they might think that even giving the content providers this option is somehow "evil". Well, guess what - this is capitalism, and Microsoft thinks that the ability to play HDDVD/BlueRay is good for business. They have no obligation to uphold some undefined ideal of freedom - if the consumers want media without drm, they'll buy media without drm.
You completely missed the point of my argument. If you claim that I have to pay you $10 every time I walk by your house, I don't have to actually pay you unless I agree to do so. Now if, for example, I want to go through your property, then you can say "Pay me $10 or I will charge you with tresspassing". However, if I'm walking down a public road, you can't just set up a toll booth and make me pay you.
The same thing happens here. The way the GPL works, is that it implicitly says "if you distribute this software without agreeing to the terms of this license, we can sue you for copyright infringement". That's why people have to abide by it - that's what gives it legal power. If there is no copyright infringement, then the license is irrelevant.
What you're trying to argue is remarkably simliar to a EULA, except that unlike a EULA Microsoft isn't actually forced to agree to the license (or even read it for that matter). What gives a EULA legal power is that it's considered to be a contract between the software maker and the user. It would be pretty hard to consider the GPL lincense a valid contract when Microsoft clearly said that it doesn't agree to the terms.
IANAL, but from reading the article, P.J. describes why what Microsoft is doing fits under the GPLv3 definitions of conveyance and propagation. However, this doesn't address Microsoft's assertion that it doesn't accept the GPLv3 license, and is thus unaffected by it. In general, a license such as the GPL is a license given by the copyright holder to do something that would otherwise be prohibited by the copyright law. In the case of the GPL, it gives third parties the right to distribute the copyrighted material - something which without the license would be copyright infringement. Microsoft asserts that what it is doing with their voucher system is not illegal distribution under the copyright law definitions. Thus the terms of the GPL license are completely irrelevant - there is no agreement between the copyright holders and Microsoft - Microsoft is doing what it's legally allowed to do with any copyrighted material.
Whether or not Microsoft's voucher system is legal under copyright law is a matter for the courts (should it get that far), but this point is in no way addressed by the Groklaw article. From first glance, it might actually be legit, since they are buying a voucher from Novell, and then reselling it, which should be covered by first-sale doctrine.
There are some other details she proposes, some of which are head-scratchers such as "The detector can not consume significant amount of CPU time (say > 90%) for more then, say 1 sec."
This one actually makes perfect sense - if the malware runs in some sort of VM bellow the OS, this will necessarily impact performance, so one way to detect it is to compare performance of some tasks against an expected baseline. It can be argued that this is cheating, because even though in this case it's possible to pre-benchmark the laptop, this may not be generally feasible. Or maybe this would actually become the accepted method of detecting such malware - benchmark when you buy the computer (before it gets a chance to get infected), then later compare performance.
I now these are not full on debates, but Google has a "Candidates@Google" program where they bring out various presidential candidates, interview them, and then let the audience ask questions. So far we've had Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and John McCain. The cool thing about this is that everyone except for Hillary stayed to answer questions from the audience for at least half an hour - sometimes longer. While some of the answers were definitely "politicized", I thought those talks were a pretty good resource for getting a handle on what these candidates think.
For my taste, I was really impressed by John Edwards - he gave good justification for a quick pullout out of Iraq (as opposed to Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton), he's very enthusiastic about foreign aid, and he also favors campaign finance reform, which I think is a major flaw in the system today, giving far too much power to special interest groups.
There is no inborn right to "own" intellectual property - you can't really own IP, since cost of replication is zero. Thus, the government provlides you with a temporary monopoly to compensate the time and money invested in the development of the invention. The government doesn't do this out of some magical concept of fairness, or because the invention is somehow yours - again, once an idea is out in public, it's everyone's. The government does this to promote innovation, figuring that otherwise people wouldn't invest the work needed to develop said invention. However, there must be a balance - if the patent time is too long, people aren't free to build and improve on the invention, and innovation suffers. If the patent time is too short, then people may be reluctant to make large invenstments in developing the invention, and innovation suffers.
Now apply this thinking to the software field. The reason why software patents are unnecessary is twofold: 1) The software market is changing so quickly, that being first to market is often conpensation enough in itself. Having patents in the software market last more than a few years is ludicrous, since they would then often be obsolete, and if the patents are that short, there's very little reason to have them there. 2) It costs very little money to develop a software algorithm - all you need is a pen and a piece of paper. Compare this to the medical field for example, where companies have to spend billions on developing a drug, and then billions more testing it. With software, if you have a good idea, that's all you need.
What these two factors achieve, is that we have no reason to think that there is a lack of innovation because there are no software patents. It seems that software patents might make software producers richer, but that people would still be in the software business without patents. Again, contrast with the medical industry, where if you spend $billions on developing a drug, and then someone goes and replicates it that's a fast way to go out of business. And if there is no reason to think that lack of software patents is hurting innovation, why have them?
P.S. Yes, I realize the medical industry claims can also be disputed, but that's a different argument.
Slashdot Mirror
in my opinion this kind of automated man-hunt should be forbidden.
If I may ask... why? What is the damage to you besides a handwavy "it freaks me out" type of statement? You are going to a free website. If these website owners have collectively figured out that showing you these particular ads is the best way to generate money from the free experience they are providing, why do you feel they should be forbidden from doing so?
Why are our elected officials spending any time on this? Is there *any* evidence that the data collected has ever been misused in any way? The online advertising industry is based on selectively targetting users with advertisements, and so far I see no compelling reasons for the government to interfere. Before the government starts regulating an industry, shouldn't there be evidence that the industry is in fact in need of regulating? Disclaimer: I work in an advertising company developing the conversion rate models
Actually, I don't think this was a 20% project. Chrome had a team of engineers working on it, and at its core it has the V8 Javascript engine. You don't just wake up one day and say "Hey, why don't I write an optimized Javascript engine from scratch!" This is a project that fits in with Google's strategic vision, and it had the necessary manpower allocated to it.
The problem isn't the number of tabs - it's the pages that use Ajax a lot. Try leaving a couple of Gmail tabs, and a Google calendar tab up for over a day, and it'll grind firefox to a halt.
This is exactly right. I think a lot of the problems with the current system arose from people treating IP as physical property, which implies the ability of the owner to fully control it in perpetuity. After all, your ownership of physical property never expires, why should IP be any different?
As far as fixing the system is concerned I think the following steps would help:
1) Forced licensing for copyrights to be used in derivative works. Something like say 15% of profits. This will allow for innovation while still rewarding the original creator.
2) Actually, forced licensing for patents may not be a bad idea either. If you can't make a go of your idea with the advantages of being first to market and not paying licensing fees, then maybe you don't deserve to keep a monopoly on your idea.
3) Much stricter non-obviousness standards for patents. This one is tough, but I think in order to hold a patent you need to show that a top 5% professional in the field would not be able to reasonably come up with the same idea.
4) Repeal business patents. Business patents have a low enough development cost that being first to market should be reward enough in itself.
5) The point above also applies to software patents.
Actually, there is no inherent reason why a democratic society should be any more tolerant than a dictatorship. We (the U.S.) keep focusing on the democracy part, and bringing democracy to the world, when in fact what makes the U.S. special is the constitution that protects the right to free speech and equal treatment by law. Without a well drafted constitution, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
And if I had the private number to Larry's and Sergey's yacht, I'd call them and give them a piece of my mind.
And you would say... what exactly? Google is doing nothing more than obeying the law. The law very clearly states that in order to have 'safe harbor' protection from copyright infringement lawsuits, Google must take down the content, and it's up to the person who put it up in the first place to challenge the DMCA notice.I don't think Google could fight this particular battle even if they wanted to. I'm not entirely sure about this point, but I think DMCA is an all or nothing deal - you either don't monitor any content, or you monitor all of it, so if they don't obey this DMCA notice, they're liable for all the other copyrighted material they host/link to.
The point is, you don't like it - feel free to lobby congress to change the law, or start a defense fund so that the CoreAVC team can go to court and prove they're not infringing on anyone's copyrights. Just don't blame Google for obeying the law of the land.
This actually brings up a question that not enough people seem to be asking: "Should we be trying to stop Global Warming or adapting to it?"
If it is in fact caused by the Sun, then stopping it is largely out of the question, and so we're forced to adapt. I suspect we will be able to do so, although I don't have any particular evidence to back this up. I would like to see some scientific projections on the costs of adapting to a 1C rise in global temperatures, and then compare these costs to the costs of changing to alternative energy sources.
I don't know if I agree. True, it probably doesn't create a lot of long term jobs. However, in the short term, it's a 600 million dollar infusion into the local economy. And they are paying for both the power and the water they use in the datacenter, so I don't see how these are negative effects. I'm sure that these considerations were taken into account when the deals were offered by the local governments - Google picked the best offer, but I'm sure that the local government is pretty happy with Google being there.
And just what kind of privacy laws would you like to have in place? Google provides you with a free service under specific terms of service. They also disclose exactly which data is being collected. If you are uncomfortable using their services, you're free not to do so. Where exactly do you see a place for government intervention? Where is this "invasion of privacy"?
You also mention limits on personally targeted marketing. Why? I think it would be great if every ad that I'm shown on the web was for something that I was interested in. Who exactly is harmed by personalized marketing to the extent that it requires government regulation?
The reason that Australia is not in the running is that this datacenter will mostly serve continental Asia, so it makes sense to put it in continental Asia. As a result, you guys are losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the local economy.
The ability to set a *minimum price* has nothing to do with this particular case, as the retailers are selling at above MSRP. At no point was the manufacturer allowed to set the maximum price for the product, so if Nintendo stopped shipping to the retailers that do so they'd have a price fixing suit on their hands.
I really should have made this clear in the original post, but I'm not in any way representing Google - I just happen to work for them, and wanted to help the guy get the bug to the right people. I'm not on the Gmail team, and I don't know about any plans Google might have for new protocols, nor would I be able to say anything about them if I did. On the plus side, if you feel like telling me your ideas, I can definitely listen and then pass them off as my own :D
Just to clarify, I'm in no way an official representative/spokesman for Google - I'm just one of thousands of software engineers that work there (not even on the Gmail team), so at most I can make sure the issue gets forwarded to the right people (or you can go to flynns' link and do so yourself - sorry for the bad link in parent). I'll pass the web interface issue along, although I'm sure they're aware of it if you already contacted them. For the IMAP issue, could you say which encoding/charset combination broke?
Barraketh
I work for Google, so I know for a fact that we have not "fired all employees that know anything about character encoding issues". We have an internationalization team which works with most customer facing Google products. I personally have tried this with foreign emails written in KOI8-R, UTF-8, GB2312, and ISO-8859-1 charsets. Please go to here to contact the gmail team with this issue, or you can reply to me directly with more details (specifically which character set and content transfer encoding were used in the mangled emails), and I will forward your issue to the right people.
Barraketh
Isn't that how the DMCA supposed to work? That was the one good thing that came out of that law - it affirmed the right of web companies to display user content without screening it, and left it up to the copyright holders to defend their copyright. Now, I have no idea whether this applies to trademarks or not, but seems to make sense that Google will allow most things until someone complains about them.
I think this is an important distinction that has to be made, so I'm glad Ed Bott is making it. The provider is *choosing* to make his content only playable through an encrypted channel, and the consumer is again *choosing* to buy this content. Microsoft is merely providing the option to do so. Including the option of playing drm'd wma files in media player doesn't mean that your system suddenly won't play mp3s, and similarly this doesn't mean that Vista won't play regular h264 files over d-sub. Now, many slashdotters hate the entire idea of drm, and so they might think that even giving the content providers this option is somehow "evil". Well, guess what - this is capitalism, and Microsoft thinks that the ability to play HDDVD/BlueRay is good for business. They have no obligation to uphold some undefined ideal of freedom - if the consumers want media without drm, they'll buy media without drm.
You completely missed the point of my argument. If you claim that I have to pay you $10 every time I walk by your house, I don't have to actually pay you unless I agree to do so. Now if, for example, I want to go through your property, then you can say "Pay me $10 or I will charge you with tresspassing". However, if I'm walking down a public road, you can't just set up a toll booth and make me pay you.
The same thing happens here. The way the GPL works, is that it implicitly says "if you distribute this software without agreeing to the terms of this license, we can sue you for copyright infringement". That's why people have to abide by it - that's what gives it legal power. If there is no copyright infringement, then the license is irrelevant.
What you're trying to argue is remarkably simliar to a EULA, except that unlike a EULA Microsoft isn't actually forced to agree to the license (or even read it for that matter). What gives a EULA legal power is that it's considered to be a contract between the software maker and the user. It would be pretty hard to consider the GPL lincense a valid contract when Microsoft clearly said that it doesn't agree to the terms.
IANAL, but from reading the article, P.J. describes why what Microsoft is doing fits under the GPLv3 definitions of conveyance and propagation. However, this doesn't address Microsoft's assertion that it doesn't accept the GPLv3 license, and is thus unaffected by it. In general, a license such as the GPL is a license given by the copyright holder to do something that would otherwise be prohibited by the copyright law. In the case of the GPL, it gives third parties the right to distribute the copyrighted material - something which without the license would be copyright infringement. Microsoft asserts that what it is doing with their voucher system is not illegal distribution under the copyright law definitions. Thus the terms of the GPL license are completely irrelevant - there is no agreement between the copyright holders and Microsoft - Microsoft is doing what it's legally allowed to do with any copyrighted material.
Whether or not Microsoft's voucher system is legal under copyright law is a matter for the courts (should it get that far), but this point is in no way addressed by the Groklaw article. From first glance, it might actually be legit, since they are buying a voucher from Novell, and then reselling it, which should be covered by first-sale doctrine.
This one actually makes perfect sense - if the malware runs in some sort of VM bellow the OS, this will necessarily impact performance, so one way to detect it is to compare performance of some tasks against an expected baseline. It can be argued that this is cheating, because even though in this case it's possible to pre-benchmark the laptop, this may not be generally feasible. Or maybe this would actually become the accepted method of detecting such malware - benchmark when you buy the computer (before it gets a chance to get infected), then later compare performance.
I now these are not full on debates, but Google has a "Candidates@Google" program where they bring out various presidential candidates, interview them, and then let the audience ask questions. So far we've had Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and John McCain. The cool thing about this is that everyone except for Hillary stayed to answer questions from the audience for at least half an hour - sometimes longer. While some of the answers were definitely "politicized", I thought those talks were a pretty good resource for getting a handle on what these candidates think.
The videos are all on youtube:
John Edwards
John McCain
Bill Richardson
Hillary Clinton
For my taste, I was really impressed by John Edwards - he gave good justification for a quick pullout out of Iraq (as opposed to Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton), he's very enthusiastic about foreign aid, and he also favors campaign finance reform, which I think is a major flaw in the system today, giving far too much power to special interest groups.
As a Google employee let me just say... yes
let me just say - if Google has to skirt the law a bit to get a third pool table in my building, then I can live with it!
rules having last name Ponosov punishment enough. (Ponos = diarrhea in Russian)
Here's the way I see it:
There is no inborn right to "own" intellectual property - you can't really own IP, since cost of replication is zero. Thus, the government provlides you with a temporary monopoly to compensate the time and money invested in the development of the invention. The government doesn't do this out of some magical concept of fairness, or because the invention is somehow yours - again, once an idea is out in public, it's everyone's. The government does this to promote innovation, figuring that otherwise people wouldn't invest the work needed to develop said invention. However, there must be a balance - if the patent time is too long, people aren't free to build and improve on the invention, and innovation suffers. If the patent time is too short, then people may be reluctant to make large invenstments in developing the invention, and innovation suffers.
Now apply this thinking to the software field. The reason why software patents are unnecessary is twofold:
1) The software market is changing so quickly, that being first to market is often conpensation enough in itself. Having patents in the software market last more than a few years is ludicrous, since they would then often be obsolete, and if the patents are that short, there's very little reason to have them there.
2) It costs very little money to develop a software algorithm - all you need is a pen and a piece of paper. Compare this to the medical field for example, where companies have to spend billions on developing a drug, and then billions more testing it. With software, if you have a good idea, that's all you need.
What these two factors achieve, is that we have no reason to think that there is a lack of innovation because there are no software patents. It seems that software patents might make software producers richer, but that people would still be in the software business without patents. Again, contrast with the medical industry, where if you spend $billions on developing a drug, and then someone goes and replicates it that's a fast way to go out of business. And if there is no reason to think that lack of software patents is hurting innovation, why have them?
P.S. Yes, I realize the medical industry claims can also be disputed, but that's a different argument.
Brightness of midnight sunlit summer sky?
I think something got lost in the translation...
(Yes, i realize that it took place beyond the arctic circle, but it still sounds strange =))