If that's true, though, why did ALL of the other search engine companies roll over?
Probably they weighed up the trouble of resisting the government, and the value of the information requested, and made the call that it just wasn't worth that much to them. Google on the other hand decided the information was too valuable to just hand over. And in their case, they are absoloutely right.
I'd been using Google for years before I heard about the "don't be evil" thing.
Indeed, but how often do you hear it toted on these hallowed boards as definitive proof that Google is, in fact, some sort of messianic "new corporation"? The only thing they have is the fact that they said it.
Anyway the point I was making was that google is not refusing to hand over the goods to the government based on a moral stance, but on a purely intellectual property based stance. Evil or not, thats my take on what they are currently doing.
Oh okay, maybe you can point out exactly where I was incorrect in my definition of the response? Was the part where he says "You sound like" perhaps a little vague for you? Or the part where he went off on a wild tangent about whether capitalism can handle google, entirely unrelated to what I was saying? Focus, now.
Drawing analogies between data and physical goods is bound to fail; they simply are not the same.
Well you're half right. Thats why I put "forever" in there. Because once the information is out, it can't be taken back, unlike those tins of beans. Once google gives up that information, they have permanently lost something of great value to them. Lost as in, its value to them is drawn from the fact that they uniquely have it, and no one else does.
Sounds to me like you dont believe a company can be good under any circumstances if they make money.
I call ad hominmem, an argument "against the man" or person. This is a device employed to attack not the issues but rather the one you are arguing with, especially on a personal level or basis. It is usually employed by those whose arguments are weak.
I think the real question is does capitalism really want "nice" companies.
I also call strawman. A straw-man argument is the practice of refuting a weaker argument than an opponent actually offers.
Google is a marketing and advertising company. First, foremost, and mostly only. The don't be evil thing is superb marketing that gained them a groundswell of grassroots support, good for them. But their stock in trade, the tins of beans on their shelves, is consumer data. This information is their livelihood. the only reason they are resisted government requests for this information is because they don't want to give up their hard won and very valuable data. Plain and simple. Once it gets into govt hands, who knows where else it will go?
This is not ethics or morals, its like asking walmart to give up their entire inventory of shop-brand cola forever, while still buying it in. That's google's position, so spare us the hero stuff. (Shakespeare?!?) I fully expect this to be modded into the topsoil by the cleansed of brain, but honestly, this is slashdot. Three strangers disagree with you and you're meant to feel bad?
Eh do you mind if I ask you where you are based and what kind of sales you do? You can email me at info 'ta' nuatech d0t com, obfuscated for the spam crawlers... We might be able to do some business.
You're just another asshole who'd enforce his own personal standards on everyone he doesn't happen to agree with.
Still not getting it are you? You like to put nice, clean words like "personal standards" on it, produce that well trodden rhetoric ("will of the majority is used to oppress the minority", a true classic) on an industrial scale, but in the end you're the one doing the whitewashing. These aren't some ethnic group, fighting for equal rights.
Seems like you and those douchebag neo-Nazis have something in common
Well I don't want to stir up the masses into a fascist state with me at the helm, so I fail to see where your argument is here.
So what exactly differentiates you from any other group of fucks who use violence against groups they don't like?
Tell me pal, what do you do with people that push drugs like heroin on schoolkids? Oh thats right, you hit them with truncheons and lock them up. So what makes this any different? Clever and calculating people are turning teenagers' natural rebellious instincts into a lifelong crusade. A bit like cigarette companies. Thats when they aren't organising riots and beating up immigrants.
People like you like to pretend that its just words, and words never hurt anybody, but you'd best listen up good, buddy. Words are all there is. Everything is made of words. Words made Auschwitz and mother Teresa. Have you ever been to Auschwitz? You know its been preserved exactly as it is since 1945? Most schoolkids in Europe take a tour of it at once time or another. Words are more dangerous to throw around than bullets. And if you don't lock up people that shoot you, you'll get shot.
Nothing, so far as I can see. Just another bunch of self-righteous assholes.
Honestly, I have to laugh everytime I hear an American parroting on one hand that they saved Europe's ass in WWII, and turning around and whining about the anti-nazi laws in force today. For shame. In all probability, some of your relations fought and died in that war. You impugn their blood with your quacking. For shame. Those laws are in place to ensure you don't have to come over and help out again. Self righteous? For shame.
Thank the gods I don't live in whatever shithole you call home.
No need, I'm doing it for you. Bah. You'd think a follower of the Nordic pantheon (I assume) would get it. Real evil exists, and must be put down. Hate speech laws don't exist to curb freedom; if your definition of freedom means being free to claim that millions of jews (a true ethnic minority, and where's your bleeding heart for them?) never died in concentration camps and then using that to gain political power to do the same thing again, you belong in a cell next to the child molesters and murderers, safely away from civilised society.
Some very solid point there, no doubt. I am just trying to respond to those shooting it down before it's even born. Who knows, we may all be surprised!
So freedom of speech is just fine, so long as it happens to be speech you don't disagree with.
Eh this place is getting noisy with all the dogmas yapping. Hey, you missed a bit there. I not only disagree with it, I'll merrily lock up anyone advocating it and trying to teach it to the weakest members of our community, children. Still with me?
Great argument there, son.
Thanks, dad.
I'm sure your government-controlled, government-regulated search engine will suit you just fine.
Yes, and you enjoy your corporate controlled, company regulated search engine.
you can pretend neo-Nazis don't exist because they aren't allowed to be public about their beliefs.
Again with the yapping doggie-ma. We know full well they exist. We know why they exist and what they are trying to do. Thats why we hit them with truncheons and let them cool their heels for a few years to reconsider their roles as charismatic leaders. You might look to your own house for that one by the way...
Fortunately for the rest of us, there's still Google and Yahoo.
Especially for those in China. Go go free (corporate) speech!! Woohoo!!
But its time to exercise my rights to free speech...
glorifying the USSR and communism, a society that killed over 60 million people
And did you know, you can get merchandise glorifying the USA, a society that killed millions of native americans and vietnamese, to name but a few? I'm shocked, I tell you. And the English, who murdered and displaced millions in a knock-kneed effort at an empire? Did you know you can still get union jacks in some parts of the world? Disgraceful.
Hypocrites de luxe.
So tell me, if I float a zepplin over New York City saying "thank god the twin towers got blown up, all praise allah", that would be cool with you? How about taking out an advert in the LA times explaining why "niggers" should be treated less equally due to their obvious poor social performance? Thats all good? I know, wait, I'll threaten the president. Freedom uber alles, baby!
You either have free speech, or you do not.
The world has more colours in it than black and white, son. That might not jive with a nice totalitarian starship troopers worldview, but that doesn't make it less true.
One man's "hate speech" is another man's "I'm defending myself in an argument and making a point"
If by context one is arguing a point, and not trying to rewrite history, there is no problem with saying what you like.
YOU run afoul of some bogus "hate" law.
Yes, they are churning out those anti-hate speech laws at a fierce rate. Why only last week they set up a new one to deny people the right to dislike traffic wardens! Oh no wait, they didn't. In fact, they haven't set up any new ones at all. Can you say a government that knows when to stop? Must seem like a fantastical concept to you murkins I know...
Listen here, you turkey, heres how it is. We don't like to give the time of day to nazi apologists, nor waste any more time arguing with them. Maybe you have the excess wind to blow (in fact I'd bet on it), but I surely don't. So what I'll do instead is I'll lock the shites up and have done with them, and make sure they don't twist any more young minds to their sick creed, and you can fuck off back to texas where you pig misses you. Hows that?
Well it pretty much had to happen sooner or later. The fact is, google largely controls what a lot of people get to see on the internet. And google, besides being a for-profit marketing and advertising company (a brilliant example of which is the don't be evil phrase), is a uniquely American company. Which is something for Americans to be proud of, by the way. However that puts it directly in uncle georgies (ick, I feel dirty saying that for some reason) power, and thats not where you want your access to the world's greatest information reservoir to be.
To those who say google is better etc, you are right. But I will say this; there's no corporation or combination of corporations that can stand up to the extraordinary financial weight of a first world nation. Is brain trust an issue? Certainly. Google has made a point of hiring some of the very smartest in the world. Are there similarily smart people in the many nations of Europe hungry for a chance? Certainly there are.
Beaurocracy, red tape, regulations and committees - all things google has none of. These slow down competitors in a very fast moving field. However no one has any idea yet how it will be organised, or if it will be set up as an independant group with a distinct hierarchy and clean chain of command. And on the whole, I'd feel safer with a government run search engine than with a profit motivated one. Even if some (not all) of those governments have strong hate-speech laws. Laws which are there for a very good reason, to prevent the horrors unleashed in world war two ever originating in Europe again; the history is not obscured in any way, just people trying to re-write it.
I for one welcome our not-motivated-by-profit overlords.
I even noted that in my post, to pre-emptively head off any nitpicking. Looking at the page you link to, I see no concrete plans. I see "if", I see "possibility", I see "could", and I see "might". Nothing that says, yes, we will repair Hubble in the mission scheduled for such and such a date. I'm all for a continuance of Hubble service; I just don't see it happening.
O'Keefe has been gone from NASA for nine months now
Yup, I should have said "said", not says. Mea culpa for the typo.
Well let's see, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe says it will never be visited by a space shuttle repair mission again, which means it will be history as soon as its batteries or gyroscope fails within the next few years, despite repeated efforts by concerned groups to keep it up and running. I'd call that effectively decommissioned.
From the BBC after NASA's 2006 budget announcement (in February 2005)...
but the big challenge is getting mass out of the Earth's gravity well at the moment
Well I wasn't dealing with the whole "getting it up there" issue... go too far down that road and you're talking about the energy costs to produce the rocket fuel and so on, which isn't the point of space exploration. This would never be a lander, not that that would reduce its usefulness in any way. Besides, the discoveries and resources such a vessel could return would more than make it worth our while, and if we can get the ISS up and more or less running, we can do the same for this. No need to launch in one piece at all. I think another poster dealt with the extra grids question...
although there are limits, because each new thruster adds to the mass signficantly.
Eh? That doesn't make sense. Yes, each thruster adds to the mass, but it makes up for that by providing additional thrust. Ideally what you want to see is a near-zero mass drive. If we can't make the ion drive fly faster, reduce the mass needed to produce it. That should pump up the acceleration curve a bit. How fast does the "ion jet" or whatever actually exit the drive anyway? Maybe it would make more sense just to build a super sized ion drive, Extremely Large... ELION drives, has a nice ring to it.:D I also like the gyroscope mentioned earlier because firefly has a spinny thing in it too.:D:D
very little acceleartion thus they'd only be able to get a ship to the moon by creating an increasingly eccentric orbit around the earth then eventually transferring to a very eccentric moon orbit and normalizing. Such a process would take a month at least and more realistically 3-6.
Why not just increase the number of ion engines? If one gives for example a 1 m/s thrust, wouldn't 20 of them combined give a 20 m/s thrust? I know its not that simple, but you will see significant increases in acceleration, I am sure. Put together a platform with 50 of them, slap on a crew compartment and storage spage, and you have your first in-system exploration ship to go gadding about in! I'd probably throw in a nuclear plant for the giant frickin lasers myself (purely to clear debris, naturally;)), but we could build all that right now...
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares? It doesn't make you any more right. Or any less a troll.
Damn I have to get me a copy of google's marketing methods. This is better than scientology.
Thank you. Nice to see not everyone around here drinks the kool-aid.
You said you wanted an ad hominem, right?
No thats what you said, troll. Moderators please note and moderate as such, thanks.
If that's true, though, why did ALL of the other search engine companies roll over?
Probably they weighed up the trouble of resisting the government, and the value of the information requested, and made the call that it just wasn't worth that much to them. Google on the other hand decided the information was too valuable to just hand over. And in their case, they are absoloutely right.
If they had turned over their logs you would just say "I knew it, their motto doesn't mean crap."
Actually I would have said, whoops, that was stupid, that stuff was probably one of their most valuable assets.
I'd been using Google for years before I heard about the "don't be evil" thing.
Indeed, but how often do you hear it toted on these hallowed boards as definitive proof that Google is, in fact, some sort of messianic "new corporation"? The only thing they have is the fact that they said it.
Anyway the point I was making was that google is not refusing to hand over the goods to the government based on a moral stance, but on a purely intellectual property based stance. Evil or not, thats my take on what they are currently doing.
Oh okay, maybe you can point out exactly where I was incorrect in my definition of the response? Was the part where he says "You sound like" perhaps a little vague for you? Or the part where he went off on a wild tangent about whether capitalism can handle google, entirely unrelated to what I was saying? Focus, now.
Drawing analogies between data and physical goods is bound to fail; they simply are not the same.
Well you're half right. Thats why I put "forever" in there. Because once the information is out, it can't be taken back, unlike those tins of beans. Once google gives up that information, they have permanently lost something of great value to them. Lost as in, its value to them is drawn from the fact that they uniquely have it, and no one else does.
Sounds to me like you dont believe a company can be good under any circumstances if they make money.
I call ad hominmem, an argument "against the man" or person. This is a device employed to attack not the issues but rather the one you are arguing with, especially on a personal level or basis. It is usually employed by those whose arguments are weak.
I think the real question is does capitalism really want "nice" companies.
I also call strawman. A straw-man argument is the practice of refuting a weaker argument than an opponent actually offers.
Thanks for playing, come again soon!
I think Google did the right thing.
Google is a marketing and advertising company. First, foremost, and mostly only. The don't be evil thing is superb marketing that gained them a groundswell of grassroots support, good for them. But their stock in trade, the tins of beans on their shelves, is consumer data. This information is their livelihood. the only reason they are resisted government requests for this information is because they don't want to give up their hard won and very valuable data. Plain and simple. Once it gets into govt hands, who knows where else it will go?
This is not ethics or morals, its like asking walmart to give up their entire inventory of shop-brand cola forever, while still buying it in. That's google's position, so spare us the hero stuff. (Shakespeare?!?) I fully expect this to be modded into the topsoil by the cleansed of brain, but honestly, this is slashdot. Three strangers disagree with you and you're meant to feel bad?
if you had to buy anti-virus software, that was a business loss due to cybercrime!
It is.
Eh do you mind if I ask you where you are based and what kind of sales you do? You can email me at info 'ta' nuatech d0t com, obfuscated for the spam crawlers... We might be able to do some business.
You're just another asshole who'd enforce his own personal standards on everyone he doesn't happen to agree with.
Still not getting it are you? You like to put nice, clean words like "personal standards" on it, produce that well trodden rhetoric ("will of the majority is used to oppress the minority", a true classic) on an industrial scale, but in the end you're the one doing the whitewashing. These aren't some ethnic group, fighting for equal rights.
Seems like you and those douchebag neo-Nazis have something in common
Well I don't want to stir up the masses into a fascist state with me at the helm, so I fail to see where your argument is here.
So what exactly differentiates you from any other group of fucks who use violence against groups they don't like?
Tell me pal, what do you do with people that push drugs like heroin on schoolkids? Oh thats right, you hit them with truncheons and lock them up. So what makes this any different? Clever and calculating people are turning teenagers' natural rebellious instincts into a lifelong crusade. A bit like cigarette companies. Thats when they aren't organising riots and beating up immigrants.
People like you like to pretend that its just words, and words never hurt anybody, but you'd best listen up good, buddy. Words are all there is. Everything is made of words. Words made Auschwitz and mother Teresa. Have you ever been to Auschwitz? You know its been preserved exactly as it is since 1945? Most schoolkids in Europe take a tour of it at once time or another. Words are more dangerous to throw around than bullets. And if you don't lock up people that shoot you, you'll get shot.
Nothing, so far as I can see. Just another bunch of self-righteous assholes.
Honestly, I have to laugh everytime I hear an American parroting on one hand that they saved Europe's ass in WWII, and turning around and whining about the anti-nazi laws in force today. For shame. In all probability, some of your relations fought and died in that war. You impugn their blood with your quacking. For shame. Those laws are in place to ensure you don't have to come over and help out again. Self righteous? For shame.
Thank the gods I don't live in whatever shithole you call home.
No need, I'm doing it for you. Bah. You'd think a follower of the Nordic pantheon (I assume) would get it. Real evil exists, and must be put down. Hate speech laws don't exist to curb freedom; if your definition of freedom means being free to claim that millions of jews (a true ethnic minority, and where's your bleeding heart for them?) never died in concentration camps and then using that to gain political power to do the same thing again, you belong in a cell next to the child molesters and murderers, safely away from civilised society.
Some very solid point there, no doubt. I am just trying to respond to those shooting it down before it's even born. Who knows, we may all be surprised!
So freedom of speech is just fine, so long as it happens to be speech you don't disagree with.
Eh this place is getting noisy with all the dogmas yapping. Hey, you missed a bit there. I not only disagree with it, I'll merrily lock up anyone advocating it and trying to teach it to the weakest members of our community, children. Still with me?
Great argument there, son.
Thanks, dad.
I'm sure your government-controlled, government-regulated search engine will suit you just fine.
Yes, and you enjoy your corporate controlled, company regulated search engine.
you can pretend neo-Nazis don't exist because they aren't allowed to be public about their beliefs.
Again with the yapping doggie-ma. We know full well they exist. We know why they exist and what they are trying to do. Thats why we hit them with truncheons and let them cool their heels for a few years to reconsider their roles as charismatic leaders. You might look to your own house for that one by the way...
Fortunately for the rest of us, there's still Google and Yahoo.
Especially for those in China. Go go free (corporate) speech!! Woohoo!!
But its time to exercise my rights to free speech...
glorifying the USSR and communism, a society that killed over 60 million people
And did you know, you can get merchandise glorifying the USA, a society that killed millions of native americans and vietnamese, to name but a few? I'm shocked, I tell you. And the English, who murdered and displaced millions in a knock-kneed effort at an empire? Did you know you can still get union jacks in some parts of the world? Disgraceful.
Hypocrites de luxe.
So tell me, if I float a zepplin over New York City saying "thank god the twin towers got blown up, all praise allah", that would be cool with you? How about taking out an advert in the LA times explaining why "niggers" should be treated less equally due to their obvious poor social performance? Thats all good? I know, wait, I'll threaten the president. Freedom uber alles, baby!
You either have free speech, or you do not.
The world has more colours in it than black and white, son. That might not jive with a nice totalitarian starship troopers worldview, but that doesn't make it less true.
One man's "hate speech" is another man's "I'm defending myself in an argument and making a point"
If by context one is arguing a point, and not trying to rewrite history, there is no problem with saying what you like.
YOU run afoul of some bogus "hate" law.
Yes, they are churning out those anti-hate speech laws at a fierce rate. Why only last week they set up a new one to deny people the right to dislike traffic wardens! Oh no wait, they didn't. In fact, they haven't set up any new ones at all. Can you say a government that knows when to stop? Must seem like a fantastical concept to you murkins I know...
Listen here, you turkey, heres how it is. We don't like to give the time of day to nazi apologists, nor waste any more time arguing with them. Maybe you have the excess wind to blow (in fact I'd bet on it), but I surely don't. So what I'll do instead is I'll lock the shites up and have done with them, and make sure they don't twist any more young minds to their sick creed, and you can fuck off back to texas where you pig misses you. Hows that?
Well it pretty much had to happen sooner or later. The fact is, google largely controls what a lot of people get to see on the internet. And google, besides being a for-profit marketing and advertising company (a brilliant example of which is the don't be evil phrase), is a uniquely American company. Which is something for Americans to be proud of, by the way. However that puts it directly in uncle georgies (ick, I feel dirty saying that for some reason) power, and thats not where you want your access to the world's greatest information reservoir to be.
To those who say google is better etc, you are right. But I will say this; there's no corporation or combination of corporations that can stand up to the extraordinary financial weight of a first world nation. Is brain trust an issue? Certainly. Google has made a point of hiring some of the very smartest in the world. Are there similarily smart people in the many nations of Europe hungry for a chance? Certainly there are.
Beaurocracy, red tape, regulations and committees - all things google has none of. These slow down competitors in a very fast moving field. However no one has any idea yet how it will be organised, or if it will be set up as an independant group with a distinct hierarchy and clean chain of command. And on the whole, I'd feel safer with a government run search engine than with a profit motivated one. Even if some (not all) of those governments have strong hate-speech laws. Laws which are there for a very good reason, to prevent the horrors unleashed in world war two ever originating in Europe again; the history is not obscured in any way, just people trying to re-write it.
I for one welcome our not-motivated-by-profit overlords.
America doesn't have a problem with Europe.
Eh France is a part of Europe, you know...
your article link is almost a year old
I even noted that in my post, to pre-emptively head off any nitpicking. Looking at the page you link to, I see no concrete plans. I see "if", I see "possibility", I see "could", and I see "might". Nothing that says, yes, we will repair Hubble in the mission scheduled for such and such a date. I'm all for a continuance of Hubble service; I just don't see it happening.
O'Keefe has been gone from NASA for nine months now
Yup, I should have said "said", not says. Mea culpa for the typo.
Well let's see, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe says it will never be visited by a space shuttle repair mission again, which means it will be history as soon as its batteries or gyroscope fails within the next few years, despite repeated efforts by concerned groups to keep it up and running. I'd call that effectively decommissioned.
From the BBC after NASA's 2006 budget announcement (in February 2005)...
but the big challenge is getting mass out of the Earth's gravity well at the moment
Well I wasn't dealing with the whole "getting it up there" issue... go too far down that road and you're talking about the energy costs to produce the rocket fuel and so on, which isn't the point of space exploration. This would never be a lander, not that that would reduce its usefulness in any way. Besides, the discoveries and resources such a vessel could return would more than make it worth our while, and if we can get the ISS up and more or less running, we can do the same for this. No need to launch in one piece at all. I think another poster dealt with the extra grids question...
although there are limits, because each new thruster adds to the mass signficantly.
:D I also like the gyroscope mentioned earlier because firefly has a spinny thing in it too. :D :D
Eh? That doesn't make sense. Yes, each thruster adds to the mass, but it makes up for that by providing additional thrust. Ideally what you want to see is a near-zero mass drive. If we can't make the ion drive fly faster, reduce the mass needed to produce it. That should pump up the acceleration curve a bit. How fast does the "ion jet" or whatever actually exit the drive anyway? Maybe it would make more sense just to build a super sized ion drive, Extremely Large... ELION drives, has a nice ring to it.
very little acceleartion thus they'd only be able to get a ship to the moon by creating an increasingly eccentric orbit around the earth then eventually transferring to a very eccentric moon orbit and normalizing. Such a process would take a month at least and more realistically 3-6.
How fast will 50 of them get you there?
Why not just increase the number of ion engines? If one gives for example a 1 m/s thrust, wouldn't 20 of them combined give a 20 m/s thrust? I know its not that simple, but you will see significant increases in acceleration, I am sure. Put together a platform with 50 of them, slap on a crew compartment and storage spage, and you have your first in-system exploration ship to go gadding about in! I'd probably throw in a nuclear plant for the giant frickin lasers myself (purely to clear debris, naturally ;)), but we could build all that right now...