This isn't a surprise, considering who ended up holding the Nokia bag.
Microsoft would love to someday get above 15% of cell phone installs. Its working the only way it knows how, buying the losers, suing the winners, and locking down every piece of hardware they can get their tendrils on.
Yes, Android is a Monopoly. iOS - never heard of it, and I can assure you that you can use it fully without ever getting an app store account or providing any personal information to Apple.
Clearly Google is bullying businesses by allowing this opensource operating system, with its ROMs and Kangs. This makes manufactures of locked down phones with closed source software look bad. Can't have that. At least not without getting sued by the EU.
I don't think the point was this app specifically. The point is that Google tries their hardest to make all apps depend on Google's "services".
Keep was a FREE app written by Google. What do you expect? The shit is free.
Keep is less than 1% of the note apps available for Android. Almost all of those apps don't depend on any Google service. Some are adware. Some will phone home to someone other than Google with info gathered from your phone. Some you have to pay a small fee for. Some come with a degree of privacy and security. It takes time to sort out which is the best app, but if you don't like Google's services in your apps, don't install the apps that use these services.
Nokia killed Symbian long before Microsoft purchase them.
But I agree with the sentiment. Android pushed Nokia into a panic. They could never get Symbian together, and so their response was to try to use a Microsoft OS on their phones. Everyone outside of the Redmond bubble could see that car crash happing.
Nokia's smart move would have been to embrace Android. It really was the only rational choice, since clearly they could not roll their own, and the OS was just sitting there, opensource for the picking. But Nokia management was either too proud or too stupid or both. Either way they were clearly mismanaged.
Now the EU sues Google for some unclear reason. Actually, we know the reason. Just another EU shakedown. Somewhere there is an irony in all of this. A clear case of those who can't do, sue.
Every time I read about this EU nonsense with Android, I think about Nokia and Symbian. Maybe the EU is chapped because all the good smart phone OSs are developed in the US?
First, I'm not blindly exonerating Google. Google isn't a monopoly. That is not an exoneration, that is a fact.
As far as this "like" of Google you claim I have - you are full of shit. For instance, I don't like Google's data collection tactics, and I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. You are spouting off without knowing what the fuck you are talking about.
Second, the article you linked to is not excellent, it is complete bullshit. The author starts off saying that Google has been crappy for the Internet. A hardly a reasonable position, but its nice of him to start off telling us he is an irrational Google hater. The claim that the US courts don't look at how companies treat competitors in Anti-Trust is complete nonsense. And is it vertical or verticals? I don't think the author knows. His explanation of what Google has done to deserve the EU investigation is opaque - so Google is controlling verticals to punish companies that are spamming? It makes no fucking sense.
If this is why the EU is going after Google, then it is sad. It would be nice if governments tried to better regulate what Google does with the data it collects, but this EU Anti-Trust nonsense is none of that. It is just a thuggish shakedown by a government.
"Their customers are advertisers, who cannot choose someone else to advertise with because google will not show them on search if they do. Or will artificially drop their rank."
So are you saying that if someone advertises with Google and Bing, that Google will drop them simply because they use Bing? Or are you complaining because search engine results are provided based on advertising dollars?
For Google, I'm not sure either is true - Google claims advertisers are given space around the search results, but the search results themselves get taylored to the searcher, not advertisers. Maybe Google is lying here, but at the moment that seems more speculative and cynical than factual. But simply giving advertisers better results still isn't illegal, and both Bing and Yahoo admit to the practice.
Maybe the EU has hard evidence on how Google rigs results for advertiser that exclusively use Google, but one would figure if the proof exists it would be rather big news already. Or at least it would be big news on Bing and Yahoo.
Perhaps the reason you feel different is that Google isn't forcing people to use Google. This is a little bit different than Internet Exploder, which MS was forcing people to keep installed when using the OS. But one could just as easily type www.yahoo.com into the URL, or even www.bing.com into the URL. Heck those are easier, less characters. Perhaps people don't want to do this because Google is a better search engine?
Google isn't a Monopoly by any means. At the time of its Anti-Trust case, Microsoft was effectively a monopoly on all PCs, and was acting like a monopolist dickwad. Microsoft well deserved the Anti-Trust treatment. The unfortunate fallout from the Microsoft cases were that governments got the bright idea to bring Anti-Trust lawsuits any tech market leader. Google just happens to be in line this week.
All one has to do to use another search engine is google "search engine".
Google doesn't even return Google when you google "search engine". It does return half a dozen other search engines, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. A market leader perhaps, but not a monopoly.
Maybe if an EU company like Nokia could figure out how to put an open source smart phone operating system like Android on their phones, this lawsuit wouldn't happen.
Google is 5 years out from having their cars on the market, just like they were 5 years ago.
Did Google say they were 5 years from having their cars on the market in 2010? Or are you just clumsily trying to apply the old saw about cold fusion to them?
Google is 5 years out from having their cars on the market, just like they were 5 years ago.
Google is a lot closer than 5 years. The computing and sensing technology now exist to make this reasonable priced. The problem is an engineering problem - developing the algorithms to work properly as a driver.
Well within 5 years (try 2 years), both Google and Uber will be running low speed taxi services in dense city areas using their respective vehicles. You may not be able to purchase the vehicle or drive the freeways, but Uber and Google will replace a lot of Uber drivers and cabbies. Google is very close to making this work, and Uber just hired a team of engineers to compete. Both of these companies are in a competitive rush, and throwing cash at this problem. Unless one throws in the towel soon (doubtful), automated vehicles are a sure thing.
Oh, the tangents are great. Crytonomicon had some of the best with Turing's bike, granny furniture, and shoes in the Philippines.
But I have trouble believing that SnowCrash, Crytonomicon, and Diamond Age weren't edited. It would have been way too easy for those books to jump the rails in a baroque way.
Have to agree. The only problem with Anathem it takes about 300 pages to get started. I know a few people that put that put that book down. But once it gets started, Anathem is a very good book. Just could have used a bit of editing.
Editing seems to be the problem with Neal Stephenson's post-Crypto stuff. The Baroque Cycle often seemed more like Neal showing off his historical research than writing a book of fiction. If he wanted to write three volumes about 17th century technology and finance, non-fiction would have been better. For a work of fiction, those three volumes could have easily been edited down to one. But then, he probably makes way more money doing it the way that he did.
I'm glad that Reamde at least seemed edited. Maybe this new book will get the same treatment?
The House of Representatives is citizen-elected, the FCC is an unelected bureaucracy.
The FCC gets its regulatory authority from the Congress (Senate and House of Representatives). The FCC exists because Congress punted on the idea of regulating the details of telecommunications long ago, and has done so again, several times since.
By the way, most of the US government works this way. US bureaucracies - the IRS, EPA, DOD, NSA, etc. do not get detailed direction from Congress. They operate under a framework of laws established over many, many years by Congress (and signed by the president, and argued in courts). There is good reason for this... you may not have noticed but generally the world works a tad bit faster than Congress. Only recently has Congress figured out that the Internet is indeed not a "series of tubes".
they're probably unhappy that the FCC, all by itself, asserted its authority over the Internet, which they have no statutory authority over.
Wrong. Just plain wrong. The FCC absolutely has authority over the Internet.
The Supreme Court recently affirmed the FCC's had authority over the Internet, but found the FCC was taking too much of a hodge-podge fashion in it regulation. The court agreed and acknowledged that if the FCC wanted to regulate the Internet it could if it simply called the Internet a common carrier. Nobody has every denied the FCC's legal authority here.
Right now, Congress isn't unhappy that the FCC asserted authority over the Internet. Congress is unhappy because now the FCC is LAWFULLY asserting authority over the. Now, some of Congress' biggest contributors may start losing their court cases.
With that said, Congress is probably even more unhappy that they have to take a meaningful stance on a topic with high public visibility. Poor, poor congress.
Yes, you aren't familiar with the ins and outs of US law/politics.
Our courts say money==speech. The first amendment to our constitution says that no law can be made "prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances". And so our lawmakers are free to use wallets as ears.
It really isn't that complicated. But it is kinda sad....
Seriously, we have a lot of members of congress who think that their one and only duty is to oppose all government action of any kind (though a subset of them approve of military action as an exception).
This assumes members of congress have some sense of duty. They don't.
The ultra-libertarian view is simply an appeal to the cynicism of the have not rubes. Tell 'em the current government is bad and so the only thing to do is nothing (IOW, keep it bad). No wonder the "ultra-libertarians" all seem to originate from areas where the economy sucks and education has been poor for years.
Nearly all terrestrial radio stations are part of a larger media conglomerate that are all vertically integrated. So the bulk of payments would be companies paying themselves? Is this some kind of tax dodge in the works? Or maybe it is the music industry about to go into another round of eating itself.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a surprise, considering who ended up holding the Nokia bag.
Microsoft would love to someday get above 15% of cell phone installs. Its working the only way it knows how, buying the losers, suing the winners, and locking down every piece of hardware they can get their tendrils on.
Yes, Android is a Monopoly. iOS - never heard of it, and I can assure you that you can use it fully without ever getting an app store account or providing any personal information to Apple.
Clearly Google is bullying businesses by allowing this opensource operating system, with its ROMs and Kangs. This makes manufactures of locked down phones with closed source software look bad. Can't have that. At least not without getting sued by the EU.
I don't think the point was this app specifically. The point is that Google tries their hardest to make all apps depend on Google's "services".
Keep was a FREE app written by Google. What do you expect? The shit is free.
Keep is less than 1% of the note apps available for Android. Almost all of those apps don't depend on any Google service. Some are adware. Some will phone home to someone other than Google with info gathered from your phone. Some you have to pay a small fee for. Some come with a degree of privacy and security. It takes time to sort out which is the best app, but if you don't like Google's services in your apps, don't install the apps that use these services.
Nokia killed Symbian long before Microsoft purchase them.
But I agree with the sentiment. Android pushed Nokia into a panic. They could never get Symbian together, and so their response was to try to use a Microsoft OS on their phones. Everyone outside of the Redmond bubble could see that car crash happing.
Nokia's smart move would have been to embrace Android. It really was the only rational choice, since clearly they could not roll their own, and the OS was just sitting there, opensource for the picking. But Nokia management was either too proud or too stupid or both. Either way they were clearly mismanaged.
Now the EU sues Google for some unclear reason. Actually, we know the reason. Just another EU shakedown. Somewhere there is an irony in all of this. A clear case of those who can't do, sue.
Every time I read about this EU nonsense with Android, I think about Nokia and Symbian. Maybe the EU is chapped because all the good smart phone OSs are developed in the US?
Too bad there aren't any other note apps to use on Android. Oh, wait....
Florida mailMan
First, I'm not blindly exonerating Google. Google isn't a monopoly. That is not an exoneration, that is a fact.
As far as this "like" of Google you claim I have - you are full of shit. For instance, I don't like Google's data collection tactics, and I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. You are spouting off without knowing what the fuck you are talking about.
Second, the article you linked to is not excellent, it is complete bullshit. The author starts off saying that Google has been crappy for the Internet. A hardly a reasonable position, but its nice of him to start off telling us he is an irrational Google hater. The claim that the US courts don't look at how companies treat competitors in Anti-Trust is complete nonsense. And is it vertical or verticals? I don't think the author knows. His explanation of what Google has done to deserve the EU investigation is opaque - so Google is controlling verticals to punish companies that are spamming? It makes no fucking sense.
If this is why the EU is going after Google, then it is sad. It would be nice if governments tried to better regulate what Google does with the data it collects, but this EU Anti-Trust nonsense is none of that. It is just a thuggish shakedown by a government.
Not nonsense. The plan is to start testing in Singapore this year. http://www.technologyreview.co...
The software may be a bit farther along than it seems.
"Their customers are advertisers, who cannot choose someone else to advertise with because google will not show them on search if they do. Or will artificially drop their rank."
So are you saying that if someone advertises with Google and Bing, that Google will drop them simply because they use Bing? Or are you complaining because search engine results are provided based on advertising dollars?
For Google, I'm not sure either is true - Google claims advertisers are given space around the search results, but the search results themselves get taylored to the searcher, not advertisers. Maybe Google is lying here, but at the moment that seems more speculative and cynical than factual. But simply giving advertisers better results still isn't illegal, and both Bing and Yahoo admit to the practice.
Maybe the EU has hard evidence on how Google rigs results for advertiser that exclusively use Google, but one would figure if the proof exists it would be rather big news already. Or at least it would be big news on Bing and Yahoo.
A quote out of context? Seriously?
"At the time of its Anti-Trust case, Microsoft was effectively a monopoly on all PCs, and was acting like a monopolist dickwad"
You left out the "acting like a monopolistic dickwad" and the went on two paragraph rant about how I missed that point. How very Microsoft of you.
Perhaps the reason you feel different is that Google isn't forcing people to use Google. This is a little bit different than Internet Exploder, which MS was forcing people to keep installed when using the OS. But one could just as easily type www.yahoo.com into the URL, or even www.bing.com into the URL. Heck those are easier, less characters. Perhaps people don't want to do this because Google is a better search engine?
Google isn't a Monopoly by any means. At the time of its Anti-Trust case, Microsoft was effectively a monopoly on all PCs, and was acting like a monopolist dickwad. Microsoft well deserved the Anti-Trust treatment. The unfortunate fallout from the Microsoft cases were that governments got the bright idea to bring Anti-Trust lawsuits any tech market leader. Google just happens to be in line this week.
All one has to do to use another search engine is google "search engine".
Google doesn't even return Google when you google "search engine". It does return half a dozen other search engines, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. A market leader perhaps, but not a monopoly.
Maybe if an EU company like Nokia could figure out how to put an open source smart phone operating system like Android on their phones, this lawsuit wouldn't happen.
Did Google say they were 5 years from having their cars on the market in 2010? Or are you just clumsily trying to apply the old saw about cold fusion to them?
Its cold fusion nonsense. Google didn't start their project until 2012: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robot...
Google is 5 years out from having their cars on the market, just like they were 5 years ago.
Google is a lot closer than 5 years. The computing and sensing technology now exist to make this reasonable priced. The problem is an engineering problem - developing the algorithms to work properly as a driver.
Well within 5 years (try 2 years), both Google and Uber will be running low speed taxi services in dense city areas using their respective vehicles. You may not be able to purchase the vehicle or drive the freeways, but Uber and Google will replace a lot of Uber drivers and cabbies. Google is very close to making this work, and Uber just hired a team of engineers to compete. Both of these companies are in a competitive rush, and throwing cash at this problem. Unless one throws in the towel soon (doubtful), automated vehicles are a sure thing.
Oh, the tangents are great. Crytonomicon had some of the best with Turing's bike, granny furniture, and shoes in the Philippines.
But I have trouble believing that SnowCrash, Crytonomicon, and Diamond Age weren't edited. It would have been way too easy for those books to jump the rails in a baroque way.
5 pages and he didn't once mention a whistle.
Have to agree. The only problem with Anathem it takes about 300 pages to get started. I know a few people that put that put that book down. But once it gets started, Anathem is a very good book. Just could have used a bit of editing.
Editing seems to be the problem with Neal Stephenson's post-Crypto stuff. The Baroque Cycle often seemed more like Neal showing off his historical research than writing a book of fiction. If he wanted to write three volumes about 17th century technology and finance, non-fiction would have been better. For a work of fiction, those three volumes could have easily been edited down to one. But then, he probably makes way more money doing it the way that he did.
I'm glad that Reamde at least seemed edited. Maybe this new book will get the same treatment?
Does it matter if laws or back room deals did it? These days, most laws are back room deals.
In either case this is about allowing big companies to run rampant with a publicly subsidize resource.
The House of Representatives is citizen-elected, the FCC is an unelected bureaucracy.
The FCC gets its regulatory authority from the Congress (Senate and House of Representatives). The FCC exists because Congress punted on the idea of regulating the details of telecommunications long ago, and has done so again, several times since.
By the way, most of the US government works this way. US bureaucracies - the IRS, EPA, DOD, NSA, etc. do not get detailed direction from Congress. They operate under a framework of laws established over many, many years by Congress (and signed by the president, and argued in courts). There is good reason for this... you may not have noticed but generally the world works a tad bit faster than Congress. Only recently has Congress figured out that the Internet is indeed not a "series of tubes".
they're probably unhappy that the FCC, all by itself, asserted its authority over the Internet, which they have no statutory authority over.
Wrong. Just plain wrong. The FCC absolutely has authority over the Internet.
The Supreme Court recently affirmed the FCC's had authority over the Internet, but found the FCC was taking too much of a hodge-podge fashion in it regulation. The court agreed and acknowledged that if the FCC wanted to regulate the Internet it could if it simply called the Internet a common carrier. Nobody has every denied the FCC's legal authority here.
Right now, Congress isn't unhappy that the FCC asserted authority over the Internet. Congress is unhappy because now the FCC is LAWFULLY asserting authority over the. Now, some of Congress' biggest contributors may start losing their court cases.
With that said, Congress is probably even more unhappy that they have to take a meaningful stance on a topic with high public visibility. Poor, poor congress.
Yes, you aren't familiar with the ins and outs of US law/politics.
Our courts say money==speech.
The first amendment to our constitution says that no law can be made "prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances".
And so our lawmakers are free to use wallets as ears.
It really isn't that complicated. But it is kinda sad....
Seriously, we have a lot of members of congress who think that their one and only duty is to oppose all government action of any kind (though a subset of them approve of military action as an exception).
This assumes members of congress have some sense of duty. They don't.
The ultra-libertarian view is simply an appeal to the cynicism of the have not rubes. Tell 'em the current government is bad and so the only thing to do is nothing (IOW, keep it bad). No wonder the "ultra-libertarians" all seem to originate from areas where the economy sucks and education has been poor for years.
Nearly all terrestrial radio stations are part of a larger media conglomerate that are all vertically integrated. So the bulk of payments would be companies paying themselves? Is this some kind of tax dodge in the works? Or maybe it is the music industry about to go into another round of eating itself.
I'm guessing the NSA is employing trolls these days. Just another in a long line of tactics borrowed from Russian dictators...