I think it's funny how people get upset over the idea that there are those of us who are OK with a company with a track record of Google's having more access to information on how we use their free services than we are OK with a company with the track record of Viacom or any other 'big media' having access to information on how we use someone else's services.
Meanwhile glossing over the fact that the majority of the information Google keeps isn't really that personally identifying and helps them actually provide those free services in the first place.
Regardless of whether you feel it or not, you have been screwed over. Twice now Blizzard has managed to push through the BS argument that simply running code on a computer is an infringement on copyright and thus only possible under their strict license.
Assuming that it's a precedent that stands, it means that ANYTHING you do on a computer is subject to that. Want to listen to that CD you bought? Sorry, to play the CD you have to make a temporary copy of the signals on the disc to pass through the circuits in your player. Even worse if you do it on a computer where you actually have to load the song into RAM to pass it through the sound card.
eBook readers? Whoops, you have to make a copy of the book in RAM in order to render the page.
This is a HORRIBLE decision, regardless of why Blizzard went after them, and it was a HORRIBLE idea for them to use that argument when there were other ways around it.
Now someone somewhere is going to have to spend time setting up and winning some other case to actually bring this set of case law into the 20th century.
And no, I am aware that this ridiculous definition of 'copying' wasn't put in place by Blizzard, but putting forward the opportunity for more case law supporting it and worse, winning, has screwed us all over.
I like Blizzard's games, I hate Blizzard's legal decisions. Everytime I hear their name in regards to a legal dispute, they have the most assine way of looking at the matter and win decisions that completely screw over the rest of us regardless of whether the company had a good leg to stand on or not.
Also speaking from experience, albeit the experience of someone who was surveyed, it seems to have worked for Valve. Perhaps you just aren't providing the correct presentation/incentive for your survey if you aren't getting enough opt-in to recover useful data.
Question for you as a tomato user. I'm currently using OpenWrt(/X-Wrt) and have been thinking about playing with other firmware like tomato. How hard is it to set up, especially the QOS part (which is what I've been looking at tomato for since everyone and their grandma is telling me to go to tomato for the best QOS)?
All property should be privately owned. Once the government takes control of land and creates enforceable rules about its use, particularly when the land permeates every square mile of the country, what results is a supreme manipulation of the economy.
and
You have a right to your property. If someone tries to stop you from accessing your property, or from leaving your property, they are violating your rights to property and life. The law enforcement will put them in their place.
pretty much tell me the person who isn't thinking things through isn't me.
No one (especially the government according to you) should be able to force you to do something with your land, but it's OK if the government is allowed to force you to let others cross it to get somewhere? Catch-22 anyone?
However, the rest of your response has pretty much convinced me you are just another idealist who hasn't bothered to let facts get in the way of prosthelizing the joys of libertarian capitalism.
When you can come back with actual meaningful responses to the Microsoft part of my post, please feel free to do so. Till then I'm not going to waste more time arguing with the human equivalent of a recorded message.
You must have never played any of the Half-life's if you think Freeman or you as his alter-ego would think anything of carrying around a cow. His typical weapons load out would make a full squad whimper to think about carrying it.
"Ownership however, as in "you don't own the city/state/federal property you are putting your lines down on" does."
You are only destroying your own argument even as you make it. You've once again identified the problem all the more clearly - government restriction. All property should be privately owned. Once the government takes control of land and creates enforceable rules about its use, particularly when the land permeates every square mile of the country, what results is a supreme manipulation of the economy. No private entities are permitted to compete with these government-run services. And the end result is obvious to all.
You seem to have forgotten something. If all land is privately owned, how in the world are you going to get any access to your land?
Politely ask your neighbors and hope you never get into a fight with them? How are the telephone/water/electric companies going to get access to your land? Will you be paying your neighbors and everyone between them and the company's land for access?
We've tried that too. Look up "feudal serfdom" in the history books. Do you think the first feudal lords became land owners because they were part of the government? No. They became the government because they were the land owners. Unless you have a magic wand which will provide some way for everyone to get what they need without stepping off their land, there has to be some community accepted way of sharing parts of the land to allow everyone to actually use their own land. And once you have that, you have government ownership of land.
Without government-backed, forced manipulation, how is it possible for any privately-run entity to get big enough that they "run the sandbox" for any extended period of time. I can see companies merging, but as the demand for better service increases, either the company provides that service or another company comes along to fill that demand. What can stop such a competitor from existing except for force, and what entity can apply force except for the government?
Really? So how did Microsoft take over the computer world? How did it kill Netscape, Novell, and thousands of other compeditors who were providing services?
Oh, wait. I know. They used their monopoly in one sector, gained primarly through providing "just good enough, just cheap enough" to strong arm their way into any other sector they wanted a piece of.
"Disk compression utilities? Nah, you don't need to buy our compeditors, we've just included (stole) one in our latest OS!"
"Web browsers? Nah, you don't want to install that. We've included our own in our latest OS, and as a bonus, we've made sure ours works better than theirs by deliberately preventing them from being able to do what ours can."
"Word processing? Nah, you don't need to buy that. Ours is the same cost and does only half of what theirs does. But we've gone out of our way to break their programs on our OS so you can't run them anyway!"
Capitalism is a tool. And like ANY other tool, it's useful only when you know what you are doing with it.
Well until Valve gets into the MMO business that is.
*Drools*
"Welcome. Welcome, to City 17. You have chosen, or been chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17, that I elected to establish my administration, here, in the citadel, so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I am proud to call City 17 my home. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through to parts unknown, welcome, to City 17. It's safer here."
"But, could you please bring us 10 headcrab fangs for... research purposes? Here's a cowbar."
Expediency is no justification for forcibly preventing individuals/companies from doing with the property as they please and trading with willing parties as they please.
Ownership however, as in "you don't own the city/state/federal property you are putting your lines down on" does.
Existing companies will want their service. If demand is high enough for service providers to filter phone calls, either existing providers will start to offer that service, or new providers will spring up to offer that service and fill that demand. Existing providers will still want those services and permit them access. But if they don't, then so what? People can choose to go with the larger provider who is unwilling to provide call filtering services.
Yes, I'm sure it'll turn out all right this time around, after all last time when they did that we got Ma Bell and wasn't she wonderful ?
We've been there and done that already Unicorn. The reality of life is if you let some people get big enough that they run the sandbox, suddenly they don't care if they have your business. Take off the magic glasses and read a history book.
You've only identified the problem all the more clearly. Government restriction. Get rid of the restriction on the number of telephone companies in an area, and maybe you'll get some choice. Your argument, as it stands now, is basically "the government doesn't give me any choice, so it shouldn't give anyone else a choice either." In other words, you are accepting the status quo in defense of the status quo.
No my argument is that for many things that are considered public services, such as phone lines, electricity, and water, there is only ONE provider in an area by either necessity or expediency.
It's all well and good for you to blow smoke about how other companies should be allowed in the game and I would be all for it, if you know... it was feasible for other companies to get into the game at this point. Who is going to sign up for telephone service that only lets you call people on your block? Who, other than the government, would force any of the companies to make their systems interoptable? Or is it your idea of a utopia when there are 12 phones all on a wall in each house because you need service with 12 different companies to be able to actually get something close to national coverage?
And as far as "OMG, we have a list of phone numbers we can use to phish with": Dude, don't ever open those big yellow books the phone company sends out every now and then, you'll shit yourself.
You can still report them, especially since I'm fairly certain the rules regarding recorded messages are that they must provide a clear manner of contacting them to be removed from their calling list in the message (i.e. a live phone number not a "press 1 to..."
Right, and by your nick I assume you live in magical fairy land where there are more than one phone companies that can supply POTS? Cause you see, here in the US we happen to have one company per area that is allowed to supply land lines. Or one company and a bunch of twits who will happily bill you to act as a go-between for you and that one company.
PS. The entire "personal" information provided by the DNC is your phone number, not exactly an exploitable source of information when the whole system is number based and most telemarketers are behind auto-dialers.
Which is why I'm sure that the list of developers 'let in' included all the groups that Apple felt they needed to kiss up to. Lets face it, Apple needs Adobe, Apple doesn't need Garage Developer #253221. At least not till #253221 comes up with something that takes over the platform, in which case Apple figures "No harm, no foul".
Not that I agree with their take on the situation, and if I ever actually got an iTouch/Phone, I'd probably jailbreak it out of principle. But they really haven't shot themselves in the foot here.
/**
* Encrypt or decrypt a string. In Clobber, strings are encrypted with
* AES-CBC-256. The IV is an HMAC of the original value, along with any
* additional data we can scrape together that will be known and stable at
* both encryption and decryption time.
*
* This class relies on bits of CLB_Crypter. Once all clients are upgraded, we
* can remove CLB_Crypter and move those bits into this class.
*/
Don't get me wrong, I think Wikipedia does serve a valuable purpose. But I'm sad that the stock knee-jerk joke concerning anything on Wikipedia the project turned out not to be a joke in this case. Seriously, sometimes following back scenes of that site makes me wonder if the inmates aren't running the asylum and getting ready to burn it to the ground.
Google tends to buy finished products, if this was someone elses work, it'd have been a lot more polished before it went 'public'. See Picassa, Google Earth, or Feedburner for the caliber of products they tend to buy. Their 20% stuff tends to be launched extremely rough around the edges (like Lively) and either polished up, as Gmail was, or discarded when there turns out to be not enough interest (dev or user wise), as Google Browser Sync was.
For a 20% product, it's interesting; but...
on
Google Lively Review
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
it's not interesting enough in itself for me to want to spend time playing with it.
Looking at it in terms of a "20%" product that one of their engineers whipped out on their 'spare' time, it's fairly cool. I don't think they really expected the level of interest that would be shown though, or they would have held it back a bit longer for some more polish.
It has been in testing before this current release. I can't remember which, but it was released to a university a year prior for their student community to play with.
In a year, when it's been hammered on a bit more and Google either rolls it into a full fledged product or cuts it loose, I'll start paying more attention.
They all ready had it. You had two 'passwords' that you had to enter to use GBS. One was your account password and the other was a passphase used to encrypt what you uploaded to them.
It works the same way Mozilla's Weave project works. The only those with your passphrase can use your data.
I never bought that massive collision thing, something about it just doesn't seem right. Now there is some proof it isn't.
Not quite.
"That points to two possibilities: Water either was not completely vaporised in that collision or it was added a short time - less than 100 million years - afterward by volatiles introduced from the outside, such as with meteorites."
Seems like you are missing the code they released that allows you to implement this in a number of languages from the 'get-go'.
You've also missed that they've just told the world how the majority of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google's strong points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly manner.
PS. Your format stinks and is horribly slow and unscalable when it comes to adding to the library. Genre's are so unbelievably grey defined that you might as well just sort them by the dominate color of the cover. Google would have done better.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's funny how people get upset over the idea that there are those of us who are OK with a company with a track record of Google's having more access to information on how we use their free services than we are OK with a company with the track record of Viacom or any other 'big media' having access to information on how we use someone else's services.
Meanwhile glossing over the fact that the majority of the information Google keeps isn't really that personally identifying and helps them actually provide those free services in the first place.
Regardless of whether you feel it or not, you have been screwed over. Twice now Blizzard has managed to push through the BS argument that simply running code on a computer is an infringement on copyright and thus only possible under their strict license.
Assuming that it's a precedent that stands, it means that ANYTHING you do on a computer is subject to that. Want to listen to that CD you bought? Sorry, to play the CD you have to make a temporary copy of the signals on the disc to pass through the circuits in your player. Even worse if you do it on a computer where you actually have to load the song into RAM to pass it through the sound card.
eBook readers? Whoops, you have to make a copy of the book in RAM in order to render the page.
This is a HORRIBLE decision, regardless of why Blizzard went after them, and it was a HORRIBLE idea for them to use that argument when there were other ways around it.
Now someone somewhere is going to have to spend time setting up and winning some other case to actually bring this set of case law into the 20th century.
And no, I am aware that this ridiculous definition of 'copying' wasn't put in place by Blizzard, but putting forward the opportunity for more case law supporting it and worse, winning, has screwed us all over.
I like Blizzard's games, I hate Blizzard's legal decisions. Everytime I hear their name in regards to a legal dispute, they have the most assine way of looking at the matter and win decisions that completely screw over the rest of us regardless of whether the company had a good leg to stand on or not.
Also speaking from experience, albeit the experience of someone who was surveyed, it seems to have worked for Valve. Perhaps you just aren't providing the correct presentation/incentive for your survey if you aren't getting enough opt-in to recover useful data.
Question for you as a tomato user. I'm currently using OpenWrt(/X-Wrt) and have been thinking about playing with other firmware like tomato. How hard is it to set up, especially the QOS part (which is what I've been looking at tomato for since everyone and their grandma is telling me to go to tomato for the best QOS)?
and
pretty much tell me the person who isn't thinking things through isn't me.
No one (especially the government according to you) should be able to force you to do something with your land, but it's OK if the government is allowed to force you to let others cross it to get somewhere? Catch-22 anyone?
However, the rest of your response has pretty much convinced me you are just another idealist who hasn't bothered to let facts get in the way of prosthelizing the joys of libertarian capitalism.
When you can come back with actual meaningful responses to the Microsoft part of my post, please feel free to do so. Till then I'm not going to waste more time arguing with the human equivalent of a recorded message.
You must have never played any of the Half-life's if you think Freeman or you as his alter-ego would think anything of carrying around a cow. His typical weapons load out would make a full squad whimper to think about carrying it.
You seem to have forgotten something. If all land is privately owned, how in the world are you going to get any access to your land?
Politely ask your neighbors and hope you never get into a fight with them? How are the telephone/water/electric companies going to get access to your land? Will you be paying your neighbors and everyone between them and the company's land for access?
We've tried that too. Look up "feudal serfdom" in the history books. Do you think the first feudal lords became land owners because they were part of the government? No. They became the government because they were the land owners. Unless you have a magic wand which will provide some way for everyone to get what they need without stepping off their land, there has to be some community accepted way of sharing parts of the land to allow everyone to actually use their own land. And once you have that, you have government ownership of land.
Really? So how did Microsoft take over the computer world? How did it kill Netscape, Novell, and thousands of other compeditors who were providing services?
Oh, wait. I know. They used their monopoly in one sector, gained primarly through providing "just good enough, just cheap enough" to strong arm their way into any other sector they wanted a piece of.
"Disk compression utilities? Nah, you don't need to buy our compeditors, we've just included (stole) one in our latest OS!"
"Web browsers? Nah, you don't want to install that. We've included our own in our latest OS, and as a bonus, we've made sure ours works better than theirs by deliberately preventing them from being able to do what ours can."
"Word processing? Nah, you don't need to buy that. Ours is the same cost and does only half of what theirs does. But we've gone out of our way to break their programs on our OS so you can't run them anyway!"
Capitalism is a tool. And like ANY other tool, it's useful only when you know what you are doing with it.
Well until Valve gets into the MMO business that is.
*Drools*
"Welcome. Welcome, to City 17. You have chosen, or been chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17, that I elected to establish my administration, here, in the citadel, so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I am proud to call City 17 my home. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through to parts unknown, welcome, to City 17. It's safer here."
"But, could you please bring us 10 headcrab fangs for... research purposes? Here's a cowbar."
The Telco might, but the DNC list does not.
Ownership however, as in "you don't own the city/state/federal property you are putting your lines down on" does.
Yes, I'm sure it'll turn out all right this time around, after all last time when they did that we got Ma Bell and wasn't she wonderful ? We've been there and done that already Unicorn. The reality of life is if you let some people get big enough that they run the sandbox, suddenly they don't care if they have your business. Take off the magic glasses and read a history book.
No my argument is that for many things that are considered public services, such as phone lines, electricity, and water, there is only ONE provider in an area by either necessity or expediency.
It's all well and good for you to blow smoke about how other companies should be allowed in the game and I would be all for it, if you know... it was feasible for other companies to get into the game at this point. Who is going to sign up for telephone service that only lets you call people on your block? Who, other than the government, would force any of the companies to make their systems interoptable? Or is it your idea of a utopia when there are 12 phones all on a wall in each house because you need service with 12 different companies to be able to actually get something close to national coverage?
And as far as "OMG, we have a list of phone numbers we can use to phish with":
Dude, don't ever open those big yellow books the phone company sends out every now and then, you'll shit yourself.
You can still report them, especially since I'm fairly certain the rules regarding recorded messages are that they must provide a clear manner of contacting them to be removed from their calling list in the message (i.e. a live phone number not a "press 1 to..."
Right, and by your nick I assume you live in magical fairy land where there are more than one phone companies that can supply POTS? Cause you see, here in the US we happen to have one company per area that is allowed to supply land lines. Or one company and a bunch of twits who will happily bill you to act as a go-between for you and that one company.
PS. The entire "personal" information provided by the DNC is your phone number, not exactly an exploitable source of information when the whole system is number based and most telemarketers are behind auto-dialers.
Which is why I'm sure that the list of developers 'let in' included all the groups that Apple felt they needed to kiss up to. Lets face it, Apple needs Adobe, Apple doesn't need Garage Developer #253221. At least not till #253221 comes up with something that takes over the platform, in which case Apple figures "No harm, no foul".
Not that I agree with their take on the situation, and if I ever actually got an iTouch/Phone, I'd probably jailbreak it out of principle. But they really haven't shot themselves in the foot here.
Doesn't look like ROT13 to me.
Don't get me wrong, I think Wikipedia does serve a valuable purpose. But I'm sad that the stock knee-jerk joke concerning anything on Wikipedia the project turned out not to be a joke in this case. Seriously, sometimes following back scenes of that site makes me wonder if the inmates aren't running the asylum and getting ready to burn it to the ground.
Even more intereseting is how it happened.
Nope, it's a 20% product (something developed by an engineer under their "spend 20% of your time on your own projects" policy).
Coincidently I remembered where I was reading that and it also listed the university they demoed it to last year.
It was on Google's own blog post announcing it.
Google tends to buy finished products, if this was someone elses work, it'd have been a lot more polished before it went 'public'. See Picassa, Google Earth, or Feedburner for the caliber of products they tend to buy. Their 20% stuff tends to be launched extremely rough around the edges (like Lively) and either polished up, as Gmail was, or discarded when there turns out to be not enough interest (dev or user wise), as Google Browser Sync was.
it's not interesting enough in itself for me to want to spend time playing with it.
Looking at it in terms of a "20%" product that one of their engineers whipped out on their 'spare' time, it's fairly cool. I don't think they really expected the level of interest that would be shown though, or they would have held it back a bit longer for some more polish.
It has been in testing before this current release. I can't remember which, but it was released to a university a year prior for their student community to play with.
In a year, when it's been hammered on a bit more and Google either rolls it into a full fledged product or cuts it loose, I'll start paying more attention.
Citation needed? ^_^
Should we start a pool on how quickly the project is tagged for speedy deletion due to lack of noteability?
They all ready had it. You had two 'passwords' that you had to enter to use GBS. One was your account password and the other was a passphase used to encrypt what you uploaded to them.
It works the same way Mozilla's Weave project works. The only those with your passphrase can use your data.
Not quite.
Seems like you are missing the code they released that allows you to implement this in a number of languages from the 'get-go'.
You've also missed that they've just told the world how the majority of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google's strong points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly manner.
PS. Your format stinks and is horribly slow and unscalable when it comes to adding to the library. Genre's are so unbelievably grey defined that you might as well just sort them by the dominate color of the cover. Google would have done better.
Seeing as it's based on a cluster of Pentiums, did you really expect it to add up?