It's not just on Google sites. From what I've seen Google has been pushing huge numbers of ads about Chrome through pretty much every single site that uses Google ads, though this presumably depends on which browser you're using.
Of course the OSS community would like them to continue contributing to open source so I wouldn't expect applause, but there's no dishonor in abstaining.
They're not abstaining thought - they're still planning to use the GPL-licensed Linux kernel and probably other GPL components as well, it's just that they know that no-one is going to sue them when they fail to comply with the license on those. So this essentially means they can get away with violating the GPL whereas before they'd have been forced to actually comply and release source for all their GPL components by virtue of Busybox's license enforcement efforts. It looks very much like evidence of willful infringement to me, though IANAL.
The key is in the free market's lack of centralization, which results in, to use a modern analogy, a strongly optimized neural network in which each node (each individual or, more precisely, each individual at each atomic economic transaction in which he engages) is doing the best it can, input-output-wise, given the constraints under which it operates.
That's the problem - different individuals are operating under different constraints. In particular, there's an interesting economic idea called rational ignorance - basically, at some point the cost of gathering more information in order to make a decision exceeds the expected benefits, so that it's rational to just go ahead and decide without that information. There are three problems. Firstly, this threshold is much lower for individual consumers than for corporations or corporate executives making corporate-scale decisions - the cost of gathering information is essentially the same but individual consumers are dealing with far less money. Secondly, it applies to political decisions such as deciding who to vote for. Thirdly, there are various ways that large corporations can increase the cost of making a rational decision to tilt this balance further in their favour. For example, have you ever looked at mobile phone contracts? All the competing companies have different balances of minutes versus texts versus other services, different phones, different everything to make it as hard as possible for a consumer to make a fully-informed, rational economic decision and cause them to choose a more expensive plan from the wrong company.
Competing MP3 players at the time had crap software that made it hard to load them up with music, poor UI, and either bad form factors (Nomad) or almost no storage (flash based devices.)
Apple solved this by finding the only company that had started making disks small enough to build compact MP3 players with and entering into an exclusive contract with them, making it impossible for any of their competitors to get their hands on them. (Oh, and I seem to recall that they were later sued for patent infringement by Creative over copying the Nomad UI.)
Angry Birds' game mechanics were - mostly - taken wholesale from other games, but an important reason why it was so popular was almost certainly the whole birds vs. pigs idea and the artwork, sound effects, etc that built on that. As far as I'm aware that was entirely Rovio's work.
Even if they did, does any health insurance actually cover pre-existing chronic conditions like cystic fibrosis, especially when the medication for them costs $300,000 a year?
Except that this is America. It's not and never has been "Nazi land".
Quite right. It's the other way around - it was America and the incredibly popular American eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis in the first place. Admittedly the US eugenics programs stuck with things like forcibly sterilizing rape victims without their knowledge or consent rather than going for death camps, but the death camps were kind of the last resort of the Nazi regime anyway.
That's true so long as you have a decent internet connection with the exception of, for some reason, Portal 2. The DRM for that was hugely broken on release to the point that many users couldn't play it, and I still have to disable my anti-virus software or it'll exit to the desktop with one of a number of cryptic DRM-related errors.
Is there any evidence that Siri's supposed natural language processing is anything other than a larger and slightly fuzzier set of pre-defined commands, where it still can't understand anything except the commands it knows?
But there have been scientific "hoaxes" before such as the predicted rate of increase of AIDS, the exaggerated benefits of Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology and sequencing the gene.
The rate of increase in AIDS was thankfully a self-defeating prophecy thanks to huge changes in sexual behaviour, Government-funded and charitable publicity campaigns, and to a certain extent antiretroviral drugs. If you want to get some idea of how bad things could've become, take a look at sub-Saharan Africa sometime.
The rest are just predicted future innovations that turned out to be harder to achieve and less useful than predicted. As it happens, it's mainly the side of the debate that believes AGW isn't a big deal and peak oil doesn't matter which is relying on this kind of future innovation - geo-engineering to deal with the effects of more CO2, new methods of farming which don't rely on oil-based chemicals but can still feed as many people and can do so in a world with shifting climatic zones, that kind of thing.
It's not just "some liberals said this, so it must be wrong" - the current right-wing political ideology of so-called limited government in the US makes it impossible for them to actually do anything about global warming, so admitting that it exists would mean admitting their ideology was flawed.
Yet as recently as a few days ago, I ran into "assert(sizeof(long) == sizeof(uint32_t));". Not even a compile-time failure. A runtime failure. Like I said, some of the worst code I've ever seen comes from open source projects. Pulling that kind of crap often enough will get you fired in any company with a code review policy.
Compare the amount of commercial software available in 64-bit versions with the amount of open source software that is. Now take a look at when it became available in 64-bit versions. Finally, look at all the companies out there whose software really needs a 64-bit release but who have mysteriously been dragging their feet.
Commercial code is obviously in general a lot worse than you're making out. Hell, for the longest time the last major 32-bit-only holdout in the open source world was OpenOffice, mostly because of the legacy of really awful code from its time as commercial software. There's no commercial incentive to do it right - that costs money and the benefits are long-term if they're ever seen at all, by which time the CEO and CTO will have exercised their options for a nice bonus and moved elsewhere.
From what I recall, it's not just that the spec was wrong but that one or two bits of it were unworkable and it could only be implemented after it could be confirmed that Google wasn't planning on using those parts for their services. Something like that anyway.
Not just that, but it's a bundled closed-source Flash plugin that isn't available to users of Chromium and its spin-offs, plus it has an additional bundled closed-source PDF reader plugin from Adobe that not only isn't available to Chromium users but also has no viable replacement.
So long as you only want the certificate for a single domain with no wildcards and no subdomains, yes. If you want anything more than that it's $59.90 a year and that's actually relatively cheap.
Have you ever read any comments by a Brazilian geek, or indeed one from any other country with this kind of high import tariffs? The main effect is that prices of consumer electronics are so inflated as to be unaffordable to most of the population.
From what I recall from reading the bug report about adding it, SPDY was just on the borderline of being actually implementable by other browsers - undocumented and requiring some hairy low-level changes to their SSL implementation, but simple enough to be doable. There's probably a reason it's not enabled by default though. Also, I think bits of it may have been effectively reverse-engineered from the behaviour of the Google services using it.
Imagine a world where every time you set up a website you have to fork over money to a certificate provider in order for people to be able to access your sites, where the prices for certificates are sky-high once again because the CAs know that they've got everyone over a barrel, where governments use their influence to get their own CAs into every browser and go right on ahead MITMing everything in site by painting anyone that refuses as a supporter of child porn...
Nope, just don't give them special treatment either way. Allowing them easier passage through security on the assumption that they might know terrorists is still kind of insulting if you think about it.
How many of them are economic libertarians though? There seems to be a lot of them in the geek community and they pretty much all insist on denying that global warming exists because their economic ideology is completely and utterly unable to deal with it - it's a symptom of a bigger problem with their underlying beliefs, not just a case of them being unexpectedly irrational about one topic.
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It's not just on Google sites. From what I've seen Google has been pushing huge numbers of ads about Chrome through pretty much every single site that uses Google ads, though this presumably depends on which browser you're using.
Of course the OSS community would like them to continue contributing to open source so I wouldn't expect applause, but there's no dishonor in abstaining.
They're not abstaining thought - they're still planning to use the GPL-licensed Linux kernel and probably other GPL components as well, it's just that they know that no-one is going to sue them when they fail to comply with the license on those. So this essentially means they can get away with violating the GPL whereas before they'd have been forced to actually comply and release source for all their GPL components by virtue of Busybox's license enforcement efforts. It looks very much like evidence of willful infringement to me, though IANAL.
The key is in the free market's lack of centralization, which results in, to use a modern analogy, a strongly optimized neural network in which each node (each individual or, more precisely, each individual at each atomic economic transaction in which he engages) is doing the best it can, input-output-wise, given the constraints under which it operates.
That's the problem - different individuals are operating under different constraints. In particular, there's an interesting economic idea called rational ignorance - basically, at some point the cost of gathering more information in order to make a decision exceeds the expected benefits, so that it's rational to just go ahead and decide without that information. There are three problems. Firstly, this threshold is much lower for individual consumers than for corporations or corporate executives making corporate-scale decisions - the cost of gathering information is essentially the same but individual consumers are dealing with far less money. Secondly, it applies to political decisions such as deciding who to vote for. Thirdly, there are various ways that large corporations can increase the cost of making a rational decision to tilt this balance further in their favour. For example, have you ever looked at mobile phone contracts? All the competing companies have different balances of minutes versus texts versus other services, different phones, different everything to make it as hard as possible for a consumer to make a fully-informed, rational economic decision and cause them to choose a more expensive plan from the wrong company.
Competing MP3 players at the time had crap software that made it hard to load them up with music, poor UI, and either bad form factors (Nomad) or almost no storage (flash based devices.)
Apple solved this by finding the only company that had started making disks small enough to build compact MP3 players with and entering into an exclusive contract with them, making it impossible for any of their competitors to get their hands on them. (Oh, and I seem to recall that they were later sued for patent infringement by Creative over copying the Nomad UI.)
Angry Birds' game mechanics were - mostly - taken wholesale from other games, but an important reason why it was so popular was almost certainly the whole birds vs. pigs idea and the artwork, sound effects, etc that built on that. As far as I'm aware that was entirely Rovio's work.
Even if they did, does any health insurance actually cover pre-existing chronic conditions like cystic fibrosis, especially when the medication for them costs $300,000 a year?
Except that this is America. It's not and never has been "Nazi land".
Quite right. It's the other way around - it was America and the incredibly popular American eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis in the first place. Admittedly the US eugenics programs stuck with things like forcibly sterilizing rape victims without their knowledge or consent rather than going for death camps, but the death camps were kind of the last resort of the Nazi regime anyway.
A copy of a particular piece of information on a nice shiny round disk is pretty clearly still property even if the actual information or idea isn't.
That's true so long as you have a decent internet connection with the exception of, for some reason, Portal 2. The DRM for that was hugely broken on release to the point that many users couldn't play it, and I still have to disable my anti-virus software or it'll exit to the desktop with one of a number of cryptic DRM-related errors.
Is there any evidence that Siri's supposed natural language processing is anything other than a larger and slightly fuzzier set of pre-defined commands, where it still can't understand anything except the commands it knows?
But there have been scientific "hoaxes" before such as the predicted rate of increase of AIDS, the exaggerated benefits of Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology and sequencing the gene.
The rate of increase in AIDS was thankfully a self-defeating prophecy thanks to huge changes in sexual behaviour, Government-funded and charitable publicity campaigns, and to a certain extent antiretroviral drugs. If you want to get some idea of how bad things could've become, take a look at sub-Saharan Africa sometime.
The rest are just predicted future innovations that turned out to be harder to achieve and less useful than predicted. As it happens, it's mainly the side of the debate that believes AGW isn't a big deal and peak oil doesn't matter which is relying on this kind of future innovation - geo-engineering to deal with the effects of more CO2, new methods of farming which don't rely on oil-based chemicals but can still feed as many people and can do so in a world with shifting climatic zones, that kind of thing.
It's not just "some liberals said this, so it must be wrong" - the current right-wing political ideology of so-called limited government in the US makes it impossible for them to actually do anything about global warming, so admitting that it exists would mean admitting their ideology was flawed.
Rambus's patent applications predated the JEDEC meetings.
Their amendments to their applications to match what they'd heard in the JEDEC meetings, on the other hand...
Yet as recently as a few days ago, I ran into "assert(sizeof(long) == sizeof(uint32_t));". Not even a compile-time failure. A runtime failure. Like I said, some of the worst code I've ever seen comes from open source projects. Pulling that kind of crap often enough will get you fired in any company with a code review policy.
Compare the amount of commercial software available in 64-bit versions with the amount of open source software that is. Now take a look at when it became available in 64-bit versions. Finally, look at all the companies out there whose software really needs a 64-bit release but who have mysteriously been dragging their feet.
Commercial code is obviously in general a lot worse than you're making out. Hell, for the longest time the last major 32-bit-only holdout in the open source world was OpenOffice, mostly because of the legacy of really awful code from its time as commercial software. There's no commercial incentive to do it right - that costs money and the benefits are long-term if they're ever seen at all, by which time the CEO and CTO will have exercised their options for a nice bonus and moved elsewhere.
From what I recall, it's not just that the spec was wrong but that one or two bits of it were unworkable and it could only be implemented after it could be confirmed that Google wasn't planning on using those parts for their services. Something like that anyway.
Actually, I think Mozilla refused to even allow Debian to backport security-critical bugfixes to older versions of Firefox and still call it that.
Not just that, but it's a bundled closed-source Flash plugin that isn't available to users of Chromium and its spin-offs, plus it has an additional bundled closed-source PDF reader plugin from Adobe that not only isn't available to Chromium users but also has no viable replacement.
So long as you only want the certificate for a single domain with no wildcards and no subdomains, yes. If you want anything more than that it's $59.90 a year and that's actually relatively cheap.
They probably can, but the US isn't the only country that will want to MITM traffic.
Have you ever read any comments by a Brazilian geek, or indeed one from any other country with this kind of high import tariffs? The main effect is that prices of consumer electronics are so inflated as to be unaffordable to most of the population.
From what I recall from reading the bug report about adding it, SPDY was just on the borderline of being actually implementable by other browsers - undocumented and requiring some hairy low-level changes to their SSL implementation, but simple enough to be doable. There's probably a reason it's not enabled by default though. Also, I think bits of it may have been effectively reverse-engineered from the behaviour of the Google services using it.
Imagine a world where every time you set up a website you have to fork over money to a certificate provider in order for people to be able to access your sites, where the prices for certificates are sky-high once again because the CAs know that they've got everyone over a barrel, where governments use their influence to get their own CAs into every browser and go right on ahead MITMing everything in site by painting anyone that refuses as a supporter of child porn...
Nope, just don't give them special treatment either way. Allowing them easier passage through security on the assumption that they might know terrorists is still kind of insulting if you think about it.
How many of them are economic libertarians though? There seems to be a lot of them in the geek community and they pretty much all insist on denying that global warming exists because their economic ideology is completely and utterly unable to deal with it - it's a symptom of a bigger problem with their underlying beliefs, not just a case of them being unexpectedly irrational about one topic.
I expect a lot of people really were uploading pirated stuff as encrypted files, though.