From my experience these types of managers are often also technically clueless; by aligning with MS and allowing MS to 'guide' them, they have a solution that 'even they' can get implemented and thus they can retain their management position and prevent their incompetency from being exposed. The "strategy" they are referring to is the "strategy" of keeping their own jobs. If they had to implement something that might perhaps be more cost-efficient e.g. open source, it would require more knowledge than they have and they'd simply be lost.
At the level we're talking about, "they" don't implement anything; they direct people who manage people who implement everything -- this is at least two levels above anything technical. Their main worry is conversations like this:
Manager A: Team B's system still isn't working for us -- none of our administrators using OpenSourceSoftwareFoo can access patient records. Manager B: OpenSourceSoftwareFoo is an obscure crap piece of buggy software. If you think we've got the budget to work around every buggy piece of client software in the world, you're joking Manager C: But this still doesn't tell me when B and C's team are going to support the data formats of the OSSSpazmundo software we've been using for five years! Manager D: That's a dead piece of crap. If you keep using that, you'll never be able to support the open source FabulosoSecurity product we're pushing out across the hospital system. It's a great new product. Managers A-Z (except D): What?? It'll cost us millions to try to integrate with that! Doctors: None of our systems work with each other, we're having endless fights with different departments' IT departments just to be able to do our jobs, and that means mistakes are being made and patients are dying. CIO: That's the last time I let teams pick their own technologies. We're just going single vendor.
Ah, yes. Slashdot... where correlation does not mean causation unless the study supports your prejudices.
Does high IQ produce the bent away from conservative values and religion? Or does high IQ cause one to feel "superior to the masses", arrogance and then a rejection of these values? The study is not able to go into this.
And assuming this is the same study as the one I read... was done on a college population (brilliant sampling technique, I must admit)
It's the "college population" that is normally the root of the issue in most of these studies. Psychologists simply can't afford to study the general public (students are free because psych students have to take part in studies as part of their courses; the public costs). So we get most studies based on psychology students. Usually first years. Who are for the very first time living away from their parents. I wonder if any of those factors might make them a little, et, unrepresentative of the general populace...?
The UK is one small jurisdiction and I'm not familiar with their antitrust laws. I generally pay attention to the big three (US, EU, CN) since most other jurisdictions follow suit. Do you have a citation of UK law? I strongly suspect you're looking at general competition laws and not antitrust laws if it regards market share that low.
Riiight; I can imagine that argument in court... "Your honour, I know we employ thousands of people here, and have millions of customers, but we figured it's just one small jurisdiction and we could ignore it. Oh, and we forgot it's a major part of the EU while we were at it." You're welcome to look up the UK law yourself (I gave the link in another post and can't be bothered to look it up again). "Antitrust" is an exclusively US distinction. The EU laws also do not place a high bar on being treated as a monopoly -- in BA v Virgin 2000, BA was considered "dominant" (the EU equivalent of a US monopoly) at 39.7% market share. Again, well below Google's.
You make this comment twice, but fail to site the relevant portions of my comment about why even if they did have sufficient market share in search, they would probably not be in violation of the law
Your comments that I cut were predicated on the (false) notion that Google don't have a monopoly in search. I cut paragraphs with phrases like "especially since they don't have a legal monopoly on search", "if Google actually had a legal monopoly on search", etc. It'd help if you even knew what you'd written, let alone what you're talking about.
Umm, because they're interested in mergers and partnerships that are not allowed if they consolidate markets too much, such as the search advertising market.
No, the question was why the EC should care about US market shares; the answer is they do not -- they care about market share within each of the member countries of the EU. (So, they most certainly do care about UK market share.)
Google has 67% of the search market in the US, which does not actually qualify as a monopoly under US law and basic antitrust guidelines.
But does in other jurisdictions. The bar for being a monopoly in the UK is 25%, where Google have 86% of the market. Ooh, what's that big thing outside the US's borders... I think it's called a "world". You migh
Yes they do, but that is probably not enough to qualify as bundling, especially since they don't have a legal monopoly on search, just on search advertising. That means they have to bundle it with the product they offer to advertisers, not end users
See above.
If Google actually had a legal monopoly on search and skewed the results to their own services, I'd agree with you. As it is, I doubt the courts would.
See above.
Except you're the only one asserting Google has a monopoly "desktop". Everyone else is talking about the market where Google is over 70% in the US, that being search related online advertising.
No, that's just you. If you even read the title, let alone RTFA, you will see it says "Microsoft behind Google complaints to EC". Now what exactly would the European Commission care about US market shares for?
Well, let's see. The UK definition of a monopoly is where one company controls at least 25% of a market. Does Google have more than 25% of the search market... um yes, they have 86% of the UK search market and do indeed have a monopoly!
Meanwhile, MS was never accused of becoming number one in the desktop market by "by using coercive, anti-trust-law-violating tactics" -- they were accused of abusing their monopoly once they had become number one in order to gain advantage in other markets.
Really, the exact same? What other market is Google using it's search advertising market to gain an advantage in and by what mechanism?
In fact, Google most certainly have been doing bundling, similar to what Microsoft was initially called out for. Remember that Google has a monopoly in search, not just in search advertising. (And browsers and media players were considered a 'market' even though IE and Windows Media Player were not sold, so "making no money from it" is no defense.) The Google search page -- both the home page and every results page -- contains direct links to their own other products (Maps, News, Books, GMail all appear in a neat row). Yahoo! Mail cannot even be installed there. That's far worse than Microsoft's situation (where you could set another browser as the Windows default if you installed one.) Google most certainly are leveraging their monopoly in search to draw users to their other services.
Ironically, they are starting to draw attention to it. When everybody thought "it's just a web page" people might not have noticed; but as Google talks up the browser as being the desktop, people start to notice more and more that Google's monopoly "desktop" only links their own services.
How did they rule out the possibility that children who are prone to violence might also be prone to playing more violent video games?
Because lots and lots of things in psychology work by reinforcement. It might be that you play golf because you are good at it; but you probably became good at it by playing golf. The simplest assumption in the psychology of habits and tendencies is not "A causes B" or "B causes A", but both.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished. That would reveal a big chunk of the world's assholes who can no longer point to the cross or to the Qur'an as justification for their actions.
The articles wisely cite valid questions concerning real-life phenominae. That's healthy debate, and it's a sign that hummanity is capable of "moving on". But there still a large number of "my god is better than your god" nyah-nyahs whose idea of healthy debate is killing others who don't agree with them rather than thinking.
Abolishment of religion won't solve all problems, but it has the highest ratio of simplicty-of-suggestion to worldwide-problems-solved.
So are you going to present your rigorous peer-reviewed empirical study of "simplicity-of-suggestion" against "worldwide-problems-solved" for different life-decision strategies? Or is that just a bit of evidence-free fanciful (magical?) thinking of your own? It'd be very interesting to see your rigorous peer-reviewed and widely accepted definition of "problems-solved" for starters...
The fact that a relatively simple machine (especially when we look back ten or fifty years from now) can do what was originally thought to be difficult undermines the pedestal that many humans have put themselves on. This is why people were upset when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It would have to be a skill that we've abandoned as uniquely human - such as raw mathematical calculations - that a machine would be allowed to beat us at without this sort of reaction.
Fact is, what's hard for humans to do isn't necessarily hard for a computer, but those who fail to understand that get upset.
You miss the difference between Mozart and a computer. It is extraordinarily easy for me to get a computer to produce a Mozart symphony. At the simplest, I put a Mozart CD into a CD player and the computer program in the CD player carefully produces Mozart tunes. Only one level more complex is hard-coding the tunes into the program itself so it really is a program producing Mozart. If you want to get a bit more complex, you can have a nifty algorithm that you have carefully tuned to produce something that sounds a bit like Mozart from whatever source you like (genetic algorithms, or whatever composition algorithm this program uses). Mozart himself, however, did not have a professor directly programming his brain with an algorithm (not even an AI genetic algorithm -- the music itself was not encoded in his DNA), nor a few centuries of academic analysis of his own compositions to derive the algorithms from. He had to start from scratch, learn his own craft, find his own style, with not much more than a piano teacher and a disdain for Salieri. And of course that was after growing himself from a single cell and inducing what the concept of "music" means in the first place.
The computer has done nothing special at all. It has blindly implemented the algorithm its programmer told it to. If the output is beautiful music, then that suggests the algorithms (or the algorithms' value functions in an iterative approach) correspond to some things that humans consider beautiful in music; it says nothing about computers. They are still just the mechanical implementations of human-derived algorithms that they always were.
From TFA, one of the group is defined by:"Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the 'individualistic' group."
Shock horror, the people who embrace new technology were more likely to embrace a new piece of technology...
This is almost a zero-information experiment. The definitions classified the results that were then analysed against the classifications. In other news, when we classified coin tosses into a "heads" group and a "tails" group, we found that the "heads" group contained 100% heads results, no matter how many times the coin was tossed... we conclude therefore that randomness is an illusion.
The participants were not presented with "facts", they were presented with "claimed facts" which they had to both interpret and assess. (A process called "reading" and "understanding".) That the participants were able ahead-of-time to describe the foibles of their assessment strategies (that one group was able to say it was more amenable to new technology) merely shows that the participants were pretty good at reflecting on their own decision strategies.
My only wishes for the civ games has always been for a more in depth combat systems (maybe not Rome: Total War in depth, but at least Star Trek: Birth of the Federation in depth) and a good way to create your own civilization (unique units, leaders, etc)
I've always wanted them to solve the problem that the number of pieces you have to push around grows polynomially as the game goes on. A game that is quick, snappy, and fun in the ancient to middle ages gradually morphs into a slow grind in the modern era, as moves take 10 minutes, the CPU slows to a crawl coping with all the units, and the game loses its risk and becomes just a matter of momentum (losing your sole War Elephant to an archer matters; losing one of a dozen Tanks does not.)
Of course I have my own "why don't they do this" solution to that, but hopefully CivV will come up with something even better.
All men and women are created equal. Everyone has a right to practice what religion they so choose. So keep your religious crap out of our public schools.
"All men are created equal" is itself a religious view -- the second clause that you did not quote being "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights", and being a religious rejection of the divine right of kings. Indeed, the idea that all men and women are created equal is entirely anti-scientific as it is strongly held even though it flies in the face of all the empirical evidence. We are not equal at conception or birth; we have distinct advantages and disadvantages based on our genes and the family situations we are born into. So does that mean you would like it banned from our public schools, or does it get a pass because you happen to like it?
Surely this does not come as a surprise to anyone?
Oracle, who have deliberately lessened the abilities of their own products (from a reasonably solid database system 10 years ago to a steaming turd now) in order to sell more licenses to do the same amount of work will continue to cut anything that is not immediately profitable.
Anything that Sun pursued on moral or ethical grounds, and anything that shows "future promise" will be axed as soon as they spot it.
Or, if we take off our doom-coloured spectacles, we might realise that Oracle (largely a server applications company) and Sun (largely a server hardware company) probably don't consider a niche open source desktop environment to be part of their core business. In other news, I hear the Dunlop tyre company hasn't spent much on improving the accessibility of car stereos either.
It should say: Oracle breaks their commitment to accessibility, that they inherited when they acquired sun.
In other words, Oracle is going back on their word, and is perhaps about to show how dishonest, despicable, and evil they (apparently) are, or not, depending on whether they keep their word (or not).
Did I miss the press release -- does Sun now own Linux or Gnome in order to be solely responsible for its accessibility? Surely that'd be the bigger news story if it were true. I was under the impression, and I suspect so is everyone else on Slashdot, that Linux and Gnome are independent open source projects owned by the community; if Sun choses not to contribute code to a particular portion of the source tree any more, so be it, and we should thank them for their extensive work thus far, rather than pillory them for no longer being willing to be the only sucker actually doing anything about this community responsibility to improve Gnome's accessibility.
I mean... those villains at Sun/Oracle haven't repainted my house for me either, or swept my yard -- the scoundrels!
And it's why the government have been trying to get rid of unelected members of the House of Lords for most of the past 10 years; something that I suspect the next government will continue to do.
Not quite correct. They have done a great deal to get rid of the hereditary peers, but most of the members of the House of Lords are appointed by the Government and Opposition themselves -- but still not elected. Some government MPs have proposed electing some of the Lords, but it has never looked likely to succeed.
Actually, even in the House of Commons (parliament) there is less appetite than you would think for an elected House of Lords -- if the Lords were also elected, then the justification for the Parliament Act would disappear, weakening the House of Commons. (The Parliament Act allows the House of Commons to force a bill into law against the will of the House of Lords, if it has passed a vote three times in the Commons.) The, Commons being the elected house, is considered more important/powerful than the Lords; if both houses were elected, the Lords would effectively turn into a senate and would be expected to be able to block the Commons.
As a gamer who has made purchasing decisions based on the fact that PSN is free and Xbox Live costs money, I believe this would be a big negative for Sony at a time when they are actually making headway in the console wars. The only way I see this working out is if all the current services offered by PSN are free and these new features are optional, not essential for having a good gaming experience, and priced modestly. Otherwise, I think this will amount to Sony shooting themselves in the foot when they have momentum, just like they did with the PS2 to PS3 transition.
Very much worse than the PS2 to PS3 transition. With the PS3, Sony has started to gain real traction as a "just works" media and entertainment hub for ordinary folk and families (rather than techies). For instance, the sales success of PlayTV (cheap, easy, and friendly digital tv recording functionality), LittleBigPlanet, etc -- it's starting to conquer the Wii's territory now more people have high-definition tvs. As soon as it's "$X/month subscription", families and casual users won't look at it. They'd reckon that kind of "all-you-can-eat" pricing means it's for hard-core WoW/XBox360 8-hours-a-day types, not for them. "Not only do I not want to spend that much of my time playing it, I don't want to be playing against people who spend that much time on it either."
The PS2/3 transition, in comparison, was a temporary problem -- PS2 support was there because otherwise at first launch it would have looked like there was very little you could play on the PS3. Pissing off the hardcore PS2 players ("I have to keep both boxes?") was minor in comparison because most people do not consider themselves hardcore gamers.
From the article: " I'm sure the 'content providers' will continue to sell content to the BBC, ITV, etc., if this is not implemented."
My guess would be 'no' actually - they'll happily sell non-HD versions, but I doubt they will sell HD without the DRM.
Indeed the price would go up for the HD version, and they'd happily tell the BBC and ITV "Sorry, but Sky [an entirely encrypted pay-TV channel] are offering lots of cash with built in DRM. Cya." The BBC has already been out-bid on many popular programs by Sky -- they plucked 24 from the BBC after season 2 when it had built an audience; same for Lost; they plucked the cricket from Channel 4;... If you're keen to tie the BBC's hands behind its back in content negotiations, the result won't be "more for free" -- it'll be "now I have to pay for a Sky subscription at three times the licence fee AND put up with adverts AND put up with DRM"...
Before you go acusing Google of doing Evil (TM), think. If they don't do this, some troll will. The troll will lose, but Google will waste a lot more money defending against it.
Actually, no. (Usual caveat of I Am Not A Lawyer). Google could quite happily have let the patent application be rejected by the USPTO. It would still have become a published patent application, and thus would still have been included in any USPTO "prior art" searches for future patent applications just as a granted patent would. Having the patent granted rather than rejected doesn't seem to do anything extra to prevent anyone else from submitting a patent. The USPTO tried to reject it four times, but Google kept tweaking it to get it granted, so it seems Google really do want the patent, not just to prevent anybody else from getting it.
A somewhat optimistic guess is that they'll be restricted to using this defensively. Are they really going to sue Hadoop, the open-source implementation of MapReduce? Hadoop not only implements a version of MapReduce, it even uses its name, so is not at all coy about being a direct infringement of this patent. And yet, I would be surprised if Google sued them, or the many people using it. They certainly haven't said anything yet, as far as I can find--- when things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce were launched, I can't find record of Google saying, "hey, you're stealing our tech!"
Your evidence of their good intentions is that they didn't sue anyone for patent infringement before they had a patent granted?
I have news for you. They now have the legal ability to sue people for infringement of this patent (that they didn't have before it was granted). Even if you think "But Eric Schmidt is such a lovely chap, he'd never be so dastardly" you have no guarantee that he will be CEO tomorrow let alone in ten years' time. At any time, Google could choose to sue and they have made no public legally binding statement that they will not do so. As with any patent, you infringe at your peril.
In my (non-legal-professional) opinion, what you are doing sounds high risk -- you are consciously replicating their expressed work (the game) and even admittedly giving it a deliberately similar title. It sounds like there are some copyright issues -- some things about games can be copyright and others can't; your remake might be considered a "derivative work" however. If you did wheedle out of that complaint, it sounds like you could still potentially be sued for "passing off" as you have a deliberately similar product with a deliberately similar name.
I'd advise having a look at the legal history of Scrabulous. They remade a not-so-obscure game, got sued, won on some parts but lost on others, but are still trading (being sued is not necessarily game over).
If the fictional nuke wielding terrorists managed to set one off every four years and kill as many people as died at Hiroshima, they'd kill about as many people as die from motor vehicle accidents in the US in the same time period.
Deaths through medical error are the equivalent of a fully laden 747 crashing every week (see the human factors in healthcare literature), but that is not considered a reason to be more lax with aeroplane maintenance...
Yeah, everyone is scared a terrorist group may have a nuke. And no, there is very little reliable data to show it has a nuke. It is a lot more reasonable to say that Iraq, with a simi-legitimate government, large area, and somewhat rich would have WMDs. Oh wait... when we invaded Iraq... they had no WMDs. If Iraq, a nation with many people couldn't get a WMD (or managed to turn these WMDs into ninjas so the US/UN/etc couldn't find them...)
It's very well-documented that in the past Iraq most certainly had been able to obtain WMDs (in particular chemical weapons)... because they have used them to suppress uprisings. There are mass dead bodies to prove that they once did obtain WMDs. The issue before the invasion was whether they still had them, or whether the UN inspections had succeeded in making Iraq get rid of them. (Turns out, Blair and Bush were wrong and they had got rid of them -- though there's some likelihood they got rid of them by giving them away to Syria)
The "fear of a terrorist group getting a nuke", now, is pretty much that Pakistan most definitely does have nukes and is in danger of instability because of the problems in Afghanistan having pretty much crossed the border into Pakistan now. If the Pakistan government were to fail, and Pakistan became a failed state (like Afghanistan or Somalia), then it's not beyond belief that an extremist militia would not only be able to obtain a nuclear device, but a whole dang nuclear missile facility. The reason your aeroplane is unlikely to miss the runway is simply because the pilots, air-traffic controllers, and system designers are very intently working to make sure it doesn't. Similarly, the reason that the terrorists are unlikely to obtain a WMD is because there are thousands of people working very intently to make sure they don't. It is precisely because people are worrying about this sort of thing (and indeed are employed to worry about this sort of thing) that ensures that you don't need to worry about it.
I'm not that surprised it got through. About 15 years ago a friend's brother inadvertently traveled through at least six airports with a WW2 grenade casing (explosive core removed) in his luggage, courtesy of one of his drunk friends hiding it in there as a joke. He only found it when he unpacked after getting back home from his travels. Sure there were no explosives so it wouldn't set of a chemical detector, but you'd have thought the X-Ray operators might have raised their eyebrows at something clearly grenade-shaped..
Slashdot Mirror
From my experience these types of managers are often also technically clueless; by aligning with MS and allowing MS to 'guide' them, they have a solution that 'even they' can get implemented and thus they can retain their management position and prevent their incompetency from being exposed. The "strategy" they are referring to is the "strategy" of keeping their own jobs. If they had to implement something that might perhaps be more cost-efficient e.g. open source, it would require more knowledge than they have and they'd simply be lost.
At the level we're talking about, "they" don't implement anything; they direct people who manage people who implement everything -- this is at least two levels above anything technical. Their main worry is conversations like this:
Manager A: Team B's system still isn't working for us -- none of our administrators using OpenSourceSoftwareFoo can access patient records.
Manager B: OpenSourceSoftwareFoo is an obscure crap piece of buggy software. If you think we've got the budget to work around every buggy piece of client software in the world, you're joking
Manager C: But this still doesn't tell me when B and C's team are going to support the data formats of the OSSSpazmundo software we've been using for five years!
Manager D: That's a dead piece of crap. If you keep using that, you'll never be able to support the open source FabulosoSecurity product we're pushing out across the hospital system. It's a great new product.
Managers A-Z (except D): What?? It'll cost us millions to try to integrate with that!
Doctors: None of our systems work with each other, we're having endless fights with different departments' IT departments just to be able to do our jobs, and that means mistakes are being made and patients are dying.
CIO: That's the last time I let teams pick their own technologies. We're just going single vendor.
Ah, yes. Slashdot... where correlation does not mean causation unless the study supports your prejudices. Does high IQ produce the bent away from conservative values and religion? Or does high IQ cause one to feel "superior to the masses", arrogance and then a rejection of these values? The study is not able to go into this. And assuming this is the same study as the one I read... was done on a college population (brilliant sampling technique, I must admit)
It's the "college population" that is normally the root of the issue in most of these studies. Psychologists simply can't afford to study the general public (students are free because psych students have to take part in studies as part of their courses; the public costs). So we get most studies based on psychology students. Usually first years. Who are for the very first time living away from their parents. I wonder if any of those factors might make them a little, et, unrepresentative of the general populace...?
The UK is one small jurisdiction and I'm not familiar with their antitrust laws. I generally pay attention to the big three (US, EU, CN) since most other jurisdictions follow suit. Do you have a citation of UK law? I strongly suspect you're looking at general competition laws and not antitrust laws if it regards market share that low.
Riiight; I can imagine that argument in court... "Your honour, I know we employ thousands of people here, and have millions of customers, but we figured it's just one small jurisdiction and we could ignore it. Oh, and we forgot it's a major part of the EU while we were at it." You're welcome to look up the UK law yourself (I gave the link in another post and can't be bothered to look it up again). "Antitrust" is an exclusively US distinction. The EU laws also do not place a high bar on being treated as a monopoly -- in BA v Virgin 2000, BA was considered "dominant" (the EU equivalent of a US monopoly) at 39.7% market share. Again, well below Google's.
You make this comment twice, but fail to site the relevant portions of my comment about why even if they did have sufficient market share in search, they would probably not be in violation of the law
Your comments that I cut were predicated on the (false) notion that Google don't have a monopoly in search. I cut paragraphs with phrases like "especially since they don't have a legal monopoly on search", "if Google actually had a legal monopoly on search", etc. It'd help if you even knew what you'd written, let alone what you're talking about.
Umm, because they're interested in mergers and partnerships that are not allowed if they consolidate markets too much, such as the search advertising market.
No, the question was why the EC should care about US market shares; the answer is they do not -- they care about market share within each of the member countries of the EU. (So, they most certainly do care about UK market share.)
Google has 67% of the search market in the US, which does not actually qualify as a monopoly under US law and basic antitrust guidelines.
But does in other jurisdictions. The bar for being a monopoly in the UK is 25%, where Google have 86% of the market. Ooh, what's that big thing outside the US's borders... I think it's called a "world". You migh
Yes they do, but that is probably not enough to qualify as bundling, especially since they don't have a legal monopoly on search, just on search advertising. That means they have to bundle it with the product they offer to advertisers, not end users
See above.
If Google actually had a legal monopoly on search and skewed the results to their own services, I'd agree with you. As it is, I doubt the courts would.
See above.
Except you're the only one asserting Google has a monopoly "desktop". Everyone else is talking about the market where Google is over 70% in the US, that being search related online advertising.
No, that's just you. If you even read the title, let alone RTFA, you will see it says "Microsoft behind Google complaints to EC". Now what exactly would the European Commission care about US market shares for?
Google doesn't have anything like a monopoly,
Well, let's see. The UK definition of a monopoly is where one company controls at least 25% of a market. Does Google have more than 25% of the search market... um yes, they have 86% of the UK search market and do indeed have a monopoly!
Meanwhile, MS was never accused of becoming number one in the desktop market by "by using coercive, anti-trust-law-violating tactics" -- they were accused of abusing their monopoly once they had become number one in order to gain advantage in other markets.
(Sorry to rain a few facts on your ranty parade.)
Really, the exact same? What other market is Google using it's search advertising market to gain an advantage in and by what mechanism?
In fact, Google most certainly have been doing bundling, similar to what Microsoft was initially called out for. Remember that Google has a monopoly in search, not just in search advertising. (And browsers and media players were considered a 'market' even though IE and Windows Media Player were not sold, so "making no money from it" is no defense.) The Google search page -- both the home page and every results page -- contains direct links to their own other products (Maps, News, Books, GMail all appear in a neat row). Yahoo! Mail cannot even be installed there. That's far worse than Microsoft's situation (where you could set another browser as the Windows default if you installed one.) Google most certainly are leveraging their monopoly in search to draw users to their other services.
Ironically, they are starting to draw attention to it. When everybody thought "it's just a web page" people might not have noticed; but as Google talks up the browser as being the desktop, people start to notice more and more that Google's monopoly "desktop" only links their own services.
How did they rule out the possibility that children who are prone to violence might also be prone to playing more violent video games?
Because lots and lots of things in psychology work by reinforcement. It might be that you play golf because you are good at it; but you probably became good at it by playing golf. The simplest assumption in the psychology of habits and tendencies is not "A causes B" or "B causes A", but both.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished. That would reveal a big chunk of the world's assholes who can no longer point to the cross or to the Qur'an as justification for their actions.
The articles wisely cite valid questions concerning real-life phenominae. That's healthy debate, and it's a sign that hummanity is capable of "moving on". But there still a large number of "my god is better than your god" nyah-nyahs whose idea of healthy debate is killing others who don't agree with them rather than thinking.
Abolishment of religion won't solve all problems, but it has the highest ratio of simplicty-of-suggestion to worldwide-problems-solved.
So are you going to present your rigorous peer-reviewed empirical study of "simplicity-of-suggestion" against "worldwide-problems-solved" for different life-decision strategies? Or is that just a bit of evidence-free fanciful (magical?) thinking of your own? It'd be very interesting to see your rigorous peer-reviewed and widely accepted definition of "problems-solved" for starters...
The fact that a relatively simple machine (especially when we look back ten or fifty years from now) can do what was originally thought to be difficult undermines the pedestal that many humans have put themselves on. This is why people were upset when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It would have to be a skill that we've abandoned as uniquely human - such as raw mathematical calculations - that a machine would be allowed to beat us at without this sort of reaction.
Fact is, what's hard for humans to do isn't necessarily hard for a computer, but those who fail to understand that get upset.
You miss the difference between Mozart and a computer. It is extraordinarily easy for me to get a computer to produce a Mozart symphony. At the simplest, I put a Mozart CD into a CD player and the computer program in the CD player carefully produces Mozart tunes. Only one level more complex is hard-coding the tunes into the program itself so it really is a program producing Mozart. If you want to get a bit more complex, you can have a nifty algorithm that you have carefully tuned to produce something that sounds a bit like Mozart from whatever source you like (genetic algorithms, or whatever composition algorithm this program uses). Mozart himself, however, did not have a professor directly programming his brain with an algorithm (not even an AI genetic algorithm -- the music itself was not encoded in his DNA), nor a few centuries of academic analysis of his own compositions to derive the algorithms from. He had to start from scratch, learn his own craft, find his own style, with not much more than a piano teacher and a disdain for Salieri. And of course that was after growing himself from a single cell and inducing what the concept of "music" means in the first place.
The computer has done nothing special at all. It has blindly implemented the algorithm its programmer told it to. If the output is beautiful music, then that suggests the algorithms (or the algorithms' value functions in an iterative approach) correspond to some things that humans consider beautiful in music; it says nothing about computers. They are still just the mechanical implementations of human-derived algorithms that they always were.
From TFA, one of the group is defined by:"Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the 'individualistic' group."
Shock horror, the people who embrace new technology were more likely to embrace a new piece of technology...
This is almost a zero-information experiment. The definitions classified the results that were then analysed against the classifications. In other news, when we classified coin tosses into a "heads" group and a "tails" group, we found that the "heads" group contained 100% heads results, no matter how many times the coin was tossed ... we conclude therefore that randomness is an illusion.
The participants were not presented with "facts", they were presented with "claimed facts" which they had to both interpret and assess. (A process called "reading" and "understanding".) That the participants were able ahead-of-time to describe the foibles of their assessment strategies (that one group was able to say it was more amenable to new technology) merely shows that the participants were pretty good at reflecting on their own decision strategies.
Next...
My only wishes for the civ games has always been for a more in depth combat systems (maybe not Rome: Total War in depth, but at least Star Trek: Birth of the Federation in depth) and a good way to create your own civilization (unique units, leaders, etc)
I've always wanted them to solve the problem that the number of pieces you have to push around grows polynomially as the game goes on. A game that is quick, snappy, and fun in the ancient to middle ages gradually morphs into a slow grind in the modern era, as moves take 10 minutes, the CPU slows to a crawl coping with all the units, and the game loses its risk and becomes just a matter of momentum (losing your sole War Elephant to an archer matters; losing one of a dozen Tanks does not.)
Of course I have my own "why don't they do this" solution to that, but hopefully CivV will come up with something even better.
...they thought about pulling out of China, but then they decided "Don't. Be evil."
All men and women are created equal. Everyone has a right to practice what religion they so choose. So keep your religious crap out of our public schools.
"All men are created equal" is itself a religious view -- the second clause that you did not quote being "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights", and being a religious rejection of the divine right of kings. Indeed, the idea that all men and women are created equal is entirely anti-scientific as it is strongly held even though it flies in the face of all the empirical evidence. We are not equal at conception or birth; we have distinct advantages and disadvantages based on our genes and the family situations we are born into. So does that mean you would like it banned from our public schools, or does it get a pass because you happen to like it?
Surely this does not come as a surprise to anyone?
Oracle, who have deliberately lessened the abilities of their own products (from a reasonably solid database system 10 years ago to a steaming turd now) in order to sell more licenses to do the same amount of work will continue to cut anything that is not immediately profitable.
Anything that Sun pursued on moral or ethical grounds, and anything that shows "future promise" will be axed as soon as they spot it.
Or, if we take off our doom-coloured spectacles, we might realise that Oracle (largely a server applications company) and Sun (largely a server hardware company) probably don't consider a niche open source desktop environment to be part of their core business. In other news, I hear the Dunlop tyre company hasn't spent much on improving the accessibility of car stereos either.
It should say: Oracle breaks their commitment to accessibility, that they inherited when they acquired sun.
In other words, Oracle is going back on their word, and is perhaps about to show how dishonest, despicable, and evil they (apparently) are, or not, depending on whether they keep their word (or not).
Did I miss the press release -- does Sun now own Linux or Gnome in order to be solely responsible for its accessibility? Surely that'd be the bigger news story if it were true. I was under the impression, and I suspect so is everyone else on Slashdot, that Linux and Gnome are independent open source projects owned by the community; if Sun choses not to contribute code to a particular portion of the source tree any more, so be it, and we should thank them for their extensive work thus far, rather than pillory them for no longer being willing to be the only sucker actually doing anything about this community responsibility to improve Gnome's accessibility.
I mean... those villains at Sun/Oracle haven't repainted my house for me either, or swept my yard -- the scoundrels!
And it's why the government have been trying to get rid of unelected members of the House of Lords for most of the past 10 years; something that I suspect the next government will continue to do.
Not quite correct. They have done a great deal to get rid of the hereditary peers, but most of the members of the House of Lords are appointed by the Government and Opposition themselves -- but still not elected. Some government MPs have proposed electing some of the Lords, but it has never looked likely to succeed.
Actually, even in the House of Commons (parliament) there is less appetite than you would think for an elected House of Lords -- if the Lords were also elected, then the justification for the Parliament Act would disappear, weakening the House of Commons. (The Parliament Act allows the House of Commons to force a bill into law against the will of the House of Lords, if it has passed a vote three times in the Commons.) The, Commons being the elected house, is considered more important/powerful than the Lords; if both houses were elected, the Lords would effectively turn into a senate and would be expected to be able to block the Commons.
As a gamer who has made purchasing decisions based on the fact that PSN is free and Xbox Live costs money, I believe this would be a big negative for Sony at a time when they are actually making headway in the console wars. The only way I see this working out is if all the current services offered by PSN are free and these new features are optional, not essential for having a good gaming experience, and priced modestly. Otherwise, I think this will amount to Sony shooting themselves in the foot when they have momentum, just like they did with the PS2 to PS3 transition.
Very much worse than the PS2 to PS3 transition. With the PS3, Sony has started to gain real traction as a "just works" media and entertainment hub for ordinary folk and families (rather than techies). For instance, the sales success of PlayTV (cheap, easy, and friendly digital tv recording functionality), LittleBigPlanet, etc -- it's starting to conquer the Wii's territory now more people have high-definition tvs. As soon as it's "$X/month subscription", families and casual users won't look at it. They'd reckon that kind of "all-you-can-eat" pricing means it's for hard-core WoW/XBox360 8-hours-a-day types, not for them. "Not only do I not want to spend that much of my time playing it, I don't want to be playing against people who spend that much time on it either."
The PS2/3 transition, in comparison, was a temporary problem -- PS2 support was there because otherwise at first launch it would have looked like there was very little you could play on the PS3. Pissing off the hardcore PS2 players ("I have to keep both boxes?") was minor in comparison because most people do not consider themselves hardcore gamers.
To Free/Open alternatives. GCJ anyone?
But given that Sun has already GPL'ed Java -- see OpenJDK -- you'd be wasting your time.
From the article: " I'm sure the 'content providers' will continue to sell content to the BBC, ITV, etc., if this is not implemented." My guess would be 'no' actually - they'll happily sell non-HD versions, but I doubt they will sell HD without the DRM.
Indeed the price would go up for the HD version, and they'd happily tell the BBC and ITV "Sorry, but Sky [an entirely encrypted pay-TV channel] are offering lots of cash with built in DRM. Cya." The BBC has already been out-bid on many popular programs by Sky -- they plucked 24 from the BBC after season 2 when it had built an audience; same for Lost; they plucked the cricket from Channel 4; ... If you're keen to tie the BBC's hands behind its back in content negotiations, the result won't be "more for free" -- it'll be "now I have to pay for a Sky subscription at three times the licence fee AND put up with adverts AND put up with DRM"...
Before you go acusing Google of doing Evil (TM), think. If they don't do this, some troll will. The troll will lose, but Google will waste a lot more money defending against it.
Actually, no. (Usual caveat of I Am Not A Lawyer). Google could quite happily have let the patent application be rejected by the USPTO. It would still have become a published patent application, and thus would still have been included in any USPTO "prior art" searches for future patent applications just as a granted patent would. Having the patent granted rather than rejected doesn't seem to do anything extra to prevent anyone else from submitting a patent. The USPTO tried to reject it four times, but Google kept tweaking it to get it granted, so it seems Google really do want the patent, not just to prevent anybody else from getting it.
A somewhat optimistic guess is that they'll be restricted to using this defensively. Are they really going to sue Hadoop, the open-source implementation of MapReduce? Hadoop not only implements a version of MapReduce, it even uses its name, so is not at all coy about being a direct infringement of this patent. And yet, I would be surprised if Google sued them, or the many people using it. They certainly haven't said anything yet, as far as I can find--- when things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce were launched, I can't find record of Google saying, "hey, you're stealing our tech!"
Your evidence of their good intentions is that they didn't sue anyone for patent infringement before they had a patent granted?
I have news for you. They now have the legal ability to sue people for infringement of this patent (that they didn't have before it was granted). Even if you think "But Eric Schmidt is such a lovely chap, he'd never be so dastardly" you have no guarantee that he will be CEO tomorrow let alone in ten years' time. At any time, Google could choose to sue and they have made no public legally binding statement that they will not do so. As with any patent, you infringe at your peril.
In my (non-legal-professional) opinion, what you are doing sounds high risk -- you are consciously replicating their expressed work (the game) and even admittedly giving it a deliberately similar title. It sounds like there are some copyright issues -- some things about games can be copyright and others can't; your remake might be considered a "derivative work" however. If you did wheedle out of that complaint, it sounds like you could still potentially be sued for "passing off" as you have a deliberately similar product with a deliberately similar name.
I'd advise having a look at the legal history of Scrabulous. They remade a not-so-obscure game, got sued, won on some parts but lost on others, but are still trading (being sued is not necessarily game over).
If the fictional nuke wielding terrorists managed to set one off every four years and kill as many people as died at Hiroshima, they'd kill about as many people as die from motor vehicle accidents in the US in the same time period.
Deaths through medical error are the equivalent of a fully laden 747 crashing every week (see the human factors in healthcare literature), but that is not considered a reason to be more lax with aeroplane maintenance...
Yeah, everyone is scared a terrorist group may have a nuke. And no, there is very little reliable data to show it has a nuke. It is a lot more reasonable to say that Iraq, with a simi-legitimate government, large area, and somewhat rich would have WMDs. Oh wait... when we invaded Iraq... they had no WMDs. If Iraq, a nation with many people couldn't get a WMD (or managed to turn these WMDs into ninjas so the US/UN/etc couldn't find them...)
It's very well-documented that in the past Iraq most certainly had been able to obtain WMDs (in particular chemical weapons) ... because they have used them to suppress uprisings. There are mass dead bodies to prove that they once did obtain WMDs. The issue before the invasion was whether they still had them, or whether the UN inspections had succeeded in making Iraq get rid of them. (Turns out, Blair and Bush were wrong and they had got rid of them -- though there's some likelihood they got rid of them by giving them away to Syria)
The "fear of a terrorist group getting a nuke", now, is pretty much that Pakistan most definitely does have nukes and is in danger of instability because of the problems in Afghanistan having pretty much crossed the border into Pakistan now. If the Pakistan government were to fail, and Pakistan became a failed state (like Afghanistan or Somalia), then it's not beyond belief that an extremist militia would not only be able to obtain a nuclear device, but a whole dang nuclear missile facility. The reason your aeroplane is unlikely to miss the runway is simply because the pilots, air-traffic controllers, and system designers are very intently working to make sure it doesn't. Similarly, the reason that the terrorists are unlikely to obtain a WMD is because there are thousands of people working very intently to make sure they don't. It is precisely because people are worrying about this sort of thing (and indeed are employed to worry about this sort of thing) that ensures that you don't need to worry about it.
I'm not that surprised it got through. About 15 years ago a friend's brother inadvertently traveled through at least six airports with a WW2 grenade casing (explosive core removed) in his luggage, courtesy of one of his drunk friends hiding it in there as a joke. He only found it when he unpacked after getting back home from his travels. Sure there were no explosives so it wouldn't set of a chemical detector, but you'd have thought the X-Ray operators might have raised their eyebrows at something clearly grenade-shaped..