"No - Google's is, and can only be, a license violation."
Licensed copywritten material.
"the application is not serving up copyrighted data - maps are factual data"
They aren't just maps they are also photographs. Surely aerial photography is covered by copyright laws and is licensed (to Google) like anything else.
The way I see it from a common sense perspective is the "terms" of service consist of a mix of
* Disclaimers of warranty and
* Conditions of use copywritten material.
Copyright and the 'derivative works' shizzle doesn't come into the spotlight here. Legal action for copyright violation would most likely come from the source (whatever 3rd party Google get their photos from). Google wouldn't take that legal route directly unless they have an exclusive deal on the content (which they probably do) and because Gmerge were only really providing the means to use the material in such a way and not doing it themselves (much) it'd be a difficult argument to win.
A company defending it's right to have the opportunity at a later time to open up a similar service to a less-personal/business audience is fairy muff.
I don't see the difference between conditions set forth in terms of service about it's use and the rights protected by law to allow licensed copyright holders to make profit from their works.
"I can think of a few times it would be great if one website could help someone fill out another websites forms"..."If someone really wants to do that, they should attain permission and do it via GET or POST vars, or some serverside communication."
Essentially you can do this already using 3rd party cookies (setting domain=TheOtherSite.com). Of course most savvy Firefox, Opera (and maybe Safari?) users block or whitelist 3rd party cookies due to ads and trackers.
At the moment this 9 month old, and as of yet unpatched, oversight in Firefox/Mozilla let's webmasters pass their own website cookies to any domain (maybe coordinated with advertisers) in the same TLD anyway though.
Has anyone else noticed Firefox 1.x now has 28% to IE's 31% of unpatched vulnerabilities?
At a high programming level all computing software advances rely on the solving of problems found in mathematics rather than that of typical electronics. Math has certainly advanced in the last 20 years.
Right now i'm sat here trying to make sense of a paper published in just 2004 so I can apply mathematical transformations similar to what it describes into a program i'm writing.
I'm not bad at math but I'm sat here staring at the babble before me (and Slashdot - another source of babble) and can't help thinking the next big leap in computing will be due to a similar leap in the quality of communication between two peoples brains.
I don't see how update frequency has anything to do with getting your content indexed initially. Google should crawl stuff not in it's index as soon as possible regardless of it's update frequency.
Why do you care if they are making use of anonymous data you helped to build?
It's only useful to them in the example you give if it works as advertising material. So here's a concept. Don't help them by not falling into the trap yourself of letting advertisements effect your judgements...oh wait..Slashdot..Google good..Gmail awesome...you already have no free thought.
I believe proxies cache the headers as well, unless must-revalidate is specified in which case it must do a If-Modifed-Since or similar request which will return fresh headers. How is it not Google's responsibility to remember when to crawl your page anyway? Thats exactly what they intend to do.
"They're designed for clients like web browsers, where you only care about whether there have been changes when the user is checking on the site"
Why is Google any different to these clients? It still needs to know if content has been updated on a crawl or whether it can safely assume it's unchanged and the index needs to be updated when it does change.
"they're not good for trying to schedule spidering"
If a HTML file hasn't been changed since late 2000 and the cache-control says to keep it for 3 months I think we can safely say this page deserves a low priority value and can go to the back of the spider queue.
"many things specify "no-cache""
no-cache doesn't effect Googles indexing or acknowledgement of a pages existance. Or retreiving these headers.
"Doing HEAD requests on the whole web for the Last-Modified dates is going to be slow."
And fully retrieving a XML document is not? Remember that most of the pages Google spiders are already in it's index. Only a minority of pages on an established website will be additions to the Googledex on any given crawl and their headers need to be retreived. For the existing stuff the engine will need to check for modifications anyway, and hence receive headers for these as well. This is nothing new and happens each time the bot visits your website.
I just feel the current XML Sitemap specification is over engineered and not very human friendly. A changelog (in the form of an XML document) that shows URI's that have been created and modified and when, would provide much better information for a crawler than a document describing when content may be updated. When Googlebot next visits it would have a central location to find new and updated documents that have appeared since it's last crawl. IF such a log only listed new documents (not updates), the bot still only has to do a quick scan (If-Modified-Since requests) for pages already in the index. This scan doesn't really need to be prioritised although can be using information from HTTP headers it retreived on the last crawl.
IMHO the suggested specification introduces more ways for webmasters to screw with (for better or for worse) the efficiency of indexing on their website. This is the first official way that you've been able to actually screw with Googles interaction with your site! and to me this could lead to a more doubtful future for casual webmasters, not upto speed with the latest search engine aids, from being found in Google search results.
Hopefully though, being extendable and under a good license, this draft will be replaced with a format that provides data currently not immediately available to search engines.
But as it stands this XML Sitemap index doesn't provide any new information that HTTP headers don't (assuming dynamic pages update handle them well) except for the priority weighting...which should be derived from update frequency.
I don't see how centralising all this header information serves webmasters better. Only Google.
Google should index my website as often as possible. It should use algorithms to detect update frequency and content type and assign it's own indexing priorities to meet the needs of people who are actually searching for information and present them with a fresh result set. Caching mechanisms do this all the time - the Last-Modified and Cache-Control headers tell you how likely it is content is to be updated and how often.
It won't save bandwidth if the algorithms mentioned above work correctly. HEAD requests we're also made for this reason.
That suggests to me bad web design and structuring. If you want something to be found, by robot or by human - you link to it
Overall this is offloading Google's workload onto webmasters.
Ermm this is all well and good and such but isn't a large chunk of this information already made available via Cache-Control and Last-Modified HTTP headers?
Reminds me of blog pings - what's wrong with using the Referer header? Doing some checking and then fetching the referering page and checking for linkage?
Trekkies want to see the Star Trek universe expand. Thats the whole crux of the fandom. The Star Trek universe is already huge and because we always see it a Star Fleets POV, and it has always been (DS9 being an exception) primarily about exploration we have seen, and COULD continue to see see, it expand indefinately.
In the hearts and minds of Trekkies Star Trek is less of a series of films and tv shows and has more in common with a series of novels. Trekkies will always flood the doors of cinemas until the day the universe becomes unrecogniseable. You can prove this by doing a quick google for Star Trek wiki, encyclopedia or archive.
Personally, I can't see a reason why a new Star Trek movie has to be from the Star Fleet POV, I think a movie based around another Federation outpost, race or planet or even another major playing race seen in the alpha quadrant locale in any of the series, would fail as a movie if written and directed well. The only problem of course is that most races, in some way, seem to be cast as less 'righteous' than Star Fleet...something that also has becoming associated with the franchise and to some extent gives it it's human appeal (the whole 'to boldly go where noone has gone before' concept is rather romantic, no?).
Let's face it all sci-fi has a common recycling of ideas - time travel, aliens, wormholes, amazing technology etc. Thats what makes it sci-fi, and ultimately what prevents a show from chugging on indefinately - just like any other genre.
The difference with Star Trek is it strives to paint an entire universe, something it, with the argueable exception of Star Wars, few shows have ever attempted to do on such a detailed scale. Trekkies want to see that universe expand and become documented but now I think we have reached a point where we want to a see breather, and a slight shift away from the traditional POV.
It all depends on how you perceive the franchise, as a story of humanity set in the future struggling to spread peace and hope throughout the galaxy (Star Fleet) or a fascinating galaxy of borg, romulans, klingons, vulcans, cardasians, ferangi, transporters, warp, sub-space, deflector dishes, and utopian Earth that needs to be expanded and explored for the sheer satisfaction of ones imagination.
Detaching from the Star Fleet POV, what people of the former opinion may call a 'spin-off', may be the only thing that can save the genre.
Star Trek has evolved from Gene Roddenberry's original concept, it is now a blend of his concept overlayed onto a Star Wars like universe. Maybe Gene's original idea is the one that is long dead.
The Star Wars franchise is now a dead horse itself. It has failed in my eyes to expand even as a prequel. For instance the story of the rise of the Jedi and how the Jedi council was forged would be intreeging but the prequel trilogy basically just extended a story. An extension that we could have mostly lived without - with very little information on the universe seeping through.
This shifting process needs to be done with care as to not alienate the fans, I think for example a movie based on the cardasian occupation of bajor featuring, although not in a major role Kira, would work well. Or maybe a story of the Dax symbiont's prior lives. Or how the Romulans and Vulcans became so different. Or how the changlings in the gamma quadrant were oppressed and formed the dominion. Or how the Borg first came to be. Or,pushing it, the how the Q came to be omnipotent or invent a powerful enemy that attacks them.
If anything I hope Star Trek doesn't fall down the same hole Star Wars has and be totally destroyed because it has been pigeon holed as a show about some highly evolved apes flying a saucer shaped ship around the galaxy, because as a true fan of the ST sub-genre I think i'd be crushed.
The Borg and the Romulan Empire have joined forces against the Federation
The borg do not generally forge aliances unless you're with Janeway in the delta quadrant.
In the alpha quadrant they are still hardcore and sacrifice millions of drones to accomplish their goals.
I would have modded you funny but damnit how could I overlook this. One question does come to mind though, why hasn't the borg ever established cloaking technology?
Shortly after that episode there was another where Troi had to take an empathic inhibitor so she could cope with an 'empathic photograph' effect left in a room adjacent to one of the Enterprise's nacel's (this was also a very cool geeky moment because you get to see what inside of one of a nacel looks like!) where Troi was investigating a suicide mystery. This of course meant she also couldn't read Wolf's rapidly developing feelings for her.
At one point in the investigation Wolf enters Troi's quarters and wishes her good night but Troi could tell he was practically wagging for her. She asked him to stay for dinner and he ended up staying the night. Not a very courageous approach from a Warrior;-) I think this was the episode Troi and Wolf began there relationship.
Of course I could have my episodes muddled. I'm not hardcore yet and don't know them all by title:-(
Yeah you tend to lose count how many times Picard or Janeway initiated self destruct.
I laughed at the episode of VOY when Seska planned a series of sneeky attacks on one of the ship's auxillery processors, a seemingly unvital and pointless target which turned out to control the self destruct mechanism. Janeway tried to commit sepuku and the ship was taken.
Anyone who speculated that was purely wishful thinking. It should be obvious that making IE standalone would require and extensive rewrite of code of both the OS and the browser.
Slashdot Mirror
"No - Google's is, and can only be, a license violation."
Licensed copywritten material.
"the application is not serving up copyrighted data - maps are factual data"
They aren't just maps they are also photographs.
Surely aerial photography is covered by copyright laws and is licensed (to Google) like anything else.
The way I see it from a common sense perspective is the "terms" of service consist of a mix of
* Disclaimers of warranty and
* Conditions of use copywritten material.
Copyright and the 'derivative works' shizzle doesn't come into the spotlight here. Legal action for copyright violation would most likely come from the source (whatever 3rd party Google get their photos from). Google wouldn't take that legal route directly unless they have an exclusive deal on the content (which they probably do) and because Gmerge were only really providing the means to use the material in such a way and not doing it themselves (much) it'd be a difficult argument to win.
A company defending it's right to have the opportunity at a later time to open up a similar service to a less-personal/business audience is fairy muff.
I don't see the difference between conditions set forth in terms of service about it's use and the rights protected by law to allow licensed copyright holders to make profit from their works.
"I can think of a few times it would be great if one website could help someone fill out another websites forms"..."If someone really wants to do that, they should attain permission and do it via GET or POST vars, or some serverside communication."
Essentially you can do this already using 3rd party cookies (setting domain=TheOtherSite.com). Of course most savvy Firefox, Opera (and maybe Safari?) users block or whitelist 3rd party cookies due to ads and trackers.
At the moment this 9 month old, and as of yet unpatched, oversight in Firefox/Mozilla let's webmasters pass their own website cookies to any domain (maybe coordinated with advertisers) in the same TLD anyway though.
Has anyone else noticed Firefox 1.x now has 28% to IE's 31% of unpatched vulnerabilities?
At a high programming level all computing software advances rely on the solving of problems found in mathematics rather than that of typical electronics. Math has certainly advanced in the last 20 years.
Right now i'm sat here trying to make sense of a paper published in just 2004 so I can apply mathematical transformations similar to what it describes into a program i'm writing.
I'm not bad at math but I'm sat here staring at the babble before me (and Slashdot - another source of babble) and can't help thinking the next big leap in computing will be due to a similar leap in the quality of communication between two peoples brains.
Right now the coral cache of the Magic-1 is operating. But only the front page.
Amazing!
And isn't that hint provided by the headers from when it initially discovered or indexed the document?
Opera is making excellent progress with Acid2. Only a few more lines to go. They are treading softly with regression testing.
The priority refers to Googles indexing of your content.
What over reason would Googlebot have to revisit your page other than you having made updates?
I don't see how update frequency has anything to do with getting your content indexed initially. Google should crawl stuff not in it's index as soon as possible regardless of it's update frequency.
Why do you care if they are making use of anonymous data you helped to build?
It's only useful to them in the example you give if it works as advertising material. So here's a concept. Don't help them by not falling into the trap yourself of letting advertisements effect your judgements...oh wait..Slashdot..Google good..Gmail awesome...you already have no free thought.
"Cache-Control only works on a per-request basis"
I believe proxies cache the headers as well, unless must-revalidate is specified in which case it must do a If-Modifed-Since or similar request which will return fresh headers. How is it not Google's responsibility to remember when to crawl your page anyway? Thats exactly what they intend to do.
"They're designed for clients like web browsers, where you only care about whether there have been changes when the user is checking on the site"
Why is Google any different to these clients? It still needs to know if content has been updated on a crawl or whether it can safely assume it's unchanged and the index needs to be updated when it does change.
"they're not good for trying to schedule spidering"
If a HTML file hasn't been changed since late 2000 and the cache-control says to keep it for 3 months I think we can safely say this page deserves a low priority value and can go to the back of the spider queue.
"many things specify "no-cache""
no-cache doesn't effect Googles indexing or acknowledgement of a pages existance. Or retreiving these headers.
"Doing HEAD requests on the whole web for the Last-Modified dates is going to be slow."
And fully retrieving a XML document is not? Remember that most of the pages Google spiders are already in it's index. Only a minority of pages on an established website will be additions to the Googledex on any given crawl and their headers need to be retreived. For the existing stuff the engine will need to check for modifications anyway, and hence receive headers for these as well. This is nothing new and happens each time the bot visits your website.
I just feel the current XML Sitemap specification is over engineered and not very human friendly. A changelog (in the form of an XML document) that shows URI's that have been created and modified and when, would provide much better information for a crawler than a document describing when content may be updated. When Googlebot next visits it would have a central location to find new and updated documents that have appeared since it's last crawl. IF such a log only listed new documents (not updates), the bot still only has to do a quick scan (If-Modified-Since requests) for pages already in the index. This scan doesn't really need to be prioritised although can be using information from HTTP headers it retreived on the last crawl.
IMHO the suggested specification introduces more ways for webmasters to screw with (for better or for worse) the efficiency of indexing on their website. This is the first official way that you've been able to actually screw with Googles interaction with your site! and to me this could lead to a more doubtful future for casual webmasters, not upto speed with the latest search engine aids, from being found in Google search results.
Hopefully though, being extendable and under a good license, this draft will be replaced with a format that provides data currently not immediately available to search engines.
But as it stands this XML Sitemap index doesn't provide any new information that HTTP headers don't (assuming dynamic pages update handle them well) except for the priority weighting...which should be derived from update frequency.
I don't see how centralising all this header information serves webmasters better. Only Google.
Overall this is offloading Google's workload onto webmasters.
Ermm this is all well and good and such but isn't a large chunk of this information already made available via Cache-Control and Last-Modified HTTP headers?
Reminds me of blog pings - what's wrong with using the Referer header? Doing some checking and then fetching the referering page and checking for linkage?
Has the world gone XML crazy?
In Korea only memory leaks from IE
more likely http://images.google.xxx/
Ouch. Thats ridiculous. But I must read it all the same.
In this case size does matter and my screen resolution is far superior to yours. :-P
Trekkies want to see the Star Trek universe expand. Thats the whole crux of the fandom. The Star Trek universe is already huge and because we always see it a Star Fleets POV, and it has always been (DS9 being an exception) primarily about exploration we have seen, and COULD continue to see see, it expand indefinately.
In the hearts and minds of Trekkies Star Trek is less of a series of films and tv shows and has more in common with a series of novels. Trekkies will always flood the doors of cinemas until the day the universe becomes unrecogniseable. You can prove this by doing a quick google for Star Trek wiki, encyclopedia or archive.
Personally, I can't see a reason why a new Star Trek movie has to be from the Star Fleet POV, I think a movie based around another Federation outpost, race or planet or even another major playing race seen in the alpha quadrant locale in any of the series, would fail as a movie if written and directed well. The only problem of course is that most races, in some way, seem to be cast as less 'righteous' than Star Fleet...something that also has becoming associated with the franchise and to some extent gives it it's human appeal (the whole 'to boldly go where noone has gone before' concept is rather romantic, no?).
Let's face it all sci-fi has a common recycling of ideas - time travel, aliens, wormholes, amazing technology etc. Thats what makes it sci-fi, and ultimately what prevents a show from chugging on indefinately - just like any other genre.
The difference with Star Trek is it strives to paint an entire universe, something it, with the argueable exception of Star Wars, few shows have ever attempted to do on such a detailed scale. Trekkies want to see that universe expand and become documented but now I think we have reached a point where we want to a see breather, and a slight shift away from the traditional POV.
It all depends on how you perceive the franchise, as a story of humanity set in the future struggling to spread peace and hope throughout the galaxy (Star Fleet) or a fascinating galaxy of borg, romulans, klingons, vulcans, cardasians, ferangi, transporters, warp, sub-space, deflector dishes, and utopian Earth that needs to be expanded and explored for the sheer satisfaction of ones imagination.
Detaching from the Star Fleet POV, what people of the former opinion may call a 'spin-off', may be the only thing that can save the genre.
Star Trek has evolved from Gene Roddenberry's original concept, it is now a blend of his concept overlayed onto a Star Wars like universe. Maybe Gene's original idea is the one that is long dead.
The Star Wars franchise is now a dead horse itself. It has failed in my eyes to expand even as a prequel. For instance the story of the rise of the Jedi and how the Jedi council was forged would be intreeging but the prequel trilogy basically just extended a story. An extension that we could have mostly lived without - with very little information on the universe seeping through.
This shifting process needs to be done with care as to not alienate the fans, I think for example a movie based on the cardasian occupation of bajor featuring, although not in a major role Kira, would work well. Or maybe a story of the Dax symbiont's prior lives. Or how the Romulans and Vulcans became so different. Or how the changlings in the gamma quadrant were oppressed and formed the dominion. Or how the Borg first came to be. Or,pushing it, the how the Q came to be omnipotent or invent a powerful enemy that attacks them.
If anything I hope Star Trek doesn't fall down the same hole Star Wars has and be totally destroyed because it has been pigeon holed as a show about some highly evolved apes flying a saucer shaped ship around the galaxy, because as a true fan of the ST sub-genre I think i'd be crushed.
The Borg and the Romulan Empire have joined forces against the Federation
The borg do not generally forge aliances unless you're with Janeway in the delta quadrant.
In the alpha quadrant they are still hardcore and sacrifice millions of drones to accomplish their goals.
I would have modded you funny but damnit how could I overlook this. One question does come to mind though, why hasn't the borg ever established cloaking technology?
Second star to the right, and straight on til dawn.
Correction: Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning.
If you call Kirk a stud again you may just not survive the premiere of this movie.
Shortly after that episode there was another where Troi had to take an empathic inhibitor so she could cope with an 'empathic photograph' effect left in a room adjacent to one of the Enterprise's nacel's (this was also a very cool geeky moment because you get to see what inside of one of a nacel looks like!) where Troi was investigating a suicide mystery. This of course meant she also couldn't read Wolf's rapidly developing feelings for her.
;-) I think this was the episode Troi and Wolf began there relationship.
:-(
At one point in the investigation Wolf enters Troi's quarters and wishes her good night but Troi could tell he was practically wagging for her. She asked him to stay for dinner and he ended up staying the night. Not a very courageous approach from a Warrior
Of course I could have my episodes muddled. I'm not hardcore yet and don't know them all by title
Yeah you tend to lose count how many times Picard or Janeway initiated self destruct.
I laughed at the episode of VOY when Seska planned a series of sneeky attacks on one of the ship's auxillery processors, a seemingly unvital and pointless target which turned out to control the self destruct mechanism. Janeway tried to commit sepuku and the ship was taken.
Yes VOY had it's gems.
Anyone who speculated that was purely wishful thinking. It should be obvious that making IE standalone would require and extensive rewrite of code of both the OS and the browser.
That's only five, you haven't go a trilogy duet yet.
Isn't that what all the geeks who never party and have never got laid say?