Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos â" or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in â" simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"
In other words, what iChat has allowed me to do for half a decade? I've used it to run contract negotiations with the contract document shared via iChat to all parties, for example.
As the Cypherpunks have been saying for maybe 20 years now: Use encryption. Not just SSL when you buy something online, but for everything. Heck, we should all be running IPSec. But it's not going anywhere because we don't understand interception and think it doesn't happen to us.
Apple likes to wait for a technology to mature, then "swoop" in and perfect then popularize it.
They do. If you stay with "technology". Apple often comes in after the technology matured, but before there are mature products built on it - and provides them. Multitouch is a good example. It was invented elsewhere (there is an old TED talk that I think is the first public presentation of the tech), and some companies had products. One of them - TouchStream - was bought up by Apple and something like a year later we get the iPhone.
Why should a parent that is home schooling their children be required to teach evolution?
Because one day, your kids will leave your home and meet something we call the real world. The world the rest of us live in. The world that keeps you safe from wolves and bears and provides you with electricity and Internet.
You are a part of society, like it or not. You benefit from society. In return, society may demand certain things from you. That's called reciprocity.
One of the things society demands is that the people you unleash upon it (i.e. your kids) aren't total freaks. In western society, we have a fairly loose definition of that, compared to both our own history and most other places in the world, but there are some things we expect members of our society to agree upon. Not killing each other for fun. Understanding the concept of property. Those kinds of things.
Understanding a few basic scientific facts is just another item on the list. Science is part of the reciprocity cycle. You will find that even the most hardcore anti-science religious nutjob is driving a car, flying around in planes, using a computer, enjoying modern healthcare and thousands of other things that came out of science, not out of the holy books.
were elements within the Nazi regime who dabbled into non-christian beliefs and superstitions, but Hitler himself wasn't one of them.
Anti-semitism, meanwhile, has deep christian roots that the Nazis exploited. Jews had been prosecuted for centuries within Europe, almost none of the accusations the Nazis raised against them were new. What was new was the scale and determination of the Holocaust. There had been systematic purgings before, but they had been local and more limited, and "only" resulted in thousands of deaths.
Evolution is likely the correct explanation for life on earth, but what happens when science is wrong?
Science isn't wrong, because it is a method and not a result. One particular scientific theory can be wrong, and we all know what happens in that case because it has happened many times before - someone comes along with a better theory and replaces the faulty one. Happened to the Ether, for instance.
The likelihood of evolution to be wrong are very near zero. Most established theories are being improved, not revised. The theory of gravity is unlikely to be found wrong, either. What we are likely to find are more details, more in-depth knowledge, more interconnections to other theories. But we won't suddenly find out that things do not, in fact, fall downwards. And we won't suddenly find that the fur colour of animals changes because they go to a paint shop in the sky.
Sorry, mate, the very point of evolution is that it does not need guidance. It is a very efficient search algorithm that doesn't require you to know the search target, only its vital parameters.
While young-earth creationists are entirely out of their mind, the concept of "evolution led by god" is equally ridiculous. It's like saying that math is the language of heaven - it's entirely meaningless because you try to inject religious concepts into something that works perfectly fine without. You are adding a zero to an equation, just because you want that specific zero to be there.
We are, and this is an important step. The foundation of science education is to go by facts, not superstition. Your problem, while important, follows later in the chain.
First, I assume that a court is the only place to properly decide whether some information is illegal to distribute or not. That, btw., is not censorship in the usual sense.
Google is re-publishing considerable amounts of content. It has a cache, its search results contain excerpts, it runs Google News which contains more than just headlines, etc. etc. - it is much more than just an index.
Two, forging evidence is a crime. While I will agree that the procedure has practical limits, at least in my country the courts sort those out, and do not, for example, simply accept any evidence brought to them. At the least, someone will have to sign some paper that says "under penalty of perjury..." - which your lawyer will definitely not do for some insulting blog post.
What I fail to find in all the opposing statements I got here is any suggestion of a practical alternative, other than "suck it up". Which works maybe as nerd fantasy, but in the real world we as a society have agreed that we want people to be able to defend not only their body, but also their reputation against illegal assaults.
Actually, I cared a great deal about DeCSS. I ran the #1 DeCSS site for a long time, worked with the EFF, set up the mailing list that all the defendants in the case used to coordinate, etc.
The point I am making is that taking my site away from me is something they should have to attempt in a court I can conveniently defend myself in. Just like if I want to force some server in India shut down, I understand I should at least care enough to file a case there, not here.
Because after all, Google should be put in the position of deciding whether or not it's worth going to court to defend each and every thing anybody on the internet objects to having seen.
No, that would mean they think they are somehow superior to the court systems. If the courts decide this information violates local law, then that applies to Google as well - for example the Google cache.
When the DVD CSS sued me in a Californian court over DeCSS, I was sure pissed that I could not put up a reasonable defense over this distance. However, they were trying to shut down my site, located on a server in Europe, just like me. Had they tried to get it removed from the Google index in the US, I wouldn't really have cared all that much.
If I want the site from India taken offline, I sure should sue in an indian court. But if I want to stop its spread within my own country, why should I not sue those who re-publish or otherwise distribute it here?
Is it an unbearable imposition on some guy in India that his site will no longer be readily available in one country several thousand miles away? Would it matter to him all that much, and if so, then he can come halfway around the world, yes.
Just like I would have to come halfway around the world if it mattered enough for me to shut him down entirely.
Yeah, that's the tricky issue of jurisdictions and Internet. Legally, the court can tell Google to not display these results in Australia, no matter the domain. How they do that is their problem, GeoIP comes to mind.
No, it is not. You ignore the entire question of jurisdiction.
Especially for a private person, it is prohibitively expensive to bring court cases in remote countries. But most of the time, you don't care about something on a page in India. You do care if people in your vicinity will find it.
but you are fine with them potentially paying a fine for disobeying a court order
Yes. You not? Why would Google not have to follow the same rules as everyone else?
The net effect of what you propose is still that Google will be punished for the publication of content it doesn't control.
No. They do control their search results. They filter them all the time (see chillingeffects.org), they analyze them to display fitting ads, they have full control over what they show their users.
Ah, you are misunderstanding that I defend this particular case and its result. I am not. On the contrary, I posted in my very first post that I disagree with the particular judgement, but agree with the principle concept that Google can be forced to remove certain content from its index.
Which are all the reasons why I say the damages are off, the verdict should have been "yes, you do have to take it down, now that a proper court has decided that it indeed is libel".
However, the realities of the imperfect world we live in also mean that when your offending site is unreachable (Pakistan, etc.) then removing it from Google (and some other big search engines) index is pretty much making it vanish.
Sometimes, the law can only give you an imperfect solution. Like when it throws the guy who raped and killed your wife into jail, even though you'd rather cut his nuts off and force him to eat them. But it's better than nothing, you know?
Same here. It's not a perfect solution, but it's what the court could offer after finding that the complainer was in the right.
What you in essence are saying is that GOOGLE should police the internet because it does the data search work.
No, I didn't and I don't. I am saying that once a court has found something to be illegal, Google, too, should remove it. Just because they are a republisher and not the original creator does not absolve them of the responsibility to stop distributing it.
"policing" implies that they cast their own judgement on content, and I am firmly against that.
So, Google's supposed to disappear anything whose poster gets called any of an approved list of bad names?
No, that would be an automatism and I specifically said proper legal procedure, which includes evaluating the specific case and its conditions, including an opportunity for the defendant to present his position.
Do you have a specific reason for thinking that the system that - while it has shortcomings - has served us better than any alternative for at least 2000 years magically fails when the word "Internet" is involved?
So, Google's supposed to disappear anything whose poster gets called any of an approved list of bad names?
No, that would be an automatism and I specifically said proper legal procedure, which includes evaluating the specific case and its conditions, including an opportunity for the defendant to present his position.
Do you have a specific reason for thinking that the system that - while it has shortcomings - has served us better than any alternative for at least 2000 years magically fails when the word "Internet" is involved?
Exactly who gave you or them the right to judge and have that judgement enforced by law?
We agree that people deserve to be paid for their work.
I do think that correct terms are important. It makes a huge difference if you call someone a POW or an "enemy combatant". It makes the difference between humane treatment and Gitmo. Words are powerful, and whenever you notice someone abusing language, inventing new terms where there already are perfectly good ones, stuff like that - you can be sure that someone has an agenda.
Same with the "theft" term.
Maybe there isn't a legal definition that covers it.
There is. Just not one as catchy. Copyright infringement, subreption, fraud and others, depending on what exactly you are doing.
Everything the content industry whines about is already handled by the law. They just create the impression that it isn't so they can lobby for more laws to "close loopholes" that don't really exist. They call it "theft" so you have a mental image.
Sometimes that is quite difficult, for example, they might be in Pakistan or Nairobi or Russia. But without Google, pretty much nobody would find their page. Google does play a role here, they aren't the innocent bystanders they are making themselves out to be.
I don't think they should pay damages for the libel. I do think it should be possible to force them to remove search results, via the proper legal channels, i.e. a court order. Google is not above the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos â" or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in â" simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"
In other words, what iChat has allowed me to do for half a decade? I've used it to run contract negotiations with the contract document shared via iChat to all parties, for example.
So what exactly is new here?
As the Cypherpunks have been saying for maybe 20 years now: Use encryption. Not just SSL when you buy something online, but for everything. Heck, we should all be running IPSec. But it's not going anywhere because we don't understand interception and think it doesn't happen to us.
Apple likes to wait for a technology to mature, then "swoop" in and perfect then popularize it.
They do. If you stay with "technology". Apple often comes in after the technology matured, but before there are mature products built on it - and provides them. Multitouch is a good example. It was invented elsewhere (there is an old TED talk that I think is the first public presentation of the tech), and some companies had products. One of them - TouchStream - was bought up by Apple and something like a year later we get the iPhone.
Why should a parent that is home schooling their children be required to teach evolution?
Because one day, your kids will leave your home and meet something we call the real world. The world the rest of us live in. The world that keeps you safe from wolves and bears and provides you with electricity and Internet.
You are a part of society, like it or not. You benefit from society. In return, society may demand certain things from you. That's called reciprocity.
One of the things society demands is that the people you unleash upon it (i.e. your kids) aren't total freaks. In western society, we have a fairly loose definition of that, compared to both our own history and most other places in the world, but there are some things we expect members of our society to agree upon. Not killing each other for fun. Understanding the concept of property. Those kinds of things.
Understanding a few basic scientific facts is just another item on the list. Science is part of the reciprocity cycle. You will find that even the most hardcore anti-science religious nutjob is driving a car, flying around in planes, using a computer, enjoying modern healthcare and thousands of other things that came out of science, not out of the holy books.
Hitler was sort of a neo-Pagan quasi-Christian
were elements within the Nazi regime who dabbled into non-christian beliefs and superstitions, but Hitler himself wasn't one of them.
Anti-semitism, meanwhile, has deep christian roots that the Nazis exploited. Jews had been prosecuted for centuries within Europe, almost none of the accusations the Nazis raised against them were new. What was new was the scale and determination of the Holocaust. There had been systematic purgings before, but they had been local and more limited, and "only" resulted in thousands of deaths.
Evolution is likely the correct explanation for life on earth, but what happens when science is wrong?
Science isn't wrong, because it is a method and not a result. One particular scientific theory can be wrong, and we all know what happens in that case because it has happened many times before - someone comes along with a better theory and replaces the faulty one. Happened to the Ether, for instance.
The likelihood of evolution to be wrong are very near zero. Most established theories are being improved, not revised. The theory of gravity is unlikely to be found wrong, either. What we are likely to find are more details, more in-depth knowledge, more interconnections to other theories. But we won't suddenly find out that things do not, in fact, fall downwards. And we won't suddenly find that the fur colour of animals changes because they go to a paint shop in the sky.
who believes in Evolution led by God
In other words, Intelligent Design.
Sorry, mate, the very point of evolution is that it does not need guidance. It is a very efficient search algorithm that doesn't require you to know the search target, only its vital parameters.
While young-earth creationists are entirely out of their mind, the concept of "evolution led by god" is equally ridiculous. It's like saying that math is the language of heaven - it's entirely meaningless because you try to inject religious concepts into something that works perfectly fine without. You are adding a zero to an equation, just because you want that specific zero to be there.
We are, and this is an important step. The foundation of science education is to go by facts, not superstition. Your problem, while important, follows later in the chain.
I don't see the point.
First, I assume that a court is the only place to properly decide whether some information is illegal to distribute or not. That, btw., is not censorship in the usual sense.
Google is re-publishing considerable amounts of content. It has a cache, its search results contain excerpts, it runs Google News which contains more than just headlines, etc. etc. - it is much more than just an index.
Two, forging evidence is a crime. While I will agree that the procedure has practical limits, at least in my country the courts sort those out, and do not, for example, simply accept any evidence brought to them. At the least, someone will have to sign some paper that says "under penalty of perjury..." - which your lawyer will definitely not do for some insulting blog post.
What I fail to find in all the opposing statements I got here is any suggestion of a practical alternative, other than "suck it up". Which works maybe as nerd fantasy, but in the real world we as a society have agreed that we want people to be able to defend not only their body, but also their reputation against illegal assaults.
Actually, I cared a great deal about DeCSS. I ran the #1 DeCSS site for a long time, worked with the EFF, set up the mailing list that all the defendants in the case used to coordinate, etc.
The point I am making is that taking my site away from me is something they should have to attempt in a court I can conveniently defend myself in. Just like if I want to force some server in India shut down, I understand I should at least care enough to file a case there, not here.
Because after all, Google should be put in the position of deciding whether or not it's worth going to court to defend each and every thing anybody on the internet objects to having seen.
No, that would mean they think they are somehow superior to the court systems. If the courts decide this information violates local law, then that applies to Google as well - for example the Google cache.
When the DVD CSS sued me in a Californian court over DeCSS, I was sure pissed that I could not put up a reasonable defense over this distance. However, they were trying to shut down my site, located on a server in Europe, just like me. Had they tried to get it removed from the Google index in the US, I wouldn't really have cared all that much.
If I want the site from India taken offline, I sure should sue in an indian court. But if I want to stop its spread within my own country, why should I not sue those who re-publish or otherwise distribute it here?
Is it an unbearable imposition on some guy in India that his site will no longer be readily available in one country several thousand miles away? Would it matter to him all that much, and if so, then he can come halfway around the world, yes.
Just like I would have to come halfway around the world if it mattered enough for me to shut him down entirely.
Seems fairly balanced to me.
Yeah, that's the tricky issue of jurisdictions and Internet. Legally, the court can tell Google to not display these results in Australia, no matter the domain. How they do that is their problem, GeoIP comes to mind.
No, it is not. You ignore the entire question of jurisdiction.
Especially for a private person, it is prohibitively expensive to bring court cases in remote countries. But most of the time, you don't care about something on a page in India. You do care if people in your vicinity will find it.
but you are fine with them potentially paying a fine for disobeying a court order
Yes. You not? Why would Google not have to follow the same rules as everyone else?
The net effect of what you propose is still that Google will be punished for the publication of content it doesn't control.
No. They do control their search results. They filter them all the time (see chillingeffects.org), they analyze them to display fitting ads, they have full control over what they show their users.
So, I don't see why they should have to even remove the links.
Here's the legal reasoning as to why, from someone who actually is a lawyer:
http://www.dba-oracle.com/internet_linking_libel_lawsuit.htm
Because knee-jerk reactions are so very professional?
Doing that would not only be on the level of kindergarden, it would also hurt people looking for information, you know, people who search.
Ah, you are misunderstanding that I defend this particular case and its result. I am not. On the contrary, I posted in my very first post that I disagree with the particular judgement, but agree with the principle concept that Google can be forced to remove certain content from its index.
Which are all the reasons why I say the damages are off, the verdict should have been "yes, you do have to take it down, now that a proper court has decided that it indeed is libel".
Which is why I said that damages is wrong.
However, the realities of the imperfect world we live in also mean that when your offending site is unreachable (Pakistan, etc.) then removing it from Google (and some other big search engines) index is pretty much making it vanish.
Sometimes, the law can only give you an imperfect solution. Like when it throws the guy who raped and killed your wife into jail, even though you'd rather cut his nuts off and force him to eat them. But it's better than nothing, you know?
Same here. It's not a perfect solution, but it's what the court could offer after finding that the complainer was in the right.
Google is, literally, a list of websites.
No, it isn't. Here's what a list of websites looks like:
You might notice some differences between that and a Google search result. And let's not even get started about the Google cache, shall we?
What you in essence are saying is that GOOGLE should police the internet because it does the data search work.
No, I didn't and I don't. I am saying that once a court has found something to be illegal, Google, too, should remove it. Just because they are a republisher and not the original creator does not absolve them of the responsibility to stop distributing it.
"policing" implies that they cast their own judgement on content, and I am firmly against that.
So, Google's supposed to disappear anything whose poster gets called any of an approved list of bad names?
No, that would be an automatism and I specifically said proper legal procedure, which includes evaluating the specific case and its conditions, including an opportunity for the defendant to present his position.
Do you have a specific reason for thinking that the system that - while it has shortcomings - has served us better than any alternative for at least 2000 years magically fails when the word "Internet" is involved?
So, Google's supposed to disappear anything whose poster gets called any of an approved list of bad names?
No, that would be an automatism and I specifically said proper legal procedure, which includes evaluating the specific case and its conditions, including an opportunity for the defendant to present his position.
Do you have a specific reason for thinking that the system that - while it has shortcomings - has served us better than any alternative for at least 2000 years magically fails when the word "Internet" is involved?
Exactly who gave you or them the right to judge and have that judgement enforced by law?
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Rule+of+law
Or I could play Jesus and reply with a counter-question: Who gave you the right to say that Google is exempt from the rules?
We agree that people deserve to be paid for their work.
I do think that correct terms are important. It makes a huge difference if you call someone a POW or an "enemy combatant". It makes the difference between humane treatment and Gitmo. Words are powerful, and whenever you notice someone abusing language, inventing new terms where there already are perfectly good ones, stuff like that - you can be sure that someone has an agenda.
Same with the "theft" term.
Maybe there isn't a legal definition that covers it.
There is. Just not one as catchy. Copyright infringement, subreption, fraud and others, depending on what exactly you are doing.
Everything the content industry whines about is already handled by the law. They just create the impression that it isn't so they can lobby for more laws to "close loopholes" that don't really exist. They call it "theft" so you have a mental image.
THAT is who you should sue or prosecute.
Sometimes that is quite difficult, for example, they might be in Pakistan or Nairobi or Russia. But without Google, pretty much nobody would find their page. Google does play a role here, they aren't the innocent bystanders they are making themselves out to be.
I don't think they should pay damages for the libel. I do think it should be possible to force them to remove search results, via the proper legal channels, i.e. a court order. Google is not above the law.