But Google does include parts of the result pages, and thus does re-publish content from elsewhere. They didn't create it, true. But neither does your radio station create most of the content it is publishing.
I don't get what was wrong with what Google told him to do.
They are supplying the information on their site, under their domain name. Sure, they are only re-publishing it from some other source, but they actually do publish it (and not just link to it - summaries and previews come to mind).
That's roughly comparable to a newspaper posting a letter-to-the-editors that is libel. They can be told to refrain from publishing it, even though they didn't write it themselves.
Because you aren't physically taking something doesn't mean it's not theft.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In mine, for example, the law book (not the dictionary) actually specifies that theft refers to the taking of moveable objects.
If you go to the doctor's office and he gives you a full exam. Do you leave without paying? You didn't take anything physical?
I didn't say that not paying for a service is fine. I said that it is not theft. It is some other crime (again, depending on your jurisdiction). Copyright infringement, for example, is a perfectly good crime that's in the law books. There's no need to call it something else except that copyright infringement isn't as "catchy" as "theft".
All they ask is that you allow them
Actually, most don't. They don't ask, they just shove ads at me. No asking involved. That's actually one of the main reasons I dislike ads: They are just thrown at you wherever you go and nobody cares to wonder whether you want them or not.
Some big south american city, I think it was Sao Paolo, banned all outdoor advertising. No billboards anymore. No flags. Not even shop signs (yes, that's extreme, but they did it). After a short while of adaptation, most shop owners are still a bit so-so, but almost all residents are extremely happy. Funny thing is that apparently the TV interviews following the ban were the first time anyone ever asked the people living in the city about what they think about ads and what they do to the public space.
To everyone who whined about how evil the law is: Keep in mind who said this. It's hard to think of a more biased source, isn't it?
This is newsworthy once the alleged evidence is shown. Prior to that, it's just "one side of a conflict claims the other is evil", which is probably the most non-newsworthy thing you can imagine aside from "sun rose this morning".
No. The content industry has a continuous campaign against internet companies which help to distribute material
Like Apple (iTuneS), Netflix, Amazon (eBooks) and such?
I dislike the MAFIAA as much as anyone here, but let's not get overzealous, irrational and stupid. What they dislike is people not paying them what they think they are due. You can love them or hate them, but at least that's a rational motive.
It is stealing because you are denying the revenue stream.
Then it is not stealing. "Stealing" is defined as:
the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale)
Which in this case does not happen. If we talk about things, it helps to use the proper terms. If you talk about cars, but call them cats instead, all kinds of confusion will result.
It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.
That's easy to answer.
He doesn't.
He does have the right to distribute his work under his own terms. He does not have a right to determine how I consume said work. He can try to force me through technological means, but not through legal means.
If you want to make sure you are paid for your work, there is already a system we have in place for doing so, it's called selling it, aka taking my money before you give me your product. It's really simple, it works, and it is quite common.
and that small minority tends to be disproportionately made up of the kooky anti-consumerist crowd anyway, who aren't worth advertising to due to their hatred of advertising in general
Or peope intelligent enough to install plugins. Which, frankly, puts you outside the target audience of most ads anyways.
I use ABP extensively because ads are just obnoxious and tax my mental resources, which are limited. I realize that everything inside my field of vision gets processed by my brain, even if just to be filtered out. Why should I expend expensive biological CPU power to do something that yields me no benefit?
Once advertisers realize that they are parasites, we might be on talking grounds again. If you would really recommend me things I am looking for, now that might be something. Paid searches on Google, for example, are a pretty brilliant concept. When I am looking for something, then showing me links to that something is what might actually interest me.
Most advertisement, however, is a shotgun approach. No, let me rephrase that, a shotgun is a precision sniper rifle in comparison to most advertisement. Just because I read/. doesn't mean I need some server hosting. Just because I'm driving down a street doesn't mean I want a burger, or women's underwear.
Advertisement is bombarding me with 99.9% useless information all the time, which is why I will use every means I can find to filter it out. I do mean what I put in my signature: Any and all unsolicited advertisement is spam.
Oh, is THAT what they call corrupt judges? Outliers?
They are not corrupt. They are crazy. Corruption implies that they do it for money, basically. But in this case, the judges simply have a very... unique interpretation of the law. The companies, of course, like that, but there is no bribery or anything involved.
Statistically speaking, "outlier" is the perfectly correct term. You have normal fluctuations in court opinions, that's a normal, positive and well-known phenomenon of the system. Some judges differ more from the norm than others. And some fall well outside the standard deviation.
The only people who should be ridiculed at this point are the ones allowing this particular court to continue to operate.
Ah, so you are now going to regulate judges? And who is going to watch the watchers? The system of appeals already works well to reduce the impact of these crazy decisions.
One, this particular court (and I know it well, this is my home city) is being ridiculed throughout Germany and its judgement are routinely reversed by the higher courts. It does cause trouble, but it is an outlier, not the norm.
And that is important because Germany follows the CIVIL law system, not the common law system - courts do not set precedents, other courts will interpret the law, not whatever some court elsewhere decided. And the so-called "flying court", a system where you can choose which court to sue in if you can reason why the case falls into its jurisdiction - easy for Internet-related cases to do - has been dramatically culled back this year, with more and more courts not accepting the easy arguments anymore.
So, in essence, this is one court well-known for being crazy. Still unfortunate, but not half as consequential as the summary makes you believe.
Exactly. We are moving towards a system where your size and financial power determines how "important" you are. Not cultural values, contributions to society, or other real-world factors. It's sickening, really.
But the real evil part is that a lot of the big companies probably did these grabs for purely legal reasons - defending their trademarks. I would be surprised if anyone at Amazon thinks that germany.amazon is preferable to amazon.de for their local online shop. For internal use, you can already use whatever TLD you want. So where's the profit?
Of course it only works for Israel. Iron Dome is a specific solution for a specific problem. You can't take it and apply it to other problems anymore than you can use a Google route from New York to Detroit as a solution for your drive from Paris to Rome.
If you have a sufficiently similar problem, you can check which parts of the solution might apply to you. But everyone who thinks that all rockets are the same should try to land a man on the moon using fireworks rockets.
It's a semantical trap. We call non-identical things by the same name due to some similarity. What we call rockets works on the same basic principle, which is why we call it the same name. But if you know anything about rockets at all, you know that there are vast differences - more like between a model car and a real car than between two different brand cars.
Not really, no. Even in Europe where you get unemployment benefits, pressure has been increasing for over a decade to make unemployment as much hell as possible. Work isn't voluntary at all, and with the economy and the unemployment numbers, for many less qualified people, there aren't all too many jobs, so they can't afford to be choicy.
In theory, you might be right, from a purely philosophical perspective. But in real life, with bills to pay and families to feed, you're pretty darn wrong.
Did they have too many crazy pills again and handed them out in bundles?
You should make NO EFFORT to "ensure diversity" at a tech conference. You should make every effort to ensure great speeches by great speakers, IRRESPECTIVE of their race, gender, sexuality, height, weight, or whatever else.
If you select based on race, you are a racist. If you select based on gender, you are a sexist. That is true in both directions: Excluding blacks or women (or small, or homosexual, etc,) people who would otherwise qualify is crazy. But excluding white males who would otherwise qualify just because you want to "promote diversity" is no less racist and sexist - you are discriminating against someone based on their race and gender.
I know that racism, sexism and other discriminations are well alive in our society. But the answer is not to replace them with the opposite evil, the answer is to grow beyond them and, in the words of Ghandi, "be the change you want to see in the world". We are talking about a tech conference. We tech people should know that overcompensation leads to unstable systems that will run out of control in self-reinforcing positive feedback cycles. Steer towards the optimum you want to reach, not towards the opposite of where you are at.
It would be interesting to know if the Iraelis are doing something the rest of the world doesn't know about
Unlikely, except for maybe a few isolated tricks.
But look at what they are doing in airport security and you quickly spot why they succeed where the rest of the western world struggles. They are focussed on actual, real, effective security measures instead of security theatre. They really want to prevent attacks, instead of giving everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling.
I work in IT security (yes, you can hire me). Most companies waste incredible amounts of money on replacing their current 5" steel front door with a new 7" steel front door, all the while ignoring that the back door is plywood and typically unlocked. Or they buy a shiny new firewall, but don't train anyone to configure and run it professionally (similarities to the TSA spending billions on body scanners but paying the people who monitor them minimum wage? Nah... never...).
If you want to know if firing the interceptor is worth it, you compare its cost to the estimated damage the missile will cause if it hits.
But if you want to estimate who wins the arms race, you compare the cost of the interceptor to the cost of the missile. Whichever is more expensive means one side is spending more money on the exchange. The relation of the money spent compared to the income/reserves of the two sides gives you a hint as to who can keep it up longer.
but is it really feasible, desirable or even affordable for the majority of Earth's population?"
No, yes, no.
The majority of the planet's population is still living near the poverty line. What they have they spend on food and shelter and other essentials. But in that same demographic, death in childbed is still very real for both mother and child, so something less risky would be desirable.
From a global perspective, hower, low population is not exactly a problem we are having. So this should not be about producing more humans.
Making someone a criminal is also the first move of an authoritarian regime to suppress the speech of opponents/dissidents
Yes, but the reverse does not hold true - not everyone treated as a criminal is actually a heroic freedom fighter. Even in China, some of the people in jail are simply robbers, rapists and murderers.
The world is not that simple and nobody, including the US, is strong and independent enough not to have to resort to dealing with unsavory regimes, leaders, and people.
True, and I'll be the first to agree that "good" and "bad" are often relative.
But you're trying to distract from the point I made. That two bad guys fighting are still two bad guys fighting. And the fact that they are fighting each other, does not miraculously turn one of them into a good guy we should root for.
Many French criminals and criminal gangs became part of the French Resistance in WW2 as well.
And a lot of people in the security industry have less than white pasts. But in these cases, their new activities are clean, while the/. crowd is white-washing Kim's past activities into something they were not.
That quote alone means nothing. Only by adding some of your own words does it become a statement about your opinion, thoughts, whatever. Illustrating your point with quotes is perfectly fine, but parrotting other people does not create a meaningful utterance.
The point, as in all things, is balance. The world is not binary. Both your and my arguments are simplifications. I think we agree that posting a rant about the current government is Free Speech. I think we also agree that posting a verbatim copy of the latest Hollywood movie is not. As we move these two extremes towards each other - adding commentary to the movie (creating a derivative work) or illustrating your rant with quotes (adding other peoples' words to your own), things become more tricky to sort out. Somewhere a line is crossed between Free Speech and unauthorized copying. Where exactly that line is is what this argument is all about.
It's been a while since Microsoft pulled the "oh no, this new version of DirectX couldn't possibly work on earlier versions of Windows" scamgasm, but as the relatively friendly age of Windows 7 is overshadowed by the dawning of the firm's desperate desire to make Windows 8 a cross-platform goliath/software shop, an old habit has returned.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a very good reason. Google is an index, not a publisher.
Not entirely. Google does re-publish excerpts of the sites it lists. If Google were a 100% pure index, your search results would look like this:
But Google does include parts of the result pages, and thus does re-publish content from elsewhere. They didn't create it, true. But neither does your radio station create most of the content it is publishing.
I don't get what was wrong with what Google told him to do.
They are supplying the information on their site, under their domain name. Sure, they are only re-publishing it from some other source, but they actually do publish it (and not just link to it - summaries and previews come to mind).
That's roughly comparable to a newspaper posting a letter-to-the-editors that is libel. They can be told to refrain from publishing it, even though they didn't write it themselves.
Because you aren't physically taking something doesn't mean it's not theft.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In mine, for example, the law book (not the dictionary) actually specifies that theft refers to the taking of moveable objects.
If you go to the doctor's office and he gives you a full exam. Do you leave without paying? You didn't take anything physical?
I didn't say that not paying for a service is fine. I said that it is not theft. It is some other crime (again, depending on your jurisdiction). Copyright infringement, for example, is a perfectly good crime that's in the law books. There's no need to call it something else except that copyright infringement isn't as "catchy" as "theft".
All they ask is that you allow them
Actually, most don't. They don't ask, they just shove ads at me. No asking involved. That's actually one of the main reasons I dislike ads: They are just thrown at you wherever you go and nobody cares to wonder whether you want them or not.
Some big south american city, I think it was Sao Paolo, banned all outdoor advertising. No billboards anymore. No flags. Not even shop signs (yes, that's extreme, but they did it).
After a short while of adaptation, most shop owners are still a bit so-so, but almost all residents are extremely happy.
Funny thing is that apparently the TV interviews following the ban were the first time anyone ever asked the people living in the city about what they think about ads and what they do to the public space.
Exactly.
Except for one thing: A trustworthy politician or lawyer would be a newsworthy item all by itself. ;-)
No, we don't know better. We don't know, which is the whole point of the whole thing.
If he has evidence, he should show it. Otherwise, it's just talk. Talk is cheap.
Kim Dotcom says his team has evidence
To everyone who whined about how evil the law is: Keep in mind who said this. It's hard to think of a more biased source, isn't it?
This is newsworthy once the alleged evidence is shown. Prior to that, it's just "one side of a conflict claims the other is evil", which is probably the most non-newsworthy thing you can imagine aside from "sun rose this morning".
No. The content industry has a continuous campaign against internet companies which help to distribute material
Like Apple (iTuneS), Netflix, Amazon (eBooks) and such?
I dislike the MAFIAA as much as anyone here, but let's not get overzealous, irrational and stupid. What they dislike is people not paying them what they think they are due. You can love them or hate them, but at least that's a rational motive.
It is stealing because you are denying the revenue stream.
Then it is not stealing. "Stealing" is defined as:
the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale)
Which in this case does not happen. If we talk about things, it helps to use the proper terms. If you talk about cars, but call them cats instead, all kinds of confusion will result.
It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.
That's easy to answer.
He doesn't.
He does have the right to distribute his work under his own terms. He does not have a right to determine how I consume said work. He can try to force me through technological means, but not through legal means.
If you want to make sure you are paid for your work, there is already a system we have in place for doing so, it's called selling it, aka taking my money before you give me your product. It's really simple, it works, and it is quite common.
and that small minority tends to be disproportionately made up of the kooky anti-consumerist crowd anyway, who aren't worth advertising to due to their hatred of advertising in general
Or peope intelligent enough to install plugins. Which, frankly, puts you outside the target audience of most ads anyways.
I use ABP extensively because ads are just obnoxious and tax my mental resources, which are limited. I realize that everything inside my field of vision gets processed by my brain, even if just to be filtered out. Why should I expend expensive biological CPU power to do something that yields me no benefit?
Once advertisers realize that they are parasites, we might be on talking grounds again. If you would really recommend me things I am looking for, now that might be something. Paid searches on Google, for example, are a pretty brilliant concept. When I am looking for something, then showing me links to that something is what might actually interest me.
Most advertisement, however, is a shotgun approach. No, let me rephrase that, a shotgun is a precision sniper rifle in comparison to most advertisement. Just because I read /. doesn't mean I need some server hosting. Just because I'm driving down a street doesn't mean I want a burger, or women's underwear.
Advertisement is bombarding me with 99.9% useless information all the time, which is why I will use every means I can find to filter it out. I do mean what I put in my signature: Any and all unsolicited advertisement is spam.
Oh, is THAT what they call corrupt judges? Outliers?
They are not corrupt. They are crazy. Corruption implies that they do it for money, basically. But in this case, the judges simply have a very... unique interpretation of the law. The companies, of course, like that, but there is no bribery or anything involved.
Statistically speaking, "outlier" is the perfectly correct term. You have normal fluctuations in court opinions, that's a normal, positive and well-known phenomenon of the system. Some judges differ more from the norm than others. And some fall well outside the standard deviation.
The only people who should be ridiculed at this point are the ones allowing this particular court to continue to operate.
Ah, so you are now going to regulate judges? And who is going to watch the watchers? The system of appeals already works well to reduce the impact of these crazy decisions.
Two things you need to know:
One, this particular court (and I know it well, this is my home city) is being ridiculed throughout Germany and its judgement are routinely reversed by the higher courts. It does cause trouble, but it is an outlier, not the norm.
And that is important because Germany follows the CIVIL law system, not the common law system - courts do not set precedents, other courts will interpret the law, not whatever some court elsewhere decided. And the so-called "flying court", a system where you can choose which court to sue in if you can reason why the case falls into its jurisdiction - easy for Internet-related cases to do - has been dramatically culled back this year, with more and more courts not accepting the easy arguments anymore.
So, in essence, this is one court well-known for being crazy. Still unfortunate, but not half as consequential as the summary makes you believe.
Exactly. We are moving towards a system where your size and financial power determines how "important" you are. Not cultural values, contributions to society, or other real-world factors. It's sickening, really.
But the real evil part is that a lot of the big companies probably did these grabs for purely legal reasons - defending their trademarks. I would be surprised if anyone at Amazon thinks that germany.amazon is preferable to amazon.de for their local online shop. For internal use, you can already use whatever TLD you want. So where's the profit?
By that logic, amazon.com should use .amazoncompany, if they wish.
Of course it only works for Israel. Iron Dome is a specific solution for a specific problem. You can't take it and apply it to other problems anymore than you can use a Google route from New York to Detroit as a solution for your drive from Paris to Rome.
If you have a sufficiently similar problem, you can check which parts of the solution might apply to you. But everyone who thinks that all rockets are the same should try to land a man on the moon using fireworks rockets.
It's a semantical trap. We call non-identical things by the same name due to some similarity. What we call rockets works on the same basic principle, which is why we call it the same name. But if you know anything about rockets at all, you know that there are vast differences - more like between a model car and a real car than between two different brand cars.
You could hire me as a spellchecker, you desperately need one. :-)
School is not voluntary. Work is.
Not really, no. Even in Europe where you get unemployment benefits, pressure has been increasing for over a decade to make unemployment as much hell as possible. Work isn't voluntary at all, and with the economy and the unemployment numbers, for many less qualified people, there aren't all too many jobs, so they can't afford to be choicy.
In theory, you might be right, from a purely philosophical perspective. But in real life, with bills to pay and families to feed, you're pretty darn wrong.
Did they have too many crazy pills again and handed them out in bundles?
You should make NO EFFORT to "ensure diversity" at a tech conference. You should make every effort to ensure great speeches by great speakers, IRRESPECTIVE of their race, gender, sexuality, height, weight, or whatever else.
If you select based on race, you are a racist. If you select based on gender, you are a sexist. That is true in both directions: Excluding blacks or women (or small, or homosexual, etc,) people who would otherwise qualify is crazy. But excluding white males who would otherwise qualify just because you want to "promote diversity" is no less racist and sexist - you are discriminating against someone based on their race and gender.
I know that racism, sexism and other discriminations are well alive in our society. But the answer is not to replace them with the opposite evil, the answer is to grow beyond them and, in the words of Ghandi, "be the change you want to see in the world".
We are talking about a tech conference. We tech people should know that overcompensation leads to unstable systems that will run out of control in self-reinforcing positive feedback cycles. Steer towards the optimum you want to reach, not towards the opposite of where you are at.
It would be interesting to know if the Iraelis are doing something the rest of the world doesn't know about
Unlikely, except for maybe a few isolated tricks.
But look at what they are doing in airport security and you quickly spot why they succeed where the rest of the western world struggles. They are focussed on actual, real, effective security measures instead of security theatre. They really want to prevent attacks, instead of giving everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling.
I work in IT security (yes, you can hire me). Most companies waste incredible amounts of money on replacing their current 5" steel front door with a new 7" steel front door, all the while ignoring that the back door is plywood and typically unlocked. Or they buy a shiny new firewall, but don't train anyone to configure and run it professionally (similarities to the TSA spending billions on body scanners but paying the people who monitor them minimum wage? Nah... never...).
Neither is more correct.
If you want to know if firing the interceptor is worth it, you compare its cost to the estimated damage the missile will cause if it hits.
But if you want to estimate who wins the arms race, you compare the cost of the interceptor to the cost of the missile. Whichever is more expensive means one side is spending more money on the exchange. The relation of the money spent compared to the income/reserves of the two sides gives you a hint as to who can keep it up longer.
My UID is smaller than yours! (Feels somehow wrong, bragging that way :-/...)
yes
but is it really feasible, desirable or even affordable for the majority of Earth's population?"
No, yes, no.
The majority of the planet's population is still living near the poverty line. What they have they spend on food and shelter and other essentials. But in that same demographic, death in childbed is still very real for both mother and child, so something less risky would be desirable.
From a global perspective, hower, low population is not exactly a problem we are having. So this should not be about producing more humans.
Making someone a criminal is also the first move of an authoritarian regime to suppress the speech of opponents/dissidents
Yes, but the reverse does not hold true - not everyone treated as a criminal is actually a heroic freedom fighter. Even in China, some of the people in jail are simply robbers, rapists and murderers.
The world is not that simple and nobody, including the US, is strong and independent enough not to have to resort to dealing with unsavory regimes, leaders, and people.
True, and I'll be the first to agree that "good" and "bad" are often relative.
But you're trying to distract from the point I made. That two bad guys fighting are still two bad guys fighting. And the fact that they are fighting each other, does not miraculously turn one of them into a good guy we should root for.
Many French criminals and criminal gangs became part of the French Resistance in WW2 as well.
And a lot of people in the security industry have less than white pasts. But in these cases, their new activities are clean, while the /. crowd is white-washing Kim's past activities into something they were not.
Ok, I'll elaborate:
That quote alone means nothing. Only by adding some of your own words does it become a statement about your opinion, thoughts, whatever. Illustrating your point with quotes is perfectly fine, but parrotting other people does not create a meaningful utterance.
The point, as in all things, is balance. The world is not binary. Both your and my arguments are simplifications. I think we agree that posting a rant about the current government is Free Speech. I think we also agree that posting a verbatim copy of the latest Hollywood movie is not. As we move these two extremes towards each other - adding commentary to the movie (creating a derivative work) or illustrating your rant with quotes (adding other peoples' words to your own), things become more tricky to sort out. Somewhere a line is crossed between Free Speech and unauthorized copying. Where exactly that line is is what this argument is all about.
The best summary is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
It's been a while since Microsoft pulled the "oh no, this new version of DirectX couldn't possibly work on earlier versions of Windows" scamgasm, but as the relatively friendly age of Windows 7 is overshadowed by the dawning of the firm's desperate desire to make Windows 8 a cross-platform goliath/software shop, an old habit has returned.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/12/old-dog-old-tricks-ms-locks-directx-11-1-to-win-8/
(reposting because /. stupid UTF-8 non-support mangled the quote the first time)