The article is FUD. If Google wants to place its services in the top results, it's their choice to. As long as they are willing to accept that they won't make as much money off of PPC (their only real source of income, outside of partnerships) for those keywords, they can do whatever they want. The law has no place there, because they aren't doing anything illegal, or even questionable.
While I agree that any "monopoly" argument is out of place and that there is nothing *illegal* happening here, I have to take issue with "or even questionable".
Sure, it may be their playing field to run however they fit, but the value of Google ads to the customer is that it purports to be a free and open market for ad placement. If it becomes free and open *except for the company that owns the marketplace*, I'd hope their customers would start abandoning them in droves.
Also, Google search results placement are purported by Google to *not* be for sale. Again, if the perception become that Google won't sell search placement but will alter them for their own purposes, then people should rightly question whether or not Google is a level playing field.
If these allegations prove substantial, then I think Google's customers should absolutely consider these practices "questionable". However, the market, rather than the law, will be what sorts this out.
According to this, a grain of sand can range from 0.30 mg to 13 mg. That's milligrams: 1/1,000ths of grams.
The quoted safe dose of Po-210 is 6.8 picograms, which is trillionths (1/1,000,000,000,000) of grams.
Without taking the differences of density between sand and Po-210 into account (quartz is 2.65, Po is over 9), that amount is in the order of one-billionth of a grain of sand.
Even so, the "known to be deadly" dose could be 1,000,000 times the "considered safe" dose, and it would still be 6.8*10^-6 grams or 6.8 micrograms. Doesn't seem like it should be so hard to hide in food.
The point is that the hardware enthusiast market is pretty small compared to big business and the likes of Dell. They could have, as they usually do, flip the bird to this small demographic and "forced" gamers and the like to shell out money for the new OS (or reduce them to piracy, whatever the combination).
Perhaps that may have determined through marketing research that, although the enthusiast market may be small, it is also disproportionately influential. Who do you think the "average Joe and Jane" market turns to for computer advice and support? I can certainly see where they may have found that larger portions of the market might have been saying, "Well, Vista looks really sweet, but my computer expert friend/relative is telling me all sorts of bad things about it, maybe I should stick with XP?"
Any market researcher worth their salt should know that all consumers are not equal.
Actually, the adage of "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice" is known as Hanlon's razor.
However, I propose that if one accepts Hanlon's razor, then it follows that faking stupidity or incompetence provides the perfect cover for malice. Or as Carol's answer (from the reference above) states: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
There was a larger deliberate explosion in Canada: the explosion of Ripple Rock, off Vancouver Island in 1958. It used 1,375 tons of explosives.
I have seen the Ripple Rock explosion characterized as the "largest man-made non-nuclear explosion ever" or the "largest peacetime man-made non-nuclear explosion ever."
Read "Atlas Shrugged", and memorize the speech (is it Dagny Taggart's?) about how the government has no hold over law-abiding citizens...
I believe you mean this:
Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens' What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
If you prefer, Frank Zappa also poetically expressed a similar sentiment.
Yeah, all I saw was the open source statistics as well.
Without seeing how the closed source apps were analyzed, the only conclusion I can reach is that automated bug detection finds more bugs when you have have access to the source code than when you don't. How surprising. Duh.
Judging from some of the comments, you'd think everywhere they were planning to disribute these laptops was like Darfur. Sure, there are many spots on the globe too unstable to benefit from this plan, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of places where they could do some real good.
There is a large difference between the counterexamples provided and the one I gave. Neither counterexample is due to an intentionally designed point of failure, which is essentially a vendor-controlled kill switch which the owner has no control over.
My main point was to illustrate that an "average 3-4 minute" call to MS might in some circumstances be a very big deal, contrary to the OPs suggestion, and in my haste I didn't present the optimum example. The better example would be a situation seen in other activation schemes where someone uses a keygen and comes up with YOUR key, which gets distubuted through the warez channels, and now your server is invalidated. In general, the MS track record on false positives with their activation, while probably much exaggerated here on/., certainly has been high enough to be concerned that one's server could be wrongly shut down. Is the admin who oversees the mission critical server that has these failures incompetent?
Since you seem to categorize allowing any predictable failure as incompetence, I would suggest that putting any mission critical system on a server OS with an added failure "feature" is incompetence, and certainly to dismiss out of hand any concerns about such an intentional failure mode would be doubly so. Would you really suggest that any competent technologist considering Longhorn server should not see a red flag here?
That said, I predict Microsoft will back off this on the server for exactly that reason.
In fact, the average length of a call to activate (or deal with an activation problem) your copy of Windows is between 2 and 3 minutes. OH THE HORROR!
Consider a future scenario: You have just been rushed to the hospital from a rare medical condition you suffer from. The hospital, not knowing your condition, needs access to your medical records which are stored on a Longhorn Server. Ooops, someone changes some component on the server last night and today the server has shut down waiting to be re-activated. Your medical information now can not be accessed until someone complains about the outage, someone else ascertains that it is an activation issue, and then hopefully your call to Microsoft to re-activate is "average". Every tick of the clock increases the chances that the hospital will not be able to treat you.
Will your cry of "OH THE HORROR!" be sarcastic then? Or will you seriously be wondering why anyone would run a critical system on a server prone to failure due to a false positive with its anti-piracy policy? Will you feel any better knowing how "rare" such an event is?
IMHO, if a copyright period is enshrined in law as a specific, arbitrary period of time, then it is relatively easy to have that time period extended, ad infinitum. That's why I think any (new) form of copyright law *cannot* work from such a basis, or it is inherently vulnerable to abuse.
You do have a good point there, and unless the actual term is enshrined constitutionally to make it next to impossible to change. And still, as you note that only works in one country.
Additionally, it seems to put valuable works at the mercy of corporations, who will effectively be unbeatable in any bidding wars with their endless financial resources and put an infinite copyright on works simply by extending the term every time it is up for renewal (I would expect the average "IP" company would look at it as a defensive strategy, keeping control of works not so much for the works themselves, but for any future derivative works).
Maybe, maybe not. First, my proposal does give an advantage to the original holder (and perhaps that should be further restricted only to the actual creator of the work), that anyone else will have to pay double for any extension. Further, the only way corporations can continually outbid others for the extended rights would be for them to habitually pay more for those rights than they are actually worth, and no one's financial resources can be endless if they are buying "property" at a loss, especially "property" that expires.
Actually, part of my concern with the the reporting of dev costs and revenues is actually similar, that if you create a complicated bureaucracy, it will be the corps that will gain the best advantage of it.
Anyway, thanks for responding and here's hoping we get it all worked out someday.
I'd hate to be in the shoes of a 23rd century researcher trying to play back a 2005 issue SONY drm'd compact disc or the last copy of a tune surviving on some ancient file server in encrypted apple iTunes format.
I'm picturing the end of A.I., when the future robots find Haley Joel Osment at the bottom of the frozen sea, and when they also find the 2005 Sony CD, one sticks the CD in its chest and is instantly rooted, clutching its head moaning "Damn XP legacy code!!"
I like the general diraction of your proposals, but I would offer a few simpler ideas of my own.
1) Fixed term copyright is not a bad idea as long as no copyrights can be extended after the fact. Indeed, as I see it, it should be unconstitutional to extend a copyright term beyond what was in effect at the time of creation (i.e., if a term can be extended after the fact, it can not be guarantted to be "limited" as the Contitution provides.
2) I think the term of copyright should be much shorter; the orignal 14 years is probably adequate.
3) Instead of creating a bureaucracy to police the development costs and reported income from a work, a more efficient and market oriented solution would be to simply auction the extension of copyright terms when the current term expires. Whatever value a given work may have after its initial (let's say 14 years) term, let the market decide what the value of that work over the next 14 years would be.
The way I envision it, anyone except the current holder could bid on a work. Assuming there are actually bids, the highest bidder sets the extension value. The current holder would then have the option to either pay 50% of the high bid to the copyright office (i.e., "the people" who grant said copyright, for the purpose of financing the protection of these granted temporary "rights") and extend the copyright for another term, or the high bidder can take possession of the extended copyright at the full amount of the high bid, which is then split 50% to the original holder, and 50% to the copyright office. If no one else is interested enough to bid on the work, a flat fee is then required to extend the term, set at a value high enough to discourage holders from extending everything.
I won't pretend I have it all worked out, but I see this system as addressing many of the issues where copyright seems to be breaking down:
* Highly valuable works can have their copyrights extended as long as they are valuable, but in exchange for that extended protection some of that value must be given back.
* The vast majority of less valuable work will enter the public domain much sooner.
* It incents the original copyright owner (presumably the creator) over anyone else who would wish to purchase those rights.
So, if I can say what I want, and I can give money to whoever I want, and the government isn't allowed to interfere, how do they get to dictate that I can't offer money to someone in exchange for something random happening or not happening?
It's no different that prostitution laws. Something that is perfectly legal to give away for free becomes a crime when money exchanges hands.
How to they get to dicate that? Start at "Think of the children," proceed through "The Constitution is just a godamned piece of paper," and wind up at "We are a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced."
the whole Amsterdam experiance was wasted on them - they spent the whole weekend getting blowjobs of women dressed as School girls! (a little wierd for my liking) where as my friends and I enjoyed more of the greenery.
It seems to me that the "whole Amsterdam experience" would involve doing both, no?
When I was 15 I certainly didn't give two shits about crappy music from the past, and few others did. Those that did were thought of as weird.
As a forty-something who has observed a least a few of today's teens, I'd say this is far more true of my generation than today's generation. I've seen more than few kids that like old stuff like Led Zep, Black Sabbath, The Beatles, The Stones, etc. and as far as I can tell they are not thought of as "weird" for doing so. That music is 30-40 years old now. In contrast, when I was a teenager in the late '70s/early '80s, not even the "weird" kids were listening to to 30+ year old popular music, which would have been The Andrew Sisters or Patti Page era. For that matter, many kids thought I was "weird" for preferring Jimi Hendrix to Van Halen or Billy Squier, which was a little more than a decade old at the time.
It's just my personal observation, but I think today's kids have far more exposure to their parents' music than my generation did.
what kind of a home has a gasoline pump? i'd imagine there would be special places along the roads that you plug into, just like how it works now.
One thing I haven't seen addressed here is whether or not this technology could be alternatively chargeable from a standard 110 or 220 outlet. If it could be (and I don't see any reason why it couldn't), that greatly reduces the infrastructure needed to implement this. If people could charge their cars off of regular outlets at home and work, then the need for the 5 minute recharge would only be for those cases when you need to drive over 500 miles at a stretch or in instances where one forgets or is unable to recharge during the vehicle's downtime.
I think the technical ability to able to recharge in 5 minutes could be a great boon to electric car technology, but unless it has to be done that way, I think most consumers would opt to charge at home and work. This would be especially true if there is a premium on high capacity recharging, as I would assume there would be.
It may be worse than you think. According to this article I just read today, the average person watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of TV a day. If watching that much TV qualifies as addictive, then TV would have to qualify as most prevalent addiction out there.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that any "monopoly" argument is out of place and that there is nothing *illegal* happening here, I have to take issue with "or even questionable".
Sure, it may be their playing field to run however they fit, but the value of Google ads to the customer is that it purports to be a free and open market for ad placement. If it becomes free and open *except for the company that owns the marketplace*, I'd hope their customers would start abandoning them in droves.
Also, Google search results placement are purported by Google to *not* be for sale. Again, if the perception become that Google won't sell search placement but will alter them for their own purposes, then people should rightly question whether or not Google is a level playing field.
If these allegations prove substantial, then I think Google's customers should absolutely consider these practices "questionable". However, the market, rather than the law, will be what sorts this out.
According to this, a grain of sand can range from 0.30 mg to 13 mg. That's milligrams: 1/1,000ths of grams.
The quoted safe dose of Po-210 is 6.8 picograms, which is trillionths (1/1,000,000,000,000) of grams.
Without taking the differences of density between sand and Po-210 into account (quartz is 2.65, Po is over 9), that amount is in the order of one-billionth of a grain of sand.
Even so, the "known to be deadly" dose could be 1,000,000 times the "considered safe" dose, and it would still be 6.8*10^-6 grams or 6.8 micrograms. Doesn't seem like it should be so hard to hide in food.
If you're running any OS in a VM, then isn't it by definition NOT your "main OS"?
This distinction makes absolutely no sense to me.
Well, if you do a German-to-English translation of "Diebold" on Babelfish, it comes back with "thief old".
Even worse, if you rearrange the letters of Diebold Election Systems, you get So Dems Lose Indetectibly.
Coincidence? You decide.
Perhaps that may have determined through marketing research that, although the enthusiast market may be small, it is also disproportionately influential. Who do you think the "average Joe and Jane" market turns to for computer advice and support? I can certainly see where they may have found that larger portions of the market might have been saying, "Well, Vista looks really sweet, but my computer expert friend/relative is telling me all sorts of bad things about it, maybe I should stick with XP?"
Any market researcher worth their salt should know that all consumers are not equal.
Actually, the adage of "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice" is known as Hanlon's razor.
However, I propose that if one accepts Hanlon's razor, then it follows that faking stupidity or incompetence provides the perfect cover for malice. Or as Carol's answer (from the reference above) states: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
Use this razor with care.
There was a larger deliberate explosion in Canada: the explosion of Ripple Rock, off Vancouver Island in 1958. It used 1,375 tons of explosives.
I have seen the Ripple Rock explosion characterized as the "largest man-made non-nuclear explosion ever" or the "largest peacetime man-made non-nuclear explosion ever."
You can watch the CBC footage here.
I believe you mean this:
If you prefer, Frank Zappa also poetically expressed a similar sentiment.
Click link:
ADODB.Command error '800a0d5d'
Application uses a value of the wrong type for the current operation.
/ViewPressRel.asp, line 44
Yep, that cleared it up.
Yeah, all I saw was the open source statistics as well.
Without seeing how the closed source apps were analyzed, the only conclusion I can reach is that automated bug detection finds more bugs when you have have access to the source code than when you don't. How surprising. Duh.
You'd get a mod point if I had one.
Judging from some of the comments, you'd think everywhere they were planning to disribute these laptops was like Darfur. Sure, there are many spots on the globe too unstable to benefit from this plan, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of places where they could do some real good.
There is a large difference between the counterexamples provided and the one I gave. Neither counterexample is due to an intentionally designed point of failure, which is essentially a vendor-controlled kill switch which the owner has no control over.
My main point was to illustrate that an "average 3-4 minute" call to MS might in some circumstances be a very big deal, contrary to the OPs suggestion, and in my haste I didn't present the optimum example. The better example would be a situation seen in other activation schemes where someone uses a keygen and comes up with YOUR key, which gets distubuted through the warez channels, and now your server is invalidated. In general, the MS track record on false positives with their activation, while probably much exaggerated here on /., certainly has been high enough to be concerned that one's server could be wrongly shut down. Is the admin who oversees the mission critical server that has these failures incompetent?
Since you seem to categorize allowing any predictable failure as incompetence, I would suggest that putting any mission critical system on a server OS with an added failure "feature" is incompetence, and certainly to dismiss out of hand any concerns about such an intentional failure mode would be doubly so. Would you really suggest that any competent technologist considering Longhorn server should not see a red flag here?
That said, I predict Microsoft will back off this on the server for exactly that reason.
Consider a future scenario: You have just been rushed to the hospital from a rare medical condition you suffer from. The hospital, not knowing your condition, needs access to your medical records which are stored on a Longhorn Server. Ooops, someone changes some component on the server last night and today the server has shut down waiting to be re-activated. Your medical information now can not be accessed until someone complains about the outage, someone else ascertains that it is an activation issue, and then hopefully your call to Microsoft to re-activate is "average". Every tick of the clock increases the chances that the hospital will not be able to treat you.
Will your cry of "OH THE HORROR!" be sarcastic then? Or will you seriously be wondering why anyone would run a critical system on a server prone to failure due to a false positive with its anti-piracy policy? Will you feel any better knowing how "rare" such an event is?
I've heard it comes complete with a suite called Sideshow Bob.
You do have a good point there, and unless the actual term is enshrined constitutionally to make it next to impossible to change. And still, as you note that only works in one country.
Maybe, maybe not. First, my proposal does give an advantage to the original holder (and perhaps that should be further restricted only to the actual creator of the work), that anyone else will have to pay double for any extension. Further, the only way corporations can continually outbid others for the extended rights would be for them to habitually pay more for those rights than they are actually worth, and no one's financial resources can be endless if they are buying "property" at a loss, especially "property" that expires.
Actually, part of my concern with the the reporting of dev costs and revenues is actually similar, that if you create a complicated bureaucracy, it will be the corps that will gain the best advantage of it.
Anyway, thanks for responding and here's hoping we get it all worked out someday.
I'm picturing the end of A.I., when the future robots find Haley Joel Osment at the bottom of the frozen sea, and when they also find the 2005 Sony CD, one sticks the CD in its chest and is instantly rooted, clutching its head moaning "Damn XP legacy code!!"
I like the general diraction of your proposals, but I would offer a few simpler ideas of my own.
1) Fixed term copyright is not a bad idea as long as no copyrights can be extended after the fact. Indeed, as I see it, it should be unconstitutional to extend a copyright term beyond what was in effect at the time of creation (i.e., if a term can be extended after the fact, it can not be guarantted to be "limited" as the Contitution provides.
2) I think the term of copyright should be much shorter; the orignal 14 years is probably adequate.
3) Instead of creating a bureaucracy to police the development costs and reported income from a work, a more efficient and market oriented solution would be to simply auction the extension of copyright terms when the current term expires. Whatever value a given work may have after its initial (let's say 14 years) term, let the market decide what the value of that work over the next 14 years would be.
The way I envision it, anyone except the current holder could bid on a work. Assuming there are actually bids, the highest bidder sets the extension value. The current holder would then have the option to either pay 50% of the high bid to the copyright office (i.e., "the people" who grant said copyright, for the purpose of financing the protection of these granted temporary "rights") and extend the copyright for another term, or the high bidder can take possession of the extended copyright at the full amount of the high bid, which is then split 50% to the original holder, and 50% to the copyright office. If no one else is interested enough to bid on the work, a flat fee is then required to extend the term, set at a value high enough to discourage holders from extending everything.
I won't pretend I have it all worked out, but I see this system as addressing many of the issues where copyright seems to be breaking down:
* Highly valuable works can have their copyrights extended as long as they are valuable, but in exchange for that extended protection some of that value must be given back.
* The vast majority of less valuable work will enter the public domain much sooner.
* It incents the original copyright owner (presumably the creator) over anyone else who would wish to purchase those rights.
* Values are determined by the free market.
Something to think about, anyway.
"Cultural peculularities?"
Is that when you have the cultural peculiarity of ululating at people?
It's no different that prostitution laws. Something that is perfectly legal to give away for free becomes a crime when money exchanges hands.
How to they get to dicate that? Start at "Think of the children," proceed through "The Constitution is just a godamned piece of paper," and wind up at "We are a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced."
It seems to me that the "whole Amsterdam experience" would involve doing both, no?
As a forty-something who has observed a least a few of today's teens, I'd say this is far more true of my generation than today's generation. I've seen more than few kids that like old stuff like Led Zep, Black Sabbath, The Beatles, The Stones, etc. and as far as I can tell they are not thought of as "weird" for doing so. That music is 30-40 years old now. In contrast, when I was a teenager in the late '70s/early '80s, not even the "weird" kids were listening to to 30+ year old popular music, which would have been The Andrew Sisters or Patti Page era. For that matter, many kids thought I was "weird" for preferring Jimi Hendrix to Van Halen or Billy Squier, which was a little more than a decade old at the time.
It's just my personal observation, but I think today's kids have far more exposure to their parents' music than my generation did.
One thing I haven't seen addressed here is whether or not this technology could be alternatively chargeable from a standard 110 or 220 outlet. If it could be (and I don't see any reason why it couldn't), that greatly reduces the infrastructure needed to implement this. If people could charge their cars off of regular outlets at home and work, then the need for the 5 minute recharge would only be for those cases when you need to drive over 500 miles at a stretch or in instances where one forgets or is unable to recharge during the vehicle's downtime.
I think the technical ability to able to recharge in 5 minutes could be a great boon to electric car technology, but unless it has to be done that way, I think most consumers would opt to charge at home and work. This would be especially true if there is a premium on high capacity recharging, as I would assume there would be.
It may be worse than you think. According to this article I just read today, the average person watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of TV a day. If watching that much TV qualifies as addictive, then TV would have to qualify as most prevalent addiction out there.
Try some "Plays For Sure" anagrams:
Pays For Rules
Pay For Lusers
For Real Pussy
Leprosy As Fur
Surely For Sap
Sorry Flea Pus
Sue Pals Or Fry
Syrup For Sale
Furry Ass Pole