I think google tried to claim fair use on indexing content and was denied because of the AdSense ads, which makes all this commercial activity.
Basically I'm not certain the judge really understood the technical aspects of the case particularly well...look how many Slashdotters keep babbling about robots.txt
So basically these Charlies sue Google because other websites pirate their content, and some of these have (gasp!) Google ads. Wow.
And in any case, since when did it become necessary for a search engine to know that its searches link to content that violates someone's copyrights? I mean, even the RIAA wouldn't sue Google just because I can do searches like:
All Google needs to do is to remove links to infringing sites when these are brought to its notice, and even there it is allowed to display the actual complaint with the list of bad URL's.
Getting approval to do something like this would be difficult. Any human experiments in this country are under rigorous scrutiny. Lawyers and administrators at institutions take a dim view of this kind of thing because of the liability issues. And there is a definite slippery slope argument. I might be able to make a case for my own experiment, but it could set precedent for others for whom it would be more risky...Some young graduate student might see it as a way to get ahead in his career and decide to do it.
Would these regulators find it easier to approve of such things if this scientist were an idiot and merely did these things for fun? It seems like even an elementary respect for personal autonomy - which suffices to allow skydiving and elephant training and smoking - ought to allow someone to take risks that are far lower, for rewards that, at least to me, appear rather more noble and inspiring. In fact, I'd assume anyone who pierces their dick or forks their tongue or something faces long-term risks from injury or infection that much higher than anything this man's considering with (his own!!) head under controlled circumstances.
Don't get me wrong...I'm NOT arguing that any of the other things I mentioned ought to be more strictly regulated. I just think we're succumbing a bit too much to mad-scientist paranoia in treating this experiment differently.
While we're taking care of Google, they're throwing in stuff about manufacturing companies offering below-U.S. minimum wage, work hours, and child labor laws in other countries, right?
Wait...why on earth should Bangladesh (say) pay American minimum wages? In fact, how on earth can they? Either you say *American* companies in a third world country need to pay American wages, essentially pricing them out because their Bangladeshi counterparts are under no such obligation. Or you claim that *all* companies selling in the US need to pay American wages to their workers so as not to have Americans sponsoring a lower-than-American quality of life for others. In which case you just made every entry barrier / subsidy seeking lobby and nativist in the US insanely happy, while denying those poor Bangladeshi textile mill workers one of their better chances at getting out of poverty.
It is one thing to say that American companies ought not to sponsor (say) slave labor in Cambodia. It is quite another to claim that Walmart needs to pay $5.25 per hour to all its workers in China and Vietnam and India. No company, American or otherwise, is going to pay that for unskilled labor in those countries any time soon.
So are these people also going to require that Walmart or Nike not operate within China, or does having people work under slave labor conditions in a sweatshop not count sufficiently as a restriction upon freedom?
Even assuming you could get around all the hacks and workarounds (ya right) how does this help? The original source for most MP3's on any network is probably some CD someone ripped. Unless you started putting individualized watermarks on each CD there'd be no point, and this would be way too expensive to do.
Two people in the same period of history came up with this same idea at roughly the same time. That suggests that the environment and the emerging evidence had a lot to do with it
If anything that's more true of Einstein, not less:
1. Lorentz figured out the (yep) Lorentz transformations, contractions and time dilation five years before Einstein. He didn't realize how these laws encoded the very structure of space and time, but he was pretty radical himself, proposing a universal force acting on everything causing it to transform per the equations. You could probably do a lot of relativty calculations, maybe even field theoretic calculations from that perspective without getting it too wrong.
2. two different guys wrote down E = m (c^2) before Einstein without quite knowing what it meant
3. Poincare is understood to have been only a few months away from figuring it all out when Einstein finally did. As it is he's credited with the Poincare group formalism.
4. Einstein never thought of the spacetime manifold, that was Minkowski, three years later.
5. In figuring out General Relativity, Einstein collaborated extensively with the leading mathematicians of the time. In fact, if a lot of this math had not already existed (guess who thought up Riemannian Geometry) he probably would never have got his results
6. Mach was thinking about the nature of intertia as early as 1890. Einstein himself says Mach affected him profoundly.
7. Hilbert got the field equations for GR wihin a few weeks of Einstein, not independently true, but utilizing a whole new principle. Even today Hilbert's action based derivation is probably more fruitful in trying to extend relativity to incorporate other physics.
Given Maxwell's equations (1860) and the null result of Michelson and Morley (1885) it's pretty clear someone's going to come up with relativity - the miracle is that one person had so much to do with it, and did it so quickly. But I doubt any physicist really thinks no-one would've figured out relativity without Einstein, say by 1930-5. Just accounting for the muon decay data would've been hard enough without.
In fact, in physics lore quantum mechanics is often held up as an example of what might have happened with relativity without Einstein - a collaboration of less brilliant minds figures it out anyway. I mean, most physicists would agree that quantum mechanics and field theory, not relativity, are the crowning achievements of 20th century physics, and while there is no one person of Einstein's brilliance associated with them there are say fifteen or twenty quite brilliant physicists (Schrodinger and Dirac and Heisenberg and Pauli and Fermi and Yukawa and Feynman and Schwinger and Gell Mann and...) doing their work. The bottleneck is not so much "the brilliant person" as "something to be brilliant about"
Similar things can be said about Newton and Kepler / Galileo / Liebnitz / Hooke / Descartes / Copernicus. That stuff about standing on the shoulders of giants isn't merely faux modesty. It really is true. Very rarely does science proceed via one person singlehandedly doing things no one else is even thinking about, and when this happens that one person is often ignored till everyone else gets the point. Consider Boltzmann or Mendeleev or Mendel.
And comparing Darwin to Hawking is a joke. I'd say Hawking isn't even one of the *twenty* greatest physicists of the 20th century, which isn't to say he isn't great, just not up there, certainly not with Darwin.
I think the GP's point might be different - many content providers aren't American, and simply aren't going to bother to make deals with one or another ISP in the US, assuming reasonably safely that their competitors won't either. How, and to what extent, this affects American sites vis a vis foreign competitors is an interesting question.
It seems like calling it a silicon laser is a bit iffy when you're drilling billions of holes all over it. I mean, those holes aren't silicon. In the limit you have no silicon at all, just a very big hole, with air in it;)
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and it is a price that we all must pay each and every day.
In dollars? Not to disagree with the the spirit of your remarks, but at least to me the very fact that how you go about influencing political leaders is by paying them is rather disurbing in itself
One measure of google's ad quality is just how few people do that. If you poll the slashdot crowd, I'm guessing most people block pop-up ads, banner ads, flash and so on.
But I think you'll find many (including myself) leave *google* ads on, because they ARE useful sometimes and unobtrusive the rest of the time. Nor is this exclusively a matter of graphics vs. text ads - I routinely block text ads that add sponsored hyperlinks to pages.
Ah. I do agree with you that science isn't in the God business one way or the other. My point is the following - tell someone that his concept of origins is wrong, that the account of biological descent given in his text of choice is incorrect, that the timeframe over which things happened is vastly different from what he's been told by God, and so on. THEN tell him with a straight face that your statements have no bearing on the truth of his fundamental beliefs, including belief in God as he understands the term.
Point is, this person listens to all this, and thinks "heresy!" or something equally theatrical. Understandably so. Whether you and I think God is disproved is neither here nor there.
Consider as an analogy - suppose you tell a child that Santa does not in fact
1. come down chimneys (we've made video recordings at night)
2. fly on reindeer (the anatomy of these animals simply does not support flight)
3. the gifts were in fact bought by the parents (show receipts)
but then say that no, you've made no statements whatsoever about the existence of Santa. Well, yes technically that's true. But you see why someone committed to a belief in Santa (not some other metaphysically nonmaterial entity whose phenomenological implications are rather more sparse and avoid falsification) would find these ideas threatening, precisely because they tend to undermine his beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Microsoft is getting back at them for helping pirate windows and office in the bad old days ;)
But they're violating history's copyright!
I think google tried to claim fair use on indexing content and was denied because of the AdSense ads, which makes all this commercial activity.
Basically I'm not certain the judge really understood the technical aspects of the case particularly well...look how many Slashdotters keep babbling about robots.txt
So basically these Charlies sue Google because other websites pirate their content, and some of these have (gasp!) Google ads. Wow.
And in any case, since when did it become necessary for a search engine to know that its searches link to content that violates someone's copyrights? I mean, even the RIAA wouldn't sue Google just because I can do searches like:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q= -inurl%3Ahtm+-inurl%3Ahtml+intitle%3A%22index+of%2 2+mp3+%22pearl+jam%22&btnG=Searchthis.
(Not that they wouldn't like to try...)
All Google needs to do is to remove links to infringing sites when these are brought to its notice, and even there it is allowed to display the actual complaint with the list of bad URL's.
from TFA:
Getting approval to do something like this would be difficult. Any human experiments in this country are under rigorous scrutiny. Lawyers and administrators at institutions take a dim view of this kind of thing because of the liability issues. And there is a definite slippery slope argument. I might be able to make a case for my own experiment, but it could set precedent for others for whom it would be more risky...Some young graduate student might see it as a way to get ahead in his career and decide to do it.
Would these regulators find it easier to approve of such things if this scientist were an idiot and merely did these things for fun? It seems like even an elementary respect for personal autonomy - which suffices to allow skydiving and elephant training and smoking - ought to allow someone to take risks that are far lower, for rewards that, at least to me, appear rather more noble and inspiring. In fact, I'd assume anyone who pierces their dick or forks their tongue or something faces long-term risks from injury or infection that much higher than anything this man's considering with (his own!!) head under controlled circumstances.
Don't get me wrong...I'm NOT arguing that any of the other things I mentioned ought to be more strictly regulated. I just think we're succumbing a bit too much to mad-scientist paranoia in treating this experiment differently.
Wait...why on earth should Bangladesh (say) pay American minimum wages? In fact, how on earth can they? Either you say *American* companies in a third world country need to pay American wages, essentially pricing them out because their Bangladeshi counterparts are under no such obligation. Or you claim that *all* companies selling in the US need to pay American wages to their workers so as not to have Americans sponsoring a lower-than-American quality of life for others. In which case you just made every entry barrier / subsidy seeking lobby and nativist in the US insanely happy, while denying those poor Bangladeshi textile mill workers one of their better chances at getting out of poverty.
It is one thing to say that American companies ought not to sponsor (say) slave labor in Cambodia. It is quite another to claim that Walmart needs to pay $5.25 per hour to all its workers in China and Vietnam and India. No company, American or otherwise, is going to pay that for unskilled labor in those countries any time soon.
So are these people also going to require that Walmart or Nike not operate within China, or does having people work under slave labor conditions in a sweatshop not count sufficiently as a restriction upon freedom?
Even assuming you could get around all the hacks and workarounds (ya right) how does this help? The original source for most MP3's on any network is probably some CD someone ripped. Unless you started putting individualized watermarks on each CD there'd be no point, and this would be way too expensive to do.
you really think there's only a 50% chance he stopped being a Simpsons fan?
might you cause a nice tidal wave by detonating these things a kilometer from shore?
Two people in the same period of history came up with this same idea at roughly the same time. That suggests that the environment and the emerging evidence had a lot to do with it
If anything that's more true of Einstein, not less:
1. Lorentz figured out the (yep) Lorentz transformations, contractions and time dilation five years before Einstein. He didn't realize how these laws encoded the very structure of space and time, but he was pretty radical himself, proposing a universal force acting on everything causing it to transform per the equations. You could probably do a lot of relativty calculations, maybe even field theoretic calculations from that perspective without getting it too wrong.
2. two different guys wrote down E = m (c^2) before Einstein without quite knowing what it meant
3. Poincare is understood to have been only a few months away from figuring it all out when Einstein finally did. As it is he's credited with the Poincare group formalism.
4. Einstein never thought of the spacetime manifold, that was Minkowski, three years later.
5. In figuring out General Relativity, Einstein collaborated extensively with the leading mathematicians of the time. In fact, if a lot of this math had not already existed (guess who thought up Riemannian Geometry) he probably would never have got his results
6. Mach was thinking about the nature of intertia as early as 1890. Einstein himself says Mach affected him profoundly.
7. Hilbert got the field equations for GR wihin a few weeks of Einstein, not independently true, but utilizing a whole new principle. Even today Hilbert's action based derivation is probably more fruitful in trying to extend relativity to incorporate other physics.
Given Maxwell's equations (1860) and the null result of Michelson and Morley (1885) it's pretty clear someone's going to come up with relativity - the miracle is that one person had so much to do with it, and did it so quickly. But I doubt any physicist really thinks no-one would've figured out relativity without Einstein, say by 1930-5. Just accounting for the muon decay data would've been hard enough without.
In fact, in physics lore quantum mechanics is often held up as an example of what might have happened with relativity without Einstein - a collaboration of less brilliant minds figures it out anyway. I mean, most physicists would agree that quantum mechanics and field theory, not relativity, are the crowning achievements of 20th century physics, and while there is no one person of Einstein's brilliance associated with them there are say fifteen or twenty quite brilliant physicists (Schrodinger and Dirac and Heisenberg and Pauli and Fermi and Yukawa and Feynman and Schwinger and Gell Mann and ...) doing their work. The bottleneck is not so much "the brilliant person" as "something to be brilliant about"
Similar things can be said about Newton and Kepler / Galileo / Liebnitz / Hooke / Descartes / Copernicus. That stuff about standing on the shoulders of giants isn't merely faux modesty. It really is true. Very rarely does science proceed via one person singlehandedly doing things no one else is even thinking about, and when this happens that one person is often ignored till everyone else gets the point. Consider Boltzmann or Mendeleev or Mendel.
And comparing Darwin to Hawking is a joke. I'd say Hawking isn't even one of the *twenty* greatest physicists of the 20th century, which isn't to say he isn't great, just not up there, certainly not with Darwin.
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders - Hal Abelson
I think the GP's point might be different - many content providers aren't American, and simply aren't going to bother to make deals with one or another ISP in the US, assuming reasonably safely that their competitors won't either. How, and to what extent, this affects American sites vis a vis foreign competitors is an interesting question.
It's startling this comment is modded Interesting, not Funny. Cuddly?
If you honestly think the average person thinks poorly of "Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford", you do need to get out more
more like: goes in with 0.3937 inches, comes out with 3.937 inches
It seems like calling it a silicon laser is a bit iffy when you're drilling billions of holes all over it. I mean, those holes aren't silicon. In the limit you have no silicon at all, just a very big hole, with air in it ;)
if enticing the electrons to move to a lower orbit releases energy, it's going to require energy input to make them return to a normal orbit.
Damn. Assuming that our fine doctor is reading this thread, you just gave him a way of stopping global warming
My professor once compared fusion energy to the Brazilian economy - "the next big thing. Always has been, always will be" :)
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and it is a price that we all must pay each and every day.
In dollars? Not to disagree with the the spirit of your remarks, but at least to me the very fact that how you go about influencing political leaders is by paying them is rather disurbing in itself
actually, fish fish fish fish fish fish fish.
you sure? sounds fishy to me
how about just 'unintelligent design'? Then we can teach all sides - no design, intelligent design and unintelligent design :)
One measure of google's ad quality is just how few people do that. If you poll the slashdot crowd, I'm guessing most people block pop-up ads, banner ads, flash and so on.
But I think you'll find many (including myself) leave *google* ads on, because they ARE useful sometimes and unobtrusive the rest of the time. Nor is this exclusively a matter of graphics vs. text ads - I routinely block text ads that add sponsored hyperlinks to pages.
Ah. I do agree with you that science isn't in the God business one way or the other. My point is the following - tell someone that his concept of origins is wrong, that the account of biological descent given in his text of choice is incorrect, that the timeframe over which things happened is vastly different from what he's been told by God, and so on. THEN tell him with a straight face that your statements have no bearing on the truth of his fundamental beliefs, including belief in God as he understands the term.
Point is, this person listens to all this, and thinks "heresy!" or something equally theatrical. Understandably so. Whether you and I think God is disproved is neither here nor there.
Consider as an analogy - suppose you tell a child that Santa does not in fact
1. come down chimneys (we've made video recordings at night)
2. fly on reindeer (the anatomy of these animals simply does not support flight)
3. the gifts were in fact bought by the parents (show receipts)
but then say that no, you've made no statements whatsoever about the existence of Santa. Well, yes technically that's true. But you see why someone committed to a belief in Santa (not some other metaphysically nonmaterial entity whose phenomenological implications are rather more sparse and avoid falsification) would find these ideas threatening, precisely because they tend to undermine his beliefs.