While a cloud service provider isn't necessarily like Amazon, this is a prime example of why the cloud can't be trusted: you are at the mercy of the service provider, and if they alter the deal you can only pray they don't alter it further.
This is not a problem with "the cloud" (which is defined by technology).
There may be a social issue involved in relying on a provider to continue a behavior which they haven't undertaken any binding obligation to continue, but that isn't really specific to the cloud. Nothing provides cloud providers from offering stron, enforceable agreements of what they will and won't do with your data. Its probably less common in consumer-oriented (and particularly free consumer-oriented) cloud services, but that's not about the cloud, its about TANSTAAFL.
I say they should take it one step further. They only get paid if somebody buys something on my website. This is the way Amazon compensated their partners. It gives the advertising companies more skin in the game
The company with which you are placing ads has no control of the factors which determine whether people who arrive at your website decide to purchase once they get there. Your website's ability to convert people who actually arrive to buyers isn't in their control. Unless you are giving them control of the factors -- like the design of your website, pricing of your products, etc. -- which control the success of that, why should they be willing to provide advertising placement for your website on terms that where whether and how much they get paid depends on those factors?
Sponsored stories might increase placement in the News Feeds of people that are already fans of the sponsoring page, but an important part of their use is that they increase the placement of stories in the news feeds of friends of your fans. When a company pays for these, friends of people who have liked the site, shared the page that is being promoted, etc., are more likely to see an item about the liking/sharing/etc. in their news feed.
Yeah but promoted posts are (as far as I can tell) a non-click-through sort of advertising. Much as I criticize Facebook, this sort of thing is a good thing for the web: monetizing by advertisement impressions rather than by clicks is how we should have been doing things in the first place
Advertising by impressions rather than clicks on the web is what was done "in the first place" (that is, when web advertising was a new market, since impressions are the model used off the web for advertisement, and so it was what the advertising market was used to.)
Taking click-throughs into account was something that evolved as a way to reassure advertising purchasers that what they were paying for was proportional to effectiveness of ads in motivating behavior.
I think that the click-through model can help, to mitigate the tragedy of the commons effect of race-to-the-most-obtrusive between advertisers that comes from trying to maximize per-impression effect when ads are sold in a strictly impression-based manner. Or, at least, it helps get advertisers to buy advertising in venues that restrict the obtrusiveness of ads to avoid that race, because they are paying for measurable effect.
And if you don't mitgate that race, you quickly get to a place where users take more active steps to avoid ads -- whether that means going out of their way to find and employ technical means to strip ads out of the content they receive or whether it means just avoiding using the ad-laden service.
Advertisers may be your customers, and users eyeball-time may be the thing you are selling, but users are your suppliers, and if you forget them in your efforts to maximize the short-term appeal to your customers, you risk finding yourself without any eyeball-time to sell to your customers.
As a very nasty side-effect of Google requiring all in-app purchases to go through Checkout, only US and UK based companies can develop apps which use in-app purchases and still be in the Play store.
The actual list of supported countries is slightly longer. Currently: Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Brazil Canada Czech Republic Denmark Finland France Germany Hong Kong Ireland Israel Italy Japan Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Poland Portugal Russia Singapore Spain South Korea Sweden Switzerland Taiwan United Kingdom United States
It's pretty clearly giving them an exclusive copyright license
Its pretty clearly claiming that it requires that, but since in US law an exclusive copyright license (even if limited in time or scope of the rights under copyright licensed) is a transfer of copyright ownership, and a transfer of copyright ownership requires a written transfer document signed by the transferring owner or a duly authorized agent, so, if its a usual Terms of Service and not a signed written document, they probably don't actually have any license other than whatever a court would find is implied by posting without a valid agreement.
Oh Mighty GOOG, your lowly human followers beseech you to create an app store for windows much like your mighty holiness has created for your son, Android.
K thx bye (aka amen)
P.S. and osx and linux app stores too if its not too much trouble, your mighty holiness.
Well, you've got Chrome browser (including Native Client and other desktop-app-enabling functionality) + Chrome Web Store. That's probably as close as you are likely to get.
Goddamn money-grubbing, parasitic Apple always trying to take a take a cut from other people's hard work. Oh wait, this is Google doing it?
Both Google and Apple require apps in their online store with in-app purchase to use their respective payment system for purchases (Google has exceptions for purchases of things used outside of the app itself, and I think Apple has a similar exception.) So far, pretty similar.
OTOH, Android, unlike iOS, allows consumers to install apps not delivered through the OS vendors app store, meaning that the restriction on the store isn't a restriction on the OS.
It is true that certain Android devices come with restrictions that make the consumer experience similar to iOS in this regard, but since consumers have a choice between those Android devices and Android devices that aren't locked down, that's an issue specific to the devices in question, not to Android as an OS.
IBM's motion to prevent Reuters from publishing what IBM gave them has been denied already. Those of a conspiracy turn of mind will now cue the old boy network where IBM execs get together with Reuter's execs at the Old Boys Club and work out what Reuters gets for not publishing after all.
Presumably, what they would get for not publishing is not sued for publishing. They request for an order for them not to publish was denied as a prior restraint, which doesn't require the court to find that the publication is legal merely that the harm from publication is not of the kind of extreme and immediate nature which allows prior restraint. Its still quite possible for their to be legal consequences for the actual publication.
Her claim is the book was refused because it mentions Amazon.
More precisely, her claim is that that is the reason Apple stated the second time they rejected it.
Go to the iTunes store. Do a search for Amazon. Ignore the results about the geographic region and notice how many other books clearly and obviously mention Amazon. Take particular note, for example, of the book titled "Amazon.com" which, one would assume, is about Amazon and makes mention of the company.
So? It wouldn't be the first time that the reasons Apple stated to the creator for rejecting one product from their online store were inconsistent with the fact that other products which would, rationally, be rejected by the same rule had already been accepted in the same store.
After you do this basic level of investigation, one can only be left to assume that there's either some key part of this story missing and/or she is doing this to generate attention for her book as a marketing ploy (driving people to buy her book on Amazon, most likely).
Well, no. In order to reach that conclusion based on the evidence you cited you have to first assume, additionally: 1. That Apple's stated reasons for rejecting a product are always accurate and complete, 2. That Apple's standards in accepting products in its online store are consistent.
Unless you assume both of those are true, the fact that other products appear in the store that would not be expected to if the reasons they allegedly stated for rejecting the product in question had been applied across the aboard is not evidence against the allegation that they rejected the product and gave the reason stated.
I really don't see Zuckerberg, the Banks, the SEC, or anybody else giving FB shareholders any money.
Well, NASDAQ is for the technical trading problems, but that's kind of a different issue.
Whether Facebook or the underwriting banks or any of the insiders accused of misdeeds in connection with the IPO "give" FB shareholders any money depends, I would think, mostly on the outcome of the many lawsuits that seek to compel them to do so.
If, as the central accusation in many of those lawsuits goes, any of those parties are found to have deliberately withheld material information that they were required to disclose in connection with IPO, then the parties found to have done so are quite likely to be ordered to pay some amount of money to the people financially harmed as a result of that failure.
Well, there are at least indications -- and several lawsuits stemming from those indications -- that the only reason they were able to sell shares to the first-in IPO buyers at the price the IPO was set at was because Facebook and the IPO underwriters illegally withheld material information (particularly, revenue projections that were substantially lower than those filed in earlier required disclosures) that they were required to disclose under federal securities laws.
Those indication tend to support the conclusion that the price was too high.
I think right now servers & computers will be the bottleneck... Unless you're writing your download to a SSD or RAID array... you barely can handle a 1 Gbps write (quick math, 1Gbps = ~125MB/s)
You seem to be assuming that: * Customers using broadband connections are only using one client machine per connection, and * Customers using broadband connections are using all of their bandwidth to download content which will be permanently stored.
I would suggest that both of those assumptions are false when it comes to the use of residential broadband in general is a big part of the motivation beyond Google offering much faster connections, and that Google offering much faster connections is intended to increase the degree to which those assumptions are not true.
So the best way to avoid car accidents is to not own a car?
Not really parallel because...
Seems a bit impractical.
Yeah, in the modern US, communities are mostly planned and constructed on the assumption that people will use cars for basic tasks like travel between home and work, travelling between home and places to by food and other necessities, etc. So its often impractical to get through daily life without a car.
Guns...not so much. That's not to say that there aren't people who legitimately need them, or at least live/work/etc. in circumstances where the benefits of having one outweigh the risks such that it is rational to own them. But its not really parallel to automobiles at all.
For $50/month, expect to get about $50/month worth of channels, nothing more. Most of the money is going to the content providers so Google's ability to deliver more value for money for TV channels is limited.
Google isn't magic.
Google doesn't sell a TV-only plan, and the whole current Fiber effort is a promotional effort to build the new markets for Google's internet advertising, online services, and Google-and-partner hardware businesses. So there's no reason that some of the money that looks like its part of the "internet" portion of the bill can't be subsidizing the TV content being provided in the TV+internet plans (and no reason that Google couldn't -- agains, since the whole effort promotes other Google businesses besides the new TV and ISP business -- be further subsidizing the TV content from outside of the whole Google Fiber endeavor.)
Google may not be magic, but having more ways than just the charge for the hookup and content that you expect to make money off of people that hook up to your data network is a real -- even if not "magic" -- source of incentive to use outside resources to subsidize the features that will attract people to your offering, and TV content is potentially one of those attractive features.
Isn't this pretty much a universal condition for residential internet?
Its also about as clear a violation of the FCC Open Internet rules as one could imagine, since it is very much not an application- or use-agnostic rule, and that it prohibits the use of lawful applications, content, and services over a fixed broadband connection.
Its not surprising that the incumbents -- whose rules predate the FCC Report and Order and who are challenging the FCC's authority to issue it -- retain such rules. It is a bit more surprising that Google -- who has generally been a backer of Net Neutrality -- would have such terms.
I thought the whole point of the competition (that had cities hysterically renaming themselves "Google") was that residents were going to get broadband service for free, or at least at a sharp discount compared to what the robber barron Baby Bells and CATV operators were offering.
5Mbs/1Mbs asymmetric access at a one-time $300 connection fee (lump-sum or paid as $25/mo over 12 months) and $0/month service is a sharp discount compared to similar low-end broadband offerings, but the actual pitch wasn't to get broadband "free" or "cheaper" than existing broadband, it was gigabit/s broadband at prices that were competitive with the prices at which existing (much slower) broadband services were being offered. Which Google's pricing for its symmetric gigabit/s tiers (being fairly comparable in price to what other providers are offering for plans offering "up to" speeds in the tens of megabits/s) certainly would seem to be.
Of course, even my 50/25 FiOS is far faster than what most servers seem able to deliver, so it's unlikely to make much difference unless you're planning to host a reasonably heavy server...
Or host (or have devices connecting too) more than one server at a time.
Usually, slashvertisements attempt to sneak by as industry news, cloaked in a veil of third-party language and trying to pretend to be mostly about new developments in the industry and less about "sign up for our service now".
I suppose there's a sense in which this more overt slashvertisement is an improvement (in that it doesn't pretend to be something its not). I just hope Slashdot is getting paid more for this than it would be for a regular ad (since there's no option for established users to hide this kind of ad, unlike the more normal kind.)
Natural gas, the use of which has jumped 25 percent since 2008 while prices have fallen more than 80 percent, now generates as much electricity as coal in the United States, which would have been unthinkable not long ago.
That's nice, but while natural gas is "cleaner burning" than some other fossil fuels in ways that are very significant to a number of other environmental concerns (particulates, sulfur emissions, etc.), its only very slightly better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions for the energy produced, and even completely replacing all coal power generation overnight wouldn't do much for climate change. In the context of climate change, natural gas is red herring, not an alternative.
Are you referring to the decision to use AdBlock being one which is encouraged because of a Tragedy of the Commons situation in which the "players" are consumers of internet content, or are you referring to the production of ad blocking tools being a result of the escalation of intrusive advertising which results from a Tragedy of the Commons in which ad-supported internet sites are the players?
either they just came up with a process to explain why they can't finalize html 5 or they just decided to split the people who are dragging their feet out of the equation.
They didn't just do anything; this is essentially the way WHATWG has been working for years, and they announced the change in the name of the WHATWG document from "HTML5" to the "HTML Living Standard" at the beginning of 2011.
Until now the two standards bodies working on HTML5 (WHATWG and W3C ) have cooperated. An announcement by WHATWG makes it clear that this is no longer true. WHATWG is going to work on a living standard for HTML which will continue to evolve as more technologies are added. WC3 is going the traditional and much more time consuming route of creating a traditional standard which WHATWG refers to as a 'snapshot' of their living standard.
Whatever happens, the future has just become more complicated — now you have to ask yourself 'Which HTML5?'"
Actually, no -- prior to the change at WHATWG in 2011, there were two HTML5 efforts (WHATWG and W3C). Now there is only one (W3C). WHATWG's living standard is for HTML, with no number attached to it. The two standards have somewhat different purposes. The WHATWG living standard represent the common functionality that browser vendors have agreed to implement, the W3C standard is more conservative. In theory, given the goals of the two standards, the W3C one would be the better one for app developers to target and the WHATWG one would be mostly a tool for browser vendors to align on what features they were going to work toward getting to the point where they were generally usable, and be much more forward looking. But that requires the W3C to draw a line in the sand and commit to finishing HTML5 (and then get started on HTML6, etc.) Otherwise, you end up with the WHATWG work that is officially a living standard, and the W3C work is a series of "Working Drafts" chasing the WHATWG living standard but never actually producing a stable standard, either.
But do people really want that at the expense of carrying around such a huge, heavy lump of tech in their pocket?
IME, more often than not, with typical attire, men with large smartphones carry them on belt clips, and women carry them in purses (many of which have dedicated compartments for them.) That's actually not that uncommon even with smaller phones.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a problem with "the cloud" (which is defined by technology).
There may be a social issue involved in relying on a provider to continue a behavior which they haven't undertaken any binding obligation to continue, but that isn't really specific to the cloud. Nothing provides cloud providers from offering stron, enforceable agreements of what they will and won't do with your data. Its probably less common in consumer-oriented (and particularly free consumer-oriented) cloud services, but that's not about the cloud, its about TANSTAAFL.
The company with which you are placing ads has no control of the factors which determine whether people who arrive at your website decide to purchase once they get there. Your website's ability to convert people who actually arrive to buyers isn't in their control. Unless you are giving them control of the factors -- like the design of your website, pricing of your products, etc. -- which control the success of that, why should they be willing to provide advertising placement for your website on terms that where whether and how much they get paid depends on those factors?
Sponsored stories might increase placement in the News Feeds of people that are already fans of the sponsoring page, but an important part of their use is that they increase the placement of stories in the news feeds of friends of your fans. When a company pays for these, friends of people who have liked the site, shared the page that is being promoted, etc., are more likely to see an item about the liking/sharing/etc. in their news feed.
Advertising by impressions rather than clicks on the web is what was done "in the first place" (that is, when web advertising was a new market, since impressions are the model used off the web for advertisement, and so it was what the advertising market was used to.)
Taking click-throughs into account was something that evolved as a way to reassure advertising purchasers that what they were paying for was proportional to effectiveness of ads in motivating behavior.
I think that the click-through model can help, to mitigate the tragedy of the commons effect of race-to-the-most-obtrusive between advertisers that comes from trying to maximize per-impression effect when ads are sold in a strictly impression-based manner. Or, at least, it helps get advertisers to buy advertising in venues that restrict the obtrusiveness of ads to avoid that race, because they are paying for measurable effect.
And if you don't mitgate that race, you quickly get to a place where users take more active steps to avoid ads -- whether that means going out of their way to find and employ technical means to strip ads out of the content they receive or whether it means just avoiding using the ad-laden service.
Advertisers may be your customers, and users eyeball-time may be the thing you are selling, but users are your suppliers, and if you forget them in your efforts to maximize the short-term appeal to your customers, you risk finding yourself without any eyeball-time to sell to your customers.
The actual list of supported countries is slightly longer. Currently:
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Canada
Czech Republic
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Hong Kong
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Russia
Singapore
Spain
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
United Kingdom
United States
Its pretty clearly claiming that it requires that, but since in US law an exclusive copyright license (even if limited in time or scope of the rights under copyright licensed) is a transfer of copyright ownership, and a transfer of copyright ownership requires a written transfer document signed by the transferring owner or a duly authorized agent, so, if its a usual Terms of Service and not a signed written document, they probably don't actually have any license other than whatever a court would find is implied by posting without a valid agreement.
Well, you've got Chrome browser (including Native Client and other desktop-app-enabling functionality) + Chrome Web Store. That's probably as close as you are likely to get.
Both Google and Apple require apps in their online store with in-app purchase to use their respective payment system for purchases (Google has exceptions for purchases of things used outside of the app itself, and I think Apple has a similar exception.) So far, pretty similar.
OTOH, Android, unlike iOS, allows consumers to install apps not delivered through the OS vendors app store, meaning that the restriction on the store isn't a restriction on the OS.
It is true that certain Android devices come with restrictions that make the consumer experience similar to iOS in this regard, but since consumers have a choice between those Android devices and Android devices that aren't locked down, that's an issue specific to the devices in question, not to Android as an OS.
Presumably, what they would get for not publishing is not sued for publishing. They request for an order for them not to publish was denied as a prior restraint, which doesn't require the court to find that the publication is legal merely that the harm from publication is not of the kind of extreme and immediate nature which allows prior restraint. Its still quite possible for their to be legal consequences for the actual publication.
More precisely, her claim is that that is the reason Apple stated the second time they rejected it.
So? It wouldn't be the first time that the reasons Apple stated to the creator for rejecting one product from their online store were inconsistent with the fact that other products which would, rationally, be rejected by the same rule had already been accepted in the same store.
Well, no. In order to reach that conclusion based on the evidence you cited you have to first assume, additionally:
1. That Apple's stated reasons for rejecting a product are always accurate and complete,
2. That Apple's standards in accepting products in its online store are consistent.
Unless you assume both of those are true, the fact that other products appear in the store that would not be expected to if the reasons they allegedly stated for rejecting the product in question had been applied across the aboard is not evidence against the allegation that they rejected the product and gave the reason stated.
Well, NASDAQ is for the technical trading problems, but that's kind of a different issue.
Whether Facebook or the underwriting banks or any of the insiders accused of misdeeds in connection with the IPO "give" FB shareholders any money depends, I would think, mostly on the outcome of the many lawsuits that seek to compel them to do so.
If, as the central accusation in many of those lawsuits goes, any of those parties are found to have deliberately withheld material information that they were required to disclose in connection with IPO, then the parties found to have done so are quite likely to be ordered to pay some amount of money to the people financially harmed as a result of that failure.
Well, there are at least indications -- and several lawsuits stemming from those indications -- that the only reason they were able to sell shares to the first-in IPO buyers at the price the IPO was set at was because Facebook and the IPO underwriters illegally withheld material information (particularly, revenue projections that were substantially lower than those filed in earlier required disclosures) that they were required to disclose under federal securities laws.
Those indication tend to support the conclusion that the price was too high.
You seem to be assuming that:
* Customers using broadband connections are only using one client machine per connection, and
* Customers using broadband connections are using all of their bandwidth to download content which will be permanently stored.
I would suggest that both of those assumptions are false when it comes to the use of residential broadband in general is a big part of the motivation beyond Google offering much faster connections, and that Google offering much faster connections is intended to increase the degree to which those assumptions are not true.
Not really parallel because...
Yeah, in the modern US, communities are mostly planned and constructed on the assumption that people will use cars for basic tasks like travel between home and work, travelling between home and places to by food and other necessities, etc. So its often impractical to get through daily life without a car.
Guns...not so much. That's not to say that there aren't people who legitimately need them, or at least live/work/etc. in circumstances where the benefits of having one outweigh the risks such that it is rational to own them. But its not really parallel to automobiles at all.
Google doesn't sell a TV-only plan, and the whole current Fiber effort is a promotional effort to build the new markets for Google's internet advertising, online services, and Google-and-partner hardware businesses. So there's no reason that some of the money that looks like its part of the "internet" portion of the bill can't be subsidizing the TV content being provided in the TV+internet plans (and no reason that Google couldn't -- agains, since the whole effort promotes other Google businesses besides the new TV and ISP business -- be further subsidizing the TV content from outside of the whole Google Fiber endeavor.)
Google may not be magic, but having more ways than just the charge for the hookup and content that you expect to make money off of people that hook up to your data network is a real -- even if not "magic" -- source of incentive to use outside resources to subsidize the features that will attract people to your offering, and TV content is potentially one of those attractive features.
Its also about as clear a violation of the FCC Open Internet rules as one could imagine, since it is very much not an application- or use-agnostic rule, and that it prohibits the use of lawful applications, content, and services over a fixed broadband connection.
Its not surprising that the incumbents -- whose rules predate the FCC Report and Order and who are challenging the FCC's authority to issue it -- retain such rules. It is a bit more surprising that Google -- who has generally been a backer of Net Neutrality -- would have such terms.
5Mbs/1Mbs asymmetric access at a one-time $300 connection fee (lump-sum or paid as $25/mo over 12 months) and $0/month service is a sharp discount compared to similar low-end broadband offerings, but the actual pitch wasn't to get broadband "free" or "cheaper" than existing broadband, it was gigabit/s broadband at prices that were competitive with the prices at which existing (much slower) broadband services were being offered. Which Google's pricing for its symmetric gigabit/s tiers (being fairly comparable in price to what other providers are offering for plans offering "up to" speeds in the tens of megabits/s) certainly would seem to be.
Or host (or have devices connecting too) more than one server at a time.
Usually, slashvertisements attempt to sneak by as industry news, cloaked in a veil of third-party language and trying to pretend to be mostly about new developments in the industry and less about "sign up for our service now".
I suppose there's a sense in which this more overt slashvertisement is an improvement (in that it doesn't pretend to be something its not). I just hope Slashdot is getting paid more for this than it would be for a regular ad (since there's no option for established users to hide this kind of ad, unlike the more normal kind.)
That's nice, but while natural gas is "cleaner burning" than some other fossil fuels in ways that are very significant to a number of other environmental concerns (particulates, sulfur emissions, etc.), its only very slightly better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions for the energy produced, and even completely replacing all coal power generation overnight wouldn't do much for climate change. In the context of climate change, natural gas is red herring, not an alternative.
Are you referring to the decision to use AdBlock being one which is encouraged because of a Tragedy of the Commons situation in which the "players" are consumers of internet content, or are you referring to the production of ad blocking tools being a result of the escalation of intrusive advertising which results from a Tragedy of the Commons in which ad-supported internet sites are the players?
Because, you know, both are true.
They didn't just do anything; this is essentially the way WHATWG has been working for years, and they announced the change in the name of the WHATWG document from "HTML5" to the "HTML Living Standard" at the beginning of 2011.
The WHATWG standard is the HTML Living Standard.
The W3C standards effort is HTML5.
See the blog post (from January 2011, so this is decidedly not news) announcing the whole process shift at WHATWG.
This (except correctly referring to the W3C instead of "WC3", whatever that might be) was announced on the WHATWG blog on January 19, 2011. How is this news?
Actually, no -- prior to the change at WHATWG in 2011, there were two HTML5 efforts (WHATWG and W3C). Now there is only one (W3C). WHATWG's living standard is for HTML, with no number attached to it. The two standards have somewhat different purposes. The WHATWG living standard represent the common functionality that browser vendors have agreed to implement, the W3C standard is more conservative. In theory, given the goals of the two standards, the W3C one would be the better one for app developers to target and the WHATWG one would be mostly a tool for browser vendors to align on what features they were going to work toward getting to the point where they were generally usable, and be much more forward looking. But that requires the W3C to draw a line in the sand and commit to finishing HTML5 (and then get started on HTML6, etc.) Otherwise, you end up with the WHATWG work that is officially a living standard, and the W3C work is a series of "Working Drafts" chasing the WHATWG living standard but never actually producing a stable standard, either.
IME, more often than not, with typical attire, men with large smartphones carry them on belt clips, and women carry them in purses (many of which have dedicated compartments for them.) That's actually not that uncommon even with smaller phones.