Posts by Turtle

Not Universally Accepted?

"They employ low-level ionizing radiation, which some studies have claimed can damage DNA and possibly cause cancer and other nastiness."

Does this mean that there are people (and by "people" I mean "competent scientists and medical researchers") who claim that ionizing radiation does *not* damage DNA and (by this mechanism) cause cancer and damage the organism in other ways? I would have thought that this effect of ionizing radiation was both well-known and widely if not universally accepted. Is this not so?

"The campaign focused attention on US-UK extradition requirements, which critics argue are unfairly biased because US extradition requests need not be accompanied by any evidence"

This would seem to be irrelevant insofar as he has admitted it.

Confidence.

"baryogenesis – at least, I think that’s how it’s spelled and what it means"

You know, reading a statement like that does not exactly instill in the reader great confidence in the rest of the article.

Life. Or close to it.

Rotundo and his cohorts, if convicted of the money-laundering charges, could well spend the rest of their lives in prison. Criminal charges do not get too much more serious than that, really.

Either pass a law. . .

"Rosa Barcelo, a privacy and data protection specialist working for the Commission [...] pointed out that Reding's plans had already been relaxed from a "full obligation" on the part of an individual business and its handling of user data to a "best effort" requirement."

They are a government ffs! Either pass a law or get off the pot. And wtf is a "best effort"? How does a court decide if an effort has been "only hafl-hearted" or that is was a bona fide "best effort" in a situation where "real results" were maybe not possible and therefore the effort only *seems* to be a sort of "apathetic effort whose only purpose was to avoid complying with standards that could have been achieved if sufficient effort was made but since it was inconvenient to make the effort and since compliance was not actually required thanks to the 'best effort' standard, they really didn't bother".

Accommodations available!

So I guess these "hacktivists" fully intend to keep their "direct actions" going until they convince all the governments of the world that the internet needs to be closely surveilled, closely regulated, and tightly controlled.

Well, if that's what the "hacktivists" want, they can be accommodated. . .

And....?

Are these people who are so concerned about the effect of money on government also calling for an investigation into Google's spending habits?

No?

For some reason I am not surprised.

“Competing Form Factors”

"Customers were, as he put it, faced with 'competing form factors' - a polite way of saying that tablets are selling like hotcakes and Redmond still hasn’t a good-enough OS for that market."

Out of curiosity, have *any* tablets other than iPads been selling in significant numbers?

Worth a giggle!

"amassed a fortune that allowed him to rent a vast multi-million-dollar mansion near Auckland in New Zealand."

Rented?

/me giggles!

He'd better hope that he saved lots of that money, because he is going to need it to hire lawyers.

On a related note. . .

This is a only marginally interesting article, considering that we all know that the financial markets are thoroughly corrupt, and have always been thoroughly corrupt, and how they will always remain thoroughly corrupt. But what would really be interesting is to learn how NVidia's top executives, especially Jen-Hsun Huang, have managed to stay out of prison for intentionally misleading investors and analysts, violation of various laws regarding financial reporting, and similar..

Servers as proof.

This protest against the rights of creators simply serves as proof that website operators are fully aware of the importance of piracy and content-theft to the economy of the web.

I am sure that Jim Wales would *love* to be able to enrich his website by putting entire books of copyright-protected material on-line. And considering that of all the huge number of people who either are directly employed by, or contribute to, Wikipedia, he is the only one who gets paid, it is understandable that he feels so much solidarity with a movement to insure that content-creators get nothing for their work.

Really, it's easy to see why website operators are on one side, and the AFL-CIO is on the other.

Oh, and who remembers http://news.softpedia.com/news/Wikipedia-5000-Scandal-80372.shtml?

Sometimes.

“'The laws are designed to help consumers benefit from innovation, not to help competitors.'”

Well sometimes it does the one thing by doing the other, y'know. Oh wait, you're from Google, so you don't know, I guess.

Let me see if I understand this...

Now, if I understand this correctly, then Google, after having built up a huge empire thanks to its search engine, and while taking great pains to weed out spam from its search results, now wants to include spam in those same search results in the guise of the droolings of people whose "data" it has appropriated?

Who is this supposed to benefit? (Aside from possibly Google's competitors?)

Looked at Thierry Legault's gallery...

The advice to look at Thierry Legault's online gallery is quite good advice indeed: there are some extraordinary and striking images there. It's very, very impressive.

It may be right. May be wrong.

"Google calls this 'extortion,' and it may be right."

It may be wrong. What is certainly not wrong, is that Google has consistently acted with blatant and willful disregard for other people's IP. For example, I am sure that you are familiar with the Andy Rubin email which Google is desperately trying to prevent from being admitted into evidence, right? (Maybe Google should have just gotten that $60m / year license from Sun, eh?)

Android has had an incredible number of lawsuits pending against it. And note that the Oracle lawsuit is not only for patent-infringement, but for copyright-infringement too. And of course you know that Google refused to join the consortium that bought the Nortel patents, and for the stupidest of reasons: buying into the consortium would have prevented Google from asserting those patents against other entities.

No, at this point, Google can't complain about anything, as their willful disregard of the rights of all other IP holders has brought this on themselves. And on their partners, too, who have been selling Android devices. You know how much help Google has given them, right? None whatsoever....

And these people are... uh...

1) Who are these people that I, or anyone really, should care about their opinions or the study that they have commissioned? Let me answer that for you! Looking at http://piracy.ssrc.org/partners/ we see their work commended by highly laudatory statements from, among others, William Patry, senior copyright counsel, Google, and Michael Geist, favorite academic authority of the anti-copyright bureaucrats in Canadian government (and for more about whom go to http://www.musictechpolicy.com/ and use search to find many articles about this well-paid shill.)

And would I, or anyone else, be surprised to learn that Google is funneling money to either Columbia University, the American Assembly, or both, rather like they funnel money into the Berkman Center at Harvard?

In spite of how often The American Assembly likes to say that their organization was founded by Dwight Eisenhower, this organization seems to have no real existence other than a few guys sitting around doing, well, doing not much other than thinking of schemes to get grant money. At any rate, looking at some of their previous work and the people who support them (see the MPEE Support Group on Facebook, for example) the contents of this latest "empirical study" were easily predictable. (On the MPEE Facebook page find the following: "The reliably obnoxious Andrew Orlowski...")

"The data, from respected think-tank American Assembly..." Respected by whom, for heaven's sake"? Google, Michael Geist, and others who profit from piracy?

2) "When it comes to the penalties for piracy the American public is a lot more forgiving than the courts." What the courts say is one thing, but *juries* have awarded copyright holders enormous sums for damages. Is there any reason to think that those juries were more representative of the American public than the sample in this survey?

I understand that there are people who want to justify content theft but they need to do better than this "highly-respected" "American Assembly".

Well, maybe. We'll see.

"2011 was a bad year for dictators, with the Arab uprising taking out regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya".

Well maybe. Maybe not. We'll see whether democratic institutions take root, or if one dictator and his authoritarian elite is simply replaced by a new dictator and his authoritarian elite.

Pessimism is always appropriate.

The Olympics?

"What are you most looking forward to next year? Euro 2012 and the Olympics? "

The Olympics?

Do you mean The Olympics with hordes of cheating, blood-doping, performance-enhancing-drug taking, money-seeking "athletes" in a display pandering to the shallowest kind of national chauvinism by allowing nations to compete against each other in fields of endeavor which have no actual significance whatsoever - scored by dishonest and biased judges and run by the corrupt officials of a corrupt corporation known as the IOC?

Those Olympics?

To answer the original question, no, I am not looking forward to the Olympics.

How close?

It will be interesting to see how close Google's annual legal expenses can come to their annual gross revenue.

Competition.

Competition - gotta love it.

Cost Overruns.

Just like government problems, I would think that this program would be highly susceptible to cost overruns, and in a program like this, those overruns could be ruinous to even someone of Paul Allen's wealth.

It will be interesting to see how it goes.

Possible advantage of a possible flaw.

If I were using this device in public places, or even in an office of which I was not the sole occupant, I might consider the "visual degradation depending upon viewing angle" to be a worthwhile privacy or security feature. Depending on how degraded the image becomes at off-angles.