And Google gets nothing out of the relationship I hear you say.

You'll feel relieved, then, to know that modern atypical antipsychotics work much better, and with far fewer side effects, than the old-school phenothiazines.

Of course Google gets something out of the relationship. Google exists to make money. They don't, however, sell news. They don't sell content. They sell us. And in that regard, Google really doesn't care in the least if the newspapers decide to play ball or give up the single best source of eyeballs from across the globe they've ever known - Google can simply filter them out and only the newspapers themselves will even notice the loss.


But I no longer have as many bookstores I can go to, to look at books, find something I might not have picked before, have a coffee, talk to real people.

Amazon doesn't sell friends (you need to go to Facebook for that). Amazon sells stuff.

The number of people required for "Collusion" aside - Not as different as you might think.

Both situations involve a company providing a distribution channel for third party content creators. Both situations involve those third parties thinking they have an unconditional "right" to access that channel. Both situations involve those third parties pissing and moaning over the owner of that channel not actually caring in the least about the loss of any particular group of content producers.

I'll admit that the Google situation has a bit more of a karmically-satisfying edge to it, by virtue of the very thing the newspapers want physically requiring the very thing they complain about. In Amazon's case, a bit less of a clear-cut "Ha-ha!", but still just an absurd level of entitlement by Hachette.

Beat me to it.

As I said - Rational thought just seems to hit a brick wall when you mention the likes of Amazon and Google. Free advertising becomes stealing (free) content; one-on-one vendor negotiation becomes collusion.

This one will do nicely, thanks.

Whoosh!


You're going to be the one who'll have to leave, unless you grow up and decide to join the civilized community. :)

Have fun finding enough people to fix it when it breaks. :)

Nah, just screwing with you. Sure, you can have this one, we'll gladly take your money to keep the ol' girl running as an echo chamber as looong as you want. We'll just make our own new and improved (and you-less) fork, while yours slowly devolves into "TV v.2"

I'm trying to wrap my brain around how these news outlets thought it was bad for Google to send traffic their way.

Because they myopically stop thinking at "Google steals our content, grar!"

On a somewhat more excusable level, they just haven't yet come to terms with how people read news today. People (under 60) don't casually read the whole newspaper over breakfast anymore; they go to a news aggregation site and skim the headlines. When they find something of interest, they click through to read more - But, they don't necessarily click through to the Nowheresville Tribute, they click through to WaPo or NYT, or perhaps to a media outlet that focuses more on a preferred aspect of most stories (for example, reading about German newspaper contractual negotiations at Slashdot vs reading about them at Groklaw vs reading about them in Time).

"Wait wait wait! We still want the free advertising that comes from Google's use of our content! We just want Google to pay us for the privilege of giving us a service we would otherwise have to pay for, in exchange for displaying content we already give away for free online!"

Sad. I get so sick of people griping about the effects of Amazon and Google (etc), without giving a second thought to just how much they already get in return for the relationship. Same idea goes for Amazon and Hachette - They have every right to refuse to sell at the price Amazon wants; they'll just never sell another eBook.

I agree, but what is your point? We should ignore sexual harassment because the police and society are bad at dealing with it? Shouldn't we try to fix that?

Did I say anything about ignoring it?

The great-most-parent of this thread wrote:

The definition of harassment, at least where I live, is "unwanted sexual advances", meaning the distinction between flirting and harassment is purely based on subjective experience.

You responded to a clarification that referenced a specific country's (Norway's) wording, to claim that one of two equally subjective words ("troublesome") made it just peachy that we had a victim-subjective law.

I disagree with your assertion. That doesn't mean I approve of sexual harassment in the workplace; rather, that if we want people to take it seriously, we need to come up with a reasonably objective metric that doesn't reduce to "don't behave in a way that might offend the most fragile person around you, oh and BTW you won't that threshold until you've crossed it".


As for whether or not people really think like that - I have seriously gotten into arguments with SJWs over whether or not merely complimenting (once, politely and legitimately, not talking about catcalls and shouting "nice tits" at every woman walking by) a stranger in a public place counts as "harassment", only to endure a subsequent rant of "imagine if you had to put up with that everywhere you went, no matter what you did, whether you wanted it or not". Hmm. Yeah, people complimenting me too often, you poor, poor thing! Consider me properly chastised, yup.

Today, however, with a lot of file systems in the Terabyte range, a 90-95% full file system can still have a considerable amount of free space but we still mostly get bugged by the same alerts as in the days of yore when there really isn't a cause for immediate concern.

When we had drives in the 100s of MB range, we used a few MB at a time. Now that we have drives in the multi-TB range, we tend to use tens of GB at a time. In my experiences, a 90 percent full drive has as much time left before running out as it did a decade ago.

Perhaps more importantly, running at 90% of capacity kills your performance if you still use spinning glass platters as your primary storage medium (not so much when talking about a SAN of SSDs). In general, when you hit 90% full, you have problems other than just how long you can last before reaching 100%.

Seems like you are likening legitimate issues to trolling. Busting down barriers for women's rights and segregation are valid. Comparing trolling grammar to suffrage is a bit of a leap.

Tough to blame that on the parent post, when the FP made that particular leap for us right out of the gate.

No, first a police officer, then a public prosecutor and finally a jury of your peers define the conditions under which it is considered sexual harassment.

By the time you get to "police", the accused has already lost his (or her) job, because employers hate dealing with shit like this but can't risk looking soft on harassment.

So as I said, wake of ruined lives while the Violets struggle to figure out why every man they meet runs screaming from them as a sign of unwanted affection.

Too many people do too much online for things to stay the way they are

If you don't like it, leave and get a new internet.

So the GP missed the key point there, which is that it has to be both unwelcome and troublesome.

No, you missed the point that the "victim" defines both of those conditions subjectively.

With normal, socially-well-adjusted folks, that doesn't really present a problem. At the one extreme, however, we have the chronic harasser who really sees nothing wrong with friendly backrubs at work; at the other, we have "professional victims" who get to ruin as many lives in their wake as they want. Both of those extremes make such definitions unworkable in any fair and objective system of justice.


it's only once it starts causing them trouble (like being very persistent when she has clearly rebuffed you) that it turns into sexual harassment.

The fact that you needed to clarify the meaning of "troublesome", as you interpret it, nicely illustrates the real problem here.

But if it's anything else, taxes are so great.

Wait, what? We reading the same website here?

The same website where we routinely see rants about attempts to tax Amazon? Where people seethe over paying POTS-era taxes on data-only cell plans? Where people routinely complain that we need to do away with SS and privatize all retirement benefits? Where Obamacare causes flamewars and we consider WIC a necessary evil?

Offhand, I can think of only a single pro-tax issue generally considered "great" among Slashdotters - Eliminating the double-Irish-dodge and getting multinationals to pay their fare share. And personally, I'd say that has less to do with "pro-tax" than "anti-corporate". Other than that, we seem like a pretty anti-tax anti-government crowd, overall.

So why does he get so much credit on slashdot? Is this the new libertarian conservative shithole of the internet?

Nice throwaway slam - Want to borrow a crowbar to get that foot out of your mouth?

Because, for the most part, Libertarians hate Reagan. Despite how you might prefer to demonize Libertarians, laissez faire doesn't mean "subsidize the rich".

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

We "clearly socially and politically influence" people to hold down a job, not smoke, refrain from promiscuous sexual behavior, and a wide variety of other behaviors.

And yet - We all still have the right to live under a bridge, smoke, fuck anything that moves, yadda yadda yadda.

When women want to go into tech and can't, we have a problem. When women don't want to go into tech... Hey, start your own marketing campaign like Google has done, but lose the guilt-tripping SJW faux indignation BS.

Thanks.