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Comment Where does the paycheck come from? (Score 5, Insightful) 206

by Contusion (#27166771) Attached to: GrandCentral Reborn As Google Voice
How does google plan to make money off of this? TFA mentions that they'll be transcribing voicemail to text in near real-time. Will they also be sifting those voicemails for marketing keywords? If my buddy calls to brag about his new car, will I be seeing BMW ads next time I log into gmail?

*Pulling the tinfoil hat even lower over the brow now* Will Google Talk also have the ability to monitor calls made through their service for marketing info?
Yeah, it sounds like a great service, but what's the cost in privacy?
Patents

EU Patent Staff Go On Strike 116

Posted by timothy from the stop-exploiting-me dept.
h4rm0ny writes "Last Friday, staff at the European Patent Office went on strike. They protested outside for several hours and issued a statement claiming that 'the organisation is decentralising and focusing on granting as many patents as possible to gain financially from fees generated.' They also declared this as being disastrous for innovation and that their campaign was not for better wages, but for better quality patents. Meanwhile, an article on it discusses the US's own approach to dealing with the increasing flood of patent applications: a community patent project to help identify prior art. It might sound like a grass-roots scheme, and maybe it is, but those roots include such patent behemoths as IBM. So it looks like on both sides of the Atlantic, some signs of sanity might be emerging in the patent world from those people right in the thick of it." Note, this was a half-day strike, not ongoing.

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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

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