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Comment Re: What is it? (Score -1, Troll) 37

Itâ(TM)s in its name. SERP = Search Engine Results Page. Theyâ(TM)re scrapes of Google SERPs. This is fallout from the Reddit license where Reddit decided to collect rent from Google and others for scraping their content. Apparently Reddit and Google decided to put Google only visible stuff on their pages (which is explicitly illegal under Googleâ(TM)s TOS, and has resulted in index banning) and then served up this secret content via SerpAPI.

Scraping Google SERPs has been standard behavior for literally as long as Google has existed. Thatâ(TM)s literally how Facebook, Microsoft, and countless startups and academics evaluate their own search engines. Iâ(TM)m not exaggerating. They literally compare their results to Google results, which always made me wonder what Google does.

As far as ignoring robots.txt and using different IPs? Please. Thatâ(TM)s also has been standard behavior for as long as the web has been around.

This is monopoly behavior, and Google is openly engaging in it and attacking the open web because thereâ(TM)s a sympathetic White House administration for them.

Comment Re: For them, an arms race with no risk (Score 1) 41

Even after criminal disaster. No one goes to jail. Ever.

Elizabeth Holmes must have missed the memo.

She only missed the memo because she was new to the game. Had it been directed by a more established CEO instead it would have been brushed under the rug. They always protect their own kind, and she wasn't (yet) one of them.

Just wait until we get to see how hard CEOs will pull to defend Elon when Tesla fails to turn in the earnings his bonus is dependent on.

Comment For them, an arms race with no risk (Score 4, Insightful) 41

The CEOs aren't spending their own money. If they somehow don't win the arms race, they can always look back and say they needed to spend more. If they can declare themselves winners, they will look brilliant and be able to demand huge pay raises from their companies. Even if they nearly drive their companies to bankruptcy on the matter, they'll have other execs from other companies to point to as examples of people who either did worse, or won by spending more.

It was a good time to be a CEO in January of this year. It's an even better time now.

Comment CWA is not a very strong union (Score 1) 32

I was a CWA member throughout grad school. It may be that they just put a lot more effort into the larger companies where their members were employed (think Verizon as one great example) but we didn't see much help from them as grad students. I remember one meeting my first year where we were reminded we could always ask for a union rep anytime we were talking with our PI, and that was about it.

Comment Good luck with that (Score 1) 83

These laws they are referring to, they are only fooling themselves when they pretend that they might apply to the richest people in the world. It doesn't matter how "clear" one might think trademark laws to be, when the other side can spend more on lawyers than the GDP of many small nations, you don't have a chance of winning.

Comment Re: Economic terrorism (Score 1) 206

I can only speak from my viewpoint in Eugene, Oregon area, but two of the three you name are each the third most expensive in their respective areas.

Half the stores in the area were closed in the Kroger/Albersons/Safeway merger. There is now no competition between them in any neighborhood. You get one or the other.

ATT owns all communication infrastructure in Oregon (going back to the Ma Bell break-up and the acquisition of some Internet backbone), they license to Verizon, who sell licenses to anyone else. T-Mobile has a nice pre-pay plan, but their regular service wasn't cheaper, you just got a better free phone.

There is one tower where I live, it belongs to Verizon. There is one cable company (under many names, but all are equal to Comcast, who leases hanging wire space from ATT, or WiFi/Satellite from Verizon) and it's not cheap.

And before someone tries to blame the big corps here, Oregon as a State issues all these exclusive licenses, and is 95 percent Democrat and has been since 1982.

Mergers are never for the consumer.

Unless they own stock.

Comment Re:Just don't tell the administration ... (Score 1) 201

Actually, Times Roman, new or not, is named for the Times of London.

Thank you for the correction on that. I had always heard it was for the NY Times, until I looked it up on wikipedia.

I would counter though that even with the Times of London being considered a "centre-right" newspaper in the UK, it is still a "far left" paper compared to anything Trump associates himself with.

Comment the low activity of Slashdot these years (Score 1) 1

the low activity of Slashdot these years

That's an understatement. I know I've been predicting the fall of this conservablog for years now but seriously how will we know if there's even someone left to turn out the lights? Some front page articles generate discussions now that are barely longer than ones I've had with my dog.

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