Slashdot Mirror
Dispute Damages Would Exceed Android Revenues
CWmike writes "A new document in a year-old patent lawsuit filed by Oracle against Google over Android intellectual property suggests Oracle could be seeking huge damages from Google. The damages owed to Oracle, if granted by federal Judge William Alsup for the US District Court for Northern California, would 'far exceed any money Google has ever earned with Android' and could lead to a rewrite of Android's Dalvik virtual machine, considered integral to Android and used by Android device manufacturers and potentially thousands of Android app developers, wrote one blogger, Florian Mueller, who writes about intellectual property issues involving the software industry."
If anyone here doesn't keep up with Linux Weekly News, here's a example article and discussion thread involving said Florian Mueller:
http://lwn.net/Articles/434318/
Never knew much about him, but still was startled by his descent into on-payroll patent troll.
Florian Mueller blog is a fake. Some call this astroturfing. All he does is spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about Android (Linux). His blog was setup for journalists to point to because journalists have to point to other sources of information for their articles. And it seems to be working because I have seen CNN and other news outlets point to it. Shame on you CNN.
Only guessing here, but Florian seems to be paid by Microsoft somehow to say these things. He even has written against IBM for the sake of Microsoft crushing IBM's mainframe business.
His blog is misnamed - it should read what his intentions are - Anti-FOSS Blog.
Seriously, half of the stories that get posted on /. now are from trolls, particularly the ones about Android. It's gotten so bad that I really feel guilty that I'm continuing to read slashdot - I think it is wrong of me to continue to give my attention to such a low quality source of news and discussion when surely there are higher quality outlets available and more deserving of our attention.
So, what are those other sites? Has some other site picked up where /. left off? A site where they (or their system) somehow weeds out the lowest quality items before accepting them?
well, there's metafilter, reddit and digg. But those are even worse.
The problem with /. is that being a geek is mainstream and cool, so there are hipsters coming here and trying to act like us. And then they post retarded shit, but what we've seen over the past year is them gaining enough critical mass to break the moderation system.
I'm personally a socialist, but I remember that there was a time when well-researched conservative arguments had a place here; now there's only retarded libertarianism and neoconservatism, though that may have more to do with the collapse of conservatism as an intellectual movement. I remember a time when the highest-rated posts on science stories were from people in the field providing context that the science writers couldn't, now the highest-rated posts are LOL SCIENCE IS HARD.
There's 4chan, which avoids herd mentality and having community leaders and karma and not saying what you mean for the sake of your reputation by making everyone anonymous.
Ultimately, we need to make it so being a geek isn't cool any more. Then the idiots will leave us alone.