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Oracle Not Satisfied With Potential $150,000; Goes Against Judge's Warning
bobwrit writes with news about how the monetary damages in the Google v. Oracle case might shake out. On Thursday, Judge Alsup told Oracle the most it could expect for statutory damages was a flat $150,000, a far cry from the $6.1 billion Oracle wanted in 2011, or even the $2.8 million offered by Google as a settlement. However, Oracle still thinks it can go after infringed profits, even though Judge Alsup specifically warned its lawyers they were making a mistake. He said, "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions." Groklaw has a detailed post about today's events.
that lawyers would ignore the advice of the judge and pursue ridiculous sums of money with no basis.
Blatantly abusing the copyright of a full 9 lines of code? When I was teaching introductory CS courses, we would not even accuse students of cheating over 9 identical lines of code.
Palm trees and 8
You have to feel sorry for Larry. He was hoping the Google settlement would pay his America's Cup expenses. $150k will barely cover In-N-Out burgers for the deck hands.
On the one hand, Oracle is giving up a potential maximum of $150,000 in statutory damages -- but in fact it would likely be rather less. On the other hand, if they go for actual damages they can get a ridiculous chunk of money and force Google to turn over all sorts of information on Google's profits if they win on that claim. $150,000 is peanuts to Oracle, so of course they're going to go for the moon.
I suspect they will end up with zero or token damages instead.
RIAA has been awarded millions in their pursuits against individuals who gave some music away. Then we have a company that is blatantly abusing copyright laws and makes tens of billions an year, and they get punished $150,000!
Someone should look into US court system.
This comment is so bloated with troll and stupid ... I believe my brain bled by reading it.
Hey look, another bonch stockpuppet gets the first post with an anti-Google post.
What the fuck are they talking about...? Google pirated a GPLed programming language and used it in Android?!! What damages could Oracle possibly be listing? I wanna know. Show the damages, Oracle.
The Admin and the Engineer
Christ, not this fucking anti-Google troll again. What a worthless repugnant human being. I bet his mother prays he gets hit by a bus, preferably being dragged for thirty miles before being shaken loose, sent careening into a tar pond where, two million years from now, he'll be dug up, recognized as the evil little bastard that he is, and put on display as "Microsoftus uptheassus".
Not only that but the function is so simple that it could have been a complete accident.
Teachers would be more tempted to accuse students of cheating if the school had a bounty of ten million dollars per caught student.
Oracle can go after infringers profits, but in doing so it has to give up on statutory damages.
The Judge has pointed out that they haven't submitted any evidence supporting that Google has any profits associated with the rangeCheck method that is at issue, so this may not be a wise course of action.
Anybody know what the nine lines are?
No sig today...
The rich have pretty close to 100% control over political office and media access. I don't really see the point in differentiating.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Can someone post the 9 infringing lines of code here for us to see?
The engineer has admitted he "probably" copy-pasted the code over.
(Google wasn't exactly running a 'clean room', and Android engineers were also contributing to Sun Java.)
And it shouldn't be 9 lines anyway. Someone doesn't know how to use OR in a boolean expression. Looks like they were trying to get their LOC metric up
I presume the 9 lines in question refer to TimSort.rangeCheck().
Have you ever looked at it? If I had to implement that method, I probably would have done it the exact same way.
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
You're soft. Back when I was teaching CS courses we punished students for copying even 1 line of code.
Not a lot of people passed. Had something to do with "int main() {". Hmmm I wonder if that line has been copyrighted...
- Larry P.
Dude, you were easy. We didn't let them use the same characters. Usually the blatant copying of a "{" nailed them - lots of people seemed to copy that for some reason. The TAs loved it though - grading the assignments was really easy.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
See! it is obvious!
1) $ 6100000000 = 6,1e9
2) $ 2800000 = 2,8e6
3) $ 150000 = 1,5e5
4) ???
base series: 6.1, 2.8, 1.5... 0.91!
power series: 9, 6, 5... 4!
So: 0.91e4 or 9.1e3 or $ 9100
If I were Oracle, I'll be happy with the $ 150.000 offer.
The engineer made was rewriting the sort function for dalvik and contributed it back to java. He was the original author of the java sort function, and reused the java sort range check function since he believed it would all be reintegrated back into the the original java sort.
From WP: /adtk/), commonly referred to as photographic memory,
"Eidetic memory (
is a medical term, popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds, or
objects in memory with extreme precision and in abundant volume."
I would assert(tm) that the class of programmers a company like Google hires
would have Eidetic memory to one degree or another. Fundamental patterns
would stick and be used little different that humming a tune in the shower.
"Double double toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble... " I would further
assert(R) that despite the geekish bent of this community a very large number
could continue for nine line and perhaps a lot more.
If nine lines is worth billions then programming is in trouble as a profession
except for those that live like mushrooms.
AND most importantly these qualities could hold an individual hostage to the
point that an employer that wishes to enforce copyright must continue to
pay these employees full and fair for the reasonable legal length of such copyrights
if they wish to enforce such limitations to this degree.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Barring formatting changes, considering the exception is different depending on the case, there would still need to be nine lines. I do wonder why they did not use the if/else construct though. I seems kind of wasteful to run checks on cases at are no longer possible.
university of phoenix does.
Oracle has a history of going after smaller companies, (Ask me how I know.) and threatening litigation. Smaller companies usually fold, and just pay out. It is cheaper than court. I love that they have decided to go after someone who can afford to say "Let's let the courts decide."
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Because after the exception is thrown we magically just move on to the next if?
But Oracle said this isn't about money! In court no less!
C|N>K
Those checks aren't run because an exception is thrown before that.
Sure, because only Microsoft dislikes Google. Couldn't be Apple, or Yahoo, or the government, or just a private individual.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Not only simple and small. The author of both copies is the same person: Josh Bloch. He wrote the original lines while working for Sun, and repeated the same code while working for Google. So, according the law, Josh Bloch plagiarized himself
MOD THE CHILD UP!
I'll politely disagree -
It's the flood of new accounts posting long sculpted messages on FP and the next 80 of us *are too lazy even to change the topic heading*. They're all signed in. Someone might even be spotting them $50 to get the Paid User preview of future stories so they can craft their long FP's.
Everyone keeps saying "bonch" but that feels to me more like a triple confusion of Set Theory. We definitely have shills now, more this year than any other year. But it's not clear that it's "one user", the next step is "one firm", but I can't believe that exactly one shill firm is ruling the waters - so I bet there's even 3-7 of them going on.
The AC's don't tend to post 12 line FP's with a message.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As calculated by Hollywood accountants right?
Hey! You remembered to post AC this time. Good Job!
okay, I've seen the level of difficulty of a university of phoenix programming class and some of the final projects could be written in under 9 lines of code..
Not only that but the function doesn't work unless there is some sort of zero indexed array whose highest index is equal to the array length.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Then God ran out of money, and sold off the word to Oracle.
"May 12, 2012. In a highly controversial Ohio court filing today, Oracle Corp. demanded damages of 6 quintillion dollars for the unauthorized use of derived literary works, including the sun, sea and sky, and fishes, animals and rocks dated from about 6000 years ago. A tiny chosen sample of humans is also expected to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay for initial court expenses."
Yes, because there's so many powerful poor people and so many powerless rich people.
I was actually thinking the same thing. And you're at -1 flamebait at the moment for speaking it. Oh well I can burn some karma if need be, because this needs to be said.
Not that there is anything wrong with what google did here that I can see, that's not the point at all, but dont you see the double-standard here? When the RIAA sues a private individual for alleged non-commercial copyright infringement, they throw the book at them. When google gets caught here, and I would argue that the 9 lines are de minimis and probably functionally determined and the court is wrong on this, BUT, it appears that is not what the court has decided, so let's go with that. Google infringed copyright, commercially no less! and... the judge is (quite rightly) informing oracle that despite this determination the damage is minimal and therefore their recovery is likely to be a LOT less than their lawyer fees.
Great. But why doesnt it work that way when the RIAA sues somebodies grandmother over a Britney Spears recording? Surely that is an even more minor issue than what google is stuck with here, yet the punishment would likely be far greater. That's all I am saying.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The larger figures quoted ($6.1 billion) refer to the estimated total for all infringement claims. The $150,000 discussed today is for one claim. Of course, the whole case doesn't revolve around the nine lines of code. The big (unresolved) questions are about copyright of the APIs and infringement of patents.
When the RIAA sues, typically they sue over a large number of different copyright protected works; with up to $150,000 in statutory damages available per work without proof of actual damages or infringers profits, they are able to rack up large statutory damage awards this way.
In the charge at issue here, Oracle has gotten a verdict on Google infringing a single work for which they have provided no evidence of actual damages or infringers profits. With up to $150,000 in statutory damages available per work, that gives them $150,000 in statutory damages available.
Its worth noting that the judge isn't informing Oracle that their damages are minimal. He has informed Oracle that they didn't bother presenting evidence on damages or infringers profits from the infringement of the work at issue, and since they didn't do that, there is no evidence in the case on which to find anything other than statutory damages.
The difference here is not a problem with the court system (I'm not saying that the court system does not, in many ways, favor the wealthier litigant, but the difference in the damages available in the two kinds of cases at issue in this subthread isn't actually that kind of issue.)
If there is a problem, its with the way copyright statutory damages work (either in being too generous in the kinds of cases the RIAA brings or being too stingy in the kind of case Oracle has brought.) But its not the the people targetted by the RIAA have succeeded less well in cases where the facts at issue were parallel to those in Oracle v. Google, its that the legal rules provide larger awards without proof of actual damages when lots of works are at issue than when fewer works are at issue.
pretty much any c program can be written in under 9 lines of code. Of course, some of those lines will be very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long ...
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions
This is the direction in which our entire IP system must inevitably move.
If some piece of IP costs $6 billion to develop (using fair accounting), then it should receive $6 billion worth of protection.
The development of 9 lines of code has a marginal cost of a few hundred dollars at most. Therefore, it should receive a corresponding amount of protection.
This is the only approach that feels fair and sensible to most people.
All of the most egregious problems in IP law occur when this one simple rule is violated:
"The protection must be proportional to the investment."
That one simple rule must ultimately become the fundamental doctrine upon which our entire IP system is based.
Until then, we will suffer with continual strife.
Dear Oracle,
I thought we were friends, partners, but lately you've just been all about the money... and getting all bully-boy about it just isn't my style.
It's the end, I don't want to see you any more, you're just not the kind of guy for me any more.
This is goodbye...
Just like copyright infringement is not theft, it's also not plagiarism.
You seem to have a very superficial grasp of modern society. The world must be very easy for you to understand.
WHAT THE WHAT?!
The original author wrote the same utility function twice for two different projects, and this is against the law? How is this even an issue?
I'm befuddled.
I'd be anonymous too if that was the best attempt at being condescending I could come up with.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
So show the code using OR in boolean expressions if it is so simple.
Hey! You still fail at hiding the fact that you're sockpuppeting!
Oracle is out exactly nothing because of Google's infringement. Google's benefit from using that code instead of rolling their own -- and they clearly intended to roll their own -- was less than an hour of a competent programmers time. So the benefit to Google was at most $200.
Copyright law is not intended to protect a few lines of code. It's intended to protect the ownership and merchantability of a significant body of work.
Let's hope they award Oracle what they ACTUALLY LOST by Google's mistake.
Interestingly enough, if you do the math you will see that the poor out number the rich by a large enough amount that the poor are more powerful than the rich. But make sure the poor never actually catch on to that fact or else they might actually use their power.
When I was in university taking an assembly language class, the prof. accused 9 people of cheating (plagiarism). I was one of them. I did the assignment on my own. Someone asked the prof. if it was possible to get the correct result with code that was different. He hummed for a while (there were only about 15 lines of code). Ultimately, he admitted that there was no other correct solution.
In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.
Powerful people aren't all super-rich. There's a lot of politicians (esp. at lower levels: city mayors, for instance) who are really just middle-class. Of course, the corrupt ones try to use their position to vault themselves into the rich classes. The OP has a good point; we should be watching out for these people, to prevent them from succeeding in that quest (where they'll become both rich and more powerful).
I don't know where you live, but where I live and across most of the country the liberals are the ones pushing high density housing. The McMansions were built by the unrestricted greed is good set. There are things liberals don't get right, but this isn't one of them.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This is in Virginia.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
Given the little I understand about coding, there are usually zillions of ways (many convoluted) to come up with the correct results if you don't care about doing it very well, don't care about performance, storage, robustness or readability. You could write a program to write a large subset of the possible programs.
When you do care, the number of solutions goes down.
Might sound silly, but deep inside I have this something that somehow does not make me feel so good anymore to develop in Java. Of course you cannot drop company projects or let's say your MQ broker or Glassfish/Jboss/Tomcat/whatever else with all their deployed apps.
It just makes me think, that my personal/fun projects should be written in something else that does not have shitty news around them and do not really belong to anyone. (C - any flavor with any topping, Python, Perl, whatever fits the purpose ...)
Thanks you, troll of the day. The point is not about how money makes Google but how money it make with infringing code that is near zéro.
which, lets face it, was nothing.. thats right, Oracle actually lost nothing from this, but Google has spent quite a bit of money defending a baseless suit.. perhaps they should award Google costs of the court case times three, as a punishment for Oracle
I have the perfect analogy for this. I'm a sound engineer, and for mixing live shows on digital consoles I can save my mix parameters of a band onto a USB key and recall them onto a same-model digital board in a competing music venue. If I load the mix I was paid to prepare by venue A into the console at competing venue B, does venue A have the right to sue venue B?
The answer is this: if I charged venue B less because I'd already done the work paid for by venue A, then venue A could reasonably claim half the difference. So at best, Google owes Oracle half the cost Sun paid Mr Bloch specifically to write those precious 9 lines of code. Oracle should take the $150,000 and run before they're ordered to pay Google's legal bill, which is inevitable if they push this any farther.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Copyright infringement is not theft or plagiarism, it's tortuous interference. If you provide to people a copyrighted work when they could only otherwise get it legitimately by paying the copyright holder, you're on the hook for the copyright holder's losses. Just because you don't understand piracy doesn't mean you get to pretend it's ok.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Certainly they're not all super rich, particularly at the city/town level. However, even there they tent to be quite upper middle class. Far enough that the lower class sees them as rich. Lets just say that for them, total blow out economic disaster means they are forced to retire into a modest but comfortable middle class existence, not end up on welfare like much of the middle class would.
That is, their worst case is what many if not most aspire to.
It is reasonable to say though that they tend to have the ear and patronage of the rich and most of their resources. Their financial realities track the rich more closely than the rest of us.
All that said, they're not the powerful ones, they're the well rewarded instruments of other's power.
When you write a novel you own the copyright to the entire work. Even large portions of it can not be copied without your consent. But if you start extorting people for copying "I am", the original language construct you invented, then you, the copyright owner, are stealing. There are limits.
No it isn't.
- An IllegalArgumentException is thrown if the toIndex parameter less than the fromIndex parameter.
- An ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException indicating that fromIndex is the problematic parameter is thrown when the fromIndex is less than 0
- An ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException indicating that toIndex is the problematic parameter is thrown when the toIndex is bigger than the array length
Three different cases, three different problems that need to be reported back in three different exceptions.
Of course if someone calls has ALL those three wrong (for example by passing -7 as fromIndex and -10 as toIndex for an array from 0 to 4 ) then only the first is raised and not the two other problems.
And while completely understanding the Java code, I had problems parsing the English that your (jimshatt's) reply was already to a post mentioning the "wastefulness" of the other checks, so that the exception is OF COURSE already "thrown before that.", so you are perfectly correct. Sorry. ;-P
If Google is found guilty of copyright infringement and/or patent infringement, then it is backward looking to focus on the amount of money that Oracle may win in damages and it is forward looking to focus on a permanent injunction barring Google from continuin to exploit Oracle's copyrights and/or patents without first obtaining licenses.
To be sure, Oracle is forward looking.
Which way are you looking?
Well, that's plausible. Virginia is a red state, so you don't have a ton of liberals to begin with, and it's also a more rural state, so you don't have the more typical urban liberals.
So I'll give you 2 things to consider:
1) Liberals are broadly anti-sprawl. Enough so that there have actually been incidences of extremists on the left setting fire to the kinds of developments that bother you.
2) I don't know anything about Virginia politics, but given how red Virginia is, the right/Republicans ought to have had sufficient legislative control to prevent the McMansions situation. That they didn't indicates a problem either in competence or in will.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
If GKNT chooses option 'A' (sell the "online media properties", presumably so they can stick to their core mission of selling tech-themed coffee cups and t-shirts), here is what I've come up:
I'm sure the staff at /. are hoping that Tim O'Reilly will step in as a white knight.
Crazy like a fox Michael Robertson of "Lindows" fame, possibly.
There's no hope that Yahoo or Google will, as they might have about eight years ago before the financial crash. They both have plenty of issues of their own to worry about.
The usual angel suspects Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, Charles Simonyi etc. wouldn't be interested... not futuristic enough for them.
The guy at Techdirt would love to but he can't afford it.
Some clueless European outfit that nobody in the US has heard of, is always a possibility.
I think one issue that a potential buyer would have, is the degree to which /. has become the pro-piracy, anti-RIAA/MPAA/BSA site. We see this literally every day, as an article on the piracy issue goes up and hundreds of posters all fall on one side of the issue, and get +5 mods. Any poster on the other side gets modded down. This would be regarded as unfriendly to a business based on digital IP.
http://notavailablein.ca/2012/05/googles-infringement-against-oracle-9-lines-of-code/
Palm trees and 8
You fuckers were sweethearts. In my day we'd beat students black and blue if their encoded assignments used the same bits! Made them tough! And stupid! Just the way we liked 'em.
The rich have pretty close to 100% control over political office and media access. I don't really see the point in differentiating.
The problem with remarks like this is that when you try to nail down who "the rich" are, they inevitably become "people who run everything", so it's effectively a tautology. So there's some vast conspiracy of people "controlling" everything, except you can never find any ultimate point to it. Money? They're already rich and have more money than any of them need. Power? They already have it all, and further, what are they supposedly *doing* with it?
It's a popular notion, but total bullshit.
And you can disprove it, yourself, by simply contacting your representative. They really are very approachable and really do listen to constituents. Find an issue you're concerned about, write a letter to your representative or senator, or get them on the phone. It's that simple. If you're too lazy to do that, fine, but don't cry about how awful your government is.
I live in Tempe, Arizona, a city of 161,000 in the Phoenix metro area. We're currently having a (very nasty) mayoral race. One of the candidates, Mark Mitchell, has been on the city council for 10 years, and is the son of a one-term US Congressman, Harry Mitchell. His current occupation is part-time carpet salesman. That's not exactly something rich people do. I once saw his father shopping at the local Fry's grocery store (which is one of the cheaper stores around here; it's a little higher-class than Food City (where everything is in Spanish), but it's not as nice as Albertson's, and certainly not at the level of AJ's Fine Foods or Whole Foods. Of course, Harry (the senior) was only a Congressman for a single term, so maybe you have to be in there a while to get rich from your connections. Anyway, the point is, from what I can tell, the city councilpeople here aren't rich people. I'm not sure about the former mayors. However, many political positions like this can and are used as stepping-stones to higher positions, where you can have the ear and patronage of even richer people and their resources as you say. I'm quite sure that's Mark Mitchell's goal in this. His whole campaign is mostly about pushing for some stupid giant conference center downtown (at taxpayer expense of course), something we have absolutely no need for, and he was instrumental in getting our nice little Mill Avenue (a street next to the university that used to be full of small, quaint businesses) ruined by pushing out the small mom-n-pop shops and replacing them with big corporate chain stores from the malls, which of course all went out of business when the economy crashed leaving the street a disaster, plus ruining the parking situation by building expensive underground parking and replacing the free parking lots with giant condo hi-rises which are all unfinished and sitting empty. The guy's all about bringing in big businesses to supposedly increase the tax base, and of course his own power; a very typical Democrat. (For some reason, many people think Democrats are for the small guy, but it's total BS, they're just as much for big business as the Republicans.)
Just looked at the code : that's function isn't even needed , Java will throw an IndexOutOfBoundsException, you could just catch that and handle it.
You might as well copyright a for each loop.
Slipping shoelaces ?
from his official bio:
Mitchell is a native of Tempe where he is a member of the Kiwanis Club of Tempe, Tempe Diablos, Tempe Leadership Class XV, Tempe Sister Cities, Tempe Impact Education Foundation, Tempe YMCA and a Board member of East Valley Partnership. Mitchell is currently on the Board of Directors for the National League of Cities (NLC), is the past Chair of the NLC City Futures Community and Regional Development Panel and a Board member for the NLC University Community Council. Mitchell is the past Chair of the University Community Council. Mitchell serves as the Vice President for the Executive Committee for the Arizona League of Cities and Towns.
Think about it, he has a family. If he could support them AND a political campaign on the income of a part-time carpet salesman, he'd have to have a metric assload of cash socked away. That doesn't make him super rich, but he's not exactly poor.
Can larry code from Oracle?
If he could, then he might see how crap his company is.
hehehhe
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
That's what they do in other countries. Well some of them. It doesn't matter exactly how many, it's enough that it's totally un-American. Soviet Russia is un-American.
tl;dr: loser pays = commienissum.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Soft bastards. We had to invent our own language.
And that was in the second week of the first term.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From a purely logical point of view, you're 100% correct. If Socrates is a carrot and all lobsters are mortal, we cannot deduce one way or the other whether Plato is an alcoholic.
However draw me a Venn diagram with the rich people in red, the politicians in green, and the media barons in blue.
Assuming additive mixing, what do you think the ratio of white to primary colours and primary to secondary will be?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You actually read that fucking wall of text? You get marks for effort, that's for sure.
So you're a little dick?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because the poor only have power in large numbers, the corruption is naturally averaged out. It also suffers great deals of inertia and communications overhead that the power of a single rich and powerful person doesn't have to deal with.
The divisibility of a collective also means that in a power struggle, individuals stand to suffer far greater consequences than individuals with significant wealth and power.
Was that entire bastard last paragraph one unholy run-on sentence of doom?
Fucking hell, it was. Die soon, but not quickly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In Soviet Russia, meme programs you!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Are you kidding? What they're doing with it is ensuring maintenance on the status quo where possible, and gradually shifting the wealth created by our society even more into their control in order to reduce social mobility.
I contact my representative regularly. They don't respond. I try to get people to vote them out of office. It isn't working. I'm not capable of being persuasive enough to achieve the kind of change we need.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
May the ghosts of Shakespeare, Dryden, Joyce, Donne, Swift & Shaw form a rota to rise from their rest and ensure you never find any. Stop it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You had languages!? Oh, we used to DREAM about having languages!
We had to bash our head into a sharp metal spike until the right bits were randomly generated, or we passed out from blood loss.
And after that, for the failed students, the professor would rip their skin off and make punch cards from it!
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Use your preferred search engine and see if you can find such a law. Alternatively, find a company that has made charitable donations where the officers have been prosecuted for it.
One slight problem: knowing in advance what the result will be. That would apply to lots of other things too - launching a new product, open (or closing) a factory.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
To be more specific, this was Northern VA, Prince William County to be exact.
McMansions are very profitable, so thats mostly what developers are interested in when they have smaller tracts of land. So thats what got built all over the rest of the country.
This was pretty much that last major development in the county. At first, everyone was against it because of all the other developments. People on both side just wanted it done. But the population was booming and something had to be done. So it very quickly turned into the conservatives fighting for a free market vs the liberals fighting sprawl under the guise of protecting the environment.
Lack of will power could explain it, to be honest though, I think no one really gave a damn as far as planning intelligently. Just mindless short sighted politics(on both sides) that goes on in this country all the time.
I wish they would set fire to it, it's gonna be a mess after everything gets bulldozed after all the foreclosures.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
I forgot to mention Northern VA is a lot more liberal than the rest of the state. It's almost a completely different state.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
Yeah, sadly I'd have to agree with the shortsightedness on both sides. As much as I dislike the right's ideas, the left's leadership is useless for actually trying to get anything done. Depressingly, the right seems to have the more capable leaders in this generation (not that any of them are superb, but the right's seem stronger).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The original poster is a bit confused by this. The 9 line is applies to Oracle's copywrite portion of the lawsuit. Nothing has been decided on the patient argument which goes to trial next.
Normally i don't respond after the first day but since you seem to be confused and have missed the previous post I will explain. if you have ever played DM in a game that allows chat you quickly find that there are trolls that love to spam the words nigger and faggot to the point of absurdity. It doesn't matter what is going on in game, or what is done or isn't, because no matter what you WILL hear constant strings of profanity with either of those two words or both in the sentence.
Since you missed the earlier post I was using this behavior as a metaphor with what we are currently seeing on Slashdot, where it doesn't matter what the topic is, whether the person is upmodded or down, because within the first 5 post you WILL get the /. equivalent of those DM players with their "nigger faggot" garbage only in the case of /. it is the "shill astroturfer' posts which just break the flow and will derail the conversation just as having some 14 year old screaming "you damned nigger faggot!" can break the gameflow and ruin what was otherwise an enjoyable afternoon of game play.
So i hope that clears things up, its not a slur against any race or sexual preference but just an easy to understand (at least for those of us who DM) metaphor for derailing something with pointless insults. Lets face it, considering how damned obvious corporate paid shills and astroturfers are, with their using key talking points like "synergy' or "vertical integration" or other marketing drone buzzwords there really is NO point in the constant screaming of those words yet in article after article that is EXACTLY what one gets here now. Frankly its no wonder readership is going down because again to use a game analogy its like those MP games that do nothing to discourage wall hacks or aimbots, the BS quickly reaches a point most would rather be elsewhere than deal with the shit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are you kidding? What they're doing with it is ensuring maintenance on the status quo where possible, and gradually shifting the wealth created by our society even more into their control in order to reduce social mobility.
Reduce social mobility, what is this, neo-feudalism? How? And to what end? When you're making less sense than the plot of the X-Files, you're doing it wrong.
I contact my representative regularly. They don't respond.
Really, they don't even answer the phone?
I try to get people to vote them out of office. It isn't working. I'm not capable of being persuasive enough to achieve the kind of change we need.
Two problems: the point isn't to get people out of office, it's to get your guy into office. That means you first need to have your guy. Second, you're confusing what "you want" with what "we need." To be persuasive, you have to be honest and admit that you've got an agenda like everyone else. Until you do that, you can't find common interest with others and put a movement together.
Re: social mobility:
how: by reducing the distribution of the wealth production of the country. The statistics don't lie, it has happened.
why: to reduce the capability of the lower classes to disrupt their wealth/control in the short or long term.
And indeed, my representative does not answer the phone. She has glad handers to do it for her.
And yes, obviously I'm trying to get someone else elected when I say I'm trying to get her out. And of course I have an agenda, everyone does, that's the very definition of politics. I happen to believe, earnestly, that my goals align better with the interests of the vast majority of the population.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That's why my card punch used triangles!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Perhaps because it is a troll? The article is about a research paper trying to make the point that search results should be considered free speech, what does that have to do with antitrust?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So your best example as to Liberal meddling in the economy is the fact that Liberals where you are insisted that they live in McMansions instead of apartments, and they hate mass transit? Where do the conservatives live, in eco-friendly apartments with plenty of bus service? Also why did a bunch of liberals move in and not conservatives? Was there some conservative ethnic cleansing driving them in from somewhere else or something?
You make far too many assumptions for me to even try to discuss anything with you.
Where you got ethnic cleansing from, that this was my best example, that liberals wanted to live in a certain place, etc is all beyond me and I'm sure anyone else.
Are you even old enough to vote?
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
What you said was true until you used the word 'piracy' which is loaded and invalid.
"Copyright Infringement" is all it is, piracy is something else entirely that implies theft of a physical item that cannot be duplicated for free (and often death of the original owner).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Or its possible that your opinion is in the minority and shouldn't win out in a democracy.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Absolutely. There is a critical difference between being right and being popular.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Democracy has little to do with the first :)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.
Old thread I know.. but wanted to weigh in here all the same.
The poor and the middle class are their own worst enemies. Do you know why? Because when monied interests air advertising, TV interviews, and press releases to try and convince everyone else to vote their way, the average person (who is not wealthy) just eats that shit up. You know what the average person does not do, not even when the issue is important to them? They don't inform themselves. They don't take a hard look at who benefits from the suggested action, what the consequences could be, or whether other societies which did similar things lived to regret it. They think that's someone else's job.
In the Information Age they have absolutely no excuse for this. You don't even have to drive to your library anymore. It's as though they sincerely believe that political agendas and monied interests are going to be completely honest with them and truthfully tell them all about the downsides of their proposals. They do not seem to comprehend that advertising is the most biased information source imaginable, and that not all advertising is clearly labelled as such. Much of it tries to pass for legitimate news.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein