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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.
But there is no way that Slashdot will call attention to this in a regular story:
http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=672629
Excerpt:
FAIRFAX, Va., May 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Geeknet, Inc. (Nasdaq:GKNT), the online network for the global geek community, today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the Company and its advisors to explore strategic alternatives with respect to its online media business, including the SourceForge, Slashdot and Freecode websites. The Company and its advisors will evaluate a range of options to maximize shareholder value, including, but not limited to, a potential sale of the Company's online media business, investing additional capital to expand the online media business, or other possible transactions involving the online media business.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120510/MM05555LOGO)
Ken Langone, Chairman and CEO of Geeknet, stated, "After much discussion, our management team and Board of Directors have decided to begin a formal review of our media business to realize the full potential of these valuable assets and maximize shareholder value. With more than 46 million total unique visitors last month, our media properties have a large community of engaged users and we are committed to creating the best online experience for them."
I would like to convert to Gamemakerdom, as I believe it to be preferable to PHP, but I cannot acquire the money for the license. If you buy it for me, I will join the bliss of Gamemakerful Nirvana.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
4chan is staying true to it's roots. Just yesterday they spent the whole night changing a Tea Party website to different incredibly offensive imagery and language after someone posted that the admin password was p9assw0rd. also reddit still had boat loads of cat pictures so there's that.
/. isn't doing too bad compared to ars or tech crunch. the only way i can stand them any more is through an rss feed, and even then just barely.
really though
Third time's the charm? Andover.net bought Slashdot. VA Linux bought Andover.net. Then renamed themselves a few times (VA Linux, VA Research, SourceForge, now Geek.Net). What's another company or another name at this point? Maybe next they can be facebook/linked in for nerds. NerdVirgIn.com.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
re: ars, I've sworn off all Conde Nast properties now. I saw the ars moderators engaging in what I thought was abuse of moderator powers, labeling posts "trolls" and getting them minimized when they probably didn't deserve it. A centralized authority picking and choosing what gets suppressed and what doesn't - not what I want to see in a comment system.
I remember when I could go to ars and read about the latest hardware architecture and why it will be better than the last. That was back in the P4 days. They're just not worth reading anymore.
:(){
I have to agree with Ars, its gotten this kind of political bent now that i find a turn off. I go to a geeky site to read about geeky things, the latest CPUs or GPUs or some cool project like the Pi, not to hear some mods thoughts on the politics of the day.
I'd say the only thing really wrong with /. is our crazys just aren't entertaining anymore...anybody remember Twitter? i miss twit, he could take ANY story and turn it into a convoluted plot involving Gates and the Illuminati, so even though he was batshit as hell he was damned entertaining. Now frankly the best we got is the crazies i call the "FOSSies" because of their Moonie like devotion to all things GPL but they have NO flair or entertainment value. Frankly they are like the trolls you'll get in DM that call everyone faggot or nigger, only they call everyone shill or astroturfer that dares not to believe in their "God". Hell look at this very thread, it wasn't three posts before someone screamed nigger or faggot, in this case the nigger or "shill" comment which was the second post.
So I say if you want to fix /. ban ACs completely. It takes less than 3 minutes to make an account and you can put down your are a member of the Swedish bikini team for all the system cares, so damned near all the ACs now are nigger faggot posts. of course with the fucked up mod system one has to surf in negative mode simply because a well thought out viewpoint will be buried for the first few hours of a post if it goes against groupthink, sure the metamods will eventually correct it but who goes back two or three days to look at stories?
So get rid of ACs, put a system in place that keeps up with who is modding who so we can get rid of "modbombs" by those with a chip on their shoulder, perhaps if they downmod the same person X number of times they are blocked from modpoints or maybe by IP address to keep sockpuppets down, I'm not a coder so I'll leave that to guys who know that stuff, all I know is frankly the nigger faggot shill astroturfer shit ruins flow and its nearly always ACs pulling the shit so a good place to start would be to get rid of them or at least have a setting where one can simply block ALL ACs from view if they are less than say a +2 rating.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Also, I haven't seen Michael Kristopeit in a while. You know, cover in my shadow some more feeb and all that. Completely pathetic, blah blah.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
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
The first step to passing a Turing Test is finding a sufficiently programmable meme. I bet any 50 of you here could build chat bots better than some ten certain memes of which he is one. Seen those posts like :
"you orange must div in the muslim death but becaus yo how babby mrdured?"
Who is possibly posting those and why?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
shit, I wish I could give you an "insightful" for that... Notice in this story how its bumped the whole discussion about Oracle down to the level that very few will really read it?
C|N>K
Or even just getting lucky and getting a first post - I've gotten 2 in the last 2 days without even trying ... just luck.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
They're the new numbers broadcasts. Bob takes a short secret message, compresses and encrypts it, then feeds it through a language generator, or word picker. You can get the bits/word up by adding deliberate misspellings.
At the other end, Alice feeds the sentence through the reverse word picker, then decrypts and uncompresses the message.
If they were wise, they'd make a gramatically correct sentence generator - the whole point is to avoid attracting the attention of eve, so she never even tries to intercept the message.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Exactly FPs don't mean shit, I've probably gotten a dozen in the past 2 years without even trying, just happened on a story that had something I wanted to talk about and got first totally by accident.
But notice how the nigger faggot shill troll AC posts have already blown the flow to hell so that it isn't even about oracle now? THAT is what I'm talking about. We USED to have some pretty interesting arguments over here on various subjects, everything from quantum theories to NTFS VS EXT 3 to what differences a compiler can make on code, quite interesting stuff.
But for those to happen there needs to be a flow and all the AC nigger faggot shill troll crap just turns everything into a flamewar and ruins any chance of a conversation. Now i find myself lurking more and more on other sites, which I shall not name because last time I did i had a FOSSie follow me around for half a year just so they could post "die you fat fucker die" over and over, simply because at those other sites, even when we disagree, there is a conversation on the topic at hand. Just the other day we had a nice one about "at which point does a feature in an OS cease to become helpful but instead becomes bling and fluff"? some believed that it should be judged by the majority, others believed that it didn't matter as long as there was SOME way to turn it off, and a few agreed with me that when it hampers the user or slows down their task it ceases to be helpful.
I really miss having those kinds of conversations here because at least once upon a time we had some pretty bright folks here with many different areas of expertise. You had everything from the little PC shop guys like me to a nice fellow from CERN who was nice enough to explain in layman's terms what the finding of new particles would do to our understanding of physics and its real world value.
But the only way we are gonna have those kinds of conversations again is either everyone ignores the nigger faggot trolls or the system does something about them. Now considering how this Oracle article was so quickly derailed by a single AC I'd argue that we need the system to help in this regard. While my ideas are only a start and i'm sure others can think of more and better ways i think one thing we can ALL agree on is these flow breaking posts that spam this site frankly need to go.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I still think he was some sort of bot. I mean you had every account being "his name plus incremental number" which is the kind of thing a bot does, most humans will at least through SOME variation in there, even if its calling him Mike instead of Michael, and then his posts were always "insert piece of text from original post" followed by as you pointed out a predictable insult which was usually the same ones over and over and sometimes didn't even fit with the sentence piece culled, again smelt like a bot to me.
At least with twitter, while he did have FOSSie disease complete with a minor case of Voldemort (which for those that don't know, its a condition where they can NEVER type Microsoft or MSFT or MS, it always has to be "That other OS" or "M$", for an example please see Robert Pogson over at Linux Insider who has a severe case of Voldemort) he would weave these elaborate delusions around the narrative, for example he once posted that I was "A secret M$ representative in a facility in Redmond dedicated to destroying FOSS and run by Gates" which of course while completely batshit did make for a nice goldeneye style image of a secret lair complete with map of the world and Gates with a white kitteh.
hell we don't even get inventive ASCII art trolls or even a good nigger troll anymore, its all just copypasta of shit that was old when it was first sent over dialup. Now like I said its all similar to those 14 year old Halo players just spamming their favorite curse words, only with shill and troll and astroturfer taking the place of nigger, fag, and cunt. Not only does it totally break flow but frankly its boring as hell, just no spark of creativity or flair at all, kinda sad really.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Is this some sort of meta-humour that I don't understand? Or are you actually comfortable with using the phrase "nigger faggot trolls" to make your point? You've been modded up, so I hope I'm missing something.
But notice how the nigger faggot shill troll AC posts have already blown the flow to hell so that it isn't even about oracle now? THAT
No, actually, I haven't noticed that. But then, I have figured out how to use the comment score modifier system.
I really miss having those kinds of conversations here because at least once upon a time we had some pretty bright folks here with many different areas of expertise.
A lot of them are still here. Sometimes they post anonymously, for reasons you describe.
IMO the only way to fix the problems with this site are as follows, pretty simple plan. 1, eliminate anonymous posting, it's not that hard to get a slashdot ID. 2, don't allow posting from a new ID for a week. 3, unfuck moderation. A moderation system which does not permit you to comment and moderate the same conversation is designed to guarantee mediocrity by ensuring that the people most qualified to moderate, who are also the people most qualifed to comment, only do one or the other. That's why we have metamoderation. Penalize them harder for bad mods if the mod is near their comment, and/or deny moderation of comments beneath their comments in a thread. But Slashdot doesn't WANT to fix moderation; the current moderation system is working fine for the purpose of attracting eyeballs to ad impressions, which is what this site is for today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This FP was supposed to be a "second post", not a first post, to make a point. I waited a bit before hitting submit, but ... which just goes to show that "getting a FP" doesn't require some sort of conspiracy.
I've had a few of those - in the end, they just discredit themselves, same as every time APK or Michael Kristopeit or whoever sees an anonymous comment someone posted against them and thinks it's me they go all nuts for a day, a week or even a month. My reaction? I couldn't care less. Or, I could care less, but I'd really have to work at it. They're just amateurs when it comes to "l'art de la trollerie". More of a threat to themselves than to anyone else.
Most of the people already ignore the posters attacking blacks and LGBTtQq, and the recent spate of "these accounts are paid shills controlled by blah-blah-blah", while they were different enough to be amusing at first, are getting boring (esp. since at least one of the accounts listed is pretty obviously not a paid shill to anyone who's been around for a while, so really, who cares ... :-)
Ultimately, they just discredit themselves, same as RMS did with the larger public when he made his asinine "Dead Steve Jobs" remarks. Maybe he was suffering from "footcheese-in-mouth" disease ... Same as for Oracle, Ellison has pretty much discredited himself with his failed acquisition of Sun, because it really IS a fail.
Ultimately, this will prove to be a "Steve Ballmer Moment" for both Oracle and Ellison. Just another stupid decision that quickly gets forgotten as long as the profits keep rolling in.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.