Want to know the best way to raise responsible kids? It's easy!
If I was 20 years younger, I'm sure I'd be
responding something like this: BWAH HA HA HA
HA! LOL!! ROTFLMAO!!
But I'm not. I'm 40, and a parent. So
let me instead say that you may get a different
perspective once you have children yourself.
Just to prepare you, let me state for the record
that raising kids in any kind of manner is not easy; raising responsible ones even less so.
There's also no magical formula that will work
for every child in every situation. For every
kid who just needs to be treated like an adult
to get motivated to act that way, there is another
who - searching for limits and having never been given them - will go out and literally
kill themselves unless prevented from doing so.
Contrary to the opinion of slashdot kiddies
everywhere, must parenting failures I've seen
are the result of parents not establishing
boundaries of acceptable behavior for their
children, leaving them to learn them the hard
way when they get out into real life. Children even as young as age 1 search for limits
and instinctually test those limits in a loving environment. Parents do their children no end
of harm allowing themselves to be run over
roughshod.
Oh, and by the way, monitoring your kids from
home and the internet is called "strict parenting"; if it's pathologial, it might be called
"overprotective parenting". By no means is it
"spoiling". Spoiling is when you let your
teenager do whatever the hell he or she wants,
assuming they're wise enough to avoid
behaviors that can result in
life-altering consequences.
I noticed you go a number of clueless answers
to your question, so I decided I might as well
give you a more informative reply.
"Price dumping" is a term used largely to describe
selling below costs in an export market. A corportation is encouraged to export at a
price below the costs of production, which the corporation's government then makes up for by
giving them money, below market access to
materials, or other consideration. Governments
typically engage in this kind of market manipulation in emerging industries which have
1] significant barriers to entry, 2] are
lucrative, and 3] will result in significant
numbers of high paying jobs.
Dumping is not illegal, per se. It is a government backed practice. However it does
piss off other countries, and will typically
cause them to raise tarrifs.
Selling below cost is not illegal.
It happens all the time. Every time
you see a going out of business sale, or
even a regular "ultra discount" sale, the
company in question is probably selling
below cost. All they want is some money
back on the product they weren't able to
move within a certain period of time.
Even attempting to "buy market share", which
is what Amazon was doing, is not illegal.
The only case where the law gets involved at
all is with what is called "Predatory Pricing".
This is where a big player attempts to
establish a monopoly position by driving out
the competition in order to later raise prices
back up. By selectively engaging in price-wars
with less deep pocketed competition, large
owners can establish prices at a higher level
than would otherwise be. This is illegal.
There is also a provision against using market
power to stifle technologies that might cause
you to loose a monopoly you might have.
This is what Microsoft ran afoul of.
Funny, they didn't include my first thought on
what might be causing it: (i) our understanding
of the heleopause is incorrect.
It may be that the heleosheath is not a hard
boundary, but rather has a mix of both solar winds and interstellar gasses for a much wider region than is presently thought. In other words, it could be that there is no true heleopause at all. If that was the case, our little space probes could have been heading "upwind" against largely stagnant gasses for some time now, slowing them.
Of course I have absolutely no evidence for this,
but it is a missing hypothesis.
The simple fact is that although the startup costs for a web paper are cheaper than
the equivalent print version, there are still significant costs.
Uhhhh.... No.
You have it almost diametrically the opposite
of the way it really is. Startup costs for
papers is actually pretty low. You can outsource
the printing of a specialty paper without
much cost. Visit any street corner in a large
city and/or college town, and you'll see papers given away for free
that follow this model. They typically are left
leaning, and filled with personals, and ads for
music acts coming into town.
Unfortunately this doesn't scale very well.
The costs per-paper remain about the same,
whereas advertisers tend to be interested only
in the local audience - for obvious reasons.
Even finding a qualified systems administrator (and knowing who is qualified
and who is not) is often simply too hard a
task for many non-technical people.
However, if you manage to do it, the costs
per viewer drop dramatically. It costs you
no more to service 10,000 page views a day
than it does 1,000 or 100. You're site may
be a bit less responsive, but you're saving
huge amounts of money per viewer.
The essential problem is still the same
however. Most specialty advertising tends
to be local. Most advertisers couldn't care
one whit about how many New Zealanders who
are reading their ads if their product isn't
available in New Zealand.
However, global advertisers tend to like T.V.
because that has an even lower price-per-view.
Plus, the audio-visual TV experience tends to
allow for ad campaigns based on emotional manipulation. Highly priced overpolished
cars streaming through maple leaves on some
country road with an announcer intoning
"The new Midlifecrisisia - with 780 horses under
it's massive phallic shaped hood" (or something
like that) is more likely to get someone
to buy the car than any dull page view.
They put that in on purpose, so I doubt
they're going to take it out again.
Don't ask me what the justification for
it is. I'm sure they've got some excuse.
For the on-topic portion of this comment,
let me suggest that there is really no reason
to do a pure text based GUI anymore.
Text based GUIs were invented largely because
of limitations in the hardware, which have all
must disappeared. These days, the term "Glass TTY" has about
as much pertenence as "Horseless Carrage".
Just about ever normal GUI is still able to do
text, so if you want a "text only" application, you certainly can get the same
functionality, plus benefit from better
tools cross-platform functionality, etc.
As far as joq is concerned, I find that browsing
at +1 manages to filter out most of the crap
pretty well. I wish moderators would spend
their time modding up +1 posts to +2 instead
of modding down +0 posts to -1, but there isn't
much anyone can do about that. It's their
mod points after all.
Trolls will be trolls. Ignore them (or read
them at -1 if that amuses you). But don't
take it seriously.
You can make a few offers "too good
to refuse", but as the demise of
internet companies have recently showed
us, you can't build a business model around it.
I guarantee you that no amount of marketing
push from Microsoft will eliminate Linux's inherent advantages: flexibility and price.
Furthermore, as Linux becomes an ever more
acceptable network platform, you will begin
to see ISVs start to build products specifically
for it. These ISVs can easily carve out
profitable niches - becoming Linux evanglists - and can be run by some of the most
unlikely people, even so called "Microsoft villains".
The major stumbling block with building
a space elevator has nothing to do with
whether it is theoretically possible
to build one, but rather with economics.
Let us assume, for the purposes of illustration,
that all this technology was totally proven
and risk-free. We have carbon tube launch
vehicles and a potential carbon tube elevator.
I will blithely also make up a few more numbers:
Counting sustaining costs, an ultra-light ultra-strong space elevator
trip costs only 1/4 that of a new ultra-light ultra-strong space vehicle,
and it takes a mere 100,000 flights to build
the elevator.
My assumptions are probably wildly optimistic,
but the conclusion you reach still shows
why it won't be done: You break even
when you reach (merely) your 125,000th trip into space.
Even the most wide eyed space enthusiast would
have trouble justifying such demand for space
travel.
The "signal" in this case comes from the
one time agreement between Alice and Bob
over a single data set.
However this is not a generalized algorithm
for hiding information in an arbitrarily
large number of examples - which is what I
was talking about. Maybe I should have
made that clearer.
I don't have time (or perhaps the ability)
to deliver you a formal proof, but the outline
of it would be something like this: Assuming
an undetectable algorithm did exist, Alice
would have an Algorithm A that placed a
signal in white noise that resulted in
pure white noise (possible) and Bob would
have an Algorithm A' that took the white noise
and extracted the original signal from it (impossible - white noise contains no information).
Q.E.D.
Now of course things get immeasurably more
complex when we add the factors of
hiding signal in signal,
rubustness in compression, and the P/NP
completeness of the problem of trying to
locate the hidden signal. But based on
my conserable experience in CODECs, I can tell you there are precious
few ways to hide watermarks that will survive
a DCT, and they're all pretty obvious.
From a mathematical perspective, white
noise is not information. Steganography
- hope I spelled it right this time - is
the attempt to hide a signal. All your counter-example does is increase the noise floor.
Something I see in the Linux community over
and over again is the overestimation of the
power of marketing, and the underestimation
of the intelligence of consumers. This
article is a classic example of it.
By saying Microsoft marketing is to be
feared, the Linux bigots are implicitly criticizing Microsoft's technology.
I assure you that the latter - while not
focused on the same things Linux is - is
quite formidable.
People do not choose Microsoft over Linux (or
vice versa) due to marketing. They choose it
due to hard-nosed business considerations - cost of
licensing, cost of ownership, support costs, training costs, documentation, features and uniformity of available applications, etc., etc.
Based on the above, it is easy to see why
Microsoft has (and probably will always have)
a dominant position on the desktop. Ms.
Secretary values the ability to drag-and-drop
her bosses' excell-based expense report into
her email to send off to finance, than she ever
will having an elegant Samba configuration.
Linux will (due to it's many different subcommunities) never be able
to create a consistent unified user interface -
among other things.
On the other hand, Linux is obviously better for
the network server type tasks it grew up doing.
Microsoft products will never be as
flexible as Linux, nor free.
Stenography is just another form of encryption,
and a weak one at that. The primary reason is
simple - it is security through obscurity.
It is mathematically impossible to hide information in another medium that cannot be
figured out. The signal carrying the second data stream
will always be recongnizable. Figuring out algorithms robust enough to survive Lossy compression is - to
an applied mathemitician - nearly trivial.
Don't believe me? The SDMI "challenge", such as
it was, was cracked almost immediately by
a simple signal analysis.
That is why, in America, you can sue when you burn yourself with coffee.
You are referring to the case of Stella Liebeck, the New Mexico grandmother who ordered coffee from a McDonald's drive-thru window. In the parking lot, with her grandson behind the
wheel of the stationary car, Liebeck opened the lid of her coffee to add cream and sugar and inadvertently spilled hot coffee on her lap. The coffee--maintained at a scalding 180F-190F because
customers supposedly "like it hot"--caused severe third-degree burns to Liebeck's groin, inner thighs and buttocks. She spent seven days in the hospital and was treated with skin grafts.
Initially, Ms. Liebeck only wanted payment for her medical bills, but McDonald's refused to even negotiate with her. Consequently, she contacted an attorney who had settled another coffee burn
case with McDonald's. Liebeck sued, and in the course of trial in August 1994, company documents revealed that "in the past decade McDonald's had received at least 700 reports of coffee
burns ranging from mild to third-degree, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000," wrote Andrea Gerlin in the Wall Street Journal (9/1/94).
Despite knowledge of the hazard, company officials refused to warn its customers. "There are more serious dangers in restaurants," said one McDonald's official. And given the 1 billion cups of coffee sold annually, McDonald's considered the number of burn complaints to be "statistically insignificant."
After hearing such testimony, the jurors found McDonald's liable and awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages. The jurors deducted $40,000 for contributory negligence on Liebeck's part.
Also, given McDonald's conduct, the jury awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages, which was equal to two days' worth of the company's coffee sales.
Later, the punitive damage award was reduced by the judge to $480,000 (Reuters, 9/14/94). While awaiting appeal, the parties settled for an undisclosed amount (Reuters, 12/1/94).
As a result of the lawsuit, McDonalds now sets
it's coffee temperature to 120 degrees - a temperature it's rivals Burker King and Wendys
had voluntarily put in place when the incident
occurred (due to customer complaints).
Now you may still disagree with the outcome of
this case, but I hope that you can at least see
that it was based on legal principals (paraphrased: don't give your customers dangerous
products likely to cause accidents), rather
than trying to blame an entire industry for
the actions of people committing a felony.
Remember that in America, everyone has identical
access to redress of grievances. That means:
1] You can file a suit about anything or nothing.
2] If it IS about nothing, you'll be thrown out on your ear.
This is not a real lawsuit. It is not based
on any law, statute, legal doctrine, or precident.
The lawyer involved is simply using the legal
system to try to make political waves.
In short:
The Lawsuit Is A Troll Intended For the Media.
Slashdot bit, as did you. I'm sure a lot of
radio talkshow hosts will be using it as a
topic for their rants. This kind of pseudo-story is their
bread and butter.
Having 10 patents myself, I know a little about
this business.
"There goes their patent" is actually a better
phrasing of it. You can patent anything unique you
invent - the trick is to patent something valuable - e.g. something
the market actually wants.
RAMBUS went on this strategy of suing SDRAM makers
because their own technology turned out to be
inferior, offering massively higher price with no matching performance gain.
If RAMBUS is unable to enforce their patent
against SDRAM, then the patent is - from a business standpoint - worthless. All it could be used for is preventing unauthorized copies
of RAMBUS memory, which most customers don't want anyway.
Actually, this is one of the major reasons why liberal states
do so well in the national economy. In conservative states like Texas, the
law is set up to protect entrenched corporate interests. Not only is a non-compete strongly enforcable, but even things you invent on your own time with
your own money is considered property of your
employer. In the long run this discourages innovation - which hurts their economy
far more than liberal states' high taxes.
Other generations told war stories or bragged about their sexual exploits.
Oh, I don't know about that, Mr. Katz. We old
fogeys had our games too...
My favorite was one called "strip poker".
Re:EULA enforcability is a fiction...
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
That means I don't have to distribute the source code to modifications I make to GPLed software when I distribute the
binaries, right?
Actually, wrong.
Copyleft isn't an EULA.
Rather, the terms of
distribution (which is all that Copyleft covers) is
the consideration you are providing - you're not
paying for it after all.
Further, since you must look at the code before you can use it in ways the Copyleft
prohibits, you are free to reject the terms
as you see fit.
You certainly would have an argument if the
Copyleft contained restrictions on simple
terms of Use, since you might not be
exposed to those terms before you used it.
But it is flat out impossible for you to
modify any software covered by the GNU public
license without being made aware of the
restrictions on distributing modified versions.
That, by the way, is why the GNU public license
is ever so redundantly repeated over each and
every file it covers. That way, no one can
say "I modified this file, but there was
nothing in it that said I couldn't keep the
modification to myself when I distributed the binary".
EULA enforcability is a fiction...
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 5
EULAs, like old deed stiplations from the 50s
that restrict the race that owners can
supposedly can sell to, are in all non-UICTA
states, nothing but legal fiction.
One of the most fundimental tenets of contract
law is that you must be aware of the terms of
a contract before you commit to it. EULAs do
not appear until after sale, and thus are
entirely invalid, whether you click "I agree"
or not.
Some more creative laywers have tried to get
around the law by saying "If you don't agree,
you can return the product for a full refund".
However, even if you *could* return the product this way (which you typically can't),
this would not be enforcable. You paid your
money, the store gave you the product. That was the contract.
The only part of EULAs that are enforcable
are terms that are generally against the law
anyway - like copyright violations. But those
are enforcable with or without EULAs.
90% of civil contract enforcement is based
on intimidation and taking advantage of legal ignorance.
Of course nobody is going to read this, since
typical slashdot kiddies just look at the most
recent articles, but anyway...
This is a good decision. It gives a little
teeth back into the examination process, which
relatively recently has been eroded to the point
of a joke. Now, at least, if you submit a patent that the examiner initially rejects because it is overly broad, that initial decision will stick - even if you subsequently narrow the scope to get
the application approved.
Even though I have about a dozen patent and patents pending, I can't help but believe this
is a good thing, and will promote innovation.
I only hope the Supreme Court doesn't choose
to overturn this one.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was 20 years younger, I'm sure I'd be responding something like this: BWAH HA HA HA HA! LOL!! ROTFLMAO!!
But I'm not. I'm 40, and a parent. So let me instead say that you may get a different perspective once you have children yourself.
Just to prepare you, let me state for the record that raising kids in any kind of manner is not easy; raising responsible ones even less so.
There's also no magical formula that will work for every child in every situation. For every kid who just needs to be treated like an adult to get motivated to act that way, there is another who - searching for limits and having never been given them - will go out and literally kill themselves unless prevented from doing so.
Contrary to the opinion of slashdot kiddies everywhere, must parenting failures I've seen are the result of parents not establishing boundaries of acceptable behavior for their children, leaving them to learn them the hard way when they get out into real life. Children even as young as age 1 search for limits and instinctually test those limits in a loving environment. Parents do their children no end of harm allowing themselves to be run over roughshod.
Oh, and by the way, monitoring your kids from home and the internet is called "strict parenting"; if it's pathologial, it might be called "overprotective parenting". By no means is it "spoiling". Spoiling is when you let your teenager do whatever the hell he or she wants, assuming they're wise enough to avoid behaviors that can result in life-altering consequences.
I noticed you go a number of clueless answers to your question, so I decided I might as well give you a more informative reply.
"Price dumping" is a term used largely to describe selling below costs in an export market. A corportation is encouraged to export at a price below the costs of production, which the corporation's government then makes up for by giving them money, below market access to materials, or other consideration. Governments typically engage in this kind of market manipulation in emerging industries which have 1] significant barriers to entry, 2] are lucrative, and 3] will result in significant numbers of high paying jobs.
Dumping is not illegal, per se. It is a government backed practice. However it does piss off other countries, and will typically cause them to raise tarrifs.
Selling below cost is not illegal. It happens all the time. Every time you see a going out of business sale, or even a regular "ultra discount" sale, the company in question is probably selling below cost. All they want is some money back on the product they weren't able to move within a certain period of time.
Even attempting to "buy market share", which is what Amazon was doing, is not illegal.
The only case where the law gets involved at all is with what is called "Predatory Pricing". This is where a big player attempts to establish a monopoly position by driving out the competition in order to later raise prices back up. By selectively engaging in price-wars with less deep pocketed competition, large owners can establish prices at a higher level than would otherwise be. This is illegal.
There is also a provision against using market power to stifle technologies that might cause you to loose a monopoly you might have. This is what Microsoft ran afoul of.
In some games, like CounterStrike, weapons have the ability to penetrate thin walls. Kind of like reality, actually.
Some people lay down suppression fire; this is expected. However, if you use a wall hack, you can easily kill numerous enemies this way.
So no, it isn't just for campers.
Funny, they didn't include my first thought on what might be causing it: (i) our understanding of the heleopause is incorrect.
It may be that the heleosheath is not a hard boundary, but rather has a mix of both solar winds and interstellar gasses for a much wider region than is presently thought. In other words, it could be that there is no true heleopause at all. If that was the case, our little space probes could have been heading "upwind" against largely stagnant gasses for some time now, slowing them.
Of course I have absolutely no evidence for this, but it is a missing hypothesis.
It was close to being slashdotted. Still, I found a unique banner ad, which read:
Boy, those security focus people sure do take their security seriously!
Uhhhh.... No.
You have it almost diametrically the opposite of the way it really is. Startup costs for papers is actually pretty low. You can outsource the printing of a specialty paper without much cost. Visit any street corner in a large city and/or college town, and you'll see papers given away for free that follow this model. They typically are left leaning, and filled with personals, and ads for music acts coming into town.
Unfortunately this doesn't scale very well. The costs per-paper remain about the same, whereas advertisers tend to be interested only in the local audience - for obvious reasons.
Even finding a qualified systems administrator (and knowing who is qualified and who is not) is often simply too hard a task for many non-technical people. However, if you manage to do it, the costs per viewer drop dramatically. It costs you no more to service 10,000 page views a day than it does 1,000 or 100. You're site may be a bit less responsive, but you're saving huge amounts of money per viewer.
The essential problem is still the same however. Most specialty advertising tends to be local. Most advertisers couldn't care one whit about how many New Zealanders who are reading their ads if their product isn't available in New Zealand.
However, global advertisers tend to like T.V. because that has an even lower price-per-view. Plus, the audio-visual TV experience tends to allow for ad campaigns based on emotional manipulation. Highly priced overpolished cars streaming through maple leaves on some country road with an announcer intoning "The new Midlifecrisisia - with 780 horses under it's massive phallic shaped hood" (or something like that) is more likely to get someone to buy the car than any dull page view.
That's why webzines are in trouble.
They put that in on purpose, so I doubt they're going to take it out again. Don't ask me what the justification for it is. I'm sure they've got some excuse.
For the on-topic portion of this comment, let me suggest that there is really no reason to do a pure text based GUI anymore. Text based GUIs were invented largely because of limitations in the hardware, which have all must disappeared. These days, the term "Glass TTY" has about as much pertenence as "Horseless Carrage".
Just about ever normal GUI is still able to do text, so if you want a "text only" application, you certainly can get the same functionality, plus benefit from better tools cross-platform functionality, etc.
As far as joq is concerned, I find that browsing at +1 manages to filter out most of the crap pretty well. I wish moderators would spend their time modding up +1 posts to +2 instead of modding down +0 posts to -1, but there isn't much anyone can do about that. It's their mod points after all.
Trolls will be trolls. Ignore them (or read them at -1 if that amuses you). But don't take it seriously.
Not at all. The cheaters, having both low coding skills and morals, but an impressive sounding degree, are doomed to become senior managers and CEOs.
Don't you read Dilbert at all? I assure you it wouldn't be as funny if it wasn't mostly true.
You can make a few offers "too good to refuse", but as the demise of internet companies have recently showed us, you can't build a business model around it.
I guarantee you that no amount of marketing push from Microsoft will eliminate Linux's inherent advantages: flexibility and price.
Furthermore, as Linux becomes an ever more acceptable network platform, you will begin to see ISVs start to build products specifically for it. These ISVs can easily carve out profitable niches - becoming Linux evanglists - and can be run by some of the most unlikely people, even so called "Microsoft villains".
The major stumbling block with building a space elevator has nothing to do with whether it is theoretically possible to build one, but rather with economics.
Let us assume, for the purposes of illustration, that all this technology was totally proven and risk-free. We have carbon tube launch vehicles and a potential carbon tube elevator. I will blithely also make up a few more numbers: Counting sustaining costs, an ultra-light ultra-strong space elevator trip costs only 1/4 that of a new ultra-light ultra-strong space vehicle, and it takes a mere 100,000 flights to build the elevator.
My assumptions are probably wildly optimistic, but the conclusion you reach still shows why it won't be done: You break even when you reach (merely) your 125,000th trip into space.
Even the most wide eyed space enthusiast would have trouble justifying such demand for space travel.
The "signal" in this case comes from the one time agreement between Alice and Bob over a single data set. However this is not a generalized algorithm for hiding information in an arbitrarily large number of examples - which is what I was talking about. Maybe I should have made that clearer.
I don't have time (or perhaps the ability) to deliver you a formal proof, but the outline of it would be something like this: Assuming an undetectable algorithm did exist, Alice would have an Algorithm A that placed a signal in white noise that resulted in pure white noise (possible) and Bob would have an Algorithm A' that took the white noise and extracted the original signal from it (impossible - white noise contains no information).
Q.E.D.
Now of course things get immeasurably more complex when we add the factors of hiding signal in signal, rubustness in compression, and the P/NP completeness of the problem of trying to locate the hidden signal. But based on my conserable experience in CODECs, I can tell you there are precious few ways to hide watermarks that will survive a DCT, and they're all pretty obvious.
From a mathematical perspective, white noise is not information. Steganography - hope I spelled it right this time - is the attempt to hide a signal. All your counter-example does is increase the noise floor.
Something I see in the Linux community over and over again is the overestimation of the power of marketing, and the underestimation of the intelligence of consumers. This article is a classic example of it.
By saying Microsoft marketing is to be feared, the Linux bigots are implicitly criticizing Microsoft's technology. I assure you that the latter - while not focused on the same things Linux is - is quite formidable.
People do not choose Microsoft over Linux (or vice versa) due to marketing. They choose it due to hard-nosed business considerations - cost of licensing, cost of ownership, support costs, training costs, documentation, features and uniformity of available applications, etc., etc.
Based on the above, it is easy to see why Microsoft has (and probably will always have) a dominant position on the desktop. Ms. Secretary values the ability to drag-and-drop her bosses' excell-based expense report into her email to send off to finance, than she ever will having an elegant Samba configuration. Linux will (due to it's many different subcommunities) never be able to create a consistent unified user interface - among other things.
On the other hand, Linux is obviously better for the network server type tasks it grew up doing. Microsoft products will never be as flexible as Linux, nor free.
Stenography is just another form of encryption, and a weak one at that. The primary reason is simple - it is security through obscurity.
It is mathematically impossible to hide information in another medium that cannot be figured out. The signal carrying the second data stream will always be recongnizable. Figuring out algorithms robust enough to survive Lossy compression is - to an applied mathemitician - nearly trivial.
Don't believe me? The SDMI "challenge", such as it was, was cracked almost immediately by a simple signal analysis.
You are referring to the case of Stella Liebeck, the New Mexico grandmother who ordered coffee from a McDonald's drive-thru window. In the parking lot, with her grandson behind the wheel of the stationary car, Liebeck opened the lid of her coffee to add cream and sugar and inadvertently spilled hot coffee on her lap. The coffee--maintained at a scalding 180F-190F because customers supposedly "like it hot"--caused severe third-degree burns to Liebeck's groin, inner thighs and buttocks. She spent seven days in the hospital and was treated with skin grafts.
Initially, Ms. Liebeck only wanted payment for her medical bills, but McDonald's refused to even negotiate with her. Consequently, she contacted an attorney who had settled another coffee burn case with McDonald's. Liebeck sued, and in the course of trial in August 1994, company documents revealed that "in the past decade McDonald's had received at least 700 reports of coffee burns ranging from mild to third-degree, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000," wrote Andrea Gerlin in the Wall Street Journal (9/1/94).
Despite knowledge of the hazard, company officials refused to warn its customers. "There are more serious dangers in restaurants," said one McDonald's official. And given the 1 billion cups of coffee sold annually, McDonald's considered the number of burn complaints to be "statistically insignificant."
After hearing such testimony, the jurors found McDonald's liable and awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages. The jurors deducted $40,000 for contributory negligence on Liebeck's part. Also, given McDonald's conduct, the jury awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages, which was equal to two days' worth of the company's coffee sales.
Later, the punitive damage award was reduced by the judge to $480,000 (Reuters, 9/14/94). While awaiting appeal, the parties settled for an undisclosed amount (Reuters, 12/1/94).
As a result of the lawsuit, McDonalds now sets it's coffee temperature to 120 degrees - a temperature it's rivals Burker King and Wendys had voluntarily put in place when the incident occurred (due to customer complaints).
Now you may still disagree with the outcome of this case, but I hope that you can at least see that it was based on legal principals (paraphrased: don't give your customers dangerous products likely to cause accidents), rather than trying to blame an entire industry for the actions of people committing a felony.
Remember that in America, everyone has identical access to redress of grievances. That means:
1] You can file a suit about anything or nothing.
2] If it IS about nothing, you'll be thrown out on your ear.
This is not a real lawsuit. It is not based on any law, statute, legal doctrine, or precident. The lawyer involved is simply using the legal system to try to make political waves.
In short: The Lawsuit Is A Troll Intended For the Media.
Slashdot bit, as did you. I'm sure a lot of radio talkshow hosts will be using it as a topic for their rants. This kind of pseudo-story is their bread and butter.
Banner ads are perfectly fine as an advertising medium. The problem is that most of the dot-Bombs buying them don't know how to advertise.
They:Advertise on sites whose user profile doesn't match their market audience.
Measure their ads using immediate "click through" measurements, instead of building brand equity.
Mismatch the pitches. Often the dullest banners hide the best deals, while the most eye-grabbing ones lead nowhere.
Think advertising can make up for a company that provides inferior customer-value.
If full-page advertisements become the norm, then junkbuster and other such advertising deletion programs will become the norm too.
If you want to see net based advertising work well, you need look no further than ThinkGeek, which targets its ads directly at.. well people like us.
Having 10 patents myself, I know a little about this business.
"There goes their patent" is actually a better phrasing of it. You can patent anything unique you invent - the trick is to patent something valuable - e.g. something the market actually wants.
RAMBUS went on this strategy of suing SDRAM makers because their own technology turned out to be inferior, offering massively higher price with no matching performance gain.
If RAMBUS is unable to enforce their patent against SDRAM, then the patent is - from a business standpoint - worthless. All it could be used for is preventing unauthorized copies of RAMBUS memory, which most customers don't want anyway.
Sorry. Guess I haven't been keeping up with changes in Texas law. I don't live there, and the stories I heard were from before this.
Actually, this is one of the major reasons why liberal states do so well in the national economy. In conservative states like Texas, the law is set up to protect entrenched corporate interests. Not only is a non-compete strongly enforcable, but even things you invent on your own time with your own money is considered property of your employer. In the long run this discourages innovation - which hurts their economy far more than liberal states' high taxes.
Oh, I don't know about that, Mr. Katz. We old fogeys had our games too...
My favorite was one called "strip poker".
Actually, wrong.
Copyleft isn't an EULA. Rather, the terms of distribution (which is all that Copyleft covers) is the consideration you are providing - you're not paying for it after all. Further, since you must look at the code before you can use it in ways the Copyleft prohibits, you are free to reject the terms as you see fit.
You certainly would have an argument if the Copyleft contained restrictions on simple terms of Use, since you might not be exposed to those terms before you used it. But it is flat out impossible for you to modify any software covered by the GNU public license without being made aware of the restrictions on distributing modified versions.
That, by the way, is why the GNU public license is ever so redundantly repeated over each and every file it covers. That way, no one can say "I modified this file, but there was nothing in it that said I couldn't keep the modification to myself when I distributed the binary".
EULAs, like old deed stiplations from the 50s that restrict the race that owners can supposedly can sell to, are in all non-UICTA states, nothing but legal fiction.
One of the most fundimental tenets of contract law is that you must be aware of the terms of a contract before you commit to it. EULAs do not appear until after sale, and thus are entirely invalid, whether you click "I agree" or not.
Some more creative laywers have tried to get around the law by saying "If you don't agree, you can return the product for a full refund". However, even if you *could* return the product this way (which you typically can't), this would not be enforcable. You paid your money, the store gave you the product. That was the contract.
The only part of EULAs that are enforcable are terms that are generally against the law anyway - like copyright violations. But those are enforcable with or without EULAs.
90% of civil contract enforcement is based on intimidation and taking advantage of legal ignorance.
Of course nobody is going to read this, since typical slashdot kiddies just look at the most recent articles, but anyway...
This is a good decision. It gives a little teeth back into the examination process, which relatively recently has been eroded to the point of a joke. Now, at least, if you submit a patent that the examiner initially rejects because it is overly broad, that initial decision will stick - even if you subsequently narrow the scope to get the application approved.
Even though I have about a dozen patent and patents pending, I can't help but believe this is a good thing, and will promote innovation. I only hope the Supreme Court doesn't choose to overturn this one.