In Star Trek: The Next Generation the characters claimed that the Federation no longer needs or uses money, which seems unlikely in the extreme to me.
The moment you invent a replicator, money becomes worthless -- both because you can replicate any denomination of money in any amount and because you can replicate products instead of buying them.
Gee! I wish I knew more about Hillary Clinton's crimes. I know! I'll use that Google thing to find out! OK, here we go: H-I-L-L-A-R-Y C-L-I-N-T-O-N C-R-I. Oh boy! I'm so tired of typing! Still three more characters to go. I don't think I can make it! I wish Google had autocompleted my search for me. I don't see "hillary clinton crimes" in the list of suggestions, though. Oh! If only there was a way for me to do this search! But no, it's impossible! Wait a minute! Of course! IT'S OBVIOUS! GOOGLE WANTS TO HIDE CLINTON'S CRIMES FROM ME!
Laugh if you will, but you know many rightwingers are not indoctrinated by years of higher education, and might not be familiar with abstruse terminology such as "crimes". They may know enough to type in the first three letters in the hope that Google would understand what they wanted, but clearly Google is conspiring to shield these potential Republican voters from the truth.
I can't believe someone at Slashdot is using Vox as a legitimate source for anything involving Hillary. Vox is practically a spokesperson for the Democratic party. O course they won't be able to see the search manipulation that is right before their eyes.
Here are more examples of how Google skewed the search results involving Clinton. Don't trust sources. Trust factual information that you can test yourself. http://freebeacon.com/politics...
What? Google and Bing have different algorithms? Omigod!
So, other than alerting all True Conservatives to use Bing so as to have their partially typed search terms regarding evil Hillary autocomplete correctly and save themselves a few characters of typing per search, did you have anything else in mind? A constitutional amendment regarding separation of search and state?
I’m confused... Why shouldn’t Google be able to rank their search results any way they want to? Google is a private company, not a utility or common carrier, they can and should be able to manipulate their search results any way they want to, with whatever innate biases they feel are necessary to keep their users happy. Are the people that are complaining about supposed bias seriously saying that they think some government bureaucrat should police search engines and shut down the ones they don‘t like? Really?? Come on people, get a grip! Chill out and let the invisible hand of the market do its thing. If you don’t like Google’s search results, the solution is obvious: use another search engine!
There, problem solved.
well, you've pointed out the essential flaw in the radical right, small government, free market theory. If it doesn't come out the way they like it, they don't have any solution. Take Hollywood, probably the least regulated, most free market industry, as an example; with rare exceptions, what it produces is forgettable, crude, childish, stupid, vapid, uninformative, titillating, pandering, sniggering, etc. etc. etc; not family friendly, upstanding, patriotic, illuminating, inspiring, or educational; and, worst of all for the rightwingers: mostly liberal. Now, liberals and lefties know what to do when faced with this kind of situation; government intervention. Regulation, establishment of public broadcasting, etc. But what can righwingers do? Their faith is that the free market will deliver the best results, but when they don't see the results their faith leads them to expect, they are stuck whining and pointing fingers and acting like "liberals" were somehow doing something wrong by producing product which the public preferred to buy, rather than accept that either their faith in the free market or their standards in entertainment is defective.
First they came for the Vietnamese, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Vietnamese.
Then they came for the Filipino, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Filipino.
Then they came for the Malaysians, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Malaysian.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Poetry aside, there is a good reason to be concerned about territorial expansion, especially when it's projecting military power uncomfortably close to neighbors. If it continues unchecked, then if or when a war does break out, the first fighting will be to capture that nearby territory in a powerful first strike. That eliminates potential allies for opponents, and concentrates the first counterattacks on liberating the conquered territory.
That's how it worked in previous wars, at least. In a long-range modern war between superpowers, territorial expansion primarily serves as yet another target. It's another place for satellites to watch, another suspicious building, and another place that might hide another missile. Once the big powers break out their big weapons, it won't matter whose sons or daughters are in uniform. What will matter is who can keep their weapons operational long enough to fire at the enemy, and I doubt very much that anyone will care about "dignity".
As I recall, the US hasn't exactly been tolerant of, say, a nation getting friendly with the Russians, if it happened to be a large island 1,000 miles off our shores.
Now if only the US and the Middle East would stop fighting over who's prophet of a sky god has a bigger nut sack, there might be hope for humanity.
In case you somehow missed it, the Jews, Christians and Muslims all worship the same god. The Jews call him Yahweh, the Christians call him God, and the Muslims call him Allah, but they are all speaking of the same God.
Most of them, of course, worship the same god, His name is Lucre.
you mean we're going to see fewer of those apps that allow you to recharge your phone by leaving the screen facing the sun? or putting the phone in a microwave? darn.
Basically, the argument is that aliens are probably not on exactly the same "blink of an eye" as we are. As you noted, from discovering fire to space travel took us only about 10,000 years, or 0.00025% of the time life has existed on our planet. And only the last hundred years or so would have allowed for interstellar communication. So you shouldn't expect more than a 0.0000025% chance that we are able to contact aliens less advanced than us. The chance is further reduced if you assume the more advanced aliens would be more visible (eg galaxy-spanning empire) compared to barely-out-of-the-stone-age aliens.
But.... we are getting a pretty wide timeslice of the universe, due to the timelag of distant signals.
The elephant in the room is that cosmological distances are unbelievably large. The energy expenditure and sheer material cost of building something that can move any further than the outer reaches of a solar system is so huge as to make almost pointless even if possible. Currently it is blind faith rather than physics that suggests that the human race will ever be able to visit even the nearest star.
What is slightly more puzzling is that if the galaxy is teaming with technological civilizations we can detect no sign of their signals. Though this may just be the inadequacy of current technology. Discriminating against stars for any electromagnetic signal even for a focused laser is probably beyond our means at the moment. I have not seen any analysis of this from people like the SETI institute, has anyone seen this analysis?
> My personal theory is that the most likely thing for any intelligent and technologically capable alien race to be doing is exactly what *we* are doing.
Exactly - making ourselves go extinct over the cosmological blip of a few hundred years, by systematically undermining our own life conditions (us: global warming); by squandering non-replenishable resources (oil, gas, rare earth elements); by maintaining nation states that act like we don't share a planet (Putin's Russia, North Korea, China, Arab / Islam countries, USA etc.); by creating weapons that allow more and more destructive potential per user (nuclear, biological and autonomous weapons); and by resisting the completion of the surveillance police state and precrime, which are pretty much the only means to ensure that terrorists are killed before they can fake some nuclear attack, setting off WWIII, or release some plague that wipes out half of mankind and destroys economy as we know it.
Once we global-warm, war or terrorism ourselves back into a pre-technological tribe, we'll no longer have the chance for an industrial and thus technological revolution, for we have already used up most of the easily accessible oil and gas; no more radio telescopes sent to space.
Maybe we can't observe other intelligent life simply because chances are, any transmission is puny and fleeting on the cosmological scale, making reception incredibly unlikely. However maybe there are intelligent creatures that enjoyed their brief technological triumph, only to be followed by millions of years of an eternal Stone Age in the optimistic doom scenario when large bodied intelligent creatures can even survive their own technological windfall.
The rare few civilizations that survive the high mortality rate of technological infancy might evolve to such superpowers that they have unimaginable matter manipulation and computational capabilities in their hand. We, at such premature stage, already build vast, large simulations even without really trying (called games or machine learning environments). They (and maybe we) then go on building new universes which themselves beget alife, some of which may become powerful to build their own simulations. Then, we can conclude that believing that we are World #1 is the same anthropocentric view and hubris as geocentrism was a moment ago. Most probably we're currently on the bottom of a deep stack, hoping for adequate power redundancy and backup procedures in all layers above.
In conclusion, most of the fellow technological civilizations are behind us or ahead of us (time), or above us and maybe at some point, below us (simulation stack). All except the last of these are very unlikely to encounter and detect.
i wonder if fossil carbon fuels might not be just a fluke of terrestrial history, and that other planets might not discover a similar windfall of energy, which prevents them from getting the boost in mechanical technology that leads to space travel.
Except that it ignores subsurface oceans, which seem to be quite stable over long timeperiods and quite likely to be very abundant in the universe.
Sure, a species evolved to an undersea environment faces challenges in getting to their surface and beyond... but if we can get out of this deep gravity well after such a (geologically) short period of time after our species' evolution, sentient species in subsurface oceans with hundreds of millions or billion years on their "hands" would surely deal with the technical difficulties.
And of course there's also the possibility of LNAWKI, but let's just stick with LAWKI for now.
My personal suspicion is that a wide variety of factors work together to keep complex life rather rare on a per-planet basis, great distances dilute any signals from any that do achieve sentience, and the speed of light and difficulty of propagating a civilization outward at near that limit keeps the vast majority far away. Basically, rarity + dilution. But that's just my suspicion.
Just blueskying here, but even if a subsurface underwater species develops technology, it would seem that EM radiation wouldn't be a feature, given the nature of water, and that's what we're looking for.
If I left my Answer of how then it would not be a highly secure mechanism anymore. However for my moderately security sensitive passwords I usually use a pass phrase combined with capital's, numbers and non alpha numeric characters. e.g. Security thru Obscurity could become "5eCur!tythru0bsCur!ty" incredibly easy to remember and incredibly difficult to brute force or guess
I can crack any password. Let's see 00000000 no 00000001 no 00000002 no i'm getting there, give me a minute 0000003 no
I use a password manager and try to make passwords as long as the app or site will allow me.
The bitch is, a lot of sites and apps artificially limit password length at around 10 characters.
Always include some of the alchemical symbols in your password.
If you believe you have a legitimate dispute, then why would you feel that you could not present it adequately to convince a judge, and obtain a ruling in your favor? And if you did not feel you could adequately present it to convince a judge, why do you feel that your case is legitimate in the first place?
Loser pays would also make it basically impossible to sue any entity that has more money than you. The risk would be far too great, even if you had a legitimate dispute.
Let the judge award "loser pays" only after meeting a high threshold. Such as in situations where no rational person would consider it a legitimate dispute.
But it's still basically impossible to sue any entity that has more money than you. In fact, it's worse this way. If it was loser pays, then at least you'd have a chance of getting your expenditure back, and somebody who believes in your case can lend you the money. This way, the deeper pockets can just drag it out until you run out of money.
For instance:
"The News of Radio; Armstrong Files Suit Against RCA and NBC -- Charges Infringements on Patents" NYTimes July 24, 1948
"Armstrong, FM Inventor, Dies In Leap From East Side Suite; Pioneer in Radio, 63, Plunges From River House Window -- Left a Note for Wife" NYTimes February 02, 1954
" The Radio Corporation of America and the National Broadcasting Company have settled for "approximately $1,000,000" claims against them by the estate of the late Maj. Edwin H. Armstrong." NYTimes, December 31, 1954
The winning technique used by the plaintiff was thus:
Send a letter to the target asking him to admit fault and owing a certain amount of money ($30K, $600K, whatever).
Wait for him to not respond in 30 days
Voila, by Indiana law, this not-responding is equivalent to the admission being sought.
Profit, obviously.
The judge, who awarded him $30K (plus interest), acknowledged the amount is "seemingly high" and the judgment "may seem extreme for the breach of contract for the purchase of a printer." But he wrote that he's constrained by how the Supreme Court had previously interpreted a state trial rule, called Rule 36, which sets the 30-day deadline for responding to requests for admissions.
The appeal court noted:
"He did not send requests claiming $30,000 and $300,000 and $600,000 in damages because he believes those figures are legally justified and thought Costello might agree," Vaidik wrote. "He sent them because he hoped Costello would not respond, rendering the matters admitted..."
Yes, he did, you dimwits. You sat on that rule for years and saw nothing wrong with it. You saw nothing wrong with it applied by your fellow pedigreed lawyers acting just as predatory — if only a little less obviously — against others. Suddenly, a man comes around filing his own lawsuits, representing himself in court — and you find yourself bound by your own arcane rules.
"Oh, but we did not mean for it be used that way." Well, you should not have written it that way then...
Whether the sold printer was broken, whether the seller really did try to sell a lemon — that's small potatoes. What pan Zavodnik exposed was the incompetence of Indiana's judges. Hurrah for the hacker!
same as the "you have not replied to my post therefore i Pwn you" school of comment flames.
It doesn't. His cased was dismissed from small claims, because he threw out the evidence (printer). He refiled in Superior Court with a bunch of new complaints. He didn't sue for $30,000, what he did was send a Request for Admission to the opponent requesting he admit to owing the 30,000 or the 300,000 or the 600,000. Marion County has a rule that if you don't respond to a Request for Admission in 30 days then you are presumed to have admitted the fact at issue. That was the plaintiff's game here. Send a bunch of requests and hope they don't respond.
Ah, the old default opt in trick, eh.
Zavodnik should now sue every software company, claiming he has the rights to that technology.
Not being able to sue over someone outside of small claims court for a $40 printer is not a Utopian society it is plain common sense.
Deporting what I assume are citizens, over a what is essentially a minor dispute, no one was killed, or hurt in the matter. Is essentially the same type insane overreaction that causes a $40 dispute to escalate to a $30K court case. If someone just keeps suing give them a warning or two that if they continue to do so they will be band from filing any further legal action.
This is not the fault of Zavodnik, it is the fault of the legal system that allowed it in the first place. Any sane judge should have just awarded one of them $40, any sane court of appeal should just have told the person who filed the appeal, stop wasting our time, and charged them a couple of hundred dollars in admin fees.
There no need for utopia here.
This is why in most countries, the lose pays the winner's costs.
Supposedly, the each guy pays his own system was set up so that Brits who had lost property during the Revolution would be discouraged from trying to get it back.
Because back in the 1980s computers booted to the BASIC command line interpreter/REPL. Nowadays, there is, more or less, no such thing. Closest similar thing most non-geeks will get to is a browser console, and while that is reasonable debugging tool for pros, it's not a similarly friendly programming tool for beginners.
Every copy of Windows has a command prompt which will let you write and execute batch files. Not that I'd recommend that as a way to learn programming, but most of the functionality is still there. Just not in a popular "language".
I think the bigger impediment is that users expect everything to be in an easy-to-use GUI nowadays, and aren't all that interested in writing code which will only run in a command prompt. (That and the switch from procedural to event driven programming drove everything up an abstraction level.)
My secret programming language in the 80s; there was a shareware batch file compiler. Made.com files so I guess it wouldn't work any more.
Slashdot Mirror
The moment you invent a replicator, money becomes worthless -- both because you can replicate any denomination of money in any amount and because you can replicate products instead of buying them.
bitcoins!
Gee! I wish I knew more about Hillary Clinton's crimes. I know! I'll use that Google thing to find out! OK, here we go: H-I-L-L-A-R-Y C-L-I-N-T-O-N C-R-I. Oh boy! I'm so tired of typing! Still three more characters to go. I don't think I can make it! I wish Google had autocompleted my search for me. I don't see "hillary clinton crimes" in the list of suggestions, though. Oh! If only there was a way for me to do this search! But no, it's impossible! Wait a minute! Of course! IT'S OBVIOUS! GOOGLE WANTS TO HIDE CLINTON'S CRIMES FROM ME!
Laugh if you will, but you know many rightwingers are not indoctrinated by years of higher education, and might not be familiar with abstruse terminology such as "crimes". They may know enough to type in the first three letters in the hope that Google would understand what they wanted, but clearly Google is conspiring to shield these potential Republican voters from the truth.
I can't believe someone at Slashdot is using Vox as a legitimate source for anything involving Hillary. Vox is practically a spokesperson for the Democratic party. O course they won't be able to see the search manipulation that is right before their eyes. Here are more examples of how Google skewed the search results involving Clinton. Don't trust sources. Trust factual information that you can test yourself. http://freebeacon.com/politics...
What? Google and Bing have different algorithms? Omigod!
So, other than alerting all True Conservatives to use Bing so as to have their partially typed search terms regarding evil Hillary autocomplete correctly and save themselves a few characters of typing per search, did you have anything else in mind? A constitutional amendment regarding separation of search and state?
I’m confused... Why shouldn’t Google be able to rank their search results any way they want to? Google is a private company, not a utility or common carrier, they can and should be able to manipulate their search results any way they want to, with whatever innate biases they feel are necessary to keep their users happy. Are the people that are complaining about supposed bias seriously saying that they think some government bureaucrat should police search engines and shut down the ones they don‘t like? Really?? Come on people, get a grip! Chill out and let the invisible hand of the market do its thing. If you don’t like Google’s search results, the solution is obvious: use another search engine!
There, problem solved.
well, you've pointed out the essential flaw in the radical right, small government, free market theory. If it doesn't come out the way they like it, they don't have any solution.
Take Hollywood, probably the least regulated, most free market industry, as an example; with rare exceptions, what it produces is forgettable, crude, childish, stupid, vapid, uninformative, titillating, pandering, sniggering, etc. etc. etc; not family friendly, upstanding, patriotic, illuminating, inspiring, or educational; and, worst of all for the rightwingers: mostly liberal.
Now, liberals and lefties know what to do when faced with this kind of situation; government intervention. Regulation, establishment of public broadcasting, etc.
But what can righwingers do? Their faith is that the free market will deliver the best results, but when they don't see the results their faith leads them to expect, they are stuck whining and pointing fingers and acting like "liberals" were somehow doing something wrong by producing product which the public preferred to buy, rather than accept that either their faith in the free market or their standards in entertainment is defective.
I was thinking SeaQuest DSV (the first season, before it got all weird and messed up). And also SeaLab.
Isn't anybody going to mention Spongebob?
First they came for the Vietnamese, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Vietnamese. Then they came for the Filipino, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Filipino. Then they came for the Malaysians, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Malaysian. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Poetry aside, there is a good reason to be concerned about territorial expansion, especially when it's projecting military power uncomfortably close to neighbors. If it continues unchecked, then if or when a war does break out, the first fighting will be to capture that nearby territory in a powerful first strike. That eliminates potential allies for opponents, and concentrates the first counterattacks on liberating the conquered territory.
That's how it worked in previous wars, at least. In a long-range modern war between superpowers, territorial expansion primarily serves as yet another target. It's another place for satellites to watch, another suspicious building, and another place that might hide another missile. Once the big powers break out their big weapons, it won't matter whose sons or daughters are in uniform. What will matter is who can keep their weapons operational long enough to fire at the enemy, and I doubt very much that anyone will care about "dignity".
As I recall, the US hasn't exactly been tolerant of, say, a nation getting friendly with the Russians, if it happened to be a large island 1,000 miles off our shores.
Now if only the US and the Middle East would stop fighting over who's prophet of a sky god has a bigger nut sack, there might be hope for humanity.
In case you somehow missed it, the Jews, Christians and Muslims all worship the same god. The Jews call him Yahweh, the Christians call him God, and the Muslims call him Allah, but they are all speaking of the same God.
Most of them, of course, worship the same god, His name is Lucre.
because hackers want to be able to control a phone with a microphone.
a phone without a microphone is what i mean.
because hackers want to be able to control a phone with a microphone.
I can use the new version of Firefox to remove unwanted body hair? cool!
you mean we're going to see fewer of those apps that allow you to recharge your phone by leaving the screen facing the sun? or putting the phone in a microwave? darn.
Basically, the argument is that aliens are probably not on exactly the same "blink of an eye" as we are. As you noted, from discovering fire to space travel took us only about 10,000 years, or 0.00025% of the time life has existed on our planet. And only the last hundred years or so would have allowed for interstellar communication. So you shouldn't expect more than a 0.0000025% chance that we are able to contact aliens less advanced than us. The chance is further reduced if you assume the more advanced aliens would be more visible (eg galaxy-spanning empire) compared to barely-out-of-the-stone-age aliens.
But.... we are getting a pretty wide timeslice of the universe, due to the timelag of distant signals.
The elephant in the room is that cosmological distances are unbelievably large. The energy expenditure and sheer material cost of building something that can move any further than the outer reaches of a solar system is so huge as to make almost pointless even if possible. Currently it is blind faith rather than physics that suggests that the human race will ever be able to visit even the nearest star.
What is slightly more puzzling is that if the galaxy is teaming with technological civilizations we can detect no sign of their signals. Though this may just be the inadequacy of current technology. Discriminating against stars for any electromagnetic signal even for a focused laser is probably beyond our means at the moment. I have not seen any analysis of this from people like the SETI institute, has anyone seen this analysis?
maybe they all use spread spectrum.
> My personal theory is that the most likely thing for any intelligent and technologically capable alien race to be doing is exactly what *we* are doing.
Exactly - making ourselves go extinct over the cosmological blip of a few hundred years, by systematically undermining our own life conditions (us: global warming); by squandering non-replenishable resources (oil, gas, rare earth elements); by maintaining nation states that act like we don't share a planet (Putin's Russia, North Korea, China, Arab / Islam countries, USA etc.); by creating weapons that allow more and more destructive potential per user (nuclear, biological and autonomous weapons); and by resisting the completion of the surveillance police state and precrime, which are pretty much the only means to ensure that terrorists are killed before they can fake some nuclear attack, setting off WWIII, or release some plague that wipes out half of mankind and destroys economy as we know it.
Once we global-warm, war or terrorism ourselves back into a pre-technological tribe, we'll no longer have the chance for an industrial and thus technological revolution, for we have already used up most of the easily accessible oil and gas; no more radio telescopes sent to space.
Maybe we can't observe other intelligent life simply because chances are, any transmission is puny and fleeting on the cosmological scale, making reception incredibly unlikely. However maybe there are intelligent creatures that enjoyed their brief technological triumph, only to be followed by millions of years of an eternal Stone Age in the optimistic doom scenario when large bodied intelligent creatures can even survive their own technological windfall.
The rare few civilizations that survive the high mortality rate of technological infancy might evolve to such superpowers that they have unimaginable matter manipulation and computational capabilities in their hand. We, at such premature stage, already build vast, large simulations even without really trying (called games or machine learning environments). They (and maybe we) then go on building new universes which themselves beget alife, some of which may become powerful to build their own simulations. Then, we can conclude that believing that we are World #1 is the same anthropocentric view and hubris as geocentrism was a moment ago. Most probably we're currently on the bottom of a deep stack, hoping for adequate power redundancy and backup procedures in all layers above.
In conclusion, most of the fellow technological civilizations are behind us or ahead of us (time), or above us and maybe at some point, below us (simulation stack). All except the last of these are very unlikely to encounter and detect.
i wonder if fossil carbon fuels might not be just a fluke of terrestrial history, and that other planets might not discover a similar windfall of energy, which prevents them from getting the boost in mechanical technology that leads to space travel.
Except that it ignores subsurface oceans, which seem to be quite stable over long timeperiods and quite likely to be very abundant in the universe.
Sure, a species evolved to an undersea environment faces challenges in getting to their surface and beyond... but if we can get out of this deep gravity well after such a (geologically) short period of time after our species' evolution, sentient species in subsurface oceans with hundreds of millions or billion years on their "hands" would surely deal with the technical difficulties.
And of course there's also the possibility of LNAWKI, but let's just stick with LAWKI for now.
My personal suspicion is that a wide variety of factors work together to keep complex life rather rare on a per-planet basis, great distances dilute any signals from any that do achieve sentience, and the speed of light and difficulty of propagating a civilization outward at near that limit keeps the vast majority far away. Basically, rarity + dilution. But that's just my suspicion.
Just blueskying here, but even if a subsurface underwater species develops technology, it would seem that EM radiation wouldn't be a feature, given the nature of water, and that's what we're looking for.
If I left my Answer of how then it would not be a highly secure mechanism anymore. However for my moderately security sensitive passwords I usually use a pass phrase combined with capital's, numbers and non alpha numeric characters. e.g. Security thru Obscurity could become "5eCur!tythru0bsCur!ty" incredibly easy to remember and incredibly difficult to brute force or guess
I can crack any password. Let's see
00000000 no
00000001 no
00000002 no
i'm getting there, give me a minute
0000003 no
I use a password manager and try to make passwords as long as the app or site will allow me. The bitch is, a lot of sites and apps artificially limit password length at around 10 characters.
Always include some of the alchemical symbols in your password.
00000000 ?
or ********?
If you believe you have a legitimate dispute, then why would you feel that you could not present it adequately to convince a judge, and obtain a ruling in your favor? And if you did not feel you could adequately present it to convince a judge, why do you feel that your case is legitimate in the first place?
Many crazy people out there.
Loser pays would also make it basically impossible to sue any entity that has more money than you. The risk would be far too great, even if you had a legitimate dispute.
Let the judge award "loser pays" only after meeting a high threshold. Such as in situations where no rational person would consider it a legitimate dispute.
But it's still basically impossible to sue any entity that has more money than you. In fact, it's worse this way. If it was loser pays, then at least you'd have a chance of getting your expenditure back, and somebody who believes in your case can lend you the money. This way, the deeper pockets can just drag it out until you run out of money.
For instance:
"The News of Radio; Armstrong Files Suit Against RCA and NBC -- Charges Infringements on Patents" NYTimes July 24, 1948
"Armstrong, FM Inventor, Dies In Leap From East Side Suite; Pioneer in Radio, 63, Plunges From River House Window -- Left a Note for Wife" NYTimes February 02, 1954
" The Radio Corporation of America and the National Broadcasting Company have settled for "approximately $1,000,000" claims against them by the estate of the late Maj. Edwin H. Armstrong." NYTimes, December 31, 1954
The winning technique used by the plaintiff was thus:
The judge, who awarded him $30K (plus interest), acknowledged the amount is "seemingly high" and the judgment "may seem extreme for the breach of contract for the purchase of a printer." But he wrote that he's constrained by how the Supreme Court had previously interpreted a state trial rule, called Rule 36, which sets the 30-day deadline for responding to requests for admissions.
The appeal court noted:
Yes, he did, you dimwits. You sat on that rule for years and saw nothing wrong with it. You saw nothing wrong with it applied by your fellow pedigreed lawyers acting just as predatory — if only a little less obviously — against others. Suddenly, a man comes around filing his own lawsuits, representing himself in court — and you find yourself bound by your own arcane rules.
"Oh, but we did not mean for it be used that way." Well, you should not have written it that way then...
Whether the sold printer was broken, whether the seller really did try to sell a lemon — that's small potatoes. What pan Zavodnik exposed was the incompetence of Indiana's judges. Hurrah for the hacker!
same as the "you have not replied to my post therefore i Pwn you" school of comment flames.
It doesn't. His cased was dismissed from small claims, because he threw out the evidence (printer). He refiled in Superior Court with a bunch of new complaints. He didn't sue for $30,000, what he did was send a Request for Admission to the opponent requesting he admit to owing the 30,000 or the 300,000 or the 600,000. Marion County has a rule that if you don't respond to a Request for Admission in 30 days then you are presumed to have admitted the fact at issue. That was the plaintiff's game here. Send a bunch of requests and hope they don't respond.
Ah, the old default opt in trick, eh.
Zavodnik should now sue every software company, claiming he has the rights to that technology.
Not being able to sue over someone outside of small claims court for a $40 printer is not a Utopian society it is plain common sense.
Deporting what I assume are citizens, over a what is essentially a minor dispute, no one was killed, or hurt in the matter. Is essentially the same type insane overreaction that causes a $40 dispute to escalate to a $30K court case. If someone just keeps suing give them a warning or two that if they continue to do so they will be band from filing any further legal action.
This is not the fault of Zavodnik, it is the fault of the legal system that allowed it in the first place. Any sane judge should have just awarded one of them $40, any sane court of appeal should just have told the person who filed the appeal, stop wasting our time, and charged them a couple of hundred dollars in admin fees.
There no need for utopia here.
This is why in most countries, the lose pays the winner's costs. Supposedly, the each guy pays his own system was set up so that Brits who had lost property during the Revolution would be discouraged from trying to get it back.
If only Zavodnik had taken a course at Trump U, but nooooooo.
Every copy of Windows has a command prompt which will let you write and execute batch files. Not that I'd recommend that as a way to learn programming, but most of the functionality is still there. Just not in a popular "language". I think the bigger impediment is that users expect everything to be in an easy-to-use GUI nowadays, and aren't all that interested in writing code which will only run in a command prompt. (That and the switch from procedural to event driven programming drove everything up an abstraction level.)
My secret programming language in the 80s; there was a shareware batch file compiler. Made .com files so I guess it wouldn't work any more.