The guy who the movie "Catch Me If You Can" was based on ended up in the employ of the FBI detecting counterfeit stuff because he was so damned good at it. Then people started arresting those who did such things. It's far less common for these people to get security jobs after their jail-time.
Frank Abagnale, Jr. spent six months in a French prison where he could not stand erect and where he slept in his own excrement. He was borderline insane when he was finally released to the custody of (IIRC) the Netherlands, where he spent about a year in a much nicer prison. He was slated to be turned over to (again, IIRC) Spain, where he would have spent time in another miserable and inhumane prison, but his Dutch captors took pity on him and found a way to invalidate his passport. That meant they had to "deport" him to the United States, where he promptly escaped by crawling out of the toilet when his plane landed. He was re-captured and spent some time in a US prison. He still managed to start his own security consulting business and make millions of dollars. The difference was not the jail time. The difference was that he was truly brilliant and he apparently did not have a truly criminal disposition. He was basically a horny teenager (much of his crime was committed in pursuit of women). When he got some maturity, he was able to put his skills to a beneficial use. He also eventually paid back all of the money he stole.
In contrast, I'm betting this little hacker twerp is some wannabe who got ahold of a computer and read a couple of "howto" sites. He may or may not have the disposition of a hardened criminal, but until he does something original, nobody will notice him. Maybe if he's lucky, he'll get a wikipedia entry.
Your post is unintelligible and choleric and in your zeal to blam the President, you obviously missed my point. Normally this would not warrant a response, but I would like to point out one thing. The Mayor "evacuated" people to the Super Dome and Convention Center - places within the city he knew was doomed. Those also happen to be the places where people were forced to live in their own filth like animals. He knew those places were not equipped to handle evacuees. It was like an afterthought at the last minute when the mayor suddenly realized he had a bunch of people with no way to evacuate. You could counter that he didn't have time to plan a large-scale evacuation, but how long has he known that he had a largely indigent population living at up to 10 feet below sea level? Ultimately the decision to open the Super Dome and Convention Center saved a lot of lives, but you can say the same for the government aid that finally came four days later. It helped, but it could have been a lot better.
My point was that the first failure lies with the black mayor who sent the people to "shelters" that were unfit for that purpose and who had no plan for dealing with them thereafter. He was partly responsible for the conditions at the Super Dome and Convention Center, so I think it's really stupid for morons like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to pretend that this is some kind of conspiracy of the White Man to keep the Black Man down. This certainly was not the finest hour of the government's disaster relief organization, but it has nothing to do with race. If we start blaming it on race, then we are detracting from the critical look we should take at the poor preparation, planning and execution that is really responsible. And if we do that, we are doing a grave disservice to the eventual victims of the next natural disaster we face who may be lily white but who will suffer just the same when the system fails. Your own quote:
Instead, Katrina's aftermath turned into a typical--if unimaginably and hellaciously tragic--scene from New Orleans politics, with the requisite allegations that the rudderless, incompetent city government can't deal with the city's intrinsic geographic, economic, and racial problems...
Sounds like you made my point for me. The incompetence and poor planning starts at the bottom and goes all the way to the top.
I agree with you. The mayor knew he had a city full of poor people with no way out, and then just left them to their own devices. But you're not allowed to say that. Mayor Nagin is black, and if it's even partially his fault, that confounds the Congressional Black Caucus and other idiots who are trying to politicize this thing by making it racial. It has to be that our white President and the white director of FEMA just made a conscious decision to leave tens of thousands of people to die BECAUSE THEY'RE BLACK. It certainly couldn't be just a bunch of politicians who like getting re-elected but have no intelligent plan for this kind of thing, partly because it's never happened before, so their best bet is to blame each other until they can all figure it out.
Honestly, it disgusts me how much finger pointing has been going on while there are still people stranded in that hell hole. ALL of these politicians need to get their priorities in order. FIRST, make sure the people stuck there have some food and water to survive on and finish picking up the ones who are stranded (maybe some of those helicopters dropping sandbags on the friggin' levees could be rescuing people still stuck on their rooftops). SECOND, get everybody out of the city. THIRD, plug the levees and start figuring out what to do with this mess. THEN they can all start bickering about who didn't respond quickly enough and who didn't prepare well enough and who should've done something first and should we even bother rebuilding the place. Somebody needs to step up and show some leadership here. It looks like Gen. Honore is the only one who has so far.
Some are even less obvious than that. For example, a contract where a bank absolutely agrees to pay a minimum interest rate on ivestments is void as a matter of publlic policy if market conditions make it impractical to pay that rate (rationale is that we don't want banks failing like in the 30s). Or if you agree to liquidate damages and a court finds there was no rational basis for the number agreed to, the court may assess more contractually sound damages. There is an entire body of contract law that deals with contracts (or parts of contracts) that are either void or voidable for various reasons. A capitalist society values Freedom of Contract, but remember that it is the government that has to enforce your contract if it comes to litigation. There are some contracts that the government rightly refuses to be a party to.
More importantly, before a court would even go about "interpreting" this EULA one way or another, somebody with standing (i.e., MACROMEDIA) would have to bring a suit against a laptop user of the software. Last I checked, the only software company stupid enough to sue its customers for using its software is SCO.
It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand years.
But by that time it will think its name is "Newzons" and that its mission is to convert the entire population of earth into a binary format to add to its name database.
That's great, but it has nothing to do with my point. Better regulation (along with things like better screening and requiring expert testimony) is actually a very sane alternative to the kind of hard cap tort reform we've seen recently that almost completely bars recovery and rewards tortfeasors. My point, in response to the GP's prediction of massive tort liability on the part of manufacturers if causation can be proved, was that the threat of massive lawsuits is no longer a meaningful deterrent to beancounters who are weighing the cost of hurting people against the savings. Wit hard caps that amount to nothing more than a nominal fine, it is almost always more cost effective to go ahead and hurt somebody. This is true in most states now, and the medical insurance lobby is pushing to get it passed in the rest. Even better, they are pushing for a (IMHO) Unconstitutional Federal law to make these reforms uniform throughout the U.S. Getting rid of "frivolous" lawsuits is a fine goal, but they've tried very hard to shove the baby down the drain after the bathwater.
Now they and batteries of scientists and doctors on their side deny there is any link between this and rising autism rates among vaccinated children but at this point you can't really trust them, because if there is ever a definitive link proven to Autism their liability is going to be massive.
Actually, it would have been massive a few years ago. Thanks to the "tort reform" legislation passed in many states (bought and paid for by the medical insurance lobby), they'll pay out token settlements and go on their merry ways.
I know everybdoy is thinking, "But what about that quarter of a billion dollar judgment against Merck last week?" Under Texas statute, the ~$230M in punitives will be reduced to a MAXIMUM of just over $1M, and it's quite possible that the appellate judge will throw the whole thing out for lack of evidence of causation. Even if he doesn't, the $23M left for noneconomic damages will probably be sliced dramatically, which will leave Merck paying the widow ~$450k in economic damages and some token "pain and suffering." Merck made a highly profitable decision by choosing to suppress the test results that showed their drug caused heart problems. If putting Hg in the vaccines saves the manufacturers money, don't expect to see them stop the practice any time soon. Capped awards provide them the only incentive they need.
Audiences have gotten smart to the marketing, and they can smell the good ones from the bad ones at a distance.
If we can why can't you? Seems like an open and shut case to me.
They can. Problem is, they used to not have to care. The hoardes used to drop their money on it anyway. Lots of movies equaled lots of money. Now people are getting tired of wathcing the crap (I think a lot of people have shorter attention spans too, which doesn't help boring films). This means they'll have to make a product instead of basically printing their own money. Wouldn't you be a little peeved too?
Now all we need is a targeting system that can get close enough, hit a missile with its laser toy, and hold the beam steady on the target long enough to actually destroy it -- all before the missile is able to do its own damage. I'm betting they'd have better luck with kinetic interceptors that at least only have to hit once.
Every drug has side effects. The only difference between a "side" effect and a "use" of a drug is which one gets advertised on the television. Drugs are designed to mess with your body. This particular drug messes with your body in very big ways. You can't mess with a brain this dramatically (especially on a regular basis) and expect that nothing bad will happen as a consequence.
This month's IEEE Spectrum features an article by Bradley Edwards who studied the near-term feasibility of a space elevator under a grant from NASA. His conclusion is that it could be accomplished in as little as 10-15 years and for as "little" as $10B (meaning little enough that there are several individuals on Earth who could fund it privately). Of course, the major technological limitation is the nanotubes. He suggests "spun" nanotubes (like yarn) or nanotube composites (and he contends that if one of these broke near the top, it would not be the end of life as we know it -- it's a ribbon that would loft gently down to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere). He even addresses storms, terrorism and space-borne threates. It's a good article and somewhat technical (written for engineers). His conclusions are quite credible, and probably more informed than your average Slashdot debate.
You know, I used to know a member of the Flat Earth Society, and I never quite understood those guys. Given a body of a certain mass, it WILL collapse into a spheroid. And where do they think all the turtles come from anyway? I can almost sympathize with the loons who think the moon shots were staged. That would at least be theoretically possible. But these guys are in serious denial.
But this patent claims an extension to that idea where "four thousand" is highlighted just like "4,000." That may or may not be an obvious extension, but I have not seen syntax highlighting in any editor or IDE that did that (and probably for good reason -- that would be a stupid feature). I'm not saying this is a good or valid patent, or that it should be issued (remember, it's just a published application right now). I'm just saying that every time some stupid patent is discussed on Slashdot, the first reaction everybody has is, "I've seen that before." That may be true, but the PTO isn't going to take your word for it. You're going to need some documentation that they can positively date before they will enter it as prior art.
Prior art is not just as easy as saying, "I'm pretty sure I saw somebody do this on Emacs back in '89." Prior art is very technically defined by 35 U.S.C. 102, and at a bare minimum, has to be published. If you can find a published reference showing how somebody did this prior to the application date for this patent, you're in business. If you can find it within the next two months, you may be able to stop this patent from ever issuing. If not, the only hope is that the examiner will give it a 35 U.S.C. 103 Obviousness rejection, but that bar seems to be pretty low in anything related to computers.
I'd mod the AC up if I had points, but since I don't, I'll reiterate what he said. It is standard practice at the USPTO to reject all applications at least once. If your first office action on the merits is a notice of allowance, your patent is probably worthless. They do NOT just rubber stamp patents.
Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis.
You mean they held on to their data until they could do a proper analysis and really determine what they had, rather than jump all over a premature and sensationalistic announcement? Those charlatans! Pons and Fleischman would be ashamed of them.
Yes, like any good whore, she seduced HP, screwed it, took its money (to the tune of $42e6), and then left it a shattered and bitter shell of its former self.
Carly Fiorina was their mistake. I hate that woman. She ruined one of the most respectable companies in engineering. It's not just the calculators. HP used to be synonymous with quality in instrumentation. That's what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started doing in their garage fer cryin' out loud! Now that's been spun off (how can you buy an instrument named "Agilent" with a straight face), the Australian Calculator Division is closed, THEY MERGED WITH FRIGGIN' COMPAQ, MAKERS OF THE CRAPPIEST COMPUTERS SINCE PACKARD BELL, and the HP brand means nothing more than "Mediocre PCs." Honestly, does she go and piss on their graves every week too? Is she sleeping with Satan? What's up with that woman?
You know, just a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking, "What was that whacked-out 80s show where the guy had a little light that flew around that he called "cursor" and a car that could do 90-degree turns." Now that you've reminded me, I remember why I forgot it.
Best of luck to you. I guess I've already gotten something out of these tactics. The very nice, very new building where I am currently attending school was built by the generosity of Phillip Morris, and has something to do with their current glut of commercials telling their customers how to quit smoking.
Actually, the legal department is just a variable in the formula in this case (the quality of legal representation goes to probability of getting caught and fined). It's the bean counters that budgeted for this, and if they hadn't, they'd get fired. This is a case of profitable breach. We make $X billion dollars from doing this at the price of a $10M fine. It's obscenely profitable. There's no way this fine will curb the practice.
As an aside, the next time you sneer in disgust at a greedy tort lawyer (the sneer is very deserved in some cases) and think about calling for sweeping reform of our "broken" tort system, remember that manufacturers do the same thing with product safety. Probability that it will hurt somebody times what it will cost us when it does. If that's less than the savings from making an unsafe product, they make the unsafe product. The reason they don't like lawyers (and especially juries) is because they're an uncontrolled element to the damages variable. Huge jury awards hurt them (and can actually drive changes in unsafe behavior) because they can't accurately budget for them. They have such a love affair with capped awards and forced arbitration because it makes it easier for them to lock down that variable and accurately measure the benefit of hurting people.
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In contrast, I'm betting this little hacker twerp is some wannabe who got ahold of a computer and read a couple of "howto" sites. He may or may not have the disposition of a hardened criminal, but until he does something original, nobody will notice him. Maybe if he's lucky, he'll get a wikipedia entry.
My point was that the first failure lies with the black mayor who sent the people to "shelters" that were unfit for that purpose and who had no plan for dealing with them thereafter. He was partly responsible for the conditions at the Super Dome and Convention Center, so I think it's really stupid for morons like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to pretend that this is some kind of conspiracy of the White Man to keep the Black Man down. This certainly was not the finest hour of the government's disaster relief organization, but it has nothing to do with race. If we start blaming it on race, then we are detracting from the critical look we should take at the poor preparation, planning and execution that is really responsible. And if we do that, we are doing a grave disservice to the eventual victims of the next natural disaster we face who may be lily white but who will suffer just the same when the system fails. Your own quote:
Sounds like you made my point for me. The incompetence and poor planning starts at the bottom and goes all the way to the top.Honestly, it disgusts me how much finger pointing has been going on while there are still people stranded in that hell hole. ALL of these politicians need to get their priorities in order. FIRST, make sure the people stuck there have some food and water to survive on and finish picking up the ones who are stranded (maybe some of those helicopters dropping sandbags on the friggin' levees could be rescuing people still stuck on their rooftops). SECOND, get everybody out of the city. THIRD, plug the levees and start figuring out what to do with this mess. THEN they can all start bickering about who didn't respond quickly enough and who didn't prepare well enough and who should've done something first and should we even bother rebuilding the place. Somebody needs to step up and show some leadership here. It looks like Gen. Honore is the only one who has so far.
Some are even less obvious than that. For example, a contract where a bank absolutely agrees to pay a minimum interest rate on ivestments is void as a matter of publlic policy if market conditions make it impractical to pay that rate (rationale is that we don't want banks failing like in the 30s). Or if you agree to liquidate damages and a court finds there was no rational basis for the number agreed to, the court may assess more contractually sound damages. There is an entire body of contract law that deals with contracts (or parts of contracts) that are either void or voidable for various reasons. A capitalist society values Freedom of Contract, but remember that it is the government that has to enforce your contract if it comes to litigation. There are some contracts that the government rightly refuses to be a party to.
I don't care how hard it is, I am not buying my wife a new ring.
More importantly, before a court would even go about "interpreting" this EULA one way or another, somebody with standing (i.e., MACROMEDIA) would have to bring a suit against a laptop user of the software. Last I checked, the only software company stupid enough to sue its customers for using its software is SCO.
I know everybdoy is thinking, "But what about that quarter of a billion dollar judgment against Merck last week?" Under Texas statute, the ~$230M in punitives will be reduced to a MAXIMUM of just over $1M, and it's quite possible that the appellate judge will throw the whole thing out for lack of evidence of causation. Even if he doesn't, the $23M left for noneconomic damages will probably be sliced dramatically, which will leave Merck paying the widow ~$450k in economic damages and some token "pain and suffering." Merck made a highly profitable decision by choosing to suppress the test results that showed their drug caused heart problems. If putting Hg in the vaccines saves the manufacturers money, don't expect to see them stop the practice any time soon. Capped awards provide them the only incentive they need.
Now all we need is a targeting system that can get close enough, hit a missile with its laser toy, and hold the beam steady on the target long enough to actually destroy it -- all before the missile is able to do its own damage. I'm betting they'd have better luck with kinetic interceptors that at least only have to hit once.
Well I tried to start one up, but some company in Washington sued me out of business for trademark infringement.
This month's IEEE Spectrum features an article by Bradley Edwards who studied the near-term feasibility of a space elevator under a grant from NASA. His conclusion is that it could be accomplished in as little as 10-15 years and for as "little" as $10B (meaning little enough that there are several individuals on Earth who could fund it privately). Of course, the major technological limitation is the nanotubes. He suggests "spun" nanotubes (like yarn) or nanotube composites (and he contends that if one of these broke near the top, it would not be the end of life as we know it -- it's a ribbon that would loft gently down to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere). He even addresses storms, terrorism and space-borne threates. It's a good article and somewhat technical (written for engineers). His conclusions are quite credible, and probably more informed than your average Slashdot debate.
You know, I used to know a member of the Flat Earth Society, and I never quite understood those guys. Given a body of a certain mass, it WILL collapse into a spheroid. And where do they think all the turtles come from anyway? I can almost sympathize with the loons who think the moon shots were staged. That would at least be theoretically possible. But these guys are in serious denial.
But this patent claims an extension to that idea where "four thousand" is highlighted just like "4,000." That may or may not be an obvious extension, but I have not seen syntax highlighting in any editor or IDE that did that (and probably for good reason -- that would be a stupid feature). I'm not saying this is a good or valid patent, or that it should be issued (remember, it's just a published application right now). I'm just saying that every time some stupid patent is discussed on Slashdot, the first reaction everybody has is, "I've seen that before." That may be true, but the PTO isn't going to take your word for it. You're going to need some documentation that they can positively date before they will enter it as prior art.
Prior art is not just as easy as saying, "I'm pretty sure I saw somebody do this on Emacs back in '89." Prior art is very technically defined by 35 U.S.C. 102, and at a bare minimum, has to be published. If you can find a published reference showing how somebody did this prior to the application date for this patent, you're in business. If you can find it within the next two months, you may be able to stop this patent from ever issuing. If not, the only hope is that the examiner will give it a 35 U.S.C. 103 Obviousness rejection, but that bar seems to be pretty low in anything related to computers.
I'd mod the AC up if I had points, but since I don't, I'll reiterate what he said. It is standard practice at the USPTO to reject all applications at least once. If your first office action on the merits is a notice of allowance, your patent is probably worthless. They do NOT just rubber stamp patents.
Yes, like any good whore, she seduced HP, screwed it, took its money (to the tune of $42e6), and then left it a shattered and bitter shell of its former self.
Carly Fiorina was their mistake. I hate that woman. She ruined one of the most respectable companies in engineering. It's not just the calculators. HP used to be synonymous with quality in instrumentation. That's what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started doing in their garage fer cryin' out loud! Now that's been spun off (how can you buy an instrument named "Agilent" with a straight face), the Australian Calculator Division is closed, THEY MERGED WITH FRIGGIN' COMPAQ, MAKERS OF THE CRAPPIEST COMPUTERS SINCE PACKARD BELL, and the HP brand means nothing more than "Mediocre PCs." Honestly, does she go and piss on their graves every week too? Is she sleeping with Satan? What's up with that woman?
You know, just a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking, "What was that whacked-out 80s show where the guy had a little light that flew around that he called "cursor" and a car that could do 90-degree turns." Now that you've reminded me, I remember why I forgot it.
Was that movie supposed to be funny? I never saw it, but it doesn't exactly sound like a comedy.
Best of luck to you. I guess I've already gotten something out of these tactics. The very nice, very new building where I am currently attending school was built by the generosity of Phillip Morris, and has something to do with their current glut of commercials telling their customers how to quit smoking.
As an aside, the next time you sneer in disgust at a greedy tort lawyer (the sneer is very deserved in some cases) and think about calling for sweeping reform of our "broken" tort system, remember that manufacturers do the same thing with product safety. Probability that it will hurt somebody times what it will cost us when it does. If that's less than the savings from making an unsafe product, they make the unsafe product. The reason they don't like lawyers (and especially juries) is because they're an uncontrolled element to the damages variable. Huge jury awards hurt them (and can actually drive changes in unsafe behavior) because they can't accurately budget for them. They have such a love affair with capped awards and forced arbitration because it makes it easier for them to lock down that variable and accurately measure the benefit of hurting people.