The amount will, of course, be determined during discovery when Getty is forced to reveal the number of times they actually sold a license for each of her images. The three-times-$400M amount bandied about is assuming maximum value on each image, and one violation per image. That's a place to start, and gives a scale for the potentially massive size a judgement could take, but is unlikely to be found to be accurate in the end.
The actual value is irrelevant when calculating the statutory damages. This is why Jammie Thomas-Rasset who got sued and lost for pirating 24 songs owes $1.92 million. (Which will never get paid.) The quoted $468 million is the ceiling for damages provided for by law, regardless of real damages, without factoring in willful infringement, as in the Thomas-Rasset case. Using the Thomas-Rasset award for willful infringement as the benchmark (which a judge would consider perfectly reasonable), the damages per violation is $80,000 on each image, out of a possible $150,000, times the number of violations per image. $1.5 billion is the lower bound, by law and precedent. The Thomas-Rasset case was upheld on appeal, so it establishes binding precedent for its federal district, and persuasive precedent everywhere else. Discovery will only make that go up.
Undoubtedly Getty Images will refuse to pay. I suspect in order to actually get the damages, this woman will have to pull the stunt that Warren and Maureen Nyerges did to Bank of America: show up at their offices with two sheriff's deputies and a moving van and start confiscating their furniture.
wow. and just who the hell do you think you are, you little spoiled, entitled, nasty little totalitarian? why is anyone entitled to anything others produce? your words betray your true ugliness. MAKE them?
disgusting.
I don't know about him, but I'm a taxpayer you fuckhead. Stop licking corporate asshole long enough to realize they should pay taxes TOO.
People did it because it was fun and for a good cause, and two years later we can point to concrete and significant scientific results from the money raised. That's not only pretty good, it's pretty damned awesome.
Downright spectacular, I would think. How many thousands of cancer fundraisers have their been, with precious little to show for it?
Maybe they should start having anti-cancer fundraisers...
Three different people posting the same Youtube link to the same babbling jackass.
You people do realize that Elon Musk had actual rocket scientists working on the original Hyperloop paper, right? Whether or not Mr. Musk's own physics degree is worth anything or not, the degrees of his employees definitely are, or SpaceX rockets wouldn't fly. They did modeling of vacuum evacuation of the tube. They did modeling of stresses on a basic pylon, using the same software they use to model the stresses on SpaceX rockets. They did modeling of the capsule. The math and engineering have been vetted pretty seriously. At least, the original version.
Whether or not Hyperloop One's version has enjoyed the same degree of scrutiny by people who have been demonstrated not to drop a decimal place I don't know, but regardless, you can stop linking to the babbling fool.
The fundamental flaws of Hyperloop are political, not physical. The link proposed between SF and LA will never be built because it would have followed the highway, which would deny the Right People the opportunity to get rich off of real estate speculation, the way the Not Very High Speed Rail project is allowing.
I remember reading something from Tesla saying they found autopilot was not on, and had it been it would have stopped the car.
Different incident. There have been three in recent weeks. This is the fatality, where autopilot was on, didn't detect the truck, and the jackass was watching a Harry Potter DVD in the driver's seat. Hopefully he didn't have children, for their sake and for ours, so no one has lost their father and we get a Darwin Award nominee.
You mean Monster Aether? Plugs into the wall like those room perfume thingies, and spreads complex organic molecules tuned to the specific BT frequencies, to help carry the signal and keep it coherent.
Shut up shut up shut up they might hear you. And then there will be a product. Gawd...
You're like the guy who said he didn't know it was loaded...
Admitted, I'm just another guy debating a topic I don't know much about, but won't layering components on top of each other result in massive heating issues? I mean, the heat from each layer has to go somewhere, right?
Yes. That's why IBM, among others, has been fabricating cooling capillaries into chips. They're experimenting with inter-layer liquid cooling through tubes just a few microns wide, imitating physical shapes found in the smallest of blood vessels to keep the fluid moving.
People use free WiFi without encryption. Not only is this unremarkable, it should not be in any way remarkable. The Internet Protocol and its children, UDP and TCP, were designed from the very beginning with one overriding goal: the intelligence is at the edges. Only the nodes matter. Everything else is just transit. Whether or not Layer 2 is encrypted is irrelevant. Only Layer 6/7 encryption can be trusted.[1] It is equally as safe to use any random wifi hotspot as it is to use your cable modem at home.
Knowing what we know about NSA spying, let me repeat that: it is equally as safe to use any random wifi hotspot as it is to use your cable modem. Historically, the various protocols that were designed to run over TCP/IP and UDP[2] largely assumed that transit would be benign. That's because IMAP and POP and HTTP were designed by engineers who were unaccustomed to designing a world that's proof against flaming assholes. Those days are over.
Now that the whole world uses the Internet, engineers have to design protocols and systems that are proof against flaming assholes. It's no longer optional. Avast saw identity leakage because not all software has come to grips with the new reality. Eventually, when all the software is updated, there will be nothing to report. The grand strength of the design of the Internet will once again make itself felt: upgrade the nodes to use encryption (math is your friend) and transit is just transit, as was and ever shall be. You and I already have the ability to upgrade the nodes under our control to be proof against flaming assholes. Eventually the nodes that Jane and John Q. Public buy will come configured that way out of the box.
We just want our packets routed. The SSID will be totally irrelevant. People who already treat it as if it is aren't wrong. They just need to use a slightly smarter node. Apparently 30% of users already have one.
--- [1] Or possibly you can squeeze it all the way down to Layer 4, if you use Authentication Header and Encapsulating Security Payload. (IPSEC) [2] Why does no one ever write UDP/IP?
I haven't read the linked wankery on medium.com, but I'm quite comfortable condemning it based solely on the Slashdot summary, since obviously no facts were involved in its authorship.
It pains me to say it, but resource concentration allows things that would otherwise be impossible. This is very much a two-edged sword, as powerful tools often are, but while resource concentration allows Rupert Murdoch to spew his delusional version of reality into the world, it also allows Elon Musk to build a rocket with a first stage that can land itself. Neither is possible without one person controlling resources far in excess of those necessary for his own survival.
Capitalism's great strength is the ability to get a whole bunch of people moving in the same direction, aimed at a common goal, without the use of coercive force or religious delusion. This happens only very rarely in any other fashion, and of course those other motivations can invade and co-opt capitalism, but setting aside the messy exigencies of reality for a moment, capitalism is the system whereby one person can say to 20 other people, "I want you to design, document, produce, and market a Widget. I have 20 times the resources I need to live and I will give some of them to each of you if you will do this for me." And lo and behold, a Widget comes into existence, where there was no Widget before. This is something capitalism has, historically at least, done better than any other system.
Open source has demonstrated that there are other models that work, but only rarely do you get 20+ people moving in the same direction in open source, and it only seems to work in software. Open source hardware is stillborn, in all fields. Managing developers has been famously compared to herding cats. We can expand that a little to say that managing engineers of all stripes is like herding cats. As Microsoft and Oracle and Google and Apple (and indeed GE, GM, and Samsung) et al. have discovered, the most effective way to herd cats is with money.
Redundant semicolons at the end of macro instantiations that have an embedded semicolon. Because code editors try to auto-indent the next line if it's not there. Both the extraneous semicolon and the auto-indent make me twitchy, but... other people's libraries. What can you do.
actually now that I think about it, why did this need to be pointed out?
Because it's Google.
Did people think it was going to be temporary or something?
Yes. It's Google. They lose interest in everything that isn't search or email or maps. And maps is iffy. They forgot that search didn't earn billions overnight, and now have unreasonable expectations for everything else. If it doesn't earn hundreds of millions in its first year, it's deemed pathetic and gets abandoned. Google Fiber probably runs in the red. Making physical things happen is expensive. It will pay for itself in the long run, but Google is about as far away from the mindset of a utility as you can possibly get while remaining on the same planet. Waiting for a long run low margin payoff is not in their corporate DNA. The continued existence of Google Fiber is anomalous already. It will only get worse.
So yes, that did need clearing up, and I'm still skeptical.
So apparently the US Patent Office will now grant a patent for a transcript of a late night undergrad bull session where at least 2 of the participants are high...
That seems the most likely source of this patent, to me. I think the USPTO has inverted the obviousness clause: the very most obvious of business method patents require and obviously deserve to be granted, or how can US businesses continue to get richer?
"Our drones are really short range. How do we use them to deliver stuff everywhere?"
"Drone docks everywhere!"
"Ok. So we put drone docks everywhere. How do we keep people from stealing or vandalizing them?"
"They fly, right?
"Yes."
"So like.... like.... uhmmmm.... what was I saying.... this is really good weed..... flying... oh yeah, put 'em high up!"
"Like on top of lamp posts and church steeples?"
"Yeah!"
"And make 'em deliver roaches!"
"Yeah!"
Thankfully, Amazon figured out that drones can have wings, and eliminated the problem entirely. So they got a patent granted for some stoner's idea. They'll never use it.
One single Chinese microblogger with a tin foil hat advances crackpot theory and actual Chinese official can't be bothered to even talk about, and it makes front page of Slashdot?
It's always nice to have confirmation that every culture has its crackpots, and they all post on the Internet.
I agree it's mostly the driver's fault, but that doesn't relieve Tesla of liability. If I have a pool in my backyard surrounded by a 10' locked fence, and a kid climbs the fence and drowns in my pool, I can still be sued even though it was the kid's fault. If I have a pit bull in my home, and a burglar breaks in and gets bitten by the dog, I can still be sued even though it was the burglar's fault. Case law is full of suits like this that have been won by the plaintiff.
Case law is full of such cases being filed. It is NOT full of such cases being won by the plaintiff. Having a pool with no fence is having an attractive nuisance. Having a pool with a fence is bog standard across the world. Yes grieving parents will still file suit. They lose.
Any idiot who has ever interacted with a product user knows that if a product lets someone do something without any (real) obstacle, they'll do it.
Yes, and we give Darwin Awards for that and move on. There are limits in consumer protections beyond which a court will say, "His own colossal stupidity resulted in his death. Case dismissed." The lone Tesla Autopilot death is most definitely in that category.
The article is content-free and makes no sense, as so many of these articles do. It's also barely longer than the "summary". At least this one didn't fall victim to the usual tech reporting failure of saying the blockchain is public. Still, the magical blockchain does not eliminate $1.2 billion in expenses. Far from it. If anything, their hardware expenses will go up, because they have to devote hardware to hashing, where before, a financial transaction was a straight-forward database transaction. They still have to keep track of everything they keep track of now, plus hash. Now, they can control and explicitly cap the amount of hashing required to drive the system, since they're not limited to the Bitcoin implementation, but there still has to be work done, i.e. processing.
Here's the nonsensical part though:
The start-up has been working with about ten banks, Taylor said, at least one of which would be starting a trial using the new system in August.
At least one? You mean at least two. One bank doesn't need a blockchain at all. The controls required to prevent internal fraud are quite simple when you know everything there is to know about both sides of the transaction. It's when one party of the transaction has an account at a different bank that a blockchain comes in. The banks are hoping to disintermediate the Automated Clearing House (in the US) and the Pan-European Automated Clearing House (with the cutesy PE-ACH acronym). In practice, they're going to discover that sufficient hashing to secure 100 billion transactions per year (ACH+EPN+PE-ACH) is neither free nor even cheap. It remains to be seen if hashing expenses can be kept below ACH fees.
It was the noösphere before Slashdot got a hold of it. A word some pretentious asshole thought up to refer to the universe of ideas. Maybe when there are humans living on some other sphere besides Earth it will be a useful distinction. You could talk about the Earth noösphere and the Mars noösphere. Until then, it's just a molestation of two perfectly innocent Greek words. Or in Bruce's case, ferocious sarcasm.
Slashdot Mirror
The amount will, of course, be determined during discovery when Getty is forced to reveal the number of times they actually sold a license for each of her images. The three-times-$400M amount bandied about is assuming maximum value on each image, and one violation per image. That's a place to start, and gives a scale for the potentially massive size a judgement could take, but is unlikely to be found to be accurate in the end.
The actual value is irrelevant when calculating the statutory damages. This is why Jammie Thomas-Rasset who got sued and lost for pirating 24 songs owes $1.92 million. (Which will never get paid.) The quoted $468 million is the ceiling for damages provided for by law, regardless of real damages, without factoring in willful infringement, as in the Thomas-Rasset case. Using the Thomas-Rasset award for willful infringement as the benchmark (which a judge would consider perfectly reasonable), the damages per violation is $80,000 on each image, out of a possible $150,000, times the number of violations per image. $1.5 billion is the lower bound, by law and precedent. The Thomas-Rasset case was upheld on appeal, so it establishes binding precedent for its federal district, and persuasive precedent everywhere else. Discovery will only make that go up.
Undoubtedly Getty Images will refuse to pay. I suspect in order to actually get the damages, this woman will have to pull the stunt that Warren and Maureen Nyerges did to Bank of America: show up at their offices with two sheriff's deputies and a moving van and start confiscating their furniture.
wow. and just who the hell do you think you are, you little spoiled, entitled, nasty little totalitarian? why is anyone entitled to anything others produce? your words betray your true ugliness. MAKE them?
disgusting.
I don't know about him, but I'm a taxpayer you fuckhead. Stop licking corporate asshole long enough to realize they should pay taxes TOO.
People did it because it was fun and for a good cause, and two years later we can point to concrete and significant scientific results from the money raised. That's not only pretty good, it's pretty damned awesome.
Downright spectacular, I would think. How many thousands of cancer fundraisers have their been, with precious little to show for it?
Maybe they should start having anti-cancer fundraisers...
Three different people posting the same Youtube link to the same babbling jackass.
You people do realize that Elon Musk had actual rocket scientists working on the original Hyperloop paper, right? Whether or not Mr. Musk's own physics degree is worth anything or not, the degrees of his employees definitely are, or SpaceX rockets wouldn't fly. They did modeling of vacuum evacuation of the tube. They did modeling of stresses on a basic pylon, using the same software they use to model the stresses on SpaceX rockets. They did modeling of the capsule. The math and engineering have been vetted pretty seriously. At least, the original version.
Whether or not Hyperloop One's version has enjoyed the same degree of scrutiny by people who have been demonstrated not to drop a decimal place I don't know, but regardless, you can stop linking to the babbling fool.
The fundamental flaws of Hyperloop are political, not physical. The link proposed between SF and LA will never be built because it would have followed the highway, which would deny the Right People the opportunity to get rich off of real estate speculation, the way the Not Very High Speed Rail project is allowing.
That'd be awesome! Run a few raids, pay for my driver's license renewal!
I never said the exchange rate was favorable...
Marvelous.
Now write a legal definition of "virtual currency" that includes Bitcoin but excludes WoW gold and EVE Online ISK. I dare you.
Actually, they might be perfectly happy to suck those in too, just because a bureaucrat never met a tracking database they didn't like.
I remember reading something from Tesla saying they found autopilot was not on, and had it been it would have stopped the car.
Different incident. There have been three in recent weeks. This is the fatality, where autopilot was on, didn't detect the truck, and the jackass was watching a Harry Potter DVD in the driver's seat. Hopefully he didn't have children, for their sake and for ours, so no one has lost their father and we get a Darwin Award nominee.
You mean Monster Aether? Plugs into the wall like those room perfume thingies, and spreads complex organic molecules tuned to the specific BT frequencies, to help carry the signal and keep it coherent.
Shut up shut up shut up they might hear you. And then there will be a product. Gawd...
You're like the guy who said he didn't know it was loaded...
Admitted, I'm just another guy debating a topic I don't know much about, but won't layering components on top of each other result in massive heating issues? I mean, the heat from each layer has to go somewhere, right?
Yes. That's why IBM, among others, has been fabricating cooling capillaries into chips. They're experimenting with inter-layer liquid cooling through tubes just a few microns wide, imitating physical shapes found in the smallest of blood vessels to keep the fluid moving.
People use free WiFi without encryption. Not only is this unremarkable, it should not be in any way remarkable. The Internet Protocol and its children, UDP and TCP, were designed from the very beginning with one overriding goal: the intelligence is at the edges. Only the nodes matter. Everything else is just transit. Whether or not Layer 2 is encrypted is irrelevant. Only Layer 6/7 encryption can be trusted.[1] It is equally as safe to use any random wifi hotspot as it is to use your cable modem at home.
Knowing what we know about NSA spying, let me repeat that: it is equally as safe to use any random wifi hotspot as it is to use your cable modem. Historically, the various protocols that were designed to run over TCP/IP and UDP[2] largely assumed that transit would be benign. That's because IMAP and POP and HTTP were designed by engineers who were unaccustomed to designing a world that's proof against flaming assholes. Those days are over.
Now that the whole world uses the Internet, engineers have to design protocols and systems that are proof against flaming assholes. It's no longer optional. Avast saw identity leakage because not all software has come to grips with the new reality. Eventually, when all the software is updated, there will be nothing to report. The grand strength of the design of the Internet will once again make itself felt: upgrade the nodes to use encryption (math is your friend) and transit is just transit, as was and ever shall be. You and I already have the ability to upgrade the nodes under our control to be proof against flaming assholes. Eventually the nodes that Jane and John Q. Public buy will come configured that way out of the box.
We just want our packets routed. The SSID will be totally irrelevant. People who already treat it as if it is aren't wrong. They just need to use a slightly smarter node. Apparently 30% of users already have one.
---
[1] Or possibly you can squeeze it all the way down to Layer 4, if you use Authentication Header and Encapsulating Security Payload. (IPSEC)
[2] Why does no one ever write UDP/IP?
I haven't read the linked wankery on medium.com, but I'm quite comfortable condemning it based solely on the Slashdot summary, since obviously no facts were involved in its authorship.
It pains me to say it, but resource concentration allows things that would otherwise be impossible. This is very much a two-edged sword, as powerful tools often are, but while resource concentration allows Rupert Murdoch to spew his delusional version of reality into the world, it also allows Elon Musk to build a rocket with a first stage that can land itself. Neither is possible without one person controlling resources far in excess of those necessary for his own survival.
Capitalism's great strength is the ability to get a whole bunch of people moving in the same direction, aimed at a common goal, without the use of coercive force or religious delusion. This happens only very rarely in any other fashion, and of course those other motivations can invade and co-opt capitalism, but setting aside the messy exigencies of reality for a moment, capitalism is the system whereby one person can say to 20 other people, "I want you to design, document, produce, and market a Widget. I have 20 times the resources I need to live and I will give some of them to each of you if you will do this for me." And lo and behold, a Widget comes into existence, where there was no Widget before. This is something capitalism has, historically at least, done better than any other system.
Open source has demonstrated that there are other models that work, but only rarely do you get 20+ people moving in the same direction in open source, and it only seems to work in software. Open source hardware is stillborn, in all fields. Managing developers has been famously compared to herding cats. We can expand that a little to say that managing engineers of all stripes is like herding cats. As Microsoft and Oracle and Google and Apple (and indeed GE, GM, and Samsung) et al. have discovered, the most effective way to herd cats is with money.
Redundant semicolons at the end of macro instantiations that have an embedded semicolon. Because code editors try to auto-indent the next line if it's not there. Both the extraneous semicolon and the auto-indent make me twitchy, but... other people's libraries. What can you do.
actually now that I think about it, why did this need to be pointed out?
Because it's Google.
Did people think it was going to be temporary or something?
Yes. It's Google. They lose interest in everything that isn't search or email or maps. And maps is iffy. They forgot that search didn't earn billions overnight, and now have unreasonable expectations for everything else. If it doesn't earn hundreds of millions in its first year, it's deemed pathetic and gets abandoned. Google Fiber probably runs in the red. Making physical things happen is expensive. It will pay for itself in the long run, but Google is about as far away from the mindset of a utility as you can possibly get while remaining on the same planet. Waiting for a long run low margin payoff is not in their corporate DNA. The continued existence of Google Fiber is anomalous already. It will only get worse.
So yes, that did need clearing up, and I'm still skeptical.
As of this writing, KAT is down, both through conventional DNS and through their onion address.
So apparently the US Patent Office will now grant a patent for a transcript of a late night undergrad bull session where at least 2 of the participants are high...
That seems the most likely source of this patent, to me. I think the USPTO has inverted the obviousness clause: the very most obvious of business method patents require and obviously deserve to be granted, or how can US businesses continue to get richer?
"Our drones are really short range. How do we use them to deliver stuff everywhere?"
"Drone docks everywhere!"
"Ok. So we put drone docks everywhere. How do we keep people from stealing or vandalizing them?"
"They fly, right?
"Yes."
"So like.... like.... uhmmmm.... what was I saying.... this is really good weed..... flying... oh yeah, put 'em high up!"
"Like on top of lamp posts and church steeples?"
"Yeah!"
"And make 'em deliver roaches!"
"Yeah!"
Thankfully, Amazon figured out that drones can have wings, and eliminated the problem entirely. So they got a patent granted for some stoner's idea. They'll never use it.
... because, before, that stuff was only used for child porn, sex slavery, and snuff films.
Well sure, but that's just CNN's front page today. Chinese users will be reading and watching something else tomorrow.
One single Chinese microblogger with a tin foil hat advances crackpot theory and actual Chinese official can't be bothered to even talk about, and it makes front page of Slashdot?
It's always nice to have confirmation that every culture has its crackpots, and they all post on the Internet.
I agree it's mostly the driver's fault, but that doesn't relieve Tesla of liability. If I have a pool in my backyard surrounded by a 10' locked fence, and a kid climbs the fence and drowns in my pool, I can still be sued even though it was the kid's fault. If I have a pit bull in my home, and a burglar breaks in and gets bitten by the dog, I can still be sued even though it was the burglar's fault. Case law is full of suits like this that have been won by the plaintiff.
Case law is full of such cases being filed. It is NOT full of such cases being won by the plaintiff. Having a pool with no fence is having an attractive nuisance. Having a pool with a fence is bog standard across the world. Yes grieving parents will still file suit. They lose.
Any idiot who has ever interacted with a product user knows that if a product lets someone do something without any (real) obstacle, they'll do it.
Yes, and we give Darwin Awards for that and move on. There are limits in consumer protections beyond which a court will say, "His own colossal stupidity resulted in his death. Case dismissed." The lone Tesla Autopilot death is most definitely in that category.
The article is content-free and makes no sense, as so many of these articles do. It's also barely longer than the "summary". At least this one didn't fall victim to the usual tech reporting failure of saying the blockchain is public. Still, the magical blockchain does not eliminate $1.2 billion in expenses. Far from it. If anything, their hardware expenses will go up, because they have to devote hardware to hashing, where before, a financial transaction was a straight-forward database transaction. They still have to keep track of everything they keep track of now, plus hash. Now, they can control and explicitly cap the amount of hashing required to drive the system, since they're not limited to the Bitcoin implementation, but there still has to be work done, i.e. processing.
Here's the nonsensical part though:
The start-up has been working with about ten banks, Taylor said, at least one of which would be starting a trial using the new system in August.
At least one? You mean at least two. One bank doesn't need a blockchain at all. The controls required to prevent internal fraud are quite simple when you know everything there is to know about both sides of the transaction. It's when one party of the transaction has an account at a different bank that a blockchain comes in. The banks are hoping to disintermediate the Automated Clearing House (in the US) and the Pan-European Automated Clearing House (with the cutesy PE-ACH acronym). In practice, they're going to discover that sufficient hashing to secure 100 billion transactions per year (ACH+EPN+PE-ACH) is neither free nor even cheap. It remains to be seen if hashing expenses can be kept below ACH fees.
Naturally I got his handle wrong. It's bluefoxlucid. Sorry about that.
He also used a parachute to escape and had a lot of knowledge on how to actually open a commercial airlines doors IN FLIGHT.
From wikipedia: ...
Given all that, it's fairly obvious. D.B. Cooper was an ex-CIA agent arranging his own retirement. Guess the pension wasn't enough for his taste.
hectoring from the sidelines?
What? It's a verb. Hey, when you're using weapons-grade sarcasm and words like noösphere, a little word like hectoring has to fend for itself.
What's the noÃsphere?
It was the noösphere before Slashdot got a hold of it. A word some pretentious asshole thought up to refer to the universe of ideas. Maybe when there are humans living on some other sphere besides Earth it will be a useful distinction. You could talk about the Earth noösphere and the Mars noösphere. Until then, it's just a molestation of two perfectly innocent Greek words. Or in Bruce's case, ferocious sarcasm.
You mean