Katzer responded by bringing a SLAPP suit against Jacobsen. SLAPP is a law that was meant to defend little folks sued by big rich companies, but is increasingly used in just the other direction. And the judge upheld this, which meant that Jacobsen would have to pay Katzer's lawyer's fees before the case was even decided. After some court argument, the unreasonable fees asked were reduced to $14,486.68 and $16,976.25, for two lawyers used by Katzer, and Bob Jacobsen paid them.
Most Open Source developers, faced with a court-enforced $30,000+ bill to pay their opponent's lawyers, would have been forced to give up.
Judas Priest!
I changed my mind. This Katzer guy and his lawyers should be executed. To quote the Federal Circuit Court, "Repentant, Katzer is not. A fair reading of the record shows Katzer has engaged in a pattern of misappropriation and obfuscation. That pattern establishes a likelihood that he will continue, especially since his conduct was intentional." In other words like any common criminal, he's likely to be a repeat offender.
Katzer is only paying $100,000. "This doesn't fully compensate Jacobsen for all of his time and expense over 5 years, but it was the best he could get." Nope. Not even close. I would have awarded 1 million..... about $500,000 to cover actual expenses, plus $250,000 for the damages caused with Jacobsen's employer (he was denied a promotion by the DOE), and another $250,000 for the thousands of uncompensated hours wasted on the case (aka worrying and fear and sleepless nights).
Jacobsen has more restraint than I do.
I'll probably shoot the bastard. Or else feed him lots of deep-fried chicken, in hopes of inducing a heart attack or stroke. Either would do.
Katzer started sending demand letters to Jacobsen, asking for more than $200,000 in patent royalties. What probably made Jacobsen most angry was when Katzer's lawyer sent a Freedom of Information Act request to Jacobsen's employer, the U.S. Department of Energy and its Lawrence Berkeley Labs, accusing them of sponsoring the model train project, and asking for copies of all of Jacobsen's email and Skype communications, and a long list of other information which one could conclude was meant to embarrass Jacobsen in front of his employer.
The Department of Energy eventually denied the FOIA, but only after it had caused Jacobsen a lot of trouble. Because it was so unlikely that the laboratory would disclose what was obviously private correspondence, the only reason I can see for this FOIA would have been to harass Jacobsen through his employer and to put his job at risk.
From time-to-time, I think the government should serve life sentences to people (and their lawyers) for "acting like assholes". Or to quote the Declaration: "eating out the substance of our people" via harassment.
This is one of those times.
The $100,000 fine is nothing for a businessman like Katzer, and no doubt he'll continue suing people in the future, and giving them a decade of fear/grief/worry like he did to OSS programmer/physicist Jacobsen. In this case, I think it was the bad guy who actually won, because he got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
>>>Except for the school, which is a public, gov't agency, and thus has no copyright powers.
The Oregon government and New York government (and probably others have well) have claimed copyright over their documents, and sent takedown notices to website owners who published them online.
>>>But I don't want the sappy music and the long drawn out family history
Well......you have to remember the Olympics largest demographic is female. (Yes I'm serious - check out the Nielsen Ratings.) So they don't really care about our minority male voice. NBC wants to please their largest audience, and the females like the sap.
>>>Once that guy left the track, no amount of barriers or cushioning would have helped at all.
I disagree. The wooden wall they put-up now, would have deflected him away from the steel beams, and back onto the track. He'd still probably have a broken arm or leg, but that's better than a crushed head.
And even if the wall was not there, putting the steel beams on the *inside* of the surve instead of the outside would have meant he'd never hit them. Instead he'd have skidded across the ground and into the nearby audience. Not a fun experience, but motorcyclists have survived 80mph crashes and the luger would have survived too.
So a skiier making a mistake and getting killed by falling in a ditch or hitting a tree is entirely their fault, while a luger making a mistake and flying into a pillar is the track's fault?
Yeah, that's brilliant reasoning there.
STRAWMAN ARGUMENT (pisspoor debating tactic). I never said that. Please don't put words into my mouth that I did not say, Anonymous Coward. ----- What I said is that the designers of the ski course did not put-in steel beams, or leave in trees, or other killer objects, for the skiers to hit. The designers of the luge course should have been just as intelligent, but they were delinquent.
>>>If those poles weren't there he would have hit the whatever object was in the next 50 meters.
Yes. The soft cushioning of the human audience. In which case he would have survived, and then we'd be discussing how lucky he was and that nobody got hurt (other than minor injuries), instead of his funeral.
>>>And the skiing example? I reckon you didn't catch the womens' alpine downhill last week, where a huge portion of the skiiers whiped out >>>
That's because the downhill skiing course isn't lined with steel beams that the athletes can hit and be turned into squash. If a skier did happen to die last week, it would be due to their own mistake, not because an engineer put a human-crushing steel beam in the way.
Probably trial-and-error, using experience from previous tracks. The problem is that this track was about 10mph faster, and therefore needed higher walls, but the designers didn't provide them.
This is similar to how the Titanic and Britannic had rudders that were sized too small. They would have been fine for older ships, but these new ships were much larger, and designers forgot to account for the difference.
>>>Though based on the general negative raction the other lugers had to moving down the starting position...
Did you just make that up? I heard the lugers say the exact opposite ("This course is waaay too fast," and "Are they using us like test dummies? It's ridiculous."). Plus many, many of them crashed during training. It was only a matter of time until one of them died.
A friend and coworker had dinner with us Friday evening..... and then died the next day while rock-climbing. According to WBAL news he was climbing without a rope. On one hand I couldn't believe the news...... on the other hand, knowing that it had just rained that morning, I decided he was incredibly stupid to climb over slippery rocks.
It's one thing to enjoy a sport, but something else entirely to be dumb.
>>>but in the video he doesn't even get his hands in front of his head
Since he hit the steel beam with the back of his head, and human arms don't bend backwards like that, the suggestion you offer would not be possible. The man was doomed, and even if he had superhuman reflexes, there's nothing he could have done to stop his head from slamming against that steel beam.
Of course you would have known this yourself, but since the IOC is censoring the video, there was no way to double-check it prior to posting, so all you had to go on was fuzzy memory. Pretty soon (2-3 years) we'll forget the death was caused by poor safety design (steel beams along track), and the IOC will have accomplished its goal to cover its ass. (Yes that's a slam against censorship.)
I'm not posting this because I'm a "ghoul" but because I think it's educational. When I first saw how twisted/dismantled these humans were, simply because of a car crash, it got me to thinking that I don't really need to drive 85 to get to work. 60-65 mph will still get me there in a decent amount of time, and if I impact anything, there will be about 50% less kinetic energy to rip apart my body.
Yet another reason the IOC wants this video "silenced". They don't want people seeing it and asking inconvenient questions like, "Why wasn't there a wall between the track and the steel beams?" So they silence the criticism by removing the evidence.
Also if you've seen the SAFER barrier in NASCAR, then you know it is possible to create cushioning to *absorb* the energy, rather than do nothing and blame the driver.
I'll support government-run hospitalization if somebody can name one thing they do well:
- Amtrak? Nope. Billions in debt, inconvenient to ride, and take longers to travel cross-country by train than by car.
- Post office? Nope. Billions in debt, and when they tried to streamline operations by eliminating Saturday delivery (a day that incurs losses, rather than profits), the Congress overruled them and forced the USPS to continue operating inefficiently and losing money.
- Medicare? Social Security? Nope. The number of retirees will soon outnumber the workers, such that in 2014, these programs will become bankrupt (not be able to continue cashflow, unless they borrow money from someplace else).
Yeah. I want the government to run my body. Not.
Oh and my advice for the original poster: Virtually everyone who gets sick or dies is past age 60. I don't see any reason for you to waste money buying insurance when you're still young and healthy, and therefore get nothing out of it. Stop living in fear over rare events (like asteroids falling from the sky and hitting you on the head).
If it makes you feel more comfortable, get a high deductible insurance ($10,000 or more) where you pay all your own health bills except in case of catastrophe. I do that. I only spend $200-300 each year.
You are correct, but the losses are more about the economy than the games, or how they are presented. Advertisers are pulling back.
For example FOX Broadcast lost millions of dollars in 2009, however FX actually increased revenue (due to cable subscriptions). Likewise NBC is probably making money off their MSNBC, CNBC, and USA cable coverage, but losing money on their advertising-supported NBC and NBC Sports channels.
If the economy was still booming, and advertisers still buying, NBC would be as profitable this time as they were in Winter 2006.
And then immediately replace it with another video of a different luger (perhaps one that crashed but survived). I will not cave-in to demands that I limit my free speech rights, otherwise companies could use copyright to censor uncomfortable things. Like Toyota claiming copyright over a video of one of their cars going off a cliff. Or Marlboro claiming copyright over an advertisement of an actor who later died from smoking-related cancer. Or Microsoft claiming copyright to make me remove a Vista ad that claimed it would work on only 256 megabytes (got to cover that up).
Or a school claiming copyright over a vid which reveals they were spying on kids via laptops. Copyright claims can be abused to censor the news to eliminate negative publicity. And right now, I think that's what the IOC's ultimate goal is.
Hosting Olympics has NEVER been a money-maker. Montreal is still paying-off their Olympic-related debt and that was all the was back in 1976. Almost no city has "made money" since then. Atlanta made money, but then people complained it was too commercialized (companies hung ads along stadium walls).
So you just can't win - either you lose money (and go into debt), or you make money and then you get criticized for it.
Otherwise it would be just a bunch of strangers moving around on screen. At least this way we know the motivations behind the athletes. For example I would not have known that one Canadian skier was motivated by his brother's Down Syndrome to push even when he's in pain.
For me the problem didn't have anything to do with drivers. They all worked fine.
For me the problem was that Microsoft lied to the hardware makers, told them 512 MB wouldn't run Aero but would still be sufficient to run Vista, and my brother ended-up with a 512 MB machine that ran slower than his old XP machine on only 128 megabytes, and suffered severe hard drive thrashing.
Depending on your viewpoint, the software was either vastly bloated because it needed 1024 to run properly (in contrast the Mac OS released that same year ran great on only 256 MB) - or else the software was fine but MS was guilty of lying about the hardware specs.
You sound very reasonable, but I issue this challenge:
What if some of those "buckets" you use consisted of the categories "White" "Black" "Jew" "Arab" "Italian" and so on, which double rates for Italians (gangsters have short lives, dont ya know), 1.5x rates for Blacks, average rates for whites, and the lowest rates for Jews, and so on.
Isn't that discriminatory/prejudicial? YES.
Well it's no different when you do it based on age. One of the reasons I waited until 18 to drive is precisely *because* the company would make me pay three times more money at ages 16 and 17 than a 30-yr-old does. That's prejudging me, when you don't even know me. (In reality I've never had an accident, not even a broken bone in twenty years of driving, because I'm very cautious.)
Our property tax and school tax are separate. So it's technically possible to pay one but not the other.
And yes it would be illegal to not pay school tax, but just as I don't pay Comcast or Microsoft (because I don't use their products), neither should I have to support my local Philadelphia public school if my daughter is being sent to (and paying tuition for) the nearby Valley Forge public school instead. Customers should not have to pay for products not being used.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S.
Katzer responded by bringing a SLAPP suit against Jacobsen. SLAPP is a law that was meant to defend little folks sued by big rich companies, but is increasingly used in just the other direction. And the judge upheld this, which meant that Jacobsen would have to pay Katzer's lawyer's fees before the case was even decided. After some court argument, the unreasonable fees asked were reduced to $14,486.68 and $16,976.25, for two lawyers used by Katzer, and Bob Jacobsen paid them.
Most Open Source developers, faced with a court-enforced $30,000+ bill to pay their opponent's lawyers, would have been forced to give up.
Judas Priest!
I changed my mind. This Katzer guy and his lawyers should be executed. To quote the Federal Circuit Court, "Repentant, Katzer is not. A fair reading of the record shows Katzer has engaged in a pattern of misappropriation and obfuscation. That pattern establishes a likelihood that he will continue, especially since his conduct was intentional." In other words like any common criminal, he's likely to be a repeat offender.
Katzer is only paying $100,000. "This doesn't fully compensate Jacobsen for all of his time and expense over 5 years, but it was the best he could get." Nope. Not even close. I would have awarded 1 million..... about $500,000 to cover actual expenses, plus $250,000 for the damages caused with Jacobsen's employer (he was denied a promotion by the DOE), and another $250,000 for the thousands of uncompensated hours wasted on the case (aka worrying and fear and sleepless nights).
Jacobsen has more restraint than I do.
I'll probably shoot the bastard. Or else feed him lots of deep-fried chicken, in hopes of inducing a heart attack or stroke. Either would do.
Katzer started sending demand letters to Jacobsen, asking for more than $200,000 in patent royalties. What probably made Jacobsen most angry was when Katzer's lawyer sent a Freedom of Information Act request to Jacobsen's employer, the U.S. Department of Energy and its Lawrence Berkeley Labs, accusing them of sponsoring the model train project, and asking for copies of all of Jacobsen's email and Skype communications, and a long list of other information which one could conclude was meant to embarrass Jacobsen in front of his employer.
The Department of Energy eventually denied the FOIA, but only after it had caused Jacobsen a lot of trouble. Because it was so unlikely that the laboratory would disclose what was obviously private correspondence, the only reason I can see for this FOIA would have been to harass Jacobsen through his employer and to put his job at risk.
From time-to-time, I think the government should serve life sentences to people (and their lawyers) for "acting like assholes". Or to quote the Declaration: "eating out the substance of our people" via harassment.
This is one of those times.
The $100,000 fine is nothing for a businessman like Katzer, and no doubt he'll continue suing people in the future, and giving them a decade of fear/grief/worry like he did to OSS programmer/physicist Jacobsen. In this case, I think it was the bad guy who actually won, because he got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
>>>Except for the school, which is a public, gov't agency, and thus has no copyright powers.
The Oregon government and New York government (and probably others have well) have claimed copyright over their documents, and sent takedown notices to website owners who published them online.
So what I'm saying is - you're wrong. ;-)
>>>But I don't want the sappy music and the long drawn out family history
Well... ...you have to remember the Olympics largest demographic is female. (Yes I'm serious - check out the Nielsen Ratings.) So they don't really care about our minority male voice. NBC wants to please their largest audience, and the females like the sap.
>>>You also watch Oprah, right?
Sometimes. Got a problem with that? (cocks gun)
"no sir"
That's what I thought.
>>>Once that guy left the track, no amount of barriers or cushioning would have helped at all.
I disagree. The wooden wall they put-up now, would have deflected him away from the steel beams, and back onto the track. He'd still probably have a broken arm or leg, but that's better than a crushed head.
And even if the wall was not there, putting the steel beams on the *inside* of the surve instead of the outside would have meant he'd never hit them. Instead he'd have skidded across the ground and into the nearby audience. Not a fun experience, but motorcyclists have survived 80mph crashes and the luger would have survived too.
>>>other lugers complained vehemently when the course was shortened
Source please. I did not hear any of them say that. I think you made it up.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
So a skiier making a mistake and getting killed by falling in a ditch or hitting a tree is entirely their fault, while a luger making a mistake and flying into a pillar is the track's fault?
Yeah, that's brilliant reasoning there.
STRAWMAN ARGUMENT (pisspoor debating tactic). I never said that. Please don't put words into my mouth that I did not say, Anonymous Coward. ----- What I said is that the designers of the ski course did not put-in steel beams, or leave in trees, or other killer objects, for the skiers to hit. The designers of the luge course should have been just as intelligent, but they were delinquent.
>>>If those poles weren't there he would have hit the whatever object was in the next 50 meters.
Yes. The soft cushioning of the human audience. In which case he would have survived, and then we'd be discussing how lucky he was and that nobody got hurt (other than minor injuries), instead of his funeral.
>>>And the skiing example? I reckon you didn't catch the womens' alpine downhill last week, where a huge portion of the skiiers whiped out
>>>
That's because the downhill skiing course isn't lined with steel beams that the athletes can hit and be turned into squash. If a skier did happen to die last week, it would be due to their own mistake, not because an engineer put a human-crushing steel beam in the way.
Probably trial-and-error, using experience from previous tracks. The problem is that this track was about 10mph faster, and therefore needed higher walls, but the designers didn't provide them.
This is similar to how the Titanic and Britannic had rudders that were sized too small. They would have been fine for older ships, but these new ships were much larger, and designers forgot to account for the difference.
And then (according to some religious beliefs), you'd wake-up in hell. Boy church is a depressing place.
>>>Though based on the general negative raction the other lugers had to moving down the starting position...
Did you just make that up? I heard the lugers say the exact opposite ("This course is waaay too fast," and "Are they using us like test dummies? It's ridiculous."). Plus many, many of them crashed during training. It was only a matter of time until one of them died.
Good point.
A friend and coworker had dinner with us Friday evening..... and then died the next day while rock-climbing. According to WBAL news he was climbing without a rope. On one hand I couldn't believe the news ...... on the other hand, knowing that it had just rained that morning, I decided he was incredibly stupid to climb over slippery rocks.
It's one thing to enjoy a sport, but something else entirely to be dumb.
>>>but in the video he doesn't even get his hands in front of his head
Since he hit the steel beam with the back of his head, and human arms don't bend backwards like that, the suggestion you offer would not be possible. The man was doomed, and even if he had superhuman reflexes, there's nothing he could have done to stop his head from slamming against that steel beam.
Of course you would have known this yourself, but since the IOC is censoring the video, there was no way to double-check it prior to posting, so all you had to go on was fuzzy memory. Pretty soon (2-3 years) we'll forget the death was caused by poor safety design (steel beams along track), and the IOC will have accomplished its goal to cover its ass. (Yes that's a slam against censorship.)
>>>If that blogger had given a damn about the moral high road, he wouldn't have posted the video in the first place
Here: http://www.fatalfailblog.com/
I'm not posting this because I'm a "ghoul" but because I think it's educational. When I first saw how twisted/dismantled these humans were, simply because of a car crash, it got me to thinking that I don't really need to drive 85 to get to work. 60-65 mph will still get me there in a decent amount of time, and if I impact anything, there will be about 50% less kinetic energy to rip apart my body.
Yet another reason the IOC wants this video "silenced". They don't want people seeing it and asking inconvenient questions like, "Why wasn't there a wall between the track and the steel beams?" So they silence the criticism by removing the evidence.
Also if you've seen the SAFER barrier in NASCAR, then you know it is possible to create cushioning to *absorb* the energy, rather than do nothing and blame the driver.
I'll support government-run hospitalization if somebody can name one thing they do well:
- Amtrak? Nope. Billions in debt, inconvenient to ride, and take longers to travel cross-country by train than by car.
- Post office? Nope. Billions in debt, and when they tried to streamline operations by eliminating Saturday delivery (a day that incurs losses, rather than profits), the Congress overruled them and forced the USPS to continue operating inefficiently and losing money.
- Medicare? Social Security? Nope. The number of retirees will soon outnumber the workers, such that in 2014, these programs will become bankrupt (not be able to continue cashflow, unless they borrow money from someplace else).
Yeah. I want the government to run my body.
Not.
Oh and my advice for the original poster: Virtually everyone who gets sick or dies is past age 60. I don't see any reason for you to waste money buying insurance when you're still young and healthy, and therefore get nothing out of it. Stop living in fear over rare events (like asteroids falling from the sky and hitting you on the head).
If it makes you feel more comfortable, get a high deductible insurance ($10,000 or more) where you pay all your own health bills except in case of catastrophe. I do that. I only spend $200-300 each year.
You are correct, but the losses are more about the economy than the games, or how they are presented. Advertisers are pulling back.
For example FOX Broadcast lost millions of dollars in 2009, however FX actually increased revenue (due to cable subscriptions). Likewise NBC is probably making money off their MSNBC, CNBC, and USA cable coverage, but losing money on their advertising-supported NBC and NBC Sports channels.
If the economy was still booming, and advertisers still buying, NBC would be as profitable this time as they were in Winter 2006.
I would take it down (for the family's sake)...
And then immediately replace it with another video of a different luger (perhaps one that crashed but survived). I will not cave-in to demands that I limit my free speech rights, otherwise companies could use copyright to censor uncomfortable things. Like Toyota claiming copyright over a video of one of their cars going off a cliff. Or Marlboro claiming copyright over an advertisement of an actor who later died from smoking-related cancer. Or Microsoft claiming copyright to make me remove a Vista ad that claimed it would work on only 256 megabytes (got to cover that up).
Or a school claiming copyright over a vid which reveals they were spying on kids via laptops.
Copyright claims can be abused to censor the news to eliminate negative publicity.
And right now, I think that's what the IOC's ultimate goal is.
Hosting Olympics has NEVER been a money-maker. Montreal is still paying-off their Olympic-related debt and that was all the was back in 1976. Almost no city has "made money" since then. Atlanta made money, but then people complained it was too commercialized (companies hung ads along stadium walls).
So you just can't win - either you lose money (and go into debt), or you make money and then you get criticized for it.
I like the human interest "crap".
Otherwise it would be just a bunch of strangers moving around on screen. At least this way we know the motivations behind the athletes. For example I would not have known that one Canadian skier was motivated by his brother's Down Syndrome to push even when he's in pain.
For me the problem didn't have anything to do with drivers. They all worked fine.
For me the problem was that Microsoft lied to the hardware makers, told them 512 MB wouldn't run Aero but would still be sufficient to run Vista, and my brother ended-up with a 512 MB machine that ran slower than his old XP machine on only 128 megabytes, and suffered severe hard drive thrashing.
Depending on your viewpoint, the software was either vastly bloated because it needed 1024 to run properly (in contrast the Mac OS released that same year ran great on only 256 MB) - or else the software was fine but MS was guilty of lying about the hardware specs.
You sound very reasonable, but I issue this challenge:
What if some of those "buckets" you use consisted of the categories "White" "Black" "Jew" "Arab" "Italian" and so on, which double rates for Italians (gangsters have short lives, dont ya know), 1.5x rates for Blacks, average rates for whites, and the lowest rates for Jews, and so on.
Isn't that discriminatory/prejudicial? YES.
Well it's no different when you do it based on age. One of the reasons I waited until 18 to drive is precisely *because* the company would make me pay three times more money at ages 16 and 17 than a 30-yr-old does. That's prejudging me, when you don't even know me. (In reality I've never had an accident, not even a broken bone in twenty years of driving, because I'm very cautious.)
Our property tax and school tax are separate. So it's technically possible to pay one but not the other.
And yes it would be illegal to not pay school tax, but just as I don't pay Comcast or Microsoft (because I don't use their products), neither should I have to support my local Philadelphia public school if my daughter is being sent to (and paying tuition for) the nearby Valley Forge public school instead. Customers should not have to pay for products not being used.