You can tell that the Fox fall line-up sucks without even watching an episode of these shows.
1-Ally McBeal-okay, people like it, but it is stupid and has collapsed under its own weight. How many episodes of a show that focuses on a too-thin, whiny, passive aggressive member of the white upper-class can you watch before you puke? If the answer is more than 6, you should be looking for a good therapist.
2-Boston Public-this show is just bad. I can't believe that people don't read a magazine instead of turning this on before Ally McBeal.
Twenty Four- Great. Basically, an obnoxiously long movie spread out in installments so that if you miss a week, you have no idea what is going on.
Pasadena- starring Dana Delaney. You can tell that this is going to stink, just from the description.
Stand-up comic Bernie Mac- this show (i.e., funny guy finds himself in akward situation with children) has been aired and failed so many times you would think they would have the sense to kill it before they waste time building sets.
Undeclared-how many college-based comedies have died horribly in the last five years? Answer: just a few less than shows by comics in weird family situations.
X-Files sans Duchovny: Stick a fork in it and turn it over. It's done.
Even in houses that do have central heat and air, the furnace is gas powered. The electricity required to run the fan to push the heated air isn't all that great. I know this because of my power bills.
In the summer, my gas bill is negligible (just the hot water heater). My electricity bill is huge.
In the winter, my gas bill skyrockets. My electricity bill drops to a third or less of what it is in the summer.
Oh, did I mention that I live in California?
This power crisis is the result of poorly thought out degregulation (partial), along with some factors that frankly don't appear to have been made public. The point about HVAC is a good one. In the summery, California is going to draw way more electricity than it will in the winter. While the Bay Area lacks a great deal of air conditioning, in the Sacramento valley and Southern California they are almost mandatory. So for places without AC, power consumption should remain relatively constant from season to season (as most places without central heat/air do have gas heat). In other heavily populated areas of the state, power consumption is going to rise significantly in the summer.
So it makes no sense that a sudden increase in demand is behind the crisis. It has been brewing for a long time.
One big problem is that with the wholesalers deregulated, who is going to build excess capacity and then sit on it for a few years until it is needed. So power firms are going to go with a "just in time" approach, or, more likely "not quite just in time" (i.e., they want to bring new capacity online after the need has been there for a while and the price has gone up).
Okay, this is offtopic, but what the federal government ought to do is condemn (i.e., exercise its eminent domain power) various patents before they are really worth anything because no one has figured out how valuable they are. Then the gov. licenses those IP rights, and makes a bundle. Then we all don't have to pay taxes.
For example, the federal government could have taken the Amazon.com "one-click" patent and sold it to every retailer in the country.
I'm being a smartass, in case it didn't come across.
"They simply have to declare that it's a trade secret." Again, this is not correct. A trade secret is defined (I'm paraphrasing here) as information from which a business derives an economic benefit by virtue of that information not being known to competitors and which is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy. If the information isn't really something that the business benefits from, it isn't a trade secret. A business can't just "declare" something a trade secret, although they frequently attempt to do so. Think about the alternative: a world where you spend years generating a customer list and then a disgruntled employee copies your list along with the prices you charge those customers, sells it to your competitor, and there isn't a god damn thing you can do about it. your competitor goes to your customers, offers them a lower price, and suddenly the business you spent years building is gone. Trade secret laws aren't primarily about free speech. They are about regulating businesses.
Unless there are new laws I'm not aware of, as far as I understand it (and I have studied this recently), by definition, trade secrets are NOT
protected by law.
This is wrong, at least as far as California is concenred. California (as have a large number of states, actually) has enacted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. See Civil Code section 3426 et seq.
It provides a cause of action for misapproriation of trade secrets. In this case, there was presumably "misappropriation" because the rumor sites disclosed apple's trade secrets, which were obtained "from or through a person who owed a duty to the person seeking relief (apple) to maintain its secrecy." In other words, if you get trade secrets from someone who has violated an NDA to give you the information, your disclosure consitutes misappropriation.
I too have studied this issue recently, and in fact have litigated some trade secret cases. This isn't just a scare tactic (although that may be its primary purpose), as the law provides for monetary damages, and, in the right circumstances, exemplary (i.e., punitive) damages and attorneys' fees. Attorneys' fees would be a big hammer here, because apple's damages are probably pretty small (they introduced the cube a couple of weeks later, so what great loss did they suffer during that time?). But Apple could easily rack up $200,000 in attorneys' fees prosecuting one of these cases.
Well, that isn't' quite true. For one thing, someone would have to realize that the evidence was obtained as a result of an illegal search. Usually there is closer relationship temporally between the illegal search and evidence that later results from that search, e.g., an officer makes an illegal search of a trunk and finds evidence, such as drugs, that give rise to probable cause to search the guys house and then find a drug lab in the basement. Here, the illegal search may be a long ways from the next event, and no one realize that the reason the FBI were interested in someone was an email six months ago. The government can also argue some of the exceptions to the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine, such as inevitability, i.e., we would have found the evidence even without the tainted search.
I have some of the funkiest Macs, don't I?:) Everyone who uses Macs has such a collection of funk, for the most part. I have an SE/30, a Powerbook 100, a Duo 210, a Quadra 610, and a B&W G3. The really sad thing? I have them all on an ethernet network in my house. Why? No reason that I can figure out. Just cause they exist.
I'm sorry, but your legal analysis is what is ridiculous. Copyright is not at issue here. Trade secrets are at issue. Just because a NDA wasn't breached doesn't mean that the information is free game. If I break into Apple and look through their confidential files, I've misappropriated trade secrets. And MOSR doesn't get to cross-complain against Apple just because Apple sues. To get damages based on the mere fact that Apple sues, MOSR first has to win the lawsuit. Then it would have to bring a separate lawsuit, which would be difficult to win. And Apple hasn't sued anyone. They asked MOSR to pull a story. And there are lots of reasons for Apple to make such a request. As pointed out above, they have done so in the past in response to totally bogus stories. Frankly, there is a strong bias on/. against companies that assert their legal rights. There is nothing fundementally wrong with doing so. It may be unfair in particular situations, but anyone has the right to do so.
I'm really going to disagree that there is a big difference between "legal language" and english. There are certain words that are "terms of art," which have a specific meaning that might not be the meaning that is the most common, but english is english. And, frankly, I don't think that comma changes all that much. So there.
I've been using the internet for a while now, much longer than most folks (basically daily since 1988). For whatever its worth, this is about the tenth time that someone has put a web interface on these unix "translator" programs. It is also the tenth time that the site has been forced to shutdown, for various reasons.
Someone else will invariably create a web front end for these programs and put them back up for the world to enjoy for a few weeks or months. That's one of the nice things about the net: it's decentralized, which makes it hard to pin something like this down and kill it off for good. In fact, that's the whole point of the net, at least in its incarnation as a DARPA research project, i.e., a communication system without a central location that can be taken out.
I actually think that the film wasn't a half bad job. Trying to put that book into a film format is a huge undertaking, and I think you have to consider anything less than a complete disaster to be something of a success.
I understand the point about the rain, but as the movie was a one shot deal that needed a final, resounding resolution to the story, what the hell... that's the way I look at it.
I think the movie is kind of fun, and I've enjoyed watching it several times.
A "trade secret" is quite different from copyright, patent, etc. A trade secret is information that the holder derives economic value from because the information is a secret. Customer lists are a perfect example. A business has a list of customers it knows have a need for a particular product. That business can focus its marketing efforts on those customers, while competitors may have to market to a broad audience because they don't know who has a need and who doesn't. Reverse engineering for interoperatability implicates copyright and patent concepts more than trade secret concepts. If you put a piece of software on the market and I figure out the algorithm you used to do a particular task, I haven't "appropriated" your trade secret. But if I bust into your office and steal your source code, I have. My point was that the mere fact that you didn't "agree" to keep something secret doesn't preclude liability.
The post equating trade secrets to "open season" is wrong on all points.
Remember, you're allowed to try to *obtain* a trade secret, and once you do, if you haven't agreed to anything, it's no longer a secret.
This is not true. Under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which has been adopted by many states, including Washington, a trade secret retains its status as long as it is the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain its staus as secret. So, if I have a trade secret in a file on my hard drive, which is password protected, and you steal my password and copy the file off my drive, you have misappropriated my trade secret. The fact that you didn't "agree" to anything is irrelevant.
Trade secrets enjoy very little legal protection, unlike other kinds of information. They can't sue you for infringement, for instance.
Again, totally incorrect. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act provides for injunctive relief, monetary damages, and exemplary damages up to two times actual damages, plus the possibility of recovery attorneys' fees. See, e.g., California Civil Code sections 3426.3 and 3426.4.
So, if someone is able to *extract* the information from the.exe, without running it or agreeing to anything, that's well and good.
where this kind of thing has been going on for, oh, I don't know, 20 or 30 years. It was old hat when I started school there 15 years ago. As pointed out above, this is just something to do for the hell of it. It's hardly a "prank." RPI just wishes it had it going on...
his point was that he would be impressed when he could no longer tell the difference between a LAN and a net server in another country, not that he would be impressed when there was no difference.
If I access a web page on a server in London from California, lets say it takes 60ms to load. Now let's say it takes 10ms to load from a local server. Am I going to notice the 50ms. Maybe, but probably just barely.
I think what he means is that he is looking forward to the day when everything is just fast, so fast that stuff just loads seemingly instantly. It's like the difference between opening MS Word on a 500 MHz P3 and a 1 GHz P3. Is there a difference. Certainly. Are you really going to notice it? Not likely.
Since Iridium has a plan to deorbit the sattelites, I don't think they are salvagable. They haven't been abandoned, but are instead scheduled to be destroyed. Iridium may well have confidential design issues with respect to the sats. themselves, and may wish to destroy them. As an example, if I want to blow up my car, I'm free do so. You can't claim that you have the right to "salvage" it just because I've chosen to destroy it.
If you follow the links, you come to some pretty cool photos of Io. For some reason the URL I copied from my browser window doesn't work, so you'll have to do the work yourself.
Joe Bob says check them out (only if you have a fast connection).
Uh, the UCITA has yet to be enacted anywhere. Furthermore, uniform acts are designed to be enacted as state law, not federal law (e.g., uniform partnership act, uniform trade secret act, uniform common interest development act). The federal government is really powerless to do much about the UCITA, unless it passes a similar act that would preempt the UCITA, which is somethign that Congress doesn't do on a very frequent basis.
One possible solution (and feel free to rip this apart as unworkable): Create a consensus document that sets forth interface guidelines, like Apple has for Mac developers. Not to create a rigid dogma, but to provide a starting point for interface design, so that one person or group isn't starting from one end of the spectrum while another group starts at the other. To create a common language for UI design. As for user feed back, well, a web based feedback forum, like/. boards, could allow end users to comment on interface features. This problem is not one that is insurmountable. It simply needs to be recognized.
Re:We Are Heading To A Crisis In Trademark Law
on
Master Of Your Domain
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· Score: 1
"I have to hand it to you, the idea of Auto Body "I have to hand it to you, the idea of Auto BodyShops competeing on the Internet is rather amusing to visualize." Thank you. I envision a model whereby you email a jpeg of your damaged car, and the shop sends the jpeg back showing the repairs they would make and how well they would restore your car. Seriously, I realize that auto body shops are not the best example, but I couldn't think of another business with a common name like that on the spot. And a quick check of Yahoo! shows that there are a number of body shops with web sites. It's tought to be absurd in this market.
Re:We Are Heading To A Crisis In Trademark Law
on
Master Of Your Domain
·
· Score: 1
Is yours a trademark law practice? Will differences be hammered out? Yes, of course. The question, and hence the crisis, is how painful the hammering is going to be. I don't think the current trademark model holds up well in a global net based economy where suddenly everything is local and remote at the same time. Our business practices laws depend on physical separation quite a bit. You can have a lot of A-1 Auto Body businesses without problems when each business is in a different city. Now what happens when all those business start competing over the net? It's going to be a bit ugly for a while. This is one area where new rules are needed to deal with the realities of this new economy.
The answer is that the courts will first attempt to construe the language of the two acts so that there is no conflict. If there is no way to do that (e.g., one act says "you can't fly to the moon" and the other says "you can fly to the moon")then the court will most likely look to the most recent enactment to determine what the law actually is. Most likely, though, you have a court construing the latter as an exception to the former, or vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
You can tell that the Fox fall line-up sucks without even watching an episode of these shows. 1-Ally McBeal-okay, people like it, but it is stupid and has collapsed under its own weight. How many episodes of a show that focuses on a too-thin, whiny, passive aggressive member of the white upper-class can you watch before you puke? If the answer is more than 6, you should be looking for a good therapist. 2-Boston Public-this show is just bad. I can't believe that people don't read a magazine instead of turning this on before Ally McBeal. Twenty Four- Great. Basically, an obnoxiously long movie spread out in installments so that if you miss a week, you have no idea what is going on. Pasadena- starring Dana Delaney. You can tell that this is going to stink, just from the description. Stand-up comic Bernie Mac- this show (i.e., funny guy finds himself in akward situation with children) has been aired and failed so many times you would think they would have the sense to kill it before they waste time building sets. Undeclared-how many college-based comedies have died horribly in the last five years? Answer: just a few less than shows by comics in weird family situations. X-Files sans Duchovny: Stick a fork in it and turn it over. It's done.
Even in houses that do have central heat and air, the furnace is gas powered. The electricity required to run the fan to push the heated air isn't all that great. I know this because of my power bills. In the summer, my gas bill is negligible (just the hot water heater). My electricity bill is huge. In the winter, my gas bill skyrockets. My electricity bill drops to a third or less of what it is in the summer. Oh, did I mention that I live in California? This power crisis is the result of poorly thought out degregulation (partial), along with some factors that frankly don't appear to have been made public. The point about HVAC is a good one. In the summery, California is going to draw way more electricity than it will in the winter. While the Bay Area lacks a great deal of air conditioning, in the Sacramento valley and Southern California they are almost mandatory. So for places without AC, power consumption should remain relatively constant from season to season (as most places without central heat/air do have gas heat). In other heavily populated areas of the state, power consumption is going to rise significantly in the summer. So it makes no sense that a sudden increase in demand is behind the crisis. It has been brewing for a long time. One big problem is that with the wholesalers deregulated, who is going to build excess capacity and then sit on it for a few years until it is needed. So power firms are going to go with a "just in time" approach, or, more likely "not quite just in time" (i.e., they want to bring new capacity online after the need has been there for a while and the price has gone up).
Okay, this is offtopic, but what the federal government ought to do is condemn (i.e., exercise its eminent domain power) various patents before they are really worth anything because no one has figured out how valuable they are. Then the gov. licenses those IP rights, and makes a bundle. Then we all don't have to pay taxes. For example, the federal government could have taken the Amazon.com "one-click" patent and sold it to every retailer in the country. I'm being a smartass, in case it didn't come across.
Have you tried Astroids? The buttons work remarkably well as controls for Asteroids. Centipede, on the other hand, is an unplayable disaster.
"They simply have to declare that it's a trade secret." Again, this is not correct. A trade secret is defined (I'm paraphrasing here) as information from which a business derives an economic benefit by virtue of that information not being known to competitors and which is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy. If the information isn't really something that the business benefits from, it isn't a trade secret. A business can't just "declare" something a trade secret, although they frequently attempt to do so. Think about the alternative: a world where you spend years generating a customer list and then a disgruntled employee copies your list along with the prices you charge those customers, sells it to your competitor, and there isn't a god damn thing you can do about it. your competitor goes to your customers, offers them a lower price, and suddenly the business you spent years building is gone. Trade secret laws aren't primarily about free speech. They are about regulating businesses.
Unless there are new laws I'm not aware of, as far as I understand it (and I have studied this recently), by definition, trade secrets are NOT protected by law.
This is wrong, at least as far as California is concenred. California (as have a large number of states, actually) has enacted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. See Civil Code section 3426 et seq. It provides a cause of action for misapproriation of trade secrets. In this case, there was presumably "misappropriation" because the rumor sites disclosed apple's trade secrets, which were obtained "from or through a person who owed a duty to the person seeking relief (apple) to maintain its secrecy." In other words, if you get trade secrets from someone who has violated an NDA to give you the information, your disclosure consitutes misappropriation.
I too have studied this issue recently, and in fact have litigated some trade secret cases. This isn't just a scare tactic (although that may be its primary purpose), as the law provides for monetary damages, and, in the right circumstances, exemplary (i.e., punitive) damages and attorneys' fees. Attorneys' fees would be a big hammer here, because apple's damages are probably pretty small (they introduced the cube a couple of weeks later, so what great loss did they suffer during that time?). But Apple could easily rack up $200,000 in attorneys' fees prosecuting one of these cases.
Well, that isn't' quite true. For one thing, someone would have to realize that the evidence was obtained as a result of an illegal search. Usually there is closer relationship temporally between the illegal search and evidence that later results from that search, e.g., an officer makes an illegal search of a trunk and finds evidence, such as drugs, that give rise to probable cause to search the guys house and then find a drug lab in the basement. Here, the illegal search may be a long ways from the next event, and no one realize that the reason the FBI were interested in someone was an email six months ago. The government can also argue some of the exceptions to the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine, such as inevitability, i.e., we would have found the evidence even without the tainted search.
I have some of the funkiest Macs, don't I? :) Everyone who uses Macs has such a collection of funk, for the most part. I have an SE/30, a Powerbook 100, a Duo 210, a Quadra 610, and a B&W G3. The really sad thing? I have them all on an ethernet network in my house. Why? No reason that I can figure out. Just cause they exist.
I'm sorry, but your legal analysis is what is ridiculous. Copyright is not at issue here. Trade secrets are at issue. Just because a NDA wasn't breached doesn't mean that the information is free game. If I break into Apple and look through their confidential files, I've misappropriated trade secrets. And MOSR doesn't get to cross-complain against Apple just because Apple sues. To get damages based on the mere fact that Apple sues, MOSR first has to win the lawsuit. Then it would have to bring a separate lawsuit, which would be difficult to win. And Apple hasn't sued anyone. They asked MOSR to pull a story. And there are lots of reasons for Apple to make such a request. As pointed out above, they have done so in the past in response to totally bogus stories. Frankly, there is a strong bias on /. against companies that assert their legal rights. There is nothing fundementally wrong with doing so. It may be unfair in particular situations, but anyone has the right to do so.
Nice troll...
I'm really going to disagree that there is a big difference between "legal language" and english. There are certain words that are "terms of art," which have a specific meaning that might not be the meaning that is the most common, but english is english. And, frankly, I don't think that comma changes all that much. So there.
Someone else will invariably create a web front end for these programs and put them back up for the world to enjoy for a few weeks or months. That's one of the nice things about the net: it's decentralized, which makes it hard to pin something like this down and kill it off for good. In fact, that's the whole point of the net, at least in its incarnation as a DARPA research project, i.e., a communication system without a central location that can be taken out.
I understand the point about the rain, but as the movie was a one shot deal that needed a final, resounding resolution to the story, what the hell... that's the way I look at it.
I think the movie is kind of fun, and I've enjoyed watching it several times.
A "trade secret" is quite different from copyright, patent, etc. A trade secret is information that the holder derives economic value from because the information is a secret. Customer lists are a perfect example. A business has a list of customers it knows have a need for a particular product. That business can focus its marketing efforts on those customers, while competitors may have to market to a broad audience because they don't know who has a need and who doesn't. Reverse engineering for interoperatability implicates copyright and patent concepts more than trade secret concepts. If you put a piece of software on the market and I figure out the algorithm you used to do a particular task, I haven't "appropriated" your trade secret. But if I bust into your office and steal your source code, I have. My point was that the mere fact that you didn't "agree" to keep something secret doesn't preclude liability.
This is not true. Under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which has been adopted by many states, including Washington, a trade secret retains its status as long as it is the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain its staus as secret. So, if I have a trade secret in a file on my hard drive, which is password protected, and you steal my password and copy the file off my drive, you have misappropriated my trade secret. The fact that you didn't "agree" to anything is irrelevant.
Again, totally incorrect. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act provides for injunctive relief, monetary damages, and exemplary damages up to two times actual damages, plus the possibility of recovery attorneys' fees. See, e.g., California Civil Code sections 3426.3 and 3426.4.
No, that's a good way to get your ass sued.
where this kind of thing has been going on for, oh, I don't know, 20 or 30 years. It was old hat when I started school there 15 years ago. As pointed out above, this is just something to do for the hell of it. It's hardly a "prank." RPI just wishes it had it going on...
his point was that he would be impressed when he could no longer tell the difference between a LAN and a net server in another country, not that he would be impressed when there was no difference. If I access a web page on a server in London from California, lets say it takes 60ms to load. Now let's say it takes 10ms to load from a local server. Am I going to notice the 50ms. Maybe, but probably just barely. I think what he means is that he is looking forward to the day when everything is just fast, so fast that stuff just loads seemingly instantly. It's like the difference between opening MS Word on a 500 MHz P3 and a 1 GHz P3. Is there a difference. Certainly. Are you really going to notice it? Not likely.
Since Iridium has a plan to deorbit the sattelites, I don't think they are salvagable. They haven't been abandoned, but are instead scheduled to be destroyed. Iridium may well have confidential design issues with respect to the sats. themselves, and may wish to destroy them. As an example, if I want to blow up my car, I'm free do so. You can't claim that you have the right to "salvage" it just because I've chosen to destroy it.
Isn't he dead already?
If you follow the links, you come to some pretty cool photos of Io. For some reason the URL I copied from my browser window doesn't work, so you'll have to do the work yourself.
Joe Bob says check them out (only if you have a fast connection).
Uh, the UCITA has yet to be enacted anywhere. Furthermore, uniform acts are designed to be enacted as state law, not federal law (e.g., uniform partnership act, uniform trade secret act, uniform common interest development act). The federal government is really powerless to do much about the UCITA, unless it passes a similar act that would preempt the UCITA, which is somethign that Congress doesn't do on a very frequent basis.
One possible solution (and feel free to rip this apart as unworkable): Create a consensus document that sets forth interface guidelines, like Apple has for Mac developers. Not to create a rigid dogma, but to provide a starting point for interface design, so that one person or group isn't starting from one end of the spectrum while another group starts at the other. To create a common language for UI design. As for user feed back, well, a web based feedback forum, like /. boards, could allow end users to comment on interface features. This problem is not one that is insurmountable. It simply needs to be recognized.
"I have to hand it to you, the idea of Auto Body "I have to hand it to you, the idea of Auto BodyShops competeing on the Internet is rather amusing to visualize." Thank you. I envision a model whereby you email a jpeg of your damaged car, and the shop sends the jpeg back showing the repairs they would make and how well they would restore your car. Seriously, I realize that auto body shops are not the best example, but I couldn't think of another business with a common name like that on the spot. And a quick check of Yahoo! shows that there are a number of body shops with web sites. It's tought to be absurd in this market.
Is yours a trademark law practice? Will differences be hammered out? Yes, of course. The question, and hence the crisis, is how painful the hammering is going to be. I don't think the current trademark model holds up well in a global net based economy where suddenly everything is local and remote at the same time. Our business practices laws depend on physical separation quite a bit. You can have a lot of A-1 Auto Body businesses without problems when each business is in a different city. Now what happens when all those business start competing over the net? It's going to be a bit ugly for a while. This is one area where new rules are needed to deal with the realities of this new economy.
The answer is that the courts will first attempt to construe the language of the two acts so that there is no conflict. If there is no way to do that (e.g., one act says "you can't fly to the moon" and the other says "you can fly to the moon")then the court will most likely look to the most recent enactment to determine what the law actually is. Most likely, though, you have a court construing the latter as an exception to the former, or vice versa.