If you could prove it, it wouldn't be secretly, so it would be false.
So all you need to do is show that it isn't secret, and you've proven the statement false. I really can't imagine any other way to prove it false. (Proving a negative is always hard.)
However, this is why civil courts operate on "the perponderance of the evidence". If you can't provide any evidence that it's a true statement, and he is normally not considered to behave in that way, then the civil court would find against you. Damages, however, would probably be limited to paying for your lawyers.
In the case in the article, damages, while speculative, are probably more significant. And the prior suit between them may enter into things. So might the precise way in which the statments made to Yelp were made. (Does Yelp edit statements made to them? That could also be significant.)
The requested damages *sound* unreasonable. But I don't know his business, so it's hard to be certain. And the accusations sound plausible. (Enough so that *I* wouldn't be hiring him...of course, all I read is the Slashdot summary, which is often misleading. Perhaps he should sue Slashdot, too.)
In this case, I would currently side with the customer...but it wouldn't surprise me that further investigation of the evidence would show that was unjust.
Sorry, but no. While there will be more rain on a global scale, it won't happen in the same places. Wind patterns shift with rising temperature at the poles and smaller rises at the equator, which is what's happening. What this does is slow down the jet stream, causing weather patterns to move more slowly. So hot, cold, wet, and dry episodes tend to linger more than they would have otherwise. (This is already happening.)
Other changes are quite possible. Perhaps Greenland melting could dilute the ocean, changing the patterns of ocean currents. This would bring much colder weather to northern Europe, but wouldn't be likely to change the pacific "Japanese current". This, however, is quite speculative, as Greenland melting isn't at all the same the the dumping of a large lake of glacial melt water. That happened very suddenly rather than over a period of decades. (See the Younger Dryas.) Also, the continents are in a slightly different configuration. Still, it's an uncomfortably close analogy.
Locally, where I live, weather patterns have, so far, just been moving North. But local geography differs, so the effects aren't easy to predict even for this relatively smooth change. And, of course, the slowing jet stream affects everyone North of the equator. (I don't know what's happening to it's southern counterpart, but given that Antarctica still has lots of ice, I suspect that it's maintaining speed. Though news about the timing of the monsoons changing makes that assumption questionable.)
They aren't relatively constant, but they're an essentially random variation with a period of effect of roughly a year. (Yeah, there are effects that last longer, but the major effect is the particulates and sulfates. [What's the word that includes all valences of sulfur compounds...well, that's what I meant. I'm including both Sulphurous and Sulphuric compounds, and gasses as well as particulates.])
Note that while (I think it was) Krakatoa produced "The year without a summer", it didn't produce "The decade without a summer". (And as a side note, some of the effects of volcano eruptions COOL things rather than heating them. In fact, some of the geo-engineering schemes to cool the Earth are based around mimicing some of the effects of volcanos.)
But large eruptions are rare. And we haven't seen a really large eruption since the dinosaurs died off. But look up the Yellowstone supervolcano, or Deccan Traps ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps ).
Now when I claim that these eruptions are random, I don't mean that they are without cause, but that we can't predict them. But "relatively constant" they aren't.
It's worse than that. It's extreme hypocracy, as Hollywood moved to California to escape prosecution for violating copyright laws in New York. (Not sure why that worked, but apparently it did.) Perhaps at that point prosecution under copyright laws was handled by the states.
I suspect that Google has sufficient information on those that use it's services, that it could ensure that the ban was specific to that particular user.
As for search results.... that is a more difficult problem. It might not be possible to avoid a high error rate. But that, after all, is what the court is insisting on.
Blocking Austrailia would be too expensive. However, blocking all services (as well as all references) to anyone who accused Google of libel would be relatively cheap. You would need to figure out how to identify which computers those individuals were using, but IIUC, governments are already requireing Google to collect that information. Certainly it would be trivial to refuse to allow them to use Google mail, etc., though I admit the search is a bit more difficult.
The easy answer is to just refuse to answer any queries that include his name or e-mail address...or can otherwise be linked to him in any way, such as being posted from a computer which he is using.
Possibly they could return a page merely stating "Trkulja is under the ban".
I doubt that there would ever be any need to remove the ban. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." is the way I normally see it phrased.
Where I live everyone is required to have drivers insurance, so the insurance company would be footing the bill. They'd be quite happy with a lot fewer accidents to defend, and if the auto had a decent black-box, they could easily prove who was at fault in the court case. And they've got deep enough pockets to file an appeal if they run up against a prejudiced judge or jury.
Do you think that you won't be at fault if the robot is driving the car? I think you're wrong. The other guy would sue you, and it would be YOUR responsibility to get the manufacturer to pay your bills. OTOH, IANAL, so I could be wrong. But it's worked out that way in many other areas.
You are wrong. And the reason why is that trucks without truck drivers will be a lot cheaper to operate.
Yes, the companies and the lawyers will need to come to some agreements, and this may mean that the legislators need to pass new laws. But it will happen, and not slowly.
I will grant you that automated personal autos may be delayed for several customer acceptance reasons. But automated vehicles already exist, and will only become more wide-spread. (Currently I believe that most of them are fork-lifts operating within warehouses...a controlled environment that simplifies things. But time is moving on apace. And hiring drivers is costing companies lots of money.)
I think the idea is you use prevailing winds to cause the air to circulate, hence the name. Clearly you could also use solar cells, but those would have been observable. Windtraps were basically holes through a hill fairly near the top, that didn't run straight through, and that condensed water from the cooled air near the center of the tunnel. And they had to be unobtrusive, because the Fremen were being hunted by the Harkonnens. So avoid using power, because that's detectable.
What you have wrong is that it's the same episode. So you've inverted the timing of the claims.
This is Samsung responding to Apple attacking them. If the judge is fair, Apple will probably be forced to sign a patent pool agreement with Samsung. This preserves the patents to be allowed to attack newcomers. (So are the judge has seem biased towards Apple. Samsung is creating multiple grounds for appeal, as is legally required, because if you don't claim now, you won't be able to claim it in the appeal.)
I am skeptical. I said "appeared in Homo erectus", not "caused the appearance of Homo erectus". It doesn't appear early enough to have caused the divergence of Homo erectus. And it clearly didn't produce a large brain on it's own, as Homo erectus didn't have a large brain. It does, however, seem to increase the tendency of cells to divide, and it's particularly active in the brain (and switched off elsewhere). This tends to imply that it might be ONE of the causes of the neural proliferation in later species of genus Homo, but it clearly isn't sufficient in itself.
Oh, it *runs*. That's not the point. They all run. It's just incomparably WORSE than... well, than MSWindows95A. It's up in the "Bob" class for usability. (Not for the same reasons. If MS-Bob were running on today's hardware it might be *better* than Gnome3.)
Yeah. If I could get electricsheep to run as a screensaver under xfce or LXDE, I wouldn't have to put up with KDE4. None of those options are as good as Gnome2, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. (Maybe I shoudl give Mate another try.....)
I've considered that obvious. I'm not sure it's a good design even for that market, but its clear that they're aiming at tablets or cell phones.
I don't care. It's a lousy desktop. I never said it was a lousy cell phone. Maybe it isn't. But I doubt I'll ever try it because I so mad about what they did to the desktop, that I don't trust them at all for any purpose. And they did it wil malice (or *gross* incompetence) aforethought.
No, I don't know that. From observing their actions I would assume that they were funded by Microsoft or Apple. I'll admit that I haven't looked at a Red Hat distro lately, so I don't know what their GUIs are like, but before they killed the "Red Hat Professional" version they would NEVER have pushed that kind of garbage.
Indeed, it certainly wasn't good enough to replace Gnome2. Whether your graphics drivers were hosed or not. Gnome3 is, itself, a hosing of the system.
I doubt that I'll go back to a team that has proven to be so unreliable a supplier. That would require that nearly EVERYONE else to be equally unreliable. Better at the moment are KDE, LXDE, and xfce...possibly others I haven't examined. I'm not considering specialty things like blackbox to be competitors. I haven't evaluated Mate or Cinnamon, because when I was changing away from Gnome, they were in early beta. (I'm not happy with the changes from KDE3 to KDE4 either, but it's better than Gnome. And I'm talking about UI design, not bugs caused by a premature release.)
FWIW, it's common for map makers and atlas makers to include some false streets and features. This is to enable them to prove that someone else copied from them. Perhaps this is one of those receiving publicity?
While the don't claim it started the human divergence, they do leave it wide open to interpret as being the reason we grew large brains. Quite possibly the divergence had already happened, but the timing is about right for the gene to have appeared in Homo erectus. Or perhaps a bit earlier. That was not a species with a large brain. Perhaps other mutations were required to allow the skull size to expand.
Your estimate of the probability assumes that all results are correct, and none have been fudged to match a pre-determined answer. That's mathematics, not the court system. In fact, not even the labs. Labs have a much higher error rate than you expect, and it's often biased to maintain their business. Want proof that you are descended from King Richard I, you can probably buy it, no matter what your ancestry.
(P.S.: Rumor has it that he didn't HAVE any descendants. This may, of course, be incorrect.)
Now labs that do official business are, presumably, held to a higher standard. But how certain are you that they always live up to it. Do they know what their target is? The standard approach for certainty is that they should do the sequencing without knowning the desired result. Reports indicate that this is, or was, not common practice. (Back when annealing was the standard method for doing a match, this would have been impossible. But when the methods changed, did the procedures?)
OTOH, "I only know what I read in the papers.". They may be popular science articles, but they aren't extremely reliable, only fairly reliable. And Holland is not the US. And the articles I read were years ago. Perhaps they don't apply anymore, or over there. But don't let math blind you to sources of error and bias that you aren't considering.
Slashdot Mirror
If you could prove it, it wouldn't be secretly, so it would be false.
So all you need to do is show that it isn't secret, and you've proven the statement false. I really can't imagine any other way to prove it false. (Proving a negative is always hard.)
However, this is why civil courts operate on "the perponderance of the evidence". If you can't provide any evidence that it's a true statement, and he is normally not considered to behave in that way, then the civil court would find against you. Damages, however, would probably be limited to paying for your lawyers.
In the case in the article, damages, while speculative, are probably more significant. And the prior suit between them may enter into things. So might the precise way in which the statments made to Yelp were made. (Does Yelp edit statements made to them? That could also be significant.)
The requested damages *sound* unreasonable. But I don't know his business, so it's hard to be certain. And the accusations sound plausible. (Enough so that *I* wouldn't be hiring him...of course, all I read is the Slashdot summary, which is often misleading. Perhaps he should sue Slashdot, too.)
In this case, I would currently side with the customer...but it wouldn't surprise me that further investigation of the evidence would show that was unjust.
Sorry, but no. While there will be more rain on a global scale, it won't happen in the same places. Wind patterns shift with rising temperature at the poles and smaller rises at the equator, which is what's happening. What this does is slow down the jet stream, causing weather patterns to move more slowly. So hot, cold, wet, and dry episodes tend to linger more than they would have otherwise. (This is already happening.)
Other changes are quite possible. Perhaps Greenland melting could dilute the ocean, changing the patterns of ocean currents. This would bring much colder weather to northern Europe, but wouldn't be likely to change the pacific "Japanese current". This, however, is quite speculative, as Greenland melting isn't at all the same the the dumping of a large lake of glacial melt water. That happened very suddenly rather than over a period of decades. (See the Younger Dryas.) Also, the continents are in a slightly different configuration. Still, it's an uncomfortably close analogy.
Locally, where I live, weather patterns have, so far, just been moving North. But local geography differs, so the effects aren't easy to predict even for this relatively smooth change. And, of course, the slowing jet stream affects everyone North of the equator. (I don't know what's happening to it's southern counterpart, but given that Antarctica still has lots of ice, I suspect that it's maintaining speed. Though news about the timing of the monsoons changing makes that assumption questionable.)
Caution: I am not a climatologist.
They aren't relatively constant, but they're an essentially random variation with a period of effect of roughly a year. (Yeah, there are effects that last longer, but the major effect is the particulates and sulfates. [What's the word that includes all valences of sulfur compounds...well, that's what I meant. I'm including both Sulphurous and Sulphuric compounds, and gasses as well as particulates.])
Note that while (I think it was) Krakatoa produced "The year without a summer", it didn't produce "The decade without a summer". (And as a side note, some of the effects of volcano eruptions COOL things rather than heating them. In fact, some of the geo-engineering schemes to cool the Earth are based around mimicing some of the effects of volcanos.)
But large eruptions are rare. And we haven't seen a really large eruption since the dinosaurs died off. But look up the Yellowstone supervolcano, or Deccan Traps ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps ).
Now when I claim that these eruptions are random, I don't mean that they are without cause, but that we can't predict them. But "relatively constant" they aren't.
It's worse than that. It's extreme hypocracy, as Hollywood moved to California to escape prosecution for violating copyright laws in New York. (Not sure why that worked, but apparently it did.) Perhaps at that point prosecution under copyright laws was handled by the states.
I suspect that Google has sufficient information on those that use it's services, that it could ensure that the ban was specific to that particular user.
As for search results.... that is a more difficult problem. It might not be possible to avoid a high error rate. But that, after all, is what the court is insisting on.
Maybe they got them from Britain.
I don't know what legal bills are in Australia, but I suspect that he isn't going to see much of that $200,000.
Blocking Austrailia would be too expensive. However, blocking all services (as well as all references) to anyone who accused Google of libel would be relatively cheap. You would need to figure out how to identify which computers those individuals were using, but IIUC, governments are already requireing Google to collect that information. Certainly it would be trivial to refuse to allow them to use Google mail, etc., though I admit the search is a bit more difficult.
The easy answer is to just refuse to answer any queries that include his name or e-mail address...or can otherwise be linked to him in any way, such as being posted from a computer which he is using.
Possibly they could return a page merely stating "Trkulja is under the ban".
I doubt that there would ever be any need to remove the ban. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." is the way I normally see it phrased.
Where I live everyone is required to have drivers insurance, so the insurance company would be footing the bill. They'd be quite happy with a lot fewer accidents to defend, and if the auto had a decent black-box, they could easily prove who was at fault in the court case. And they've got deep enough pockets to file an appeal if they run up against a prejudiced judge or jury.
Do you think that you won't be at fault if the robot is driving the car? I think you're wrong. The other guy would sue you, and it would be YOUR responsibility to get the manufacturer to pay your bills. OTOH, IANAL, so I could be wrong. But it's worked out that way in many other areas.
You are wrong. And the reason why is that trucks without truck drivers will be a lot cheaper to operate.
Yes, the companies and the lawyers will need to come to some agreements, and this may mean that the legislators need to pass new laws. But it will happen, and not slowly.
I will grant you that automated personal autos may be delayed for several customer acceptance reasons. But automated vehicles already exist, and will only become more wide-spread. (Currently I believe that most of them are fork-lifts operating within warehouses...a controlled environment that simplifies things. But time is moving on apace. And hiring drivers is costing companies lots of money.)
Because they're bigger than I am, and could beat me up if they wanted to.
I think the idea is you use prevailing winds to cause the air to circulate, hence the name. Clearly you could also use solar cells, but those would have been observable. Windtraps were basically holes through a hill fairly near the top, that didn't run straight through, and that condensed water from the cooled air near the center of the tunnel. And they had to be unobtrusive, because the Fremen were being hunted by the Harkonnens. So avoid using power, because that's detectable.
What you have wrong is that it's the same episode. So you've inverted the timing of the claims.
This is Samsung responding to Apple attacking them. If the judge is fair, Apple will probably be forced to sign a patent pool agreement with Samsung. This preserves the patents to be allowed to attack newcomers. (So are the judge has seem biased towards Apple. Samsung is creating multiple grounds for appeal, as is legally required, because if you don't claim now, you won't be able to claim it in the appeal.)
Caution: IANAL.
I am skeptical. I said "appeared in Homo erectus", not "caused the appearance of Homo erectus". It doesn't appear early enough to have caused the divergence of Homo erectus. And it clearly didn't produce a large brain on it's own, as Homo erectus didn't have a large brain. It does, however, seem to increase the tendency of cells to divide, and it's particularly active in the brain (and switched off elsewhere). This tends to imply that it might be ONE of the causes of the neural proliferation in later species of genus Homo, but it clearly isn't sufficient in itself.
Oh, it *runs*. That's not the point. They all run. It's just incomparably WORSE than ... well, than MSWindows95A. It's up in the "Bob" class for usability. (Not for the same reasons. If MS-Bob were running on today's hardware it might be *better* than Gnome3.)
Yeah. If I could get electricsheep to run as a screensaver under xfce or LXDE, I wouldn't have to put up with KDE4. None of those options are as good as Gnome2, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. (Maybe I shoudl give Mate another try.....)
I've considered that obvious. I'm not sure it's a good design even for that market, but its clear that they're aiming at tablets or cell phones.
I don't care. It's a lousy desktop. I never said it was a lousy cell phone. Maybe it isn't. But I doubt I'll ever try it because I so mad about what they did to the desktop, that I don't trust them at all for any purpose. And they did it wil malice (or *gross* incompetence) aforethought.
Gnome3 shell extensions may be a horrible kludge, but they aren't as bad as the thing they're fixing.
No, I don't know that. From observing their actions I would assume that they were funded by Microsoft or Apple. I'll admit that I haven't looked at a Red Hat distro lately, so I don't know what their GUIs are like, but before they killed the "Red Hat Professional" version they would NEVER have pushed that kind of garbage.
Do they work for Microsoft?
Indeed, it certainly wasn't good enough to replace Gnome2. Whether your graphics drivers were hosed or not. Gnome3 is, itself, a hosing of the system.
I doubt that I'll go back to a team that has proven to be so unreliable a supplier. That would require that nearly EVERYONE else to be equally unreliable. Better at the moment are KDE, LXDE, and xfce...possibly others I haven't examined. I'm not considering specialty things like blackbox to be competitors. I haven't evaluated Mate or Cinnamon, because when I was changing away from Gnome, they were in early beta. (I'm not happy with the changes from KDE3 to KDE4 either, but it's better than Gnome. And I'm talking about UI design, not bugs caused by a premature release.)
FWIW, it's common for map makers and atlas makers to include some false streets and features. This is to enable them to prove that someone else copied from them. Perhaps this is one of those receiving publicity?
While the don't claim it started the human divergence, they do leave it wide open to interpret as being the reason we grew large brains. Quite possibly the divergence had already happened, but the timing is about right for the gene to have appeared in Homo erectus. Or perhaps a bit earlier. That was not a species with a large brain. Perhaps other mutations were required to allow the skull size to expand.
Caution: I am not an anthropoligist.
Your estimate of the probability assumes that all results are correct, and none have been fudged to match a pre-determined answer. That's mathematics, not the court system. In fact, not even the labs. Labs have a much higher error rate than you expect, and it's often biased to maintain their business. Want proof that you are descended from King Richard I, you can probably buy it, no matter what your ancestry.
(P.S.: Rumor has it that he didn't HAVE any descendants. This may, of course, be incorrect.)
Now labs that do official business are, presumably, held to a higher standard. But how certain are you that they always live up to it. Do they know what their target is? The standard approach for certainty is that they should do the sequencing without knowning the desired result. Reports indicate that this is, or was, not common practice. (Back when annealing was the standard method for doing a match, this would have been impossible. But when the methods changed, did the procedures?)
OTOH, "I only know what I read in the papers.". They may be popular science articles, but they aren't extremely reliable, only fairly reliable. And Holland is not the US. And the articles I read were years ago. Perhaps they don't apply anymore, or over there. But don't let math blind you to sources of error and bias that you aren't considering.