Nope, most libels are a civil affair, but there is such an offense as "criminal libel". Usually it has to be pretty malicious to warrant this treatment, however. --montoya
He's a bigger prick than Stallman (who notoriously used to stink out the MIT Law Library when consulting Lessig on the GPL). My firm did some speculative liti work for a bunch of college kids from Tennessee who reckoned he'd ripped off their "Polygon Management Architecture", back in the days when J-J-J-J-Julius systems (BTW, that's four j's, not three, the prick has a typo in his.sig) was marketing its engine without designing any games. He would not settle, choosing instead to nearly bankrupt these college students by forcing us to take him on a ludicrously expensive round of litigation, which we lost on a technicality at huge expense to our clients. A bigger asshole, there isn't.
John Saul Montoya (Yeah, Wosten, thatJohnny Montoya, the guy who kicked your fucken ass over the KKW second-stage funding. Don't fuck with Wall Street).
We did, in fact, receive funding from individuals who were the founders and deal makers behind Exodus Communications and AboveNet. We are not, however, "owned" by AboveNet. We feel that having access to these successful and highly intelligent business professionals is an asset to our company.
Translation: They own our asses right back to the perineum, and have options on our various penises, testicles and women's parts, too.
John Montoya, going to business school and law school so you don't have to.
The question is surely, can drummers appreciate good music? Many of them have friends who are musicians, but that in and of itself wouldn't necessarily mean anything. And Lars, as far as I can tell, doesn't have any remotely musically talented acquaintances.
Errrmmmm... I know you guys aren't professional journalists, but Roblimo has been in the business long enough to know that leaving in all of somebody's "You know"'s and "OK"'s in an attempt to make them look like a moron isn't good ethics. I certainly hope that this utterly verbatim account is at Metallica's request, otherwise it looks a bit shabby.
And bTW, what did he actually say which Emmett replaced by [fight] above. I'm guessing he used the c-word?
Dickhead. Yours is the millionth post with exactly the same stupid message. Why don't you think about it for one second? You have, on occasion, eaten an Apple. Apple has trademarked the apple. There is no conflict between these two statements because you are not a computer manufacturer. Neither are you a rival maker of scented tennis balls. For fucking crying out loud, I swear that Rob and Hemos simply post these stories when they want to see how many of the coveted moron demographic read slashdot. Why don't you click a banner and do something productive for someone, instead?
Oh yeh, and your shitty pyramid scheme is nothing like distributed.net
I'm appending this to your post rather than a higher one because it;s the first reaonsable and correct one I've seen. Most of the other patent/trademark/IP whiners are too annoying to deserve this piece of advice -- all these people squealing about "it's so stupid, patenting this, that, the other" are committing the fallacy of assuming that all patents, merely because granted, are enforceable. The US Patents Office is not a court, and they cannot prejudge any future litigation. A patent gives you the right to sue someone -- it doesn't confer magical litigation powers (you have to pay my fee to get those). The cat exercising guy hasn't sued anyone since filing his patent, and would clearly get his ass handed to him if he did.
So the reaction to something like the cat patent should be more like "Knobhead Wastes Money on Filing Unenforceable Patent, Film at 11". That's why the Amazon patent shocked everybody -- because a court upheld a patent which everyone had assumed to be bullshit.
Sadly, along with patents, copyrights, English, trees and cockroaches, the act of being an unfunny, unoriginal, tired, desperately lame twat was invented a long time ago, by someone who wasn't you. So you can't even patent that.
No, and if you rest your coffe cup on a blotter and leave an ugly ring, you won't be sued by Lucent either. You're not selling your tennis ball, you're not passing it off as this company's, you're not interfering with their trademark. You can't trademark "the smell of pizza" for a pizza, because smelling of pizza is a general feature of pizza, not a distinctive feature of Fred's Pizza.
Here's a a short checklist for Slashbots wanting to put up instances of "obviously ridiculous features of IP law" to make great jokes at the expense of those silly lawyers (who, miraculously, seem to earn good money for their moronic tweetings).
1. Get the distinction between trademark, patent and copyright clear. If you're not sure that you've got the right one, shut up.
2. If your example took you less than five minutes to cook up, chances are that it didn't get through the four or five stages of drafting that most legislation goes through, and the law doesn't say what you think it says. Shut up.
3. If you example took you less than an hour to cook up, chances are that this point has already occurred to someone else, been litigated and decided by one of those moronic judges who make more genuinely tough decisions in a day than you lot make in a lifetime. The anomaly has been dealt with in precedent. Shut up.
4. If your example is genuinely new (clue: it probably isn't), or if you're criticising the actual outcome of an actual case which is not about to be overturned on appeal (clue: you probably aren't), and you're aware of the actual facts of the case rather than a newspaper report hastily drafted by someone with newspapers to sell (clue: I'd bet good money you aren't), then post away. But remember that there may be legitimately held positions on the other side. Otherwise, shut up.
There's no error there -- the uppercase letters plus space, full stop and comma add up to 28 characters, because I was following the Roman alphabet and using the same character for V and U, as I seem to remember Borges claimed the library did.
Here's something else for you to think about -- it's quite possible to actually build such a library. The theory goes as follows:
The library doesn't have to be anything like as big as the one Borges described. He's talking about large, quarto volumes, perhaps with 2,000,000 characters per volume. Therefore, for all the combinations of (say) uppercase letters plus space, full stop and comma, we're thinking about 2,000,000^28 -- a huge number of volumes.
But you can build it smaller than this by halving the length of a volume. It doesn't matter that they'll only have 1,000,000 characters, because there will always be a volume somewhere else in the library that carries on and contains the "second half" of the book. 1,000,000^28 is still huge, but it's much smaller than 2000,000^28.
Carry this on even further, and we can get to the point at which a "volume" is a small slip of paper with only 100 characters on it. 100^28 is a pretty huge number, but you could probably store this many small slips of paper on microfilm if you had both World Trade Centres to spare. Now we're getting into the realms of feasibility. There's a trade-off in terms of time spent searching for the correct "continuation" of the slip you just finished, but the index was always a problem, even in the original library of Babel.
The obvious further simplification is to reduce the number of characters per volume to 1. 1^28 is still 1, so you can now carry around the entire library of Babel in your pocket. Now you'll really have trouble combining the volumes accurately, but it's still possible -- you can make every possible combination of characters, out of the characters, and that's all that the original Library contained.
Still a bit cumbersome? Thought so. Well, let's assign the numbers 0 through 27 to the characters, and represent those numbers by their binary equivalent. Now you can wear the Library of Babel as cufflinks -- just have a 1 on your left hand and a 0 on your right (or vice versa, I don't care). You'll have to look back and forth a lot, and translate on the fly, but you can still produce any volume in the original Tower of Babel.
The point is that Borges' Library contains no information at all. Exhaustive iterations of permutations don't contain any more information than the original elements. Hey ho hum.
All the algorithm needs is one or two definitive search terms, like the person's first name, and clues to the other items, like a guess at the last name or street, plus a probability associated with each search criteria.
"It would be most useful where you have partial information and probabilities," Grover explained. "(If) you are 90 percent sure it is John and 10 percent it's James and 50 percent it's on Broadway... there is a high probability you will get the right result."
On the other hand, if you can't assign meaningful probabilties to "how sure" you are about these guesses, or if your subjective probability estimates don't match up to anything in the real world, you're kind of fucked.
Is it just me, or is this a prime example of the kind of shit people will swallow if the word "quantum" is prefixed to it? It's quite obvious that this search algorithm depends on someone being able to attach probabilities of correctness to their own statements, a proposition which looks to be in very dodgy epistemic standing. If you're reduced to guessing, how are you going to be able to guess (accurately, perforce -- GIGO hasn't been repealed here) how accurate your own wild-assed guess is?
28 posts so far, and nobody except me has read enough of the article to realise it's full of crap. And I'm a fucking lawyer, for God's sake. I sincerely hope that the fucking world of the future will be designed by the posters at advogato.net rather than the Slashbots.
Afterall, if a CPU fries, or a power supply starts letting its magic smoke out...
Good to know you are Jargon File compliant. I understand that's very important to some people, and if I ever find out who these people are, I will make sure to call them fucken dumbasses, you fucken dumbass.
As the proud owner of a Masters' in Business Administration, I feel able to tell you that you are wrong. Whatever stock prices may or may not reflect, and whatever the shortcomings of LinuxOne's management (a plagiarised SEC filing certainly suggests they may be manifold), the point made in your italicised sentence is by no means completely irrational. Given that LinuxOne is cash negative (has a positive burn rate), it depends (depended) for its survival as a company on the ability to refinance at regular intervals. This constant, repeated cash drain made it what has been called (by, eg, Hyman Minsky) a "Ponzi" project (one which cannot meet its interest bill without refinancing).
Because LinuxCare was a Ponzi scheme, it needed constant access to new investors, in order to pay its bills. Therefore, the "stock-market instability" (ie, the unaccountable refusal of investors to throw good money after bad in this case, despite their willingness to do just that in the case of Red Hat et al) was indeed, a major factor in their downfall.
That's what happens when geeks run a company -- they forget about little technicalities like paying the bills in their insane quest for free "open source" solutions. LinuxOne suffered, pure and simple, from a surfeit of Quake-players and a dearth of those annoying, but often useful individuals, who you call "suits". Even though we favour smartly pressed Gap khakis these days.
--montoya
A bit of friendly advice
on
An MP3 Update
·
· Score: 2
Since you're under eighteen, I'll dispense this friendly advice without my usual tirade of profanity. The key to understading is in your very first sentence -- "I cannot believe that you are serious in this proposal. "
If you "cannot believe" something, it is often a very good course of action to not believe it. Follow this course of action through your life and you will end up both believing a lot less shit, and having less of your time wasted by people like me.
A moment's thought about the magnitudes involved would show that this couldn't possibly be true. If legal services were a significant factor in making CDs more expensive then 1) it would be the legal practices making huge supernormal profits, not the record companies, and the FTC would have no case against the record companies. 2) Music industry lawyers would be as rich as rock stars; there are rather fewer lawyers working in the entertainment industry than there are recording artists with record deals. 3) Utterly implausible things would have to be true about the economics of CD manufacturing. But of course, a moment's thought is far too much for the average slashbot.
I'm afraid that I happen to know that the "Australia, land without music" troll is incredibly fertile ground from having used it in conversation with Aussies of my acquaintance. The trouble is that there are a few great Australian bands (I always liked Midnight Oil), but outraged Aussies will always take it too far by insisting that God knows how many horrible pub quartets are actually the equal of anything produced in the First World. Guaranteed chuckles, and always useful to move the conversation off the subject of sport.
Yeah, yeah, great idea, molecular computing. Never mind that the phenolacytithin molecules involved are proven carcinogens. Never mind that the manufacture of these horrifically toxic chemicals spreads huge amounts of di-ethyl-chloroplectythides (DEPs) over whatever luckless Third World country ends up having the plants sited there. Just so long as we get our new toys.
If you guys would just leave the computer room for a while, you might get some sense of proportion about what you're destroying. I happen to own a small ngwa in the limitless plains of Tanzania, bought with my share of the fees on a biggish corporate real estate settlement. It brings tears to my hard face to think of the despoliation that will be wreaked somewhere just as lovely, simply in order to produce more toxic shit so that somebody can play Quake a little bit faster.
How many science fiction books do you need to read before you come up with the idea "Launch some more satellites", anyway?
ESA has no money to do anything other than a) develop probes with experiments in them and b) launch telecoms satellites to raise money to develop another probe. Whatever they discover, they aren't going to have the money to do anything else, ever.
Here are a few other bands whose fans should be banned:
Nine Inch Nails (like heavy metal without the talent) Rush (think they're clever, but aren't) Hootie and the Blowfish (shit name, shit band) AC/DC (the single least musical bunch of morons God ever created, and disgustingly sexist to boot) The Grateful Dead (shit beyond shit) The Beatles (the Britney Spears of their generation) The entire country of Australia ("I come from a land Down Under, where the only band is a one-hit wonder)
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, most libels are a civil affair, but there is such an offense as "criminal libel". Usually it has to be pretty malicious to warrant this treatment, however. --montoya
John Saul Montoya (Yeah, Wosten, thatJohnny Montoya, the guy who kicked your fucken ass over the KKW second-stage funding. Don't fuck with Wall Street).
No it wasn't. DES was and remains secure for suitable key length. There are no known bugs in DES.
Translation: They own our asses right back to the perineum, and have options on our various penises, testicles and women's parts, too.
John Montoya, going to business school and law school so you don't have to.
The question is surely, can drummers appreciate good music? Many of them have friends who are musicians, but that in and of itself wouldn't necessarily mean anything. And Lars, as far as I can tell, doesn't have any remotely musically talented acquaintances.
And bTW, what did he actually say which Emmett replaced by [fight] above. I'm guessing he used the c-word?
Oh yeh, and your shitty pyramid scheme is nothing like distributed.net
I'm appending this to your post rather than a higher one because it;s the first reaonsable and correct one I've seen. Most of the other patent/trademark/IP whiners are too annoying to deserve this piece of advice -- all these people squealing about "it's so stupid, patenting this, that, the other" are committing the fallacy of assuming that all patents, merely because granted, are enforceable. The US Patents Office is not a court, and they cannot prejudge any future litigation. A patent gives you the right to sue someone -- it doesn't confer magical litigation powers (you have to pay my fee to get those). The cat exercising guy hasn't sued anyone since filing his patent, and would clearly get his ass handed to him if he did.
So the reaction to something like the cat patent should be more like "Knobhead Wastes Money on Filing Unenforceable Patent, Film at 11". That's why the Amazon patent shocked everybody -- because a court upheld a patent which everyone had assumed to be bullshit.
Sadly, along with patents, copyrights, English, trees and cockroaches, the act of being an unfunny, unoriginal, tired, desperately lame twat was invented a long time ago, by someone who wasn't you. So you can't even patent that.
Here's a a short checklist for Slashbots wanting to put up instances of "obviously ridiculous features of IP law" to make great jokes at the expense of those silly lawyers (who, miraculously, seem to earn good money for their moronic tweetings).
1. Get the distinction between trademark, patent and copyright clear. If you're not sure that you've got the right one, shut up.
2. If your example took you less than five minutes to cook up, chances are that it didn't get through the four or five stages of drafting that most legislation goes through, and the law doesn't say what you think it says. Shut up.
3. If you example took you less than an hour to cook up, chances are that this point has already occurred to someone else, been litigated and decided by one of those moronic judges who make more genuinely tough decisions in a day than you lot make in a lifetime. The anomaly has been dealt with in precedent. Shut up.
4. If your example is genuinely new (clue: it probably isn't), or if you're criticising the actual outcome of an actual case which is not about to be overturned on appeal (clue: you probably aren't), and you're aware of the actual facts of the case rather than a newspaper report hastily drafted by someone with newspapers to sell (clue: I'd bet good money you aren't), then post away. But remember that there may be legitimately held positions on the other side. Otherwise, shut up.
Ever hear of Bourbaki, fuckhead?
There's no error there -- the uppercase letters plus space, full stop and comma add up to 28 characters, because I was following the Roman alphabet and using the same character for V and U, as I seem to remember Borges claimed the library did.
The library doesn't have to be anything like as big as the one Borges described. He's talking about large, quarto volumes, perhaps with 2,000,000 characters per volume. Therefore, for all the combinations of (say) uppercase letters plus space, full stop and comma, we're thinking about 2,000,000^28 -- a huge number of volumes.
But you can build it smaller than this by halving the length of a volume. It doesn't matter that they'll only have 1,000,000 characters, because there will always be a volume somewhere else in the library that carries on and contains the "second half" of the book. 1,000,000^28 is still huge, but it's much smaller than 2000,000^28.
Carry this on even further, and we can get to the point at which a "volume" is a small slip of paper with only 100 characters on it. 100^28 is a pretty huge number, but you could probably store this many small slips of paper on microfilm if you had both World Trade Centres to spare. Now we're getting into the realms of feasibility. There's a trade-off in terms of time spent searching for the correct "continuation" of the slip you just finished, but the index was always a problem, even in the original library of Babel.
The obvious further simplification is to reduce the number of characters per volume to 1. 1^28 is still 1, so you can now carry around the entire library of Babel in your pocket. Now you'll really have trouble combining the volumes accurately, but it's still possible -- you can make every possible combination of characters, out of the characters, and that's all that the original Library contained.
Still a bit cumbersome? Thought so. Well, let's assign the numbers 0 through 27 to the characters, and represent those numbers by their binary equivalent. Now you can wear the Library of Babel as cufflinks -- just have a 1 on your left hand and a 0 on your right (or vice versa, I don't care). You'll have to look back and forth a lot, and translate on the fly, but you can still produce any volume in the original Tower of Babel.
The point is that Borges' Library contains no information at all. Exhaustive iterations of permutations don't contain any more information than the original elements. Hey ho hum.
On the other hand, if you can't assign meaningful probabilties to "how sure" you are about these guesses, or if your subjective probability estimates don't match up to anything in the real world, you're kind of fucked.
Is it just me, or is this a prime example of the kind of shit people will swallow if the word "quantum" is prefixed to it? It's quite obvious that this search algorithm depends on someone being able to attach probabilities of correctness to their own statements, a proposition which looks to be in very dodgy epistemic standing. If you're reduced to guessing, how are you going to be able to guess (accurately, perforce -- GIGO hasn't been repealed here) how accurate your own wild-assed guess is?
28 posts so far, and nobody except me has read enough of the article to realise it's full of crap. And I'm a fucking lawyer, for God's sake. I sincerely hope that the fucking world of the future will be designed by the posters at advogato.net rather than the Slashbots.
--montoya
Good to know you are Jargon File compliant. I understand that's very important to some people, and if I ever find out who these people are, I will make sure to call them fucken dumbasses, you fucken dumbass.
certainly not, I would never use the word "freakin'". "Fucken" is my trademark.
Because LinuxCare was a Ponzi scheme, it needed constant access to new investors, in order to pay its bills. Therefore, the "stock-market instability" (ie, the unaccountable refusal of investors to throw good money after bad in this case, despite their willingness to do just that in the case of Red Hat et al) was indeed, a major factor in their downfall.
That's what happens when geeks run a company -- they forget about little technicalities like paying the bills in their insane quest for free "open source" solutions. LinuxOne suffered, pure and simple, from a surfeit of Quake-players and a dearth of those annoying, but often useful individuals, who you call "suits". Even though we favour smartly pressed Gap khakis these days.
--montoya
If you "cannot believe" something, it is often a very good course of action to not believe it. Follow this course of action through your life and you will end up both believing a lot less shit, and having less of your time wasted by people like me.
A moment's thought about the magnitudes involved would show that this couldn't possibly be true. If legal services were a significant factor in making CDs more expensive then 1) it would be the legal practices making huge supernormal profits, not the record companies, and the FTC would have no case against the record companies. 2) Music industry lawyers would be as rich as rock stars; there are rather fewer lawyers working in the entertainment industry than there are recording artists with record deals. 3) Utterly implausible things would have to be true about the economics of CD manufacturing. But of course, a moment's thought is far too much for the average slashbot.
I'm afraid that I happen to know that the "Australia, land without music" troll is incredibly fertile ground from having used it in conversation with Aussies of my acquaintance. The trouble is that there are a few great Australian bands (I always liked Midnight Oil), but outraged Aussies will always take it too far by insisting that God knows how many horrible pub quartets are actually the equal of anything produced in the First World. Guaranteed chuckles, and always useful to move the conversation off the subject of sport.
If you guys would just leave the computer room for a while, you might get some sense of proportion about what you're destroying. I happen to own a small ngwa in the limitless plains of Tanzania, bought with my share of the fees on a biggish corporate real estate settlement. It brings tears to my hard face to think of the despoliation that will be wreaked somewhere just as lovely, simply in order to produce more toxic shit so that somebody can play Quake a little bit faster.
How many science fiction books do you need to read before you come up with the idea "Launch some more satellites", anyway?
ESA has no money to do anything other than a) develop probes with experiments in them and b) launch telecoms satellites to raise money to develop another probe. Whatever they discover, they aren't going to have the money to do anything else, ever.
Those who can't sell, starve, unless somebody with that talent comes along to work with them.
Here are a few other bands whose fans should be banned:
Nine Inch Nails (like heavy metal without the talent)
Rush (think they're clever, but aren't)
Hootie and the Blowfish (shit name, shit band)
AC/DC (the single least musical bunch of morons God ever created, and disgustingly sexist to boot)
The Grateful Dead (shit beyond shit)
The Beatles (the Britney Spears of their generation)
The entire country of Australia ("I come from a land Down Under, where the only band is a one-hit wonder)
And in general, anything else I don't like.