While I believe that, for the most part, there is far too much litigation going on in the US, there are times when suing is most certainly a reasonable and proper course of action.
In 1997, Mark Iversen sued the Kent School District because they failed to protect him from the harrasment he experienced as a high school student because he was perceived as being gay. In 1998, the school district settled the suit for $40,000. I wonder how many submitters of stories of "High School Hell" would be justified in filing a similar lawsuit.
While I have never experienced the same horrors many here have described, as both a geek and a gay man, I understand where a lot of these stories are coming from. Kids can be terribly cruel, I don't think anybody denies this. What is worse, however, are actions of parents and teachers that ACCEPT AND EVEN ENCOURAGE HARASSMENT.
I cannot condone what the boys in Colorado did--violence is never an acceptable solution. But if violence is not a solution, neither is standing idly by and watching kids get picked on, beat up, harrassed, and humiliated. If we, as a culture, want to stop this sort of thing from happening time and time again, perhaps we would be better off letting people wear trench coats and play video games and concentrate instead on stopping verbal and physical abuse in schools and in homes. Perhaps instead of persecuting people who dare to be different, it would be in our interests to hire educators who refuse to be complacent in the face of bigotry.
I'm pretty sure I've read about this sort of thing several times over the past few years. It's just like those 3-d postcards or movie posters (among other things)...yes? I remember Cracker Jack prizes where the sticker would change depending on the angle you looked at it from. It doesn't strike me as too much of a stretch to stick it on a monitor. Also...couldn't you just as easily put the plastic "lens" on a CRT to get 3-d really cheaply? The only problem would be lining it up properly, which wouldn't be too hard with some calibration software.
Not to start a political flame war, and it has been pointed out before, but check out the board of directors. They come from some of the leading conservative think tanks and organizations...The Leadership Institute, The Heritage Foundation, etc... Seems that they have a huge interest in seeing OSS fail. After all, if software is freely distributable, the source code is available, etc... then how can you make money off of it? Sure, there are other business models, but these are the same types of people who want MP3 to be illegal, public libraries to be censored, etc... Information is something to be concealed, restricted, kept out of the hands of the masses. Is this too ideological? Perhaps. But it seems to me that there are two kinds of people...ones who want information to be free, and ones who want information to be restricted so money can be made for their own personal gain. I feel that the Capital Research Center is in the latter.
On a side note, can anyone really take seriously an organization who believes that food banks encourage people to remain poor and malnourished? (See the As CRC Sees It link)
First we all complained when MS charged for beta copies of Win95. Now we're complaining about MS charging for bug fixes. This is getting utterly ridiculous, not to mention very expensive. But to a large degree, I'm not sure that all of this is Bill's fault. My understanding is that patches/service packs/fixes are to FIX EXISTING BUGS THAT WERE MISSED DURING TESTING. These, I think we all agree, need to be free...the user purchased the software in good faith that it would work properly. I work in QA...I understand that bugs will be missed, but it is the RESPONSIBILITY of a company to fix them when possible. Upgrades, OTOH, are to ADD NEW FEATURES. I can understand charging users for this. Problem is, where do you draw the line between the two? What if you say, "Well, we know it's a bug, but we'll just fix it in the next version." Sometimes that's legitimate...you can't go around supporting old software forever. Sometimes a customer just needs to bite the bullet and upgrade. (Do we really need patches for DOS 3.1 anymore?) This is one reason I'm a proponent of free/open source software...it avoids a lot (but not all--how many binaries out there are still being compiled for linux's a.out) of this problem. Perhaps, for commercial software, we need a new scheme, like licenses that last for a period of time. Windows 98,99,2000--supported until 2001, all upgrades free till then. Seems to me that the real issue here is where you draw the lines between upgrade and bug fix, supported and obsolete.
Does anybody know if anyone has ever studied the use of a non-biological pet in a therapy setting? Probably not, but the possibilities are really interesting...For an elderly or disabled patient who can't take care of, or would be intimidated by, a real dog, a substitute might still improve their mood and help them with their need for companionship.
Don't laugh--for someone who is lonely, any companionship or interaction, even with a machine, might be better than nothing at all. And to those who don't understand how a person could have feelings for something that's not alive, go watch a small child play with a stuffed animal or doll.
Provided that this is true, there's a few major problems here. IANAL, but I do know that some states, mine included, take the position that anytime someone says "STOP" and the other party continues, they are commiting rape. Doesn't matter if she (or he) hugged on-line, doesn't matter if she was wearing a really skimpy dress or was "asking for it." (There's a concept to churn the stomach) Seems to me that this woman needs to file a complaint with someone...the DA's office, perhaps? Also, every internet chat is logged? Huh? I don't know what system the parties involved were using, but wow. Talk about a waste of drive space.
Seems to me this is possibly a case of "Mommy...Tommy from next door called me a stupid fatso." Don't get me wrong...by all means, this guy has the right to be upset for the slander. But why can't he respond in a reasonable, adult manner? And besides, my understanding (insert obligatory IANAL disclaimer here) is once someone is a public figure, they lose the right to sue for slander. Might the case be made the CEO of the company is a public figure?
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babelfish
According to Yahoo Finance, SCOX has a market cap of 16.4M. Can't the FSF try to buy them and then release the IP to the community?
It seems to me that this is an opportunity for us open-source geeks to put our money where our mouths are.
Seems like he would be a great person to interview. Anyone have an in with him (or the other Palm gurus?)
Edmund Scientific
The Unemployed Philosopher's Guild
While I believe that, for the most part, there is far too much litigation going on in the US, there are times when suing is most certainly a reasonable and proper course of action.
In 1997, Mark Iversen sued the Kent School District because they failed to protect him from the harrasment he experienced as a high school student because he was perceived as being gay. In 1998, the school district settled the suit for $40,000. I wonder how many submitters of stories of "High School Hell" would be justified in filing a similar lawsuit.
While I have never experienced the same horrors many here have described, as both a geek and a gay man, I understand where a lot of these stories are coming from. Kids can be terribly cruel, I don't think anybody denies this. What is worse, however, are actions of parents and teachers that ACCEPT AND EVEN ENCOURAGE HARASSMENT.
I cannot condone what the boys in Colorado did--violence is never an acceptable solution. But if violence is not a solution, neither is standing idly by and watching kids get picked on, beat up, harrassed, and humiliated. If we, as a culture, want to stop this sort of thing from happening time and time again, perhaps we would be better off letting people wear trench coats and play video games and concentrate instead on stopping verbal and physical abuse in schools and in homes. Perhaps instead of persecuting people who dare to be different, it would be in our interests to hire educators who refuse to be complacent in the face of bigotry.
I'm pretty sure I've read about this sort of thing several times over the past few years. It's just like those 3-d postcards or movie posters (among other things)...yes? I remember Cracker Jack prizes where the sticker would change depending on the angle you looked at it from. It doesn't strike me as too much of a stretch to stick it on a monitor. Also...couldn't you just as easily put the plastic "lens" on a CRT to get 3-d really cheaply? The only problem would be lining it up properly, which wouldn't be too hard with some calibration software.
Hmmm...Let's see...We need to make more money and impress our shareholders...I've got it! We'll change our name to its abbreviation!
-or-
How many MBA's does it take to change a logo?
(On a side note, if they wanted a name change, why not Cray? They own it, after all.)
Not to start a political flame war, and it has been pointed out before, but check out the board of directors. They come from some of the leading conservative think tanks and organizations...The Leadership Institute, The Heritage Foundation, etc... Seems that they have a huge interest in seeing OSS fail. After all, if software is freely distributable, the source code is available, etc... then how can you make money off of it? Sure, there are other business models, but these are the same types of people who want MP3 to be illegal, public libraries to be censored, etc... Information is something to be concealed, restricted, kept out of the hands of the masses. Is this too ideological? Perhaps. But it seems to me that there are two kinds of people...ones who want information to be free, and ones who want information to be restricted so money can be made for their own personal gain. I feel that the Capital Research Center is in the latter.
On a side note, can anyone really take seriously an organization who believes that food banks encourage people to remain poor and malnourished? (See the As CRC Sees It link)
First we all complained when MS charged for beta copies of Win95. Now we're complaining about MS charging for bug fixes. This is getting utterly ridiculous, not to mention very expensive. But to a large degree, I'm not sure that all of this is Bill's fault. My understanding is that patches/service packs/fixes are to FIX EXISTING BUGS THAT WERE MISSED DURING TESTING. These, I think we all agree, need to be free...the user purchased the software in good faith that it would work properly. I work in QA...I understand that bugs will be missed, but it is the RESPONSIBILITY of a company to fix them when possible. Upgrades, OTOH, are to ADD NEW FEATURES. I can understand charging users for this. Problem is, where do you draw the line between the two? What if you say, "Well, we know it's a bug, but we'll just fix it in the next version." Sometimes that's legitimate...you can't go around supporting old software forever. Sometimes a customer just needs to bite the bullet and upgrade. (Do we really need patches for DOS 3.1 anymore?) This is one reason I'm a proponent of free/open source software...it avoids a lot (but not all--how many binaries out there are still being compiled for linux's a.out) of this problem. Perhaps, for commercial software, we need a new scheme, like licenses that last for a period of time. Windows 98,99,2000--supported until 2001, all upgrades free till then. Seems to me that the real issue here is where you draw the lines between upgrade and bug fix, supported and obsolete.
Does anybody know if anyone has ever studied the use of a non-biological pet in a therapy setting? Probably not, but the possibilities are really interesting...For an elderly or disabled patient who can't take care of, or would be intimidated by, a real dog, a substitute might still improve their mood and help them with their need for companionship.
Don't laugh--for someone who is lonely, any companionship or interaction, even with a machine, might be better than nothing at all. And to those who don't understand how a person could have feelings for something that's not alive, go watch a small child play with a stuffed animal or doll.
Provided that this is true, there's a few major problems here. IANAL, but I do know that some states, mine included, take the position that anytime someone says "STOP" and the other party continues, they are commiting rape. Doesn't matter if she (or he) hugged on-line, doesn't matter if she was wearing a really skimpy dress or was "asking for it." (There's a concept to churn the stomach) Seems to me that this woman needs to file a complaint with someone...the DA's office, perhaps? Also, every internet chat is logged? Huh? I don't know what system the parties involved were using, but wow. Talk about a waste of drive space.
It does contain their registered trademark, after all. ;)
Seems to me this is possibly a case of "Mommy...Tommy from next door called me a stupid fatso." Don't get me wrong...by all means, this guy has the right to be upset for the slander. But why can't he respond in a reasonable, adult manner? And besides, my understanding (insert obligatory IANAL disclaimer here) is once someone is a public figure, they lose the right to sue for slander. Might the case be made the CEO of the company is a public figure?