It's not a 20 cent part, it's a $500 laptop. Those are the damages. Dell is refusing to honor it's warranty and it's legal obligations on the entire product as a unit. The cost to replace the entire laptop is the damages.
False. That is not how civil actions work. If you have a defect in a component of a warranted product, you are entitled to repair or replacement of only the component that is faulty, not a brand new full product.
Your "loss" that you may be able to sue over is not the cost of the product --- it is the cost of remedying the defect.
Since you can remedy the defect by plugging in a $5 external speaker, the possible claim in civil damages is no more than $5.
Your argument is analogous to "My gas cap no longer affixes properly, therefore, Mercedes is due to replace the full value of my car"
We'll have shell companies created with zero revenue acting as harassing entities. So if you find them out and sue and win, you'll get no damages
It's called a company intentionally undercapitalized, and it's a cause of action for the judge to pierce the corporate veil, and hold the company's shareholder's liable in proportion to their percentage of beneficial ownership,
AND base the 5 to 10% penalty on the owners' assets.
Go for it! Or ignore it. Your call. If they're not breaking the law, what are you going to do?
Using corporate resources specifically to attempt to attack or discredit the character, or interfere with the business of an individual should be made actionable.
Damage by a corporation to an individual's peace of mind should be assigned statutory damages based on the greater of $10 Milliion, and
5 to 10% of the perpetrating company's annual revenues.
What might have happened is that netadmins like Snowden had uid/pwd that allowed ftp access (necessary to fix files). Then run the directories just as `archie` did 20+ years ago.
The tool he had access to that was 'more advanced' than WGET was probably called Rsync
He doesn't want to sue dell for unfairly treating VLC, he just wants his speaker repaired without obvious bullshit excuses.
What court do you think will hear a suit over a $0.22 part? Dell just has to suggest a workaround "Recommend you plug in an external $5 speaker"
The small claims filing fees would be greater than any potential award.
Not to mention the time and energy it would take to file a claim and push it through court, only to have the case thrown out because a $50 in damages threshold was not met.
Why use 10 year old software to demo a "Windows replacement"? If a successful demo only works because it is old software, that somewhat speaks volumes.
Office 2007 and newer have this crappy 'ribbon bar', so since Office 2003 is so widely used... in a way it makes sense.
I also suspect the newer UI APIs aren't fully implemented, so, perhaps... indeed only the old software actually works.
Task all CPU cores and all GPU shader units at the same time and many laptops will overheat.
That's a defective product. The CPU and GPU units are engineered for a certain thermal capacity, and
the product would be advertised as containing these CPUs and GPUs that have a certain number of cores, frequency, etc;
the laptop itself must be engineered to handle them at full load, or apply a thermal limiting technology,
otherwise the overheat condition when it occurs is a hardware product defect that results in inability to perform
as advertised.
Agreed. A computer should be able to perform any sequence of instructions the user can come up with.
What about the sequences of instructions that relate to the system BIOS or add-in card/peripheral components' EEPROM or flash ROM, and allow you to zero it, or flash it with bits of your choice?
IANAL, but your first path for court action is small claims, not a class action.
OK, but to make the true claim of Unfair competition, and ANTICOMPETITIVE BEHAVIOR
against open source software (VLC product), in favor of Dell Partners' products, a small claims action is not going to fit the bill.
This should be the American People VS Dell, for half a billion dollars.
not when youre paying $2 for it on ebay and its coming in zillions of tiny packages one at a time
They just have to check 1 in 10 of the zillions of tiny packages, and fine the crap out of the recipient,
as in a $10,000 penalty for whoever the tiny package was being shipped to, every time a shipment found to contain uncertified electronics requiring FCC/UL certification for import.
Yeah, but they have voice recognition, so you only actually lose control of a starship capable of causing damage on a planetary scale if a homesick android turns hostile
Normally the computer can tell the difference between a human and an android or a recoring.
The android happened to be a computer genius though, and so he reprogrammed the voice recognition procedure
He could have defeated a physical switch too.
The fact is.... if your adversary is a technically sophisticated android with local access, then you are screwed.
Who are they planning to imprison for this? The president of the company? The guy who changes out the lightbulbs? Will they build a giant prison around the building?
They could probably very well start by giving the utility operator a law enforcement order to disconnect and keep disconnected all electrical power service at the location.
They would probably be making the forfeiture order against the company itself.
As for criminal sanctions involving prison time ---- this would potentially go to officers of the company.
Isn't this a case where the manufacturer of the fluorescent fixtures needs to fix them so they don't emit interference?
That only works before the person/company operating the fixtures is informed of the interference:
once informed, they must disconnect the fixtures and cease operating them immediately --- otherwise, they are liable for potential forfeitures or criminal sanctions.
Veriexec is NetBSD's file integrity subsystem. It's kernel based, hence can provide some protection even in the case of a root compromise.
Although.... the JunOS routers which are based on FreeBSD use veriexec.
Upon boot, after mounting filesystems; the devices set veriexec to level 3 and increase the securelevel to 1.
Sadly, the worst problem for system security is humans. If you required the flipping of a physical switch then malware would simply tell the user to flip the switch to see your choice of free porn, music, movies, games, etc.
Maybe so, but in an Enterprise environment, the "Toggle Switch" would be replaced with a KeySwitch, and the end user would not have the key to operate it.
Wikipedia, not any other organization has the right to do business on their terms just because they can hide themselves behind a server.
Wikipedia DO have a right to do business, and Finland has no control of Wikipedia's ability to solicit funds, or to accept payments from people in Finland. Finland can only interfere with this business by passing a law forbidding Finlands from visiting Wikipedia's website to do business.
A website in Finland does not get to dictate the terms of a website anywhere outside of Finland. Period.
However, ISPs operating in Finland do not have the same luxury ---- it is possible that the government will pass a law requiring them to interfere with foreign ISPs not judged to be operating to the satisfaction of the local authorities.
no idea of how the police think they can force a US organization to comply with the rules if all the servers and staff are outside Finland.
I would hesitate on that.... there are a lot of international deals between countries.
The US has capital controls on US citizens passed in 2010, that the government wants Finnish banks to enforce against American, to prevent us from opening foreign accounts ---- therefore, it is not hard to see the US enforcing Finland's controls.
That means even a church in Finland doing disaster relief cannot call together a congregational meeting and ask for funds without getting a "by your leave, sire" from a bunch of police bureaucrats.
CORRECT. This is a way to help prevent private association that the government does not approve of.
You can congregate; HOWEVER, if you want to pool some money for any real action, then the government has to approve of what you want to accomplish strongly enough to issue you a permit.
If they decide in the future that you are a threat, or you fail to comply with any later "requests" or insistences they make ----- such as making sure your Wikipedia articles about certain finish representatives and legal practices are most favorable and uplifting, then you will no longer be issued permits
Well, I don't own the servers at my bank. There is nothing in this Universe, other than virtual association of some monetary units with the number of my bank account
You own a legal claim to the deposits you made with your bank. Their computer/"virtual association"/books
are just an automated accounting system that documents how much in claims you have Versus payments made.
If I may have access to it at any time, and if I can spend it in any way I want. I guess the money at the bank satisfies that test.
You might be able to cause a spend. The network design says you should be able to, if the public ledger denotes a token association. There is no counterparty that has guaranteed this to you.
There are various situations in which you would not even be able to enter a spend.
One example is: local network or electrical outage.
There is no authority other than you who can do it (aside from the 50% attack.)
A 50% attack is an example of an authority you would have no recourse against, who can do it.
You can't cast that aside, because it can really happen ---- there is no reason to believe that it would be unable to happen in the future.
If you ask any IRS agent, any lawyer, any judge they will tell you that you own a thing if you exercise full control over it.
The fact is; while you control the private keys, you don't control the bitcoins.
As long as they are not declared money, or other goods in real world, they are just part of the game; you cannot call the police if a demon of 34th rank jumps you and robs you of all your gold.
Indeed.... and the same applies to Bitcoin. Just a toy currency that is part of a virtual game environment.
As with World of Warcraft gold..... a valueless entry in some virtual ledger that can vanish on the whim of some miners, Of no value on its own.
But in some cases, you may be able to persaude some fool on eBay to part with cold hard cash for it.
Just like you can sell WoW gold and WoW characters.
...if they catch you running an illegal operation using Bitcoins, the necessary bribe to the authorities just got bigger.
In other words: you have to pay them in Russian ruble, based in the Bitcoin amount involved, and THEY get to decide
which exchanges rate you will have to use (Hint: they'll pick the highest possible choice, and increase it by a percentage
of their choosing)
BTC seems to have dropped quite a bit today, but IMHO it's more likely to be because Mt. Gox has 'temporarily' halted withdrawals rather than any news coming out of Russia..
If you look at the price charts on bitcoinity.org..... the Mtgox chart shows a much larger dip than the btce or bitstamp.
The price of BTC needs a pullback though. The network hashrate is really growing at too big a rate,
and the Ghash pool even threatens to exceed 51% of the network size.
We need for some of the folks mining and manufacturing mining equipment to go bankrupt --- for the network to shed excess heat and become more efficient and stable over the long run.
The "get rich quick" mentality needs to go away.
It would help if the price of a BTC dropped in exchange rate to about $10 US, and then remained pretty stable for about 6 months.
That would make Bitcoin more viable as a currency.
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It's not a 20 cent part, it's a $500 laptop. Those are the damages. Dell is refusing to honor it's warranty and it's legal obligations on the entire product as a unit. The cost to replace the entire laptop is the damages.
False. That is not how civil actions work. If you have a defect in a component of a warranted product, you are entitled to repair or replacement of only the component that is faulty, not a brand new full product.
Your "loss" that you may be able to sue over is not the cost of the product --- it is the cost of remedying the defect.
Since you can remedy the defect by plugging in a $5 external speaker, the possible claim in civil damages is no more than $5.
Your argument is analogous to "My gas cap no longer affixes properly, therefore, Mercedes is due to replace the full value of my car"
We'll have shell companies created with zero revenue acting as harassing entities. So if you find them out and sue and win, you'll get no damages
It's called a company intentionally undercapitalized, and it's a cause of action for the judge to pierce the corporate veil, and hold the company's shareholder's liable in proportion to their percentage of beneficial ownership, AND base the 5 to 10% penalty on the owners' assets.
Go for it! Or ignore it. Your call. If they're not breaking the law, what are you going to do?
Using corporate resources specifically to attempt to attack or discredit the character, or interfere with the business of an individual should be made actionable.
Damage by a corporation to an individual's peace of mind should be assigned statutory damages based on the greater of $10 Milliion, and 5 to 10% of the perpetrating company's annual revenues.
What might have happened is that netadmins like Snowden had uid/pwd that allowed ftp access (necessary to fix files). Then run the directories just as `archie` did 20+ years ago.
The tool he had access to that was 'more advanced' than WGET was probably called Rsync
He doesn't want to sue dell for unfairly treating VLC, he just wants his speaker repaired without obvious bullshit excuses.
What court do you think will hear a suit over a $0.22 part? Dell just has to suggest a workaround "Recommend you plug in an external $5 speaker"
The small claims filing fees would be greater than any potential award. Not to mention the time and energy it would take to file a claim and push it through court, only to have the case thrown out because a $50 in damages threshold was not met.
Why use 10 year old software to demo a "Windows replacement"? If a successful demo only works because it is old software, that somewhat speaks volumes.
Office 2007 and newer have this crappy 'ribbon bar', so since Office 2003 is so widely used... in a way it makes sense.
I also suspect the newer UI APIs aren't fully implemented, so, perhaps... indeed only the old software actually works.
Please tell me if you know how to circumvent this problem.
A circuit to detect the clipped audio pattern or dangerous vibration pattern and shut off power to the speaker, or power limit it.
Task all CPU cores and all GPU shader units at the same time and many laptops will overheat.
That's a defective product. The CPU and GPU units are engineered for a certain thermal capacity, and the product would be advertised as containing these CPUs and GPUs that have a certain number of cores, frequency, etc; the laptop itself must be engineered to handle them at full load, or apply a thermal limiting technology, otherwise the overheat condition when it occurs is a hardware product defect that results in inability to perform as advertised.
Agreed. A computer should be able to perform any sequence of instructions the user can come up with.
What about the sequences of instructions that relate to the system BIOS or add-in card/peripheral components' EEPROM or flash ROM, and allow you to zero it, or flash it with bits of your choice?
IANAL, but your first path for court action is small claims, not a class action.
OK, but to make the true claim of Unfair competition, and ANTICOMPETITIVE BEHAVIOR against open source software (VLC product), in favor of Dell Partners' products, a small claims action is not going to fit the bill.
This should be the American People VS Dell, for half a billion dollars.
not when youre paying $2 for it on ebay and its coming in zillions of tiny packages one at a time
They just have to check 1 in 10 of the zillions of tiny packages, and fine the crap out of the recipient, as in a $10,000 penalty for whoever the tiny package was being shipped to, every time a shipment found to contain uncertified electronics requiring FCC/UL certification for import.
Yeah, but they have voice recognition, so you only actually lose control of a starship capable of causing damage on a planetary scale if a homesick android turns hostile
Normally the computer can tell the difference between a human and an android or a recoring.
The android happened to be a computer genius though, and so he reprogrammed the voice recognition procedure
He could have defeated a physical switch too.
The fact is.... if your adversary is a technically sophisticated android with local access, then you are screwed.
Of course, with our global economy it is easy to order cheap crap from Asia or elsewhere that was never tested by the UL or FCC.
Isn't that exactly the type of stuff customs is supposed to be keeping out of the US if not bearing the proper UL or FCC cert?
Who are they planning to imprison for this? The president of the company? The guy who changes out the lightbulbs? Will they build a giant prison around the building?
They could probably very well start by giving the utility operator a law enforcement order to disconnect and keep disconnected all electrical power service at the location.
They would probably be making the forfeiture order against the company itself.
As for criminal sanctions involving prison time ---- this would potentially go to officers of the company.
Isn't this a case where the manufacturer of the fluorescent fixtures needs to fix them so they don't emit interference?
That only works before the person/company operating the fixtures is informed of the interference: once informed, they must disconnect the fixtures and cease operating them immediately --- otherwise, they are liable for potential forfeitures or criminal sanctions.
Veriexec is NetBSD's file integrity subsystem. It's kernel based, hence can provide some protection even in the case of a root compromise.
Although.... the JunOS routers which are based on FreeBSD use veriexec. Upon boot, after mounting filesystems; the devices set veriexec to level 3 and increase the securelevel to 1.
Sadly, the worst problem for system security is humans. If you required the flipping of a physical switch then malware would simply tell the user to flip the switch to see your choice of free porn, music, movies, games, etc.
Maybe so, but in an Enterprise environment, the "Toggle Switch" would be replaced with a KeySwitch, and the end user would not have the key to operate it.
Electronic Glasses can be vewwy vewwy dangerous.
Wikipedia, not any other organization has the right to do business on their terms just because they can hide themselves behind a server.
Wikipedia DO have a right to do business, and Finland has no control of Wikipedia's ability to solicit funds, or to accept payments from people in Finland. Finland can only interfere with this business by passing a law forbidding Finlands from visiting Wikipedia's website to do business.
A website in Finland does not get to dictate the terms of a website anywhere outside of Finland. Period.
However, ISPs operating in Finland do not have the same luxury ---- it is possible that the government will pass a law requiring them to interfere with foreign ISPs not judged to be operating to the satisfaction of the local authorities.
no idea of how the police think they can force a US organization to comply with the rules if all the servers and staff are outside Finland.
I would hesitate on that.... there are a lot of international deals between countries. The US has capital controls on US citizens passed in 2010, that the government wants Finnish banks to enforce against American, to prevent us from opening foreign accounts ---- therefore, it is not hard to see the US enforcing Finland's controls.
That means even a church in Finland doing disaster relief cannot call together a congregational meeting and ask for funds without getting a "by your leave, sire" from a bunch of police bureaucrats.
CORRECT. This is a way to help prevent private association that the government does not approve of. You can congregate; HOWEVER, if you want to pool some money for any real action, then the government has to approve of what you want to accomplish strongly enough to issue you a permit.
If they decide in the future that you are a threat, or you fail to comply with any later "requests" or insistences they make ----- such as making sure your Wikipedia articles about certain finish representatives and legal practices are most favorable and uplifting, then you will no longer be issued permits
Well, I don't own the servers at my bank. There is nothing in this Universe, other than virtual association of some monetary units with the number of my bank account
You own a legal claim to the deposits you made with your bank. Their computer/"virtual association"/books are just an automated accounting system that documents how much in claims you have Versus payments made.
If I may have access to it at any time, and if I can spend it in any way I want. I guess the money at the bank satisfies that test.
You might be able to cause a spend. The network design says you should be able to, if the public ledger denotes a token association. There is no counterparty that has guaranteed this to you.
There are various situations in which you would not even be able to enter a spend. One example is: local network or electrical outage.
There is no authority other than you who can do it (aside from the 50% attack.)
A 50% attack is an example of an authority you would have no recourse against, who can do it. You can't cast that aside, because it can really happen ---- there is no reason to believe that it would be unable to happen in the future.
If you ask any IRS agent, any lawyer, any judge they will tell you that you own a thing if you exercise full control over it.
The fact is; while you control the private keys, you don't control the bitcoins.
As long as they are not declared money, or other goods in real world, they are just part of the game; you cannot call the police if a demon of 34th rank jumps you and robs you of all your gold.
Indeed.... and the same applies to Bitcoin. Just a toy currency that is part of a virtual game environment.
As with World of Warcraft gold..... a valueless entry in some virtual ledger that can vanish on the whim of some miners, Of no value on its own. But in some cases, you may be able to persaude some fool on eBay to part with cold hard cash for it.
Just like you can sell WoW gold and WoW characters.
In other words: you have to pay them in Russian ruble, based in the Bitcoin amount involved, and THEY get to decide which exchanges rate you will have to use (Hint: they'll pick the highest possible choice, and increase it by a percentage of their choosing)
BTC seems to have dropped quite a bit today, but IMHO it's more likely to be because Mt. Gox has 'temporarily' halted withdrawals rather than any news coming out of Russia..
If you look at the price charts on bitcoinity.org..... the Mtgox chart shows a much larger dip than the btce or bitstamp.
The price of BTC needs a pullback though. The network hashrate is really growing at too big a rate, and the Ghash pool even threatens to exceed 51% of the network size.
We need for some of the folks mining and manufacturing mining equipment to go bankrupt --- for the network to shed excess heat and become more efficient and stable over the long run.
The "get rich quick" mentality needs to go away.
It would help if the price of a BTC dropped in exchange rate to about $10 US, and then remained pretty stable for about 6 months.
That would make Bitcoin more viable as a currency.