For antitrust purposes, a monopoly doesn't mean what most people think it means. Antitrust is about behavior, not about size.
As my antitrust professor used to say, owning the only movie theater in town may be a monopoly by the dictionary definition, but it isn't an antitrust violation. Being one of two movie theaters, then buying the other one and closing it down, is.
There have been reported antitrust cases where a company actually controlled only 5-10% of the market-- but used that 5-10% to fix prices, block access to the market for new companies, or attain control of a supply chain to eliminate competitors. (I've often wondered whether Apple could get into serious antitrust trouble for supplying Apple Stores with Hot New Items faster than they do independent Apple dealers) Recall that the big issue in the DR-DOS suit involved Microsoft modifying Windows to detect DR-DOS and then not run.
Microsoft may not have the market share that it had a few years ago in certain areas. But they've definitely continued some of the behaviors that got them into trouble in the first place-- with file formats, with chat protocols, etc. It happens that the Bushies don't take antitrust enforcement very seriously, so it's been largely ignored in this country. But that doesn't mean that the potential isn't there, especially if the abuses get too egregious, for them to get whacked a whole lot harder than they were the last time.
There are several already on the market. I'm currently on a case which requires the review of something on the order of 90 million documents going back 20 years. Emails, newsletters, drafts of articles. You name it. Whatever was on every single one of this company's computers during the period in question. (including undeleted spam, stupid jokes forwarded through email, and even a whole series of love letters). I know we've produced something like 30 gigs of data already, and we've probably reviewed another 20 and withheld it as privileged or as not relevant to the discovery request. The one we're using seems to be a Java frontend to an utterly huge SQL database.
So much of the book is consumed with dialogue between burnt-out or nearly burnt-out druggies, and they seem to have cast every indie-type star who's had a public bout with rehab. Winona Ryder as Donna? Woody Harrelson as Luckman? And you've gotta love Robert Downey, Jr. as Barris. If any
I also think that the rotoscoping should make for a really cool effect for Fred's "vague blur" suits.
(This is my favorite PKD novel-- and I did an undergraduate thesis on the guy, and so have read, at last count, 50 of the 52 extant novels. I'll probably be one of those losers who take the day off work and show up for the premiere....)
Being forced to show ID before boarding used to be a "security ramped up" sort of move-- something they'd do after a lot of hijackings or a notable plane crash.
In 1989, after the crash of a jet into a cornfield in Iowa, (a plane which I was supposed to board if it had landed in Philadelphia as planned), the FAA temporarily ordered this. (They also did it at the time of the 1st Gulf War)
I distinctly remember I was forced to show ID to board a commuter plane in Colorado the day of the crash. As I didn't have my passport with me, and didn't yet have a driver's license, this proved to be a problem, which was only solved with the intervention of the airline's manager at Stapelton airport, who confirmed my identity with a few phone calls and let me board. They were ostensibly concerned with identifying bodies if something went wrong. (The jet crash, which was notable for the large number of survivors, turned out to be a mechanical fault)
But a lot of the security measures now in place (no stopping with a car at the entrance to the airport, no short-term parking, ID to board aircraft, etc.) were things that were ordered temporarily once in a while pre-9/11 if the FAA wanted to be serious about security.
In my case, eight years of post-HS education. (Most lawyers are 7. I picked up a master's degree along the way in addition to the law degree.) In my experience, the bar exam has very little to do with what you learn in law school, actually. Law school teaches you to think a certain way-- the bar exam tests you on your memory of laws. There's some overlap (especially in areas like contract law, where there's a set of default rules that apply), but most lawyers take cram courses after law school to take the exam. And the amount of really basic stuff, like drafting suits, that doesn't get taught in law school at all, is astonishing.
Trust me. I know other professions sometimes have it harder. Especially medical doctors. Hell, my sister's in a PhD program that will take her 6 years to complete (and she already has a master's in the same field). But the fact remains is that lawyers have at least three years of post-bachelor's training.
Do crappy lawsuits happen? Sure. I was on the defendant's side of one today. Can people use the law to abuse other people? Sure. Information is power. Law is more or less the structural foundation of society. If a bad apple wants to abuse it, there are lots of ways to abuse it. And after you're abused by it, you can use it right back-- it's called Abuse of Legal Process. But when some stupid punk kid writes a virus or worm that causes a lot of people a lot of trouble, do you hear calls to lynch all the computer programmers? If a doctor amputates the wrong limb, is there an outcry that it's too easy to become a doctor? No. But let someone hear about an abusive lawsuit, and suddenly all lawyers are not only abusive, but evil people as well. What we don't remember is that the system does work, if it gets enough attention. Remember the original spammers? The immigration lawyers who spammed USENET back in '91 or so? One of them got disbarred. Both faced discipline. Hell, even Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn (and Bill Clinton, if that's your political bent) ended up getting disciplined.
I've never filed a medical malpractice action, for what it's worth. I've never filed any lawsuit for the deliberate purpose of annoying another person. I drop clients who lie to me-- or request to my boss that I not have to work on their files. I won't defend the indefensible-- hell, I don't even like criminal law or family law, and do my best to avoid obtaining work in those fields. But I work in a despised, misunderstood profession, nonetheless. It's a living, and more than occasionally I get the chance to help people.
They get disciplined. It just doesn't get publicized much unless the lawyer ends up going to jail as well. Just in running in legal circles for the last 6 years or so, I've run into four lawyers who've been disbarred-- two for insurance fraud, one for improper handling of an escrow account, and one for taking a bribe. (Three of the four served jail time. Two I met socially, one was looking for paralegal work after he got out of jail, and the fourth's bribe happened in a case involving an industry my firm represents some clients in, and we ended up taking over some of his cases after he got his license yanked.)
Disbarment is a really, really extreme measure-- just as taking away someone's medical license is. Being told that you're not able to practice a profession that you have trained for for the rest of your life is one of the heaviest things you can do to someone. Most cases of lawyer discipline involve suspension or fines rather than disbarment for that reason. I can tell you, looking at Pennsylvania, (www.padisciplinaryboard.org) that about 90 lawyers in Pennsylvania have been disciplined since Jan 1. this year. Whether that's a low number or a high number depends on your belief in the integrity of the legal profession. That's about 1 in 500 practicing lawyers in the state, incidentally.
The Missouri bar association certainly is accountable to the people. Missouri holds retention elections. If you don't like the way a judge is handling disciplinary matters, vote him or her out. Can you do the same thing for the organization which regulates doctors, dentists, or architects?
Lawyers end up as legislators because the skillsets tend to overlap, just as lots of people who take lots of math tend to have a lot of overlap with computer programmers (I actually am surprised there aren't more computer/law overlap people-- the skillsets are actually pretty similar). Most states require judges to be lawyers, yes. And most of those laws appeared on the books at the same time as the laws that require surgeons to be doctors, or required licenses for engineers, architects, etc.
I laugh when you talk about rich lawyers. Only a very small percentage are what I'd call rich. I made more money when I was a network geek-- and my hourly rate was higher.
This is frankly bullshit. I'm an attorney in Pennsylvania. I am regulated by the disciplinary board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania is elected (not appointed, elected), by the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If a person has a complaint about my conduct as a lawyer, it goes to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. When I make out my check to renew my license every year, it's to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Most states, at least in the eastern part of the US, are like this. Many states, including my neighboring state of New Jersey, post details of all ethics investigations of individual lawyers on their Disciplinary Board websites, whether the lawyer is found guilty or not. Incidentally, I've never seen a state do the same for doctors and malpractice complaints. Or engineers and structural failures. I had to pass an intensive background check before I was able to work in the profession I devoted three years of study to. How about you?
The ABA, Pennsylvania Bar Association, Philadelphia Bar Association, etc. are *private organizations* which collect dues. Many lawyers aren't members.
It never ceases to amaze me, as a former network consultant, how people who would scream and yell at the slightest sign of ignorance of a computer-related topic are perfectly willing to make the most outrageous statements about other people's livelihoods (which, let me assure you, require equally arduous study as CS) without the slightest bit of knowledge to back them up.
Some lawyers are crooks. Some doctors are incompetent bunglers. Some politicians are liars. And some slashdot users? Can't spell "frivolous..."
Depends on what the skillset is, honestly. While I agree with the basic premise-- don't fake it unless you know you can-- I recall, back in the days I worked in the CS field, that job descriptions were often written by people who had no idea what the hell they were looking for or what they actually did.
Like (and this'll date me) asking for Java programmers with 5 years experience when the language had only existed for 2 years. Or demanding 5-7 years experience in a version of the Linux kernel that had only been out for a year and a half.
I could see why SCO itself might not want to go there, but if I were their lawyer, I'd be scared that they'd go after *me* for malpractice if the case went down on a Rule 12 motion. It's just too messy. Better to lose it on the merits, with all those consquences, or withdraw the case without prejudice and save it for a better time, than to lose it because the lawyer screwed up-- which is an impolite way of expressing what Rule 12 is about. Not being a securities lawyer, I'm not sure which result would have a better shot of starting a class-action derivative suit by SCO's stockholders, but that's a classic sign of rats leaving a sinking ship, if you're waiting for the fall of SCO.
I think that this memorandum opinion is almost wholly procedural, and barely newsworthy. This was a motion to dismiss under rule 12, rather than a rule 56 summary judgment motion-- which would be a conclusion, as a matter of law, that there was no case. Rule 12 basically means that they didn't plead it right-- and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are exceedingly liberal when it comes to amended complaints. Novell almost certainly filed the Rule 12 motion because they didn't want to have to defend against a complaint as vague as SCO's. Unless SCO annoys the judge by not even making an attempt to plead special damages in the amended complaint, I suspect this case will last until summary judgment, which, knowing Federal scheduling, could be six months to a year away.
Why? Because there's a hell of a lot of leeway to amend-- all the pleading is is a basic outline of what the lawsuit is about. You can't make stuff up-- Rule 11 of the FRCP can bite you hard if you do (and I fully expect SCO to get hit by Rule 11 sanctions before the end of the case if their case is as weak as it appears)-- but a bright law student could come up with special damages in an amended complaint. It was just sloppiness or vagueness on the drafting lawyer's part-- special damages could relate to SCO's stock value, to the value of its UNIX assets, or to money lost in licensing fees. Get an accountant to estimate some numbers based on sales and licensing figures, sign an affidavit that they're good, and attach them to the complaint. All they have to do is say what they think they lost-- they'll still have to prove it later, which is the tricky part, but at this stage of the case, they just have to allege their damages with some particularity.
(I'm halfway convinced that the reason Novell wants this case in Federal court is Rule 11 of the FRCP. I don't know Utah law, but I highly doubt it's as harsh as the Feds are if you're caught making up evidence or telling lies to the court.)
Destroying evidence in Federal Court is a very bad idea if you hope to defend a suit (at least if you're caught). In most courts, that means, at the least, that the jury is simply instructed to assume that the destroyed evidence supported the other party's version of events. This aside from fines, jail sentences, etc..
Interesting. I had noticed when I stopped by Municipal Court to schedule a trial date that the computers were down. I was told by an employee that it was due to the power outage, a comment that didn't make sense considering that I knew for a fact that the server farm was a floor above us...
As pissed as I am at the asshole who wrote the worm (it took nearly half an hour to schedule something that normally takes 2 minutes-- thank "Bob" that I was in Municipal Court, which is only starting to modernize from an old IBM mainframe setup, rather than in Common Pleas or Federal District Court, which are totally computerized-- and in he case of Common Pleas at least, running on Windows), this is, of course, another example of why governments, in the name of security, should go to more open-source solutions.
is completely boilerplate. Not a Microsoft trick. Pretty much the same text I see every day when dealing with insurance companies, for instance. (IAAL)
Incidentally, for those of you griping about the legal fees, keep in mind the lawyers get nothing if they don't win the case, have to pay support staff all through the suit (including multiple associates who themselves are making in excess of a hundred grand a year), not knowing whether they'll win or not, and have to justify every bit of their time to the Court down to each tenth of an hour (I left the computer industry, pissed about billing my time in 15 minute increments. Now I do it in six minute increments). $48 million, incidentally, while a large sum of money, is comparatively small in the world of class actions. There's one in the Third Circuit right now where the legal fees will likely reach $3 billion, spread among about 20 law firms.
I'm not a class action lawyer, and I don't make anywhere near a hundred grand a year. But I've seen these guys, and for the work they do and the risks they take, their fees, while high, are not outrageous. (Most contingency fees are in the neighborhood of 33-40% in the rest of the legal profession)
It immediately occurred to me that F# is the perfect name.
F# is the tritone (flatted fifth) of C, thus making it one of the most dissonant intervals possible. Perfect analogy for the lack of interoperability between M$ and the rest of the world.
This idea was originally suggested by a group of American socialists back in about 1890, in the days when 20,000 people would actually let you form a territorial government, at a time when state governments had a hell of a lot more power than they do now. Didn't work out back then, either. Read any history of the Socialist Party or of Eugene Debs.
You know the world is going to hell when Libertarians start stealing ideas from 19th century socialists and passing them off as original.
Yeah, it looks exactly like an iPod in different colors, and I guarantee you that if this product isn't vaporware and it ships that they'll have a massive suit on their hands for violation of Apple's no doubt inconsiderable amount of intellectual property connected to the iPod's design (Trademarks and perhaps even design patents).
This makes me think it's vaporware, perhaps part of the stock scheme mentioned in another thread-- no legit company would be so utterly stupid in opening themselves up to suit. Even eMachines made a few vague attempts in their design to look only sort of like an iMac.
IAAL, though this is only my personal opinion and shouldn't be relied on for actual legal advice.
Yes, all fact finding is conducted by the district court-- which is entirely why this is a bad case for Supreme Court review. Did you actually read the lower court opinion? The way the facts are presented in the lower opinion were entirely unsympathetic-- look at pages 15-17 of the opinion. He's described as a "leader of the hacker community"-- not a journalist-- showing people how to hack, to steal domain names, and to tap cell phone calls, That bad view of Goldstein by necessity carries itself up on appeal.
But Minersville School Dist. V. Gobitis (1940) was overturned by West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette (1943) in just three years, and unlike Plessy v. Ferguson, this doesn't radically effect whole social systems
True, (though that involved one of the most conservative justices ever, McReynolds, leaving the bench in the interim) but I could still point you to far more examples of idiotic Supreme Court decisions that have stood because the Court doesn't have the guts to reverse itself than situations like Barnette where WWII gave them an excuse to rethink. To use some other First Amendment examples (which tend not to affect millions of schoolchildren) to go with your Barnette example, keep in mind that Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952, I think) is still on the books (group libel) despite nearly unanimous criticism from Justices and First Amendment scholars. So is Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942, guy getting arrested for "fighting words" because the cops didn't like that he was calling them fascists).
I think that we can agree that it's better to win the first time....
My guess is the Supremes probably....
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2600 Appeal Rejected
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· Score: 3, Informative
won't grant certiorari (the appeal). Until the issue comes up again in another circuit, they won't see any reason to rule on it. The Supreme Court takes an incredibly small (about 100) number of cases a year, from the thousands and thousands which make it up to the (13) Circuit Courts of Appeals and (50+DC, PR, etc.) State Supreme Courts. Unless two courts in different parts of the country are in conflict, or the law is clear enough to rule on it now, it just won't be a priority for them-- and it takes 4 justices to decide to hear a case (out of 9).
In a sense, I'm not sure that if I were the EFF that I'd want this to be the case in front of the Supreme Court. Don't get me wrong, I've met Emmanuel Goldstein a couple of times and he's a great guy, but to the non-geek straight world he's a Bad Criminal Hacker, not a journalist. You generally would like to have a case with a more sympathetic client before taking it up to the Supreme Court, which is why the Princeton prof or the Russian programmer writing software for the blind would have been better for us. It's too bad for 2600 if it loses, but it's worse if it loses at the highest possible level and screws up a better chance down the road for the Supreme Court to see just how terrible this law can be. Contrary to popular belief, the Supreme Court doesn't reverse themselves all that often (and the most famous time they did-- Plessy v. Ferguson being overturned by Brown v. Board of Ed of Topeka, took 58 years).
You obviously don't understand the difference between what I said and what you replied.
Something like 90% of companies in the US, wherever they do business, are incorporated in Delaware. It is entirely possible-- in fact, entirely likely-- for a company to be incorporated in one state and do most of its business in another.
People don't always live in the states where their businesses are-- e.g.,lots of people who own businesses in NYC live in NJ or CT. For all we know, his company could be financed in part by his aunt in Dubuque, Iowa, even though he lives in California-- which would make him subject to suit in Iowa. And since his company does business on the net, that means that the company could be conceivably a defendant in all 50 states, depending on where goods are sold.
That's why the statement is completely incorrect. It's not a matter of "Pfft. Lawyers" (and I worked as a programmer and UNIX sysadmin for 5 years before going to law school, anyway-- I'm secure in my geek cred)-- it's a matter of an inaccurate statement by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about which could get someone in a lot of trouble if they rely on it. A default judgment in a state where you were subject to jurisdiction is going to cost you a lot of money in legal fees to try to overturn it, assuming that you don't end up owing the whole chunk of money because some self-anointed legal expert (who isn't a lawyer) on Slashdot told you that you could safely ignore it.
What state are you in? is it the same as PanIP? They have to sue you in your home state, remember. At the very least, make the proceedings as expensive for them as possible.
This is completely incorrect. They can sue him in any state in which he his company does business, has shareholders, or is incorporated. A suit was once permitted against an insurance company in a state in which they had one customer (See McGee v. International Life Insurance Co., 355 US 220 [1957]).
To the person who posted the story-- please contact a lawyer in your jurisdiction. (Or the EFF or another public service organization) Given the possibility here for a countersuit for abuse of process, and potentially fraud, you might be able to get someone willing to take the case on contingency, if you can't afford legal fees and can't find someone willing to do it for free.
To the moderators: IAAL, though not a member of the patent bar.
While the above is legally correct to the best of my knowledge and experience, don't rely on it-- see a lawyer in your jurisdiction for legal information.
Some of you may remember that Microsoft lost a patent infringment suit in 1994 to Stac Electronics for much the same reason. See this article for more info.
In that case, they blamed it on a subcontractor. It's been speculated that the big Apple/Microsoft deal at that time (to keep Office for Mac and to bundle IE with Macs, plus a big MS investment in Apple) may have been to settle a copyright infringment claim.
Re:New to Macs, Do They Charge for Updates?
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Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 1
IIRC, they charged $20 for the update from 10.0 to 10.1. There were a lot of complaints about this (because 10.0 was pretty crappy, and 10.1 was the first one that should have been a commercial release), but it was a pretty large update (few hundred megs) which would have probably caused much frustration had Apple just put it on their servers.
This update, from what I've read about it, will likely be 2 CDs-- one for the 10.2 update, and one for the updated developer tools. It would not surprise me to see Apple release the developer tools for free download-- they have with all prior releases. But I'd expect a small amount of money for the.2 update.
Indeed, the article's favoring of the status quo shows up even more when they note that the Bono law brings us "in line with the EU," (those Europeans, always hip and up to date),
Which isn't even a correct assumption. The EU is life +50, not life +70, which was taken care of by the Copyright Act of 1976....
What the Bono Act did, in part (as did the DMCA) is put us into position to accede to several international treaties on copyright-- the Berne Convention (which was ironically started in the 19th century to differentiate those oh-so-stylish Europeans from the US, which didn't even allow foreigners to copyright until 1870!), the TRIPS agreement, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. (The WIPO Treaty is where the anti-circumvention language of DMCA comes from, though the WIPO Treaty is much less harsh.)
As I recall, many European countries were opposed to the Bono Act's increased terms for copyrights-- it took nearly 30 years for the US to match the European standard of life plus 50, (Adopted by the Berne signatories in 1948) and they didn't want another situation where copyright terms were different in the US.
If this even *remotely* gets off the ground, Motorola sues them for trademark infringement on the term "G4." Slashdot posts an article. People whine about how unfair it is.
Why would anyone in their right mind name their company after something that is so clearly a trademark of another company? It's like putting up a big neon sign on the front wall of your building saying "sue me!"
Slashdot Mirror
For antitrust purposes, a monopoly doesn't mean what most people think it means. Antitrust is about behavior, not about size.
As my antitrust professor used to say, owning the only movie theater in town may be a monopoly by the dictionary definition, but it isn't an antitrust violation. Being one of two movie theaters, then buying the other one and closing it down, is.
There have been reported antitrust cases where a company actually controlled only 5-10% of the market-- but used that 5-10% to fix prices, block access to the market for new companies, or attain control of a supply chain to eliminate competitors. (I've often wondered whether Apple could get into serious antitrust trouble for supplying Apple Stores with Hot New Items faster than they do independent Apple dealers) Recall that the big issue in the DR-DOS suit involved Microsoft modifying Windows to detect DR-DOS and then not run.
Microsoft may not have the market share that it had a few years ago in certain areas. But they've definitely continued some of the behaviors that got them into trouble in the first place-- with file formats, with chat protocols, etc. It happens that the Bushies don't take antitrust enforcement very seriously, so it's been largely ignored in this country. But that doesn't mean that the potential isn't there, especially if the abuses get too egregious, for them to get whacked a whole lot harder than they were the last time.
(IAAL)
There are several already on the market. I'm currently on a case which requires the review of something on the order of 90 million documents going back 20 years. Emails, newsletters, drafts of articles. You name it. Whatever was on every single one of this company's computers during the period in question. (including undeleted spam, stupid jokes forwarded through email, and even a whole series of love letters). I know we've produced something like 30 gigs of data already, and we've probably reviewed another 20 and withheld it as privileged or as not relevant to the discovery request. The one we're using seems to be a Java frontend to an utterly huge SQL database.
So much of the book is consumed with dialogue between burnt-out or nearly burnt-out druggies, and they seem to have cast every indie-type star who's had a public bout with rehab. Winona Ryder as Donna? Woody Harrelson as Luckman? And you've gotta love Robert Downey, Jr. as Barris. If any
I also think that the rotoscoping should make for a really cool effect for Fred's "vague blur" suits.
(This is my favorite PKD novel-- and I did an undergraduate thesis on the guy, and so have read, at last count, 50 of the 52 extant novels. I'll probably be one of those losers who take the day off work and show up for the premiere....)
Being forced to show ID before boarding used to be a "security ramped up" sort of move-- something they'd do after a lot of hijackings or a notable plane crash.
In 1989, after the crash of a jet into a cornfield in Iowa, (a plane which I was supposed to board if it had landed in Philadelphia as planned), the FAA temporarily ordered this. (They also did it at the time of the 1st Gulf War)
I distinctly remember I was forced to show ID to board a commuter plane in Colorado the day of the crash. As I didn't have my passport with me, and didn't yet have a driver's license, this proved to be a problem, which was only solved with the intervention of the airline's manager at Stapelton airport, who confirmed my identity with a few phone calls and let me board. They were ostensibly concerned with identifying bodies if something went wrong. (The jet crash, which was notable for the large number of survivors, turned out to be a mechanical fault)
But a lot of the security measures now in place (no stopping with a car at the entrance to the airport, no short-term parking, ID to board aircraft, etc.) were things that were ordered temporarily once in a while pre-9/11 if the FAA wanted to be serious about security.
In my case, eight years of post-HS education. (Most lawyers are 7. I picked up a master's degree along the way in addition to the law degree.) In my experience, the bar exam has very little to do with what you learn in law school, actually. Law school teaches you to think a certain way-- the bar exam tests you on your memory of laws. There's some overlap (especially in areas like contract law, where there's a set of default rules that apply), but most lawyers take cram courses after law school to take the exam. And the amount of really basic stuff, like drafting suits, that doesn't get taught in law school at all, is astonishing.
Trust me. I know other professions sometimes have it harder. Especially medical doctors. Hell, my sister's in a PhD program that will take her 6 years to complete (and she already has a master's in the same field). But the fact remains is that lawyers have at least three years of post-bachelor's training.
Do crappy lawsuits happen? Sure. I was on the defendant's side of one today. Can people use the law to abuse other people? Sure. Information is power. Law is more or less the structural foundation of society. If a bad apple wants to abuse it, there are lots of ways to abuse it. And after you're abused by it, you can use it right back-- it's called Abuse of Legal Process. But when some stupid punk kid writes a virus or worm that causes a lot of people a lot of trouble, do you hear calls to lynch all the computer programmers? If a doctor amputates the wrong limb, is there an outcry that it's too easy to become a doctor? No. But let someone hear about an abusive lawsuit, and suddenly all lawyers are not only abusive, but evil people as well. What we don't remember is that the system does work, if it gets enough attention. Remember the original spammers? The immigration lawyers who spammed USENET back in '91 or so? One of them got disbarred. Both faced discipline. Hell, even Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn (and Bill Clinton, if that's your political bent) ended up getting disciplined.
I've never filed a medical malpractice action, for what it's worth. I've never filed any lawsuit for the deliberate purpose of annoying another person. I drop clients who lie to me-- or request to my boss that I not have to work on their files. I won't defend the indefensible-- hell, I don't even like criminal law or family law, and do my best to avoid obtaining work in those fields. But I work in a despised, misunderstood profession, nonetheless. It's a living, and more than occasionally I get the chance to help people.
They get disciplined. It just doesn't get publicized much unless the lawyer ends up going to jail as well. Just in running in legal circles for the last 6 years or so, I've run into four lawyers who've been disbarred-- two for insurance fraud, one for improper handling of an escrow account, and one for taking a bribe. (Three of the four served jail time. Two I met socially, one was looking for paralegal work after he got out of jail, and the fourth's bribe happened in a case involving an industry my firm represents some clients in, and we ended up taking over some of his cases after he got his license yanked.)
Disbarment is a really, really extreme measure-- just as taking away someone's medical license is. Being told that you're not able to practice a profession that you have trained for for the rest of your life is one of the heaviest things you can do to someone. Most cases of lawyer discipline involve suspension or fines rather than disbarment for that reason. I can tell you, looking at Pennsylvania, (www.padisciplinaryboard.org) that about 90 lawyers in Pennsylvania have been disciplined since Jan 1. this year. Whether that's a low number or a high number depends on your belief in the integrity of the legal profession. That's about 1 in 500 practicing lawyers in the state, incidentally.
The Missouri bar association certainly is accountable to the people. Missouri holds retention elections. If you don't like the way a judge is handling disciplinary matters, vote him or her out. Can you do the same thing for the organization which regulates doctors, dentists, or architects?
Lawyers end up as legislators because the skillsets tend to overlap, just as lots of people who take lots of math tend to have a lot of overlap with computer programmers (I actually am surprised there aren't more computer/law overlap people-- the skillsets are actually pretty similar). Most states require judges to be lawyers, yes. And most of those laws appeared on the books at the same time as the laws that require surgeons to be doctors, or required licenses for engineers, architects, etc.
I laugh when you talk about rich lawyers. Only a very small percentage are what I'd call rich. I made more money when I was a network geek-- and my hourly rate was higher.
This is frankly bullshit. I'm an attorney in Pennsylvania. I am regulated by the disciplinary board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania is elected (not appointed, elected), by the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If a person has a complaint about my conduct as a lawyer, it goes to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. When I make out my check to renew my license every year, it's to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Most states, at least in the eastern part of the US, are like this. Many states, including my neighboring state of New Jersey, post details of all ethics investigations of individual lawyers on their Disciplinary Board websites, whether the lawyer is found guilty or not. Incidentally, I've never seen a state do the same for doctors and malpractice complaints. Or engineers and structural failures. I had to pass an intensive background check before I was able to work in the profession I devoted three years of study to. How about you?
The ABA, Pennsylvania Bar Association, Philadelphia Bar Association, etc. are *private organizations* which collect dues. Many lawyers aren't members.
It never ceases to amaze me, as a former network consultant, how people who would scream and yell at the slightest sign of ignorance of a computer-related topic are perfectly willing to make the most outrageous statements about other people's livelihoods (which, let me assure you, require equally arduous study as CS) without the slightest bit of knowledge to back them up.
Some lawyers are crooks. Some doctors are incompetent bunglers. Some politicians are liars. And some slashdot users? Can't spell "frivolous..."
Depends on what the skillset is, honestly. While I agree with the basic premise-- don't fake it unless you know you can-- I recall, back in the days I worked in the CS field, that job descriptions were often written by people who had no idea what the hell they were looking for or what they actually did.
Like (and this'll date me) asking for Java programmers with 5 years experience when the language had only existed for 2 years. Or demanding 5-7 years experience in a version of the Linux kernel that had only been out for a year and a half.
I could see why SCO itself might not want to go there, but if I were their lawyer, I'd be scared that they'd go after *me* for malpractice if the case went down on a Rule 12 motion. It's just too messy. Better to lose it on the merits, with all those consquences, or withdraw the case without prejudice and save it for a better time, than to lose it because the lawyer screwed up-- which is an impolite way of expressing what Rule 12 is about. Not being a securities lawyer, I'm not sure which result would have a better shot of starting a class-action derivative suit by SCO's stockholders, but that's a classic sign of rats leaving a sinking ship, if you're waiting for the fall of SCO.
I think that this memorandum opinion is almost wholly procedural, and barely newsworthy. This was a motion to dismiss under rule 12, rather than a rule 56 summary judgment motion-- which would be a conclusion, as a matter of law, that there was no case. Rule 12 basically means that they didn't plead it right-- and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are exceedingly liberal when it comes to amended complaints. Novell almost certainly filed the Rule 12 motion because they didn't want to have to defend against a complaint as vague as SCO's. Unless SCO annoys the judge by not even making an attempt to plead special damages in the amended complaint, I suspect this case will last until summary judgment, which, knowing Federal scheduling, could be six months to a year away.
Why? Because there's a hell of a lot of leeway to amend-- all the pleading is is a basic outline of what the lawsuit is about. You can't make stuff up-- Rule 11 of the FRCP can bite you hard if you do (and I fully expect SCO to get hit by Rule 11 sanctions before the end of the case if their case is as weak as it appears)-- but a bright law student could come up with special damages in an amended complaint. It was just sloppiness or vagueness on the drafting lawyer's part-- special damages could relate to SCO's stock value, to the value of its UNIX assets, or to money lost in licensing fees. Get an accountant to estimate some numbers based on sales and licensing figures, sign an affidavit that they're good, and attach them to the complaint. All they have to do is say what they think they lost-- they'll still have to prove it later, which is the tricky part, but at this stage of the case, they just have to allege their damages with some particularity.
(I'm halfway convinced that the reason Novell wants this case in Federal court is Rule 11 of the FRCP. I don't know Utah law, but I highly doubt it's as harsh as the Feds are if you're caught making up evidence or telling lies to the court.)
(IAAL)
Destroying evidence in Federal Court is a very bad idea if you hope to defend a suit (at least if you're caught). In most courts, that means, at the least, that the jury is simply instructed to assume that the destroyed evidence supported the other party's version of events. This aside from fines, jail sentences, etc..
(IAAL)
Interesting. I had noticed when I stopped by Municipal Court to schedule a trial date that the computers were down. I was told by an employee that it was due to the power outage, a comment that didn't make sense considering that I knew for a fact that the server farm was a floor above us...
As pissed as I am at the asshole who wrote the worm (it took nearly half an hour to schedule something that normally takes 2 minutes-- thank "Bob" that I was in Municipal Court, which is only starting to modernize from an old IBM mainframe setup, rather than in Common Pleas or Federal District Court, which are totally computerized-- and in he case of Common Pleas at least, running on Windows), this is, of course, another example of why governments, in the name of security, should go to more open-source solutions.
is completely boilerplate. Not a Microsoft trick. Pretty much the same text I see every day when dealing with insurance companies, for instance. (IAAL)
Incidentally, for those of you griping about the legal fees, keep in mind the lawyers get nothing if they don't win the case, have to pay support staff all through the suit (including multiple associates who themselves are making in excess of a hundred grand a year), not knowing whether they'll win or not, and have to justify every bit of their time to the Court down to each tenth of an hour (I left the computer industry, pissed about billing my time in 15 minute increments. Now I do it in six minute increments). $48 million, incidentally, while a large sum of money, is comparatively small in the world of class actions. There's one in the Third Circuit right now where the legal fees will likely reach $3 billion, spread among about 20 law firms.
I'm not a class action lawyer, and I don't make anywhere near a hundred grand a year. But I've seen these guys, and for the work they do and the risks they take, their fees, while high, are not outrageous. (Most contingency fees are in the neighborhood of 33-40% in the rest of the legal profession)
It immediately occurred to me that F# is the perfect name.
F# is the tritone (flatted fifth) of C, thus making it one of the most dissonant intervals possible. Perfect analogy for the lack of interoperability between M$ and the rest of the world.
This idea was originally suggested by a group of American socialists back in about 1890, in the days when 20,000 people would actually let you form a territorial government, at a time when state governments had a hell of a lot more power than they do now. Didn't work out back then, either. Read any history of the Socialist Party or of Eugene Debs.
You know the world is going to hell when Libertarians start stealing ideas from 19th century socialists and passing them off as original.
Yeah, it looks exactly like an iPod in different colors, and I guarantee you that if this product isn't vaporware and it ships that they'll have a massive suit on their hands for violation of Apple's no doubt inconsiderable amount of intellectual property connected to the iPod's design (Trademarks and perhaps even design patents).
This makes me think it's vaporware, perhaps part of the stock scheme mentioned in another thread-- no legit company would be so utterly stupid in opening themselves up to suit. Even eMachines made a few vague attempts in their design to look only sort of like an iMac.
IAAL, though this is only my personal opinion and shouldn't be relied on for actual legal advice.
Yes, all fact finding is conducted by the district court-- which is entirely why this is a bad case for Supreme Court review. Did you actually read the lower court opinion? The way the facts are presented in the lower opinion were entirely unsympathetic-- look at pages 15-17 of the opinion. He's described as a "leader of the hacker community"-- not a journalist-- showing people how to hack, to steal domain names, and to tap cell phone calls, That bad view of Goldstein by necessity carries itself up on appeal.
True, (though that involved one of the most conservative justices ever, McReynolds, leaving the bench in the interim) but I could still point you to far more examples of idiotic Supreme Court decisions that have stood because the Court doesn't have the guts to reverse itself than situations like Barnette where WWII gave them an excuse to rethink. To use some other First Amendment examples (which tend not to affect millions of schoolchildren) to go with your Barnette example, keep in mind that Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952, I think) is still on the books (group libel) despite nearly unanimous criticism from Justices and First Amendment scholars. So is Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942, guy getting arrested for "fighting words" because the cops didn't like that he was calling them fascists).
I think that we can agree that it's better to win the first time....
In a sense, I'm not sure that if I were the EFF that I'd want this to be the case in front of the Supreme Court. Don't get me wrong, I've met Emmanuel Goldstein a couple of times and he's a great guy, but to the non-geek straight world he's a Bad Criminal Hacker, not a journalist. You generally would like to have a case with a more sympathetic client before taking it up to the Supreme Court, which is why the Princeton prof or the Russian programmer writing software for the blind would have been better for us. It's too bad for 2600 if it loses, but it's worse if it loses at the highest possible level and screws up a better chance down the road for the Supreme Court to see just how terrible this law can be. Contrary to popular belief, the Supreme Court doesn't reverse themselves all that often (and the most famous time they did-- Plessy v. Ferguson being overturned by Brown v. Board of Ed of Topeka, took 58 years).
(IAAL, but this is just a prediction. YMMV.)
Something like 90% of companies in the US, wherever they do business, are incorporated in Delaware. It is entirely possible-- in fact, entirely likely-- for a company to be incorporated in one state and do most of its business in another.
People don't always live in the states where their businesses are-- e.g.,lots of people who own businesses in NYC live in NJ or CT. For all we know, his company could be financed in part by his aunt in Dubuque, Iowa, even though he lives in California-- which would make him subject to suit in Iowa. And since his company does business on the net, that means that the company could be conceivably a defendant in all 50 states, depending on where goods are sold.
That's why the statement is completely incorrect. It's not a matter of "Pfft. Lawyers" (and I worked as a programmer and UNIX sysadmin for 5 years before going to law school, anyway-- I'm secure in my geek cred)-- it's a matter of an inaccurate statement by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about which could get someone in a lot of trouble if they rely on it. A default judgment in a state where you were subject to jurisdiction is going to cost you a lot of money in legal fees to try to overturn it, assuming that you don't end up owing the whole chunk of money because some self-anointed legal expert (who isn't a lawyer) on Slashdot told you that you could safely ignore it.
This is completely incorrect. They can sue him in any state in which he his company does business, has shareholders, or is incorporated. A suit was once permitted against an insurance company in a state in which they had one customer (See McGee v. International Life Insurance Co., 355 US 220 [1957]).
To the person who posted the story-- please contact a lawyer in your jurisdiction. (Or the EFF or another public service organization) Given the possibility here for a countersuit for abuse of process, and potentially fraud, you might be able to get someone willing to take the case on contingency, if you can't afford legal fees and can't find someone willing to do it for free.
To the moderators: IAAL, though not a member of the patent bar.
While the above is legally correct to the best of my knowledge and experience, don't rely on it-- see a lawyer in your jurisdiction for legal information.
Microsoft was also caught in 1995 using bits of Apple's Quicktime for Windows in an MS product. See this old cnet article for more details.
In that case, they blamed it on a subcontractor. It's been speculated that the big Apple/Microsoft deal at that time (to keep Office for Mac and to bundle IE with Macs, plus a big MS investment in Apple) may have been to settle a copyright infringment claim.
IIRC, they charged $20 for the update from 10.0 to 10.1. There were a lot of complaints about this (because 10.0 was pretty crappy, and 10.1 was the first one that should have been a commercial release), but it was a pretty large update (few hundred megs) which would have probably caused much frustration had Apple just put it on their servers. This update, from what I've read about it, will likely be 2 CDs-- one for the 10.2 update, and one for the updated developer tools. It would not surprise me to see Apple release the developer tools for free download-- they have with all prior releases. But I'd expect a small amount of money for the .2 update.
Indeed, the article's favoring of the status quo shows up even more when they note that the Bono law brings us "in line with the EU," (those Europeans, always hip and up to date),
Which isn't even a correct assumption. The EU is life +50, not life +70, which was taken care of by the Copyright Act of 1976....
What the Bono Act did, in part (as did the DMCA) is put us into position to accede to several international treaties on copyright-- the Berne Convention (which was ironically started in the 19th century to differentiate those oh-so-stylish Europeans from the US, which didn't even allow foreigners to copyright until 1870!), the TRIPS agreement, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. (The WIPO Treaty is where the anti-circumvention language of DMCA comes from, though the WIPO Treaty is much less harsh.)
As I recall, many European countries were opposed to the Bono Act's increased terms for copyrights-- it took nearly 30 years for the US to match the European standard of life plus 50, (Adopted by the Berne signatories in 1948) and they didn't want another situation where copyright terms were different in the US.
If this even *remotely* gets off the ground, Motorola sues them for trademark infringement on the term "G4." Slashdot posts an article. People whine about how unfair it is.
Why would anyone in their right mind name their company after something that is so clearly a trademark of another company? It's like putting up a big neon sign on the front wall of your building saying "sue me!"