1. It does not appear to be their corporate face (they do iPhone stuff) 2. They worked with Google for a year, then things went sour (Google made their own and LimitNone has no boxed product) 3. They suing for a Billion dollars, as opposed to, say, expenses (time and materials) during the working period, likely in the high-6 to low-7 figure range.
As with anything legal, there are gray areas. If verbal agreements and emails were all that were necessary, though, we wouldn't have the aforementioned instruments. Verbal agreements are hard to make stick for large and/or significant disagreements. Again, a handshake and a nod will probably work for a nominal amount in small claims court, and you can find cases of larger settlements, but this smacks of a collaborative deal that didn't pan out.
Industrial espionage is quite different from two partners sharing common information on an interfacing product. It's going to be a bit harder to convince a judge that you volunteered the information on how you connect to a third party's (MS Outlook) format, received interface information from Google in return or as part of the dialog, and then claim those were trade secrets.
Well, since LimitNone's own website says that they are "...a leading provider of applications that leverage the revolutionary iPhone and other mobile devices to deliver communication solutions and GPS location-based services to mobile workers." this seems to be a bit of a failed business agreement rather than a stolen core of their business plan. Is it kind of sleazy to steal somebodies idea and make it better? Perhaps, but it depends on a lot of other factors. The talks sounded like they started over a year ago. That's a long time on the internet - maybe Google needed it done now. And conversion software isn't exactly a "novel" idea.
They may be truly wronged, but my money is on the likelihood that they put in the order for the new yacht and private plane before they had shipping product and paying customers and now they're figuring to get the phantom money they might have had by fishing with expensive lawyers.
Sure, a smile and a handshake is fine if you're doing a $300 quick job with a repeat customer, but if a billion dollars is on the line there needs to be paperwork. Now, if it is reasonable to presume that there wasn't much to be made on this at the beginning, then it is also reasonable to believe the change of heart on the part of Google is based on "new" information as to the viability of the product. If there are trade secrets involved, there should (must?) be an NDA, or it's not really a trade secret. And where do consumers come in this (i.e. the consumer fraud complaint)? It sounds like the consumers are going to make out to the tune of $29 per user.
2. "until they realized how much money could be made from it, at which point they decided to build their own clone and give it away for free." WTF? That doesn't even make sense. We could make a fortune if we had this product, lets give it away for free and we'll all be rich!!! No. I'm not sure if Google cares _how_ the conversion is done, just that the users come to Google at some point in the transaction. A converter, while convenient if it's free, is just as valuable if somebody else sells it...as long as it it used.
I have a similar issue, but have chosen PDF because they meet the digital signature requirements of most professional licensure boards (architects and engineers worry about this stuff). It's not a large hurdle, just that the documents can be externally verified against a publically available key. Adobe lets you do that for free (well, assuming you have their s/w; I can post a key on my website for a 3rd party to install and verify the signature).
This isn't a high-crypto requirement area - you can easily fake a paper document, and the standard isn't too much higher for A/E work, but it has to be sealed and marked for the inability to change, and the certificate must be publicly available and easily verified.
Most 24-28 foot wide homes (aka "doublewides"), in my experience, hold payloads of quite a bit more than 400lbs. (I live in southwest Virginia; we've got a lot of them)
Then again, most doublewides won't lift of with their payloads, unless of course you live in the midwest. In that case, they take off quite frequently in tornado season.
You may think your employer is making $90/hr on you, but you're probably wrong. More than likely, your employer will spend 6 months without making a penny, then clear between 10% and 20% of your billing rate ($12.50 to $25/hr) from that point on. See, while you only make $70k, you don't work for about 20% of the year (vacation, sick, training, reviews, administrative time, and a host of other inefficiencies), in the best years. From the 80% "ideal mark" comes your salary, your G&A costs, your overhead, time your supervisor and others spend training or helping you that's not billable, management, etc. the list of costs is long. That doesn't even touch on the job where you'll spend 20 hours for which the company bid 8 hours of time to complete the work, and it will happen (it always does).
You're correct that fixing a "new" problem with vista isn't worth the cost to your employer if XP works fine, but don't think that the man in the top seat is making $90/hr on you. If you do, you'll think you can make a fortune being a one-man shop and working 20 hours a week. I'd hate to see you go into business with such a skewed perspective.
Should we truse folks who can't keep a web server up (and I mean that in the most general sense, with hot failover and multiple backup sites) to give us a browser? I realize this could be considered a troll, but in business you have to realize that many "consumers" think this way. If Verizon had a huge "switch to Verizon" campaign for a particular day and then when everyone called in all they got was busy signals, would you really want to switch to them as a phone provider?
Note: I use only Firefox, and won't switch. Still, it doesn't look very good.
This is for special ops. You're acting as if this is the CIA manual (I'm sure one exists, but that's an argument for another thread). This is a _military_ manual where one would anticipate that we are at war with the offending country.
I'm curious, would you prefer unrestricted nuclear attacks? Personally, I've always been partial to renaming Iraq "New Iowa", but I can understand that thousands of square miles of radioactive glass may actually not be preferable to taking a government down from within.
I would presume that there are minimum wage laws in the UK, and that the cost of labor must factor in (unless it is specifically excluded). It's actually only reasonable that the participants be allocated a wage similar to other professionals in the field. Here in the US, that would be no less than $30/hr, and more realistically closer to $50-75/hr for an aerospace grunt with a few years of experience. Heck, for 9 orbits, you're looking at $50x9x1.5 plus, say, 20 hours for assembly and launch, and 8 hours to read the rules and file the paperwork. Over $2000 - beyond the allowable cost - and that's for a single person on the project, and discounting any R&D time for the first item - i.e. just the actual launch costs.
We should try to cut off the terrorists funding source. There must be something which is funneling huge dollars to their backers...I just can't figure out what it is...
Think about it from a lawyer's standpoint. You get a constant stream of income to support a group of very good IP defense lawyers. It's the typical reverse-ambulance-chaser play. You get money in the form of premiums, and then if you can prove bad faith on the part of the RIAA/MPAA you can attempt to recover your fees from a deep pocketed organization. Sounds like a good double-dip option. Somebody contact NYCL and a couple of startup investors. In fact, if you can get a few universities to add $19/student/year to their fees (it's a drop in the bucket when tuition is topping $30-40k), you might be able get startup funds from just a proposed team of lawyers, especially if you can kick in support for the Uni against subpoenas if they cover all their students with a policy. As long is you incorporate, if for some reason you lose miserably, you just shut down the company and let the losses die with the corporation.
You are correct, but I'll add that superchargers (as I understand the definition) are powered by the crankshaft, while turbochargers are powered by the exhaust. That's an important distinction, as a turbo charger is using waste energy (pressure differential at the exhaust) to increase the pressure of incoming air. The downside is that the exhaust heat tends to degrade them more quickly, and there is a lag between the request for power and the application of the increased compression.
Like most slashdotters, I have no idea what is and isn't legal when it comes to techinicalities, but since it was a motion filed with the judge, it is typically within the judges discretion to grant or deny the motion. I believe that your answer is yes, the judge may deny the motion to withdraw and grant the motion to dismiss. It may be challenged, again on technical grounds, but you'd have to find a very RIAA-sympathetic judge to review the grounds for the decision given that the final result for the case in question was nominally the same. (Of course, that takes a narrow view which ignores the precedent it sets and the possibility of awarding the defense fees).
Well, if the cost of production is $1.00 (assuming $1 production, $1 royalties, $0.50 mfr profit, 50% markup for retail distribution and profit), then the energy cost is no less than the equivalent CO2 burned to produce $1 of energy. Here's why: To the first order of magnitude, all costs can be distilled to energy costs. Nothing in this world costs money to "produce". It costs nothing to "make" the raw materials. We use energy to convert materials in the ground to materials we can use (mining, processing, converting, finishing). Some of the money is used to power those operations, the rest is used to pay manpower costs. Manpower is generally thought of as a time-based commodity, however the cost of manpower is related to the cost to provide sustenance for the worker (in all its various forms). With the exception of "savings" - a concept lost on Americans - all that sustenance is based on fuel usage - food, gasoline, heat, cooling, buying manufactured goods (which are recursively based on energy costs).
So, in a net-zero stable economy, the costs to produce goods are really just the cost of energies all the way down the line. You can argue what the carbon footprint is by the mix of energy sources used by the process, and the recursive processes involved, or you can just take the average and call it a day.
For gasoline, a liter (here in the states) is about $1.00 now. So you're even. You don't have to really worry about carbon mix, because most of the cost of gasoline is in profit along the supply chain (it only takes about $0.15-$0.20 to extract and refine a liter, if I remember correctly). Of course, to that you're adding the net carbon of the oil, so it may indeed be worse if it takes a whole liter to get you to the store and back.
Anyway, it's still far cheaper for the environment to rent a disc and return it via mail. Downloading is a tricky argument, as it may require a 60-100W source online for an extended period when it would otherwise be either (idle) or turned off.
A) Some are fun to watch more than once. Not everybody watches just to see what happens at the end of the story.
B) Children prefer watching movies about 500 times. Many take them 3-4 watchings to understand the whole storyline, the rest are out of familiarity.
I can't argue with the last statement. I often *gasp* download movies I'm not sure about, and those which are worth seeing again I'll usually buy and rip to my media server. Often the added value of the extras is worth the money I pay, but usually I watch them before they're released on DVD so I _can't_ actually buy them until later.
I really wish I could buy discs of movies when they are released theatrically. I'd gladly pay double ($30-40) for a movie on DVD within a week or two of the theatrical release. Of course the theaters would not be happy, as they would lose the paltry portion of the ticket fee I get, and (more importantly) the $3.85 they make off the $4 coke I' probably share with my wife or daughter. I'd probably end up buying about double the movies that I do now if I could. Of course, I'd watch many more mediocre movies, but I could live with that.
If they are, then they are a horrible failure at it. Vista, while useful for simple tasks, is a steaming pile for anyone other than users who don't mind doing it the one way the Vista engineers envisioned and enjoy the sub-par interface included in the package. I run Vista Media Center because it has better hardware support than XP MCE (mostly due to the poor programming in XPMCE and total lack of follow-on support). Yes, it works. No, it is neither intuitive nor useful. Just scroll through The Green Button forums to find out how many usability issues there are. And what's worse, most user requests fall on deaf ears or worse - often the MS people who try to help out honestly indicate that many critical features will never be added. Vista still doesn't ship with most of the common audio and video codecs. I'd say it's for licensing reasons, but they don't even include free codecs (and with their muscle, you'd think they could get most of the for-pay decoder codecs for next to nothing).
As for networking - sure there are some positive steps, but overall it's a convoluted mess to administer as a layperson, with half a dozen different dialogs controlling networking functions, and many bits of information are still only available from the command line.
MS will still dominate because of their position with a few business apps (calendaring and contacts come to mind as must-haves), but if someone really put some time into a desktop-mobile combination with an out-of-the box virtual machine to run the few necessary MS-bound applications, MS would need to take a good hard look at operations to figure out how to prevent a serious market shift. (Okay, that might be a little bit of wishful thinking)
ATTFA, it's got _satellites_ on the top of it for internet access. Seems like it would be cheaper to just use satellite dishes and the existing satellite networks.;-)
I've got some bad news - the US government really shouldn't be finding new ways to give out money. They've gotten so good at it that they're printing more every day just to stay afloat. Wonder why oil is so expensive? It's because it is priced in dollars, and dollars are worth far less today than they were 8 years ago. Sure, it's gone up in value relative to more stable currencies, but about half of the runup is just the devaluation of the dollar.
Right now regulatory pressures are balancing part of the equation, and any US based endeavors are partially insulated from the weak dollar. Now is the time to get these things up and running, if ever. Many things were tried in the 70s, but they just weren't good enough to be sustainable when oil dropped back down to $20/bbl. While we may or may not see prices fall on oil, now is the time to make these thing profitable for the long haul. (Back in the 70s, oil prices were never going to go back down either, btw).
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1. It does not appear to be their corporate face (they do iPhone stuff)
2. They worked with Google for a year, then things went sour (Google made their own and LimitNone has no boxed product)
3. They suing for a Billion dollars, as opposed to, say, expenses (time and materials) during the working period, likely in the high-6 to low-7 figure range.
As with anything legal, there are gray areas. If verbal agreements and emails were all that were necessary, though, we wouldn't have the aforementioned instruments. Verbal agreements are hard to make stick for large and/or significant disagreements. Again, a handshake and a nod will probably work for a nominal amount in small claims court, and you can find cases of larger settlements, but this smacks of a collaborative deal that didn't pan out.
Industrial espionage is quite different from two partners sharing common information on an interfacing product. It's going to be a bit harder to convince a judge that you volunteered the information on how you connect to a third party's (MS Outlook) format, received interface information from Google in return or as part of the dialog, and then claim those were trade secrets.
Well, since LimitNone's own website says that they are "...a leading provider of applications that leverage the revolutionary iPhone and other mobile devices to deliver communication solutions and GPS location-based services to mobile workers." this seems to be a bit of a failed business agreement rather than a stolen core of their business plan. Is it kind of sleazy to steal somebodies idea and make it better? Perhaps, but it depends on a lot of other factors. The talks sounded like they started over a year ago. That's a long time on the internet - maybe Google needed it done now. And conversion software isn't exactly a "novel" idea.
They may be truly wronged, but my money is on the likelihood that they put in the order for the new yacht and private plane before they had shipping product and paying customers and now they're figuring to get the phantom money they might have had by fishing with expensive lawyers.
Sure, a smile and a handshake is fine if you're doing a $300 quick job with a repeat customer, but if a billion dollars is on the line there needs to be paperwork. Now, if it is reasonable to presume that there wasn't much to be made on this at the beginning, then it is also reasonable to believe the change of heart on the part of Google is based on "new" information as to the viability of the product. If there are trade secrets involved, there should (must?) be an NDA, or it's not really a trade secret. And where do consumers come in this (i.e. the consumer fraud complaint)? It sounds like the consumers are going to make out to the tune of $29 per user.
1. It's press release by the plaintiff's lawyers.
2. "until they realized how much money could be made from it, at which point they decided to build their own clone and give it away for free." WTF? That doesn't even make sense. We could make a fortune if we had this product, lets give it away for free and we'll all be rich!!! No. I'm not sure if Google cares _how_ the conversion is done, just that the users come to Google at some point in the transaction. A converter, while convenient if it's free, is just as valuable if somebody else sells it...as long as it it used.
I have a similar issue, but have chosen PDF because they meet the digital signature requirements of most professional licensure boards (architects and engineers worry about this stuff). It's not a large hurdle, just that the documents can be externally verified against a publically available key. Adobe lets you do that for free (well, assuming you have their s/w; I can post a key on my website for a 3rd party to install and verify the signature).
This isn't a high-crypto requirement area - you can easily fake a paper document, and the standard isn't too much higher for A/E work, but it has to be sealed and marked for the inability to change, and the certificate must be publicly available and easily verified.
Most 24-28 foot wide homes (aka "doublewides"), in my experience, hold payloads of quite a bit more than 400lbs. (I live in southwest Virginia; we've got a lot of them)
Then again, most doublewides won't lift of with their payloads, unless of course you live in the midwest. In that case, they take off quite frequently in tornado season.
You may think your employer is making $90/hr on you, but you're probably wrong. More than likely, your employer will spend 6 months without making a penny, then clear between 10% and 20% of your billing rate ($12.50 to $25/hr) from that point on. See, while you only make $70k, you don't work for about 20% of the year (vacation, sick, training, reviews, administrative time, and a host of other inefficiencies), in the best years. From the 80% "ideal mark" comes your salary, your G&A costs, your overhead, time your supervisor and others spend training or helping you that's not billable, management, etc. the list of costs is long. That doesn't even touch on the job where you'll spend 20 hours for which the company bid 8 hours of time to complete the work, and it will happen (it always does).
You're correct that fixing a "new" problem with vista isn't worth the cost to your employer if XP works fine, but don't think that the man in the top seat is making $90/hr on you. If you do, you'll think you can make a fortune being a one-man shop and working 20 hours a week. I'd hate to see you go into business with such a skewed perspective.
Should we truse folks who can't keep a web server up (and I mean that in the most general sense, with hot failover and multiple backup sites) to give us a browser? I realize this could be considered a troll, but in business you have to realize that many "consumers" think this way. If Verizon had a huge "switch to Verizon" campaign for a particular day and then when everyone called in all they got was busy signals, would you really want to switch to them as a phone provider?
Note: I use only Firefox, and won't switch. Still, it doesn't look very good.
This is for special ops. You're acting as if this is the CIA manual (I'm sure one exists, but that's an argument for another thread). This is a _military_ manual where one would anticipate that we are at war with the offending country.
I'm curious, would you prefer unrestricted nuclear attacks? Personally, I've always been partial to renaming Iraq "New Iowa", but I can understand that thousands of square miles of radioactive glass may actually not be preferable to taking a government down from within.
I would presume that there are minimum wage laws in the UK, and that the cost of labor must factor in (unless it is specifically excluded). It's actually only reasonable that the participants be allocated a wage similar to other professionals in the field. Here in the US, that would be no less than $30/hr, and more realistically closer to $50-75/hr for an aerospace grunt with a few years of experience. Heck, for 9 orbits, you're looking at $50x9x1.5 plus, say, 20 hours for assembly and launch, and 8 hours to read the rules and file the paperwork. Over $2000 - beyond the allowable cost - and that's for a single person on the project, and discounting any R&D time for the first item - i.e. just the actual launch costs.
We should try to cut off the terrorists funding source. There must be something which is funneling huge dollars to their backers...I just can't figure out what it is...
Think about it from a lawyer's standpoint. You get a constant stream of income to support a group of very good IP defense lawyers. It's the typical reverse-ambulance-chaser play. You get money in the form of premiums, and then if you can prove bad faith on the part of the RIAA/MPAA you can attempt to recover your fees from a deep pocketed organization. Sounds like a good double-dip option. Somebody contact NYCL and a couple of startup investors. In fact, if you can get a few universities to add $19/student/year to their fees (it's a drop in the bucket when tuition is topping $30-40k), you might be able get startup funds from just a proposed team of lawyers, especially if you can kick in support for the Uni against subpoenas if they cover all their students with a policy. As long is you incorporate, if for some reason you lose miserably, you just shut down the company and let the losses die with the corporation.
I want in on this at the ground floor.
You are correct, but I'll add that superchargers (as I understand the definition) are powered by the crankshaft, while turbochargers are powered by the exhaust. That's an important distinction, as a turbo charger is using waste energy (pressure differential at the exhaust) to increase the pressure of incoming air. The downside is that the exhaust heat tends to degrade them more quickly, and there is a lag between the request for power and the application of the increased compression.
There's got to be an udder joke in here somewhere.
Like most slashdotters, I have no idea what is and isn't legal when it comes to techinicalities, but since it was a motion filed with the judge, it is typically within the judges discretion to grant or deny the motion. I believe that your answer is yes, the judge may deny the motion to withdraw and grant the motion to dismiss. It may be challenged, again on technical grounds, but you'd have to find a very RIAA-sympathetic judge to review the grounds for the decision given that the final result for the case in question was nominally the same. (Of course, that takes a narrow view which ignores the precedent it sets and the possibility of awarding the defense fees).
Not quite. Million is 10^6, Billion is 10^9, and Trillion is 10^12. At least, that's the way it's been for at least the last 40 years in the US of A.
It's the first answer I thought of.
Well, if the cost of production is $1.00 (assuming $1 production, $1 royalties, $0.50 mfr profit, 50% markup for retail distribution and profit), then the energy cost is no less than the equivalent CO2 burned to produce $1 of energy. Here's why: To the first order of magnitude, all costs can be distilled to energy costs. Nothing in this world costs money to "produce". It costs nothing to "make" the raw materials. We use energy to convert materials in the ground to materials we can use (mining, processing, converting, finishing). Some of the money is used to power those operations, the rest is used to pay manpower costs. Manpower is generally thought of as a time-based commodity, however the cost of manpower is related to the cost to provide sustenance for the worker (in all its various forms). With the exception of "savings" - a concept lost on Americans - all that sustenance is based on fuel usage - food, gasoline, heat, cooling, buying manufactured goods (which are recursively based on energy costs).
So, in a net-zero stable economy, the costs to produce goods are really just the cost of energies all the way down the line. You can argue what the carbon footprint is by the mix of energy sources used by the process, and the recursive processes involved, or you can just take the average and call it a day.
For gasoline, a liter (here in the states) is about $1.00 now. So you're even. You don't have to really worry about carbon mix, because most of the cost of gasoline is in profit along the supply chain (it only takes about $0.15-$0.20 to extract and refine a liter, if I remember correctly). Of course, to that you're adding the net carbon of the oil, so it may indeed be worse if it takes a whole liter to get you to the store and back.
Anyway, it's still far cheaper for the environment to rent a disc and return it via mail. Downloading is a tricky argument, as it may require a 60-100W source online for an extended period when it would otherwise be either (idle) or turned off.
A) Some are fun to watch more than once. Not everybody watches just to see what happens at the end of the story.
B) Children prefer watching movies about 500 times. Many take them 3-4 watchings to understand the whole storyline, the rest are out of familiarity.
I can't argue with the last statement. I often *gasp* download movies I'm not sure about, and those which are worth seeing again I'll usually buy and rip to my media server. Often the added value of the extras is worth the money I pay, but usually I watch them before they're released on DVD so I _can't_ actually buy them until later.
I really wish I could buy discs of movies when they are released theatrically. I'd gladly pay double ($30-40) for a movie on DVD within a week or two of the theatrical release. Of course the theaters would not be happy, as they would lose the paltry portion of the ticket fee I get, and (more importantly) the $3.85 they make off the $4 coke I' probably share with my wife or daughter. I'd probably end up buying about double the movies that I do now if I could. Of course, I'd watch many more mediocre movies, but I could live with that.
If they are, then they are a horrible failure at it. Vista, while useful for simple tasks, is a steaming pile for anyone other than users who don't mind doing it the one way the Vista engineers envisioned and enjoy the sub-par interface included in the package. I run Vista Media Center because it has better hardware support than XP MCE (mostly due to the poor programming in XPMCE and total lack of follow-on support). Yes, it works. No, it is neither intuitive nor useful. Just scroll through The Green Button forums to find out how many usability issues there are. And what's worse, most user requests fall on deaf ears or worse - often the MS people who try to help out honestly indicate that many critical features will never be added. Vista still doesn't ship with most of the common audio and video codecs. I'd say it's for licensing reasons, but they don't even include free codecs (and with their muscle, you'd think they could get most of the for-pay decoder codecs for next to nothing).
As for networking - sure there are some positive steps, but overall it's a convoluted mess to administer as a layperson, with half a dozen different dialogs controlling networking functions, and many bits of information are still only available from the command line.
MS will still dominate because of their position with a few business apps (calendaring and contacts come to mind as must-haves), but if someone really put some time into a desktop-mobile combination with an out-of-the box virtual machine to run the few necessary MS-bound applications, MS would need to take a good hard look at operations to figure out how to prevent a serious market shift. (Okay, that might be a little bit of wishful thinking)
If not, he can get together and work with Scooter Libby at the GOP.
ATTFA, it's got _satellites_ on the top of it for internet access. Seems like it would be cheaper to just use satellite dishes and the existing satellite networks. ;-)
I don't remember at time when thongs were a fashion statement. Maybe I'm just not going to the right beaches.
I've got some bad news - the US government really shouldn't be finding new ways to give out money. They've gotten so good at it that they're printing more every day just to stay afloat. Wonder why oil is so expensive? It's because it is priced in dollars, and dollars are worth far less today than they were 8 years ago. Sure, it's gone up in value relative to more stable currencies, but about half of the runup is just the devaluation of the dollar.
Right now regulatory pressures are balancing part of the equation, and any US based endeavors are partially insulated from the weak dollar. Now is the time to get these things up and running, if ever. Many things were tried in the 70s, but they just weren't good enough to be sustainable when oil dropped back down to $20/bbl. While we may or may not see prices fall on oil, now is the time to make these thing profitable for the long haul. (Back in the 70s, oil prices were never going to go back down either, btw).