Rescinding sales after the fact may qualify as willful tortious misconduct. The requirement is that it must have been a direct action taken by NASDAQ (rescinding the stocks, in this case) with intent to harm a business (the day traders) rather than to promote its own purposes.
If it can be shown that NASDAQ's systems caused this, rather than a glitch in someone else's systems, then their action was taken as an act of self-preservation, and would not be tortious. If it was caused by a problem on someone else's system, though, it probably would be.
If, however, the failure was caused by NASDAQ's systems, the fact that safeguards were not put in place to detect such a runaway sell order qualifies as gross negligence on their part.
Either way, if that were the contractual agreement between the day traders and NASDAQ, it seems likely that NASDAQ is screwed. However, the text you quote above is clearly web site boilerplate information, and has nothing to do with the contractual obligations NASDAQ has regarding an actual sale of stock. Without those contracts and a solid knowledge of contract law in the state of New York, we're all basically guessing here.
That having been said, the odds do seem to lean in favor of NASDAQ being found to be negligent, and thus at fault, IMHO.
All new products must be sold with warranty. The minimum warranty requirements vary from state to state. Only products being resold may be sold without warranty.
However, this isn't about sales at all. The product didn't turn out to be bad, the sale itself was rescinded after the product was resold. That's completely different, and falls under contract law, not consumer protection law.
The question then becomes whether the body of contract law in the state where the sale legally occurred (which may or may not be where the computer itself is located) contains compulsory buy-back provisions. There may also be a compulsory buy-back clause in the NASDAQ contract, in which case if the day traders sold before the end of that compulsory buy-back window, they really are screwed, and they explicitly took on that risk.
That having been said, both such provisions are unlikely (and are more likely to have been explicitly waived in a NASDAQ contract rather than being created by one to prevent people from being able to do stuff like this maliciously), and thus it seems likely that NASDAQ can and should be held liable for damages resulting out of this situation.
According to all the reports I've seen in our area, there was no shortage. A bunch of generator companies colluded to keep plants offline for "servicing" for months at a time. Those plants could have supplied the needed power. Many were not actually in need of servicing. One such plant was a block from where I lived, and I got to hear all about how Bank of America refused to let our campus continue operating the plant because the generator company had filed for bankruptcy.... Eventually, the campus bought a controlling interest in the plant, IIRC.
Make no mistake, it was ALL about price manipulation. The price manipulation occurred by keeping plants offline that didn't need to remain offline, thus leading to an artificial shortage....
I can't imagine the tax bill I'd get nailed with for the various MkLinux email discussion lists.
It's interesting that Microsoft is suddenly interested in stopping spam. If they decided to sponsor a bill to tax email... they could pretty much kill Linux in one fell swoop, along with every other piece of open source and/or free software that isn't sponsored by a large corporation.
Actually, that's a gross distortion of the law. Upon re-reading it, the grandparent was correct. The or says that it IS excluded if either condition is true, not that it is not excluded if the either condition is not true.
But does it relate to the aspect of the employer's business that this particular employee is involved in? If not, it fails test #2, and would therefore not be claimable.
Pay phone. That way, they get charged an extra 35 cents for the call. Even better, I've read that the rules on payphone charges leave the possibility open that they would also be charged the 35 cent surcharge for calling you back at that number, although it's unclear whether any providers are actually billing for such charges at this time.;-)
It may be hard to justify, but your road analogy is fundamentally broken. A road costs an amount of money proportional to its width and length in terms of material costs, man hours, and maintenance costs. A network costs an amount of money proportional to its bandwidth in material costs. It costs an amount of money proportional to the physical coverage area in terms of maintenance costs. It costs roughly a fixed amount of money in terms of man hours.
The alternative to overbuilding is to dig up every street and/or send someone up on a pole to string more fiber every few years. That gets expensive very quickly, particularly when you're talking about trenching under roads or digging up sections and repaving. There's a huge initial cost that is incurred every time you add additional fiber, so there is a significant incentive to design it up front to handle the expected needs for many, many years. Sure, it might not get you reelected, but the alternative will get you utterly villified five years down the road.
This is a load of bull. As thousands of examples around the country have proven, temporary monopolies don't actually work. They almost always become permanent. Do you have a choice in local phone service? Really? Congratulations. You're part of only one or two percent of the country.
The fact is, those monopolies, incentives, and regulations are the reason that we're still paying the sorts of rates you'd expect from a line switching telco to long distance providers that do everything by packet switching. It's the reason that we pay a couple of bucks for our long distance provider to have "access" to our local telco to provide us with service (when, of course, there is absolutely zero actual incremental cost involved). It's the reason that our public telephone system is abysmal and our public internet triply so.
The government should run ALL utilities, or else those utilities should be non-profit organizations (either way works similarly, for similar reasons, though the latter tends to have less waste). Municipal power, water, gas, cable TV, telephone, and networking. Anything less gets you rolling blackouts, random cell phone disconnection, dirty lines that drop your DSL connection repeatedly, grainy cable service that looks like it has been split a thousand times, etc. Corporations are, by nature, profit-centric. That might be acceptable for consumer goods, but it is not an acceptable situation for basic utilities.
No, I wasn't referring to an ISO filesystem, either. If the term ISO has been overloaded to include RAW images, then it is rather a bastardization of the term.
An ISO is properly used to refer to a data block level copy, which for audio data would mean that a bunch of data would be lost, since the space used for checksums in data block storage is not included in those images, but is used for part of the audio data.
Or just buy a decent VCR. Most semi-pro and pro gear can deal with Macrovision just fine, in my experience; it's mostly only cheap consumer crap that gets confused by it.
The grandparent poster is correct. Audio CDs are not encoded in the same way as data CDs. Audio CDs have 2352 bytes/block, while data CDs have 2048 bytes/block. The difference is that data CDs employ more error correction. You can't create an ISO image (defined as a Mode 1 data track) of audio (Audio Mode track).
What you could do is create a "RAW" image, pulling the actual data bits, including subcode, with no error correction. That's a 2448 byte block. If you get that, I -think- you should be able to burn it back to a disc in the same mode and get a usable disc. That having been said, I'm not aware of any software that allows you to even rip in that mode, much less burn in it.
You -might- also be able to do an audio mode copy and get back a usable copy of the data tracks, but I'm not sure. Regardless, either mode is a very different animal from an ISO image.
Case in point, a few years ago, I never thought there was a chance in you-know-where that anything I learned in my undergrad compiler class would ever be useful. Now I'm maintaining and enhancing a piece of software that creates documentation out of code comments. Two weeks ago, I gave it a new tokenizing parser....
Apple releasing iTunes for Windows, me rewriting a code processor that parses close to a dozen different programming languages, and the 700 club criticizing a Republican administration... Hell definitely froze over, and it's showing no signs of thawing. As long as this trend continues, you never know what could happen next or what skills might come in handy in a few years....
While that is true, it is not the whole picture. Schools must also teach the how. This is the difference between a useful education and one of these cookie-cutter "theory schools" that churn out people that can explain in great detail how one develops optimal storage patterns for data storage on hard drives but thinks that it's okay to lose data every now and then, and writing a version that doesn't is just an irrelevant "implementation detail".
I've seen those sorts of crap graduates in TV, in computers, in film, even in music. Every time I do, if I'm involved in the hiring process, I ask "yes, but can this person really do the job?" and when the answer comes back "no", I say "then hire someone who can." You can't get a good job without at least basic knowledge of "how". You have to not only know the "how" as it stands right now, but also know how to learn the "how" when it changes, and then you have to actually go out and do just that---continue learning it. You have to constantly maintain your skills, constantly learn, constantly adapt, constantly grow.
If you don't get the understanding of "why", you're going to be one of these out-of-work tech workers who, as one of my former coworkers once put it, know how to sign their names and write perl scripts and call themselves engineers... but if you don't get the "how", I hope you enjoy asking "would you like fries with that?", as you'll likely find that skill much more helpful than anything you learned in school.... The "why" may help you keep a job or move to a new job, but only the "how" will get you a job in the first place.
That has no grounds in the law. The customer has purchased a license to the software. Invalid licensing of a portion of a work cannot invalidate the licensing of the work as a whole unless the entire work is derived from the GPLed portion (i.e. a new version of a GPLed program that adds features, NOT a new version of a non-GPLed program that adds a GPLed feature).
The company has not committed fraud. That would imply that they sold a product which did not do what they say it did, which is not the case. They did not sell the software to the customer with the promise that it would come with source code, nor did they in any way imply that their software would be released under the GPL. Therefore, the customer has no rights to their source code. Period.
I don't care how many judges you go up in front of, they're all going to say the same thing. The customers of CocoaTech have not been harmed. They were sold a product with a promise of certain functionality, and such a product was delivered. The licensing terms of the original source code neither confers any additional rights upon the end user nor affects the end user's rights under the terms of the proprietary license. If you believe otherwise, I'd be happy to sell you that bridge.
Now if a judge ordered that all copies of the software be confiscated, THEN AND ONLY THEN could the end users claim harm against CocoaTech. Such an act would be extraordinarily unlikely, however (read "That just doesn't happen").
This is just the tip of the iceberg that they've discovered. I can add another ten calls to their stats myself. I think their numbers drastically underestimate the harrassment of AT&T's local services division....
I would bet that we could find many thousands of people who have been repeatedly harrassed by them. At that rate, suddenly we're talking about a couple hundred dollars per person harrassed, which is almost certainly more than made up for by the number of suckers... err... customers they gained.
No, anything less than 780 Million dollars is unreasonably low, IMHO. This is nothing more than a light slap on the wrist....
Why do I have a feeling this is going to become the next troll?:-)
Anyway, heaven help us all, boot into 9 and run Norton from a CD. (Don't install it....) It should be able to find the partitions by telling it to find missing volumes. Then do a repair, and everything should be intact, assuming that only the partition table was blown. If you don't have Norton, find someone who does, and hook the drive up to their machine.
If that fixes the damage, PLEASE post here and tell everyone. If only the partition table is damaged, I think I can write a really simple program to fix the damage.
There are three valid reasons for having no-camera policies:
Protecting trade secrets
Protecting store design
Avoiding liability
The first one is only valid if you are in an area where trade secrets could reasonably be found. A semi-public loading dock doesn't qualify.
The second one is the reason that some retail stores do this, the theory being that their store layout is something that another store could copy, thus causing them to lose their advantage. Yeah, like anybody really wants to copy Fry's "I can't find anything" layout.... Sheesh. But I digress. Obviously, this doesn't apply.
The third one is solely a ban on commercial photography without permission, as this can generate lots of liability issues if someone gets hurt. In these cases, nobody is likely to stop you from shooting pictures of your family in such a location. This totally doesn't apply, as it only applies to outside persons, not to people employed by the company (who have already likely signed appopriate limitations of liability, and who are covered by different laws and different insurance).
Stores and restaurants fall under #2, with the addition of proprietary graphics on signage, etc. that also falls into #2.
Slashdot Mirror
If it can be shown that NASDAQ's systems caused this, rather than a glitch in someone else's systems, then their action was taken as an act of self-preservation, and would not be tortious. If it was caused by a problem on someone else's system, though, it probably would be.
If, however, the failure was caused by NASDAQ's systems, the fact that safeguards were not put in place to detect such a runaway sell order qualifies as gross negligence on their part.
Either way, if that were the contractual agreement between the day traders and NASDAQ, it seems likely that NASDAQ is screwed. However, the text you quote above is clearly web site boilerplate information, and has nothing to do with the contractual obligations NASDAQ has regarding an actual sale of stock. Without those contracts and a solid knowledge of contract law in the state of New York, we're all basically guessing here.
That having been said, the odds do seem to lean in favor of NASDAQ being found to be negligent, and thus at fault, IMHO.
However, this isn't about sales at all. The product didn't turn out to be bad, the sale itself was rescinded after the product was resold. That's completely different, and falls under contract law, not consumer protection law.
The question then becomes whether the body of contract law in the state where the sale legally occurred (which may or may not be where the computer itself is located) contains compulsory buy-back provisions. There may also be a compulsory buy-back clause in the NASDAQ contract, in which case if the day traders sold before the end of that compulsory buy-back window, they really are screwed, and they explicitly took on that risk.
That having been said, both such provisions are unlikely (and are more likely to have been explicitly waived in a NASDAQ contract rather than being created by one to prevent people from being able to do stuff like this maliciously), and thus it seems likely that NASDAQ can and should be held liable for damages resulting out of this situation.
Make no mistake, it was ALL about price manipulation. The price manipulation occurred by keeping plants offline that didn't need to remain offline, thus leading to an artificial shortage....
It's interesting that Microsoft is suddenly interested in stopping spam. If they decided to sponsor a bill to tax email... they could pretty much kill Linux in one fell swoop, along with every other piece of open source and/or free software that isn't sponsored by a large corporation.
Food for thought.
The alternative to overbuilding is to dig up every street and/or send someone up on a pole to string more fiber every few years. That gets expensive very quickly, particularly when you're talking about trenching under roads or digging up sections and repaving. There's a huge initial cost that is incurred every time you add additional fiber, so there is a significant incentive to design it up front to handle the expected needs for many, many years. Sure, it might not get you reelected, but the alternative will get you utterly villified five years down the road.
The fact is, those monopolies, incentives, and regulations are the reason that we're still paying the sorts of rates you'd expect from a line switching telco to long distance providers that do everything by packet switching. It's the reason that we pay a couple of bucks for our long distance provider to have "access" to our local telco to provide us with service (when, of course, there is absolutely zero actual incremental cost involved). It's the reason that our public telephone system is abysmal and our public internet triply so.
The government should run ALL utilities, or else those utilities should be non-profit organizations (either way works similarly, for similar reasons, though the latter tends to have less waste). Municipal power, water, gas, cable TV, telephone, and networking. Anything less gets you rolling blackouts, random cell phone disconnection, dirty lines that drop your DSL connection repeatedly, grainy cable service that looks like it has been split a thousand times, etc. Corporations are, by nature, profit-centric. That might be acceptable for consumer goods, but it is not an acceptable situation for basic utilities.
*badabump* Thanks, folks. I'll be here all night.
Too late..
An ISO is properly used to refer to a data block level copy, which for audio data would mean that a bunch of data would be lost, since the space used for checksums in data block storage is not included in those images, but is used for part of the audio data.
Sigh.
What you could do is create a "RAW" image, pulling the actual data bits, including subcode, with no error correction. That's a 2448 byte block. If you get that, I -think- you should be able to burn it back to a disc in the same mode and get a usable disc. That having been said, I'm not aware of any software that allows you to even rip in that mode, much less burn in it.
You -might- also be able to do an audio mode copy and get back a usable copy of the data tracks, but I'm not sure. Regardless, either mode is a very different animal from an ISO image.
Apple releasing iTunes for Windows, me rewriting a code processor that parses close to a dozen different programming languages, and the 700 club criticizing a Republican administration... Hell definitely froze over, and it's showing no signs of thawing. As long as this trend continues, you never know what could happen next or what skills might come in handy in a few years....
I've seen those sorts of crap graduates in TV, in computers, in film, even in music. Every time I do, if I'm involved in the hiring process, I ask "yes, but can this person really do the job?" and when the answer comes back "no", I say "then hire someone who can." You can't get a good job without at least basic knowledge of "how". You have to not only know the "how" as it stands right now, but also know how to learn the "how" when it changes, and then you have to actually go out and do just that---continue learning it. You have to constantly maintain your skills, constantly learn, constantly adapt, constantly grow.
If you don't get the understanding of "why", you're going to be one of these out-of-work tech workers who, as one of my former coworkers once put it, know how to sign their names and write perl scripts and call themselves engineers... but if you don't get the "how", I hope you enjoy asking "would you like fries with that?", as you'll likely find that skill much more helpful than anything you learned in school.... The "why" may help you keep a job or move to a new job, but only the "how" will get you a job in the first place.
Just my $0.02.
The company has not committed fraud. That would imply that they sold a product which did not do what they say it did, which is not the case. They did not sell the software to the customer with the promise that it would come with source code, nor did they in any way imply that their software would be released under the GPL. Therefore, the customer has no rights to their source code. Period.
I don't care how many judges you go up in front of, they're all going to say the same thing. The customers of CocoaTech have not been harmed. They were sold a product with a promise of certain functionality, and such a product was delivered. The licensing terms of the original source code neither confers any additional rights upon the end user nor affects the end user's rights under the terms of the proprietary license. If you believe otherwise, I'd be happy to sell you that bridge.
Now if a judge ordered that all copies of the software be confiscated, THEN AND ONLY THEN could the end users claim harm against CocoaTech. Such an act would be extraordinarily unlikely, however (read "That just doesn't happen").
I would bet that we could find many thousands of people who have been repeatedly harrassed by them. At that rate, suddenly we're talking about a couple hundred dollars per person harrassed, which is almost certainly more than made up for by the number of suckers... err... customers they gained.
No, anything less than 780 Million dollars is unreasonably low, IMHO. This is nothing more than a light slap on the wrist....
Anyway, heaven help us all, boot into 9 and run Norton from a CD. (Don't install it....) It should be able to find the partitions by telling it to find missing volumes. Then do a repair, and everything should be intact, assuming that only the partition table was blown. If you don't have Norton, find someone who does, and hook the drive up to their machine.
If that fixes the damage, PLEASE post here and tell everyone. If only the partition table is damaged, I think I can write a really simple program to fix the damage.
- Protecting trade secrets
- Protecting store design
- Avoiding liability
The first one is only valid if you are in an area where trade secrets could reasonably be found. A semi-public loading dock doesn't qualify.The second one is the reason that some retail stores do this, the theory being that their store layout is something that another store could copy, thus causing them to lose their advantage. Yeah, like anybody really wants to copy Fry's "I can't find anything" layout.... Sheesh. But I digress. Obviously, this doesn't apply.
The third one is solely a ban on commercial photography without permission, as this can generate lots of liability issues if someone gets hurt. In these cases, nobody is likely to stop you from shooting pictures of your family in such a location. This totally doesn't apply, as it only applies to outside persons, not to people employed by the company (who have already likely signed appopriate limitations of liability, and who are covered by different laws and different insurance).
Stores and restaurants fall under #2, with the addition of proprietary graphics on signage, etc. that also falls into #2.
Thanks, folks. I'm here all night.