Wikipedia doesn't operate hand-to-mouth, they have savings so that when something bad happens, like a law suit, they don't have to shut down.
If you're accustomed to spending your paychecks as you get them, the idea of reserves (savings) may be a bit foreign to you. But what happens when your car breaks down (and eventually it will)? You're screwed. Responsible charitable organizations don't operate that way.
Disabling or clearing cache is common in testing/benchmarking to measure/simulate performance loading fresh pages or otherwise doing something the first time, but repeating the test for more accurate results.
CR probably had a list of 12-25 commonly used web sites they used as example sites, and loaded each of those sites many times rather than loading hundreds of different sites. If you want to load 12 web sites ten times, to simulate loading 120 web sites, you need to disable cache to simulate loading 120 different sites.
It sounds like Safari had an issue where loading a site with cache off did *not* work the same as loading a fresh copy of the site for the first time, with the cache on. You'd expect the two scenarios to be more or less equivalent, and they normally are, but not always. Safari was probably doing the same thing in normal operation that IE used to do - first download it to cache, then immediately display the cached version rather than displaying first, then saving to cache). With cache disabled, it would need to use a completely different code path.
> The purpose of fitness trackers and the awards they give to users are to try to make fitness addictive like a video game. That is, there are challenges of increasing difficulty and rewards that unlock other parts of the application. It actually can be an effective motivational tool, and I can't see why it would be a bad thing if it motivates people who need to get in shape to get more exercise.
Yeah it does help many people get more active. That's cool. I don't quite understand it; it seems a bit silly to me - much like I don't "get" video games. I don't play video games, but I understand many people enjoy them and if the same principles of gamification are helping my wife get in shape I'm all for it. I don't quite understand gamification, but I do understand my wife is looking more like she did ten years and 35 pounds ago.
The whole "participation trophies" *in lieu of recognizing exceptional performance* is a different thing altogether. With my daughter, I recognize when she works hard to achieve something, but I won't mislead her by telling her that working hard enough to be *the best* doesn't have value.
Dry foods such as pasta and sugar have shelf life measured in years. Pasta can get a slight off taste after a two years or so but it's still edible for five more years.
I would guess these cups similar - just keep them dry.
> I would have thought biodegradable plastic would have been relatively simple, and chalk isn't exactly what I think of as a pollutant.
Yep, some of the hippy places serve drinks in biodegradable plastic cups made from corn. In function they are indistinguishable from the popular red Solo cups - not noticeably brittle and prone to breakage or anything when I played with them.
Interesting, thanks. I suppose one could say that Alice creates a new category of "objectively baseless" patents. Where Octane Fitness articulates the "objectively baseless" test, Alice declares that "on a computer" patents are objectively baseless.
> Altaba? I mean, what is that? People are going to confuse it with "Alibaba."
With Verizon buying Yahoo mail, Yahoo news, etc., the remains of the company will just be their Alibaba stock, which is already their primary asset. Buying Altaba *is* buying Alibaba, with one step of indirection. It's how you buy Alibaba stock if you want to (on paper) own a US company.
Where my post says "white-blowers", that should be "whistle-blowers". In the 1980s, whistle-blowers gave leads to investigators and testified against bosses. The Obama administration has of course been hostile to whistle-blowers.
Also some who didn't go to prison did get fines over over $100 million.
Compared to the 1980s S&L crisis, there were certainly fewer prosecutions. One career prosecutor who is knowledgeable about both says that one reason for that is the the Obama administration, unlike the Reagan administration, was hostile toward white-blowers who could have enabled prosecution.
To the extent that banker types get their way, the VW execs will be in prison for a long time. Prior to the scandal, VW was trading at over $200/share, as high as $250. After the information came out, it dropped to $100. That's about $80-$100 billion or so that investors lost.
That's a bit more than the losses from Enron. Enron executives got prison sentences of up to 24 years (later reduced to 14 years).
The damage to investors side of the issue is on top of the EPA / environmental crimes.
The in the case question is whether web sites (including Slashdot) are responsible for the content of posts by their users. If so, Slashdot, Backpage, and every other web site where people can talk would need a team of censors.
Child porn is illegal, slander is illegal, threatening people is illegal - if web sites are responsible for the posts, Slashdot would need to make sure no posts might be considered slander, or an unlawful threat. It just doesn't make any sense to say "the web site is liable if a user posts something that a jury considers child porn, but not liable for any other unlawful posts".
Like Colin Powell, Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr first overcame racism is own life, achieving personal success in the face of these challenges, in order to put him in a position to affect societal change. He didn't whine, he earned two bachelor degrees and a phd before becoming president of the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Here's what Doctor King had to say about whether you should overcome whatever challenges you encounter: -- We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome. And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
We shall overcome because Carlisle is right; no lie can live forever.
We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right; truth crushed to earth will rise again.
We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right:
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Stands God, within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own. -- From Doctor King's speech "We Shall Overcome".
Insurance companies created the fire code, Underwriters Laboratories (UL listed), and many other organisations and standards to reduce their risk. As insurance companies become involved in information security, they may well insist that to be covered companies need to comply with various standards, they may offer a rate discount if all of your developers take continuing education on security, etc. So the involvement of security companies will likely mean that companies will spend less dealing with security incidents by spending more on prevention, as part of the annual budget.
On the other hand, everybody knows that security has been growing in the last few years, and with the weak economy it's the only thing that's been growing, so the growth has been hyped. A LOT of college students are planning do go into security, as well as experienced sysadmins, programmers, etc. There will be a lot of college grads competing for the nee jobs in information security. I'm glad that I've been in the field for 20 years; the flood of new people aren't competing with me for the position of CSO.
Absolutely this. Do what you enjoy. Some people enjoy teaching, some people enjoy solving puzzles, etc. Figure out at least two or three things that get you pumped up. Then figure out which jobs combine at least two things that you enjoy and work toward doing that.
> The left has a bias or belief that problems are the fault of society, whereas the right tends to bias to the belief that problems are the fault of the individual.
That's reasonably fair and I realize this is a bit of a tangent to your main point, but I don't know that "fault" is necessarily the right word. I believe that my daughter, who is black and of course female, can become a supreme court justice, president, or chairwoman of the joint chiefs DESPITE whatever is wrong with society, and that it's easier for her to change her own actions than to change all of society. I'm sure Colin Powell encountered some racism; he went right ahead and became Secretary of State *anyway*. He was then in a position to affect society. He didn't whine about the problems in society, he overcame them.
> The only way... if the vast majority of patents they might assert in the future are Alice-susceptible
I wonder where you get that. I see the holding as essentially:
Attorneys who file meritless suits on a contingency basis may be liable for costs, especially if they engage in actions which are similar to, but not quite, abuse of abuse of process, malicious prosecution, or barratry. I don't see that Alice ("on a computer") is the key element here.
Certainly "meritless suits on a contingency basis, with a hint of the odor barratry" applies to many patent trolls.
Certainly not all such patents have the issue decided in Alice, I didn't say they did. I said they tend to be questionable patents, as applied to the defendants. And they tend to engage in trollish behavior that is disrespectful to the court, as these attorneys did. I suppose that's a bit by definition - trolls act trollish. Prenda did the same KINDS of things, which is why they were considered trolls and the courts shut them down. Prenda were of course copyright trolls, but the trollish tactics were the same and the court responded appropriately, as it did in this case.
Perhaps the difference in what we're saying is that I'm speaking specifically when I say trolls, not all patent-related cases, not all east Texas cases; but I'm speaking generally when I say they engage in similar patterns of trolish behavior, while the details may differ. Maybe you're thinking of the specific issues in the case, and also thinking of a wider variety of cases.
It's interesting that we have such different information, considering that you seem to be fairly well informed, yet I've received information from multiple reliable sources that doesn't match what you're saying. I am speaking specifically of patent TROLLS, not all cases related to patents. You asked which law firms. Austin Hansley and Craig Tadlock filed 10% of all NPE patent cases in 2015. I don't recall other names offhand, but Hansley and Tadlock account for maybe 20% of TROLL suits (guesstimating, because many patents are legitimately licensed to manufacturers).
Continued below due to lameness filter triggering in one of the words.
Because about 90% of patent trolling is done by only a handful of law firms, who all sue on questionable patents in East Texas and generally follow a similar pattern of behavior, this certainly could have a significant effect. Heck, even knocking one of the top five troll firms out of the trolling business would be significant.
That's true the law firm was held liable for costs based in the actions of this law firm, the same reasoning doesn't apply to other patent suites generally. HOWEVER, 90% of patent trolling is done by just a handful of law firms, who all pretty much act the same way. So the reasoning does apply to the vast majority of patent troll suits.
This post is absolutely correct. In defamation law, the word "publish" is explicitly b defined as "communicate to another person" and it absolutely CAN be just one other person. It's been held that insulting someone, saying something to the target and only them, isn't libel or slander, it has to be communicated to at least one other person.
In the US at least, truth is an absolute defense to a defamation claim. So you are safe if you stick to true statements and hold on to some form of documentation (you only have to prove truth by "most likely", not "beyond av reasonable doubt).
As someone else pointed out, you are also safe from a libel or slander claim if you say "I'm leaving because of Joe Shmoe", without giving a specifics.
A safe, yet specific combination would be to separate the logs you save but not create, such as CVS histories, log files, etc, and say "I'm leaving due to Joe's actions. I put logs are on this flash drive for you." (But be sure you haven't put anything you're not supposed to acccess on the drive.)
Opinion is also safe, and facts can be magically turned into opinion with words like "I think" in written communication. "Joe's a vindictive asshole and I can't tolerate his abuse anymore" is probably non-actionable opinion. Probably, "based on these logs, I believe Joe sabotaged project X" is likely not actionable, unless he can't prove you don't really believe that - the statement of fact is "I believe". Only use "based on... I believe" qualifiers in writing so someone testifying doesn't forget you included the "I believe" qualifier.
Quoting TFS, "t is not a language that you think of while writing programs for popular fields such as mobile apps or websites". Submitter clearly doesn't have much idea how web sites work. For web sites, your browser (a C or C++ program) sends a request through routers running Cisco iOS (a C program) to a web server such as Apache (a C program), which may run a module such as mod_php (a C program) which in turn probably runs a library such as ImageMagick (a C program) which generates the content. The content is fed back through the web server (still C) to your browser. For larger sites, there is often a proxy in the middle, such as Squid (written in C) or mod_proxy (more C).
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the short form of the above post:
Wikipedia doesn't operate hand-to-mouth, they have savings so that when something bad happens, like a law suit, they don't have to shut down.
If you're accustomed to spending your paychecks as you get them, the idea of reserves (savings) may be a bit foreign to you. But what happens when your car breaks down (and eventually it will)? You're screwed. Responsible charitable organizations don't operate that way.
18:9? Did someone miss sixth grade math or is this some odd nomenclature/jargon is the display industry?
Disabling or clearing cache is common in testing/benchmarking to measure/simulate performance loading fresh pages or otherwise doing something the first time, but repeating the test for more accurate results.
CR probably had a list of 12-25 commonly used web sites they used as example sites, and loaded each of those sites many times rather than loading hundreds of different sites. If you want to load 12 web sites ten times, to simulate loading 120 web sites, you need to disable cache to simulate loading 120 different sites.
It sounds like Safari had an issue where loading a site with cache off did *not* work the same as loading a fresh copy of the site for the first time, with the cache on. You'd expect the two scenarios to be more or less equivalent, and they normally are, but not always. Safari was probably doing the same thing in normal operation that IE used to do - first download it to cache, then immediately display the cached version rather than displaying first, then saving to cache). With cache disabled, it would need to use a completely different code path.
> The purpose of fitness trackers and the awards they give to users are to try to make fitness addictive like a video game. That is, there are challenges of increasing difficulty and rewards that unlock other parts of the application. It actually can be an effective motivational tool, and I can't see why it would be a bad thing if it motivates people who need to get in shape to get more exercise.
Yeah it does help many people get more active. That's cool. I don't quite understand it; it seems a bit silly to me - much like I don't "get" video games. I don't play video games, but I understand many people enjoy them and if the same principles of gamification are helping my wife get in shape I'm all for it. I don't quite understand gamification, but I do understand my wife is looking more like she did ten years and 35 pounds ago.
The whole "participation trophies" *in lieu of recognizing exceptional performance* is a different thing altogether. With my daughter, I recognize when she works hard to achieve something, but I won't mislead her by telling her that working hard enough to be *the best* doesn't have value.
I think it was Hillary who said a lot of nasty things about some white blowers.
Dry foods such as pasta and sugar have shelf life measured in years. Pasta can get a slight off taste after a two years or so but it's still edible for five more years.
I would guess these cups similar - just keep them dry.
> I would have thought biodegradable plastic would have been relatively simple, and chalk isn't exactly what I think of as a pollutant.
Yep, some of the hippy places serve drinks in biodegradable plastic cups made from corn. In function they are indistinguishable from the popular red Solo cups - not noticeably brittle and prone to breakage or anything when I played with them.
Interesting, thanks. I suppose one could say that Alice creates a new category of "objectively baseless" patents. Where Octane Fitness articulates the "objectively baseless" test, Alice declares that "on a computer" patents are objectively baseless.
> Altaba? I mean, what is that? People are going to confuse it with "Alibaba."
With Verizon buying Yahoo mail, Yahoo news, etc., the remains of the company will just be their Alibaba stock, which is already their primary asset. Buying Altaba *is* buying Alibaba, with one step of indirection. It's how you buy Alibaba stock if you want to (on paper) own a US company.
This is one of the few useful answers posted.
Where my post says "white-blowers", that should be "whistle-blowers". In the 1980s, whistle-blowers gave leads to investigators and testified against bosses. The Obama administration has of course been hostile to whistle-blowers.
Not quite true that *nobody* was jailed. Here are 35 bankers sent to prison:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/2...
Also some who didn't go to prison did get fines over over $100 million.
Compared to the 1980s S&L crisis, there were certainly fewer prosecutions. One career prosecutor who is knowledgeable about both says that one reason for that is the the Obama administration, unlike the Reagan administration, was hostile toward white-blowers who could have enabled prosecution.
To the extent that banker types get their way, the VW execs will be in prison for a long time. Prior to the scandal, VW was trading at over $200/share, as high as $250. After the information came out, it dropped to $100. That's about $80-$100 billion or so that investors lost.
That's a bit more than the losses from Enron. Enron executives got prison sentences of up to 24 years (later reduced to 14 years).
The damage to investors side of the issue is on top of the EPA / environmental crimes.
The in the case question is whether web sites (including Slashdot) are responsible for the content of posts by their users. If so, Slashdot, Backpage, and every other web site where people can talk would need a team of censors.
Child porn is illegal, slander is illegal, threatening people is illegal - if web sites are responsible for the posts, Slashdot would need to make sure no posts might be considered slander, or an unlawful threat. It just doesn't make any sense to say "the web site is liable if a user posts something that a jury considers child porn, but not liable for any other unlawful posts".
Like Colin Powell, Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr first overcame racism is own life, achieving personal success in the face of these challenges, in order to put him in a position to affect societal change. He didn't whine, he earned two bachelor degrees and a phd before becoming president of the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Here's what Doctor King had to say about whether you should overcome whatever challenges you encounter:
--
We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome. And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
We shall overcome because Carlisle is right; no lie can live forever.
We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right; truth crushed to earth will rise again.
We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right:
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Stands God, within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.
--
From Doctor King's speech "We Shall Overcome".
Insurance companies created the fire code, Underwriters Laboratories (UL listed), and many other organisations and standards to reduce their risk. As insurance companies become involved in information security, they may well insist that to be covered companies need to comply with various standards, they may offer a rate discount if all of your developers take continuing education on security, etc. So the involvement of security companies will likely mean that companies will spend less dealing with security incidents by spending more on prevention, as part of the annual budget.
On the other hand, everybody knows that security has been growing in the last few years, and with the weak economy it's the only thing that's been growing, so the growth has been hyped. A LOT of college students are planning do go into security, as well as experienced sysadmins, programmers, etc. There will be a lot of college grads competing for the nee jobs in information security. I'm glad that I've been in the field for 20 years; the flood of new people aren't competing with me for the position of CSO.
Absolutely this. Do what you enjoy. Some people enjoy teaching, some people enjoy solving puzzles, etc. Figure out at least two or three things that get you pumped up. Then figure out which jobs combine at least two things that you enjoy and work toward doing that.
> The left has a bias or belief that problems are the fault of society, whereas the right tends to bias to the belief that problems are the fault of the individual.
That's reasonably fair and I realize this is a bit of a tangent to your main point, but I don't know that "fault" is necessarily the right word. I believe that my daughter, who is black and of course female, can become a supreme court justice, president, or chairwoman of the joint chiefs DESPITE whatever is wrong with society, and that it's easier for her to change her own actions than to change all of society. I'm sure Colin Powell encountered some racism; he went right ahead and became Secretary of State *anyway*. He was then in a position to affect society. He didn't whine about the problems in society, he overcame them.
> The only way ... if the vast majority of patents they might assert in the future are Alice-susceptible
I wonder where you get that. I see the holding as essentially:
Attorneys who file meritless suits on a contingency basis may be liable for costs, especially if they engage in actions which are similar to, but not quite, abuse of abuse of process, malicious prosecution, or barratry. I don't see that Alice ("on a computer") is the key element here.
Certainly "meritless suits on a contingency basis, with a hint of the odor barratry" applies to many patent trolls.
Certainly not all such patents have the issue decided in Alice, I didn't say they did. I said they tend to be questionable patents, as applied to the defendants. And they tend to engage in trollish behavior that is disrespectful to the court, as these attorneys did. I suppose that's a bit by definition - trolls act trollish.
Prenda did the same KINDS of things, which is why they were considered trolls and the courts shut them down. Prenda were of course copyright trolls, but the trollish tactics were the same and the court responded appropriately, as it did in this case.
Perhaps the difference in what we're saying is that I'm speaking specifically when I say trolls, not all patent-related cases, not all east Texas cases; but I'm speaking generally when I say they engage in similar patterns of trolish behavior, while the details may differ. Maybe you're thinking of the specific issues in the case, and also thinking of a wider variety of cases.
It's interesting that we have such different information, considering that you seem to be fairly well informed, yet I've received information from multiple reliable sources that doesn't match what you're saying. I am speaking specifically of patent TROLLS, not all cases related to patents.
You asked which law firms. Austin Hansley and Craig Tadlock filed 10% of all NPE patent cases in 2015. I don't recall other names offhand, but Hansley and Tadlock account for maybe 20% of TROLL suits (guesstimating, because many patents are legitimately licensed to manufacturers).
Continued below due to lameness filter triggering in one of the words.
Because about 90% of patent trolling is done by only a handful of law firms, who all sue on questionable patents in East Texas and generally follow a similar pattern of behavior, this certainly could have a significant effect. Heck, even knocking one of the top five troll firms out of the trolling business would be significant.
That's true the law firm was held liable for costs based in the actions of this law firm, the same reasoning doesn't apply to other patent suites generally. HOWEVER, 90% of patent trolling is done by just a handful of law firms, who all pretty much act the same way. So the reasoning does apply to the vast majority of patent troll suits.
This post is absolutely correct. In defamation law, the word "publish" is explicitly b defined as "communicate to another person" and it absolutely CAN be just one other person. It's been held that insulting someone, saying something to the target and only them, isn't libel or slander, it has to be communicated to at least one other person.
In the US at least, truth is an absolute defense to a defamation claim. So you are safe if you stick to true statements and hold on to some form of documentation (you only have to prove truth by "most likely", not "beyond av reasonable doubt).
As someone else pointed out, you are also safe from a libel or slander claim if you say "I'm leaving because of Joe Shmoe", without giving a specifics.
A safe, yet specific combination would be to separate the logs you save but not create, such as CVS histories, log files, etc, and say "I'm leaving due to Joe's actions. I put logs are on this flash drive for you." (But be sure you haven't put anything you're not supposed to acccess on the drive.)
Opinion is also safe, and facts can be magically turned into opinion with words like "I think" in written communication. "Joe's a vindictive asshole and I can't tolerate his abuse anymore" is probably non-actionable opinion. Probably, "based on these logs, I believe Joe sabotaged project X" is likely not actionable, unless he can't prove you don't really believe that - the statement of fact is "I believe". Only use "based on ... I believe" qualifiers in writing so someone testifying doesn't forget you included the "I believe" qualifier.
Quoting TFS, "t is not a language that you think of while writing programs for popular fields such as mobile apps or websites". Submitter clearly doesn't have much idea how web sites work. For web sites, your browser (a C or C++ program) sends a request through routers running Cisco iOS (a C program) to a web server such as Apache (a C program), which may run a module such as mod_php (a C program) which in turn probably runs a library such as ImageMagick (a C program) which generates the content. The content is fed back through the web server (still C) to your browser. For larger sites, there is often a proxy in the middle, such as Squid (written in C) or mod_proxy (more C).