The IEEE-SA rules are legally binding, so with standards subject to the new rule, such an injunction would be relatively easy to fight off.
The DoJ was involved to make sure the IEEE-SA was not engaging in conduct that would fall afoul of anti-trust law. They don't personally have any dog in the patent fight; they are just making sure the IEEE was not trying to discourage competition by new market entrants by working out rules designed by current competitors.
In case anybody was wondering why the DoJ was involved, it was most likely to ensure that the IEEE's rules passed anti-trust muster. A bunch of erstwhile competitors gathering together and deciding jointly on restraints on their conduct (and the conduct of future competitors) is subject to heightened scrutiny to make sure that the rules are not written to discourage new market entrants.
Oh, you are right, jury nullification is no more or less than the statement that a jury can acquit a defendant for any reason they damn well please and there's nothing to stop them; this is obvious to anybody that ever paid a lick of attention in 8th-grade civics class. I would hope it would only be used to refuse to convict under illegal laws, because otherwise it turns the concept of us being a nation of laws, and not men, on it's head. If a prosecution produces an unpleasant result under the law, but the prosecution is still legal, there are means (however imperfect) for the law to be changed. The jury deciding on their own that they like the defendant too much for his/her sentence is not how the law is supposed to work.
And not that your other points have anything to do with nullification, but...
The "see no evil" defense is pretty weak sauce against these money-laundering related charges. (And certainly they will get you civilly fined to kingdom come.) The idea that DPR/Ulbricht did NOT know the primary use of his market was the illegal drug trade is ludicrous in the extreme; it does not take any great leap of logic to discard such an assertion utterly.
And no, pre-paid providers do NOT benefit from burner phones. Such phones are usually subsidized at retail (plus there are real costs involved with activation) and when they are quickly discarded after a short period of time, so the provider takes it in the proverbial shorts. (But what do cell phone providers have to do with the proverbial price of tea in China? Not sure what you are getting at there.)
And, given that the police don't even need to file charges to perform civil forfeiture (I certainly usually don't agree with that practice), arguing that that was their motive for prosecuting him is also pretty silly. (However, in this case, civil forfeiture actually makes sense since nobody ever laid official claim to Silk Road's Bitcoins.)
The prosecutors objected to everything (and the judge allowed) because the defense wanted to cross-examine prosecution witnesses on topics the prosecution had not brought up on direct examination.
The proper thing to do when you want to bring up new topics with prosecution witnesses is to also list them as witnesses for the defense, not lay out your defense case before it's your turn to do so.
And the defense tried to insert their experts at the last minute without presenting sufficient evidence that they were experts. Again, this is not an obscure corner of trial procedure. If you want to introduce expert witnesses at the last minute (and it's certainly permissible to do so), you better make damn sure all your ducks are in a row on demonstrating their expertise.
The idea that it should be illegal to knowingly profit from transactions of highly illegal products is not exactly an obscure or particularly controversial area of jurisprudence, nor it it an example of overly-broad vaguely-worded laws, like, say, CFAA prosecutions.
And jury nullification is supposed to be for juries to nullify illegal laws (i.e. unconstitutional ones), not laws they might have a personal disagreement with.
The Snowden revelations about constitutionally-questionable domestic spying have been with the full co-operation of telecom and internet companies, hence no super-smart mathematicians necessary, just a bunch of IT guys and CompSci specialists to deal with the large amount of data.
NSA's "traditional" activities, which involve espionage and codebreaking applied against foreign powers (requiring the aid of mathematicians for codebreaking) is an accepted and normal part of international relations, in a tradition going back millenia. Yes, when spies or espionage projects are caught there's usually a stern press release, but nothing ever comes of it.
China can ask for the source, but I don't see any US firm agreeing. They certainly wouldn't care about China-only builds having back-doors; that I'm sure they'd agree to. But giving up the source? No way. If they do that, they know that the code will quickly be incorporated into products from Chinese companies and their sales will drop soon afterwards as the thieves sell their own versions for far less.
If service call costs for one or two disks are prohibited, simply put in enough spares so you only have to roll a tech for, say, 10 drives.
Alternatively, make them user-swappable. If all the customer has to do is ask their tech to yank drives with a Blinky Amber Light of Doom, even the most untrained monkey could figure that out.
Unlimited WiFi data within their local service area is not really that big of a deal, given the wide availability of free WiFi already. And you can already get worldwide free "phone service" (through WiFi) through any number of providers.
I'm pretty sure they are doing it this way because they don't want to talk Joe Public through the process of replacing whatever dialer they have with the one they'll need for the app.
$30/mo is a terrible price. If all you want is talk/text, you can get that, on an ACTUAL cellular network (Cricket/AT&T, and I'm sure other providers) for $25/mo. And, to top it off, they'll only charge you $25 for that Moto G, instead of $100.
As a $5 add-on to your cable plan, it's pretty nice... but not at the "rack" rate.
The most common mouse failure is the microswitches. Most mice use the exact same switch... Ten minutes, a cheap pencil iron, desolder wick, and some solder, and you are good to go for another few years.
I've been nursing along an original Trackman Marble for twenty years this way.
The only part of the automaking process that they changed was body/chassis assembly. That part is already highly automated, with robots doing most of the work. Yay, so you get all the automation, with the addition of greater customization. However, the vast majority of the labor is in assembly of the rest of the car. And if every car off the line is different, a lot of the efficiencies you get with the moving assembly line go completely out the window.
After seeing a truly execrable trailer for "Strange Magic" (an upcoming animated movie, with the story provided by Lucas), I don't think there's anything JJ Abrams could possibly do worse than George Lucas.
The big question is: Can they attract developers? If not, they'll need to be able to run Android apps natively. Once you are doing that, why not just run Android, an OS where somebody else bears most of the development cost?
I can see Samsung being more successful at this than Amazon was, but Samsung also doesn't have the motivations Amazon had/has for doing so.
Hans Reiser tried the "somebody else did it" defense. He suggested it was somebody else, but presented no more than vague hints in that general direction suggesting that somebody else had motive. (And, of course, it was all silly hand-waving, since he later confessed and led police to the body.) For Ulbrict's sake, let's hope he has something more substantive.
The police have no obligation to investigate alternate suspects once they've decided on one to charge. If you, defendant, want to blame the crime on somebody else, you need to perform your own investigation rather than merely pointing out the police didn't chase after whomever the defendant thinks would be a more worthy suspect.
I don't know if Ulbrict has some real evidence; if he did, you'd think he would have released it by now.
How do we have any freaking clue whether or not the jury understands the internet? If they are doing their jobs, they aren't saying a damn thing about what they do or don't understand.
The judge on the other hand, certainly is requesting things be simplified on her (and the juror's) behalf.
Really, this isn't any different from ANY other trial. Any trial involves the jury deciding on things that they do not have a great deal (or any) experience with. The whole job of the Forensic evidence, insider trading, patents, whatever.
Even if you buy bitcoins, unload them ASAP to buy something, and then the receiver unloads them ASAP to get them back into something a tad more stable, it's STILL too volatile to rely on. A retailer could lose a significant chunk of his/her margin in the lag time before the coins can be transferred again.
A national currency that routinely swung by this amount would be a national crisis. (For example, something similar happened to the Swiss yesterday (they abandoned a policy to keep the Franc weak), and it's making headlines all over the world. And it's just a one-time event.) The economy would be in shambles as all trade came to a screeching halt, due to the complete and total inability to properly price contracts. Even used solely as a money-transfer system (instead of a real currency) it still swings too wildly. By the time you can unload the bitcoins somebody's transferred to you, you could lose your entire profit margin.
I remember when VMWare first came out, and there was all this amazement about all the cool things you could do with Virtual Machines. Very little mention anywhere that these were things you could do for decades already on mainframes.
Same thing with I/O offloading (compared to mainframes, x86 and UNIX I/O offload is still quite primitive and rudimentary), DB-based filesystems (MS has been trying to ship one of those for over 20 years now; IBM has been successfully selling one (the AS/400 / iSeries) for 25, built-in encryption features, and a host of other features.
While none of the post-paid providers sell 2.3 any more, plenty of pre-paid providers still do. Boost, Straight Talk, TracFone, Page Plus, etc. If you are a pre-paid operator, many of your customers don't have good enough credit for payment plan on a nice phone, don't have enough money to buy a nice phone out-right, and said customers aren't forced to stay with your company long enough for you to risk much of a subsidy in the monthly fees. That leaves you being forced to sell the cheapest phones you can for the customers that want them.
We are talking $30-40, out the door, here... If you are spending that little on a phone, you have to trim cost anywhere you can, which means the thing won't even run stuff much more recent, even if the carrier wanted to put forth the effort to do so. (Which, given their generally low margins, they won't even think of doing.)
Yes, for not much more money, you can get a MUCH nicer phone ($65 will get you a Moto G on Boost, for instance), but at the very bottom end, every dollar counts when specing out phones.
(Personally, I use a Boost Moto G flashed to PagePlus/VzW... an excellent example as to why the phones can't be subsidized much. Sprint/Boost totally has taken it in the shorts here, as outside of the phone itself (which is still subsidized somewhat), they've haven't gotten a dime from me, as they inexplicably didn't request Moto lock the bootloader, making it fairly trivial to convert it over to working with Verizon.)
Slashdot Mirror
The IEEE-SA rules are legally binding, so with standards subject to the new rule, such an injunction would be relatively easy to fight off.
The DoJ was involved to make sure the IEEE-SA was not engaging in conduct that would fall afoul of anti-trust law. They don't personally have any dog in the patent fight; they are just making sure the IEEE was not trying to discourage competition by new market entrants by working out rules designed by current competitors.
In case anybody was wondering why the DoJ was involved, it was most likely to ensure that the IEEE's rules passed anti-trust muster. A bunch of erstwhile competitors gathering together and deciding jointly on restraints on their conduct (and the conduct of future competitors) is subject to heightened scrutiny to make sure that the rules are not written to discourage new market entrants.
Oh, you are right, jury nullification is no more or less than the statement that a jury can acquit a defendant for any reason they damn well please and there's nothing to stop them; this is obvious to anybody that ever paid a lick of attention in 8th-grade civics class. I would hope it would only be used to refuse to convict under illegal laws, because otherwise it turns the concept of us being a nation of laws, and not men, on it's head. If a prosecution produces an unpleasant result under the law, but the prosecution is still legal, there are means (however imperfect) for the law to be changed. The jury deciding on their own that they like the defendant too much for his/her sentence is not how the law is supposed to work.
And not that your other points have anything to do with nullification, but...
The "see no evil" defense is pretty weak sauce against these money-laundering related charges. (And certainly they will get you civilly fined to kingdom come.) The idea that DPR/Ulbricht did NOT know the primary use of his market was the illegal drug trade is ludicrous in the extreme; it does not take any great leap of logic to discard such an assertion utterly.
And no, pre-paid providers do NOT benefit from burner phones. Such phones are usually subsidized at retail (plus there are real costs involved with activation) and when they are quickly discarded after a short period of time, so the provider takes it in the proverbial shorts. (But what do cell phone providers have to do with the proverbial price of tea in China? Not sure what you are getting at there.)
And, given that the police don't even need to file charges to perform civil forfeiture (I certainly usually don't agree with that practice), arguing that that was their motive for prosecuting him is also pretty silly. (However, in this case, civil forfeiture actually makes sense since nobody ever laid official claim to Silk Road's Bitcoins.)
The prosecutors objected to everything (and the judge allowed) because the defense wanted to cross-examine prosecution witnesses on topics the prosecution had not brought up on direct examination.
The proper thing to do when you want to bring up new topics with prosecution witnesses is to also list them as witnesses for the defense, not lay out your defense case before it's your turn to do so.
And the defense tried to insert their experts at the last minute without presenting sufficient evidence that they were experts. Again, this is not an obscure corner of trial procedure. If you want to introduce expert witnesses at the last minute (and it's certainly permissible to do so), you better make damn sure all your ducks are in a row on demonstrating their expertise.
The idea that it should be illegal to knowingly profit from transactions of highly illegal products is not exactly an obscure or particularly controversial area of jurisprudence, nor it it an example of overly-broad vaguely-worded laws, like, say, CFAA prosecutions.
And jury nullification is supposed to be for juries to nullify illegal laws (i.e. unconstitutional ones), not laws they might have a personal disagreement with.
When this weak sauce is all you can come up with for a defense, why, oh why, would you not plead out?
"I made the site, but I left (but came back just in time for the FBI to catch me.)" Yeah, that's really going to sway a jury.
The Snowden revelations about constitutionally-questionable domestic spying have been with the full co-operation of telecom and internet companies, hence no super-smart mathematicians necessary, just a bunch of IT guys and CompSci specialists to deal with the large amount of data.
NSA's "traditional" activities, which involve espionage and codebreaking applied against foreign powers (requiring the aid of mathematicians for codebreaking) is an accepted and normal part of international relations, in a tradition going back millenia. Yes, when spies or espionage projects are caught there's usually a stern press release, but nothing ever comes of it.
China can ask for the source, but I don't see any US firm agreeing. They certainly wouldn't care about China-only builds having back-doors; that I'm sure they'd agree to. But giving up the source? No way. If they do that, they know that the code will quickly be incorporated into products from Chinese companies and their sales will drop soon afterwards as the thieves sell their own versions for far less.
If service call costs for one or two disks are prohibited, simply put in enough spares so you only have to roll a tech for, say, 10 drives.
Alternatively, make them user-swappable. If all the customer has to do is ask their tech to yank drives with a Blinky Amber Light of Doom, even the most untrained monkey could figure that out.
Unlimited WiFi data within their local service area is not really that big of a deal, given the wide availability of free WiFi already. And you can already get worldwide free "phone service" (through WiFi) through any number of providers.
Most ISP's (and some cell carriers) offer unlimited data on their own WiFi network already. That's not really a very big feature.
There's no sign they are including a single byte of cellular data here.
I'm pretty sure they are doing it this way because they don't want to talk Joe Public through the process of replacing whatever dialer they have with the one they'll need for the app.
$30/mo is a terrible price. If all you want is talk/text, you can get that, on an ACTUAL cellular network (Cricket/AT&T, and I'm sure other providers) for $25/mo. And, to top it off, they'll only charge you $25 for that Moto G, instead of $100.
As a $5 add-on to your cable plan, it's pretty nice... but not at the "rack" rate.
The most common mouse failure is the microswitches. Most mice use the exact same switch... Ten minutes, a cheap pencil iron, desolder wick, and some solder, and you are good to go for another few years.
I've been nursing along an original Trackman Marble for twenty years this way.
The only part of the automaking process that they changed was body/chassis assembly. That part is already highly automated, with robots doing most of the work. Yay, so you get all the automation, with the addition of greater customization. However, the vast majority of the labor is in assembly of the rest of the car. And if every car off the line is different, a lot of the efficiencies you get with the moving assembly line go completely out the window.
The only thing 3D printed on this vehicle was the body. None of the running gear (you know, the parts that usually break) were printed.
After seeing a truly execrable trailer for "Strange Magic" (an upcoming animated movie, with the story provided by Lucas), I don't think there's anything JJ Abrams could possibly do worse than George Lucas.
The big question is: Can they attract developers? If not, they'll need to be able to run Android apps natively. Once you are doing that, why not just run Android, an OS where somebody else bears most of the development cost?
I can see Samsung being more successful at this than Amazon was, but Samsung also doesn't have the motivations Amazon had/has for doing so.
Hans Reiser tried the "somebody else did it" defense. He suggested it was somebody else, but presented no more than vague hints in that general direction suggesting that somebody else had motive. (And, of course, it was all silly hand-waving, since he later confessed and led police to the body.) For Ulbrict's sake, let's hope he has something more substantive.
The police have no obligation to investigate alternate suspects once they've decided on one to charge. If you, defendant, want to blame the crime on somebody else, you need to perform your own investigation rather than merely pointing out the police didn't chase after whomever the defendant thinks would be a more worthy suspect.
I don't know if Ulbrict has some real evidence; if he did, you'd think he would have released it by now.
Karpeles: "I'm not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund, and he's been living like a king in Patagonia for 20 years."
How do we have any freaking clue whether or not the jury understands the internet? If they are doing their jobs, they aren't saying a damn thing about what they do or don't understand.
The judge on the other hand, certainly is requesting things be simplified on her (and the juror's) behalf.
Really, this isn't any different from ANY other trial. Any trial involves the jury deciding on things that they do not have a great deal (or any) experience with. The whole job of the Forensic evidence, insider trading, patents, whatever.
Even if you buy bitcoins, unload them ASAP to buy something, and then the receiver unloads them ASAP to get them back into something a tad more stable, it's STILL too volatile to rely on. A retailer could lose a significant chunk of his/her margin in the lag time before the coins can be transferred again.
A national currency that routinely swung by this amount would be a national crisis. (For example, something similar happened to the Swiss yesterday (they abandoned a policy to keep the Franc weak), and it's making headlines all over the world. And it's just a one-time event.) The economy would be in shambles as all trade came to a screeching halt, due to the complete and total inability to properly price contracts. Even used solely as a money-transfer system (instead of a real currency) it still swings too wildly. By the time you can unload the bitcoins somebody's transferred to you, you could lose your entire profit margin.
I remember when VMWare first came out, and there was all this amazement about all the cool things you could do with Virtual Machines. Very little mention anywhere that these were things you could do for decades already on mainframes.
Same thing with I/O offloading (compared to mainframes, x86 and UNIX I/O offload is still quite primitive and rudimentary), DB-based filesystems (MS has been trying to ship one of those for over 20 years now; IBM has been successfully selling one (the AS/400 / iSeries) for 25, built-in encryption features, and a host of other features.
While none of the post-paid providers sell 2.3 any more, plenty of pre-paid providers still do. Boost, Straight Talk, TracFone, Page Plus, etc. If you are a pre-paid operator, many of your customers don't have good enough credit for payment plan on a nice phone, don't have enough money to buy a nice phone out-right, and said customers aren't forced to stay with your company long enough for you to risk much of a subsidy in the monthly fees. That leaves you being forced to sell the cheapest phones you can for the customers that want them.
We are talking $30-40, out the door, here... If you are spending that little on a phone, you have to trim cost anywhere you can, which means the thing won't even run stuff much more recent, even if the carrier wanted to put forth the effort to do so. (Which, given their generally low margins, they won't even think of doing.)
Yes, for not much more money, you can get a MUCH nicer phone ($65 will get you a Moto G on Boost, for instance), but at the very bottom end, every dollar counts when specing out phones.
(Personally, I use a Boost Moto G flashed to PagePlus/VzW... an excellent example as to why the phones can't be subsidized much. Sprint/Boost totally has taken it in the shorts here, as outside of the phone itself (which is still subsidized somewhat), they've haven't gotten a dime from me, as they inexplicably didn't request Moto lock the bootloader, making it fairly trivial to convert it over to working with Verizon.)