No, they don't deserve anything. They KNEW that what they were doing was against the law- that's why they're begging for immunity. If WE did something along the same lines, we'd be doing hard prison time.
Sorry, companies need to be held accountable for their actions- period.
It's not "okay" because the President asked them pretty please and gave 'em an offer they couldn't refuse. If a mobster did the same thing and you robbed a bank, stole a car, or killed someone- you'd do the time all the same or some lessened sentence and you'd be found guilty of the crime.
No immunity. Present your evidence- roll the dice and see what comes of it.
He needs to be held accountable for that idle talk- there's tons of OTHER, much more important things to be worrying about- say, like securing the utility grid or shoring up the security on the telecommunications infrastructure from attacks.
The Gentleman Senator is foolishly worrying about something that's not going to matter a whole damn lot if either get screwed up on is.
This works for many, but not for enterprise level stuff where you can't afford to take that level of risks with your systems.
It works for me, but I'd consider caution in fielding things that weren't armor-plated and a bit long in the tooth in something that collected or processed financials, etc.
Heh... They've been popping up like weeds around Dallas and Ft. Worth. Many of the stupid things seem to be arbitrary. I've seen them trigger at night for little good reasons.
In the end, you can't challenge the accuser with these things right at the moment (Which is why the charge would get dropped if the cop didn't show up...) so, I'm not sure where to go with that situation.
I would think the line of reasoning from an attorney would be that they're FAR from infallible- and all they've proof of your "violation" is your plate info in a digital photo.
It's not quite the same thing as the open road toll tag readers on the tollways around here- in that case, you have to have a tag account (for failed read instances...) or you're guilty as a cat caught in a goldfish bowl.
These stoplight and speed cameras they keep trying to run up the flagpole... Not quite the same thing.
They've never been hit from behind so hard that it totaled the vehicle they were driving and almost slid you into the vehicles in front of you.
I have.
It wasn't at an intersection, but it was in traffic conditions on an on-ramp where another accident (Just a fender bender from what little I could tell before I became party to a much bigger accident...) and the lady, driving an SUV whilst not paying attention (I vaguely remember seeing her jabbering on a cell phone in the rear-view before impact, but I couldn't be sure...), plowed into me and my pickup, deploying her air bags and doing enough damage to her vehicle that it had to be towed away.
Stopping suddenly like people are proposing CAN produce similar results- and while it's their fault for illegal operation, it's small consolation when you're seriously injured or you end up being plowed into others, seriously injuring them.
I would rather take the ticket than be carted off to the emergency room for whiplash and have to repair my car- it would definitely cost much less overall. I would also rather take a ticket than end up in an ICU because I "followed the law" and it's the other person's look out.
Actually, no. It's legit for Boeing to do that sort of thing. I won't sue you over this infringement or count it as an infringement if you do it- IF you'll drop this other suit over here.
What's abusing the Patent system is the bogus patent they filed that ended up being used this way.
Yeah, yeah, it's a subtle distinction, but you need to have that distinction in hand and be able to explain it to others to be taken seriously in trying to FIX the mess we're in over Patents in general.
It's using a highly BOGUS patent and it's "you reap what you sow". If it were a legit patent it'd just be reaping. Since it's a bogus patent, if it'd gotten the job done and been less money to prove it bogus, they'd have done it- but since it'd deorbit before that happened, and it'd cost more money than they're about to lose, thanks to an insurance payout (legit, even...), they're not going to pursue it.
In the case of the IP's they've been using, it doesn't connect anything other than an act to a machine- they must pin it to a person doing the deed to count.
In the case of this situation, unless Mediasentry can prove they got hacked into (heh... Do security ever again with THAT black mark...) with the express purpose of being framed, they are as guilty as a cat caught in a goldfish bowl. ANY use of those IP's, allocated to them, unless conclusively proven that nobody IN your org did it, the whole org is accountable- it's a distinction of a person versus a company.
Actually, it's not a problem for them to do so in this case.
Even leasing out the lines would be stepping on the C&D- you can't even allow someone else to be doing what you're told to stop doing using your resources. Even an alternate player leasing the lines out would be in violation.
The ONLY out they have would be to prove that they were hacked into (which would be difficult to pin on someone else- they HAVE to pin it on someone else without any involvement on their part at all...) with the purpose of framing them for the violation of the C&D. Not likely.
It's not what you think it is. They can provide the bandwidth at the local loop level, that last mile.
What they're bitching about is the backhaul, which ISN'T constrained the way you think it is. All that constrains it is that they're bitching about having to foot the bill and eat into their cushy margins they've been raking in from overselling the resources at the backhaul end of things and now they have to fix the problem they made for themselves by not thinking ahead to when people would actually take them up on the "unlimited" part of the marketing speech they've been spewing for years now.
The biggest problem with this is that the bandwidth is less of a fixed commodity (contrary to what the ISPs claim...) than one would be led to believe.
They're whining more because they'd have to eat into their cushy margins, short-to-medium term, to be able to fix their problem they've made for themselves.
Wrong. You can't automate technical support and a bunch of other things.
Jobs ARE being lost to outsourcing- and to declare that they're all just being lost to automation is to delude yourself and to attempt to delude others.
The stupid problem with that thinking is that the consumers are disconnected from the other.
The consumers are the people doing the work in this country. They're the people working here.
Outsource their work and they don't have money to buy your stuff at some point.
Everybody foolishly thinks that they're enriching the lives of the people over here when they make stuff cheaper. Short term, perhaps a bit. Long term, not so.
If you do it in one place, it might not be a bad idea. If you do it everywhere (which is what is getting done here...) it's not just a specific group of workers getting impacted, it's a lot of them, which then causes the consumers to have less or no money to buy things.
It's the simplistic thinking that you can simply envision a single aspect of a business and modify it without understanding the whole that keeps getting everyone into trouble. It gets worse when you start trying to apply that same simplistic thinking to what is effectively an ecosystem.
The economics textbooks expound an UNPROVEN theory that is actually being misapplied.
You want division of labor, yes, but the economics books are applying a mathematical model to a real-world thing. Math is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't make for rules of how the world works (opposite thinking...) nor does those numbers force things to be something other than they're not.
It looks good on paper to outsource to another country- for a couple of years, if that. In many cases, the outsource partner looks good on paper- but the reality of all the work you end up doing re-working their work (And, I know this from professional experience...) and all the lost reputation of your company because your product has vastly more defects when delivered (again...) ends up more often than not washing out any gains you might have gotten from the process. Add on to this that you're moving that money from your own country to another that only gives a damn about their own country (which is highly understandable, really...) and doesn't reinvest resources here- meaning that the money sunk in offshore outsourcing just went bye-bye... The math doesn't add up to what is going on right now. When the math doesn't add up; when the theories don't match up to what you're seeing- it's time to come up with new math and theories.
The people keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the results the theories tell them should be happening and all we're doing is spiraling back down into a Great Depression.
The biggest problem with pretty much ANY of these thoughts either way is that the proponents thereof seem to think that they're such great ideas that're workable that they do them to the exclusion of everything else- including outsourcing. Never mind the consequences.
Just as Communism and Protectionism failed- so will this other stupid idea we keep seeming to have.
We're not outsourcing to "make new opportunities" or that it does this when you do it- that's really analogous to breaking all the windows in a business district because it'll "make new opportunities" for the glass makers. When you outsource, that job is gone. If you don't make another job somehow (and the people that're outsourcing AREN'T- they're just pocketing the short term gains they got by cheapening things...) then the money that you spent there went elsewhere- wherever you outsourced it to. When you outsource it doesn't magically mean that you're going to be in a position to keep supplying ideas to the outsource places. They take your ideas and run with them for themselves- eventually they don't need you for ideas because you've given them all to the other people. Where are you when that happens? Outsourcing and a whole host of other things that're in vogue are no different than Communism or Protectionism when they're practiced the way they've been done for the last 10-20 years. In the end, they're no more sustainable than the others. And, we're in an economic recession, almost depression, right now largely as a result of all this unsustainable activities.
What everyone that's a proponent of outsourcing keeps missing are questions like this:
What good does it do to make a product for less money, when nobody wants it? What good does it do to outsource something for less money, when nobody can buy it? What good does it do to outsource something for less money, when the people you outsourced it to took your ideas and no longer need you?
There's tons more unasked (but SHOULD be so...) questions like this.
All of this is now ongoing and we're beginning to see the signs of the damage from the real start of this madness some 15-20 years ago.
Is the answer Protectionism?
No. But a little less "openness", considering that most of the people we're outsourcing to are very much Protectionist, will go a long way.
Is the answer Communism?
No. But I think some accountability to the populace, and not just Shareholders, would go a lot longer way on things.
We certainly can't keep going the way we are- we're going to see the collapse of this country because of the short-term thinking on things that's driven by the current business thinkings.
These plaintiffs have devised a clever scheme to obtain court-authorized discovery prior to the service of complaints, but it troubles me that they do so with impunity and at the expense of the requirements of Rule 11(b)(3) because they have no good faith evidentiary basis to believe the cases should be joined.
Based off of my reading of this part of the decision, I'd also say he had a problem with them doing it in the first place because they were obviously using the filing in question for the purposes of pre-trial discovery- also violating Rule 11(b).
What's tragically true about that statement is going to be missed by many in the business field.
What good is a process if you produce the perfect product nobody wants? What good is a process if there's no customers to buy the things? (Outsourcing takes jobs away that are NOT replaced elsewhere by other employers- eventually that catches up with you...)
Considering that OpenMesh is offering a very similar device for $49 each, very probably near cost on it, I seriously doubt that they were selling them at a loss for $50. If they were, they're getting screwed on the embedded boards SERIOUSLY.
A three times jump in pricing from $50 implies price gouging. An increase to $75 would probably be realistic if they were selling below cost or at cost. More troubling is the updating of the firmware without the user's permission. If they're not subscribers in the company's service and if the units were not phrased as LEASED, the units were sold. This means they don't have the right to update the firmware the way they did. Technically, it's under the anti-hacking laws of the country and actionable as all get out.
All in all, this is a hang your head in shame in the corner moment for the company.
The biggest problem I have with this is that they're monitoring I-5.
Why aren't you placing this sort of gear at the ports of call in a way that you can't pass by them without setting them off- you'll increase your odds of successfully preventing a terrorist from this sort of thing. If you're looking for dirty bombs, they HAVE to get the stuff into the country; unless you're presuming that the security on the stuff we have over here from the nuke plants and bomb facilities isn't secure enough and you've got the stuff slipping out of facility. If that's the case, then we have a more serious problem than dirty bombs and people spraying hot isotopes everywhere.
The DHS has a lot of well intentioned "doing something"- but they keep seeming to focus on things that just won't do any good at doing their stated job.
Wind? Not enough of it unless you're using LED or CFL lighting, etc. Solar? Ditto. Hydroelectric? Ditto. Nuclear? Heh... Maybe clean if you're talking Migma Fission or a Pebble Bed, but otherwise...
Scrubbing coal stacks? They're already doing it and the Mercury's still getting into the atmosphere. Natural Gas? Maybe- but they're only used to build backing plants to backfill demand; they're expensive as all get out to fire up. Primary power is Coal and Hydro in most places.
You don't have a clean power source that can handle the capacity for incandescents right at the moment and we don't look like that unless you've got some magic Zero Point Energy based solution that'll do the job, you're not going to see what you're glibly claiming can be done anytime soon.
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If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
I'm seeing enough to wish there were more RICO suits filed against the whole lot of them.
No, they don't deserve anything. They KNEW that what they were doing was against the law- that's why they're begging for immunity. If WE did something along the same lines, we'd be doing hard prison time.
Sorry, companies need to be held accountable for their actions- period.
It's not "okay" because the President asked them pretty please and gave 'em an offer they couldn't refuse. If a mobster did the same thing and you robbed a bank, stole a car, or killed someone- you'd do the time all the same or some lessened sentence and you'd be found guilty of the crime.
No immunity. Present your evidence- roll the dice and see what comes of it.
He needs to be held accountable for that idle talk- there's tons of OTHER, much more important things to be worrying about- say, like securing the utility grid or shoring up the security on the telecommunications infrastructure from attacks.
The Gentleman Senator is foolishly worrying about something that's not going to matter a whole damn lot if either get screwed up on is.
That's not what they're doing. They appear to be taking things private, something also allowed by the license.
This works for many, but not for enterprise level stuff where you can't afford to take that level of risks with your systems.
It works for me, but I'd consider caution in fielding things that weren't armor-plated and a bit long in the tooth in something that collected or processed financials, etc.
Heh... They've been popping up like weeds around Dallas and Ft. Worth. Many of the stupid things seem to be arbitrary. I've seen them trigger at night for little good reasons.
In the end, you can't challenge the accuser with these things right at the moment (Which is why the charge would get dropped if the cop didn't show up...) so, I'm not sure where to go with that situation.
I would think the line of reasoning from an attorney would be that they're FAR from infallible- and all they've proof of your "violation" is your plate info in a digital photo.
It's not quite the same thing as the open road toll tag readers on the tollways around here- in that case, you have to have a tag account (for failed read instances...) or you're guilty as a cat caught in a goldfish bowl.
These stoplight and speed cameras they keep trying to run up the flagpole... Not quite the same thing.
They've never been hit from behind so hard that it totaled the vehicle they were driving and almost slid you into the vehicles in front of you.
I have.
It wasn't at an intersection, but it was in traffic conditions on an on-ramp where another accident (Just a fender bender from what little I could tell before I became party to a much bigger accident...) and the lady, driving an SUV whilst not paying attention (I vaguely remember seeing her jabbering on a cell phone in the rear-view before impact, but I couldn't be sure...), plowed into me and my pickup, deploying her air bags and doing enough damage to her vehicle that it had to be towed away.
Stopping suddenly like people are proposing CAN produce similar results- and while it's their fault for illegal operation, it's small consolation when you're seriously injured or you end up being plowed into others, seriously injuring them.
I would rather take the ticket than be carted off to the emergency room for whiplash and have to repair my car- it would definitely cost much less overall. I would also rather take a ticket than end up in an ICU because I "followed the law" and it's the other person's look out.
That's what it means in most jurisdictions.
/.'ers don't have a handle on it.
Unsurprisingly, most people promptly forgot what the rules of the road actually WERE after getting their operator's license.
It's a bit appalling, but not at all unsurprising to me that quite a few
I would be interested, but they chose to use QuickTime 7, which isn't fully supported across all operating systems. :-D
Actually, no. It's legit for Boeing to do that sort of thing. I won't sue you over this infringement or count it as an infringement if you do it- IF you'll drop this other suit over here.
What's abusing the Patent system is the bogus patent they filed that ended up being used this way.
Yeah, yeah, it's a subtle distinction, but you need to have that distinction in hand and be able to explain it to others to be taken seriously in trying to FIX the mess we're in over Patents in general.
It's both.
It's using a highly BOGUS patent and it's "you reap what you sow". If it were a legit patent it'd just be reaping. Since it's a bogus patent, if it'd gotten the job done and been less money to prove it bogus, they'd have done it- but since it'd deorbit before that happened, and it'd cost more money than they're about to lose, thanks to an insurance payout (legit, even...), they're not going to pursue it.
It doesn't win them anything.
In the case of the IP's they've been using, it doesn't connect anything other than an act to a machine- they must pin it to a person doing the deed to count.
In the case of this situation, unless Mediasentry can prove they got hacked into (heh... Do security ever again with THAT black mark...) with the express purpose of being framed, they are as guilty as a cat caught in a goldfish bowl. ANY use of those IP's, allocated to them, unless conclusively proven that nobody IN your org did it, the whole org is accountable- it's a distinction of a person versus a company.
Actually, it's not a problem for them to do so in this case.
Even leasing out the lines would be stepping on the C&D- you can't even allow someone else to be doing what you're told to stop doing using your resources. Even an alternate player leasing the lines out would be in violation.
The ONLY out they have would be to prove that they were hacked into (which would be difficult to pin on someone else- they HAVE to pin it on someone else without any involvement on their part at all...) with the purpose of framing them for the violation of the C&D. Not likely.
It's not what you think it is. They can provide the bandwidth at the local loop level, that last mile.
What they're bitching about is the backhaul, which ISN'T constrained the way you think it is. All that constrains it is that they're bitching about having to foot the bill and eat into their cushy margins they've been raking in from overselling the resources at the backhaul end of things and now they have to fix the problem they made for themselves by not thinking ahead to when people would actually take them up on the "unlimited" part of the marketing speech they've been spewing for years now.
The biggest problem with this is that the bandwidth is less of a fixed commodity (contrary to what the ISPs claim...) than one would be led to believe.
They're whining more because they'd have to eat into their cushy margins, short-to-medium term, to be able to fix their problem they've made for themselves .
Wrong. You can't automate technical support and a bunch of other things.
Jobs ARE being lost to outsourcing- and to declare that they're all just being lost to automation is to delude yourself and to attempt to delude others.
The stupid problem with that thinking is that the consumers are disconnected from the other.
The consumers are the people doing the work in this country. They're the people working here.
Outsource their work and they don't have money to buy your stuff at some point.
Everybody foolishly thinks that they're enriching the lives of the people over here when they make stuff cheaper. Short term, perhaps a bit. Long term, not so.
If you do it in one place, it might not be a bad idea. If you do it everywhere (which is what is getting done here...) it's not just a specific group of workers getting impacted, it's a lot of them, which then causes the consumers to have less or no money to buy things.
It's the simplistic thinking that you can simply envision a single aspect of a business and modify it without understanding the whole that keeps getting everyone into trouble. It gets worse when you start trying to apply that same simplistic thinking to what is effectively an ecosystem.
The economics textbooks expound an UNPROVEN theory that is actually being misapplied.
You want division of labor, yes, but the economics books are applying a mathematical model to a real-world thing. Math is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't make for rules of how the world works (opposite thinking...) nor does those numbers force things to be something other than they're not.
It looks good on paper to outsource to another country- for a couple of years, if that. In many cases, the outsource partner looks good on paper- but the reality of all the work you end up doing re-working their work (And, I know this from professional experience...) and all the lost reputation of your company because your product has vastly more defects when delivered (again...) ends up more often than not washing out any gains you might have gotten from the process. Add on to this that you're moving that money from your own country to another that only gives a damn about their own country (which is highly understandable, really...) and doesn't reinvest resources here- meaning that the money sunk in offshore outsourcing just went bye-bye... The math doesn't add up to what is going on right now. When the math doesn't add up; when the theories don't match up to what you're seeing- it's time to come up with new math and theories.
The people keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the results the theories tell them should be happening and all we're doing is spiraling back down into a Great Depression.
The biggest problem with pretty much ANY of these thoughts either way is that the proponents thereof seem to think that they're
such great ideas that're workable that they do them to the exclusion of everything else- including outsourcing. Never mind the
consequences.
Just as Communism and Protectionism failed- so will this other stupid idea we keep seeming to have.
We're not outsourcing to "make new opportunities" or that it does this when you do it- that's really analogous to breaking all
the windows in a business district because it'll "make new opportunities" for the glass makers. When you outsource, that job
is gone. If you don't make another job somehow (and the people that're outsourcing AREN'T- they're just pocketing the short
term gains they got by cheapening things...) then the money that you spent there went elsewhere- wherever you outsourced it to.
When you outsource it doesn't magically mean that you're going to be in a position to keep supplying ideas to the outsource
places. They take your ideas and run with them for themselves- eventually they don't need you for ideas because you've given
them all to the other people. Where are you when that happens? Outsourcing and a whole host of other things that're in vogue
are no different than Communism or Protectionism when they're practiced the way they've been done for the last 10-20 years.
In the end, they're no more sustainable than the others. And, we're in an economic recession, almost depression, right now
largely as a result of all this unsustainable activities.
What everyone that's a proponent of outsourcing keeps missing are questions like this:
What good does it do to make a product for less money, when nobody wants it?
What good does it do to outsource something for less money, when nobody can buy it?
What good does it do to outsource something for less money, when the people you outsourced it to took your ideas and no longer need you?
There's tons more unasked (but SHOULD be so...) questions like this.
All of this is now ongoing and we're beginning to see the signs of the damage from the real start of this madness some 15-20 years ago.
Is the answer Protectionism?
No. But a little less "openness", considering that most of the people we're outsourcing to are very much Protectionist, will go a long way.
Is the answer Communism?
No. But I think some accountability to the populace, and not just Shareholders, would go a lot longer way on things.
We certainly can't keep going the way we are- we're going to see the collapse of this country because of the short-term thinking on things
that's driven by the current business thinkings.
Based off of my reading of this part of the decision, I'd also say he had a problem with them doing it in the first place because they were obviously using the filing in question for the purposes of pre-trial discovery- also violating Rule 11(b).
ROFLMAO!
What's tragically true about that statement is going to be missed by many in the business field.
What good is a process if you produce the perfect product nobody wants?
What good is a process if there's no customers to buy the things? (Outsourcing takes jobs away that are NOT replaced elsewhere by other employers- eventually that catches up with you...)
It's yet another fad, in a long line of others...
Considering that OpenMesh is offering a very similar device for $49 each, very probably near cost on it, I seriously doubt that
they were selling them at a loss for $50. If they were, they're getting screwed on the embedded boards SERIOUSLY.
A three times jump in pricing from $50 implies price gouging. An increase to $75 would probably be realistic if they were selling
below cost or at cost. More troubling is the updating of the firmware without the user's permission. If they're not subscribers
in the company's service and if the units were not phrased as LEASED, the units were sold. This means they don't have the right
to update the firmware the way they did. Technically, it's under the anti-hacking laws of the country and actionable as all
get out.
All in all, this is a hang your head in shame in the corner moment for the company.
The biggest problem I have with this is that they're monitoring I-5.
Why aren't you placing this sort of gear at the ports of call in a way that
you can't pass by them without setting them off- you'll increase your odds
of successfully preventing a terrorist from this sort of thing.
If you're looking for dirty bombs, they HAVE to get the stuff into the
country; unless you're presuming that the security on the stuff we have
over here from the nuke plants and bomb facilities isn't secure enough
and you've got the stuff slipping out of facility. If that's the case,
then we have a more serious problem than dirty bombs and people spraying
hot isotopes everywhere.
The DHS has a lot of well intentioned "doing something"- but they keep seeming
to focus on things that just won't do any good at doing their stated job.
How?
Wind? Not enough of it unless you're using LED or CFL lighting, etc.
Solar? Ditto.
Hydroelectric? Ditto.
Nuclear? Heh... Maybe clean if you're talking Migma Fission or a Pebble Bed, but otherwise...
Scrubbing coal stacks? They're already doing it and the Mercury's still getting into the atmosphere.
Natural Gas? Maybe- but they're only used to build backing plants to backfill demand; they're expensive
as all get out to fire up. Primary power is Coal and Hydro in most places.
You don't have a clean power source that can handle the capacity for incandescents right at the moment
and we don't look like that unless you've got some magic Zero Point Energy based solution that'll do
the job, you're not going to see what you're glibly claiming can be done anytime soon.
You know... Someone moderated you "insightful". I'd call it informative, yes.
But in the end, which is more important? An industry that can find OTHER things to do with it's resources?
Or our collective survival on this planet?