This is like suing the phone company because I said something about someone else I didn't like over a phone conversation.
If this becomes any sort of legal precedent, then I will go right out and sue my own phone company for libel when all my friends talk about me behind my back.
You can't sue for libel over a spoken conversation: you can only be libelled where the defamatory matter is published. At least in this jurisdiction (England/Wales).
You could try suing for slander though.:-)
The facts of the case are interesting. The plaintiff in the case informed Demon that they had libellous material (and it was not disputed at trial that the material was, in fact, libellous), but Demon didn't do anything about it.
Now, technically, in English law, the act of serving an article from a news spool is publication. Since Demon knew that the article was potentially libellous, they couldn't avail themselves of the 'innocent publication' defence that is part of the 1996(? I should know this) Act.
In terms of legal reasoning, the argument is pretty cut and dried.
I would be very surprised that, had he not informed of the existence of the posting before suing, the plaintiff in this case would've succeeded before the court.
Therefore, I don't think the ramifications of this case are as far reaching as some will no doubt prophesy. That's not to say that there aren't some important implications:
1) The role of ISP as censor - from now on, if I see something on a newsgroup that I don't like, I can send out a note to all the ISPs in England asking them to remove it, or face a libel action. How many of them are going to take a stand and refuse to remove the article if they know that getting the call wrong means an expensive libel suit?
2) If you think this is a bad thing, how _can_ you protect ISPs from this sort of thing, without 'breaking' a load of case law?
And Intel can only build better CPU's if they integrate the FPU (remember superior non-Intel 386 FPU's?)
To be fair, anyone who knows anything about architecture knows that putting the FPU onto the same die as the ALU is good sense. I mean, MIPS and most others did it a long time before the 486.
If we're entirely honest, the only reason to run any chip much faster than (say) a Celeron-333 is to play games.
Outside of the corporate markets, where whatever is fitted in the latest Dell/Compaq/IBM will ship (I know - I've put PII/350s on secretaries' desks), the one thing that drives most power-user types to upgrade is the 3D game. Quake/Unreal/WHY...
The fact is, most of these games have an inner loop that's tight enough to fit (to a large extent) into the on-chip cache: most 3D gaming benchmarks show Celerons based on the Mendocino core (with 128K core-speed L2 cache) are faster clock-for-clock than Pentium-IIs (with 512K half-core L2).
133MHz FSB is a great concept for scientific computing. Intel architecture machines are notoriously lacking in memory bandwidth. But I don't seriously think that VIA is chasing the scientific market (even if they were, Intel's relatively poor FPU performance would probably sink them). They're chasing the people who clock their Celeron-300As at 504MHz: these are predominantly 3D power-gamers.
The increase in performance that you're going to see on a Quake II benchmark is not going to be spectacular - we saw maybe 10% going from 66->100MHz. Figure on half that by going to 133.
133MHz FSB means PC-133 RAM, which is going to be quite a lot more expensive than the PC-100 variety.
Amdahl's law indicates that optimizing the most frequently used parts of a system yield the best performance returns... I think 133MHz FSB for Wintel is missing the point for those who are performance led, rather than technology driven.
Another point that's worth bearing in mind, is that I hear that VIA's AGP implementation is less than stellar in performance. Like: a 133MHz pre-release system benchmarks slower than a system based on the (now-almost-venerable) BX AGPset, because of it.
So, tell me, who's going to buy into 133MHz FSB now?
I've just read a smattering on the postings on this topic, and there seems to be one overwhelming assumption: that the only degree course worth pursuing is one in computer science (or maybe mathematics...)
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from the first few comments here, it looks like quite a few people are failing to grasp what actually happened here...
You might want to check out my posting here if you want a semi-legal insight.
This is like suing the phone company because I said something about someone else I didn't like over a phone conversation.
:-)
If this becomes any sort of legal precedent, then I will go right out and sue my own phone company for libel when all my friends talk about me behind my back.
You can't sue for libel over a spoken conversation: you can only be libelled where the defamatory matter is published. At least in this jurisdiction (England/Wales).
You could try suing for slander though.
The facts of the case are interesting. The plaintiff in the case informed Demon that they had libellous material (and it was not disputed at trial that the material was, in fact, libellous), but Demon didn't do anything about it.
Now, technically, in English law, the act of serving an article from a news spool is publication. Since Demon knew that the article was potentially libellous, they couldn't avail themselves of the 'innocent publication' defence that is part of the 1996(? I should know this) Act.
In terms of legal reasoning, the argument is pretty cut and dried.
I would be very surprised that, had he not informed of the existence of the posting before suing, the plaintiff in this case would've succeeded before the court.
Therefore, I don't think the ramifications of this case are as far reaching as some will no doubt prophesy. That's not to say that there aren't some important implications:
1) The role of ISP as censor - from now on, if I see something on a newsgroup that I don't like, I can send out a note to all the ISPs in England asking them to remove it, or face a libel action. How many of them are going to take a stand and refuse to remove the article if they know that getting the call wrong means an expensive libel suit?
2) If you think this is a bad thing, how _can_ you protect ISPs from this sort of thing, without 'breaking' a load of case law?
Tough one.
And Intel can only build better CPU's if they integrate the FPU (remember superior non-Intel 386 FPU's?)
To be fair, anyone who knows anything about architecture knows that putting the FPU onto the same die as the ALU is good sense. I mean, MIPS and most others did it a long time before the 486.
If we're entirely honest, the only reason to run any chip much faster than (say) a Celeron-333 is to play games.
Outside of the corporate markets, where whatever is fitted in the latest Dell/Compaq/IBM will ship (I know - I've put PII/350s on secretaries' desks), the one thing that drives most power-user types to upgrade is the 3D game. Quake/Unreal/WHY...
The fact is, most of these games have an inner loop that's tight enough to fit (to a large extent) into the on-chip cache: most 3D gaming benchmarks show Celerons based on the Mendocino core (with 128K core-speed L2 cache) are faster clock-for-clock than Pentium-IIs (with 512K half-core L2).
133MHz FSB is a great concept for scientific computing. Intel architecture machines are notoriously lacking in memory bandwidth. But I don't seriously think that VIA is chasing the scientific market (even if they were, Intel's relatively poor FPU performance would probably sink them). They're chasing the people who clock their Celeron-300As at 504MHz: these are predominantly 3D power-gamers.
The increase in performance that you're going to see on a Quake II benchmark is not going to be spectacular - we saw maybe 10% going from 66->100MHz. Figure on half that by going to 133.
133MHz FSB means PC-133 RAM, which is going to be quite a lot more expensive than the PC-100 variety.
Amdahl's law indicates that optimizing the most frequently used parts of a system yield the best performance returns... I think 133MHz FSB for Wintel is missing the point for those who are performance led, rather than technology driven.
Another point that's worth bearing in mind, is that I hear that VIA's AGP implementation is less than stellar in performance. Like: a 133MHz pre-release system benchmarks slower than a system based on the (now-almost-venerable) BX AGPset, because of it.
So, tell me, who's going to buy into 133MHz FSB now?
I've just read a smattering on the postings on this topic, and there seems to be one overwhelming assumption: that the only degree course worth pursuing is one in computer science (or maybe mathematics...)
Expand your horizons!