but ultimately it's the legal firm that screwed up. Not Samsung
If they accepted it with the knowledge that the judge had forbidden them from having it, and didn't tell anybody about it, then Samsung may well have crossed a line.
The reason these things are intended to be kept only by the lawyers is so that neither party can gain an advantage by using information they're not legally allowed to have.
To then take the information you're not legally allowed to have and then use that to gain leverage in a contract negotiation would be illegal. And it sounds like Samsung went into negotiations with someone and said "well, I know the terms of this deal with these people, and I want better".
It's like SEC regulations on insider trading -- they're designed to keep people from profiting from information which isn't public. And there are cases where you could be told something as part of your job, and warned sternly that, for that issue you are now an insider and can't act on that. (Which is why many of us try very hard to not actually know the specifics of some of the systems we work with. It's just easier to keep some information at arms length.)
Having that information may be illegal. Using the information may certainly be illegal. I'm not so sure that Samsung would be blameless here.
Except many settlements are essentially a contract between two private parties, enforced and accepted by the court. Often time, the settlement is made to allow anybody admitting any legal responsibility while making the issue go away -- like Michael Jackson't settlement with the kids he allegedly molested.
There's lots of occasions where some of this stuff remains private information, because it's an agreement between the two entities, and spares them having it discussed in court and going on the record.
This isn't something where the court has ruled, this is a case where the two parties agreed to stop the court proceedings and come up with a settlement. Since this can involve information which can affect stock prices and the like, it sometimes needs to be confidential.
Lawyers are supposed to work for their client, not hide information from them.
Except, as TFS says, there are strict rules in place for some things.
Sometimes, a lawyer is needed to be a buffer between you and something else you're not legally allowed to know. If this was the case, then the lawyer has either broken the law, or the standards of the Bar. Those are the kinds of things that can get you in trouble.
Whether or not this is true is a different story, but if it is true, there could be some serious consequences.
Plus, generally speaking, its not all that hard to get into Mensa.
Hmmm... given that their aim is to get people in the 98th percentile, they're looking for the top 2% of IQs. So not exactly easy.
Not all that hard if you're a) one of those people, b) give a shit, and c) want to hang out with other people like that.
so the people who end up in there tend to be a lot less intelligent than they want to believe they are, or have crushing self doubt and are looking for validation
It sounds like being in a room full of people like the Comic Book Guy from Simpsons who like to stand around and feel self superior, when in actuality they're a bunch of complete wankers looking for validation.
Certainly the only people I've ever met who claimed to be members were best described like that.
Ah, but the question is do these guys actually have a specific implementation?
Or is this a business process patent disguised as a specific implementation?
I don't know enough about the state of genetics to know if they can do this or not. But so many patents are just bafflegab intended to make it look like you've solved a problem -- when in fact you've just enumerated some of the things you'd need and don't have a way of doing it.
The devil is in the details, and I'm skeptical they have anything more than a series of whitepapers detailing how you'd go about it.
So, an offline mode presumes I'm ever going to give it an on-line mode, which I'm not.
Take disc out of cellophane, put in console, play disc. No network. Ever. Need for a network connection at any time in the life of the console is a deal breaker for me.
From what I gather, the guy was a pretty big egomaniac and he probably did it for the thought of having his name on 20 bajillion things instead of only 10 bajillion things.
Again, I say "can you blame him"?
If your work is successful enough to do that, run wild. If his name is what sold all of those books and the spinoffs, then quite frankly I don't see the problem.
Unlike the Kardashians, who are famous for... well, I'm not sure what they're famous for to be honest. Famous for having fucked someone famous or wanting to be famous, or being Kanye's baby-momma, but not for anything they've done (other than the stupid shit they've done since become known) .
thinking that 'shareholders' will drive MS into anything but the ground is really delusional
As opposed to what they're doing now, with a series of products nobody is buying and for which they're taking huge write downs? Or that hardware makers are informing Microsoft they'll no longer make products for?
It's hard not to think Microsoft isn't being driven in to the ground now.
Or, are you just being sneaky?
Not at all. I'm saying welcome to the stock market where shareholder value seems to be what drives everything, and long-term planning be damned.
If you don't want a bunch of stock owners yelling about how badly you're doing... don't go public.
Except Gates doesn't own enough shares to do that.
He's been steadily selling off his shares for years, and I think he's down to 4.5% or so with the expectation that by 2018 he won't have any.
At which point, if you're a company trying to make long-term plans and possibly fix things, do you want someone with 4.5% of the shares to be able to wield as much power as Bill does?
The whole point of this is that Bill is perceived as being able to control a larger proportion of Microsoft than the number of shares he owns would suggest.
Exactly. Bill owns about 4.5% of the stock... the people trying to oust him control about 5%.
Bill Gates is essentially a minority shareholder, but exercises clout like he still owns half the company.
And maybe people are thinking that if Ballmer is going, this is a perfect time to put the company in the hands of someone beholden to the shareholders, instead of Bill Gates. And, long term, it's hard to argue with that.
I've always wondered what kind of audience his books are intended for.
For me, Tom Clancy books were always the ones I brought on vacation with me. In fact, they still are. Most of the books are pretty long, so you only need to bring one or two with you.
His books are pretty much geo-political/military/espionage thrillers, usually have a very complex plot presented from multiple angles involving a lot of events and characters, and make for a very satisfying (if admittedly escapist) read.
Since there was continuity across the books in terms of characters and the overall arc (even if they weren't published in order), you could pick up the book and mostly know who the players were and remember why you liked the characters. Even if you just grab one from the series it's got that familiar "yeah, this is what I want right not" kind of read to it.
I wouldn't call it Earth-changing literature, but it's still an enjoyable read. And when I'm lounging pool-side in the Caribbean with a drink in my hand... it's pretty much exactly what I want to be reading. Not overly taxing, but page turning and time filling in an enjoyable way.
Tom Clancy has been my go-to 'fluff' read for a long time now, and every couple of years I re-read some or all of them.
Then again, I know a lot of people who absolutely hated his books, so they definitely weren't for everybody.
i just wish he hadnt put his name on those "co-authored" series, never cared for most of those.
But, really, can you blame him?
When someone comes along and says "hey, we'll give you big piles of money if we can crank out pulp associated with your name and based in and around your fiction", it's hard to turn them down when they add enough zeroes.
Don't they force you to update to watch the latest discs? Or are you implying that those updates are better-tested
I have no idea. I can tell you that my Samsung BluRay player has never been connected to a network and has worked just fine for almost two years.
If it's done any updates, it's been directly from the disc and never told me about it. And I can't imagine every disc has updates for every brand of player on it.
So either those upgrades are unnecessary and only get flagged if the player is connected to the network, they're been installed without me being asked, or I've never encountered a disc which required it.
But there has never been a network connection to the device for it to get updates from any other source, and there never will be.
The fact that if you DO decide to attach it to the network so you can use the streaming features, its performance will be horrible.
I'll take your word for it.
I've never been interested in whole streaming thing, and I think the whole idea of having my DVD player hooked up to the internet means sooner or later someone will disable something/break it for me because it can access the internet and update itself.
I just don't trust the vendors of consumer electronics with direct access to the internet -- because they either want to gather and report data I'm not willing to allow, or because they want to be in control of the device that I purchased.
Since I don't want any of the on-line features, there's nothing in it for me to give these things a network connection. To me it carries more down-side risk than potential benefits.
And for a device which plays movies, I'm not giving the movie studios the option to decide they want to exert even more control over how I use it.
You've obviously never used their Blu-Ray players.
I've got one, and haven't found it that bad.
Granted, there's no way in hell I'm connecting it to a network so they can decide on a whim to update it, so I haven't seen the full extent of how annoying they can be.
But the device itself I've never had issues with... what unspecified evil are you alluding to?
Well, lots of people don't start out with millions of dollars they can use in that endeavor. You can grease a lot of palms in a developing country, and buy yourself some legitimacy in the right circles if you start our with huge sums of money.
And somehow I think if he was a fugitive from the US, they'd have gone in and gotten him by now if they wanted him badly enough.
So, I'd me more impressed if he'd done it without a huge personal fortune to make it easier, and I'm afraid my sample of other millionaires who are also fugitives to compare him against is a little limited.:-P
I still think he's batshit crazy, but sometimes that's a plus in security paranoia. But that still doesn't mean I'd trust him.
There's many things that Apple might not have invented, but did nonetheless popularize.
I'm certainly not going to defend everything they've done as awesome -- but before the iPod came about, you probably couldn't explain to most people what an MP3 player was or why you'd want one.
And before the iPad came out, I doubt many people had ever even seen tablets because they were extremely specialized niche products. I know for a fact I'd never seen one, and you certainly couldn't walk into Best Buy and get one.
Apple hasn't made their money by inventing things in general, but in making a solid product with a really good user experience -- which in a few cases took the market by storm and established that there was widespread consumer demand. And I think that's what being valued here -- the brand recognition and awareness.
And in periodically having to work with stuff that has a terrible user experience, I wish more companies tried harder at that.
Wow, I don't envy anybody the job of sifting through that mountain of applicants who are all self professed l337 hax0rs.
As Grouch Marx said, I donâ(TM)t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member -- and this group is likely going to self-select for some strange people.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't the only republican to agree with that philosophy.
But it's the exact same kind of stupid -- our ideology tells us these things, and the facts be damned. I believe the Republicans were saying that in context of continuing to disagree with women's birth control and abortion.
It's wanting your beliefs to trump reality, when it's your beliefs that are faulty.
If you believe driving a car is going to damage ovaries, or that if you get raped your body will prevent pregnancy -- then you're a blistering idiot since there is zero facts to support your belief.
Slashdot Mirror
If they accepted it with the knowledge that the judge had forbidden them from having it, and didn't tell anybody about it, then Samsung may well have crossed a line.
The reason these things are intended to be kept only by the lawyers is so that neither party can gain an advantage by using information they're not legally allowed to have.
To then take the information you're not legally allowed to have and then use that to gain leverage in a contract negotiation would be illegal. And it sounds like Samsung went into negotiations with someone and said "well, I know the terms of this deal with these people, and I want better".
It's like SEC regulations on insider trading -- they're designed to keep people from profiting from information which isn't public. And there are cases where you could be told something as part of your job, and warned sternly that, for that issue you are now an insider and can't act on that. (Which is why many of us try very hard to not actually know the specifics of some of the systems we work with. It's just easier to keep some information at arms length.)
Having that information may be illegal. Using the information may certainly be illegal. I'm not so sure that Samsung would be blameless here.
Except many settlements are essentially a contract between two private parties, enforced and accepted by the court. Often time, the settlement is made to allow anybody admitting any legal responsibility while making the issue go away -- like Michael Jackson't settlement with the kids he allegedly molested.
There's lots of occasions where some of this stuff remains private information, because it's an agreement between the two entities, and spares them having it discussed in court and going on the record.
This isn't something where the court has ruled, this is a case where the two parties agreed to stop the court proceedings and come up with a settlement. Since this can involve information which can affect stock prices and the like, it sometimes needs to be confidential.
Except, as TFS says, there are strict rules in place for some things.
Sometimes, a lawyer is needed to be a buffer between you and something else you're not legally allowed to know. If this was the case, then the lawyer has either broken the law, or the standards of the Bar. Those are the kinds of things that can get you in trouble.
Whether or not this is true is a different story, but if it is true, there could be some serious consequences.
Hmmm ... given that their aim is to get people in the 98th percentile, they're looking for the top 2% of IQs. So not exactly easy.
Not all that hard if you're a) one of those people, b) give a shit, and c) want to hang out with other people like that.
Can't disagree there.
I've never seen the appeal of Mensa.
It sounds like being in a room full of people like the Comic Book Guy from Simpsons who like to stand around and feel self superior, when in actuality they're a bunch of complete wankers looking for validation.
Certainly the only people I've ever met who claimed to be members were best described like that.
Ah, but the question is do these guys actually have a specific implementation?
Or is this a business process patent disguised as a specific implementation?
I don't know enough about the state of genetics to know if they can do this or not. But so many patents are just bafflegab intended to make it look like you've solved a problem -- when in fact you've just enumerated some of the things you'd need and don't have a way of doing it.
The devil is in the details, and I'm skeptical they have anything more than a series of whitepapers detailing how you'd go about it.
Unless you have something singularly unique, like a Cray or something, I very much doubt your old computer gear is of value to anybody.
I don't imagine a lot of these places want to be contacted to dump off your old PC, no matter how cool you think it is.
So, an offline mode presumes I'm ever going to give it an on-line mode, which I'm not.
Take disc out of cellophane, put in console, play disc. No network. Ever. Need for a network connection at any time in the life of the console is a deal breaker for me.
You know, old school.
It depends on what you want out of your gaming experience.
Old curmudgeons like me who want to play video games offline and without needing a network connection won't want this.
And I'm sure lots of people will want the kind of gaming experience this platform has to offer.
I guess it depends on how much people trust Valve and want their stuff. And how many people Microsoft annoyed with the XBone announcements.
Again, I say "can you blame him"?
If your work is successful enough to do that, run wild. If his name is what sold all of those books and the spinoffs, then quite frankly I don't see the problem.
Unlike the Kardashians, who are famous for ... well, I'm not sure what they're famous for to be honest. Famous for having fucked someone famous or wanting to be famous, or being Kanye's baby-momma, but not for anything they've done (other than the stupid shit they've done since become known) .
I think Tom Clancy was more deserving of it.
As opposed to what they're doing now, with a series of products nobody is buying and for which they're taking huge write downs? Or that hardware makers are informing Microsoft they'll no longer make products for?
It's hard not to think Microsoft isn't being driven in to the ground now.
Not at all. I'm saying welcome to the stock market where shareholder value seems to be what drives everything, and long-term planning be damned.
If you don't want a bunch of stock owners yelling about how badly you're doing ... don't go public.
Except Gates doesn't own enough shares to do that.
He's been steadily selling off his shares for years, and I think he's down to 4.5% or so with the expectation that by 2018 he won't have any.
At which point, if you're a company trying to make long-term plans and possibly fix things, do you want someone with 4.5% of the shares to be able to wield as much power as Bill does?
The whole point of this is that Bill is perceived as being able to control a larger proportion of Microsoft than the number of shares he owns would suggest.
Exactly. Bill owns about 4.5% of the stock ... the people trying to oust him control about 5%.
Bill Gates is essentially a minority shareholder, but exercises clout like he still owns half the company.
And maybe people are thinking that if Ballmer is going, this is a perfect time to put the company in the hands of someone beholden to the shareholders, instead of Bill Gates. And, long term, it's hard to argue with that.
For me, Tom Clancy books were always the ones I brought on vacation with me. In fact, they still are. Most of the books are pretty long, so you only need to bring one or two with you.
His books are pretty much geo-political/military/espionage thrillers, usually have a very complex plot presented from multiple angles involving a lot of events and characters, and make for a very satisfying (if admittedly escapist) read.
Since there was continuity across the books in terms of characters and the overall arc (even if they weren't published in order), you could pick up the book and mostly know who the players were and remember why you liked the characters. Even if you just grab one from the series it's got that familiar "yeah, this is what I want right not" kind of read to it.
I wouldn't call it Earth-changing literature, but it's still an enjoyable read. And when I'm lounging pool-side in the Caribbean with a drink in my hand ... it's pretty much exactly what I want to be reading. Not overly taxing, but page turning and time filling in an enjoyable way.
Tom Clancy has been my go-to 'fluff' read for a long time now, and every couple of years I re-read some or all of them.
Then again, I know a lot of people who absolutely hated his books, so they definitely weren't for everybody.
But, really, can you blame him?
When someone comes along and says "hey, we'll give you big piles of money if we can crank out pulp associated with your name and based in and around your fiction", it's hard to turn them down when they add enough zeroes.
I suspect he was happy enough to get the money.
I have no idea. I can tell you that my Samsung BluRay player has never been connected to a network and has worked just fine for almost two years.
If it's done any updates, it's been directly from the disc and never told me about it. And I can't imagine every disc has updates for every brand of player on it.
So either those upgrades are unnecessary and only get flagged if the player is connected to the network, they're been installed without me being asked, or I've never encountered a disc which required it.
But there has never been a network connection to the device for it to get updates from any other source, and there never will be.
I'll take your word for it.
I've never been interested in whole streaming thing, and I think the whole idea of having my DVD player hooked up to the internet means sooner or later someone will disable something/break it for me because it can access the internet and update itself.
I just don't trust the vendors of consumer electronics with direct access to the internet -- because they either want to gather and report data I'm not willing to allow, or because they want to be in control of the device that I purchased.
Since I don't want any of the on-line features, there's nothing in it for me to give these things a network connection. To me it carries more down-side risk than potential benefits.
And for a device which plays movies, I'm not giving the movie studios the option to decide they want to exert even more control over how I use it.
I've got one, and haven't found it that bad.
Granted, there's no way in hell I'm connecting it to a network so they can decide on a whim to update it, so I haven't seen the full extent of how annoying they can be.
But the device itself I've never had issues with ... what unspecified evil are you alluding to?
There's lies, damned lies, statistics, and vendor performance numbers.
I'm a little disappointed that there isn't actually any penalties for fudging your benchmarks -- it's blatantly lying to consumers about your product.
And to me, that seems like it's bordering on fraud.
Well, lots of people don't start out with millions of dollars they can use in that endeavor. You can grease a lot of palms in a developing country, and buy yourself some legitimacy in the right circles if you start our with huge sums of money.
And somehow I think if he was a fugitive from the US, they'd have gone in and gotten him by now if they wanted him badly enough.
So, I'd me more impressed if he'd done it without a huge personal fortune to make it easier, and I'm afraid my sample of other millionaires who are also fugitives to compare him against is a little limited. :-P
I still think he's batshit crazy, but sometimes that's a plus in security paranoia. But that still doesn't mean I'd trust him.
There's many things that Apple might not have invented, but did nonetheless popularize.
I'm certainly not going to defend everything they've done as awesome -- but before the iPod came about, you probably couldn't explain to most people what an MP3 player was or why you'd want one.
And before the iPad came out, I doubt many people had ever even seen tablets because they were extremely specialized niche products. I know for a fact I'd never seen one, and you certainly couldn't walk into Best Buy and get one.
Apple hasn't made their money by inventing things in general, but in making a solid product with a really good user experience -- which in a few cases took the market by storm and established that there was widespread consumer demand. And I think that's what being valued here -- the brand recognition and awareness.
And in periodically having to work with stuff that has a terrible user experience, I wish more companies tried harder at that.
Wow, I don't envy anybody the job of sifting through that mountain of applicants who are all self professed l337 hax0rs.
As Grouch Marx said, I donâ(TM)t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member -- and this group is likely going to self-select for some strange people.
And I'm going to trust a crazy fugitive with my data why?
He may be a person who is also interested in privacy, but I see no reason at all to trust him.
The crazy enemy of my enemy might have some valid points, but he's still a crazy person.
LOL, I refused to waste any high-school credits on a typing class when I'd already been typing well enough for years.
I can type well enough for my own needs, and I don't need to look at the keys as I do it. The specifics I don't care about.
I'm largely of the opinion after using a keyboard long enough people will figure it out themselves.
But it's the exact same kind of stupid -- our ideology tells us these things, and the facts be damned. I believe the Republicans were saying that in context of continuing to disagree with women's birth control and abortion.
It's wanting your beliefs to trump reality, when it's your beliefs that are faulty.
If you believe driving a car is going to damage ovaries, or that if you get raped your body will prevent pregnancy -- then you're a blistering idiot since there is zero facts to support your belief.