The lawyers said "we will not tolerate coexistance with your website in its current form." That doesn't sound very polite to me.
It's about as polite as it can be in a letter of this nature. They had to make that statement. It is still a cease and desist letter, and they needed to make it very clear what the alternative to compliance was. As a counter example, the letter also indicates a desire to resolve the matter amicably, and offers the possibility of including the data on the official PCI-SIG website. If I were the author, I'd have jumped at the chance.
Image that your dog gets out and digs up your neighbors flowers. Would your rather
A: have your neighbor come over and ask you to keep your dog tied up.
B: Recieve a letter in the mail saying "From the law offices of attorney so and so. We will not tolerate your dog digging up my flowers. If you do not stop him we will sue, but I hope to resolve this in a friendly manner."
I'm sure you're well aware that this isn't the same thing at all. The case of the dog that dug up my flowers is a whole lot more clear-cut than trademark disputes. Also bear in mind that this particular instance may have been one of many potential "trademark violations" that was being pursued by PCI-SIG. If they had a whole list of situations to look at, it's not surprising that first contact came from the lawyer.
Try thinking on this. It's considered common wisdom to realize that life is only about 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. In my eyes, Jim failed this test. Completely taking down the website and giving up hurts free OS development a whole lot more than PCI-SIG. However, we can always hope that after careful reflection, he'll change his mind and try to work with PCI-SIG.
Do I think PCI-SIG handled things in the wrong way? Sure! They should have accepted Jim's original offer to put everything on their site. But my guess is that there was a management change or something and that information got lost in the shuffle. However, I still think Jim's reaction was out-of-line. Still, it's his project. He can shut it down if he'd like, although I'd rather see him at least give all the data to somebody else for maintaining.
When they had a problem with him, instead of just giving him a call on the phone, they send in the lawyers.
I don't see it that way. I see the lawyers being used as a legal framework so that things don't get wierd if there's a problem. The letter was extremely polite, and invited him to give them a call to discuss the issue.
Another important thing to remember is that PCI-SIG doesn't have control over information found in the free PCI device table. As such, they don't want any confusion over liability should some of the information be wrong. One of the listed methods of remedying the conflict suggests that this may have been their primary purpose for getting the lawyers involved.
Here's an interesting point I found. His website mentions that first contact was on January 13, and that it was a threatening letter with reference to a previous communication they claim to have sent. Unless the letter received on Jan 13 is different from the one sent on Dec 30, I don't see the letter as particularly threatening. If they are the same, then I would submit that Jim's reaction is a kneejerk one. A 30 minute contact with PCI-SIG would probably generate a solution that was satisfactory to all parties.
Another interesting point is that he has proof that PCI-SIG was aware of his site for more than five years. During this time, they made no effort to defend their trademark. Any lawyers out there know how this might impact the validity of the trademark?
I guess not, especially when there is money to be made.
They aren't asking for any money. In fact, this is one of the most amicable cease and desist letters I've seen. The letter didn't state anything about the information. They were merely defending their trademark. The letter basically offers two valid options. They can either try to come to an agreement to post this information on the legitimate PCI site, or they can remove all "confusing" references to PCI-SIG. Basically, the company just doesn't want its customers to think this is a site that they sanctioned. What am I missing here?
How many farmers are there in the US now as a percentage of the population compared to a century ago?
That's a pretty poor comparison. How many farmers shut down the business because it was cheaper to import the same products from another country? We're more likely to import stuff that doesn't grow very well in this country. A better way of looking at it: how much wheat and corn (maize) do we import?
I am pretty sure India has a negative economic balance with the US.
You are way misinformed. In 2000, there was a seven billion dollar trade deficit (in India's favor). Exports from the United states were $3.7 billion, while imports from India were $10.7 billion.
There are plenty of technological measures (no, not whitelists) that could stop spam completely
Yeah, but all of them require some sort of periodic maintenance -- even Bayesian filters. I think I'd be willing to pay a *very small* fee if it would stop spam at the *source*. Not that there's much chance of that happening....
At any rate, I intended for my previous post to provoke a grin.
No, it's not. But I bet it's more complex than you imagined. First off, figuring out $destinationTaxRate can be a bit tricky. It's not just a 50 row table. "Sales Tax" or "Use Tax" is assessed not only by the State, but also by the county and locality. NY State is a really good example of this complexity. That's why sales tax in NYC is higher than elsewhere in NY.
Now, let's assume that you can use zip code to get the correct tax rate (and that there's no locality ambiguity within a zip code). So, you manage to collect the right amount of taxes from each purchaser. Now what do you do with it? You have to figure out which portion of that tax belongs to which government agency. You probably have to fill out a different form for each agency that requires you to collect taxes. Although you can probably send off your collected taxes periodically, you probably have to account for each purchase in detail. No matter how you slice it, you'll have to report the taxes on hundreds of different forms.
Sure, you can obtain software to do this, but what's that going to cost? If you can afford the software, how often will you have to update? Quarterly? What will the maintenance fees on that be?
If each State could agree on a single rate for that one state, it would make things much simpler, but would require that each and every state pass legislation forbidding the collection of local and county use/sales taxes for internet purchases. I think the snowball has already melted.
. I am not completely opposed to tax, so long as it is a VERY small one one, which reflects the money they are already spending in regards to protecting consumers' purchases on the internet.
So, what if the feds managed to completely eliminate spam mail? What would tha' be worth to ya in terms of internet tax, laddie?:-)
I know, but by noticing that the problem only occured when the debugger was attached indicated a memory violation of some sort.
Of course it was a memory violation. If it had been a simple logic error, I'd have probably been able to track it down just by seeing how the program behaved, no debugger necessary. But finding a memory violation wasn't (at least at that time) as easy as it might seem. You don't know if you accessed a dangling pointer, reference an array with an out-of-bounds index, or some other such nonsense. I knew the problem was a memory violation as soon as the program crashed while running. The debugger didn't help there.
...but Lisp usually is compiled to native code these days, yet it still has a cool debugging environment...
Not being a Lisp programmer, I'm completely ignorant of the modern state of Lisp. My question on this one is, does the debugging environment get compiled into every Lisp program? If so, you can expect all kinds of advanced debugging features, but also a large executable size. If not, you may find that programs that fail under normal operation run just fine within the debugger. Of course, the Lisp syntax probably makes it much more difficult for these types of "glitches" to occur.
Perhaps if the C language designers actually tried to learn from things Lisp and Smalltalk systems did 20 years ago...
Smalltalk is interpreted, whereas C normally isn't. One of the powers of interpreted languages is the ability to easily add much more flexible debugging tools. Sure, you could create a debugging environment for C that had similar functionality, but you'd then be running your program on a completely different "platform" from that without a debugger. Along a similar line, I've seen many cases where a compiler was used to turn code in a normally interpreted language into machine code. Frequently, programs that ran just fine through the interpreter had serious problems in the compiled version. It ends up that there were bugs in the program that just didn't show up in the interpreter.
I have been coding for over two decades and have yet to see a reason to abandon debugger use.
I stopped relying on debugging tools about 12 years ago when I ran into a bug that disappeared everytime I ran the program in the debugging environment. Yeah, it was "C" and yeah, I was shooting myself in the foot with a pointer. At that time, printf became my best friend. Since then, I've worked in many environments that have no debugging tools whatsoever, so I've had to get creative with debugging output to find problems. I still use a debugger as my first crack at finding a problem, but I'm always ready to add some code to track what's going on in the program.
Ah, this was the part of your post that I missed.;)
No, no no. You charge so as to have profitability (or perhaps maintainability).
Agreed.
The person in India CAN'T AFFORD the information. It can be "given" (read exchanged for something of lesser value), but that's it. This is sad, but there are many things Indians cannot afford.
Agreed. It is really sad. In a perfect world, information would truly be free. However, we don't live in a perfect world and never will.
Personally, I prefer choice when it comes to financing a web site. I don't mind advertisements as long as they don't dictate the content (which is a primary focus of the original post) and don't generate pop-ups (or -unders). If I have to pay for content, I prefer subscription-based because of the predictability -- I'm paranoid that way. For those who can't stand the adverts or the subscriptions, micropayments are a nice option.
I don't necessarily disagree with your belief, but I wanted to point out some problems with your argument...
Solution: Information should be free. . . . Micropayments would reward directly reward what people want and would make it much easier to say... not have slashdot lose money.
These two ideas are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. If information should be free, you can't really charge the viewer anything. While the aforementioned $30 per month might be affordable for someone in the United States, let's see how that works for the average person in, say, India. In 1999, the reported average hourly wage was 0.16USD. With 192 working hours listed per month, that would bring the average monthly income up to 30.72USD. So, if they live in a box in an alley and don't eat or drink anything, they can afford their internet content.
The most obvious solution to this problem is to charge different amounts depending on the economy of the viewer. However, if this system is implemented, I foresee proxy servers springing up in foreign countries that allow viewers to access content for a low flat fee.
Yes, web sites must somehow be paid for. I don't think advertising (in today's form) is necessarily the answer, but if your goal is for information to be free for everyone, I don't think micropayments are going to work either.
I'd say that chances are overwhelmingly against Microsoft being found guilty; no, not because they will "buy their way out."
I disagree. The only thing Microsoft has in their favor is the fact that they still haven't been able to provide an OS that meets carrier approval. They are accused of breach of contract, which appears to be true because they did not provide the software as promised, and they did not make a capital payment as promised. The fact that they still don't have a viable OS will serve partly as an indicator that failure to provide the software as promised was not fully intentional.
My guess is that unless Microsoft makes a contribution to somebody's retirement fund, breach of contract will be upheld, and you'll have a following battle over IP because Microsoft will no longer be entitled to the information they possess and are now using in conjunction with another company.
But Sendo executives or lawyers were crazy to have signed such a contract with someone like Microsoft.
I'm not sure why you feel this way. While it's true that many of us here on Slashdot are aware of the seedier side of Microsoft's business practices, it's also just as obvious that the majority of the US is not aware. The fact that business continue to form relationships (at their own peril) and that consumers continue to purchase Microsoft's products indicates this. The problem just hasn't escalated to a high enough level to financially impact Microsoft yet. You can see this situation as another log on the fire, and maybe more people will be able to see the flames now; it all depends on how the civil case pans out.
What those greedy companies know that you don't seem to is that many of the people who would be buying their products (if only they had jobs) are living outside the US. By exporting those jobs, they might (in the short run) be reducing their market in the US, but they are (in the short run) expanding their market outside the US.
That's an awfully big gamble for a company to take, and I doubt that they've really thought it out that far. Let's look at the potential flaws with your argument.
There is absolutely no guarantee that the markets to which jobs are transferred will choose to buy their products from US companies. It's actually more likely that some company in their own country will start producing a similar product at a significantly lower cost.
Building up a market in another country takes time -- probably more time that it will take for Americans to stop buying your product due to lack of affordability. It's likely that your company will go out of business before seeing the fruits of their labor.
Even if a foreign market is quickly established, the lower salaries (which prompted your company to move jobs there in the first place) will force you to sell you product at a lower cost in that country. Add on the extra cost of managing a remote operation, and you'll see that your net gain in revenue quickly becomes negative.
No, companies who think they'll create additional markets and profit off of it are only deluding themselves. An honestly, I don't give the pointy-haired bosses that much credit for thinking ahead. I believe it's far more likely that they are merely trying to get their product out the door for a lower cost than their competitors, and thus focusing on short term profit.
Imagine how much better off we would all be if the entire world had that sort of free trade; the sort which exists between the states. It can't happen until the rest of the world catches up to the US, economically and politically.
I agree that free trade within the world will ultimately be good for everybody, but I don't think you can have truly equitable and free trade until countries share similar labor laws and social regard for their people. It only makes sense to have free trade with a country that has managed to create its own viable economic system.
I think you and I probably agree on the end result, but disagree on the means of getting there.
But that's not what we're doing. Instead, we're acting in the next-quarter interests of specific companies, and that's a Bad Thing(tm) for everyone concerned.
Absolutely agreed. And what the greedy companies who follow this practice don't seem to realize is that they are effectively taking money out of the hands of the very people who would be buying their products. Look at the current trade deficit for the United States. The vast majority of consumers of US products live in... the US. If you stop handing them the money they need to buy your products, you'll eventually start losing money. I'm not sure how long that process takes, but it's virtually guaranteed happen.
The article doesn't show if the sites benifited from the documents or even can benefit from the documents.
Depends on how you look at it. If all the sites did was post the information so that people could build their own cards, then the people building the cards would benefit by cost avoidance. The article does indicate that the documents would provide a significant advantage to someone trying to hack the technology. Clearly, the prosecution feels they have enough evidence to charge him.
However, he is not really guilty of the crime he's being accused of.
Could you be a little more specific? After having read the article, it appear that he is indeed guilty. He used his business relationship to obtain trade secrets that should have been protected under a NDA, and then provided them to others who will be able to economically benefit. The espionage law doesn't require that he be the financial beneficiary.
No matter how you look at it, he's up a creek without a paddle. None only did he violate the espionage law, but he also violated a contractual agreement with the law firm he worked at. Once he's convicted, he can probably count on a civil suit filed by the law firm.
Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 2
I've got one of those!
Except he doesn't read out the notes, he stands in near-silence while writing them on an overhead transparency extremely fast, while occasionally muttering something incomprehensible into his navel.
Well, surely he has the most learned navel on the face of the planet.:-) I had a similar experience with someone who couldn't speak English well enough. He would say a sentence and leave out a word that he didn't know, pantomiming to get the class to guess the word. I ended up dropping the class (along with several others) and reporting the situation to the dean. He seemed to know the course material pretty well, but probably needed some language lessons before being allowed to teach.
It depends on the quality of the demo. I've seen several demonstrations. Some of them were so bad that I walked away during the demo. Others left me drooling for the technology. But, alas, it's still the price tag that keeps me from buying. The awesome picture is not worth that much to me. I'm still holding out for a time when 60" flatscreens drop below $2000. If and when that happens, I'm in.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about as polite as it can be in a letter of this nature. They had to make that statement. It is still a cease and desist letter, and they needed to make it very clear what the alternative to compliance was. As a counter example, the letter also indicates a desire to resolve the matter amicably, and offers the possibility of including the data on the official PCI-SIG website. If I were the author, I'd have jumped at the chance.
Image that your dog gets out and digs up your neighbors flowers. Would your rather
A: have your neighbor come over and ask you to keep your dog tied up.
B: Recieve a letter in the mail saying "From the law offices of attorney so and so. We will not tolerate your dog digging up my flowers. If you do not stop him we will sue, but I hope to resolve this in a friendly manner."
I'm sure you're well aware that this isn't the same thing at all. The case of the dog that dug up my flowers is a whole lot more clear-cut than trademark disputes. Also bear in mind that this particular instance may have been one of many potential "trademark violations" that was being pursued by PCI-SIG. If they had a whole list of situations to look at, it's not surprising that first contact came from the lawyer.
Try thinking on this. It's considered common wisdom to realize that life is only about 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. In my eyes, Jim failed this test. Completely taking down the website and giving up hurts free OS development a whole lot more than PCI-SIG. However, we can always hope that after careful reflection, he'll change his mind and try to work with PCI-SIG.
Do I think PCI-SIG handled things in the wrong way? Sure! They should have accepted Jim's original offer to put everything on their site. But my guess is that there was a management change or something and that information got lost in the shuffle. However, I still think Jim's reaction was out-of-line. Still, it's his project. He can shut it down if he'd like, although I'd rather see him at least give all the data to somebody else for maintaining.
I don't see it that way. I see the lawyers being used as a legal framework so that things don't get wierd if there's a problem. The letter was extremely polite, and invited him to give them a call to discuss the issue.
Another important thing to remember is that PCI-SIG doesn't have control over information found in the free PCI device table. As such, they don't want any confusion over liability should some of the information be wrong. One of the listed methods of remedying the conflict suggests that this may have been their primary purpose for getting the lawyers involved.
Here's an interesting point I found. His website mentions that first contact was on January 13, and that it was a threatening letter with reference to a previous communication they claim to have sent. Unless the letter received on Jan 13 is different from the one sent on Dec 30, I don't see the letter as particularly threatening. If they are the same, then I would submit that Jim's reaction is a kneejerk one. A 30 minute contact with PCI-SIG would probably generate a solution that was satisfactory to all parties.
Another interesting point is that he has proof that PCI-SIG was aware of his site for more than five years. During this time, they made no effort to defend their trademark. Any lawyers out there know how this might impact the validity of the trademark?
They aren't asking for any money. In fact, this is one of the most amicable cease and desist letters I've seen. The letter didn't state anything about the information. They were merely defending their trademark. The letter basically offers two valid options. They can either try to come to an agreement to post this information on the legitimate PCI site, or they can remove all "confusing" references to PCI-SIG. Basically, the company just doesn't want its customers to think this is a site that they sanctioned. What am I missing here?
That's a pretty poor comparison. How many farmers shut down the business because it was cheaper to import the same products from another country? We're more likely to import stuff that doesn't grow very well in this country. A better way of looking at it: how much wheat and corn (maize) do we import?
You are way misinformed. In 2000, there was a seven billion dollar trade deficit (in India's favor). Exports from the United states were $3.7 billion, while imports from India were $10.7 billion.
Yeah, but all of them require some sort of periodic maintenance -- even Bayesian filters. I think I'd be willing to pay a *very small* fee if it would stop spam at the *source*. Not that there's much chance of that happening....
At any rate, I intended for my previous post to provoke a grin.
Yeah, but this is only possible because there's only about 200 people living in Canada, right? :-) Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm only joking.
No, it's not. But I bet it's more complex than you imagined. First off, figuring out $destinationTaxRate can be a bit tricky. It's not just a 50 row table. "Sales Tax" or "Use Tax" is assessed not only by the State, but also by the county and locality. NY State is a really good example of this complexity. That's why sales tax in NYC is higher than elsewhere in NY.
Now, let's assume that you can use zip code to get the correct tax rate (and that there's no locality ambiguity within a zip code). So, you manage to collect the right amount of taxes from each purchaser. Now what do you do with it? You have to figure out which portion of that tax belongs to which government agency. You probably have to fill out a different form for each agency that requires you to collect taxes. Although you can probably send off your collected taxes periodically, you probably have to account for each purchase in detail. No matter how you slice it, you'll have to report the taxes on hundreds of different forms.
Sure, you can obtain software to do this, but what's that going to cost? If you can afford the software, how often will you have to update? Quarterly? What will the maintenance fees on that be?
If each State could agree on a single rate for that one state, it would make things much simpler, but would require that each and every state pass legislation forbidding the collection of local and county use/sales taxes for internet purchases. I think the snowball has already melted.
So, what if the feds managed to completely eliminate spam mail? What would tha' be worth to ya in terms of internet tax, laddie? :-)
Coupled with the latest study on alcohol and the heart, it looks like we can now officially say that Linux is good for your health!
Of course it was a memory violation. If it had been a simple logic error, I'd have probably been able to track it down just by seeing how the program behaved, no debugger necessary. But finding a memory violation wasn't (at least at that time) as easy as it might seem. You don't know if you accessed a dangling pointer, reference an array with an out-of-bounds index, or some other such nonsense. I knew the problem was a memory violation as soon as the program crashed while running. The debugger didn't help there.
...but Lisp usually is compiled to native code these days, yet it still has a cool debugging environment... Not being a Lisp programmer, I'm completely ignorant of the modern state of Lisp. My question on this one is, does the debugging environment get compiled into every Lisp program? If so, you can expect all kinds of advanced debugging features, but also a large executable size. If not, you may find that programs that fail under normal operation run just fine within the debugger. Of course, the Lisp syntax probably makes it much more difficult for these types of "glitches" to occur.
Smalltalk is interpreted, whereas C normally isn't. One of the powers of interpreted languages is the ability to easily add much more flexible debugging tools. Sure, you could create a debugging environment for C that had similar functionality, but you'd then be running your program on a completely different "platform" from that without a debugger. Along a similar line, I've seen many cases where a compiler was used to turn code in a normally interpreted language into machine code. Frequently, programs that ran just fine through the interpreter had serious problems in the compiled version. It ends up that there were bugs in the program that just didn't show up in the interpreter.
I stopped relying on debugging tools about 12 years ago when I ran into a bug that disappeared everytime I ran the program in the debugging environment. Yeah, it was "C" and yeah, I was shooting myself in the foot with a pointer. At that time, printf became my best friend. Since then, I've worked in many environments that have no debugging tools whatsoever, so I've had to get creative with debugging output to find problems. I still use a debugger as my first crack at finding a problem, but I'm always ready to add some code to track what's going on in the program.
Ah, this was the part of your post that I missed. ;)
No, no no. You charge so as to have profitability (or perhaps maintainability).
Agreed. The person in India CAN'T AFFORD the information. It can be "given" (read exchanged for something of lesser value), but that's it. This is sad, but there are many things Indians cannot afford.
Agreed. It is really sad. In a perfect world, information would truly be free. However, we don't live in a perfect world and never will.
Personally, I prefer choice when it comes to financing a web site. I don't mind advertisements as long as they don't dictate the content (which is a primary focus of the original post) and don't generate pop-ups (or -unders). If I have to pay for content, I prefer subscription-based because of the predictability -- I'm paranoid that way. For those who can't stand the adverts or the subscriptions, micropayments are a nice option.
Solution: Information should be free.
.
.
.
Micropayments would reward directly reward what people want and would make it much easier to say... not have slashdot lose money.
These two ideas are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. If information should be free, you can't really charge the viewer anything. While the aforementioned $30 per month might be affordable for someone in the United States, let's see how that works for the average person in, say, India. In 1999, the reported average hourly wage was 0.16USD. With 192 working hours listed per month, that would bring the average monthly income up to 30.72USD. So, if they live in a box in an alley and don't eat or drink anything, they can afford their internet content.
The most obvious solution to this problem is to charge different amounts depending on the economy of the viewer. However, if this system is implemented, I foresee proxy servers springing up in foreign countries that allow viewers to access content for a low flat fee.
Yes, web sites must somehow be paid for. I don't think advertising (in today's form) is necessarily the answer, but if your goal is for information to be free for everyone, I don't think micropayments are going to work either.
I disagree. The only thing Microsoft has in their favor is the fact that they still haven't been able to provide an OS that meets carrier approval. They are accused of breach of contract, which appears to be true because they did not provide the software as promised, and they did not make a capital payment as promised. The fact that they still don't have a viable OS will serve partly as an indicator that failure to provide the software as promised was not fully intentional.
My guess is that unless Microsoft makes a contribution to somebody's retirement fund, breach of contract will be upheld, and you'll have a following battle over IP because Microsoft will no longer be entitled to the information they possess and are now using in conjunction with another company.
I'm not sure why you feel this way. While it's true that many of us here on Slashdot are aware of the seedier side of Microsoft's business practices, it's also just as obvious that the majority of the US is not aware. The fact that business continue to form relationships (at their own peril) and that consumers continue to purchase Microsoft's products indicates this. The problem just hasn't escalated to a high enough level to financially impact Microsoft yet. You can see this situation as another log on the fire, and maybe more people will be able to see the flames now; it all depends on how the civil case pans out.
That's an awfully big gamble for a company to take, and I doubt that they've really thought it out that far. Let's look at the potential flaws with your argument.
- There is absolutely no guarantee that the markets to which jobs are transferred will choose to buy their products from US companies. It's actually more likely that some company in their own country will start producing a similar product at a significantly lower cost.
- Building up a market in another country takes time -- probably more time that it will take for Americans to stop buying your product due to lack of affordability. It's likely that your company will go out of business before seeing the fruits of their labor.
- Even if a foreign market is quickly established, the lower salaries (which prompted your company to move jobs there in the first place) will force you to sell you product at a lower cost in that country. Add on the extra cost of managing a remote operation, and you'll see that your net gain in revenue quickly becomes negative.
No, companies who think they'll create additional markets and profit off of it are only deluding themselves. An honestly, I don't give the pointy-haired bosses that much credit for thinking ahead. I believe it's far more likely that they are merely trying to get their product out the door for a lower cost than their competitors, and thus focusing on short term profit.Imagine how much better off we would all be if the entire world had that sort of free trade; the sort which exists between the states. It can't happen until the rest of the world catches up to the US, economically and politically.
I agree that free trade within the world will ultimately be good for everybody, but I don't think you can have truly equitable and free trade until countries share similar labor laws and social regard for their people. It only makes sense to have free trade with a country that has managed to create its own viable economic system.
I think you and I probably agree on the end result, but disagree on the means of getting there.
Absolutely agreed. And what the greedy companies who follow this practice don't seem to realize is that they are effectively taking money out of the hands of the very people who would be buying their products. Look at the current trade deficit for the United States. The vast majority of consumers of US products live in ... the US. If you stop handing them the money they need to buy your products, you'll eventually start losing money. I'm not sure how long that process takes, but it's virtually guaranteed happen.
Depends on how you look at it. If all the sites did was post the information so that people could build their own cards, then the people building the cards would benefit by cost avoidance. The article does indicate that the documents would provide a significant advantage to someone trying to hack the technology. Clearly, the prosecution feels they have enough evidence to charge him.
Is there a web site somewhere that summarizes this kind of stupidity? Something similar to the "Darwin Awards" would be nice.
Could you be a little more specific? After having read the article, it appear that he is indeed guilty. He used his business relationship to obtain trade secrets that should have been protected under a NDA, and then provided them to others who will be able to economically benefit. The espionage law doesn't require that he be the financial beneficiary.
No matter how you look at it, he's up a creek without a paddle. None only did he violate the espionage law, but he also violated a contractual agreement with the law firm he worked at. Once he's convicted, he can probably count on a civil suit filed by the law firm.
Well, surely he has the most learned navel on the face of the planet. :-) I had a similar experience with someone who couldn't speak English well enough. He would say a sentence and leave out a word that he didn't know, pantomiming to get the class to guess the word. I ended up dropping the class (along with several others) and reporting the situation to the dean. He seemed to know the course material pretty well, but probably needed some language lessons before being allowed to teach.
It depends on the quality of the demo. I've seen several demonstrations. Some of them were so bad that I walked away during the demo. Others left me drooling for the technology. But, alas, it's still the price tag that keeps me from buying. The awesome picture is not worth that much to me. I'm still holding out for a time when 60" flatscreens drop below $2000. If and when that happens, I'm in.