A few years ago I bought a camera tripod from a small specialist British company... It gets lots of regular (ab)use and is doing brilliantly. About a year after I bought it, I happened to see what looked like a mirror copy, only smaller, being sold on Amazon's web site.
With no more knowledge of the original company than having purchased one of their products direct, I picked up the phone and gave the company a call. Because it was a small British company at the time, the person who answered the phone turned out to be one of the owners... and we got talking. It turns out that he'd taken a phone call from Amazon one day, with the Amazon person saying something to the effect of,
"We've got a solid demand for your product, people asking us for something exactly like your current model range and enough to provide about £100,000 of orders. We're going to buy your product in bulk and sell it, and here are the terms you're going to agree to..." [ I'm exaggerating to make the point].
The small British company decided that they did not want to sell through Amazon, but, believe it or not, ensuring that this happened ended up taking a court case which - despite the win - cost this company a *vast* amount of time and money. In response, Amazon went out and started to purchase rip-off clones from a Chinese manufacturing supplier... Amazon are still selling the rip-off model on their site... This sort of scenario is going to be applicable in every case, of course.
By now, Amazon will know that some of the products they are selling infringe on original product designs from other companies, but in some cases there may be more to the story than Amazon simply being an innocent victim.
As others have identified, this will simply generate tit-for-tat trolling.
A much better idea would be to select, from the existing sub-set of moderators, a group who can then monitor moderator activity, with a view to looking for any abuses.
Finally, Slashdot staff could then moderate the super-moderators, just to be sure.
And for what it's worth, the moderation system here on Slashdot is already orders of magnitude better than, say, Ars Technica, where anyone can vote on every post, and you end up with exactly the sort of down-vote trolling that others have raised as a concern to the original suggestion that started this thread.
Secondly, the one thing that surprised me during the technical outage was that no acknowledgement message was posted. The site remained up and previous posts remained visible, but there was a long window in which it looked as though nothing was happening. That was, of course, not the case.
So my suggestion would be to take a leaf out of any good DR (Disaster Recovery) playbook: "Communicate early and often". Obviously we hope that you don't experience another outage like this again, but perhaps one thing you might like to consider would be to put in place some form of mechanism that would let you redirect your visitors to a "status update page" that you could periodically amend to let people know what is happening.
Obviously the need to do so is less than a retail web shop, but at the same time, the revenue you generate from on-screen advertising depends on visitors. You likely wouldn't want your regulars to give up...
I keep my music library on a QNAP NAS box - which is also available to my Windows PC[s] and my Linux Mint workstation. I always buy my audio on CD and import to iTunes using Apple Lossless, which means that I can play the music back using Rhythmbox.
Apart from the fact that iTunes can make a pretty awful mess of the way that it lays out files from "compilation" CDs [ARGH!], I have ZERO problem playing any of the content using Rhythmbox. I've never known the Rhythmbox library to become corrupted - and even if it did, all I need to do is delete one single file and re-launch the program and, voila!, my library rebuilds itself in about 3 minutes. [OK, sounds like a lot time, but then Rhythmbox is currently reporting 970 albums and 11,242 songs, so it does take a while to scan across that lot, even on a NAS...]
There is something unutterably stupid about the way that Apple's iTunes maintains it's library - and, worst of all, it does this in a way that is fragile, hard to detect breakage sometimes, and difficult to repair. It really does need a ground-up rewrite by people who know what they're doing... Unlikely in my lifetime, sadly...
I guess that when something gets under your skin, it's going to chafe no matter what you do. Maybe that moment stood out in Corey's recollection and now he simply can't see past it.
On the one hand: Meh. On the other hand, when the film in question is an MCU Production, which means that their budget is bonkers and their QA checking should be flawless, it's very [very] rare for this sort of thing to creep in, so perhaps it just seems a bit more egregious when we see it.
I mean, if you look back at the gaffs in, say the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, with Legolas shooting not-arrows, with Gimli riding behind then in front then behind of Legolas [when they set out with Aragorn to muster the undead to the battle of Pelennor Fields]... I could go on, but the point is that even the most carefully crafted movie is going to have bloopers that make it in to production.
In the case of this specific example, however, it really looked to me to be more like in-fill than CGI. I reckon this was touch-up work. But: it's not going to spoil my enjoyment of the movie...
I did as Corey Hutchinson suggested and watched that moment in the clip, carefully, maybe a dozen or more times.
I'm most assuredly not a CGI specialist, or even anything to do with film or television. However, I would hazard a guess: the crew shot that clip as part of the entire end-to-end series of shots needed to complete that portion of the story. Then, when they got the prints back and were looking at it in editing, they realised that something which happened on the balcony [i.e. the second guy getting shot] simply didn't work as they wanted it to.
For reasons we don't understand, they then set up a green-screen shot and had an actor repeat the moves as if being shot directly, then composited it in to the main take. Unlike Corey, I don't think that what we see is a CGI moment, I think it's a human actor painted back in during editing.
Does this quality as CGI or the over-use of CGI? I'm going to argue the negative and offer two reasons:-
1. I don't think this is CGI per se. I think this is two sequences shot separately and then brought together via compositing.
2. We have no way of knowing what the original shot looked like. But I'll give Marvel's editing team the benefit of the doubt and take on faith that this was the "least worst option". Marvel aren't in the habit of deliberately screwing up one of there movies when they have a better way on hand. [ Speaking of which, that would likely have been a complete re-shoot of that scene. We simply have no way of knowing if that was even possible... ]
My first Apple purchase was a Mac Mini with an Intel Core Duo CPU, 160Gb laptop HDD and (I think) 4Gb RAM. Since then I've purchased various other Apple devices (including iPods, iPads and an iPhone 7). According to my records, "Apple spend" has made up about 31% of my total hardware budget since the Mini.
One thing I've noticed change at Apple over that period of time is that, since the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a slow but steady decline in quality and reliability from Apple products. That's not to say that they were immune before he left us, just that there appears, subjectively, to be deterioration in QA over at Apple.
I write this not as an Apple Fanboi nor an Apple Basher: my current iPad (Pro, 10") is probably the most-used piece of technology I've ever owned, but on the other hand last weekend saw me swearing in disbelief at my Mac Mini : having gone to it to update my iPhone and iPad software, I discovered that, somehow, iTunes had decided to unilaterally "lose" the artwork for about 20-25% of my music collection. Of 900 albums. I've already spent a good 90 minutes trying to repair that damage and have a *long* way to go yet...
My experience to date has been that when I made my first Apple purchase, the company had a reputation for high prices but excellent quality. Today, the high prices remain but the quality appears to be disappearing rapidly. Issues with iTunes Artwork, iCloud replication, corruption of the iOS Address Book, a Mac Mini update that bricked the machine, iTunes that can't cope with it's media database on a network-connected drive; the list goes on - and that's just since Christmas 2017...
Apple really needs to get back to basics. If it can't sell reliable product, then no matter how shiny it is, people won't buy.
Lots of interesting additional material here, but I'd just like to make one key observation. You have responded to a statement that I did not make.
At no point did I claim that Clinton ran a surplus. I'm not qualified as a forensic auditor, so any attempt on my part to try and interpret or argue the addition material you share here is, I think, a wasted exercise. I was actually looking at this from a slightly different perspective - and ironically one I see being mirrored in the UK at the moment.
What I took from the numbers in my linked post, specifically for George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush was that, in each of these successive Presidencies, the US National Debt increased. However, looking at the amounts by which it increased, I concluded [perhaps incorrectly] that Clinton had either cut Federal spending and/or increased Federal tax receipts to the point where the rate of increase of National Debt was being curbed.
To my way of thinking, this could have given President George W. Bush a truly golden opportunity. For example, instead of instigating the tax cuts and increasing federal spending [for things like military expenditure], had he chosen to continue or even improve upon the changes introduced by Clinton, then in theory the US *could* have achieved annual budget surplus well before the end of his term. He didn't; the rest is history.
I hope these don't come across as partisan or party political observations - I absolutely don't mean for them to be. Instead, I am looking at this, if you will, from the perspective of someone responsible for a household budget. I know that I can't continue to outspend household income - because my bank won't stand it. However, the rules seem to change when it is a government doing the borrowing and not a private individual or a company. It's different because the "collateral" that a government puts up against the "borrowing" [i.e. the debt] is, effectively, the ability of her citizens to keep on paying taxes. Since that's "a given", our societal and financial systems seem to allow this to happen. None of which makes it sensible.
I remember seeing a comment reported on the UK news during the most heated moments of the 2008 financial crisis, [when the UK deficit ballooned from £160 Billion to £322 Billion], and a member of a government from South America was interviewed by the press. [Might of been Colombia, might have been Chile - can't remember]. The reporter asked "Are you concerned for your country about this debt crisis?" The answer was, "No. We understand that there are good years and lean years. During the strong years we make provisions and pay down debt. During the lean years those previous actions protect us." [ I'm simplifying, but only slightly].
We're not doing that. We haven't learned the lessons of 2008. I hope we wake up before we see history repeat...
1. The Vermont Public Utility Commission issue a new 11-year permit for Comcast to operate in Vermont.
2. Vermont sue the Vermont Public Utility Commission, because the terms on offer are unappealing?
Well, surely, if Comcast don't like it, Comcast are entirely free to decline to accept the new permit and step away from offering their services, in order to allow a competitor - who will meet the requirements - take over?
No?
I wonder why the likes of Comcast don't just skip over all this dull and boring intermediate legal wrangle nonsense and just file a case in each state which says, "We demand the right to receive monies and make a profit just from saying we operate in this State."
I mean, they're pretty much there already, right? They just haven't used such a concise form of words...
... can we take another look at the definition of the working week?
I'm pretty sure that most of the folks who vote in the EU parliament don't work five days a week or more. So how about we declare that Friday is actually part of a 3-day weekend and that the working week is only 4 days long?
Given the amount of time I'm asked to spend in pointless meetings each week, if I could schedule those to run back-to-back on a Friday I could achieve this with at worst zero drop in productivity...
I'd rather we did this than worry about the time of day...
If you go back far enough into gaming history [back to when Bill Gates was running Microsoft, before Ballmer took over], you would get to a heated competition between two graphics APIs. First, there was OpenGL, the "Open Graphics Library", which is somewhat self-declarative. The other was "DirectX", which was driven and maintained by Microsoft.
IIRC, in the very earliest of days, Microsoft actually supported OpenGL, but then spun away from that and created their own API, DirectX [which they still support].
Now the main reason that Microsoft switched from OpenGL to DirectX was because OpenGL was supported by other Operating Systems, not just Windows. Which meant that games would be available for those platforms, which meant, ultimately, that OpenGL became a lever to threaten Windows... So that's why MS eventually wrote their own. The problem that they created for themselves was that they had to suddenly convince games studios to support their new API. And, in it's early days, DirectX was not well understood, not well supported and, well, a bit clunky.
To help bring what we'd now call Triple-A titles to DirectX/Windows, Microsoft actually had teams of developers who would literally go to game studios and offer to port their game code to DirectX, for free. . And that's how DirectX became the dominant API in the gaming space, eventually killing off OpenGL in all but name.
Once MIcrosoft had the two main graphics card manufacturers on board with this [now nVidia and AMD] the natural evolution was to take this model - at least in part - and apply it to other peripherals. So around the time that Creative moved on to the X-Fi hardware platform from their earlier, non-PCI-based cards, so Microsoft began working with Creative on driver development. The particularly observant might have noticed or might remember that there was a marketing campaign at the time, "Runs on Windows". This was, in essence, a program in which Microsoft financially contributed to the marketing and advertising for peripheral makers... However - and here I need to stress that I've never seen the terms of any contract Microsoft produced [NDA and all that], there was a lot of scuttlebutt at the time to suggest that in the small print of these support deals was a clause that basically said, "Terms will be void if you develop or provide support for your hardware for any Microsoft competitor OS" [or equivalent].
Now, that was a very different Microsoft, so we have no way of knowing why any well-respected hardware manufacturer would make life difficult for the Open Source community, but the inference was that this was just very simple, very basic market forces. Microsoft didn't want to invest their time, money and effort in a company not dedicated to supporting Windows, and had a cheque book big enough to help make sure that happened.
Does this apply here? Not sure. Not even sure that this history is entirely accurate as I've represented it. If you really wanted the skinny on this sort of thing, the man to ask would be Greg Kroar-Hartman. If anyone in the OS community would know what's going on, he would. [Although his role moves around a bit, he was the guy who led the "Device Driver" program for Linux during key periods of this history.
Really, *really* disappointed your reply got down-voted to a zero score. I think this is an entirely fair and insightful response.
In fact, the only thing you state which I'm not in complete agreement with [because I just don't have the facts to understand the accuracy of the statement] is when you say that the US is "very far from being unable to service the national debt".
I'm not doubting the truth of what you write, but I'm less certain about the way that conditions might have to change before that statement becomes false. Here's why... I think that a nation as large and economically powerful as the US can continue to plough forwards on momentum even when the underlying economy starts to soften. By cutting taxes without reducing spending it is possible to give a short-term, "in your pocket" sense of prosperity all the while building up a debt burden. The longer that burden exists for, the bigger it grows, the harder it will be to deal with.
Although it's "before my time", I'm aware of what happened to the United Kingdom in the 1970s, when the UK economy hit problems. The country got to a point where they simply couldn't afford any tax cuts, but the economy wasn't generating enough income. The response was to inflate their way out of trouble by literally printing money and generating inflation - which they thought they could control - to "jump-start" the economy. It didn't work out quite as expected and took decades to recover.
Not being an economist I can't say whether or not the current US economy has a similar profile, but I think it should be fair to say that cutting taxes and maintaining spending, whilst pushing up the US national debt, is an unsustainable model.
I'm not a US citizen, so US party politics is not something that matters a great deal to me. I wasn't sure if there were documented facts concerning debt levels and US Presidents, so I went digging and came up with this:-
It's a single source, so of course could be complete hogwash, but it's a start. According to the records there, every single US president all the way back to Herbert Hoover [directly before Franklin D. Roosevelt] added to the US Debt.
Unfortunately, even these figures don't tell the whole story, because we have to consider both debt and deficit, in which the former is the amount the US owes, and the latter is the rate with which the former is changing.
I make this distinction because, in recent memory, Bill Clinton has been the only US president who has actually decelerated the increase in US national debt. When he left office [IIRC] he did so leaving his successor, George W. Bush, with a tiny budgetary surplus. It's also instructive to look at the scale of the change in the debt position between Presidents. For example, George H.W. Bush left office with a national debt 54% greater than the one he inherited. Bill Clinton had trimmed that to a 32% increase. George W. Bush doubled-down on his Father's spending policies and managed a 101% increase in national debt. In the case of the two Bush Presidents, the increases were likely driven mainly by military spending to support the wars that they started.
Now, I'd absolutely have to agree with you if we look at Obama's record. He added $7.917 trillion to the US national debt, a 68% increase, which puts him somewhere between Bush Father and Bush Son and way beyond Clinton's record. However, it has to be remembered that Obama won office in late 2008 and became President in Januaru 2009. In other words, less than 6 months after the 2008 financial crash had really hit home.
What Obama did during his 8 years in office was, in economic terms, kick the can down the road. These are unarguable facts - the record speaks for itself. The reason *why* this is the case is obviously going to be highly partisan and subject to fierce debate. But the fact remains that the chief reason that Obama's record on the economy stands where it does is simply because he inherited one of the worst financial crises in living memory from his predecessor. The damage was done during the 8 years that George W. Bush spent in office [with increased military spending and tax cuts]. Obama just papered over the cracks and kicked the can down the road.
But the record is pretty clear - with the exception of Coolidge and Warren Harding [who served immediately before him] every US President from the First World War to the present day has added to the US debt.
In the linked article, the author seems to be making an argument that one benefit of using Snap Apps is that, particularly with LTS releases, there comes a point at which package maintainers simply stop providing "new" packages for a release which may have been generally available for two or more years.
If I understand this particular argument, the author is making a case that "snap apps" have the ability to "stay current" - something which may be relevant for software packages on fairly short release cycles, such as browsers [Firefox] or office suites [LibreOffice].
But what is not clear from this section of the article is whether snaps contain some inherent functionality that makes them more suitable for this than traditional Debian-pased.deb packages. Can anyone help clarify this, just to give the article some context please?
I think you might be half-right when you state that this isn't the way the law works. You're example about North Korea's ability to censor any Western criticism of Kim Jong-Un is, I would say, about right.
The EU observed that when they wrote the GDPR, so they structured their law differently. The law applies to any company which has business dealings within the EU - i.e. a financial stake in the EU. Obviously that includes companies such as Google and Facebook and a host of others. The GDPR says, in effect, "If you do business in any state, then you are bound by this law."
By writing the law this way, the EU can make it effective. The consequences of the law are that the companies concerned, if they break the law, can be forced to pay fines of up to 20 Million Euros, or 4% of annual, global turnover, whichever is the higher. In other words: "It is entirely up to you whether or not you do business in the EU. But if you do, you implicitly agree to be bound by this law. Break this law and you can be fund up to 4% of annual global turnover."
In 2017, Facebook's reported annual turnover was just over 40 billion dollars [US]. Applying the GDPR penalties to this means that Facebook could be fined up to 1.6 billion if they break the law. That might sound like a lot, but remember that BP was fined $20.8 billion for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Entirely unrelated transgressions [which makes direct comparison mostly meaningless] that show the range of penalties being levied for the DPGR are still relatively small in corporate terms.
I've read reports that the Russian Government has the ability to mess with backbone internet routers, done in such a way that traffic that would normally route around Russia is tweaked in such a way that the traffic flows through the Russian internet backbone - the inference being that this would allow the capture and inspection of that traffic. Obviously you have to consider the sources - something I'm just not in a position to validate or disprove.
If this is actually, technically possible, then I suppose that there is a narrow chance that you are observing the side effects of this sort of manipulation. It isn't entirely clear to me what consequences would occur if one were to reprogram backbone routers, hacking the OSPF tables to move traffic around the net. But it does introduce the possibility of an explanation for what you're seeing...
Yes - and we can set our technology to automate this for us.
Unfortunately, it is no longer enough. Our local ISPs - who are utterly corrupt - are not only selling details that connect us as individual households to our IP address leases, but also are using our billing records to join the dots to our postal location and home address...
If I try and access slashdot on my iPad, I notice that some of the served advertisements [those from Tamboola and others] are geographically specific to within 5 miles of my home address. I've discussed this with my ISP, who are presently trying to claim that they allocate IP blocks on a location-by-location basis. I'm presently trying to determine if this is the truth [which I doubt] and if not true this would go a long way to confirming my suspicions.
However, if your identity can be ascertained from the moment you connect, even a daily purge of your network access technology simply won't be enough.
Lastly, if you haven't already tried it, take a look at panopticlick, from the EFF, here:-
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
It is a really effective way of determining whether or not your web browsing setup of choice can be used to track you based on nothing more than the configuration of the browser.
Unfortunately, whilst I do agree with the sentiment that the largest web monopolies such as Google and Facebook need to have their all-pervasive monitoring addressed, I do not believe that any change will come via meaningful government legislation.
The reason is simple. Today, governments around the world can turn up at the doorstep of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others with a National Security Letter (NSL) and demand information in a way that the companies concerned are prohibited from discussing. In other words, it is in the interests of governments all around the world to allow these companies to become private extensions of the surveillance state. It's also much cheaper for the governments concerned - they can demand access by law - and at zero cost to them...
Unfortunately, that "cost angle" adds another twist, another dimension to this picture. In the case of the very largest providers concerned, governments know that the costs incurred from answering NSLs can soon become very, very expensive. Now, governments are not going to want to upset these companies to the point where they start to resist such demands [witness the Microsoft defense against the servers located in the Irish Republic], so said governments need to find a way to "sweeten" the deal. I have no knowledge of what they might be willing to do in such scenarios, but I am inclined to look at, for example, the case of Microsoft's purchase of both Skype and Hotmail.
When Microsoft made the purchases, these two companies were still in early growth stages and (IIRC) neither were operating at a profit. In the case of both acquisition, Microsoft then had to spend a very considerable sum of money to make changes. In the case of Skype, for instance, they changed the infrastructure model so that all calls, instead of being point-to-point, were re-routed via Microsoft's own internal servers, so Microsoft then had the potential [if required] to intercept and/or record Skype calls. So the question becomes: how do you make such a deal attractive to Microsoft?
Perhaps - again, I don't have any evidence of this - as a government you might be willing to strike a deal with respect to Corporation Tax? Or to award contracts? Or both? The point being that, ultimately, the relationship between these internet giants and the governments who are supposed to regulate them is already far too cozy for us to consider the relationship as "formal and polite"...
Add to this the truly massive amount of money and resource these companies can afford to spend on lobbying and you start to get an understanding of how unlikely meaningful government regulation can be. In fact, ironically, only the EU, which isn't a single government and which doesn't have the power to tax these corporations directly, seems to have been remotely successful in trying to curb their powers. And even their successes have been extremely limited.
I'm not a US citizen so not directly impacted by this specific discussion, but something which interests me about it is the apparent argument [from the dealers] that there is something uniquely special about an automotive purchase that requires that all such transactions cannot happen directly with the manufacturer and must go through the dealer. Why is this?
It can't be simply transaction value: huge numbers of new homes are built every year, many sold by agents and not by the builders.
It can't be because it's a mechanical device or has an engine in it: motor boats and motor yachts are sold every year - many for prices far higher than cars - without enforcing dealership based purchase.
Maybe it's because the dealers can continue to gouge their clients for years and years - on servicing and a raft of other things. Maybe it's because it allows for artificial control of used vehicle pricing.
Bottom line is: there doesn't seem to be any established or practical precedent that explains *why* motor vehicle dealers think they have such a unique use case as to grant them this special dispensation.
IIRC, the brain is pretty much the only organ in the body able to directly ingest and consume glucose from the blood stream; all the other parts of the body have to wait for glucose to be broken down into simpler compounds which they can then use. However, it's also been widely known that an overdose of glucose in the blood can be unhelpful/harmful. But it's one of the reason that people who conduct intellectually demanding work - i.e. work with a dependency on lots of cognitive processing - have a sweet tooth.
The point you raise consumed what felt like literally hours of court time during the pre-bankruptcy hearings presided over by Judge Kimball and Magistrate Judge Wells.
There is a helpful article on Groklaw which covers this point:-
in which there is discussion of an expression used by Magistrate Judge Wells during an evidentiary hearing. The analogy she used was that The SCO Group were essentially trying to perform the equivalent of accusing a shoplifter from stealing from Neiman Marcus [a US catalogue-based retailer, for non-US readers]. The Magistrate Judge basically told The SCO Group that what they were trying to do was (in accusing IBM of being the "shoplifter") say, "This thing we claim you stole. It's in the catalogue. You figure it out."
The two legal Teams (BSF for The SCO Group and CSM - Cravath, Swaine and Moore - for IBM) duelled on this point during the hearing, with IBM actually using the BSF/TSG cited cases against them, showing that the cases proved the opposite of what BSF/TSG were claiming. Even this wasn't enough to have the claims thrown out by the Magistrate Judge.
I would venture that the only reason that these claims remain and that this entire fiasco is still underway is simply because the original TSG filed for Chapter 11 literally just before a definitive ruling from Judge Kimball that would have blown their case out of the water. I'll go further: TSG filed for bankruptcy when they did precisely because they knew that the ruling would go against them and would sink their case. Their hope was that they could file for Chapter 11, swim along beneath the surface for a bit, then return with a new argument or new case when Judge Kimball got re-assigned. What they hadn't banked on was Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross deciding that the reason that The SCO Group got in such a mess was because of mis-management and deciding to appoint a Trustee. In some cases, after all, the Chapter 11 company is allowed to continue under existing management but simply with a protection-from-creditors shield in place long enough for them to be able to dig themselves out from under their troubles. Useful for legitimate Chapter 11 claimants, after all...
I'm bound to mention, as an aside, that in the view of this observer there was something decidedly fishy about the appointment of the Trustee, Cahn. During one of the bankruptcy hearings, Judge Gross made a comment on his decision to appoint a Trustee along the lines of: "Given the nature of the circumstances of this applicant - and the legal nature of their worries - it would be nice if we could find a Trustee with, I don't know, some form of legal background..."
And then, as if by magic, along comes (retired) Judge Cahn to save the day...
What followed - and again, in the view of this observer - was a relationship between Gross and Cahn which stretched the boundaries of due process. It would be an exaggeration for me to say that Judge Gross was fawning over the opinions of Judge Cahn, but it was abundantly clear that the former held the latter in the highest of regard and was entirely willing to let Judge Cahn do pretty much whatever he asked for - the rulings were getting signed off thick and fast and every bit as quickly as they were made.
In a situation like this it is true to say that there were losers all round, but the one thing I found most egregious were the "incidental" victims. For example, I recall that one of the creditors [who didn't get a dime, all the while Judge Cahn paid his own company to conduct legal research into the court case] was a small Mom-and-Pop pizzeria, not far from TSGs offices, who had provided the company with "pizzas on account". I just came away with this vision of Darl McBride and Co all sat round a meeting room table, with open pizza boxes piled high while they filled their faces, only to have them chortling
This is an entirely valid question, but, I suspect, a dangerous legal principle.
Imagine a scenario where a plaintiff were seriously ill or otherwise unable to act... or a mirror of this case, but one in which the plaintiff actually had a legitimate complaint and weren't a shake-down artist. In these alternate scenarios, we'd want the law to give the party the time they needed to move their case forward. So I think that, for these reasons, a court will default to a position where it will allow the time if required.
Where a Court would not entertain this [at least, only up to a point] would be a scenario in which a plaintiff was claiming injury and claiming to have evidence, but then failed to provide it in a timely manner. This, it is worth noting, is entirely the approach taken by The SCO Group in their original case and entirely the bluff that Judge Dale A. Kimball [quite rightly] called.
I would suspect [I don't know, IANAL] that a legal system will always presume good faith until such time as there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a reasonable course of action, after all, since to do otherwise would attract the criticism of bias and lead to decisions being overturned on appeal. [It's worth noting, by the way, that when his orders for summary judgement were overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal in the original TSG vs. IBM case, Judge Kimball recused himself: it was his way of respectfully acknowledging: "I've made an error of legal judgement here and my decision has been over-ridden by my peers. Given this evidence of bias I must step away from the case..." If only some of the plaintiffs in cases acted with this sort of honour... A slightly different take on the principle of "Good Faith", but Judge Kimball likely recused himself to avoid any [baseless, IMHO] suggestions of bad faith...
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago I bought a camera tripod from a small specialist British company... It gets lots of regular (ab)use and is doing brilliantly. About a year after I bought it, I happened to see what looked like a mirror copy, only smaller, being sold on Amazon's web site.
With no more knowledge of the original company than having purchased one of their products direct, I picked up the phone and gave the company a call. Because it was a small British company at the time, the person who answered the phone turned out to be one of the owners... and we got talking. It turns out that he'd taken a phone call from Amazon one day, with the Amazon person saying something to the effect of,
"We've got a solid demand for your product, people asking us for something exactly like your current model range and enough to provide about £100,000 of orders. We're going to buy your product in bulk and sell it, and here are the terms you're going to agree to..." [ I'm exaggerating to make the point].
The small British company decided that they did not want to sell through Amazon, but, believe it or not, ensuring that this happened ended up taking a court case which - despite the win - cost this company a *vast* amount of time and money. In response, Amazon went out and started to purchase rip-off clones from a Chinese manufacturing supplier... Amazon are still selling the rip-off model on their site... This sort of scenario is going to be applicable in every case, of course.
By now, Amazon will know that some of the products they are selling infringe on original product designs from other companies, but in some cases there may be more to the story than Amazon simply being an innocent victim.
As others have identified, this will simply generate tit-for-tat trolling.
A much better idea would be to select, from the existing sub-set of moderators, a group who can then monitor moderator activity, with a view to looking for any abuses.
Finally, Slashdot staff could then moderate the super-moderators, just to be sure.
And for what it's worth, the moderation system here on Slashdot is already orders of magnitude better than, say, Ars Technica, where anyone can vote on every post, and you end up with exactly the sort of down-vote trolling that others have raised as a concern to the original suggestion that started this thread.
Firstly, good to see Slashdot is back.
Secondly, the one thing that surprised me during the technical outage was that no acknowledgement message was posted. The site remained up and previous posts remained visible, but there was a long window in which it looked as though nothing was happening. That was, of course, not the case.
So my suggestion would be to take a leaf out of any good DR (Disaster Recovery) playbook: "Communicate early and often". Obviously we hope that you don't experience another outage like this again, but perhaps one thing you might like to consider would be to put in place some form of mechanism that would let you redirect your visitors to a "status update page" that you could periodically amend to let people know what is happening.
Obviously the need to do so is less than a retail web shop, but at the same time, the revenue you generate from on-screen advertising depends on visitors. You likely wouldn't want your regulars to give up...
Thank you, I will.
But here's the odd thing, right...
I keep my music library on a QNAP NAS box - which is also available to my Windows PC[s] and my Linux Mint workstation. I always buy my audio on CD and import to iTunes using Apple Lossless, which means that I can play the music back using Rhythmbox.
Apart from the fact that iTunes can make a pretty awful mess of the way that it lays out files from "compilation" CDs [ARGH!], I have ZERO problem playing any of the content using Rhythmbox. I've never known the Rhythmbox library to become corrupted - and even if it did, all I need to do is delete one single file and re-launch the program and, voila!, my library rebuilds itself in about 3 minutes. [OK, sounds like a lot time, but then Rhythmbox is currently reporting 970 albums and 11,242 songs, so it does take a while to scan across that lot, even on a NAS...]
There is something unutterably stupid about the way that Apple's iTunes maintains it's library - and, worst of all, it does this in a way that is fragile, hard to detect breakage sometimes, and difficult to repair. It really does need a ground-up rewrite by people who know what they're doing... Unlikely in my lifetime, sadly...
Well. Yes.
I guess that when something gets under your skin, it's going to chafe no matter what you do. Maybe that moment stood out in Corey's recollection and now he simply can't see past it.
On the one hand: Meh. On the other hand, when the film in question is an MCU Production, which means that their budget is bonkers and their QA checking should be flawless, it's very [very] rare for this sort of thing to creep in, so perhaps it just seems a bit more egregious when we see it.
I mean, if you look back at the gaffs in, say the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, with Legolas shooting not-arrows, with Gimli riding behind then in front then behind of Legolas [when they set out with Aragorn to muster the undead to the battle of Pelennor Fields]... I could go on, but the point is that even the most carefully crafted movie is going to have bloopers that make it in to production.
In the case of this specific example, however, it really looked to me to be more like in-fill than CGI. I reckon this was touch-up work. But: it's not going to spoil my enjoyment of the movie...
I did as Corey Hutchinson suggested and watched that moment in the clip, carefully, maybe a dozen or more times.
I'm most assuredly not a CGI specialist, or even anything to do with film or television. However, I would hazard a guess: the crew shot that clip as part of the entire end-to-end series of shots needed to complete that portion of the story. Then, when they got the prints back and were looking at it in editing, they realised that something which happened on the balcony [i.e. the second guy getting shot] simply didn't work as they wanted it to.
For reasons we don't understand, they then set up a green-screen shot and had an actor repeat the moves as if being shot directly, then composited it in to the main take. Unlike Corey, I don't think that what we see is a CGI moment, I think it's a human actor painted back in during editing.
Does this quality as CGI or the over-use of CGI? I'm going to argue the negative and offer two reasons:-
1. I don't think this is CGI per se. I think this is two sequences shot separately and then brought together via compositing.
2. We have no way of knowing what the original shot looked like. But I'll give Marvel's editing team the benefit of the doubt and take on faith that this was the "least worst option". Marvel aren't in the habit of deliberately screwing up one of there movies when they have a better way on hand. [ Speaking of which, that would likely have been a complete re-shoot of that scene. We simply have no way of knowing if that was even possible... ]
My first Apple purchase was a Mac Mini with an Intel Core Duo CPU, 160Gb laptop HDD and (I think) 4Gb RAM. Since then I've purchased various other Apple devices (including iPods, iPads and an iPhone 7). According to my records, "Apple spend" has made up about 31% of my total hardware budget since the Mini.
One thing I've noticed change at Apple over that period of time is that, since the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a slow but steady decline in quality and reliability from Apple products. That's not to say that they were immune before he left us, just that there appears, subjectively, to be deterioration in QA over at Apple.
I write this not as an Apple Fanboi nor an Apple Basher: my current iPad (Pro, 10") is probably the most-used piece of technology I've ever owned, but on the other hand last weekend saw me swearing in disbelief at my Mac Mini : having gone to it to update my iPhone and iPad software, I discovered that, somehow, iTunes had decided to unilaterally "lose" the artwork for about 20-25% of my music collection. Of 900 albums. I've already spent a good 90 minutes trying to repair that damage and have a *long* way to go yet...
My experience to date has been that when I made my first Apple purchase, the company had a reputation for high prices but excellent quality. Today, the high prices remain but the quality appears to be disappearing rapidly. Issues with iTunes Artwork, iCloud replication, corruption of the iOS Address Book, a Mac Mini update that bricked the machine, iTunes that can't cope with it's media database on a network-connected drive; the list goes on - and that's just since Christmas 2017...
Apple really needs to get back to basics. If it can't sell reliable product, then no matter how shiny it is, people won't buy.
Hal,
Lots of interesting additional material here, but I'd just like to make one key observation. You have responded to a statement that I did not make.
At no point did I claim that Clinton ran a surplus. I'm not qualified as a forensic auditor, so any attempt on my part to try and interpret or argue the addition material you share here is, I think, a wasted exercise. I was actually looking at this from a slightly different perspective - and ironically one I see being mirrored in the UK at the moment.
What I took from the numbers in my linked post, specifically for George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush was that, in each of these successive Presidencies, the US National Debt increased. However, looking at the amounts by which it increased, I concluded [perhaps incorrectly] that Clinton had either cut Federal spending and/or increased Federal tax receipts to the point where the rate of increase of National Debt was being curbed.
To my way of thinking, this could have given President George W. Bush a truly golden opportunity. For example, instead of instigating the tax cuts and increasing federal spending [for things like military expenditure], had he chosen to continue or even improve upon the changes introduced by Clinton, then in theory the US *could* have achieved annual budget surplus well before the end of his term. He didn't; the rest is history.
I hope these don't come across as partisan or party political observations - I absolutely don't mean for them to be. Instead, I am looking at this, if you will, from the perspective of someone responsible for a household budget. I know that I can't continue to outspend household income - because my bank won't stand it. However, the rules seem to change when it is a government doing the borrowing and not a private individual or a company. It's different because the "collateral" that a government puts up against the "borrowing" [i.e. the debt] is, effectively, the ability of her citizens to keep on paying taxes. Since that's "a given", our societal and financial systems seem to allow this to happen. None of which makes it sensible.
I remember seeing a comment reported on the UK news during the most heated moments of the 2008 financial crisis, [when the UK deficit ballooned from £160 Billion to £322 Billion], and a member of a government from South America was interviewed by the press. [Might of been Colombia, might have been Chile - can't remember]. The reporter asked "Are you concerned for your country about this debt crisis?" The answer was, "No. We understand that there are good years and lean years. During the strong years we make provisions and pay down debt. During the lean years those previous actions protect us." [ I'm simplifying, but only slightly].
We're not doing that. We haven't learned the lessons of 2008. I hope we wake up before we see history repeat...
Tell you what - let's do both.
So the timing here is:-
1. The Vermont Public Utility Commission issue a new 11-year permit for Comcast to operate in Vermont.
2. Vermont sue the Vermont Public Utility Commission, because the terms on offer are unappealing?
Well, surely, if Comcast don't like it, Comcast are entirely free to decline to accept the new permit and step away from offering their services, in order to allow a competitor - who will meet the requirements - take over?
No?
I wonder why the likes of Comcast don't just skip over all this dull and boring intermediate legal wrangle nonsense and just file a case in each state which says, "We demand the right to receive monies and make a profit just from saying we operate in this State."
I mean, they're pretty much there already, right? They just haven't used such a concise form of words...
... can we take another look at the definition of the working week?
I'm pretty sure that most of the folks who vote in the EU parliament don't work five days a week or more. So how about we declare that Friday is actually part of a 3-day weekend and that the working week is only 4 days long?
Given the amount of time I'm asked to spend in pointless meetings each week, if I could schedule those to run back-to-back on a Friday I could achieve this with at worst zero drop in productivity...
I'd rather we did this than worry about the time of day...
... Wally, from the Dilbert Cartoon strip?
If you go back far enough into gaming history [back to when Bill Gates was running Microsoft, before Ballmer took over], you would get to a heated competition between two graphics APIs. First, there was OpenGL, the "Open Graphics Library", which is somewhat self-declarative. The other was "DirectX", which was driven and maintained by Microsoft.
IIRC, in the very earliest of days, Microsoft actually supported OpenGL, but then spun away from that and created their own API, DirectX [which they still support].
Now the main reason that Microsoft switched from OpenGL to DirectX was because OpenGL was supported by other Operating Systems, not just Windows. Which meant that games would be available for those platforms, which meant, ultimately, that OpenGL became a lever to threaten Windows... So that's why MS eventually wrote their own. The problem that they created for themselves was that they had to suddenly convince games studios to support their new API. And, in it's early days, DirectX was not well understood, not well supported and, well, a bit clunky.
To help bring what we'd now call Triple-A titles to DirectX/Windows, Microsoft actually had teams of developers who would literally go to game studios and offer to port their game code to DirectX, for free. . And that's how DirectX became the dominant API in the gaming space, eventually killing off OpenGL in all but name.
Once MIcrosoft had the two main graphics card manufacturers on board with this [now nVidia and AMD] the natural evolution was to take this model - at least in part - and apply it to other peripherals. So around the time that Creative moved on to the X-Fi hardware platform from their earlier, non-PCI-based cards, so Microsoft began working with Creative on driver development. The particularly observant might have noticed or might remember that there was a marketing campaign at the time, "Runs on Windows". This was, in essence, a program in which Microsoft financially contributed to the marketing and advertising for peripheral makers... However - and here I need to stress that I've never seen the terms of any contract Microsoft produced [NDA and all that], there was a lot of scuttlebutt at the time to suggest that in the small print of these support deals was a clause that basically said, "Terms will be void if you develop or provide support for your hardware for any Microsoft competitor OS" [or equivalent].
Now, that was a very different Microsoft, so we have no way of knowing why any well-respected hardware manufacturer would make life difficult for the Open Source community, but the inference was that this was just very simple, very basic market forces. Microsoft didn't want to invest their time, money and effort in a company not dedicated to supporting Windows, and had a cheque book big enough to help make sure that happened.
Does this apply here? Not sure. Not even sure that this history is entirely accurate as I've represented it. If you really wanted the skinny on this sort of thing, the man to ask would be Greg Kroar-Hartman. If anyone in the OS community would know what's going on, he would. [Although his role moves around a bit, he was the guy who led the "Device Driver" program for Linux during key periods of this history.
Really, *really* disappointed your reply got down-voted to a zero score. I think this is an entirely fair and insightful response.
In fact, the only thing you state which I'm not in complete agreement with [because I just don't have the facts to understand the accuracy of the statement] is when you say that the US is "very far from being unable to service the national debt".
I'm not doubting the truth of what you write, but I'm less certain about the way that conditions might have to change before that statement becomes false. Here's why... I think that a nation as large and economically powerful as the US can continue to plough forwards on momentum even when the underlying economy starts to soften. By cutting taxes without reducing spending it is possible to give a short-term, "in your pocket" sense of prosperity all the while building up a debt burden. The longer that burden exists for, the bigger it grows, the harder it will be to deal with.
Although it's "before my time", I'm aware of what happened to the United Kingdom in the 1970s, when the UK economy hit problems. The country got to a point where they simply couldn't afford any tax cuts, but the economy wasn't generating enough income. The response was to inflate their way out of trouble by literally printing money and generating inflation - which they thought they could control - to "jump-start" the economy. It didn't work out quite as expected and took decades to recover.
Not being an economist I can't say whether or not the current US economy has a similar profile, but I think it should be fair to say that cutting taxes and maintaining spending, whilst pushing up the US national debt, is an unsustainable model.
I'm not a US citizen, so US party politics is not something that matters a great deal to me. I wasn't sure if there were documented facts concerning debt levels and US Presidents, so I went digging and came up with this:-
https://www.thebalance.com/us-...
It's a single source, so of course could be complete hogwash, but it's a start. According to the records there, every single US president all the way back to Herbert Hoover [directly before Franklin D. Roosevelt] added to the US Debt.
Unfortunately, even these figures don't tell the whole story, because we have to consider both debt and deficit, in which the former is the amount the US owes, and the latter is the rate with which the former is changing.
I make this distinction because, in recent memory, Bill Clinton has been the only US president who has actually decelerated the increase in US national debt. When he left office [IIRC] he did so leaving his successor, George W. Bush, with a tiny budgetary surplus. It's also instructive to look at the scale of the change in the debt position between Presidents. For example, George H.W. Bush left office with a national debt 54% greater than the one he inherited. Bill Clinton had trimmed that to a 32% increase. George W. Bush doubled-down on his Father's spending policies and managed a 101% increase in national debt. In the case of the two Bush Presidents, the increases were likely driven mainly by military spending to support the wars that they started.
Now, I'd absolutely have to agree with you if we look at Obama's record. He added $7.917 trillion to the US national debt, a 68% increase, which puts him somewhere between Bush Father and Bush Son and way beyond Clinton's record. However, it has to be remembered that Obama won office in late 2008 and became President in Januaru 2009. In other words, less than 6 months after the 2008 financial crash had really hit home.
What Obama did during his 8 years in office was, in economic terms, kick the can down the road. These are unarguable facts - the record speaks for itself. The reason *why* this is the case is obviously going to be highly partisan and subject to fierce debate. But the fact remains that the chief reason that Obama's record on the economy stands where it does is simply because he inherited one of the worst financial crises in living memory from his predecessor. The damage was done during the 8 years that George W. Bush spent in office [with increased military spending and tax cuts]. Obama just papered over the cracks and kicked the can down the road.
But the record is pretty clear - with the exception of Coolidge and Warren Harding [who served immediately before him] every US President from the First World War to the present day has added to the US debt.
In the linked article, the author seems to be making an argument that one benefit of using Snap Apps is that, particularly with LTS releases, there comes a point at which package maintainers simply stop providing "new" packages for a release which may have been generally available for two or more years.
.deb packages. Can anyone help clarify this, just to give the article some context please?
If I understand this particular argument, the author is making a case that "snap apps" have the ability to "stay current" - something which may be relevant for software packages on fairly short release cycles, such as browsers [Firefox] or office suites [LibreOffice].
But what is not clear from this section of the article is whether snaps contain some inherent functionality that makes them more suitable for this than traditional Debian-pased
Thanks.
I think you might be half-right when you state that this isn't the way the law works. You're example about North Korea's ability to censor any Western criticism of Kim Jong-Un is, I would say, about right.
The EU observed that when they wrote the GDPR, so they structured their law differently. The law applies to any company which has business dealings within the EU - i.e. a financial stake in the EU. Obviously that includes companies such as Google and Facebook and a host of others. The GDPR says, in effect, "If you do business in any state, then you are bound by this law."
By writing the law this way, the EU can make it effective. The consequences of the law are that the companies concerned, if they break the law, can be forced to pay fines of up to 20 Million Euros, or 4% of annual, global turnover, whichever is the higher . In other words: "It is entirely up to you whether or not you do business in the EU. But if you do, you implicitly agree to be bound by this law. Break this law and you can be fund up to 4% of annual global turnover."
In 2017, Facebook's reported annual turnover was just over 40 billion dollars [US]. Applying the GDPR penalties to this means that Facebook could be fined up to 1.6 billion if they break the law. That might sound like a lot, but remember that BP was fined $20.8 billion for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Entirely unrelated transgressions [which makes direct comparison mostly meaningless] that show the range of penalties being levied for the DPGR are still relatively small in corporate terms.
I've read reports that the Russian Government has the ability to mess with backbone internet routers, done in such a way that traffic that would normally route around Russia is tweaked in such a way that the traffic flows through the Russian internet backbone - the inference being that this would allow the capture and inspection of that traffic. Obviously you have to consider the sources - something I'm just not in a position to validate or disprove.
If this is actually, technically possible, then I suppose that there is a narrow chance that you are observing the side effects of this sort of manipulation. It isn't entirely clear to me what consequences would occur if one were to reprogram backbone routers, hacking the OSPF tables to move traffic around the net. But it does introduce the possibility of an explanation for what you're seeing...
Yes - and we can set our technology to automate this for us.
Unfortunately, it is no longer enough. Our local ISPs - who are utterly corrupt - are not only selling details that connect us as individual households to our IP address leases, but also are using our billing records to join the dots to our postal location and home address...
If I try and access slashdot on my iPad, I notice that some of the served advertisements [those from Tamboola and others] are geographically specific to within 5 miles of my home address. I've discussed this with my ISP, who are presently trying to claim that they allocate IP blocks on a location-by-location basis. I'm presently trying to determine if this is the truth [which I doubt] and if not true this would go a long way to confirming my suspicions.
However, if your identity can be ascertained from the moment you connect, even a daily purge of your network access technology simply won't be enough.
Lastly, if you haven't already tried it, take a look at panopticlick, from the EFF, here:- https://panopticlick.eff.org/ It is a really effective way of determining whether or not your web browsing setup of choice can be used to track you based on nothing more than the configuration of the browser.
Unfortunately, whilst I do agree with the sentiment that the largest web monopolies such as Google and Facebook need to have their all-pervasive monitoring addressed, I do not believe that any change will come via meaningful government legislation.
The reason is simple. Today, governments around the world can turn up at the doorstep of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others with a National Security Letter (NSL) and demand information in a way that the companies concerned are prohibited from discussing. In other words, it is in the interests of governments all around the world to allow these companies to become private extensions of the surveillance state. It's also much cheaper for the governments concerned - they can demand access by law - and at zero cost to them...
Unfortunately, that "cost angle" adds another twist, another dimension to this picture. In the case of the very largest providers concerned, governments know that the costs incurred from answering NSLs can soon become very, very expensive. Now, governments are not going to want to upset these companies to the point where they start to resist such demands [witness the Microsoft defense against the servers located in the Irish Republic], so said governments need to find a way to "sweeten" the deal. I have no knowledge of what they might be willing to do in such scenarios, but I am inclined to look at, for example, the case of Microsoft's purchase of both Skype and Hotmail.
When Microsoft made the purchases, these two companies were still in early growth stages and (IIRC) neither were operating at a profit. In the case of both acquisition, Microsoft then had to spend a very considerable sum of money to make changes. In the case of Skype, for instance, they changed the infrastructure model so that all calls, instead of being point-to-point, were re-routed via Microsoft's own internal servers, so Microsoft then had the potential [if required] to intercept and/or record Skype calls. So the question becomes: how do you make such a deal attractive to Microsoft?
Perhaps - again, I don't have any evidence of this - as a government you might be willing to strike a deal with respect to Corporation Tax? Or to award contracts? Or both? The point being that, ultimately, the relationship between these internet giants and the governments who are supposed to regulate them is already far too cozy for us to consider the relationship as "formal and polite"...
Add to this the truly massive amount of money and resource these companies can afford to spend on lobbying and you start to get an understanding of how unlikely meaningful government regulation can be. In fact, ironically, only the EU, which isn't a single government and which doesn't have the power to tax these corporations directly, seems to have been remotely successful in trying to curb their powers. And even their successes have been extremely limited.
Bottom line: ain't going to happen.
I'm not a US citizen so not directly impacted by this specific discussion, but something which interests me about it is the apparent argument [from the dealers] that there is something uniquely special about an automotive purchase that requires that all such transactions cannot happen directly with the manufacturer and must go through the dealer. Why is this?
It can't be simply transaction value: huge numbers of new homes are built every year, many sold by agents and not by the builders.
It can't be because it's a mechanical device or has an engine in it: motor boats and motor yachts are sold every year - many for prices far higher than cars - without enforcing dealership based purchase.
Maybe it's because the dealers can continue to gouge their clients for years and years - on servicing and a raft of other things. Maybe it's because it allows for artificial control of used vehicle pricing.
Bottom line is: there doesn't seem to be any established or practical precedent that explains *why* motor vehicle dealers think they have such a unique use case as to grant them this special dispensation.
Or are they just being precious?
Isn't this something that has been reasonably well understood for some time?
For example, see here:-
http://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/h...
IIRC, the brain is pretty much the only organ in the body able to directly ingest and consume glucose from the blood stream; all the other parts of the body have to wait for glucose to be broken down into simpler compounds which they can then use. However, it's also been widely known that an overdose of glucose in the blood can be unhelpful/harmful. But it's one of the reason that people who conduct intellectually demanding work - i.e. work with a dependency on lots of cognitive processing - have a sweet tooth.
The point you raise consumed what felt like literally hours of court time during the pre-bankruptcy hearings presided over by Judge Kimball and Magistrate Judge Wells.
There is a helpful article on Groklaw which covers this point:-
http://www.groklaw.net/article...
in which there is discussion of an expression used by Magistrate Judge Wells during an evidentiary hearing. The analogy she used was that The SCO Group were essentially trying to perform the equivalent of accusing a shoplifter from stealing from Neiman Marcus [a US catalogue-based retailer, for non-US readers]. The Magistrate Judge basically told The SCO Group that what they were trying to do was (in accusing IBM of being the "shoplifter") say, "This thing we claim you stole. It's in the catalogue. You figure it out."
The two legal Teams (BSF for The SCO Group and CSM - Cravath, Swaine and Moore - for IBM) duelled on this point during the hearing, with IBM actually using the BSF/TSG cited cases against them, showing that the cases proved the opposite of what BSF/TSG were claiming. Even this wasn't enough to have the claims thrown out by the Magistrate Judge.
I would venture that the only reason that these claims remain and that this entire fiasco is still underway is simply because the original TSG filed for Chapter 11 literally just before a definitive ruling from Judge Kimball that would have blown their case out of the water. I'll go further: TSG filed for bankruptcy when they did precisely because they knew that the ruling would go against them and would sink their case. Their hope was that they could file for Chapter 11, swim along beneath the surface for a bit, then return with a new argument or new case when Judge Kimball got re-assigned. What they hadn't banked on was Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross deciding that the reason that The SCO Group got in such a mess was because of mis-management and deciding to appoint a Trustee. In some cases, after all, the Chapter 11 company is allowed to continue under existing management but simply with a protection-from-creditors shield in place long enough for them to be able to dig themselves out from under their troubles. Useful for legitimate Chapter 11 claimants, after all...
I'm bound to mention, as an aside, that in the view of this observer there was something decidedly fishy about the appointment of the Trustee, Cahn. During one of the bankruptcy hearings, Judge Gross made a comment on his decision to appoint a Trustee along the lines of: "Given the nature of the circumstances of this applicant - and the legal nature of their worries - it would be nice if we could find a Trustee with, I don't know, some form of legal background..."
And then, as if by magic, along comes (retired) Judge Cahn to save the day...
What followed - and again, in the view of this observer - was a relationship between Gross and Cahn which stretched the boundaries of due process. It would be an exaggeration for me to say that Judge Gross was fawning over the opinions of Judge Cahn, but it was abundantly clear that the former held the latter in the highest of regard and was entirely willing to let Judge Cahn do pretty much whatever he asked for - the rulings were getting signed off thick and fast and every bit as quickly as they were made.
In a situation like this it is true to say that there were losers all round, but the one thing I found most egregious were the "incidental" victims. For example, I recall that one of the creditors [who didn't get a dime, all the while Judge Cahn paid his own company to conduct legal research into the court case] was a small Mom-and-Pop pizzeria, not far from TSGs offices, who had provided the company with "pizzas on account". I just came away with this vision of Darl McBride and Co all sat round a meeting room table, with open pizza boxes piled high while they filled their faces, only to have them chortling
Thank you! I really should have looked that up...
This is an entirely valid question, but, I suspect, a dangerous legal principle.
Imagine a scenario where a plaintiff were seriously ill or otherwise unable to act... or a mirror of this case, but one in which the plaintiff actually had a legitimate complaint and weren't a shake-down artist. In these alternate scenarios, we'd want the law to give the party the time they needed to move their case forward. So I think that, for these reasons, a court will default to a position where it will allow the time if required.
Where a Court would not entertain this [at least, only up to a point] would be a scenario in which a plaintiff was claiming injury and claiming to have evidence, but then failed to provide it in a timely manner. This, it is worth noting, is entirely the approach taken by The SCO Group in their original case and entirely the bluff that Judge Dale A. Kimball [quite rightly] called.
I would suspect [I don't know, IANAL] that a legal system will always presume good faith until such time as there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a reasonable course of action, after all, since to do otherwise would attract the criticism of bias and lead to decisions being overturned on appeal. [It's worth noting, by the way, that when his orders for summary judgement were overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal in the original TSG vs. IBM case, Judge Kimball recused himself: it was his way of respectfully acknowledging: "I've made an error of legal judgement here and my decision has been over-ridden by my peers. Given this evidence of bias I must step away from the case..." If only some of the plaintiffs in cases acted with this sort of honour... A slightly different take on the principle of "Good Faith", but Judge Kimball likely recused himself to avoid any [baseless, IMHO] suggestions of bad faith...