They're merciful.. They weren't planning on giving you enough food to die from cancer in the first place... and the "eat me last" rations are laced with slow acting poison.
he could even claim he's still an employee and due back wages. The original fight was because he was an ass to a new woman manager and she walked to her boss and claimed "sex harassment". The manager tried to fire him without following city process in the first place... and didn't follow legal process to get the passwords in the second place... he could probably go back to the city worker's union and actually win his job back for managerial misconduct if charges don't stick!!!! After all he hasn't even had 3 officially written strikes yet!!!
He may be an ass, but he's been smart enough to follow the City's work rules to the letter.... it's the management that's skipping steps in the written HR process.
Didn't they say he had a good chunk of the money in checking/cash not to mention a house anywhere in CA is worth at least most of that. I think the goal was to get him to pay the $500K to the bondsman (usually you pay only 10% and if you don't show they sic Dog the bounty hunter on you because the bondsman is out $4.5M) which you DON'T GET BACK and he didn't fall for it.
Exactly, the entire thing was a CIVIL matter, not criminal, because he legally had the right to possess the passwords and he was questioning the right of the managers to ask for what they claimed was their stuff. The very arresting him without some kind of charge first.. the DA isn't a JUDGE... and isn't a police officer there's no obligation to follow any orders from them.
They KNEW they were going to fire him and could have gotten an injunction from a judge to compel the passwords before they even told him. Then the whole deal would be simple contempt and done with over a year ago.
that's what just happened, the date to formally file charges passed, and the DA had to make them stick or shut up... he's down to just one charge that made it past "justified" to go to trial. At this point the judge is also screwed because they bought the DA's hype and overreacted... they're hoping SOMETHING will stick or they'll face lawsuits.
the proper course would have been to go to CIVIL court for the passwords, take him to the judge and demand him to tell... then he's in custody, can't do harm, and sits in jail for contempt of the order... which generally has no limit! The city refused to follow proper civil procedures to get him to release their property and were totally at fault for wrongful prosecution here.
again.. been in jail for a year and they don't KNOW they have properly locked him out... THAT is criminally negligent when they know a potential threat to the city and they're not stopping it.
Again, they're claiming multi-million dollar damages to call in consultants to perform just the actions you said were complex and expensive... so you're saying after 1 full year they haven't done what they told the court they did? Those charges were thrown out anyway.
All they're really sticking him with is the "improper use of a network" rule.. because it's worth millions of dollars in hardware and employee work time that makes not telling the password some super-duper value crime....it's the only straw they got left.
no it shouldn't. The whole thing could have been fixed with a simple contempt of court charge and sweat him till he tells, that was their legal option and they chose not to do that.
Beyond that all the attempts of the management to "hack in" were unnecessary and not relevant to the criminal case. (like breaking the windows out of YOUR car because somebody stole it) HE did not do any damage after he was fired... the trouble was that he was fired TWICE... the first time the manager didn't write him up per union policy for being a dick and he got his job back. So he was refusing to turn his password over to the people that GOT him fired and weren't qualified to properly manage the network... they broke it because they didn't call a certified person FIRST. Also, they had already accused him of wrongdoing when he hadn't done anything....how do you prove you DIDN'T attempt to commit a crime?
he's given up the password and been lock in JAIL for a full year now... the only criminal thing at this point would be the IT manager that hasn't properly locked him out... they were claiming million dollar damages... if the city IT manager didn't fix the problem by now he's guilty of stealing city money.
He held the password "hostage" for about 1 week and has served over a year in Jail WAITING FOR CHARGES to stick. The judge knows the guy has enough cash in a mattress to take off and not be found. At this point the Judge is giving the prosecutor one last chance before the whole thing gets thrown out.
The standard MS OEM contract is basically SOL to the OEM. That part about "no warranty express or implied or merchantability...." I bet that applies to Dell and HP just like your local shop! I'd venture OEMs are stuck and have no legal means to reopen negotiations with Microsoft about this matter. Microsoft will lose installs like crazy but sales are contracted well ahead of time and tied to advertising, shipment quotas, bundling agreements, etc. Just because the court disqualifies one piece doesn't mean OEMs can stop PAYING Microsoft for the rest of them, unless their contract says they can. (I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it certainly is in Microsoft's favor)
They're welcome to try suing... and see their money piss off to lawyers. Let's see how that works out.
This is PATENTS... There is no first sale, no take backs for gifts or personal use. Legally you can't even use a patent you discovered independently in your own HOME without paying, although that's seldom enforced that way. Patents are damn near absolute because the patent is for USE of the invention, not reproduction of the materials.
You are obviously not a practicing IT person because you'd know that there is NO 100% uninstall option for MS Office. It inserts itself EVERYWHERE in the system. Worse would be trying to sell Office without Word (remember only Word is the culprit here) because they are so interrelated that would be even worse. The Office install overwrites parts of Windows as soon as it kicks off, and that's how the images are built and tested.
While DLL hell is better than it once was, removing Office is the crowning list of stupid IT tricks. A clean reinstall means building all new images.. because nearly EVERY PC sold comes with that Demo copy on it.
But Dell deals in hard drives binary copied by the box full with various combinations of software products fully installed when the user first boots, then selects which hard drives have the products needed at the assembly line. The trouble is not "removing" office but in thoroughly testing the images of the removed product (and the DEMOS too!) and then catching back up on the box fulls of copies. Dell tests and ships the products mostly installed ready for users to input their info and not need CDs or downloads, it's not simple like in a linux distro that has to perform the full install each time.
All the products like McAfee, Norton, Adobe, Office, and the other pre-installed software we love is shipped in the "just installed" state, just waiting for that last user screen. So they all have to be tried out.. together (THAT is the real trick) so that when the user boots up the system doesn't wipe out.
It's the OEM's fault if they don't have a "chargeback" in their contracts.Microsoft will laugh all the way to the bank on this one!!! I know in the Auto industry there's a whole legal branch dedicated to writing up chargebacks for something as simple as a shipment being one hour late up to who pays for recalls (postage, mechanic fees, replacement parts, rental cars, etc)
You mean Dell wouldn't have something like that in place with their KEY supplier... somebody should be fired for accepting the most vital product with "no warranty or fitness for use or merchantability..."
Microsoft certainly won't pay Dell or HP one red cent not in the OEM contract for their troubles but sure as hell will do everything they can to fight the judgment or have bloody mutiny in the OEM ranks... torches and pitchforks by the bus load to Nevada (the OEM license company) and Redmond. Sounds like something for Google to post on YouTube.. being as Microsoft's causing THEM trouble lately.
no, they should be shut down cold. It should hurt!!!
I wouldn't want my company to be hit by this, but the point is that the gavel has hit and it's not really fair to leave MONTHS for Dell to work around or pre-ship replacements to customers to get around the judgments.
Dell would have whole drives pre-imaged in high speed copiers anyway, right at the shipping dock and just pick which install to load up off the shelf when building product... they certainly aren't going to hold up the assembly line of finished product waiting for a hard drive to image. That means they have lots of inventory WIP to flush out.. and that could possibly shut down shipping boxes, but that's not "undue" for only a few days downtime. Not being able to ship imaged replacement disks is a slightly bigger problem, but again it's Dell's problem for not shipping out all the pieces and the customer's for not keeping backups... it's not big enough to be the COURT'S problem.
Microsoft has Billions of dollars in the bank... maybe "reasonable" is $25B or $40B? How much is reasonable for i4i to ask for if M$ wants to keep the doors open? That's just cash they have lying around, right? We can sue individual citizens for $100K per copy for just 20 songs... how many copies (millions times $100k each!) of Word has Microsoft SOLD in the just the years of the case? The BSA charges "settlements" of how much per unlicensed copy they find on business computers? These are settlements the court has upheld as "fair" over and over again (Tennenbaum just got nailed for how much?), when Microsoft is the big bad wolf against individuals and small businesses many times smaller... what's good for the goose... get the idea!
Secondly, the court can clearly site dozens of these cases Microsoft has been judged against, many times more they've settled out of court and yet they continue to infringe other people's work and it's time to take the more severe next step of shutting down shipments. They've done it for Dish.. actually requiring them to remotely take away features from DVRs already bought and paid for.
that's up to Dell to put those kinds of things in their contract with Microsoft. My company supplies Automakers and we're responsible for EVERYTHING related to our product because it's in the contract. If the product is late, we pay for downtime, if it's out of spec, we pay for downtime, and the cost of their employees to tell us it's wrong. If bad product gets to customers, we pay the cost of the auto maker to tell the customer and pay the cost of the repair guy to buy a new part and replace it. If we violate a patent in our operation, and it costs them.. it all comes down on us.
If Dell didn't negotiate the cost of having to "rework" the OEM copy the get from Microsoft into their contracts it's their problem (and another score for the MS EULA guys!) Something Microsoft is very good at is running their contracts so OTHER people take the hit for patching, poor performance, bugs, late shipments, etc. I agree with some other posters, shutting down OEMs ruins MICROSOFT'S credibility and ability to make these one-sided contracts leaving no fall-back option for the OEMs... these are the kind of nails needed to get OEMs to "second source" their options for OS and Office programs (i.e. real, interoperable competition) so their customers aren't stopped cold. This is shutdown, this is actual reworking costs that aren't covered under contract, this is the kind of pain the DOJ couldn't find the balls to inflict!
Because sure as hell Dell is interoperable with HP or with Acer from the customer's point of view.. if they have to feel the pain, why should MS not get some too!!
the patent isn't useless... they were parsing out a BINARY.doc file into an XML file with metadata and cdata parts so that it could be put in a storage system and searched or reprinted into a.doc on command.
That's exactly what the NEW OOXML format does, remember when it went to ISO and many parts were just "wrapping" what.doc did rather than describing things out like other XML formats do? Microsoft could have instituted a new data type but even in being more "open" they choose to crib somebody else's technology. (after all that's how customers were using it, wouldn't want to make cribbing a business partner's customers any harder would we) On top of that, MS built the new desktop search features of Windows Vista and Server 2008 ON TOP of that XML technology... i.e. cataloging info about documents stored in directories without actually reading them all through. That's EXACTLY the product i4i was selling, back when.doc files were binary blobs nobody (even microsoft servers) could look inside without actually opening Word.
it's more than that. i4i's patent has to do not so much with XML but how MS Word encapsulates the old.doc format inside the XML. Remember when we all dismissed the OOXML format because large parts of it were just ".doc" binaries "wrapped" and were totally useless as an open format. i4i had a product years ago that did THAT.. wrapped a.doc binary into an XML filing system so that it could be searched with metadata but the original.doc binary was still reproducible on demand. it was way more than just "Using XML" and something things like OpenOffice and other programs don't do.
Slashdot Mirror
that said maybe they could try dry runs on the moon .. with proper stations in orbit they could be rescued in a few day.
Dig for a giant obelisk to save you!
They're merciful.. They weren't planning on giving you enough food to die from cancer in the first place. .. and the "eat me last" rations are laced with slow acting poison.
Giant, Killer, Robots...
If we did send astronauts and they did survive would they have started their own country?
he could even claim he's still an employee and due back wages. The original fight was because he was an ass to a new woman manager and she walked to her boss and claimed "sex harassment". The manager tried to fire him without following city process in the first place... and didn't follow legal process to get the passwords in the second place... he could probably go back to the city worker's union and actually win his job back for managerial misconduct if charges don't stick!!!! After all he hasn't even had 3 officially written strikes yet!!!
He may be an ass, but he's been smart enough to follow the City's work rules to the letter.... it's the management that's skipping steps in the written HR process.
Didn't they say he had a good chunk of the money in checking/cash not to mention a house anywhere in CA is worth at least most of that. I think the goal was to get him to pay the $500K to the bondsman (usually you pay only 10% and if you don't show they sic Dog the bounty hunter on you because the bondsman is out $4.5M) which you DON'T GET BACK and he didn't fall for it.
Exactly, the entire thing was a CIVIL matter, not criminal, because he legally had the right to possess the passwords and he was questioning the right of the managers to ask for what they claimed was their stuff. The very arresting him without some kind of charge first .. the DA isn't a JUDGE... and isn't a police officer there's no obligation to follow any orders from them.
They KNEW they were going to fire him and could have gotten an injunction from a judge to compel the passwords before they even told him. Then the whole deal would be simple contempt and done with over a year ago.
that's what just happened, the date to formally file charges passed, and the DA had to make them stick or shut up... he's down to just one charge that made it past "justified" to go to trial. At this point the judge is also screwed because they bought the DA's hype and overreacted... they're hoping SOMETHING will stick or they'll face lawsuits.
the proper course would have been to go to CIVIL court for the passwords, take him to the judge and demand him to tell... then he's in custody, can't do harm, and sits in jail for contempt of the order... which generally has no limit! The city refused to follow proper civil procedures to get him to release their property and were totally at fault for wrongful prosecution here.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you. ... and he's DEFINITELY out to get them!!!
then we have to get THEIR passwords.... better lock them up BEFORE asking just to be sure!!!
again.. been in jail for a year and they don't KNOW they have properly locked him out... THAT is criminally negligent when they know a potential threat to the city and they're not stopping it.
Again, they're claiming multi-million dollar damages to call in consultants to perform just the actions you said were complex and expensive... so you're saying after 1 full year they haven't done what they told the court they did? Those charges were thrown out anyway.
All they're really sticking him with is the "improper use of a network" rule.. because it's worth millions of dollars in hardware and employee work time that makes not telling the password some super-duper value crime....it's the only straw they got left.
no it shouldn't. The whole thing could have been fixed with a simple contempt of court charge and sweat him till he tells, that was their legal option and they chose not to do that.
Beyond that all the attempts of the management to "hack in" were unnecessary and not relevant to the criminal case. (like breaking the windows out of YOUR car because somebody stole it) HE did not do any damage after he was fired... the trouble was that he was fired TWICE... the first time the manager didn't write him up per union policy for being a dick and he got his job back. So he was refusing to turn his password over to the people that GOT him fired and weren't qualified to properly manage the network... they broke it because they didn't call a certified person FIRST. Also, they had already accused him of wrongdoing when he hadn't done anything....how do you prove you DIDN'T attempt to commit a crime?
he's given up the password and been lock in JAIL for a full year now... the only criminal thing at this point would be the IT manager that hasn't properly locked him out... they were claiming million dollar damages... if the city IT manager didn't fix the problem by now he's guilty of stealing city money.
He held the password "hostage" for about 1 week and has served over a year in Jail WAITING FOR CHARGES to stick. The judge knows the guy has enough cash in a mattress to take off and not be found. At this point the Judge is giving the prosecutor one last chance before the whole thing gets thrown out.
The standard MS OEM contract is basically SOL to the OEM. That part about "no warranty express or implied or merchantability...." I bet that applies to Dell and HP just like your local shop! I'd venture OEMs are stuck and have no legal means to reopen negotiations with Microsoft about this matter. Microsoft will lose installs like crazy but sales are contracted well ahead of time and tied to advertising, shipment quotas, bundling agreements, etc. Just because the court disqualifies one piece doesn't mean OEMs can stop PAYING Microsoft for the rest of them, unless their contract says they can. (I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it certainly is in Microsoft's favor)
They're welcome to try suing... and see their money piss off to lawyers. Let's see how that works out.
This is PATENTS... There is no first sale, no take backs for gifts or personal use. Legally you can't even use a patent you discovered independently in your own HOME without paying, although that's seldom enforced that way. Patents are damn near absolute because the patent is for USE of the invention, not reproduction of the materials.
You are obviously not a practicing IT person because you'd know that there is NO 100% uninstall option for MS Office. It inserts itself EVERYWHERE in the system. Worse would be trying to sell Office without Word (remember only Word is the culprit here) because they are so interrelated that would be even worse. The Office install overwrites parts of Windows as soon as it kicks off, and that's how the images are built and tested.
While DLL hell is better than it once was, removing Office is the crowning list of stupid IT tricks. A clean reinstall means building all new images.. because nearly EVERY PC sold comes with that Demo copy on it.
But Dell deals in hard drives binary copied by the box full with various combinations of software products fully installed when the user first boots, then selects which hard drives have the products needed at the assembly line. The trouble is not "removing" office but in thoroughly testing the images of the removed product (and the DEMOS too!) and then catching back up on the box fulls of copies. Dell tests and ships the products mostly installed ready for users to input their info and not need CDs or downloads, it's not simple like in a linux distro that has to perform the full install each time.
All the products like McAfee, Norton, Adobe, Office, and the other pre-installed software we love is shipped in the "just installed" state, just waiting for that last user screen. So they all have to be tried out.. together (THAT is the real trick) so that when the user boots up the system doesn't wipe out.
It's the OEM's fault if they don't have a "chargeback" in their contracts.Microsoft will laugh all the way to the bank on this one!!! I know in the Auto industry there's a whole legal branch dedicated to writing up chargebacks for something as simple as a shipment being one hour late up to who pays for recalls (postage, mechanic fees, replacement parts, rental cars, etc)
You mean Dell wouldn't have something like that in place with their KEY supplier... somebody should be fired for accepting the most vital product with "no warranty or fitness for use or merchantability..."
Microsoft certainly won't pay Dell or HP one red cent not in the OEM contract for their troubles but sure as hell will do everything they can to fight the judgment or have bloody mutiny in the OEM ranks... torches and pitchforks by the bus load to Nevada (the OEM license company) and Redmond. Sounds like something for Google to post on YouTube.. being as Microsoft's causing THEM trouble lately.
no, they should be shut down cold. It should hurt!!!
I wouldn't want my company to be hit by this, but the point is that the gavel has hit and it's not really fair to leave MONTHS for Dell to work around or pre-ship replacements to customers to get around the judgments.
Dell would have whole drives pre-imaged in high speed copiers anyway, right at the shipping dock and just pick which install to load up off the shelf when building product... they certainly aren't going to hold up the assembly line of finished product waiting for a hard drive to image. That means they have lots of inventory WIP to flush out.. and that could possibly shut down shipping boxes, but that's not "undue" for only a few days downtime. Not being able to ship imaged replacement disks is a slightly bigger problem, but again it's Dell's problem for not shipping out all the pieces and the customer's for not keeping backups... it's not big enough to be the COURT'S problem.
Microsoft has Billions of dollars in the bank... maybe "reasonable" is $25B or $40B? How much is reasonable for i4i to ask for if M$ wants to keep the doors open? That's just cash they have lying around, right? We can sue individual citizens for $100K per copy for just 20 songs... how many copies (millions times $100k each!) of Word has Microsoft SOLD in the just the years of the case? The BSA charges "settlements" of how much per unlicensed copy they find on business computers? These are settlements the court has upheld as "fair" over and over again (Tennenbaum just got nailed for how much?), when Microsoft is the big bad wolf against individuals and small businesses many times smaller... what's good for the goose... get the idea!
Secondly, the court can clearly site dozens of these cases Microsoft has been judged against, many times more they've settled out of court and yet they continue to infringe other people's work and it's time to take the more severe next step of shutting down shipments. They've done it for Dish.. actually requiring them to remotely take away features from DVRs already bought and paid for.
that's up to Dell to put those kinds of things in their contract with Microsoft. My company supplies Automakers and we're responsible for EVERYTHING related to our product because it's in the contract. If the product is late, we pay for downtime, if it's out of spec, we pay for downtime, and the cost of their employees to tell us it's wrong. If bad product gets to customers, we pay the cost of the auto maker to tell the customer and pay the cost of the repair guy to buy a new part and replace it. If we violate a patent in our operation, and it costs them.. it all comes down on us.
If Dell didn't negotiate the cost of having to "rework" the OEM copy the get from Microsoft into their contracts it's their problem (and another score for the MS EULA guys!) Something Microsoft is very good at is running their contracts so OTHER people take the hit for patching, poor performance, bugs, late shipments, etc. I agree with some other posters, shutting down OEMs ruins MICROSOFT'S credibility and ability to make these one-sided contracts leaving no fall-back option for the OEMs... these are the kind of nails needed to get OEMs to "second source" their options for OS and Office programs (i.e. real, interoperable competition) so their customers aren't stopped cold. This is shutdown, this is actual reworking costs that aren't covered under contract, this is the kind of pain the DOJ couldn't find the balls to inflict!
Because sure as hell Dell is interoperable with HP or with Acer from the customer's point of view.. if they have to feel the pain, why should MS not get some too!!
the patent isn't useless... they were parsing out a BINARY .doc file into an XML file with metadata and cdata parts so that it could be put in a storage system and searched or reprinted into a .doc on command.
That's exactly what the NEW OOXML format does, remember when it went to ISO and many parts were just "wrapping" what .doc did rather than describing things out like other XML formats do? Microsoft could have instituted a new data type but even in being more "open" they choose to crib somebody else's technology. (after all that's how customers were using it, wouldn't want to make cribbing a business partner's customers any harder would we) On top of that, MS built the new desktop search features of Windows Vista and Server 2008 ON TOP of that XML technology... i.e. cataloging info about documents stored in directories without actually reading them all through. That's EXACTLY the product i4i was selling, back when .doc files were binary blobs nobody (even microsoft servers) could look inside without actually opening Word.
it's more than that. i4i's patent has to do not so much with XML but how MS Word encapsulates the old .doc format inside the XML. Remember when we all dismissed the OOXML format because large parts of it were just ".doc" binaries "wrapped" and were totally useless as an open format. i4i had a product years ago that did THAT.. wrapped a .doc binary into an XML filing system so that it could be searched with metadata but the original .doc binary was still reproducible on demand. it was way more than just "Using XML" and something things like OpenOffice and other programs don't do.