I saw a great show on discovery health yesterday about one theory surrouding Hitler's demise in the early 1940's.
One doctor examined thousands of hours of footage of speeches and meetings and followed his ever-increasing fanatical and intransigent behavior and postulated that Hitler was abusing amphetamines. Apparently, mental deadlocking is a symptom of amphetamine toxicity, meaning that someone who abuses amphetamines (speed) for a long time will become evermore set in their ways and unwilling to look at the truth if it threatens their reality.
I had an epiphany yesterday while I was watching this program because it suddenly hit me that the same thing could be happening here. This guy has to be on drugs to think SCO has a snowball's chance in hell of winning any aspect of this suit.
He has, however, managed to talk up SCOX to about $10, which is TEN TIMES what it was before they filed this suit. There are apparently a lot of morons out there who thing IBM is just going to cut SCO a check for (pinky to mouth) one-hundred-billion-dollars or something. Meanwhile, SCOX insiders are just lying in wait until they realize they've been bested, then they'll dump their stock a couple of days before news breaks of their defeat.
I just hope they join Martha Stewart in prison when it's all over.
"It's mathematically futile to work yourself out of a job."
Ok, so how exactly to I tell my boss I'm not going to do it? It's also pretty futile to refuse to do what they tell me to, and achieves the same result even faster....
Oh, and college is expensive. I didn't have the benefit of a parental wallet and had to pay everything myself. In 8 years, it's easy to rack up 60k.
Education *is* open source - you can buy the same books and learn the same crap that they teach. However, those pieces of paper are not:)
1) Keep track of EVERY PENNY you pay in EVERY KIND OF TAX for a year, and see how much of your gross income goes to taxes. I mean *EVERY TAX*, gas tax, sales tax, property tax, wage taxes, income taxes, taxes on your phone line, taxes on your cell phone, taxes on your DSL, lease tax (PA charges 3% lease tax on top of the 6% sales tax on leases), and every other tax you pay. You will find, my friend, that well over 50% of your income is paid back in taxes. It doesn't matter how much you make - i fact, the less you make, the MORE of your income goes back to taxes.
2) Look, anyone who does not have the benefit of parents who give them money during college is going to have significant student loans at the end. I went to a very good school (that was a bargain at the time) but between tuition, out-of-state fees, housing, meal plan, and books, it came to about 60k for the 8 years that I was there. There is only so much a part time job can pay for, and only so many hours you can work while in school.
A tale of two jobs
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok, so I'm ineligible for overtime based both on my pay scale and my degree. I make what most snivelers would call "damn good money" but somehow after two years out of school, and under the crushing load of student loans, it doesn't seem like a whole hell of a lot of money to me. After Uncle Sam and the Commonwealth are finished raping me for more than 55% of my income (including all taxes, like sales, property, gasoline, income, wage, etc), I actually end up making just as much money working for $7.25/hr at the bikeshop where I have my moonlight job. The bike shop is a hell of a lot more fun, so I'm wondering why I don't just do that.
Oh yeah, those student loans... all $60k worth of them.
"Make an investment in your future" they tell you. "You'll be worth so much more money" they tell you. I drive a 15 year old car with 200k miles on it, live in a dumpy three bedroom house in the ghetto with two other technical "professionals," and have a very hard time making ends meet on what's left of my biweekly pittance.
What I've learned from the last 10 or so years of my life is that a) a college degree isn't worth it - as it will only be used to prove that you're capable of training your replacements from India and b) get a job because you enjoy it, not because it pays well. It's amazing how much I sit in my cubicle teaching the three guys from Bangalore how to do my job, looking forward to making my seven bucks at the bike shop.
Re:What a strange legal system....
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 1
An NDA cannot legally forbid disclosure in a court of law when under examination. If you're on the stand, you must answer, even if the answer would "violate" the NDA.
is to prepare, say, a 100,000 page answer document. The SCO lawyers will have to read every single page, and there's no doubt they wouldn't do that kind of time on credit. SCO would be bankrupt by the end of the first 10,000 pages.
Another way might be to have every single IBM employee world wide buy 1000 shares of SCO stock. Hostile takeover without the mess of SEC filings and whatnot. SCO wouldn't even know what hit them.
Even another way might be to have IBM "license" some Novell technology much like Microsoft "licensed" SCO technology, and basically have Novell sue the fancy-pants off of SCO for claiming rights to UNIX that it does not own, and for infringing upon Novell's IP rights that were NOT part of the sale of UNIX to SCO.
Finally, just to show how much of a dirtbag SCO is, we have the right in this country to be confronted with the evidence against us. Now that SCO has levied criminal charges against IBM, they had better be ready to pony up the infringing code or they themselves be cast into oblivion.
I had made a comment before about the possibility of this case being heard by one of these liberal "go for the underdog" judges, but the opposite could also happen. If I were hearing this case, the first thing I'd do is lock the SCO lawyers up for contempt by refusing to present the evidence and for wasting the court's time.
It's despicable that people can't do something nice for the world and write free software without the fear of being sued by some corporate criminal...
You're getting out of your car with your briefcase and your bag of groceries and you have this eerie feeling you're forgetting something important. You stand up and reach for the door and give it a shove. As the door careens toward closure, that little switch in your brain flips and that little voice starts screaming "Take it back! Take it back! Your keys are in there!!!" In an instant, your body wretches trying to catch the car door closing but to no avail. That little voice in your head then says "Awww shit, you really fucked up now, and you're beyond the point of no return."
This is what SCO has just done. They have started the final nail in their coffin in their juvenile, if not heroic, last stand. Their captain has just delivered the message to the crew that this cause is more important than their corporate lives, and they will fight to the death even though the odds are indeed impossible.
In other news, monster.com stock is up 40% today on a wave of new resumes, mostly for UNIX developers.
Now, if this turns out to be a "David and Goliath" situation and they get one of these "root for the underdog" bleeding heart liberal judges, we may have an interesting time yet. These do-gooders who think that parity is more important than justice and truth are easily conned by the "crying little guy" who is actually the devil incarnate.
The government is the easiest settlement you'll ever see. If you bat your eyelashes at the government and your case even has one quark of merit, they'll throw suitcases of money at you to shut up..
I didn't see anyone else ask this, but, are we really sure this is a "vulnerability" and an "exploit?"
We all know that hotmail has been in the business of selling hotmail email lists to spammers ever since Microsoft bought them out. Could this just be a broadening of Microsoft's cooperation with spammers? After all, in a down economy, you do what you can to rake in more dough.
This is already done, and broadcasters spend millions of dollars per year on propagation studies so that they comply with the rules regarding maintaining their BTA (Basic Trade Area) so that they don't interfere with an adjacent BTA on the same channel.
Well I was going to reply to this, and spent 10 minutes typing examples, but their fucking "lameness filter" wouldn't let me write " open-parenthesis-capital-x-closed-parenthesis" and I got pissed off..
Well, there's probably some gray area because behavior is different from existence. That is, the way someone behaves is subjective, but a bag of white powder-looking substance is just that, a bag of white powder-looking substance. A person may stagger and be uncoordinated because of a disease of disorder, but nobody accidentally carries a bag of white powder-looking substance.
Just a guess here though.. not sure why exactly the two are different
There are no provisions for civil litigation. Anybody can sue anybody else for anything. It's up to the judge to first decide whether the case has merit and then for a civil jury (usually of 6) to decide whether the person being sued is liable and how much the liability is worth.
I don't see where a police department couldn't file a civil lawsuit against someone.
But, now that I think of it, they usually build in the civil suit with the criminal suit - in the form of fines and court costs imposed on the defendant. So, upon conviction, they get stuck with the bill without even having the opportunity to argue their liability in front of a civil jury...
I don't think trademarks have anything to do with it. Assuming you meant copyrights, it's still a crime to distribute copyrighted material. The only difference between Coke v. 10X Sugar and Real v. Fake MP3 is that in the latter, there is civil relief IN ADDITION to the criminal element.
However, I don't see what would prevent a local police department from suing someone in civil court who had been caught trafficking or making fake cocaine, in order to recover the money they spent investigating and prosecuting the crime.
What is going to happen now is that ISPs are going to enact corporate policies against keeping logs.
Lots of libraries and bookstores are doing this in protest of the Patriot act, which forces libraries and bookstores to furnish, if possible, lists of who buys or borrows which books. One of many articles can be read here
Here's an analog to show you that this is a dangerous idea...
If you take 5 lbs of flour or powdered sugar, and put it in clear ziplocks and tape it up to look like cocaine, and you get pulled over and searched, and the cop finds it... guess what, you're STILL going to jail even though the substance you are carrying isn't itself illegal.
Just one example, in Arizona, State Law 13-3453 states that "It is unlawful for a person to manufacture, distribute or possess with intent to distribute an imitation controlled substance." The reason being that such activities mimic the actual felony and therefore consume the time and resources of law enforcement engaged in the investigation of a crime. In AZ it's a class 6 felony, but it may vary from state to state, and could probably be considered felony obstruction of justice by some overzealous district attorneys.
The same legal theory can probably be applied to the manufacture and distribution of other "contraband," such as "illicit" digital "substances." If you make a fake with the intent of diverting or otherwise spoofing law enforcement, they are going to be very pissed, and will not by any means think what you are doing is cute or funny.
Actually, the more broad a patent is worded, the less likely it is to be awarded in the first place, and if it does survive an overworked patent examiner who just wants to go home and eat dinner for a change, they are much easier to defeat in court.
My company won't let us file patents unless our patent attorneys believe they are narrow enough to ensure defendability. We don't make our money suing people over bogus IP claims, so we actually have to do it right.
The human genome has already been patented. Patent number 00000001 is owned by God, and was issued a few million years ago. But, I don't think he's capable of enforcing it as there are no lawyers in heaven.
Ahhh but if your ship is registered American, the Coast Guard can get you anywhere in the world.. they will also claim boarding rights if your ship moves in a direction toward the U.S. while in international waters...
They'll find some way to nail you... after all, you're driving a warship with lots of firepower toward the U.S. I'm sure if they wanted to they'd declare you a terrorist, blow your ship up, sieze your bank accounts, and ignore due process the entire way...
This is why we shouldn't give up our rights in exchange for "security"... look what happened to Rome... same deal..
Slashdot Mirror
"Now if we could just get those god damn short wave stations off 40 meters..."
*sniff* Amen, brother!
I saw a great show on discovery health yesterday about one theory surrouding Hitler's demise in the early 1940's.
One doctor examined thousands of hours of footage of speeches and meetings and followed his ever-increasing fanatical and intransigent behavior and postulated that Hitler was abusing amphetamines. Apparently, mental deadlocking is a symptom of amphetamine toxicity, meaning that someone who abuses amphetamines (speed) for a long time will become evermore set in their ways and unwilling to look at the truth if it threatens their reality.
I had an epiphany yesterday while I was watching this program because it suddenly hit me that the same thing could be happening here. This guy has to be on drugs to think SCO has a snowball's chance in hell of winning any aspect of this suit.
He has, however, managed to talk up SCOX to about $10, which is TEN TIMES what it was before they filed this suit. There are apparently a lot of morons out there who thing IBM is just going to cut SCO a check for (pinky to mouth) one-hundred-billion-dollars or something. Meanwhile, SCOX insiders are just lying in wait until they realize they've been bested, then they'll dump their stock a couple of days before news breaks of their defeat.
I just hope they join Martha Stewart in prison when it's all over.
"It's mathematically futile to work yourself out of a job."
:)
Ok, so how exactly to I tell my boss I'm not going to do it? It's also pretty futile to refuse to do what they tell me to, and achieves the same result even faster....
Oh, and college is expensive. I didn't have the benefit of a parental wallet and had to pay everything myself. In 8 years, it's easy to rack up 60k.
Education *is* open source - you can buy the same books and learn the same crap that they teach. However, those pieces of paper are not
1) Keep track of EVERY PENNY you pay in EVERY KIND OF TAX for a year, and see how much of your gross income goes to taxes. I mean *EVERY TAX*, gas tax, sales tax, property tax, wage taxes, income taxes, taxes on your phone line, taxes on your cell phone, taxes on your DSL, lease tax (PA charges 3% lease tax on top of the 6% sales tax on leases), and every other tax you pay. You will find, my friend, that well over 50% of your income is paid back in taxes. It doesn't matter how much you make - i fact, the less you make, the MORE of your income goes back to taxes.
2) Look, anyone who does not have the benefit of parents who give them money during college is going to have significant student loans at the end. I went to a very good school (that was a bargain at the time) but between tuition, out-of-state fees, housing, meal plan, and books, it came to about 60k for the 8 years that I was there. There is only so much a part time job can pay for, and only so many hours you can work while in school.
Ok, so I'm ineligible for overtime based both on my pay scale and my degree. I make what most snivelers would call "damn good money" but somehow after two years out of school, and under the crushing load of student loans, it doesn't seem like a whole hell of a lot of money to me. After Uncle Sam and the Commonwealth are finished raping me for more than 55% of my income (including all taxes, like sales, property, gasoline, income, wage, etc), I actually end up making just as much money working for $7.25/hr at the bikeshop where I have my moonlight job. The bike shop is a hell of a lot more fun, so I'm wondering why I don't just do that.
Oh yeah, those student loans... all $60k worth of them.
"Make an investment in your future" they tell you. "You'll be worth so much more money" they tell you. I drive a 15 year old car with 200k miles on it, live in a dumpy three bedroom house in the ghetto with two other technical "professionals," and have a very hard time making ends meet on what's left of my biweekly pittance.
What I've learned from the last 10 or so years of my life is that a) a college degree isn't worth it - as it will only be used to prove that you're capable of training your replacements from India and b) get a job because you enjoy it, not because it pays well. It's amazing how much I sit in my cubicle teaching the three guys from Bangalore how to do my job, looking forward to making my seven bucks at the bike shop.
An NDA cannot legally forbid disclosure in a court of law when under examination. If you're on the stand, you must answer, even if the answer would "violate" the NDA.
And NDA cannot usurp the Constitution.
I love the RIAA, they screw over the same people they need money to stay alive
No, they try to screw over the peoplewho DON'T give them money...
is to prepare, say, a 100,000 page answer document. The SCO lawyers will have to read every single page, and there's no doubt they wouldn't do that kind of time on credit. SCO would be bankrupt by the end of the first 10,000 pages.
Another way might be to have every single IBM employee world wide buy 1000 shares of SCO stock. Hostile takeover without the mess of SEC filings and whatnot. SCO wouldn't even know what hit them.
Even another way might be to have IBM "license" some Novell technology much like Microsoft "licensed" SCO technology, and basically have Novell sue the fancy-pants off of SCO for claiming rights to UNIX that it does not own, and for infringing upon Novell's IP rights that were NOT part of the sale of UNIX to SCO.
Finally, just to show how much of a dirtbag SCO is, we have the right in this country to be confronted with the evidence against us. Now that SCO has levied criminal charges against IBM, they had better be ready to pony up the infringing code or they themselves be cast into oblivion.
I had made a comment before about the possibility of this case being heard by one of these liberal "go for the underdog" judges, but the opposite could also happen. If I were hearing this case, the first thing I'd do is lock the SCO lawyers up for contempt by refusing to present the evidence and for wasting the court's time.
It's despicable that people can't do something nice for the world and write free software without the fear of being sued by some corporate criminal...
You know what I'm talking about...
You know you do..
You're getting out of your car with your briefcase and your bag of groceries and you have this eerie feeling you're forgetting something important. You stand up and reach for the door and give it a shove. As the door careens toward closure, that little switch in your brain flips and that little voice starts screaming "Take it back! Take it back! Your keys are in there!!!" In an instant, your body wretches trying to catch the car door closing but to no avail. That little voice in your head then says "Awww shit, you really fucked up now, and you're beyond the point of no return."
This is what SCO has just done. They have started the final nail in their coffin in their juvenile, if not heroic, last stand. Their captain has just delivered the message to the crew that this cause is more important than their corporate lives, and they will fight to the death even though the odds are indeed impossible.
In other news, monster.com stock is up 40% today on a wave of new resumes, mostly for UNIX developers.
Now, if this turns out to be a "David and Goliath" situation and they get one of these "root for the underdog" bleeding heart liberal judges, we may have an interesting time yet. These do-gooders who think that parity is more important than justice and truth are easily conned by the "crying little guy" who is actually the devil incarnate.
Yeah, but Honeywell has better avionics with which to deliver their nukes..
The government is the easiest settlement you'll ever see. If you bat your eyelashes at the government and your case even has one quark of merit, they'll throw suitcases of money at you to shut up..
Umm, IBM is a hell of a lot bigger than that..
IBM could initiate a successful hostile takeover of SCO with its petty cash account...
Right, but the real issue is - what the hell gives the EU jurisdiction to make US companies do ANYTHING?
I didn't see anyone else ask this, but, are we really sure this is a "vulnerability" and an "exploit?"
We all know that hotmail has been in the business of selling hotmail email lists to spammers ever since Microsoft bought them out. Could this just be a broadening of Microsoft's cooperation with spammers? After all, in a down economy, you do what you can to rake in more dough.
You would probably also blame cops for crime.. To blame anyone other than spammers for spam is ludicrous.
This is already done, and broadcasters spend millions of dollars per year on propagation studies so that they comply with the rules regarding maintaining their BTA (Basic Trade Area) so that they don't interfere with an adjacent BTA on the same channel.
Well I was going to reply to this, and spent 10 minutes typing examples, but their fucking "lameness filter" wouldn't let me write " open-parenthesis-capital-x-closed-parenthesis" and I got pissed off..
Well, there's probably some gray area because behavior is different from existence. That is, the way someone behaves is subjective, but a bag of white powder-looking substance is just that, a bag of white powder-looking substance. A person may stagger and be uncoordinated because of a disease of disorder, but nobody accidentally carries a bag of white powder-looking substance.
Just a guess here though.. not sure why exactly the two are different
There are no provisions for civil litigation. Anybody can sue anybody else for anything. It's up to the judge to first decide whether the case has merit and then for a civil jury (usually of 6) to decide whether the person being sued is liable and how much the liability is worth.
I don't see where a police department couldn't file a civil lawsuit against someone.
But, now that I think of it, they usually build in the civil suit with the criminal suit - in the form of fines and court costs imposed on the defendant. So, upon conviction, they get stuck with the bill without even having the opportunity to argue their liability in front of a civil jury...
I don't think trademarks have anything to do with it. Assuming you meant copyrights, it's still a crime to distribute copyrighted material. The only difference between Coke v. 10X Sugar and Real v. Fake MP3 is that in the latter, there is civil relief IN ADDITION to the criminal element.
However, I don't see what would prevent a local police department from suing someone in civil court who had been caught trafficking or making fake cocaine, in order to recover the money they spent investigating and prosecuting the crime.
What is going to happen now is that ISPs are going to enact corporate policies against keeping logs.
Lots of libraries and bookstores are doing this in protest of the Patriot act, which forces libraries and bookstores to furnish, if possible, lists of who buys or borrows which books. One of many articles can be read here
This may end up not being any different for ISPs
Here's an analog to show you that this is a dangerous idea...
If you take 5 lbs of flour or powdered sugar, and put it in clear ziplocks and tape it up to look like cocaine, and you get pulled over and searched, and the cop finds it... guess what, you're STILL going to jail even though the substance you are carrying isn't itself illegal.
Just one example, in Arizona, State Law 13-3453 states that "It is unlawful for a person to manufacture, distribute or possess with intent to distribute an imitation controlled substance." The reason being that such activities mimic the actual felony and therefore consume the time and resources of law enforcement engaged in the investigation of a crime. In AZ it's a class 6 felony, but it may vary from state to state, and could probably be considered felony obstruction of justice by some overzealous district attorneys.
The same legal theory can probably be applied to the manufacture and distribution of other "contraband," such as "illicit" digital "substances." If you make a fake with the intent of diverting or otherwise spoofing law enforcement, they are going to be very pissed, and will not by any means think what you are doing is cute or funny.
Actually, the more broad a patent is worded, the less likely it is to be awarded in the first place, and if it does survive an overworked patent examiner who just wants to go home and eat dinner for a change, they are much easier to defeat in court.
My company won't let us file patents unless our patent attorneys believe they are narrow enough to ensure defendability. We don't make our money suing people over bogus IP claims, so we actually have to do it right.
The human genome has already been patented. Patent number 00000001 is owned by God, and was issued a few million years ago. But, I don't think he's capable of enforcing it as there are no lawyers in heaven.
Ahhh but if your ship is registered American, the Coast Guard can get you anywhere in the world.. they will also claim boarding rights if your ship moves in a direction toward the U.S. while in international waters...
They'll find some way to nail you... after all, you're driving a warship with lots of firepower toward the U.S. I'm sure if they wanted to they'd declare you a terrorist, blow your ship up, sieze your bank accounts, and ignore due process the entire way...
This is why we shouldn't give up our rights in exchange for "security"... look what happened to Rome... same deal..