1) You're poor, and can't afford a high profile lawyer.
2) You're rich, and the publicity is so bad that the judge is afraid for his next election campaign.
In all other cases, perjury is swept under the rug. Since this falls under option 2, the only way perjury charges will be filed is if there is massive public outcry. There won't be an outcry, though, so there won't be any charges.
The summary has a terrible bias, and has nothing to do with small inventors being steamrolled by patent troll portfolios. What this article is actually about is someone patenting an exceedingly trivial idea (storing energy in a windup mechanism to deliver that energy to some device; an idea and implementation that has been around for at least a century), and complaining that his trivial rehash of an old idea was used by another company with the resources to actually produce said trivial products.
Now he wants his government to criminalize the use of ancient ideas if he can't make money off of them. He isn't a small inventor; he is a con artist trying to steal from the public domain.
They have to send their sticks to Apple, then buy them back as iSticks. They're the same sticks, but they're not allowed to use them without paying Apple first.
What you're describing isn't a progress bar. It's a time remaining indicator. Progress bars tell you how far long a process is on its path to completion. It was never meant to tell you how much time remains, and using it as such will predictably lead to end user confusion and frustration.
Even when a progress bar goes from 0 to 99% in an instant, then takes forever to go from 99% to 100%, it is doing what it is intended to do: tell you how far long the process is. That's all it is supposed to do. It should NEVER be used to tell you how much time remains. You can sometimes infer timing from progress if the progress bar progresses smoothly, but that's a side effect.
As for the time remaining indicators: those will ALWAYS be inaccurate (usually severely so) because most factors that contribute to how much longer a process must run to completion are unpredictable. It's like trying to predict when someone is going to turn off the hall light tonight based on when they turned it off last night. It might be accurate sometimes, but that's just from pure chance.
The fact is, they aren't going to retain very much of anything that gets said anymore than I would retain asking a mechanic what he'd do to fix my hypendupulator pump.
At the risk of divulging information that may cost me customers, fixing the Hypendululator Pump is a one or two step process, depending on whether you're using Imperial units or non-Imperial units. The first step is to apply the Hydrospanner to the pump's Hypen Bolt; but be sure you are running slower than light, as an improperly tightened Hypen bolt can cause catastrophic failure at faster than light speeds. This is probably a moot point, though, because if you're having to deal with this particular part, you probably won't be in Hyperspace to begin with. But it's always good to be cautious. If your Hypendupulator Pump uses Imperial units, then this should do the trick.
If you are using non-Imperial units, and tightening the Hypen bolt does not induce faster than light travel, you may have to acquire additional tools to read the onboard computer. Fortunately, most readily available R2 units are equipped with such tools as standard features. This will usually work, but tends to be much more expensive than the common Hydrospanner you're likely to already have in your toolbox.
Depending on the contents of the letter, begin registered may be immaterial. The the Posting Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_rule) for an explanation. The basic premise is that a contract offer (settlement, etc.) is considered delivered the moment the Post Office accepts it for delivery. The recipient doesn't even have to physically receive it.
Also, at least in some circumstances, the Court will hold the recipient liable for having read and understood the contents of the letter anyway.
In any event (as the OP is trying to do), the only sane response to the letter is to consult an attorney who has experience dealing with this situation. We can give advice until the cows come home, but that is not what the OP wants. The OP wants advice in finding an attorney that can help.
I'm mystified as to why these questions keep getting asked, as the answers are blindingly obvious.
How long will I have access to my documents?
Until, at Microsoft's sole, arbitrary discretion, Microsoft says you no longer have access to them.
What happens to my documents if I am using 100% of Skydrive (including the additional 20GB)?
Whatever Microsoft, at its sole and arbitrary discretion, says happens to them at that particular random moment in time.
Bottom line: if your data are only available on someone else's servers, especially those of a multi-convicted, monopolistic felon, you're already screwed. You just haven't yet woken up to that inevitability.
[Java] isn't the write once run everywhere that was promised
I've been writing Java apps that run on Linux and Windows for a long time, and have yet to run into this. Can you give an example where using pure Java doesn't work the same across platforms?
3.) tight vertical spacing is archaic and stupid, unless absolutely necessary for some display reason
After spending the first several years of my C programming life using K&R syntax, I eventually realized that many of the problems I had maintaining my code came from trying to parse through the dense insanity of tight vertical spacing (and other K&R style issues that originated from constraints that haven't existed in many years).
When reading Linux source code, the first thing I have to do in order to make the code intelligible is reformat it away from K&R. K&R is perhaps the single ugliest coding style I have ever seen or used.
And if the heirs didn't demand compensation for transferring their rights, well, they just pay the price for their stupidity.
I know it goes against Slashdot standards, but a lot of pointless, wasteful speculation could be avoided by all if people would read the stories before engaging their knee jerks.
Yes, all important questions are answered in the story.
I was reading that the vulnerability is not in general standalone Java...
That's true, which is why the people saying to uninstall Java sound like blathering idiots. You need to either uninstall the Java browser plugin, or use NoScript to whitelist your internal sites only. Frankly, you need to do this for all browser plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), as the entire browser plugin architecture is fundamentally flawed.
No, this is Netflix realizing that they are essentially owned by Amazon at this point, and putting on their best facade. And this is Amazon realizing the same thing, and putting on the shit eating grin of an imminent conqueror. Once Amazon's streaming customer base becomes competitive with Netflix's, the former will crush the latter. This is how "cloud" computing is supposed to work, from the viewpoint of the "cloud" owner -- we control your vital asset (delivery), and can take it away at anytime of our choosing.
People should take technology history classes before running a technology company. Netflix is screwed.
A retired couple was on their porch swing watching the neighborhood when the wife leans over and suddenly slaps her husband. "That's for forty years of bad sex!".
They continue sitting still for a few minutes when the husband leans over and suddenly slaps her back. "That's for knowing the difference!"
And that's what I've never understood. To these people using cross breeding and classical Mendelian genetics to modify plants are fine. But go in scientifically and do the same thing in a sophisticated lab and suddenly it's evil.
There is much you're leaving out, but I don't have time to address it all. I'll address the biggest problem with your posting, which I quoted above. If we were to go in and do exactly the same thing that natural crossbreeding does, but just do it faster and more efficiently, I don't think there would be nearly the opposition that we're seeing with GMO crops.
But that isn't what we're doing. We are genetically modifying crops in ways that would never happen naturally, such as splicing frog genes into our vegetables. Even this, by itself, could possibly pass muster if there were anything even remotely close to enough data over anything even remotely close to an adequate period of time showing that the practice were safe. Unfortunately, what little data we have over the short time period we've been evaluating that data are indicating that it's a dangerous practice. Putting this kind of crap in our food supply at this point in time, with what we know about the results (such as it is), should be a criminal act.
In Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, the late Apple CEO is quoted as saying that, "I know that it's possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat, but I have to keep going on. If I don't, it's an admission that I'm about to die."
Translation: I know I'll never pay this guy for all his work, as I'm about to die. If I can't royally screw someone over one last time, I just won't be able to live with myself.
I don't know which is sadder: that Steve Jobs was this shallow, hollow person who valued money more than people, or that it says volumes about our country that so many people worshipped him.
How about congress actually pass a LAW on this, after all, they are supposed to be the legislators, eh?
I know most people don't bother reading the stories here, but did you bother to even read the summary (which actually does a decent job of summarizing the story)?
This is a bill. Bills become laws if they are approved by Congress.
Though the rest of your post was rather insightful, this is wild hyperbole...
Go to youtube and watch this video, and then see if you still think it's hyperbole. A career defense attorney/law professor and a career police interrogator explicitly agree: you are committing crimes just going about your day to day life, and if you say anything to the police other than, "I have nothing to say," you may be condemning yourself to prison without even realizing you did something illegal.
So never, ever, ever, *EVER* talk to the police except for those very limited items you must divulge (which, unfortunately, vary from state to state). "Stop and identify" laws come to mind.
We used a single byte to store the offset from 1900 in binary. So there will be no overflow until 2156.
The vast, vast majority of software that ran infrastructure was COBOL, and it almost always uses PICture statements, not single bytes, to define dates. Those PIC statements most commonly defined dates using 2-digit years. Stupid and short sighted, yes. But also a very real issue that took gajillions of man hours to fix.
Y2K disasters would have been very real (not as real as the Press would have had us believe, but very painful) if all that code hadn't been hacked. Note that the problem wasn't actually fixed in a lot of cases. It was just delayed another 70 years or so by using a Y2K window.
Slashdot Mirror
Perjury is only a crime in certain circumstances:
1) You're poor, and can't afford a high profile lawyer.
2) You're rich, and the publicity is so bad that the judge is afraid for his next election campaign.
In all other cases, perjury is swept under the rug. Since this falls under option 2, the only way perjury charges will be filed is if there is massive public outcry. There won't be an outcry, though, so there won't be any charges.
Unless Holland was annexed by the US recently
Does Holland have oil?
The summary has a terrible bias, and has nothing to do with small inventors being steamrolled by patent troll portfolios. What this article is actually about is someone patenting an exceedingly trivial idea (storing energy in a windup mechanism to deliver that energy to some device; an idea and implementation that has been around for at least a century), and complaining that his trivial rehash of an old idea was used by another company with the resources to actually produce said trivial products.
Now he wants his government to criminalize the use of ancient ideas if he can't make money off of them. He isn't a small inventor; he is a con artist trying to steal from the public domain.
They have to use sticks with rounded corners now.
They have to send their sticks to Apple, then buy them back as iSticks. They're the same sticks, but they're not allowed to use them without paying Apple first.
What you're describing isn't a progress bar. It's a time remaining indicator. Progress bars tell you how far long a process is on its path to completion. It was never meant to tell you how much time remains, and using it as such will predictably lead to end user confusion and frustration.
Even when a progress bar goes from 0 to 99% in an instant, then takes forever to go from 99% to 100%, it is doing what it is intended to do: tell you how far long the process is. That's all it is supposed to do. It should NEVER be used to tell you how much time remains. You can sometimes infer timing from progress if the progress bar progresses smoothly, but that's a side effect.
As for the time remaining indicators: those will ALWAYS be inaccurate (usually severely so) because most factors that contribute to how much longer a process must run to completion are unpredictable. It's like trying to predict when someone is going to turn off the hall light tonight based on when they turned it off last night. It might be accurate sometimes, but that's just from pure chance.
The fact is, they aren't going to retain very much of anything that gets said anymore than I would retain asking a mechanic what he'd do to fix my hypendupulator pump.
At the risk of divulging information that may cost me customers, fixing the Hypendululator Pump is a one or two step process, depending on whether you're using Imperial units or non-Imperial units. The first step is to apply the Hydrospanner to the pump's Hypen Bolt; but be sure you are running slower than light, as an improperly tightened Hypen bolt can cause catastrophic failure at faster than light speeds. This is probably a moot point, though, because if you're having to deal with this particular part, you probably won't be in Hyperspace to begin with. But it's always good to be cautious. If your Hypendupulator Pump uses Imperial units, then this should do the trick.
If you are using non-Imperial units, and tightening the Hypen bolt does not induce faster than light travel, you may have to acquire additional tools to read the onboard computer. Fortunately, most readily available R2 units are equipped with such tools as standard features. This will usually work, but tends to be much more expensive than the common Hydrospanner you're likely to already have in your toolbox.
Good Luck!
Grrr....I hit submit instead of preview. Some corrections:
"The the" = See the
"begin registered" = being registered
#include <IAmNotAnAttorney>
#include <ConsultARealAttorney>>
#include <YourMileageMayVary>>
#include <AllOtherStandardDisclaimers>>
Depending on the contents of the letter, begin registered may be immaterial. The the Posting Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_rule) for an explanation. The basic premise is that a contract offer (settlement, etc.) is considered delivered the moment the Post Office accepts it for delivery. The recipient doesn't even have to physically receive it.
Also, at least in some circumstances, the Court will hold the recipient liable for having read and understood the contents of the letter anyway.
In any event (as the OP is trying to do), the only sane response to the letter is to consult an attorney who has experience dealing with this situation. We can give advice until the cows come home, but that is not what the OP wants. The OP wants advice in finding an attorney that can help.
Cloud services effectively died that day.
I wish you were right, but you're not. Sadly, Stupid breeds way faster than Smart, so "cloud" subscriptions keep growing.
I'm mystified as to why these questions keep getting asked, as the answers are blindingly obvious.
How long will I have access to my documents?
Until, at Microsoft's sole, arbitrary discretion, Microsoft says you no longer have access to them.
What happens to my documents if I am using 100% of Skydrive (including the additional 20GB)?
Whatever Microsoft, at its sole and arbitrary discretion, says happens to them at that particular random moment in time.
Bottom line: if your data are only available on someone else's servers, especially those of a multi-convicted, monopolistic felon, you're already screwed. You just haven't yet woken up to that inevitability.
[Java] isn't the write once run everywhere that was promised
I've been writing Java apps that run on Linux and Windows for a long time, and have yet to run into this. Can you give an example where using pure Java doesn't work the same across platforms?
3.) tight vertical spacing is archaic and stupid, unless absolutely necessary for some display reason
After spending the first several years of my C programming life using K&R syntax, I eventually realized that many of the problems I had maintaining my code came from trying to parse through the dense insanity of tight vertical spacing (and other K&R style issues that originated from constraints that haven't existed in many years).
When reading Linux source code, the first thing I have to do in order to make the code intelligible is reformat it away from K&R. K&R is perhaps the single ugliest coding style I have ever seen or used.
And if the heirs didn't demand compensation for transferring their rights, well, they just pay the price for their stupidity.
I know it goes against Slashdot standards, but a lot of pointless, wasteful speculation could be avoided by all if people would read the stories before engaging their knee jerks.
Yes, all important questions are answered in the story.
I was reading that the vulnerability is not in general standalone Java...
That's true, which is why the people saying to uninstall Java sound like blathering idiots. You need to either uninstall the Java browser plugin, or use NoScript to whitelist your internal sites only. Frankly, you need to do this for all browser plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), as the entire browser plugin architecture is fundamentally flawed.
Standalone Java apps are not a problem.
Just a bunch of nerds, getting along.
No, this is Netflix realizing that they are essentially owned by Amazon at this point, and putting on their best facade. And this is Amazon realizing the same thing, and putting on the shit eating grin of an imminent conqueror. Once Amazon's streaming customer base becomes competitive with Netflix's, the former will crush the latter. This is how "cloud" computing is supposed to work, from the viewpoint of the "cloud" owner -- we control your vital asset (delivery), and can take it away at anytime of our choosing.
People should take technology history classes before running a technology company. Netflix is screwed.
I know there is 1000 millimetres in a metre, 1000 millilitres in a litre, 1000 milligrams in a gram.
We'll meet you half way. We'll start saying there are 1000 millimiles in a mile, 1000 milligallons in a gallon, and 1000 milliounces in an ounce.
I'd give them another couple of months.
You remind me of a joke my wife told me:
A retired couple was on their porch swing watching the neighborhood when the wife leans over and suddenly slaps her husband. "That's for forty years of bad sex!".
They continue sitting still for a few minutes when the husband leans over and suddenly slaps her back. "That's for knowing the difference!"
And that's what I've never understood. To these people using cross breeding and classical Mendelian genetics to modify plants are fine. But go in scientifically and do the same thing in a sophisticated lab and suddenly it's evil.
There is much you're leaving out, but I don't have time to address it all. I'll address the biggest problem with your posting, which I quoted above. If we were to go in and do exactly the same thing that natural crossbreeding does, but just do it faster and more efficiently, I don't think there would be nearly the opposition that we're seeing with GMO crops.
But that isn't what we're doing. We are genetically modifying crops in ways that would never happen naturally, such as splicing frog genes into our vegetables. Even this, by itself, could possibly pass muster if there were anything even remotely close to enough data over anything even remotely close to an adequate period of time showing that the practice were safe. Unfortunately, what little data we have over the short time period we've been evaluating that data are indicating that it's a dangerous practice. Putting this kind of crap in our food supply at this point in time, with what we know about the results (such as it is), should be a criminal act.
[Ballmer] has literally done nothing positive for [Microsoft] since he took over.
But he has been great for the computing industry.
In Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, the late Apple CEO is quoted as saying that, "I know that it's possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat, but I have to keep going on. If I don't, it's an admission that I'm about to die."
Translation: I know I'll never pay this guy for all his work, as I'm about to die. If I can't royally screw someone over one last time, I just won't be able to live with myself.
I don't know which is sadder: that Steve Jobs was this shallow, hollow person who valued money more than people, or that it says volumes about our country that so many people worshipped him.
How about congress actually pass a LAW on this, after all, they are supposed to be the legislators, eh?
I know most people don't bother reading the stories here, but did you bother to even read the summary (which actually does a decent job of summarizing the story)?
This is a bill. Bills become laws if they are approved by Congress.
Though the rest of your post was rather insightful, this is wild hyperbole...
Go to youtube and watch this video, and then see if you still think it's hyperbole. A career defense attorney/law professor and a career police interrogator explicitly agree: you are committing crimes just going about your day to day life, and if you say anything to the police other than, "I have nothing to say," you may be condemning yourself to prison without even realizing you did something illegal.
So never, ever, ever, *EVER* talk to the police except for those very limited items you must divulge (which, unfortunately, vary from state to state). "Stop and identify" laws come to mind.
So then I read the second link and it actually says:...
The actual git log explains this:
Merge branch 'x86-nuke386-for-linus' of git://git./linux/kernel/git/tip/tip
Pull "Nuke 386-DX/SX support" from Ingo Molnar:
"This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit
of complexity:
The part you quoted was badly phrased, but technically correct.
We used a single byte to store the offset from 1900 in binary. So there will be no overflow until 2156.
The vast, vast majority of software that ran infrastructure was COBOL, and it almost always uses PICture statements, not single bytes, to define dates. Those PIC statements most commonly defined dates using 2-digit years. Stupid and short sighted, yes. But also a very real issue that took gajillions of man hours to fix.
Y2K disasters would have been very real (not as real as the Press would have had us believe, but very painful) if all that code hadn't been hacked. Note that the problem wasn't actually fixed in a lot of cases. It was just delayed another 70 years or so by using a Y2K window.
This would be an opportune time for Apple to buy Sharp....
This would be an even more opportune time for Samsung to buy Sharp.