I'm trying to decide whether I'm proud of knowing that.
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Re:How can this hold up in court?
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
Be careful--if your kids opened the box, you may not be allowed to use the software at all.
Then again, if they're the ones bound the the ULA, you could say things like "eat all your broccoli or Microsoft'll come take your computer away." How's that for a boogieman?
Possibly. Hopefully. But in the U.S., most "frivolous lawsuit" rules are intended to make the filer pay for any legal fees incurred by the defendant, and no defendant has had any. Since I dropped the suit before it went to court, and since I never actually named a defendant, there isn't anyone who can sue me for this. Even if I discover the name of a John Doe, there is no actual defendant until I have amended the suit, which I am not going to do, since all I ever wanted was to discover John Doe's identity, not actually sue him.
I'll forfeit my filing fee, which will pay the gov't for its troubles, but even that may be tax-deductible.
I wonder how many programmers would make good lawyers (and vice-versa)? It seems like both professions require one to navigate pedantic and complex rulesets to arrive at a stated goal...
However, is that where the article was focused? No, it is not.
That's kinda why I focused on it--I get scared when the whole issue gets dumbed down to the point of "Civil libertarians are complaining that AOL helped the police catch a child molester." With that kind of lead-in, nobody notices the significance of the aside: companies and individuals are routinely abusing the system.
And to boot, less critical readers get the thought-concept "civil libertarian" mapped over to "pro-child-molestation." But that's a rant for another time.
Perhaps a compromise solution would be to disallow accessing ISP records for a civil suit?
It is possible to attempt to fight a subpoena, if you are willing to spend the money on lawyers. However, not only is it perfectly legal for AOL to turn over subpoenaed documents, it's a whole hell of a lot cheaper.
Although I only take partial issue with AOL's willingness to comply with search warrants (more to do with the laws themselves than the warrants), there is something much more sinister afoot here that goes well beyond busting criminals. Please read further in the article to the section about civil suits and subpoenas.
Raytheon wanted to find out which of its employees were badmouthing the company in public via AOL, so they sued "John Doe," which means they filed a lawsuit which said, essentially, "We don't know who we're suing just yet, but by Ghod we're suing somebody." With the civil suit filed all nice and pretty, they typed up some subpoenas demanding the identities of the John Does, and carried them over to AOL, who turned over the true names behind the aliases.
Here's the absolute best part: as soon as Raytheon knew who the employees in question were, they dropped the lawsuit. Then they either fired or disciplined all the employees involved.
This is called a tactical lawsuit: it's one where you don't give any sort of damn what the suit's own outcome may be; you file it just to make sure there's a lawsuit in place so you can do things you ordinarily wouldn't be allowed to do. Here's how it works, fable2112: Say for example that I hate you and decide to kick your ass. If I ask servtech who you are, they will promptly tell me to go to hell, which is as it should be. Since that approach won't work, I'm going to file a lawsuit: I sue John Doe for inducing mental distress in a SlashDot article. Nevermind the suit is complete crap. Nevermind it will never see trial--a lawsuit is a lawsuit, and I can use it to start issuing subpoenas. I send a subpoena to servtech, demanding your name and billing address. Are they going to tell me to go to hell? Of course not! I've got a subpoena--a court order!--demanding to know who you are. So instead of fighting it, they turn over your billing information. Now that I know where you live, I can drop the bogus lawsuit and cheerfully proceed with the asskicking I've decided you deserve.
Is any of this bothering you yet? Keep in mind that up to the actual asskicking, everything I did was completely legal. The great big question here, whether it's about AOL or any other ISP, is how much cooperation should they have given me? The obvious answer is "none." The legally viable answer is somewhat more nebulous.
Just something to contemplate.
Disclaimer: I don't actually want to kick your ass.
Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" was first published in Amazing Science Fiction, in 1940 and republished in 1950 in the collection The Man Who Sold the Moon.
Thank you for the clarifications from a Caldera insider's point of view.
Thank you also for pointing out that DR-DOS is still used for embedded and special-purpose applications. I'm glad to see that DR-DOS's technical merits have found a new home in this market. As an AC pointed out above, I was thinking of the world in terms of desktops and servers, not in terms of smaller environments. I suspect, however, that in environments such as install-disks and industrial controllers, interoperability with Windows 3.11 is hardly an issue.
You have to admit, though, that buying a product and filing a lawsuit on the very same day looks awfully suspicious from the outside. Although I'm sure you cannot legally comment on this, it looks very much like the sort of thing an opportunistic company would do if it were buying a lawsuit.
And my arguments and opinions, as they apply to the desktop environment, and as they apply to things which transpired before Caldera existed, are still valid:
The mechanism by which wrongs are remedied is that criminals are punished. No one else, in a sequence of companies with standing in such matters, has done anything to pursue a remedy or punishment of Microsoft over the alleged criminal acts they committed. It is fairly clear that this is so because of the threat of retaliation from Microsoft. Caldera enjoys a position where retaliation by Microsoft is somewhat more difficult due to the markets we are in.
So are you doing this because it needs doing, or because you can get away with it? I suspect the latter, and I still have ethical problems with this sort of thinking. You don't right a wrong by punishing a wrongdoer. Punishing someone who has harmed you is not the same thing as repairing the harm done.
Many people, including Microsoft, have a hard time with the concept that legal standing can be transferred with a product, but I believe that the law allows it for exactly these types of situations. Legally, Caldera can act on behalf of DRI and Novell, to punish Microsoft for their criminal acts. The fact that many of us were actually materially affected by the bad acts is just icing on the cake (justice-wise).
Of course the law allows for it. The law allows for all sorts of opportunistic behavior. I'm happy the soulless entity "Caldera" has engaged in a behavior which will fulfill its success objectives through legally valid mechanisms. But I am unhappy that people use what is legal as an excuse to ignore what is right.
Legally, Caldera can act on behalf of DRI and Novell, to punish Microsoft for their criminal acts. The fact that many of us were actually materially affected by the bad acts is just icing on the cake (justice-wise).
So you're doing this to punish Microsoft. This is substantially different than seeking redress. You're well with in your legal rights, of course. Your company is engaging in legally correct activities--so what if they're revolting? They're legal, and that's all that matters anymore.
Okay, so I'm being a voice in the wilderness. So are these guys, most likely. Maybe I just need to sell out too, replace my soul with an algorithm.
I'm glad DR-DOS has a viable future, I really am. It's a good product that deserves to be used. I'm just ashamed of what it's being used as an excuse for.
Um, sex*kitten? do you even know what what "ex post facto" means?
Art. 1 Sec. 9 says that you cannot pass a law today and use it to prosecute someone for something they did last year. This means that if we ever come to our senses and ban disco music, we cannot go arrest the BeeGees for having helped make the 1970s a stereophonic hell-on-earth. No matter how much they deserve it.
Furthermore, since the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, which is before the actions alleged by Microsoft, before Microsoft was even incorporated and--assuming Gates is not the immortal and timeless Dark One--before the founders of the company were even born, the current FTC/DoJ/LMNOP case against Microsoft is not an ex-post-facto application of the Act.
I believe, kitten, that you are under the misapprehension that Art.1 Sec.9 means that you can get away with murder just because the trial happened after you cut the brake lines on the tour bus of the Bros. Gibb. Sadly, this is not the case.
Although I do believe that Microsoft engages in coercive, anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior, I still have an ethical problem with this action by Caldera.
Caldera bought DR-DOS just a couple of years ago, well after it became an obsolete product with no sales potential. Then they filed a lawsuit against Microsoft based on something that happened to the product before they ever had any vested interest in its success or even in its very existence.
In their defense, I must say that Caldera has in fact been making at least a symbolic effort at marketing DR-DOS, calling it a "thin client solution." But there's not much one can do with DR-DOS that one cannot do using the DOS emulation already bundled under Caldera's own Open Linux. Why would Caldera compete with itself this way, when it could consolidate the two into a unified, robust product that can run not only any source-available Unix program ever written, but also any DOS-based binary application written before 1994? They own the source to a full-blown DOS; instead of competing with their flagship product, they could be using it to make their flagship product's DOS emulation bullet-proof and save themselves a bundle in marketing and future development costs.
They won't do that, though, because it is in their best fiscal interest to hang DR-DOS out to dry, to go through the motions of trying to sell it into a market that vanished years ago.
DR-DOS is, as of 1999, a useless product. That begs the question, why did Caldera buy it at all? The only answer I can come to is that they didn't buy an operating system: they bought the grounds for a lawsuit. I believe that Caldera purchased Digital Research's old MS-DOS clone in full knowledge that they would never be able to make any significant amount of money by selling or supporting the product to end-users, or by using its technology to improve any of its other future or existing products. Furthermore I believe their primary--if not their sole--purpose in the buy was to make a huge pile of money by suing the biggest player in the business over something that happened before Caldera was even incorporated.
Regardless of the target of Caldera's lawsuit, I believe their premeditated behavior in this matter is grossly unethical. It is morally bankrupt. It is litigous opportunism at its All-American worst: Caldera themselves were never hurt by Microsoft; they just bought someone else's pain and pretended it was their own. You will be hard-pressed to find a lawsuit which more clearly exhibits the near-total subversion of the United States' civil judicial system from a mechanism by which wrongs are remedied to one you use to make a fast buck.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drive down to Florida now and buy a pack of cigarettes. Then I'm going to buy a buggy-whip concern and use it to sue GM.
> The code is significantly smaller and easier to understand.
This is one of the best little snippets I've seen in this whole thread. See, I've been contemplating installing FreeBSD on one of my machines so that I could start studying Unix internals, kernal architecture, FS management and so forth. Every time I try to learn Unix's innards under Linux, I run into a huge tangle of hooks, and hacks.
I've enjoyed Linux as a user and as a programmer. Linus et al have gone through great pains to make the kernel a flexible, extensible framework, and these have paid off in an unbelievable level of hardware support. Unfortunately, the all-hooks model makes it frustrating to dig down further and further until I get to the True Purpose underneath it all.
Maybe I need to just go dig out my old 0.99pl13 Infomagic CD and compare that Linux's simpler monolithic kernel against the Bach book, but it seems you're suggesting that *BSDs have a sufficiently coherent internal architecture that maybe I should study them instead.
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Factoid Spamming Protection
on
The Factoid
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· Score: 1
What you really need on your widget is a "make the person who sent me this beep" button. When the spammer chirps, you and everybody near you get to pummel them!
Maybe someday we'll have an enforceable law about "sending e-mail under false pretenses," kind of like AOL is using in Virginia. If we do, then you set the Factoid protocol up to have an "advertiser" bit. All widgets have an "ignore advertising" flag; anyone spamming without setting the bit gets sued, assuming they make it out of the room alive. Unfortunately, like any other ruleset, the more rules you add in to defeat a loophole, the more loopholes you introduce. Any electronic protocol you end up having to punt to legal protocols gets punted to the most loophole-ridden construct in existence.
How well would a transmit-through-touch-only version fly? I have seen experimental devices which send faint digital pulses through your skin, which is naturally conductive. So if you had Factoid-touch embedded in your wristwatch (which would also give you a way of displaying the data), all you have to do is shake hands and wait for the beep--you've just exchanged business cards. Add some sort of input device to the watch and you could compose a custom message for your recipient ("meet back here 7pm"), or just choose the right stock message to send (e.g. your home phone number vs. your office pager).
While a touch device would give you a great deal of protection against spam and evesdropping, the concept would probably go over better in countries with fewer body taboos. On the other hand, you could always just both touch a copper plate or other piece of metal.
Or even better, download enough information from the person you're necking with to send to your cell-modem, which forwards it to your home computer, which investigates them and sends the results back to you just in time for you to decide whether to go all for it or run screaming from the room.
Pure speculation ahead: With the human genome project a mere year from completion, and with genetic engineering becoming so sophisticated, how long after human cloning before we started seeing geneered clones? Picture this: at age forty, you order a version of yourself with clear vision, perfect teeth and arteries, immunity to a variety of diseases, stronger bones, no vermiform appendix and:
If you are male:
no male pattern baldness,
chest hair,
that gigantic tallywhacker you've always dreamed of,
a cast-iron prostate gland, and
no chance of becoming impotent, or
If you are female:
no endometriosis or cramps worth mentioning,
a pre-atrophied hymen,
no cellulite,
no chance of osteoporosis, and
that pesky family history of breast cancer gone bye-bye.
In ten years, the brainless, accelerated-growth, pre-exercised, healthy young body is ready for your brain to be dropped on in. There you are, fifty, with not just any eighteen year-old's body, but your own, new, improved eighteen year-old's body. You could be your own Friday! Not only that, but by the time you're a physical thirty years old, you can start drawing Social Security, your pension and your 401(k), join the AARP and get a senior citizen's discount on just everything.
Just to throw a monkey wrench into things, if you're male, chances are they could excise the Y chromosome, extrapolate a new X chromosome from the one you got from your Mom, and you could live your life over again as a woman!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to decide whether I'm proud of knowing that.
--
Then again, if they're the ones bound the the ULA, you could say things like "eat all your broccoli or Microsoft'll come take your computer away." How's that for a boogieman?
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I'd love to audit an "ethics in journalism" class, just to see what's being taught and ignored.
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I'll forfeit my filing fee, which will pay the gov't for its troubles, but even that may be tax-deductible.
I wonder how many programmers would make good lawyers (and vice-versa)? It seems like both professions require one to navigate pedantic and complex rulesets to arrive at a stated goal...
--
That's kinda why I focused on it--I get scared when the whole issue gets dumbed down to the point of "Civil libertarians are complaining that AOL helped the police catch a child molester." With that kind of lead-in, nobody notices the significance of the aside: companies and individuals are routinely abusing the system.
And to boot, less critical readers get the thought-concept "civil libertarian" mapped over to "pro-child-molestation." But that's a rant for another time.
It is possible to attempt to fight a subpoena, if you are willing to spend the money on lawyers. However, not only is it perfectly legal for AOL to turn over subpoenaed documents, it's a whole hell of a lot cheaper.
--
Raytheon wanted to find out which of its employees were badmouthing the company in public via AOL, so they sued "John Doe," which means they filed a lawsuit which said, essentially, "We don't know who we're suing just yet, but by Ghod we're suing somebody." With the civil suit filed all nice and pretty, they typed up some subpoenas demanding the identities of the John Does, and carried them over to AOL, who turned over the true names behind the aliases.
Here's the absolute best part: as soon as Raytheon knew who the employees in question were, they dropped the lawsuit. Then they either fired or disciplined all the employees involved.
This is called a tactical lawsuit: it's one where you don't give any sort of damn what the suit's own outcome may be; you file it just to make sure there's a lawsuit in place so you can do things you ordinarily wouldn't be allowed to do. Here's how it works, fable2112: Say for example that I hate you and decide to kick your ass. If I ask servtech who you are, they will promptly tell me to go to hell, which is as it should be. Since that approach won't work, I'm going to file a lawsuit: I sue John Doe for inducing mental distress in a SlashDot article. Nevermind the suit is complete crap. Nevermind it will never see trial--a lawsuit is a lawsuit, and I can use it to start issuing subpoenas. I send a subpoena to servtech, demanding your name and billing address. Are they going to tell me to go to hell? Of course not! I've got a subpoena--a court order!--demanding to know who you are. So instead of fighting it, they turn over your billing information. Now that I know where you live, I can drop the bogus lawsuit and cheerfully proceed with the asskicking I've decided you deserve.
Is any of this bothering you yet? Keep in mind that up to the actual asskicking, everything I did was completely legal. The great big question here, whether it's about AOL or any other ISP, is how much cooperation should they have given me? The obvious answer is "none." The legally viable answer is somewhat more nebulous.
Just something to contemplate.
Disclaimer: I don't actually want to kick your ass.
--
Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" was first published in Amazing Science Fiction, in 1940 and republished in 1950 in the collection The Man Who Sold the Moon.
--
This is fscking great! Fried chickens falling out of the sky! Somebody invent a machine to make it rain beer!
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What the hell are you doing? Don't you know you can't have a spelling flame that doesn't have a spelling eror in it?
--
Thank you also for pointing out that DR-DOS is still used for embedded and special-purpose applications. I'm glad to see that DR-DOS's technical merits have found a new home in this market. As an AC pointed out above, I was thinking of the world in terms of desktops and servers, not in terms of smaller environments. I suspect, however, that in environments such as install-disks and industrial controllers, interoperability with Windows 3.11 is hardly an issue.
You have to admit, though, that buying a product and filing a lawsuit on the very same day looks awfully suspicious from the outside. Although I'm sure you cannot legally comment on this, it looks very much like the sort of thing an opportunistic company would do if it were buying a lawsuit.
And my arguments and opinions, as they apply to the desktop environment, and as they apply to things which transpired before Caldera existed, are still valid:
So are you doing this because it needs doing, or because you can get away with it? I suspect the latter, and I still have ethical problems with this sort of thinking. You don't right a wrong by punishing a wrongdoer. Punishing someone who has harmed you is not the same thing as repairing the harm done. Of course the law allows for it. The law allows for all sorts of opportunistic behavior. I'm happy the soulless entity "Caldera" has engaged in a behavior which will fulfill its success objectives through legally valid mechanisms. But I am unhappy that people use what is legal as an excuse to ignore what is right. So you're doing this to punish Microsoft. This is substantially different than seeking redress. You're well with in your legal rights, of course. Your company is engaging in legally correct activities--so what if they're revolting? They're legal, and that's all that matters anymore.Okay, so I'm being a voice in the wilderness. So are these guys, most likely. Maybe I just need to sell out too, replace my soul with an algorithm.
I'm glad DR-DOS has a viable future, I really am. It's a good product that deserves to be used. I'm just ashamed of what it's being used as an excuse for.
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Linux-start.com has seventy thousand employees?
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Art. 1 Sec. 9 says that you cannot pass a law today and use it to prosecute someone for something they did last year. This means that if we ever come to our senses and ban disco music, we cannot go arrest the BeeGees for having helped make the 1970s a stereophonic hell-on-earth. No matter how much they deserve it.
Furthermore, since the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, which is before the actions alleged by Microsoft, before Microsoft was even incorporated and--assuming Gates is not the immortal and timeless Dark One--before the founders of the company were even born, the current FTC/DoJ/LMNOP case against Microsoft is not an ex-post-facto application of the Act.
I believe, kitten, that you are under the misapprehension that Art.1 Sec.9 means that you can get away with murder just because the trial happened after you cut the brake lines on the tour bus of the Bros. Gibb. Sadly, this is not the case.
--
Caldera bought DR-DOS just a couple of years ago, well after it became an obsolete product with no sales potential. Then they filed a lawsuit against Microsoft based on something that happened to the product before they ever had any vested interest in its success or even in its very existence.
In their defense, I must say that Caldera has in fact been making at least a symbolic effort at marketing DR-DOS, calling it a "thin client solution." But there's not much one can do with DR-DOS that one cannot do using the DOS emulation already bundled under Caldera's own Open Linux. Why would Caldera compete with itself this way, when it could consolidate the two into a unified, robust product that can run not only any source-available Unix program ever written, but also any DOS-based binary application written before 1994? They own the source to a full-blown DOS; instead of competing with their flagship product, they could be using it to make their flagship product's DOS emulation bullet-proof and save themselves a bundle in marketing and future development costs.
They won't do that, though, because it is in their best fiscal interest to hang DR-DOS out to dry, to go through the motions of trying to sell it into a market that vanished years ago.
DR-DOS is, as of 1999, a useless product. That begs the question, why did Caldera buy it at all? The only answer I can come to is that they didn't buy an operating system: they bought the grounds for a lawsuit. I believe that Caldera purchased Digital Research's old MS-DOS clone in full knowledge that they would never be able to make any significant amount of money by selling or supporting the product to end-users, or by using its technology to improve any of its other future or existing products. Furthermore I believe their primary--if not their sole--purpose in the buy was to make a huge pile of money by suing the biggest player in the business over something that happened before Caldera was even incorporated.
Regardless of the target of Caldera's lawsuit, I believe their premeditated behavior in this matter is grossly unethical. It is morally bankrupt. It is litigous opportunism at its All-American worst: Caldera themselves were never hurt by Microsoft; they just bought someone else's pain and pretended it was their own. You will be hard-pressed to find a lawsuit which more clearly exhibits the near-total subversion of the United States' civil judicial system from a mechanism by which wrongs are remedied to one you use to make a fast buck.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drive down to Florida now and buy a pack of cigarettes. Then I'm going to buy a buggy-whip concern and use it to sue GM.
--
This is one of the best little snippets I've seen in this whole thread. See, I've been contemplating installing FreeBSD on one of my machines so that I could start studying Unix internals, kernal architecture, FS management and so forth. Every time I try to learn Unix's innards under Linux, I run into a huge tangle of hooks, and hacks.
I've enjoyed Linux as a user and as a programmer. Linus et al have gone through great pains to make the kernel a flexible, extensible framework, and these have paid off in an unbelievable level of hardware support. Unfortunately, the all-hooks model makes it frustrating to dig down further and further until I get to the True Purpose underneath it all.
Maybe I need to just go dig out my old 0.99pl13 Infomagic CD and compare that Linux's simpler monolithic kernel against the Bach book, but it seems you're suggesting that *BSDs have a sufficiently coherent internal architecture that maybe I should study them instead.
--
Maybe someday we'll have an enforceable law about "sending e-mail under false pretenses," kind of like AOL is using in Virginia. If we do, then you set the Factoid protocol up to have an "advertiser" bit. All widgets have an "ignore advertising" flag; anyone spamming without setting the bit gets sued, assuming they make it out of the room alive. Unfortunately, like any other ruleset, the more rules you add in to defeat a loophole, the more loopholes you introduce. Any electronic protocol you end up having to punt to legal protocols gets punted to the most loophole-ridden construct in existence.
How well would a transmit-through-touch-only version fly? I have seen experimental devices which send faint digital pulses through your skin, which is naturally conductive. So if you had Factoid-touch embedded in your wristwatch (which would also give you a way of displaying the data), all you have to do is shake hands and wait for the beep--you've just exchanged business cards. Add some sort of input device to the watch and you could compose a custom message for your recipient ("meet back here 7pm"), or just choose the right stock message to send (e.g. your home phone number vs. your office pager).
While a touch device would give you a great deal of protection against spam and evesdropping, the concept would probably go over better in countries with fewer body taboos. On the other hand, you could always just both touch a copper plate or other piece of metal.
Or even better, download enough information from the person you're necking with to send to your cell-modem, which forwards it to your home computer, which investigates them and sends the results back to you just in time for you to decide whether to go all for it or run screaming from the room .
--
With the human genome project a mere year from completion, and with genetic engineering becoming so sophisticated, how long after human cloning before we started seeing geneered clones? Picture this: at age forty, you order a version of yourself with clear vision, perfect teeth and arteries, immunity to a variety of diseases, stronger bones, no vermiform appendix and:
If you are male:
If you are female:
In ten years, the brainless, accelerated-growth, pre-exercised, healthy young body is ready for your brain to be dropped on in. There you are, fifty, with not just any eighteen year-old's body, but your own, new, improved eighteen year-old's body. You could be your own Friday! Not only that, but by the time you're a physical thirty years old, you can start drawing Social Security, your pension and your 401(k), join the AARP and get a senior citizen's discount on just everything.
Just to throw a monkey wrench into things, if you're male, chances are they could excise the Y chromosome, extrapolate a new X chromosome from the one you got from your Mom, and you could live your life over again as a woman!
Sound fun? Order yours today!
--