Well, it says that after he got the negative result, he sued the hospital for fucking up the first time and making him think he had AIDS. The article goes on to say "The results came back negative and Mr Stimpson began legal action against the trust, convinced there had been a mistake with the original diagnosis. But an extensive investigation, including DNA testing on his blood samples, has confirmed all the results". I'm not sure if that means "DNA testing to confirm both samples were his" or "DNA testing for vDNA pairs produced by the RNA transcription of the virus".
It's not. That's why I posted the link to a discussion of the differences. Thanks for playing "Do You or Do You Not Have Basic Reading Comprehension Skills" though. In a defense of Justification (ie. "It's not Libel, it's the truth!"), the burden of proof is on the Defendant in Canadian law. Canada is not the US; our legal system is not identical to yours.
Actually, under Canadian law, to pursue a defense of Justification against a Libel suit, the defendant must prove that their words were true. Quote:
Justification
If a person publishes a statement which lowers the reputation of another, the law presumes the falsity of the statement and the defendant then has the burden of proving the truth of the statement. If it is the truth anyone is free to say it. However, if the plaintiff consents to the statement being made, he/she cannot later argue they have been defamed. Actionable defamation only consists in a false statement impairing ones reputation.
I'd call it the MPEG-4 audio layer, because, you know, it is. MP3, if you were curious, stands for MPEG-1, Layer 3, the MPEG-1 audio layer. AAC (which stands for Advanced Audio Codec, not, as you seem to think, Apple's Audio Codec) is the successor to MP3, designed as a more advanced replacement of it that fixes most of its more egregious flaws, from the same industry group who created MP3. It's an ISO standard.
So you're saying that by adding value to their operating system, Microsoft is being anti-competitive?
No, he's saying that by leveraging their monopoly in one market (Operating Systems) to enter another market (spyware/virus software), they are breaking the law. The Courts have already found them guilty of doing this very thing before.
That sounds a lot more like good old fashioned capitalistic competition to me.
If letting monopolies go unchecked sounds like the height of "capitalistic competition" to you, you might want to read the theories on the subject of this crazy guy I've heard of, name of Adam Smith
If you start losing customers to another vendor (Apple) because their product is better, you improve upon your own product to retain your customer base
You're not seriously claiming that Microsoft cannot improve their product without leveraging their way into Yet Another Software Market, are you? They could as easily solve the spyware problem by closing the legion of security holes that allow it to propogate, rather than leveraging their way into the Clean Up After Our Stupidity software space.
That said, you can fault apple for doing the same thing by bundling a Mail app, a calendar app, a movie editing app, a photo app, a music app, a development environment, etc..... into their OS
No, you cannot. Apple has never been ruled by any court to be a monopoly in any market, and they certainly have never issued a consent decree explicitly admitting that they themselves agree that they are such. You cannot be found guilty of illegally leveraging your own monopoly in another market if you don't have a monopoly in any market. I should have though that would be blindingly obvious, but I guess I overestimated your intelligence.
Secondly, with government so charged to "protect" consumers from scams, you'd think scams would go away. They won't. The only way that scams will be unprofitable is when government stops "protecting" citizens and lets people learn to be aware of what they're buying.
As the government doesn't actually refund the losses of any victim of scam victims (except in the vanishingly small number of cases where their money is recovered, months or years later), there is no less incentive right now to smarten up than there would be in a system under which the government didn't attempt to punish the scammer for his actions. People fall victim to scams because that's human nature, not because we have a nation of perfectly rational people who are shutting off their rationality because there's no punishment for doing so. The real world isn't a Libertarian's flight of fancy; humans are not perfectly rational actors.
On the other hand under the current system there is less incentive for new scammers to take up the trade, while in a system absent the disincentives of government punishment, given that gullible people will still be every bit as gullible, scammers would flourish.
Apple wasn't going to have completed the Intel transition till 2007 anyway, so it's not like the timing is a huge problem. The dual-core PA Semi chip is supposed to be out first, 3Q06;
Yeah, assuming absolutely no delays, and part of that plan is to scale down to a new 65 nm process, and new processes are always fraught with delays. It's like a freaking law of nature.
The PowerPC road is littered with the bloated corpses of aggressive young companies that were going to come in and shoot the moon with fantastic new advances; history is not on PA Semi's side. Freescale's got a magic new G4 that was due months and months ago. Remember Exponential Technologies and their revolutionary x704? Neither does anyone else, but in 1996 the tech world was enchanted with its promises of a new PowerPC (shipping in 12 months!) that was going to run circles around everything else. Good thing Apple didn't bet on their success.
And what's Apple supposed to do? Sit around with the portable lineup stagnant for another 18 months because of the vapourware promises of a startup with no experience delivering to a company as big as Apple? That sounds like a winning business plan to you? Betting the farm on a fringe player's completely unsubstantiated promises is suicide.
No, Apple's making the smart move: putting themselves where all the competition is. Now they don't have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses because they are the Joneses. Apple will finally have two suppliers driving each other in the same market space, which is a luxury they haven't had since the early days of the PowerPC. Hell, all reports are that the current x86 Mac dev boxes already kick the living shit out of the G5 lineup, speedwise.
Exactly! Will the average person who purchases an iMac G5 use any of the developer tools?
Hey, you were the one who decided to do a feature-for-feature price comparison on the theory that, all features taken into account, the PC would come out on top. I'm just helping fill in the features you forgot to include.
Sure will be fun playing with the BIOS on that thing, since that's the only thing it'll boot into in your config. Let's continue, shall we?
Full copy of Windows XP Pro (for closer feature equivalence) - $135 OEM from NewEgg. We're up to $985.
Now, I'm a developer, and Apple ships their full RAD development environment with every Mac sold. I'm going to need the same for my new Windows box, so throw on a copy of Visual Studio Pro - A whopping $700 from NewEgg. Now it's costing $1685 and we haven't even started talking about the iLife equivalents...
It's quite unfortunate that Apple chose not to go with the Cell
Yeah, the Cell and it's completely branch-pessimizing architecture would have run a general purpose OS just great
And it's not as though it's a big port job to switch to AMD if Intel doesn't shape up. They're binary compatible. That's why the switch is a good thing; two competing, competent vendors to choose from with no porting cost if you switch between.
The only reason that Linux would become a hobby is if you felt a need to update things that don't need updating continually. Similarly, I have a hacked Xbox and the version of XBMC I have on the thing is like a year old, but it works just fine and I haven't been having problems with it. This player with some [working] OSS on it would be the same story.
Or until one of the bugs in the perpetually-in-beta desktop environments, graphics drivers, media players, office suites, email clients et al bites you in the butt and causes you to need to try to upgrade to the latest version, which half the time, despite being available from the developer, hasn't been repackaged by the distro maintainer (or been released into the stable version of the package repository), leaving you in a situation where you either sit around waiting with unusable software, hack around with the config files to enable installing unstable packages (and risking further breakage through installation of unstable dependencies, because every bloody version of every bloody app wants it's own point revision of one of the multitude of GUI libraries, XML parsing libraries, etc, etc), or bypassing (and therefore rendering irrelevant) your package manager and building it yourself. And then tomorrow you do it all again when one of the other buggy progs bites you in the butt and...
Yeah, those were fun times, and every bit as easy as how I have it now with OS X, where I download the app from the dev and drag a single file to wherever the hell I want, knowing full well that it's dependencies are a perfectly standard set of libraries that came with the system, and that it will have the same interface as everything else. Not.
WindowServer is responsible for handling moving windows, drawing the frames of windows, hidding and unhiding them and the like. It doesn't handle the desktop and drawing the items on it, Finder does that.
Likely, WindowServer got itself all tied into knots for some other reason entirely, and rebooting put an end to all that, not clearing off the desktop.
Anyway, it's moot. In c if you assign the value of fish to the container fish, it'll still return true since the assignment will be successful and the value of fish will essencially not be changed.
Uh, what?
fish = fish, assuming fish is some previously declared variable, will evaluate to whatever the value that fish was assigned. if(fish=fish) {} may or may not execute, depending on whether the value of fish is non-zero (remember, in C, any non-zero value is true.) It has nothing to do with "returning true if the assignment is successful".
We're talking about written material posted on blogs here, so slander is right out. That leaves libel.
Now the thing about libel is, it can't be libel if it's actually true (at least in the US, where Forbes is based). The Forbes article bitches about, among other things, bloggers saying mean things about poor little old Kryptonite Corporation. But the things is, what they were saying was true; the company was selling faulty, easily picked locks and hoping no one would notice. Ergo, what the bloggers were posting wasn't remotely libelous.
Since what the article is attacking meets neither the standard for slander nor libel, that leaves good old fashioned free speech. So the assertion made by many here is valid: Forbes Magazine is attacking Free Speech.
Because it's his Internet you want to alter. And mine, and lots of other peoples too.
Yeah, and shit, you'd almost think they all deserve a say in how it's run. And, come to think of it, most of them live outside the US, so what we need is some kind of international body in which representatives from everywhere can get together and hash things out. A group of nations, united....
On the one hand, I almost feel compelled to call the Seattle PD (local for me) and plead with them not to take any action based on Mr. Thompson's ludicrous and exaggerated claims; on the other hand,
I wouldn't worry about it. Quoth Tycho:
It is critical to establish that this letter isn't anything to worry about. We've been sent worse by better.
A response that should, with any luck, inspire Thompson to further heights of lunacy to the amusement of all.
This guy (Thompson) is railing against freedom of expression, and the mainstream press is ignoring him in droves.
Are you kidding me? The mainstream press loves this guy. The hot coffee mod "scandal" is but his latest whipping boy. This guy has scored a lot of prime time interviews and news stories on major outlets since the early '90s with, among other things, demands that 2 Live Crew's "As Nasty As They Wanna Be" and Ice T's "Cop Killer" be banned (those were big news items at the time), been a major factor behind several indecency fines Howard Stern received from the FCC, and been a part of damn near every news story on the dangers of violent video games.
This is the guy who insisted that Columbine was caused by DOOM being a "murder simulator". He has sued, among others Time Warner Inc., Polygram Film Entertainment Distribution Inc., Palm Pictures, Island Pictures and New Line Cinema, Atari Corp., Nintendo of America, Sega of America Inc. and Sony Computer Entertainment under Federal Product Liability laws after a different school shooting.
His allegations led Dateline NBC to report that Lee Boyd Malvo, the beltway sniper, had "trained extensively using Halo".
He has been interviewed numerous times on CBS, including one famous instance in which he compared Doug Lowesnstein of the ESA to Joseph Goebbels..
He has appeared on 60 minutes to discuss how Grand Theft Auto (he alleges) trained a young man to murder two police officers.
No, the problem is most definitely not that the media is ignoring him. Quite the opposite, really.
and put a bullet in your head. Come on, it's all bullshit anyways, right? Feeding yourself, cleaning yourself, earning money to sustain yourself, that's all just a fancy way of supporting your comfortable life.
So put your mouth where your money is -- around the end of a gun barrel. Embrace the nihilism you preach and blow your fucking brains out. Or realize that taking actions to keep yourself alive make perfect sense if you're not suicidal.
Either way, quit being a hypocrite. Eat a bullet or wise up, it's your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it says that after he got the negative result, he sued the hospital for fucking up the first time and making him think he had AIDS. The article goes on to say "The results came back negative and Mr Stimpson began legal action against the trust, convinced there had been a mistake with the original diagnosis. But an extensive investigation, including DNA testing on his blood samples, has confirmed all the results". I'm not sure if that means "DNA testing to confirm both samples were his" or "DNA testing for vDNA pairs produced by the RNA transcription of the virus".
I imagine Canadian law would be similar.
It's not. That's why I posted the link to a discussion of the differences. Thanks for playing "Do You or Do You Not Have Basic Reading Comprehension Skills" though. In a defense of Justification (ie. "It's not Libel, it's the truth!"), the burden of proof is on the Defendant in Canadian law. Canada is not the US; our legal system is not identical to yours.
From here, rather.
Actually, under Canadian law, to pursue a defense of Justification against a Libel suit, the defendant must prove that their words were true. Quote:
Justification
If a person publishes a statement which lowers the reputation of another, the law presumes the falsity of the statement and the defendant then has the burden of proving the truth of the statement. If it is the truth anyone is free to say it. However, if the plaintiff consents to the statement being made, he/she cannot later argue they have been defamed. Actionable defamation only consists in a false statement impairing ones reputation.
From here, about half way down, under "Canada".
Sorry I couldn't resist
Few people have that capacity.
What would you call AAC then?
I'd call it the MPEG-4 audio layer, because, you know, it is. MP3, if you were curious, stands for MPEG-1, Layer 3, the MPEG-1 audio layer. AAC (which stands for Advanced Audio Codec, not, as you seem to think, Apple's Audio Codec) is the successor to MP3, designed as a more advanced replacement of it that fixes most of its more egregious flaws, from the same industry group who created MP3. It's an ISO standard.
So you're saying that by adding value to their operating system, Microsoft is being anti-competitive?
No, he's saying that by leveraging their monopoly in one market (Operating Systems) to enter another market (spyware/virus software), they are breaking the law. The Courts have already found them guilty of doing this very thing before.
That sounds a lot more like good old fashioned capitalistic competition to me.
If letting monopolies go unchecked sounds like the height of "capitalistic competition" to you, you might want to read the theories on the subject of this crazy guy I've heard of, name of Adam Smith
If you start losing customers to another vendor (Apple) because their product is better, you improve upon your own product to retain your customer base
You're not seriously claiming that Microsoft cannot improve their product without leveraging their way into Yet Another Software Market, are you? They could as easily solve the spyware problem by closing the legion of security holes that allow it to propogate, rather than leveraging their way into the Clean Up After Our Stupidity software space.
That said, you can fault apple for doing the same thing by bundling a Mail app, a calendar app, a movie editing app, a photo app, a music app, a development environment, etc..... into their OS
No, you cannot. Apple has never been ruled by any court to be a monopoly in any market, and they certainly have never issued a consent decree explicitly admitting that they themselves agree that they are such. You cannot be found guilty of illegally leveraging your own monopoly in another market if you don't have a monopoly in any market. I should have though that would be blindingly obvious, but I guess I overestimated your intelligence.
Secondly, with government so charged to "protect" consumers from scams, you'd think scams would go away. They won't. The only way that scams will be unprofitable is when government stops "protecting" citizens and lets people learn to be aware of what they're buying.
As the government doesn't actually refund the losses of any victim of scam victims (except in the vanishingly small number of cases where their money is recovered, months or years later), there is no less incentive right now to smarten up than there would be in a system under which the government didn't attempt to punish the scammer for his actions. People fall victim to scams because that's human nature, not because we have a nation of perfectly rational people who are shutting off their rationality because there's no punishment for doing so. The real world isn't a Libertarian's flight of fancy; humans are not perfectly rational actors.
On the other hand under the current system there is less incentive for new scammers to take up the trade, while in a system absent the disincentives of government punishment, given that gullible people will still be every bit as gullible, scammers would flourish.
or why he's pretending to be a chick, but everyone knows there are no girls on teh internets.
Apple wasn't going to have completed the Intel transition till 2007 anyway, so it's not like the timing is a huge problem. The dual-core PA Semi chip is supposed to be out first, 3Q06;
Yeah, assuming absolutely no delays, and part of that plan is to scale down to a new 65 nm process, and new processes are always fraught with delays. It's like a freaking law of nature.
The PowerPC road is littered with the bloated corpses of aggressive young companies that were going to come in and shoot the moon with fantastic new advances; history is not on PA Semi's side. Freescale's got a magic new G4 that was due months and months ago. Remember Exponential Technologies and their revolutionary x704? Neither does anyone else, but in 1996 the tech world was enchanted with its promises of a new PowerPC (shipping in 12 months!) that was going to run circles around everything else. Good thing Apple didn't bet on their success.
And what's Apple supposed to do? Sit around with the portable lineup stagnant for another 18 months because of the vapourware promises of a startup with no experience delivering to a company as big as Apple? That sounds like a winning business plan to you? Betting the farm on a fringe player's completely unsubstantiated promises is suicide.
No, Apple's making the smart move: putting themselves where all the competition is. Now they don't have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses because they are the Joneses. Apple will finally have two suppliers driving each other in the same market space, which is a luxury they haven't had since the early days of the PowerPC. Hell, all reports are that the current x86 Mac dev boxes already kick the living shit out of the G5 lineup, speedwise.
There are fast low-power PPC architecture chips out there (like PA Semi) that Apple could use if they wanted
Provided they're willing to wait until 2007, when PA Semi starts actually shipping those chips...
Exactly! Will the average person who purchases an iMac G5 use any of the developer tools?
Hey, you were the one who decided to do a feature-for-feature price comparison on the theory that, all features taken into account, the PC would come out on top. I'm just helping fill in the features you forgot to include.
Sure will be fun playing with the BIOS on that thing, since that's the only thing it'll boot into in your config. Let's continue, shall we?
Full copy of Windows XP Pro (for closer feature equivalence) - $135 OEM from NewEgg. We're up to $985.
Now, I'm a developer, and Apple ships their full RAD development environment with every Mac sold. I'm going to need the same for my new Windows box, so throw on a copy of Visual Studio Pro - A whopping $700 from NewEgg. Now it's costing $1685 and we haven't even started talking about the iLife equivalents...
Cheapness is largely a matter of expected use.
It's quite unfortunate that Apple chose not to go with the Cell
Yeah, the Cell and it's completely branch-pessimizing architecture would have run a general purpose OS just great
And it's not as though it's a big port job to switch to AMD if Intel doesn't shape up. They're binary compatible. That's why the switch is a good thing; two competing, competent vendors to choose from with no porting cost if you switch between.
The only reason that Linux would become a hobby is if you felt a need to update things that don't need updating continually. Similarly, I have a hacked Xbox and the version of XBMC I have on the thing is like a year old, but it works just fine and I haven't been having problems with it. This player with some [working] OSS on it would be the same story.
...
Or until one of the bugs in the perpetually-in-beta desktop environments, graphics drivers, media players, office suites, email clients et al bites you in the butt and causes you to need to try to upgrade to the latest version, which half the time, despite being available from the developer, hasn't been repackaged by the distro maintainer (or been released into the stable version of the package repository), leaving you in a situation where you either sit around waiting with unusable software, hack around with the config files to enable installing unstable packages (and risking further breakage through installation of unstable dependencies, because every bloody version of every bloody app wants it's own point revision of one of the multitude of GUI libraries, XML parsing libraries, etc, etc), or bypassing (and therefore rendering irrelevant) your package manager and building it yourself. And then tomorrow you do it all again when one of the other buggy progs bites you in the butt and
Yeah, those were fun times, and every bit as easy as how I have it now with OS X, where I download the app from the dev and drag a single file to wherever the hell I want, knowing full well that it's dependencies are a perfectly standard set of libraries that came with the system, and that it will have the same interface as everything else. Not.
Because the US is one of the few countries to tax income earned in another country that has already been taxed by the foreign country.
WindowServer is responsible for handling moving windows, drawing the frames of windows, hidding and unhiding them and the like. It doesn't handle the desktop and drawing the items on it, Finder does that.
Likely, WindowServer got itself all tied into knots for some other reason entirely, and rebooting put an end to all that, not clearing off the desktop.
Anyway, it's moot. In c if you assign the value of fish to the container fish, it'll still return true since the assignment will be successful and the value of fish will essencially not be changed.
Uh, what?
fish = fish, assuming fish is some previously declared variable, will evaluate to whatever the value that fish was assigned. if(fish=fish) {} may or may not execute, depending on whether the value of fish is non-zero (remember, in C, any non-zero value is true.) It has nothing to do with "returning true if the assignment is successful".
We're talking about written material posted on blogs here, so slander is right out. That leaves libel.
Now the thing about libel is, it can't be libel if it's actually true (at least in the US, where Forbes is based). The Forbes article bitches about, among other things, bloggers saying mean things about poor little old Kryptonite Corporation. But the things is, what they were saying was true; the company was selling faulty, easily picked locks and hoping no one would notice. Ergo, what the bloggers were posting wasn't remotely libelous.
Since what the article is attacking meets neither the standard for slander nor libel, that leaves good old fashioned free speech. So the assertion made by many here is valid: Forbes Magazine is attacking Free Speech.
to voice their opinions!
I, for one, am glad that Forbes Magazine is willing to stand up and speak out for the victims of this heinous free speech.
That's not going to lead to any grouchiness at all.
Because it's his Internet you want to alter. And mine, and lots of other peoples too.
Yeah, and shit, you'd almost think they all deserve a say in how it's run. And, come to think of it, most of them live outside the US, so what we need is some kind of international body in which representatives from everywhere can get together and hash things out. A group of nations, united....
On the one hand, I almost feel compelled to call the Seattle PD (local for me) and plead with them not to take any action based on Mr. Thompson's ludicrous and exaggerated claims; on the other hand,
I wouldn't worry about it. Quoth Tycho:
It is critical to establish that this letter isn't anything to worry about. We've been sent worse by better.
A response that should, with any luck, inspire Thompson to further heights of lunacy to the amusement of all.
This guy (Thompson) is railing against freedom of expression, and the mainstream press is ignoring him in droves.
.
.
Are you kidding me? The mainstream press loves this guy. The hot coffee mod "scandal" is but his latest whipping boy. This guy has scored a lot of prime time interviews and news stories on major outlets since the early '90s with, among other things, demands that 2 Live Crew's "As Nasty As They Wanna Be" and Ice T's "Cop Killer" be banned (those were big news items at the time), been a major factor behind several indecency fines Howard Stern received from the FCC, and been a part of damn near every news story on the dangers of violent video games.
This is the guy who insisted that Columbine was caused by DOOM being a "murder simulator". He has sued, among others Time Warner Inc., Polygram Film Entertainment Distribution Inc., Palm Pictures, Island Pictures and New Line Cinema, Atari Corp., Nintendo of America, Sega of America Inc. and Sony Computer Entertainment under Federal Product Liability laws after a different school shooting
His allegations led Dateline NBC to report that Lee Boyd Malvo, the beltway sniper, had "trained extensively using Halo".
He has been interviewed numerous times on CBS, including one famous instance in which he compared Doug Lowesnstein of the ESA to Joseph Goebbels.
He has appeared on 60 minutes to discuss how Grand Theft Auto (he alleges) trained a young man to murder two police officers.
No, the problem is most definitely not that the media is ignoring him. Quite the opposite, really.
and put a bullet in your head. Come on, it's all bullshit anyways, right? Feeding yourself, cleaning yourself, earning money to sustain yourself, that's all just a fancy way of supporting your comfortable life.
So put your mouth where your money is -- around the end of a gun barrel. Embrace the nihilism you preach and blow your fucking brains out. Or realize that taking actions to keep yourself alive make perfect sense if you're not suicidal.
Either way, quit being a hypocrite. Eat a bullet or wise up, it's your choice.