On the Lowry vs. Legg Mason Judgement
on
Pirate Hunter
·
· Score: 1
Juries hand out large awards like this all the time. What typically happens in any lartge civil cases is this:
The defendant promises to appeal
The defendant tells the plaintiff that they won't pay a dime unitl the appeals are over, which could last many years
The plaintiff's attorney knows that the defendant can move assets off-shore, file bankruptcy, etc in an effort to dodge paying the judgement.
The plaintiff and the defendant negotiate a post-judgement settlement, where the plaintiff pays a smaller amount immediately, rahter than dragging the process out.
I predict that the defendant here is going to walk away with 2 or 3 milion, not the 19 million that the jury awarded.
In my experience, when I've told someone I can't support something and they tell me they'll just handle it, it almost inevitably turns into my problem anyway. Most people who assume they can 'just handle it' are geniuses who run one or two boxes at home and don't have a clue at the issues they're going to run into in a corporate environment.
I'm an applicationn developer, but I have the same experience. Someone does a quick and dirty app on their PC using VBA, and then wants to deploy it to a 30,000 employee firm. They don't understand why we constantly throw up roadblocks like "How are we going to deploy it to 30,000 PCs?", "Why did you design it to require over one hundred new NT servers spread through 30 or 40 offices when we could have put the backend on a single Oracle server in the datacenter?", "Where is the documentation for the Help Desk?".
I run into this issue with J2EE all the time. Web developers who haven't done much more than a few small web sites for a few local businesses using php or perl frequently criticize the longer development cycle of a J2EE app. What they fail to consider is that J2EE is a platform for "enterprise quality" applications. Writing a web app is easy. Writing a web app that runs in a clustered environment with automatic failover, integrates seemlessly with every major messaging system, integrates with every major directory system, talks CORBA, integrates with all major RDBMS vendors, integrates with independant enterprise security and authentication products, etc. is difficult.
What were you using ten years ago? Frankly, I don't even remember what I used. I'll guess rather blindly and say a 66 MHz 486 was cutting-edge ten years ago.
For what it is worth, I was running minix in the fall of 1991. I remember Linus posting about his new project. I also remember how some of the Minix adherents were annoyed Linux oriented posting took more and more of the bandwidth of comp.os.minix. comp.os.linux was created in the Spring of '92.
At that point I was running a 386DX-33 and it was a decent machine, not bleeding edge but toward the front of the pack. Two years later, a 486DX-66 sounds about right.
Something along the lines of "Smile or get Shot" I assume...
Don't kid yourself. China is a poor agrarian country, with many of their people in poverty that would shock a westerner. The workers that land skilled factory jobs like these are taking a huge step forward in their qulaity of life. They more than likely have substantial discretionary income and free time to enjoy it, compared to thsoe that still labor on small farms. Their income is reasonably assured, they have access to health care and education, they have good housing.
The "happy peasant" is a romantic notion with little or no basis in fact. For people living in third world conditions, these jobs represent a quantum leap.
As far as I can work out from reading various posts in which an assortment of septics used the term, an "S.O." is what a Brit such as I would call a boyfriend, but how does one derive that abbreviation from that word? What is S.O. short for? Well, I can guess what the S probably stands for..... it must be sex something..... but what is the O for?
SO = Significant Other
SO is a generic term for 1) someone you sleep with and 2) someone who has substantial decision making influence in your life. It includes Husband, Wife, fiancee, live in boyfriend or girlfriend, etc. It includes both hetero and homosexual relationships.
can you wire tap your home phone to spy on your wife, husband, SO, or roommate?
There are specific laws in most states that prohibit listening in on a telephone conversation with the knowledge of both parties. That being said, nothing prohibits you from tracking when calls were made, what number was called, what the duration of the call was, etc.
It is going to be unpopular here, but you don't have right to provacy at work, and your children don't have a right to privacy from you.
An employer has every right to monitor the usage of their computers and their network, just as they can go through your desk if they want. With very few exceptions, they don't have a right to look at your home pc. (For instance, if you work for a defense/intelligence organization as a government employee or a government contractor, you must consent to additional priovacy intrusions.)
Likewise, you can monitor what anyone else does on your computer.
The issue here is that the company in question made software that could easily be installed on machines that you don't own. They reduced that potential, and should be lauded for it.
If you only follow the link programatically once, and everyone else did as well, you allow the malicious to perform a DDoS an innocent server. It is unlikely that the blacklist could be maintained properly.
Once you follow the link more than once, and programatically, you are treading into the aea of DDoS. It could be that the authorities will come looking for you!
But the real key is that spammers are using distributed hosting techniques to host there web sites through unprotected windows machines with a trojan. So a million machines would be hitting another million machines, not a million hitting one server.
Re: the metric system. The reason I [and the majority of the first-world] endorse it is because you can readily [and without any real 'computation'] translate any given amount into other units. Whereas you can instantly relate a mililiter to a liter, you have a slightly more difficult time relating a cup to a gallon.
In the kitchen, one rarely wants to scale by a factor of ten. Typical English kitchen measures scale by 2 very easily, so doubling or halving a recipe is quite easy. For Liquid measure: 1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups = 128 fluid ounces. For Dry measure: 1 cup = 16 tablespoons = 48 teaspoons. Yes - Tablespoon to teaspoon is a factor of 3, not 2, and the the pattern breaks. The teaspoon does allow you to get a one-third cup easily. Considering that the typical kitchen has half-cup, quarter-cup, etc measures, it is trivially easy to scale a recipe.
Frankly, I look at how we [Americans] ridiculed the UK for its non-metric system of money so recently, all whilst they've had everything else metric for years...its plain silly.
It is more important to have "clean" numbers on money. How often would someone need to calculate 8.75% sales tax of 2.15% interest on a money value? All the time! Doing that calculation on strange denominations is a pain in the ass. One rarely needs a cup of sugar + 8.75% however, and so it is less valuable there. Most industrial processes, including food oriented ones, I believe are done in metric. For instance, a candy manufacturer will measure the sugar content of every shipment of molasses and adjust the recipe accordingly. They may deal with a batch size of several thousand liters, and scale a the various ingredients by a few percent in order to maintain the consistent quality of the product.
... prices are usually inclusive of tax so there are fewer oddball amounts to pay.
Oddball amounts in the US are not the result of taxes being added to the total. Shopkeepers could easily work backwards to price things such that the taxes rounded off the total.
Our non-round prices were intentionally set to force cashiers to use the cash register. If prices were nice and easy to calculate in one's head and were likely to come to some round number, a cashier might never key the sale into the register. Since the number was round, the customer might hand over the exact amount. The cashier could pocket the amount of the entire sale.
By forcing the cashier to key the sale into the cash register, and forcing the cashier to make change, the opportunities to steal are reduced.
Actually, I'd revamp more than just the dollar. On factor to take into account is how many change slots are in a typical cash register, and how many denominations can a typical vending machine handle. If all this equipment has to be replaced, there will be uproar.
My Plan:
Eliminate the penny and the dime.
Eliminate the dollar and the two dollar bills.
Create a decent size $1 and $2.50 coin.
???
Profit.
Next, the Metric system: time to join the rest of the planet.
Just don't get all "religious" with the metric system. For instance, kitchen measures work quite fine in English measure, and there is nothing wrong with ordering a pint of beer. Celsius I can take or leave. I'd love to get rid of "surveying" measures. Who the hell knows what an acre, rod, or chain are. The big dirty secret is that outside of the sciences and the manufacturing industry, it doesn't matter all that much.
the telecom companies however seem to have missed the point of building a good service(build a good cellular service and the users will start using it).
There is another part of the equation, however. I don't specifically know about Finland, but in many parts of Europe the wired telephone carriers were absolutely horrible. For instance, a few years ago I know some people who were interconnecting some offices in Athens. They needed to build a radio link because there was a 9 month lead time to get a circuit. In the US, that was a two week lead time, max. I've heard of 18 month waiting lists in Italy and France to get residential service. On top of that, calls were expensive in Europe. International travelers from the US would arrange that that the call originate from the US because the international rates were 60% to 80% cheaper.
When the cell phone companies arrived, they could deliver better service, faster and cheaper. They were adopted very quickly. When the cell phone companies started in the US, they could not deliver as well as the wired systems. they were less reliable and more expensive. Their only advantage was mobility.
If the American phone companies were putting out as poor a product as the European phone companies, I think adoption of cell technology would have gone much faster, and consequently the networks would have been built out more.
I don't get the big deal with this. OK, Verisign isn't the best company on the planet (I can think of one Utah based one that's much worse, and don't get me started on Redmond...), but this is insane.
OK, so maybe they're taking a bit of traffic away from Google or someone like that. Big deal. They setup a "search engine" for people to use. People that are not like use geeks here (we know what a 404 means when we see it). I mean the other users.
If it just handled a malformed url in a web browser, it would not have been a big deal. The problem is that DNS doesn't know why you want the address.
For example, if you sent an email and mistyped the address, your MTA would attempt to send that email to verisign's sitefinder servers. That means that verisign had the opportunity to read a large percentage of the misaddressed email on the internet. Do you want to give them that opportunity? Would you let the publishers of a phone book (very often not the phone company) automatically listen to every call that you misdialed?
There may be room for a service like this, but it can't break existing expectations.
What about RMS, he has done a lot of work for Free Software.
If Linus gets to #5 being the embodiment of Open Source, how can they neglect GNU?
Linus is influential because he has given very few people cause to dislike him. He avoids taking part in political arguments, he avoids making himself anyone's enemy.
RMS is a zealot, and for every person he brings into his way, he alienates two others. RMS's influence is limited becaue of the numbers of people that he alienates.
As a good example of what Linus does right, compare the *BSD community to the Linux community. Regardless of technical merit, Linux has been far more successful while the BSD community forks again and again. Linus is the steady hand that everyone looks to. Linus has stayed above the arguments so that he can have the authority to mediate the arguments, rather than have Linux suffer a fork.
Slashdot Mirror
- The defendant promises to appeal
- The defendant tells the plaintiff that they won't pay a dime unitl the appeals are over, which could last many years
- The plaintiff's attorney knows that the defendant can move assets off-shore, file bankruptcy, etc in an effort to dodge paying the judgement.
- The plaintiff and the defendant negotiate a post-judgement settlement, where the plaintiff pays a smaller amount immediately, rahter than dragging the process out.
I predict that the defendant here is going to walk away with 2 or 3 milion, not the 19 million that the jury awarded.I'm an applicationn developer, but I have the same experience. Someone does a quick and dirty app on their PC using VBA, and then wants to deploy it to a 30,000 employee firm. They don't understand why we constantly throw up roadblocks like "How are we going to deploy it to 30,000 PCs?", "Why did you design it to require over one hundred new NT servers spread through 30 or 40 offices when we could have put the backend on a single Oracle server in the datacenter?", "Where is the documentation for the Help Desk?".
I run into this issue with J2EE all the time. Web developers who haven't done much more than a few small web sites for a few local businesses using php or perl frequently criticize the longer development cycle of a J2EE app. What they fail to consider is that J2EE is a platform for "enterprise quality" applications. Writing a web app is easy. Writing a web app that runs in a clustered environment with automatic failover, integrates seemlessly with every major messaging system, integrates with every major directory system, talks CORBA, integrates with all major RDBMS vendors, integrates with independant enterprise security and authentication products, etc. is difficult.
At that point I was running a 386DX-33 and it was a decent machine, not bleeding edge but toward the front of the pack. Two years later, a 486DX-66 sounds about right.
Don't kid yourself. China is a poor agrarian country, with many of their people in poverty that would shock a westerner. The workers that land skilled factory jobs like these are taking a huge step forward in their qulaity of life. They more than likely have substantial discretionary income and free time to enjoy it, compared to thsoe that still labor on small farms. Their income is reasonably assured, they have access to health care and education, they have good housing.
The "happy peasant" is a romantic notion with little or no basis in fact. For people living in third world conditions, these jobs represent a quantum leap.
I used Vile on an old VMS system. It was the only vi family editor that I could comple over there. At the time, I was using lemmy for my win32 work.
I agree, but everyone else seems to want a touchpad on their laptop, or even carry around a mouse.
What do you use? SPF?
Come back when you've used EVE or pmate.
Other than Outlook integration, has anyone an opinion on Thunderbird's future compared to Evolution?
No, very few people prefer emacs, they just take up far more system resources than the vi/vim majority.
First round goes to the forces of light - the vi/vim camp!
SO is a generic term for 1) someone you sleep with and 2) someone who has substantial decision making influence in your life. It includes Husband, Wife, fiancee, live in boyfriend or girlfriend, etc. It includes both hetero and homosexual relationships.
There are specific laws in most states that prohibit listening in on a telephone conversation with the knowledge of both parties. That being said, nothing prohibits you from tracking when calls were made, what number was called, what the duration of the call was, etc.
An employer has every right to monitor the usage of their computers and their network, just as they can go through your desk if they want. With very few exceptions, they don't have a right to look at your home pc. (For instance, if you work for a defense/intelligence organization as a government employee or a government contractor, you must consent to additional priovacy intrusions.)
Likewise, you can monitor what anyone else does on your computer.
The issue here is that the company in question made software that could easily be installed on machines that you don't own. They reduced that potential, and should be lauded for it.
Once you follow the link more than once, and programatically, you are treading into the aea of DDoS. It could be that the authorities will come looking for you!
But the real key is that spammers are using distributed hosting techniques to host there web sites through unprotected windows machines with a trojan. So a million machines would be hitting another million machines, not a million hitting one server.
In the kitchen, one rarely wants to scale by a factor of ten. Typical English kitchen measures scale by 2 very easily, so doubling or halving a recipe is quite easy. For Liquid measure: 1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups = 128 fluid ounces. For Dry measure: 1 cup = 16 tablespoons = 48 teaspoons. Yes - Tablespoon to teaspoon is a factor of 3, not 2, and the the pattern breaks. The teaspoon does allow you to get a one-third cup easily. Considering that the typical kitchen has half-cup, quarter-cup, etc measures, it is trivially easy to scale a recipe.
Frankly, I look at how we [Americans] ridiculed the UK for its non-metric system of money so recently, all whilst they've had everything else metric for years...its plain silly.
It is more important to have "clean" numbers on money. How often would someone need to calculate 8.75% sales tax of 2.15% interest on a money value? All the time! Doing that calculation on strange denominations is a pain in the ass. One rarely needs a cup of sugar + 8.75% however, and so it is less valuable there. Most industrial processes, including food oriented ones, I believe are done in metric. For instance, a candy manufacturer will measure the sugar content of every shipment of molasses and adjust the recipe accordingly. They may deal with a batch size of several thousand liters, and scale a the various ingredients by a few percent in order to maintain the consistent quality of the product.
Oddball amounts in the US are not the result of taxes being added to the total. Shopkeepers could easily work backwards to price things such that the taxes rounded off the total.
Our non-round prices were intentionally set to force cashiers to use the cash register. If prices were nice and easy to calculate in one's head and were likely to come to some round number, a cashier might never key the sale into the register. Since the number was round, the customer might hand over the exact amount. The cashier could pocket the amount of the entire sale.
By forcing the cashier to key the sale into the cash register, and forcing the cashier to make change, the opportunities to steal are reduced.
That's right! 20 dollars won't equal 20 cents until Dean is elected and brings back the good old days of Jimmy Carter and stagflation.
Yes, I'm trolling. Smile, chuckle, and move on. Don't reply to this.
Damn, that is pretty small to weigh 1 pound. What is it made out of? Depleted Uranium?
Don't throw one of those off a tall building!
My Plan:
- Eliminate the penny and the dime.
- Eliminate the dollar and the two dollar bills.
- Create a decent size $1 and $2.50 coin.
- ???
- Profit.
Next, the Metric system: time to join the rest of the planet.Just don't get all "religious" with the metric system. For instance, kitchen measures work quite fine in English measure, and there is nothing wrong with ordering a pint of beer. Celsius I can take or leave. I'd love to get rid of "surveying" measures. Who the hell knows what an acre, rod, or chain are. The big dirty secret is that outside of the sciences and the manufacturing industry, it doesn't matter all that much.
I'm not worried about dollar stores, I'm worried about Strip Clubs. "And now, on the center pole, Candi!" - Jingle Jingle Jingle.
wow, the same kibo of usenet fame now graces slashdot.
No, you are thinking of Joel Furr.
Kibo # 66
AT&T is owned by spot, so it is not allowed.
There is another part of the equation, however. I don't specifically know about Finland, but in many parts of Europe the wired telephone carriers were absolutely horrible. For instance, a few years ago I know some people who were interconnecting some offices in Athens. They needed to build a radio link because there was a 9 month lead time to get a circuit. In the US, that was a two week lead time, max. I've heard of 18 month waiting lists in Italy and France to get residential service. On top of that, calls were expensive in Europe. International travelers from the US would arrange that that the call originate from the US because the international rates were 60% to 80% cheaper.
When the cell phone companies arrived, they could deliver better service, faster and cheaper. They were adopted very quickly. When the cell phone companies started in the US, they could not deliver as well as the wired systems. they were less reliable and more expensive. Their only advantage was mobility.
If the American phone companies were putting out as poor a product as the European phone companies, I think adoption of cell technology would have gone much faster, and consequently the networks would have been built out more.
For example, if you sent an email and mistyped the address, your MTA would attempt to send that email to verisign's sitefinder servers. That means that verisign had the opportunity to read a large percentage of the misaddressed email on the internet. Do you want to give them that opportunity? Would you let the publishers of a phone book (very often not the phone company) automatically listen to every call that you misdialed?
There may be room for a service like this, but it can't break existing expectations.
RMS is a zealot, and for every person he brings into his way, he alienates two others. RMS's influence is limited becaue of the numbers of people that he alienates.
As a good example of what Linus does right, compare the *BSD community to the Linux community. Regardless of technical merit, Linux has been far more successful while the BSD community forks again and again. Linus is the steady hand that everyone looks to. Linus has stayed above the arguments so that he can have the authority to mediate the arguments, rather than have Linux suffer a fork.