If it had simply been a reasoned explaination of why the services didn't work out in that particular case, or why she was unhappy, them's facts, and not libel.
Actually, it doesn't even have to be reasoned. You can say "I hired so-and-so to do a job for me and when I saw how they did it I hit the roof! I had to be physically restrained by a squad of orange attack ninjas, and as soon as they fall asleep I'm going to hunt so-and-so down and beat them with a stick!" Note that at no point do you actually disparage so-and-so, you merely express your displeasure over the quality of their work. You don't need to give any details, just say that you're extremely unhappy and you'd recommend that anyone who'd consider hiring them would be better served by giving themselves a lobotomy with a rusty corkscrew. After all, you're just expressing your opinion, there's no way anyone can say that you don't feel the way you say you do. And that's really all you said. So-and-so could have built you a moon rocket from a '98 Cavalier and some scavenged propane tanks, and you're just mad because they couldn't fix the radio -- nobody needs to know that...
You have to show up to defend yourself or you are in contempt of court.
I'm guessing that's not true in civil cases. If so, then I would expect that Bock should have received a summons, which should have listed the court date. If the summons couldn't be delivered, then the trial would have had to be delayed until she could be contacted.
Scheff won on a technicality due to natural disaster
Nah, she won due to apathy on the part of the defendant, who used a natural disaster as an excuse. Sure, it's a damn good one ("the hurricane ate my house"), but she should have known that she was facing a multi-million dollar judgement, and gotten her ass down to the county clerk and filed for an extension. I can't imagine the court didn't routinely grant those to anyone who could prove they lived in the southern Louisiana area when Katrina hit.
Seems Ms. Sheff is no stranger to trashing others on web sites.
While I have no interest in justifying Ms. Sheff's actions, if you read the linked appeal, it sounds to me like she had a bad experience with the company that filed the appeal; so bad, in fact, that she started her own company to provide a similar service. The appeal goes on to mention that the company was the subject of investigative reports by 48 Hours, the Miami Herald and Forbes magazine. <sarcasm>Why they would go after a small-time competitor instead of these larger companies is a mystery to me.</sarcasm> Also note that the document linked above was an appeal — they had already sued her once and lost on all counts. Another person they sued with Ms. Sheff won a summary judgement, and didn't even have to go to trial.
Again, I'm no fan of Ms. Sheff, but you picked a really bad example if you were trying to paint her in a bad light.
"She knew the trial was approaching, but did not know the date." What part of this sounds like she was paying attention? She sounds like some low-life bottom feeder to me. First, she hires someone to get her kids out of a situation she doesn't approve of, and then after they do what she hired them to do, starts bitching about it. And not "I'm not happy with the service I received" or "I don't feel they provide good value for the money", but "I was conned out of my money by some fraud". That clearly crosses the line between expressing your opinion and libel.
You say maybe she didn't care about proper procedure anymore. That's really not an option when you're involved in a court case. Maybe you're in the wrong, maybe you're not but you don't have the resources to fight it. In any event, you need to limit the damage. Do whatever it takes to minimize the hit you have to take. Figure out what your options are, then pick the one(s) that help you most. Call the judge, find someone in your area who can give you some free legal advice, read up on the procedure, whatever it takes. It sounds to me like Bock thought she could just walk away, like it would just go away if she ignored it. Guess she knows different now.
Has anyone actually seen this? I'm just having trouble understanding how it's supposed to slip "outside" the running OS. Plus, how does it do things like capture the MMU state and transfer that to a virtual session without getting out of sync? If it somehow hijacks the interrupts or sets its IPL way high so it can run to completion, wouldn't it take awhile to get everything set up and copy the entire state of the box?
Dunno, maybe I need to read up on the virtualization facilities, but I'm having trouble imagining how this would be transparent to a user.
Except they weren't "random places", it was places where people who would use the services of the plaintiff were known to visit. Sure, I wouldn't care if somebody wandered somewhere around London or Paris carrying a sign saying I was a jerk, but it'd be different if they paraded in front of the office where I work, or in front of my home.
Interesting, but I have trouble with the whole concept of "trapping" a running OS. I haven't been following the new virtualization facilities from AMD and Intel, but that seems like something you would need to set up before you launched your OS. And without virtualization, good luck writing to swap space without already having some significant privileges.
Funny how much better your searching goes when you know the right keywords! Not only do they talk about running recent builds on non-Apple hardware, they tell you how to do the same!
Ah, but what prevents something from tampering with Code (CI)?
An easy way to answer this is: "If it was your job to prevent someone from tampering with CI, how would you do it?" Because obviously it is someone at Microsoft's job, and they had MS resources to play with (time, money, equipment, access to source code...).
One thing that springs to mind immediately is validating the launch path in both directions. The boot loader should verify that the kernel it's loading is valid, and once the kernel is loaded it should verify that it was launched by a trusted boot loader. In the higher-level modules, maybe write the verifier two or three different ways and put it in two or three different DLLs and either call one at random or call all two/three and confirm that their results match. Gotta patch 'em all! And don't forget that you'll be trying to pull code from a complex and poorly-documented (at least to the general public) file system. Just trying to figure out how the second-stage boot loader finds the first kernel module to load could take days of poring over disassembler listings. There's no guarantee that loading is still just a simple matter of reading consecutive blocks from the disk and loading them at a predefined start address.
I also wonder if MS doesn't have some deep traps in place, so if you do manage to get most of the CI patched around, there will still be places that check to verify that it's still functioning, maybe trying to execute code that is supposed to fail, then continuing execution from the exception handler. If the code doesn't fail, it falls through to the "call home" function and notifies MS that there's a rooted box somewhere. The next time WGA is invoked, you find out you're no longer running a Genuine copy of Windows...
Seriously, things probably won't be that extreme, but just spend a couple of minutes considering how you would approach the problem and you'll probably get an idea of just how difficult it could be, or could be made to be.
Dunno if Apple's "just learned" about this -- all the articles I could find on it were about a year old, and concerned the version of OSX that shipped with the original Transition Developer's Kit. I didn't see anything about a recent version of OSX running on non-Apple hardware.
For a while now, the EU and other bodies have been grousing about ICANN being under the control of the US (Dept of Commerce, IIRC). I wonder if this stance *against* a US court will somewhat mollify those objections? ICANN's hardly a US puppydog if it distances itself from the US court system...right? Maybe?
I realize they aren't acting in defiance of a court order (they haven't even been contacted by the court yet, if I understand the press release), but at least they're toeing the "We're independent and neutral" line.
Oh, good idea. Kid got ADHD? How about hooking him directly up to a video game! Overstimulation without all that messy Ritalin, and for only pennies a day*.
Who -- besides companies looking for more profits and a constant revenue stream -- actually wants this?
Large companies who currently pay through the nose for maintaining "enterprise-class" software. You can't imagine the dancing in the street there would be if someone like SAP announced that you wouldn't have to have a couple hundred servers and a legion of support staff to run their software anymore. Just configure your network to enable QoS on the SAN service and point everyone's browser at http://www.software-ag.com/sap/service/your-compan y-here/login. Now the vendor is responsible for software maintenance, you never have to go through parallel operation when upgrading to a new version, no more keeping a half-dozen or so gurus on staff for $$$ to handle those weird situations that always occur just when you're trying to run year-end financials to meet your SEC filing deadline.
I really don't understand how Microsoft is planning on making a go of this, though. All their applications have pretty modest (hell, miniscule) requirements compared to large software systems. I mean, I can see the incentive when you're talking about dropping support and maintenance contracts on several racks of high-end servers and their associated costs (personnel, power, cooling, floor space). But what are you going to save by going to a service-oriented word processor or spreadsheet? Even their Great Plains stuff takes maybe a separate box for SQL Server, but not much else.
Sounds to me like all you need is a scheduler (easy enough to write) that feeds an MPEG stream to whatever device you're using to drive the broadcast signal. How hard is that? How are you converting your MPEG stream to NTSC? I've done basically the same thing for these, although that won't help you as they're basically just streamers that work with a corresponding player on somebody's PC. But I did whip it up in just a couple of hours, so hopefully your solution won't take much longer.
Or is that your question, what kind of hardware should you be looking at? If so, sorry, the phrase "need the equivalent of iTunes for high-quality video" threw me off. I'm sure you can Google just as well (or in this case, probably better) than I can...
How could she NOT know that laws were going to be broken?
How was she supposed to know that? One of my neighbors raised holy hell when he found out his neighbor knew how much he paid for his house, and what his taxes were. Apparently he didn't know such information is public record, and readily available via the web (in many places).
I don't know the minutiae of the case, but if she told a supposedly reputable investigation firm "Find out who might have been in contact with journalists X, Y and Z", then it'll be hard to convince a jury that she specifically knew that they were going to illegally obtain confidential information. Maybe she was just going through the motions, and didn't really expect that they'd turn up anything. Maybe she just thought they'd bribe one of the journos (or get them drunk) and convince them to give up the information. Or do some TV Detective-class work and review parking garage video records or some such. It all falls under "reasonable doubt". Unless they've got a damning memo or phone recording, it's going to be an uphill fight.
That may have been doctrine back when the laws were either codifications of the Ten Commandments or admonitions not to tresspass on the King's land, but things aren't so clear-cut anymore. I mean, it's a good principle, but here in the US we've got so many stupid laws (c.f. yesterday's sub-discussion of homeowner's association covenants under the wind power topic) enforcing special interests it's unreasonable to expect an ordinary person guided by common sense to stay clear of the law in all situations. Especially when dealing with new abuses of technology (even if the abuse is based on a long-standing crime like fraud).
I'm not excusing Dunn's actions, or those of the rest of the HP board. I think the AG's actions are entirely reasonable and should have been expected. I'm just saying the crimes that were committed were reasonably unforseeable[1] and at a far enough remove that HP board members will have a decent claim of plausible deniability. Unless there's a smoking gun memo where someone explicitly says "investigate this at all costs" or "stop at nothing", or the investigating company explicitly said they were going to "venture into a legally grey area", in which case it should be a slam-dunk.
[1] If you ask someone to run out and get you a screwdriver, you wouldn't expect them to break into a hardware store, would you?
Hmmm, I wonder if an Altair with sufficient memory (8K might be enough) and some kind of network interface could run a text-based IM ("IRC Classic")? Assuming it had an appropriate terminal connected, of course. I mean, 99% of its time would be spent waiting for the user to type something, or waiting for input on the network interface.
ISTR that Freescale (nee Motorola) or one of the FPGA suppliers (Xylinx?) had something like this. Basically, you would pick electronic "assemblies" (PLLs, caches, ALUs, etc) that were all guaranteed to work together. I don't remember if they would then build and ship the chips to you, or if it was up to you to program one of their devices, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea.
when I say same computer, I mean same Motherboard and Chip
I can see your point, but I'll respectfully differ. I bought a motherboard with the "new!" AGP slot and a top-of-the-line AGP card. I eventually wound up replacing the motherboard (+CPU +memory) with one with a "legacy" AGP slot. I was able to re-use all my other components (except for the too-lame-to-die ISA Ethernet card, but the new MB had Ethernet built-in). Had to do a little device driver tweaking, but everything worked without too much hassle. And it was just like you'd expect: like some little gnomes had come in and turned the CPU up to 11.
So, because he's popular, he's entitled to many millions of dollars?
Uh, what? I never said anyone was (or wasn't) entitled to many millions of dollars. For the record, I don't believe anyone is literally "entitled" to millions of dollars unless they're the heir to a family fortune. In which case, good luck to them. I do believe that popular people are entitled to use their popularity to obtain millions of dollars, if they have the drive and desire to do so. But that's not what I was talking about...
(I don't see a McDonald's fry cook driving a BMW 3 series)
A ratty-looking 3-series is apparently well within the budget of many high-school kids here where I live. Of course, there are also opportunities for high-school kids to earn more money than a fry cook, too. My point was that driving a beat-up car (even a beat-up nice car) doesn't exactly scream "rock star", which was what the GP was attempting to imply.
I believe the PP meant to say that iTunes (the media player) would also play non-DRM'd MP3 files. So you could continue to support Magnatune while using iTunes, it just wouldn't be as convenient as using the Apple store.
<idea> Somebody should make a skinnable/themeable/brandable media player with hooks for music purchases. Then Magnatune and other on-line retailers could offer a branded version that connects with their catalog and purchasing channel, giving you the convenience of iTunes without...iTunes.</idea>
Wow, has anyone else seen these new Apple helicopters? They're really quiet, I didn't even hear this one outside! Hey, what's it (ping timeout)
And yet, since the rise of filesharing, people who used to tour rarely now tour continuously
And how exactly are you connecting those two dots? Are there really a lot of people on P2P nets sharing Jackson Browne music? Most of the stuff I used to see was all contemporary bands, the only older music was "eternal classics" (doesn't everybody have a copy of Dark Side of the Moon?). The musicians you name are also all pretty well-known, the sort who have probably already made their money and are touring because they enjoy it, and because it's become cool for big acts to tour small venues. These are also the acts who can reasonably expect to make a profit whereever they go, I notice that the Claude Pate reunion didn't exactly rake in the bucks...
after the gig you can see him driving himself off in a somewhat ratty looking BMW 3 series. I refuse to believe that he's losing money on it
Dunno, doesn't sound like he's making a lot of money on it...
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, she won due to apathy on the part of the defendant, who used a natural disaster as an excuse. Sure, it's a damn good one ("the hurricane ate my house"), but she should have known that she was facing a multi-million dollar judgement, and gotten her ass down to the county clerk and filed for an extension. I can't imagine the court didn't routinely grant those to anyone who could prove they lived in the southern Louisiana area when Katrina hit.
Again, I'm no fan of Ms. Sheff, but you picked a really bad example if you were trying to paint her in a bad light.
"She knew the trial was approaching, but did not know the date." What part of this sounds like she was paying attention? She sounds like some low-life bottom feeder to me. First, she hires someone to get her kids out of a situation she doesn't approve of, and then after they do what she hired them to do, starts bitching about it. And not "I'm not happy with the service I received" or "I don't feel they provide good value for the money", but "I was conned out of my money by some fraud". That clearly crosses the line between expressing your opinion and libel.
You say maybe she didn't care about proper procedure anymore. That's really not an option when you're involved in a court case. Maybe you're in the wrong, maybe you're not but you don't have the resources to fight it. In any event, you need to limit the damage. Do whatever it takes to minimize the hit you have to take. Figure out what your options are, then pick the one(s) that help you most. Call the judge, find someone in your area who can give you some free legal advice, read up on the procedure, whatever it takes. It sounds to me like Bock thought she could just walk away, like it would just go away if she ignored it. Guess she knows different now.
Has anyone actually seen this? I'm just having trouble understanding how it's supposed to slip "outside" the running OS. Plus, how does it do things like capture the MMU state and transfer that to a virtual session without getting out of sync? If it somehow hijacks the interrupts or sets its IPL way high so it can run to completion, wouldn't it take awhile to get everything set up and copy the entire state of the box?
Dunno, maybe I need to read up on the virtualization facilities, but I'm having trouble imagining how this would be transparent to a user.
Except they weren't "random places", it was places where people who would use the services of the plaintiff were known to visit. Sure, I wouldn't care if somebody wandered somewhere around London or Paris carrying a sign saying I was a jerk, but it'd be different if they paraded in front of the office where I work, or in front of my home.
Interesting, but I have trouble with the whole concept of "trapping" a running OS. I haven't been following the new virtualization facilities from AMD and Intel, but that seems like something you would need to set up before you launched your OS. And without virtualization, good luck writing to swap space without already having some significant privileges.
Funny how much better your searching goes when you know the right keywords! Not only do they talk about running recent builds on non-Apple hardware, they tell you how to do the same!
One thing that springs to mind immediately is validating the launch path in both directions. The boot loader should verify that the kernel it's loading is valid, and once the kernel is loaded it should verify that it was launched by a trusted boot loader. In the higher-level modules, maybe write the verifier two or three different ways and put it in two or three different DLLs and either call one at random or call all two/three and confirm that their results match. Gotta patch 'em all! And don't forget that you'll be trying to pull code from a complex and poorly-documented (at least to the general public) file system. Just trying to figure out how the second-stage boot loader finds the first kernel module to load could take days of poring over disassembler listings. There's no guarantee that loading is still just a simple matter of reading consecutive blocks from the disk and loading them at a predefined start address.
I also wonder if MS doesn't have some deep traps in place, so if you do manage to get most of the CI patched around, there will still be places that check to verify that it's still functioning, maybe trying to execute code that is supposed to fail, then continuing execution from the exception handler. If the code doesn't fail, it falls through to the "call home" function and notifies MS that there's a rooted box somewhere. The next time WGA is invoked, you find out you're no longer running a Genuine copy of Windows...
Seriously, things probably won't be that extreme, but just spend a couple of minutes considering how you would approach the problem and you'll probably get an idea of just how difficult it could be, or could be made to be.
Dunno if Apple's "just learned" about this -- all the articles I could find on it were about a year old, and concerned the version of OSX that shipped with the original Transition Developer's Kit. I didn't see anything about a recent version of OSX running on non-Apple hardware.
For a while now, the EU and other bodies have been grousing about ICANN being under the control of the US (Dept of Commerce, IIRC). I wonder if this stance *against* a US court will somewhat mollify those objections? ICANN's hardly a US puppydog if it distances itself from the US court system...right? Maybe?
I realize they aren't acting in defiance of a court order (they haven't even been contacted by the court yet, if I understand the press release), but at least they're toeing the "We're independent and neutral" line.
Oh, good idea. Kid got ADHD? How about hooking him directly up to a video game! Overstimulation without all that messy Ritalin, and for only pennies a day*.
* Batteries not included.
I really don't understand how Microsoft is planning on making a go of this, though. All their applications have pretty modest (hell, miniscule) requirements compared to large software systems. I mean, I can see the incentive when you're talking about dropping support and maintenance contracts on several racks of high-end servers and their associated costs (personnel, power, cooling, floor space). But what are you going to save by going to a service-oriented word processor or spreadsheet? Even their Great Plains stuff takes maybe a separate box for SQL Server, but not much else.
Sounds to me like all you need is a scheduler (easy enough to write) that feeds an MPEG stream to whatever device you're using to drive the broadcast signal. How hard is that? How are you converting your MPEG stream to NTSC? I've done basically the same thing for these, although that won't help you as they're basically just streamers that work with a corresponding player on somebody's PC. But I did whip it up in just a couple of hours, so hopefully your solution won't take much longer.
Or is that your question, what kind of hardware should you be looking at? If so, sorry, the phrase "need the equivalent of iTunes for high-quality video" threw me off. I'm sure you can Google just as well (or in this case, probably better) than I can...
I don't know the minutiae of the case, but if she told a supposedly reputable investigation firm "Find out who might have been in contact with journalists X, Y and Z", then it'll be hard to convince a jury that she specifically knew that they were going to illegally obtain confidential information. Maybe she was just going through the motions, and didn't really expect that they'd turn up anything. Maybe she just thought they'd bribe one of the journos (or get them drunk) and convince them to give up the information. Or do some TV Detective-class work and review parking garage video records or some such. It all falls under "reasonable doubt". Unless they've got a damning memo or phone recording, it's going to be an uphill fight.
That may have been doctrine back when the laws were either codifications of the Ten Commandments or admonitions not to tresspass on the King's land, but things aren't so clear-cut anymore. I mean, it's a good principle, but here in the US we've got so many stupid laws (c.f. yesterday's sub-discussion of homeowner's association covenants under the wind power topic) enforcing special interests it's unreasonable to expect an ordinary person guided by common sense to stay clear of the law in all situations. Especially when dealing with new abuses of technology (even if the abuse is based on a long-standing crime like fraud).
I'm not excusing Dunn's actions, or those of the rest of the HP board. I think the AG's actions are entirely reasonable and should have been expected. I'm just saying the crimes that were committed were reasonably unforseeable[1] and at a far enough remove that HP board members will have a decent claim of plausible deniability. Unless there's a smoking gun memo where someone explicitly says "investigate this at all costs" or "stop at nothing", or the investigating company explicitly said they were going to "venture into a legally grey area", in which case it should be a slam-dunk.
[1] If you ask someone to run out and get you a screwdriver, you wouldn't expect them to break into a hardware store, would you?
What's with these crickets?
Obviously, software sucks because Platt is the master of the non-sequitur.
Hmmm, I wonder if an Altair with sufficient memory (8K might be enough) and some kind of network interface could run a text-based IM ("IRC Classic")? Assuming it had an appropriate terminal connected, of course. I mean, 99% of its time would be spent waiting for the user to type something, or waiting for input on the network interface.
ISTR that Freescale (nee Motorola) or one of the FPGA suppliers (Xylinx?) had something like this. Basically, you would pick electronic "assemblies" (PLLs, caches, ALUs, etc) that were all guaranteed to work together. I don't remember if they would then build and ship the chips to you, or if it was up to you to program one of their devices, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea.
A ratty-looking 3-series is apparently well within the budget of many high-school kids here where I live. Of course, there are also opportunities for high-school kids to earn more money than a fry cook, too. My point was that driving a beat-up car (even a beat-up nice car) doesn't exactly scream "rock star", which was what the GP was attempting to imply.
I believe the PP meant to say that iTunes (the media player) would also play non-DRM'd MP3 files. So you could continue to support Magnatune while using iTunes, it just wouldn't be as convenient as using the Apple store.
<idea> Somebody should make a skinnable/themeable/brandable media player with hooks for music purchases. Then Magnatune and other on-line retailers could offer a branded version that connects with their catalog and purchasing channel, giving you the convenience of iTunes without...iTunes.</idea>
Wow, has anyone else seen these new Apple helicopters? They're really quiet, I didn't even hear this one outside! Hey, what's it
(ping timeout)
Dunno, doesn't sound like he's making a lot of money on it...