Justice Charron gets it, as did the lower courts. I'm therefor expecting the said "epic failure" for Charon's claim.
In addition, this this is a tempset in a teapot. The article is based on the desire of the news organizations to have something cool to talk about, rather that the recorded behavior of the courts.
In actual practice, courts are disinclined to make sweeping change is how a law is to be interpreted, and instead deal with the problem of "bad cases produce bad law" by writing very narrow verdicts.
Canadian courts in particular, when faced with massive failure of the law to meet its purpose, tend to send the law in question back to the legislature to be rewritten.
If the supreme court were going to do something radical like define publishing the location of a defamatory article as equivalent to publishing the defamation, they'd had already said so, and put the government on notice they need to fix the law.
Instead they put it in the queue of boring stuff to write up in the next six months.
Courts are reluctant to punish people who bring suits and lose, lest they make people fear to go to court.
Obtaining money by the threat of legal action based on a false and fraudulent pretense, however, may be something a court, or more likely the appropriate law society, would act on.
IMHO, the critical point is the degree to which the claim can be demonstrated to be fraudulent. An oldish definition is, in part,
"An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right." [Black's Law Dictionary (6th edition) page 660]
As a philosopher, it strikes me the hurdle to a successful prosecution was initially fairly high. Until the court found they didn't have the copyrights, they could claim they were merely in error, not intentionally making false claims.
That is no longer an option in any new threats: the bar is now much lower.
Walled garden, with options to raise the walls or load a different walled garden.
A nice platform for a software vendor to buy to host their app in isolation from others, so if it ran on a 286 without an MMU, or on a Z80 in the dashboard of a car, I'd consider it a good idea. For a anything general-purpose, it's underwhelming.
Interestingly, IBM and Oracle got more value out of using Java than Sun did by writing it. That appears to have been one of the decision points for Oracle.
One of the extra advantages of Linux for IBM was that it offered a new OS for the 390s, and of a very popular flavor. Sun already had a Unix OS for SPARC, so they didn't get the added value.
Sun was, IMHO, always a "BSD vs Bell" shop: they understood the struggle to free BSD, and learned how to deal with Bell and the commercial world, but that's where they stopped.
Indeed, I quite agree, they're wildly different ways to achieve a like end, thus my tease about orthogonality.
Much of my work has been in fixed-price contract work, where quality of specification (and contract!) is critical, so my interest in Agile lies the degree to which it's different from hero-driven development. It values customer involvement in requirements, test development from requirements and early customer acceptance testing, all of which address my concerns with classic waterfall.
And yes, my original opinion of Agile was less than charitable. After a year doing a large, business-critical semi-embedded storage product using scrum, I was pleasantly surprised by the degree to which "Agile development" can be considered "Anal development".
Customer managers like owning the backlogs and
having regular deliveries against them, instead
of waiting loooong times and then getting something
that's close, but not quite there.
She was in the 'States, which tends to ignore
minor crimes and expect the victim to sue/shoot the culprit (;-))
You're better off in Germany, and the Americans are better off than some of the third world, where our American cousins and we send volunteers to teach the concept of the rule of Law, as in http://www.lawyerswithoutborders.org/Pages/Default.aspx
For similar reasons, courts interpret abuse of process narrowly, to what I'd consider using the court to threaten or abuse. Laying a charge or commencing a suit without proper evidence isn't enough: defrauding the court into issuing an unjustified order arguably would be in Canada.
If it were political speech, various states and provinces set a lower bar, and will dismiss "SLAPP" suits with costs against.
Repeated attempts to use legal processing to threaten, harass or abuse tend to get responded to, and the archaic charge of barratry can be laid.
I don't know what fits in the gap between, where you are. Something with "fraudulent misrepresentation" in it, perhaps? I suspect you need at least a part-time lawyer to do a bit of research on what to claim.
... at http://gtalug.org/wiki/Meetings:2005-12, Peter demonstrated the virtual oscilloscope and virtual function generator applications, which are available as open source.
So it's a temporary hack in Eclipse while the Sun bug gets fixed (;-))
Reminds me of a program named "netnews", that was going to be used for a few weeks in 1979, until Duke University set up an X.25 link to the University of North Carolina.
Indeed: Oracle now employs my former Sun boss, David J. Brown, who pointed out on the order of ten (10!) years ago that one needed to distinguish between stable and unstable interfaces. He then labeled all the interfaces with the number of their standard document, and all the unstable ones SUNWprivate.
And yes, you can ask the JVM if any of the Java interfaces are supported, so switching on the name of the company that produced them is unnecessary. The company name is neither a necessary nor a sufficient test for anything. For those kinds of tests you use this reflective thingie they invented...
--dave
This is the anti-Unix approach
on
Employee Monitoring
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
To quote Doug Gwyn, "UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things."
In Unix, one of the design principle is that you can do anything, even something insecure and stupid, but we can always find out what you did and whack you over the head.
Auditing what your users do so you can diagnose an error later is roughly O(n) with the number of errors. Predicting what users should be allowed to do and granting them permissions is maybe O(n^2) or worse with the number of things allowed. It works, but only for small numbers of allowed things. Watching everything users do doesn't scale at all: worst case, you could need as many sysadmins as users, O(n) with number of users.
--dave
Re:Are you serious? Do you even know who phk is?
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 1
Hey, blame me, not kdawson! We both know who phk is.
Multics got B2 by fiat, since it only fell down on the design documentation side (according to the rumors, back when I used to be a Multician), so I mildly suspect that B2 is only properly reachable by a project with security in the design from the very beginning...
I fear that the debate is also between two groups who both know what worked, over the degree to which they wanted to accept boom and bust.
If one knows one is in a boom/bust cycle, one can treat a market as a zero-sum game, ride the waves and profit on every oscillation, at the disadvantage of everyone who thinks it's stable growth.
Definitely, but that doesn't speak to the question of boom and bust. And the rest of the world rapidly rebuilt with U.S. loans, which in principle should have cause a "south sea bubble" or two (;-))
Slashdot Mirror
Justice Charron gets it, as did the lower courts. I'm therefor expecting the said "epic failure" for Charon's claim.
In addition, this this is a tempset in a teapot. The article is based on the desire of the news organizations to have something cool to talk about, rather that the recorded behavior of the courts.
In actual practice, courts are disinclined to make sweeping change is how a law is to be interpreted, and instead deal with the problem of "bad cases produce bad law" by writing very narrow verdicts.
Canadian courts in particular, when faced with massive failure of the law to meet its purpose, tend to send the law in question back to the legislature to be rewritten. If the supreme court were going to do something radical like define publishing the location of a defamatory article as equivalent to publishing the defamation, they'd had already said so, and put the government on notice they need to fix the law.
Instead they put it in the queue of boring stuff to write up in the next six months.
IMHO, Charron's radical claim is toast.
--dave (a philosopher, not a lawyer) c-b
A railgun could perhaps be used to launch a rocket, which could then continue accelerating...
--dave
Mach 8 is about twice as fast as a rifle bullet, but modern anti-tank guns (APDS) start at about Mach 9 (admitted).
For an experimental breadboard rig, though, Mach 8 is pretty impressive.
Can I have one in a 9MM PPK form factor, please?
--dave
Courts are reluctant to punish people who bring suits and lose, lest they make people fear to go to court.
Obtaining money by the threat of legal action based on a false and fraudulent pretense, however, may be something a court, or more likely the appropriate law society, would act on.
IMHO, the critical point is the degree to which the claim can be demonstrated to be fraudulent. An oldish definition is, in part, "An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right." [Black's Law Dictionary (6th edition) page 660]
As a philosopher, it strikes me the hurdle to a successful prosecution was initially fairly high. Until the court found they didn't have the copyrights, they could claim they were merely in error, not intentionally making false claims.
That is no longer an option in any new threats: the bar is now much lower.
--dave
... we may well prevent you from doing something brilliant."
Probably either Thompson or Ritchie, speaking about Unix.
--dave (anyone sell additional memory chips for humans?) c-b
Walled garden, with options to raise the walls or load a different walled garden.
A nice platform for a software vendor to buy to host their app in isolation from others, so if it ran on a 286 without an MMU, or on a Z80 in the dashboard of a car, I'd consider it a good idea. For a anything general-purpose, it's underwhelming.
--dave
Interestingly, IBM and Oracle got more value out of using Java than Sun did by writing it. That appears to have been one of the decision points for Oracle.
One of the extra advantages of Linux for IBM was that it offered a new OS for the 390s, and of a very popular flavor. Sun already had a Unix OS for SPARC, so they didn't get the added value.
Sun was, IMHO, always a "BSD vs Bell" shop: they understood the struggle to free BSD, and learned how to deal with Bell and the commercial world, but that's where they stopped.
--dave
The moderator didn't get tongue-in-cheek (;-))
--dave
Indeed, I quite agree, they're wildly different ways to achieve a like end, thus my tease about orthogonality.
Much of my work has been in fixed-price contract work, where quality of specification (and contract!) is critical, so my interest in Agile lies the degree to which it's different from hero-driven development. It values customer involvement in requirements, test development from requirements and early customer acceptance testing, all of which address my concerns with classic waterfall.
And yes, my original opinion of Agile was less than charitable. After a year doing a large, business-critical semi-embedded storage product using scrum, I was pleasantly surprised by the degree to which "Agile development" can be considered "Anal development".
--dave
A dedication to process is a substitute for thinking.
It is, and when I'm too scared and exhausted to think, it's a lifesaver. That's why soldiers practice a LOT.
Good practices that have become habit are genuinely beneficial. Bad practices imposed from without get you killed.
Chose your practices well.
--dave
Customer managers like owning the backlogs and having regular deliveries against them, instead of waiting loooong times and then getting something that's close, but not quite there.
--dave
Oddly enough, that's also a way to achieve the same ends as CMMU level 5, optimizing.
Both aim at aligning the process with the business ends, and increasing the value of the process to the business.
Mind you, except for that homomorphism, they're orthogonal (;-))
--dave (who's customers are in both worlds) c-b
She was in the 'States, which tends to ignore minor crimes and expect the victim to sue/shoot the culprit (;-))
You're better off in Germany, and the Americans are better off than some of the third world, where our American cousins and we send volunteers to teach the concept of the rule of Law, as in http://www.lawyerswithoutborders.org/Pages/Default.aspx
--dave
If the licenses are incompatible, then why even port it? Academic interest?
--dave
If it were political speech, various states and provinces set a lower bar, and will dismiss "SLAPP" suits with costs against.
Repeated attempts to use legal processing to threaten, harass or abuse tend to get responded to, and the archaic charge of barratry can be laid.
I don't know what fits in the gap between, where you are. Something with "fraudulent misrepresentation" in it, perhaps? I suspect you need at least a part-time lawyer to do a bit of research on what to claim.
--dave
I'm a philosopher, not a lawyer
... in a reference to urgency, not expediency. I suspect he knew that the one/many discussion was a long-running theme in the show.
--dave
... at http://gtalug.org/wiki/Meetings:2005-12, Peter demonstrated the virtual oscilloscope and virtual function generator applications, which are available as open source.
The hardware unit (approx 3 x 6 x 1" thick) is available at http://www.syscompdesign.com/CGR101.html
--dave
So it's a temporary hack in Eclipse while the Sun bug gets fixed (;-))
Reminds me of a program named "netnews", that was going to be used for a few weeks in 1979, until Duke University set up an X.25 link to the University of North Carolina.
--dave
Indeed: Oracle now employs my former Sun boss, David J. Brown, who pointed out on the order of ten (10!) years ago that one needed to distinguish between stable and unstable interfaces. He then labeled all the interfaces with the number of their standard document, and all the unstable ones SUNWprivate.
And yes, you can ask the JVM if any of the Java interfaces are supported, so switching on the name of the company that produced them is unnecessary. The company name is neither a necessary nor a sufficient test for anything. For those kinds of tests you use this reflective thingie they invented...
--dave
To quote Doug Gwyn, "UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things."
In Unix, one of the design principle is that you can do anything, even something insecure and stupid, but we can always find out what you did and whack you over the head.
Auditing what your users do so you can diagnose an error later is roughly O(n) with the number of errors. Predicting what users should be allowed to do and granting them permissions is maybe O(n^2) or worse with the number of things allowed. It works, but only for small numbers of allowed things. Watching everything users do doesn't scale at all: worst case, you could need as many sysadmins as users, O(n) with number of users.
--dave
Hey, blame me, not kdawson! We both know who phk is.
--dave (with tongue firmly in cheek) c-b
Multics got B2 by fiat, since it only fell down on the design documentation side (according to the rumors, back when I used to be a Multician), so I mildly suspect that B2 is only properly reachable by a project with security in the design from the very beginning...
--dave
I fear that the debate is also between two groups who both know what worked, over the degree to which they wanted to accept boom and bust.
If one knows one is in a boom/bust cycle, one can treat a market as a zero-sum game, ride the waves and profit on every oscillation, at the disadvantage of everyone who thinks it's stable growth.
--dave
Definitely, but that doesn't speak to the question of boom and bust. And the rest of the world rapidly rebuilt with U.S. loans, which in principle should have cause a "south sea bubble" or two (;-))
--dave
I only observed that it worked in practice: I have no proof it is necessary and sufficient in theory...
In theory, theory and practice are identical. In practice, they're not.
--dave