On most (translation: ALL) roads in the US, the typical speed of traffic is higher than the posted limit. In fact, driving the limit, some claim, causes more accidents than going with the flow of traffic. In spite of this, traffic deaths have been falling for decades, and non-injury accidents as well, all in the face of increased miles traveled and vehicles on the road.
Insurance covers the driver based on his record of accidents. Its not their job to enforce the law. And its not their job to second guess an evasive maneuver that might exceed the speed limit.
But what makes you sure this will only be used in claims? In addition to mandatory smog inspections, what is to prevent some governments from mandating recorder dumps yearly, followed by citations in the mail?
Suggesting any tiny violation invalidates your insurance simply eliminates insurance totally, because they will always find something in a recorder to invalidate your policy. Is that what you are really advocating? It doesn't sound like you have thought this thru very well.
You still have to pay the fees appropriate to your class. You don't get to use the patents for free and contribute neither money or patents to the pool. Its not discriminatory to expect you to pay for the patents you use.
Meanwhile, Motorola (and others) approached Apple and said that they wouldn't accept cash from them anyway as payment for the FRAND technology,
That's the part you made up out of whole cloth. Moto never said they wouldn't accept cash. In fact they are suing for several billion in cash.
The patent pool had FRAND pricing and collection mechanisms for two different tiers. One was the members, the other was for non-members. (Apple is not the only non-member, there are several who use various pieces of this technology and pay the non-member pricing for everything from speed cameras to water meters).
Apple refused to pay the non member pricing. Non-discriminatory doesn't mean you get it for free if you don't feel the price is ok. It means you get the same price as everybody else in your class.
Further Apple's claim of having paid via their purchase from Qualcomm in violation of the licening agreement set up by the association. is As of April 2012, the controversy centers on whether a FRAND license to a components manufacturer carries over to an equipment manufacturer incorporating the component into equipment, an issue NOT addressed in the U.S. Supreme Court's default exhaustion doctrine in Quanta v. LG Electronics.
Typically, I try to spend at least half my time looking for ways for IT to actually add value to other silos. This involves a lot of "fuzzy people" time, learning what those roles do, and how the people in those roles "feel" about their work. When you spend the time to get to know your company, you discover not only ways to make things substantially better for everyone
Most people would be surprised just how many alligators are lurking in un-drained swamps in companies that thought they had a smoothly functioning IT department. Walking around and talking to people, and watching them do their job, you find all sorts of these things.
Like the clerk taking numbers off of a screen and filling in a report or a spread sheet that someone needs in order to submit a government form or process an order for parts or something similar. Or the entire off-computer book keeping operation done in some office to obscure office re-entering orders or bills that were already entered by someone else. Or one department painstakingly putting together a spreadsheet and sending it to another department for manual data extraction simply because one department couldn't access the data they were obligated to use.
Its like the overflowing closet, the door people don't want to open. Nobody wants to fill in the work order to have it automated, they just suffer through it. But if the right guy from IT wanders by and understands the problem it can usually be automated in under an hour.
Apple does hold some patents that they are now using to sue everyone in sight. They could have offered these patents to the patent pool, but instead they chose to offer none, even when some were asked for.
As for charging the chip makers and then the handset makers, that is standard practice, agreed upon by the entire pool. Its not double dipping, because it was purposely set up that way. Further, some chips have multiple different capabilities, and you only have to license the ones you actually use in your handset.
Johnny-come-lately entrants have to offer something to get pool pricing. Else they pay non-pool pricing. Apple knew this going in.
Sure, but those guys are just using an off the shelf package for this. Any mom-and-pop company can use those, without a CIO, or even a single IT guy.
The big chains, yeah, they have and need an IT department, but unless its customer facing (web based pizza ordering, with smart phone apps, etc) that guy is not bringing in new customers.
IT needs to stay in IT. The last thing we need is for them to join marketing. Wouldn't you really rather have them hardening your own installation rather then having them trying to publicly grandstand on a failure of the competition? Doesn't that simply make YOUR company more of a target?
If I wanted to do business only, I'd be getting an MBA. I wanted to work in the tech department, so I'm getting a different degree through the MIS department. You need someone who is more focused on the information and the technology than the business ramifications, otherwise you end up cutting corners dangerously and ending up with a dead infrastructure at a critical moment.
Probably not true.
Are Shipping Operations Managers hired from the driver pool or the mechanic pool? Are CFOs hired from tellers or account clerks? Are hospital administrators selected from the best nursing staff or even the interns?
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
You've exhibited this mentality in your very post! You ARE part of the problem.
Yet in reality, MBAs are trained to be very risk adverse. They are also trained to manage costs, plan for the future, and plan for emergencies. They might even know a bit about growing the business, adding locations, expanding the customer base.
You should be reporting to a CIO that has a business background. You should be able to explain why you need that new router or that data center upgrade. If you can't make that case succinctly and factually, and with due regard for cost/benefits involved, then you NEED another layer between you and the board room.
But you should clearly not be making high level business decisions with ONLY a technical level background.
I started out in the technical end of IT as well. I lead that department after a few years. But I still reported to VPs who were business management oriented. And unless I chose to go back and get an MBA, that would have been as high as I was ever going to get.
I've often gotten the impression that IT is perceived by management as Janitorial services, or Corporate Archives, or the company cafeteria by companies that are not directly selling IT services themselves, as well as government agencies in general. They are a cost center, but not a revenue center. They are not customer facing, so they are just another physical plant cost. Like keeping the lights on, the water flowing, and the elevators running.
In some companies this is in fact the proper place for IT services. If all a company's use of computer technology is merely to process letters and reports, fill out time sheets, and read email you really don't need to attributed a great deal of status or power to the IT staff.
But who uses computers that way any more? Only really small business. Restaurants, plumbers, small stores, small law firms, etc.
IT departments have a problem of perception, because the better they do their job (without being total dickheads about it) the less they get noticed, and the more they become perceived as mere Archivists or telephone repairmen. Its almost like management needs an emergency or outage every 4 years to remind them just how much of their business relies on their IT.
That being said, unless your IT is customer facing (internet services or sales, etc) the perception that CIOs do not bring new business is reasonably valid. They may help you keep the business you have, but just about nothing IT can do will sell one more unit of product, or add one new customer. IT that is not customer facing is in fact still a support service. Support services tend not to make business decisions or grow the company.
So maybe pushing CIOs into the front office and the boardroom was not always warranted. And maybe in a lot of companies they still don't belong there. And maybe CIOs should not be hired from technical backgrounds.
By the way, FRAND doesn't mean "free" as you seem to believe, some of those companies make a lot of money off of their FRAND patents. It means that you can't charge Apple more than you charge Toshiba--which is exactly what Motorola was trying to do.
Not only motorola, but others in the same consortium were trying to charge Apple more.
Why? Because it was a patent POOL, with an organization to track and settle licensing fees between partners. You brought your pertinent patents into the pool, and you paid your license fees per handset. Apple brought no patents to the table. They just usurped the right to use all of these patents, claiming that any fees due were paid by the chip manufacturers. They offered nothing in return for the use of these patents, refusing to license any of their own. (They really had virtually nothing to offer in GSM or CDMA arena anyway, because they invented nothing in this area).
So the other companies charged Apple the non-FRAND prices. Apple refused to pay, refused to cross license, and simply used the patents anyway, knowing they would be protected by their friends in Washington. If Apple lost in court (and there are cases pending which they may well lose), the penalties would extend to billions of dollars, and cover all handsets they ever made.
FRAND only works when all parties play along. No part of FRAND implies Mandatory Licensing. One might argue that it should, especially for Standards Based Technologies.
Fighting about rounded corners is simply a desperation move.
A few weeks ago, two GIMP hackers got together to do some general hacking, and inadvertedly ported the core graphics code to GEGL.
Is it just me, or does that not pretty much sum up GIMP development since day one?
Now if these guys would just inadvertently fix the user interface, or perhaps trip and fall into a total redesign, or accidentally re-organize and re-name all the tools using bumbled into industry standard names, and serendipitously selected value scales, they might unintentionally come up with something that, purely as a side effect, resembled, ever so slightly, the principal of Least Astonishment.
Look, I 100% guarantee you that the attackers were 1) male 2) Muslims 3) were taught that women should not be educated in an Islamic school.
You don't get to stand up on your hind legs here and state what Islamic teachings are, or if they are the problem or not. Just because you interpret the Qur'an that way does not make it "Islamic teaching". Trying to pass it off as a political problem is equally bogus. Define for me where politics ends and religion begins in places where any Religion is the official Religion, and Islamic law is the law of the land.
There is no Central Authority in Islam. No Pope. There is, therefore no central and universally accepted authority on what constitutes Islam or its teachings. Which is precisely why the religion is so abused in so many places. Anyone can appoint themselves an Imam, and begin preaching virtually anything they want. There is really no one to hold them in check.
It seems to me this would be best used to get drugs delivered deep within the body, such as in a tumor, without dosing the rest of the body, or even near by areas.
But how do they get the laser there? If it were near the surface, a laser could be used. But deeper in the body, liver, brain, etc., how do you get laser light in there to cause the drug bomb to be dropped?
Quoting TFA:
Mario Magnani, of the University of Urbino, in Italy, calls the method novel and interesting, especially because it appears to leave the red blood cells intact. However, he sees two practical problems: Infrared light doesn’t penetrate deeply into body tissue, making many tumors difficult to access with the technique’s laser.
Wouldn't intersecting focused microwaves be a better approach for heating these blood cells than an infrared laser?
I still don't understand why an offhand comment by a studio head makes it to a story here on Slashdot, when its entirely possible he didn't even know what CK made via his alternative monitization, and he may have simply meant that CK chose not to monitize with Paramount.
Really, it seems silly to hang on every single word and echo it on a blog post, and even sillier to rush into Slahsdot and post story about a stupid blog post about a stupid one-line comment.
But how can this stuff be protected? There are car-bombings almost daily in the news from Iraq. All those foreign ideas arriving in Iraq are sure to piss off people who will truck bomb you merely for dressing different.
For some methods of documentation this is very true. For some programmers that care about their work its very true.
But if you don't care about your code, you probably won't care about the documentation. In this case, I agree its False.
If you know the documentation you just wrote is a bag of lies but you turn it in anyway, because you know that the PHB won't understand it and couldn't check if it was true if his life depended on it, then you might as well junk the code you just wrote as well. Chance are it will break the minute you walk out the door.
I thought everyone knew that documentation describes what you intended code to do, rather than what it actually does.
Just as often, while writing documentation on code I just wrote, I've thrown up my hands, and thought "this is so ridiculous and embarrassing that I can't be associated with it", and I went back and re-wrote it to do it the right way. The act of documenting it revealed you left too much undone, or too many situations un-handled.
Any time your documentation reads like you are describing a game of twister you just know the code can't be worth documenting, or even keeping.
But as for finding bugs, I don't know. You may document exactly what you intended, and thought the code did, but still be wrong because of some corner case. Documenting it isn't likely to reveal all of these situations any better than the code itself. A
Not that AT&T is taking possession of the stolen property, but they are receiving service payments because of the stolen property.
So I pull into a gas station with my stolen car. Is the gas station aiding and abetting or receiving stolen property? Even if I tell them, hey, look at this cool car I just stole?
Look, be careful what you advocate for here. Are you really suggesting that anybody some crook passes in the street automatically becomes guilty by association? Are you really saying that the fast food joint KNEW or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that the guy at the drive up window wearing the funny orange jumpsuit was an escapee? Are you suggesting or the grocery store clerk should have known the creepy looking guy who starts buying stuffed toys had just kidnapped some child?
Do you REALLY want to carry your papers every where you go, proving you own your car, your phone? Do you really want every store you walk into to run a complete background check on you and your lawn mower just because you want to buy a replacement part or a new spark plug?
Without a database of stolen phones (it would have to be world wide, not just carrier wide) the carrier's can't know a phone was stolen. Even if reported to AT&T there is no reason to believe they have a company wide database of stolen phones. That is precisely what this suit is about. At&t claimed they COULD NOT record the fact that the phone was stolen and block it.
They COULD NOT is probably true, because they never set up such a database. And even if they did, they did not tie it to their registration system. BUT there is no law saying they must. The FCC has finally forced them to do this, but not for many months.
At most you can prove negligence, not a criminal violation of the law. If there was such a law, why aren't the CEOs of all major carriers in jail today? Why is this being handled in civil court?
Why? I'll tell you why. There is no law that requires them to do this, and your concept of guilt by association is scary dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Define speeding.
On most (translation: ALL) roads in the US, the typical speed of traffic is higher than the posted limit. In fact, driving the limit, some claim, causes more accidents than going with the flow of traffic. In spite of this, traffic deaths have been falling for decades, and non-injury accidents as well, all in the face of increased miles traveled and vehicles on the road.
Insurance covers the driver based on his record of accidents. Its not their job to enforce the law. And its not their job to second guess an evasive maneuver that might exceed the speed limit.
But what makes you sure this will only be used in claims? In addition to mandatory smog inspections, what is to prevent some governments from mandating recorder dumps yearly, followed by citations in the mail?
Suggesting any tiny violation invalidates your insurance simply eliminates insurance totally, because they will always find something in a recorder to invalidate your policy. Is that what you are really advocating? It doesn't sound like you have thought this thru very well.
Why don't you look it up!
There is no clear definition of FRAND, it differs with each patent pool.
You still have to pay the fees appropriate to your class. You don't get to use the patents for free and contribute neither money or patents to the pool. Its not discriminatory to expect you to pay for the patents you use.
Meanwhile, Motorola (and others) approached Apple and said that they wouldn't accept cash from them anyway as payment for the FRAND technology,
That's the part you made up out of whole cloth. Moto never said they wouldn't accept cash. In fact they are suing for several billion in cash.
The patent pool had FRAND pricing and collection mechanisms for two different tiers. One was the members, the other was for non-members. (Apple is not the only non-member, there are several who use various pieces of this technology and pay the non-member pricing for everything from speed cameras to water meters).
Apple refused to pay the non member pricing. Non-discriminatory doesn't mean you get it for free if you don't feel the price is ok. It means you get the same price as everybody else in your class.
Further Apple's claim of having paid via their purchase from Qualcomm in violation of the licening agreement set up by the association. is As of April 2012, the controversy centers on whether a FRAND license to a components manufacturer carries over to an equipment manufacturer incorporating the component into equipment, an issue NOT addressed in the U.S. Supreme Court's default exhaustion doctrine in Quanta v. LG Electronics.
Typically, I try to spend at least half my time looking for ways for IT to actually add value to other silos. This involves a lot of "fuzzy people" time, learning what those roles do, and how the people in those roles "feel" about their work. When you spend the time to get to know your company, you discover not only ways to make things substantially better for everyone
Most people would be surprised just how many alligators are lurking in un-drained swamps in companies that thought they had a smoothly functioning IT department. Walking around and talking to people, and watching them do their job, you find all sorts of these things.
Like the clerk taking numbers off of a screen and filling in a report or a spread sheet that someone needs in order to submit a government form or process an order for parts or something similar. Or the entire off-computer book keeping operation done in some office to obscure office re-entering orders or bills that were already entered by someone else. Or one department painstakingly putting together a spreadsheet and sending it to another department for manual data extraction simply because one department couldn't access the data they were obligated to use.
Its like the overflowing closet, the door people don't want to open. Nobody wants to fill in the work order to have it automated, they just suffer through it.
But if the right guy from IT wanders by and understands the problem it can usually be automated in under an hour.
Apple does hold some patents that they are now using to sue everyone in sight. They could have offered these patents to the patent pool, but instead they chose to offer none, even when some were asked for.
As for charging the chip makers and then the handset makers, that is standard practice, agreed upon by the entire pool. Its not double dipping, because it was purposely set up that way. Further, some chips have multiple different capabilities, and you only have to license the ones you actually use in your handset.
Johnny-come-lately entrants have to offer something to get pool pricing. Else they pay non-pool pricing. Apple knew this going in.
Sure, but those guys are just using an off the shelf package for this. Any mom-and-pop company can use those, without a CIO, or even a single IT guy.
The big chains, yeah, they have and need an IT department, but unless its customer facing (web based pizza ordering, with smart phone apps, etc) that guy is not bringing in new customers.
IT needs to stay in IT. The last thing we need is for them to join marketing.
Wouldn't you really rather have them hardening your own installation rather then having them trying to publicly grandstand on a failure of the competition? Doesn't that simply make YOUR company more of a target?
Does Stratfor ring any bells?
If I wanted to do business only, I'd be getting an MBA. I wanted to work in the tech department, so I'm getting a different degree through the MIS department. You need someone who is more focused on the information and the technology than the business ramifications, otherwise you end up cutting corners dangerously and ending up with a dead infrastructure at a critical moment.
Probably not true.
Are Shipping Operations Managers hired from the driver pool or the mechanic pool?
Are CFOs hired from tellers or account clerks?
Are hospital administrators selected from the best nursing staff or even the interns?
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
You've exhibited this mentality in your very post! You ARE part of the problem.
Yet in reality, MBAs are trained to be very risk adverse. They are also trained to manage costs, plan for the future, and plan for emergencies. They might even know a bit about growing the business, adding locations, expanding the customer base.
You should be reporting to a CIO that has a business background. You should be able to explain why you need that new router or that data center upgrade. If you can't make that case succinctly and factually, and with due regard for cost/benefits involved, then you NEED another layer between you and the board room.
But you should clearly not be making high level business decisions with ONLY a technical level background.
I started out in the technical end of IT as well. I lead that department after a few years. But I still reported to VPs who were business management oriented. And unless I chose to go back and get an MBA, that would have been as high as I was ever going to get.
I've often gotten the impression that IT is perceived by management as Janitorial services, or Corporate Archives, or the company cafeteria by companies that are not directly selling IT services themselves, as well as government agencies in general. They are a cost center, but not a revenue center. They are not customer facing, so they are just another physical plant cost. Like keeping the lights on, the water flowing, and the elevators running.
In some companies this is in fact the proper place for IT services. If all a company's use of computer technology is merely to process letters and reports, fill out time sheets, and read email you really don't need to attributed a great deal of status or power to the IT staff.
But who uses computers that way any more? Only really small business. Restaurants, plumbers, small stores, small law firms, etc.
IT departments have a problem of perception, because the better they do their job (without being total dickheads about it) the less they get noticed, and the more they become perceived as mere Archivists or telephone repairmen. Its almost like management needs an emergency or outage every 4 years to remind them just how much of their business relies on their IT.
That being said, unless your IT is customer facing (internet services or sales, etc) the perception that CIOs do not bring new business is reasonably valid. They may help you keep the business you have, but just about nothing IT can do will sell one more unit of product, or add one new customer. IT that is not customer facing is in fact still a support service. Support services tend not to make business decisions or grow the company.
So maybe pushing CIOs into the front office and the boardroom was not always warranted. And maybe in a lot of companies they still don't belong there. And maybe CIOs should not be hired from technical backgrounds.
By the way, FRAND doesn't mean "free" as you seem to believe, some of those companies make a lot of money off of their FRAND patents. It means that you can't charge Apple more than you charge Toshiba--which is exactly what Motorola was trying to do.
Not only motorola, but others in the same consortium were trying to charge Apple more.
Why? Because it was a patent POOL, with an organization to track and settle licensing fees between partners. You brought your pertinent patents into the pool, and you paid your license fees per handset. Apple brought no patents to the table. They just usurped the right to use all of these patents, claiming that any fees due were paid by the chip manufacturers. They offered nothing in return for the use of these patents, refusing to license any of their own. (They really had virtually nothing to offer in GSM or CDMA arena anyway, because they invented nothing in this area).
So the other companies charged Apple the non-FRAND prices. Apple refused to pay, refused to cross license, and simply used the patents anyway, knowing they would be protected by their friends in Washington. If Apple lost in court (and there are cases pending which they may well lose), the penalties would extend to billions of dollars, and cover all handsets they ever made.
FRAND only works when all parties play along. No part of FRAND implies Mandatory Licensing. One might argue that it should, especially for Standards Based Technologies.
Fighting about rounded corners is simply a desperation move.
A few weeks ago, two GIMP hackers got together to do some general hacking, and inadvertedly ported the core graphics code to GEGL.
Is it just me, or does that not pretty much sum up GIMP development since day one?
Now if these guys would just inadvertently fix the user interface, or perhaps trip and fall into a total redesign, or accidentally re-organize and re-name all the tools using bumbled into industry standard names, and serendipitously selected value scales, they might unintentionally come up with something that, purely as a side effect, resembled, ever so slightly, the principal of Least Astonishment.
You put "GE" and "quality" in the same sentence?
Facepalm!
Islamic teachings? Teachings?
Look, I 100% guarantee you that the attackers were 1) male 2) Muslims 3) were taught that women should not be educated in an Islamic school.
You don't get to stand up on your hind legs here and state what Islamic teachings are, or if they are the problem or not. Just because you interpret the Qur'an that way does not make it "Islamic teaching". Trying to pass it off as a political problem is equally bogus. Define for me where politics ends and religion begins in places where any Religion is the official Religion, and Islamic law is the law of the land.
There is no Central Authority in Islam. No Pope. There is, therefore no central and universally accepted authority on what constitutes Islam or its teachings. Which is precisely why the religion is so abused in so many places. Anyone can appoint themselves an Imam, and begin preaching virtually anything they want. There is really no one to hold them in check.
Just a quick google finds this to be true.
Dimmable 9 Watt LED Bulb Standard Screw Base A80 60 Watt Replacement Warm.
http://www.amazon.com/Dimmable-LED-Replacement-Ledwholesalers-1020ww/dp/B004ORMXBO
Oh, look, it uses less power 8.8 watts vs 10, and lasts longer 40k hrs vs 30k.
For 16 bucks!!
Couldn't it also be that they feel its unfair to have to compete with a government funded agency?
Just askin. I couldn't find any clear statement on the site as to the source of their funding.
It seems to me this would be best used to get drugs delivered deep within the body, such as in a tumor, without dosing the rest of the body, or even near by areas.
But how do they get the laser there? If it were near the surface, a laser could be used. But deeper in the body, liver, brain, etc., how do you get laser light in there to cause the drug bomb to be dropped?
Quoting TFA:
Mario Magnani, of the University of Urbino, in Italy, calls the method novel and interesting, especially because it appears to leave the red blood cells intact. However, he sees two practical problems: Infrared light doesn’t penetrate deeply into body tissue, making many tumors difficult to access with the technique’s laser.
Wouldn't intersecting focused microwaves be a better approach for heating these blood cells than an infrared laser?
I still don't understand why an offhand comment by a studio head makes it to a story here on Slashdot, when its entirely possible he didn't even know what CK made via his alternative monitization, and he may have simply meant that CK chose not to monitize with Paramount.
Really, it seems silly to hang on every single word and echo it on a blog post, and even sillier to rush into Slahsdot and post story about a stupid blog post about a stupid one-line comment.
But how can this stuff be protected? There are car-bombings almost daily in the news from Iraq.
All those foreign ideas arriving in Iraq are sure to piss off people who will truck bomb you merely for dressing different.
You can delay the proceedings by not providing information in a timely manner.
The FCC can also get a subpoena instead of asking Google to voluntarily throw an employee under the bus.
For some methods of documentation this is very true. For some programmers that care about their work its very true.
But if you don't care about your code, you probably won't care about the documentation. In this case, I agree its False.
If you know the documentation you just wrote is a bag of lies but you turn it in anyway, because you know that the PHB won't understand it and couldn't check if it was true if his life depended on it, then you might as well junk the code you just wrote as well. Chance are it will break the minute you walk out the door.
I thought everyone knew that documentation describes what you intended code to do, rather than what it actually does.
Just as often, while writing documentation on code I just wrote, I've thrown up my hands, and thought "this is so ridiculous and embarrassing that I can't be associated with it", and I went back and re-wrote it to do it the right way. The act of documenting it revealed you left too much undone, or too many situations un-handled.
Any time your documentation reads like you are describing a game of twister you just know the code can't be worth documenting, or even keeping.
But as for finding bugs, I don't know. You may document exactly what you intended, and thought the code did, but still be wrong because of some corner case. Documenting it isn't likely to reveal all of these situations any better than the code itself. A
Not that AT&T is taking possession of the stolen property, but they are receiving service payments because of the stolen property.
So I pull into a gas station with my stolen car. Is the gas station aiding and abetting or receiving stolen property? Even if I tell them, hey, look at this cool car I just stole?
Look, be careful what you advocate for here. Are you really suggesting that anybody some crook passes in the street automatically becomes guilty by association? Are you really saying that the fast food joint KNEW or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that the guy at the drive up window wearing the funny orange jumpsuit was an escapee? Are you suggesting or the grocery store clerk should have known the creepy looking guy who starts buying stuffed toys had just kidnapped some child?
Do you REALLY want to carry your papers every where you go, proving you own your car, your phone? Do you really want every store you walk into to run a complete background check on you and your lawn mower just because you want to buy a replacement part or a new spark plug?
Without a database of stolen phones (it would have to be world wide, not just carrier wide) the carrier's can't know a phone was stolen.
Even if reported to AT&T there is no reason to believe they have a company wide database of stolen phones.
That is precisely what this suit is about. At&t claimed they COULD NOT record the fact that the phone was stolen and block it.
They COULD NOT is probably true, because they never set up such a database. And even if they did, they did not tie it to their registration system.
BUT there is no law saying they must. The FCC has finally forced them to do this, but not for many months.
At most you can prove negligence, not a criminal violation of the law. If there was such a law, why aren't the CEOs of all major carriers in jail today?
Why is this being handled in civil court?
Why? I'll tell you why. There is no law that requires them to do this, and your concept of guilt by association is scary dangerous.
Have you seen any perp walks?
Any AT&T execs being lead out of their offices in hand cuffs?
Any other carriers execs arrested?
No?
Thought not.
He subsequently stated he misspoke, and it was an IMEI.