My theory about these recent cases of a patent parasite starting out suing some big company, such as Disney, is that they approach the big company, offer them something in exchange for "licensing" their patent, just so they can say "these guys signed, so you little guys have no chance". Notice the terms of the agreement are always confidential, so for all we know the big company could have paid basically nothing for the license, and may even be collecting a fee so their name could be used in the patent campaign. But the little guys will pay right up, fearing a huge lawsuit that even a huge company couldn't seem to win.
With all the worries that people have about open source developers being sued, it's worth remembering that patent litigation usually targets companies that are selling something so the patent holder can ask for a certain percentage of sales. In the case of open source, 10% of 0 is still 0. Of course, patent holders can require that the "infringer" stop using their device, but I don't think too many companies are stupid enough to expect big bucks from suing open source developers.
As I recall, soon after he said this and was being ridiculed for it, he then tried to backpedal and say that he didn't really mean that 9/11 should be blamed on gays, etc. I don't think anyone really fell for his obvious attempt at damage control, but it just shows that he says things primarily to get attention, and he'll say whatever gets him the most attention at any given time. All publicity is good publicity for someone like this, which is why I wish the media would completely ignore him.
At the very least a criminal caught using evident from a honeypot/net may launch a lawsuit.
If I were a corporate IT director, I would absolutely not be concerned about this. As other posters have explained, it is not entrapment. A criminal has no reasonable expectation of privacy on someone else's property. If the intruder sued, the corporate lawyers would use every stonewalling tactic in the book, then launch a counter-suit for the intrusion. In the United States anyway, the one with the better lawyer wins. Since most hackers have little money to spend on lawyers, I don't believe I need to spell out the result of the lawsuits. This is a non-issue.
If you donate to their pension fund and put that little sticker they send you on your car, they'll be more inclined to let you go.
Are they really that stupid to fall for this? Like there's any other reason someone would put this on their car. Also, these things can be faked pretty easily. As a practical matter, you would have to have a sticker for every police union or organization in the state, and there are a lot. Once your entire bumper is covered in these things, you will have given enough donations to pay for your tickets and your obvious bootlicking will annoy the cop enough to write you a ticket anyway.
Contrary to popular belief, being exposed to some second-hand smoke for a couple of hours a day is NOT the same as smoking. Not only are you not inhaling a concentrated amount of smoke, but you are most likely not exposed to it continuously. Blood levels of nicotine will reflect this. If someone is around cigarette smoke so much that their nicotine levels are the same as a smoker, then they are at as much risk as a smoker and should be priced accordingly for insurance.
Some of us don't want to turn an 8 hour car trip into 10. Also, we don't want to be so bored driving 40 mph on a wide open highway that we fall asleep and let the car veer off the road. Yes, people should pay attention to their driving and obey traffic laws at all times, but if the purpose of speed limits is safety, making limits arbitrarily too low does not serve that purpose. After all, a 40 mph crash can still be deadly.
You may as well get on the subway with a toy driving wheel and make vroom-vroom sounds.
I've seen mentally disturbed people on the Chicago subway really doing this before. Instead of a toy wheel, they just held their hands up around an invisible steering wheel.
If I, an end user, license a proprietary OS and it is determined to have violated someone's patent, how could I be held responsible? In order to file a lawsuit against someone, there are 3 basic tenants that must be proven. First, you must prove that someone had a duty to do something or to ensure that something does not happen. Second, you must prove that the duty was breached. Third, you must prove that your injury or loss was a result of that breach. A lawsuit will be quickly thrown out if you cannot do these things. In the case of finding a patent violation in proprietary software, I the user would not even have the means, much less a duty to detect violations since I wouldn't have the source and could not legally obtain the source code. This may be one reason why someone would feel better with a proprietary OS, since the chance of litigation regarding the use of it would be very remote, at best.
Exactly. Why spend the money for central A/C only to not use it? The inside of a house will get uncomfortably stifling when the air temp is much above 75, unless you have some good ceiling fans.
But the flip side to this situation is that it is a lot easier to change VOIP providers than to change your POTS service, if you can change it at all. Extreme regulation was needed when the phone company was the only provider in town, but if you can change VOIP providers fairly easily, the competition aspect will prevent companies from angering their customers with unreasonable policies and service.
The only thing they could deny you would be something that they are not legally required to provide, such as insurance continuation or severance. However, in some cases they may be required to pay severance anyway, and if that is true then there can be no strings attached. In no case would an employer be able to say "sign this form or you don't get your last paycheck", or anything along those lines. And I highly doubt they could stop you from collecting unemployment due to refusal to sign some agreement.
This is far from true. First of all, at will employment is not a contract. Either party can terminate the agreement for any or no reason at any time. Second, non-competes have been struck down in many cases. In some states such as California, non-competes are basically prohibited except in very limited circumstances. Sure, you can't take your company's product and sell it to a competitor, but non-compete agreements typically go much farther than this. Some former.com employees have told stories about agreements containing words like "forever", which would guarantee a judge would immediately throw them out. This is very shaky legal ground, and companies that try to abuse non-compete agreements to keep someone out of work have been pretty much shot down in court on a consistant basis.
I have a hard time believing that switching from a proprietary OS that can only be maintained by the vendor to a proprietary OS that can only be maintained by the vendor is cost effective. Any company that can afford to spend millions of R&D dollars developing medical equipment can afford to pay a couple of programmers to build a Linux or other BSD based OS for them that would have all the features needed to run the machine, nothing more, nothing less. In the end, this would be far more cost effective than keeping up with Windows patches and hoping they don't break the machine. Once again, short term profits are being valued over long term results and stability.
Will state governments ever finally get a clue and realize they can't regulate the internet? In case some state attorney general is reading this, let me explain. The internet is WORLD WIDE. That's right, anyone in the world can put something online if they have an internet connection. What will some file sharing company based in the Netherlands do when they get a letter from the New York State Attorney General's office? My guess is they would laugh, then throw it away, just like I would if I got a letter from some provincial government of another country telling me to shut down my website.
If the day ever comes when local governments have some sort of reciprocity agreement to regulate the internet in any way they see fit, watch out for the morality codes that some southern U.S. towns will try to force on the internet as a whole. Not to mention the regulations from middle eastern countries against any non-Islamic religion. For these reason, localities will never be allowed to regulate the internet in any meaningful way.
It seems like there are a number of lawyers who have not yet figured out that the first amendment does in fact apply on the internet, as we can see by these examples. Although this is becoming a little less common, many business owners/managers have tried to have critical websites shut down for little reason other than they don't like what is being said.
As we've seen with copy protected CDs, fair use rights don't always mean freedom for the customer. Apparently, the recording industry is permitted to make CDs that are "copyproof" despite fair use clauses in copyright law. The rationale is that the customer cannot be prosecuted for making personal copies but the producer does not have to do anything to enable that, and can apparently stop it too. In this case, I didn't see anything in the article that said the NFL or other content producers had to go along with this, it only said the FCC gave TiVO the OK on the technology. I expect to see lots of obstruction efforts on the part of media companies and would be surprised if this gets resolved anytime soon. In the mean time, legitimate customers will be inconvenienced and pirates will continue as usual.
Just wait until they reduce the length of the yellow light in order to "enhance revenue". All the safety gains will be out the window. Just google for red light cameras in California if you want to see what I'm talking about. It always happens that way.
I don't think it will be so bad if they get rid of McNealy. He is the biggest obstacle to Sun having any sort of future other than bankruptcy. If Sun acquires a marketable product, like SuSE Linux, this could only help them.
But willfull infringement of patents or copyrights is grounds for triple damages to be awarded in court. Some companies, knowing that they're bound to be guilty of something, try to remain ignorant so that at least there's no evidence of willfull infringement. I'm not sure how successful this tactic is, but it is common practice in some industries.
Like spammers, telemarketers, and junk faxers, they seem unable to grasp the concept that they are using other peoples' resources for free to send their ads. That is why people don't like them and want to shut them down. It's a fairly simple concept for most of us, but they honestly think they are doing nothing wrong.
Considering the technical knowledge of management in most companies, these are exactly the hands that you do not want to have power. Come back and troll again when a Windows machine can stay up and running for more than 2 weeks without a crash or major slowdown.
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My theory about these recent cases of a patent parasite starting out suing some big company, such as Disney, is that they approach the big company, offer them something in exchange for "licensing" their patent, just so they can say "these guys signed, so you little guys have no chance". Notice the terms of the agreement are always confidential, so for all we know the big company could have paid basically nothing for the license, and may even be collecting a fee so their name could be used in the patent campaign. But the little guys will pay right up, fearing a huge lawsuit that even a huge company couldn't seem to win.
With all the worries that people have about open source developers being sued, it's worth remembering that patent litigation usually targets companies that are selling something so the patent holder can ask for a certain percentage of sales. In the case of open source, 10% of 0 is still 0. Of course, patent holders can require that the "infringer" stop using their device, but I don't think too many companies are stupid enough to expect big bucks from suing open source developers.
As I recall, soon after he said this and was being ridiculed for it, he then tried to backpedal and say that he didn't really mean that 9/11 should be blamed on gays, etc. I don't think anyone really fell for his obvious attempt at damage control, but it just shows that he says things primarily to get attention, and he'll say whatever gets him the most attention at any given time. All publicity is good publicity for someone like this, which is why I wish the media would completely ignore him.
At the very least a criminal caught using evident from a honeypot/net may launch a lawsuit.
If I were a corporate IT director, I would absolutely not be concerned about this. As other posters have explained, it is not entrapment. A criminal has no reasonable expectation of privacy on someone else's property. If the intruder sued, the corporate lawyers would use every stonewalling tactic in the book, then launch a counter-suit for the intrusion. In the United States anyway, the one with the better lawyer wins. Since most hackers have little money to spend on lawyers, I don't believe I need to spell out the result of the lawsuits. This is a non-issue.
If you donate to their pension fund and put that little sticker they send you on your car, they'll be more inclined to let you go.
Are they really that stupid to fall for this? Like there's any other reason someone would put this on their car. Also, these things can be faked pretty easily. As a practical matter, you would have to have a sticker for every police union or organization in the state, and there are a lot. Once your entire bumper is covered in these things, you will have given enough donations to pay for your tickets and your obvious bootlicking will annoy the cop enough to write you a ticket anyway.
Contrary to popular belief, being exposed to some second-hand smoke for a couple of hours a day is NOT the same as smoking. Not only are you not inhaling a concentrated amount of smoke, but you are most likely not exposed to it continuously. Blood levels of nicotine will reflect this. If someone is around cigarette smoke so much that their nicotine levels are the same as a smoker, then they are at as much risk as a smoker and should be priced accordingly for insurance.
Some of us don't want to turn an 8 hour car trip into 10. Also, we don't want to be so bored driving 40 mph on a wide open highway that we fall asleep and let the car veer off the road. Yes, people should pay attention to their driving and obey traffic laws at all times, but if the purpose of speed limits is safety, making limits arbitrarily too low does not serve that purpose. After all, a 40 mph crash can still be deadly.
You may as well get on the subway with a toy driving wheel and make vroom-vroom sounds.
I've seen mentally disturbed people on the Chicago subway really doing this before. Instead of a toy wheel, they just held their hands up around an invisible steering wheel.
If I, an end user, license a proprietary OS and it is determined to have violated someone's patent, how could I be held responsible? In order to file a lawsuit against someone, there are 3 basic tenants that must be proven. First, you must prove that someone had a duty to do something or to ensure that something does not happen. Second, you must prove that the duty was breached. Third, you must prove that your injury or loss was a result of that breach. A lawsuit will be quickly thrown out if you cannot do these things. In the case of finding a patent violation in proprietary software, I the user would not even have the means, much less a duty to detect violations since I wouldn't have the source and could not legally obtain the source code. This may be one reason why someone would feel better with a proprietary OS, since the chance of litigation regarding the use of it would be very remote, at best.
Exactly. Why spend the money for central A/C only to not use it? The inside of a house will get uncomfortably stifling when the air temp is much above 75, unless you have some good ceiling fans.
But the flip side to this situation is that it is a lot easier to change VOIP providers than to change your POTS service, if you can change it at all. Extreme regulation was needed when the phone company was the only provider in town, but if you can change VOIP providers fairly easily, the competition aspect will prevent companies from angering their customers with unreasonable policies and service.
If it were an option, would we give it a +1 or a -1?
The only thing they could deny you would be something that they are not legally required to provide, such as insurance continuation or severance. However, in some cases they may be required to pay severance anyway, and if that is true then there can be no strings attached. In no case would an employer be able to say "sign this form or you don't get your last paycheck", or anything along those lines. And I highly doubt they could stop you from collecting unemployment due to refusal to sign some agreement.
This is far from true. First of all, at will employment is not a contract. Either party can terminate the agreement for any or no reason at any time. Second, non-competes have been struck down in many cases. In some states such as California, non-competes are basically prohibited except in very limited circumstances. Sure, you can't take your company's product and sell it to a competitor, but non-compete agreements typically go much farther than this. Some former .com employees have told stories about agreements containing words like "forever", which would guarantee a judge would immediately throw them out. This is very shaky legal ground, and companies that try to abuse non-compete agreements to keep someone out of work have been pretty much shot down in court on a consistant basis.
I have a hard time believing that switching from a proprietary OS that can only be maintained by the vendor to a proprietary OS that can only be maintained by the vendor is cost effective. Any company that can afford to spend millions of R&D dollars developing medical equipment can afford to pay a couple of programmers to build a Linux or other BSD based OS for them that would have all the features needed to run the machine, nothing more, nothing less. In the end, this would be far more cost effective than keeping up with Windows patches and hoping they don't break the machine. Once again, short term profits are being valued over long term results and stability.
Will state governments ever finally get a clue and realize they can't regulate the internet? In case some state attorney general is reading this, let me explain. The internet is WORLD WIDE. That's right, anyone in the world can put something online if they have an internet connection. What will some file sharing company based in the Netherlands do when they get a letter from the New York State Attorney General's office? My guess is they would laugh, then throw it away, just like I would if I got a letter from some provincial government of another country telling me to shut down my website.
If the day ever comes when local governments have some sort of reciprocity agreement to regulate the internet in any way they see fit, watch out for the morality codes that some southern U.S. towns will try to force on the internet as a whole. Not to mention the regulations from middle eastern countries against any non-Islamic religion. For these reason, localities will never be allowed to regulate the internet in any meaningful way.
What do you expect from a state that bans dildos?
It seems like there are a number of lawyers who have not yet figured out that the first amendment does in fact apply on the internet, as we can see by these examples. Although this is becoming a little less common, many business owners/managers have tried to have critical websites shut down for little reason other than they don't like what is being said.
As we've seen with copy protected CDs, fair use rights don't always mean freedom for the customer. Apparently, the recording industry is permitted to make CDs that are "copyproof" despite fair use clauses in copyright law. The rationale is that the customer cannot be prosecuted for making personal copies but the producer does not have to do anything to enable that, and can apparently stop it too. In this case, I didn't see anything in the article that said the NFL or other content producers had to go along with this, it only said the FCC gave TiVO the OK on the technology. I expect to see lots of obstruction efforts on the part of media companies and would be surprised if this gets resolved anytime soon. In the mean time, legitimate customers will be inconvenienced and pirates will continue as usual.
Just wait until they reduce the length of the yellow light in order to "enhance revenue". All the safety gains will be out the window. Just google for red light cameras in California if you want to see what I'm talking about. It always happens that way.
It makes a lot of business sense to migrate away from SCO. Who wants to be stuck with an unsupported operating system when SCO goes belly up?
I don't think it will be so bad if they get rid of McNealy. He is the biggest obstacle to Sun having any sort of future other than bankruptcy. If Sun acquires a marketable product, like SuSE Linux, this could only help them.
But willfull infringement of patents or copyrights is grounds for triple damages to be awarded in court. Some companies, knowing that they're bound to be guilty of something, try to remain ignorant so that at least there's no evidence of willfull infringement. I'm not sure how successful this tactic is, but it is common practice in some industries.
Like spammers, telemarketers, and junk faxers, they seem unable to grasp the concept that they are using other peoples' resources for free to send their ads. That is why people don't like them and want to shut them down. It's a fairly simple concept for most of us, but they honestly think they are doing nothing wrong.
Windows puts power in the hands of management:
Considering the technical knowledge of management in most companies, these are exactly the hands that you do not want to have power. Come back and troll again when a Windows machine can stay up and running for more than 2 weeks without a crash or major slowdown.