Please, they'll bypass the 4th amendment any time they want to get access to the data.
As a criminal defendant, your best hope is that the government did in fact violate the Fourth Amendment while procuring evidence against you. All evidence, acquired directly or indirectly as the result of an illegal search, must be excluded as the fruit of the poisonous tree. Wong Sun v. U.S.
1) Craigslist does not have a duty to avoid competition with ebay in the marketplace, even though ebay is a minority shareholder.
2) Craigslist's duty is to manage their company in such a way that does not unduly favor the majority shareholders over minority shareholders (such as ebay). The lawsuit alleges that Craigslist breached this duty.
3) Hostile takeovers work by either a) offering a bunch of money and getting shareholders to accept the offer regardless of the opinion of the board of directors; or b) buying up some shares and trying to establish a voting bloc which will replace existing management. Since Craigslist is (presumably) a closely held private company which is managed by its majority shareholders, neither of these strategies is likely to work.
ebay actually owns a minority interest in Craigslist. Minority shareholders are protected by the corporate laws of most states from abusive practices by the majority shareholders. In this case, ebay claims that the majority shareholders diluted the value of their shares in an unspecified way. Most likely, Craigslist issued additional shares of stock (thus reducing ebay's proportional ownership), or took property from the company in a way that reduced the value of ebay's investment.
Minority shareholders are a major hassle, and it was a pretty sloppy bit of work that ebay was able to acquire the shares of Craigslist in the first place.
Re:For those of you that are going to ask
on
eBay Sues Craigslist
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah Craigslist's attorney really F'ed that up - you can include a clause in the bylaws or a shareholder agreement which provides that the company has the right of first refusal to redeem any outstanding shares. That is pretty basic stuff, I am surprised they didn't think of it.
they are aiming to restore a Unix-like environment to its former propriety glory
The most glorious thing that I can remember about proprietary unix was the awesome pizza box cases. I seriously have no idea why the PC "tower" caught on instead of that.
Patents are for a fixed 20-year term, and must be laid out in specificity for the good of the general public upon expiration. Patents are subject to a lengthy examination process to prove that they are novel and non-trivial extensions of the current knowledge.
By contrast, copyright is for the life of the author plus (currently) 70 years. Thanks to our Congress, everything created since 1923 could potentially still be protected. After 80 years of Mickey Mouse, he is STILL not in the public domain. Walt Disney croaked in 1966, and his copyright will last until at least 2024. See this article for more details.
Trademarks are designed to protect your interest in your "brand", and to prevent customer confusion. They are inherently a good thing.
I would posit that 1) trademarks are good for companies and the consumer; 2) patents are mostly a good system (with the possible exclusion of business method patents), and 3) that copyright is much more heinous.
Now that you've won spectacularly, is it possible to pursue those damages?
That is an interesting civil procedure question but the answer is probably not.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, there is no formation of attorney client privilege, this does not serve as an offer to represent you, your family, or anyone you have ever met, consult the advice of a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before taking any action, the forgoing is for informational and educational purposes only, and any and all warranties inherent in this post whether express or implied are hereby disclaimed.
It is easy to write scripts that do anti-forensic stuff on logon/logoff or startup/shutdown. Even pulling the plug is often not enough to freeze a system from doing stuff so that you can gather evidence.
Patents are supposed to benefit the common good. That's their only purpose.
Actually the original purpose was to reward and protect technological innovators. This was subsequently expanded to innovators of "business methods" with the State Street case, a Federal Circuit decision with incredible ramifications.
Now that they recognize one case (in many) where patents are crippling productivity, harming the economy, and working against the common good, they do nothing to address the problem of people abusing the patent system.
Patents serve as a limited form of government-granted monopoly. It is sort of like a social contract - if you fully and completely disclose your invention to the public through the patent application process, the government will reward you with a temporary exclusive grant to benefit economically from the invention.
The patent system itself is legitimate, and has been in effect in various incarnations since medieval Italian city-states. The main controversies are 1) the recent acceptability of business method patents; and 2) the Federal Circuit standard of review on patent cases is de novo, which means that they reconsider the patent from scratch instead of relying on the USPTO's findings of fact. As a result, the Federal Circuit does not fully benefit from the federal agency's domain expertise. All other federal courts (to the best of my knowledge) have to give deference to the findings of federal agencies under the Chevron test.
**Note: Any patent law attorneys out there are invited to take issue with this, as my understanding is not very nuanced.
Instead, they take more money from the people, harming the common good further, in order to bail out banks.
This is a separate issue entirely, and I agree that it is an absolutely horrible idea. The very thought of the US taxpayer bailing out enormous corporate banks makes the bile rise in my throat.
Hey thanks for the tip - I've been evaluating various antivirus things and that ZoneAlarm seems really nice. It actually found a virus on my system that two other "big name" programs missed.
That is awesome! You sound alot like myself at that age, although I dropped out of college during the dot com days to try and make it big time. I ended up writing some pretty valuable software, and my employer got quite the windfall from it. My bits of advice for you are this:
1) If you are actively involved in a small business and are a key component of it, you should renegotiate your pay to include some type of commission or pay-for-performance element. If you get paid a straight salary or lump sum amount, no matter how successful the business is you will not be the beneficiary. What you need is some sort of way to measure your financial contribution to the company, and then ask for a small slice of it. For example, you want 5% of sales pertaining to all software you wrote and an additional 15% if you make the sale yourself. If the money at stake is more than a couple thousand bucks, get an attorney to help you draft the agreement.
Note that your ability to negotiate for stuff like this is directly dependent on your role in the company. If you are the primary innovator or you are creating products for new markets, you will have alot of leverage to negotiate.
2) Make sure you stack your chips, because the gravy train is always temporary. Don't buy Xbox, car, restaurant food, etc... even if you think you don't need the money for anything, there will come a time (probably in less than 5 years) when you will wish you had saved every penny you made. DO NOT TAKE ON DEBT OF ANY SORT FOR ANY REASON OR FOR ANY LENGTH OF TIME. NO CAR PAYMENT NO MORTGAGE NO CREDIT CARDS!
3) Even though you have been successful without it, at some point your career will hit a glass ceiling without a degree. Go to a 4 year university (preferably public), and commit to studying hard and making at least a B in every class. Make sure you take a bunch of CLEP tests (those are very cheap credits). Take 6 credits per semester while working full time, and pay cash for them (or see if the employer will pay it).
If your job falls apart, you will have a good start on your degree. You will have been saving your money, and will hopefully have a nice cushion. Take out as much student loans as you need to be effective in school and get the degree finished up by going full-time. The degree will absolutely pay for itself dozens of time over, so don't agonize too much over the loans (go to a public school in your state, and make sure you are getting at least a B in every class).
4) Major in some sort of engineering, computer science, or accounting. All those liberal arts and science degrees are interesting and fun, but all that crap is a waste of money. Pick a bachelor's degree that will get you paid right out of college. You can get a good job, or you can go on and get any graduate degree you want.
I guarantee you will be able to transition into any graduate science program from engineering, and you will be able to do any business or legal thing you want from accounting. If you want to be an artist or musician, you can earn a decent income and spend your extra money on oil paints and violin strings.
5) Most importantly, just remember that your success is a curse. You have an ideal setup, but it will be difficult or impossible to make a comparable standard of living at any other job. You are basically trapped at your current job and cannot escape it without a degree. A degree is your lifeline, and the ONLY thing you can do that will ensure your continued middle class prosperity. College bureaucrats are a major pain, classes are expensive, those books are $125 each, so you have to cling to your education like a liferaft in the middle of the ocean. It isn't a question of IF your job will end, it is only a question of WHEN... make sure you don't get stranded!
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are being grossly mischaracterized here. The main purpose of the changes is to make it so companies can't intentionally obfuscate their data storage in order either 1) increase the timeline for digital discovery; or 2) increase the costs (especially to the non-business plaintiff) for digital discovery.
The FRCP are not a set of regulations to govern businesses, it just means that parties with digital information will bear the burden to produce it in the event of a lawsuit. Depending on the frequency with which your company is sued, it may or may not be a good idea to make it faster to access your backups.
You aren't under an obligation to save all electronic corresponce unless you are in a heavily regulated industry with special rules requiring that. However, anyone who deletes or destroys documents once a court order has been issued is in pretty big trouble if they get caught. This has been true long before the advent of email.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, there is no formation of attorney client privilege, this does not serve as an offer to represent you, your family, or anyone you have ever met, consult the advice of a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before taking any action, the forgoing is for informational and educational purposes only, and any and all warranties inherent in this post whether express or implied are hereby disclaimed.
I would advise reading up on EVE character creation before you get too far into it. I played for two months before I realized that my stats were crap and that I would never be any good with my current set-up (an Amarr with high charisma). The game is sneaky because it takes a long time to learn what the heck is going on. I was like 4 days from getting my first battleship before I realized what was up.
Rather than paying $30 bucks to wait around while a new character learned stuff, I just cancelled it and went back to Diablo 2.
I figure at the rate things are going, there will one day be a game consisting solely of giant-sized genitalia doing battle with machine guns and bodily fluids while healing themselves with crack cocaine. The villain will be an undead mutant urethra, who rapes the players with his radioactive waste-spewing demon gonads and multifarious blood-dripping, sulfurous tube-like appendages, better known as 'Satan-tacles'
Thanks for the nostalgic flashback... that sounds like a GWAR video!:)
I bet Wii has to be more careful about the type of games it allows. If you had a ninja assassin game where you have to pantomime garroting a guard with the controller wire, it might cause parents to get upset!
Those ratios also probably reflect the amount of investment and work that the parties put in. The label has to produce, market, distribute the music, and handle all the business stuff. Apple has to make enough to offset the cost of their fancy itunes infrastructure. The artists just smoke some pot, sleep with some women, and take all the credit for their commercial success.
Just think - if an artist could be a commercial success simply by being good, they would do it. The skillsets for operating a successful music business are largely at variance with what it takes to be an entertainer. Off the top of my head, the only two artists I can think of who truly understand the music business are Jay-Z and MC Hammer. There have been other artists more successful than them in real terms (Beatles, Elvis, Madonna, etc), but I bet Jay-Z and Hammer took home a substantially larger percentage of the revenue they earned than most of their colleagues.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, they'll bypass the 4th amendment any time they want to get access to the data.
As a criminal defendant, your best hope is that the government did in fact violate the Fourth Amendment while procuring evidence against you. All evidence, acquired directly or indirectly as the result of an illegal search, must be excluded as the fruit of the poisonous tree. Wong Sun v. U.S.
The FBI's access to the materials will still be limited by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the constitution.
1) Craigslist does not have a duty to avoid competition with ebay in the marketplace, even though ebay is a minority shareholder.
2) Craigslist's duty is to manage their company in such a way that does not unduly favor the majority shareholders over minority shareholders (such as ebay). The lawsuit alleges that Craigslist breached this duty.
3) Hostile takeovers work by either a) offering a bunch of money and getting shareholders to accept the offer regardless of the opinion of the board of directors; or b) buying up some shares and trying to establish a voting bloc which will replace existing management. Since Craigslist is (presumably) a closely held private company which is managed by its majority shareholders, neither of these strategies is likely to work.
ebay actually owns a minority interest in Craigslist. Minority shareholders are protected by the corporate laws of most states from abusive practices by the majority shareholders. In this case, ebay claims that the majority shareholders diluted the value of their shares in an unspecified way. Most likely, Craigslist issued additional shares of stock (thus reducing ebay's proportional ownership), or took property from the company in a way that reduced the value of ebay's investment.
Minority shareholders are a major hassle, and it was a pretty sloppy bit of work that ebay was able to acquire the shares of Craigslist in the first place.
Yeah Craigslist's attorney really F'ed that up - you can include a clause in the bylaws or a shareholder agreement which provides that the company has the right of first refusal to redeem any outstanding shares. That is pretty basic stuff, I am surprised they didn't think of it.
email for things
I already get about 40 emails a day pertaining to my thing. How is this new?
three solid rocket motors as well as separation mechanisms and canards
He won't be alone they are sending along some ducks for company.
they are aiming to restore a Unix-like environment to its former propriety glory
The most glorious thing that I can remember about proprietary unix was the awesome pizza box cases. I seriously have no idea why the PC "tower" caught on instead of that.
Patents are far more evil than copyrights
Patents are for a fixed 20-year term, and must be laid out in specificity for the good of the general public upon expiration. Patents are subject to a lengthy examination process to prove that they are novel and non-trivial extensions of the current knowledge.
By contrast, copyright is for the life of the author plus (currently) 70 years. Thanks to our Congress, everything created since 1923 could potentially still be protected. After 80 years of Mickey Mouse, he is STILL not in the public domain. Walt Disney croaked in 1966, and his copyright will last until at least 2024. See this article for more details.
Trademarks are designed to protect your interest in your "brand", and to prevent customer confusion. They are inherently a good thing.
I would posit that 1) trademarks are good for companies and the consumer; 2) patents are mostly a good system (with the possible exclusion of business method patents), and 3) that copyright is much more heinous.
david geek vs goliath megacorp
It looks like they have already prepared a press release.
Now that you've won spectacularly, is it possible to pursue those damages?
That is an interesting civil procedure question but the answer is probably not.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, there is no formation of attorney client privilege, this does not serve as an offer to represent you, your family, or anyone you have ever met, consult the advice of a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before taking any action, the forgoing is for informational and educational purposes only, and any and all warranties inherent in this post whether express or implied are hereby disclaimed.
It is easy to write scripts that do anti-forensic stuff on logon/logoff or startup/shutdown. Even pulling the plug is often not enough to freeze a system from doing stuff so that you can gather evidence.
Patents are supposed to benefit the common good. That's their only purpose.
Actually the original purpose was to reward and protect technological innovators. This was subsequently expanded to innovators of "business methods" with the State Street case, a Federal Circuit decision with incredible ramifications.
Now that they recognize one case (in many) where patents are crippling productivity, harming the economy, and working against the common good, they do nothing to address the problem of people abusing the patent system.
Patents serve as a limited form of government-granted monopoly. It is sort of like a social contract - if you fully and completely disclose your invention to the public through the patent application process, the government will reward you with a temporary exclusive grant to benefit economically from the invention.
The patent system itself is legitimate, and has been in effect in various incarnations since medieval Italian city-states. The main controversies are 1) the recent acceptability of business method patents; and 2) the Federal Circuit standard of review on patent cases is de novo, which means that they reconsider the patent from scratch instead of relying on the USPTO's findings of fact. As a result, the Federal Circuit does not fully benefit from the federal agency's domain expertise. All other federal courts (to the best of my knowledge) have to give deference to the findings of federal agencies under the Chevron test.
**Note: Any patent law attorneys out there are invited to take issue with this, as my understanding is not very nuanced.
Instead, they take more money from the people, harming the common good further, in order to bail out banks.
This is a separate issue entirely, and I agree that it is an absolutely horrible idea. The very thought of the US taxpayer bailing out enormous corporate banks makes the bile rise in my throat.
Hey thanks for the tip - I've been evaluating various antivirus things and that ZoneAlarm seems really nice. It actually found a virus on my system that two other "big name" programs missed.
The only channel you need... right here!
Mourn the passing of his younger self, and feel free to despise his older self.
Fans of the Highlander series are especially adept at selective memory such as this.
The sales guy at the Apple store told me that there was a persistent rumor of a solid state laptop coming in the next few weeks...
Boot camp + solid state = me finally replacing the old powerbook!!
A tear, caused by a predator, shows that below the scales of the Psittacosaurus was a thick hide comprised of 25 layers of collagen.
It's like I always say, 25 layers of collagen just isn't enough if you can't outrun your predators.
That is awesome! You sound alot like myself at that age, although I dropped out of college during the dot com days to try and make it big time. I ended up writing some pretty valuable software, and my employer got quite the windfall from it. My bits of advice for you are this:
1) If you are actively involved in a small business and are a key component of it, you should renegotiate your pay to include some type of commission or pay-for-performance element. If you get paid a straight salary or lump sum amount, no matter how successful the business is you will not be the beneficiary. What you need is some sort of way to measure your financial contribution to the company, and then ask for a small slice of it. For example, you want 5% of sales pertaining to all software you wrote and an additional 15% if you make the sale yourself. If the money at stake is more than a couple thousand bucks, get an attorney to help you draft the agreement.
Note that your ability to negotiate for stuff like this is directly dependent on your role in the company. If you are the primary innovator or you are creating products for new markets, you will have alot of leverage to negotiate.
2) Make sure you stack your chips, because the gravy train is always temporary. Don't buy Xbox, car, restaurant food, etc... even if you think you don't need the money for anything, there will come a time (probably in less than 5 years) when you will wish you had saved every penny you made. DO NOT TAKE ON DEBT OF ANY SORT FOR ANY REASON OR FOR ANY LENGTH OF TIME. NO CAR PAYMENT NO MORTGAGE NO CREDIT CARDS!
3) Even though you have been successful without it, at some point your career will hit a glass ceiling without a degree. Go to a 4 year university (preferably public), and commit to studying hard and making at least a B in every class. Make sure you take a bunch of CLEP tests (those are very cheap credits). Take 6 credits per semester while working full time, and pay cash for them (or see if the employer will pay it).
If your job falls apart, you will have a good start on your degree. You will have been saving your money, and will hopefully have a nice cushion. Take out as much student loans as you need to be effective in school and get the degree finished up by going full-time. The degree will absolutely pay for itself dozens of time over, so don't agonize too much over the loans (go to a public school in your state, and make sure you are getting at least a B in every class).
4) Major in some sort of engineering, computer science, or accounting. All those liberal arts and science degrees are interesting and fun, but all that crap is a waste of money. Pick a bachelor's degree that will get you paid right out of college. You can get a good job, or you can go on and get any graduate degree you want.
I guarantee you will be able to transition into any graduate science program from engineering, and you will be able to do any business or legal thing you want from accounting. If you want to be an artist or musician, you can earn a decent income and spend your extra money on oil paints and violin strings.
5) Most importantly, just remember that your success is a curse. You have an ideal setup, but it will be difficult or impossible to make a comparable standard of living at any other job. You are basically trapped at your current job and cannot escape it without a degree. A degree is your lifeline, and the ONLY thing you can do that will ensure your continued middle class prosperity. College bureaucrats are a major pain, classes are expensive, those books are $125 each, so you have to cling to your education like a liferaft in the middle of the ocean. It isn't a question of IF your job will end, it is only a question of WHEN... make sure you don't get stranded!
The preferred nomenclature is "sino-porcine phosphorents".
Slashdot is so insensitive towards racial discrimination.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are being grossly mischaracterized here. The main purpose of the changes is to make it so companies can't intentionally obfuscate their data storage in order either 1) increase the timeline for digital discovery; or 2) increase the costs (especially to the non-business plaintiff) for digital discovery.
The FRCP are not a set of regulations to govern businesses, it just means that parties with digital information will bear the burden to produce it in the event of a lawsuit. Depending on the frequency with which your company is sued, it may or may not be a good idea to make it faster to access your backups.
You aren't under an obligation to save all electronic corresponce unless you are in a heavily regulated industry with special rules requiring that. However, anyone who deletes or destroys documents once a court order has been issued is in pretty big trouble if they get caught. This has been true long before the advent of email.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, there is no formation of attorney client privilege, this does not serve as an offer to represent you, your family, or anyone you have ever met, consult the advice of a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before taking any action, the forgoing is for informational and educational purposes only, and any and all warranties inherent in this post whether express or implied are hereby disclaimed.
I would advise reading up on EVE character creation before you get too far into it. I played for two months before I realized that my stats were crap and that I would never be any good with my current set-up (an Amarr with high charisma). The game is sneaky because it takes a long time to learn what the heck is going on. I was like 4 days from getting my first battleship before I realized what was up.
Rather than paying $30 bucks to wait around while a new character learned stuff, I just cancelled it and went back to Diablo 2.
I figure at the rate things are going, there will one day be a game consisting solely of giant-sized genitalia doing battle with machine guns and bodily fluids while healing themselves with crack cocaine. The villain will be an undead mutant urethra, who rapes the players with his radioactive waste-spewing demon gonads and multifarious blood-dripping, sulfurous tube-like appendages, better known as 'Satan-tacles'
Thanks for the nostalgic flashback... that sounds like a GWAR video!
I bet Wii has to be more careful about the type of games it allows. If you had a ninja assassin game where you have to pantomime garroting a guard with the controller wire, it might cause parents to get upset!
Those ratios also probably reflect the amount of investment and work that the parties put in. The label has to produce, market, distribute the music, and handle all the business stuff. Apple has to make enough to offset the cost of their fancy itunes infrastructure. The artists just smoke some pot, sleep with some women, and take all the credit for their commercial success.
Just think - if an artist could be a commercial success simply by being good, they would do it. The skillsets for operating a successful music business are largely at variance with what it takes to be an entertainer. Off the top of my head, the only two artists I can think of who truly understand the music business are Jay-Z and MC Hammer. There have been other artists more successful than them in real terms (Beatles, Elvis, Madonna, etc), but I bet Jay-Z and Hammer took home a substantially larger percentage of the revenue they earned than most of their colleagues.