Without tying the ticket to a person, "good luck with that."
The system above ties some tickets to people directly and it ties the remaining tickets (except group tickets and other special situations) to tickets that are tied to a name.
If you really want to slow down wholesale scalpers, tie at least 1 ticket in each purchase to a real person and don't allow any one person to buy more than 10 tickets per purchase without registering as a "group purchase."
The other tickets can have names assigned to them or not at the time of purchase as the buyer sees fit. The original purchaser can assign names to the unnamed tickets any time up to the event or they can be left un-assigned as "bearer tickets."
However:
* "Unnamed/bearer" tickets are not valid until at least one "named" ticket has entered the event. * Once a name is assigned to a ticket, the name can be only be changed with a time-consuming phone call, paper-mail, or in-person visit that would include some form of identity verification. The venue can (and probably will) limit the number of such changes to a few dozen per year per person to curb abuse.
In exchange for making it somewhat harder for "Average Joe" ticket-buyers to re-sell their tickets, venues and authorized ticketing agents like Ticketmaster would promise to buy back tickets for a full refund for the ticket price and the convenience charge up to, say, a week before the event and refund the full price of the ticket up to a day before the event, subject to limits to prevent abuse.
Tickets sold to registered groups would come under different rules.
This system is NOT designed to stop or even put much of a road-block in the way of small-time scalpers or people who resell their season tickets. It's designed to increase the cost of doing business for organizations who buy and resell hundreds or thousands of tickets per year and who are determined to "beat the system" by * Forcing them to have lots of different "buyers" with lots of different credit card numbers so their high activity won't be flagged * Forcing them to assign a name to at least one out of every 10 tickets * Forcing them to make sure at least 1 of every 10 tickets is represented by a warm body who shows up at the event before the other 9 people in that "ticket group" do
This will make large-scale scalping non-cost-effective for events where the secondary-price of the ticket isn't a whole lot more than the face value of the ticket. Since the non-mass-ticket-buying public can get a full refund, they won't have an incentive to sell tickets to scalpers at anything less than face value.
Wholesale ticket-buying by scalpers will still be an issue for high-demand events. For those events, either a ticket lottery with every ticket having a name on it and a full refund may be the only way to ensure the general public can get tickets at reasonable prices. Alternatively, a dutch auction wouldn't save ticket-buyers any money but at least the ticket revenue would go back to the venue and those running the event rather than to scalpers.
and part of that agreement is their requirements for you to attend.
That was the person's point: If it's NOT part of the agreement or otherwise stated clearly up-front, then he will request a refund and sue if necessary.
Unless the performer doesn't have good lawyers or the venue is in a location with anti-consumer laws, you can bet that he (or she) will be on the hook for the face value of the ticket (or less if the ticket was sold at a discount). As for other costs like parking, etc., that's going to depend on how consumer-friendly the applicable laws are.
As a practical matter, most business people (and big-time entertainment IS a business) know that it's far cheaper in PR terms to say "you [the customer] are right, what can we do to make you whole and cover your inconvenience" for a legitimate complaint than it is to dig in their heels. On the other hand, if it looks like people are abusing the system or demanding more than is reasonable and fair (e.g. an obviously-greedy customer demanding a refund, a refund for parking and transportation, and "payment for his time" at $100/hour for driving to a $40 concert he decided not to attend because he wanted to have his cell phone accessible at all times), then offering reasonable-and-fair compensation but digging in your heels for everything over that might be the financially prudent thing to do,
Skim some old books of decades past, so you at least get a feel for the history of computer programming and know what was taught to undergraduates in different eras.
For the late-70s era, I recommend Roger Kaufman's A FORTRAN Coloring Book.
I also recommend skimming both the original (1978) and second (1988) editions of Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language.
While I don't have specific recommendations, it would be worth a trip to a university library to find early instructional books using the BASIC, COBOL, and JAVA languages if you don't know those already. Then pick up something on a late-1990s/early-2000s version of Microsoft's Visual Basic. Again, these are just for skimming and picking up a bit of history, not for learning the languages (unless you actually want to, of course - in which case also get a modern book on the language you want to learn).
If you've never used an assembly language, I recommend learning at least enough to do a "hello world" and call and return from a subroutine on whatever real or simulated processor you have handy. I know that's not a book recommendation but it may lead you to find a book on the topic worth reading or skimming. Today almost nobody uses assembly language except in very specialized environments, but it's still good to understand what is going on at the chip-architecture level (what we used to call the "bare metal" before sophisticated microcode and the like made that statement not-exactly-true).
On a non-technical level, find yourself a good, up-to-date book on computer security practices from a human-being point of view and a good book on businesses how they work (yes, that's a very broad topic, feel free to pick a sub-topic). For the business book, I'd go for an older book that has withstood the test of time. The Peter Principle qualifies but it's not the only good book out there.
It's somewhat dated in that it doesn't exactly apply to some modern programming models, but Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month is worth reading cover-to-cover.
In the spirit of complete honesty, I've only read some of the books mentioned above cover-to-cover.
I quit cold turkey every year: In late November, I have cold turkey for several days in a row, but the Thanksgiving leftovers eventually run out so I quit. Yes, there are cravings, but they usually disappear after a day or two.
Okay, I haven't read the books, but the only way you can say "there is no such thing as addiction" is to give some other name to
"engaging in a behavior in a compulsive way, for reasons that cannot be explained otherwise (such as because the individual has OCD, or the individual has been taught/conditioned to engage in the behavior, or some other reason)"
In some cases, addicts take a drug only because of a physical dependence and the desire to avoid withdrawal symptoms.
In other cases, they may take them under doctor's orders and they may not realize they are addicts until the doctor tells them to stop.
However, In most cases where physical dependency or medical advice isn't the reason to take the drug, addicts take drugs to feel better or to "escape" from dealing with the "bad things" of life. I assume this is what you meant when you said "People take drugs because their EMOTIONS make them feel bad, period." The same goes for most gambling addicts, sex addicts, and the like. This compulsion, driven by emotions, is a definition (but not the only definition) of a behavior addiction. So, unless we are going to come up with a new term for this, we have to admit that addictions - in the sense I just described - do exist.
You can change the name if you want to, but it won't change the fact that there are people out there who compulsively engage in some behavior - be it gambling, drug use, or what not - because their emotions make them feel bad and the behavior makes them feel less bad and/or the behavior itself makes them feel good.
With respect to opiate addicts who are also psychologically addicted to the drug, maintenance drugs like the one described here "buy time" for the addict to develop coping mechanisms and alternative ways to deal with the unpleasant aspects of life, so that when he finally does wean himself off of the maintenance drugs and go through withdrawal, he will be much less likely to relapse during withdrawal or later, after his detox is complete.
I'm afraid that I may become addicted to books/movies of that genre.
Note - this may sound like a joke, but I know myself too well, I've become morbidly fascinated with unhealthy ideas from the written word before. For me at least, watching this film or reading the book is very likely unwise - I'm likely to enjoy it for all the wrong reasons. I've read synopses and reviews and that's enough to get the important social message, I don't need to read the book or see the film in all of its gory detail.
Is there really such a thing as a stable drug addict?
Yes, especially if "stability" means either "stable in recovery, very unlikely to relapse" (which may be "for life" for some addicts) or "recovered completely" (which is a realistic objective for some but not all addicts).
I'm probably not the only/. poster who is "stable and recovered" from caffeine addiction: There was a time when my use was quite literally out of control. I really was an addict. I went through a period of not using it at all. Now I can - and do - drink caffeine-containing beverages responsibly and in moderation, but mainly because there is no decaffeinated version of my preferred beverage available. If I were always given the choice between that beverage and a decaf version of the same, I would almost always go with the decaf. Every now and then, I deliberately use caffeine to let me stay awake. However, if I know ahead of time that I need to be wide awake at my normal bedtime, I prefer to adjust my sleep schedule rather than relying on caffeine to keep me awake.
Regarding being stable-and-recovered from narcotic addiction:
A few decades ago, someone I knew was in a car wreck. He was in the hospital for many weeks. During that time, he developed a physical dependence on a particular narcotic painkiller. I don't think he became psychologically addicted though. In any case, he had to detox and from what his spouse said, he went through physical withdrawal. If my decades-old memory is correct, the detox and withdrawal were all done while he was in the hospital.
Whenever something "mainstream" reports about random number generation, they get it wrong.
Not always. Okay, technically, yes, but practically, no:
When I see TV shows that explain the "ping-pong-ball"-type lotteries, where a fan blows a bunch of numbered ping-pong balls around until one "pops out," they do a decent job of stating the obvious: This is about as random as you can get, assuming the ping-pong balls are all equal enough and the air is moving around enough to make any initial conditions (which balls were where before the air started moving) that could be controlled by a human being trying to cheat the system irrelevant.
Of course, we all know that there are minuscule differences in each ping-pong ball and we all know that, except where quantum effects become noticeable, initial conditions DO matter. But the point is that, like the "butterfly effect," a change in initial conditions that is too small for a human cheater to control can radically alter the outcome.
The same goes for TV-explanations of "it's obviously random in every practical sense of the word" things like a fair coin flip, a fair draw of a card from a deck of cards that has been shuffled in a good-but-uncontrolled way many times (i.e. not a "pharaoh shuffle" or other "controlled" shuffle), and the like.
Is the objective "computer literacy on steroids" where people can cobble together toy programs and they can cobble together really useful programs from a small handful of "large blocks" in the same way you can "build" a PC from a motherboard (pick one of many), a power supply (pick one of many - but make sure it's beefy enough), a case (pick one of many - but make sure it's right for your motherboard and other parts), a keyboard (pick one of many), a mouse or trackball (pick one of many), etc.?
If that's the objective, then "watered down" is the way to go.
Is the objective to use programming as a way to teach people to think logically? Well, you'll get some of that with the watered-down approach, but it's not a substitute of 2 years of real computer-science/programming classes that force you to learn logic and teach you to make "deep" choices between various libraries that superficially do the same thing but under the hood have different efficiency- and other trade-offs. On the other hand, you don't *need* to take a computer-science approach to teach logical thinking. We've been teaching kids to think logically (with varying success) since way before the invention of the modern computer.
Is the goal to make professional programmers out of the kids? Sorry, there's no substitute for doing it the hard way.
"Anything else" primarily means African-American and Hispanic.
I don't have enough information about people with Asian, Indian-sub-continent, Middle East, Native American, or other backgrounds and whose parents grew up in the United States to know if there is a negative, or for that matter, positive correlation.
If you look only at 2nd-generation-or-more Americans (those whose parents were born and raised in America), parental education probably accounts for most of the difference for Whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics.
High-tech is typically skewed towards the highly-trained, which is correlated with parents who value education.
Among those whose parents aren't immigrants, having parents who value education is correlated to having educated parents. Having educated parents is also correlated to growing up in a middle-class-or-higher household.
Thanks to American's sad history of racial discrimination, having educated parents is also highly correlated to being non-Hispanic white and negatively correlated with being anything else, at least with respect to people whose parents were raised in the United States.
I don't know Canadian law, but in some Western countries, embezzlement of this sort would be considered a crime. So, even if there is no recourse for contributors, if the guy goes to jail it may deter other Canadians from pulling a stunt like this.
As for investors, no, there probably isn't any legal recourse. However, the others running the project probably have grounds to sue him for the actual funds plus a separate action for taking actions that he knew, or should have known, would hurt the reputation of the others who were running the project. Unless the value of the house is high enough to recover the lost money though, "good luck" collecting any damages.
Give me a "headless" fits-in-my-pocket computer, then let me connect it to a very-low-end phone, laptop, smart-tv, or what-not using a probably(?)-not-yet-developed industry-standard high-bandwidth connection.
This "pocket PC" would handle data storage and whatever data-processing/operating-system-ish tasks that weren't running "in the cloud" ("cloud apps" would run "in the cloud," and "cloud data" would be stored "in the cloud").
The phone, laptop, smart-tv, or what-not would handle the physical aspects of the user interface and connectivity to the outside world. This would include most graphics processing. Almost no data except device-specific configuration data and possibly data needed to connect and re-connect to "Pocket PCs" would be kept on the phone, laptop, smart-TVs, etc. They would be basically a combination of "terminals" to the PCs and whatever their "stand-alone" function was (a phone without a computer could still make and receive phone calls, a smart-tv without a computer could still do what today's smart-tvs do, etc.).
In a typical scenario, I could * pop the "pocket PC" into a slot on my phone, laptop, smart-TV, or what-not and get a very high-speed connection * connect the "pocket PC" to the device using a cable, and enjoy at least HDMI-cable bandwidth * connect the "pocket PC" to the device using wireless technology, with bandwidth being limited by distance and RF noise (in other words, if the device is in my pocket and the "phone handset" is in my hands, I shouldn't expect full-4K 120Hz video).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, nevermind.
Anyone got some chalk and slate?
Captcha: laughs
Without tying the ticket to a person, "good luck with that."
The system above ties some tickets to people directly and it ties the remaining tickets (except group tickets and other special situations) to tickets that are tied to a name.
... "Twitter Pays $150 Million For My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Technology?"
If you really want to slow down wholesale scalpers, tie at least 1 ticket in each purchase to a real person and don't allow any one person to buy more than 10 tickets per purchase without registering as a "group purchase."
The other tickets can have names assigned to them or not at the time of purchase as the buyer sees fit. The original purchaser can assign names to the unnamed tickets any time up to the event or they can be left un-assigned as "bearer tickets."
However:
* "Unnamed/bearer" tickets are not valid until at least one "named" ticket has entered the event.
* Once a name is assigned to a ticket, the name can be only be changed with a time-consuming phone call, paper-mail, or in-person visit that would include some form of identity verification. The venue can (and probably will) limit the number of such changes to a few dozen per year per person to curb abuse.
In exchange for making it somewhat harder for "Average Joe" ticket-buyers to re-sell their tickets, venues and authorized ticketing agents like Ticketmaster would promise to buy back tickets for a full refund for the ticket price and the convenience charge up to, say, a week before the event and refund the full price of the ticket up to a day before the event, subject to limits to prevent abuse.
Tickets sold to registered groups would come under different rules.
This system is NOT designed to stop or even put much of a road-block in the way of small-time scalpers or people who resell their season tickets. It's designed to increase the cost of doing business for organizations who buy and resell hundreds or thousands of tickets per year and who are determined to "beat the system" by
* Forcing them to have lots of different "buyers" with lots of different credit card numbers so their high activity won't be flagged
* Forcing them to assign a name to at least one out of every 10 tickets
* Forcing them to make sure at least 1 of every 10 tickets is represented by a warm body who shows up at the event before the other 9 people in that "ticket group" do
This will make large-scale scalping non-cost-effective for events where the secondary-price of the ticket isn't a whole lot more than the face value of the ticket. Since the non-mass-ticket-buying public can get a full refund, they won't have an incentive to sell tickets to scalpers at anything less than face value.
Wholesale ticket-buying by scalpers will still be an issue for high-demand events. For those events, either a ticket lottery with every ticket having a name on it and a full refund may be the only way to ensure the general public can get tickets at reasonable prices. Alternatively, a dutch auction wouldn't save ticket-buyers any money but at least the ticket revenue would go back to the venue and those running the event rather than to scalpers.
Sure, it will cost the scalpers a little more but it's not illegal. Yet.
and part of that agreement is their requirements for you to attend.
That was the person's point: If it's NOT part of the agreement or otherwise stated clearly up-front, then he will request a refund and sue if necessary.
Unless the performer doesn't have good lawyers or the venue is in a location with anti-consumer laws, you can bet that he (or she) will be on the hook for the face value of the ticket (or less if the ticket was sold at a discount). As for other costs like parking, etc., that's going to depend on how consumer-friendly the applicable laws are.
As a practical matter, most business people (and big-time entertainment IS a business) know that it's far cheaper in PR terms to say "you [the customer] are right, what can we do to make you whole and cover your inconvenience" for a legitimate complaint than it is to dig in their heels. On the other hand, if it looks like people are abusing the system or demanding more than is reasonable and fair (e.g. an obviously-greedy customer demanding a refund, a refund for parking and transportation, and "payment for his time" at $100/hour for driving to a $40 concert he decided not to attend because he wanted to have his cell phone accessible at all times), then offering reasonable-and-fair compensation but digging in your heels for everything over that might be the financially prudent thing to do,
*holds non-cellular iPad in his hand*
"That's a pocket-sized computer with a camera, mic, and speaker that happens to have a WiFi connection to the cell phone in my car!"
For local-copy music, I don't have a favorite but my top 3 are digital downloads, MP3s ripped from other media, or CDs.
If you leave your paper records lying around in view of your internet-connected-and-still-using-the-default-password security cameras ....
... after you factor in inflation.
Well, most of the time anyways - yes, I know the USA has had a recent period of near-zero inflation, but that's not the norm.
I started BIGNUM years ago and I hope I'll still be learning until the day I die.
Skim some old books of decades past, so you at least get a feel for the history of computer programming and know what was taught to undergraduates in different eras.
For the late-70s era, I recommend Roger Kaufman's A FORTRAN Coloring Book.
I also recommend skimming both the original (1978) and second (1988) editions of Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language.
While I don't have specific recommendations, it would be worth a trip to a university library to find early instructional books using the BASIC, COBOL, and JAVA languages if you don't know those already. Then pick up something on a late-1990s/early-2000s version of Microsoft's Visual Basic. Again, these are just for skimming and picking up a bit of history, not for learning the languages (unless you actually want to, of course - in which case also get a modern book on the language you want to learn).
If you've never used an assembly language, I recommend learning at least enough to do a "hello world" and call and return from a subroutine on whatever real or simulated processor you have handy. I know that's not a book recommendation but it may lead you to find a book on the topic worth reading or skimming. Today almost nobody uses assembly language except in very specialized environments, but it's still good to understand what is going on at the chip-architecture level (what we used to call the "bare metal" before sophisticated microcode and the like made that statement not-exactly-true).
On a non-technical level, find yourself a good, up-to-date book on computer security practices from a human-being point of view and a good book on businesses how they work (yes, that's a very broad topic, feel free to pick a sub-topic). For the business book, I'd go for an older book that has withstood the test of time. The Peter Principle qualifies but it's not the only good book out there.
It's somewhat dated in that it doesn't exactly apply to some modern programming models, but Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month is worth reading cover-to-cover.
In the spirit of complete honesty, I've only read some of the books mentioned above cover-to-cover.
I quit cold turkey every year: In late November, I have cold turkey for several days in a row, but the Thanksgiving leftovers eventually run out so I quit. Yes, there are cravings, but they usually disappear after a day or two.
Okay, I haven't read the books, but the only way you can say "there is no such thing as addiction" is to give some other name to
"engaging in a behavior in a compulsive way, for reasons that cannot be explained otherwise (such as because the individual has OCD, or the individual has been taught/conditioned to engage in the behavior, or some other reason)"
In some cases, addicts take a drug only because of a physical dependence and the desire to avoid withdrawal symptoms.
In other cases, they may take them under doctor's orders and they may not realize they are addicts until the doctor tells them to stop.
However, In most cases where physical dependency or medical advice isn't the reason to take the drug, addicts take drugs to feel better or to "escape" from dealing with the "bad things" of life. I assume this is what you meant when you said "People take drugs because their EMOTIONS make them feel bad, period." The same goes for most gambling addicts, sex addicts, and the like. This compulsion, driven by emotions, is a definition (but not the only definition) of a behavior addiction. So, unless we are going to come up with a new term for this, we have to admit that addictions - in the sense I just described - do exist.
You can change the name if you want to, but it won't change the fact that there are people out there who compulsively engage in some behavior - be it gambling, drug use, or what not - because their emotions make them feel bad and the behavior makes them feel less bad and/or the behavior itself makes them feel good.
With respect to opiate addicts who are also psychologically addicted to the drug, maintenance drugs like the one described here "buy time" for the addict to develop coping mechanisms and alternative ways to deal with the unpleasant aspects of life, so that when he finally does wean himself off of the maintenance drugs and go through withdrawal, he will be much less likely to relapse during withdrawal or later, after his detox is complete.
I've already posted in this thread or I would do it myself.
I'm afraid that I may become addicted to books/movies of that genre.
Note - this may sound like a joke, but I know myself too well, I've become morbidly fascinated with unhealthy ideas from the written word before. For me at least, watching this film or reading the book is very likely unwise - I'm likely to enjoy it for all the wrong reasons. I've read synopses and reviews and that's enough to get the important social message, I don't need to read the book or see the film in all of its gory detail.
Is there really such a thing as a stable drug addict?
Yes, especially if "stability" means either "stable in recovery, very unlikely to relapse" (which may be "for life" for some addicts) or "recovered completely" (which is a realistic objective for some but not all addicts).
I'm probably not the only /. poster who is "stable and recovered" from caffeine addiction: There was a time when my use was quite literally out of control. I really was an addict. I went through a period of not using it at all. Now I can - and do - drink caffeine-containing beverages responsibly and in moderation, but mainly because there is no decaffeinated version of my preferred beverage available. If I were always given the choice between that beverage and a decaf version of the same, I would almost always go with the decaf. Every now and then, I deliberately use caffeine to let me stay awake. However, if I know ahead of time that I need to be wide awake at my normal bedtime, I prefer to adjust my sleep schedule rather than relying on caffeine to keep me awake.
Regarding being stable-and-recovered from narcotic addiction:
A few decades ago, someone I knew was in a car wreck. He was in the hospital for many weeks. During that time, he developed a physical dependence on a particular narcotic painkiller. I don't think he became psychologically addicted though. In any case, he had to detox and from what his spouse said, he went through physical withdrawal. If my decades-old memory is correct, the detox and withdrawal were all done while he was in the hospital.
Whenever something "mainstream" reports about random number generation, they get it wrong.
Not always. Okay, technically, yes, but practically, no:
When I see TV shows that explain the "ping-pong-ball"-type lotteries, where a fan blows a bunch of numbered ping-pong balls around until one "pops out," they do a decent job of stating the obvious: This is about as random as you can get, assuming the ping-pong balls are all equal enough and the air is moving around enough to make any initial conditions (which balls were where before the air started moving) that could be controlled by a human being trying to cheat the system irrelevant.
Of course, we all know that there are minuscule differences in each ping-pong ball and we all know that, except where quantum effects become noticeable, initial conditions DO matter. But the point is that, like the "butterfly effect," a change in initial conditions that is too small for a human cheater to control can radically alter the outcome.
The same goes for TV-explanations of "it's obviously random in every practical sense of the word" things like a fair coin flip, a fair draw of a card from a deck of cards that has been shuffled in a good-but-uncontrolled way many times (i.e. not a "pharaoh shuffle" or other "controlled" shuffle), and the like.
Is the objective "computer literacy on steroids" where people can cobble together toy programs and they can cobble together really useful programs from a small handful of "large blocks" in the same way you can "build" a PC from a motherboard (pick one of many), a power supply (pick one of many - but make sure it's beefy enough), a case (pick one of many - but make sure it's right for your motherboard and other parts), a keyboard (pick one of many), a mouse or trackball (pick one of many), etc.?
If that's the objective, then "watered down" is the way to go.
Is the objective to use programming as a way to teach people to think logically? Well, you'll get some of that with the watered-down approach, but it's not a substitute of 2 years of real computer-science/programming classes that force you to learn logic and teach you to make "deep" choices between various libraries that superficially do the same thing but under the hood have different efficiency- and other trade-offs. On the other hand, you don't *need* to take a computer-science approach to teach logical thinking. We've been teaching kids to think logically (with varying success) since way before the invention of the modern computer.
Is the goal to make professional programmers out of the kids? Sorry, there's no substitute for doing it the hard way.
It's been around for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Anything else" primarily means African-American and Hispanic.
I don't have enough information about people with Asian, Indian-sub-continent, Middle East, Native American, or other backgrounds and whose parents grew up in the United States to know if there is a negative, or for that matter, positive correlation.
If you look only at 2nd-generation-or-more Americans (those whose parents were born and raised in America), parental education probably accounts for most of the difference for Whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics.
High-tech is typically skewed towards the highly-trained, which is correlated with parents who value education.
Among those whose parents aren't immigrants, having parents who value education is correlated to having educated parents. Having educated parents is also correlated to growing up in a middle-class-or-higher household.
Thanks to American's sad history of racial discrimination, having educated parents is also highly correlated to being non-Hispanic white and negatively correlated with being anything else, at least with respect to people whose parents were raised in the United States.
Just a wild guess.
I don't know Canadian law, but in some Western countries, embezzlement of this sort would be considered a crime. So, even if there is no recourse for contributors, if the guy goes to jail it may deter other Canadians from pulling a stunt like this.
As for investors, no, there probably isn't any legal recourse. However, the others running the project probably have grounds to sue him for the actual funds plus a separate action for taking actions that he knew, or should have known, would hurt the reputation of the others who were running the project. Unless the value of the house is high enough to recover the lost money though, "good luck" collecting any damages.
Give me a "headless" fits-in-my-pocket computer, then let me connect it to a very-low-end phone, laptop, smart-tv, or what-not using a probably(?)-not-yet-developed industry-standard high-bandwidth connection.
This "pocket PC" would handle data storage and whatever data-processing/operating-system-ish tasks that weren't running "in the cloud" ("cloud apps" would run "in the cloud," and "cloud data" would be stored "in the cloud").
The phone, laptop, smart-tv, or what-not would handle the physical aspects of the user interface and connectivity to the outside world. This would include most graphics processing. Almost no data except device-specific configuration data and possibly data needed to connect and re-connect to "Pocket PCs" would be kept on the phone, laptop, smart-TVs, etc. They would be basically a combination of "terminals" to the PCs and whatever their "stand-alone" function was (a phone without a computer could still make and receive phone calls, a smart-tv without a computer could still do what today's smart-tvs do, etc.).
In a typical scenario, I could
* pop the "pocket PC" into a slot on my phone, laptop, smart-TV, or what-not and get a very high-speed connection
* connect the "pocket PC" to the device using a cable, and enjoy at least HDMI-cable bandwidth
* connect the "pocket PC" to the device using wireless technology, with bandwidth being limited by distance and RF noise (in other words, if the device is in my pocket and the "phone handset" is in my hands, I shouldn't expect full-4K 120Hz video).