It is about violating patents. Any damages that result of that possible violation should have a monetary value attributed to them, if you want the violator to be liable to pay you damages. You are suddenly looking at the legal definition of "free" in order to assess the damages.
The trick question here is that even if you open the source code up and allow anyone to download and use the compiled product, it could still not be "free". There could be a profit model around the right to put the name of the product on other products using the technology, or the right to redistribute the product, or the right to claim your hardware is compatible with it. These are just examples, there are more business models to make money from open source software that can be labeled "free" in specific cases.
This means that there is no binary answer to the question if Java is free, without a lot of context added to it. Ellison's answer is the only right one in his position, since the question was phrased in such a way that he'd be damned if he answered yes or no.
It's not that hard to get the shares turned over to a holding company owned by the CEO that is based in a tax-friendly country. Maybe they closed this one by now, but there are plenty of tricks to move your money^wassets around in such a way that you don't pay taxes anywhere. Moving the assets around costs you money, but if they are worth enough, it's cheaper than paying taxes. If you move ten times as much as the threshold, you hardly pay more in total, making it way cheaper. People like Ellison are moving way more than ten times the threshold...
It's about time Google is getting serious competition from competitive android distributions. I for one would like very much to be able to store my data on non-google servers (preferably my own) and use a competitors apps store that is trustworth and not laden with (google) ads. It works for Linux, it should work for Android. It's about time we separated the software from the hardware and the service providers. Anti competitive pacts like the US phone companies almost certainly seem to be having should be looked into. It's virtually impossible to get a decent phone separate from an affordable plan there, even tho there will be plenty of people wanting to just purchase a phone and get a cheap plan with it, that suits their needs. This is all a tinfoil hat size of a conspiracy that seems to be going on between the phone vendors and the operators, making free choice for buyers impossible.
Why don't you agree with it? First of all, he did nothing illegal. This is how binary software gets reversed. There is a copyright on the code, but not on the ideas inside of it (you can't patent an idea). There is no copyright on the hardware he's violating in any way. He merely copied it's function, not the actual code itself. Second of all, Qualcomm will not sell a single piece of hardware less than what they were already selling. If anything, they'll be selling more because there's a better driver for it now. Third of all, Qualcomm will now have an opportunity to save money because they only have to help support the freeware driver and they can bin their own.
The only spicy thing about this whole deal is that he is not just a guy that does this for a hobby, but he does the exact same thing for a Qualcomm competitor when he's on the clock. Maybe his employer will think he benefited a competitor in his free time, but firing him for it will mean that they are admitting that open source drivers are better and they will admit to their own failure by not providing their own. They are in a catch 22 on this. Fire him and admit they are doing business wrong, which the shareholders and investors won't like, or just leave him be and decide on their own if they want to put code for their GPU drivers in open source. I think he's safe, or will at least have a good career at some other company that is willing to hire him for his skills.
The backup, (all the data being mirrored on several servers), is also confiscated. Even if they were to have one on tape, the DOJ would have taken those as well. Who's stupid now?
What proof, beyond reasonable doubt, is there that he would not have jumped if those people wouldn't have egged him on? If just a few people wriitng mean things on an Internet forum would cause people to jump from buildings, the Internet would be the primary cause of death and facebook would have been sued bankrupt a long time ago. Unless there is irrefutable proof that these posts have a direct significant relation to the death of this person, there is no damage to be claimed.
People get depressed and take their own lives. in the majority of cases suicide happens, external circumstances may be triggers for already predetermined actions and behavior, but are not a cause. This is a part of life, it's a natural reaction to a chemical imbalance, caused by a variation of things. It could be stress, it could be hereditary, it could be a reaction to hormone imbalances (both mother and fetus) during pregnancy and childhood and it could be due to physical trauma or illness. The vast majority of suicide attempts happen anyway and the circumstances merely act as a vehicle, if they even have any influence at all.
There are a few other cars that offer electric power, some even without a "regular" engine in them. However, there hasn't been any real development in actual purchasable cars at "normal" consumer rates for years and years. If you have a prius and want a new car after 5 years, what's the market for you? A lot of exciting new vehicles in all sorts of shapes, colors, classes and brands, some even pretty green, even compared to your prius and... wait for it, a prius. Oh, there's the honda and the Volt. They are all more or less compacts, fairly dull to drive, look utterly boring and even though they may have a tad more technology in them than the prius, they are still basically an oversized golf cart.
Tesla offered an expensive short radius all electric sports car. It was a novelty, it could be fun if your drives are without a weeks worth of groceries, kids or further than 50 miles from home, but it wasn't practical as a primary car for most people. Hybrid SUVs are just gas guzzlers, even if they are relatively easy on the fuel for a big, gas guzzling car, there is no real incentive to buy one except when your name is Al Gore.
The public is waiting for the next generation of hybrids and even if current hybrid owners are 15 times more likely to buy a hybrid again than non-owners, it's not going to happen until there is a new competitor on the block to tell the prius "exit stage left".
The old Warshaw pact would be so jealous of all this. The East-German Stasi would have (probably already have) killed for something like this. It's time that the USA people put a stop to mass spending of money for the benefit spying on their own innocent population. There are no (honest) jobs in it, it doesn't produce food, clothing or even transportation and their nation is turning into poverty at an alarming rate.
I'm fairly certain he worked for facebook at the time his account was last checked into, since 172.23.*.* is not routed on the Internet, being RFC 1918 compliant. Or did facebook log in to his account themselves?
In Fukushima they had "containment units" as well, albeit for a different reason and technology. In at least one reactor, those "unbreakable containment units" cracked open and started leaking radioactive water. I wouldn't put my trust in "containment units" if that all there is to stop radioactive crap from escaping.
I have had pet snakes for the last 10 years of various species, some with IR receptors.
Big warmed things tend to trigger the "too big to eat" response in snakes. That is, as long as they are moving. Stationary dead but still warm prey, may be looked upon as "luck, I found myself a free meal".
Most poisonous snakes tend to either not inject venom at all, or tone down the dose considerably when attacking as a defensive movement. Hence, even if the snake seems to miss, it might actually have hit and bitten, but no big damage is done. Making yourself too big to eat is an advantage even if it comes to a fight for the squirrel. For the snake, it makes no sense to waste valuable poison on something you can't eat, so just a warning dose will be more economical.
The squirrel can counter-attack and bite the snake behind the head if it attacks the big moving warm thing just next to the tail. There is plenty of evidence on youtube they do just that.
It will take quite some robotic squirrels before you can statistically prove these things, but I'm fairly certain most of these logical assumptions will be backed up by numbers.
Can Monsanto proof without a reasonable doubt that the seeds in question did not come from two "natural" parents and that their precious patented genes don't already exist in nature, or just happened to spontaneously mutate? It will be very hard for them and the burden of proof still says with them.
Having to completely reinstall the server because of possible back doors left by the "thief". Business value of the domains stolen. These are most definitively damages that are a direct result of the fact that they let a stranger on his cloud server. Possible damages include lost revenue that can be proven by either actual cancellations and possibly statistics, monetary equivalent of lost reputation (reduced business income) and overhead costs like legal fees, time taken to sort out the incident and such. Even if you only take 8 hours to reinstall the server at a modest rate of $50/hour you are looking at $400 in damages. I doubt you'd be paying much more than that for an average cloud server for a whole year, so the settlement offer they give is nowhere near your costs and what your claim should be.
"electrical vehicles" don't usually come without a gasoline engine. They tend to require more maintenance than a WW2 era technology 20 MPG gas guzzler oversized USA straight-line-only vehicle. Yes, most are still that, even when glorified with electronic fuel injection and gizmo's inside the car.
Modern jap/euro cars tend to weigh less and are just as comfortable, if you pick the right ones. That will save you half of the fuel you are burning in your yank tank easily. Fuel won't stay at the $1/gallon mark for long. At this rate, expect $2 per gallon within the next 3-5 years. Staying with your gas guzzler will make life expensive really quickly. Not producing your own compact cars but rather importing them or licensing them will not help economy a lot either.
I work in an IT support function at the current customer. Basically, it's the classical ISP "mission control" role. Since we moved buildings last summer, we were put in "flex working spaces" which means 70% of our staff gets a seat, anywhere in the building, no longer access to our own equipment and laptop computers to accommodate the fact that we don't have our own desks anymore. Also, we're supposed to deal with that by working from home two days a week. Nobody even got a company cell phone.
Your "IT support" exception doesn't seem to have landed at a lot of work places, since I hear about stuff like this a lot. Maybe you and others should advocate it a bit more, since some pointy head bosses haven't gotten it in their heads yet.
You don't have to do that, ever. You are innocent, until proven guilty by a court of law. To be proven guilty, someone else must convince a group o gullible people called "jury" that you in fact committed a crime, or if you're lucky, a bored judge that has a case load that will keep them busy for the next 120 years at least, if they have to actually listen to every relevant argument that can be made in those cases. If you feel the urge to refute anything that will be given in evidence against you, best keep that until your day in court, if it ever comes. Never ever do so against a po-po. They aren't judge or jury. They tend to play mind games to get people to think they are, but really, they are not.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe this judge has been giving verdict in favor of BREIN in the past.
It is about violating patents. Any damages that result of that possible violation should have a monetary value attributed to them, if you want the violator to be liable to pay you damages. You are suddenly looking at the legal definition of "free" in order to assess the damages.
The trick question here is that even if you open the source code up and allow anyone to download and use the compiled product, it could still not be "free". There could be a profit model around the right to put the name of the product on other products using the technology, or the right to redistribute the product, or the right to claim your hardware is compatible with it. These are just examples, there are more business models to make money from open source software that can be labeled "free" in specific cases.
This means that there is no binary answer to the question if Java is free, without a lot of context added to it. Ellison's answer is the only right one in his position, since the question was phrased in such a way that he'd be damned if he answered yes or no.
It's not that hard to get the shares turned over to a holding company owned by the CEO that is based in a tax-friendly country. Maybe they closed this one by now, but there are plenty of tricks to move your money^wassets around in such a way that you don't pay taxes anywhere. Moving the assets around costs you money, but if they are worth enough, it's cheaper than paying taxes. If you move ten times as much as the threshold, you hardly pay more in total, making it way cheaper. People like Ellison are moving way more than ten times the threshold...
It's about time Google is getting serious competition from competitive android distributions. I for one would like very much to be able to store my data on non-google servers (preferably my own) and use a competitors apps store that is trustworth and not laden with (google) ads. It works for Linux, it should work for Android. It's about time we separated the software from the hardware and the service providers. Anti competitive pacts like the US phone companies almost certainly seem to be having should be looked into. It's virtually impossible to get a decent phone separate from an affordable plan there, even tho there will be plenty of people wanting to just purchase a phone and get a cheap plan with it, that suits their needs. This is all a tinfoil hat size of a conspiracy that seems to be going on between the phone vendors and the operators, making free choice for buyers impossible.
Why don't you agree with it? First of all, he did nothing illegal. This is how binary software gets reversed. There is a copyright on the code, but not on the ideas inside of it (you can't patent an idea). There is no copyright on the hardware he's violating in any way. He merely copied it's function, not the actual code itself. Second of all, Qualcomm will not sell a single piece of hardware less than what they were already selling. If anything, they'll be selling more because there's a better driver for it now. Third of all, Qualcomm will now have an opportunity to save money because they only have to help support the freeware driver and they can bin their own.
The only spicy thing about this whole deal is that he is not just a guy that does this for a hobby, but he does the exact same thing for a Qualcomm competitor when he's on the clock. Maybe his employer will think he benefited a competitor in his free time, but firing him for it will mean that they are admitting that open source drivers are better and they will admit to their own failure by not providing their own. They are in a catch 22 on this. Fire him and admit they are doing business wrong, which the shareholders and investors won't like, or just leave him be and decide on their own if they want to put code for their GPU drivers in open source. I think he's safe, or will at least have a good career at some other company that is willing to hire him for his skills.
The backup, (all the data being mirrored on several servers), is also confiscated. Even if they were to have one on tape, the DOJ would have taken those as well. Who's stupid now?
What proof, beyond reasonable doubt, is there that he would not have jumped if those people wouldn't have egged him on? If just a few people wriitng mean things on an Internet forum would cause people to jump from buildings, the Internet would be the primary cause of death and facebook would have been sued bankrupt a long time ago. Unless there is irrefutable proof that these posts have a direct significant relation to the death of this person, there is no damage to be claimed.
People get depressed and take their own lives. in the majority of cases suicide happens, external circumstances may be triggers for already predetermined actions and behavior, but are not a cause. This is a part of life, it's a natural reaction to a chemical imbalance, caused by a variation of things. It could be stress, it could be hereditary, it could be a reaction to hormone imbalances (both mother and fetus) during pregnancy and childhood and it could be due to physical trauma or illness. The vast majority of suicide attempts happen anyway and the circumstances merely act as a vehicle, if they even have any influence at all.
There are a few other cars that offer electric power, some even without a "regular" engine in them. However, there hasn't been any real development in actual purchasable cars at "normal" consumer rates for years and years. If you have a prius and want a new car after 5 years, what's the market for you? A lot of exciting new vehicles in all sorts of shapes, colors, classes and brands, some even pretty green, even compared to your prius and... wait for it, a prius. Oh, there's the honda and the Volt. They are all more or less compacts, fairly dull to drive, look utterly boring and even though they may have a tad more technology in them than the prius, they are still basically an oversized golf cart.
Tesla offered an expensive short radius all electric sports car. It was a novelty, it could be fun if your drives are without a weeks worth of groceries, kids or further than 50 miles from home, but it wasn't practical as a primary car for most people. Hybrid SUVs are just gas guzzlers, even if they are relatively easy on the fuel for a big, gas guzzling car, there is no real incentive to buy one except when your name is Al Gore.
The public is waiting for the next generation of hybrids and even if current hybrid owners are 15 times more likely to buy a hybrid again than non-owners, it's not going to happen until there is a new competitor on the block to tell the prius "exit stage left".
One does not simply play guitar in the Rolling Stones?
If they don't exist, do your mod points really matter at this time?
The old Warshaw pact would be so jealous of all this. The East-German Stasi would have (probably already have) killed for something like this. It's time that the USA people put a stop to mass spending of money for the benefit spying on their own innocent population. There are no (honest) jobs in it, it doesn't produce food, clothing or even transportation and their nation is turning into poverty at an alarming rate.
Finding a console that will yield useful sensitive information is why it's worth 6 figures.
I'm fairly certain he worked for facebook at the time his account was last checked into, since 172.23.*.* is not routed on the Internet, being RFC 1918 compliant. Or did facebook log in to his account themselves?
Yer cannet detact me skull'n'bones flag!
Stop fscking us in the rectum with your evil sales of our privacy.
In Fukushima they had "containment units" as well, albeit for a different reason and technology. In at least one reactor, those "unbreakable containment units" cracked open and started leaking radioactive water. I wouldn't put my trust in "containment units" if that all there is to stop radioactive crap from escaping.
I have had pet snakes for the last 10 years of various species, some with IR receptors.
Big warmed things tend to trigger the "too big to eat" response in snakes. That is, as long as they are moving. Stationary dead but still warm prey, may be looked upon as "luck, I found myself a free meal".
Most poisonous snakes tend to either not inject venom at all, or tone down the dose considerably when attacking as a defensive movement. Hence, even if the snake seems to miss, it might actually have hit and bitten, but no big damage is done. Making yourself too big to eat is an advantage even if it comes to a fight for the squirrel. For the snake, it makes no sense to waste valuable poison on something you can't eat, so just a warning dose will be more economical.
The squirrel can counter-attack and bite the snake behind the head if it attacks the big moving warm thing just next to the tail. There is plenty of evidence on youtube they do just that.
It will take quite some robotic squirrels before you can statistically prove these things, but I'm fairly certain most of these logical assumptions will be backed up by numbers.
Can Monsanto proof without a reasonable doubt that the seeds in question did not come from two "natural" parents and that their precious patented genes don't already exist in nature, or just happened to spontaneously mutate? It will be very hard for them and the burden of proof still says with them.
Having to completely reinstall the server because of possible back doors left by the "thief". Business value of the domains stolen. These are most definitively damages that are a direct result of the fact that they let a stranger on his cloud server. Possible damages include lost revenue that can be proven by either actual cancellations and possibly statistics, monetary equivalent of lost reputation (reduced business income) and overhead costs like legal fees, time taken to sort out the incident and such. Even if you only take 8 hours to reinstall the server at a modest rate of $50/hour you are looking at $400 in damages. I doubt you'd be paying much more than that for an average cloud server for a whole year, so the settlement offer they give is nowhere near your costs and what your claim should be.
Bloody empirical measurements again, start thinking metric you folks... $5/gallon will turn into $10/gallon soon enough.
"electrical vehicles" don't usually come without a gasoline engine. They tend to require more maintenance than a WW2 era technology 20 MPG gas guzzler oversized USA straight-line-only vehicle. Yes, most are still that, even when glorified with electronic fuel injection and gizmo's inside the car.
Modern jap/euro cars tend to weigh less and are just as comfortable, if you pick the right ones. That will save you half of the fuel you are burning in your yank tank easily. Fuel won't stay at the $1/gallon mark for long. At this rate, expect $2 per gallon within the next 3-5 years. Staying with your gas guzzler will make life expensive really quickly. Not producing your own compact cars but rather importing them or licensing them will not help economy a lot either.
or European?
I work in an IT support function at the current customer. Basically, it's the classical ISP "mission control" role. Since we moved buildings last summer, we were put in "flex working spaces" which means 70% of our staff gets a seat, anywhere in the building, no longer access to our own equipment and laptop computers to accommodate the fact that we don't have our own desks anymore. Also, we're supposed to deal with that by working from home two days a week. Nobody even got a company cell phone.
Your "IT support" exception doesn't seem to have landed at a lot of work places, since I hear about stuff like this a lot. Maybe you and others should advocate it a bit more, since some pointy head bosses haven't gotten it in their heads yet.
Where else will you find pictures of people doing silly things while intoxicated in bars? Brilliant detective work!
You don't have to do that, ever. You are innocent, until proven guilty by a court of law. To be proven guilty, someone else must convince a group o gullible people called "jury" that you in fact committed a crime, or if you're lucky, a bored judge that has a case load that will keep them busy for the next 120 years at least, if they have to actually listen to every relevant argument that can be made in those cases. If you feel the urge to refute anything that will be given in evidence against you, best keep that until your day in court, if it ever comes. Never ever do so against a po-po. They aren't judge or jury. They tend to play mind games to get people to think they are, but really, they are not.