I should think that the burden of proof should be on the person making the assertions, personally.
Yes, in a libel case, the burden of proof lies with the person making the assertions. But as I pointed out, you can't disprove any of these statements. So the person making them would make their case, and you couldn't disprove it.
In this case, you're right that some of the terms ("character flaws") are open to interpretation. But paranoid? That has a clinical definition, doesn't it?
Sure, it *can* be, but that is not the context in which it was used. A layman saying someone is paranoid does not carry the same weight as a psychiatrist. A layman's definition of paranoid vould be any number of things. Maybe he thinks he blinks too often. Who knows?
And if you want to say someone's leadership has failed, then you ought to be able to provide specific examples where and how you think a better leader could have done better.
This is false - saying someone's leadership has failed is nothing more than an asertion of your opinion of their leadership. Otherwise, any politicial could sue almost any othe rpolitician for libel during a campaign, where they routinely say things like this.
It is very, very hard to make a case for libel. Few fases that go to court actually succeed. First you have to get around the first amendmant, by making sure that they are purporting what they are saying to be truth rather than opinion. Then you have to be sure that what they are saying is all false. I don't think that these comments would come anywhere near standing up.
Take, for instance, the connections running between Europe and America. I bet most of them run in almost exactly the same place on the sea bed because it's the cheapest / shortest path to take. A fairly localized geological disaster (at least in geological terms) could cut all the cables at once; or at least enough to make to difference.
This isn't a good example, because in this case most traffic would automatically be re-routed to go through Asia and the trans-Pacific cables. And if those went down it would go over South America Oceana.
It would get much slower, sure, but would not cause an outage.
There is no *technical* reason this peering relationship breaking down should be causing an outage either. If the both also peered with some third party that could service them both, like MCI or something, then the traffic would still get through. The companies are just being bull-headed.
Slander \Slan"der\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Slandered}; p. pr. &
vb. n. {Slandering}.]
1. To defame; to injure by maliciously uttering a false
report; to tarnish or impair the reputation of by false
tales maliciously told or propagated; to calumniate.
The actual comments were...
"character flaws," "mental deterioration," and "failed leadership," and stated that "Gahill [sic] is...paranoid."
The comments he used are so vague, no lawyer would ever take this to court, because they would surely lose against any halfway-competant defence. Everyone has character flaws. Everyone over 30 could easily be shown to have some measure of "mental deterioration", all they would have to do is ask them some trivial fact about last year that they would not remember. As for "failed leadership", that is also open to interpertation.
In order to make a case for slander, the comments have top be false. There is absolutely no way you could prove or disprove that with these comments.
Those numbers are extremely over-inflated
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
... because they count the *free* distirbution of Spiderman 2 with nearly every PSP at launch as a "sale" (technically, it is a sale, but come on, it is not the same thing).
Add to that the number of people who will buy only one UMD ever for the "try it out" factor, and you will see that the numbers are not as good as it looks.
Portable video players have a bright future I think, but not based on a closed priorietary format that costs more than a DVD (who wants to buy a movie twice?).
I think a better idea would be if more municipalities enacted a garbage tax on the citizens.
If a city has proper compost and curb-side recycling pickup programs in place, your average 4 person household should not be throwing away more than a bag and a half of garbage a week. I know, because it is what my family produces.
But I see others on our street who routinely have 5 bags out there, simply because they are too lazy to put paper in their grey bin, and metal/glass/plastic in their blue bin (come on people, they pick it up for you, how much easier can it get???)
These types of people disgust me. I think a weight-based garbage tax would be a good solution. If they want to be lazy, fine - charge them for it. The city can use the money to fund the recycling program, and it will not only encourage people to recycle and compost more, but would also indirectly encourage companies to produce less wasteful packaging (because people would maybe think twice about buying that giant half-empty box of stuff when a smaller one would do).
You don't care about the min and max here, because the amount of brightness your eye can discern depends on the dialation of your pupil. What matters is the amount you can discern at any given pupil dialation, which is much mushc smaller.
For example, Go into a brightly lit room and try to differentiate between 10 subtle shades of black. Or go into a dimly lit room and try to discern between 10 subtle shades of white.
Some sources are reporting that the EPA estimated mileage for the current generations of hybrids is as much as 42% more than the real world mileage, while the margin of error for compact gas only vehicles is only about %30.
This is why I always take those ratings with a grain of salt. I use the ratings in the Consumer Reports auto issue and auto buying guide soley, since they actually take the cars out and measure them in real-world stop-and-go/highway driving.
If you as a company, invest tens of millions into a rollout of a new software product ( be it a new version of Windows, or a new Linux Kernel), without
Fully researching the present and past state of the company or individuals responsible for the software, and their abilities both demonstrated and implied.
Fully looking into [resent and past security issues with the software
Doing a full independant side-by-side comparison with competitors
.. then Yes, you are responsible for a large part, if that software catastrophically fails. Because it is likely something you would have came across in all this research, in one form or another.
Take windows for example. If you lose $500,000 in a day because some critical windows server crashed from a certain DDOS attack, should Microsoft be responsible? Or should you be responsible, because you should have known from years of examples that Windows is very vulnerabile to those kinds of attacks, and you should either have an external protection mechanism in place, or not use the software?
I think the latter. Then again, I am not the person who thinks "sue" when I slip on icy stairs in the winter and break my neck either. I think "maybe I should have bought better gooddamned shoes for walking around in the winter".
The other commentors are right, there is not enough responsibility in the world today. Grow a backbone and stop sueing everyone.
... this was spoken from the mouth of someone who has never actually done commercial development.
It does not matter if the toolbar does actually work in all versions of Firefox. Unless the Google QA team has test machines that encompass every possible version of Firefox across every platform, then they cannot test said platforms and thus can not sign off on the product actually working.
Also, despite what you may or may not think, there *are* differences between Firefox on different platforms. Different vendors compile in their own patch sets, which may or may not break that particular extention that you want to use. I have even seen differences between the exact same official released versions of Firefox when comparing Windows vs. OSX vs. Linux builds. A certain page will render differently on one than the other two.
Unless they can actually test it on all the platforms, then they can't be 100% sure, so they are perfectly justified in not supporting that particular combination. Otherwise they wouldge tons of complaint emails and bug reports on something they never actually tested.
Anyone else find it weird that AOL uses Google Adsense to display location-specific ads in Mapquest, and lists Google as a "partner", even though Google has it's own competing maps site?
MS buying a share in Google makes this relationship even stranger. AOL uses Google for ads all over the place. And MS also has it's own mapping site.
Compact Power Systems also introduced a product called the iRecharge, a rechargeable portable battery that fits snugly around your iPod, iPod mini or iPod shuffle giving the iPod and iPod mini 12 hours of extra play time and the iPod shuffle 40 extra hours. It has an on/off switch, so you can charge your iPod as needed, as well as a charge-level indicator that glows to tell you how much juice is left.
My house is destroyed, I have no food and water, but thank god I can still listen to U2 - Vertigo!
Actually, to use AOL dialup in the past, all I did was create a dial-up connection on the computer and the username would be AOL\ and then the password in the password box. I used to do this all the time because I refused to use AOL software.
I did not say you had to use the AOL browser. You had to have AOL software installed to create the TCP connection. They did not use a standard PPP negotiation protocol. This made AOL connection in Linux and other open source OS's very difficult.
MSN connectivity can be achieved via Trillian, Gaim, etc.
If I want to use AOL I have no choice but to use their proprietary PPP software. Google's ISP is standards-based VPN, I can use any number of software packages to connect to it.
If I want to use the MSN Messenger network I have (at least from MS's point of view) no choice but to use MSN messenger. Google's IM network is standards based Jabber, I can use any client and they even promote this.
If I want to use MSN TV I have to use Windows Media Player. Google Video uses standard open codecs and I can even download the source code for it.
AOL and MS want to try to lock you in to use only their services. Google wants to *convince* you to use their services by making them the best. This is a huge difference.
If it costs X dollars to create, market, and distribute a CD with 20 songs on it, than it costs X/20 dollars to create each song on that CD.
Since you would be hard pressed to find a CD priced at much less than $1 x the number of tracks, a song can be sold at less than a dollar and make a profit.
Even if you want to argue that some songs cost more than others to produce, because of music videos and whatnot, that cost as it stands right now is offset by the profit of the CD as a whole. So therefore the online sales would do the same.
As well, you need to account for the fact that the record company is now selling the music directly, cutting out the middleman (the retailers) and thus making even more money.
So your argument is pretty much nonsense.
Fred-E-Zone is a spinoff of the citys fibre network. When they built it to handle the city's data in the late 90's, they installed tons of esxtra fibre (of course - fibre is cheap, laying it is not). Now they resell the capacity to business in the city. They make more money off of it than it costs to maintain the thing.
So not only is the spinoff WiFi free, it makes money for the city.
My phone has a 1.3 MP camera (fine for the snapshots you take on the go), an mp3 player with playlists and a 512 MB transflash card, and I can sync my contacts and datebook with outlook. All this in a clamshell the size of a credit card and 2 inches thick.
Because not everyone is a technophile geek that likes to carry around 29384729347 gadgets 24 hours a day.
I recently spend an extra $150 dollars on a phone *expressly because it had an mp3 player and a transflash slot, because I don't want ot be carrying around both a phone *and* an mp3 player when one can do the job of both.
Not everyone wants or needs te ability to carry their whole music collection around 24/7. And I have never hard a problem with battery life on this phone, I can talk for a few hours in a day and still listen to music for a few hours, no problem. And more importantly, I only need one bulky piece of plastic in my pocket (yes, an iPod is a bulky piece of plastic when you don't wear a jacket).
NBAD systems in enterprises are rapidly making hydra-like virus spreading a thing of the past, because the sudden surge in traffic coming from an infected host is so easily identifiable and quarentined automatically.
What you need to worry about are viruses that spread very very slowly, are very well hidden, and only activate after some preset condition.
All you need is the second file (the one with the passwords). You don't need to know the hosts, this can be deduced simply by looking at what clients his company has, which is usually very easy to get information (usually it is even in press releases!). Then all you do is try each password in succession till you find the right one. There would be such a small number to attempt it would be almost trivial.
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Yes, in a libel case, the burden of proof lies with the person making the assertions. But as I pointed out, you can't disprove any of these statements. So the person making them would make their case, and you couldn't disprove it.
Sure, it *can* be, but that is not the context in which it was used. A layman saying someone is paranoid does not carry the same weight as a psychiatrist. A layman's definition of paranoid vould be any number of things. Maybe he thinks he blinks too often. Who knows?
This is false - saying someone's leadership has failed is nothing more than an asertion of your opinion of their leadership. Otherwise, any politicial could sue almost any othe rpolitician for libel during a campaign, where they routinely say things like this.
It is very, very hard to make a case for libel. Few fases that go to court actually succeed. First you have to get around the first amendmant, by making sure that they are purporting what they are saying to be truth rather than opinion. Then you have to be sure that what they are saying is all false. I don't think that these comments would come anywhere near standing up.
This isn't a good example, because in this case most traffic would automatically be re-routed to go through Asia and the trans-Pacific cables. And if those went down it would go over South America Oceana.
It would get much slower, sure, but would not cause an outage.
There is no *technical* reason this peering relationship breaking down should be causing an outage either. If the both also peered with some third party that could service them both, like MCI or something, then the traffic would still get through. The companies are just being bull-headed.
The comments he used are so vague, no lawyer would ever take this to court, because they would surely lose against any halfway-competant defence. Everyone has character flaws. Everyone over 30 could easily be shown to have some measure of "mental deterioration", all they would have to do is ask them some trivial fact about last year that they would not remember. As for "failed leadership", that is also open to interpertation.
In order to make a case for slander, the comments have top be false. There is absolutely no way you could prove or disprove that with these comments.
... because they count the *free* distirbution of Spiderman 2 with nearly every PSP at launch as a "sale" (technically, it is a sale, but come on, it is not the same thing).
Add to that the number of people who will buy only one UMD ever for the "try it out" factor, and you will see that the numbers are not as good as it looks.
Portable video players have a bright future I think, but not based on a closed priorietary format that costs more than a DVD (who wants to buy a movie twice?).
That is a nice trick.
Unless you don't have to pay the license fee for computers or projectors. But if you don't, couldn't you just use a TV Tuner card?
I think a better idea would be if more municipalities enacted a garbage tax on the citizens.
If a city has proper compost and curb-side recycling pickup programs in place, your average 4 person household should not be throwing away more than a bag and a half of garbage a week. I know, because it is what my family produces.
But I see others on our street who routinely have 5 bags out there, simply because they are too lazy to put paper in their grey bin, and metal/glass/plastic in their blue bin (come on people, they pick it up for you, how much easier can it get???)
These types of people disgust me. I think a weight-based garbage tax would be a good solution. If they want to be lazy, fine - charge them for it. The city can use the money to fund the recycling program, and it will not only encourage people to recycle and compost more, but would also indirectly encourage companies to produce less wasteful packaging (because people would maybe think twice about buying that giant half-empty box of stuff when a smaller one would do).
You don't care about the min and max here, because the amount of brightness your eye can discern depends on the dialation of your pupil. What matters is the amount you can discern at any given pupil dialation, which is much mushc smaller.
For example, Go into a brightly lit room and try to differentiate between 10 subtle shades of black. Or go into a dimly lit room and try to discern between 10 subtle shades of white.
Some sources are reporting that the EPA estimated mileage for the current generations of hybrids is as much as 42% more than the real world mileage, while the margin of error for compact gas only vehicles is only about %30.
This is why I always take those ratings with a grain of salt. I use the ratings in the Consumer Reports auto issue and auto buying guide soley, since they actually take the cars out and measure them in real-world stop-and-go/highway driving.
If you as a company, invest tens of millions into a rollout of a new software product ( be it a new version of Windows, or a new Linux Kernel), without
Take windows for example. If you lose $500,000 in a day because some critical windows server crashed from a certain DDOS attack, should Microsoft be responsible? Or should you be responsible, because you should have known from years of examples that Windows is very vulnerabile to those kinds of attacks, and you should either have an external protection mechanism in place, or not use the software? I think the latter. Then again, I am not the person who thinks "sue" when I slip on icy stairs in the winter and break my neck either. I think "maybe I should have bought better gooddamned shoes for walking around in the winter". The other commentors are right, there is not enough responsibility in the world today. Grow a backbone and stop sueing everyone.
... this was spoken from the mouth of someone who has never actually done commercial development.
It does not matter if the toolbar does actually work in all versions of Firefox. Unless the Google QA team has test machines that encompass every possible version of Firefox across every platform, then they cannot test said platforms and thus can not sign off on the product actually working.
Also, despite what you may or may not think, there *are* differences between Firefox on different platforms. Different vendors compile in their own patch sets, which may or may not break that particular extention that you want to use. I have even seen differences between the exact same official released versions of Firefox when comparing Windows vs. OSX vs. Linux builds. A certain page will render differently on one than the other two.
Unless they can actually test it on all the platforms, then they can't be 100% sure, so they are perfectly justified in not supporting that particular combination. Otherwise they wouldge tons of complaint emails and bug reports on something they never actually tested.
Anyone else find it weird that AOL uses Google Adsense to display location-specific ads in Mapquest, and lists Google as a "partner", even though Google has it's own competing maps site?
MS buying a share in Google makes this relationship even stranger. AOL uses Google for ads all over the place. And MS also has it's own mapping site.
Compact Power Systems also introduced a product called the iRecharge, a rechargeable portable battery that fits snugly around your iPod, iPod mini or iPod shuffle giving the iPod and iPod mini 12 hours of extra play time and the iPod shuffle 40 extra hours. It has an on/off switch, so you can charge your iPod as needed, as well as a charge-level indicator that glows to tell you how much juice is left.
My house is destroyed, I have no food and water, but thank god I can still listen to U2 - Vertigo!
Actually, to use AOL dialup in the past, all I did was create a dial-up connection on the computer and the username would be AOL\ and then the password in the password box. I used to do this all the time because I refused to use AOL software.
I did not say you had to use the AOL browser. You had to have AOL software installed to create the TCP connection. They did not use a standard PPP negotiation protocol. This made AOL connection in Linux and other open source OS's very difficult.
MSN connectivity can be achieved via Trillian, Gaim, etc.
Not without violating the MSN TOS.
It is called lock in and choice.
If I want to use AOL I have no choice but to use their proprietary PPP software. Google's ISP is standards-based VPN, I can use any number of software packages to connect to it.
If I want to use the MSN Messenger network I have (at least from MS's point of view) no choice but to use MSN messenger. Google's IM network is standards based Jabber, I can use any client and they even promote this.
If I want to use MSN TV I have to use Windows Media Player. Google Video uses standard open codecs and I can even download the source code for it.
AOL and MS want to try to lock you in to use only their services. Google wants to *convince* you to use their services by making them the best. This is a huge difference.
If it costs X dollars to create, market, and distribute a CD with 20 songs on it, than it costs X/20 dollars to create each song on that CD. Since you would be hard pressed to find a CD priced at much less than $1 x the number of tracks, a song can be sold at less than a dollar and make a profit. Even if you want to argue that some songs cost more than others to produce, because of music videos and whatnot, that cost as it stands right now is offset by the profit of the CD as a whole. So therefore the online sales would do the same. As well, you need to account for the fact that the record company is now selling the music directly, cutting out the middleman (the retailers) and thus making even more money. So your argument is pretty much nonsense.
FYI - Bell Canada owns a 60% stake (read:controlling) in Aliant. For all intents and purposes, Aliant == Bell Canada.
Fred-E-Zone is a spinoff of the citys fibre network. When they built it to handle the city's data in the late 90's, they installed tons of esxtra fibre (of course - fibre is cheap, laying it is not). Now they resell the capacity to business in the city. They make more money off of it than it costs to maintain the thing.
So not only is the spinoff WiFi free, it makes money for the city.
I use a different name for the mother's maiden name question, *always*. This way it is easy to remember, but not to guess.
Sure, if someone discoevered it for one site they would have it for all, but at least they can't just look it up using a family tree.
My Yahoo! mail box is 2 GB.
It has been 2 GB before GMail even existed.
My phone has a 1.3 MP camera (fine for the snapshots you take on the go), an mp3 player with playlists and a 512 MB transflash card, and I can sync my contacts and datebook with outlook. All this in a clamshell the size of a credit card and 2 inches thick.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I specifically do NOT want a device that does more than one thing.
Yes, you are. Most people do not want to carry a cell phone, an mp3 player, and a digital camera around with them all day.
Not everyone wears cargo pants 24/7. Try getting your GF to carry that all around in her 15" by 5" handbag.
Because not everyone is a technophile geek that likes to carry around 29384729347 gadgets 24 hours a day.
I recently spend an extra $150 dollars on a phone *expressly because it had an mp3 player and a transflash slot, because I don't want ot be carrying around both a phone *and* an mp3 player when one can do the job of both.
Not everyone wants or needs te ability to carry their whole music collection around 24/7. And I have never hard a problem with battery life on this phone, I can talk for a few hours in a day and still listen to music for a few hours, no problem. And more importantly, I only need one bulky piece of plastic in my pocket (yes, an iPod is a bulky piece of plastic when you don't wear a jacket).
IDS/IPS and other signature based systems are yesterday's news. NBAD is where it is at when it comes to detecting targetted attacks.
NBAD systems in enterprises are rapidly making hydra-like virus spreading a thing of the past, because the sudden surge in traffic coming from an infected host is so easily identifiable and quarentined automatically.
What you need to worry about are viruses that spread very very slowly, are very well hidden, and only activate after some preset condition.
All you need is the second file (the one with the passwords). You don't need to know the hosts, this can be deduced simply by looking at what clients his company has, which is usually very easy to get information (usually it is even in press releases!). Then all you do is try each password in succession till you find the right one. There would be such a small number to attempt it would be almost trivial.