The gist of this is that now statement in and of themselves cannot be actionable until it can be proven that the mind of the person making the threat actually intends harm.
This doesn't mean what you seem you think it means. The man harmed his wife by making what a reasonable person (including his wife) saw as credible threats. If he had no intent whatsoever to assault her in any way, but had the intent to make her afraid by sending credible threats, then he did in fact intent to cause her harm.
They have to prove that he intended to make threats, not that he intended to follow up on his threats. I don't actually see this as much of a problem. I am sure he would have been convicted with the right jury instruction, but the right jury instruction was not given.
Basically, the long-and-short of it appears to be that SCOTUS just made this shit a hell of a lot more confusing.
Not at all.
Courts sometimes get things wrong, and then SCOTUS steps in and tells them that they got it wrong. The courts then have to look at the matter again. They are supposed to do it right the next time. SCOTUS is not supposed to tell them how to do it right. They are not little children that need hand holding. They are assumed to get it right on their own most of the time.
One thing that bugs me about these is that people seem to get the unconscious takeaway that the guy gets off scott free. That he walks away without consequence for his words. And they think to themselves (pretty reasonably) "that's unacceptable!" and even "we need to make the law more interpretable and arbitrary!"
Well, he is not getting away with it (not yet). It was decided that the judge gave wrong instructions to the jury. The wrong instruction was that the jury had to decide whether a reasonable person would think of his posts as threats. The correct instruction would have to be that the man himself knew that what he posted would be taken as threats.
So it's going back to court. I personally believe and hope that he will be found guilty with the correct jury instruction as well.
No, this is big brother technology. They can now map the serial numbers of the currency from the ATM to a person. One step closer to cashless, surveillance society.
They can already map the serial numbers of the currency to the account holder and the person in possession of PIN and card. And there already are cameras, except that currently they don't protect you from misuse of your card by a thief, but can only tell that it was a thief after the fact.
Perfect is the enemy of improvement. The crime of kidnapping/murder is far more serious than pick pocketing or card cloning. A lot fewer people will try the more serious crime.
That's always the same on Slashdot. They come up with weird fantasies of kidnapping and so on.
Stealing or duplicating a credit card is relatively easy and no big risk. If you get caught, the punishment isn't too bad even if you stole a thousand cards. Kidnapping on the other hand doesn't give you any more reward, even a single attempt is dangerous for you, unlike normal kidnapping where you hide the victim you must bring the victim to a public place which hugely increases the risk, and if you are caught they never let you out again.
This scheme will work for one branch in Lesser Nowhere, Sechwan Province, with a finite and small set of pictures, and a small number of crooks. Once the number of faces increases, the probability of a false positive explodes,
Not at all. If someone puts Joe Smith's card into the reader, and types in Joe Smith's card PIN, then they only need to compare the face of the person with a picture of Joe Smith, and nobody else. A crook can only get your money if by a huge coincidence that crooks looks the same as you. And that crook cannot get anybody else's money. There are no false positives, there is no reason to compare the face with the photo of anybody else.
I can't claim to know how bankruptcy laws work in France, but in the U.S. secured creditors get paid before priority unsecured creditors, which include employee claims for wages. So employees get paid last, since any corporate debt is sure to be secured. This is a company with only $600k per year in revenue that has already filed for bankruptcy once, so I doubt it is standing on a pile of cash.
In European countries the order is typically tax, social security, employees, then everyone else. Tax includes income tax for the employees, so as long as that is paid, the employee will get some cash in their tax return. (Say you were supposed to make $100,000, they paid $40,000 tax on your behalf and the money is gone, then you effectively made $40,000 that year and all the overpaid tax gets returned to you).
It's not hearsay when the prosecution were the ones (under false pretenses) who were asked by the defendant to arrange the hit.
Police officer says: "He told me that he had hired a hitman" - hearsay.
Police officer says: "He asked me to kill the guy" - not hearsay.
Actually, a bit more complicated. If someone is accused of intimidating witnesses. and the police officer says "I heard him telling Mr. X that he had hired hitmen to kill people giving evidence against him before". That's hearsay as far as hiring hitmen and killing people is concerned, but it is perfectly acceptable evidence for witness intimidation.
if the sentence is in any way based on an assumption of guilt for a crime he wasn't actually tried for.
I don't think so. The jury has to decide based on evidence whether he is guilty of crimes beyond reasonable doubt. However, the same doesn't apply to sentencing. Sentencing can take your good behaviour into account, and it can take your bad but not criminal behaviour into account. If you have a history of harrassing your neighbour in a non-criminal way, and then you beat him up, your sentence for the beating may very well be higher because of that history.
That Apple makes a lot more profit on their phones than Samsung and other Android makers do... that's a whole different story. Maybe it simply is the case that Apple users are those that are swayed easiest by advertising, making them pay a massive premium for their phones. And people that already have shown to be happy to buy big in an advertising ploy should be valuable for other advertisers as well.
For many years, Samsung has spent more money on advertising than Apple. Recently with their revenue drop, and with their massive drop in profits, it seems they had to scale their spending back.
Profits are quite simple: They are the difference between what people are willing to pay for a product, that is how much it is worth to them, and what it costs to manufacture and sell the product. So Apple seems to be just very good at making products that are worth a lot of money to people.
There are two fights. The smartphone maker fight is one. The OS fight is another. Just like there is a fight between OS X and Windows in the PC world.
Not really. The fight is between PC makers and Mac makers (that's Apple). There would be an obvious way to increase the MacOS X market share, which would be to make it available and market it to PCs. And obviously Apple doesn't do that because they would lose more in Mac sales than they would gain in OS sales. (If you think compatibility would be a problem, I think that Dell, HP etc. would be delighted to sell computers that have been thoroughly tested and work fine with MacOS X).
PC versus Mac is the same issue... People who say Windows crashes all the time but because they bought cheap hardware.. Hardware at a price point that Apple wouldn't dream about touching. Then they go and spend 3x more but on a Mac and gloat about how stable it is.
The problem that PC manufacturers have: I have no way to find out what is a quality product and what isn't. If PC X costs more than PC Y, then I don't know if it is because X is better or because the seller tries to rip me off. So I buy the cheaper one. The manufacturers building better and more expensive hardware lose out, so they use cheaper and lower quality hardware. And so on and so on.
With a Mac I go to the Apple Store and whatever I buy, it is quality. If I have a problem, I take the Mac to the store and they fix it. Every other store tries to get rid of customers with problems.
Volume 2 of "The Art Of Computer Programming" contains an excellent description of RSA.
Actually, a decent mathematician should figure out RSA if you just remind them that every prime number has a primitive root, and that primitive roots of about half of all primes can be used to solve x^3 = a (modulo p) for primes p, and to solve x^3 = a (modulo pq) for a product of two primes pq if p and q are known, but not if only the product pq is known.
For large primes (like 1024 or 2048 bit) the number of calculations needed are a bit lengthy, but even a naive implementation on a modern computer is fast enough to implement it. Maybe not fast enough for hard disk encryption, but fast enough to encrypt a few megabytes of documents.
Why does Apple feel the compulsion to plow money into an inferior map service? It only benefit their iphone niche until they can't sustain a lower end iphone market.
They are just copying a Google strategy. Google does things just to mess up things for competitors. That's why you have Google Apps (take that, Microsoft!) and Android (take that, Apple!). Maps is just a bit of payback. A few billion dollars that don't end up in Google's pocket. That alone is worth it for Apple.
That said, when was the last time you looked at Apple Maps? Used it in London at the weekend, and it looked quite a bit better than Google maps. On a iPad or iPhone, it is ages better.
What I'm pointing out is that him previously stating that he took control of a virtual plane does not rule out him subsequently taking control of a real plane, though it's not clear from the article just what period "previously" covers, and now I think about it it's vague enough to make little sense whichever way you take it.
But that's about the same as arresting a film team and the actors for bank robbery, after they filmed a movie depicting a bank robbery.
If your start-up (i.e. poor) company is dependent on the work your lead researcher is doing, and an other company offers $bignum to hire her (with a co-hiring bonus for every former cow-irker that follows), and everyone involved except you are in on the deal, how can you possibly bid to keep your top dog, especially since he already has a fairly good understanding of what you can - and cannot - afford to pay?
And what reason can you give why the lead researcher shouldn't be able to make more money?
everyone has a price, and if you have the dollars, you can use the dollars from your monopoly to poach anyone. This isn't an anti-collusion suit; this is a civil suit about monopoly abuses.
You're being ridiculous. This is a suit about one company not liking that another company offers an employee a better paying job. To which I say "suck it up".
I doubt that there has ever been a single case in recorded history where a customer has been able to actually write a proper specification for the software that they want.
So therefore there has never been a single case in recorded history where software developers have known what they needed to know to do their jobs. How can you POSSIBLY expect them to do the job right?
In a reasonable world, you pick the right person to do the right job. Gathering requirements and turning them into a proper specification needs a lot of talent, practice, and hard work. Your customer is very unlikely to have the talent or practice. That's the job of the company producing the software to supply the person who can do it.
The job of the software developer is to recognise rubbish specs, push back when the specs are rubbish, and otherwise implement the spec. It's not that difficult.
Yep, to this day, I"m still amazed that we have to have warning tags on hair blow dryers, that not only have it in print, but also with cartoon like diagrams warning you to NOT use the blow dryer while in the bathtub filled with water.
I'm not amazed at all. People who put their pets into the microwave to dry them will complain to the microwave manufacturer. People who use a hair dryer in the bathtub filled with water don't complain afterwards.
"Hi, I'm Muhammad, I can't write, read or preform simple math. I'm totally illiterate, have epilepsy, like to wear diapers on my head and ride unicorns. Let me tell you about Islam where women are objects, female children, much like Christianity, are rape objects and science must be outlawed at all costs, oh and don't think about drawing a picture of me, or someone could kill you"
Actually, the "don't draw a picture" is a quite sensible rule for muslims, so they don't get confused that Allah is the important thing and Mohammed is just the lowly messenger, after looking at his picture for too long. Even if you are a muslim, drawing a picture of Mohammed should only result in some explanation _why_ a muslim shouldn't draw this. If you are not a muslim, then nobody should care.
Now of course all those people who are not really interested in religion but in reasons to kill other people take this as a good excuse for murder.
What about this situation: You're a construction worker and at some point during your workday, you find a smurf and attach it to the hammer you were using to do some hammering. The smurfhammer proves to work ten times better than the smurfless hammer -- a great invention!
According to your reasoning, the company the construction worker works for now owns the smurfhammer (2000).
The construction worker is paid to do construction work, the software developer is paid for writing code, the researcher is paid to do original research. The company owns the construction work, and the software developed, and the results of the research.
The companies don't own what is outside of the paid work, which would be the hammer that the construction worker invented, the painting that the software developer painted in his spare time, and the million dollars the original researcher won in the lottery.
It doesn't matter how trivial and stupid the DRM is - what matters is that circumventing it is illegal.
The DRM is on Keurig's coffee pods. If you couldn't brew them in another coffee machine, and you circumvented that, that _might_ be illegal. But you are buying DRM-free coffee. There is nothing in the DMCA that prevents you from doing that. Like it may be illegal to play DVDs with DRM without permission, but it isn't illegal to play DVDs without DRM, and that's what people are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
The gist of this is that now statement in and of themselves cannot be actionable until it can be proven that the mind of the person making the threat actually intends harm.
This doesn't mean what you seem you think it means. The man harmed his wife by making what a reasonable person (including his wife) saw as credible threats. If he had no intent whatsoever to assault her in any way, but had the intent to make her afraid by sending credible threats, then he did in fact intent to cause her harm.
They have to prove that he intended to make threats, not that he intended to follow up on his threats. I don't actually see this as much of a problem. I am sure he would have been convicted with the right jury instruction, but the right jury instruction was not given.
Basically, the long-and-short of it appears to be that SCOTUS just made this shit a hell of a lot more confusing.
Not at all.
Courts sometimes get things wrong, and then SCOTUS steps in and tells them that they got it wrong. The courts then have to look at the matter again. They are supposed to do it right the next time. SCOTUS is not supposed to tell them how to do it right. They are not little children that need hand holding. They are assumed to get it right on their own most of the time.
One thing that bugs me about these is that people seem to get the unconscious takeaway that the guy gets off scott free. That he walks away without consequence for his words. And they think to themselves (pretty reasonably) "that's unacceptable!" and even "we need to make the law more interpretable and arbitrary!"
Well, he is not getting away with it (not yet). It was decided that the judge gave wrong instructions to the jury. The wrong instruction was that the jury had to decide whether a reasonable person would think of his posts as threats. The correct instruction would have to be that the man himself knew that what he posted would be taken as threats.
So it's going back to court. I personally believe and hope that he will be found guilty with the correct jury instruction as well.
No, this is big brother technology. They can now map the serial numbers of the currency from the ATM to a person. One step closer to cashless, surveillance society.
They can already map the serial numbers of the currency to the account holder and the person in possession of PIN and card. And there already are cameras, except that currently they don't protect you from misuse of your card by a thief, but can only tell that it was a thief after the fact.
Perfect is the enemy of improvement. The crime of kidnapping/murder is far more serious than pick pocketing or card cloning. A lot fewer people will try the more serious crime.
That's always the same on Slashdot. They come up with weird fantasies of kidnapping and so on.
Stealing or duplicating a credit card is relatively easy and no big risk. If you get caught, the punishment isn't too bad even if you stole a thousand cards. Kidnapping on the other hand doesn't give you any more reward, even a single attempt is dangerous for you, unlike normal kidnapping where you hide the victim you must bring the victim to a public place which hugely increases the risk, and if you are caught they never let you out again.
This scheme will work for one branch in Lesser Nowhere, Sechwan Province, with a finite and small set of pictures, and a small number of crooks. Once the number of faces increases, the probability of a false positive explodes,
Not at all. If someone puts Joe Smith's card into the reader, and types in Joe Smith's card PIN, then they only need to compare the face of the person with a picture of Joe Smith, and nobody else. A crook can only get your money if by a huge coincidence that crooks looks the same as you. And that crook cannot get anybody else's money. There are no false positives, there is no reason to compare the face with the photo of anybody else.
I can't claim to know how bankruptcy laws work in France, but in the U.S. secured creditors get paid before priority unsecured creditors, which include employee claims for wages. So employees get paid last, since any corporate debt is sure to be secured. This is a company with only $600k per year in revenue that has already filed for bankruptcy once, so I doubt it is standing on a pile of cash.
In European countries the order is typically tax, social security, employees, then everyone else. Tax includes income tax for the employees, so as long as that is paid, the employee will get some cash in their tax return. (Say you were supposed to make $100,000, they paid $40,000 tax on your behalf and the money is gone, then you effectively made $40,000 that year and all the overpaid tax gets returned to you).
Whilst most jobs don't _require_ coding skills, a lot of them would be done more efficiently if people had those skills.
Depending on the level of your coding skills, you are either harmless, dangerous, or useful.
You need to learn quite a bit to skip over "dangerous" into the "useful" territory.
It's not hearsay when the prosecution were the ones (under false pretenses) who were asked by the defendant to arrange the hit.
Police officer says: "He told me that he had hired a hitman" - hearsay.
Police officer says: "He asked me to kill the guy" - not hearsay.
Actually, a bit more complicated. If someone is accused of intimidating witnesses. and the police officer says "I heard him telling Mr. X that he had hired hitmen to kill people giving evidence against him before". That's hearsay as far as hiring hitmen and killing people is concerned, but it is perfectly acceptable evidence for witness intimidation.
if the sentence is in any way based on an assumption of guilt for a crime he wasn't actually tried for.
I don't think so. The jury has to decide based on evidence whether he is guilty of crimes beyond reasonable doubt. However, the same doesn't apply to sentencing. Sentencing can take your good behaviour into account, and it can take your bad but not criminal behaviour into account. If you have a history of harrassing your neighbour in a non-criminal way, and then you beat him up, your sentence for the beating may very well be higher because of that history.
That Apple makes a lot more profit on their phones than Samsung and other Android makers do... that's a whole different story. Maybe it simply is the case that Apple users are those that are swayed easiest by advertising, making them pay a massive premium for their phones. And people that already have shown to be happy to buy big in an advertising ploy should be valuable for other advertisers as well.
For many years, Samsung has spent more money on advertising than Apple. Recently with their revenue drop, and with their massive drop in profits, it seems they had to scale their spending back.
Profits are quite simple: They are the difference between what people are willing to pay for a product, that is how much it is worth to them, and what it costs to manufacture and sell the product. So Apple seems to be just very good at making products that are worth a lot of money to people.
There are two fights. The smartphone maker fight is one. The OS fight is another. Just like there is a fight between OS X and Windows in the PC world.
Not really. The fight is between PC makers and Mac makers (that's Apple). There would be an obvious way to increase the MacOS X market share, which would be to make it available and market it to PCs. And obviously Apple doesn't do that because they would lose more in Mac sales than they would gain in OS sales. (If you think compatibility would be a problem, I think that Dell, HP etc. would be delighted to sell computers that have been thoroughly tested and work fine with MacOS X).
It's, pretty much, the most boring piece of crap on the planet.
For an operating system, being called boring is a compliment. I wouldn't want an exciting operating system.
PC versus Mac is the same issue... People who say Windows crashes all the time but because they bought cheap hardware.. Hardware at a price point that Apple wouldn't dream about touching. Then they go and spend 3x more but on a Mac and gloat about how stable it is.
The problem that PC manufacturers have: I have no way to find out what is a quality product and what isn't. If PC X costs more than PC Y, then I don't know if it is because X is better or because the seller tries to rip me off. So I buy the cheaper one. The manufacturers building better and more expensive hardware lose out, so they use cheaper and lower quality hardware. And so on and so on.
With a Mac I go to the Apple Store and whatever I buy, it is quality. If I have a problem, I take the Mac to the store and they fix it. Every other store tries to get rid of customers with problems.
Volume 2 of "The Art Of Computer Programming" contains an excellent description of RSA.
Actually, a decent mathematician should figure out RSA if you just remind them that every prime number has a primitive root, and that primitive roots of about half of all primes can be used to solve x^3 = a (modulo p) for primes p, and to solve x^3 = a (modulo pq) for a product of two primes pq if p and q are known, but not if only the product pq is known.
For large primes (like 1024 or 2048 bit) the number of calculations needed are a bit lengthy, but even a naive implementation on a modern computer is fast enough to implement it. Maybe not fast enough for hard disk encryption, but fast enough to encrypt a few megabytes of documents.
Why does Apple feel the compulsion to plow money into an inferior map service? It only benefit their iphone niche until they can't sustain a lower end iphone market.
They are just copying a Google strategy. Google does things just to mess up things for competitors. That's why you have Google Apps (take that, Microsoft!) and Android (take that, Apple!). Maps is just a bit of payback. A few billion dollars that don't end up in Google's pocket. That alone is worth it for Apple.
That said, when was the last time you looked at Apple Maps? Used it in London at the weekend, and it looked quite a bit better than Google maps. On a iPad or iPhone, it is ages better.
What I'm pointing out is that him previously stating that he took control of a virtual plane does not rule out him subsequently taking control of a real plane, though it's not clear from the article just what period "previously" covers, and now I think about it it's vague enough to make little sense whichever way you take it.
But that's about the same as arresting a film team and the actors for bank robbery, after they filmed a movie depicting a bank robbery.
If your start-up (i.e. poor) company is dependent on the work your lead researcher is doing, and an other company offers $bignum to hire her (with a co-hiring bonus for every former cow-irker that follows), and everyone involved except you are in on the deal, how can you possibly bid to keep your top dog, especially since he already has a fairly good understanding of what you can - and cannot - afford to pay?
And what reason can you give why the lead researcher shouldn't be able to make more money?
everyone has a price, and if you have the dollars, you can use the dollars from your monopoly to poach anyone. This isn't an anti-collusion suit; this is a civil suit about monopoly abuses.
You're being ridiculous. This is a suit about one company not liking that another company offers an employee a better paying job. To which I say "suck it up".
I doubt that there has ever been a single case in recorded history where a customer has been able to actually write a proper specification for the software that they want.
So therefore there has never been a single case in recorded history where software developers have known what they needed to know to do their jobs. How can you POSSIBLY expect them to do the job right?
In a reasonable world, you pick the right person to do the right job. Gathering requirements and turning them into a proper specification needs a lot of talent, practice, and hard work. Your customer is very unlikely to have the talent or practice. That's the job of the company producing the software to supply the person who can do it.
The job of the software developer is to recognise rubbish specs, push back when the specs are rubbish, and otherwise implement the spec. It's not that difficult.
Yep, to this day, I"m still amazed that we have to have warning tags on hair blow dryers, that not only have it in print, but also with cartoon like diagrams warning you to NOT use the blow dryer while in the bathtub filled with water.
I'm not amazed at all. People who put their pets into the microwave to dry them will complain to the microwave manufacturer. People who use a hair dryer in the bathtub filled with water don't complain afterwards.
"Hi, I'm Muhammad, I can't write, read or preform simple math. I'm totally illiterate, have epilepsy, like to wear diapers on my head and ride unicorns. Let me tell you about Islam where women are objects, female children, much like Christianity, are rape objects and science must be outlawed at all costs, oh and don't think about drawing a picture of me, or someone could kill you"
Actually, the "don't draw a picture" is a quite sensible rule for muslims, so they don't get confused that Allah is the important thing and Mohammed is just the lowly messenger, after looking at his picture for too long. Even if you are a muslim, drawing a picture of Mohammed should only result in some explanation _why_ a muslim shouldn't draw this. If you are not a muslim, then nobody should care.
Now of course all those people who are not really interested in religion but in reasons to kill other people take this as a good excuse for murder.
Elton John wrote one of his biggest hits 'Your Song' in 20 minutes. Even if it takes a whole month, it's still not worth 70 years of royalties.
If it is good enough that people are willing to pay for it 70 years after it is written, then surely it deserves the royalties.
If I build a house and rent it out, surely I deserve the rent payment as long as the house is in a good enough state where people want to rent it?
Remember that all these artists only get royalties when people actually listen to their music.
What about this situation: You're a construction worker and at some point during your workday, you find a smurf and attach it to the hammer you were using to do some hammering. The smurfhammer proves to work ten times better than the smurfless hammer -- a great invention!
According to your reasoning, the company the construction worker works for now owns the smurfhammer (2000).
The construction worker is paid to do construction work, the software developer is paid for writing code, the researcher is paid to do original research. The company owns the construction work, and the software developed, and the results of the research.
The companies don't own what is outside of the paid work, which would be the hammer that the construction worker invented, the painting that the software developer painted in his spare time, and the million dollars the original researcher won in the lottery.
It doesn't matter how trivial and stupid the DRM is - what matters is that circumventing it is illegal.
The DRM is on Keurig's coffee pods. If you couldn't brew them in another coffee machine, and you circumvented that, that _might_ be illegal. But you are buying DRM-free coffee. There is nothing in the DMCA that prevents you from doing that. Like it may be illegal to play DVDs with DRM without permission, but it isn't illegal to play DVDs without DRM, and that's what people are doing.