First of all, there is no Law Enforcement involved here, just lawyers and contracts. If Ceglia wants to contest the forensic analysis of the document, he will have to hire a credible lab to rebut Zuckerberg's lab's findings. Forensics labs don't build their business by being wrong. The court will weigh the credibility of the experts and exercise its judgement.
This case comes down the the existence, validity and enforceability of the contract between Zuckerberg and Ceglia. There are 2 versions of all the evidence: Ceglia's version and Zuckerberg's version. Neither party disputes that there was a contract. Ceglia claims he provided start up funding for "The Facebook" and hired Zuckerberg to develop the "StreetFax" site and that the penalties for late delivery on the StreetFax project gave him majority equity in Facebook. Zuckerberg's version is that he was hired to develop StreetFax but never paid in full and there was no contractual connection between Ceglia and Facebook. So whose claims are more credible?
I tend to believe Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg's investigators claim that Ceglia has a long history of shady and fraudulent business practices including selling swamp land in Florida on eBay, shill bidding on his own land auctions on eBay, forging documents to support fraudulent land sales and of course the larceny charges in NY w.r.t. his wood pallet business. Zuckerberg's lawyers and reporters have produced court documents to back most of these claims up. In addition to the larceny charges in NY, there are court documents showing that Ceglia was charged with misdemeanor trespassing on an orange grove in Florida - apparently he was trying to sell the land (that he didn't own) to an ederly couple. Nice guy. Evidence of his eBay land auctions should be easy to cross reference with land title databases. The press has had enough time to validate these claims, and they do not look good for Ceglia.
Ceglia's email evidence was initially pretty damning - it shows a string of emails between himself and Zuckerberg in which Zuckerberg (Mark in the emails) is apologetic for being late on the "StreetFax" project, discusses Ceglia's funding of "The Facebook" project and is pessimistic about [Facebook's] future, offering to refund Ceglia's start-up funds. In Ceglia's emails also have Zuckerberg discussing some upper-classmen (presumably the Winklevoss's) with a competing idea and Zuckerberg's intention to "hold them off". Ceglia also has a contract (which is apparently too confidential to disclose the original) and a cancelled cheque in which he paid Zuckerberg $1000. This evidence was enough to get DLA Piper of NY to represent him.
However Zuckerberg's team has gone through his account on the Harvard email servers and not found these emails. We can have some confidence in this, because Zuckerberg's email records were already subpoenaed in the Winklevoss case, and if such damning evidence had been there, the settlement would have been much, much larger. What Zuckerberg's team did find on the Harvard email servers were numerous emails between Ceglia and Zuckerberg in which Ceglia was apologetic for being unable to pay Zuckerberg for work done on the "StreetFax" project. According to these emails, at one point, Zuckerberg had apparently taken "aggressive action" against the StreetFax site as a result of non-payment and Celgia was begging "Mark" not do do so again. If Zuckerberg has forged/faked these emails, he would also have to hack the Harvard server backups and plant the fakes there. I'm not a computer forensics expert, but I have dug through enough backups to know that inserting emails (on someone elses server) without leaving a trail not easy to do.
On Zuckerberg's version of the contract (produced very late in the game), there is no mention of Facebook. Ceglia's version (also produced very late in the game) has him acquiring most of Facebook. Whose late production of the contract is more credible? Is it reasonably that a billionaire - for whom an insignificantly sm
And lastly... YOU DON'T NEED TO SHOOT SOMEONE TO DEATH GOD DAMN IT, you can shoot him in the leg, shoulder, arm, whatever. Cops know about that. You don't need to execute someone that was just pointing a knife at you. Hell, if all he had is a knife, you could have maced him and he was out. I honestly don't know how people can not only justify the execution of a man by police, but also protests. Claims like "oh but it was private space". Sure, you know what? For what it's worth they could have also go through your phone and delete your pics too...
You've been watching too many Chuck Norris movies. In movies the good guys (after being shot at and missed multiple times) expertly shoot guns out of people's hands and disarm thugs with a soda straw while doing cartwheels and back flips. In the real world, police officers are trained that when you shoot, you aim for the centre of mass (chest) and shoot to put them down as quickly as possible. The intent is not to kill (that is often the result), but to stop the threat quickly.
Put yourself in the position of being a police officer who is being attacked by a man with a knife. Now imagine that you are required to stop him, but rules require you to defend yourself with a little bottle of pepper spray. Oh yeah - and you do this for a public sector wage.
Maybe you're only 12 years old, but you are using language that you don't seem to understand. Unless they handcuffed him, put him on his knees and then shot him in the head, a police shooting is not an execution. Now I'm not from the US, and we don't execute criminals in Canada, but an execution, even in the US, is a court ordered sentence imposed by the state after a trial, conviction and usually multiple appeals. A police shooting is an instantaneous act of a police officer defending himself, his partner and the public against an armed and dangerous assailant.
All police shootings are investigated, and not all are found to be justified. Here in Vancouver, police at the airport tackled and then tasered to death this unfortunate Polish dude whose only crime was that he didn't speak English and couldn't get anyone to assist him in getting out of the security screening areas where he has been wandering for 5 hours. In this case, they tried to cover it up (confiscated and suppressed the cell phone video) and claimed he was armed (he had a stapler in his hand). The initial investigation cleared the police officers, but (I believe) a subsequent, more independent investigation has recommended that charges against the 4 RCMP officers be reinstated. The family reached an out of court financial settlement with 2 levels of government, the RCMP and the YVR Airport Authority.
I get a little tired of people making these types of comparisons. See if you can spot the differences:
Protesters in San Francisco were protesting a police shooting of an armed, drunken and enraged crazy dude who threatened BART Police officers. As a result, the protesters were slightly inconvenienced for a short period of time by having their iPhones and Blackberries off-line within the very narrow confines of the underground portions of the BART system while lawfully exercising their unimpinged democratic right to free speech. San Francisco is a progressive city with a long history of allowing peaceful demonstrations and free speech and is a haven for independent media and social networking channels.
Protesters in Egypt were protesting (what started with) a savage beating and killing of a young man whose only crime was posting a video of police corruption. As a result, protesters were beaten, tortured, shot, killed and dragged in to alleyways to never be seen again. Oh yeah, and they also have the Internet turned off nationwide for days on end, along with newspapers, TV and any independent media channel. Egypt is a police state with a long history of corruption, repression of individual rights, state sponsored police brutality and censorship / control of the media.
If you are going to make comparisons to those who have truly suffered to speak out against oppression, don't whine and bitch like a baby if you have to suffer the indignity of having to walk outside the transit station to use your iPhone.
BART is public. But they are not REQUIRED to keep transponders for private cellular systems operational at all times within the BART system. The way I see it, because of the potential for a complementary ancillary service (operating transponders/repeaters for third party cellular operators) to disrupt BART's primary public service (transportation) - in the interest of fulfilling their mandate to provide public transportation, they shut down the transponders.
I think the riots in London - which also started in response to a police shooting, probably played into the decision to shutdown the transponders.
There are people, anarchists and others who just like to smash shit up and loot stores, who will take advantage of any public gathering to try and escalate it into a riot. We saw this with the WTO riots in Seattle, the G4 and G8 summits in Genoa and Toronto, the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver and the recent riots in London. It's unfortunate, but the fact remains that it only takes a small core of people to turn a protest into a riot. The tools of choice of late for organizing (if that's even the correct term - maybe orchestrating or igniting) these riots have been social networking apps such as twitter, facebook and blogs. So when BART got wind of a protest, they shut down the means for those within the BART system to communicate and escalate a demonstration into a riot.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this approach used more and more often.
I added the word "deadly" after the fact, without re-reading the whole sentence. But the police are required to respond and defend themselves and the public when threatened. The level of force used in different situations will vary depending upon training and protocols in different police jurisdictions, but the determination of threat and forcefulness of the response almost always comes down the the judgement and training of the officers involved. However, it is generally understood that when you pull a weapon on a police officer, being shot is a likely outcome.
When I lived in San Francisco, there was no cell service in the transbay tunnel or underground portions of the system. Were my rights being denied because BART hadn't installed transponders in the tunnels?
This has got to be one of the stupidest posts ever.
An officer (in his judgement) being threatened by a suspect, in most police forces, is one of the key requirements for use of deadly force. If you think that an officer should somehow kung-fu-ninja disarm a suspect you've been watching too many bad Steven Segal movies.\
Everyone knows if you pull a weapon on a cop, things are going to go really bad for you in a hurry.
Seriously - you think you can throw a knife at a police officer and not get shot? Depending on how the officers perceive the threat, that's going to get you shot in most places.
How is the police officer to know the guy is no longer armed? He threw a bottle and a knife; does he have something else? The police responded to the threat to themselves and BART patrons.
The penalty for assaulting a police officer with a weapon is jail, not death. Penalty infers an arrest, charges and a trial, however the police do not need to arrest or charge someone to respond to a threat. When threatened, the police are permitted (actually required) to use deadly force to defend themselves and the public. Had the police not responded with force, and the guy assaulted and injured or killed a BART patron, the BART police would have been castigated for failing to respond more forcefully earlier.
Launching stuff into orbit is great, but why would humans want to migrate off of earth? Migrate to where? Orbital communities? The moon? Mars? Certainly you can't be suggesting migration to other stars, as the closest ones with potentially habitable planets are anywhere from 20 - 40 million light years away.
In London's Hackney district, hundreds of youths left a trail of burning trash and shattered glass. Looters ransacked a small convenience store, filling plastic shopping bags with alcohol, cigarettes, candy and toilet paper.
"This is the uprising of the working class. We're redistributing the wealth," said Bryn Phillips, 28, a self-described anarchist, as young people emerged from the store with chocolate bars and ice cream cones.
Doesn't seem much like a broad, populous, principled protest against tyranny. These "chavs" (I learned a new word) need to experience true tyranny - move to Syria.
I don't live in the UK, so I obviously don't have my finger on the pulse of London. I'm sure SOME of the people are upset over actions of the police and real or perceived inequalities and the police shooting of a young man in a poorer neighbourhood. But there is undoubtedly a number of people for whom this is just an opportunity to behave badly.
As someone who has observed pointless, causeless, riots, or attempts to get riots started at so many large public gatherings and events over the last decade, from the Seattle WTO meetings, the Toronto G8 summit, the Genoa G8 Summit, the Vancouver Stanley Cup finals, a failed attempt at the Vancouver Olympics, football hooliganism across Europe, etc. in most of these cases, there was really no social cause, just an opportunity to behave badly and anonymously in a crowd. Most of the participants, were simply partying violently and could not even articulate what social injustice they were upset about.
No one loves their government, there is always unrest, and always the "disaffected" and "disenfranchised". Sometimes there is a cause, but it has to be recognized that every large public gathering provides an opportunity for the darker side of human "crowd mentality" to come out.
We won't really know until the aftermath, but if the riots in London are at all similar to the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots, most of the 'disaffected youth" were middle class, teens and young men from the suburbs, spurred on by a handful of professional anarchists. The same black masked anarchists tried to get something going during the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, but fortunately, due to the enormous good will in the city at the time, the crowd turned on the small handful of rioters and shut them down really quickly. After losing the Stanley Cup final - the good will was absent and it took very little to get the crowd going. One thing that was common to both incidents in Vancouver was that early in the day, long before the events, the police began detaining people who were bringing cans of gasoline and weapons into the downtown core.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't they pretty much spin off Agilent so they could acquire Compaq - to be stronger in the PC hardware sector?
Steve, that you? How's that injunction going? Is your plan for the courts to maintain your market share?
First of all, there is no Law Enforcement involved here, just lawyers and contracts. If Ceglia wants to contest the forensic analysis of the document, he will have to hire a credible lab to rebut Zuckerberg's lab's findings. Forensics labs don't build their business by being wrong. The court will weigh the credibility of the experts and exercise its judgement.
This case comes down the the existence, validity and enforceability of the contract between Zuckerberg and Ceglia. There are 2 versions of all the evidence: Ceglia's version and Zuckerberg's version. Neither party disputes that there was a contract. Ceglia claims he provided start up funding for "The Facebook" and hired Zuckerberg to develop the "StreetFax" site and that the penalties for late delivery on the StreetFax project gave him majority equity in Facebook. Zuckerberg's version is that he was hired to develop StreetFax but never paid in full and there was no contractual connection between Ceglia and Facebook. So whose claims are more credible?
I tend to believe Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg's investigators claim that Ceglia has a long history of shady and fraudulent business practices including selling swamp land in Florida on eBay, shill bidding on his own land auctions on eBay, forging documents to support fraudulent land sales and of course the larceny charges in NY w.r.t. his wood pallet business. Zuckerberg's lawyers and reporters have produced court documents to back most of these claims up. In addition to the larceny charges in NY, there are court documents showing that Ceglia was charged with misdemeanor trespassing on an orange grove in Florida - apparently he was trying to sell the land (that he didn't own) to an ederly couple. Nice guy. Evidence of his eBay land auctions should be easy to cross reference with land title databases. The press has had enough time to validate these claims, and they do not look good for Ceglia.
Ceglia's email evidence was initially pretty damning - it shows a string of emails between himself and Zuckerberg in which Zuckerberg (Mark in the emails) is apologetic for being late on the "StreetFax" project, discusses Ceglia's funding of "The Facebook" project and is pessimistic about [Facebook's] future, offering to refund Ceglia's start-up funds. In Ceglia's emails also have Zuckerberg discussing some upper-classmen (presumably the Winklevoss's) with a competing idea and Zuckerberg's intention to "hold them off". Ceglia also has a contract (which is apparently too confidential to disclose the original) and a cancelled cheque in which he paid Zuckerberg $1000. This evidence was enough to get DLA Piper of NY to represent him.
However Zuckerberg's team has gone through his account on the Harvard email servers and not found these emails. We can have some confidence in this, because Zuckerberg's email records were already subpoenaed in the Winklevoss case, and if such damning evidence had been there, the settlement would have been much, much larger. What Zuckerberg's team did find on the Harvard email servers were numerous emails between Ceglia and Zuckerberg in which Ceglia was apologetic for being unable to pay Zuckerberg for work done on the "StreetFax" project. According to these emails, at one point, Zuckerberg had apparently taken "aggressive action" against the StreetFax site as a result of non-payment and Celgia was begging "Mark" not do do so again. If Zuckerberg has forged/faked these emails, he would also have to hack the Harvard server backups and plant the fakes there. I'm not a computer forensics expert, but I have dug through enough backups to know that inserting emails (on someone elses server) without leaving a trail not easy to do.
On Zuckerberg's version of the contract (produced very late in the game), there is no mention of Facebook. Ceglia's version (also produced very late in the game) has him acquiring most of Facebook. Whose late production of the contract is more credible? Is it reasonably that a billionaire - for whom an insignificantly sm
911 service in the BART system predates cell phones. There are emergency telephones on the trains, tunnels and stations.
And lastly... YOU DON'T NEED TO SHOOT SOMEONE TO DEATH GOD DAMN IT, you can shoot him in the leg, shoulder, arm, whatever. Cops know about that. You don't need to execute someone that was just pointing a knife at you. Hell, if all he had is a knife, you could have maced him and he was out. I honestly don't know how people can not only justify the execution of a man by police, but also protests. Claims like "oh but it was private space". Sure, you know what? For what it's worth they could have also go through your phone and delete your pics too...
You've been watching too many Chuck Norris movies. In movies the good guys (after being shot at and missed multiple times) expertly shoot guns out of people's hands and disarm thugs with a soda straw while doing cartwheels and back flips. In the real world, police officers are trained that when you shoot, you aim for the centre of mass (chest) and shoot to put them down as quickly as possible. The intent is not to kill (that is often the result), but to stop the threat quickly.
Put yourself in the position of being a police officer who is being attacked by a man with a knife. Now imagine that you are required to stop him, but rules require you to defend yourself with a little bottle of pepper spray. Oh yeah - and you do this for a public sector wage.
Maybe you're only 12 years old, but you are using language that you don't seem to understand. Unless they handcuffed him, put him on his knees and then shot him in the head, a police shooting is not an execution. Now I'm not from the US, and we don't execute criminals in Canada, but an execution, even in the US, is a court ordered sentence imposed by the state after a trial, conviction and usually multiple appeals. A police shooting is an instantaneous act of a police officer defending himself, his partner and the public against an armed and dangerous assailant.
All police shootings are investigated, and not all are found to be justified. Here in Vancouver, police at the airport tackled and then tasered to death this unfortunate Polish dude whose only crime was that he didn't speak English and couldn't get anyone to assist him in getting out of the security screening areas where he has been wandering for 5 hours. In this case, they tried to cover it up (confiscated and suppressed the cell phone video) and claimed he was armed (he had a stapler in his hand). The initial investigation cleared the police officers, but (I believe) a subsequent, more independent investigation has recommended that charges against the 4 RCMP officers be reinstated. The family reached an out of court financial settlement with 2 levels of government, the RCMP and the YVR Airport Authority.
I get a little tired of people making these types of comparisons. See if you can spot the differences:
Protesters in San Francisco were protesting a police shooting of an armed, drunken and enraged crazy dude who threatened BART Police officers. As a result, the protesters were slightly inconvenienced for a short period of time by having their iPhones and Blackberries off-line within the very narrow confines of the underground portions of the BART system while lawfully exercising their unimpinged democratic right to free speech. San Francisco is a progressive city with a long history of allowing peaceful demonstrations and free speech and is a haven for independent media and social networking channels.
Protesters in Egypt were protesting (what started with) a savage beating and killing of a young man whose only crime was posting a video of police corruption. As a result, protesters were beaten, tortured, shot, killed and dragged in to alleyways to never be seen again. Oh yeah, and they also have the Internet turned off nationwide for days on end, along with newspapers, TV and any independent media channel. Egypt is a police state with a long history of corruption, repression of individual rights, state sponsored police brutality and censorship / control of the media.
If you are going to make comparisons to those who have truly suffered to speak out against oppression, don't whine and bitch like a baby if you have to suffer the indignity of having to walk outside the transit station to use your iPhone.
BART is public. But they are not REQUIRED to keep transponders for private cellular systems operational at all times within the BART system. The way I see it, because of the potential for a complementary ancillary service (operating transponders/repeaters for third party cellular operators) to disrupt BART's primary public service (transportation) - in the interest of fulfilling their mandate to provide public transportation, they shut down the transponders.
I think the riots in London - which also started in response to a police shooting, probably played into the decision to shutdown the transponders.
There are people, anarchists and others who just like to smash shit up and loot stores, who will take advantage of any public gathering to try and escalate it into a riot. We saw this with the WTO riots in Seattle, the G4 and G8 summits in Genoa and Toronto, the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver and the recent riots in London. It's unfortunate, but the fact remains that it only takes a small core of people to turn a protest into a riot. The tools of choice of late for organizing (if that's even the correct term - maybe orchestrating or igniting) these riots have been social networking apps such as twitter, facebook and blogs. So when BART got wind of a protest, they shut down the means for those within the BART system to communicate and escalate a demonstration into a riot.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this approach used more and more often.
I added the word "deadly" after the fact, without re-reading the whole sentence. But the police are required to respond and defend themselves and the public when threatened. The level of force used in different situations will vary depending upon training and protocols in different police jurisdictions, but the determination of threat and forcefulness of the response almost always comes down the the judgement and training of the officers involved. However, it is generally understood that when you pull a weapon on a police officer, being shot is a likely outcome.
When I lived in San Francisco, there was no cell service in the transbay tunnel or underground portions of the system. Were my rights being denied because BART hadn't installed transponders in the tunnels?
This has got to be one of the stupidest posts ever.
An officer (in his judgement) being threatened by a suspect, in most police forces, is one of the key requirements for use of deadly force. If you think that an officer should somehow kung-fu-ninja disarm a suspect you've been watching too many bad Steven Segal movies.\
Everyone knows if you pull a weapon on a cop, things are going to go really bad for you in a hurry.
Seriously - you think you can throw a knife at a police officer and not get shot? Depending on how the officers perceive the threat, that's going to get you shot in most places.
How is the police officer to know the guy is no longer armed? He threw a bottle and a knife; does he have something else? The police responded to the threat to themselves and BART patrons.
The penalty for assaulting a police officer with a weapon is jail, not death. Penalty infers an arrest, charges and a trial, however the police do not need to arrest or charge someone to respond to a threat. When threatened, the police are permitted (actually required) to use deadly force to defend themselves and the public. Had the police not responded with force, and the guy assaulted and injured or killed a BART patron, the BART police would have been castigated for failing to respond more forcefully earlier.
Until some NASA engineer steals your skin to build a space elevator.
Need something to mount the lasers on.
Launching stuff into orbit is great, but why would humans want to migrate off of earth? Migrate to where? Orbital communities? The moon? Mars? Certainly you can't be suggesting migration to other stars, as the closest ones with potentially habitable planets are anywhere from 20 - 40 million light years away.
Export controls on cell phones.
What's your opinion on tinfoil hats?
Button labelled "p0rn"
http://www.inventinginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Sarah_Sisko_reconstruction.jpg
In London's Hackney district, hundreds of youths left a trail of burning trash and shattered glass. Looters ransacked a small convenience store, filling plastic shopping bags with alcohol, cigarettes, candy and toilet paper.
"This is the uprising of the working class. We're redistributing the wealth," said Bryn Phillips, 28, a self-described anarchist, as young people emerged from the store with chocolate bars and ice cream cones.
Doesn't seem much like a broad, populous, principled protest against tyranny. These "chavs" (I learned a new word) need to experience true tyranny - move to Syria.
Because comparing a small, rural, farming town to 3 large urban metropolises is reasonable and valid?
In any of these cities you could find numerous apartment buildings with larger populations than Tombstone Arizona that have no crime to speak of.
It's human nature and a mob mentality.
I don't live in the UK, so I obviously don't have my finger on the pulse of London. I'm sure SOME of the people are upset over actions of the police and real or perceived inequalities and the police shooting of a young man in a poorer neighbourhood. But there is undoubtedly a number of people for whom this is just an opportunity to behave badly.
As someone who has observed pointless, causeless, riots, or attempts to get riots started at so many large public gatherings and events over the last decade, from the Seattle WTO meetings, the Toronto G8 summit, the Genoa G8 Summit, the Vancouver Stanley Cup finals, a failed attempt at the Vancouver Olympics, football hooliganism across Europe, etc. in most of these cases, there was really no social cause, just an opportunity to behave badly and anonymously in a crowd. Most of the participants, were simply partying violently and could not even articulate what social injustice they were upset about.
No one loves their government, there is always unrest, and always the "disaffected" and "disenfranchised". Sometimes there is a cause, but it has to be recognized that every large public gathering provides an opportunity for the darker side of human "crowd mentality" to come out.
We won't really know until the aftermath, but if the riots in London are at all similar to the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots, most of the 'disaffected youth" were middle class, teens and young men from the suburbs, spurred on by a handful of professional anarchists. The same black masked anarchists tried to get something going during the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, but fortunately, due to the enormous good will in the city at the time, the crowd turned on the small handful of rioters and shut them down really quickly. After losing the Stanley Cup final - the good will was absent and it took very little to get the crowd going. One thing that was common to both incidents in Vancouver was that early in the day, long before the events, the police began detaining people who were bringing cans of gasoline and weapons into the downtown core.
Because, of course, the solution to wide spread rioting, looting and violence is more powerful weapons.