Yes, scientific analysis has affirmed the theory that The Mark of the Beast and RFID tags are one and the same. The Antichrist will manifest. After a period of sustained visitation by demons and hellfire, Category 5 fire and brimstone should begin raining down on Earth, followed by 100% eradication of humanity. The sorting of human souls will then commence, and all souls with Level 4 or higher Good Quotients will be diverted to Heaven for infinite happiness, while those with Category 3 or lower Good Quotients will be diverted to Hell for infinite damnation.
You do realize there are thousands of people responding on this site right?
Absolutely. That's why I refered to the overall response, not to individual responses. My general impression is that for every true libertarian who is willing to take the consequences of true competition, there are another two or three who think of themselves as libertarians but are uncomfortable with the actual global competition.
how the often libertarian gestalt of Slashdot suddenly advocates government-sponsored trade protectionism as soon as the topic of *computer-related* jobs comes up. Farm subsidies are economically inefficient, and they distort the true price of food. The same thing is true of the oil industry. Why can't the government get smart and start allowing non-distorted prices for gasoline?! Obviously the government is in the hands of special interests. Ah, but then the subject of outsourcing comes up, and the tech industry is under threat and in need of assistance!
There's clear hypocrisy at play here. We want competition and open markets, we want global cooperation in open source software development, we just don't want to give up top dog status in areas that directly affect our jobs.
Made in China is fine and programming in India is fine, as long as the price of laptops keeps dropping. When a product is even a few dollars more expensive than average, Slashdotters are more than willing to scream and yell about it. Well, lower prices are the result of global markets. More buyers, more sources of cheap production.
We'd rather get cheap, well-made goods and donate to aid organizations than truly allow developing economies to compete with us.
Given the fact that Apple lost its lawsuit against MS, the DoJ abruptly dropped its case against MS when Bush came in on his first term, and Al Gore is on Apple's board, I find it unlikely that Jobs has much pull with the federal government. That said, Apple is a major force in the tech economy right now, so the feds might be willing to give Jobs more of an ear than usual simply because he runs a high-impact, successful company.
The problem is that on Slashdot, if you're a marketer, you're evil until proven otherwise.
Of course, once you start up your own company and are competing against the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Sun, et. al., you realize that those competitors have tons of content on their sites, and thousands of inbound links, and all you have is a great product. So if you're smart, you'll start developing new content of your own that showcases your product, goes into detail about why the underlying technology is so good, describes how customers have used your product successfully, and so on.
There's nothing wrong in that, and it's not gaming the system. Ignoring the fact that search engines work the way they do would be an incredibly stupid move, particularly since it works to the advantage of your larger, better-funded incumbent competitors.
Urban concentrations are still important because of the social networks they engender. In particular, Silicon Valley has a very strong network of investors, universities, and veteran entrepreneurs. Perhaps more importantly, the environment in Silicon Valley is one that embraces risk. In the Valley, having worked at a few startups that bombed is not a mark of failure. It's more like a badge of courage. It shows that you have some experience and that you've learned something. People here literally enjoy sharing tales about companies they started that flamed out.
That entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to take risks and try new things is what makes Silicon Valley necessary. When other regions start truly embracing this culture of risk-taking, Silicon Valley will no longer be the dominant tech innovator that it is today.
Until the issue of ownership is settled this whole case is moot.
Determining ownership is at the heart of the whole case. Sometimes the only way to prove something is to take it to the courts. The alternative is SCO claiming they own the code, IBM claiming they own the code, and nobody else being certain as to who really owns it. Tort law is often used to resolve differences of opinion just like this one. There's really no other way to settle the dispute in a way that will create certainty for both parties and for the industry at large.
Don't worry, despite all the so called pre-cautions it's virtually certain that we have executed innocent people. We have certainly executed mentally ill and retarded people.
I don't disagree with you. I recently saw a talk by a man who was removed from death row after a DNA exoneration. But the standard of proof in torts law is lower, and torts law addresses far different issues than criminal law. In particular, torts law is generally unconcerned with the defendant's intent, while intent is central in criminal law (and part of the reason criminal law is such a minefield). Torts law resolves disputes where one party (or multiple parties, in the case of class actions) has been damaged by the actions of another. Criminal law is used to deter acts that society considers to be so harmful that they require extraordinary sanction. Torts and criminal law are two separate domains.
Obviously there's some serious glue-sniffing going on in Lindon.
Darl: "Let's see. We're a UNIX company. We're taking on the world in litigation that will very likely fail. What we need is fresh, new, out of the box thinking!"
Dude from the Mail Room: "Umm.. Mr. McBride... umm.. I have an idea. Why confine ourselves to pissing people off by suing them? I read an article about this guy in Florida who is like, mega-rich because he is a spammer. See, I think we could make stuff that would help people get rich spamming people an' stuff, and it would piss people off in the process."
Darl: "Sweet! Kid, you're brilliant! Let me put this family-sized bottle of Crazy Glue down, so I can come over and hug you."
You're still assuming that the suit is frivolous. Just because the outcome is 90% likely to resolve in favor of one party does not mean it's a frivolous case. If there is a reasonable doubt as to the outcome, it's not frivolous.
Supposedly the we have given judges the power to throw a frivolous case out before it gets anywhere and cost people millions of dollars.
Defining "frivolous" is the problem.
Generally the term means "without legal or factual basis." If you are bringing an action for which there is no legal remedy, you are bringing a legally frivolous case. Stating that I made you feel bad, and therefore I should be put in jail is not a legal claim, and is therefore frivolous. If you took me to court, claiming that I had entered your home and burned it to the ground, but you had no evidence whatsoever of my entry and no witnesses, your case would be thrown out on factual grounds.
Short of circumstances so obviously one-sided, the reason for having courts at all in torts cases is to allow for nonviolent dispute resolution where one party feels it has been harmed by the other. The problem with applying a case-by-case standard of evidence is that it fosters unpredictability. The system becomes merely a conduit for the individual interpetations of judges. Torts law is already slippery enough as it is, and I certainly wouldn't want a judge to arbitrarily decide that my case was not strong enough to go to trial.
I'm also not sure this is going to be frivolous at all, because the outcome is likely to be a resounding win for IBM specifically and Linux generally. In that regard the original intent of the plaintiff might not be satisfied, but the case is serving a larger purpose in that it is clarifying a host of issues surrounding Open Source software.
Alas most judges do not exercise that right. They are perfectly happy to let any old case get to court no matter how baseless or silly.
You've been reading too many of those chain emails about the "outrages" of the legal system. I doubt very much that judges are "happy" dealing with cases that are baseless or silly. One of the most important things judges do these days is manage their caseload, in many cases by forcing parties to ADR (alternative dispute resolution). They get rid of cases that have no legal or factual claims, they push as many as they can to ADR, then they deal with the rest as they are able. Note also that the vast majority (about 90%) of cases never reach trial. That's not by mistake. The point is to provide a broad forum for resolving the dispute, balancing the need to hear all sides in a case with the need to maintain efficiency.
It's certainly not perfect, but I'd be more nervous about a system that short-changed the opportunity for people to have their grievances aired in court, at the sole discretion of a judge.
Word of mouth, review websites/magazines, and even general newsy outlets like papers and slashdot.
Magazines survive because of advertising in their pages. Take away ads, and be prepared to pay a lot more for the latest issue of your favorite mag.
Websites are either supported by subscription fees (rare) or by advertising.
Newspapers generate almost all of their revenue from advertising. Take a look at the classifieds, job ads, home listings, and inserts the next time you pick up the Sunday paper.
You've seen those funny looking boxes with corporate logos at the top of Slashdot stories, right?
A losing party should not be allowed to drag out the proceedings hoping to force the opposition to spend money.
You are assuming that SCO is the losing party, but the case has not yet been tried. The jury trial isn't scheduled to begin until next February.
The system is deliberately set up to allow both SCO and IBM to file crossclaims, bring in parties that are necessary for full resolution of all the issues, and conduct thorough discovery. It emphasizes thoroughness over speed.
It is expensive and time-consuming, which is why most businesses would prefer not to bring lawsuits. SCO obviously brought suit because they realized they couldn't survive without a successful lawsuit. It was a desperate gamble, but before discovery, nobody actually *knew* that IBM would prevail, which is why it survived a motion for summary judgment. The facts were very much in dispute. Everyone talks about it as if at the moment the original complaint was filed, we all had the facts at our disposal to disprove the SCO case. But what if during discovery, SCO had come up with a "smoking gun" of some kind?
My point is that the judge's role is to be an impartial referee in the fight between SCO and IBM. A judge who decided the case before trial would have his decision reversed in a heartbeat.
If we operated under the so-called "English Rule", which is used throughout most of the world, the loser would pay costs. This would cut down on frivolous lawsuits, but it could also potentially stifle legitimate use of the courts by parties. There is serious and ongoing debate as to whether the English Rule system actually reduces the cost of litigation or leads to a more "just" outcome.
Advertisers and marketeers are the scum of the Earth
Annoying. Yes. Bothersome. Yes. Scum of the Earth? They win out over child molesters, animal torturers, and Jim Jones?
I know a few marketing folks, and most of them are decent human beings, just like you and me, trying to earn a buck. Plus, how do you propose to have commerce without advertising?
This was a US District Court case, at the lowest level of the federal judicial structure, and there are likely other decisions in other districts that may have come out differently.
Furthermore, the facts in this case don't look terribly good for the plaintiff. As others have pointed out, in a torts case you need to prove a harm. From the decision:
Brazos points out that
the evidentiary record is completely devoid of any disputed facts indicating that Guin's
personal information was actually on Wright's laptop at the time it was stolen, or that
Guin's personal information is now in the possession of the burglar.
The rationale for summary judgment in this case is clear, because the plaintiff can't provide any evidence of harm.
The author of the SecurityFocus piece further muddies the waters by giving it the title "Strict liability for data breaches?" Strict liability is imposed in torts cases for activities that are abnormally dangerous. The case in question was purely about negligence.
Most court cases are very fact-specific, and in this one the facts were such that the law of torts gunned down the plaintiff. It wasn't the specifics of statute, but the plaintiff's inability to prove he'd been harmed that doomed the case. Imagine if in order to win a torts case, you didn't have to prove that you had been harmed. Even emotional harm cases require some actual evidence of damage to the plaintiff. What if you were a sysad and someone in the office where you work claimed you had illicitly entered their computer and taken their private information, but they had no proof. Would you want your accuser to prevail?
For those opposed to violence, can you think of a better solution?
Yeah, the rule of law really sucks. You should come and live in Somalia. It freakin' rocks here! No lawyers. No taxes. *Everyone* has the fear of God in them. Oh, and the best thing of all: No bullshit personal data losses by stupid big businesses, because there are no big businesses. It's all nice and small and simple and manageable.
Come on out, and I'll set you up in a sweet little shack in the outskirts of Mogadishu. The occasional gunshots might wake you up at night, but I can lend you my earplugs.
Maybe that's just a bunch of nonsense, I haven't actually tried any of those dating sites, but you know what, if a jobs site as big as eHarmony made a claim like that, I'd try it.
Yeah, it certainly could all be crap. I'm quite happily married, so I don't know from experience one way or another. I read an interesting article about it in this month's issue of The Atlantic, and it seemed like they were making progress but most of the researchers realized that it would be several years before they would be able to match people as accurately as they'd like. I found that attitude rather refreshing, in stark contrast to the line of b.s. you get from job sites.
I want a social networking site that is oriented toward jobfinding, and that works. So far, there are social networking sites that purport to be all about helping people connect with jobs, but LinkedIn and their ilk aren't quite there yet. They're moving in the right direction, but it still has the feel of a Monster-type site with the social network info bolted on.
The hard truth is that none of the job-hunting sites are much better than a newspaper ad. You can search and match and quantify all you want, but at the end of it all, you'll still using a process that relies on an attempt to quantify human characteristics. If you are a non-traditional employee in some way, or if you are the kind of person who motivates teams very well, or if you are someone who can put out fires extremely well, during the initial vetting process your means of conveying these strengths are very limited.
This is just as frustrating for companies that are offering jobs. Managers looking for new hires vary in what they are looking for, obviously, but it is particularly frustrating if you are attempting to hire the right kind of person first, and the right position fit second. Management books frequently talk about hiring people who will fit with your team, people who can learn the specifics of the job, but have the overall aptitude and personality that make the most sense for the long haul. I've hired people who didn't know a damned thing about the specifics of their job, but excelled over people who had years of experience but the wrong attitude.
Currently the process, despite all of the wonderful bells and whistles, is still flawed. Employers can't find out much at all from a resume, and everyone knows they are really just used dispositively. If I am sifting through 100 resumes to find the ten people I need to interview, those resumes that have typos, or look goofy, or bother me for some other reason get tossed. Now that it's all being done online, there are more resumes to deal with, and you're still left with the nagging possibility that your evaluative criteria (must have 35 years Java development experience!) are excluding a few job hunters who might be perfect for your organization. I really would like to see some sort of combination of social networking and the kind of relationship analysis that dating sites are now embracing. Yes, that sounds absurd, but the psychological dimension of work is extremely important, and people who study relationships are far ahead of most management theorists in understanding how individuals relate to each other.
The factory model is supposedly dead and gone, a relic of the industrial age. Corporate America has moved into a new age where employees are freelancers and companies are scrambling to find the best talent. But how is that struggle defined? Look at Monster.com and see how you are forced to fit yourself into the tidy little boxes that their system requires. I don't think that sort of approach is more than an incremental improvement over the bad old days of searching the want ads every Sunday.
For now, personal networks still trump any other means of finding a job.
...is this another tactic to lure users away from Google with candy and other shiny things?
MS knows traditional shrink-wrap software marketing better than anyone. It seems they realize this search engine stuff is a new ballgame, but they haven't quite figured out that emulating cheezy operators like iWon isn't the way to go. If I want to get pimped, I'll go down to Quickie Mart and play Lotto.
Some people need experience to do this, but it would appear as if some people have a natural capability for it, or simply pick it up through a series of life-or-death situations. I'm not presumptuous enough to presume that I'd be Rambo in a combat situation, but I'm fairly certain I'd do a fairly good job keeping my head about me - at least compared to most others of untrained nature
That makes sense. I hadn't really considered analagous situations.
Most Americans don't get themselves into (or find themselves in, as the case may be) situations that compare to combat. However, I'm sure there are more than a few less fortunate souls who have had to confront life-or-death tests on a much more routine basis than most of us. Also, I think your point about self-knowledge is pretty accurate. If you know through actual experience that you can handle yourself in a "fight or flight" situation, your ability to gauge your probable reaction to a combat situation is probably better than that of Joe Armchair.
Why don't we start with criminal law. After all, I never received any instruction in any of my K-12 classes about the basics of criminal law.
The basics of contract law would probably be good to teach as well. After all, most people enter into contracts all the time without thinking about it.
Since tort law covers non-criminal actions that are harmful to others, I think we should give some instruction to students in tort law as well. After all, battery is a tort, and after they reach the age of majority, those students will be fully responsible for their own actions.
Now I'll take my tongue out of my cheek. Don't you find it odd that the only sort of law this guy wants to teach our students is law that most directly influences... drumroll, please... big content companies (and there are more than a few in the L.A. area, which is where his district lies).
I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation.
For most armies, the most important and difficult task they face is in training their young soldiers to accurately and deliberately fire their weapons at enemy soldiers. S.L.A. Marshall's classic work "Men Against Fire" first addressed this issue over 50 years ago, and although the statistics he cites in the book have been vigorously disputed, the gist of his argument is still true. So modern armies spend an awful lot of time and energy doing the sort of training you mentioned - running around in the rain and dirt and snow and mud, creating situations that are as close as possible to real combat. If you want to talk about successful training, don't look to video games. Look instead at the NTC and JRTC.
One of the things that no video game (in particular) or sterile target range training environment will ever reproduce is the uncertainty of combat. You are not operating in a pre-defined, bounded killing zone. Your squad leader is shouting something and you're trying to hear what he's saying. You hear the crack of an AK nearby, but your hearing is so screwed up that you can't tell where it came from. You're hot. You're tired. Sweat is running down into your eyes, forcing you to swipe at your face every few minutes with the back of your free hand. Your flak vest is trying to strangle you. There is dust all over the place, making it that much harder to see. There are friendlies nearby. They're supposed to be on your flank, but are they? There are enemy combatants to your front, but they've hidden in a crowd and they don't wear uniforms. Is than an AKS or just a big stick in that kid's hands? Your ears are ringing from the M60 being fired right next to you, and when you can't hear things, it takes one more of your sensory inputs away from you. Now you're relying purely on your vision. What if that guy waving at you at the intersection 100 meters away is a friendly, who lost his helmet somehow? Is he shouting? What is he shouting at you?
All of this business about virtual combat training is crap. There's a reason small unit combat courses aren't virtual. There's a reason Ranger School, BUD/S, and the Q Course aren't virutal. You train to fight. The closer you can replicate the real experience in training, the more likely you'll do the right thing reflexively in real combat.
Still, even with all that training, I find it difficult to believe that anyone truly "knows" what they will or will not do when forced to fire a weapon in combat. The military training makes it more likely that you will react as you have been trained, but there is only one way to find out for sure.
The GP's point was that customers are worse than VCs and there are more of them.
I've been involved in starting two businesses, and have worked as a contractor to a few VC-funded firms. In my experience, VCs are worse than customers. Customers generally don't dissemble. They're not trying to get something for nothing. To please customers, you provide a service or product they want at a price they find acceptable. Customers can be very demanding, but their demands are not difficult to understand, and they're usually not difficult to meet.
Pleasing VCs and anticipating the myriad ways they can screw you is much more difficult. I don't think I'm alone in this view; it represents the experience of many people who endured the Dot-Com era in Silicon Valley. I'm sure there are some people whose experiences during that time didn't leave such a bitter aftertaste, and there may be people now who are finding the VCs they work with to be less than draconian.
I'm torn on this issue. On the one hand, the Chinese government is restricting free speech, and US companies are assisting in that effort. On the other hand, I believe that in general engagement is the best way to cajole repressive governments into better behavior. There are limits to this, of course. Discerning those limits is difficult. For example, why are we not similarly purturbed with American activities in Russia, even though everyone knows the last vestiges of Russian democracy are slipping away. How much of the current reaction to American tech companies' involvement with China is really a reaction to growing Chinese economic power?
Another question: Would pulling Google, Cisco, et. al. from China actually help the Chinese people at large, would it harm them, or would the end result be neutral? Would we be harming our own economic interests for some tangible end, or would it be a hollow gesture, akin to the "Free Tibet" bumper stickers that make us all feel good, but are essentially pointless?
It sounds like I'm begging the question, because right now I am leaning in favor of keeping the US government from interfering with tech companies that do business in China. But I am still profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that American technology is being used to smother dissent. So at the moment, all I have is questions.
Find and read Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
Thanks for the tip. I'll hunt that one down at the bookstore. It sounds like an interesting, if discouraging, read.
I continue to hold out hope that the distributed medium of the Net will provide the impetus for a shift away from the idiocy of our current fast food news environment, but the fact that most Americans still get their news from the idiot box still astounds me. I pulled the plug on TV news about seven or eight years ago, and haven't regretted it for a minute.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, scientific analysis has affirmed the theory that The Mark of the Beast and RFID tags are one and the same. The Antichrist will manifest. After a period of sustained visitation by demons and hellfire, Category 5 fire and brimstone should begin raining down on Earth, followed by 100% eradication of humanity. The sorting of human souls will then commence, and all souls with Level 4 or higher Good Quotients will be diverted to Heaven for infinite happiness, while those with Category 3 or lower Good Quotients will be diverted to Hell for infinite damnation.
The facts all point to it.
You do realize there are thousands of people responding on this site right?
Absolutely. That's why I refered to the overall response, not to individual responses. My general impression is that for every true libertarian who is willing to take the consequences of true competition, there are another two or three who think of themselves as libertarians but are uncomfortable with the actual global competition.
how the often libertarian gestalt of Slashdot suddenly advocates government-sponsored trade protectionism as soon as the topic of *computer-related* jobs comes up. Farm subsidies are economically inefficient, and they distort the true price of food. The same thing is true of the oil industry. Why can't the government get smart and start allowing non-distorted prices for gasoline?! Obviously the government is in the hands of special interests. Ah, but then the subject of outsourcing comes up, and the tech industry is under threat and in need of assistance!
There's clear hypocrisy at play here. We want competition and open markets, we want global cooperation in open source software development, we just don't want to give up top dog status in areas that directly affect our jobs.
Made in China is fine and programming in India is fine, as long as the price of laptops keeps dropping. When a product is even a few dollars more expensive than average, Slashdotters are more than willing to scream and yell about it. Well, lower prices are the result of global markets. More buyers, more sources of cheap production.
We'd rather get cheap, well-made goods and donate to aid organizations than truly allow developing economies to compete with us.
Coincidence? I think not.
Given the fact that Apple lost its lawsuit against MS, the DoJ abruptly dropped its case against MS when Bush came in on his first term, and Al Gore is on Apple's board, I find it unlikely that Jobs has much pull with the federal government. That said, Apple is a major force in the tech economy right now, so the feds might be willing to give Jobs more of an ear than usual simply because he runs a high-impact, successful company.
So what's the problem?
The problem is that on Slashdot, if you're a marketer, you're evil until proven otherwise.
Of course, once you start up your own company and are competing against the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Sun, et. al., you realize that those competitors have tons of content on their sites, and thousands of inbound links, and all you have is a great product. So if you're smart, you'll start developing new content of your own that showcases your product, goes into detail about why the underlying technology is so good, describes how customers have used your product successfully, and so on.
There's nothing wrong in that, and it's not gaming the system. Ignoring the fact that search engines work the way they do would be an incredibly stupid move, particularly since it works to the advantage of your larger, better-funded incumbent competitors.
Who needs silicon valley?
Urban concentrations are still important because of the social networks they engender. In particular, Silicon Valley has a very strong network of investors, universities, and veteran entrepreneurs. Perhaps more importantly, the environment in Silicon Valley is one that embraces risk. In the Valley, having worked at a few startups that bombed is not a mark of failure. It's more like a badge of courage. It shows that you have some experience and that you've learned something. People here literally enjoy sharing tales about companies they started that flamed out.
That entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to take risks and try new things is what makes Silicon Valley necessary. When other regions start truly embracing this culture of risk-taking, Silicon Valley will no longer be the dominant tech innovator that it is today.
Until the issue of ownership is settled this whole case is moot.
Determining ownership is at the heart of the whole case. Sometimes the only way to prove something is to take it to the courts. The alternative is SCO claiming they own the code, IBM claiming they own the code, and nobody else being certain as to who really owns it. Tort law is often used to resolve differences of opinion just like this one. There's really no other way to settle the dispute in a way that will create certainty for both parties and for the industry at large.
Don't worry, despite all the so called pre-cautions it's virtually certain that we have executed innocent people. We have certainly executed mentally ill and retarded people.
I don't disagree with you. I recently saw a talk by a man who was removed from death row after a DNA exoneration. But the standard of proof in torts law is lower, and torts law addresses far different issues than criminal law. In particular, torts law is generally unconcerned with the defendant's intent, while intent is central in criminal law (and part of the reason criminal law is such a minefield). Torts law resolves disputes where one party (or multiple parties, in the case of class actions) has been damaged by the actions of another. Criminal law is used to deter acts that society considers to be so harmful that they require extraordinary sanction. Torts and criminal law are two separate domains.
Obviously there's some serious glue-sniffing going on in Lindon.
Darl: "Let's see. We're a UNIX company. We're taking on the world in litigation that will very likely fail. What we need is fresh, new, out of the box thinking!"
Dude from the Mail Room: "Umm.. Mr. McBride... umm.. I have an idea. Why confine ourselves to pissing people off by suing them? I read an article about this guy in Florida who is like, mega-rich because he is a spammer. See, I think we could make stuff that would help people get rich spamming people an' stuff, and it would piss people off in the process."
Darl: "Sweet! Kid, you're brilliant! Let me put this family-sized bottle of Crazy Glue down, so I can come over and hug you."
You're still assuming that the suit is frivolous. Just because the outcome is 90% likely to resolve in favor of one party does not mean it's a frivolous case. If there is a reasonable doubt as to the outcome, it's not frivolous.
Supposedly the we have given judges the power to throw a frivolous case out before it gets anywhere and cost people millions of dollars.
Defining "frivolous" is the problem.
Generally the term means "without legal or factual basis." If you are bringing an action for which there is no legal remedy, you are bringing a legally frivolous case. Stating that I made you feel bad, and therefore I should be put in jail is not a legal claim, and is therefore frivolous. If you took me to court, claiming that I had entered your home and burned it to the ground, but you had no evidence whatsoever of my entry and no witnesses, your case would be thrown out on factual grounds.
Short of circumstances so obviously one-sided, the reason for having courts at all in torts cases is to allow for nonviolent dispute resolution where one party feels it has been harmed by the other. The problem with applying a case-by-case standard of evidence is that it fosters unpredictability. The system becomes merely a conduit for the individual interpetations of judges. Torts law is already slippery enough as it is, and I certainly wouldn't want a judge to arbitrarily decide that my case was not strong enough to go to trial.
I'm also not sure this is going to be frivolous at all, because the outcome is likely to be a resounding win for IBM specifically and Linux generally. In that regard the original intent of the plaintiff might not be satisfied, but the case is serving a larger purpose in that it is clarifying a host of issues surrounding Open Source software.
Alas most judges do not exercise that right. They are perfectly happy to let any old case get to court no matter how baseless or silly.
You've been reading too many of those chain emails about the "outrages" of the legal system. I doubt very much that judges are "happy" dealing with cases that are baseless or silly. One of the most important things judges do these days is manage their caseload, in many cases by forcing parties to ADR (alternative dispute resolution). They get rid of cases that have no legal or factual claims, they push as many as they can to ADR, then they deal with the rest as they are able. Note also that the vast majority (about 90%) of cases never reach trial. That's not by mistake. The point is to provide a broad forum for resolving the dispute, balancing the need to hear all sides in a case with the need to maintain efficiency.
It's certainly not perfect, but I'd be more nervous about a system that short-changed the opportunity for people to have their grievances aired in court, at the sole discretion of a judge.
Amazing what a difference a few years makes, eh?
Remember back in 2000, when the big rumor (broken by the Great Drudge) was that Disney was gonna buy Apple?
Personally, I think Sony is going to buy Sun, so they can get into the thin client business. That's the real wave of the future.
Word of mouth, review websites/magazines, and even general newsy outlets like papers and slashdot.
Magazines survive because of advertising in their pages. Take away ads, and be prepared to pay a lot more for the latest issue of your favorite mag.
Websites are either supported by subscription fees (rare) or by advertising.
Newspapers generate almost all of their revenue from advertising. Take a look at the classifieds, job ads, home listings, and inserts the next time you pick up the Sunday paper.
You've seen those funny looking boxes with corporate logos at the top of Slashdot stories, right?
A losing party should not be allowed to drag out the proceedings hoping to force the opposition to spend money.
You are assuming that SCO is the losing party, but the case has not yet been tried. The jury trial isn't scheduled to begin until next February.
The system is deliberately set up to allow both SCO and IBM to file crossclaims, bring in parties that are necessary for full resolution of all the issues, and conduct thorough discovery. It emphasizes thoroughness over speed.
It is expensive and time-consuming, which is why most businesses would prefer not to bring lawsuits. SCO obviously brought suit because they realized they couldn't survive without a successful lawsuit. It was a desperate gamble, but before discovery, nobody actually *knew* that IBM would prevail, which is why it survived a motion for summary judgment. The facts were very much in dispute. Everyone talks about it as if at the moment the original complaint was filed, we all had the facts at our disposal to disprove the SCO case. But what if during discovery, SCO had come up with a "smoking gun" of some kind?
My point is that the judge's role is to be an impartial referee in the fight between SCO and IBM. A judge who decided the case before trial would have his decision reversed in a heartbeat.
If we operated under the so-called "English Rule", which is used throughout most of the world, the loser would pay costs. This would cut down on frivolous lawsuits, but it could also potentially stifle legitimate use of the courts by parties. There is serious and ongoing debate as to whether the English Rule system actually reduces the cost of litigation or leads to a more "just" outcome.
Advertisers and marketeers are the scum of the Earth
Annoying. Yes. Bothersome. Yes. Scum of the Earth? They win out over child molesters, animal torturers, and Jim Jones?
I know a few marketing folks, and most of them are decent human beings, just like you and me, trying to earn a buck. Plus, how do you propose to have commerce without advertising?
This was a US District Court case, at the lowest level of the federal judicial structure, and there are likely other decisions in other districts that may have come out differently.
Furthermore, the facts in this case don't look terribly good for the plaintiff. As others have pointed out, in a torts case you need to prove a harm. From the decision:
Brazos points out that the evidentiary record is completely devoid of any disputed facts indicating that Guin's personal information was actually on Wright's laptop at the time it was stolen, or that Guin's personal information is now in the possession of the burglar.The rationale for summary judgment in this case is clear, because the plaintiff can't provide any evidence of harm.
The author of the SecurityFocus piece further muddies the waters by giving it the title "Strict liability for data breaches?" Strict liability is imposed in torts cases for activities that are abnormally dangerous. The case in question was purely about negligence.
Most court cases are very fact-specific, and in this one the facts were such that the law of torts gunned down the plaintiff. It wasn't the specifics of statute, but the plaintiff's inability to prove he'd been harmed that doomed the case. Imagine if in order to win a torts case, you didn't have to prove that you had been harmed. Even emotional harm cases require some actual evidence of damage to the plaintiff. What if you were a sysad and someone in the office where you work claimed you had illicitly entered their computer and taken their private information, but they had no proof. Would you want your accuser to prevail?
For those opposed to violence, can you think of a better solution?
Yeah, the rule of law really sucks. You should come and live in Somalia. It freakin' rocks here! No lawyers. No taxes. *Everyone* has the fear of God in them. Oh, and the best thing of all: No bullshit personal data losses by stupid big businesses, because there are no big businesses. It's all nice and small and simple and manageable.
Come on out, and I'll set you up in a sweet little shack in the outskirts of Mogadishu. The occasional gunshots might wake you up at night, but I can lend you my earplugs.
Maybe that's just a bunch of nonsense, I haven't actually tried any of those dating sites, but you know what, if a jobs site as big as eHarmony made a claim like that, I'd try it.
Yeah, it certainly could all be crap. I'm quite happily married, so I don't know from experience one way or another. I read an interesting article about it in this month's issue of The Atlantic, and it seemed like they were making progress but most of the researchers realized that it would be several years before they would be able to match people as accurately as they'd like. I found that attitude rather refreshing, in stark contrast to the line of b.s. you get from job sites.
I want a social networking site that is oriented toward jobfinding, and that works. So far, there are social networking sites that purport to be all about helping people connect with jobs, but LinkedIn and their ilk aren't quite there yet. They're moving in the right direction, but it still has the feel of a Monster-type site with the social network info bolted on.
The hard truth is that none of the job-hunting sites are much better than a newspaper ad. You can search and match and quantify all you want, but at the end of it all, you'll still using a process that relies on an attempt to quantify human characteristics. If you are a non-traditional employee in some way, or if you are the kind of person who motivates teams very well, or if you are someone who can put out fires extremely well, during the initial vetting process your means of conveying these strengths are very limited.
This is just as frustrating for companies that are offering jobs. Managers looking for new hires vary in what they are looking for, obviously, but it is particularly frustrating if you are attempting to hire the right kind of person first, and the right position fit second. Management books frequently talk about hiring people who will fit with your team, people who can learn the specifics of the job, but have the overall aptitude and personality that make the most sense for the long haul. I've hired people who didn't know a damned thing about the specifics of their job, but excelled over people who had years of experience but the wrong attitude.
Currently the process, despite all of the wonderful bells and whistles, is still flawed. Employers can't find out much at all from a resume, and everyone knows they are really just used dispositively. If I am sifting through 100 resumes to find the ten people I need to interview, those resumes that have typos, or look goofy, or bother me for some other reason get tossed. Now that it's all being done online, there are more resumes to deal with, and you're still left with the nagging possibility that your evaluative criteria (must have 35 years Java development experience!) are excluding a few job hunters who might be perfect for your organization. I really would like to see some sort of combination of social networking and the kind of relationship analysis that dating sites are now embracing. Yes, that sounds absurd, but the psychological dimension of work is extremely important, and people who study relationships are far ahead of most management theorists in understanding how individuals relate to each other.
The factory model is supposedly dead and gone, a relic of the industrial age. Corporate America has moved into a new age where employees are freelancers and companies are scrambling to find the best talent. But how is that struggle defined? Look at Monster.com and see how you are forced to fit yourself into the tidy little boxes that their system requires. I don't think that sort of approach is more than an incremental improvement over the bad old days of searching the want ads every Sunday.
For now, personal networks still trump any other means of finding a job.
MS knows traditional shrink-wrap software marketing better than anyone. It seems they realize this search engine stuff is a new ballgame, but they haven't quite figured out that emulating cheezy operators like iWon isn't the way to go. If I want to get pimped, I'll go down to Quickie Mart and play Lotto.
Some people need experience to do this, but it would appear as if some people have a natural capability for it, or simply pick it up through a series of life-or-death situations. I'm not presumptuous enough to presume that I'd be Rambo in a combat situation, but I'm fairly certain I'd do a fairly good job keeping my head about me - at least compared to most others of untrained nature
That makes sense. I hadn't really considered analagous situations.
Most Americans don't get themselves into (or find themselves in, as the case may be) situations that compare to combat. However, I'm sure there are more than a few less fortunate souls who have had to confront life-or-death tests on a much more routine basis than most of us. Also, I think your point about self-knowledge is pretty accurate. If you know through actual experience that you can handle yourself in a "fight or flight" situation, your ability to gauge your probable reaction to a combat situation is probably better than that of Joe Armchair.
don't focus exclusively on dismounted infantry, where simulation is weakest.
Excellent point. My experiences at the NTC led me to believe that the tankers were getting much more valuable training than the light fighters were.
Why don't we start with criminal law. After all, I never received any instruction in any of my K-12 classes about the basics of criminal law.
The basics of contract law would probably be good to teach as well. After all, most people enter into contracts all the time without thinking about it.
Since tort law covers non-criminal actions that are harmful to others, I think we should give some instruction to students in tort law as well. After all, battery is a tort, and after they reach the age of majority, those students will be fully responsible for their own actions.
Now I'll take my tongue out of my cheek. Don't you find it odd that the only sort of law this guy wants to teach our students is law that most directly influences... drumroll, please... big content companies (and there are more than a few in the L.A. area, which is where his district lies).
I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation.
For most armies, the most important and difficult task they face is in training their young soldiers to accurately and deliberately fire their weapons at enemy soldiers. S.L.A. Marshall's classic work "Men Against Fire" first addressed this issue over 50 years ago, and although the statistics he cites in the book have been vigorously disputed, the gist of his argument is still true. So modern armies spend an awful lot of time and energy doing the sort of training you mentioned - running around in the rain and dirt and snow and mud, creating situations that are as close as possible to real combat. If you want to talk about successful training, don't look to video games. Look instead at the NTC and JRTC.
One of the things that no video game (in particular) or sterile target range training environment will ever reproduce is the uncertainty of combat. You are not operating in a pre-defined, bounded killing zone. Your squad leader is shouting something and you're trying to hear what he's saying. You hear the crack of an AK nearby, but your hearing is so screwed up that you can't tell where it came from. You're hot. You're tired. Sweat is running down into your eyes, forcing you to swipe at your face every few minutes with the back of your free hand. Your flak vest is trying to strangle you. There is dust all over the place, making it that much harder to see. There are friendlies nearby. They're supposed to be on your flank, but are they? There are enemy combatants to your front, but they've hidden in a crowd and they don't wear uniforms. Is than an AKS or just a big stick in that kid's hands? Your ears are ringing from the M60 being fired right next to you, and when you can't hear things, it takes one more of your sensory inputs away from you. Now you're relying purely on your vision. What if that guy waving at you at the intersection 100 meters away is a friendly, who lost his helmet somehow? Is he shouting? What is he shouting at you?
All of this business about virtual combat training is crap. There's a reason small unit combat courses aren't virtual. There's a reason Ranger School, BUD/S, and the Q Course aren't virutal. You train to fight. The closer you can replicate the real experience in training, the more likely you'll do the right thing reflexively in real combat.
Still, even with all that training, I find it difficult to believe that anyone truly "knows" what they will or will not do when forced to fire a weapon in combat. The military training makes it more likely that you will react as you have been trained, but there is only one way to find out for sure.
The GP's point was that customers are worse than VCs and there are more of them.
I've been involved in starting two businesses, and have worked as a contractor to a few VC-funded firms. In my experience, VCs are worse than customers. Customers generally don't dissemble. They're not trying to get something for nothing. To please customers, you provide a service or product they want at a price they find acceptable. Customers can be very demanding, but their demands are not difficult to understand, and they're usually not difficult to meet.
Pleasing VCs and anticipating the myriad ways they can screw you is much more difficult. I don't think I'm alone in this view; it represents the experience of many people who endured the Dot-Com era in Silicon Valley. I'm sure there are some people whose experiences during that time didn't leave such a bitter aftertaste, and there may be people now who are finding the VCs they work with to be less than draconian.
I'm torn on this issue. On the one hand, the Chinese government is restricting free speech, and US companies are assisting in that effort. On the other hand, I believe that in general engagement is the best way to cajole repressive governments into better behavior. There are limits to this, of course. Discerning those limits is difficult. For example, why are we not similarly purturbed with American activities in Russia, even though everyone knows the last vestiges of Russian democracy are slipping away. How much of the current reaction to American tech companies' involvement with China is really a reaction to growing Chinese economic power?
Another question: Would pulling Google, Cisco, et. al. from China actually help the Chinese people at large, would it harm them, or would the end result be neutral? Would we be harming our own economic interests for some tangible end, or would it be a hollow gesture, akin to the "Free Tibet" bumper stickers that make us all feel good, but are essentially pointless?
It sounds like I'm begging the question, because right now I am leaning in favor of keeping the US government from interfering with tech companies that do business in China. But I am still profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that American technology is being used to smother dissent. So at the moment, all I have is questions.
Find and read Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
Thanks for the tip. I'll hunt that one down at the bookstore. It sounds like an interesting, if discouraging, read.
I continue to hold out hope that the distributed medium of the Net will provide the impetus for a shift away from the idiocy of our current fast food news environment, but the fact that most Americans still get their news from the idiot box still astounds me. I pulled the plug on TV news about seven or eight years ago, and haven't regretted it for a minute.