But yeah, "background music", either via speaker or headphone, is otherwise usually about as conducive to productivity as leaving a television on within visual range. I think the reasons that we keep answering those surveys otherwise, is really that on at least a subconscious level we want to be paid for listening to music we like.
I think the reason is that, in fact, they do improve productivity in many real world work environments. Not because "listening to music" improves productivity (which, as TFA notes, it doesn't), but because it decreases productivity less than the office chatter that it often serves to mask.
Effective active noise-cancelling headphones without music would be even better, but active noise cancelling headphones that work to shut out distractions when they aren't being used to play music (etc.) are more expensive.
I really do not see what Linus's problem is with the GPL3.
I don't know about Linus, but my problems include (but are not limited to) the fact that it restricts available software functionality and imposes restrictions on the use (without distribution) of software, contrary to the whole point of free software, and that it creates difference classes of users, with different rules that apply when targetting them.
The first is "Tivoization". Vendors should not hardwire checks to prevent "unapproved" software from being run.
I disagree, and so (in a different way) does the FSF, apparently. I disagree in that I think this rule is entirely unnecessary, the FSF appears to think that vendors of business hardware should may legitimately need to do this, but vendors of consumer hardware should not. Personally, I think that software freedom is enough, and hardware restrictions of the type imposed by the GPLv3 anti-tivoization provisions on "consumer" devices are not only unnecessary, but actually antithetical to software freedom. This is particularly the case because a mechanism for addressing the same concerns that is consistent with software freedom is suggested by the text of the GPL -- just require that hardware with which GPL software is distributed have specifications that are available under a particular set of license terms, and which is available on the terms as the software source.
Such a check really is software no matter that it's been hardwired in.
So? Since when does software freedom involve limiting the available functionality of software?
With a scheme like that in place, you can't fix so much as a typo let alone a simple bug.
Sure you can. You may not be able to deploy it on the original hardware, but that's a different issue.
Linus is apparently okay with Tivoization.
So is the FSF, so long as the user who wants the freedom to select a device with that feature is part of the privileged class of "business" users. Consumers who might prefer tamper-proof devices, and the manufacturers who want to sell to them, are locked out by the GPLv2.
It's simple: Add rules to any position of public office restricting the revolving door of private industry. Make those in power commit to avoid working for those they are regulating or accepting "contributions" from them.
If the best paying positions by a wide margin for people with knowledge in the field are in private industry, then -- while this might have some effect on regulatory-capture-through-career-planning -- it would also assure that few competent people would ever enter the regulatory agency in the first place. The imbalance of resources and skill between private industry actors with lots of profit on the line is itself a source of effective regulatory capture, as regulators are dependent on information.
Equally importantly, ethics rules governing regulators don't address the problem of industry influence on the chief executives and legislators who define the boundaries of regulatory authority and the funding of regulators and control the composition of the courts to which regulatory decisions are appealed.
But class action lawsuits never deliver anything of real value to the people who actually suffered from whatever prompted the class action suit.
Sure they do, they provide notification of a potential cause of action that they are quite likely to have overlooked on their own. Potential class members are provided notice and an opportunity to opt-out and preserve the right to file individual, direct-action lawsuits.
Class actions are far from perfect, but they exist to deal with an economy of justice problem with diffuse harms (cases where they are available overlap, to an extent, with cases where regulatory agencies and states attorneys-general have the right to file claims on behalf of the public or affected specific citizens, but regulatory capture and other effects of corporate influence on government make them necessary.)
The reason corporations want to foreclose them is because they are often the only effective method of addressing harms, especially where the harm to each individual is fairly small. Mass direct actions have a lot more overhead to coordinate than class actions, and individual direct actions require essentially each plaintiff to bear the full cost of an action to prove the same points. This makes direct action, particularly individual direct action, impractical where the individual harm isn't very large but lots of people are affected.
Attempts to use an EULA to foreclose class action lawsuits ought to be void as contrary to public policy, since class actions are provided as a mechanism for economy of justice.
And even.Net is being deprecated by Microsoft in favour of the Tablet Formfactor Metro apps.
.NET isn't being deprecated in favor of Metro. It may be the case that, for client UI for non-web applications, Microsoft is favoring Metro-style apps over WPF or Windows Forms. But.NET isn't a client UI library (it has WPF, WinFomrs, and even Metro libraries), and preference for one UI-style over another is pretty much orthogonal to the use of.NET.
"This is contrary to law and sound economic policy" means ( "This is contrary to law" ) AND ( "This is sound economic policy" )
No, it doesn't. That would be written, "This is contrary to law and is sound economic policy." (More likely, it would be written, "This is contrary to law but is sound economic policy.")
When written correctly, with the Oxford Comma in place, it would have the intended meaning
There is no place for the serial (also known as "Oxford" or "Harvard") comma in that sentence, since where it is used at all, it is used in separating the final item in a series of 3 or more.
Nor would commas separating the elements do anything to tell you whether the common portion of the list ended with "is" or "to" and whether the first element started with "contrary" or was just "law".
If one was especially concerned about avoiding potential confusion of the meaning, one could rewrite the sentence as "This is contrary to both law and sound economic policy", but while that would be more explicit, it is unnecessary, but in any case throwing superfluous commas into the sentence doesn't help anything.
It is one thing to pedantic. It is something worse to be pedantic and wrong.
This sounds like going back to a variation on self-signed certificates.
Its not. Its a verification scheme orthogonal to certificate chains which can be used either alongside traditional certificate chain verification or without traditional certificate chain verification. It is compatible with self-signed certs, but equally compatible with CA-signed certs. Ideally, you'd use it with CA-signed certs, since CA-signed certs -- though they have known problems -- are better than nothing (unlike self-signed certs) on a first connection with no prior information, but after that TACK pins are useful to detect later CA-assisted shenanigans.
If you want a PKI based on signing certificates by CAs, the CAs need to be entities whose primary income does not derive from signing certificates.
No, what you need is an effective mechanism to detect and revoke trust in nefarious CAs. If CAs aren't trusted, they are of no value to potential clients, and thus the stream of income from signing certificates dries up. The problem isn't that CAs derive income from signing certificates, the problem is that there is no effective accountability mechanism that imposes sufficient consequences to make it so that improperly signing certificates reduces the marketability of that CA's signing services.
Or, the judge could consider 9 lines out of many thousands of lines in the original work as de minimis copying and admonish Oracle for bothering the court with trifles.
First, that's completely unrelated to the API issue [the 9 lines are implementation that was copied, not API], and, second, the judge already ruled (order dated May 10) against Google's motion asking for a judgement as a matter of law that rangeCheck was non-infringing that asserted a wide variety of arguments, including the de minimis one.
When it comes to damages they'll be lucky if they receive a sum which pays for their legal expenses.
Based on other similar cases by kinds of issues, length of trial, and counsel involved, estimates of Oracle's trial costs I've seen have been in the range of millions and possibly at over $10M. Unless they win the API copyright issue or get the patent verdicts reversed on appeal, the maximum damages they can get (since only statutory damages would then be on the table) would be $150K. So, yeah, they'd be lucky to get anywhere close to their legal costs out of this.
You can also choose to think that Google can do no evil, if you want.
I think that Google can do evil.
I also think that people who want to say that Google is doing evil ought to substantiate those claims. And, particularly in the immediate case, that some claiming that Google is doing evil by failing to adopt a policy that requires capability sniffing instead of UA sniffing for browser demos when supposedly there is some undefined group of other major browser vendors (which narrows the options down quite a bit) that, as a matter of policy, require capability sniffing instead of UA sniffing for a browser demo site analogous to Google's Chrome experiments site ought to be be able to point to evidence of other major browser vendors that do, in fact, have such a site with that requirement.
It's a great deal more important than even you are suggesting. If APIs are copyrightable, then Linux and *BSD just became illegal for implementing POSIX without a license from The Open Group.
This overstates the case. If the copyright on Java extends to include the APIs, the actual use of APIs to acheive interoperability could still be fair use. Judge Alsup's request that Oracle and Google provide further briefing on the applicability of the 9th Circuit's Sony v. Connectix decision (which addressed fair use in Connectix's copying -- as part of reverse engineering -- Sony's Playstation BIOS in the course of creating an emulator) would seem to indicate that he is considering whether to issue a JMOL that the copying of the APIs was fair use even if the APIs were protected by copyright.
There's still going to be a damages phase, but the numbers likely to be involved are so small that the sides agreed that the judge could set the damages himself,
That's actually not certain until we have the ruling on the SSO copyright. Per the May 16 Stipulation and Order, one of two things will happen:
1. Alsup will rule the SSO's aren't protected by copyright, in which case rangeCheck and the copied test files are the only infringements to consider. In that event, both parties have waived trial by jury and Oracle has waived any claim to actual damages or infringers profits, and Alsup will set an award for statutory damages only, and the trial will be done. (And the appeals will start.)
2. Alsup will rule that the SSO are copyrightable, in which case neither party has waived jury trial on any portion of the copyright damages, and the parties have agreed to a two-part trial on the SSO Claim damages (and, it seems, a separate part covering rangeCheck and the test files), so it looks like in that case there would be a three-phase trial on damages with a whole new jury.
If that assertion is correct then one can conclude that Google is the real entity that just got the ITC to impose a ban on the xBox.
There are many reasons why this is false, the most obvious being that no entity has gotten the ITC to impose a ban on the Xbox. Instead, an ITC Administrative Law Judge has made a recommendation to the ITC that if the ITC upholds that same judge's earlier determination that the Xbox violates several Motorola Mobility patents, then the ITC should impose certain remedies, including a ban on Xbox imports.
However, all this shows is that Google is not all about "do no evil". The fact they paid 25 billion to buy a company only to turn around and use it as a vehicle to sue another competitor pretty much seals the fate that Google is about as cantankerous and vile as any other corporation.
Not only was this suit filed long before Google bought Motorola Mobility, but the ALJ's initial determination of patent violation also occurred before Google bought Motorola Mobility. The only thing that has happened after Google bought Motorola Mobility is that the ALJ issued his recommendation to the ITC of what the ITC should do about regarding a remedy if the ITC upholds his determination on the violation.
All of the relevant actions of Motorola Mobility and Microsoft that contributed to the ALJ's recommendation occurred before the Google acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
So you can't really make any credible argument about Google based on this ALJ decision, even if it made sense to argue that retaliating against Microsoft's patent lawsuits against Motorola Mobility was an evil action on the part of Motorola Mobility, which it doesn't.
Further, this was Motorola suing Microsoft, no Motorola Mobility, which Google fully acquired just a few days ago.
On this point you are incorrect. From the ALJ's Recommendation (Footnote 1, p. 2): The complainants are Motorola Mobility, Inc. and General Instrument Corporation of Horsham, Pennsylania (collectively, "Motorola".)
It's ridiculous. Both this action by Motorola (Google) and the patent system in the U.S. Do you really think it's good ban all sales of XBOX360 because there is (supposedly) some video playback algorithm used in XBOX360 that Motorola has patents for?
The patent system is problematic, particularly as regards software patents.
OTOH, Motorola would have been foolish not to pursue actions like this that are available under the current legal regime when Microsoft was pursuing similar actions against Motorola. (e.g., the one over Motorola Android phones generating meeting requests, which resulted in an ITC import ban on them.)
Unilateral patent disarmament on Motorola's part might be good for Microsoft, but not for anyone else, and especially not for Motorola.
Microsoft's point is also perfectly good. Banning Xbox360 will do serious damage. If you want to play any current generation AAA games, then your choice is Sony's PS3.
I'm having trouble seeing that as "serious damage".
This sort of scam is far too common. It's time that stores had updated cash registers that would display a picture of the item when the code is scanned so that it if is obviously different, it has a good chance of getting noticed. It would mean adding a display facing the checkout clerk right above the scanner, and it would require having someone take a photo of each item when it first goes on sale--the latter could be provided by the vendor.
And it would require checkout clerks to actually look at each object as it is scanned and making checkout slower (a competitive disadvantage for whichever firm adopted it first), and it would play holy hell with products that change packaging without changing SKU where a particular store might have examples of both new and old packaging on the shelf.
Doesn't the VP of a company as huge as SAP make enough shitloads of cash without robbing a toy store? $30k, isn't that like two months' salary or something?
Sometimes, people steal who have no rational financial reason to do so. Certainly, this has been seen with celebrities who have been busted for shoplifting, and perhaps more similar to the SAP VP there was Claude Allen, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President Bush and head of the President's Domestic Policy Council (and who Bush had previously unsuccessfully attempted to appoint to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals) who resigned from the White House after being caught -- but before beign charged with felony -- in a series of fraudulent returns, also at Target (totalling about $5,000 over several months, less than half a month's pay at his $160,000 White House salary.)
Holy hell, what about no? There's a huge reason why hospitals try to keep off networks, especially public ones.
Facilitating exchange via networks is a major purpose of an EMR system, so this isn't generally the case with EMR systems, or (transitively) with devices that interface with EMR systems.
Do you really want to connect all the timing devices in a hospital to an outside public server? Because running it yourself does no good, it can just fuck up all the devices in the hospital.
NTP inside the organization that is synced by one of the broadcast time signals (GPS, FM time broadcasts, etc.) from outside of the hospital would address this concern, if you really were dealing with a hospital that wanted no internet connection to the outside world.
The suit alleges that only big time investors were apprised that rising use of mobile would affect revenue. This was known to everyone weeks ago, well before the IPO.
Actually, it alleges that only big time investors were given specific revised revenue projections related to that effect.
There's a difference between a vague qualitative description of the effect of mobile and specific quantitative revenue projections based on that effect.
Even if the reduced outlook had been more widely publicized, it wouldn't have made a difference. Everyone had stars in their eyes hoping to make it big. Would a 150 P/E ratio have deterred someone who was OK with a 100 P/E ratio?
Doesn't matter, because that's not the right comparison.
The right comparison is 100 P/E ratio with a (relatively) positive outlook for future revenue vs. a 100 P/E ratio with a (relatively) negative outlook for future revenue.
And to make the argument that that doesn't make a difference, you have to argue that people were buying stock at a 100 P/E ratio not based on expectations about future revenue.
I'd agree with this when it comes to the bank, but how is this Facebook's or Mark Zuckerberg's fault?
My understanding is the basis is because the IPO underwriters revenue projections are material which is required to be disclosed by the company in when doing an IPO (and which was, but only in the earlier, more optimistic, form). Material changes to information that is in the mandatory disclosures which is known to the company and not properly disclosed is a violation of securities laws.
From some of the stories (haven't seen the actual lawsuit text) there appear to also be allegations that one or more Facebook executives were involved in the selective release of the revenue projections to privileged investors, which IIRC would be a different breach of securities laws -- one connected to insider trading -- than failing to make a mandatory disclosure.
I've seen demos that were using UA sniffing taken down by other UA vendors before. It's hard to provide evidence that something has been removed, obviously...
So, you are asking us to believe, with no evidence beside your word, that browser vendor demo sites that have posted rules on submissions also have secret rules prohibiting UA sniffing, that they don't announce (when announcing those rules would, unlike keeping them secret, actually encourage demo developers to build demos accordingly.)
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I think the reason is that, in fact, they do improve productivity in many real world work environments. Not because "listening to music" improves productivity (which, as TFA notes, it doesn't), but because it decreases productivity less than the office chatter that it often serves to mask.
Effective active noise-cancelling headphones without music would be even better, but active noise cancelling headphones that work to shut out distractions when they aren't being used to play music (etc.) are more expensive.
I don't know about Linus, but my problems include (but are not limited to) the fact that it restricts available software functionality and imposes restrictions on the use (without distribution) of software, contrary to the whole point of free software, and that it creates difference classes of users, with different rules that apply when targetting them.
I disagree, and so (in a different way) does the FSF, apparently. I disagree in that I think this rule is entirely unnecessary, the FSF appears to think that vendors of business hardware should may legitimately need to do this, but vendors of consumer hardware should not. Personally, I think that software freedom is enough, and hardware restrictions of the type imposed by the GPLv3 anti-tivoization provisions on "consumer" devices are not only unnecessary, but actually antithetical to software freedom. This is particularly the case because a mechanism for addressing the same concerns that is consistent with software freedom is suggested by the text of the GPL -- just require that hardware with which GPL software is distributed have specifications that are available under a particular set of license terms, and which is available on the terms as the software source.
So? Since when does software freedom involve limiting the available functionality of software?
Sure you can. You may not be able to deploy it on the original hardware, but that's a different issue.
So is the FSF, so long as the user who wants the freedom to select a device with that feature is part of the privileged class of "business" users. Consumers who might prefer tamper-proof devices, and the manufacturers who want to sell to them, are locked out by the GPLv2.
If the best paying positions by a wide margin for people with knowledge in the field are in private industry, then -- while this might have some effect on regulatory-capture-through-career-planning -- it would also assure that few competent people would ever enter the regulatory agency in the first place. The imbalance of resources and skill between private industry actors with lots of profit on the line is itself a source of effective regulatory capture, as regulators are dependent on information.
Equally importantly, ethics rules governing regulators don't address the problem of industry influence on the chief executives and legislators who define the boundaries of regulatory authority and the funding of regulators and control the composition of the courts to which regulatory decisions are appealed.
Sure they do, they provide notification of a potential cause of action that they are quite likely to have overlooked on their own. Potential class members are provided notice and an opportunity to opt-out and preserve the right to file individual, direct-action lawsuits.
Class actions are far from perfect, but they exist to deal with an economy of justice problem with diffuse harms (cases where they are available overlap, to an extent, with cases where regulatory agencies and states attorneys-general have the right to file claims on behalf of the public or affected specific citizens, but regulatory capture and other effects of corporate influence on government make them necessary.)
The reason corporations want to foreclose them is because they are often the only effective method of addressing harms, especially where the harm to each individual is fairly small. Mass direct actions have a lot more overhead to coordinate than class actions, and individual direct actions require essentially each plaintiff to bear the full cost of an action to prove the same points. This makes direct action, particularly individual direct action, impractical where the individual harm isn't very large but lots of people are affected.
Attempts to use an EULA to foreclose class action lawsuits ought to be void as contrary to public policy, since class actions are provided as a mechanism for economy of justice.
No, it doesn't. That would be written, "This is contrary to law and is sound economic policy." (More likely, it would be written, "This is contrary to law but is sound economic policy.")
There is no place for the serial (also known as "Oxford" or "Harvard") comma in that sentence, since where it is used at all, it is used in separating the final item in a series of 3 or more.
Nor would commas separating the elements do anything to tell you whether the common portion of the list ended with "is" or "to" and whether the first element started with "contrary" or was just "law".
If one was especially concerned about avoiding potential confusion of the meaning, one could rewrite the sentence as "This is contrary to both law and sound economic policy", but while that would be more explicit, it is unnecessary, but in any case throwing superfluous commas into the sentence doesn't help anything.
It is one thing to pedantic. It is something worse to be pedantic and wrong.
Its not. Its a verification scheme orthogonal to certificate chains which can be used either alongside traditional certificate chain verification or without traditional certificate chain verification. It is compatible with self-signed certs, but equally compatible with CA-signed certs. Ideally, you'd use it with CA-signed certs, since CA-signed certs -- though they have known problems -- are better than nothing (unlike self-signed certs) on a first connection with no prior information, but after that TACK pins are useful to detect later CA-assisted shenanigans.
No, what you need is an effective mechanism to detect and revoke trust in nefarious CAs. If CAs aren't trusted, they are of no value to potential clients, and thus the stream of income from signing certificates dries up. The problem isn't that CAs derive income from signing certificates, the problem is that there is no effective accountability mechanism that imposes sufficient consequences to make it so that improperly signing certificates reduces the marketability of that CA's signing services.
First, that's completely unrelated to the API issue [the 9 lines are implementation that was copied, not API], and, second, the judge already ruled (order dated May 10) against Google's motion asking for a judgement as a matter of law that rangeCheck was non-infringing that asserted a wide variety of arguments, including the de minimis one.
Based on other similar cases by kinds of issues, length of trial, and counsel involved, estimates of Oracle's trial costs I've seen have been in the range of millions and possibly at over $10M. Unless they win the API copyright issue or get the patent verdicts reversed on appeal, the maximum damages they can get (since only statutory damages would then be on the table) would be $150K. So, yeah, they'd be lucky to get anywhere close to their legal costs out of this.
I think that Google can do evil.
I also think that people who want to say that Google is doing evil ought to substantiate those claims. And, particularly in the immediate case, that some claiming that Google is doing evil by failing to adopt a policy that requires capability sniffing instead of UA sniffing for browser demos when supposedly there is some undefined group of other major browser vendors (which narrows the options down quite a bit) that, as a matter of policy, require capability sniffing instead of UA sniffing for a browser demo site analogous to Google's Chrome experiments site ought to be be able to point to evidence of other major browser vendors that do, in fact, have such a site with that requirement.
This overstates the case. If the copyright on Java extends to include the APIs, the actual use of APIs to acheive interoperability could still be fair use. Judge Alsup's request that Oracle and Google provide further briefing on the applicability of the 9th Circuit's Sony v. Connectix decision (which addressed fair use in Connectix's copying -- as part of reverse engineering -- Sony's Playstation BIOS in the course of creating an emulator) would seem to indicate that he is considering whether to issue a JMOL that the copying of the APIs was fair use even if the APIs were protected by copyright.
That's actually not certain until we have the ruling on the SSO copyright. Per the May 16 Stipulation and Order, one of two things will happen:
1. Alsup will rule the SSO's aren't protected by copyright, in which case rangeCheck and the copied test files are the only infringements to consider. In that event, both parties have waived trial by jury and Oracle has waived any claim to actual damages or infringers profits, and Alsup will set an award for statutory damages only, and the trial will be done. (And the appeals will start.)
2. Alsup will rule that the SSO are copyrightable, in which case neither party has waived jury trial on any portion of the copyright damages, and the parties have agreed to a two-part trial on the SSO Claim damages (and, it seems, a separate part covering rangeCheck and the test files), so it looks like in that case there would be a three-phase trial on damages with a whole new jury.
There are many reasons why this is false, the most obvious being that no entity has gotten the ITC to impose a ban on the Xbox. Instead, an ITC Administrative Law Judge has made a recommendation to the ITC that if the ITC upholds that same judge's earlier determination that the Xbox violates several Motorola Mobility patents, then the ITC should impose certain remedies, including a ban on Xbox imports.
Not only was this suit filed long before Google bought Motorola Mobility, but the ALJ's initial determination of patent violation also occurred before Google bought Motorola Mobility. The only thing that has happened after Google bought Motorola Mobility is that the ALJ issued his recommendation to the ITC of what the ITC should do about regarding a remedy if the ITC upholds his determination on the violation.
All of the relevant actions of Motorola Mobility and Microsoft that contributed to the ALJ's recommendation occurred before the Google acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
So you can't really make any credible argument about Google based on this ALJ decision, even if it made sense to argue that retaliating against Microsoft's patent lawsuits against Motorola Mobility was an evil action on the part of Motorola Mobility, which it doesn't.
On this point you are incorrect. From the ALJ's Recommendation (Footnote 1, p. 2): The complainants are Motorola Mobility, Inc. and General Instrument Corporation of Horsham, Pennsylania (collectively, "Motorola".)
The patent system is problematic, particularly as regards software patents.
OTOH, Motorola would have been foolish not to pursue actions like this that are available under the current legal regime when Microsoft was pursuing similar actions against Motorola. (e.g., the one over Motorola Android phones generating meeting requests, which resulted in an ITC import ban on them.)
Unilateral patent disarmament on Motorola's part might be good for Microsoft, but not for anyone else, and especially not for Motorola.
I'm having trouble seeing that as "serious damage".
And it would require checkout clerks to actually look at each object as it is scanned and making checkout slower (a competitive disadvantage for whichever firm adopted it first), and it would play holy hell with products that change packaging without changing SKU where a particular store might have examples of both new and old packaging on the shelf.
Sometimes, people steal who have no rational financial reason to do so. Certainly, this has been seen with celebrities who have been busted for shoplifting, and perhaps more similar to the SAP VP there was Claude Allen, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President Bush and head of the President's Domestic Policy Council (and who Bush had previously unsuccessfully attempted to appoint to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals) who resigned from the White House after being caught -- but before beign charged with felony -- in a series of fraudulent returns, also at Target (totalling about $5,000 over several months, less than half a month's pay at his $160,000 White House salary.)
Facilitating exchange via networks is a major purpose of an EMR system, so this isn't generally the case with EMR systems, or (transitively) with devices that interface with EMR systems.
NTP inside the organization that is synced by one of the broadcast time signals (GPS, FM time broadcasts, etc.) from outside of the hospital would address this concern, if you really were dealing with a hospital that wanted no internet connection to the outside world.
Actually, it alleges that only big time investors were given specific revised revenue projections related to that effect.
There's a difference between a vague qualitative description of the effect of mobile and specific quantitative revenue projections based on that effect.
Doesn't matter, because that's not the right comparison.
The right comparison is 100 P/E ratio with a (relatively) positive outlook for future revenue vs. a 100 P/E ratio with a (relatively) negative outlook for future revenue.
And to make the argument that that doesn't make a difference, you have to argue that people were buying stock at a 100 P/E ratio not based on expectations about future revenue.
True. But then agan, neither are "mandatory disclosure" or, on the negative side, "insider trading".
My understanding is the basis is because the IPO underwriters revenue projections are material which is required to be disclosed by the company in when doing an IPO (and which was, but only in the earlier, more optimistic, form). Material changes to information that is in the mandatory disclosures which is known to the company and not properly disclosed is a violation of securities laws.
From some of the stories (haven't seen the actual lawsuit text) there appear to also be allegations that one or more Facebook executives were involved in the selective release of the revenue projections to privileged investors, which IIRC would be a different breach of securities laws -- one connected to insider trading -- than failing to make a mandatory disclosure.
So, you are asking us to believe, with no evidence beside your word, that browser vendor demo sites that have posted rules on submissions also have secret rules prohibiting UA sniffing, that they don't announce (when announcing those rules would, unlike keeping them secret, actually encourage demo developers to build demos accordingly.)
The part of the old Motorola that did Cable STBs is the part that was spun off as "Motorola Mobility" and purchased by Google.
So, while the second half of your sentence is true, its irrelevant to the first half.