Posts by Turtle 1888 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2010
"The whole thing is nothing more than the state acting as hired thugs for crooked companies (manufacturers, pharmacies, other villains in the medicine racket) to prop up a racket whereby the the American people get scammed, time and time again."
Here is the link to the AP story: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_GOOGLE_ADVERTISING_INVESTIGATION?SITE=PASUN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT from which I will quote: "A separate U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigation into drugs that claimed to be manufactured in Canada found that 85 percent of the drugs examined came from 27 different countries, including some that were found to be counterfeit, said Kathleen Martin-Weis, acting director of the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations."
Now if you want to dispute that, go ahead. But do it with something from a reputable source, 'kay?
Perhaps YOU see something in the story that says that their forfeiture is serveral times as large as the revenue received from the ads they ran? No? Didn't think so. So your point is... what, exactly? That they surrendered the revenue received and perhaps end up not much worse than they would have if they had not run the ads? Perhaps you were incapable of inferring my idea is not Google should end up *no worse off* or "not much worse off" than if they not accepted the ads, but *much, much worse off*. See the difference there?
Perhaps the reason that *you* ignoring the first sentence is *also* short-term memory failure?
It would appear that you too could use a reading lesson. What the article says is "The settlement covers the gross revenue Google received from the illegal advertisements and the gross revenue made by the Canadian pharmacies from sales to customers in the US.'
What *I* said, is that I want the fine to "exceed, several times over, the profits garnered by Google..." There is nothing in the article that states that that is what the outcome of the settlement and fine/forfeiture will be.
That there have been no prison sentences handed out, is completely unacceptable. And those would need to be *lengthy* prison sentences.
And if this size of this fine does not exceed, several times over, the profits garnered by Google, then that too is unacceptable. Because I would not be surprised if payment of this fine still leaves Google with a profit from the activities for which they are being fined.
"Linux developers are generally a benign bunch, unlikely to start raising capital to fund what would be a lengthy legal case,. . ."
Didn't Bruce Parens attempt to sell or license his rights to Busybox - even though at that point, he didn't actually have any such rights? ( I am sure that someone here knows the story better than I do.)
Also, it only takes ONE developer to agree to let a lawyer take the case on a contingency basis.
Furthermore, I do not see how, legally speaking, moving to GPL v3 can possibly restore any licenses that were lost as result of violations of v2. Now of course I am not a lawyer but it simply seems absurd.
I would like to look at this in some detail.
"Readers need only cast their minds back to a damning report published by the public administration select committee (PASC) last month that lambasted over-reliance on big IT firms in Whitehall over many years."
That seems to be about the size of the firms being awarded contracts, and does not actually touch up whether tose firms supply open source or proprietary software.
"The cross-party group of MPs, whose committee is chaired by Tory politico Bernard Jenkin, labelled the IT-buying culture in central government as an "obscene" waste of taxpayer money."
Neither this quote nor the one immediately following show or imply that the "'obscene' waste" is due to the cost of licenses for proprietary software, as opposed to other factors. In fact, it does not even ascribe this waste to any particular cause, let alone to the use of proprietary as opposed to open source.
"But despite all the open-source rhetoric, openistas including Red Hat, Alfresco and Sirius Corp were shunned by the Cabinet Office after a pilot - set up using OSS components - was overlooked on 5 August in favour of a proprietary system."
Nothing that you have cited shows any promise on the part of the government to use open source in all situations, no matter how it compares to proprietary solutions.
"The minister had this to say, for example, in November last year: There are competitive processes, but actually the way we do procurement is often excluding smaller suppliers from the process. . . Very costly, very over-engineered and it isn't the open competition that we want to see that really does drive value and drives innovation.""
Again, nothing in those statements speaks to the question of open source vs proprietary; the matter being discussed seems to be the size of the supplier, and nothing beyond that.
"He also called on open standards and interoperability as key components in IT systems."
Did he mention what other factors trump this, and what other factors are trumped by it, in any given situation?
"Finally, McCluggage said he wanted the use of open source software within government to become normal practice. Notably, those plans had simply built on a pre-election Tory pledge that stated it wanted to "create a level playing field" for OSS within Whitehall."
That does not seem to imply that open source will be chosen over proprietary software every time, in all circumstances. Actually, it is still possible for open source, on a level playing field, to lose every time.
"The winning bid was assessed as providing value for money. It was comprehensive and scored highest when compared with the other bids on the basis of its ability to fulfil the functional requirements."
And your reasons for thinking that this is not true are...?
"How can you preach 'Openness' and 'New Suppliers to Government' while simultaneously locking yourself even further into Closed and Proprietary with the same old suppliers to government?, asked Taylor..."
Again, nothing in the article seems to state or imply that open source will be chosen over proprietary software in all circumstances regardless of all other factors involved.
"Either Cabinet Office are leading the change, as they claim they will, or they are entrenching the same old practice, which is what they seem to be doing."
Can you show that requiring open source software in this particular instance will be more effective and cost effective than the proprietary solution that was chosen?
------------------
To sum up: stop whining, and prove that there was an open source solution that was superior to the one chosen. That you feel that open source should have been chosen solely on ideological grounds might be sufficient for you, but there are other people who are not impressed.
Well, the thing is, that the Oracle suit against Google is not a patent suit. It is a copyright infringement suit. Even if we disregard the fact that MMI's patent portfolio has not prevented them (MMI) from getting sued by Microsoft and Apple, I do not see how any MMI patent can possibly help in a copyright-infringement suit. Care to explain?
"I don't think £7 or £8 a month for all-you-can-eat music is so terrible"
..until the time comes to disburse it - "it" being whatever remains after deducting the expenses of keeping track of who listens to what, and who gets what.
To change the subject, I think that tech companies need to pay for things in the public domain against which they run ads. There is NO reason for these tech companies to become the inheritors of all the value of all humanity's cultural works and achievements - in fact, the very thought is repugnant. These tech companies need to be forced to pay for the privilege of using these works, and the revenue that those works generate must contribute to society, and the world at large, and not merely the bottom line of rapacious web companies such as Google.
1) What makes you think that Apple, a corporation with much more money than Google, and *much* more experience in winning patent infringement suits, would be intimidated by Google's lawyers - even if Google's lawyers were armed with MMI's already-proven-to-be-non-deterring patents?
2) Much more to the point, if Google wanted to help its Android partners against Apple, it would first apply to the judge in whatever litigation is ongoing for permission to intervene - like Apple itself did in the Lodsys case. They could also offer to indemnify their partners, or pay for their defense - neither of which they have done. They would not *start* by spending $12.5bn for MMI and a patent portfolio that has not protected Motorola from Apple, and *then* pay their lawyers to assert these already-proven-to-be-non-deterring patents against Apple. Well, not in the real world, anyway.
Now, if I understand Andrew correctly, then he
1) Doesn't buy into the MMI-as-a-patent-defense theory, but
2) Also does not buy into the "closing Android, and building a walled garden to make it like the iPhone" motivation for purchasing MMI; but
3) Considers Google's purchase of MMI to be a mistake - or worse, a blunder - pure and simple.
Wouldn't all this taken together make Google's best course of action to be breaking the MMI deal, paying the $2.5bn, and then purchasing InterDigital?
As far as I could tell, Solomon Grundy was talking about standard prices for the right to legally use an image or video, whereas you are talking about penalties assessed in court proceedings for copyright infringement. Obviously these are two very different matters, and the payments involved have nothing to do with each other.
Florian Mueller points out that Motorola's patents didn't protect it from patent suits by Apple and Microsoft. Why will those patents be more efficacious for Google? And it would seem that some of Motorola's best patents are FRAND-encumbered and therefore not powerful weapons.
Care to respond?
Thanks in advance!
There's a little backstory to Schwartz' blog posting; see http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2348832&cid=36882124 by a former Sun engineer.
Just on the off-chance that you are not inclined to look at the link, let me paste the former Sun engineer's summary: "Schwartz's blog should not be taken as an indication that Sun knew about and approved what Google was doing with Android. What it does prove is what a lot of people knew then but wouldn't say: Schwartz was a clueless loud-mouthed buffoon who happily fiddled away on his blog as SUNW burned."
So Schwartz' blog posts might not really weaken Oracle's claims against Google, but they might entice Google into open a can of worms in front of a jury that Oracle might be able to use to show Google's duplicity.
"(Google needs to) forget trying to out patent those twats at MS/Oracle/Apple and whoever else is benefiting from the ludicrous patent system and lobby the governments of the world to overhaul software patents, ban them even."
Evidently you either...
1) Do not realize that Google's whole empire is built on a single patent (the PageRank patent), or
2) Think that Google needs to conform to your view of what the world should be, and destroy their multi-billion-dollar-a-year business for the sake of your worldview.
3) Both of the above.
*sighs*
"I'm with Google on the patent thing - they think it sucks, and really don't want to spend $4BILLION on a portfolio. Why would they."
Because, irrespective of what they think about other people's patents, *that* is the world in which they live and operate, and continuing to simply continue operating as if other people's patents have no validity or legal force is a *very poor business strategy* - and not merely for them, but for their partners too.
As an aside, Brin's suggestion that Robert Levine give away his book instead of selling it shows just how out-of-touch with reality these despicable people are. He and his clique have personally earned billions of dollars in as parasitic fashion as possible - running ads against other people's content, (not to mention their aiding and abetting IP and content theft) - and he now seems to think that Levine (and everyone else) should be willing to work for free, and be satisfied to know that his work is only worth a pittance that will be captured by Google.
In spite of Google's loathsomeness and self-serving policies, this seems to be a clash between two important principles. I don't know about anyone else, but I am not at all on whose side I want to be on this issue. I suppose that I will just have to wait to see the actual laws that the EU proposes (with the understanding that I am in the USA.)
Particularly enjoyed this passage: "The DoH . . . recently admitted to the committee that ending the contract with CSC could be more expensive than allowing the company to complete the project."
I guess your DoH administrators went to the same schools and took the same courses in administration as your Ministry Of Defense officials.
Nice.
"Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android – and having us pay for the privilege – must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. "
So, they didn't want to defend themselves by buying the patents because it would have prevented them from using the patents to attack others.
The phrase "hoist by their own petard" comes to mind. . .
One has to wonder whether this delusion-based penchant for investing in "Web 2.0" is starving other enterprises, in *all* areas of the world-wide economy, of funds. There was a time when people would invest in new modes of transportation, or industrial processes, or basic and applied scientific research. Sadly, too much of the world's investment funds and human intelligence seems to be devoted to "serving the perfect ad" to as many people as possible.
It's really sickening.
So, when you learned from the Climagegate ruckus that UEA has been refusing for years to let their data be scrutinized, you immediately reevaluated your opinion of their work and of global warming, right? Or need research only be independently verifiable when it conflicts with your opinions?
"If the results had shown the opposite of what he claims to have measured, I very much doubt they'd have seen the light of day." And if his results were the opposite of what they were and if he had published them anyway, you would have no problems with him, with his results, his CV, or any other opinions of anything else that he might entertain.
So you have decided to cope with the cognitive dissonance occasioned by the Climategate emails etc by pretending it never happened. Good strategy. It enables you to ignore the fact that the theory of global warming is built on cherry-picking of data (for example, from the "hottest tree in the world!) the undermining of scientific procedure and peer review, the falsification of data (hi James Hansen!), and in general more dishonesty than you will find in the health-supplements industry.
Or perhaps you too feel that the best way to address criticism of a purportedly scientific theory is to attempt to sue, for libel, the journal publishing the criticism?
Or do these things only matter when global warming is being challenged?
Someone once opined, on these very comment pages, that Google always seems to have some grandiose plan in the works, and that the actual reason for these plans is not really to introduce a product or service, but to maintain their share price by hyping those products and services before they are introduced. As absurd as such an idea seems at first glance, one really has to wonder if it is not actually true.
"Pity about how much things started going wrong when Thatcher and Reagan listened to the monetarists and Keynsian economics went out of fashion in the eighties."
Well I seem to recall that both Thatcher and Reagan were elected *well after* the economies of their respective countries were hobbled and decaying due to policies that had already been in place for years and years. . .
A "PR release" and an "indictment" are not the same things, at all. "Indictments" are handed down by grand juries, and as such, have no relation whatsoever to "PR releases".
This is an important point for you to know, especially as the article is speaking about an "indictment" and not a "PR release". Notice the references to "court documents".
Now one difference between a "PR release" and an "indictment" is that, theoretically, someone can write pretty nearly whatever they want in a "PR release" but an "indictment" enumerates "criminal charges" that a "prosecutor" intends to "prove" in a "court of law".
These are all good things for you to know.
"I'm sure we'll hear a defense that he was really only surreptitiously downloading all of this data in order perform some type of statistical analysis on it."
Or maybe he will claim that he is an asspie, and therefore not responsible for his behaviour! Certainly there are any number of specialists who would be willing to make the diagnosis from a few paragraphs in a story on some random sites on the internet.
And I am *sure* that Mrs MacKinnon would very much like another defective son, or equivalent.
This is a very good point: "By the way: "Not for profit" or "charitable" does not mean "cannot pay obscene amounts of money to employees" [. . . ] It's a good way of avoiding corporate taxation whilst still raking in the (personal) income".
The percentage of people here in the US who understand this principle is appallingly low. Tax-exempt foundations, charitable organizations, and similar schemes, are to my mind one of the biggest scandals in the US today. And I would be surprised if it were any different in any other country that allows such entities to exist.
I see nothing in the original article to indicate that this was a "small claims" court of some sort. Even if it was, then it is *still* quite brazen, and pointless, of Apple to refuse to pay a court-ordered award - or maybe simply pointless, if it is as easy to collect an award from a large company with many assets as it is here (in the US).
If it was not a small claims court, then it *is* brazen. Courts tend to look at such behaviour as if it were a species of lese majesty. A bit surprising that they were not found in contempt of court, but then again, I suppose that the court might well be satisfied with the award having been successfully collected.
"Apple Korea did not respond to the ruling. Following the decision, Apple Korea had refused to pay compensation. The court seized 1 million won from Apple Korea's bank account for payment of compensation to the complainant after deducting 2,000 won in remittance fees."
Having read this, I immediately had an image of Steve Jobs being told that Apple Korea had lost a lawsuit, and thereupon falling on the floor in a frothing-at-the-mouth tantrum, screaming "I won't pay I won't pay I won't pay!".
That a corporation in any country would simply *refuse* to pay court-ordered compensation defies belief. Or it *would*, if it weren't Apple.
It will be interesting to see how the Korean courts react to belittled in this manner.
"For all we know hoovered 16 homeless people off the street and claimed they are members of anonymous."
You, along with some other people here, might not know this, but in order to obtain an arrest warrant, the FBI or any other law enforcement agency must to apply to a judge for one, and show "probable cause". An "arrest warrant" is based, therefore, on an assumption of guilt.
As for my "scary notions of justice", that's as may be, but it *is* in accordance with the way the law operates.
You know, there seems always to be some ignoramus who likes to say "Innocent until proven guilty" while not even knowing that the principle only applies to juries: a *jury* is not allowed to start with a presumption of guilt, or to presume that arrest implies guilt.
Secondly, a person is *guilty* of a crime, or any action, if the DID the action. Whether they will be found guilty in a court of law, and what that means, is a different matter entirely. (Maybe you can find someone to explain to you, in suitably simple terms, the concept of "criminal responsibility": you might learn that a person can be found both to have committed an action, and yet be "not guilty" of it cf. M'Naghten Rules, various concepts relating to diminished capacity, etc etc etc.)
But, at any rate, since *I* am not serving on a jury, and since *I* have "freedom of speech" guaranteed to me by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, *I* can, therefore, presume *anything* I damn well please, and say so whenever I damn well please, paying no mind to an ignoramus with a platitude.
It appears "Anonymous" is not really all *that* "anonymous".
I don't know about anyone else, but I was surprised to see that the arrested participants were adults (from a legal point of view, anyway.)
It will be interesting to see how many will offer to roll on their comrades, and if they have even have anything of value to tell.
One need not "get off one's high horse" to deplore ill-timed, out-of-place, and stupid actions that accomplish *nothing useful* except obtain some publicity for the idiot that commits the action, while, at the same time, distracting attention from more important matters - the actual parliamentary hearing. One need merely detest out-and-out stupidity.
That's exactly right, as far as I am concerned. Here we have what is a rare instance of a very powerful individual having his illegal dealings exposed to public scrutiny, and some brain-damaged half-wit has "a better idea".
Idiots like this, and like those idiots who attacked Sony (and Sony's users) repeatedly, do nothing but make Sony and Murdoch look like victims. If anyone thinks that some people will not now begin to equate "parliamentary hearing" with "shaving cream pie" then they really do not understand how the world works.
Well I just looked that the UK Uncut website, hopefully to join a forum there and tell them what I think about it, but they have a notice on their site that says "Murdoch pie was not a UK Uncut action" ( http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/blog/murdoch-pie-was-not-a-uk-uncut-action ),
Frankly I would not be terribly surprised if they were lying. . .
"Microsoft, Apple and others are just as interested as Google are in your private information."
While that may be true, the *fact* of the matter is that no one has gone nearly as far as Google in getting that information. That's a pretty significant point and one that is worth keeping in mind.
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