chairface

Thank you for the reference - I agree, that's the most likely interpretation of the email. I wonder why this wasn't called out more strongly when the hedge fund was mentioned in the press release.

The only reference I found to their hedge fund said that it hasn't launched yet, not that it has failed.

You misunderstand. Your email _address_ (and mine) have already been leaked, shortly before Christmas 2011. What WikiLeaks is now publishing is a list of actual internal emails, as in, the content of their internal, private communication. Unless you were a source for them, or a buyer of their more confidential information, you won't be directly affected by this leak.

That's still not like sending a letter without an envelope.

And he's saying that this change is for the worse. He has made substantive arguments, and you have responded with a useless platitude.

This bit is inaccurate, as far as I can tell:

> it was also transmitting the data in “plain text.” This would be like mailing a private letter to someone without the envelope.

My understanding is that the data was transmitted over https, which is decidedly not like mailing a letter with no envelope.

There are no straw man arguments in this entire thread, let alone the comment you replied to.

I haven't read a whole lot on this - could you clarify on the ripping off of IP?

edit: I should have read the whole comment thread first - nevermind.

I dispute that the law "requires" prosecution.

It's still not a slippery slope. It's an analogy that illustrates what would be possible, de jure. Honestly, there's no slope involved at all.

I see no slippery slope in his argument. Singing Happy Birthday in public is actually a copyright violation, right now.

This is just a friendly suggestion to edit that second sentence - it threw me for a bit.

This sounds more like the original iTerm than the newer iTerm2 to me. They're separate projects.

Thanks for the info!

Strawman. A congressperson ought to either be an expert in those things, or listen to those that are.

I grew up less than a mile away from the Fox River, one of the worst in the state, and I must say, I never thought of myself as saddled with a horrible legacy. There are plenty of places to go if you like being in the water.

That's not to say that I don't think all the pollution sucks, I do, I just don't think it factors in very much to the everyday quality of life as much as say, the weather.

I grew up in Wisconsin, and until recently worked there. $120k seems an outrageous amount to me - where are your friends?

You posited a situation where a group of people (the artists and/or their representatives) got together for the purposes of tricking UMG into illegally issuing a DMCA takedown notice. You don't have even the slightest shred of proof. That is a conspiracy theory. Do I really need to give you elementary school lessons about your own words?

More ridiculous drivel. The "end result" of my life will be substantially different, depending on how I affect the people around me. Do you have anything to say that's even slightly true?

> If 'illegal' was as binary as you want to imply, then all penalties would be exactly the same

What a ridiculous statement, which bears absolutely no relation to what I said.

> This statement implies that UMG was making a deliberate effort to shut down MegaUpload's campaign

... That's because DMCA takedown notices require deliberate effort. Are you being intentionally obtuse?

> Don't get carried away with conspiracy theories

Followed by a conspiracy theory of your own:

> I also find it highly probable that this was a targeted effort to get the video into the sights of whatever process it is that UMG uses to issue notices

Classy.

> There is a difference between malice directed towards MegaUpload and (willful) negligence.

It's a difference that doesn't matter in the slightest. The organization is acting illegally, and people are rightfully angry about that. Who cares if someone's twirling their mustache? And why would a stereotypical corporate villain be worse than a system that is set up to screw people with the least resistance possible? It makes no difference whatsoever - only the outcome does.

edit: and I have to say that your insistence that people leave the legal stuff out of this, because you didn't explicitly mention it, is laughable. You realize that the DMCA is a law, right? And that this article is about a legal matter?

I reread it. It still looks like you're drawing a distinction between a person flagging an "infringing" work, and a bot doing the same. I still think that there is no practical use for this distinction. Where's the strawman?

We're floating conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence here now?

I see no practical difference between a human issuing illegitmate DMCA takedown notices, or using a bot to do the same. The difference to the affected party is nil. "The bot made me do it" is not a legal defense.

I'd say that's putting it nicely. His argument is so specious, I would hesitate to call it an argument. I've seldom read anything on employment where the errors in logic jump quite so far off the page.

Yes, the copying was primarily of visual design. Of course, in our opinion, it's a poor copy, but they got acquired and we didn't, so who's to say? I just don't see how it's unethical to try to improve on what someone else has done, which I'm sure is how companies in these situations think of themselves.

A lot of successful products are copies of something else, and more power to them. The company I work for* had a competitor make an "embarrassing copy" of our flagship product, and they managed to get acquired because of it. But you know what? I don't hold it against them, in fact, congrats to them. If anything it validates the space we're in.

* I'm deliberately not mentioning the company or product by name, because I don't particularly want to start a subthread about this situation - the particulars would detract from the point I'm making.

Where are the personal attacks on that page? I see none.

I have read every comment of yours on this thread, and in an effort to be charitable, I have taken a few days to digest your points regarding the status of unvested shares.

It occurs to me that in multi-founder situations, founder shares typically vest as well. As a founder, if your startup made it beyond the "risky period" before you were fully vested, would you think of it in the same way if your unvested shares were clawed back? I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that the answer is no. And this is why your position is immoral, reprehensible, and hypocritical. It's not "one way to look at it", it is being self-serving and twisting facts to justify altering the deal, Vader style.

I'm sure you've made it onto more than one "people/companies I'd never work for" list.