Jam vs. jelly

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Here in the U.S., we're getting jammed.

Get a grip

The IOC is investigating Canada's gold-medal-winning women's hockey team for daring to have beer and cigars on the ice after they beat the U.S.

Grow up, get a grip, stop being such priggish puritans. Try to enjoy life.

The Canadian women earned their celebration. I didn't want them to win, but they did. Let them enjoy their party.

Update (3/1): Here's a send-up.

Outrage, fine

... but no censorship. Google shouldn't be picking and choosing what we can see, and they already allow each of us to choose to exclude offensive images.

"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results," it says.

The American answer to offensive speech is more speech.

"I am absolutely disgusted by this picture, but the Internet has thousands and thousands of offensive images. Should Google get rid of all of them? Where do you draw the line?" [Jerry Wright of Hoboken, New Jersey,] ... said by phone.

Other countries have different answers.

"There is no way to defend this heinous incident," Alheli Picazo of Calgary, Canada, told CNN by phone. "People often claim their right to free speech to mask blatant racism and insulting bigotry, and always seem to get away with it. When it comes to issues of discrimination, hiding behind free speech just doesn't cut it."

I greatly prefer our ironclad First Amendment guarantees.

Update (11/26): Clarity in the first paragraph.

Slandering Teilhard

I've been following the Juxtacomm v. Ascential et al patent saga for years, especially for the past year on Vincent McBurney's now-silenced blog. Some pretty harsh things have been said on all sides, especially by the self-appointed defenders of management but also by various factions of shareholders. I've said some pretty harsh things, too, mostly to those same shills, though little if any of it related to their alleged very tiny penises.

I back down from nothing!

This suit was bullshit from the beginning. Its standing resulted from a commonplace failure of the US Patent and Trademark Office to know its ass from a hole in the ground where it comes to software. Patent 6195662 should never have been granted due to plain prior art. In nearly all its claims, it wasn't novel. Where it was novel (data bags and separate handling of some aspects), it was obvious. Anyone who ever coded an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool - and I worked on more than one - would know that.

Now Teilhard management has apparently announced to their shareholders that they will pursue slander lawsuits against people who have hurt their widdle feewings in the blogosphere. I say "apparently" because, as is the case with everything Teilhard does, they try to keep it as closely held as possible, and I don't have access to their shareholder announcements.

Wow! The people you begged to invest in your lawsuit, now you're suing?! Because they've been impatient for you to fulfill their perception of your pitch promises... Because they've gone years expecting, rationally or not, a dividend just around the corner and they've yet to see even a thin dime. Go read a Yahoo stock chat board for comparison. You think you've been slandered? Get a grip. Criticism comes with this gig.

My advice to Teilhard management: Take off the pull-ups, put on your big boy underwear, and try to sleep through the night without wetting the bed or suing your mommy for your night terrors.

Of course, Teilhard management is mainly threatening to sue the company's own private shareholders, which certainly suggests a different agenda. Unless otherwise convincingly explained, I'd say their agenda is not the recovery of their so-called reputations but instead the suppression by fear of debate, dissent, and organization by concerned shareholders.

In the U.S., we'd call this a SLAPP suit, and it would be grounds for rapid pre-discovery dismissal in some jurisdictions. Canada has a similar law, maybe better than the typical American patchwork. Anyone who would use lawyers as bullies deserves to be slapped down.

You can have my First Amendment when you pry it from my cold dead mouth.

Previous Teilhard posting.

The bait not taken

A couple of days ago, I received an odd email about Juxtacomm v. Ascential. Unless my correspondent (who, again, could be totally innocent) spoofed his email header, his ISP is in Calgary.

The redacted text is:

My name is __________ and I am a medium investor in Teilhard. I have noticed that you have posted quite a bit in the blogs, past and present and seem to be quite knowledgeable in the industry. I seem to recall that you work(ed) for one of the defendants in the original group. I was wondering if you could answer a few questions?

Let me know if you have the time. I would really like to call you rather than email, so if it is possible, let me know how to get in touch and the best time to call.

Thanks in advance.

Innocent enough on first blush, but after all that Teilhard management has done to suppress open communication about their company, I don't think I was clinically paranoid to think twice. Colloquially paranoid? Sure.

This could still be innocent. I just don't know what questions I'd be willing to answer I haven't already posted about. At this point, the suit's over, and it's hard to see what I might have to offer privately.

I'll tell you this: No way I'm going to have a phone conversation that might expose me to caller ID. But I'm also not going to email back. There's just too much information in a mail header, especially if I were foolish enough to email while inside the corporate firewall (yes, the corporate address is visible even if you're mailing from the web interface of a personal account).

Has anyone else received an email like this?

Previous Teilhard posting.

Lawyers in Juxtacomm v. Ascential

Had a few spare minutes at lunch six or seven weeks ago to Google up a few links related to this case and found that lawyers are beginning to tout their participation. At the time, I decided not to help the plaintiff by posting this, but that's moot now.

Here are a few of the items I found:

Akin Gump for the plaintiff you all know about.

The most interesting item is from CA's lawyer:

While this matter remains ongoing, CA was able to settle during discovery for an amount that was very beneficial to CA.

Hmm. CA owns InfoPump, which IBM was arguing as prior art. I guess the Teilhard management shills have to believe this guy's lying when he says "very beneficial."

Others:

• Microsoft's guy
• IBM's guy
• Even Sybase's guy is out there

I'm sure there will be more to follow now that this case has concluded.

Lest you think only Vincent McBurney and I believe the prior art arguments, here's yet another technical source who's mystified by Teilhard's patent trolling success so far.

Previous Teilhard thread.

Won't hear this on talk radio

A Canadian in the U.S. debunks myths of Canada's single-payer health care system:

[I]f the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.

A whiff of influence

No, not that nasty smell in my study due to a dead mouse in the walls. That whiff I can cover up with a scented candle - until I decide that's worse.

The influence? Someone who has actually posted on this blog (probably) is on CNN's list for Secretary of Commerce. Guess I won't be hearing from "goolsbee" any more. Of course, after that foofaraw about NAFTA and the Canadians early in the campaign, I'm skeptical, so maybe he will be back here.

Please don't leave me to the tender mercies of the wingnuts!

Shut up and go away

No, not you Hill. Your husband.

I'm not one of the majority of Democrats who want Hillary as VP. I have to admit my opposition is not reasoned; it's instinctive (what we call it when we choose by gut). I'm ready for someone new. I'm tired of Bill and his perpetual media circus (even though it's not all his fault).

Jennifer Granholm would be perfect. Would Canada cede her birthplace, Vancouver, to allow it? They'd have to do it retroactively.

Nah, still not Constitutional, though I'm sure the Republicans would consider it. After all, they ran two Texans in the last two elections, despite the Electoral College rules about that.

The good old days

Remember when Big Pharma told us how dangerous drugs from Canada would be? Now they're buying ingredients from the cultural equivalent of meth labs in China:

Many workshops that make crude heparin are unregulated family operations.

Data mining vs. connecting the dots

The NSA is collecting your email. Does it have to go offshore? No, they only have to have a reasonable belief it's going somewhere outside the U.S. Like, maybe, Canada, 'cause we know we can't trust anyone who's so damn polite.

Are they keeping your email for posterity? Who knows? Probably. I mean, they're scanning it for keywords and analyzing context, so the temptation to archive it has to be great. My suggestion: If you have anything you want to keep secret, disguise it as spam; there's no way they'll keep all of that.

Of course, the NSA data mining program is a state secret, so no one is allowed to know this for sure. It's just obvious. If someone could prove it, he might have standing to sue, and the Supremes already bolted out that procedural escape hatch, so that they didn't have to face the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment.

I'm sure they're not interested in your correspondence with Amy, Mistress of Pain. But just in case, better mention Cialis or Viagra whenever you beg her for mercy. And you'll have to tell her that you'll cut up your credit card if she keeps threatening to give you a jihad-on.