how many hands do you have :)

The story could largely be reduced to: Giant Multinational sues Giant Multinational; both gain support of other Giant Multinationals while World's Most Powerful Government sides with plaintiff Giant Multinational.

The EFF needs to 100,000x larger to influence this level of game.

Throw shoes at Ellison. 10000s of shoes with flyers in them about FSF ;)

This is just another iteration of BSD vs UNIX.

This is so silly. It's like every toy compiler has to pay a license because it looks like "C", even if you make money and other software with it.

As long as they did not "literally" steal the code, I don't see any reason to bother with Oracle's defense.

The same thing happens with MPAA and others, where the actual creators hardly get much but "abstract" corporates get a lot. How long should the copyright law hold? No more than the lifetime of the author. They have made a corporation an abstract person, giving it all sorts of inalienable rights. Lulz ... if that's how you want to go, every time someone in a company commits suicide, the entire corporation needs to be charged with murder and the entire team needs to be thrown in jail and be charged for murder. Every privacy violation would be espionage charges .....

Actually as a corporate person companies are restricted in a very important way: they cannot represent themselves in court, whereas a general partnership can present a partner in court. The fact that directors are employees and only some shareholders may be members actually divided the powers innate to a real person and causes it to be impossible to present a single individual capable of acting in full cognisance and responsible liability for the incorporated company. This saves the law from unimaginable pain.

> they cannot represent themselves in court

So a corporation can screw many people with legalese, pretending to be everyone's friend and no one gets blamed. It sounds like a convenient loophole to me.

What the fuck is the CEO for then? Its comical because most people treat corporations as the CEO. A vs B is very different from naming names.

The government caused the phone monopoly and the slap on the risk had nothing to do with Microsoft's missteps when it came to the internet and later mobile. Microsoft still has the same dominance on the desktop that they had during the 90's.

The government definitely played a role in AT&T's monopoly, but to say they caused it is playing it very fast and loose.

Even before the government sanctioned their monopoly, AT&T was becoming a monopoly using strategies that the feds were arguing were anti-competitive and in violation of antitrust laws. You could argue the government first acquiesced their monopoly with the Kingsbury Commitment in 1913.

In the '20s and '30s, the government allowed them to resume buying up local carriers and established the FCC to set rates, but there was still tension and antitrust suits up until the '50s.

Like any relation, the government's and Ma Bell's was always "complicated".

they were pursuing a number of antitrust cases against them. Needless to say, AT&T's relationship with the federal government and regulators wasn't static over the next 60-70 years. Sometimes it was at odds, sometimes it was symbiotic.

The action in the 90's wasn't to break up their desktop dominance, it was to prevent them using that power to dominating the internet too.

That might have been their goal, but do you really think that it had anything to do with the rise of Google, Facebook, Amazon and the resurgence of Apple?

What had more effect on IE being toppled by Chrome, the government or the most popular website advertising it on their front page and bundling it with third party downloads?

If Microsoft had built adblockers into IE from the beginning there would be no Google. But that was a strategic error, not due to law. And people were definitely on the Google bandwagon in part because of Microsoft. The "do no evil" motto was a direct shot at MS, and everybody felt relief.

Only the geeks cared about the “do no evil”.

Fair point.

Local Loop Last Mile CLECs Yup I remember 1994 very well like yesterday in fact.

It was the control over individual customers that mattered not any particular market. The ‘94 act would have been quite prescient to be defending open internet access when first drafted in the early eighties.

But they were on their way to owning internet communication. They were trying to make it so the only way to communicate was to use office products with Internet Explorer. Fortunately, they didn't get very far.

You mean "better" I hope, not "worse". Nobody else comes close.

It's hard to say exactly what "living memory" should mean, but let's call it WWII. The worst would then be FDR, followed by LBJ or Obama. All caused great harm.

Nixon is an interesting one. The major screw up was relations with China. Other than that, he wasn't bad.

Warren Harding

Except that ... Benghazi was an error, no corruption ; the IRS did not target conservative groups, Obamacare did not mandate you change doctors in any way ..

Normally I assume it is stupidity rather than malice, but now ...

"IRS Apologizes For Aggressive Scrutiny Of Conservative Groups"

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-...

Clinton blamed Benghazi on a YouTube Video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JtWTQ9AzwEk

Well if we're playing loose with language and all:

- the IRS didn't target conservative groups specifically, they just chose to stand down the audits on billionaires and add extra auditing of groups with particular keywords in their name, keywords such as; tea, party, people, patriot, country, or 9/12 to name a few. These tax exempt or applied for exempt status groups were likely funneling money and investigation was needed. Results inconclusive.

- Affordable care act mandated that you could keep your doctor. And you could. You just might not have been able to keep or afford to keep your health care plan. So it's really the fault of the people who didn't keep or couldn't afford to keep their plan, giving the ACA a bad rep.

And my personal favorite, - Hillary may Have ordered action taken on contractors and other actors when she released sensitive documents about certain employees from her private server.

I normally attribute such things to malice, but I've learned to never underestimate the gullibility of people who listen to MSNBC, CNN and occasionally FOX.

>>IRS did not target conservative groups

Then why did lois lerner plead the 5th?

Because there was absolutely nothing to be gained from testifying. Conservatives were going to go after her regardless of what she said, so why talk at all?

It's the ultimate "don't talk to cops", nothing you can say can ever help you and everything you say can hurt you, except Congressional Republicans don't even have to adhere to the very low standards that cops do. They can literally just say whatever, so there is flatly no upside in talking to them at all.

Pretty Ironic that this is the excuse you’re going with after all the times your party lambasted Trump for doing similar things. Your belief in the ends justifying the means is the root of all your hypocrisy. People are sick of hearing why it’s ok for you but not for them. You will lose badly this year as a result. For god sakes you have Bloomberg running after half your party was just outside occupying wall street no less than 3 years ago.

> For god sakes you have Bloomberg running after half your party was just outside occupying wall street no less than 3 years ago.

Independent of all the other points under discussion, I'm not sure how this is a fair a critique? It's not like there's a vote to decide who gets to run in a primary; the whole point of a primary is to vote to see who gets to run, and that isn't anywhere near being decided yet. If five months from now he gets nominated, that's another story, but there's not much evidence to suggest that will be the case.

It's a fair critique when he went from 4% to 19% in two weeks after spending 400 million on TV ads. I mean we all know the DNC will choose whomever they want because of their superdelegates, but don't act like democrats aren't starting to view him as their best option.

You aren't the victim of division, you are the creator of it.

> It's a fair critique when he went from 4% to 19% in two weeks after spending 400 million on TV ads

It's a testament to the power of completely controlling messaging people have about you because you are buying so much airtime to send your message and most of the country is at best vaguely aware of you otherwise, but I suspect as post-debate polling rolls in we're going to see Bloomberg, as many others have before, is going to realize the sharp limitations that often runs into in campaigns (Trump's 2016 performance notwithstanding.)

> I mean we all know the DNC will choose whomever they want because of their superdelegates.

Superdelegates have no first-ballot voting rights[0], as a result of reforms pushed successfully by the Sanders faction after the 2016 election.

> but don't act like democrats aren't starting to view him as their best option

Sanders is the one with a wide and widening lead, so, no, your description isn't accurate (and despite claims that this is just because there are more centrist candidates, in the few primary head to head polls he clears an absolute majority head-to-head against each of the other major candidates.) Sanders is who the Democrats are increasingly seeing as their best choice.

[0] well, unless the outcome is certain because of a pledged-delegatr majority, in which case they can vote though it won't change the outcome.

I'm not sure why your comment is stated in the second person; I have not voted in any primary, participated in any caucus, responded to any survey, or joined any sort of political association with regards to the 2020 election. I understand (and happen to disagree with) the point you're trying to make, but I don't understand why you're implying that myself or other commenters on Hacker News are personally responsible for who is running in the primary.

> For god sakes you have Bloomberg running after half your party was just outside occupying wall street no less than 3 years ago.

OWS movement peaked about 8 years ago, wasn't anywhere close to half the size of the Democratic Party, and mostly consisted of people not in the mainstream of either major party.

But, in any case, Bloomberg is free to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to allow the other candidates to preview how they’ll go after a candidate like Trump, though it's weird to see someone volunteer to be a tackling dummy, much less pay for the privilege.

Casually state talking points as fact without citation. Proceed to call the commenter stupid and malicious. Projection perhaps?

I mean, "casually state talking points as fact without citation" is exactly what the original commenter did, so I don't see why the responder should be held to a higher standard.

There's a reason why we don't like political topics on HN, and this thread is proof.

Agreed. What led me to make my comment was more the name calling (“stupid” & “malicious”).

More commonly known as Hitchen's Razor, Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur never ceases to be true in these situations.

You seem to be confusing three concepts: "corruption", "mistake", and "scandal".

- Ordering IRS to target conservative groups

> Initial reports described the selections as nearly exclusively of conservative groups with terms such as "Tea Party" in their names. According to Republican lawmakers, liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, but at a lower rate than conservative groups. The Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee issued a report, which concluded that although some liberal groups were selected for additional review, the scrutiny that these groups received did not amount to targeting when compared to the greater scrutiny received by conservative groups. The report was criticized by the committee's Democratic minority, which said that the report ignored evidence that the IRS used keywords to identify both liberal and conservative groups.

- Obamacare / You can keep your doctor

I'm not sure "compromise to allow _any_ version of a bill to pass rather than being blocked by Mitch McConnell" (who, lets not forget, famously said that he would block any of Obama's legislation, regardless of its merit or good for the country, just to block it) is "corruption".

- NSA PRISM Surveillance System

PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration.

- Holder committing perjury multiple times

Did Obama have the power of puppetry over Holder's actions, alleged or actual?

How do you compare this to Trump explicitly blocking his administration from testifying, multiple times?

Thank goodness Obama was scandal free, and good thing we keep catching Trump trying to expose all those crimes committed by Obama administrators (Clinton emails & Russia, Biden & Ukraine, Obama & Iran, Loretta Lynch and Clinton Tarmac meeting, Comey & FISA, etc...).

dont forget the Dijon mustard, how dare he.

You understand that the Obama administration oversaw an illicit investigation of a political rival on the basis of the Steele dossier, which was bought and paid for by the DNC. The FBI and CIA knew the Russia narrative was false and pushed it anyways. Look if you need a Progressive source for this info because you can't appreciate alternative points of view, then Jimmy Dore did a very good job of breaking it down:

https://youtu.be/HjPgO57AzjQ

I believe that investigation started before the Steele dossier. Steele was fuel on an already raging fire.

I forget how much Carter Page was a political rival of Barack Obama somehow.

Thanks for the reminder.

Carter Page was not the real target.

FISA warrants cover two hops. If person Y communicates with both X and Z, a FISA warrant on person X will allow spying on person Z. In this case person X is Carter Page, and person Z is Donald Trump. It is certain that a suitable person Y exists. Such a person would be anybody who communicated, no matter how briefly, with both Carter Page and Donald Trump. Numerous journalists would qualify as person Y.

One of the most jarring things about the impeachment saga was Trump supporters defending him by saying "all presidents do it". Fundamentally the issue is norms are easy to break if a bunch of people don't know what they are and don't care enough to find out.

You may be missing the point. When you look past the double standard, the criminality (collusion, corruption, embezzlement, lies, favorable pardons and lack of prosecution) is disproportionately on one side.

And of course there’s the tiny detail that Trump had to conquer the corruption of the Republican Party first to even broach the Democrats. See all the #nevertrump senators that prioritized #resisting Trump in spite of their constituents and his support amongst the party.

Lol. Mitt Romney, John McCain, Paul Ryan, Bill Kristol, both president Bushes and Jeb, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, James Comey, Robert Gates, Schwarzenegger, and literally dozens of Republican Congressmen all prove you wrong.

When exactly did you realize you were living in a Fake News echo chamber where obvious facts don’t matter to you?

If you read the parent, its emphasis is on no conquering occurring. Obviously I made clear in the OP that I feel the corruption of the GOP was included in that. The justification that the McCains, Bushes and Romneys are more corrupt is available for anyone with a memory that extends beyond 2016, and there’s no need for you to emphasize your point that Trump is more corrupt. Your position is clear.

> > Trump had to conquer the corruption of the Republican Party

> You mean "increase," not "conquer."

“Conquer”, as in “forcibly assume control of”, seems quite accurate. Insofar as there was corruption in the Party before Trump, that corruption is now firmly in service to Trump.

It's been continuously escalating, like a ratchet strap, and I don't understand how you see this as much different than what previous administrations have done.

They just don't care about hiding shit anymore because nobody understands/does anything significant to revolt.