Thursday, October 24, 2013

Abuse of Power Behavior, Meet Consequences

Late 2011 I posted about the jackass who pepper sprayed a bunch of kids for absolutely no reason. He was a University of California Davis campus police officer. I'm still stunned thinking about the restraint of each and every one of those students in the video... I'm glad my 20 year old self wasn't there. I'm pretty sure at that age my righteous rage would have gotten the better of me -- I would have tackled and restrained him and probably sparked a riot. It's just difficult to watch one human being abuse another one, doubly so when the abuser holds a position of trust and authority.

I have wondered what happened to that guy and saw this today. I assumed he would be fired and, well, I was right. Turns out he was fired after a stint on administrative leave and went on disability due to stress. The school payed him 38k for disability and ended up settling with the students.

Friday, October 4, 2013

Decisions and Consequences

I don't know all the details-- there were probably confidentiality agreements-- but I do know that HTC opted to start paying patent blackmail (aka patent licensing) fee to Microsoft. HTC's other option was to lawyer up and fight to defend the free and open source operating system on which they based their phones. HTC's phones would not exist if not for the work shared in the commons by scores of companies and individuals.

I got my HTC phone before this all went down, but I'll never buy another. Samsung is the new king of Android based phones now. In some small part, I think HTC's behavior helped that change along.

HTC posted a loss of 101 millon in last quarter. I wonder how many units they shipped? Rumor has it, the patent deal was $5 per unit. I'm betting that five bucks a phone give away is looking pretty bad about now.