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Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

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331–340 of 366 posts

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So bizarre! It really shook my belief in Philips' competence at the time. I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. I would hate to think so ill of any of my friends or colleagues to think that they could believe such an obvious fraud.

> I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. Using a low hurdle to show it still failing is a good rhetorical technique, but you lowered your hurdle too far here. Yes technically specifying the order of 6000 segments takes more than 8KB. Because it takes 8.14KB. That's a rounding error. What could have been a useful ar…

8kb to specify the order of the clips, but not a single bit is used to describe a single pixel of a single frame.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the nineties, Philips was days away from signing a licensing deal for a revolutionary video compression technology that compressed whole movies down to 8KB. The former Philips CTO was a strong believer. And then the inventor died and nothing ever came of it. To be a fly on the wall during due diligence meetings between Philips engineers and management. https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-man-who-was-paid-e113000-f…

I did DD on that for another group of investors and caused them to walk away. Interestingly, they too were scammers but of a completely different level. I think the 'inventor' (loose use of the term, nothing really got invented) was a true believer, he basically thought that if only he could get his hands on some capital that he would be able to make it work. He simply did not have the background required to see that…

Roel Pieper -- anything to do with Pied Piper? ;)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYdLGz3XBE8

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did DD on that for another group of investors and caused them to walk away. Interestingly, they too were scammers but of a completely different level. I think the 'inventor' (loose use of the term, nothing really got invented) was a true believer, he basically thought that if only he could get his hands on some capital that he would be able to make it work. He simply did not have the background required to see that…

Roel Pieper -- anything to do with Pied Piper? ;) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYdLGz3XBE8

He's a windbag. I never understood how they could even think of making him head of Philips. And to this day he claims that Sloot's box worked. The group I worked for was a bunch of wealthy Dutch guys, several of whom ended up defrauding other investors. Great little world...

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It’s hard to take your views on sentencing seriously I have no idea why he had to surrender a year and a half of his life to a notoriously dangerous "correctional" institution for redistributing television streams. For profit or not. I think his incarceration represents an abuse of the system to protect sports monopolies. I genuinely wonder if it wasn't cruel and unusual. No offense but he clearly wasn't some elite…

Professional sports league games are the output of the efforts of thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital. The right to distribute video of those games are the largest part of how those leagues make money, as arranged by contracts and underpinned by intellectual property law.

This is not a case of "you're just bottling tap water". There is tremendous value created by these leagues as represented by their revenues. It is totally absurd to me that someone can believe stealing that intellectual property at scale is not a crime. It is no different than stealing a laptop. In fact, it's worse! The ease by which the scale of the theft can amplified is like stealing thousands of laptops. Do you believe stealing laptops and selling them is criminal?

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> it doesn’t really seem like you take accountability for your crimes. from the blog: > # Why the illicit digital transmission [charge]? > I definitely did this.

You cherry picked. That was only one of the charges. He minimizes or denies the legitimacy of other charges.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#336
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Textbook ad hominem fallacy.

His views on whether he takes responsibility for his crimes goes directly to the credibility of his views on sentencing/punishment of crime.

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. Using a low hurdle to show it still failing is a good rhetorical technique, but you lowered your hurdle too far here. Yes technically specifying the order of 6000 segments takes more than 8KB. Because it takes 8.14KB. That's a rounding error. What could have been a useful ar…

8kb to specify the order of the clips, but not a single bit is used to describe a single pixel of a single frame.

Yes. That's why it's "only enough to".

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#338
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the scam that the codec had the raw video in it, so the "files" could be made trivially small?

I mean, that would work. It's going to be the reason AI video compression works; people are okay with an AI model being 1GB but they wouldn't put up with libavcodec being 1GB.

>> people are okay with an AI model being 1GB but they wouldn't put up with libavcodec being 1GB.

If people are happy with the results of the libavcodec, you could rebrand it as "libavcodec-ai" and now you have a more effective codec that might be bigger, but is now palatable to users :-)

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did DD on that for another group of investors and caused them to walk away. Interestingly, they too were scammers but of a completely different level. I think the 'inventor' (loose use of the term, nothing really got invented) was a true believer, he basically thought that if only he could get his hands on some capital that he would be able to make it work. He simply did not have the background required to see that…

I've occasionally been asked by an investor to do DD on some inventor's idea. Whenever it's an obvious scam I turn down the job. If I tell the truth and say it's a scam, the "inventor" will sue me. If I lie and say the technology has promise, the investor will sue me when he loses his investment. There's no upside to a job doing DD on a scam.

>> I've occasionally been asked by an investor to do DD on some inventor's idea. Whenever it's an obvious scam I turn down the job. If I tell the truth and say it's a scam, the "inventor" will sue me. If I lie and say the technology has promise, the investor will sue me when he loses his investment.

Wouldnt the non-confrontational approach here be to agree with everyone on a benchmark, build up the benchmark, and showcase results?

Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JPM is out that money regardless ... probably most of it was spent an MBA entrepreneur who starts a business and sells it to you for $175 million through normal channels is not likely to spend the money. this wasn't a fund wiring scam.

She never had the full proceeds in her possession. Remember, she had investors. She was venture-backed startup. She likely only had somewhere between 10% and 25% of the equity at the time that she sold the company.

>> She never had the full proceeds in her possession. Remember, she had investors. She was venture-backed startup. She likely only had somewhere between 10% and 25% of the equity at the time that she sold the company.

How does this work for the VCs? Does JPMorgan claw back money from the VCs? What if the VCs distributed to their LPs...does money get clawed back from the LPs?

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