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nbatrades · 21 years ago

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Orlando Magic and New Orleans Hornets Swap Williams and Rooks

On February 19th, 2004, the Orlando Magic traded guard Shammond Williams to the New Orleans Hornets for center Sean Rooks.

Sean Rooks joined the New Orleans Hornets in the 2003 offseason, after signing a free agent deal. A 6-10 center with an ability to knock down midrange jumpers, Rooks had a small role in New Orleans as a backup.

The Hornets began the 2003-04 season without All-Star forward Jamal Mashburn who was out with a knee injury. Still, the Hornets began the year well, going 17-7 in the first 24 games. Mashburn later returned in late January and the Hornets remained a legitimate playoff contender.

At the trade deadline, the Hornets were fourth in the East with a 30-24 record. The team decided to make a small move, sending Rooks to the Orlando Magic.

Rooks was unhappy with his playing time. He appeared in 35 games, compiling 2.3 PPG and 1.4 RPG in 9.3 MPG. Rooks was in a crowded frontcourt with starter Jamaal Magloire and reserve Robert "Tractor" Traylor ahead of him in the rotation.

Shammond Williams signed a deal with the Orlando Magic right before 2003 training camp. A combo guard, Williams had a modest role, averaging 4.9 PPG, 1.2 RPG, 1.7 APG and 0.6 SPG in 14.2 MPG and 37 appearances.

The 2003-04 season was a disaster for Orlando. After winning the first game of the season at New York, the Magic dropped 19 consecutive games. During that 19-game losing streak, head coach Doc Rivers was fired and replaced by assistant Johnny Davis.

The Magic played slightly better after the infamous streak, going 7-3 over the next 10 games. However, the team could never recover and fight for a playoff spot. Orlando had an NBA-worst 14-42 record at the trade deadline when it made a couple of moves.

First, the Magic dealt starting two-guard Gordan Giriček to the Utah Jazz for guard DeShawn Stevenson and a future second round pick. The smaller deal was Williams, who was moved to New Orleans for Rooks.

The trade was two teams shuffling the deck as Orlando added some depth at center while New Orleans bolstered its backcourt rotation.

Rooks' minutes jumped initially in Orlando, but he quickly returned to a similar role as New Orleans. He appeared in 20 games with the Magic and registered 3.1 PPG, 2.4 RPG and 0.9 APG in 13.5 MPG. The Magic went 7-19 over the final 26 games to finish 21-61.

A free agent, Rooks did not re-sign with Orlando. He never played another NBA game again. Rooks did continue his professional playing career overseas in Spain.

Shammond Williams arrived to a New Orleans team fighting for playoff positioning in a very weak East. Mashburn's knee issues would return in early March and he was placed on the injured list. He ended up missing the rest of the regular season.

New Orleans went 11-17 after the trade deadline, finishing up with a 41-41 record. Tied with the Milwaukee Bucks for the fifth best record, New Orleans took the fifth seed due to a 3-1 head-to-head record against the Bucks in the regular season.

Williams appeared in 16 games with the Hornets and posted 4.5 PPG, 1.1 RPG, 3.3 APG and 0.9 SPG in 14.9 MPG. The guard shot 34.6% from the field.

In the playoffs, the Hornets faced the number four seed Miami Heat. The first game was in Miami and Heat rookie Dwyane Wade was the main character. The guard had 21 points and made a game-winning runner with 1.3 seconds left to help Miami pull out an 81-79 win in the opener.

Game Two saw all five Heat starters reach double figures and Miami held New Orleans to 20-82 shooting (24.4% on FGs) in a 93-63 rout. In Game Three the Hornets starting backcourt of Baron Davis and David Wesley combined for 39 points as New Orleans held on for a 77-71 victory.

Davis put up 23 points and 10 assists in Game Four as New Orleans evened the series 2-2 with a 96-85 win. The fifth game saw Davis continue to dominate with 33 points, but Heat guard Eddie Jones had 25 points and Wade chipped in 21 as Miami used a 29-20 fourth quarter scoring advantage to win 87-83.

New Orleans built a 14-point lead at home after three quarters and held on for an 89-83 victory to even the series 3-3. In a final Game Seven, Miami had control for much of the game at home. Davis was hobbled with a bad back (as well as knee, elbow and ankle issues), but veteran Steve Smith had 25 points and nearly helped New Orleans tie the game. However, Miami kept its distance and won the game 85-77 and the series 4-3.

In the series loss, Williams saw little playing time. He did receive some minutes in Game Seven to fill in for an ailing Davis. Overall, the guard averaged 2.3 PPG and 1.0 APG in three contests and 6.1 MPG. After the season, Williams became a free agent and did not sign with an NBA team. He joined UNICS Kazan of the Russian Superleague.

Shammond Williams on joining the Hornets (via Hornets.com):

"I'm playing with a lot of guys that I know and played with in the past. It's a great situation for myself, just coming in and being able to help this basketball team make a push in the playoffs. I'm just trying to grasp everything and when I get my opportunity, try to help the team as much as possible."

On going from a team out of the playoff picture to a team competing for a postseason berth:

"It is [a] great opportunity to be in a position to make it to the playoffs as well as do well in the playoffs. I think we have a lot of pieces here that can basically win a championship and I think that's a great situation to be in. It just feels great to have Mr. Bass, Mr. Bristow and Coach Floyd feel like I can help this basketball team and put me in a situation that's much different than what I was in just yesterday."

On what he can bring to the Hornets:

"Anything. Defense....Ball-Handling....Scoring. Whatever they need from me. I'll basically just grasp my role and do whatever it takes. Of course, I have to be Shammond Williams and I think that's what they like in me so hopefully, I can just do the things I need to do."

How he's changed teams often:

"A lot of that has to do with the business of the NBA. You can't change things you don't have control over. When I get my opportunity, I just show the other team they made a mistake. Nobody's really given me the chance, except Coach Westphal in Seattle, my second year there, when I led my team to the playoffs and did well. "Beyond that, nobody's really give me the opportunity to lead a basketball team or just be an integral part of a team. Hopefully, that situation will change in time and I'll be able to show what I'm capable of doing."

Sean Rooks on joining Orlando after a bad experience in New Orleans (via Orlando Sentinel):

"I was lonely there, and I wasn't playing. It was the worst experience I've had in the NBA. That's why I'm so happy to be here, even if people say this team is struggling."

On his role in New Orleans:

"I lost playing time in New Orleans. I was more of an insurance policy for them."

On the trade (via Orlando Sentinel):

"I'm thrilled to be here, and I'm just so glad to be out of my previous situation. I'll help this team, whether it's on the court or off with the young players."

New Orleans Hornets general manager Bob Bass on acquiring Shammond Williams (via Hornets.com):

"Shammond gives our team another quality shooter as we head down the stretch. He has the ability to play both the point guard and (shooting) guard positions."

On the thought process behind the trade (via Hornets.com):

"To give us some insurance at the guard position, whether it be at the two (shooting guard) or the one (point guard). He's a veteran player and we know he can make shots, so we added another shooter to the team. That's basically what the thinking was."

What he likes the most about Williams:

"He can shoot the ball. I think he's got some toughness about him. I think he's an aggressive defender. I was in North Carolina when he played all the way through up there at Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina) and we've seen him play a lot there and in his pro career."

Orlando Magic general manager John Gabriel on acquiring Sean Rooks (via Magic.com):

"Sean (Rooks) brings size to our frontcourt and veteran leadership to our locker room. We look forward to his contributions both on and off the basketball court."

Magic chief operating officer John Weisbrod on Orlando's modest trade deadline (via Orlando Sentinel):

"It might not sound thrilling, but we're happy with what we could do. It's a step along the way."

Hornets head coach Tim Floyd on Williams (via Hornets.com):

"The guy's quick and he can make shots, I know that much. He gives us another guy who can make some shots off the bench. Bottom line is he's behind Baron (Davis), he's behind Darrell (Armstrong) and when David Wesley comes back, he's behind him. So, it'll have to be an opportunistic kind of thing in terms of minutes. It's some insurance as far as we are concerned at this point and hopefully he'll come in and help us win a game or two."

Image Credit:

Shammond Williams via Getty Images/G Fiume

Sean Rooks via Getty Images/Fernando Medina

#Shammond Williams #Sean Rooks #2004 #2004 Trade Deadline #2003*04 Season #Magic #Hornets

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago

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The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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