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The summary is incorrect, the lawsuit was brought on by two employees of Gallaudet university, not two students. The employees are Glenn Lockhart, the director of public relations and communications and Stacy Nowak who is part of "Arts, Communications & Theater".

You can find the relavant information on the previous post to slashdot, which includes links to the referenced material.

The summary is incorrect, the lawsuit was brought on by two employees of Gallaudet university, not two students. The employees are Glenn Lockhart, the director of public relations and communications and Stacy Nowak who is part of "Arts, Communications & Theater".

You can find the relavant information on the previous post to slashdot, which includes links to the referenced material.

About 50,000 deaf and blind adults in the USA, which would put them about 0.025% of the population.

About 2 to 4 of every 1,000 people in the United States are "functionally deaf," though more than half became deaf relatively late in life; fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 people in the United States became deaf before 18 years of age.

However, if people with a severe hearing impairment are included with those who are deaf, then the number is 4 to 10 times higher. That is, anywhere from 9 to 22 out of every 1,000 people have a severe hearing impairment or are deaf. Again, at least half of these people reported their hearing loss after 64 years of age.

Finally, if everyone who has any kind of "trouble" with their hearing is included then anywhere from 37 to 140 out of every 1,000 people in the United States have some kind of hearing loss, with a large share being at least 65 years old.

So even at 140, even ignoring those that cannot be helped by hearing aids and those that cannot afford hearing aids, the truth is that far more than 140 out of 1,000 people buy the products you mentioned. If you move a higher volume, you can price them lower and approach their true cost as your design and overhead costs diminish with numbers. What's more is that "a laptop" will more or less work for me the same as it will work for you. We don't need to mold the laptop to put it in our ears or have it tuned to our needs.

You also seem to overlook two factors: as electronics get smaller they get more expensive. The second part is that as electronics need to power themselves and get smaller they get even more expensive. And on top of that, my cell phone puts out a lot of heat. The kind of heat I would not want in my ear. So you have to consider that the battery must be small and must not dissipate tons of heat and so therefore the electronics must have a very low power draw. There's not much of a conspiracy to find here, it's an unfortunate reality that prevents someone from storming the market with the new better cheaper hearing aid (pending tech advancements).

In my family, we look at chipping in to buy our elders hearing aids for presents, I know the nice ones are crazy expensive.

Likewise AIM for Windows still supports real-time IM. It's a real boon to the deaf community as it works much like a TTY device, but without needing special hardware or relay services. Just hit control-R to get going. More detail from this 2008 article: http://tap.gallaudet.edu/text/aol/ from Gallaudet University who helped develop the technology.

(see http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1102967&cid=26584721)

in all seriousness, being deaf and blind is a small enough corner case overall, even if deafness and blindness aren't always caused independently of one another.

specific statistics are evidently not available in the relevant WP articles. Trying a general Google search:

http://gri.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php Deafness @ 0.1% to 0.2%-0.4%

http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdesped/SD-Deafblind.asp
Lits deafblindees as 0.003% at birth

If you are forced to pay it, I'm guessing you would end up using it (since you are already paying).

Public policy should not be based on what you GUESS.

Somewhere around one percent of the American population suffer from severe or complete hearing loss. Numbers vary from 0.9 to 2.2 percent, depending on the specific definition of "severe" that is used.

Do you GUESS that they will use p2p music downloads?

What do you GUESS they will use them for?

This is the most egregiously stupid idea that any bunch of greedy bastards has come up with in an age. Not only do they propose to rip off people who don't download music, they propose to rip off people who can't even hear it.

The basis of the problem from the paper (the only one not downloadable)

"The major challenge that faces American Sign Language (ASL) recognition now is to develop methods that will scale well with increasing vocabulary size. Unlike in spoken languages, phonemes can occur simultaneously in ASL. The number of possible combinations of phonemes is approximately 1.5 x 10^9, which cannot be tackled by conventional hidden Markov model-based methods. Gesture recognition, which is less constrained than ASL recognition, suffers from the same problem."

There's a researcher at Gallaudet working on the other side of this equation with a system designed to recognize sign langauge, which seems like a much harder problem.

ASL isn't like English in that there are always specific words- a lot of it has to do with spacial context (where in the signing space the sign was made) and a whole class of signs that don't translate directly into words (they're hand shapes which can translate into an event or a description of an object or set of objects).

And, as the research page shows, facial expressions and even facial movements can be part of a sign.

Of course, this is American Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language may be very different.

An example of promissory estoppel is where a foreign student declares that she is unable to return to college because she is unable to raise enough money to cover all the costs especially with textbooks costing so much and I agree to provide her with the necessary textbooks if she returns. When she returns, I cannot back off on my gift since she has relied upon it to return. In this case promissory estoppel substitutes for consideration and we have a binding contract.

Yes, clearly that is the case...oh wait a second, what the hell does "promissory estoppel" mean?

Well, dear /.'ers it's all in here glorious detail!

http://facstaff.gallaudet.edu/marshall.wick/bus447 /promissory_estoppel.html

On a personal note, I learned something today. Thanks Ari!

What city is Gallaudet located in?

Who was Helen Keller? (famous deaf and blind woman)

What was Alexander Graham Bell's job? (teacher of the deaf)

What does ASL stand for? (American Sign Language)

That's 200000-700000 people using an older type of tty terminal.

Since this is /. I'll chime in here with some clarifying information. TTYs are not what most /.ers would consider a tty. To communicate with the old, unfortunately almost standard, Baudot style TTY, you need to buy a special modem. Baudot is dog slow (45.45 Baud) and a fast typist can easily out-type the protocol. At the receiving end it is incredibly painful to wait for someone to get through a long sentence. Newer, proprietary, fast protocols (e.g., TurboCode) have removed this bottleneck, but computer compatibility still requires hardware.

This hardware requirement why internet relays are so nice - you can just use a regular computer without messing with extra gear and you can call from just about anywhere. Furthermore, you can now access the internet relays via smartphones and PDAs, thus giving users a truly mobile option.

That's 200000-700000 people using an older type of tty terminal.

Since this is /. I'll chime in here with some clarifying information. TTYs are not what most /.ers would consider a tty. To communicate with the old, unfortunately almost standard, Baudot style TTY, you need to buy a special modem. Baudot is dog slow (45.45 Baud) and a fast typist can easily out-type the protocol. At the receiving end it is incredibly painful to wait for someone to get through a long sentence. Newer, proprietary, fast protocols (e.g., TurboCode) have removed this bottleneck, but computer compatibility still requires hardware.

This hardware requirement why internet relays are so nice - you can just use a regular computer without messing with extra gear and you can call from just about anywhere. Furthermore, you can now access the internet relays via smartphones and PDAs, thus giving users a truly mobile option.

Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.

(from Helen Keller quotations)

This problem has been around for some time in the hearing impaired community.

This has nothing to do with the doctrine of promissory estoppel. As the name implies, promissory estoppel requires a _promise_. Silence is not the same as a promise. Only under limited circumanstances will a court hold that failure to enforce a right amounts to a total waiver of that right. The scenario you pose is not such a circumstance.

Sorry for not being clear. Many times a direct manager will make remarks indicating that outside work (especially open source work) is perfectly OK. They do this to keep up morale and they know that professional involvment like this is a good thing. Thus, the manager will make an unwritten policy (via private talks in person) that is directly against the work-for-hire agreement. Then, when things go sour, and upper management finds out, or the lawyers/venture capitalist get into the picture the story changes. The middle manager lies about their promise...

I am not a lawyer, but this is *exactly* what promisorry estoppel is all about. The employer (through middle manger) makes a un-written promise, the employee does work (or continues to do work) based on this promise, and then the employer (upper managment, lawyers, etc) go back on the promise. In this case, it is unfair for the employer to take back their part of the deal... even if it was unwritten. The consideration for the promise could be extra overtime or staying with the company or even doing the open source work with the company's email address.

Since no middle manager is going to admit to making the verbal promise (or it's their job) the employee is left hanging. A resonable judge will understand this situation and use the facts as a guide: (a) the manager knew that the employee was doing open source work; (b) the manager didn't do anything in writing to confront the employee about this fact (turns a blind eye). If these are the facts, then I'd say the employee has a good claim that verbal statements were made in private.

As for Silence, this is _exactly_ what the doctine is all about, no? If the agreement was verbal and both parties agreed that there was an agremment you don't need this doctrine, do you? The doctine is for verbal agreements which one party claims didn't happen. Then the judge has to figure out if it is resonable to assume that the verbal agreement did actually occur.

But then again, I'm not a lawyer... perhaps you are. For other info on Promissory Estopple, see Google, in particular Bus477 notes which say:

Promissory estoppel

A doctrine in which a non contractual promise may be made enforceable to avoid an injustice. Acceptable alternative ways of describing promissory estoppel are:

* A doctrine which arises when injustice can be avoided only by enforcement of a non enforceable promise.

* Promissory estoppel is used where, although there may not otherwise be a enforceable contract, because one party has relied on the promise of the other, it would be unfair not to enforce the agreement.

* Promissory estoppel is used to enforce charitable gift pledges where the charity relies on them.