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User: m.ducharme

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Comments · 1,342

  1. Re:misleading headline on Taking the Lawyers Out of the Loop · · Score: 1

    I hear you. I've avoided doing child protection myself, I'm just not sure I can handle that kind of case. The bar here is pretty good, but it's all legal aid work, and there's never enough money to do the job right.

  2. Re:misleading headline on Taking the Lawyers Out of the Loop · · Score: 1

    Meh, most of the family law clients I have are not terribly vindictive at all. They're hurt, but if you don't egg them on they get to a reasonable place reasonably quickly. The vindictive ones mostly don't last long that way; vindictiveness is very expensive.

  3. Re:The first thing... on Taking the Lawyers Out of the Loop · · Score: 1

    I believe you meant to say "kill".

  4. Re:Garbage in, garbage out on Taking the Lawyers Out of the Loop · · Score: 1

    There's a lot of truth to this. I practice family law, and I'd say the biggest part of my job is managing the client's expectations. More often than not, the judge and both lawyers already know how the case is going to end from the beginning; the clients have to be carefully brought around to agreement, with lots of time for them to work through their feelings.

    I wonder if I could put legal techno-mage on my cv....

  5. Re:divorce psudocode on Taking the Lawyers Out of the Loop · · Score: 1

    The problem with arbitration isn't arbitration, it's the fact that in the private sector, where one party is disproportionately more powerful than the other, then the little guy is always going to lose. Private arbitrations between equally-powerful parties are fine.

  6. Re:Take The Right Wing Out Of The Loop on Taking the Lawyers Out of the Loop · · Score: 1

    Now that it's mature, it can be replicated as many times as we need to, in reasonably short order. Can you be replicated even once?

  7. Re:Because on Why Run Linux On Macs? · · Score: 2

    2 x 0 is still 0.

  8. Re:Understand your rights!! on Innocent Adults Are Easy To Convince They Committed a Serious Crime · · Score: 1

    It's not just people happy to talk. the interrogators are trained to catch certain signs that the interviewee is telling the truth. But if the cops miss those signs or choose to ignore them, the interrogation can go on for hours and hours, plenty long enough for people to be "brainwashed" into remembering crimes they never committed in great detail. It's kinda scary how far they can take someone with stress, sleep deprivation and hunger, in only a relatively few hours.

    Later Reid courses actually show a tape of an interrogation where someone rewrote their own memories.

  9. Re: Well on Space Tourism Isn't Worth Dying For · · Score: 2

    If that roller-coaster ride can be made to start in LA or London and end in Melbourne or Beijing, I can think of a few interesting uses for it...sub-orbital global transportation, anyone?

  10. Re:First thought that I had.... on Tesla Releases Electric Car Patents To the Public · · Score: 1

    Funny thing is, I could almost see this being a legitimate patent, if the tarp had some rfid and chipware embedded that communicated with the car (ie, tarp is still on, some clown is uncovering your car, tarp is blowing down the highway you forgot to take it off you idiot)

  11. Re:Trust but verify on Tesla Releases Electric Car Patents To the Public · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I'm not familiar with the distinction you're drawing. Verbal and oral are basically the same thing, both terms mean a contract spoken but not written down (at least, that was the case when I went to law school, and I've never encountered anything in practice that says otherwise), and Musk's blog post is not verbal or oral. It's written, but it's not a contract. There is only one party, it's not a meeting of the minds. Essentially it's a gift.

  12. Re:Trust but verify on Tesla Releases Electric Car Patents To the Public · · Score: 1

    For what it's worth, I've never heard that definition of "verbal" contract at all, either in law school or in my practice. As far as I'm concerned, a verbal and an oral contract are the same thing. You might be able to quibble and say that a contract made in American Sign Language is verbal but not oral, I guess.

  13. Re:Tax filing on Canada Halts Online Tax Returns In Wake of Heartbleed · · Score: 1

    I'll concede the point on personal taxes, for the most simple solutions, but once you start adding in business income, corporate taxes, and the like, the complexity level goes way up. And if you happen to run a business in an HST jurisdiction? Forget about it. Many tax lawyers haven't yet figured that shit out.

  14. Re:Tax filing on Canada Halts Online Tax Returns In Wake of Heartbleed · · Score: 1

    Actually, governments federal and provincial have streamlined a lot of the services they provide. In fact, in at least one case I can think of, major inefficiencies are starting to crop up because they've trimmed too much fat. Employment Insurance (including sick leave and parental leave), for example, takes a month or more to get not because of the process, but because they don't have enough operators answering the phones.

  15. Re:Tax filing on Canada Halts Online Tax Returns In Wake of Heartbleed · · Score: 1

    Once you Efile they stop sending forms to you.

    I think now they've stopped sending them entirely.

    Realistically there is free tax software, and Canadian taxes are pretty straightforward.

    Ahahahahahah! I have an annotated 2010 Canadian Tax Act book weighing down my bookshelf that would beg to differ.

  16. Re:This is one thing I love about it on 60 Minutes Dubbed Engines Noise Over Tesla Model S · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I love having to manually shift, and the engine revving and all that. It's a lot of fun. I'm sure gonna miss it when I finally can afford my new Tesla. It won't stop me buying one though.

  17. Re:That's only part of the story. on Canadian Court Tries to Dampen Copyright Trolls In P2P Lawsuits · · Score: 1

    Not per infringer, per lawsuit. Only way to get $5k per infringer is to sue each infringer separately.

    38.1 (1) Subject to this section, a copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of damages and profits referred to in subsection 35(1), an award of statutory damages for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, ...
    (b) in a sum of not less than $100 and not more than $5,000 that the court considers just, with respect to all infringements involved in the proceedings for all works or other subject-matter, if the infringements are for non-commercial purposes.

  18. Re:That's only part of the story. on Canadian Court Tries to Dampen Copyright Trolls In P2P Lawsuits · · Score: 1

    It's not $5k per person, it's $5k per lawsuit. If they go after all 2000 infringers in Voltage v Does, they will be limited to $5000 statutory damages, if they choose statutory damages; they can still try to prove actual damages on a per plaintiff basis. Since actual damages is (lost profit of one copy of "jarhead")*infringer, and they actually have to prove those damages on a balance of the probabilities (i.e. everyone with open wifi routers walks), they're not going to make much money.

  19. Re:I'm sure they're grateful for COBRA on Layoffs At Now-Private Dell May Hit Over 15,000 Staffers · · Score: 2

    Sorry no, you've entirely neglected the fact that private healthcare leads to higher per-capita costs as insurers fleece their clients.Insurance companies aren't taking a little profit off the top, they're taking massive profits compared to their costs.

      The idea behind a universal health care system is that in such a system, you get the same or better health care for a lower price. It's not a matter of the government subsidizing your health care, it's a matter of giving increased power to the consumer, to prevent them from being fleeced in a transaction where otherwise they would have no bargaining power. And it works. In 2008 (the last figures I've seen, care of the WHO I believe), US health care cost per person was I think $6000/person, while the next-closest was Switzerland (which has a semi private system somewhat like the ACA) where health care costs were half of what they are in the US (I may have the figures wrong, but the proportion is correct, the Swiss pay half per person what Americans pay).

    The long and the short of it is that the free market doesn't work as intended where one party has the choice of paying or dying. Government regulation is supposed to (and in most of the world, does) equalize the playing field so that the consumer doesn't get hosed by the insurance company or the service providers.

  20. Re:Cant be worse on Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Pledges Not To Execute '51% Attack' · · Score: 1

    Go get em! You've got the trolls and the zombies on the run.

  21. Re:Cant be worse on Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Pledges Not To Execute '51% Attack' · · Score: 1

    Quite the opposite. The US Government is supposed to manipulate the currency to achieve two things: to keep inflation low (2% is the usual target) and to keep unemployment as low as possible (about 5% normally).

  22. Re:Too much credit on Shuttleworth: Apple Will Merge Mac and iPhone · · Score: 0

    No, Apple won't be following his failure or Microsoft. They'll show the market how it should have been done in the first place, and then Samsung will show everyone how to do it cheaper.

  23. Re:I hide my data in big wheels of cheese on Keeping Your Data Private From the NSA (And Everyone Else) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they WILL give up user data in response to a court order"

    I believe the correct statement would be:

    "And while 'big' providers like Google provide some degree of encryption, they HAVE GIVEN up user data in response to a court order"

  24. Re:The "still frame" isnt from the video on Ask Slashdot: How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked? · · Score: 1

    Is that you, Doug?

  25. Re:Simple test on Ask Slashdot: How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked? · · Score: 1

    And on top of that, given that the video hasn't come out yet he's not in much of a position to sue anyone. What's he going to say, "I know it was you punks who faked that video, I was there the whole time!"

    The authors of the video haven't revealed themselves, and the only way Ford could know who they are is if he was smoking crack with them.