I read an explanation somewhere, from someone who claims to know (great start, eh?) that there is a possible explanation for the discrepancy between the 1987a results and the OPERA results, specifically that the neutrinos from the supernova have a different energy level than those at OPERA. I'm not qualified to evaluate this claim of course, but it's out there.
But by all means, be skeptical. As excited as I am with the OPERA results, I'm staying skeptical too.
Well, I have no numbers to back up a claim, so keep your salt grains handy, but from what I've seen, money spent up front on lawyers tends to save you money down the road on more lawyers. What having a good agreement does is makes it more expensive down the road to try to break the agreement. The harder your lawyer has to work to find a loophole in the contract, the more you have to pay her. The more you have to pay her, the stronger your incentive to simply fulfill your side of the bargain.
If you are small, a mega corp could likely tie you up in court until you are broke even if you have the perfect contract agreement and would win in the end.
This is a different problem. This problem arises when one bargainer has much more power than the other. In that case, it doesn't matter how clear and simple or complicated and tight the contract is, the party with less power is going to get screwed. The EULA could be 60 pages long, or it could say "We reserve all our rights and you give up all your rights." Very simple and straightforward, and the consumer is stuck with it because they need the software.
People don't click through EULAs without reading them because they don't understand the EULA, they click through the EULA because they know damn well it means "you're fucked if you try to mess with us" and they think they have no choice. Nobody needs a lawyer to tell them that.
I can think of one objection: what happens if there's ambiguity between the summary and the mass of technical detail below it? If the summary is binding, then you will inevitably get conflicts in interpretation between the summary and the particulars, but if it's not binding, you still have to read the whole damn thing anyway, so why muddy the water with a summary you can't rely on?
Now as it happens I think it's still worthwhile to use a summary (indicate that the summary is to be used to resolve ambiguities in the more detailed drafting, but not binding in itself), but you do have to tread carefully.
Hahaha, you think so? Despite what many people think, a large part of a lawyer's job is figuring out (and fighting over) what people actually mean when they write agreements, legislation and the like in "clear, easy to read" language.
Drafting contracts and laws is a lot like programming; language that is clear and easily readable may not be the most powerful or effective language to use. "Plain language" languages are easy to use, but hard to do anything useful in. Those that are useful usually have a great deal of planning (and a more powerful programming language) hidden away from the user. Likewise with contracts.
Simple agreements help the parties know what they are agreeing to, but generally don't say anything about edge cases. So your nice simple one-pager, if it's a contract, is perfect when the parties are getting along, but if the relationship deteriorates it's trivial to get around that kind of contract by finding an edge case the contract doesn't cover and slipping out of it. That's when the litigation lawyers are brought in.
I'm sure that this push to simplified EULAs in software is going to make some lawyers very rich, when the companies that offer them start weaselling out of their clear, simple agreements.
Sadly, just getting rid of corporations isn't really a great option. The bundle of laws that created corporations were created specifically to address problems that couldn't be easily solved with partnerships. For example, it wouldn't make sense to have a large company capitalized by thousands of individual partners, each of whom was jointly and severably liable for the actions of the company, and people wouldn't buy into such a business. Could you imagine your mother getting sued or thrown in jail because the business that she owned, by way of some shares in retirement investments, defrauded someone? A partner in a company is 100% liable for the actions of that company (except in LLPs, but those have limited application), so what would happen is that the wealthy partners, with their fleets of lawyers would be able to find some way off the hook, leaving the small shareholder partners on the hook for the liability. The company itself couldn't be found liable, because it's not a corporation. Not very just.
You can make the argument that you should just not have large businesses with thousands of partners, but that would require a pretty complete transformation of the world economy, as a large chunk of the economic activity of the world is done by corporations. In the West, things are getting worse for the average person, in large part because of the way corporations take and distribute profits. But in China and India, the average person's life is getting better (economically), and that's because we consume so many Chinese goods and outsource so much labour to India and other places. Take corporations out of the picture, and suddenly you have a billion people out of work, scrambling around and trying to figure out how to sell their goods and services without an infrastructure.
It would be better to a) tighten up the rules governing corporations to require them to make more forward-thinking decisions (reward corps for creating dividends, rather than driving up share prices, for example), b) enforce the rules we already have, and c) put an end to the practice of having executive managers of one company sitting on the boards of their buddies' companies, which has been shown to drive up executive salaries at the expense of both lower-level employees and shareholders.
These are just a few changes off the top of my head that I think would make a huge difference. There are other areas that assuredly need tinkering, such as the nature and strength of the corporate veil, whether or not the corporate veil should exist where criminal charges are laid against a company, and others. But just eliminating corporations would have potentially disastrous consequences for the world economy. Globalization is here, whether we like it or not, and corporations are a huge part of that. We're past the point where we can just reverse the trend, but we can still direct it into better paths, with some forethought and care.
Maybe if Apple had a gaming desktop that cost less than $1500 I would consider them, but the price difference between a PC and an Apple gaming system is the down payment on a used BMW.
Well, for one thing, it's a hell of a lot cheaper. Surveillance by humans is much harder than having a gps tracker keep tabs on you 24/7. More expensive investigative methods will tend to be reserved for only the most serious crimes. If using a gps device is legal, the cops have a much broader range of crimes they can investigate, many of which are nowhere near serious enough to justify the State knowing where the suspect is 24/7.
In my jurisdiction, phone numbers can be blocked (private information) though not many people do. Your address however, is very certainly public information if you live in a Land Titles jurisdiction. Anybody and their dog can stop by the land titles office, spend a few bucks, and find out who lives at my address. Canadian privacy laws specifically exclude addresses from the list of protected personal information.
The moral of the story is, don't just assume that all your information is private, check the laws.
no. the social security numbers are not public, neither are the addresses or phone numbers. and especially that they're on some db isn't public information.
Depends on the jurisdiction. I would bet the social security numbers aren't public, but the rest of it probably is. In fact, I have handy access to a database with names, addresses and numbers of thousands of people, and you probably do to; the phone book.
Tell you what; how about you go around your home and throw out everything that was made in a sweatshop, Chinese or otherwise. Then come back and tell me what you have left.
Speaking as someone who had a hotmail account before Microsoft bought them, I can say that changing ownership brought with it changes to the service, and those changes were generally not for the better. I'd like to see what Hotmail would have evolved to if they'd never been bought up by Microsoft.
No, but other things may bind to the hydrogen, especially if the reaction occurs in open air. I thought about this after I posted, and went and checked the article. The article states that another catalyst is needed to separated out the hydrogen, indicating that it does bind to something other than the oxygen or the catalyst. The reason the article focusses on the oxygen-separating catalyst is that it is the bottle-neck, and not the hydrogen-separating catalyst.
I'm not familiar with this case, but unless the "smoking gun" specifically said that they stole the code from Oracle, it probably won't be given much weight in court. Judges are very protective of their turf, and don't think much of legal opinions coming from laypeople, or really even from lawyers. As far as a judge is concerned, it ain't patent infringement unless a judge says it's patent infringement.
Also, I rather suspect that if the e-mail were really that damning, Google would have settled the suit by now.
Perhaps you've misunderstood what "blind justice" means. It basically means that all those before the courts are treated equally, regardless of race, religion, gender, etc. Wilfulness is just a part of the element of the intent of the offender. Justice remains blind as long as, when charged with murder, each accused is assessed in the same way. If wilfulness is an element of the offence of murder, then each accused has the right to make the State prove wilfulness, and "blind justice" is preserved. Of course, in practice it doesn't always work that way.
Hoo boy, I can see that being a problem down the road, as the community implements kludgey fixes in the kernel source to work around deficiencies in the binary blobs. We've seen how well that works with linux and video cards. In some ways, mixed open/blob code is worse than either completely open or completely closed solutions.
Well, since most people aren't even going to notice the URL, I don't think it'll come up. Much more important will be the content of the page. But if the plaintiff can use the URL string to impute an intention to defame or an endorsement of the defamatory page, then they might win.
Well, my post was commenting on lawyers and judges who don't understand technology. In that sense, they certainly don't know what's "right". But as far as knowing the moral "right", well that's a whole other thread. And not as simple or clear-cut as you're making it seem. The Supreme Court of Canada has been busy just lately, and some of the decisions they've handed down have been rather painful for the government.
Obvious to you, but not so obvious to a bunch of lawyers and judges who fear or hate technology (or both), and probably not so obvious to most people who are not as expert in this area as your average slashdot reader.
Ironically, your newspaper example wouldn't have worked that way in Canada, up until Grant v. Torstar, [2009]. Previous to this, it certainly was possible for the reporter to get hit with a libel suit for reporting libelous statements. The new law under Grant sets up a new defence called responsible communication. The reporter or newspaper (or blogger) must still behave responsibly when reporting proven libelous statements made by others and must show that she acted responsibly, with the following factors to be taken into account by the jury:
The seriousness of the allegation The public importance of the matter The urgency of the matter The status and reliability of the source Whether the plaintiff's side of the story was sought and accurately reported Whether inclusion of the defamatory statement was justifiable Whether the defamatory statement’s public interest lay in the fact that it was made rather than its truth (“Reportage”)
If your link, or any other part of the page your link is on, suggests you endorse or support the defamatory page, you could be nailed for libel. It's in the decision.
Slashdot Mirror
I read an explanation somewhere, from someone who claims to know (great start, eh?) that there is a possible explanation for the discrepancy between the 1987a results and the OPERA results, specifically that the neutrinos from the supernova have a different energy level than those at OPERA. I'm not qualified to evaluate this claim of course, but it's out there.
But by all means, be skeptical. As excited as I am with the OPERA results, I'm staying skeptical too.
Well, I have no numbers to back up a claim, so keep your salt grains handy, but from what I've seen, money spent up front on lawyers tends to save you money down the road on more lawyers. What having a good agreement does is makes it more expensive down the road to try to break the agreement. The harder your lawyer has to work to find a loophole in the contract, the more you have to pay her. The more you have to pay her, the stronger your incentive to simply fulfill your side of the bargain.
If you are small, a mega corp could likely tie you up in court until you are broke even if you have the perfect contract agreement and would win in the end.
This is a different problem. This problem arises when one bargainer has much more power than the other. In that case, it doesn't matter how clear and simple or complicated and tight the contract is, the party with less power is going to get screwed. The EULA could be 60 pages long, or it could say "We reserve all our rights and you give up all your rights." Very simple and straightforward, and the consumer is stuck with it because they need the software.
People don't click through EULAs without reading them because they don't understand the EULA, they click through the EULA because they know damn well it means "you're fucked if you try to mess with us" and they think they have no choice. Nobody needs a lawyer to tell them that.
I can think of one objection: what happens if there's ambiguity between the summary and the mass of technical detail below it? If the summary is binding, then you will inevitably get conflicts in interpretation between the summary and the particulars, but if it's not binding, you still have to read the whole damn thing anyway, so why muddy the water with a summary you can't rely on?
Now as it happens I think it's still worthwhile to use a summary (indicate that the summary is to be used to resolve ambiguities in the more detailed drafting, but not binding in itself), but you do have to tread carefully.
Hahaha, you think so? Despite what many people think, a large part of a lawyer's job is figuring out (and fighting over) what people actually mean when they write agreements, legislation and the like in "clear, easy to read" language.
Drafting contracts and laws is a lot like programming; language that is clear and easily readable may not be the most powerful or effective language to use. "Plain language" languages are easy to use, but hard to do anything useful in. Those that are useful usually have a great deal of planning (and a more powerful programming language) hidden away from the user. Likewise with contracts.
Simple agreements help the parties know what they are agreeing to, but generally don't say anything about edge cases. So your nice simple one-pager, if it's a contract, is perfect when the parties are getting along, but if the relationship deteriorates it's trivial to get around that kind of contract by finding an edge case the contract doesn't cover and slipping out of it. That's when the litigation lawyers are brought in.
I'm sure that this push to simplified EULAs in software is going to make some lawyers very rich, when the companies that offer them start weaselling out of their clear, simple agreements.
Sadly, just getting rid of corporations isn't really a great option. The bundle of laws that created corporations were created specifically to address problems that couldn't be easily solved with partnerships. For example, it wouldn't make sense to have a large company capitalized by thousands of individual partners, each of whom was jointly and severably liable for the actions of the company, and people wouldn't buy into such a business. Could you imagine your mother getting sued or thrown in jail because the business that she owned, by way of some shares in retirement investments, defrauded someone? A partner in a company is 100% liable for the actions of that company (except in LLPs, but those have limited application), so what would happen is that the wealthy partners, with their fleets of lawyers would be able to find some way off the hook, leaving the small shareholder partners on the hook for the liability. The company itself couldn't be found liable, because it's not a corporation. Not very just.
You can make the argument that you should just not have large businesses with thousands of partners, but that would require a pretty complete transformation of the world economy, as a large chunk of the economic activity of the world is done by corporations. In the West, things are getting worse for the average person, in large part because of the way corporations take and distribute profits. But in China and India, the average person's life is getting better (economically), and that's because we consume so many Chinese goods and outsource so much labour to India and other places. Take corporations out of the picture, and suddenly you have a billion people out of work, scrambling around and trying to figure out how to sell their goods and services without an infrastructure.
It would be better to a) tighten up the rules governing corporations to require them to make more forward-thinking decisions (reward corps for creating dividends, rather than driving up share prices, for example), b) enforce the rules we already have, and c) put an end to the practice of having executive managers of one company sitting on the boards of their buddies' companies, which has been shown to drive up executive salaries at the expense of both lower-level employees and shareholders.
These are just a few changes off the top of my head that I think would make a huge difference. There are other areas that assuredly need tinkering, such as the nature and strength of the corporate veil, whether or not the corporate veil should exist where criminal charges are laid against a company, and others. But just eliminating corporations would have potentially disastrous consequences for the world economy. Globalization is here, whether we like it or not, and corporations are a huge part of that. We're past the point where we can just reverse the trend, but we can still direct it into better paths, with some forethought and care.
Maybe if Apple had a gaming desktop that cost less than $1500 I would consider them, but the price difference between a PC and an Apple gaming system is the down payment on a used BMW.
Well there's your problem.
Not at all. The remote for your Apple TV will (continue to) be your iPhone. Don't have an iPhone? Tough luck. Perhaps Siri can help you...
Well, for one thing, it's a hell of a lot cheaper. Surveillance by humans is much harder than having a gps tracker keep tabs on you 24/7. More expensive investigative methods will tend to be reserved for only the most serious crimes. If using a gps device is legal, the cops have a much broader range of crimes they can investigate, many of which are nowhere near serious enough to justify the State knowing where the suspect is 24/7.
In my jurisdiction, phone numbers can be blocked (private information) though not many people do. Your address however, is very certainly public information if you live in a Land Titles jurisdiction. Anybody and their dog can stop by the land titles office, spend a few bucks, and find out who lives at my address. Canadian privacy laws specifically exclude addresses from the list of protected personal information.
The moral of the story is, don't just assume that all your information is private, check the laws.
no. the social security numbers are not public, neither are the addresses or phone numbers. and especially that they're on some db isn't public information.
Depends on the jurisdiction. I would bet the social security numbers aren't public, but the rest of it probably is. In fact, I have handy access to a database with names, addresses and numbers of thousands of people, and you probably do to; the phone book.
Tell you what; how about you go around your home and throw out everything that was made in a sweatshop, Chinese or otherwise. Then come back and tell me what you have left.
Speaking as someone who had a hotmail account before Microsoft bought them, I can say that changing ownership brought with it changes to the service, and those changes were generally not for the better. I'd like to see what Hotmail would have evolved to if they'd never been bought up by Microsoft.
No, but other things may bind to the hydrogen, especially if the reaction occurs in open air. I thought about this after I posted, and went and checked the article. The article states that another catalyst is needed to separated out the hydrogen, indicating that it does bind to something other than the oxygen or the catalyst. The reason the article focusses on the oxygen-separating catalyst is that it is the bottle-neck, and not the hydrogen-separating catalyst.
Unless of course the hydrogen binds to another chemical in the process of catalysing.
I'm not familiar with this case, but unless the "smoking gun" specifically said that they stole the code from Oracle, it probably won't be given much weight in court. Judges are very protective of their turf, and don't think much of legal opinions coming from laypeople, or really even from lawyers. As far as a judge is concerned, it ain't patent infringement unless a judge says it's patent infringement.
Also, I rather suspect that if the e-mail were really that damning, Google would have settled the suit by now.
Perhaps you've misunderstood what "blind justice" means. It basically means that all those before the courts are treated equally, regardless of race, religion, gender, etc. Wilfulness is just a part of the element of the intent of the offender. Justice remains blind as long as, when charged with murder, each accused is assessed in the same way. If wilfulness is an element of the offence of murder, then each accused has the right to make the State prove wilfulness, and "blind justice" is preserved. Of course, in practice it doesn't always work that way.
Even some of us fanboys are getting sick of the media deluge.
As far as I know they haven't started sending out invites, other than to people who donated on Kickstarter.
Hoo boy, I can see that being a problem down the road, as the community implements kludgey fixes in the kernel source to work around deficiencies in the binary blobs. We've seen how well that works with linux and video cards. In some ways, mixed open/blob code is worse than either completely open or completely closed solutions.
Well, since most people aren't even going to notice the URL, I don't think it'll come up. Much more important will be the content of the page. But if the plaintiff can use the URL string to impute an intention to defame or an endorsement of the defamatory page, then they might win.
Well, my post was commenting on lawyers and judges who don't understand technology. In that sense, they certainly don't know what's "right". But as far as knowing the moral "right", well that's a whole other thread. And not as simple or clear-cut as you're making it seem. The Supreme Court of Canada has been busy just lately, and some of the decisions they've handed down have been rather painful for the government.
Obvious to you, but not so obvious to a bunch of lawyers and judges who fear or hate technology (or both), and probably not so obvious to most people who are not as expert in this area as your average slashdot reader.
Ironically, your newspaper example wouldn't have worked that way in Canada, up until Grant v. Torstar, [2009]. Previous to this, it certainly was possible for the reporter to get hit with a libel suit for reporting libelous statements. The new law under Grant sets up a new defence called responsible communication. The reporter or newspaper (or blogger) must still behave responsibly when reporting proven libelous statements made by others and must show that she acted responsibly, with the following factors to be taken into account by the jury:
The seriousness of the allegation
The public importance of the matter
The urgency of the matter
The status and reliability of the source
Whether the plaintiff's side of the story was sought and accurately reported
Whether inclusion of the defamatory statement was justifiable
Whether the defamatory statement’s public interest lay in the fact that it was made rather than its truth (“Reportage”)
If your link, or any other part of the page your link is on, suggests you endorse or support the defamatory page, you could be nailed for libel. It's in the decision.
This might be helpful: Golden Cyberfetters
It's the New York Times site, they're supposed to allow outside linking to content behind their firewall, but I don't know if it works.