>Let's put an end to this please. Void all current and ban any further patent suits. Then, everybody can go home and have a party with Warren (Warren Cuccurullo) to celebrate the end of patent wars!
Translation: "Let's put Apple out of business." If somehow the patent system were to disappear tomorrow, Chinese (and probably American) iPads, iPods, and iPhones would appear rather quickly at half the price. Apple's sales would pretty much stop overnight.
After the defections of two of the four major remaining climate-change deniers last year (and the reluctant admissions of both tha their pseudo-research had been funded by energy multinationals), my impression had been that the debate was al but over. Perhaps what we're seeing now is merely the snarling of death throes. Like (to put it into Red State terms) the hisses of a treed raccoon.
I swear, if I read one more whiney, off-base "the patent system is broken" story like this on Slashdot, I will lose my mind. Can't SD run these pieces past a patent attorney, just to see if they pass this giggle test, before posting them?? It takes only a minute to scan this patent to see that it doesn't do anything like attempt to claim the technology of "page turns." It's a *design* patent that grants rights to the exact size and shape of a page-turn animation. It has nothing to do with functionality and, as the sadly confused SD editor notes, dozens of other patents in the prior art already claim alternative page-turn animations. Alter your own animation in a tiny-but-nominally significant way and you're not within the scope of this patent. What's the problem??
Look, here's my issue with the intellectually lazy whiners who post and get wound up about these lame anti-IP stories, and this is analogous to what I tell Rush Limbaugh fans who are desperate to discredit the President: Gaia knows that there's plenty to criticize about the patent system. But when you overstate your case, fabricate and spin trivial issues to make them look like something they're not, and do all this with ignorance suffiicient to demonstrate that you don't know what you're talking about, you just discredit those of us who would like to raise legitimate concerns. Not to stretch the Limbaugh argument too far, but how defensible is the position that anybody who knows what they're talking about is not to be trusted?
So after pissing off the court once by refusing to comply with a legitimate order, Apple tries once again to "outsmart" the judge. I can't imagine what the company thinks it's going to accomplish with these shenanigans or how it could possibly think that this is a good idea. It's merely broadcasting the message that: a) it doesn't understand how legal systems work; but b) it thinks it's smarter than the judge; and c) it has contempt for both. "Well, Your Honor, I know you ordered me to stop harrassing my wife, but I merely burned her house down. I never said a word to her personally. So you can't touch me, ha-ha!" Fanboy geeks out of control trying to play with the grownups and just looking foolish. Incomprehensible behavior.
I don't take credit for this idea, and I realize that this proposition would face enormous political and legal hurdles, but wouldn't it be nice if the UN could somehow be convinced to recognize the Internet as a sovereign nation, with all the rights and obligations that accompany such a status. There would be enough ripple effect to drive a trilogy of science fiction novels.
And that remains the best comparison I can think of (except maybe for Sir Isaac Newton, whom, apocrypha has it, was never seen to smile). The posted description of Steve's general prickiness applies equally well to Tom, whom, if anything, was even more of a Richard than Jobs. Classic example: How do you think GE wound up in Schenectady? The company's NJ workers had been threatening to unionize, the story goes, so one day, Edison just shuttered the plant and moved the operation 200 miles north to open a non-union shop. Any employee not wlling to surrender plans to join a union -- and move his family -- was instantly terminated. Edison was a brilliant, arrogant, unforgiving, audacious, brutally abusive, and not all that emotionally stable boss who alternately inspired and publicly humiliated his employees. He was responsible for "seismic" changes in the way we live. But he was an insufferably arrogant s o b whom you'd never 't want marrying your sister.
And that remains the best comparison I can think of (except maybe for Sir Isaac Newton, whom, apocrypha has it, was never seen to smile). The posted description of Steve's general prickiness applies equally well to Tom, who, if anything, was even more of Richard. How do you think GE moved to Schenectady? His NJ plant was threatening to unionize, the story goes, and one day, he just shuttered the plant and moved the operation 200 miles north to open a non-union shop. Edison was a brilliant, arrogant, unforgiving, abusive boss who inspired and excoriated his employees. He was responsible for seismic changes in the way we live. But he was an insufferably arrogant s o b whom you wouldn't want him marrying your sister.
Uh-oh, Slashdot alert! Non-lawyers making authoritative statements about law again!
Here's how it really works: A ticket to attend an event or enter a museum is legally considered a license and licenses can easily revoked, almost at will in some states. There's plenty of case law to back up policies like a "no photos" constraint on admission to a museum.
As for your example about giving a picture away to a third party who infringes, there's a concept known as contributory infringement that makes you liable regardless of your own use. And the commercial user is also liable, regardless of whether it signed anything. Copyright is not a negative right. You don't collect the right to use a copyrighted property in a way not authorized by the rights owner simply because you didn't agree not to use it in that way. It's the other way around. But I mean, just think about it: How could it work any other way? It doesn't take Wiley Coyote to come up with the loopholes you cite.
The biggest argument in favor of organic foods has been -- has always been -- that government-allowed levels of pesticides and other chemical additives are high enough to increase risk of adverse health effects. Seriously, how often have there been claims that organic apples have fewer spots (cf "Big Yellow Taxi" -- sorry, couldn't resist) or that organic tomatoes have more vitamin C? Why are we reading about studies investigating the latter and not the former?
But wait -- apparently, this study did investigate this issue. The conclusary statement that resulted:
"As you might expect, there was less pesticide contamination on organic produce. But does that matter? The authors of the new study say probably not. They found that the vast majority of conventionally grown food did not exceed allowable limits of pesticide residue set by federal regulations."
MOve on, there's nothing here...
It seems to me that we don't yet have the theoretical foundation to know how to even ask about whatever it is we really want to know. Despite all we've learned over the last 150 years, humans still mostly approach cosmology like Newtonians.
Actually, the reviewer lost me when he started asking about what happened "before the Big Bang." If the "arrow of time" started pointing at the BB, what does "before" even mean in such a context?
When I read the AP coverage of the article, it initially sounded plausible. But as I read on, I spotted red flags. Some of the conclusions of the study simply defied logic. The piece claimed that researchers followed a set of 1000 subjects that comprised all people born in a small town during a one-month period. It then found that about 15% of those studied -- not merely 15% of chronic pot smokers -- had become "dependent" upon marijuana by age 18. And by "dependent," they meant unable to stop smoking despite significant health, legal, or social problems. That finding is so divergent with any reality I've known that it calls into question the validity of the rest of the study. Does a teenager who smokes pot have, say, a 1-in-3 chance of becoming "addicted" (that was the implication) by age 18? Seems like "Reefer Madness" to me.
Now, I didn't read the original paper, so perhaps AP got enough wrong (hardly unlikely) to lead me to the wrong conclusion. I believe that you can never be sure how to interpret a study's findings unless you read the original study itself. But the story as published by the mainstream news services seemed so counterintuitive -- and the burden of proof is edged a little higher here by the fact that the study was partly financed by US & UK national governments -- that I'd assign it at most minor probative value.
So unless I get the urge to seek out and study the original findings, I think the most reasonable response is to consider this to be one minor piece of evidence that will have credibility only if corroborated by other, independent, research. There's likely not much to worry about here.
So what issues that are relevant to this discussion would not apply in most other areas of the law? Should juries be banned from cases arising from disputes in corporate mergers & acquisitions? In contract law? In labor law? Tax law? How about medical malpractice? "Surely, a juror could not understand the intricacies of the Krebs Cycle sufficiently to render an informed verdict about the reasonableness of a doctor's drug selection."
I dunno what it is about patent law, but whenever the topic comes up on Slashdot, normally intelligent, reasoning individuals become incapable of coming to rational, even-handed conclusions -- and that applies especially to conclusions about their own qualifications to comment on the topic. A person who would never dream of telling his oncologist how she should treat a blastoma seems to have no problem making a patently silly (sorry, couldn't resist!) pronouncement that patent litigation would run more smoothly if juries were banned.
And, as a postscript that falls into the "painfully obvious category," anybody who's sat through even one infringement case knows that few judges outside the CAFC have all that deep of an understanding of patent law. Not only would mandating that patent infringement proceedings be conducted as bench trials set dangerous precedent that might undermine a vital precept of our legal system, but it wouldn't even be sufficient to produce better outcomes. Move along, there's nothing of interest here.
You're correct, of course. Any litigator will tell you that you never know what to expect when a verdict comes in. That's the nature of the beast. Both parties have opportunity, as you note, during voir dire to reject candidate jurors before trial and, barring fraud, coercion, or obtaining information from an illicit source, the standard for vacating a verdict is extraordinarily high. And as for requiring jurors to be tech-savvy, being a patent attorney myself, I speak from experience when I tell you that tech knowledge is not as important as you'd expect when trying an infringement suit. It's the attorneys' job to explain legal issues in terms that a lay person could understand -- just as you don't have to be a doctor to sit on a jury in a medmal case. Remember that a patent is not a technical document -- it's a legal document that has technical content. If it made sense to say that only a tech-savvy person should sit on a jury in a patent-infringement trial, then it would make even more sense to state that only a lawyer should do so. And, per the Android/Apple case, the technology underlying many of these patents is pretty easy to understand -- like sliding a virtual latch to turn on a device. This case will without a doubt go to appeal intact, and if any of the Apple Geniuses that infest Slashdot tells you differently, just walk away. (And I'm just kidding about the Apple Geniuses, everybody. People in my profession love you guys!! We really do.)
No, the standard in the American legal system is that conclusions that arise from jury deliberations must be honored unless fraudulent or contaminated by external sources. Concepts like "expert testimony" have no basis here -- every juror brings his or her own life experience to the proceedings -- and statements made by any jury member to the rest of the jury during deliberations may be held confidential to protect the deliberation process. Outside manipulation or influence of a jury, or second-guessing a jury's thought-process has always been seen to undermine the basis of our trial-by-peers system. And that's a policy that has served our nation well. If a juror considers external evidence, say a tweet, that's tampering with the process. But the foreman was (him)self a juror and there's no mention of him -- or any other juror -- introducing evidence not in the record. The claim is that what he brought to the negotiations was his own educated opinion, and the other jurors were free to consider it or reject it, as they would any other information source, based on their evaluation of its credibility. To second-guess a jury's verdict solely because you don't agree with the verdict, because you don't think enough thought was put into the verdict, because you think the jury didn't sufficiently consider some factors, or because a first juror claims that a second juror convinced the remainder of the jury to accept his opinion, would be a dangerous precedent and one that the court system rightfully avoids. It doesn't take much imagination to understand where such a path might lead. And, yes, there have been a small number of cases wherein a verdict has been overturned by a presiding judge, but those almost always occur when the verdict clearly ignores an overwhelming body of contrary evidence or when a jury clearly ignores the judge's instructions. Here, it seems as though the verdict was mostly internally consistent, the jury followed instructions, and the jury's conclusion fell well within the boundaries of a reasonable resolution of an "issue upon which reasonable minds could differ."
Maybe I'm just showing my age, but I still consider Stapledon's 1930 quasi-novel "Last and First Men" to define "epic" science fiction forty years after reading it for the first time. Decades before "cosmic" scope became science-fiction cliche (and long before the concept of natural selection had been accepted by the overwhelming majority of rational human beings), he penned this epoch-spanning story of the evolution of past, present, future, and "final" human species. Check his brief Wikipedia page. Only a few of his other works approached the audacity and imagination of L&FM, but IMHO that work alone earns him a place in the pantheon.
I faced a similar issue in 2006. Almost 30 years after earning an MS in Computer Science, I decided to treat myself to law school. In my first semester, I was surrounded by hundreds of students who seemed intimately familiar with the idea of "outlining" lectures on their notebooks. I had no friggin' idea what they were talking about.
Despite being an analyst and consultant for decades, I didn't know how to work efficiently in a 21st Century classroom -- and efficiency was crucial, given the curriculum's 200+ page/day reading assignments. I ultimately discovered that most of my 20-something classmates were pretty clueless themselves. They generally just edited prepared outlines that they found on the Internet or had begged from upperclassmen and then relied on collaborative "study groups" to distribute the workload. Me, I had a family and a house and a job, and, in the real world, nobody wanted to invite Chevy Chase into a 1L study group.
So, ultimately, I brute-forced it. I thought a lot about the unique dynamics of law-school lectures and built a set of MS Word macros to automate the repetitive note-taking and case-formatting functions specific to the wacky law-school lecture tradition. I learned the idiosyncracies of Word's horrible Outline Mode and built a little implementation-specific macro interface around it to make it usable. And that worked pretty well.
I was dead-center academically during my first semester, and felt like kids 30 years younger were me whizzing past me in their Honda Fits while I was struggling to pedal my Moped uphill. But by my second year, I'd built a nice little UI on top of Word that let me take autoformatted, hyperlinked, lecture notes on the fly and quickly navigate through hundred-page lecture notes when suddenly called upon to present a case. Post-lecture review entailed minor edits for clarity, which I was able to do rather quickly. And I ultimately graduated with one of the top 20 GPAs in my class of 450. In fact, by my 2d year, wide-eyed students looking over my shoulder would occasionally ask me where I found my "law-school outlining tools." And yes, you whippersnappers, I did share.
I think the moral of the story is that it's not the tool, it's the strategy. Even software as abstruse as Word's macro and Outline Mode functions can be forced into something that does the job, and does it well. The generality and flexibility of the tool (aka "bloat" in some circles), not the iWhatever ease-of-use is what matters. Turnkey solutions often produce least-common-denominator results. And, when faced with a complex, subtle problem like this, it may not be useful to solicit advice from a younger demographic that may have little understanding of, or empathy for, your problem (see, e.g., the clueless, "humorous" responses here). What worked for me was to observe and to try to understand the subtle requirements of my situation, identify the functions I'd need and understand how they might be implemented in order to best fit my personal style, and then try to approximate those functions with a general-purpose tool, preferably one with which I was already familiar, and one that facilitates an iterative, prototyping design process.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but that worked for me. I realize that may not be the simplistic "use product XYZ!" recommendation you'd hoped for, but when you have trouble answering a difficult question, sometimes that means you haven't identified the underlying issue.
But there's a missing link in that logic. In order to make your point, even if your other assumptions are correct (e.g., 40 work hours per week), you would need to show that "most people who earn minimum wage" (or some reasonable approximation of "most") are single.
This is why it's difficult to support a complex or subtle conclusion by citing a single statistic. Even simple statements -- actually, _especially_ simple statements -- are generally built upon implicit assumptions.
Am I the only one with a disconnect? The original stories focused on Apple losing EPEAT certification because of practices that included permanently gluing batteries and displays into mobile devices, thus rendering battery recycling impossible. Many speculated that Apple has clung to this profitable but wasteful policy in order to force users to purchase a newly manufactured product every time a battery dies.
Now, today's "resolution" cheerfully proclaims that Apple is back in the program because it embraces so many environmentally aware policies and that EPEAT is pleased as punch to have them back.
But, uh, okay, what happened? Has Apple now agreed to make its batteries removable and -- gulp! -- even user-replaceable? Or has EPEAT buckled and compromised its standards to favor a politically powerful client? Dead silence -- but isn't that the real issue?
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_posner_hits_goofy_trend_in_gop_says_hes_becoming_less_conservative/?utm_source=maestro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email
Here's a short piece in the ABA Journal, wherein Judge Posner mentions the same topic, and also says some interesting things about why he, despite having once been something of an inspiration for people like Justices Rehnquist and Scalia, is now becoming disenchanted with the Conservative movement. As usual (at least IMHO), he speaks with wit and insight.
For those of you not familiar with him, Posner is a bit of a rock star in the legal profession, a brilliant, prolific author, and one of the driving forces behind the influential "Law and Economics" movement. When he speaks, even if my gut reaction is to disagree, I listen.
Uh, sorry no. In most states, safety deposit boxes are sealed by law upon public announcement of the owner's death -- that is, upon publication of the obiturary -- even if there are joint lessors. And grieving family members generally let that one slip through the cracks. One way around the issue might be to lease the box solely in a trusted third party's name. But in this context, if there's nobody in your your life that you trust enough to hold your passwords in a sealed envelope "to be opened upon my death," there's probably nobody you'd trust to hold the lease your box.
iPhone sales figures & market share are frequently presented as indicators of the company's success. But it's harder to find stats that correlate iPhone sales to those of the iPod. It's an interesting question: To what extent did the iPhone simply cannibalize the iPod and shift customers from one Apple product line to another? Does anybody have a source for how the sum of iPod & iPhone unit sales have trended over the last five years? Making conclusory statements about Apple that consider only iPhone shipments is a bit like citing the rise in Blu-ray shipments (ignoring a complementary drop in DVD sales) to make the case that disc-based content distribution is thriving.
Seriously, you've got to read the article, not just the silly Slashdot summary, before commenting on it. This is IMO a non-issue spun into something "compelling." There appears to be nothing discriminatory (at least in the "bad" sense of the word) going on. The software is simply ranking search results based on a buying-pattern characteristic of a particular user class. Users connecting through Mac clients apparently more often choose one class of goods that has a particular characteristic, so the search engine first displays results that more closely match preferences of such users. Big deal. Nobody's insulting you because you own a Mac. And for that matter, nobody's insulting you because you own a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
>Let's put an end to this please. Void all current and ban any further patent suits. Then, everybody can go home and have a party with Warren (Warren Cuccurullo) to celebrate the end of patent wars! Translation: "Let's put Apple out of business." If somehow the patent system were to disappear tomorrow, Chinese (and probably American) iPads, iPods, and iPhones would appear rather quickly at half the price. Apple's sales would pretty much stop overnight.
After the defections of two of the four major remaining climate-change deniers last year (and the reluctant admissions of both tha their pseudo-research had been funded by energy multinationals), my impression had been that the debate was al but over. Perhaps what we're seeing now is merely the snarling of death throes. Like (to put it into Red State terms) the hisses of a treed raccoon.
Look, here's my issue with the intellectually lazy whiners who post and get wound up about these lame anti-IP stories, and this is analogous to what I tell Rush Limbaugh fans who are desperate to discredit the President: Gaia knows that there's plenty to criticize about the patent system. But when you overstate your case, fabricate and spin trivial issues to make them look like something they're not, and do all this with ignorance suffiicient to demonstrate that you don't know what you're talking about, you just discredit those of us who would like to raise legitimate concerns. Not to stretch the Limbaugh argument too far, but how defensible is the position that anybody who knows what they're talking about is not to be trusted?
But does "hampering attention span" = "decreasing reaction time"? Are we seeing an adaptive process?
So after pissing off the court once by refusing to comply with a legitimate order, Apple tries once again to "outsmart" the judge. I can't imagine what the company thinks it's going to accomplish with these shenanigans or how it could possibly think that this is a good idea. It's merely broadcasting the message that: a) it doesn't understand how legal systems work; but b) it thinks it's smarter than the judge; and c) it has contempt for both. "Well, Your Honor, I know you ordered me to stop harrassing my wife, but I merely burned her house down. I never said a word to her personally. So you can't touch me, ha-ha!" Fanboy geeks out of control trying to play with the grownups and just looking foolish. Incomprehensible behavior.
I don't take credit for this idea, and I realize that this proposition would face enormous political and legal hurdles, but wouldn't it be nice if the UN could somehow be convinced to recognize the Internet as a sovereign nation, with all the rights and obligations that accompany such a status. There would be enough ripple effect to drive a trilogy of science fiction novels.
Their goal is to "change the world for one day"?
And that remains the best comparison I can think of (except maybe for Sir Isaac Newton, whom, apocrypha has it, was never seen to smile). The posted description of Steve's general prickiness applies equally well to Tom, whom, if anything, was even more of a Richard than Jobs. Classic example: How do you think GE wound up in Schenectady? The company's NJ workers had been threatening to unionize, the story goes, so one day, Edison just shuttered the plant and moved the operation 200 miles north to open a non-union shop. Any employee not wlling to surrender plans to join a union -- and move his family -- was instantly terminated. Edison was a brilliant, arrogant, unforgiving, audacious, brutally abusive, and not all that emotionally stable boss who alternately inspired and publicly humiliated his employees. He was responsible for "seismic" changes in the way we live. But he was an insufferably arrogant s o b whom you'd never 't want marrying your sister.
Perfect.
And that remains the best comparison I can think of (except maybe for Sir Isaac Newton, whom, apocrypha has it, was never seen to smile). The posted description of Steve's general prickiness applies equally well to Tom, who, if anything, was even more of Richard. How do you think GE moved to Schenectady? His NJ plant was threatening to unionize, the story goes, and one day, he just shuttered the plant and moved the operation 200 miles north to open a non-union shop. Edison was a brilliant, arrogant, unforgiving, abusive boss who inspired and excoriated his employees. He was responsible for seismic changes in the way we live. But he was an insufferably arrogant s o b whom you wouldn't want him marrying your sister.
Here's how it really works: A ticket to attend an event or enter a museum is legally considered a license and licenses can easily revoked, almost at will in some states. There's plenty of case law to back up policies like a "no photos" constraint on admission to a museum.
As for your example about giving a picture away to a third party who infringes, there's a concept known as contributory infringement that makes you liable regardless of your own use. And the commercial user is also liable, regardless of whether it signed anything. Copyright is not a negative right. You don't collect the right to use a copyrighted property in a way not authorized by the rights owner simply because you didn't agree not to use it in that way. It's the other way around. But I mean, just think about it: How could it work any other way? It doesn't take Wiley Coyote to come up with the loopholes you cite.
The biggest argument in favor of organic foods has been -- has always been -- that government-allowed levels of pesticides and other chemical additives are high enough to increase risk of adverse health effects. Seriously, how often have there been claims that organic apples have fewer spots (cf "Big Yellow Taxi" -- sorry, couldn't resist) or that organic tomatoes have more vitamin C? Why are we reading about studies investigating the latter and not the former? But wait -- apparently, this study did investigate this issue. The conclusary statement that resulted: "As you might expect, there was less pesticide contamination on organic produce. But does that matter? The authors of the new study say probably not. They found that the vast majority of conventionally grown food did not exceed allowable limits of pesticide residue set by federal regulations." MOve on, there's nothing here...
It seems to me that we don't yet have the theoretical foundation to know how to even ask about whatever it is we really want to know. Despite all we've learned over the last 150 years, humans still mostly approach cosmology like Newtonians.
Actually, the reviewer lost me when he started asking about what happened "before the Big Bang." If the "arrow of time" started pointing at the BB, what does "before" even mean in such a context?
Sorry, that should have read "during a one-YEAR period"
Now, I didn't read the original paper, so perhaps AP got enough wrong (hardly unlikely) to lead me to the wrong conclusion. I believe that you can never be sure how to interpret a study's findings unless you read the original study itself. But the story as published by the mainstream news services seemed so counterintuitive -- and the burden of proof is edged a little higher here by the fact that the study was partly financed by US & UK national governments -- that I'd assign it at most minor probative value.
So unless I get the urge to seek out and study the original findings, I think the most reasonable response is to consider this to be one minor piece of evidence that will have credibility only if corroborated by other, independent, research. There's likely not much to worry about here.
I dunno what it is about patent law, but whenever the topic comes up on Slashdot, normally intelligent, reasoning individuals become incapable of coming to rational, even-handed conclusions -- and that applies especially to conclusions about their own qualifications to comment on the topic. A person who would never dream of telling his oncologist how she should treat a blastoma seems to have no problem making a patently silly (sorry, couldn't resist!) pronouncement that patent litigation would run more smoothly if juries were banned.
And, as a postscript that falls into the "painfully obvious category," anybody who's sat through even one infringement case knows that few judges outside the CAFC have all that deep of an understanding of patent law. Not only would mandating that patent infringement proceedings be conducted as bench trials set dangerous precedent that might undermine a vital precept of our legal system, but it wouldn't even be sufficient to produce better outcomes. Move along, there's nothing of interest here.
You're correct, of course. Any litigator will tell you that you never know what to expect when a verdict comes in. That's the nature of the beast. Both parties have opportunity, as you note, during voir dire to reject candidate jurors before trial and, barring fraud, coercion, or obtaining information from an illicit source, the standard for vacating a verdict is extraordinarily high. And as for requiring jurors to be tech-savvy, being a patent attorney myself, I speak from experience when I tell you that tech knowledge is not as important as you'd expect when trying an infringement suit. It's the attorneys' job to explain legal issues in terms that a lay person could understand -- just as you don't have to be a doctor to sit on a jury in a medmal case. Remember that a patent is not a technical document -- it's a legal document that has technical content. If it made sense to say that only a tech-savvy person should sit on a jury in a patent-infringement trial, then it would make even more sense to state that only a lawyer should do so. And, per the Android/Apple case, the technology underlying many of these patents is pretty easy to understand -- like sliding a virtual latch to turn on a device. This case will without a doubt go to appeal intact, and if any of the Apple Geniuses that infest Slashdot tells you differently, just walk away. (And I'm just kidding about the Apple Geniuses, everybody. People in my profession love you guys!! We really do.)
No, the standard in the American legal system is that conclusions that arise from jury deliberations must be honored unless fraudulent or contaminated by external sources. Concepts like "expert testimony" have no basis here -- every juror brings his or her own life experience to the proceedings -- and statements made by any jury member to the rest of the jury during deliberations may be held confidential to protect the deliberation process. Outside manipulation or influence of a jury, or second-guessing a jury's thought-process has always been seen to undermine the basis of our trial-by-peers system. And that's a policy that has served our nation well. If a juror considers external evidence, say a tweet, that's tampering with the process. But the foreman was (him)self a juror and there's no mention of him -- or any other juror -- introducing evidence not in the record. The claim is that what he brought to the negotiations was his own educated opinion, and the other jurors were free to consider it or reject it, as they would any other information source, based on their evaluation of its credibility. To second-guess a jury's verdict solely because you don't agree with the verdict, because you don't think enough thought was put into the verdict, because you think the jury didn't sufficiently consider some factors, or because a first juror claims that a second juror convinced the remainder of the jury to accept his opinion, would be a dangerous precedent and one that the court system rightfully avoids. It doesn't take much imagination to understand where such a path might lead. And, yes, there have been a small number of cases wherein a verdict has been overturned by a presiding judge, but those almost always occur when the verdict clearly ignores an overwhelming body of contrary evidence or when a jury clearly ignores the judge's instructions. Here, it seems as though the verdict was mostly internally consistent, the jury followed instructions, and the jury's conclusion fell well within the boundaries of a reasonable resolution of an "issue upon which reasonable minds could differ."
Maybe I'm just showing my age, but I still consider Stapledon's 1930 quasi-novel "Last and First Men" to define "epic" science fiction forty years after reading it for the first time. Decades before "cosmic" scope became science-fiction cliche (and long before the concept of natural selection had been accepted by the overwhelming majority of rational human beings), he penned this epoch-spanning story of the evolution of past, present, future, and "final" human species. Check his brief Wikipedia page. Only a few of his other works approached the audacity and imagination of L&FM, but IMHO that work alone earns him a place in the pantheon.
So, ultimately, I brute-forced it. I thought a lot about the unique dynamics of law-school lectures and built a set of MS Word macros to automate the repetitive note-taking and case-formatting functions specific to the wacky law-school lecture tradition. I learned the idiosyncracies of Word's horrible Outline Mode and built a little implementation-specific macro interface around it to make it usable. And that worked pretty well.
I was dead-center academically during my first semester, and felt like kids 30 years younger were me whizzing past me in their Honda Fits while I was struggling to pedal my Moped uphill. But by my second year, I'd built a nice little UI on top of Word that let me take autoformatted, hyperlinked, lecture notes on the fly and quickly navigate through hundred-page lecture notes when suddenly called upon to present a case. Post-lecture review entailed minor edits for clarity, which I was able to do rather quickly. And I ultimately graduated with one of the top 20 GPAs in my class of 450. In fact, by my 2d year, wide-eyed students looking over my shoulder would occasionally ask me where I found my "law-school outlining tools." And yes, you whippersnappers, I did share.
I think the moral of the story is that it's not the tool, it's the strategy. Even software as abstruse as Word's macro and Outline Mode functions can be forced into something that does the job, and does it well. The generality and flexibility of the tool (aka "bloat" in some circles), not the iWhatever ease-of-use is what matters. Turnkey solutions often produce least-common-denominator results. And, when faced with a complex, subtle problem like this, it may not be useful to solicit advice from a younger demographic that may have little understanding of, or empathy for, your problem (see, e.g., the clueless, "humorous" responses here). What worked for me was to observe and to try to understand the subtle requirements of my situation, identify the functions I'd need and understand how they might be implemented in order to best fit my personal style, and then try to approximate those functions with a general-purpose tool, preferably one with which I was already familiar, and one that facilitates an iterative, prototyping design process.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but that worked for me. I realize that may not be the simplistic "use product XYZ!" recommendation you'd hoped for, but when you have trouble answering a difficult question, sometimes that means you haven't identified the underlying issue.
Hope this helps.
But there's a missing link in that logic. In order to make your point, even if your other assumptions are correct (e.g., 40 work hours per week), you would need to show that "most people who earn minimum wage" (or some reasonable approximation of "most") are single.
This is why it's difficult to support a complex or subtle conclusion by citing a single statistic. Even simple statements -- actually, _especially_ simple statements -- are generally built upon implicit assumptions.
Now, today's "resolution" cheerfully proclaims that Apple is back in the program because it embraces so many environmentally aware policies and that EPEAT is pleased as punch to have them back.
But, uh, okay, what happened? Has Apple now agreed to make its batteries removable and -- gulp! -- even user-replaceable? Or has EPEAT buckled and compromised its standards to favor a politically powerful client? Dead silence -- but isn't that the real issue?
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_posner_hits_goofy_trend_in_gop_says_hes_becoming_less_conservative/?utm_source=maestro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email Here's a short piece in the ABA Journal, wherein Judge Posner mentions the same topic, and also says some interesting things about why he, despite having once been something of an inspiration for people like Justices Rehnquist and Scalia, is now becoming disenchanted with the Conservative movement. As usual (at least IMHO), he speaks with wit and insight. For those of you not familiar with him, Posner is a bit of a rock star in the legal profession, a brilliant, prolific author, and one of the driving forces behind the influential "Law and Economics" movement. When he speaks, even if my gut reaction is to disagree, I listen.
Uh, sorry no. In most states, safety deposit boxes are sealed by law upon public announcement of the owner's death -- that is, upon publication of the obiturary -- even if there are joint lessors. And grieving family members generally let that one slip through the cracks. One way around the issue might be to lease the box solely in a trusted third party's name. But in this context, if there's nobody in your your life that you trust enough to hold your passwords in a sealed envelope "to be opened upon my death," there's probably nobody you'd trust to hold the lease your box.
iPhone sales figures & market share are frequently presented as indicators of the company's success. But it's harder to find stats that correlate iPhone sales to those of the iPod. It's an interesting question: To what extent did the iPhone simply cannibalize the iPod and shift customers from one Apple product line to another? Does anybody have a source for how the sum of iPod & iPhone unit sales have trended over the last five years? Making conclusory statements about Apple that consider only iPhone shipments is a bit like citing the rise in Blu-ray shipments (ignoring a complementary drop in DVD sales) to make the case that disc-based content distribution is thriving.
Seriously, you've got to read the article, not just the silly Slashdot summary, before commenting on it. This is IMO a non-issue spun into something "compelling." There appears to be nothing discriminatory (at least in the "bad" sense of the word) going on. The software is simply ranking search results based on a buying-pattern characteristic of a particular user class. Users connecting through Mac clients apparently more often choose one class of goods that has a particular characteristic, so the search engine first displays results that more closely match preferences of such users. Big deal. Nobody's insulting you because you own a Mac. And for that matter, nobody's insulting you because you own a PC.