Depends on whether you believe he is being paid for his time or for his opinion.
The money can be used on cross-examination to impeach the witness. Generally, unless the pay is out of line for what the person normally makes, it isn't an issue to a jury.
Experts are worth money in the real world (outside of the courtroom), and it would be silly to ask them to work for free just because they are in a courtroom.
That said, there are guys who give testimony for a living pretty much. I have no idea why juries believe them -- probably because they think: "What else would a slip-and-fall expert do other than testify?"
It is a lot more than just disclosure of secrets. If you think that pharmaceuticals are only made by secret techniques, you are wrong.
Finding out what chemical cures what illness is a lot of it. Once that is out, copying is easy, and POOF goes millions or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. The copier gets for free that that chemical is safe and effective and what it is and what disease it is for.
All he has to do is start a factory, and drive the first maker out of business.
From what I can tell at the USPTO website, all of these APPLICATIONS have not issued as REGISTRATIONS yet.
You apply, then get tenative approval, your mark is then published for opposition by anyone out there, and once you get past the opposition period, then you can get the registration.
When you are searching the trademark database, a serial number is an application, a registration number is a registered trademark. (You get to put an R with a circle after your mark.) Everything I saw was an application.
Most Courts of Appeal do not announce which judges will hear the case until the day of oral argument. That way, the parties cannot try to tilt their briefs to attempt to influence specific judges.
Usually three judges hear an appellate case. The court can also hear it "en banc" which means that every full-status judge on the court sits on the case. Even when only three judges hear the case, they usually circulate the opinion to the non-sitting judges to see if anyone has big problems with it before releasing it.
The result is a much more intensive examination of the legal issues, not as subject to the biases of any one judge.
I understand the incentive system to be for "dispositions" which is to say, a patent application granted or killed. Since an applicant can always choose to modify his claims and keep going, granting is a likely faster way to a point, but not necessarily the only way.
If the examiner cannot prove up that the prior art shows the invention, he has to give a patent. It is not a question of whether he likes the application or not. The idea is that inventors are entitled to patents. Congress has structured the whole thing on that basis.
This is sorta logical. After all, the alternative is to make the inventor prove the absence of prior art. We all know that proving negatives is hard, and requiring the proving of negatives is generally a bad thing. (Prove that you don't kick your dog.)
No incentive? Ok, let's say the examiner denies a patent, and the inventor goes for a trial de novo in court to get his patent, and spends $500,000. Does the EXAMINER pay for that? How about YOU, or TAXPAYERS? What if we just deny all patents, and all pharmaceutical research stops totally? (Which it would.)
These guys are not out to screw you. The mistakes they make are not deliberate. Their names goes on the cover of the patent. Perhaps YOU would like YOUR mistakes at work published for the world to see? Why do I not think so...
Let's see. Patent gets overturned based on prior art that took months of searching (and maybe tens of thousands of dollars) to find and this is the EXAMINER'S fault?
Why should the examiner bear the brunt of the result that was dictated by the resources he had? Not many patents are invalidated solely in view of the prior art that was in front of the examiner.
You have 1 year after publication or public use to get your patent application on file. So, Emtage (based on the dates I've seen above) is about twenty years too late to patent what he did back around 1990.
Also, one year after the patents issued, you can't patent what's in the patents because even if they are not valid (thus can be held invalid by a court) they are a publication. They prevent anyone else from patenting the same subject matter more than a year after the publication.
The US in this regard is more generous than many foreign countries, which require absolute novelty, where any public use or publication prior to filing an application nixes patentability.
The PTO has lots of technical people, and few lawyers. The PTO has hundreds of PhDs. Sure, they hire hundreds of people with less than Ph.D. level degrees, but then, I don't expect that every critic of the work they do has one either. Hey, if you want to solve the problem, here's some info on becoming an examiner.
The shortcomings of the PTO have more to do with the time given to examine applications, and the money spent on examination, not the smarts of the examiners. Money is short in part because Congress is using the PTO as a piggy bank. Fees go in, and instead of putting all the money into making patents, Congress sucks about a quarter of the money out for other things.
Absolutely. Facts differ. When you read what Judge Kaplan wrote, you can see that the domain names that seem to advertise dvd copying figured prominently in the early going. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT. He surely, deep down, believed that this was about piracy.
At that point, the case is virtually impossible to win. Why? Doesn't matter. The first child to kill his parents and then put his hand out for the inheritance certainly argued "Hey, I'm an orphan!" Despite whatever law was on the books, the trial judge probably said "too bad, you lose in my court, see if you can get your inheritance out of the court of appeals, but you won't get it out of me!"
It is virtually impossible to get a jury or a trial court to give you a win on bad facts. This guy did not take the job to promote injustice. Really. The bad-boy, geek-counter-culture thing did not help in conjunction with articles on the site about "hacking" and "copying dvds."
When he was an NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall turned away hundreds of cases of race discrimination because the facts were not perfect. He knew that the system was stacked against him, so he only took "perfect" cases. Why? Despite the justice he sought, he knew he had no margin of error in trying to move the precedent his way. Case 1, perfect. Case 2, next to perfect, case 3, a little less perfect maybe. Try to move the law by microns each case.
Despite what a later response says, I see no reason to believe that Judge Kaplan was really biased. Grandpa saw a would-be thief, and hammered him. It's that simple. If you were out of your technology curve, you might do the same thing if that was the story you understood.
Lemme tell you, you'd much rather have had an MIT researcher hauled in for publishing the results of his research on CSS in an academic journal than this case. MPAA would NEVER bring that case. Let's keep in mind here that the MPAA is not stupid, it chose this particular battlefield for a reason -- its a reasonably good one for them.
That said, there is still a chance that the Second Circuit will find the DCMA overreaching. The Second Circuit has tended to favor copyright in traditional (atoms) media, and disfavor it in new (bits) media. Cross you fingers.
Wait a minute let's get clear that there are two different kind of impacts.
Your father is dead right that in terms of the effect of the JUDGMENT, that only the parties are bound. That is, whether or not 2600 can put DeCSS on its web site is determined by the outcome of THIS CASE.
On the effect of PRECEDENT, that's part right. The trial judge's opinion has little precedential value. Some other trial judges might give it weight, or might not. Again, your father is right that it is not that big a deal for anyone else.
The place where this veers into the land of incorrectness is the impact that the APPEAL will have. This is to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. When the Second Circuit decides this case, that makes the law for all of the federal trial courts in the Second Circuit that includes NY. A federal trial judge in NY will look at the opinion and see one that he is bound to follow.
In addition, the Second Circuit is one of the most influential federal courts of appeal in the nation. Other federal trial judges and appellate judges, even those not bound to follow the Second Circuit, will be substantially influenced by the opinion.
In sum, now is when the rubber really hits the road. Walking away before this step was not a big deal to uninvolved people. Whatever happens with this appeal will have lasting effect on what others can expect when they walk into court.
Generally, this is a liberal court on First Amendment issues, a tendency that is shaped primarily by Kennedy and Scalia. The key exception is Rehnquist, who is as unfriendly to the First Amendment as precedent allows.
There is ONE area where the Court seems to cut local governments some slack, and that is in the area of adult bookstores, nude dancing establishments, etc. Those often are regulable through 'secondary effects' doctrine. The Court has been buying the idea that the substantial impact of those establishments is to drive down property values and increase crime nearby. It would be unfortunate if somehow 'piracy' got labeled as a 'secondary effect', leading to upholding the regulation.
Well, we do have something to go on: the Communications Decency Act ruling in Reno v. ACLU.
In that decision, Rehnquist and O'Connor dissented in part, making for a 7-2 decision. The question would seem to be, is this an easier case, harder case or about the same as Reno? Seems to me to be about the same. Also, this problem, kiddie porn, isn't addressable easily by the "zoning" logic of O'Connor's concurrance. I think that we could easily get an 8-1 with only Rehnquist (not a big first amendment champion) dissenting.
Obscenity is not speech! That means the bill only really covers non-obscene pictures of virtual sex with minors. (It is sorta lost on me how you get into a "non-obscene" version of this stuff, but there we are!)
I suppose what I want to know is: Why weren't these barriers knocked down before?
Negroponte makes it clear in BEING DIGITAL that he thought a long time ago that this sort of thing was possible and practical. I've been largely of the belief that if this was somehow thwarted by the pre-1996 competitive marketplace, that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 should have solved it. Still, we wait for the market in these services to change, and it doesn't.
Finally, someone takes an interest in doing this (and only on a small scale). This is a test reaching some 60 customers. 1) Why wasn't it done before? 2) Even if it is made to work, how many decades will it take to reach me because nobody wants to really compete and shake things up out there? I can't believe that this is such a fundamental technical breakthrough, and the real barrier has been "business" decision makers who can't confront changed business models.
I have only vague memories of man landing on the moon, and only because my mom made such a big deal of it and made me stay up to watch it. I have no personal memory of Apollo 13, and I don't think watching the movie is the same as watching the live TV reports of the real deal.
There is a little less than a 16 year difference between 1970 and 1986. I suppose if you consider the end of the Beatles equivalent with the beginning of the Smashing Pumpkins then there's no generation gap.
Sure you could say Michael Jackson was big in music around both years, eh? Ok, so he was a cute 5 year old in the Jackson 5 for the first one, and was cruising well after Thriller for the second. No difference there, eh?
I remember perhaps too well the day Challenger blew. I had a meeting to prepare for lab that afternoon, and the boss told me that Challenger had blown up. I thought he was joking. I think everyone who heard about it by word of mouth had a hard time believing it until they saw TV footage.
I was a teaching assistant for a freshman chemistry lab, and spent more of my time that day answering questions about hydrogen/oxygen reactions than the subject planned for the day. (Oh, and getting questions about why a public school teacher was on something that dangerous wasn't fun either.)
A generation that had no space disasters finally had one. Instead of a run to the store, it was again a deadly serious business, and still is from what I can tell. Strangely enough, despite happening during the Reagan administration, the recognition of danger did not result in the removal of women from the space program.
Manned space flight isn't about science -- that gets done best with unmanned probes. The fact is that some of us want to go into that dangerous situation, and a bunch of us want those people to do it. I just hope it doesn't go back to where people are making "business decisions" when it isn't their pink little asses on the line.
There is a reason that just about every MBA program studies the decision making that led up to the Challenger disaster. Perhaps the benefit of that lesson won't be restricted to NASA. One can only hope.
Better information has allowed warehouse districts to turn into lofts. It used to be that lots of goods would sit around in the delivery pipeline waiting, and waiting. That old-fashioned "carrying cost" toasted a lot of energy keeping things warm, lit, guarded, etc.
As the article points out, there is not a dramatic demand increase. Rather, the cause is modest increases of demand with ZERO increase in supply, and no incentive to build.
I think that the cause of the problem is the old story of politicians creating a state where nobody in their right mind would want to build a power plant. The new economy had nothing to do with that.
Sending in the warranty card makes customer service so easy.
When the clip for the heart rate measurement feature of my exercise bike stopped working, all I had to do was call the 800 number. A replacement was sent snailmail and got to me in 3 days. I never had to leave home. Taking the receipt 15 miles and then likely getting the answer "we don't have a spare clip" would not have been pleasant.
Companies can and do keep track of this information. They do a better job of keeping track of it in their databases than my (ahem, well, let's be generous) "filing system" for receipts does.
My address is in the phone book. If somebody wants to mail me, it is not going to be hard to do. I'm not about to get paranoid about it.
I remember going to see the DUNE movie with my sister when it came out. As we left the movie theater she asked "what happened there? I have no idea." These inside-the-head books can make sense to a fan (or the author) had make absolutely no sense to the uninitiated.
Ender's Game probably does not have as big a problem as Dune did with length or the extent of the story being inside people's heads. (Rumors at the time were that the rough cut for Dune was 30 hours long and nicknamed "June.") I'm encouraged that so much time is being put into thinking through the problems, rather than a pile of money pushing a bad product out fast. No doubt, Ender's game should be a long, if worthwhile, project.
Let's keep something in mind. At a jury trial the judge is a traffic cop making sure that the presentation of evidence to the jury is in accordance with the rules, and is there to make sure that the lawyers and the jury don't do anything that is not in accordance with the law.
Here, Jackson was deciding whether Microsoft did it, and is supposed to be not PRE judging the case. Juries are not supposed to be PREjudiced either. However, judges and juries are allowed to be pissed at a defendant AFTER hearing all of the evidence.
Really, when a judge is setting the penalties for illegal acts he is allowed to be upset at what was done. Think about it, the judge or jury was convinced that the defendant did something illegal. It is to be expected after that, a judge will have a bad opinion of a defendant that he thinks (and/or the jury thought) did illegal things.
Surely, Jackson could have behaved better, because he is not supposed to comment on cases going up for appeal. Is he not supposed to get angry when he sees Bill Gates denying on videotape that he knows what the word "browser" means? Can't recall anything related to any email he ever read or authored? When Microsoft and/or its attorneys doctored a demonstration video on a key point of proof?
I really don't think that judges have to be punching bags. If you go out of your way to make a judge hate you, then well, golly gosh don't be surprised when he does!
Amazon again puts the customer first. Why? Because if they don't, someone else will. This is a fast-moving marketplace on the Internet -- why encourage someone to move into a legitimate competitive position? Personally, I think the customer should choose whether he sees the used price first or the new price first. It's his shopping experience and money. That's the Amazon way, and they get a premium price because of how they extend themselves to make life easy/good for me. Yay capitalism.
You are right, nexus is required if Congress doesn't do anything.
Basically, the Supreme Court said that the States can't do sales taxes without nexus unless Congress explicitly lets them. Even if the States get together, the Supreme Court is unlikely to change its mind. What happens the day after the a decision allowing the taxes when all the states start messing with their rates? The Supreme Court isn't going to sit back and try to micromanage that.
The cops keep the UPS trucks safe as well as bricks-and-mortar establishments. I don't see why ordering through a catalog or the internet should get a special break on paying the costs of running society. Especially since keeping track of the "patchwork" of laws would easily be handled with the internet to distrubute new databases of tax structures as they happen.
Of course, if the same people update the tax tables as update system security at a lot of businesses... could be ugly:)
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on whether you believe he is being paid for his time or for his opinion.
The money can be used on cross-examination to impeach the witness. Generally, unless the pay is out of line for what the person normally makes, it isn't an issue to a jury.
Experts are worth money in the real world (outside of the courtroom), and it would be silly to ask them to work for free just because they are in a courtroom.
That said, there are guys who give testimony for a living pretty much. I have no idea why juries believe them -- probably because they think: "What else would a slip-and-fall expert do other than testify?"
It is a lot more than just disclosure of secrets. If you think that pharmaceuticals are only made by secret techniques, you are wrong.
Finding out what chemical cures what illness is a lot of it. Once that is out, copying is easy, and POOF goes millions or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. The copier gets for free that that chemical is safe and effective and what it is and what disease it is for.
All he has to do is start a factory, and drive the first maker out of business.
Sorta sucks in my book. Obviously, not in yours.
You can get the opinion at either Findlaw(HTML) or at the Federal Circuit(MS-WORD) web pages.
From what I can tell at the USPTO website, all of these APPLICATIONS have not issued as REGISTRATIONS yet.
You apply, then get tenative approval, your mark is then published for opposition by anyone out there, and once you get past the opposition period, then you can get the registration.
When you are searching the trademark database, a serial number is an application, a registration number is a registered trademark. (You get to put an R with a circle after your mark.) Everything I saw was an application.
Most Courts of Appeal do not announce which judges will hear the case until the day of oral argument. That way, the parties cannot try to tilt their briefs to attempt to influence specific judges.
Usually three judges hear an appellate case. The court can also hear it "en banc" which means that every full-status judge on the court sits on the case. Even when only three judges hear the case, they usually circulate the opinion to the non-sitting judges to see if anyone has big problems with it before releasing it.
The result is a much more intensive examination of the legal issues, not as subject to the biases of any one judge.
I understand the incentive system to be for "dispositions" which is to say, a patent application granted or killed. Since an applicant can always choose to modify his claims and keep going, granting is a likely faster way to a point, but not necessarily the only way.
35 U.S.C. 102:
"A person shall be entitled to a patent UNLESS--"
If the examiner cannot prove up that the prior art shows the invention, he has to give a patent. It is not a question of whether he likes the application or not. The idea is that inventors are entitled to patents. Congress has structured the whole thing on that basis.
This is sorta logical. After all, the alternative is to make the inventor prove the absence of prior art. We all know that proving negatives is hard, and requiring the proving of negatives is generally a bad thing. (Prove that you don't kick your dog.)
No incentive? Ok, let's say the examiner denies a patent, and the inventor goes for a trial de novo in court to get his patent, and spends $500,000. Does the EXAMINER pay for that? How about YOU, or TAXPAYERS? What if we just deny all patents, and all pharmaceutical research stops totally? (Which it would.)
These guys are not out to screw you. The mistakes they make are not deliberate. Their names goes on the cover of the patent. Perhaps YOU would like YOUR mistakes at work published for the world to see? Why do I not think so...
Let's see. Patent gets overturned based on prior art that took months of searching (and maybe tens of thousands of dollars) to find and this is the EXAMINER'S fault?
Why should the examiner bear the brunt of the result that was dictated by the resources he had? Not many patents are invalidated solely in view of the prior art that was in front of the examiner.
Not any more.
You have 1 year after publication or public use to get your patent application on file. So, Emtage (based on the dates I've seen above) is about twenty years too late to patent what he did back around 1990.
Also, one year after the patents issued, you can't patent what's in the patents because even if they are not valid (thus can be held invalid by a court) they are a publication. They prevent anyone else from patenting the same subject matter more than a year after the publication.
The US in this regard is more generous than many foreign countries, which require absolute novelty, where any public use or publication prior to filing an application nixes patentability.
The PTO has lots of technical people, and few lawyers. The PTO has hundreds of PhDs. Sure, they hire hundreds of people with less than Ph.D. level degrees, but then, I don't expect that every critic of the work they do has one either. Hey, if you want to solve the problem, here's some info on becoming an examiner.
The shortcomings of the PTO have more to do with the time given to examine applications, and the money spent on examination, not the smarts of the examiners. Money is short in part because Congress is using the PTO as a piggy bank. Fees go in, and instead of putting all the money into making patents, Congress sucks about a quarter of the money out for other things.
Absolutely. Facts differ. When you read what Judge Kaplan wrote, you can see that the domain names that seem to advertise dvd copying figured prominently in the early going. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT. He surely, deep down, believed that this was about piracy.
At that point, the case is virtually impossible to win. Why? Doesn't matter. The first child to kill his parents and then put his hand out for the inheritance certainly argued "Hey, I'm an orphan!" Despite whatever law was on the books, the trial judge probably said "too bad, you lose in my court, see if you can get your inheritance out of the court of appeals, but you won't get it out of me!"
It is virtually impossible to get a jury or a trial court to give you a win on bad facts. This guy did not take the job to promote injustice. Really. The bad-boy, geek-counter-culture thing did not help in conjunction with articles on the site about "hacking" and "copying dvds."
When he was an NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall turned away hundreds of cases of race discrimination because the facts were not perfect. He knew that the system was stacked against him, so he only took "perfect" cases. Why? Despite the justice he sought, he knew he had no margin of error in trying to move the precedent his way. Case 1, perfect. Case 2, next to perfect, case 3, a little less perfect maybe. Try to move the law by microns each case.
Despite what a later response says, I see no reason to believe that Judge Kaplan was really biased. Grandpa saw a would-be thief, and hammered him. It's that simple. If you were out of your technology curve, you might do the same thing if that was the story you understood.
Lemme tell you, you'd much rather have had an MIT researcher hauled in for publishing the results of his research on CSS in an academic journal than this case. MPAA would NEVER bring that case. Let's keep in mind here that the MPAA is not stupid, it chose this particular battlefield for a reason -- its a reasonably good one for them.
That said, there is still a chance that the Second Circuit will find the DCMA overreaching. The Second Circuit has tended to favor copyright in traditional (atoms) media, and disfavor it in new (bits) media. Cross you fingers.
Wait a minute let's get clear that there are two different kind of impacts.
Your father is dead right that in terms of the effect of the JUDGMENT, that only the parties are bound. That is, whether or not 2600 can put DeCSS on its web site is determined by the outcome of THIS CASE.
On the effect of PRECEDENT, that's part right. The trial judge's opinion has little precedential value. Some other trial judges might give it weight, or might not. Again, your father is right that it is not that big a deal for anyone else.
The place where this veers into the land of incorrectness is the impact that the APPEAL will have. This is to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. When the Second Circuit decides this case, that makes the law for all of the federal trial courts in the Second Circuit that includes NY. A federal trial judge in NY will look at the opinion and see one that he is bound to follow.
In addition, the Second Circuit is one of the most influential federal courts of appeal in the nation. Other federal trial judges and appellate judges, even those not bound to follow the Second Circuit, will be substantially influenced by the opinion.
In sum, now is when the rubber really hits the road. Walking away before this step was not a big deal to uninvolved people. Whatever happens with this appeal will have lasting effect on what others can expect when they walk into court.
Generally, this is a liberal court on First Amendment issues, a tendency that is shaped primarily by Kennedy and Scalia. The key exception is Rehnquist, who is as unfriendly to the First Amendment as precedent allows.
There is ONE area where the Court seems to cut local governments some slack, and that is in the area of adult bookstores, nude dancing establishments, etc. Those often are regulable through 'secondary effects' doctrine. The Court has been buying the idea that the substantial impact of those establishments is to drive down property values and increase crime nearby. It would be unfortunate if somehow 'piracy' got labeled as a 'secondary effect', leading to upholding the regulation.
Well, we do have something to go on: the Communications Decency Act ruling in Reno v. ACLU.
In that decision, Rehnquist and O'Connor dissented in part, making for a 7-2 decision. The question would seem to be, is this an easier case, harder case or about the same as Reno? Seems to me to be about the same. Also, this problem, kiddie porn, isn't addressable easily by the "zoning" logic of O'Connor's concurrance. I think that we could easily get an 8-1 with only Rehnquist (not a big first amendment champion) dissenting.
Obscenity is not speech! That means the bill only really covers non-obscene pictures of virtual sex with minors. (It is sorta lost on me how you get into a "non-obscene" version of this stuff, but there we are!)
#define RANT
I suppose what I want to know is: Why weren't these barriers knocked down before?
Negroponte makes it clear in BEING DIGITAL that he thought a long time ago that this sort of thing was possible and practical. I've been largely of the belief that if this was somehow thwarted by the pre-1996 competitive marketplace, that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 should have solved it. Still, we wait for the market in these services to change, and it doesn't.
Finally, someone takes an interest in doing this (and only on a small scale). This is a test reaching some 60 customers. 1) Why wasn't it done before? 2) Even if it is made to work, how many decades will it take to reach me because nobody wants to really compete and shake things up out there? I can't believe that this is such a fundamental technical breakthrough, and the real barrier has been "business" decision makers who can't confront changed business models.
#undef RANT
In 1967 three astronauts died in an oxygen fire on Apollo 1. That was a top-drawer disaster in my book.
I have only vague memories of man landing on the moon, and only because my mom made such a big deal of it and made me stay up to watch it. I have no personal memory of Apollo 13, and I don't think watching the movie is the same as watching the live TV reports of the real deal.
There is a little less than a 16 year difference between 1970 and 1986. I suppose if you consider the end of the Beatles equivalent with the beginning of the Smashing Pumpkins then there's no generation gap.
Sure you could say Michael Jackson was big in music around both years, eh? Ok, so he was a cute 5 year old in the Jackson 5 for the first one, and was cruising well after Thriller for the second. No difference there, eh?
I remember perhaps too well the day Challenger blew. I had a meeting to prepare for lab that afternoon, and the boss told me that Challenger had blown up. I thought he was joking. I think everyone who heard about it by word of mouth had a hard time believing it until they saw TV footage.
I was a teaching assistant for a freshman chemistry lab, and spent more of my time that day answering questions about hydrogen/oxygen reactions than the subject planned for the day. (Oh, and getting questions about why a public school teacher was on something that dangerous wasn't fun either.)
A generation that had no space disasters finally had one. Instead of a run to the store, it was again a deadly serious business, and still is from what I can tell. Strangely enough, despite happening during the Reagan administration, the recognition of danger did not result in the removal of women from the space program.
Manned space flight isn't about science -- that gets done best with unmanned probes. The fact is that some of us want to go into that dangerous situation, and a bunch of us want those people to do it. I just hope it doesn't go back to where people are making "business decisions" when it isn't their pink little asses on the line.
There is a reason that just about every MBA program studies the decision making that led up to the Challenger disaster. Perhaps the benefit of that lesson won't be restricted to NASA. One can only hope.
Better information has allowed warehouse districts to turn into lofts. It used to be that lots of goods would sit around in the delivery pipeline waiting, and waiting. That old-fashioned "carrying cost" toasted a lot of energy keeping things warm, lit, guarded, etc.
As the article points out, there is not a dramatic demand increase. Rather, the cause is modest increases of demand with ZERO increase in supply, and no incentive to build.
I think that the cause of the problem is the old story of politicians creating a state where nobody in their right mind would want to build a power plant. The new economy had nothing to do with that.
Sending in the warranty card makes customer service so easy.
When the clip for the heart rate measurement feature of my exercise bike stopped working, all I had to do was call the 800 number. A replacement was sent snailmail and got to me in 3 days. I never had to leave home. Taking the receipt 15 miles and then likely getting the answer "we don't have a spare clip" would not have been pleasant.
Companies can and do keep track of this information. They do a better job of keeping track of it in their databases than my (ahem, well, let's be generous) "filing system" for receipts does.
My address is in the phone book. If somebody wants to mail me, it is not going to be hard to do. I'm not about to get paranoid about it.
I remember going to see the DUNE movie with my sister when it came out. As we left the movie theater she asked "what happened there? I have no idea." These inside-the-head books can make sense to a fan (or the author) had make absolutely no sense to the uninitiated.
Ender's Game probably does not have as big a problem as Dune did with length or the extent of the story being inside people's heads. (Rumors at the time were that the rough cut for Dune was 30 hours long and nicknamed "June.") I'm encouraged that so much time is being put into thinking through the problems, rather than a pile of money pushing a bad product out fast. No doubt, Ender's game should be a long, if worthwhile, project.
Let's keep something in mind. At a jury trial the judge is a traffic cop making sure that the presentation of evidence to the jury is in accordance with the rules, and is there to make sure that the lawyers and the jury don't do anything that is not in accordance with the law.
Here, Jackson was deciding whether Microsoft did it, and is supposed to be not PRE judging the case. Juries are not supposed to be PREjudiced either. However, judges and juries are allowed to be pissed at a defendant AFTER hearing all of the evidence.
Really, when a judge is setting the penalties for illegal acts he is allowed to be upset at what was done. Think about it, the judge or jury was convinced that the defendant did something illegal. It is to be expected after that, a judge will have a bad opinion of a defendant that he thinks (and/or the jury thought) did illegal things.
Surely, Jackson could have behaved better, because he is not supposed to comment on cases going up for appeal. Is he not supposed to get angry when he sees Bill Gates denying on videotape that he knows what the word "browser" means? Can't recall anything related to any email he ever read or authored? When Microsoft and/or its attorneys doctored a demonstration video on a key point of proof?
I really don't think that judges have to be punching bags. If you go out of your way to make a judge hate you, then well, golly gosh don't be surprised when he does!
Amazon again puts the customer first. Why? Because if they don't, someone else will. This is a fast-moving marketplace on the Internet -- why encourage someone to move into a legitimate competitive position? Personally, I think the customer should choose whether he sees the used price first or the new price first. It's his shopping experience and money. That's the Amazon way, and they get a premium price because of how they extend themselves to make life easy/good for me. Yay capitalism.
You are right, nexus is required if Congress doesn't do anything.
Basically, the Supreme Court said that the States can't do sales taxes without nexus unless Congress explicitly lets them. Even if the States get together, the Supreme Court is unlikely to change its mind. What happens the day after the a decision allowing the taxes when all the states start messing with their rates? The Supreme Court isn't going to sit back and try to micromanage that.
The cops keep the UPS trucks safe as well as bricks-and-mortar establishments. I don't see why ordering through a catalog or the internet should get a special break on paying the costs of running society. Especially since keeping track of the "patchwork" of laws would easily be handled with the internet to distrubute new databases of tax structures as they happen.
Of course, if the same people update the tax tables as update system security at a lot of businesses... could be ugly :)