It does kinda seem like the people running the show picked the fall guy in advance. Emptywheel's thread does point out one interesting detail - After Comey refused to sign off, George W. Bush personally called Ashcroft at the hospital, to try to hide what was going on just one more time.
The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.
Everyone is already required to pay a sales tax on the items they buy out of state anyway.
Not true. I live in Oregon. We don't have sales tax. While you are free to question the wisdom of that approach (and our public school teachers and administrators would surely agree with any criticisms you have to offer), I don't pay sales tax to (e.g.) California when I buy something online there, and I am not legally required to pay use tax to Oregon for purchases made out of state.
mod parent up. The way urban growth boundaries in Oregon work is that subdivision of parcels of land below some arbitrarily large size (I think it's 80 acres) is simply not allowed outside of the UGB.* The reasoning was that the UGB would allow farmers in the Willamette valley to continue their modest agricultural lifestyles without fighting against property speculators hoping to turn all of I-5 between Portland and Eugene into a soul-destroying chain of strip malls and burbclaves. And so far it's worked pretty well to achieve that purpose- while Eugene/Springfield is reasonably dense, there is literally NOTHING but sheep farms and hops vines in the 60 miles or so between Salem and Eugene.
The land speculation game is confined to the outskirts of existing cities- speculators can buy a big, relatively cheap parcel just outside the current UGB and hope that in 20 years, the city grows enough that at least some of their property will be pulled in, so they can break it into smaller lots and sell it. What the UGB has done is make it practically impossible for a speculator to buy a farm out in the middle of nowhere, bulldoze it flat, and build 100 houses on it... and that's just fine with most of the folks who live here.
Anyone who cares can read more here (html thanks to google)
*Local jurisdictions are allowed to make exceptions for various reasons, but "multi-unit housing development" isn't one of the allowed reasons. And of course all of the existing lots and structures were grandfathered in - the statewide UGB law was passed only about 30 years ago- much of the privately-owned land in particularly desirable locations (e.g. along the banks of the McKenzie River) was subdivided and developed long before the UGB took effect.
this analysis misses the point. If Turnitin wasn't allowed to just copy the works without permission, they would have to pay students for a license. The unlicensed use is in direct economic competition with the potential sale of legitimate licenses. This is exactly the kind of taking that copyright is supposed to prevent.
wait a sec. Obviously the student's works have economic value- to TurnItIn! If they weren't scraping work from ten thousand high schools, they wouldn't have a database of work to do their comparisons against. The court's fair-use analysis is nonsense. In an honest evaluation, all four factors weigh against the company:
1. purpose and character of the use: commercial- for the students.
2. nature of the work: individual creative writing- for the students.
3. portion of the work taken: all of it- for the students.
4. effect on the market- the company depends entirely on the student works, and is using those works without paying for them or obtaining a bargained-for license. This company's infringement entirely destroys any hope for a fair market in student works, whether for a similar purpose or for any other. This factor weighs overwhelmingly for the students.
This is object lesson #1 why a JD should be a precondition for national public office. Some lawyers may be evil and mendacious, but even the worst lawyers understand that all of the law is a game. Many lawmakers seem to be simply missing out on this feature of national government.
You're doing your constituents a disservice if you don't even realize there is a game on, let alone how that game is played.
right. first you get a temporary order. Then the court looks at the briefs, and maybe even asks for oral arguments. Then the judge decides if he needs to make the order permanent.
You're right, my fault, I'm an idiot. I posted this in 30 seconds this morning based on a link in my RSS feed, and I got some details wrong. I'd edit the story if I could.
But the upshot of the post is still correct- the ACLU won a court order against the prosecutor, preventing him from filing charges. This is still a win.
Well, sure, the ACLU only filed its complaint like, what, three or four days ago? It's ridonkulous to think a court would issue a final ruling in five days. But it's not unusual to get a temporary order this fast, that will hold while the court takes its time to figure out whether to make the order permanent or give this nutjob prosecutor a chance to back down.
well, the RIAA can move to dismiss their own case. And while it's customary for judges to grant such motions, it would be really singular for THIS judge to deny and force the MAFIAA to actually show up and take their medicine.
Despite what people may think about the Oregon experiment, we're not all a bunch of irreverent heathens:-D
Re:You can't win if you don't play
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not so much a question of whether we'll get along as it is a question of whether you'll embarrass me in front of a client. You taking bong hits in a FB pic implies that you have questionable judgment and you don't care who knows it.
Not saying that i've seen that pic of you. Just a for-example.
This is the answer. See Emptywheel's analysis, here, which reaches the same conclusion.
She makes the point that the Bushies are probably stalling the Holder confirmation so that the statute of limitations can begin to run out on Bush's FISA wiretap crimes. There is a specific block of time in 2005 where the taps were illegal, between when James Comey refused to reauthorize the program and when Congress rolled over for Bushie and shafted the American people once again.
The SoL on the criminal portion of FISA is four years, and in about seven weeks we're going to hit that four-year anniversary. So if they can keep Holder out for another few months that's one less act of treason they have to worry about.
This is the first comment that has made a goddamn bit of sense. The OP is confusing because the referenced ARTICLE (yeah, i read it) is confusing. Eric Lichtblau has done some good stuff, but he's clearly out of his depth here.
Or folks like me. This year for Christmas I'm updating our home office. I just bought two refurbished peecees with XP pro- a 3-year-old P4 2.4 IBM Intellistation and a 1-year-old Thinkpad X31. The intellistation was $150 and the laptop was $300. Sure, I could have dropped two grand to get the same laptop with Vista installed...
But I'd rather spend that extra $1500 on something else.
am I so old now that I'm the only one who thinks that PERL is cool? What better way to teach kids about loops than to make them infinite and print the result of each iteration out on the screen?
Ok, Lego mindstorms is cool, and maybe colors and stuff are exciting. But speaking as the kid who wrote a computer quiz game in apple BASIC in sixth grade, way back in 1988, with GOTO and GOSUB and incremental scorekeeping and system beep sound effects and the payoff screens coded by hand, with POKE, in 16 colors, as pictures of a confederate or a union soldier planting a flag to indicate the winner...
but seriously, here's my suggestion. Give them problems to solve. It doesn't matter what language you choose- the process is what matters, and programming is all about solving discrete problems. Start them out with something simple: "how can I print a number to the screen?" and then move up: "How can I make the computer count by one, and then print THAT number to the screen?" Those were the most satisfying programming moments of my larval stage as a nerd- look how fast it gets to 1000! and 10,000! and once it gets to 1,000,000 you can really see the time difference in how long it takes to add another order of magnitude...
The magic comes later, when the world presents you with a big complicated problem, and you realize you can solve it easily by breaking it down into N smaller simple problems.
Theoretically, you're correct. But just because a law is in effect doesn't mean that the law is ENFORCED. Patent/copyright law is NOT self-enforcing. Practically, if someone violates your patent, you need to sue them to make them stop. If a company is importing goods that violate the patent, you need to obtain assistance from US Customs / Treasury to impound those goods, or obtain a civil seizure order from a federal court and then you need assistance from the Federal Marshalls to execute the order.
If the company violating your patent is Wal-Mart, and the Customs/Treasury/DOJ officers who you need for enforcement report to George W. Bush... why don't you write us a letter from Guantanamo and let us know how the law is working out for you.
What it means is that if she gets an injunction, the U.S. is not a market for said device until they either license the technology or work around it to the satisfaction of the courts. That will happen, one way or the other, because the United States is a substantial market for consumer products based upon the blue LED.
And that's the crux of the problem. When the SCOTUS decided the betamax case in 1984, there were between four and six million VCRs already in American homes, and some other unknown number of VCRs already in the stream of commerce. In some sense, the decision had to come out the way it did because it was impossible to put that particular genie back in the bottle. Courts generally don't like to make decisions that can't practically be enforced, becuase such decisions provide easy opportunities for the public and the other branches of government to undermine the court's authority.
This isn't just about blu-ray. Can you imagine the practical limitations of trying to enforce an injunction against the sale of all DVD players in the US? An order where the FBI / Customs & Treasury / Federal Marshalls would need to go into every single electronics retailer in the United States and seize every single DVD player on the shelves? Let alone a decision that brands all CD burners and DVD players in private homes as contraband?
Righto. I guess the point I left unsaid is that the patent-holder can't pick up a gun on her own and patrol the Port of Los Angeles to keep those darn Japanese lasers off U.S. soil. She would need to get a court order to do it, which I guess is what this particluar lawsuit is about.
But my tinfoil hat is telling me that Wal-Mart would never allow US Customs to enforce an injunction against all products containing Sony lasers, no matter how valid the patent may be or how well the patent-holder does in court. In the realpolitik of global economics, it just ain't gonna happen.
Slashdot Mirror
It does kinda seem like the people running the show picked the fall guy in advance. Emptywheel's thread does point out one interesting detail - After Comey refused to sign off, George W. Bush personally called Ashcroft at the hospital, to try to hide what was going on just one more time.
The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.
Everyone is already required to pay a sales tax on the items they buy out of state anyway.
Not true. I live in Oregon. We don't have sales tax. While you are free to question the wisdom of that approach (and our public school teachers and administrators would surely agree with any criticisms you have to offer), I don't pay sales tax to (e.g.) California when I buy something online there, and I am not legally required to pay use tax to Oregon for purchases made out of state.
mod parent up. The way urban growth boundaries in Oregon work is that subdivision of parcels of land below some arbitrarily large size (I think it's 80 acres) is simply not allowed outside of the UGB.* The reasoning was that the UGB would allow farmers in the Willamette valley to continue their modest agricultural lifestyles without fighting against property speculators hoping to turn all of I-5 between Portland and Eugene into a soul-destroying chain of strip malls and burbclaves. And so far it's worked pretty well to achieve that purpose- while Eugene/Springfield is reasonably dense, there is literally NOTHING but sheep farms and hops vines in the 60 miles or so between Salem and Eugene.
The land speculation game is confined to the outskirts of existing cities- speculators can buy a big, relatively cheap parcel just outside the current UGB and hope that in 20 years, the city grows enough that at least some of their property will be pulled in, so they can break it into smaller lots and sell it. What the UGB has done is make it practically impossible for a speculator to buy a farm out in the middle of nowhere, bulldoze it flat, and build 100 houses on it... and that's just fine with most of the folks who live here.
Anyone who cares can read more here (html thanks to google)
*Local jurisdictions are allowed to make exceptions for various reasons, but "multi-unit housing development" isn't one of the allowed reasons. And of course all of the existing lots and structures were grandfathered in - the statewide UGB law was passed only about 30 years ago- much of the privately-owned land in particularly desirable locations (e.g. along the banks of the McKenzie River) was subdivided and developed long before the UGB took effect.
this analysis misses the point. If Turnitin wasn't allowed to just copy the works without permission, they would have to pay students for a license. The unlicensed use is in direct economic competition with the potential sale of legitimate licenses. This is exactly the kind of taking that copyright is supposed to prevent.
wait a sec. Obviously the student's works have economic value- to TurnItIn! If they weren't scraping work from ten thousand high schools, they wouldn't have a database of work to do their comparisons against. The court's fair-use analysis is nonsense. In an honest evaluation, all four factors weigh against the company:
These judges should be ashamed.
This is object lesson #1 why a JD should be a precondition for national public office. Some lawyers may be evil and mendacious, but even the worst lawyers understand that all of the law is a game. Many lawmakers seem to be simply missing out on this feature of national government.
You're doing your constituents a disservice if you don't even realize there is a game on, let alone how that game is played.
sorry. I submitted a lousy summary because I rushed the read on my RSS feed- and it got posted. Such is life. I'd edit the summary if I could.
OK, maybe I'm not an idiot, but my post was certainly careless. And I really do wish i could edit it now.
I'm intrigued by your logic and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter :-P
right. first you get a temporary order. Then the court looks at the briefs, and maybe even asks for oral arguments. Then the judge decides if he needs to make the order permanent.
That's how the process works.
You're right, my fault, I'm an idiot. I posted this in 30 seconds this morning based on a link in my RSS feed, and I got some details wrong. I'd edit the story if I could.
But the upshot of the post is still correct- the ACLU won a court order against the prosecutor, preventing him from filing charges. This is still a win.
Well, sure, the ACLU only filed its complaint like, what, three or four days ago? It's ridonkulous to think a court would issue a final ruling in five days. But it's not unusual to get a temporary order this fast, that will hold while the court takes its time to figure out whether to make the order permanent or give this nutjob prosecutor a chance to back down.
hey, this is slashdot. you're not supposed to read the article.
well, the RIAA can move to dismiss their own case. And while it's customary for judges to grant such motions, it would be really singular for THIS judge to deny and force the MAFIAA to actually show up and take their medicine.
because The Legality only updates once a week, and half the time the topic is something that /. doesn't give two shits about.
Despite what people may think about the Oregon experiment, we're not all a bunch of irreverent heathens :-D
It's not so much a question of whether we'll get along as it is a question of whether you'll embarrass me in front of a client. You taking bong hits in a FB pic implies that you have questionable judgment and you don't care who knows it.
Not saying that i've seen that pic of you. Just a for-example.
exactly. They've passed the law, now let's see them enforce it.
This is the answer. See Emptywheel's analysis, here, which reaches the same conclusion.
She makes the point that the Bushies are probably stalling the Holder confirmation so that the statute of limitations can begin to run out on Bush's FISA wiretap crimes. There is a specific block of time in 2005 where the taps were illegal, between when James Comey refused to reauthorize the program and when Congress rolled over for Bushie and shafted the American people once again.
The SoL on the criminal portion of FISA is four years, and in about seven weeks we're going to hit that four-year anniversary. So if they can keep Holder out for another few months that's one less act of treason they have to worry about.
This is the first comment that has made a goddamn bit of sense. The OP is confusing because the referenced ARTICLE (yeah, i read it) is confusing. Eric Lichtblau has done some good stuff, but he's clearly out of his depth here.
Or folks like me. This year for Christmas I'm updating our home office. I just bought two refurbished peecees with XP pro- a 3-year-old P4 2.4 IBM Intellistation and a 1-year-old Thinkpad X31. The intellistation was $150 and the laptop was $300. Sure, I could have dropped two grand to get the same laptop with Vista installed...
But I'd rather spend that extra $1500 on something else.
am I so old now that I'm the only one who thinks that PERL is cool? What better way to teach kids about loops than to make them infinite and print the result of each iteration out on the screen?
Ok, Lego mindstorms is cool, and maybe colors and stuff are exciting. But speaking as the kid who wrote a computer quiz game in apple BASIC in sixth grade, way back in 1988, with GOTO and GOSUB and incremental scorekeeping and system beep sound effects and the payoff screens coded by hand, with POKE, in 16 colors, as pictures of a confederate or a union soldier planting a flag to indicate the winner...
but seriously, here's my suggestion. Give them problems to solve. It doesn't matter what language you choose- the process is what matters, and programming is all about solving discrete problems. Start them out with something simple: "how can I print a number to the screen?" and then move up: "How can I make the computer count by one, and then print THAT number to the screen?" Those were the most satisfying programming moments of my larval stage as a nerd- look how fast it gets to 1000! and 10,000! and once it gets to 1,000,000 you can really see the time difference in how long it takes to add another order of magnitude...
The magic comes later, when the world presents you with a big complicated problem, and you realize you can solve it easily by breaking it down into N smaller simple problems.
Theoretically, you're correct. But just because a law is in effect doesn't mean that the law is ENFORCED. Patent/copyright law is NOT self-enforcing. Practically, if someone violates your patent, you need to sue them to make them stop. If a company is importing goods that violate the patent, you need to obtain assistance from US Customs / Treasury to impound those goods, or obtain a civil seizure order from a federal court and then you need assistance from the Federal Marshalls to execute the order.
If the company violating your patent is Wal-Mart, and the Customs/Treasury/DOJ officers who you need for enforcement report to George W. Bush... why don't you write us a letter from Guantanamo and let us know how the law is working out for you.
And that's the crux of the problem. When the SCOTUS decided the betamax case in 1984, there were between four and six million VCRs already in American homes, and some other unknown number of VCRs already in the stream of commerce. In some sense, the decision had to come out the way it did because it was impossible to put that particular genie back in the bottle. Courts generally don't like to make decisions that can't practically be enforced, becuase such decisions provide easy opportunities for the public and the other branches of government to undermine the court's authority.
This isn't just about blu-ray. Can you imagine the practical limitations of trying to enforce an injunction against the sale of all DVD players in the US? An order where the FBI / Customs & Treasury / Federal Marshalls would need to go into every single electronics retailer in the United States and seize every single DVD player on the shelves? Let alone a decision that brands all CD burners and DVD players in private homes as contraband?
Yeah, good luck with that.
Righto. I guess the point I left unsaid is that the patent-holder can't pick up a gun on her own and patrol the Port of Los Angeles to keep those darn Japanese lasers off U.S. soil. She would need to get a court order to do it, which I guess is what this particluar lawsuit is about.
But my tinfoil hat is telling me that Wal-Mart would never allow US Customs to enforce an injunction against all products containing Sony lasers, no matter how valid the patent may be or how well the patent-holder does in court. In the realpolitik of global economics, it just ain't gonna happen.