What strikes me is that by naming Google as a defendant, she's making the case of the driver (the defendant against whom she may have a legitimate claim). By suing Google, she says, in court documents, "the highway was dangerous enough so that a pedestrian shouldn't have been there." Now the driver just has to point to her own court filings which claim that there wasn't a safe place for a pedestrian to walk along that highway.
It's irrelevant whether she wins. The defendant has already lost - legal fees will cost them double the damages claimed if they fight the case.
In this case, the legal expenses are probably much more onerous to the litigant (an individual) than to the defendant (Google). Assuming she does lose in court, Google will be fine, but she won't.
This isn't the kind of case that will involve days or weeks in court and huge teams of attorneys on both sides like, say, a patent case between two companies.
There are some cases in which the loser has to pay the winner's legal fees anyway; if ever that were appropriate, it would be this case. Any idea if that's true here?
[Congress has power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;
Yes, Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, but that doesn't prohibit states from writing their own laws which affect any business done in their state unless the state law contradicts a federal law.
And is anyone still running any bare Aluminum? I certainly wouldn't, it leads to corrosion.
Yes, American Airlines has never painted their aircraft (in part to reduce weight). I don't think they've had any trouble with corrosion, and their MD-80s are going on 30 years old.
Boeing has a discussion of painting aircraft. They mention corrosion, and to a quick read, it looks like washing aircraft is more important than paint to reducing corrosion.
I don't care how many times pundits from the Census Bureau muck it up with our lord Jon and savior Steven they aren't going to convince me to answer 10 questions on a census. There is only one question I will answer on that stupid form, and if that lumps me in with the "evil" conservatives, so be it.
Questions 1, 2, 5, and 10 are all simply checks to make sure that the respondent really did, indeed, list all residents of the household (which isn't straightforward in all cases -- think roommates at college, for example).
Questions 6, 7, and 9 have all been asked since either 1790 or 1800 and are basic profiling questions. Don't like it? Complain to the almighty Founding Fathers. Question 8 (are you Hispanic) is necessary to make question 7 (race) make sense in a modern world.
Question 3 (your phone number) is to allow easy follow-up; if you don't include it, I don't think the bureau will care unless there's something they can't understand with your report (illegible handwriting, most likely), in which case they'll have to knock on your door to fix it (which costs far, far more of your tax dollars than a phone call).
Question 4, which has been asked since 1890, is the only one that I agree isn't really necessary.
The ten minutes the Census Bureau says this form will take is a gross exaggeration. Two is more like it -- far more than it took me to write this response or you to complain about it.
Yup. I was preparing to nominate this occurrence for the Darwin award, when I noticed this detail. Male lions kill the offspring of a female lion before mating with her. This is apparently advantageous for their own genes. Ol' Dougie did the same.
The mother was standing 3 feet from the child when this happened. She could have taken care of the gun too, so I'm not sure her genes deserve to live on either.
Oh really? Where's that? Where I live (UK) and where most of this site's users reside (USA) the primary purpose of prison is to punish. Then there's the desire to keep criminals away from law-abiding society. Once all that's been addressed, the courts and gaolers may give a thought to rehabilitation.
But punishing is part of rehabilitation. In this case, as others have said, the mother and stepfather are getting ample punishment by having their daughter die. I think there's no chance that these people are any danger to society (absent other evidence); they won't make this mistake again.
What if he has more kids? What if it was an illegal gun? This guy needs some jail time.
Whether he feels bad about it or not there should be a severe punishment for this level of recklessness, negligence and stupidity. Just add a gun to that level of child care and it will never end well.
If it's an illegal gun, he probably does deserve jail time on that count. However, in nearly all cases, the purpose of putting someone in prison is to rehabilitate the convicted criminal so (s)he can become a productive member of society again and not do the same (or similar) bad thing again. I rather suspect that losing his child will be a far more effective method of ensuring that he is never again careless with a gun than prison ever could be. In fact, prison may well make him worse off mentally.
In any sane society, he would certainly lose his privilege to own a gun, but this country has a misguided Constitutional amendment and a Supreme Court which misinterprets said amendment, so I'm not optimistic about that.
The article notes that he had the gun out because there was a prowler he was worried about. Is having guns around for defense really more likely to do good than cause harm?
Learn how to use your damn voice mail because nothing is that important.
And if it is that damn important, pull over to the side of the road.
On a serious note, this order really does have some practical benefit because if a federal employee has something that is important enough that it has to be dealt with while driving, the employee can pull over, make the phone call, and the employee's boss will have no justification to complain about the employee being 5 minutes late for whatever appointment s/he was driving to. If the boss complains, the employee has a written policy to cite.
I don't know why a mobile is worse, perhaps it's a pavlov dog thing since when you have a phone to your ear you are normally trying to block out your surroundings.
I suspect a big part of it is that passengers are present and can see what's going on on the road.
When there's traffic that needs attention and I, as the driver, get distracted from the conversation I'm having with my passenger, the passenger understands why I'm distracted from the conversation without the need for me to explain why. When talking on the phone, it takes both more time and more mental effort on my part to explain what's going on to the person I'm talking to. ("Sorry, I'm concentrating on switching lanes now, so I'm not listening to what you're saying".) In practice, when on the phone, the driver is more likely to just keep full attention on the conversation.
That's not to say that having an involved conversation with a passenger can't be dangerous, just less so.
Re "Just federal employees": The president can ban federal employees from texting while driving for work (or having cream in their coffee while on the job, for that matter, if he so chose) by an executive order. Banning all drivers from texting would take an act of a legislature, and this sort of thing is typically done by state law, not federal law. Congress can effectively force states to enact highway laws like this by withholding federal highway funds.
Congress may get there soon, but it takes more time.
We need some fucking laws. In other countries, you can't commercially use the word "free" to refer to any transaction which money changes hands for any reason whatsoever. Let's enact those here too.
I am sick and tired of having to hand over money for "free" merchandise. Why not call an air ticket "free" with a seating fee, a booking fee, a fuel fee, an oxygen fee, a plane maintenance fee, and a landing fee tacked on?
"Free" should mean precisely one fucking thing when you come across it in public: free.
I was deliberately not passing judgement.
However, reading what Apple actually says, I slightly misrepresented them. What they say is "If you've purchased a qualifying computer or Xserve on or after June 8, 2009 that does not include Mac OS X Snow Leopard, you can upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard for $9.95.*", with the asterisk noting that that covers shipping and handling. I mistakenly used the word "free", but Apple never does.
If you buy a MacBook after June 8, 2009 (i.e. any time now) that doesn't yet have Snow Leopard (10.6) pre-installed, the update will cost $9.99. Apple calls it "free" with a $9.99 shipping and handling fee. (See the Macworld story.)
Tuition is just a way to trim down their applicant pool. The state pays much more of your tuition than you do.
That's a cute one-liner, but if only it were true. The UW-Madison in-state tuition ($8020 for 2009-2010) is about the same as the state subsidy per student ($9379, 2008-2009). This doesn't factor in the additional $8040 per student for room and board. Nonresident of Wisconsin/Minnesota tuition is about $22,000 plus room and board.
Sure, "yo, I'm leaving", "yes sir, here, let me stamp your passport."
Well, yeah, that's what immigration is, most of the time (at least with my US passport). The UK, the US, and Australia give a bit of interrogation at immigration (and the Canadians do to Americans whatever the Americans DHS does to Canadians citizens, entirely justifiably), but Chile and the EU just open and stamp the passport, both on arrival and departure. I can't speak from experience about anywhere else. (And GP is right that I was wrong to call what they do at exit "customs".)
That's not a barrier to leaving a country, and it's not "customs." Requiring you to be fingerprinted is a whole different league. Interesting that this story shows up alongside another today where some cancer patient was detained because they couldn't get a good set of fingerprints off him. I actually just got back from a conference in Hawaii with this guy who got hassled at the border because he climbs and his fingerprints aren't all they could be.
Yes, requiring foreigners to be fingerprinted is a whole different league, something I've written my elected officials to complain about. (The people directly affected can't do, which is why it probably won't change.) That doesn't mean that the exit immigration check that most countries do isn't immigration.
As GP suggested, the US has, until recently, had essentially no idea how many visitors overstayed their visas. I don't see the problem with that old approach, in general. Exit immigration is fairly time-consuming, mostly standing in line.
All countries exercise at least some control over who can enter, but there's only one kind of country that erects barriers to who can leave. How long until you guys build a wall? Oh, apparently you've started already.
Huh?
While I agree with the complaint and don't like much of anything about the changes to US Customs and Immigration procedures in the last 7-8 years, the US is one of relatively few countries that doesn't put all passengers through an exit customs and/or immigration check. In all the overseas airports I've flown out of in recent years (in Australia, Chile, the UK, and Spain), you pass through a customs check before entering the international departures area.
This check is pretty cursory, but it's only the US and Canada (in my relatively limited experience) that don't do it.
How will this mesh with the Sears decision by SCOTUS? My understanding (I'm not a lawyer) is that taxing interstate commerce is prohibited by the constitution (the root of all US law).
My understanding is that the states don't have the authority to collect taxes on a business without a presence in their state without Congressional approval. However, the Congress (which explicitly has the authority to regulate interstate commerce) can certainly pass a law giving states that authority.
Except this phone is not unlocked; it's just without a contract! You can buy the phone, but you can't use it with any provider other than AT&T (without illegally unlocking the phone yourself) and, if you do activate the phone with AT&T, you still have to get an iPhone contract (i. e. you can't buy the no-contract iPhone and activate it on a regular, voice-only plan).
Yeah, I know. I meant "illegal" as shorthand for "in violation of the EULA supplied by the overbearing lawyers at Apple and AT&T, voiding your warranty, potentially making your life difficult after future software updates, and of questionable enough legality that you may face lawsuits from which you can't affordably defend yourself".
I wish Apple would sell an actually unlocked iPhone; I might well buy it at $600.
All that the $400 higher price for the unlocked iPhone is proving
Except this phone is not unlocked; it's just without a contract! You can buy the phone, but you can't use it with any provider other than AT&T (without illegally unlocking the phone yourself) and, if you do activate the phone with AT&T, you still have to get an iPhone contract (i. e. you can't buy the no-contract iPhone and activate it on a regular, voice-only plan).
Is a teenager having a fucking ibuprofen such a monstrous and immediate security threat that we need to strip search her? Or was somebody just a little too eager to strip search a 13 year old? Hmm?
The strip search was ordered by an assistant principal and carried out by two other, female school employees. The order is monstrous and grossly disproportionate to the alleged offense, but my reading of the story sees no suggestion of sexual innuendo.
Remember that this happened six years ago and has been working its way through the courts since then.
I love how America has so many laws and yet regardless of how many patriotic movies it creates it still believes the constitution has limited application.
Well, IANAL, but my understanding is that the question is whether the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government or by anybody and whether a public school counts as the government. For example, the Fourth Amendment does not generally apply when you fly a plane. You have every right to refuse the search and not board your plane, but you have no right to refuse the search and board the plane anyway (the TSA claims, with judicial backing with which I generally disagree). Similarly, I guess, the student could have simply left school. The fact that she is required to be in school and that the school acts in the place of the parents makes that line of argument tenuous, but it's not entirely specious.
A related note: it is clear that the First Amendment only applies to governments (originally only the Federal Government, although 20th century court decisions have interpreted the First Amendment to apply to state governments as well in light of the 14th Amendment). The First Amendment does not apply to private entities and didn't apply to public schools until the latter half of the 20th century. To my lay eye, the Fourth Amendment is less clear about how restricted its application is.
PDAs are great for those of us who don't have a staff. I think in the case of POTUS, Mr. Obama will soon discover he doesn't need to thumb around on a tiny keyboard when he is sitting in the most sophisticated communications centers on earth.
You're partially right, but the point is that Mr. Obama specifically does not want to rely entirely on his staff for information; unlike his predecessor, he wants to read the newspaper and write short emails himself, limiting the filter of his inner circle. During the campaign, he found the Blackberry to be a marvelous tool for that job.
Slashdot Mirror
What strikes me is that by naming Google as a defendant, she's making the case of the driver (the defendant against whom she may have a legitimate claim). By suing Google, she says, in court documents, "the highway was dangerous enough so that a pedestrian shouldn't have been there." Now the driver just has to point to her own court filings which claim that there wasn't a safe place for a pedestrian to walk along that highway.
It's irrelevant whether she wins. The defendant has already lost - legal fees will cost them double the damages claimed if they fight the case.
In this case, the legal expenses are probably much more onerous to the litigant (an individual) than to the defendant (Google). Assuming she does lose in court, Google will be fine, but she won't.
This isn't the kind of case that will involve days or weeks in court and huge teams of attorneys on both sides like, say, a patent case between two companies.
There are some cases in which the loser has to pay the winner's legal fees anyway; if ever that were appropriate, it would be this case. Any idea if that's true here?
Yes, Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, but that doesn't prohibit states from writing their own laws which affect any business done in their state unless the state law contradicts a federal law.
And is anyone still running any bare Aluminum? I certainly wouldn't, it leads to corrosion.
Yes, American Airlines has never painted their aircraft (in part to reduce weight). I don't think they've had any trouble with corrosion, and their MD-80s are going on 30 years old.
Boeing has a discussion of painting aircraft. They mention corrosion, and to a quick read, it looks like washing aircraft is more important than paint to reducing corrosion.
I needed the anouncement of the floppy disk demise as reminder that it is not already dead. Bought my last disk at least a decade ago....
Hmmm, a decade ago, it had been four years since I'd had a machine capable of reading a floppy disk. :)
(Bought an iMac as my primary machine in 1997, IIRC.)
Well, in 1790, they did ask for sex, race, and date of birth. http://2010.census.gov/2010census/text/text-form.php
Have you actually read the 10 questions?
Questions 1, 2, 5, and 10 are all simply checks to make sure that the respondent really did, indeed, list all residents of the household (which isn't straightforward in all cases -- think roommates at college, for example).
Questions 6, 7, and 9 have all been asked since either 1790 or 1800 and are basic profiling questions. Don't like it? Complain to the almighty Founding Fathers. Question 8 (are you Hispanic) is necessary to make question 7 (race) make sense in a modern world.
Question 3 (your phone number) is to allow easy follow-up; if you don't include it, I don't think the bureau will care unless there's something they can't understand with your report (illegible handwriting, most likely), in which case they'll have to knock on your door to fix it (which costs far, far more of your tax dollars than a phone call).
Question 4, which has been asked since 1890, is the only one that I agree isn't really necessary.
The ten minutes the Census Bureau says this form will take is a gross exaggeration. Two is more like it -- far more than it took me to write this response or you to complain about it.
The mother was standing 3 feet from the child when this happened. She could have taken care of the gun too, so I'm not sure her genes deserve to live on either.
But punishing is part of rehabilitation. In this case, as others have said, the mother and stepfather are getting ample punishment by having their daughter die. I think there's no chance that these people are any danger to society (absent other evidence); they won't make this mistake again.
It was his stepchild who killed herself. His one-year old biological child is alive and well.
If it's an illegal gun, he probably does deserve jail time on that count. However, in nearly all cases, the purpose of putting someone in prison is to rehabilitate the convicted criminal so (s)he can become a productive member of society again and not do the same (or similar) bad thing again. I rather suspect that losing his child will be a far more effective method of ensuring that he is never again careless with a gun than prison ever could be. In fact, prison may well make him worse off mentally.
In any sane society, he would certainly lose his privilege to own a gun, but this country has a misguided Constitutional amendment and a Supreme Court which misinterprets said amendment, so I'm not optimistic about that.
The article notes that he had the gun out because there was a prowler he was worried about. Is having guns around for defense really more likely to do good than cause harm?
Learn how to use your damn voice mail because nothing is that important.
And if it is that damn important, pull over to the side of the road.
On a serious note, this order really does have some practical benefit because if a federal employee has something that is important enough that it has to be dealt with while driving, the employee can pull over, make the phone call, and the employee's boss will have no justification to complain about the employee being 5 minutes late for whatever appointment s/he was driving to. If the boss complains, the employee has a written policy to cite.
I suspect a big part of it is that passengers are present and can see what's going on on the road.
When there's traffic that needs attention and I, as the driver, get distracted from the conversation I'm having with my passenger, the passenger understands why I'm distracted from the conversation without the need for me to explain why. When talking on the phone, it takes both more time and more mental effort on my part to explain what's going on to the person I'm talking to. ("Sorry, I'm concentrating on switching lanes now, so I'm not listening to what you're saying".) In practice, when on the phone, the driver is more likely to just keep full attention on the conversation.
That's not to say that having an involved conversation with a passenger can't be dangerous, just less so.
Re "Just federal employees": The president can ban federal employees from texting while driving for work (or having cream in their coffee while on the job, for that matter, if he so chose) by an executive order. Banning all drivers from texting would take an act of a legislature, and this sort of thing is typically done by state law, not federal law. Congress can effectively force states to enact highway laws like this by withholding federal highway funds.
Congress may get there soon, but it takes more time.
We need some fucking laws. In other countries, you can't commercially use the word "free" to refer to any transaction which money changes hands for any reason whatsoever. Let's enact those here too.
I am sick and tired of having to hand over money for "free" merchandise. Why not call an air ticket "free" with a seating fee, a booking fee, a fuel fee, an oxygen fee, a plane maintenance fee, and a landing fee tacked on?
"Free" should mean precisely one fucking thing when you come across it in public: free .
I was deliberately not passing judgement.
However, reading what Apple actually says, I slightly misrepresented them. What they say is "If you've purchased a qualifying computer or Xserve on or after June 8, 2009 that does not include Mac OS X Snow Leopard, you can upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard for $9.95.*", with the asterisk noting that that covers shipping and handling. I mistakenly used the word "free", but Apple never does.
Apple's upgrade page.
If you buy a MacBook after June 8, 2009 (i.e. any time now) that doesn't yet have Snow Leopard (10.6) pre-installed, the update will cost $9.99. Apple calls it "free" with a $9.99 shipping and handling fee. (See the Macworld story.)
Tuition is just a way to trim down their applicant pool. The state pays much more of your tuition than you do.
That's a cute one-liner, but if only it were true. The UW-Madison in-state tuition ($8020 for 2009-2010) is about the same as the state subsidy per student ($9379, 2008-2009). This doesn't factor in the additional $8040 per student for room and board. Nonresident of Wisconsin/Minnesota tuition is about $22,000 plus room and board.
Well, yeah, that's what immigration is, most of the time (at least with my US passport). The UK, the US, and Australia give a bit of interrogation at immigration (and the Canadians do to Americans whatever the Americans DHS does to Canadians citizens, entirely justifiably), but Chile and the EU just open and stamp the passport, both on arrival and departure. I can't speak from experience about anywhere else. (And GP is right that I was wrong to call what they do at exit "customs".)
Yes, requiring foreigners to be fingerprinted is a whole different league, something I've written my elected officials to complain about. (The people directly affected can't do, which is why it probably won't change.) That doesn't mean that the exit immigration check that most countries do isn't immigration.
As GP suggested, the US has, until recently, had essentially no idea how many visitors overstayed their visas. I don't see the problem with that old approach, in general. Exit immigration is fairly time-consuming, mostly standing in line.
Huh?
While I agree with the complaint and don't like much of anything about the changes to US Customs and Immigration procedures in the last 7-8 years, the US is one of relatively few countries that doesn't put all passengers through an exit customs and/or immigration check. In all the overseas airports I've flown out of in recent years (in Australia, Chile, the UK, and Spain), you pass through a customs check before entering the international departures area.
This check is pretty cursory, but it's only the US and Canada (in my relatively limited experience) that don't do it.
My understanding is that the states don't have the authority to collect taxes on a business without a presence in their state without Congressional approval. However, the Congress (which explicitly has the authority to regulate interstate commerce) can certainly pass a law giving states that authority.
Except this phone is not unlocked; it's just without a contract! You can buy the phone, but you can't use it with any provider other than AT&T (without illegally unlocking the phone yourself) and, if you do activate the phone with AT&T, you still have to get an iPhone contract (i. e. you can't buy the no-contract iPhone and activate it on a regular, voice-only plan).
Unlocking a cell phone is not considered illegal in the US. There have been recent challenges to that, but it currently is considered legal. Here is the first link I found from searching for it online:
http://www.darknet.org.uk/2007/04/legal-to-unlock-cell-phones-since-november-2006/
Yeah, I know. I meant "illegal" as shorthand for "in violation of the EULA supplied by the overbearing lawyers at Apple and AT&T, voiding your warranty, potentially making your life difficult after future software updates, and of questionable enough legality that you may face lawsuits from which you can't affordably defend yourself".
I wish Apple would sell an actually unlocked iPhone; I might well buy it at $600.
Except this phone is not unlocked; it's just without a contract! You can buy the phone, but you can't use it with any provider other than AT&T (without illegally unlocking the phone yourself) and, if you do activate the phone with AT&T, you still have to get an iPhone contract (i. e. you can't buy the no-contract iPhone and activate it on a regular, voice-only plan).
The strip search was ordered by an assistant principal and carried out by two other, female school employees. The order is monstrous and grossly disproportionate to the alleged offense, but my reading of the story sees no suggestion of sexual innuendo.
Remember that this happened six years ago and has been working its way through the courts since then.
Well, IANAL, but my understanding is that the question is whether the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government or by anybody and whether a public school counts as the government. For example, the Fourth Amendment does not generally apply when you fly a plane. You have every right to refuse the search and not board your plane, but you have no right to refuse the search and board the plane anyway (the TSA claims, with judicial backing with which I generally disagree). Similarly, I guess, the student could have simply left school. The fact that she is required to be in school and that the school acts in the place of the parents makes that line of argument tenuous, but it's not entirely specious.
A related note: it is clear that the First Amendment only applies to governments (originally only the Federal Government, although 20th century court decisions have interpreted the First Amendment to apply to state governments as well in light of the 14th Amendment). The First Amendment does not apply to private entities and didn't apply to public schools until the latter half of the 20th century. To my lay eye, the Fourth Amendment is less clear about how restricted its application is.
You're partially right, but the point is that Mr. Obama specifically does not want to rely entirely on his staff for information; unlike his predecessor, he wants to read the newspaper and write short emails himself, limiting the filter of his inner circle. During the campaign, he found the Blackberry to be a marvelous tool for that job.