It adds not just the ability for Firefox to run.Net applications, but the ability for links on a page to install and run.Net applications with a single click and with no indication to the user that new software's been installed on their computer. That's a problem for me at least because, unlike Java,.Net is (as is usual for Microsoft products) to some degree integrated into the Windows operating system. Java, for instance, doesn't have it's own user accounts on the system independent of the user's account, while the.Net framework does. That's fine for entirely local applications, but not fine for unknown applications loaded from unknown and potentially hostile sources at some unknown location on the Internet.
The objection isn't to them providing support in Firefox. It's in their forcing the add-on into Firefox without asking the user whether they want it or not, when established convention is that the user elects to install add-ons and that if the user hasn't elected to install something it doesn't get installed. This is made especially annoying by the fact that many Firefox users use it precisely because it doesn't support things like.Net.
Instead of installing it and letting you uninstall it if you don't want it, how about they don't install it and make it an optional thing you can choose to install?
To make sure you still have the music if the streaming service goes bankrupt, gets sued out of existence or adds restrictions to the availability of the material.
To keep you from running up against bandwidth caps your ISP imposes. It eats less bandwidth to download material once and play it multiple times from your local drive than it does to stream it every time you want to listen to it.
Well, as a matter of fact I don't trust my ISP's DNS servers. That's why my gateway box runs a copy of BIND going directly to the root nameservers, it's configured to use and verify DNSSEC if present (currently it can only verify my internal zones), and firewall's configured to block access to DNS except via the gateway box.
Note that users aren't supposed to need to verify the DNS records. The idea is that the nameserver the user's querying verifies the incoming responses and simply discards any whose DNSSEC signatures don't verify. The only people who have to worry about ever even seeing an unverified response would be people running nameservers themselves, and they're presumed to either have configured their software to do the verification or to not care about bogus records.
Well, anything running the major nameserver software probably can verify DNSSEC signatures. Given the way most ISPs have things set up, your local machine shouldn't need to verify if the ISP's nameservers are verifying. The only machines that could inject bogus data directly into your local machine would be on the local segment of your ISP's network, whereas the major DNS injection threat today is from outside the ISP's local network. And without DNSSEC things can't verify even if they want to, which is a good argument for having it there so people who want to protect themselves can.
Basically, DNSSEC lets your computer verify that the DNS responses it's getting back are really identical to what's in the authoritative zone. If someone injects bogus DNS records into your nameserver or floods you with bogus responses to your query hoping to get one of them accepted, they won't have the private key for that domain so they won't be able to create a valid signature for their records and your DNS client will reject the bogus records.
That, BTW, is why DNSSEC has to start at the top to work. If I have DNSSEC for silverglass.org but not at the org level, then someone can inject bogus key records at the org level that'll let them successfully forge signatures for silverglass.org. To prevent that the root nameservers have to sign the org data (including the keys for domains in.org) so I can verify them using local copies of the root public keys (similar to the way we have local copies of the root nameserver names/addresses).
They pretty clearly cover the fact that the government does have wide latitude to set statutory damages, and that while they can't be wildly disproportionate to the offense the entirety of the offense is not limited merely to the economic damages a party suffered. The case in particular upheld an award of 113 times the actual damages. To quote the decision, "When the penalty is contrasted with the overcharge possible in any instance it of course seems large, but, as we have said, its validity is not to be tested in that way. When it is considered with due regard for the interests of the public, the numberless opportunities for committing the offense, and the need for securing uniform adherence to established passenger rates, we think it properly cannot be said to be so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable.". And I suspect that in this case similar factors would weigh: the ease with which songs can be shared, the sheer number of copies that could be distributed and the speed with which they can be made. Looking at it all, it seems to me you've got a tough row to hoe arguing that the Court should ignore it's own holding in Williams and look solely at the dollar ratios.
Simple principle: you're responsible for what you do, not for what someone else does. And no, P2P isn't equivalent to your example, since the original sharer is still the one making it available. That a lot of other people are also doing it doesn't change things. But then, by knowingly putting the file up on P2P sharing the original sharer is also not just copying for a friend or two. They're more akin to the guy on the street-corner handing out copies to anyone who asks.
Note: the "knowingly" is significant. There is, again, a difference between the person who sets up P2P software deliberately, knowing what it'll do, and the person who got a friend to set something up for their own personal use (so they could get at their music from all their machines) and had no idea it was also handing things out to the world at large.
I don't think we fundamentally disagree. Technically, giving a copy of a couple of songs to your friend is wrong. But it's also on a whole different level from handing out copies in bulk to anybody. It's in the same area as "little white lies". It's wrong to lie, but at the same time when you Aunt Edith gives you that hideously ugly sweater as a birthday gift it's considered not really the done thing to tell her the unvarnished truth. Both fall into areas where it's not entirely black-or-white and a bit of common sense and proportion is called for.
The problem is that the RIAA are trying to draw a hard line far to one side and say that anything even a hair over that line is exactly the same as the most extreme offenses. Compounding that is that the opposition is trying to do exactly the same thing on the opposite end of the scale, claiming that anything that isn't the absolute worst example of a violation imaginable must be utterly harmless. I suspect the judges in a lot of these cases are quietly thinking the same thing I do: "Both sides are utter plonking twits. They don't need a judge, they need their mothers to tan their behinds and send them to their rooms until they decide to act civilized. But I am a judge and they're in my courtroom, and unreasonable as they may be the RIAA's technically correct about what the law says and I can't just completely ignore that.".
Precisely what you said: the equivalent of making 10,000 copies of a tape and handing them out on the street-corner. If it's wrong to do it with physical copies of a tape, it's wrong to do the same thing with copies of a bunch of bits. Likewise, if it's acceptable to do with physical copies of a tape, it ought to be acceptable to do the same thing with copies of a bunch of bits. The problem I suspect you have with my position is that you'd like something to be OK when done to bits that's widely regarded as totally unacceptable when done to more traditional media: make large numbers of copies and hand them out to anybody who asks without getting permission from nor paying royalties to the copyright holder.
My impression of the SC decision involved is that they left a lot of wiggle room when defining "unreasonably disproportionate". What I got from the ruling was that they were perfectly OK with, for instance, statutory damages of $1 million against actual damages of only a few dollars so long as the law establishing the damages also established a reason for them that passed judicial scrutiny. And I definitely don't find anything in that ruling, or in other related rulings, to suggest that the Court has ever held that statutory damages can't be set based on (to use the court's own terms) the public wrong rather than the private injury.
Yep. But if the law says statutory damages are to be in a certain range and the claim meets the requirements to award statutory damages in lieu of actual damages, which judge is legislating from the bench: the judge who awards damages in the range specified by the law, or the judge who decides that the damages are excessive and reduces the award below what the law specifies?
First, the case quoted involved willful infringement by a business and other aggravating circumstances. Also, from a strict-construction viewpoint the law does specify the amount of statutory damages so her finding that, if infringement occurred and the claim qualified for statutory damages, damages in the amount defined by the law were to be awarded would hardly be unexpected.
The big question is how she views the whole question of whether infringement occurred. That's the area where the RIAA and MPAA tend to part company with the rest of us. It's pretty clear that mass copying and distribution of unauthorized copies is infringing behavior, whether or not it's done for commercial gain. Note please that making 10,000 copies of a tape and handing them out on the street-corner is a far cry from copying a couple of songs off a tape so your friend can listen to them. To my mind there's three categories: copying that's not infringing period (eg. the copies needed to listen to anything on a computer), copying that's clearly infringing (the aforementioned making copies in bulk for anybody who comes along), and an intermediate range where the copying's technically infringing but so inoffensive that we view it as unreasonable for the owner to complain about it absent some additional problems. Making a copy of a few songs for a friend falls into that third category, it's technically infringing but the general reaction to an owner complaining about just that would be "Jeesh, get a life, dude.". The usual way the courts handle things like this is to award some token amount of damages, like the retail price of the songs copied, and then deny any request for costs by the plaintiff. What I'm interested in is exactly where Judge Sotomayor draws the lines between those three categories.
A lot of companies don't have a choice. They depend on Web-based "enterprise" applications internally that're hard-coded to work only with IE6. They can't or won't upgrade those applications, and they don't have any replacement, so they have to continue to use IE6 if they want to operate. Even upgrading to IE7 or IE8 isn't viable, the webapps refuse to work with those versions.
Yes, corporate IT should give back to open source. When they make fixes or enhancements they should, out of self-interest, contribute those back to the main-line codebase so they won't have to worry about maintaining them as future changes are made.
But they shouldn't be forced to contribute back. If they're using it in-house and not distributing modified code, they should be free to take on the maintenance headaches if they want to. If they complain and want things done to make life easier for them the correct answer should be "Personal problems are the third door down on the left, have a nice day.", though. The only exception is where they're modifying free code (ie. code under a GPL-type license) and redistributing binaries created from the modified code, in which case they should be required to comply with the license and make their modifications available in source form. If they're redistributing modified verisons of code that's under a BSD-style license, well, the license doesn't require them to disclose the source and they shouldn't be forced to do anything more than comply with the license terms. I personally may disagree with the choice of license, but the code's author apparently thought the license he chose was appropriate and it's his code and his decision, not mine.
No, I wouldn't be leaving myself open. Those "innocuous" cables would have all the proper security precautions to prevent tapping, plus the traffic on them would be encrypted to keep it secure even if someone tapped the cable (defense in depth). But the decoy cables would keep the ordinary nosies occupied, depriving the people going after the real cables of cover. It's much easier to spot intruders disguised as clumps of brush on a well-mowed lawn than in a tangle of brush./p.
If I were trying to keep a cable secret, I'd make sure the real cable was clearly recorded on the maps as something totally innocuous and not connected to anything secret at all. If it got cut, it'd get repaired per normal procedure for the kind of cable it's marked as (and I'll have sufficient backups that I don't need to make the repair an attention-grabbing rush job). Then I'd lay a few completely unused but highly suspicious-looking decoy cables, making sure they occasionally got cut and that there was a suitably public trying-to-look-not-public scramble to repair them. That way anybody trying to find my cables was likely to glom onto the ones I was trying to keep hidden, and probably wouldn't even bother looking at "backup equipment monitoring line, sewage pumping station 37, Department of Public Works".
I don't think so. As far as I know, Google doesn't sell position in the search results. They sell it in the featured links at the top and the ads down the side, but I mostly ignore those. I'm not looking for sellers at that point, I'm looking for the main site of whoever actually makes what I'm looking for, and for third-party sites with reliable information on it, so I can figure out whether it's legit and whether I'm actually interested in buying it. If I do decide to buy it, I usually either go directly to the vendor or to merchants I already do business with depending on what it is.
I for one don't mind the links going to your pages with the frames and all.
As for the advertising, I think the problem is that for me at least it's just noise to be filtered out. If I'm interested in something, odds are I've already found where to buy it using Google so the ads aren't interesting. If I'm not already interested in what's being advertised, most likely the ad won't interest me and I'll ignore it. And if the ad does catch my eye, there's a major problem with it: the ad network. There's generally too many redirects involved for me to reliably know where clicking on that ad will take me, and the ad networks themselves are notorious sources of malware. What I'll usually do if something in an ad does catch my attention is make a note of what it was and then go Google for it. That gives me a better feel for whether it's legit or not, and bypasses having to worry about the ad network and what it might be up to.
Yes, but that's not new law. It goes back to 1937. All the Kelo v. New London case did was follow that holding and say that increasing tax revenues is arguably a public purpose, and that it's not the court's job to say what public purposes are valid and what aren't.
Myself, I'm of the mind that eminent domain should only be used when the property will be put to a strictly public use and shouldn't ever be used to turn property over to a private entity. But the law in the Kelo case didn't include that restriction.
I found Kelo v. New London to be eminently correct. All it said, after all, was "Yes, the local government does have the power of eminent domain. The law giving it to them doesn't place any restrictions on it. If the people want it limited, they need to change the law to add limits. It's not the court's place to rewrite the law.".
Just remember this though: the Supreme Court (and in fact the Appeals Courts) generally only agree to hear cases where they think from the filings that they're going to want to overturn the ruling. If they agree with the ruling, they generally simply refuse to hear the appeal. So just on that alone you have to expect the SC to overturn more often than not.
More interesting are two other statistics: how many of the cases she ruled on were appealed, and how many of those did the Court agree to hear? She made 232 appellate rulings, of which the Supreme Court reviewed 5 and overturned 3. Turning that into percentages, in 97.8% of her cases either the losing party couldn't find anything to justify an appeal or the Court agreed with her ruling. The Court only found reason to look at 2.2% of her rulings, and disagreed with only 1.3% of them. That's a pretty solid record.
That depends on the context. In commercial law deals with retail consumers get treated differently than deals between businesses, for instance. In a B2B transaction both sides are expected to be experienced at this and have lawyers around to check the details, but a consumer's held to a lower standard and the onus is on the business to point out anything unusual about the deal. If the business doesn't bring something to the consumer's attention, then the standard is whether an ordinary consumer (not a lawyer or a businessman engaged in that trade) would expect that something. This comes up in commercial law involving the UCC and retail transactions, I've heard it referred to as the "quacks like a duck" clause ("If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, a consumer's entitled to assume it is a duck unless you get them to agree otherwise beforehand.").
My guess at what happened: once SAP was done with the demo and left a copy with the customer, whoever was responsible for putting it together cleaned it up. It wasn't needed anymore, and document retention policies and the need to clean up file clutter both dictate it goes. On the WMI side, the techie who got the demo filed it away. It's not like a demo mock-up's going to help a developer. And again, between document retention policies and the general need to get rid of useless junk cluttering up the directories, it got deleted. And then months after that, the lawyers come around looking for it and it's not there.
This, BTW, is one of the reasons I don't like document retention policies that're designed to make sure things get deleted/destroyed. Sure they may get rid of evidence the other guy could use against you, but at the same time they get rid of evidence you could use to support your case if you end up in court. I normally consider all vendor communications to be "retain indefinitely", likewise all product documentation, specifications, etc.. At some point you will need to be able to look one of their salespeople in the eye and say "Yes, you did promise that and I've got the letter from you to prove it.".
Slashdot Mirror
It adds not just the ability for Firefox to run .Net applications, but the ability for links on a page to install and run .Net applications with a single click and with no indication to the user that new software's been installed on their computer. That's a problem for me at least because, unlike Java, .Net is (as is usual for Microsoft products) to some degree integrated into the Windows operating system. Java, for instance, doesn't have it's own user accounts on the system independent of the user's account, while the .Net framework does. That's fine for entirely local applications, but not fine for unknown applications loaded from unknown and potentially hostile sources at some unknown location on the Internet.
The objection isn't to them providing support in Firefox. It's in their forcing the add-on into Firefox without asking the user whether they want it or not, when established convention is that the user elects to install add-ons and that if the user hasn't elected to install something it doesn't get installed. This is made especially annoying by the fact that many Firefox users use it precisely because it doesn't support things like .Net.
Instead of installing it and letting you uninstall it if you don't want it, how about they don't install it and make it an optional thing you can choose to install?
Well, as a matter of fact I don't trust my ISP's DNS servers. That's why my gateway box runs a copy of BIND going directly to the root nameservers, it's configured to use and verify DNSSEC if present (currently it can only verify my internal zones), and firewall's configured to block access to DNS except via the gateway box.
Note that users aren't supposed to need to verify the DNS records. The idea is that the nameserver the user's querying verifies the incoming responses and simply discards any whose DNSSEC signatures don't verify. The only people who have to worry about ever even seeing an unverified response would be people running nameservers themselves, and they're presumed to either have configured their software to do the verification or to not care about bogus records.
Well, anything running the major nameserver software probably can verify DNSSEC signatures. Given the way most ISPs have things set up, your local machine shouldn't need to verify if the ISP's nameservers are verifying. The only machines that could inject bogus data directly into your local machine would be on the local segment of your ISP's network, whereas the major DNS injection threat today is from outside the ISP's local network. And without DNSSEC things can't verify even if they want to, which is a good argument for having it there so people who want to protect themselves can.
Basically, DNSSEC lets your computer verify that the DNS responses it's getting back are really identical to what's in the authoritative zone. If someone injects bogus DNS records into your nameserver or floods you with bogus responses to your query hoping to get one of them accepted, they won't have the private key for that domain so they won't be able to create a valid signature for their records and your DNS client will reject the bogus records.
That, BTW, is why DNSSEC has to start at the top to work. If I have DNSSEC for silverglass.org but not at the org level, then someone can inject bogus key records at the org level that'll let them successfully forge signatures for silverglass.org. To prevent that the root nameservers have to sign the org data (including the keys for domains in .org) so I can verify them using local copies of the root public keys (similar to the way we have local copies of the root nameserver names/addresses).
ST LOUIS, I M & S R. CO. v. WILLIAMS , 251 U.S. 63 (1919)
They pretty clearly cover the fact that the government does have wide latitude to set statutory damages, and that while they can't be wildly disproportionate to the offense the entirety of the offense is not limited merely to the economic damages a party suffered. The case in particular upheld an award of 113 times the actual damages. To quote the decision, "When the penalty is contrasted with the overcharge possible in any instance it of course seems large, but, as we have said, its validity is not to be tested in that way. When it is considered with due regard for the interests of the public, the numberless opportunities for committing the offense, and the need for securing uniform adherence to established passenger rates, we think it properly cannot be said to be so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable.". And I suspect that in this case similar factors would weigh: the ease with which songs can be shared, the sheer number of copies that could be distributed and the speed with which they can be made. Looking at it all, it seems to me you've got a tough row to hoe arguing that the Court should ignore it's own holding in Williams and look solely at the dollar ratios.
Simple principle: you're responsible for what you do, not for what someone else does. And no, P2P isn't equivalent to your example, since the original sharer is still the one making it available. That a lot of other people are also doing it doesn't change things. But then, by knowingly putting the file up on P2P sharing the original sharer is also not just copying for a friend or two. They're more akin to the guy on the street-corner handing out copies to anyone who asks.
Note: the "knowingly" is significant. There is, again, a difference between the person who sets up P2P software deliberately, knowing what it'll do, and the person who got a friend to set something up for their own personal use (so they could get at their music from all their machines) and had no idea it was also handing things out to the world at large.
I don't think we fundamentally disagree. Technically, giving a copy of a couple of songs to your friend is wrong. But it's also on a whole different level from handing out copies in bulk to anybody. It's in the same area as "little white lies". It's wrong to lie, but at the same time when you Aunt Edith gives you that hideously ugly sweater as a birthday gift it's considered not really the done thing to tell her the unvarnished truth. Both fall into areas where it's not entirely black-or-white and a bit of common sense and proportion is called for.
The problem is that the RIAA are trying to draw a hard line far to one side and say that anything even a hair over that line is exactly the same as the most extreme offenses. Compounding that is that the opposition is trying to do exactly the same thing on the opposite end of the scale, claiming that anything that isn't the absolute worst example of a violation imaginable must be utterly harmless. I suspect the judges in a lot of these cases are quietly thinking the same thing I do: "Both sides are utter plonking twits. They don't need a judge, they need their mothers to tan their behinds and send them to their rooms until they decide to act civilized. But I am a judge and they're in my courtroom, and unreasonable as they may be the RIAA's technically correct about what the law says and I can't just completely ignore that.".
Precisely what you said: the equivalent of making 10,000 copies of a tape and handing them out on the street-corner. If it's wrong to do it with physical copies of a tape, it's wrong to do the same thing with copies of a bunch of bits. Likewise, if it's acceptable to do with physical copies of a tape, it ought to be acceptable to do the same thing with copies of a bunch of bits. The problem I suspect you have with my position is that you'd like something to be OK when done to bits that's widely regarded as totally unacceptable when done to more traditional media: make large numbers of copies and hand them out to anybody who asks without getting permission from nor paying royalties to the copyright holder.
My impression of the SC decision involved is that they left a lot of wiggle room when defining "unreasonably disproportionate". What I got from the ruling was that they were perfectly OK with, for instance, statutory damages of $1 million against actual damages of only a few dollars so long as the law establishing the damages also established a reason for them that passed judicial scrutiny. And I definitely don't find anything in that ruling, or in other related rulings, to suggest that the Court has ever held that statutory damages can't be set based on (to use the court's own terms) the public wrong rather than the private injury.
Yep. But if the law says statutory damages are to be in a certain range and the claim meets the requirements to award statutory damages in lieu of actual damages, which judge is legislating from the bench: the judge who awards damages in the range specified by the law, or the judge who decides that the damages are excessive and reduces the award below what the law specifies?
First, the case quoted involved willful infringement by a business and other aggravating circumstances. Also, from a strict-construction viewpoint the law does specify the amount of statutory damages so her finding that, if infringement occurred and the claim qualified for statutory damages, damages in the amount defined by the law were to be awarded would hardly be unexpected.
The big question is how she views the whole question of whether infringement occurred. That's the area where the RIAA and MPAA tend to part company with the rest of us. It's pretty clear that mass copying and distribution of unauthorized copies is infringing behavior, whether or not it's done for commercial gain. Note please that making 10,000 copies of a tape and handing them out on the street-corner is a far cry from copying a couple of songs off a tape so your friend can listen to them. To my mind there's three categories: copying that's not infringing period (eg. the copies needed to listen to anything on a computer), copying that's clearly infringing (the aforementioned making copies in bulk for anybody who comes along), and an intermediate range where the copying's technically infringing but so inoffensive that we view it as unreasonable for the owner to complain about it absent some additional problems. Making a copy of a few songs for a friend falls into that third category, it's technically infringing but the general reaction to an owner complaining about just that would be "Jeesh, get a life, dude.". The usual way the courts handle things like this is to award some token amount of damages, like the retail price of the songs copied, and then deny any request for costs by the plaintiff. What I'm interested in is exactly where Judge Sotomayor draws the lines between those three categories.
A lot of companies don't have a choice. They depend on Web-based "enterprise" applications internally that're hard-coded to work only with IE6. They can't or won't upgrade those applications, and they don't have any replacement, so they have to continue to use IE6 if they want to operate. Even upgrading to IE7 or IE8 isn't viable, the webapps refuse to work with those versions.
Yes, corporate IT should give back to open source. When they make fixes or enhancements they should, out of self-interest, contribute those back to the main-line codebase so they won't have to worry about maintaining them as future changes are made.
But they shouldn't be forced to contribute back. If they're using it in-house and not distributing modified code, they should be free to take on the maintenance headaches if they want to. If they complain and want things done to make life easier for them the correct answer should be "Personal problems are the third door down on the left, have a nice day.", though. The only exception is where they're modifying free code (ie. code under a GPL-type license) and redistributing binaries created from the modified code, in which case they should be required to comply with the license and make their modifications available in source form. If they're redistributing modified verisons of code that's under a BSD-style license, well, the license doesn't require them to disclose the source and they shouldn't be forced to do anything more than comply with the license terms. I personally may disagree with the choice of license, but the code's author apparently thought the license he chose was appropriate and it's his code and his decision, not mine.
No, I wouldn't be leaving myself open. Those "innocuous" cables would have all the proper security precautions to prevent tapping, plus the traffic on them would be encrypted to keep it secure even if someone tapped the cable (defense in depth). But the decoy cables would keep the ordinary nosies occupied, depriving the people going after the real cables of cover. It's much easier to spot intruders disguised as clumps of brush on a well-mowed lawn than in a tangle of brush./p.
If I were trying to keep a cable secret, I'd make sure the real cable was clearly recorded on the maps as something totally innocuous and not connected to anything secret at all. If it got cut, it'd get repaired per normal procedure for the kind of cable it's marked as (and I'll have sufficient backups that I don't need to make the repair an attention-grabbing rush job). Then I'd lay a few completely unused but highly suspicious-looking decoy cables, making sure they occasionally got cut and that there was a suitably public trying-to-look-not-public scramble to repair them. That way anybody trying to find my cables was likely to glom onto the ones I was trying to keep hidden, and probably wouldn't even bother looking at "backup equipment monitoring line, sewage pumping station 37, Department of Public Works".
I don't think so. As far as I know, Google doesn't sell position in the search results. They sell it in the featured links at the top and the ads down the side, but I mostly ignore those. I'm not looking for sellers at that point, I'm looking for the main site of whoever actually makes what I'm looking for, and for third-party sites with reliable information on it, so I can figure out whether it's legit and whether I'm actually interested in buying it. If I do decide to buy it, I usually either go directly to the vendor or to merchants I already do business with depending on what it is.
I for one don't mind the links going to your pages with the frames and all.
As for the advertising, I think the problem is that for me at least it's just noise to be filtered out. If I'm interested in something, odds are I've already found where to buy it using Google so the ads aren't interesting. If I'm not already interested in what's being advertised, most likely the ad won't interest me and I'll ignore it. And if the ad does catch my eye, there's a major problem with it: the ad network. There's generally too many redirects involved for me to reliably know where clicking on that ad will take me, and the ad networks themselves are notorious sources of malware. What I'll usually do if something in an ad does catch my attention is make a note of what it was and then go Google for it. That gives me a better feel for whether it's legit or not, and bypasses having to worry about the ad network and what it might be up to.
Yes, but that's not new law. It goes back to 1937. All the Kelo v. New London case did was follow that holding and say that increasing tax revenues is arguably a public purpose, and that it's not the court's job to say what public purposes are valid and what aren't.
Myself, I'm of the mind that eminent domain should only be used when the property will be put to a strictly public use and shouldn't ever be used to turn property over to a private entity. But the law in the Kelo case didn't include that restriction.
I found Kelo v. New London to be eminently correct. All it said, after all, was "Yes, the local government does have the power of eminent domain. The law giving it to them doesn't place any restrictions on it. If the people want it limited, they need to change the law to add limits. It's not the court's place to rewrite the law.".
Just remember this though: the Supreme Court (and in fact the Appeals Courts) generally only agree to hear cases where they think from the filings that they're going to want to overturn the ruling. If they agree with the ruling, they generally simply refuse to hear the appeal. So just on that alone you have to expect the SC to overturn more often than not.
More interesting are two other statistics: how many of the cases she ruled on were appealed, and how many of those did the Court agree to hear? She made 232 appellate rulings, of which the Supreme Court reviewed 5 and overturned 3. Turning that into percentages, in 97.8% of her cases either the losing party couldn't find anything to justify an appeal or the Court agreed with her ruling. The Court only found reason to look at 2.2% of her rulings, and disagreed with only 1.3% of them. That's a pretty solid record.
That depends on the context. In commercial law deals with retail consumers get treated differently than deals between businesses, for instance. In a B2B transaction both sides are expected to be experienced at this and have lawyers around to check the details, but a consumer's held to a lower standard and the onus is on the business to point out anything unusual about the deal. If the business doesn't bring something to the consumer's attention, then the standard is whether an ordinary consumer (not a lawyer or a businessman engaged in that trade) would expect that something. This comes up in commercial law involving the UCC and retail transactions, I've heard it referred to as the "quacks like a duck" clause ("If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, a consumer's entitled to assume it is a duck unless you get them to agree otherwise beforehand.").
My guess at what happened: once SAP was done with the demo and left a copy with the customer, whoever was responsible for putting it together cleaned it up. It wasn't needed anymore, and document retention policies and the need to clean up file clutter both dictate it goes. On the WMI side, the techie who got the demo filed it away. It's not like a demo mock-up's going to help a developer. And again, between document retention policies and the general need to get rid of useless junk cluttering up the directories, it got deleted. And then months after that, the lawyers come around looking for it and it's not there.
This, BTW, is one of the reasons I don't like document retention policies that're designed to make sure things get deleted/destroyed. Sure they may get rid of evidence the other guy could use against you, but at the same time they get rid of evidence you could use to support your case if you end up in court. I normally consider all vendor communications to be "retain indefinitely", likewise all product documentation, specifications, etc.. At some point you will need to be able to look one of their salespeople in the eye and say "Yes, you did promise that and I've got the letter from you to prove it.".