This is crazy. I'm not saying it always makes sense, on a personal level, to go along with a doc's rec--I might choose not to have chemo if it involves going through living hell and I'm very likely to die anyway--but when you have cancer, you find the best surgeon in your part of the world (or go elsewhere if there are no good surgeons near you) and get the f'ing thing OUT of your body.
The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation doesn't lie about how they're spending money, unlike many charities. They also are managed in an intelligent way--intelligent enough that two of the most successful men in the world have donated the bulk of their wealth to it. Contributing to antimalarial work, for example, makes an incredible difference in the lives of millions of people. In the developed world we tend to think of people as ill or not ill; in developing nations, it is not uncommon for that not to be a binary question, for people to be either sick or sicker. These programs work to change that.
Patents are a property; changes to the scope of existence of a property right change the value of the property governed by that right.
The market should estimate the possibility of a company's winning or losing a patent case; once the decision is made, the actual value of the company has changed because of the new determination of whether the company has the right.
The only alternative would be to split the patent right King-solomon style. But that only happens if both parties are willing to settle.
Parties are sometimes not willing to settle. They may know or mistakenly believe that they are in the right, or they may expect they can force the other side to settle for more later.
In addition, mucking up their estimation as to whether they will win--and thus whether it makes sense to settle--is the fact that empirical research demonstrates that lawyers are more attractive to clients when they project a higher chance of winning. Thus it is in the interest of the lawyers to artificially inflate the chance of winning by at least some margin--whether done subconsciously or deliberately--and this means parties have biased information when they decide whether to settle.
Finally, occasionally a court will do something nobody expected, either legitimately for reasons people did not anticipate would motivate them or out of stupidity.
The Senate has the power to approve treaties that the President makes:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
Under long-established judicial precedent, the Supremacy clause is interpreted to mean that the later-in-time treaty or law is the one which is in effect under domestic (United States) law when the two conflict:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Thus a treaty approved by the senate can override other laws. They often do not, because most treaties are not "self-executing." If they are not self-executing, they create an obligation under international law but do not become law under the domestic laws of the United States. In this case, failure to pass a law enacting the treaty means (in the absence of an exception in the treaty) that the United States is in violation of international law.
Disclaimer: obviously, if any of this matters to you, hire a lawyer skilled in public international law and United States Constitutional Law.
Just because there have been decades of failed attempts does not mean a thing is impossible. Greater resources and different strategies may succeed where past attempts have failed.
Collusion among horizontal competitors (i.e. not up-and-down the supply chain, but across it with other companies on the same level of industry) is problematic (read: potentially illegal and contact a good antitrust lawyer) under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
The Act technically limits "restraint of trade," but that would, if read literally, prevent all commerce. Basically, Congress left it completely up to the courts to determine what anti-trust policy would be, by legislating very generically, in part because every case is quite different.
The courts don't like horizontal collusion.
The major players implicated here control enough of the market that the anti-trust people in government (the DOJ and the FTC are the big players, though I think the SEC and a few others sometimes nibble) will not be happy.
I would be surprised if the DMCA take-down process has incurred much--it's a pretty straightforward safe-harbor provision, IIRC, not remotely complicated from a legal standpoint. It has probably cost more on the programmer/web developer side.
Not really. There aren't that many cases, and most of them aren't for much money. They can also be fairly inane. There are a few who benefit from being a part of the legislative process, and I suppose small number of real entertainment lawyers (e.g. at the big publishing houses, in hollywood, and in a few other industries), but for the most part lawyers only come up against copyright cases pretty rarely.
2. USA is just as bad as China when it comes to covert internet access, just that China doesn't run around complaining like a little girl when it happens.
I can't decide if this is misogynist, bully-ist, antidemocratic, or just silly.
Your other point is good, though. It's a guy teaching. I don't have any problem with him using the code, he just should have asked permission and they should have been willing to give it to him. Problem is they see it as something it's worth making an example over--possibly destroying his life because he didn't see a problem with using a snippet of code that, in all likelihood, it was not a problem to use.
The Fed is as close to godhood as one gets in public life. You only serve for fourteen years (unlike federal judges), but you also make the money. I suppose the Fed could be abolished, but short of that, you're pretty much set.
If you share a computer ten thousand times as powerful with ten thousand other people, *they will not be using it all the time.* Most processing power is unused most of the time. But the capital investment in a supercomputer is pretty substantial.
Of course, most supercomputers involved time sharing long before cloud computing came along.
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family
on
A Copyright Nightmare
·
· Score: 1
Did Mr. Shakespeare have an estate? If so, who was the beneficiary? His son, Hamnet, predeceased him. Perhaps his wife's family?
Not quite, no. While it was deplorable on one level, it also was done so as to ensure later legitimacy. Kind of like how in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court was very careful not to give an order it wasn't sure would be followed. Sometimes an institution does something nominal in the face of might it may not be able to stop (or cannot stop) in order to increase the chances of success in other actions it takes at a later time. Might does not "make right," but it does mean that someone who claims to have power can't say that what might chooses to do is wrong. The difference can still be an important one--Marbury established the doctrine of judicial review by the Supreme Court, for example. And though the next decision to use it led to the civil war, future decisions would support the panoply of protections under the Bill of Rights.
They'll pass it later.
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It won't see the president's desk yet.
Criminalization of copyright has been expanding since 1982. (Well, earlier, but at a slower pace before that.)
1890s - Congress criminalizes copyright violations of dramatic works by travelling street performers.
There were also changes in 1908, 1982, 1992 (software companies push for broader criminalization), 1997 (NET act), 1998 (DMCA), etc...
This is on the back-burner because of mobilized opposition. They'll carve out a compromise between the ISPs and Search providers on the one hand and big media on the other, and we'll get more complex legislation that has a similar effect inside of two years.
The question posed was whether it was really "self-defense." This is an important question because the UN Charter allows nation-states to take action in self-defense." Thus every tinpot dictator, power-mad army, or simply state that otherwise wants to use violence without the sanction of the security council--i.e. what would otherwise be an illegal war--claims that their attacks are motivated by self-defense.
So if the U.S. wants to be able to target people in drone strikes (or otherwise, e.g. Osama Bin Laden) in what would otherwise be illegal acts of war committed within the territory of a foreign nation with which we are not at war, we have to be able to justify it as self-defense. Otherwise, it's illegal. If it's illegal, nobody can stop it, but it still undermines the power of the United Nations to declare certain wars illegal--which makes it harder to respond to illegal wars in the future, easier for warmongers to justify aggressive wars, etc...
Of course, the flipside of that is that every time someone takes a warlike act, calls it self-defense, and gets away with it, that expands the boundaries of what "self-defense" means on the international stage.
At any rate, this whole debate is why the Security Council passed the resolution they did for the second Iraq war--it was deliberately ambiguous, so that the United States could claim the war was approved by the security council (and thus not illegal) and the other countries could claim that they had not approved the war; it was effectively a nominal nod to the power of the security council to decide which wars are legal.
The RIAA doesn't prosecute people. The RIAA sues people. The massive statutory penalties are a different issue than the criminalization, although both speak to disproportionate severity of the judicially sanctioned response.
A part of the solution is to be less draconian in punishment and more successful at catching people. Violating copyright is something that should basically be a traffic offense, and instead the law literally makes every American a felon.
A part of the solution is to establish reasonable protections. Copyright terms have been extended periodically since the first copyright act was passed in 1790 or so. It is insane--nobody, and I mean nobody, is making a decision about whether to invest based on potential profits fifty years from now. While perhaps extended protection is fair for works that have never turned a profit or where the profit is not significant compared to the labor involved, it certainly is not justified once fifteen years have passed and a work has earned a 1000% return. We need something more just than the current blanket number of years.
A part of the solution is international relations. If a foreign nation doesn't enforce a reasonable copyright law, we dredge up some sanctions or incentives if they are cost-justified. This makes it so that it will be in the other nation's interest to enforce copyright law. If we can't pay them enough from profits to make it a net gain for them to enforce copyright law, then economically speaking it shouldn't be enforced. (Obviously unless transaction costs of the incentive structure are too high, but that's a relatively narrow range of profits).
Last time I tried it--which was less than six months ago--OpenOffice was still unstable enough on a windows installation that it crashed about thirty seconds after opening a document, every time.
Its reputation has gotten a lot better over the years, so I assume there are people it works well for. But I couldn't recommend it over Word where reliability is an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people are born with aids.
That being said, it is far from a foregone conclusion that the children of a mother with AIDS will have AIDS. IIRC, it is actually unlikely.
This is crazy. I'm not saying it always makes sense, on a personal level, to go along with a doc's rec--I might choose not to have chemo if it involves going through living hell and I'm very likely to die anyway--but when you have cancer, you find the best surgeon in your part of the world (or go elsewhere if there are no good surgeons near you) and get the f'ing thing OUT of your body.
Also, Bank of America is generous and kind in all things and bankrolls Santa's Elves.
> Why do coutnries pay into this foundation...
The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation doesn't lie about how they're spending money, unlike many charities. They also are managed in an intelligent way--intelligent enough that two of the most successful men in the world have donated the bulk of their wealth to it. Contributing to antimalarial work, for example, makes an incredible difference in the lives of millions of people. In the developed world we tend to think of people as ill or not ill; in developing nations, it is not uncommon for that not to be a binary question, for people to be either sick or sicker. These programs work to change that.
Think about how awesome that is.
Patents are a property; changes to the scope of existence of a property right change the value of the property governed by that right.
The market should estimate the possibility of a company's winning or losing a patent case; once the decision is made, the actual value of the company has changed because of the new determination of whether the company has the right.
The only alternative would be to split the patent right King-solomon style. But that only happens if both parties are willing to settle.
Parties are sometimes not willing to settle. They may know or mistakenly believe that they are in the right, or they may expect they can force the other side to settle for more later.
In addition, mucking up their estimation as to whether they will win--and thus whether it makes sense to settle--is the fact that empirical research demonstrates that lawyers are more attractive to clients when they project a higher chance of winning. Thus it is in the interest of the lawyers to artificially inflate the chance of winning by at least some margin--whether done subconsciously or deliberately--and this means parties have biased information when they decide whether to settle.
Finally, occasionally a court will do something nobody expected, either legitimately for reasons people did not anticipate would motivate them or out of stupidity.
Not quite.
The Senate has the power to approve treaties that the President makes:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
Under long-established judicial precedent, the Supremacy clause is interpreted to mean that the later-in-time treaty or law is the one which is in effect under domestic (United States) law when the two conflict:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Thus a treaty approved by the senate can override other laws. They often do not, because most treaties are not "self-executing." If they are not self-executing, they create an obligation under international law but do not become law under the domestic laws of the United States. In this case, failure to pass a law enacting the treaty means (in the absence of an exception in the treaty) that the United States is in violation of international law.
Disclaimer: obviously, if any of this matters to you, hire a lawyer skilled in public international law and United States Constitutional Law.
Just because there have been decades of failed attempts does not mean a thing is impossible. Greater resources and different strategies may succeed where past attempts have failed.
> In the US, forcing someone to give up encryption codes is generally considered to run afoul of the self-incrimination principle
Citation needed.
Clarification: I am not saying vertical restraints on trade are always okay. (But if this matters to you, contact an antitrust lawyer).
Yes.
Collusion among horizontal competitors (i.e. not up-and-down the supply chain, but across it with other companies on the same level of industry) is problematic (read: potentially illegal and contact a good antitrust lawyer) under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
The Act technically limits "restraint of trade," but that would, if read literally, prevent all commerce. Basically, Congress left it completely up to the courts to determine what anti-trust policy would be, by legislating very generically, in part because every case is quite different.
The courts don't like horizontal collusion.
The major players implicated here control enough of the market that the anti-trust people in government (the DOJ and the FTC are the big players, though I think the SEC and a few others sometimes nibble) will not be happy.
2012 - 1987 = 25.
--
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language
Okay. So I forgot the tens digit.
But ironically, 2012-1987 can be 36 in old Fortran (since one can assign values to numbers).
I would be surprised if the DMCA take-down process has incurred much--it's a pretty straightforward safe-harbor provision, IIRC, not remotely complicated from a legal standpoint. It has probably cost more on the programmer/web developer side.
The one that was introduced 13 years later is being phased out at the same time as the one that was introduced thirty-six years ago? How odd.
Not really. There aren't that many cases, and most of them aren't for much money. They can also be fairly inane. There are a few who benefit from being a part of the legislative process, and I suppose small number of real entertainment lawyers (e.g. at the big publishing houses, in hollywood, and in a few other industries), but for the most part lawyers only come up against copyright cases pretty rarely.
2. USA is just as bad as China when it comes to covert internet access, just that China doesn't run around complaining like a little girl when it happens.
I can't decide if this is misogynist, bully-ist, antidemocratic, or just silly.
Your other point is good, though. It's a guy teaching. I don't have any problem with him using the code, he just should have asked permission and they should have been willing to give it to him. Problem is they see it as something it's worth making an example over--possibly destroying his life because he didn't see a problem with using a snippet of code that, in all likelihood, it was not a problem to use.
The Fed is as close to godhood as one gets in public life. You only serve for fourteen years (unlike federal judges), but you also make the money. I suppose the Fed could be abolished, but short of that, you're pretty much set.
If you share a computer ten thousand times as powerful with ten thousand other people, *they will not be using it all the time.* Most processing power is unused most of the time. But the capital investment in a supercomputer is pretty substantial.
Of course, most supercomputers involved time sharing long before cloud computing came along.
Did Mr. Shakespeare have an estate? If so, who was the beneficiary? His son, Hamnet, predeceased him. Perhaps his wife's family?
Not quite, no. While it was deplorable on one level, it also was done so as to ensure later legitimacy. Kind of like how in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court was very careful not to give an order it wasn't sure would be followed. Sometimes an institution does something nominal in the face of might it may not be able to stop (or cannot stop) in order to increase the chances of success in other actions it takes at a later time. Might does not "make right," but it does mean that someone who claims to have power can't say that what might chooses to do is wrong. The difference can still be an important one--Marbury established the doctrine of judicial review by the Supreme Court, for example. And though the next decision to use it led to the civil war, future decisions would support the panoply of protections under the Bill of Rights.
It won't see the president's desk yet.
Criminalization of copyright has been expanding since 1982. (Well, earlier, but at a slower pace before that.)
1890s - Congress criminalizes copyright violations of dramatic works by travelling street performers.
There were also changes in 1908, 1982, 1992 (software companies push for broader criminalization), 1997 (NET act), 1998 (DMCA), etc...
This is on the back-burner because of mobilized opposition. They'll carve out a compromise between the ISPs and Search providers on the one hand and big media on the other, and we'll get more complex legislation that has a similar effect inside of two years.
The question posed was whether it was really "self-defense." This is an important question because the UN Charter allows nation-states to take action in self-defense." Thus every tinpot dictator, power-mad army, or simply state that otherwise wants to use violence without the sanction of the security council--i.e. what would otherwise be an illegal war--claims that their attacks are motivated by self-defense.
So if the U.S. wants to be able to target people in drone strikes (or otherwise, e.g. Osama Bin Laden) in what would otherwise be illegal acts of war committed within the territory of a foreign nation with which we are not at war, we have to be able to justify it as self-defense. Otherwise, it's illegal. If it's illegal, nobody can stop it, but it still undermines the power of the United Nations to declare certain wars illegal--which makes it harder to respond to illegal wars in the future, easier for warmongers to justify aggressive wars, etc...
Of course, the flipside of that is that every time someone takes a warlike act, calls it self-defense, and gets away with it, that expands the boundaries of what "self-defense" means on the international stage.
At any rate, this whole debate is why the Security Council passed the resolution they did for the second Iraq war--it was deliberately ambiguous, so that the United States could claim the war was approved by the security council (and thus not illegal) and the other countries could claim that they had not approved the war; it was effectively a nominal nod to the power of the security council to decide which wars are legal.
I can just imagine the brouhaha that PETA will kick up over this.
If we go to war with Iran, I feel like PETA will not find a very receptive audience to said brouhaha.
Besides, Dolphins are cooler than nukes. They have sex for fun and are the second most intelligent creatures on the planet.
The RIAA doesn't prosecute people. The RIAA sues people. The massive statutory penalties are a different issue than the criminalization, although both speak to disproportionate severity of the judicially sanctioned response.
This.
A part of the solution is to be less draconian in punishment and more successful at catching people. Violating copyright is something that should basically be a traffic offense, and instead the law literally makes every American a felon.
A part of the solution is to establish reasonable protections. Copyright terms have been extended periodically since the first copyright act was passed in 1790 or so. It is insane--nobody, and I mean nobody, is making a decision about whether to invest based on potential profits fifty years from now. While perhaps extended protection is fair for works that have never turned a profit or where the profit is not significant compared to the labor involved, it certainly is not justified once fifteen years have passed and a work has earned a 1000% return. We need something more just than the current blanket number of years.
A part of the solution is international relations. If a foreign nation doesn't enforce a reasonable copyright law, we dredge up some sanctions or incentives if they are cost-justified. This makes it so that it will be in the other nation's interest to enforce copyright law. If we can't pay them enough from profits to make it a net gain for them to enforce copyright law, then economically speaking it shouldn't be enforced. (Obviously unless transaction costs of the incentive structure are too high, but that's a relatively narrow range of profits).
Last time I tried it--which was less than six months ago--OpenOffice was still unstable enough on a windows installation that it crashed about thirty seconds after opening a document, every time.
Its reputation has gotten a lot better over the years, so I assume there are people it works well for. But I couldn't recommend it over Word where reliability is an issue.