This is par for the course for the discovery process in the United States. You can force your opponent to produce ANYTHING other than articles covered by attorney-client privilege as long as there's a plausible way that it could lead to evidence admissible at trial.
And this is why almost the entire rest of the world thinks our discovery process is barbaric.
Let me introduce you to NOV - a Latin acronym that translates to "judgement notwithstanding the verdit." If the judge feels that the jury verdict differs widely from the plain facts of the case, or that the jury failed to follow his directions, he has the discretion to overrule them and make his own determination. Kind of makes the power of the jury worthless, but it's true.
You're right, India is a sovereign country and can do what it likes. But the rest of the world still has the right to make fun of them. Also, India still receives somewhere on the order of $3 billion a year in foreign aid. I guess they don't need this any more if they're sending people to the moon?
If the situation were reversed, the court would use something called the "minimum contacts" test to decide whether a foreign corporation could be brought before the court. It goes something like this: 1) Does the company have a local presence? 2) Does the company actively target or avail itself of this market? 3) Does this action arise out of the company's contacts with this market?
In this case, the answer to all three of these questions would be yes. Were the tables turned, a US court would certainly order a hypothetical Brazilian Google to produce records, rejecting the jurisdiction argument.
If Google doesn't want to submit to the authority of foreign courts, the only option is to not maintain a presence there and not actively seek out customers in that market.
So the USDA approve's Bayer's application, and Bayer's rice starts contaminating fields all over the coutry. Europe and Japan ban US rice exports permanently. Why is this better please?
So the cost of being a journalist in China is that you're not allowed to be a journalist in China? Stuff 'em. If all they want is sanitized misinformation, let them manufacture it themselves. They make everything else anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Please read more carefully before you correct others. The factory facility is located in Longhua in southern China. The controlliing corporation is headquartered in Taiwan. Hence those in a free society (Taiwan) are not worried about denying those freedoms to others (in China).
In the USA, truth is always a defense against libel. In China, the truth is what the government says it is and if you're the media there is often no defense if someone powerful is out to get you. The Taiwan connection is interesting, but not surprising: people living in free societies can be pretty feckless when it comes to depriving those in non-free societies of those same freedoms.
This is what's sometimes called an "adhesion" contract. Take it or leave it, and if you don't look the terms the other guys go home with the ball. If you refuse to sign the other party can walk away, but if you sign the thing (in some juristictions) the adhesion is a potential reason for calling the whole contract poop.
This kind of thing distorts the very reason that contracts exist - so two parties can formalize a "meeting of the minds" over a certain expectation of performance. When one party has absolute power to dictate terms, then what we have isn't really a contract in the classical sense at all. But that doesn't mean it is unenforceable.
The strongest competitor in a market segment that no one wants and where no one is buying. Bravo, Sony? On the same note, I've just designed what may be the world's best hydraulic pogo stick. I'll be rich!
The last really cool thing SGI made was their 1600SW LCD monitor. In 2000, this thing had 17" wide-screen format with 1600x1024 resolution. It was *gorgeous*. The only problem was, in true SGI fashion, it had a non-standard LDI interface that NO ONE else supported. If you wanted to use this monitor you either needed a Number 9 graphics card (chaining you to that performance point forever) or a Multilink adapter, which was made of 100% pure unobtainium. Seriously, SGI made some of Apple's I/O interface decisions look measured and rational by comparison. And I remember vividly trying to buy 8 SGI workstations (total cost in the tens of thousands) from one of their "resellers" in NYC, but it was basically impossible. Forget about getting spare parts. I was actively trying to buy SGI stuff, but the purchase process was so byzantine that I nearly gave up. No wonder they're where they are currently. Companies die and go away - I'm not crying.
I speak Chinese, and I can't for the life of me understand why people think it's so hard. Granted the writing system is amazingly backward, but the spoken language itself is pretty straightforward with little in the way of grammatical messiness. In my experience Swedish, for instance, is MUCH harder than Chinese. As for English, I guess as a native speaker the only way I can assess how hard it is to learn is to look at foreign learners and judge how hard of a time they have. And since I sometimes teach ESL at a refugee resettlement agency, the answer is: a really hard time.
One important reason that Skype should be sneaky is so people using the software under corrupt/abusive regimes can continue to do so without easy interference on the part of the government. In comparison to your intranet's security, the security of dissidents wins.
I had purchasing power at a tech job, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment passed through my office on a monthly basis. I ended up getting *fired* on the suspicion of stealing a $90 ZIP drive, because I made the mistake of auditing our stock and realizing that it had been stolen. Had I said nothing I would've been fine. Lesson? Honesty is for suckers. To think...I could've had a cluster of SGI workstations (it was 1999, give me a break).
I don't know what you're talking about. All of the Indian call reps that I call in Bangalore are actually named Cindy and live in Boise.
Re:Ask.com gaining conservative searchers
on
Ask.com's Rising Star
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your post has weasel words that make me doubt your conclusion: "many conservatives" (how many? which ones, specifically?) and "many have turned to ask.com" (same problem). People talk about "many" when they don't have any actual facts or figures, but they want to make a blanket generalization. "Many" is rhetorically equivalent to "one or more," but usually is used when the speaker wants the listener to believe he means "most" (which actually means something: 50% or more). So who cares if "one or more" conservatives stopped using Google? Is there any evidence at all of reduced traffice as a result?
If by "conservative news sources" you mean nonsense like Michelle Malkin, then good riddance to bad rubbish. What that she does isn't news, and she's not a reporter. She posts her opinions, backed by facts that are occassionally right and occassionally wrong - and she never publishes a correction, no matter how wrong she is. She's free to do this, of course, but what she does isn't news.
I am interested in what hate speech you believe exists on dailykos.com, and where you believe it's parallel to the frequent talk of "Leftards" and other hate speech I read on sites like The Jawa Report. You are also making a big assumption about the representativeness of the left-leaning sites you mention with respect to Google news overall, AND a big assumption about the quality of the reporting on these sites compared to the quality of the reporting on the (unnamed) conservative sites you mention. Factual accuracy is something that can be objectively evaluated, but not without specific references. Where do you find factual errors on daily kos, for instance?
Google is in Northern California, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Google is staffed by college graduates, many with advanced degrees, and these people are also more likely to be Democratic than not. Whatever your implication, Google probably couldn't exist if it insisted that 50% of its employees vote Republican. What you haven't demonstrated is that this pattern of private political contributions among Google employees translates to biased search results. Your use of the passive voice ("has been accused") itself suggests that you either don't know who the accusers are, or that the accusers lack any authority and that mentioning their names wouldn't help (or would even hurt) your argument.
Finally, your point about China is true. Google's dealings with China are, alas, no different from Yahoo's or Wal-Mart's, but they are all the same in this respect: they are irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Also the price of gasoline. And I suppose you'd need an endless supply of SUV drivers talking on their cell phones, a bad mass transit system, and lots of passive aggressive self-righteous jerks. So yeah, I guess it could be reproduced. Umm...why would we want that again please?
I had a Psion Revo+, and before it disappeared out of an open pocket in a NYC taxi it was the most perfect PDA I ever had. I replaced it with a Zaurus, but the Zaurus never quite worked properly. The problem is that the market for a Psion-type device is basically me and four other people - witness Psion itself, which got out of that biz a long time ago. When Psion was still making PDAs the technology and user demands were still simple enough that one small company could support the architecture fully, make software that actually works, etc. But with, for example, the Zaurus, Sharp was either unwilling or unable to give the platform the support that it needed and so offloaded the product onto the OSS community. Those are some great folks, but they have their own priorities and designing software that works out of the box and has a nice user interface usually isn't among them. The OpenZaurus project has been chugging along for years, but basic functionality like synching and dialing up still barely works, and it takes some non-trivial knowledge of Linux to get a web browser or media player (barely) working on the thing. If this is the development model that Nokia is going for, then they're crazy.
The Nokia 770 will fail. It's a product that basically no one wants, it's too expensive and too weird, and software heavy lifting has similarly been dumped on a community that barely exists. Nokia should keep extending the functionality of the thing it does best - phones.
Unfortunately, what you say sarcastically isn't that far from true. Factories in China with foreign management are perfectly capable of churning out new VWs, Citroens, etc that look and drive just fine. But let's take the old Beijing Jeep debacle as an example: when Jeep actually had a say in the manufacture of Chinese Jeeps, they were basically up to the (more or less dubious, but still) quality standards of American-made Jeeps. As soon as Jeep left the business in disgust with their Chinese "partners" who were swindling them out of money and technology, the quality went into the toilet. The exterior panels stayed the same, but the engines were suddenly coming out of military trucks, the 4WD mysteriously disappeared and was replaced with a lousy 2WD drivetrain, they started shaking and rattling, etc. I don't claim to understand why this happens, but I think that it's for one big reason: Chinese understanding of what it means to be a brand is still vastly inferior to that in the West. The state of marketing and advertising in China bears this out. Chinese bosses simply don't understand, and therefore don't have patience for, Western-style marketing. Design counts, sensitivity to market counts, image counts. It took Japanese manufacturers years to figure this out, and when they did they started hiring American designers because they understood their market well enough to know that they didn't understand it very well! (though, to be fair to Japanese manufacturers, they cared about build quality even when no one was looking over their shoulders). If you've ever dealt with Chinese suppliers/executives, then you know it will be years, if ever, before most Chinese companies come to the same kind of understanding.
I used to teach high school students. Every child was an honor student, every child was well-behaved, etc. After I gave notice, it was so liberating to call a parent to say, "Your son is obnoxious and is disrupting my class. Tell him to be nice or I'll send him home." When so much bullshit is flying, telling the truth can get people to finally STFU. Or, as my friend says, "In a land of amputees, the man with legs is king."
Hopefully this means that we'll get some sweet, sweet refurbished lovin from the Apple Store. I can't imagine that Apple will simply scrap the defective machines - or am I just not imagining hard enough?
The Chinese constitution, like the American constitution, is vaguely worded on purpose. The government of the PRC can define "honor" and "security" any way it wants to produce the specific legal outcome it desires. The courts have no flexibility in interpreting this document, and it wouldn't matter if they did - court cases in China are basically decided before the opening statements are made, and incovenient laws or treaties are simply ignored if they stand in the way of the government's desired ruling. The more important question is whether the USA, a signatory of many covenants on human rights itself, is legally required to bring companies or individuals to task when they violate those laws abroad.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is why almost the entire rest of the world thinks our discovery process is barbaric.
Let me introduce you to NOV - a Latin acronym that translates to "judgement notwithstanding the verdit." If the judge feels that the jury verdict differs widely from the plain facts of the case, or that the jury failed to follow his directions, he has the discretion to overrule them and make his own determination. Kind of makes the power of the jury worthless, but it's true.
You're right, India is a sovereign country and can do what it likes. But the rest of the world still has the right to make fun of them.
Also, India still receives somewhere on the order of $3 billion a year in foreign aid. I guess they don't need this any more if they're sending people to the moon?
If the situation were reversed, the court would use something called the "minimum contacts" test to decide whether a foreign corporation could be brought before the court. It goes something like this:
1) Does the company have a local presence?
2) Does the company actively target or avail itself of this market?
3) Does this action arise out of the company's contacts with this market?
In this case, the answer to all three of these questions would be yes. Were the tables turned, a US court would certainly order a hypothetical Brazilian Google to produce records, rejecting the jurisdiction argument.
If Google doesn't want to submit to the authority of foreign courts, the only option is to not maintain a presence there and not actively seek out customers in that market.
(IANAL - but I'll be one soon!)
to keep up with the Jones's
To keep up with the Jones's what?
So the USDA approve's Bayer's application, and Bayer's rice starts contaminating fields all over the coutry. Europe and Japan ban US rice exports permanently. Why is this better please?
So the cost of being a journalist in China is that you're not allowed to be a journalist in China?
Stuff 'em. If all they want is sanitized misinformation, let them manufacture it themselves. They make everything else anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Please read more carefully before you correct others. The factory facility is located in Longhua in southern China. The controlliing corporation is headquartered in Taiwan. Hence those in a free society (Taiwan) are not worried about denying those freedoms to others (in China).
In the USA, truth is always a defense against libel. In China, the truth is what the government says it is and if you're the media there is often no defense if someone powerful is out to get you. The Taiwan connection is interesting, but not surprising: people living in free societies can be pretty feckless when it comes to depriving those in non-free societies of those same freedoms.
This is what's sometimes called an "adhesion" contract. Take it or leave it, and if you don't look the terms the other guys go home with the ball. If you refuse to sign the other party can walk away, but if you sign the thing (in some juristictions) the adhesion is a potential reason for calling the whole contract poop.
This kind of thing distorts the very reason that contracts exist - so two parties can formalize a "meeting of the minds" over a certain expectation of performance. When one party has absolute power to dictate terms, then what we have isn't really a contract in the classical sense at all. But that doesn't mean it is unenforceable.
IAMAL
(but I will be one soon!)
The strongest competitor in a market segment that no one wants and where no one is buying. Bravo, Sony? On the same note, I've just designed what may be the world's best hydraulic pogo stick. I'll be rich!
The last really cool thing SGI made was their 1600SW LCD monitor. In 2000, this thing had 17" wide-screen format with 1600x1024 resolution. It was *gorgeous*. The only problem was, in true SGI fashion, it had a non-standard LDI interface that NO ONE else supported. If you wanted to use this monitor you either needed a Number 9 graphics card (chaining you to that performance point forever) or a Multilink adapter, which was made of 100% pure unobtainium. Seriously, SGI made some of Apple's I/O interface decisions look measured and rational by comparison. And I remember vividly trying to buy 8 SGI workstations (total cost in the tens of thousands) from one of their "resellers" in NYC, but it was basically impossible. Forget about getting spare parts. I was actively trying to buy SGI stuff, but the purchase process was so byzantine that I nearly gave up. No wonder they're where they are currently. Companies die and go away - I'm not crying.
I speak Chinese, and I can't for the life of me understand why people think it's so hard. Granted the writing system is amazingly backward, but the spoken language itself is pretty straightforward with little in the way of grammatical messiness. In my experience Swedish, for instance, is MUCH harder than Chinese.
As for English, I guess as a native speaker the only way I can assess how hard it is to learn is to look at foreign learners and judge how hard of a time they have. And since I sometimes teach ESL at a refugee resettlement agency, the answer is: a really hard time.
One important reason that Skype should be sneaky is so people using the software under corrupt/abusive regimes can continue to do so without easy interference on the part of the government. In comparison to your intranet's security, the security of dissidents wins.
I had purchasing power at a tech job, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment passed through my office on a monthly basis. I ended up getting *fired* on the suspicion of stealing a $90 ZIP drive, because I made the mistake of auditing our stock and realizing that it had been stolen. Had I said nothing I would've been fine. Lesson? Honesty is for suckers. To think...I could've had a cluster of SGI workstations (it was 1999, give me a break).
I don't know what you're talking about. All of the Indian call reps that I call in Bangalore are actually named Cindy and live in Boise.
Your post has weasel words that make me doubt your conclusion: "many conservatives" (how many? which ones, specifically?) and "many have turned to ask.com" (same problem). People talk about "many" when they don't have any actual facts or figures, but they want to make a blanket generalization. "Many" is rhetorically equivalent to "one or more," but usually is used when the speaker wants the listener to believe he means "most" (which actually means something: 50% or more). So who cares if "one or more" conservatives stopped using Google? Is there any evidence at all of reduced traffice as a result?
If by "conservative news sources" you mean nonsense like Michelle Malkin, then good riddance to bad rubbish. What that she does isn't news, and she's not a reporter. She posts her opinions, backed by facts that are occassionally right and occassionally wrong - and she never publishes a correction, no matter how wrong she is. She's free to do this, of course, but what she does isn't news.
I am interested in what hate speech you believe exists on dailykos.com, and where you believe it's parallel to the frequent talk of "Leftards" and other hate speech I read on sites like The Jawa Report. You are also making a big assumption about the representativeness of the left-leaning sites you mention with respect to Google news overall, AND a big assumption about the quality of the reporting on these sites compared to the quality of the reporting on the (unnamed) conservative sites you mention. Factual accuracy is something that can be objectively evaluated, but not without specific references. Where do you find factual errors on daily kos, for instance?
Google is in Northern California, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Google is staffed by college graduates, many with advanced degrees, and these people are also more likely to be Democratic than not. Whatever your implication, Google probably couldn't exist if it insisted that 50% of its employees vote Republican. What you haven't demonstrated is that this pattern of private political contributions among Google employees translates to biased search results. Your use of the passive voice ("has been accused") itself suggests that you either don't know who the accusers are, or that the accusers lack any authority and that mentioning their names wouldn't help (or would even hurt) your argument.
Finally, your point about China is true. Google's dealings with China are, alas, no different from Yahoo's or Wal-Mart's, but they are all the same in this respect: they are irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Also the price of gasoline. And I suppose you'd need an endless supply of SUV drivers talking on their cell phones, a bad mass transit system, and lots of passive aggressive self-righteous jerks. So yeah, I guess it could be reproduced. Umm...why would we want that again please?
...and you forgot to mention that there is no verb form of "rumor."
(spelling Nazi, meet grammar Nazi)
I had a Psion Revo+, and before it disappeared out of an open pocket in a NYC taxi it was the most perfect PDA I ever had. I replaced it with a Zaurus, but the Zaurus never quite worked properly.
The problem is that the market for a Psion-type device is basically me and four other people - witness Psion itself, which got out of that biz a long time ago. When Psion was still making PDAs the technology and user demands were still simple enough that one small company could support the architecture fully, make software that actually works, etc. But with, for example, the Zaurus, Sharp was either unwilling or unable to give the platform the support that it needed and so offloaded the product onto the OSS community. Those are some great folks, but they have their own priorities and designing software that works out of the box and has a nice user interface usually isn't among them. The OpenZaurus project has been chugging along for years, but basic functionality like synching and dialing up still barely works, and it takes some non-trivial knowledge of Linux to get a web browser or media player (barely) working on the thing. If this is the development model that Nokia is going for, then they're crazy.
The Nokia 770 will fail. It's a product that basically no one wants, it's too expensive and too weird, and software heavy lifting has similarly been dumped on a community that barely exists. Nokia should keep extending the functionality of the thing it does best - phones.
Unfortunately, what you say sarcastically isn't that far from true. Factories in China with foreign management are perfectly capable of churning out new VWs, Citroens, etc that look and drive just fine. But let's take the old Beijing Jeep debacle as an example: when Jeep actually had a say in the manufacture of Chinese Jeeps, they were basically up to the (more or less dubious, but still) quality standards of American-made Jeeps. As soon as Jeep left the business in disgust with their Chinese "partners" who were swindling them out of money and technology, the quality went into the toilet. The exterior panels stayed the same, but the engines were suddenly coming out of military trucks, the 4WD mysteriously disappeared and was replaced with a lousy 2WD drivetrain, they started shaking and rattling, etc. I don't claim to understand why this happens, but I think that it's for one big reason: Chinese understanding of what it means to be a brand is still vastly inferior to that in the West. The state of marketing and advertising in China bears this out. Chinese bosses simply don't understand, and therefore don't have patience for, Western-style marketing. Design counts, sensitivity to market counts, image counts. It took Japanese manufacturers years to figure this out, and when they did they started hiring American designers because they understood their market well enough to know that they didn't understand it very well! (though, to be fair to Japanese manufacturers, they cared about build quality even when no one was looking over their shoulders). If you've ever dealt with Chinese suppliers/executives, then you know it will be years, if ever, before most Chinese companies come to the same kind of understanding.
I used to teach high school students. Every child was an honor student, every child was well-behaved, etc. After I gave notice, it was so liberating to call a parent to say, "Your son is obnoxious and is disrupting my class. Tell him to be nice or I'll send him home." When so much bullshit is flying, telling the truth can get people to finally STFU. Or, as my friend says, "In a land of amputees, the man with legs is king."
This guy should write legal policy in Burma: ... tells the WSJ, 'I'm not allowing Skype because I don't know what it does.'
I mean, just, wow. And here I thought that the "anything I don't understand must be bad" school of management was going out of style.
Hopefully this means that we'll get some sweet, sweet refurbished lovin from the Apple Store. I can't imagine that Apple will simply scrap the defective machines - or am I just not imagining hard enough?
The Chinese constitution, like the American constitution, is vaguely worded on purpose. The government of the PRC can define "honor" and "security" any way it wants to produce the specific legal outcome it desires. The courts have no flexibility in interpreting this document, and it wouldn't matter if they did - court cases in China are basically decided before the opening statements are made, and incovenient laws or treaties are simply ignored if they stand in the way of the government's desired ruling.
The more important question is whether the USA, a signatory of many covenants on human rights itself, is legally required to bring companies or individuals to task when they violate those laws abroad.