They have sued sportscards manufactures, as well as Wizards of the Coast before for this same thing. Actually, nine such lawsuits so far. They have yet to when a case based on these grounds (oddly, I suspect they get paid by their clients everytime anyways, so winning or losing probably doesn't matter. It's a niche market.)
No, they do not get paid unless there is a settlement, then they take whatever they are allowed by the judge. Companies that settle with Milberg Weiss and the rest of these sleazy ambulance chasers just encourage them to keep going. [Not that I won't point this lawsuit out to my son who has become a nut over Pokemon. I'd like to encourage some perspective.]
Why should lawyers from the same firm not represent both parties in an action? Surely each laywer has a duty to his/her client, and the fact that the person acting for the other side has an office in the same building should not affect that. To think otherwise is question the professional integrity of the people concerned.
Some people have described Milberg Weiss as shakedown artists. Many of the proposed class action settlements in the US give coupons to "victims" and millions to Milberg Weiss and their ilk. Do we question the professional integrity of people like this? Absolutely.
Yes, the school administration is out of touch, twice. They don't understand how they are dehumanizing their charges and the High School's site gives no administration e-mail contacts so they won't have the chance to be enlightened.
Children don't like restrictions and boomer parents don't want to be bothered to go through the effort needed to raise their kids right. This is news?
Hollywood has installed a totally incompetent rating system that only Jack Valenti could love. Jack's last reform was to call X ratings NC-17. Nothing happened. Still no news.
Some day, these outraged teens and kids will look back at their outrage and wonder why. They will understand completely what motivated this "protection" that Hollywood was offering them. I hope they will see that what is happening is merely silly, not an outrage.
The truly sad part is to watch kids who are officially too young to see the movies without their parents tell other kids that they can't see it either. If the movie chains want to enforce the rules, the cineplex managers should be the ones doing the carding, not the hapless ticket sellers.
As a practical matter, I think that we as parents and as a society tend to treat teenagers as if they are younger and less mature than we ought, but it is still the responsibility of the parents to make the decisions for their kids and know when to delegate that decision-making to the kids. This is a responsibility that we cannot delegate to others. It's a responsibilty that we should not want to delegate.
At one time societies had rituals for children who were becoming teens. These could be as simple as eighth grade graduation or religious ceremonies which brought the child into an official state of (nearly) adult. Now, the big statements of growing up are the driver's license and going off to college, rituals that come far too late in adolescence to be useful.
When are kids old enough to see movies about sex, drugs, or evil behavior? Clearly, the absurd result of R ratings for movies that have a target audience that is younger than the rating "allows" in the door is no good. I'm hard pressed to think of any 15-year-old that I've met who could not handle South Park or any of the Halloweens or similar movies. Being scared is fun. Handling being scared is better. Being scared at the movies is a safe scare. Let the kids do it.
The R and totally dead, NC-17 ratings have to go. I think it needs to be replaced with an R-14 (about 80% of the R movies of today) and an A-18 (adult movies, teens allowed with parents only) rating that better reflect the desires of movie goers and still give parents a chance to help their children decide what to see. Still, if parents hadn't been willing to give up their responsibility for raising their kids, Hollywood and the chains would never have felt that they had the right to tell children (and by extension their parents) what they can see.
Why would Universal object to a site for movie lovers linking to Universal ads on the Universal site? The links are to promotional material for Universal movies. It can only be to Universal's benefit to get people to see them.
No doubt some twit Senator, having read your advice, is having the bill drawn up even though you may think you were offering sarcasm.
Professional Organizations and Unions
on
GEEK Unions?
·
· Score: 1
Professional organizations like the ABA and AMA used their political power to control access to the ranks so their members would earn what they thought they were worth. HMOs have managed to undermine some of the politically based power of the AMA, so they have given MD employees of the HMOs permission to form traditional unions. Lawyers, at least partners or self-employed ones, still control their own destinies.
The NEA started as a professional association but became a union. The AFT has always been a union.
The unions that started in the 19th century were all craft unions. They were designed to protect skilled employees from the depredations of unscrupulous owners. Craft unions are very successful as long as the craft is in demand. Craft unions that overreach tend to encourage companies to automate the overreaching craft out of their jobs. Craft unions were an extension of the concept of the guild, but guild members were self-employed.
Hockey, baseball, football and basketball are all unionized. You may not like the disruptions caused by the lockouts and strikes, but those unions work for their members.
If the French want to believe Napoleon won at Waterloo, we 'Merkins are in no position to complain. We picked Napoleon's side in that war and it's not as if our high school textbooks tell us that we lost.*
*unless they've changed a lot in the last 30 years.
The language we are complaining about has not been restricted as you think it might have. I think Yahoo intended that, but they need better, more fair language.
Lawyers get used to the give and take of negotiations when writing contracts. When there is no other side to negotiate with, the lawyers have to make an extra effor to assure that the contracts are not one-sided.
You agree not to hold Yahoo Inc. responsible for anything that someone else claims that you did.
No. It does not say that. It says that you have to pay ("indemnify") Yahoo for any expenses associated with a claim made by a third party. It does not say the claim has to be valid. It does not say that Yahoo has to contest the claim. It does not say that Yahoo has to tell you about the claim. Under Yahoo's language, Yahoo can settle the claim and come back to you for indemnification.
I'll bet that Yahoo's goals are not what their lawyers wrote in the TOS. I'll even bet that they will never try to enforce some of the more onerous provisions of 8 or 9, but they did write it and they did require agreement to get access to the sites (even if to remove them).
Yahoo screwed up. I hope they fix it. Yahoo could have explained in the TOS how they expect to use the pages.
First draft langauge follows: "You authorize us to use this information as expected based on the current operations of Yahoo and GeoCities. This includes but is not limited to the following: You authorize us to duplicate this page for multiple servers. You authorize us to add advertising, pop-ups and watermarks as we deem necessary. You authorize us to serve your pages when requested. If you have any questions about how we use your pages, contact ______. You will always have the opportunity to remove your pages if you do not like the way we are presenting or using them."
You agree to indemnify and hold Yahoo, and its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, co-branders or other partners, and employees, harmless from any claim or demand, including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your Content, your use of the Service, your connection to the Service, your violation of the TOS, or your violation of any rights of another.
They should work on this, too. A proper indemnification clause would require Yahoo to immediately inform the person who has agreed to be financially responsible so this person can take immediate control of the case. This one does not. According to 9. Yahoo can bollix up the claim, ignore any defenses you might have and then bill you for their incompetence. Again, the license language is utterly unfair to users.
Yahoo says that they do not own the content, but then assert non-exclusive but complete ownership rights by claiming:
By submitting Content to any Yahoo property, you automatically grant, or warrant that the owner of such Content has expressly granted, Yahoo the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed.
Not quite. Novell purchased DR-DOS from Digital Research. It didn't want to pursue MS, least they upset the behemoth. Novell also asked that Caldera NOT pursue litigation.
"You know what we mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink."
If Novell didn't want the lawsuit pursued, they would not have sold that right to Caldera. They sold it to a man who they knew would follow up on it. Captain Ahab's interest in Moby Dick was almost casual compared with Ray Noorda's obsessions.
As I understand it, the regulatory agency, which usually is the State Bar, is the one that brings complaints about practice without a license. I'm not aware that these complaints are ever ignored in Wisconsin. Given Iowa's reputation, I'm surprised that it would be a problem there.
If the Bar in Iowa does not have that power, it was probably because the state legislature isn't run by lawyers and the legislature thought that the Hawkeye Bar was being just a bit too self-serving in deciding what unauthorized practice of law is. It can be a tough call to decide where the line is, but it can even be tougher if the call is wrong.
I've subscribed off and on to The Economist and TNR over the past 20 years. While much of The Economists news is wire service and stringer work, it does cover the world. Time, Newsweek and USNews (Do any of them know that there are countries other than the US?) regularly devote more copy to Hollywood than the rest of thw world.
It doesn't hurt that The Economist is a fun read either, but I get most of my foreign news from the net nowadays.
These are private conversations, so anyone who does not have a warrant is not supposed to listen. but...
It is easy to listen to an analog cellphone call. The scanners that are available at Radio Shack may require a few minor adjustments, but instructions are available. Most people believe that the risk of being arrested for listening into the conversations of others is very low. If you are using a cellphone, take reasonable precautions against scanners. So, the reasonable conclusion is that you should not assume that cellphone calls are secure.
Unfortunately that article doesn't deal with the digital memory hogs of sound, smell and vision. Most people have the ability to identify (even if they cannot remember the names) thousands of people, thousands of smells, thousands of voices, and play "name that tune" for thousands of tunes. All the while, they have a working vocabulary of, say, 100,000 words, memories, thoughts and feelings. I realize that our memory is "lossy", but it isn't binary, it isn't digital. If we wanted to store all one person knew on one computer, a gigabyte would not be enough.
Slashdot Mirror
The Bar Association supervises lawyers like boxing commissions supervise Don King.
Home schooling is an option almost everywhere. Parents do not have to let their children be treated as chattel.
Yes, the school administration is out of touch, twice. They don't understand how they are dehumanizing their charges and the High School's site gives no administration e-mail contacts so they won't have the chance to be enlightened.
Hollywood has installed a totally incompetent rating system that only Jack Valenti could love. Jack's last reform was to call X ratings NC-17. Nothing happened. Still no news.
Some day, these outraged teens and kids will look back at their outrage and wonder why. They will understand completely what motivated this "protection" that Hollywood was offering them. I hope they will see that what is happening is merely silly, not an outrage.
The truly sad part is to watch kids who are officially too young to see the movies without their parents tell other kids that they can't see it either. If the movie chains want to enforce the rules, the cineplex managers should be the ones doing the carding, not the hapless ticket sellers.
As a practical matter, I think that we as parents and as a society tend to treat teenagers as if they are younger and less mature than we ought, but it is still the responsibility of the parents to make the decisions for their kids and know when to delegate that decision-making to the kids. This is a responsibility that we cannot delegate to others. It's a responsibilty that we should not want to delegate.
At one time societies had rituals for children who were becoming teens. These could be as simple as eighth grade graduation or religious ceremonies which brought the child into an official state of (nearly) adult. Now, the big statements of growing up are the driver's license and going off to college, rituals that come far too late in adolescence to be useful.
When are kids old enough to see movies about sex, drugs, or evil behavior? Clearly, the absurd result of R ratings for movies that have a target audience that is younger than the rating "allows" in the door is no good. I'm hard pressed to think of any 15-year-old that I've met who could not handle South Park or any of the Halloweens or similar movies. Being scared is fun. Handling being scared is better. Being scared at the movies is a safe scare. Let the kids do it.
The R and totally dead, NC-17 ratings have to go. I think it needs to be replaced with an R-14 (about 80% of the R movies of today) and an A-18 (adult movies, teens allowed with parents only) rating that better reflect the desires of movie goers and still give parents a chance to help their children decide what to see. Still, if parents hadn't been willing to give up their responsibility for raising their kids, Hollywood and the chains would never have felt that they had the right to tell children (and by extension their parents) what they can see.
Why would Universal object to a site for movie lovers linking to Universal ads on the Universal site? The links are to promotional material for Universal movies. It can only be to Universal's benefit to get people to see them.
Can any PHB or lawyer be this dumb?
No doubt some twit Senator, having read your advice, is having the bill drawn up even though you may think you were offering sarcasm.
Professional organizations like the ABA and AMA used their political power to control access to the ranks so their members would earn what they thought they were worth. HMOs have managed to undermine some of the politically based power of the AMA, so they have given MD employees of the HMOs permission to form traditional unions. Lawyers, at least partners or self-employed ones, still control their own destinies.
The NEA started as a professional association but became a union. The AFT has always been a union.
The unions that started in the 19th century were all craft unions. They were designed to protect skilled employees from the depredations of unscrupulous owners. Craft unions are very successful as long as the craft is in demand. Craft unions that overreach tend to encourage companies to automate the overreaching craft out of their jobs. Craft unions were an extension of the concept of the guild, but guild members were self-employed.
Hockey, baseball, football and basketball are all unionized. You may not like the disruptions caused by the lockouts and strikes, but those unions work for their members.
Boston is the Hub of the Universe, not merely the center.
"He's on a roll."
If the French want to believe Napoleon won at Waterloo, we 'Merkins are in no position to complain. We picked Napoleon's side in that war and it's not as if our high school textbooks tell us that we lost.*
*unless they've changed a lot in the last 30 years.
Lawyers get used to the give and take of negotiations when writing contracts. When there is no other side to negotiate with, the lawyers have to make an extra effor to assure that the contracts are not one-sided.
Yahoo screwed up. I hope they fix it. Yahoo could have explained in the TOS how they expect to use the pages.
First draft langauge follows: "You authorize us to use this information as expected based on the current operations of Yahoo and GeoCities. This includes but is not limited to the following: You authorize us to duplicate this page for multiple servers. You authorize us to add advertising, pop-ups and watermarks as we deem necessary. You authorize us to serve your pages when requested. If you have any questions about how we use your pages, contact ______. You will always have the opportunity to remove your pages if you do not like the way we are presenting or using them."
"You know what we mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink."
If Novell didn't want the lawsuit pursued, they would not have sold that right to Caldera. They sold it to a man who they knew would follow up on it. Captain Ahab's interest in Moby Dick was almost casual compared with Ray Noorda's obsessions.
As I understand it, the regulatory agency, which usually is the State Bar, is the one that brings complaints about practice without a license. I'm not aware that these complaints are ever ignored in Wisconsin. Given Iowa's reputation, I'm surprised that it would be a problem there.
If the Bar in Iowa does not have that power, it was probably because the state legislature isn't run by lawyers and the legislature thought that the Hawkeye Bar was being just a bit too self-serving in deciding what unauthorized practice of law is. It can be a tough call to decide where the line is, but it can even be tougher if the call is wrong.
The only thing worse than lawyers is no lawyers.
Dave Jensen, who also doesn't use his JD.
I've subscribed off and on to The Economist and TNR over the past 20 years. While much of The Economists news is wire service and stringer work, it does cover the world. Time, Newsweek and USNews (Do any of them know that there are countries other than the US?) regularly devote more copy to Hollywood than the rest of thw world.
It doesn't hurt that The Economist is a fun read either, but I get most of my foreign news from the net nowadays.
365 days * 24 hours = 8760 hrs
.003 = 26.28 hrs
.00003 = .2628 hours
8760 *
should be:
8760 *
16 minutes a year is pretty good.
365 days * 24 hours = 8760 hrs 8760 * .003 = 26.28 hrs should be: 8760 * .00003 = .2628 hours 16 minutes a year is pretty good.
Rainbow Technologies is one of many possible places to start for real encryption.
IIRC, digital cellphones use spread spectrum technology which is an effective pseudoencryption method for protecting against casual dial spinners.
It is easy to listen to an analog cellphone call. The scanners that are available at Radio Shack may require a few minor adjustments, but instructions are available. Most people believe that the risk of being arrested for listening into the conversations of others is very low. If you are using a cellphone, take reasonable precautions against scanners. So, the reasonable conclusion is that you should not assume that cellphone calls are secure.
>>>Somehow, a different word comes to mind.
It means the same thing, but Love Child is PC
Unfortunately that article doesn't deal with the digital memory hogs of sound, smell and vision. Most people have the ability to identify (even if they cannot remember the names) thousands of people, thousands of smells, thousands of voices, and play "name that tune" for thousands of tunes. All the while, they have a working vocabulary of, say, 100,000 words, memories, thoughts and feelings. I realize that our memory is "lossy", but it isn't binary, it isn't digital. If we wanted to store all one person knew on one computer, a gigabyte would not be enough.