Your point is well-taken, and I'm sure it reflects the reporter's inability to understand what's going on. I took a class from Bob Sussman (the guy that presented this theory) a couple years ago on the biological basis of human behavior--evolution, neurotransmitters, etc.--and he would never be caught dead saying that humans are driven to evolve. He would agree 100% with your semi-offtopic rant; one of his pet peeves was people talking about evolution like it was purposeful or designing. I think once he called evolution the scientific God because it gave some otherwise rational and scientifically-minded people meaning in their lives.
I think these people are old thinkers stuck in a new world where communication has changed and any seventy year old would tell you they find it hard to communicate with youth but no 20 year old ever will, and it's the 20 year olds who are the future.
Then what happens when the 20 year-olds are concerned about their peers' grammar? Just last year, I served as the opinion editor in my college's newspaper. Part of my job was reading, selecting, and editing op-eds and letters to the editor. I was stunned by my peers' inability to write without split infinitives, to distinguish "which" from "that," and to use "advanced" punctuation like colons and semicolons. And this was at one of the U.S.'s supposedly elite universities. The writers with poor grammar inevitably had confused, muddled, fallacy-filled, or incoherent arguments. Proper grammer often, but not always, correlated with a reasonable, well-made argument.
After reading hundreds of articles over two years as editor, I'm prepared to say that the lack of grammar is merely indicative of a larger problem. A writing professor once told me that if you can't communicate an idea, you don't really understand it. I think my peers' inability to communicate effectively is a product of a culture that emphasizes factual knowledge without understanding. The news, for example, is full of facts but bereft of deep analysis, perhaps because regurgitating facts is much easier than synthesizing and analyzing them. IM is good enough for communicating facts but horrible at communicating subtleties, which often come from nonverbal cues, tone of voice, or evident tone from carefully constructed sentences. The 20 year-olds just aren't used to having to understand their own thoughts well enough to crystallize them in writing.
The Constitution says whatever the Supreme Court interprets it to say. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause to essentially give Congress plenary authority (the Rehnquist court started to move in the other direction, but didn't get very far). Concerning education, look at No Child Left Behind. To my knowledge, the legal challenges to it revolve around it being an unfunded mandate, not an unconsitutional exercise of power. The Solomon Amendment is another example of Congress getting involved with education, and judging from the oral arguments, the Supreme Court is poised to uphold it. If they don't, it'll be on First Amendment grounds, not from a lack of Congressional authority. Federalism is dead, and neither political party wants to roll back national authority.
Regarding your second point, I guess we differ in what good policy is.
The "you can't stop discrimination anyway" attitude, had it been made policy, would probably have blocked the tremendous progress the U.S. has made in race relations and civil rights.
Under your logic, the Supreme Court should never have ruled school segregation was unconstitutional because they predicted white-flight from urban schools. Imagine telling Chief Justice Warren, "Don't bother upholding the constitution because whatever you do, the white folks will still have their white-only (or white-dominated) schools. They'll just move to the suburbs."
Furthermore, the "you can't stop discrimination anyway" attitude is empirically wrong. Laws don't change attitudes overnight, but the law is a tremendously powerful normative force. Before Loving v. Virginia, anti-miscegenation laws were common and interracial relationships--to say nothing of marriages!--were taboo. Roughly 40 years later, most people (or at least, more people) don't bat an eye when they see interracial couples, and some people think it should be positively encouraged.
Fair housing laws are on the same line, in that by prohibiting many types of discrimination, they are an expression of social condemnation of those types of discrimination. By increasing the costs of discrimination, they further make rational actors engage in it less. And since discrimination is founded upon ignorance and fear of the unknown, forcing different races, religions, etc. to cohabit is a powerful way to reduce or eliminate discrimination in the long run.
In response to your objection that some people feel more comfortable living with others of similar background, the Fair Housing Act generally exempts single-family residences and dwellings intended for four or fewer families, if the owner resides in that dwelling. 42 U.S.C 3603(b).
x/x=1, but dx/dx does not, since dx is a differential unit. As x goes to 0, x/x becomes indeterminate (0/0 = k, where k is some indeterminate real number).
v=dt/dt isn't nonsensical. dt is the limit of t as t goes to 0. Thus, as t goes to 0, v goes to k. Or, v is indeterminate. It's something, but we don't have the mathematical framework to figure out what k is. Thus, TFA has told us that there *is* some velocity along the time axis, but we just can't compute it.
No physics problem here, folks. Just our inability to adequately model the physical universe with our current mathematics. We can fully expect some future Important Physics Theory to give us the math needed to get past this roadblock, much like relativity gave us the mathematical framework to explain gravity.
TFA makes a point that, for the time being, this won't be used in "real world scenarios." It's clear from TFA that you can't force anyone to submit to this test because, among other things, the subject must be perfectly still for a fairly long time. TFA clearly notes that this test would be better used for truth verification than lie detection, since pretty much only somebody who wants to take the test can be tested.
For now, this fMRI test will be used by innocent people who want to bolster their claim to innocence. If allowing innocent people every opportunity to make sure they're not wrongly convicted isn't a laudable goal, I don't know what is. No tinfoil hats required, folks.
Perhaps Slashdot should have a mandatory 10-20 min. of "thinking time" between when the story is posted and when comments can begin to allow everyone to RTFA and think about the issues.
This is exactly what philosopher Harry Fankfurt fretted about in his short book "On Bullshit." The problem with political discourse today is not that we have liars, it's that we have bullshitters--people that don't care about the truth at all. You can see that dangerous thinking with Meehan's chief of staff admitting that he had no objection to deleting facts for PR purposes; Vogel essentially valued Meehan's image over the truth.
Wikipedia is a project that presumes that all parties care about the truth. Sure, people will disagree about the implications of and inferences from the facts, and that can lead to back-and-forth editing. That's good, because multiple editors are more likely to arrive, via peer-review, at a neutral point of view. But editing out known facts is recklessly disregarding the truth, and that goes against the spirit of Wikipedia. Again, the point of allowing anyone to edit is not to allow revisionist history, but to allow neutral interpretation of facts.
PR should never conflict with the truth. You can spin facts, explain them away, downplay them--that's acceptable PR. But you have to acknowledge them. I'm even willing to say that lying about them is better than pretending they don't exist: at least the liar acknowledges there is an objective truth and has the same understanding of facts as the rest of us, even if he chooses to manipulate the game. Vogel didn't even care to acknowledge the facts and that makes his actions quite dangerous to public discourse.
Don't complain. You're getting something for nothing. And you've done nothing the whole time the suit was active.
This settlement doesn't affect your right to sue Sony independently and recover your total damages. You can opt out of the settlement and bring your own lawsuit, with your own attorney, before the settlement is approved. Note that this will either require you to pay for your own lawyer (quite expensive when Sony's lawyers are on the other end) or find a lawyer willing to take your case on contingency (collecting a third of whatever you win, IF you win).
Alternately, you could hire your own attorney and try to intervene on the class action, arguing that the current class counsel is not representing the class' interests. You could try to convince the judge that the settlement is far too generous to Sony, and that plaintiffs deserve more. But it's a bit late in the game for that.
Or, you could decide that the risks of litigation aren't worth it, and take the settlement. I'd say you already did that, in choosing not to get involved in the lawsuit in the first place.
That's a good point. I was thinking (and I should've stated my assumption) that the nurse, hospital, etc. were necessary parties to the action, which would make their joinder compulsory under FRCP 19. In my mind, after P sued the surgeon and commenced discovery, he found evidence showing that in fact the nurse was liable. It wouldn't be P necessarily deciding to sue the nurse, but the surgeon bringing in the nurse as co-defendant under FRCP 19, or alternately under FRCP 14 as a 3rd-party defendant. (If the nurse wasn't joined/impleaded, the patient could theoretically sue the surgeon and win, then sue the nurse and win, then the surgeon could sue the nurse and win, subjecting the nurse to double liability). Of course, the court has discretion to compel joinder, and P may have a sufficiently good reason to not sue both parties.
Who knew that reading Slashdot would help me prepare for my Civ Pro exam?
Actually, the real reason you sue the doctor, hospital, and nurse simultaneously is as follows.
Suppose I go in for an operation, and it goes wrong. I don't know who or why, but somebody screwed up. I decide to just sue the surgeon. We litigate, he wins. Then I find out it was the nurse's fault for not doing something she should've done. In federal courts (and I think most state courts), I can't then sue the nurse for the botched operation. When I sue somebody, I have to make all claims arising out of the same transaction or occurence (here, the operation) or lose them forever. This is actually an efficiency rule, since it prevents one jerk from bringing up dozens of successive lawsuits until he wins. The courts want to hear a dispute and resolve it with finality.
In fact, this rule hurts plaintiffs, since all of a sudden they have to face down a literal army of defense lawyers; they can't divide and conquer.
The "loser pays" system certainly has its merits, but consider one of its main drawbacks: legal stagnation. When a plaintiff might get stuck with the total bill, he's more likely to not sue. Since courts can only decide the cases before them, the law develops and adapts as a result of actual cases; fewer cases means it won't keep up with the times as quickly. Many people here already think the law is too slow to adapt (especially in the tech sector), so a loser pays system would only make things worse in this regard.
Judges are indeed not thrilled with frivolous lawsuits. For one, each new suit means more work for them, and they're not paid by the case. Two, frivolous cases often don't present real and interesting legal issues; presiding over the frivolous case eats into the time a judge can spend on more interesting cases. There's a federal rule against filing frivolous or harassing lawsuits, and courts have great leeway to come up with creative punishments for violating that rule (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11).
A property right can mean pretty much any right to control a piece of property in some small way. A license is the right to use a particular piece of property in a particular way--a very limited right, for sure. "License" usually refers to a revokable right of use, while an irrevocable license is often an "easement."
Property can be real (land), intellectual, or chattel (animals and physical objects).
Information courtesy of studying for my law school Property exam in January.
First off, your statement that "the Japanese like robots more than people" is a straw man. The article actually suggests: because of complex and stringent social norms in Japan, the Japanese find it easier to interact with robots as those complex social rules don't apply. This is pretty analogous to why many westerners enjoy going to a bar and sipping beers with buddies more than going to a black tie affair with VIPs and top shelf liquor--don't have to worry about complex social relationships, don't have to watch what you say, don't have to be concerned about embarassment, etc.
TFA notes an empirical finding that Japanese make more eye contact with robots than with people (admittedly, the strength of this evidence is hard to assess). Perhaps this article does reinforce stereotypes, but fear of stereotypes should not blind us to reality. Furthermore, there's a strong argument that stereotypes are a crude and often inaccurate shortcut to explain people different than you. Since this article provides actual insight and knowledge into another culture, it fights stereotyping and promotes cultural understanding.
The converters you speak of convert digital TV signals to analog signals for use in older TVs, but the bill would ban converting analog signals into digital. TV signal coverters are thus not presently covered by the bill.
Now, the **AA would love banning digital to analog conversions, too. Right now, you can take a digital video signal and output from your TV to your VCR via analog jacks to record the TV show. That's what the Supreme Court authorized in the Betamax case. The entertainment industry would give their left kidney (metaphorically speaking) to have Congress overrule Betamax by statute. Given the Supreme Court's deference to Congress--especially when it comes to copyright--I don't think the Court would make a big fuss about it, either.
I think this is the more insiduous and dangerous possibility: that the bill will morph into a more virulent form that overrules Betamax. The TV converters that Congress mandated aren't a big concern; Congress can put some language in the new bill that devices expressly authorized by Congress to convert signals are legal. This bill should be closely watched.
Let's assume he can create a Risk-like game that doesn't techincally violate copyrights or trademarks. Hasbro might still decide to "enforce" their IP by suing the guy. After all, they have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and the Google Maps Risk creator probably doesn't.
Yes, maybe it's a specious lawsuit that no ethical lawyer should bring. Yes, the little guy might be able to counterclaim for the frivlolous lawsuit and recover attorney's fees plus damages. But that would require him to subject himself to the risk (no pun intended) of losing on Hasbro's lawsuit, then the further risk of suing Hasbro for malicious prosecution of a claim. It'd be far less risky to simply comply with Hasbro's request to remove the technically noninfringing claim.
Furthermore, it's not clear it would be a frivolous lawsuit. As long as they're making a good-faith claim to change the law, they can sue. I'm sure whatever lawyers Hasbro has can find some argument for extending IP protection to clones that's good enough to avoid being frivolous.
Holding Wikipedia et al liable for what users post will certainly have a chilling effect on speech, not because citizens will be chilled, but because there won't be an effective medium for them to communicate with each other. The equivalent statement from the early days of the republic would be to hold the town responsible for slanderous speech because the citizens used the town square to hurl anonymous insults at each other.
Seigenthaler wants these sites to be publishers, liable for their users' content, but it's clear that Congress rejected that analogy in the Communications Decency Act. If Congress did one thing right with the CDA, it's recognizing that websites serve as the "town squares" of the online community, not its publishers.
>>Mindstorms failed because as you said, it took $20 to make and cost $200 -- they sold it above the price point the market was willing and able to bear. No one wants to pay 1000% markup.
Didn't you just quote the parent saying that Mindstorm failed, not because of the markup, but because after buying the basic set, there was no incentive to buy more? If you read TFA (which parent does a nice job summarizing), the problem was that $200 was too low of a price point for Lego to profit off Mindstorm. Although they made some nice margins on the basic set, Mindstorm cannibalized their other product lines because it didn't require customers to buy further Lego sets. So even with a 1000% markup, Mindstorm was indirectly underpriced.
I hope this isn't indicative of the next (or current!) generation of scientists. Misquoting prior works and not reading the primary article are affronts to the scientific method. For all Slashdotters bemoan the decline of science in the U.S., there is suprisingly little effort to make sure science stays healthy even between the scientifically literate, right here.
When you merely charge a corporation with a crime, you effectively kill it. Corporations live on their reputations, for getting customers to buy their products, shareholders to invest in stock (and bid up the price), partnerns to make business deals, and lenders to loan money for operations and expansion. A criminal charge basically sends the corporation's reputation to zero. Nobody will want to deal with them, and they'll go under in short order. Look what happened to Arthur Andersen, for example. In this sense, state attorneys general wield essentially a nonreviewable, completely discretionary death penalty.
If Sony went under, thousands would lose their jobs. True, some of them are responsible for this rootkit and may deserve it. But the vast majority did nothing blameworthy. Is it really just to punish the innocent?
A corporation is a legal fiction. It can't *do* anything, and thus punishing it for an illegal action is misguided. The people that should, perhaps, be indicted are the executives, managers, and programmers that produced this piece of spyware. They were the ones that allegedly committed a crime.
Slashdot's hatred of the corporation is misplaced. What everyone really despises is the fact that the law allows people to shield their personal responsibility behind a legal fiction called a corporation, and the fact that this shield enables lots of abuse by those in power. Society needs a serious debate on the costs and benefits of corporations as a way to reduce personal liability for business ventures.
Definitely off topic, but how can a law student resist the urge to pontificate?
Yes, it's hard studying. But success is easier for us math/science people. The final exams, which count for your whole grade, are much more like solving a complex math/science problem than writing an english paper or taking a polisci final: they're not testing your eloquence, or knowledge (knowledge is assumed): they test your ability to analyze and solve problems.
And being a rules lawyer is what being a lawyer is all about! Doing well on finals is *about* nitpicking, though not being nitpicky about rules is only part of the story. You also have to be nitpicky about facts and applying facts to rules. That said, as a former rules lawyer, I'm having a great time with all these hypotheticals and dense fact patters to the point that I enjoy the (sometimes tons of) work.
When looking into law school, I talked with the dean of admissions for U. Michigan. They studied their law students' GPAs over the course of several years, and found that math, engineering, and natural science majors did noticably better than humanities and social science majors (the sole exception being philosophy, which is arguably similar to math). You can attribute that to selection bias (engineers that go to law are really motivated since they're changing careers), but my experience with my classmates is that "science" majors (broadly defined) have better legal analytical skills than others. While the english majors are talking about how they "feel" a case should turn out (like I give a damn), the comp sci major and the chem e major are giving solid analyses of the problems.
Why do people think themselves well-qualified to pontificate on economic matters with a freshman course in the subject? Econ 101 is only marginally more applicable to the real world than voodoo, with all its assumptions that don't hold true in reality and oversimplifications of complex relationships between actors. Note to future posters madquerading as economists: economic phenomena are not so simple as to be accurately modeled by a basic supply/demand curve; you need systems of partial differential equations to accurately model most phenomena.
That said, even assuming Econ 101 is adequate in this case, you're still wrong. Sure, an auction/fluid pricing system would maximize the seller's profits for that particular event. But a truly rational agent seeking to maximize profit isn't concerned merely about that event, but also looks to the long term (to infinity as a theoretical goal). Under this theory, it could well be profit-maximizing to rake in fewer profits today, even lose money, for bigger gains tomorrow. For example, it could be a good idea to sell tickets to a concert at a low flat rate to encourage a quick sell-out, generating lots of buzz that could enable an encore show.
We know that record labels think in this long-term manner at least sometimes because they invest tons of money on new bands, losing on the first album on the gamble that they'll make money later on. Similarly, the article's hypothesis could be correct if the lables think that artist rebellion is a significant threat to long-term profitability, and this kind of value manipulation can bring the artists back in line. That's a pretty reasonable conjecture.
If the west hadn't been willing to invest in China, I doubt China would have liberalized its economy or government at all. The strategy is somewhat akin to a drug dealer, who offers free or cheap free samples to hook the user and then charges increasing prices for future drugs: get China hooked on western trade, then demand increasing concessions on economic and political liberty for the continuance of that trade. Like junkies don't quit drugs even when they can't afford the dope (or when they realize its harmful) due to withdrawl, China won't be able to quit liberalization even when they are unwilling to pay the price in terms of social and economic change.
Sure, a class action won't help consumers much. But the actual harm in this case was thankfully pretty small, anyway.
The reason you put together a class action is to consolidate thousands of small claims, and in doing so come up with a total liability that Sony has to pay for. A class action against Sony would cost them a nice chunck of change, "helping them manage their access" to consumers' computers. In other words, a class action, which will almost certainly be settled, is how hundreds of little guys get together to punish the big guy for infringing on their rights.
I don't think any other western democracy allows U.S.-style class actions, and that's because the class action fulfills a role in the U.S. that the government fills in other countries. Specifically, the class action allows private parties to regulate and enforce the laws via large monetary damages, e.g., environmental laws and consumer protection laws. In other countries, the national government would be more involved in enforcing these laws.
The criticism is that Congress and the Supreme Court have passed the buck on patent regulation to the USPTO. The passed buck spans from approving the patent all the way back to approving who gets to prosecute the patent. Our elected officials in charge, constitutionally, of regulating patents have abdicated their responsibilty to a bureaucracy that largely writes its own rules.
As far as compensation goes, it's about $75,000 per year, and the job market is strong.
The patent bar is the only bar in the U.S. that allows practicioners to be non-lawyers. Sure, you're an agent, rather than an attorney, but you still practice before the USPTO. (And the practice is quite lucrative, if anybody is thinking of finding a new job.) The USPTO has tons of discretion to choose who practices before it, according to the Supreme Court in Sperry v. Florida.
Just another example of how the USPTO has too much power for it to use effectively, and how Congress has failed to properly regulate the patent industry.
I at first had a lot of sympathy for this argument, but over the years I've come to reconsider my position on the question: who should have authority to define what science is? "Scientists" might seem a logical answer, but virtually all scientists I've talked to (dozens of them) can't really explain the term means. At best, they talk about the scientific method, but a) that term is somewhat fuzzy, too, and b) science != scientific method.
I majored in philosophy, so naturally I thought philosophy could tell me what science is. And it does. In hundreds of different ways. Probably the most famous definition is Karl Popper's, which roughly states that science is the set of assertions that is predictive and falsifiable, but hasn't been falsified despite strong attempts to do so. There are a couple problems with this theory, though, and the theory spawned a huge amount of controversial literature. To this day, philosophers debate what "science" is.
Control of education is something that should squarely fall under the control of politicians and the political process. Public schools can compel students to study history, math, etc. despite the parents' wishes because the curriculums are determined via representative democracy. In other words, the parents collectively and indirectly choose what to teach their kids in public school.
I'm not convinced that scientists should have control over our public schools' science curriculum any more than I'm convinced that priests should set the curriculum for (comparative) religion classes. Public education is so crucial to our society that it should be set by the people or their duly elected representatives, not some unelected technocracy. Sure, the technocracy can educate the representatives. In this case, though, the very uncertainty of the term in question makes an even stronger case for politicians, rather than technocrats, defining "science" for public schools.
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Your point is well-taken, and I'm sure it reflects the reporter's inability to understand what's going on. I took a class from Bob Sussman (the guy that presented this theory) a couple years ago on the biological basis of human behavior--evolution, neurotransmitters, etc.--and he would never be caught dead saying that humans are driven to evolve. He would agree 100% with your semi-offtopic rant; one of his pet peeves was people talking about evolution like it was purposeful or designing. I think once he called evolution the scientific God because it gave some otherwise rational and scientifically-minded people meaning in their lives.
I think these people are old thinkers stuck in a new world where communication has changed and any seventy year old would tell you they find it hard to communicate with youth but no 20 year old ever will, and it's the 20 year olds who are the future.
Then what happens when the 20 year-olds are concerned about their peers' grammar? Just last year, I served as the opinion editor in my college's newspaper. Part of my job was reading, selecting, and editing op-eds and letters to the editor. I was stunned by my peers' inability to write without split infinitives, to distinguish "which" from "that," and to use "advanced" punctuation like colons and semicolons. And this was at one of the U.S.'s supposedly elite universities. The writers with poor grammar inevitably had confused, muddled, fallacy-filled, or incoherent arguments. Proper grammer often, but not always, correlated with a reasonable, well-made argument.
After reading hundreds of articles over two years as editor, I'm prepared to say that the lack of grammar is merely indicative of a larger problem. A writing professor once told me that if you can't communicate an idea, you don't really understand it. I think my peers' inability to communicate effectively is a product of a culture that emphasizes factual knowledge without understanding. The news, for example, is full of facts but bereft of deep analysis, perhaps because regurgitating facts is much easier than synthesizing and analyzing them. IM is good enough for communicating facts but horrible at communicating subtleties, which often come from nonverbal cues, tone of voice, or evident tone from carefully constructed sentences. The 20 year-olds just aren't used to having to understand their own thoughts well enough to crystallize them in writing.
The Constitution says whatever the Supreme Court interprets it to say. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause to essentially give Congress plenary authority (the Rehnquist court started to move in the other direction, but didn't get very far). Concerning education, look at No Child Left Behind. To my knowledge, the legal challenges to it revolve around it being an unfunded mandate, not an unconsitutional exercise of power. The Solomon Amendment is another example of Congress getting involved with education, and judging from the oral arguments, the Supreme Court is poised to uphold it. If they don't, it'll be on First Amendment grounds, not from a lack of Congressional authority. Federalism is dead, and neither political party wants to roll back national authority.
Regarding your second point, I guess we differ in what good policy is.
The "you can't stop discrimination anyway" attitude, had it been made policy, would probably have blocked the tremendous progress the U.S. has made in race relations and civil rights.
Under your logic, the Supreme Court should never have ruled school segregation was unconstitutional because they predicted white-flight from urban schools. Imagine telling Chief Justice Warren, "Don't bother upholding the constitution because whatever you do, the white folks will still have their white-only (or white-dominated) schools. They'll just move to the suburbs."
Furthermore, the "you can't stop discrimination anyway" attitude is empirically wrong. Laws don't change attitudes overnight, but the law is a tremendously powerful normative force. Before Loving v. Virginia, anti-miscegenation laws were common and interracial relationships--to say nothing of marriages!--were taboo. Roughly 40 years later, most people (or at least, more people) don't bat an eye when they see interracial couples, and some people think it should be positively encouraged.
Fair housing laws are on the same line, in that by prohibiting many types of discrimination, they are an expression of social condemnation of those types of discrimination. By increasing the costs of discrimination, they further make rational actors engage in it less. And since discrimination is founded upon ignorance and fear of the unknown, forcing different races, religions, etc. to cohabit is a powerful way to reduce or eliminate discrimination in the long run.
In response to your objection that some people feel more comfortable living with others of similar background, the Fair Housing Act generally exempts single-family residences and dwellings intended for four or fewer families, if the owner resides in that dwelling. 42 U.S.C 3603(b).
x/x=1, but dx/dx does not, since dx is a differential unit. As x goes to 0, x/x becomes indeterminate (0/0 = k, where k is some indeterminate real number).
v=dt/dt isn't nonsensical. dt is the limit of t as t goes to 0. Thus, as t goes to 0, v goes to k. Or, v is indeterminate. It's something, but we don't have the mathematical framework to figure out what k is. Thus, TFA has told us that there *is* some velocity along the time axis, but we just can't compute it.
No physics problem here, folks. Just our inability to adequately model the physical universe with our current mathematics. We can fully expect some future Important Physics Theory to give us the math needed to get past this roadblock, much like relativity gave us the mathematical framework to explain gravity.
TFA makes a point that, for the time being, this won't be used in "real world scenarios." It's clear from TFA that you can't force anyone to submit to this test because, among other things, the subject must be perfectly still for a fairly long time. TFA clearly notes that this test would be better used for truth verification than lie detection, since pretty much only somebody who wants to take the test can be tested.
For now, this fMRI test will be used by innocent people who want to bolster their claim to innocence. If allowing innocent people every opportunity to make sure they're not wrongly convicted isn't a laudable goal, I don't know what is. No tinfoil hats required, folks.
Perhaps Slashdot should have a mandatory 10-20 min. of "thinking time" between when the story is posted and when comments can begin to allow everyone to RTFA and think about the issues.
This is exactly what philosopher Harry Fankfurt fretted about in his short book "On Bullshit." The problem with political discourse today is not that we have liars, it's that we have bullshitters--people that don't care about the truth at all. You can see that dangerous thinking with Meehan's chief of staff admitting that he had no objection to deleting facts for PR purposes; Vogel essentially valued Meehan's image over the truth.
Wikipedia is a project that presumes that all parties care about the truth. Sure, people will disagree about the implications of and inferences from the facts, and that can lead to back-and-forth editing. That's good, because multiple editors are more likely to arrive, via peer-review, at a neutral point of view. But editing out known facts is recklessly disregarding the truth, and that goes against the spirit of Wikipedia. Again, the point of allowing anyone to edit is not to allow revisionist history, but to allow neutral interpretation of facts.
PR should never conflict with the truth. You can spin facts, explain them away, downplay them--that's acceptable PR. But you have to acknowledge them. I'm even willing to say that lying about them is better than pretending they don't exist: at least the liar acknowledges there is an objective truth and has the same understanding of facts as the rest of us, even if he chooses to manipulate the game. Vogel didn't even care to acknowledge the facts and that makes his actions quite dangerous to public discourse.
Don't complain. You're getting something for nothing. And you've done nothing the whole time the suit was active.
This settlement doesn't affect your right to sue Sony independently and recover your total damages. You can opt out of the settlement and bring your own lawsuit, with your own attorney, before the settlement is approved. Note that this will either require you to pay for your own lawyer (quite expensive when Sony's lawyers are on the other end) or find a lawyer willing to take your case on contingency (collecting a third of whatever you win, IF you win).
Alternately, you could hire your own attorney and try to intervene on the class action, arguing that the current class counsel is not representing the class' interests. You could try to convince the judge that the settlement is far too generous to Sony, and that plaintiffs deserve more. But it's a bit late in the game for that.
Or, you could decide that the risks of litigation aren't worth it, and take the settlement. I'd say you already did that, in choosing not to get involved in the lawsuit in the first place.
That's a good point. I was thinking (and I should've stated my assumption) that the nurse, hospital, etc. were necessary parties to the action, which would make their joinder compulsory under FRCP 19. In my mind, after P sued the surgeon and commenced discovery, he found evidence showing that in fact the nurse was liable. It wouldn't be P necessarily deciding to sue the nurse, but the surgeon bringing in the nurse as co-defendant under FRCP 19, or alternately under FRCP 14 as a 3rd-party defendant. (If the nurse wasn't joined/impleaded, the patient could theoretically sue the surgeon and win, then sue the nurse and win, then the surgeon could sue the nurse and win, subjecting the nurse to double liability). Of course, the court has discretion to compel joinder, and P may have a sufficiently good reason to not sue both parties.
Who knew that reading Slashdot would help me prepare for my Civ Pro exam?
Actually, the real reason you sue the doctor, hospital, and nurse simultaneously is as follows.
Suppose I go in for an operation, and it goes wrong. I don't know who or why, but somebody screwed up. I decide to just sue the surgeon. We litigate, he wins. Then I find out it was the nurse's fault for not doing something she should've done. In federal courts (and I think most state courts), I can't then sue the nurse for the botched operation. When I sue somebody, I have to make all claims arising out of the same transaction or occurence (here, the operation) or lose them forever. This is actually an efficiency rule, since it prevents one jerk from bringing up dozens of successive lawsuits until he wins. The courts want to hear a dispute and resolve it with finality.
In fact, this rule hurts plaintiffs, since all of a sudden they have to face down a literal army of defense lawyers; they can't divide and conquer.
The "loser pays" system certainly has its merits, but consider one of its main drawbacks: legal stagnation. When a plaintiff might get stuck with the total bill, he's more likely to not sue. Since courts can only decide the cases before them, the law develops and adapts as a result of actual cases; fewer cases means it won't keep up with the times as quickly. Many people here already think the law is too slow to adapt (especially in the tech sector), so a loser pays system would only make things worse in this regard.
Judges are indeed not thrilled with frivolous lawsuits. For one, each new suit means more work for them, and they're not paid by the case. Two, frivolous cases often don't present real and interesting legal issues; presiding over the frivolous case eats into the time a judge can spend on more interesting cases. There's a federal rule against filing frivolous or harassing lawsuits, and courts have great leeway to come up with creative punishments for violating that rule (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11).
IANAL(yet)
Actually, a license is a property right.
A property right can mean pretty much any right to control a piece of property in some small way. A license is the right to use a particular piece of property in a particular way--a very limited right, for sure. "License" usually refers to a revokable right of use, while an irrevocable license is often an "easement."
Property can be real (land), intellectual, or chattel (animals and physical objects).
Information courtesy of studying for my law school Property exam in January.
First off, your statement that "the Japanese like robots more than people" is a straw man. The article actually suggests: because of complex and stringent social norms in Japan, the Japanese find it easier to interact with robots as those complex social rules don't apply. This is pretty analogous to why many westerners enjoy going to a bar and sipping beers with buddies more than going to a black tie affair with VIPs and top shelf liquor--don't have to worry about complex social relationships, don't have to watch what you say, don't have to be concerned about embarassment, etc.
TFA notes an empirical finding that Japanese make more eye contact with robots than with people (admittedly, the strength of this evidence is hard to assess). Perhaps this article does reinforce stereotypes, but fear of stereotypes should not blind us to reality. Furthermore, there's a strong argument that stereotypes are a crude and often inaccurate shortcut to explain people different than you. Since this article provides actual insight and knowledge into another culture, it fights stereotyping and promotes cultural understanding.
Quitting is easy. I've done it several times already.
The converters you speak of convert digital TV signals to analog signals for use in older TVs, but the bill would ban converting analog signals into digital. TV signal coverters are thus not presently covered by the bill.
Now, the **AA would love banning digital to analog conversions, too. Right now, you can take a digital video signal and output from your TV to your VCR via analog jacks to record the TV show. That's what the Supreme Court authorized in the Betamax case. The entertainment industry would give their left kidney (metaphorically speaking) to have Congress overrule Betamax by statute. Given the Supreme Court's deference to Congress--especially when it comes to copyright--I don't think the Court would make a big fuss about it, either.
I think this is the more insiduous and dangerous possibility: that the bill will morph into a more virulent form that overrules Betamax. The TV converters that Congress mandated aren't a big concern; Congress can put some language in the new bill that devices expressly authorized by Congress to convert signals are legal. This bill should be closely watched.
Let's assume he can create a Risk-like game that doesn't techincally violate copyrights or trademarks. Hasbro might still decide to "enforce" their IP by suing the guy. After all, they have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and the Google Maps Risk creator probably doesn't.
Yes, maybe it's a specious lawsuit that no ethical lawyer should bring. Yes, the little guy might be able to counterclaim for the frivlolous lawsuit and recover attorney's fees plus damages. But that would require him to subject himself to the risk (no pun intended) of losing on Hasbro's lawsuit, then the further risk of suing Hasbro for malicious prosecution of a claim. It'd be far less risky to simply comply with Hasbro's request to remove the technically noninfringing claim.
Furthermore, it's not clear it would be a frivolous lawsuit. As long as they're making a good-faith claim to change the law, they can sue. I'm sure whatever lawyers Hasbro has can find some argument for extending IP protection to clones that's good enough to avoid being frivolous.
Holding Wikipedia et al liable for what users post will certainly have a chilling effect on speech, not because citizens will be chilled, but because there won't be an effective medium for them to communicate with each other. The equivalent statement from the early days of the republic would be to hold the town responsible for slanderous speech because the citizens used the town square to hurl anonymous insults at each other.
Seigenthaler wants these sites to be publishers, liable for their users' content, but it's clear that Congress rejected that analogy in the Communications Decency Act. If Congress did one thing right with the CDA, it's recognizing that websites serve as the "town squares" of the online community, not its publishers.
>>Mindstorms failed because as you said, it took $20 to make and cost $200 -- they sold it above the price point the market was willing and able to bear. No one wants to pay 1000% markup.
Didn't you just quote the parent saying that Mindstorm failed, not because of the markup, but because after buying the basic set, there was no incentive to buy more? If you read TFA (which parent does a nice job summarizing), the problem was that $200 was too low of a price point for Lego to profit off Mindstorm. Although they made some nice margins on the basic set, Mindstorm cannibalized their other product lines because it didn't require customers to buy further Lego sets. So even with a 1000% markup, Mindstorm was indirectly underpriced.
I hope this isn't indicative of the next (or current!) generation of scientists. Misquoting prior works and not reading the primary article are affronts to the scientific method. For all Slashdotters bemoan the decline of science in the U.S., there is suprisingly little effort to make sure science stays healthy even between the scientifically literate, right here.
When you merely charge a corporation with a crime, you effectively kill it. Corporations live on their reputations, for getting customers to buy their products, shareholders to invest in stock (and bid up the price), partnerns to make business deals, and lenders to loan money for operations and expansion. A criminal charge basically sends the corporation's reputation to zero. Nobody will want to deal with them, and they'll go under in short order. Look what happened to Arthur Andersen, for example. In this sense, state attorneys general wield essentially a nonreviewable, completely discretionary death penalty.
If Sony went under, thousands would lose their jobs. True, some of them are responsible for this rootkit and may deserve it. But the vast majority did nothing blameworthy. Is it really just to punish the innocent?
A corporation is a legal fiction. It can't *do* anything, and thus punishing it for an illegal action is misguided. The people that should, perhaps, be indicted are the executives, managers, and programmers that produced this piece of spyware. They were the ones that allegedly committed a crime.
Slashdot's hatred of the corporation is misplaced. What everyone really despises is the fact that the law allows people to shield their personal responsibility behind a legal fiction called a corporation, and the fact that this shield enables lots of abuse by those in power. Society needs a serious debate on the costs and benefits of corporations as a way to reduce personal liability for business ventures.
Definitely off topic, but how can a law student resist the urge to pontificate?
Yes, it's hard studying. But success is easier for us math/science people. The final exams, which count for your whole grade, are much more like solving a complex math/science problem than writing an english paper or taking a polisci final: they're not testing your eloquence, or knowledge (knowledge is assumed): they test your ability to analyze and solve problems.
And being a rules lawyer is what being a lawyer is all about! Doing well on finals is *about* nitpicking, though not being nitpicky about rules is only part of the story. You also have to be nitpicky about facts and applying facts to rules. That said, as a former rules lawyer, I'm having a great time with all these hypotheticals and dense fact patters to the point that I enjoy the (sometimes tons of) work.
When looking into law school, I talked with the dean of admissions for U. Michigan. They studied their law students' GPAs over the course of several years, and found that math, engineering, and natural science majors did noticably better than humanities and social science majors (the sole exception being philosophy, which is arguably similar to math). You can attribute that to selection bias (engineers that go to law are really motivated since they're changing careers), but my experience with my classmates is that "science" majors (broadly defined) have better legal analytical skills than others. While the english majors are talking about how they "feel" a case should turn out (like I give a damn), the comp sci major and the chem e major are giving solid analyses of the problems.
Why do people think themselves well-qualified to pontificate on economic matters with a freshman course in the subject? Econ 101 is only marginally more applicable to the real world than voodoo, with all its assumptions that don't hold true in reality and oversimplifications of complex relationships between actors. Note to future posters madquerading as economists: economic phenomena are not so simple as to be accurately modeled by a basic supply/demand curve; you need systems of partial differential equations to accurately model most phenomena.
That said, even assuming Econ 101 is adequate in this case, you're still wrong. Sure, an auction/fluid pricing system would maximize the seller's profits for that particular event. But a truly rational agent seeking to maximize profit isn't concerned merely about that event, but also looks to the long term (to infinity as a theoretical goal). Under this theory, it could well be profit-maximizing to rake in fewer profits today, even lose money, for bigger gains tomorrow. For example, it could be a good idea to sell tickets to a concert at a low flat rate to encourage a quick sell-out, generating lots of buzz that could enable an encore show.
We know that record labels think in this long-term manner at least sometimes because they invest tons of money on new bands, losing on the first album on the gamble that they'll make money later on. Similarly, the article's hypothesis could be correct if the lables think that artist rebellion is a significant threat to long-term profitability, and this kind of value manipulation can bring the artists back in line. That's a pretty reasonable conjecture.
If the west hadn't been willing to invest in China, I doubt China would have liberalized its economy or government at all. The strategy is somewhat akin to a drug dealer, who offers free or cheap free samples to hook the user and then charges increasing prices for future drugs: get China hooked on western trade, then demand increasing concessions on economic and political liberty for the continuance of that trade. Like junkies don't quit drugs even when they can't afford the dope (or when they realize its harmful) due to withdrawl, China won't be able to quit liberalization even when they are unwilling to pay the price in terms of social and economic change.
Sure, a class action won't help consumers much. But the actual harm in this case was thankfully pretty small, anyway.
The reason you put together a class action is to consolidate thousands of small claims, and in doing so come up with a total liability that Sony has to pay for. A class action against Sony would cost them a nice chunck of change, "helping them manage their access" to consumers' computers. In other words, a class action, which will almost certainly be settled, is how hundreds of little guys get together to punish the big guy for infringing on their rights.
I don't think any other western democracy allows U.S.-style class actions, and that's because the class action fulfills a role in the U.S. that the government fills in other countries. Specifically, the class action allows private parties to regulate and enforce the laws via large monetary damages, e.g., environmental laws and consumer protection laws. In other countries, the national government would be more involved in enforcing these laws.
The criticism is that Congress and the Supreme Court have passed the buck on patent regulation to the USPTO. The passed buck spans from approving the patent all the way back to approving who gets to prosecute the patent. Our elected officials in charge, constitutionally, of regulating patents have abdicated their responsibilty to a bureaucracy that largely writes its own rules.
As far as compensation goes, it's about $75,000 per year, and the job market is strong.
The patent bar is the only bar in the U.S. that allows practicioners to be non-lawyers. Sure, you're an agent, rather than an attorney, but you still practice before the USPTO. (And the practice is quite lucrative, if anybody is thinking of finding a new job.) The USPTO has tons of discretion to choose who practices before it, according to the Supreme Court in Sperry v. Florida.
Just another example of how the USPTO has too much power for it to use effectively, and how Congress has failed to properly regulate the patent industry.
I at first had a lot of sympathy for this argument, but over the years I've come to reconsider my position on the question: who should have authority to define what science is? "Scientists" might seem a logical answer, but virtually all scientists I've talked to (dozens of them) can't really explain the term means. At best, they talk about the scientific method, but a) that term is somewhat fuzzy, too, and b) science != scientific method.
I majored in philosophy, so naturally I thought philosophy could tell me what science is. And it does. In hundreds of different ways. Probably the most famous definition is Karl Popper's, which roughly states that science is the set of assertions that is predictive and falsifiable, but hasn't been falsified despite strong attempts to do so. There are a couple problems with this theory, though, and the theory spawned a huge amount of controversial literature. To this day, philosophers debate what "science" is.
Control of education is something that should squarely fall under the control of politicians and the political process. Public schools can compel students to study history, math, etc. despite the parents' wishes because the curriculums are determined via representative democracy. In other words, the parents collectively and indirectly choose what to teach their kids in public school.
I'm not convinced that scientists should have control over our public schools' science curriculum any more than I'm convinced that priests should set the curriculum for (comparative) religion classes. Public education is so crucial to our society that it should be set by the people or their duly elected representatives, not some unelected technocracy. Sure, the technocracy can educate the representatives. In this case, though, the very uncertainty of the term in question makes an even stronger case for politicians, rather than technocrats, defining "science" for public schools.