He writes like an elementary school student...Robots might appreciate it but humans probably would not
I disagree. He knows who his (intended) audience is--the or'nary American. As a journalist, I was taught to write at 6th grade level because that's the level that communicates most effectively with the majority of American readers. Maybe the New York Times or Wall Street Journal can write for a more sophisticated audience, but a politician from the 14th district of Illinois has to communicate with quite a different constituency.
Now, is it sad that the average American needs to be communicated to at an elementary school level? Yes.
"If Wal-Mart, McDonalds, UPS, GM, and Ford, the five companies that Fortune lists as having the most employees, all offered a similar incentive..."
Recall that Ford and GM missed the hybrid boat big time, and are now struggling to catch up with Honda and Toyota (who are developing prototype hydrogen cars already). Further, the Ford Escape hybrid (Ford's first hybrid), while technically a hybrid, has roughly the same fuel efficiency as the standard model; the electric engine is used to better performance, not efficiency. Thus, it's not clear how much green benefit society would get from Ford employees buying Ford hybrids.
Something tells me that Ford and GM wouldn't subsidize purchasing their competitors' cars, especially given their dire financial situation. Don't expect Ford and GM to jump on this bandwagon.
Go and read the license agreement I linked to. The federal government owns *lots* of patents and copyrights from basic research. In 1986, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, whose purpose was to aid in technology transfer from the federal government to the private sector. Bayh-Dole allows (nay, effectively mandates) that the government license their IP to the private sector so that biotech companies can take that basic research, build on it, and produce a commercial product with practical application.
Furthermore, just because the federal government holds a patent does not make it public. Sure, you can find out about the existence of the patent (like any other patent) from the USPTO. But if you infringe on the patent, the federal government can sue you, whether they've licensed the patent or not.
The right way to think about federally-owned IP is like much federally owned real property. It's not public in that anyone can use it, it's public in that it's held in the public trust. The reason the federal government develops all these patents and then licensed them to private industry for product development is to benefit the American consumer with new medical treatments.
Actually, the U.S. government wouldn't have to invoke eminent domain if they wanted to do something like this. Most of the basic research that leads to these drugs, vaccines, etc. is paid for by the federal government. The gov't then licenses this technology to biotech and pharmaceutical companies to develop a practical application, like a drug. The private company keeps IP rights to the developed drug/vaccine/whatever.
In these licensing agreements, however, is a clause that allows the government, in an emergency, to manufacture the drug/vaccine/whatever, or give a license to another manufacturer to increase supply of the product. So they're not invoking eminent domain to seize IP, they're availing themselves of a contractual provision. Among other things, this means the gov't doesn't have to compensate the IP holder.
See, for example, section 5.04(b) of the Model PHS Patent License Aggreement--Exclusive, available here.
Not quite. Assuming for argument's sake that Taiwan can make and is making an eminent domain seizure under the U.S. Constitution (not that they actually can), they must pay "just" compensation. "Just" doesn't equal "market price." I think "just compensation" is less than market price in many instance, this probably being one.
Eminent domain doesn't work internationally. The idea behind it is that the state is the source of property rights, so it can take property at will (in the U.S., the Constitution mandates fair compensation for the taking, though). Now, Taiwan is not the source of Roche's patents, so they can't appropriate them at will. What they can do, and what they seemingly did, is say, "We're not recognizing these patents as valid property in our nation."
The difference is subtle: eminent domain recognizes a property right, but takes the property anyway for public use; Taiwan's action is a refusal to recognize the property right.
More information about Brazil producing AIDS drugs is here. Brazil claims it is not explicitly violating patents; they claim that a loophole in WTO allows it to produce generics in an emergency. It's not clear from TFA if Taiwan is claiming the same exemption, but it looks awfully similar.
You have to stop construing the First Amendment as granting you rights. That kind of thinking almost led to the rejection of the Bill of Rights in the first place. James Madison once said: ''It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against."
That guard is the Ninth Amendment. The correct interpretation of the Constitution, then, is that you have boatloads of natural rights, and the Constitution protects them all; certain rights explicitly protected just have greater weight when rights conflict. When a court recognizes a right, they're not being "judicial activists" at all, they're keeping well within the intent of the Framers.
RICO is indeed a criminal statute, but it has a provision that allows civil actions, too.
Specifically, section 1964(c) of the act allows private parties to sue for injuries arising from any RICO violation.
If she wins, she recovers triple damages plus reasonable attorney's fees. However, in the 1990s, the Supreme Court made RICO cases a plaintiff's nightmare. It's a really complex and uncertain area of law, but that could work to our advantage: the legal complexity of RICO issues will tie up RIAA lawyers.
Not all people think that moral concerns with animal experimentation come from the "dehumanizing effect" on researchers. Some of us think that animals have rights or at least moral considerability in themselves.
Much of this debate could be solved by once and for all agreeing that the mere fact that the research subject is human is not morally significant. Right now, many people are willing to grant a cell rights because less than 1% of its DNA is different from all other organisms save other humans. That's ridiculous.
A better approach is to ground the high moral consideration we give humans on their developed traits, such as self-consiousness, a capacity to suffer and enjoy, and a desire to live.
On this model, an animal would have some moral considerability (it can feel pain), but arguably not enough to enjoin medical experimentation that can improve human lives. And a clump of cells has zero moral worth.
This result matches many people's moral intuitions. All you have to do is give up the notion (originated in the same places that today's fundamentalists cite) that being a human makes you automatically special, from the moral point of view.
The Bible says that forbidden fruit came from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Until they ate that fruit, Adam and Eve did not know good and evil, hence they did not know that eating the fruit was wrong. Talking of them has having failed a moral test is nonsensical.
And if they were perfect, and chose to disobey God, that means that perfection is found in disobeying God.
Remember Kohlberg's theory of moral development. HS students are in the "conventional" stage of morality, meaning roughly that what's right is what is socially approved of and what's wrong is what's disapproved of.
As they mature, they go into the "postconventional" phase, where rights are to be defended because of a social contract that all agree to.
The study is therefore not surprising to in finding HS students dismissive of minority rights and unpopular views. It would be surprising to see college students think the same way.
Some time ago, courts had doubts about standard contracts, that is, contracts that a company imposed on all customers that the customer had no chance of changing. Some of these contracts were held unenforcable, because the customer's bargaining power was so inferior to the company's. (cf. Henningsen v. Bloomfield Motors; Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co., )
The courts found there was no way these contracts were made by two equal, free parties, which is a cornerstone of a valid contract. Also, many contracts written in legalese, unintelligible to the customer, were thrown out, because the customer's inability to comprehend the contract was seen as evidence that he couldn't fully and freely accept the contract
In many ways, I see shrinkwrap EULAs as having similar problems: there's a gross inequality in bargaining power between the sides, there's no real way the customer can negotiate the contract (especially since the company has no agent authorized to change the contract available to the customer), and you can't realistically read and understand the contract before agreeing to it.
Speaking as a print journalist (and editor), I'm saddend by attacks on the media's credibility. But I, too, think there's a problem.
The problem that dinosaur media has is: how do we put out a daily paper that's relevant to readers who are getting real-time news updates online? Answer: shorten the news cycle, rush to scoop the story, let others do the thinking.
Think of newspapers are the layman's scientific journals--they report the latest discoveries and happenings of interest to the target audience. Now think of how credible a scientific journal would be if it had to have 24-hr. reporting cycles. There's no way the editors could fact check everything, look deep for signs of bias and spin, etc. I don't think it's humanly possible to deliver hard, unbiased, fair, and comprehensive news with today's news cycle.
What should happen is a return to the days when nobody claimed to be 100% unbiased. If you look at 19th century newspapers, there was quite a bit of editorializing even on the front page. But just because we can't be perfect doesn't mean we have an excuse to be bad. In contrast to journalists, bloggers don't try hard enough to be objective and as accurate as possible.
The right balance between speed and fairness, IMHO, is professional journalists doing the blogging. Even if journalism is a craft and not a profession, crafts need to be taught by experienced craftsmen.
My ideal solution, though, would be slowing down the pace of life, but that's not going to happen.
As the article's author admits, all he did was get various sources to comment/speculate/whatever on the Google Firefox browser. Then he looked at what the various sources agreed on with respect to the browser. Finally, he said that the areas of agreement were those most likely to be true.
The author is fully aware that this is not Truth, but it is reasonable to think that what has been said by many independent sources is more likely to be true than one person's speculation.
The RIAA *is* holding these people to the "proper legal standard."
Copyright infringement is a civil violation, which means that the burden of proof is "preponderance of evidence" (the accused more likely than not committed the infraction)
What the parent seems to suggest is that the RIAA should have to prove the accused's guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." This is the standard for criminal charges.
I certainly don't want file sharing to be a crime, punishable by jail.
Sorry, the Olmecs (2000 - 800 BCE) beat the Indians to it.
Check Wikipedia, though even they have the Indians errouneously as the discoverers of zero. They claim that the earliest use of zero as a place holder was in Babylonia (300 BCE), but also say that the Olmecs had zero *as a number.* Just looking from the dates of the Olmec civilzation, though, you can see the Olmecs were way ahead.
The Mayan number system also had zero as a number, and the Mayan civilization is ~3,000 years old.
Having just watched Bowling for Columbine, here's a theory about why we have to show IDs (and submit to other "security" measures): it helps promote the culture of fear in the U.S.
On top of overreporting of violent crime in the media, the gov't isn't a slouch when it comes to reminding us how dangerous the world is. Having pervaisive "security" serves as a constant background reminder of this.
The typical person might think, "Oh, I have to submit to all these security measures so the gov't can keep me safe. Therefore, there must be quite a bit of danger out there to warrant such measures."
The difference is that parody makes fun of the original work that the work is derived from; satire is a derivative work that makes fun of something else. Parody is protected, satire is not fair use.
It's pretty clear that the flash animation in question does not make fun of the actual song, but rather the presidential candidates and America in general. Thus, I don't think it's legal, but I'm only a law intern.
I'm not saying that I like the conclusion, however.
The article says that Nokia's problem is not having features that consumers want, like clam-shell phones. Yet their solution is not to include those features in their new phones, but to offer consumers 35 different models this year (only 6 of those are clam-shell). I'm all about consumer choice, but does this make sense to anyone?
Interestingly, the ACLU runs Windows and *only* Windows. My boss (an executive director of one regional office) told me of another regional office that got a grant from national HQ to do some IT upgrades and experimentation. They planned to use a Linux server for their office, but national stipulated that they *must* run Windows on their server to get the grant.
Of course, the "agreed" to these terms and ran Linux anyway. The regional offices from what I hear aren't thrilled with national's IT policy. Apparently, MS gives the ACLU quite the deal on their products. My office, of course, runs Linux exclusively.
I completely agree with using the Xbox as a media center, but why does Tom's harp on having a 1.4 Ghz Dream-X machine? I have a standard modded box, and it does everything I want well, not to mention everything the article mentions. Why would I pay hundreds more to have a faster processor and some more RAM in this case?
My guess is that Tom's got a free Dream-X sample, and snuck in an unrelated plug for them as a way of saying "thanks."
MS might now bundle Hotmail and/or MSN and/or Office (including Outlook) with Windows as the "consumer email client." Possibly a far-out guess, but given MS's history, it wouldn't surprise me.
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He writes like an elementary school student...Robots might appreciate it but humans probably would not
I disagree. He knows who his (intended) audience is--the or'nary American. As a journalist, I was taught to write at 6th grade level because that's the level that communicates most effectively with the majority of American readers. Maybe the New York Times or Wall Street Journal can write for a more sophisticated audience, but a politician from the 14th district of Illinois has to communicate with quite a different constituency.
Now, is it sad that the average American needs to be communicated to at an elementary school level? Yes.
"If Wal-Mart, McDonalds, UPS, GM, and Ford, the five companies that Fortune lists as having the most employees, all offered a similar incentive..."
Recall that Ford and GM missed the hybrid boat big time, and are now struggling to catch up with Honda and Toyota (who are developing prototype hydrogen cars already). Further, the Ford Escape hybrid (Ford's first hybrid), while technically a hybrid, has roughly the same fuel efficiency as the standard model; the electric engine is used to better performance, not efficiency. Thus, it's not clear how much green benefit society would get from Ford employees buying Ford hybrids.
Something tells me that Ford and GM wouldn't subsidize purchasing their competitors' cars, especially given their dire financial situation. Don't expect Ford and GM to jump on this bandwagon.
Go and read the license agreement I linked to. The federal government owns *lots* of patents and copyrights from basic research. In 1986, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, whose purpose was to aid in technology transfer from the federal government to the private sector. Bayh-Dole allows (nay, effectively mandates) that the government license their IP to the private sector so that biotech companies can take that basic research, build on it, and produce a commercial product with practical application.
Furthermore, just because the federal government holds a patent does not make it public. Sure, you can find out about the existence of the patent (like any other patent) from the USPTO. But if you infringe on the patent, the federal government can sue you, whether they've licensed the patent or not.
The right way to think about federally-owned IP is like much federally owned real property. It's not public in that anyone can use it, it's public in that it's held in the public trust. The reason the federal government develops all these patents and then licensed them to private industry for product development is to benefit the American consumer with new medical treatments.
Actually, the U.S. government wouldn't have to invoke eminent domain if they wanted to do something like this. Most of the basic research that leads to these drugs, vaccines, etc. is paid for by the federal government. The gov't then licenses this technology to biotech and pharmaceutical companies to develop a practical application, like a drug. The private company keeps IP rights to the developed drug/vaccine/whatever.
In these licensing agreements, however, is a clause that allows the government, in an emergency, to manufacture the drug/vaccine/whatever, or give a license to another manufacturer to increase supply of the product. So they're not invoking eminent domain to seize IP, they're availing themselves of a contractual provision. Among other things, this means the gov't doesn't have to compensate the IP holder.
See, for example, section 5.04(b) of the Model PHS Patent License Aggreement--Exclusive, available here.
Not quite. Assuming for argument's sake that Taiwan can make and is making an eminent domain seizure under the U.S. Constitution (not that they actually can), they must pay "just" compensation. "Just" doesn't equal "market price." I think "just compensation" is less than market price in many instance, this probably being one.
Eminent domain doesn't work internationally. The idea behind it is that the state is the source of property rights, so it can take property at will (in the U.S., the Constitution mandates fair compensation for the taking, though). Now, Taiwan is not the source of Roche's patents, so they can't appropriate them at will. What they can do, and what they seemingly did, is say, "We're not recognizing these patents as valid property in our nation."
The difference is subtle: eminent domain recognizes a property right, but takes the property anyway for public use; Taiwan's action is a refusal to recognize the property right.
More information about Brazil producing AIDS drugs is here. Brazil claims it is not explicitly violating patents; they claim that a loophole in WTO allows it to produce generics in an emergency. It's not clear from TFA if Taiwan is claiming the same exemption, but it looks awfully similar.
You have to stop construing the First Amendment as granting you rights. That kind of thinking almost led to the rejection of the Bill of Rights in the first place. James Madison once said: ''It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against."
That guard is the Ninth Amendment. The correct interpretation of the Constitution, then, is that you have boatloads of natural rights, and the Constitution protects them all; certain rights explicitly protected just have greater weight when rights conflict. When a court recognizes a right, they're not being "judicial activists" at all, they're keeping well within the intent of the Framers.
RICO is indeed a criminal statute, but it has a provision that allows civil actions, too.
Specifically, section 1964(c) of the act allows private parties to sue for injuries arising from any RICO violation.
If she wins, she recovers triple damages plus reasonable attorney's fees. However, in the 1990s, the Supreme Court made RICO cases a plaintiff's nightmare. It's a really complex and uncertain area of law, but that could work to our advantage: the legal complexity of RICO issues will tie up RIAA lawyers.
IANAL, but I am a law student.
Not all people think that moral concerns with animal experimentation come from the "dehumanizing effect" on researchers. Some of us think that animals have rights or at least moral considerability in themselves.
Much of this debate could be solved by once and for all agreeing that the mere fact that the research subject is human is not morally significant. Right now, many people are willing to grant a cell rights because less than 1% of its DNA is different from all other organisms save other humans. That's ridiculous.
A better approach is to ground the high moral consideration we give humans on their developed traits, such as self-consiousness, a capacity to suffer and enjoy, and a desire to live.
On this model, an animal would have some moral considerability (it can feel pain), but arguably not enough to enjoin medical experimentation that can improve human lives. And a clump of cells has zero moral worth.
This result matches many people's moral intuitions. All you have to do is give up the notion (originated in the same places that today's fundamentalists cite) that being a human makes you automatically special, from the moral point of view.
The Bible says that forbidden fruit came from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Until they ate that fruit, Adam and Eve did not know good and evil, hence they did not know that eating the fruit was wrong. Talking of them has having failed a moral test is nonsensical.
And if they were perfect, and chose to disobey God, that means that perfection is found in disobeying God.
Remember Kohlberg's theory of moral development. HS students are in the "conventional" stage of morality, meaning roughly that what's right is what is socially approved of and what's wrong is what's disapproved of.
As they mature, they go into the "postconventional" phase, where rights are to be defended because of a social contract that all agree to.
The study is therefore not surprising to in finding HS students dismissive of minority rights and unpopular views. It would be surprising to see college students think the same way.
Some time ago, courts had doubts about standard contracts, that is, contracts that a company imposed on all customers that the customer had no chance of changing. Some of these contracts were held unenforcable, because the customer's bargaining power was so inferior to the company's. (cf. Henningsen v. Bloomfield Motors; Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co., )
The courts found there was no way these contracts were made by two equal, free parties, which is a cornerstone of a valid contract. Also, many contracts written in legalese, unintelligible to the customer, were thrown out, because the customer's inability to comprehend the contract was seen as evidence that he couldn't fully and freely accept the contract
In many ways, I see shrinkwrap EULAs as having similar problems: there's a gross inequality in bargaining power between the sides, there's no real way the customer can negotiate the contract (especially since the company has no agent authorized to change the contract available to the customer), and you can't realistically read and understand the contract before agreeing to it.
IANAL, but I am a philosopher of law.
Speaking as a print journalist (and editor), I'm saddend by attacks on the media's credibility. But I, too, think there's a problem.
The problem that dinosaur media has is: how do we put out a daily paper that's relevant to readers who are getting real-time news updates online? Answer: shorten the news cycle, rush to scoop the story, let others do the thinking.
Think of newspapers are the layman's scientific journals--they report the latest discoveries and happenings of interest to the target audience. Now think of how credible a scientific journal would be if it had to have 24-hr. reporting cycles. There's no way the editors could fact check everything, look deep for signs of bias and spin, etc. I don't think it's humanly possible to deliver hard, unbiased, fair, and comprehensive news with today's news cycle.
What should happen is a return to the days when nobody claimed to be 100% unbiased. If you look at 19th century newspapers, there was quite a bit of editorializing even on the front page. But just because we can't be perfect doesn't mean we have an excuse to be bad. In contrast to journalists, bloggers don't try hard enough to be objective and as accurate as possible.
The right balance between speed and fairness, IMHO, is professional journalists doing the blogging. Even if journalism is a craft and not a profession, crafts need to be taught by experienced craftsmen.
My ideal solution, though, would be slowing down the pace of life, but that's not going to happen.
That's an uncharitable interpretation.
As the article's author admits, all he did was get various sources to comment/speculate/whatever on the Google Firefox browser. Then he looked at what the various sources agreed on with respect to the browser. Finally, he said that the areas of agreement were those most likely to be true.
The author is fully aware that this is not Truth, but it is reasonable to think that what has been said by many independent sources is more likely to be true than one person's speculation.
$20 in 1789 (when the Constitution was ratified) would translate to $415.22 in 2003.
Here's the nifty calculator that I used: http://eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd/
The RIAA *is* holding these people to the "proper legal standard."
Copyright infringement is a civil violation, which means that the burden of proof is "preponderance of evidence" (the accused more likely than not committed the infraction)
What the parent seems to suggest is that the RIAA should have to prove the accused's guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." This is the standard for criminal charges.
I certainly don't want file sharing to be a crime, punishable by jail.
Sorry, the Olmecs (2000 - 800 BCE) beat the Indians to it.
Check Wikipedia, though even they have the Indians errouneously as the discoverers of zero. They claim that the earliest use of zero as a place holder was in Babylonia (300 BCE), but also say that the Olmecs had zero *as a number.* Just looking from the dates of the Olmec civilzation, though, you can see the Olmecs were way ahead.
The Mayan number system also had zero as a number, and the Mayan civilization is ~3,000 years old.
Having just watched Bowling for Columbine, here's a theory about why we have to show IDs (and submit to other "security" measures): it helps promote the culture of fear in the U.S.
On top of overreporting of violent crime in the media, the gov't isn't a slouch when it comes to reminding us how dangerous the world is. Having pervaisive "security" serves as a constant background reminder of this.
The typical person might think, "Oh, I have to submit to all these security measures so the gov't can keep me safe. Therefore, there must be quite a bit of danger out there to warrant such measures."
The difference is that parody makes fun of the original work that the work is derived from; satire is a derivative work that makes fun of something else. Parody is protected, satire is not fair use.
It's pretty clear that the flash animation in question does not make fun of the actual song, but rather the presidential candidates and America in general. Thus, I don't think it's legal, but I'm only a law intern.
I'm not saying that I like the conclusion, however.
There are "Ads by Google" just under every page's review text. At the very least, there's a conflict of interest here.
The article says that Nokia's problem is not having features that consumers want, like clam-shell phones. Yet their solution is not to include those features in their new phones, but to offer consumers 35 different models this year (only 6 of those are clam-shell). I'm all about consumer choice, but does this make sense to anyone?
Interestingly, the ACLU runs Windows and *only* Windows. My boss (an executive director of one regional office) told me of another regional office that got a grant from national HQ to do some IT upgrades and experimentation. They planned to use a Linux server for their office, but national stipulated that they *must* run Windows on their server to get the grant.
Of course, the "agreed" to these terms and ran Linux anyway. The regional offices from what I hear aren't thrilled with national's IT policy. Apparently, MS gives the ACLU quite the deal on their products. My office, of course, runs Linux exclusively.
I completely agree with using the Xbox as a media center, but why does Tom's harp on having a 1.4 Ghz Dream-X machine? I have a standard modded box, and it does everything I want well, not to mention everything the article mentions. Why would I pay hundreds more to have a faster processor and some more RAM in this case?
My guess is that Tom's got a free Dream-X sample, and snuck in an unrelated plug for them as a way of saying "thanks."
MS might now bundle Hotmail and/or MSN and/or Office (including Outlook) with Windows as the "consumer email client." Possibly a far-out guess, but given MS's history, it wouldn't surprise me.