If he had foresight and a sense of humor there's a bunch of emails from Bush and Cheney saying "Thanks old buddy, us boy's from Texas really appreciate all the help..."
Not death warrant. "Sit around naked in a cold, bare concrete cell in total solitary confinement for the next 60 years" warrant. That's the precedent anyway. Sounds like you might spend some of your 60 years wishing it had been a death warrant.
I dunno, maybe they gave the guy his clothes back by now. I haven't followed it that closely.
I didn't see the "lied to police part". What was that?
I did see the google maps part. Apparently the defense says that all of the timestamps on the google maps stuff is wrong - possibly tampered with after confiscation by the police. But the judge wouldn't allow that testimony because the defense got their expert too late.
The "find your phone" thing is not remotely damning. My wife uses that technique all the time, and rarely hangs up before leaving a message. It all depends on how quickly you find your phone. If you left it in the car, there's a good chance you won't hear it before it goes to a message. She also frequently butt dials my phone. Nothing nefarious there. (nothing exculpatory either) The idea that one single phone call was the test of the alibi, yet he somehow forgot to hang up because that would prove it was an alibi test.... that's just silly.
Cell phones and VOIP are not the same thing. I have a million dollar voip installation here... doesn't mean I know squat about cell phone protocols. Heck, I've got some network engineers that handle the POE switches that don't know much about voip either.
The shoes smacks of OJ and absent more info this was the thing I found seriously questionable. I haven't read much, but I assume he has no explanation for the missing shoes. That's pretty sketchy. But it wasn't "shoes he wore to kill her", it was "a pair of shoes that he was video taped wearing after she was found dead and didn't have later". I didn't see any OJ like references where a forensics expert had found a shoeprint that only matched a size 13 Bruno Mali shoe that OJ suddenly didn't have and said he'd never wear because it was ugly but a photo later showed up of him wearing the shoes. Just "he wore a pair of shoes on video after his wife went missing that the police didn't recover".
I agree that the google maps stuff will kill him with the jury without his expert witness' rebuttal. I have no idea if the expert is right about the tampering. But it is pretty sketchy that the judge won't let the jury hear about the rebuttal. If I was on the jury and I heard "He specifically searched google maps for this obscure location to dump the body before she was killed" I'd convict. I didn't see enough about that evidence to know what it really was. If it was "there were tile images for the area in question (which also includes everything in the area near his house), I'd be less impressed. You'll find google maps tiles for the entire area around my house in my wife's computer cache, particularly all the pizza places and parks. That doesn't mean she's scouting locations to hide my body. (geez... I hope not! )
Apparently there are several witnesses that say they saw her or someone who looked like her out for that jog later as well. A few of them claim the police ignored or downplayed their statements at the time.
I did a quick read of the case coverage over at WRAL and it does appear pretty darned sketchy for the state. In addition to denying the testimony about the invalid timestamps because the prosecution wouldn't have time to prepare a rebuttal, the reason for the late witness was apparently the fact that the judge disallowed the first defense witness as "not an expert". So their argument that they wouldn't have time to rebut is a little sketchy, if that story is right. The judge apparently did allow the prosecution to present the router evidence at the very last minute in the person of Chris Fry as a rebuttal witness. So disallowing the defense rebuttal witness on the computer files (apparently lots of files had altered timestamps after being taken into police custody, not just the google maps files). There was also some stuff about the police erasing data from cell phones.
The whole thing sounds really sketchy for the prosecution. They claimed quite a few things definitively that the defense was able to absolutely prove false. It sounds like there was a pretty good PR campaign afoot to prove the guy guilty in the media as well.
Having invested less than 15 minutes in the case, I couldn't say anything useful about whether the guy killed her or not. But I can say that I'm not at all impressed with the police/prosecution/judge team in the case. There seems to be a lot of disregard for a dispassionate arbiter of justice. From what I can glean from the press reports, there's a fairly unified team of police, prosecutors, press and judge all working to ensure a conviction, with a defense team and some of the guys friends working for an acquittal.
I really didn't like the last minute inclusion of a second lesser charge of 2nd degree murder by the judge. This smacks of trying to get the jury to compromise on 2nd degree murder - a charge that would be entirely incompatible with the case the prosecution has presented (a case for premeditated murder). The jury is apparently fed up with the trial and wants to go home. So the judge offers them a way to compromise between guilty on first degree murder and acquittal - just convict on 2nd degree and you can all go home! Pretty sketchy stuff.
Google Voice is pretty amazing, even at the early stages. It can auto-recognize many languages. It can also do a fair job with bad pronunciation. Google translate is able to understand my Spanish - which is fairly incomprehensible. Of course, my vocabulary is limited to that provided by public high schools in rural North Carolina back in 1982. Good luck getting me to do more than ask for directions to the bath room.
I'll steal a joke from David Sedaris - a single year of high school Spanish just isn't enough to function in society. Trying to borrow a lighter walking around Mexico City I had to go up to people and ask to borrow some fire: podría darme un poco de fuego?
That didn't really happen - it was Sedaris talking about his adventures in France. But it could have been me. In my case it was rural Mexico on the Yuccatan looking for some Hydrocortisone ointment for the wife (who was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes). You try explaining allergic reaction to a 14 year old Mayan girl manning a pharmacy in rural Mexico while using the vocabulary of a 3 year old.... good luck sounding like anything more than an idiot. I finally had to write down "hydrocortisone ointment, 1%" on a piece of paper. She produced a tube of 2.5% ointment (prescription strength in the US - woot!) and earned my wife's undying gratitude. I can only imagine how easy that transaction would have been with google translate. Heck, if I just knew the words for "skin" and "bite" at the time it would have been really helpful...
They've gotten some pretty good data from me. My Google Voice number isn't currently published, so all of the voicemails I get are wrong numbers (or tests). They are completely incomprehensible to me, and to Google Voice - although one did a fair approximation of jibberish English (I think it was in some African dialect). Most seem to be in African languages, although a few are central European sounding. Good luck getting a good translation - but that's the magic that Google is trying to accomplish: translate some spoken language without any foreknowledge. Kind of like Google Goggles only for voice. So I volunteer all of these for their translation database.
Oh, and I do get a fair number of advertizements and service calls. If you had an appointment with Comcast last Thursday, the tech called the wrong number - that's why he didn't show up. Google did a good job on the translation though...
Strangely, this also offers you a bit of an opportunity for leverage. A certain percentage must opt in for the class to be certified. If you randomly happen to be a hold-out in a case where a few more opt-ins would make a difference, you might get offered all kinds of goodies to join the class.
Well, that's one theory anyway. Many class actions are actually more complex than that. Often a class action is pursued with the tacit support of the corporation. You see, when a corporation faces an unknown liability (in this case based on lots of individual laptops) they'd like to wrap it all up in a single number. And negotiate that number down as much as possible - with one party on the other side of the negotiation. Getting a class certified is step one of this process.
Of course, the class action attorney has a bit of conflict of interest. What he really needs is for there to be a large payout. Therefore he needs a large class to be certified and for there to be a settlement as quickly as possible (to avoid bleeding off his own funds sustaining the suit).
So the sued party and the plaintiff's attorney can sort of end up on the same team, provided that the company being sued believes that they have some actual liability. The only party not represented in this situation is the class membership. They get whatever the two principals and the judge allow.
By that definition of "selling across state lines" I am selling iPads in Mississippi right now. Since I own shares of Apple - ooh, and since I'm an owner of Apple, their home office must be in Florida!... but wait... they also are owned by my buddy who lives in London. So Apple is really a British company..... Hold on, I think I know a girl in Australia who owns stock in Apple. Maybe they are Australian too....
Or maybe a company incorporated in Maryland is not the same thing as a different company incorporated in New York, even if they have the same trade name. In fact, there is a federal law that requires them to be completely separate entities in every way. So no, they don't sell across state lines, effectively or otherwise.
Sorry about the snark, but this is the internet after all. And no amount of tortured logic can overcome the fact that both in reality and by legal requirement you cannot buy or sell health insurance across state lines. Buying and selling shares in a company or reinsurance of liabilities are not the same thing as buying and selling health insurance.
Actually, this case isn't a statistic. I wouldn't seek real redress from an arbitrator if I had serious dispute with a company - Spangy is right about the overall likelihood of success. since the arbitrator likely deals with the company all the time and has never heard of you - you'll have a built in bias against you. For a random contract dispute with a company I'd likely avoid their kangaroo court.
But in this particular case the issue they sought redress for was kinda sophomoric. Somehow they claim that it is AT&T's responsibility that their local government wants to collect sales tax on a free phone (after rebate). Look, they might even win in a court. Who knows, it can be a crap shoot. But they'd still be wrong. It is stupid on the face of it. AT&T isn't charging them anything for the free phone. The state, county and municipality are. Take it up with them since they are the ones levying the fees.
What would the arbitrator likely do? (or small claims).
A) Refund the ten bucks in sales tax. B) Cancel the entire contract and have everyone return whatever they money/materials changed hands C) Enforce the deal as agreed to at the time of purchase.
If you wanted anything other than one of these options (like: AT&T should pay me $100 for the inconvenience) then you're probably wrong. AT&T is probably right to insist on C, but they would probably have easily agreed to B. An arbitrator might actually go for B just to split the baby, since nobody loses anything. Option A would hardly be fair to AT&T, since they don't actually owe the sales tax, the purchaser does. But I could see a small claims judge going for A just because it is a big company and they did use the word "free" in their advertizing (even though they also say "not including taxes and fees. 2 year contract required").
Of course, they say "hard cases make bad law", and this is probably no exception. Since the case stinks of an ambulance chaser looking for any hook to get rich off of a class action, we now get to have a nice precedent that says you can't avoid arbitration if it says so in the contract. And then we'll get a case of a company really screwing people over that gets forced into binding arbitration when it shouldn't. So thanks for that, guys...
Even without Raich, healthcare falls under interstate commerce, unless you are paying your bills out of pocket without insurance or subsidy. Since nobody does that, they either use insurance, for which the underwriters cross state lines or government subsidy, which being a government service falls under the commerce clause.
Buying and selling insurance across state lines is illegal. There is no interstate market for health insurance - by law.
The definition being used in the current healthcare debate rests entirely on the precedent of Raich. Where the court found that non-commerce (not buying or selling) a substance that is not legal to buy or sell across state lines (pot) falls under the heading of "interstate commerce".
In his dissent in the Gonzales v. Raich case, Justice Thomas warned that this precedent would allow the federal government unlimited powers of regulation. So yeah, FFF was right in his analysis.
...because Congress will step in and provide rigorous consumer protection laws to fill in any unfairness in these kinds of agreements.
You neglect to note that the government already stepped in to ensure that the Concepcions have to pay sales tax on a free phone. That's what the lawsuit is all about. They didn't think they should have to pay sales tax on a free phone. I don't think they should have to pay sales tax on a free phone either. The state disagrees. Somehow that is AT&T's fault.
Hey look - ChemicalDave read the fine article! We don't do that around here... Somebody bring some mod points along for CD so more people can read his fine writeup and we can have an enlightened discussion.
This dispute isn't really about AT&T ripping anyone off. The dispute is over sales tax - you know, payments to the government that AT&T is forced by the government to collect on behalf of the government. The local government says AT&T has to collect sales tax on the free phone as if it were not free. The Concepcions didn't want to pay it.
As ChemicalDave points out, they could have taken arbitration or an individual lawsuit and personally fared better than they had any hope of doing in a class action. Unless you happen to be the class action attorney hoping to get a few million people joined into your class. Then you could settle out and make yourself a few tens of millions pretty quick.
Except in this case the dispute is over the payment of sales tax. Sales tax which is mandated by the local government in California. Sales tax which is paid by the purchaser of a good or service. So, not AT&T. Local governments. Who want to be paid even if you didn't pay anything for your phone. But who are immune to lawyerly powers of class-action-fu.
As a former PhD candidate I've hired many a former hard sciences student to do completely unrelated work in the area of business. They have all done extremely well. In my experience there are only 2 qualifications for a job. Intelligence and motivation. If you are bright and motivated, you'll do fine. Lacking intelligence, I'll take motivation. Without motivation.... well, that's a disaster waiting to happen.
At least in the world of Biology and Physics where I've interacted with heavy hitters - even Nobel laureates - I've found that there is a strong bias against the argument from authority. As a lowly student I told Linus Pauling that he was wrong on a particular topic.... and after listening to my argument he agreed with me. That's been 25 years ago and I still haven't accomplished as much as he did in any given year, but that didn't stop him from considering my arguments on the merit. In my experience that's the way all of the competent scientists are. Craig Venter entertained my insipid student level theories and patiently helped me refine them. He never once resorted to "I'm a big-shot PhD" as an argument. (he did have a habit of citing some obscure paper from some journal I'd never even heard of that destroyed my theories though... He also had the excellent habit of saying "that's interesting. Why don't you propose a grant and do the work to find out...")
As I've left the world of academia and science behind, their example has served me well. Unfortunately, in the world of business you are much more likely to run in to "cult of personality" types in positions of authority, so it has been a mixed blessing.
This is as it should be. Unfortunately, many fields treat the PhD as an advanced term paper. I can't speak for all areas, but for many of the non-science fields a PhD is not as impressive as even a masters degree in the hard sciences.
A PhD should be able to design and carry out original research. This is particularly difficult in areas that don't have a scientific foundation. When I was working at the Yerkes Primate Center I was an advocate for interdisciplinary work designed to bring the scientific rigor of the biologists, biochemists and medical researchers to the behavioral science research teams. I was not entirely successful in my advocacy - there was a fundamental cultural disconnect.
For areas that are not traditionally scientific in their approach, bringing a scientific discipline to bear can be extraordinarily difficult. The further you move from hard sciences, the more difficult. What is a null hypothesis in the world of history? How about literature? Still, in my book if you are not able to bring a rigorous, scientific approach to your work, you shouldn't be called "PhD".
To an extent. But power is semi-fungible. Sure, you can locate your datacenter close to a hydro-power plant and specify that you want your juice from there... but since that is a finite resource you only guaranteed that some other schmuck is using more coal or gas power somewhere else.
Focusing on efficiency is the only way to "buy green" in the energy market - as long as you are consuming energy and 100% of energy is being produced by renewables.
We used to laugh at the Soviet Union for requiring "internal passports" to travel. America, we said, was a free country and we do not have "identity papers." Now the terrorists have won, we have become Nazi Germany, and nobody seems to care. It makes my blood boil.
Preach on brother! At least the choir is listening....
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If he had foresight and a sense of humor there's a bunch of emails from Bush and Cheney saying "Thanks old buddy, us boy's from Texas really appreciate all the help..."
Not death warrant. "Sit around naked in a cold, bare concrete cell in total solitary confinement for the next 60 years" warrant. That's the precedent anyway. Sounds like you might spend some of your 60 years wishing it had been a death warrant.
I dunno, maybe they gave the guy his clothes back by now. I haven't followed it that closely.
Hopefully (if it were encrypted and we cracked it), we would continue to put out statements in the media that we couldn't crack it...
(while we were kicking doors at his safehouses and rounding up the remainder of his minions around the world)
Agreed! Didn't we learn anything from the whole "we tracked him by his cell phone" braggadocio fiasco? STFU about your intel sources. Sheesh....
I didn't see the "lied to police part". What was that?
I did see the google maps part. Apparently the defense says that all of the timestamps on the google maps stuff is wrong - possibly tampered with after confiscation by the police. But the judge wouldn't allow that testimony because the defense got their expert too late.
The "find your phone" thing is not remotely damning. My wife uses that technique all the time, and rarely hangs up before leaving a message. It all depends on how quickly you find your phone. If you left it in the car, there's a good chance you won't hear it before it goes to a message. She also frequently butt dials my phone. Nothing nefarious there. (nothing exculpatory either) The idea that one single phone call was the test of the alibi, yet he somehow forgot to hang up because that would prove it was an alibi test.... that's just silly.
Cell phones and VOIP are not the same thing. I have a million dollar voip installation here... doesn't mean I know squat about cell phone protocols. Heck, I've got some network engineers that handle the POE switches that don't know much about voip either.
The shoes smacks of OJ and absent more info this was the thing I found seriously questionable. I haven't read much, but I assume he has no explanation for the missing shoes. That's pretty sketchy. But it wasn't "shoes he wore to kill her", it was "a pair of shoes that he was video taped wearing after she was found dead and didn't have later". I didn't see any OJ like references where a forensics expert had found a shoeprint that only matched a size 13 Bruno Mali shoe that OJ suddenly didn't have and said he'd never wear because it was ugly but a photo later showed up of him wearing the shoes. Just "he wore a pair of shoes on video after his wife went missing that the police didn't recover".
I agree that the google maps stuff will kill him with the jury without his expert witness' rebuttal. I have no idea if the expert is right about the tampering. But it is pretty sketchy that the judge won't let the jury hear about the rebuttal. If I was on the jury and I heard "He specifically searched google maps for this obscure location to dump the body before she was killed" I'd convict. I didn't see enough about that evidence to know what it really was. If it was "there were tile images for the area in question (which also includes everything in the area near his house), I'd be less impressed. You'll find google maps tiles for the entire area around my house in my wife's computer cache, particularly all the pizza places and parks. That doesn't mean she's scouting locations to hide my body. (geez... I hope not! )
Apparently there are several witnesses that say they saw her or someone who looked like her out for that jog later as well. A few of them claim the police ignored or downplayed their statements at the time.
I did a quick read of the case coverage over at WRAL and it does appear pretty darned sketchy for the state. In addition to denying the testimony about the invalid timestamps because the prosecution wouldn't have time to prepare a rebuttal, the reason for the late witness was apparently the fact that the judge disallowed the first defense witness as "not an expert". So their argument that they wouldn't have time to rebut is a little sketchy, if that story is right. The judge apparently did allow the prosecution to present the router evidence at the very last minute in the person of Chris Fry as a rebuttal witness. So disallowing the defense rebuttal witness on the computer files (apparently lots of files had altered timestamps after being taken into police custody, not just the google maps files). There was also some stuff about the police erasing data from cell phones.
The whole thing sounds really sketchy for the prosecution. They claimed quite a few things definitively that the defense was able to absolutely prove false. It sounds like there was a pretty good PR campaign afoot to prove the guy guilty in the media as well.
Having invested less than 15 minutes in the case, I couldn't say anything useful about whether the guy killed her or not. But I can say that I'm not at all impressed with the police/prosecution/judge team in the case. There seems to be a lot of disregard for a dispassionate arbiter of justice. From what I can glean from the press reports, there's a fairly unified team of police, prosecutors, press and judge all working to ensure a conviction, with a defense team and some of the guys friends working for an acquittal.
I really didn't like the last minute inclusion of a second lesser charge of 2nd degree murder by the judge. This smacks of trying to get the jury to compromise on 2nd degree murder - a charge that would be entirely incompatible with the case the prosecution has presented (a case for premeditated murder). The jury is apparently fed up with the trial and wants to go home. So the judge offers them a way to compromise between guilty on first degree murder and acquittal - just convict on 2nd degree and you can all go home! Pretty sketchy stuff.
Google Voice is pretty amazing, even at the early stages. It can auto-recognize many languages. It can also do a fair job with bad pronunciation. Google translate is able to understand my Spanish - which is fairly incomprehensible. Of course, my vocabulary is limited to that provided by public high schools in rural North Carolina back in 1982. Good luck getting me to do more than ask for directions to the bath room.
I'll steal a joke from David Sedaris - a single year of high school Spanish just isn't enough to function in society. Trying to borrow a lighter walking around Mexico City I had to go up to people and ask to borrow some fire: podría darme un poco de fuego?
That didn't really happen - it was Sedaris talking about his adventures in France. But it could have been me. In my case it was rural Mexico on the Yuccatan looking for some Hydrocortisone ointment for the wife (who was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes). You try explaining allergic reaction to a 14 year old Mayan girl manning a pharmacy in rural Mexico while using the vocabulary of a 3 year old.... good luck sounding like anything more than an idiot. I finally had to write down "hydrocortisone ointment, 1%" on a piece of paper. She produced a tube of 2.5% ointment (prescription strength in the US - woot!) and earned my wife's undying gratitude. I can only imagine how easy that transaction would have been with google translate. Heck, if I just knew the words for "skin" and "bite" at the time it would have been really helpful...
They've gotten some pretty good data from me. My Google Voice number isn't currently published, so all of the voicemails I get are wrong numbers (or tests). They are completely incomprehensible to me, and to Google Voice - although one did a fair approximation of jibberish English (I think it was in some African dialect). Most seem to be in African languages, although a few are central European sounding. Good luck getting a good translation - but that's the magic that Google is trying to accomplish: translate some spoken language without any foreknowledge. Kind of like Google Goggles only for voice. So I volunteer all of these for their translation database.
Oh, and I do get a fair number of advertizements and service calls. If you had an appointment with Comcast last Thursday, the tech called the wrong number - that's why he didn't show up. Google did a good job on the translation though...
Strangely, this also offers you a bit of an opportunity for leverage. A certain percentage must opt in for the class to be certified. If you randomly happen to be a hold-out in a case where a few more opt-ins would make a difference, you might get offered all kinds of goodies to join the class.
Well, that's one theory anyway. Many class actions are actually more complex than that. Often a class action is pursued with the tacit support of the corporation. You see, when a corporation faces an unknown liability (in this case based on lots of individual laptops) they'd like to wrap it all up in a single number. And negotiate that number down as much as possible - with one party on the other side of the negotiation. Getting a class certified is step one of this process.
Of course, the class action attorney has a bit of conflict of interest. What he really needs is for there to be a large payout. Therefore he needs a large class to be certified and for there to be a settlement as quickly as possible (to avoid bleeding off his own funds sustaining the suit).
So the sued party and the plaintiff's attorney can sort of end up on the same team, provided that the company being sued believes that they have some actual liability. The only party not represented in this situation is the class membership. They get whatever the two principals and the judge allow.
We are working on a fix for that.... it should be ready in about 5 years.
By that definition of "selling across state lines" I am selling iPads in Mississippi right now. Since I own shares of Apple - ooh, and since I'm an owner of Apple, their home office must be in Florida!... but wait... they also are owned by my buddy who lives in London. So Apple is really a British company..... Hold on, I think I know a girl in Australia who owns stock in Apple. Maybe they are Australian too....
Or maybe a company incorporated in Maryland is not the same thing as a different company incorporated in New York, even if they have the same trade name. In fact, there is a federal law that requires them to be completely separate entities in every way. So no, they don't sell across state lines, effectively or otherwise.
Sorry about the snark, but this is the internet after all. And no amount of tortured logic can overcome the fact that both in reality and by legal requirement you cannot buy or sell health insurance across state lines. Buying and selling shares in a company or reinsurance of liabilities are not the same thing as buying and selling health insurance.
Actually, this case isn't a statistic. I wouldn't seek real redress from an arbitrator if I had serious dispute with a company - Spangy is right about the overall likelihood of success. since the arbitrator likely deals with the company all the time and has never heard of you - you'll have a built in bias against you. For a random contract dispute with a company I'd likely avoid their kangaroo court.
But in this particular case the issue they sought redress for was kinda sophomoric. Somehow they claim that it is AT&T's responsibility that their local government wants to collect sales tax on a free phone (after rebate). Look, they might even win in a court. Who knows, it can be a crap shoot. But they'd still be wrong. It is stupid on the face of it. AT&T isn't charging them anything for the free phone. The state, county and municipality are. Take it up with them since they are the ones levying the fees.
What would the arbitrator likely do? (or small claims).
A) Refund the ten bucks in sales tax.
B) Cancel the entire contract and have everyone return whatever they money/materials changed hands
C) Enforce the deal as agreed to at the time of purchase.
If you wanted anything other than one of these options (like: AT&T should pay me $100 for the inconvenience) then you're probably wrong. AT&T is probably right to insist on C, but they would probably have easily agreed to B. An arbitrator might actually go for B just to split the baby, since nobody loses anything. Option A would hardly be fair to AT&T, since they don't actually owe the sales tax, the purchaser does. But I could see a small claims judge going for A just because it is a big company and they did use the word "free" in their advertizing (even though they also say "not including taxes and fees. 2 year contract required").
Of course, they say "hard cases make bad law", and this is probably no exception. Since the case stinks of an ambulance chaser looking for any hook to get rich off of a class action, we now get to have a nice precedent that says you can't avoid arbitration if it says so in the contract. And then we'll get a case of a company really screwing people over that gets forced into binding arbitration when it shouldn't. So thanks for that, guys...
Even without Raich, healthcare falls under interstate commerce, unless you are paying your bills out of pocket without insurance or subsidy. Since nobody does that, they either use insurance, for which the underwriters cross state lines or government subsidy, which being a government service falls under the commerce clause.
Buying and selling insurance across state lines is illegal. There is no interstate market for health insurance - by law.
The definition being used in the current healthcare debate rests entirely on the precedent of Raich. Where the court found that non-commerce (not buying or selling) a substance that is not legal to buy or sell across state lines (pot) falls under the heading of "interstate commerce".
In his dissent in the Gonzales v. Raich case, Justice Thomas warned that this precedent would allow the federal government unlimited powers of regulation. So yeah, FFF was right in his analysis.
...because Congress will step in and provide rigorous consumer protection laws to fill in any unfairness in these kinds of agreements.
You neglect to note that the government already stepped in to ensure that the Concepcions have to pay sales tax on a free phone. That's what the lawsuit is all about. They didn't think they should have to pay sales tax on a free phone. I don't think they should have to pay sales tax on a free phone either. The state disagrees. Somehow that is AT&T's fault.
Hey look - ChemicalDave read the fine article! We don't do that around here... Somebody bring some mod points along for CD so more people can read his fine writeup and we can have an enlightened discussion.
This dispute isn't really about AT&T ripping anyone off. The dispute is over sales tax - you know, payments to the government that AT&T is forced by the government to collect on behalf of the government. The local government says AT&T has to collect sales tax on the free phone as if it were not free. The Concepcions didn't want to pay it.
As ChemicalDave points out, they could have taken arbitration or an individual lawsuit and personally fared better than they had any hope of doing in a class action. Unless you happen to be the class action attorney hoping to get a few million people joined into your class. Then you could settle out and make yourself a few tens of millions pretty quick.
Except in this case the dispute is over the payment of sales tax. Sales tax which is mandated by the local government in California. Sales tax which is paid by the purchaser of a good or service. So, not AT&T. Local governments. Who want to be paid even if you didn't pay anything for your phone. But who are immune to lawyerly powers of class-action-fu.
Preach on, brother!
As a former PhD candidate I've hired many a former hard sciences student to do completely unrelated work in the area of business. They have all done extremely well. In my experience there are only 2 qualifications for a job. Intelligence and motivation. If you are bright and motivated, you'll do fine. Lacking intelligence, I'll take motivation. Without motivation.... well, that's a disaster waiting to happen.
At least in the world of Biology and Physics where I've interacted with heavy hitters - even Nobel laureates - I've found that there is a strong bias against the argument from authority. As a lowly student I told Linus Pauling that he was wrong on a particular topic.... and after listening to my argument he agreed with me. That's been 25 years ago and I still haven't accomplished as much as he did in any given year, but that didn't stop him from considering my arguments on the merit. In my experience that's the way all of the competent scientists are. Craig Venter entertained my insipid student level theories and patiently helped me refine them. He never once resorted to "I'm a big-shot PhD" as an argument. (he did have a habit of citing some obscure paper from some journal I'd never even heard of that destroyed my theories though... He also had the excellent habit of saying "that's interesting. Why don't you propose a grant and do the work to find out...")
As I've left the world of academia and science behind, their example has served me well. Unfortunately, in the world of business you are much more likely to run in to "cult of personality" types in positions of authority, so it has been a mixed blessing.
This is as it should be. Unfortunately, many fields treat the PhD as an advanced term paper. I can't speak for all areas, but for many of the non-science fields a PhD is not as impressive as even a masters degree in the hard sciences.
A PhD should be able to design and carry out original research. This is particularly difficult in areas that don't have a scientific foundation. When I was working at the Yerkes Primate Center I was an advocate for interdisciplinary work designed to bring the scientific rigor of the biologists, biochemists and medical researchers to the behavioral science research teams. I was not entirely successful in my advocacy - there was a fundamental cultural disconnect.
For areas that are not traditionally scientific in their approach, bringing a scientific discipline to bear can be extraordinarily difficult. The further you move from hard sciences, the more difficult. What is a null hypothesis in the world of history? How about literature? Still, in my book if you are not able to bring a rigorous, scientific approach to your work, you shouldn't be called "PhD".
To an extent. But power is semi-fungible. Sure, you can locate your datacenter close to a hydro-power plant and specify that you want your juice from there... but since that is a finite resource you only guaranteed that some other schmuck is using more coal or gas power somewhere else.
Focusing on efficiency is the only way to "buy green" in the energy market - as long as you are consuming energy and 100% of energy is being produced by renewables.
At this point, one has to wonder what Princeton is doing on their network that they keep uncovering such bugs.
Or one could choose not to wonder and instead read TFA, in particular point 5, which describes exactly what they are doing.
Nah, this is Slashdot. We prefer pointless wondering. Preferably followed up with unfounded assertions and wild conjecture.
It is a fake. The "fossilized" quarter is a dead giveaway.
We used to laugh at the Soviet Union for requiring "internal passports" to travel. America, we said, was a free country and we do not have "identity papers." Now the terrorists have won, we have become Nazi Germany, and nobody seems to care. It makes my blood boil.
Preach on brother! At least the choir is listening....