The numbers come from here. Studies from earlier years (1997-99) showed similar results.
I have seen a few people try to argue that in fact the reversal rate of the 9th circuit is just average because, once cases from the 9th get to the Supreme Court, they are reversed at about the same rate as those from other courts. But this sort of argument is obviously disingenuous. It just shows that the Supreme Court is applying the same standard across lower courts when deciding which cases to review. The number that matters is the number of cases reversed by the Supreme Court in comparison to the number of cases of cases heard by the 9th, and that is way above the average for other courts.
The 9th circuit is overturned more than any other, and the frequency is way out of proportion with either the number of judges serving, or the number of cases handled. In 2002 the 9th circuit handled 17% of federal appeals, but accounted for 45% of overturned judgments from federal appellate courts, and 57% of the unanimously overturned judgements.
Not according to the law it isn't. Copyright infringement and theft have different constitutional bases, are covered by different statutes, fall under different jurisdictions, incur different penalties, require different types of proof, and are subject to a different range of acceptable defenses. In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
When was the last time you heard of someone being able to defend themselves against a charge of theft on the grounds that they only stole a little bit of stuff, or that they only stole it for the purposes of poking fun at the owner? Both defenses work just fine for copyright infringement.
So again, if you think there is something wrong with copying then why don't you just tell us what it is? Calling it theft meaningless.
Taking a book without the permission of the owner, and not giving it back, is stealing. Copying a book without the permission of the copyright holder is copyright infringement. Now if you can explain what is wrong with copying something then feel free, but save us the lame anaolgies with taking stuff.
'This is a mainstream circuit court that said using the Internet and the name of the company to criticize a company is perfectly legitimate.'
Notice that Levy felt obliged to point out that this ruling came from a mainstream circuit court, rather than from one of the fringe circuit courts whose opinions regularly get trashed by courts further up the food chain. It is a sad statement about the legal system in the US that the opinions comming from some courts are so wrong, so often, that their rulings don't count until they are confirmed by a higher court.
Anonymous, abusive, and ill-informed. That is about what I have come to expect from critics of the US.
Why would the Iraq have had to get the strains from the US? These bugs were available from numerous organisations all over the world, and from the wild. In most cases the very same strains were available from other countries, and in every case disease causing strains were available from other countries. Makes sense if you think about it. These bugs are all very common causes of disease, and medical research institutions tend to be interested in disease causing strains.
So did you have a point, or were you just looking for a reason to use "etiological" in a sentence?
Not only is none of that technology, but all of those diseases occur naturally in Iraq. In fact they all occur naturally throughout most of the world. You could find some of them in your own home. They were freely available from numerous research organisations. The ATCC still supplies samples of all of them and the ATCC is not a government organisation.
(1) You must have forgotten about the British and the Soviets. Britain ruled Iraq for a while and organised the coup that brought the Ba'athists to power. Iraq was later a Soviet client state up until the collapse of the USSR (which explains all those Soviet tanks, aircraft, and missiles they were using no?).
(2) Would you care to list up the technology that the military technology that the US supplied to Iraq? Here's a hint - the list would have 0 lines. The US provided Iraq with financial support for a while during the Iran-Iraq war, and some military intelligence, but never any sort of technology.
I think the problem is the "open and shut case" part. There is seldom any such thing in IP law, and there are good reasons to think that the RIAA might lose if they actually went to court with a case like this. In the past the courts have often been unwilling to enforce IP rights against private non-comercial uses, and it could easily happen in these cases as well.
What the RIAA should have done is sued someone, taken it all the way to court, established that they actually had the rights they were claiming, and then tried to gain settlements with other people (that is the way things have gone in the past). What they actually did was to skip the first step and proceed directly to obtaining settlements. The question then arises as to why they skipped the first step. A reasonable guess is that at some point their lawyers said "going to court with this is a risky proposition - better to force settlements". But that raises the RICO problem. If the RIAA was not sure that they had the rights they were claiming then their behavior starts to look like extortion.
There is no chance of anything like this happening. The fact that it would be difficult or even impossible to sue every infringer is itself a solid justification for not trying to do so. Discrimination is not unreasonable if it is unavoidable.
Besides that IP case law is full of cases where IP owners, faced with widespread infringement, chose just one or two infringers to sue (either because they were the easiest cases to make, or the most lucrative targets).
this is a micro investment and the reward is def. going to pay off
Micro investment? A micro investment is when you give $50 to a woman in bangladesh so that she can start her own business. Giving $683 million to a major corporation looks pretty damn macro to me. You are probably right that it will pay off for Germany and Saxony though. Having the factory there will generate a lot of taxable economic activity.
Who exactly do you think "us" is? Perhaps you come from some poor and enslaved country where soldiers are not free citizens, but around here the military is us. Thanks to technology like this we keep our peace, and secure our freedom.
You should read the reports by AI rather than this half-assed newspaper report. You can get the original reports here and here:
Nothing in these reports is "ridiculous". The claims that AI makes are well documented, and are justified concerns about human rights violations. Most of each report is concerned with what the Chinese government is doing, and not with what anyone outside of China might be doing to aid and abet these crimes. They do not acuse foreign companies of human rights violations, but they do ask that those companies exercise some responsibilty when they sell products to China. Comments from the companies in question make it quite clear that they are not even willing to ask whether their products will be used for censorship purposes, let alone refuse to do business when the answerr is "yes".
But according to this article, linked to in the summary, some of it is implants, so he is a cyborg.
According to the slashdot summary maybe, but there was no mention of implants in the orginal NYT article.
You can't get it from the NYT without paying now, so here is the original text:
STEVE MANN, an engineering professor at the University of Toronto, has lived as a cyborg for more than 20 years, wearing a web of wires, computers and electronic sensors that are designed to augment his memory, enhance his vision and keep tabs on his vital signs. Although his wearable computer system sometimes elicited stares, he never encountered any problems going through the security gates at airports.
Last month that changed. Before boarding a Toronto-bound plane at St. John's International Airport in Newfoundland, Dr. Mann says, he went through a three-day ordeal in which he was ultimately strip-searched and injured by security personnel. During the incident, he said, $56,800 worth of his $500,000 equipment was lost or damaged beyond repair, including the eyeglasses that serve as his display screen.
His lawyer in Toronto, Gary Neinstein, sent letters two weeks ago to Air Canada, the airport and the Canadian transportation authority arguing that they acted negligently and seeking reimbursement for the damaged equipment so that Dr. Mann could put his wearable computer back together again.
The difficulties that Dr. Mann faced seem related to the tightening of security in airports since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. But he had flown from Toronto to St. John's two days earlier without a hitch.
On that day, Feb. 16, he said, he followed the routine he has used on previous flights. He told the security guards in Toronto that he had already notified the airline about his equipment. He showed them documentation, some of it signed by his doctor, that described the wires and glasses, which he wears every waking minute as part of his internationally renowned research on wearable computers.
He also asked for permission not to put his computer through the X-ray machine because the device is more sensitive than a laptop. He said that the guards examined his equipment and allowed him to board the flight.
But when he tried to board his return flight on Feb. 18, his experience was entirely different. This time, he said, he was told to turn his computer on and off and put it on the X-ray machine. He took his case to Neil Campbell, Air Canada's customer service manager at the St. John's airport, and spent the next two days arranging conversations between his university colleagues and the airline.
The security guards continued to require that he turn his machine on and off and put it through the X-ray machine while also tugging on his wires and electrodes, he said. Still not satisfied, the guards took him to a private room for a strip-search in which, he said, the electrodes were torn from his skin, causing bleeding, and several pieces of equipment were strewn about the room.
Once his system was turned off, turned on again, X-rayed and dismantled, Dr. Mann passed the security check. When he was finally allowed to go home, some pieces of equipment were not returned to him, he said, and his glasses were put in the plane's baggage compartment although he warned that cold temperatures there could ruin them.
Without a fully functional system, he said, he found it difficult to navigate normally. He said he fell at least twice in the airport, once passing out after hitting his head on what he described as a pile of fire extinguishers in his way. He boarded the plane in a wheelchair.
"I felt dizzy and disoriented and went downhill from there," he said.
Air Canada said that there was no record that any of Dr. Mann's baggage had been lost and that the Canadian transportation agency, Transport Canada, had required that his belongings be X-rayed. "We don't tell the security firms that there is going to be an exception made
I agree with the general idea. Private enforcement of private property rights (and I mean lawful enforcement, not vigilante stuff) does save the government a lot of money, and it does allow the police to focus on more important matters.
Still, if these guys get used to playing cops, and everyone else gets used to them playing cops, then one day they might stop just playing. I would hate to wake up one day and find that the RIAA has a real police force with real police powers, rather than just this pretend outfit.
Specifically, while he says that he is fine with software being for "fee", his actions, especially as measured against the LGPL, make that quite hard.
There is no inconsistency here. It is hard to charge for free (as in speech) software because without the monopoly power that proprietary software owners have it is hard to persuade people to pay. That is just a consequence of basic economics, not a contradiction between what Stallman says and what he does.
Am I the only one who found that particular spoonerism amusing, BTW?
"Invidious video driver" is not a spoonerism ("videous invideo driver" would be).
So, because he can only see the world as "free" or "non-free", he is unwilling to admit that things like video drivers, which are not published as open source, may nonetheless be of significant value to the OSS community.
Stallman has never claimed that proprietary software has no value or that it is never useful. He claims that giving up some of your freedom in return for something useful is a bad bargain - in exactly the same sense that Benjamin Franklin thought that trading liberty for security was a bad bargain. Security is valuable, but only a fool would allow himself to be enslaved in the hope that it would make him more secure.
Now maybe you do not believe that software can be free in the sense that speech can be free, but if you do beleive it then there is nothing extreme or simplistic about the idea that you shoud not use slave software. It is nothing more or less than the idea that you should not trade away your liberty for convenience.
Re:Sun to blame for Win98 retiremnt
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
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· Score: 3, Interesting
First MS violated the contract that they made with Sun. Now MS is screwing its own customers rather than pay the costs of obeying the law. But you think we should blame Sun for expecting MS to abide by the contract that MS signed? And you think that we should blame the courts for enforcing the contract that MS signed?
I supose you think that the high cost of opperating prisons should be blamed on the people who report crime, and the courts who send criminals to prison?
Now there's a great idea - force people pay for free software. Now personally I like free software because it is free like free speech. And I can understand why some people like it because it is usually free in the way that beer usually isn't. But how the fuck does someone get to be a proponent of free software when they apparently don't like either kind of freedom?
France have every right to hold their own opinions...
...but the US has to "shut up"? Don't the Americans have a right to have their own opinions?
If the US wants to help the countries that help them, why souldn't they do so? If the French want to make matters difficult for the Amereicans then they should feel free, but they shouldn't get all whiney when the US then decides to help someone else.
Their motivation is to get as many people to heaven as possible. Most other religions can't claim this.
One thing that Christianity can take credit for is its universalism - in principle at least everyone is equal in the eyes of God. Sure, there have been plenty of Christians who have failed to live up to that ideal, but at least they had the ideal, and they had it a long time before almost any other religion or culture.
How many Muslims have asked you if you've been saved, and if you'd like to be?
In fact Islam has exactly the same ideal. They got it from the Christians. As with Christianity there are Islamic groups that are not very interested in gaining converts, but there are others who are very enthusiastic about it. You will also find many who would be quite happy to send you to heaven.
But the worst are evangelical atheists.
Most atheists think that the only life you get is this one, and that if you waste it then you don't get a do-over. Their aim is to get people to live worthwhile lives instead of wasting their lives on delusions that make them feel good. Of course it might be bitter news if you thought you were going to heaven, but personally I found my conversion to atheism to be like waking up from a drugged stupor. I had never felt so alive until that moment when I recognised that life wouldn't last forever.
Slashdot Mirror
The numbers come from here. Studies from earlier years (1997-99) showed similar results.
I have seen a few people try to argue that in fact the reversal rate of the 9th circuit is just average because, once cases from the 9th get to the Supreme Court, they are reversed at about the same rate as those from other courts. But this sort of argument is obviously disingenuous. It just shows that the Supreme Court is applying the same standard across lower courts when deciding which cases to review. The number that matters is the number of cases reversed by the Supreme Court in comparison to the number of cases of cases heard by the 9th, and that is way above the average for other courts.
The 9th circuit is overturned more than any other, and the frequency is way out of proportion with either the number of judges serving, or the number of cases handled. In 2002 the 9th circuit handled 17% of federal appeals, but accounted for 45% of overturned judgments from federal appellate courts, and 57% of the unanimously overturned judgements.
Copyright Infringement is theft!
Not according to the law it isn't. Copyright infringement and theft have different constitutional bases, are covered by different statutes, fall under different jurisdictions, incur different penalties, require different types of proof, and are subject to a different range of acceptable defenses. In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
When was the last time you heard of someone being able to defend themselves against a charge of theft on the grounds that they only stole a little bit of stuff, or that they only stole it for the purposes of poking fun at the owner? Both defenses work just fine for copyright infringement.
So again, if you think there is something wrong with copying then why don't you just tell us what it is? Calling it theft meaningless.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious...
Taking a book without the permission of the owner, and not giving it back, is stealing. Copying a book without the permission of the copyright holder is copyright infringement. Now if you can explain what is wrong with copying something then feel free, but save us the lame anaolgies with taking stuff.
'This is a mainstream circuit court that said using the Internet and the name of the company to criticize a company is perfectly legitimate.'
Notice that Levy felt obliged to point out that this ruling came from a mainstream circuit court, rather than from one of the fringe circuit courts whose opinions regularly get trashed by courts further up the food chain. It is a sad statement about the legal system in the US that the opinions comming from some courts are so wrong, so often, that their rulings don't count until they are confirmed by a higher court.
I guess the only surprising thing about this is that sometimes money does actually buy good government.
Its mostly a matter of duration. The moon missions took weeks. Astronauts spend months on the ISS. But a mission to Mars will take years.
Anonymous, abusive, and ill-informed. That is about what I have come to expect from critics of the US.
Why would the Iraq have had to get the strains from the US? These bugs were available from numerous organisations all over the world, and from the wild. In most cases the very same strains were available from other countries, and in every case disease causing strains were available from other countries. Makes sense if you think about it. These bugs are all very common causes of disease, and medical research institutions tend to be interested in disease causing strains.
So did you have a point, or were you just looking for a reason to use "etiological" in a sentence?
Not only is none of that technology, but all of those diseases occur naturally in Iraq. In fact they all occur naturally throughout most of the world. You could find some of them in your own home. They were freely available from numerous research organisations. The ATCC still supplies samples of all of them and the ATCC is not a government organisation.
(1) You must have forgotten about the British and the Soviets. Britain ruled Iraq for a while and organised the coup that brought the Ba'athists to power. Iraq was later a Soviet client state up until the collapse of the USSR (which explains all those Soviet tanks, aircraft, and missiles they were using no?).
(2) Would you care to list up the technology that the military technology that the US supplied to Iraq? Here's a hint - the list would have 0 lines. The US provided Iraq with financial support for a while during the Iran-Iraq war, and some military intelligence, but never any sort of technology.
Maybe if the Europeans didn't keep selling nuclear technology to nutjobs the US wouldn't feel the need to develop counter measures.
I think the problem is the "open and shut case" part. There is seldom any such thing in IP law, and there are good reasons to think that the RIAA might lose if they actually went to court with a case like this. In the past the courts have often been unwilling to enforce IP rights against private non-comercial uses, and it could easily happen in these cases as well.
What the RIAA should have done is sued someone, taken it all the way to court, established that they actually had the rights they were claiming, and then tried to gain settlements with other people (that is the way things have gone in the past). What they actually did was to skip the first step and proceed directly to obtaining settlements. The question then arises as to why they skipped the first step. A reasonable guess is that at some point their lawyers said "going to court with this is a risky proposition - better to force settlements". But that raises the RICO problem. If the RIAA was not sure that they had the rights they were claiming then their behavior starts to look like extortion.
There is no chance of anything like this happening. The fact that it would be difficult or even impossible to sue every infringer is itself a solid justification for not trying to do so. Discrimination is not unreasonable if it is unavoidable.
Besides that IP case law is full of cases where IP owners, faced with widespread infringement, chose just one or two infringers to sue (either because they were the easiest cases to make, or the most lucrative targets).
this is a micro investment and the reward is def. going to pay off
Micro investment? A micro investment is when you give $50 to a woman in bangladesh so that she can start her own business. Giving $683 million to a major corporation looks pretty damn macro to me. You are probably right that it will pay off for Germany and Saxony though. Having the factory there will generate a lot of taxable economic activity.
it's not for *us*, it's for the military
Who exactly do you think "us" is? Perhaps you come from some poor and enslaved country where soldiers are not free citizens, but around here the military is us. Thanks to technology like this we keep our peace, and secure our freedom.
You should read the reports by AI rather than this half-assed newspaper report. You can get the original reports here and here:
Nothing in these reports is "ridiculous". The claims that AI makes are well documented, and are justified concerns about human rights violations. Most of each report is concerned with what the Chinese government is doing, and not with what anyone outside of China might be doing to aid and abet these crimes. They do not acuse foreign companies of human rights violations, but they do ask that those companies exercise some responsibilty when they sell products to China. Comments from the companies in question make it quite clear that they are not even willing to ask whether their products will be used for censorship purposes, let alone refuse to do business when the answerr is "yes".
If by "worked" you mean "was popular" then there is always "Man About the House" and "Three's Company".
According to the slashdot summary maybe, but there was no mention of implants in the orginal NYT article.
You can't get it from the NYT without paying now, so here is the original text:
He's not a cyborg, unless some of this hardware actually involved surgery or the replacement of biological parts. He's a gargoyle.
I agree with the general idea. Private enforcement of private property rights (and I mean lawful enforcement, not vigilante stuff) does save the government a lot of money, and it does allow the police to focus on more important matters.
Still, if these guys get used to playing cops, and everyone else gets used to them playing cops, then one day they might stop just playing. I would hate to wake up one day and find that the RIAA has a real police force with real police powers, rather than just this pretend outfit.
Specifically, while he says that he is fine with software being for "fee", his actions, especially as measured against the LGPL, make that quite hard.
There is no inconsistency here. It is hard to charge for free (as in speech) software because without the monopoly power that proprietary software owners have it is hard to persuade people to pay. That is just a consequence of basic economics, not a contradiction between what Stallman says and what he does.
Am I the only one who found that particular spoonerism amusing, BTW?
"Invidious video driver" is not a spoonerism ("videous invideo driver" would be).
So, because he can only see the world as "free" or "non-free", he is unwilling to admit that things like video drivers, which are not published as open source, may nonetheless be of significant value to the OSS community.
Stallman has never claimed that proprietary software has no value or that it is never useful. He claims that giving up some of your freedom in return for something useful is a bad bargain - in exactly the same sense that Benjamin Franklin thought that trading liberty for security was a bad bargain. Security is valuable, but only a fool would allow himself to be enslaved in the hope that it would make him more secure.
Now maybe you do not believe that software can be free in the sense that speech can be free, but if you do beleive it then there is nothing extreme or simplistic about the idea that you shoud not use slave software. It is nothing more or less than the idea that you should not trade away your liberty for convenience.
First MS violated the contract that they made with Sun. Now MS is screwing its own customers rather than pay the costs of obeying the law. But you think we should blame Sun for expecting MS to abide by the contract that MS signed? And you think that we should blame the courts for enforcing the contract that MS signed?
I supose you think that the high cost of opperating prisons should be blamed on the people who report crime, and the courts who send criminals to prison?
Now there's a great idea - force people pay for free software. Now personally I like free software because it is free like free speech. And I can understand why some people like it because it is usually free in the way that beer usually isn't. But how the fuck does someone get to be a proponent of free software when they apparently don't like either kind of freedom?
If the US wants to help the countries that help them, why souldn't they do so? If the French want to make matters difficult for the Amereicans then they should feel free, but they shouldn't get all whiney when the US then decides to help someone else.
Their motivation is to get as many people to heaven as possible. Most other religions can't claim this.
One thing that Christianity can take credit for is its universalism - in principle at least everyone is equal in the eyes of God. Sure, there have been plenty of Christians who have failed to live up to that ideal, but at least they had the ideal, and they had it a long time before almost any other religion or culture.
How many Muslims have asked you if you've been saved, and if you'd like to be?
In fact Islam has exactly the same ideal. They got it from the Christians. As with Christianity there are Islamic groups that are not very interested in gaining converts, but there are others who are very enthusiastic about it. You will also find many who would be quite happy to send you to heaven.
But the worst are evangelical atheists.
Most atheists think that the only life you get is this one, and that if you waste it then you don't get a do-over. Their aim is to get people to live worthwhile lives instead of wasting their lives on delusions that make them feel good. Of course it might be bitter news if you thought you were going to heaven, but personally I found my conversion to atheism to be like waking up from a drugged stupor. I had never felt so alive until that moment when I recognised that life wouldn't last forever.