It is only a problem because the US does not have a modern health care system like most of the modern world.
Not really. If you're just talking about the cost of covering the bill, then sure. However, our healthcare system is one of the best for patient recovery after an injury, but the real problem here is that the old lady died anyway. It happens, even in the best systems.
Even with socialized medicine, there's still a case for wrongful death.
It appears that NY uses the third approach, but it does not appear there is one, universal standard on child liability, and in fact, as I stated, in most jurisdictions, children under age 6 or 7 are not deemed capable of negligence.
Then if you were actually aware of all of that at the time you posted, why in the hell did you lambast the judge for having obviously never spent any time around a 4 year old after acknowledging that the judge used the phrase "a reasonable child," indicating that he was amply aware of and intending to extend the lesser standard of care to a 4 year old child?
[H]ow could the kids have possibly known their actions would lead to the death of the elderly woman.
It doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not they understood that their actions could have resulted in an injury of some sort and whether (a) their actions were intentional or (b) if acting as a reasonable person (of their age) they could have prevented the injury by taking reasonable care and whether the cost of avoiding an injury was greater than the likelihood of it happening times the cost of the injury.
The "thin skull rule" says that you are still liable for injuries that are grossly out of proportion with what you expect a normal person to suffer if you would have been liable for the injuries that a normal person would have taken. If you'd be liable for bonking someone on the head hard enough to bruise them, then you'd also be liable if the hit unexpectedly caved their fragile skull in.
That being said, if a broken hip was enough to kill the woman, I don't wish to sound disrespectful, but it's likely that something else would have taken her out in relatively short order as well. A running dog, a sudden noise, a slippery step, a moment of disorientation.
That's true of every single death on the planet. If your actions didn't kill someone, they would have died anyway. Shooting someone trapped in a burning building is still murder. What matters is that the crash with the bike was the proximate cause of her death. Other contributing factors do not automatically absolve you of all responsibility, and the health of the victim is explicitly off-limits for blame shifting when injury leads to death.
It's not the old woman's fault for being old, and she shouldn't have her life cheapened as a result of it.
Now, to play the devil's advocate, if I were a defense lawyer on this one, I would look into the woman's dietary and exercise history: if I could show that with better diet and exercise, other people her age would have reasonably been able to recover from such an accident, I could probably minimize or even remove my client's liability.
It's a good thing you're not their lawyer then, because the absolute best you could do there is reduce damages for wrongful death by cutting down her life expectancy. Even if she didn't die, the kid's still potentially liable for lesser injuries. It's not like we have a "no death, no foul" rule for battery or negligence much less the insane Spartan rule you suggest.
No 4 year old can be expected to be reasonable though. The age of reason is closer to 7. It looks like the judge fails the reasonable adult test.
In most jurisdictions. New York might simply be one of the few to have no hard rule yet (as the judge's comments on the lack of a "bright-line rule" suggest), or this case might be one of an intentional tort, where that's not going to matter all that much.
Anyway, stating a claim is different from proving your case. It looks like it just passed a motion to dismiss and not summary judgment. Not that the media understands the difference or how unsurprising the result is.
#1 Doesn't matters. If a kid cannot do contracts or have full rights of an adult, you cannot expect them to have the full responsibilities of an adult either. I guess you are too dumb to understand this basic social concept and principle of equality?
Neither issue is directly on point for this case. If the case is based on the intentional tort of battery, then all that's necessary is to ascertain whether or not the kid knew that she was going to hit the lady with her bike. If she hit her deliberately, then whether or not the defendant knew the contact could result in the kind of injury that happened (i.e. whether the kid understood the consequences of her actions) is utterly irrelevant for liability in battery.
See Garratt v. Dailey (Wash. 1995), a case that almost all first-year torts text books cover about a 5 year old who yanked a chair out from under an old lady as she was sitting down.
If it's a case based on negligence, then the plaintiff is going to have to establish that the child's actions were beyond the standard of care for a reasonable person. The majority of courts adjust this standard for children to that of a reasonable person of their age group, so I think the family of the deceased is going to have a really tough time with this.
In the end, though, it's going to be the parents that have to foot the bill anyway if the kid loses. This story is non-news. The ability to sue children for their actions is long-established. Whether the family of the deceased can prevail against the girl is another matter, but all the judge did here is say that the case passes the minimum requirement needed to establish a claim that can be tried, which isn't exactly hard.
I've only scanned this law briefly, but it appears to me to only apply to computers which are owned by the federal government or certain financial institutions, or other computers that have government-classified information on them. Did I miss something?
Yep. Not that I blame you. The statute is convoluted as hell for something that only takes up a single section. The definition you gave is one of a "protected computer" under 1030(e)(2)(A). Now look at the other definition under 1030(e)(2)(B): a computer "which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States."
That's basically every computer anywhere in the US and most outside of it by modern interpretations of interstate commerce. Try to think of a computer that doesn't in anyway communicate or have any direct or indirect impact on commerce across state lines.
Sometimes I really wonder why the people who draft legislation go to all the trouble to narrowly and specifically list off a few things they care about and then place the "oh yeah, and everything else too" clause after when just the latter clause would do.
But the main point is that if there is a law that prevents access without authorization, and you need to accept the terms of the contract to get that authorization, you can't just say you don't accept the contract and access anyway. If accessing were not an offence of any kind, then there that would be an option, but as it is, it isn't.
You got it in one.
The choice isn't pay up on the contract or be sued; the choice is pay up on the contract or be potentially prosecuted for unlawful access, and probably get a slap on the wrist nominal fine, none of which goes to the operator of the computer, who can't show any actual damages and therefore can't actually sue you for anything useful.
Got it again. Of course, the difficulty there in forcing your contract on people who haven't done much in the way of damages is in getting a prosecutor's office to actually prosecute for you. Without large damages or a very large public profile, this is nigh-impossible, so the problem of whether the CFAA provides criminal penalties to breaking contracts of adhesion is mostly theoretical and untested.
Gee and stupid me I thought we were a nation that used CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, not case. If we were case law I could kill somebody and then point to an example of when someone else got off and be released myself.
Apparently, you don't understand how the common law legal system that we inherited from the English works. At all.
Case law is simply the body of previous cases addressing the same issue. In the common law system, we treat previous court decisions on the same subject as binding. This is known as "stare decisis." A court might overturn its own previous decisions if there are extraordinary circumstances but will never overturn a higher court's decision (unless they're just eager to get overruled). Most changes in precedent occur because some new legal question casts a new light on the old decisions.
We, of course, use precedent when interpreting the Constitution too, just like everything else in the law. This is why it's pointless to claim, for example, that the right to free speech trumps a person's right to be secure in their own home and hold political rallies on the front lawn of someone you don't like. It's established precedent. Any lawyer worth their salt will see the existing case law and know how such a case will turn out. So will the Supreme Court, which will simply refuse to hear it since it asks no new questions of law. To administer Constitutional Law differently would simply throw the legal system into the chaos of whim, fashion, and shifting political power.
Also, your idea that you could point to one case where someone got off for murder and be exempt from all murder prosecutions is laughably stupid and shows how much of an oversimplified view of things you must have if you think all murder trials are exactly the same.
P.S. Since you seem grossly unaware of the fact, the Constitution doesn't outlaw murder. That's always been a matter of state common and statutory law (and federal statutory law too in more recent times). It's sad to see how many people flog everything they don't like as "not Constitutional" without actually understanding a single thing about the Constitution or the legal system.
Read the whole judgement, the farmer found some plants which he knew were herbicide-resistant and selectively bred them to get enough seed to cover a significant portion of is crop. This isn't an "oops, 'somehow' some seed blew onto my field" situation.
Why isn't that his right with plants found on his land? It's not like he stole from his neighbor's farm or from the company itself. If an advantageous strain of a crop finds its way onto your land through no fault of your own, why should you have to pay someone else for it? It was basically given to him.
Claiming ownership of all descendants of a single plant is simply not how we did agriculture before the invention of GM crops and gene patenting. So why should we change the law to support this?
From a strict legal perspective, you are only allowed to browse a web site if you have its operator's permission to do so.
This is far more important than contract law for this. Federal law also has the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030 et al) which makes it similarly illegal to access a computer without authorization. There has been a lot of debate as to whether or not this law can make terms of use for websites into binding rules with criminal enforcement without any need to be a successful contract. It seems to on its face, but I can't remember how the case law goes on this. IIRC, it hasn't really been tested before.
Of course, the big problem in both a contract and computer fraud action is claiming damages. In both cases, civil actions are limited to economic damages, which will be hard to argue for mere access to a website.
You know, she does have the ability to pick and choose who to sue. There's a reason why she's going after people with unique and interesting user agents first, like Droid phones.
(So kids, remember to set your browser's UA string to that of a Droid or iPhone before trolling Starbucks!)
When was continental US ever under a real threat, especially post WW2, and by whom, even assuming no nukes? Please, enlighten us.
Read up on Able Archer 83. The Soviets thought that NATO might be hiding an actual preemptive strike behind training exercises and readied themselves for WW3.
Granted, this one was mostly our fault, and the threat was created by the existence of our respective nuclear arsenals, but it's the closest the world's come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how close we got helped spur Reagan to open up diplomatic talks with the Soviets to make sure such a mistake never happened.
Who said that I was only speaking about one side? I believe I used the plural, as we are in a discussion about copyrights and the US's hard anti-piracy stance.
That's really cute, but the majority of America's early IP conflicts with Europe had f' all to do with technology and everything to do with culture and entertainment -- books, sheet music, etc.
Which is what the author is complaining about with the iPad. He doesn't care about not being able to violate patents while using the thing. He wants music, movies, and games.
Considering the explicit job of the printing press is to make it easy to copy and widely disseminate the ideas of one author, that's not so much an irony as it is a logical cultural progression.
If it was mowing grass at 96 mph over a typically bumpy lawn, then I'd call it a feat of engineering. This is just a really unsafe and pointlessly heavy go kart on a dirt track.
You say that as if fruit and vegetable were exclusive categories.
You say that as if English is not your first language, and you've learned it exclusively through reading the dictionary instead of through speaking to people.
I can't find any definition anywhere that would exclude tomatoes or cucumbers from the vegetable category.
The problem is that words have can have multiple, overlapping meanings with nuanced differences between each use, and a dictionary will not tell you which is appropriate. The fruits and vegetables divide is a classic example. As we grow up, most of us learn to associate "fruit" with sweet plant foods and "vegetable" with other plant foods. These are the common meanings people use, and the implication (not found in your dictionary references) is that these meanings are exclusive.
But then we learn that some "vegetables" are actually "fruits," because a different, more technical definition of the word "fruit" is "the seed-bearing structure of a plant." So, by this definition a tomato is a fruit, and we learn that something can be fruit and a vegetable. This is well enough known that it too becomes a popular definition.
But we don't get taught that all fruits are vegetables, like the definitions you cited suggest. That's not the common meaning of the word. Ask 1000 people on the street if an apple is a vegetable, and I'll bet that less than 10 answer that it is. That doesn't mean the definition is incorrect or that all these people are grossly ignorant -- someone may in fact use vegetable in the way your dictionary suggests. However, the dictionary's primary failure here is that it does not inform the reader of when to use each definition in context.
So don't toss dictionary definitions around like they actually mean something.:-)
[L]arger US cities are currently reporting much higher incidences of bedbug infestation, largely blamed on the banning of DDT in 1972.
Is the ban on DDT being blamed because it actually has had an effect that wore off over the past couple of decades or because the DDT ban is a political football used by some people who have a bug up their ass and are still obsessed 30 years later with proving environmentalists to be chicken littles who do more harm than good?
If you are a person of above-average intelligence you should be able to use your intelligence in the form of charisma to make yourself and your thoughts appealing to others. If you have no social skills and you are good at math, then perhaps you aren't as smart as you think you are.
What does being smart enough to understand people have to do with IQ? Standardized IQ tests simply do not test for social adaptability. Intelligence isn't one linear set of abilities that can be measured by a number on a sheet. Charisma, empathy, and clarity of speech all each distinct abilities much like memory, spatial reasoning, intuition, creativity, alertness, speed of calculation, and other abilities generally thought of as signs of intelligence.
In that sense, intelligence is like physical ability. An Olympic boxer is probably better at running than a couch potato, but is nowhere near as good as triathlete. Both are "above average" in terms of physical ability, but being "better than average" doesn't mean being good at everything.
"Government subsidized telcos"? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Good one. There hasn't been a government subsidized telco in the US since, well, ever.
Have you never heard of the Universal Service Fund, the roughly $7-8 billion / year subsidy that taxpayers send to telecom companies to expand service to rural areas?
Also, AT&T and others have been beneficiaries of the NIST's ATP and TIP R&D subsidies for years.
Slashdot Mirror
A lawsuit is poor compensation for common sense.
"Common sense" in this case is just someone making a snap judgment without all the facts and patting themselves on the back for it.
Let the jury decide. That's at least 12x the sense you possess if sense is all that common, plus the benefit of... you know... facts.
It is only a problem because the US does not have a modern health care system like most of the modern world.
Not really. If you're just talking about the cost of covering the bill, then sure. However, our healthcare system is one of the best for patient recovery after an injury, but the real problem here is that the old lady died anyway. It happens, even in the best systems.
Even with socialized medicine, there's still a case for wrongful death.
It appears that NY uses the third approach, but it does not appear there is one, universal standard on child liability, and in fact, as I stated, in most jurisdictions, children under age 6 or 7 are not deemed capable of negligence.
Then if you were actually aware of all of that at the time you posted, why in the hell did you lambast the judge for having obviously never spent any time around a 4 year old after acknowledging that the judge used the phrase "a reasonable child," indicating that he was amply aware of and intending to extend the lesser standard of care to a 4 year old child?
[H]ow could the kids have possibly known their actions would lead to the death of the elderly woman.
It doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not they understood that their actions could have resulted in an injury of some sort and whether (a) their actions were intentional or (b) if acting as a reasonable person (of their age) they could have prevented the injury by taking reasonable care and whether the cost of avoiding an injury was greater than the likelihood of it happening times the cost of the injury.
The "thin skull rule" says that you are still liable for injuries that are grossly out of proportion with what you expect a normal person to suffer if you would have been liable for the injuries that a normal person would have taken. If you'd be liable for bonking someone on the head hard enough to bruise them, then you'd also be liable if the hit unexpectedly caved their fragile skull in.
That being said, if a broken hip was enough to kill the woman, I don't wish to sound disrespectful, but it's likely that something else would have taken her out in relatively short order as well. A running dog, a sudden noise, a slippery step, a moment of disorientation.
That's true of every single death on the planet. If your actions didn't kill someone, they would have died anyway. Shooting someone trapped in a burning building is still murder. What matters is that the crash with the bike was the proximate cause of her death. Other contributing factors do not automatically absolve you of all responsibility, and the health of the victim is explicitly off-limits for blame shifting when injury leads to death.
It's not the old woman's fault for being old, and she shouldn't have her life cheapened as a result of it.
Now, to play the devil's advocate, if I were a defense lawyer on this one, I would look into the woman's dietary and exercise history: if I could show that with better diet and exercise, other people her age would have reasonably been able to recover from such an accident, I could probably minimize or even remove my client's liability.
It's a good thing you're not their lawyer then, because the absolute best you could do there is reduce damages for wrongful death by cutting down her life expectancy. Even if she didn't die, the kid's still potentially liable for lesser injuries. It's not like we have a "no death, no foul" rule for battery or negligence much less the insane Spartan rule you suggest.
No 4 year old can be expected to be reasonable though. The age of reason is closer to 7. It looks like the judge fails the reasonable adult test.
In most jurisdictions. New York might simply be one of the few to have no hard rule yet (as the judge's comments on the lack of a "bright-line rule" suggest), or this case might be one of an intentional tort, where that's not going to matter all that much.
Anyway, stating a claim is different from proving your case. It looks like it just passed a motion to dismiss and not summary judgment. Not that the media understands the difference or how unsurprising the result is.
#1 Doesn't matters. If a kid cannot do contracts or have full rights of an adult, you cannot expect them to have the full responsibilities of an adult either. I guess you are too dumb to understand this basic social concept and principle of equality?
Neither issue is directly on point for this case. If the case is based on the intentional tort of battery, then all that's necessary is to ascertain whether or not the kid knew that she was going to hit the lady with her bike. If she hit her deliberately, then whether or not the defendant knew the contact could result in the kind of injury that happened (i.e. whether the kid understood the consequences of her actions) is utterly irrelevant for liability in battery.
See Garratt v. Dailey (Wash. 1995), a case that almost all first-year torts text books cover about a 5 year old who yanked a chair out from under an old lady as she was sitting down.
If it's a case based on negligence, then the plaintiff is going to have to establish that the child's actions were beyond the standard of care for a reasonable person. The majority of courts adjust this standard for children to that of a reasonable person of their age group, so I think the family of the deceased is going to have a really tough time with this.
In the end, though, it's going to be the parents that have to foot the bill anyway if the kid loses. This story is non-news. The ability to sue children for their actions is long-established. Whether the family of the deceased can prevail against the girl is another matter, but all the judge did here is say that the case passes the minimum requirement needed to establish a claim that can be tried, which isn't exactly hard.
I've only scanned this law briefly, but it appears to me to only apply to computers which are owned by the federal government or certain financial institutions, or other computers that have government-classified information on them. Did I miss something?
Yep. Not that I blame you. The statute is convoluted as hell for something that only takes up a single section. The definition you gave is one of a "protected computer" under 1030(e)(2)(A). Now look at the other definition under 1030(e)(2)(B): a computer "which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States."
That's basically every computer anywhere in the US and most outside of it by modern interpretations of interstate commerce. Try to think of a computer that doesn't in anyway communicate or have any direct or indirect impact on commerce across state lines.
Sometimes I really wonder why the people who draft legislation go to all the trouble to narrowly and specifically list off a few things they care about and then place the "oh yeah, and everything else too" clause after when just the latter clause would do.
But the main point is that if there is a law that prevents access without authorization, and you need to accept the terms of the contract to get that authorization, you can't just say you don't accept the contract and access anyway. If accessing were not an offence of any kind, then there that would be an option, but as it is, it isn't.
You got it in one.
The choice isn't pay up on the contract or be sued; the choice is pay up on the contract or be potentially prosecuted for unlawful access, and probably get a slap on the wrist nominal fine, none of which goes to the operator of the computer, who can't show any actual damages and therefore can't actually sue you for anything useful.
Got it again. Of course, the difficulty there in forcing your contract on people who haven't done much in the way of damages is in getting a prosecutor's office to actually prosecute for you. Without large damages or a very large public profile, this is nigh-impossible, so the problem of whether the CFAA provides criminal penalties to breaking contracts of adhesion is mostly theoretical and untested.
Gee and stupid me I thought we were a nation that used CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, not case. If we were case law I could kill somebody and then point to an example of when someone else got off and be released myself.
Apparently, you don't understand how the common law legal system that we inherited from the English works. At all.
Case law is simply the body of previous cases addressing the same issue. In the common law system, we treat previous court decisions on the same subject as binding. This is known as "stare decisis." A court might overturn its own previous decisions if there are extraordinary circumstances but will never overturn a higher court's decision (unless they're just eager to get overruled). Most changes in precedent occur because some new legal question casts a new light on the old decisions.
We, of course, use precedent when interpreting the Constitution too, just like everything else in the law. This is why it's pointless to claim, for example, that the right to free speech trumps a person's right to be secure in their own home and hold political rallies on the front lawn of someone you don't like. It's established precedent. Any lawyer worth their salt will see the existing case law and know how such a case will turn out. So will the Supreme Court, which will simply refuse to hear it since it asks no new questions of law. To administer Constitutional Law differently would simply throw the legal system into the chaos of whim, fashion, and shifting political power.
Also, your idea that you could point to one case where someone got off for murder and be exempt from all murder prosecutions is laughably stupid and shows how much of an oversimplified view of things you must have if you think all murder trials are exactly the same.
P.S. Since you seem grossly unaware of the fact, the Constitution doesn't outlaw murder. That's always been a matter of state common and statutory law (and federal statutory law too in more recent times). It's sad to see how many people flog everything they don't like as "not Constitutional" without actually understanding a single thing about the Constitution or the legal system.
Read the whole judgement, the farmer found some plants which he knew were herbicide-resistant and selectively bred them to get enough seed to cover a significant portion of is crop.
This isn't an "oops, 'somehow' some seed blew onto my field" situation.
Why isn't that his right with plants found on his land? It's not like he stole from his neighbor's farm or from the company itself. If an advantageous strain of a crop finds its way onto your land through no fault of your own, why should you have to pay someone else for it? It was basically given to him.
Claiming ownership of all descendants of a single plant is simply not how we did agriculture before the invention of GM crops and gene patenting. So why should we change the law to support this?
From a strict legal perspective, you are only allowed to browse a web site if you have its operator's permission to do so.
This is far more important than contract law for this. Federal law also has the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030 et al) which makes it similarly illegal to access a computer without authorization. There has been a lot of debate as to whether or not this law can make terms of use for websites into binding rules with criminal enforcement without any need to be a successful contract. It seems to on its face, but I can't remember how the case law goes on this. IIRC, it hasn't really been tested before.
Of course, the big problem in both a contract and computer fraud action is claiming damages. In both cases, civil actions are limited to economic damages, which will be hard to argue for mere access to a website.
(I am also not a lawyer, by the way.)
You know, she does have the ability to pick and choose who to sue. There's a reason why she's going after people with unique and interesting user agents first, like Droid phones.
(So kids, remember to set your browser's UA string to that of a Droid or iPhone before trolling Starbucks!)
When was continental US ever under a real threat, especially post WW2, and by whom, even assuming no nukes? Please, enlighten us.
Read up on Able Archer 83. The Soviets thought that NATO might be hiding an actual preemptive strike behind training exercises and readied themselves for WW3.
Granted, this one was mostly our fault, and the threat was created by the existence of our respective nuclear arsenals, but it's the closest the world's come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how close we got helped spur Reagan to open up diplomatic talks with the Soviets to make sure such a mistake never happened.
I did not know that. That is very cool. Thank you for sharing that.
<blink blink>
Who said that I was only speaking about one side? I believe I used the plural, as we are in a discussion about copyrights and the US's hard anti-piracy stance.
That's really cute, but the majority of America's early IP conflicts with Europe had f' all to do with technology and everything to do with culture and entertainment -- books, sheet music, etc.
Which is what the author is complaining about with the iPad. He doesn't care about not being able to violate patents while using the thing. He wants music, movies, and games.
Considering the explicit job of the printing press is to make it easy to copy and widely disseminate the ideas of one author, that's not so much an irony as it is a logical cultural progression.
If I like vanilla and you like chocolate, we disagree, but neither of us is wrong.
It might be if one of you tries to take the other's favorite off the market.
We're not talking about mere taste here. We're talking about forms of government that dictate which choices their citizens get to engage in.
How many calories does it take to extract and refine the oil into a burnable format?
If it was mowing grass at 96 mph over a typically bumpy lawn, then I'd call it a feat of engineering. This is just a really unsafe and pointlessly heavy go kart on a dirt track.
You say that as if fruit and vegetable were exclusive categories.
You say that as if English is not your first language, and you've learned it exclusively through reading the dictionary instead of through speaking to people.
I can't find any definition anywhere that would exclude tomatoes or cucumbers from the vegetable category.
The problem is that words have can have multiple, overlapping meanings with nuanced differences between each use, and a dictionary will not tell you which is appropriate. The fruits and vegetables divide is a classic example. As we grow up, most of us learn to associate "fruit" with sweet plant foods and "vegetable" with other plant foods. These are the common meanings people use, and the implication (not found in your dictionary references) is that these meanings are exclusive.
But then we learn that some "vegetables" are actually "fruits," because a different, more technical definition of the word "fruit" is "the seed-bearing structure of a plant." So, by this definition a tomato is a fruit, and we learn that something can be fruit and a vegetable. This is well enough known that it too becomes a popular definition.
But we don't get taught that all fruits are vegetables, like the definitions you cited suggest. That's not the common meaning of the word. Ask 1000 people on the street if an apple is a vegetable, and I'll bet that less than 10 answer that it is. That doesn't mean the definition is incorrect or that all these people are grossly ignorant -- someone may in fact use vegetable in the way your dictionary suggests. However, the dictionary's primary failure here is that it does not inform the reader of when to use each definition in context.
So don't toss dictionary definitions around like they actually mean something. :-)
[L]arger US cities are currently reporting much higher incidences of bedbug infestation, largely blamed on the banning of DDT in 1972.
Is the ban on DDT being blamed because it actually has had an effect that wore off over the past couple of decades or because the DDT ban is a political football used by some people who have a bug up their ass and are still obsessed 30 years later with proving environmentalists to be chicken littles who do more harm than good?
Any, you know, substance to that claim? If you've got numbers, I'm all ears. (Eyes?)
Or is just a "My team is better than yours," cheerleading kind of thing?
If you are a person of above-average intelligence you should be able to use your intelligence in the form of charisma to make yourself and your thoughts appealing to others. If you have no social skills and you are good at math, then perhaps you aren't as smart as you think you are.
What does being smart enough to understand people have to do with IQ? Standardized IQ tests simply do not test for social adaptability. Intelligence isn't one linear set of abilities that can be measured by a number on a sheet. Charisma, empathy, and clarity of speech all each distinct abilities much like memory, spatial reasoning, intuition, creativity, alertness, speed of calculation, and other abilities generally thought of as signs of intelligence.
In that sense, intelligence is like physical ability. An Olympic boxer is probably better at running than a couch potato, but is nowhere near as good as triathlete. Both are "above average" in terms of physical ability, but being "better than average" doesn't mean being good at everything.
If data-mining of everything that touches the service works for facebook, why not telcos?
Because telcos are currently leashed by anti-wiretapping calls that protect the contents of your phonecall. Location data on the other hand...
"Government subsidized telcos"? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Good one. There hasn't been a government subsidized telco in the US since, well, ever.
Have you never heard of the Universal Service Fund, the roughly $7-8 billion / year subsidy that taxpayers send to telecom companies to expand service to rural areas?
Also, AT&T and others have been beneficiaries of the NIST's ATP and TIP R&D subsidies for years.