As I understand Righthaven's business model, they do acquire the copyrights to the articles over which they're suing. At least in theory, that's a valid model, but they seem to be going out of bounds as well.
For example, one lawsuit dismissed was decided as fair use. The extract was 8 sentences. I'm not in a position to judge if that really was a valid derivative work, but it sounds to me like there should be many clearer cases they could be litigating without getting themselves in legal trouble over iffy and frivolous ones.
Does this apply to other areas, or just to copyright?
Are there other areas in which you can transfer the right to sue? You can sue for a debt; can you transfer the right to sue for the debt without transferring the debt itself? What about the right to sue for damages, in which case no debt has been created yet but one would be if the judgment made one?
To a non-lawyer's eye it sounds like "potential debt" and "debt" would be treated similarly in the eyes of the law, but I know that they're not the same.
Without the sales taxes, though, it's the opposite of protectionism, giving a benefit to out-of-state sales. Purchasing an identical item from a brick-and-mortar store costs more than having it delivered to you.
Despite the similarity in transactions, they're never quite equal. The brick-and-mortar store receives benefits that the online one doesn't (e.g. police protection). You drive to the B&M store on local roads; they receive their shipments via larger highways. The online store also uses those roads, but via a shipper, who pays taxes on... what, exactly? I'm sure it varies from state to state.
There's never any such thing as "fair" taxation. State spending is consumed in a variety of ways, and it's impossible to account for who's really "using" it. (How much do you owe the police for your house not being robbed today? Would you owe them more for showing up if it was robbed? Or less because they failed to protect it?)
"Terrorists caught" isn't a really useful metric, because the goal is to prevent damage, not catch terrorists. If the system is any good, terrorists wouldn't even try to challenge it. Unfortunately, "damage prevented" is an even worse metric because a metric you can't measure objectively isn't a metric.
You can count up "number of successful attacks", which is also zero. So we're reduced to the question of people picking the metric that seems most valuable to them, which is really the same as no metric at all.
Which is, unfortunately, how politics usually works. Numbers are for us techies, but the Real World is stubbornly hard to measure.
If they're trying to save money, they're looking in the wrong place. $76 million is a pittance. It's 1% of TSA's budget and.002% of the overall budget.
So maybe they're managing to do the right thing for the wrong reason for the wrong reason. I think that sentences parses and is meaningful, but it makes my head hurt.
The way I see it, they're not doing it either for the money or the privacy but because they heard a lot of people were disgruntled and they figured they could score some points. The actual reasons for the disgruntlement, whether they're valid or not, are completely immaterial.
They're calling that million dollars "sweat equity", i.e. the opportunity costs that they could have gone out and worked for somebody else. It's not hard to imagine that 18 months of developer time could be worth a million dollars, but it's double-counting to claim both the time AND the money.
I've got sympathy for them in that Apple apparently changed the rules on them, though that's the joy of running your own business. It's why that sweat equity is worth something. It sucks, big time, and I know it, which is why you don't need to exaggerate the numbers. Saying you spent 18 months on something only to lose it is sufficient.
Not for trademarks, it isn't. Fair use of trademarks extends primarily to "nominative use". That is, we get to use your name when we're talking about you. Any other attempt to profit from the mark is controlled by the company. It should be fairly clear that you can use "Foo(tm)" to declare that "Foo(tm) Sucks", but if there's a chance of consumer confusion between your use of the mark and the company's, you get into murky legal waters. The court literally ends up having to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether the joke is actually funny.
As with everything else in law, there are about a million complications, caveats, and such like. A good article on the subject:
1. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. 2. Energy and momentum are conserved. 3. Every new technology must have an article by somebody talking about how it's going to ruin everything.
Evidence for #3 has been tested as far back as Socrates and Plato. I have no doubt that at least some cave paintings are really an editorial about how fire is going to end the species: with fire to keep us warm, who is ever going to have sex again?
If the point of the article is to say, "Don't be an idiot"... did you really need to spread that advice over five page views?
"Bin Laden" is "of the Laden family". The "bin" is akin to the Hebrew "ben", "son of" (e.g. "Yeshua ben Yosef", "Jesus son of Joseph".) The Arab equivalent to "of" (in this context) is "al", e.g. Saddam Hussein al Tikriti, Saddam Hussein from Tikrit.
As with other patronymics (e.g. the Scottish "Mac"), it's often used as a general family name, inherited for multiple generations. Osama bin Laden's father is Muhammad bin Laden. The original "Laden" is unknown, but goes back at least a century.
So it's perfectly reasonable to call him "bin Laden". It's his family name, at least a few generations back. Confusion arises only as with every other family name, in that there are a lot of bin Ladens out there, and you'd have to use his full name to be clear. But using just his first name would be equivalent to referring to the Chancellor of Germany as "Angela" or the Prime Minister of the UK as "Gordon": it's their personal name, and rarely used alone in public discourse.
You could use it that was as a deliberate insult of over familiarity. The New York Times took the unusual step of referring to him just as "bin Laden" rather than "Mr. bin Laden", which they reserve generally for the worst of the worst.
The McCain comment was a joke, meant to illustrate how birthers seem more intent on humiliating Obama than in actually achieving anything.
You're right that "natural-born" is vague, and I'm not even sure if it's relevant in that the real intent was to call Obama a liar and untrustworthy. They know that they gain no direct power with their own lies. All they get is a rather odd kind of projection of their own failings onto Democrats, which seems to be a recurring theme among a certain stripe of Republican.
If he's not a natural-born citizen, then he wouldn't be a citizen at all. In fact, he'd be an illegal immigrant, and presumably subject to deportation. Though the birthers might settle for his resigning from the Presidency, which would of course put McCain in charge.
They are compared to the Communist Party. Oh, there definitely putting an important person's feet to the fire, but ignoring the broader culpability in tolerating the corruption that allows it, winking at all sorts of criminal behavior, means that they've cut accountability well short of where it really lies.
When "accountability" means throwing a few patsies under the bus (in a nearly literal fashion) to cover up a culture of corruption. In many of these cases, the crime is getting caught, for which the punishment is harsh, but the government will know and ignore of the criminal activity until foreign media forces them to acknowledge it by inducing fear of Chinese goods.
Ratcheting up the severity of the punishment isn't intended as a deterrent. It's intended as a sop to foreign media. Those who haven't been caught know that they're risking their lives, but the profits are great and the risks are low, since the only people to catch them at it are at the far end of the supply chain.
I'm sorry, you lost your shot at "reasonable" when George W. Bush was elected President, and got to pack the court with "it's what the law says (as long as it says what the corporations want it to say)" "originalists". "Reasonable" is no longer a consideration.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that they'll find a way not to. At least, this court would. But as soon as you try, they spread the message to the employees: no messing with the contracts.
AT&T can only force arbitration if you agreed to it in your contract. Which you did. All major companies make it a condition of the sale.
What the court decided is that you can't get out of your contractual agreement with a class-action suit.
The unconscionable part here is the law that they're upholding, the Federal Arbitration Act, which basically lets you give up your right to sue. You don't have to, but they don't have to give you the service, unless you agree to meet in a court of their choosing. Which, of course, they'll always require, as long as the law allows them to.
That's been upheld before. This case is just deciding that the federal law trumps state anti-arbitration laws. I find it unconscionable in both cases, and "unconscionable" is supposed to be a way out of contracts, but the existence of the federal law and 5 Republican appointees on the Supreme Court says I'm wrong.
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that China's detention rate is higher than their official data suggests. But the US is still far out of keeping with every civilized country. The US really jumps out at you on this map:
China's relative case may be as weak on incarceration as it is on internet freedom, but at last on incarceration there's a real problem, while the US is pretty damn free on the Internet.
They do have differing advantages, but taxation shouldn't be one of them. It's a thumb on the scale, rather than a natural advantage from their business method.
Usually, these things ARE taxed, only the vast majority skirt the law. (Have YOU ever paid your "use tax"?)
And for that matter, it's really more about state budgets. They'd probably be perfectly happy to let the retailers go hang if the could just close their budgets.
And if they pass this law, you could probably make a mint selling that device. Thousands of jurisdictions, rules about what is taxed and at what rate, all of it continually being updated... sounds like a gold mine.
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As I understand Righthaven's business model, they do acquire the copyrights to the articles over which they're suing. At least in theory, that's a valid model, but they seem to be going out of bounds as well.
For example, one lawsuit dismissed was decided as fair use. The extract was 8 sentences. I'm not in a position to judge if that really was a valid derivative work, but it sounds to me like there should be many clearer cases they could be litigating without getting themselves in legal trouble over iffy and frivolous ones.
Does this apply to other areas, or just to copyright?
Are there other areas in which you can transfer the right to sue? You can sue for a debt; can you transfer the right to sue for the debt without transferring the debt itself? What about the right to sue for damages, in which case no debt has been created yet but one would be if the judgment made one?
To a non-lawyer's eye it sounds like "potential debt" and "debt" would be treated similarly in the eyes of the law, but I know that they're not the same.
Without the sales taxes, though, it's the opposite of protectionism, giving a benefit to out-of-state sales. Purchasing an identical item from a brick-and-mortar store costs more than having it delivered to you.
Despite the similarity in transactions, they're never quite equal. The brick-and-mortar store receives benefits that the online one doesn't (e.g. police protection). You drive to the B&M store on local roads; they receive their shipments via larger highways. The online store also uses those roads, but via a shipper, who pays taxes on... what, exactly? I'm sure it varies from state to state.
There's never any such thing as "fair" taxation. State spending is consumed in a variety of ways, and it's impossible to account for who's really "using" it. (How much do you owe the police for your house not being robbed today? Would you owe them more for showing up if it was robbed? Or less because they failed to protect it?)
"Terrorists caught" isn't a really useful metric, because the goal is to prevent damage, not catch terrorists. If the system is any good, terrorists wouldn't even try to challenge it. Unfortunately, "damage prevented" is an even worse metric because a metric you can't measure objectively isn't a metric.
You can count up "number of successful attacks", which is also zero. So we're reduced to the question of people picking the metric that seems most valuable to them, which is really the same as no metric at all.
Which is, unfortunately, how politics usually works. Numbers are for us techies, but the Real World is stubbornly hard to measure.
If they're trying to save money, they're looking in the wrong place. $76 million is a pittance. It's 1% of TSA's budget and .002% of the overall budget.
So maybe they're managing to do the right thing for the wrong reason for the wrong reason. I think that sentences parses and is meaningful, but it makes my head hurt.
The way I see it, they're not doing it either for the money or the privacy but because they heard a lot of people were disgruntled and they figured they could score some points. The actual reasons for the disgruntlement, whether they're valid or not, are completely immaterial.
They're calling that million dollars "sweat equity", i.e. the opportunity costs that they could have gone out and worked for somebody else. It's not hard to imagine that 18 months of developer time could be worth a million dollars, but it's double-counting to claim both the time AND the money.
I've got sympathy for them in that Apple apparently changed the rules on them, though that's the joy of running your own business. It's why that sweat equity is worth something. It sucks, big time, and I know it, which is why you don't need to exaggerate the numbers. Saying you spent 18 months on something only to lose it is sufficient.
Not for trademarks, it isn't. Fair use of trademarks extends primarily to "nominative use". That is, we get to use your name when we're talking about you. Any other attempt to profit from the mark is controlled by the company. It should be fairly clear that you can use "Foo(tm)" to declare that "Foo(tm) Sucks", but if there's a chance of consumer confusion between your use of the mark and the company's, you get into murky legal waters. The court literally ends up having to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether the joke is actually funny.
As with everything else in law, there are about a million complications, caveats, and such like. A good article on the subject:
http://www.cll.com/articles/trademark-parody-statutory-and-nominative-fair-use-under-the-lanham-act#PARODY%20AS%20FAIR%20USE
Fundamental laws of physics:
1. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
2. Energy and momentum are conserved.
3. Every new technology must have an article by somebody talking about how it's going to ruin everything.
Evidence for #3 has been tested as far back as Socrates and Plato. I have no doubt that at least some cave paintings are really an editorial about how fire is going to end the species: with fire to keep us warm, who is ever going to have sex again?
If the point of the article is to say, "Don't be an idiot"... did you really need to spread that advice over five page views?
Give me five minutes and then check Wikipedia.
(Of all the stupid mistakes to make...)
"Bin Laden" is "of the Laden family". The "bin" is akin to the Hebrew "ben", "son of" (e.g. "Yeshua ben Yosef", "Jesus son of Joseph".) The Arab equivalent to "of" (in this context) is "al", e.g. Saddam Hussein al Tikriti, Saddam Hussein from Tikrit.
As with other patronymics (e.g. the Scottish "Mac"), it's often used as a general family name, inherited for multiple generations. Osama bin Laden's father is Muhammad bin Laden. The original "Laden" is unknown, but goes back at least a century.
So it's perfectly reasonable to call him "bin Laden". It's his family name, at least a few generations back. Confusion arises only as with every other family name, in that there are a lot of bin Ladens out there, and you'd have to use his full name to be clear. But using just his first name would be equivalent to referring to the Chancellor of Germany as "Angela" or the Prime Minister of the UK as "Gordon": it's their personal name, and rarely used alone in public discourse.
You could use it that was as a deliberate insult of over familiarity. The New York Times took the unusual step of referring to him just as "bin Laden" rather than "Mr. bin Laden", which they reserve generally for the worst of the worst.
Not necessarily a photoshop contest I'd want to see the results of, though.
The McCain comment was a joke, meant to illustrate how birthers seem more intent on humiliating Obama than in actually achieving anything.
You're right that "natural-born" is vague, and I'm not even sure if it's relevant in that the real intent was to call Obama a liar and untrustworthy. They know that they gain no direct power with their own lies. All they get is a rather odd kind of projection of their own failings onto Democrats, which seems to be a recurring theme among a certain stripe of Republican.
If he's not a natural-born citizen, then he wouldn't be a citizen at all. In fact, he'd be an illegal immigrant, and presumably subject to deportation. Though the birthers might settle for his resigning from the Presidency, which would of course put McCain in charge.
Yeah, I knew somebody was going to come back with "America is just as bad". I didn't say it wasn't. It's just different.
They are compared to the Communist Party. Oh, there definitely putting an important person's feet to the fire, but ignoring the broader culpability in tolerating the corruption that allows it, winking at all sorts of criminal behavior, means that they've cut accountability well short of where it really lies.
When did accountability become a dirty word?
When "accountability" means throwing a few patsies under the bus (in a nearly literal fashion) to cover up a culture of corruption. In many of these cases, the crime is getting caught, for which the punishment is harsh, but the government will know and ignore of the criminal activity until foreign media forces them to acknowledge it by inducing fear of Chinese goods.
Ratcheting up the severity of the punishment isn't intended as a deterrent. It's intended as a sop to foreign media. Those who haven't been caught know that they're risking their lives, but the profits are great and the risks are low, since the only people to catch them at it are at the far end of the supply chain.
I'm sorry, you lost your shot at "reasonable" when George W. Bush was elected President, and got to pack the court with "it's what the law says (as long as it says what the corporations want it to say)" "originalists". "Reasonable" is no longer a consideration.
Good luck with that. I hope the court upholds it.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that they'll find a way not to. At least, this court would. But as soon as you try, they spread the message to the employees: no messing with the contracts.
AT&T can only force arbitration if you agreed to it in your contract. Which you did. All major companies make it a condition of the sale.
What the court decided is that you can't get out of your contractual agreement with a class-action suit.
The unconscionable part here is the law that they're upholding, the Federal Arbitration Act, which basically lets you give up your right to sue. You don't have to, but they don't have to give you the service, unless you agree to meet in a court of their choosing. Which, of course, they'll always require, as long as the law allows them to.
That's been upheld before. This case is just deciding that the federal law trumps state anti-arbitration laws. I find it unconscionable in both cases, and "unconscionable" is supposed to be a way out of contracts, but the existence of the federal law and 5 Republican appointees on the Supreme Court says I'm wrong.
Hey! I've also had a login forever and they didn't offer me a free subscription. (Though perhaps it got lost in the spam filter.)
So... the Timecube guy is going to win?
Is javac really 140KLOC? That seems like a lot. The java->bytecode transform is relatively simple. The real work is all done in the JVM.
I suspect it's mostly in the error handling. Good error reporting and recovery is far, far harder than the actual compilation step in any language.
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that China's detention rate is higher than their official data suggests. But the US is still far out of keeping with every civilized country. The US really jumps out at you on this map:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Prisoner_population_rate_UN_HDR_2007_2008.PNG
China's relative case may be as weak on incarceration as it is on internet freedom, but at last on incarceration there's a real problem, while the US is pretty damn free on the Internet.
They do have differing advantages, but taxation shouldn't be one of them. It's a thumb on the scale, rather than a natural advantage from their business method.
Usually, these things ARE taxed, only the vast majority skirt the law. (Have YOU ever paid your "use tax"?)
And for that matter, it's really more about state budgets. They'd probably be perfectly happy to let the retailers go hang if the could just close their budgets.
And if they pass this law, you could probably make a mint selling that device. Thousands of jurisdictions, rules about what is taxed and at what rate, all of it continually being updated... sounds like a gold mine.