But anyway, concerning Corona, CA, it should be noted that some blogger linked to by TechDirt is no better a legal scholar than... anyone else, apparently. There's no Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to "shred" for traffic violations, or any misdemeanor involving less than six months or so of jail.
Cables going to very close shore landing points between similar destinations tend to be pretty close together, saves significantly on the survey costs.
The article's timing of the outages (SeaMeWe 3&4 within minutes, FLAG half an hour later) and the relative proximity of the cable courses suggests either anchor drag or someone who cares enough to make it look that way.
Chalk up another victory for geographically dispersed redundancy.{/quote>
Are you trying to say David Hasselhoff was involved?!?
As someone who suffers from a related problem called Avoidant Personality Disorder, I can tell you that self medicating with drugs and alcohol doesn't solve the problem at all. Oh, sure, you might become a little more sociable, for a while. Eventually, you get to the point where you need the alcohol to function at all, even in non-social situations. Pretty soon, you find yourself stuck in a cycle at the bottom of a bottle and the drugs and alcohol take control, making it even harder to meet other people because by that point, most people actually won't want to be around you and that reinforces the initial problem. I have a lot of family members who buried their problems with drugs and alcohol and they went from being functional addicts to not caring about themselves or pretty much anyone else anymore - all they want is to stay drunk and high. Anything which threatens that state can force them to become aggressive and violent in ways they never were before. Growing up around that, I avoid alcohol and drugs completely.
I don't mean to belittle what I have no reason to believe is not a real disorder - but I'd like to point out that the result of social drinking you apparently assume is inevitable (substance abuse) certainly isn't. Many people do feel more sociable after a drink or two, yet do not move from there to raging alcoholism or drug addiction. Not everyone shy in public has the same disorder you suffer from, so dismissal of the most common (and most commonly effective, I'd guess) solution is irresponsible
Let's keep in mind that multinational mining conglomerates are easily some of the most corrupt, soul-destroying organizations in the world. For example:
Erm if Google is providing a service, it's a "real provider" of that service, whether Google chooses to charge for it or not... are you suggesting there is no contractual relationship between users of Google services and Google?
I haven't read any Google ToS/EULAs (I don't use gmail et al), so I don't know their terms, but... those assuredly are contracts, and I would be pretty damn surprised if they didn't disclaim Google's liability for all sorts of things. If that were not the case, it seems like it would be fairly trivial to bend Google over if something went wrong... simply because you're not "paying a bill" does not mean there's no consideration for the contract.
IANYL (I Am Not Your Lawyer) and this post is not legal advice.
Anti-egalitarian? I think it's pretty damned anti-egalitarian that I pay for suburban and exurban sewer lines, telephone lines, police and fire protection and myriad other infrastructure because inner cities generally are too politically powerless to implement a truly just scheme, like concentric taxation, that would assign tax payments to those who consume the most services, and encourage sustainable, habitable community development.
Paying more for roads you actually use is a good first step, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.
How the hell did the parent post get a +5 informative of all things?! The same way yours did?
The parent poster was correct, Congress cannot amend the United States Constitution.
Congress can, as the text you supplied indicates, propose its amendment to the legislatures or to conventions of the states; just as two-thirds of the state legislatures can do without Congress' agreement. In either case, the decision is not left to the Congress.
How the hell can you quote the text and not understand what it says?
... but I couldn't make any sense of it at all. The summary mentions recent irregularities, but those aren't detailed at all. And the rest of it is incoherent, like the content it links to.
In summary: Please avoid relaying submissions to blog entries, by the blogger who wrote them, without making sure they're not stark raving unreadable. Is there some kind of news buried here about MS's activities on the Swedish OOXML vote? Maybe - but I can't tell from this garbage.
"Let's not even consider that these questions have been asked and answered[1] for years with the iPod."
Yes, let us not consider it because we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years.
Since when is filing a lawsuit, with all the costs that implies, an acceptable form of research?
"The iPhone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, but it is replaceable. This is the same as all iPods for the last several years."
Again, we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years. Replaceable but not user-replaceable isn't acceptable to many people, including myself. Why should the plaintiff be expected to be knowledgeable about Apple technology? If he's looking for a cell phone and he buys one that seems to be the best of the bunch, expecting it to have a user-replaceable battery like virtually every other cell phone doesn't seem like an outrageous expectation. If your cell phone is your primary means of communication, having to take it in for service to get the battery replaced can be unacceptable, putting you out of contact for days while you wait for service to be completed.
Unacceptable? Then clearly you care enough to check for that before you pay $500. Oh wait.
"It's also utterly and ridiculously false to say that a new battery is required every year."
Lithium-Ion batteries, especially under heavy use and recharge cycles, have their performance severely degrade after a year.
You're right. Let's invoke the judicial system to work this semantic dispute out for us.
"As to the "difficulty" of finding the information on Apple's site"
"Additionally, asking any Apple retail store, customer service representative, dealer, authorized service provider, etc., will yield a direct and immediate answer about battery replacement."
Yes, the answer is easy to find once you realize what the problem is. Before you know there's a problem, it's not immediately obvious. The same goes for asking a rep. It's a very specific question. You're obviously an iPod fan, you seem to think of it as an iPod+, but consider that it's being marketed at people who think it's a fancy cell phone, people who may not know about Apple's engineering and decision making processes.
Why is it "immediately obvious" that cell phone batteries should be user-replaceable? Especially when it's "immediately obvious" from cursory examination of the product or accompanying materials - or even, gasp, asking the vendor - that the iPhone's is not?
"Just pretend that the battery replacement costs $29 more"
Why should someone have to pay $29 extra for a new battery? Why would you even consider that an acceptable additional cost?
Because no one hid that cost, or the fact that you couldn't replace the battery yourself, from you?
"The funniest thing of all is that most iPhone owners won't ever even want or need to replace their batteries. They'll have the same slow degradation everyone experiences with lithium ion batteries over time, and before they'd even care or consider replacing it even if it was user-replaceable, they'll be on their next phone."
That's more of a "Generation Y" mentality. Some of us older folk don't run out to get the latest greatest model of everything. Some of us make periodic upgrades when there's truly a major breakthrough, but largely don't change devices until there's a pressing need.
You've gotta be shitting me. This crotchety business is relevant to lawsuits how?
Those charges would result in the gambler getting hauled before a judge and made to prove that he thought that he was just "lucky" when the machine gave him a $10 credit for every $1 he put in. Last time I checked, the presumption worked the other way: the assistant district attorney will be made to prove the "lucky" gambler realized an error had been made.
And in a casino, where a variety of factors are in play that specifically work to lower the effective attention span and cognitive abilities of the patrons (e.g. free drinks, lots of bright colored lights everywhere, wide-open spaces to induce slight agoraphobic panic, tons of noise, hopefully scantily clad service staff), I think that's not an open and shut case. Most casino patrons don't put just one dollar bill into anything, and don't assiduously count how much they have put in - they are obviously not rational actors to begin with.
Further, if the machine's UI is anything but crystal clear, its "Credits" might be easily mistaken for something other than $US - casinos and coin-op game machines convert real money to play "Credits" precisely to confuse patrons about how much is actually at stake.
If the "lucky" folks get hit with a felony bill, and thus get a jury trial, reasonable doubt might not be so far away. Even with a bench trial they might get off. This screams 'plea deal'
I won't argue with the critical portions of your comment, but that language does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, I can't imagine what kind of system could require jury authorization for a search warrant. Make search warrants more cumbersome to obtain (a different matter from altering the burden of persuasion to obtain them), and you just increase pressure on law enforcement and prosecutors to expand the exigency exceptions.
And to answer your self-reply later, you may believe the existence of a warrant procedure "implies" that searches and seizures may not be carried out without a warrant, but that interpretation absolutely is not the law in the United States. There are many exceptions to the warrant requirement that revolve around exigent circumstances. The valid arguments concern what constitutes "exigent."
Mother of God. I do everything I can to conserve power, but for a one-bedroom apartment in Louisiana, I'm lucky my electricity only costs me about $110/month, and that's when it's temperate. My usage isn't atypical, either. Two words: air conditioner.
(And yes, I have cross-ventilation, fans, the works; my house was built before air conditioning became common.)
I would say, for those folks who live and work where air conditioning is required most of the year, the savings might be quite significant. (On the other hand, my own power isn't time-variable, don't know about other places or business billing.)
I love this shit, I really do. IANAL either... but I am a law student in Louisiana. I think it's fun that even somewhat-informed folks think of this state as a bit of another country.
For the record: Parts of Louisiana law are indeed derived from the various French civil codes, mostly the "private" law: sales, successions, family/divorce, etc. In those areas, Louisiana is (somewhat) a "civil law" state. Other parts, notably the criminal law, are virtually identical to the systems of other, "common law" states. Yes, Louisiana does have a constitution (in English), and no, it does not mention alligators.
Now, as for the grandparent: the more modern, and more general, name for reliance-based estoppel is "detrimental reliance," which explains what's going on a little more clearly. Yes, the doctrine (probably!) would be applied in Louisiana as in other states: as the Wikipedia article points out, estoppel is a creation of courts sitting in equity, not of the common law per se.
However, in this or in any other state, a relying party generally should only recover its loss incurred by reliance, not the entire thing promised.
If the city of New Orleans spent, say, $10,000 in preparation for taking over the offered building, should the city get its $10,000 back... or should it get the entire building (presumably worth much more)? I don't know any of the details about this building deal, but simple equity tells me BellSouth shouldn't be liable for more than the city lost, if anything, in reliance on their promise.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice to anyone.
Major premise: Passing off bloggers' (or anyone else's) work as one's own is unprofessional, often illegal, and plain bad. Granted.
Minor premise: Bloggers and other non-professionals are way, way, way more commonly guilty of this than professional journalists are, especially those from reputable sources, i.e. old-school print journalism.
I once was a newspaper reporter myself, strictly local, quite small-time, and I guaran-damn-tee you I found my stuff (or more accurately, my employer's stuff) ripped off by bloggers and other folks online, messageboards and what have you, all the time, approximately [infinity] more than I stole material, which of course I never did.
Non-professionals just don't have the ethics background that keeps the vast majority of mainstream reporters from going anywhere near plagiarism. Yes, it's much more obvious when people with a megaphone do it and yes, those folks are getting paid for it while amateurs (at least usually) are not, but let's not kid ourselves.
Professionals with their heads screwed on straight just don't do this, which is why "press scandals" are not only rare but highly visible. Non-professionals, no matter their influence on the news culture and competitive pressure on mainstream media, are far more prone to plagiarism.
How about we nominate a Blog Plagiarist of the Year too?
1) The terms of Lexmark's contract - those "prebate" terms on the outside of the box - actually preclude only remanufacturing by anyone other than Lexmark (according to the court's analysis of Lexmark's brief). That's what "you agree to return the used cartridge only to Lexmark" means. Other uses, like filling it up oneself, may or may not be forbidden by that contract language. Generally, the Uniform Commercial Code interprets ambiguities in the consumer's favor, but YMMV.
2) Enforceablity of the contract is predicated on the ability of a patent-holder to legally restrict secondary uses by contract. That's Mallinckrodt, the Fed. Circuit decision the EFF urged the court to ignore. Lexmark's remedy for breach of the terms on the box lies in contract, not in patent infringement.
3) As much as I don't like this kind of sales strategy, I'm not sure why folks think buyers shouldn't be restricted to the terms they can read on the box. Those terms are an agreement between Lexmark and the buyer, and if the buyer doesn't like them, s/he doesn't have to buy. That's what freedom to/of contract is all about - don't like their terms, don't buy Lexmark products. Without any antitrust considerations - which I'm not aware of here - where is the rationale for telling Lexmark what it can and cannot offer in its contract terms?
Slashdot Mirror
you always have to assume some basic level competence on the part of the user (eg. knowing to type man to get program info)
[insert howling-laughing smiley here]
Well, that's odd.
But anyway, concerning Corona, CA, it should be noted that some blogger linked to by TechDirt is no better a legal scholar than... anyone else, apparently. There's no Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to "shred" for traffic violations, or any misdemeanor involving less than six months or so of jail.
Cables going to very close shore landing points between similar destinations tend to be pretty close together, saves significantly on the survey costs.
The article's timing of the outages (SeaMeWe 3&4 within minutes, FLAG half an hour later) and the relative proximity of the cable courses suggests either anchor drag or someone who cares enough to make it look that way.
Chalk up another victory for geographically dispersed redundancy.{/quote>
Are you trying to say David Hasselhoff was involved?!?
As someone who suffers from a related problem called Avoidant Personality Disorder, I can tell you that self medicating with drugs and alcohol doesn't solve the problem at all. Oh, sure, you might become a little more sociable, for a while. Eventually, you get to the point where you need the alcohol to function at all, even in non-social situations. Pretty soon, you find yourself stuck in a cycle at the bottom of a bottle and the drugs and alcohol take control, making it even harder to meet other people because by that point, most people actually won't want to be around you and that reinforces the initial problem. I have a lot of family members who buried their problems with drugs and alcohol and they went from being functional addicts to not caring about themselves or pretty much anyone else anymore - all they want is to stay drunk and high. Anything which threatens that state can force them to become aggressive and violent in ways they never were before. Growing up around that, I avoid alcohol and drugs completely.
I don't mean to belittle what I have no reason to believe is not a real disorder - but I'd like to point out that the result of social drinking you apparently assume is inevitable (substance abuse) certainly isn't. Many people do feel more sociable after a drink or two, yet do not move from there to raging alcoholism or drug addiction. Not everyone shy in public has the same disorder you suffer from, so dismissal of the most common (and most commonly effective, I'd guess) solution is irresponsible
Let's keep in mind that multinational mining conglomerates are easily some of the most corrupt, soul-destroying organizations in the world. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bougainville#Shutting_the_Panguna_mine
well...
Wow... frankly, that's pretty dick.
Erm if Google is providing a service, it's a "real provider" of that service, whether Google chooses to charge for it or not... are you suggesting there is no contractual relationship between users of Google services and Google?
I haven't read any Google ToS/EULAs (I don't use gmail et al), so I don't know their terms, but... those assuredly are contracts, and I would be pretty damn surprised if they didn't disclaim Google's liability for all sorts of things. If that were not the case, it seems like it would be fairly trivial to bend Google over if something went wrong... simply because you're not "paying a bill" does not mean there's no consideration for the contract.
IANYL (I Am Not Your Lawyer) and this post is not legal advice.
you mean...
Answers to these questions and more, rendered inaccessible by /.
Anti-egalitarian? I think it's pretty damned anti-egalitarian that I pay for suburban and exurban sewer lines, telephone lines, police and fire protection and myriad other infrastructure because inner cities generally are too politically powerless to implement a truly just scheme, like concentric taxation, that would assign tax payments to those who consume the most services, and encourage sustainable, habitable community development.
Paying more for roads you actually use is a good first step, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.
The parent poster was correct, Congress cannot amend the United States Constitution.
Congress can, as the text you supplied indicates, propose its amendment to the legislatures or to conventions of the states; just as two-thirds of the state legislatures can do without Congress' agreement. In either case, the decision is not left to the Congress.
How the hell can you quote the text and not understand what it says?
Mod parent down: -1, Uninformed.
As usual, uninformed speculation modded up by the similarly uninformed.
Since I don't work for you and this isn't legal advice, I'll leave it at that.
... but I couldn't make any sense of it at all. The summary mentions recent irregularities, but those aren't detailed at all. And the rest of it is incoherent, like the content it links to.
In summary: Please avoid relaying submissions to blog entries, by the blogger who wrote them, without making sure they're not stark raving unreadable. Is there some kind of news buried here about MS's activities on the Swedish OOXML vote? Maybe - but I can't tell from this garbage.
Yes, let us not consider it because we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years.
Since when is filing a lawsuit, with all the costs that implies, an acceptable form of research?
"The iPhone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, but it is replaceable. This is the same as all iPods for the last several years."
Again, we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years. Replaceable but not user-replaceable isn't acceptable to many people, including myself. Why should the plaintiff be expected to be knowledgeable about Apple technology? If he's looking for a cell phone and he buys one that seems to be the best of the bunch, expecting it to have a user-replaceable battery like virtually every other cell phone doesn't seem like an outrageous expectation. If your cell phone is your primary means of communication, having to take it in for service to get the battery replaced can be unacceptable, putting you out of contact for days while you wait for service to be completed.
Unacceptable? Then clearly you care enough to check for that before you pay $500. Oh wait.
"It's also utterly and ridiculously false to say that a new battery is required every year."
Lithium-Ion batteries, especially under heavy use and recharge cycles, have their performance severely degrade after a year.
You're right. Let's invoke the judicial system to work this semantic dispute out for us.
"As to the "difficulty" of finding the information on Apple's site"
"Additionally, asking any Apple retail store, customer service representative, dealer, authorized service provider, etc., will yield a direct and immediate answer about battery replacement."
Yes, the answer is easy to find once you realize what the problem is. Before you know there's a problem, it's not immediately obvious. The same goes for asking a rep. It's a very specific question. You're obviously an iPod fan, you seem to think of it as an iPod+, but consider that it's being marketed at people who think it's a fancy cell phone, people who may not know about Apple's engineering and decision making processes.
Why is it "immediately obvious" that cell phone batteries should be user-replaceable? Especially when it's "immediately obvious" from cursory examination of the product or accompanying materials - or even, gasp, asking the vendor - that the iPhone's is not?
"Just pretend that the battery replacement costs $29 more"
Why should someone have to pay $29 extra for a new battery? Why would you even consider that an acceptable additional cost?
Because no one hid that cost, or the fact that you couldn't replace the battery yourself, from you?
"The funniest thing of all is that most iPhone owners won't ever even want or need to replace their batteries. They'll have the same slow degradation everyone experiences with lithium ion batteries over time, and before they'd even care or consider replacing it even if it was user-replaceable, they'll be on their next phone."
That's more of a "Generation Y" mentality. Some of us older folk don't run out to get the latest greatest model of everything. Some of us make periodic upgrades when there's truly a major breakthrough, but largely don't change devices until there's a pressing need.
You've gotta be shitting me. This crotchety business is relevant to lawsuits how?
And in a casino, where a variety of factors are in play that specifically work to lower the effective attention span and cognitive abilities of the patrons (e.g. free drinks, lots of bright colored lights everywhere, wide-open spaces to induce slight agoraphobic panic, tons of noise, hopefully scantily clad service staff), I think that's not an open and shut case. Most casino patrons don't put just one dollar bill into anything, and don't assiduously count how much they have put in - they are obviously not rational actors to begin with.
Further, if the machine's UI is anything but crystal clear, its "Credits" might be easily mistaken for something other than $US - casinos and coin-op game machines convert real money to play "Credits" precisely to confuse patrons about how much is actually at stake.
If the "lucky" folks get hit with a felony bill, and thus get a jury trial, reasonable doubt might not be so far away. Even with a bench trial they might get off. This screams 'plea deal'
You kiss the piece of junk goodbye
Yeah I'm pretty sure that's in the manual.
It's called contributory infringement; please look it up before you open your mouth
you [b]fool[/b]
I won't argue with the critical portions of your comment, but that language does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, I can't imagine what kind of system could require jury authorization for a search warrant. Make search warrants more cumbersome to obtain (a different matter from altering the burden of persuasion to obtain them), and you just increase pressure on law enforcement and prosecutors to expand the exigency exceptions.
And to answer your self-reply later, you may believe the existence of a warrant procedure "implies" that searches and seizures may not be carried out without a warrant, but that interpretation absolutely is not the law in the United States. There are many exceptions to the warrant requirement that revolve around exigent circumstances. The valid arguments concern what constitutes "exigent."
$20 a month?!?
Mother of God. I do everything I can to conserve power, but for a one-bedroom apartment in Louisiana, I'm lucky my electricity only costs me about $110/month, and that's when it's temperate. My usage isn't atypical, either. Two words: air conditioner.
(And yes, I have cross-ventilation, fans, the works; my house was built before air conditioning became common.)
I would say, for those folks who live and work where air conditioning is required most of the year, the savings might be quite significant. (On the other hand, my own power isn't time-variable, don't know about other places or business billing.)
While Michael Rabin was inventor of the Rabin cryptosystem in 1979, it was Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman behind RSA two years earlier.
I've been forced to notice John Dvorak for far, far too long.
Please, everyone do everyone else a big favor and ignore him.
I love this shit, I really do. IANAL either... but I am a law student in Louisiana. I think it's fun that even somewhat-informed folks think of this state as a bit of another country.
For the record: Parts of Louisiana law are indeed derived from the various French civil codes, mostly the "private" law: sales, successions, family/divorce, etc. In those areas, Louisiana is (somewhat) a "civil law" state. Other parts, notably the criminal law, are virtually identical to the systems of other, "common law" states. Yes, Louisiana does have a constitution (in English), and no, it does not mention alligators.
Now, as for the grandparent: the more modern, and more general, name for reliance-based estoppel is "detrimental reliance," which explains what's going on a little more clearly. Yes, the doctrine (probably!) would be applied in Louisiana as in other states: as the Wikipedia article points out, estoppel is a creation of courts sitting in equity, not of the common law per se.
However, in this or in any other state, a relying party generally should only recover its loss incurred by reliance, not the entire thing promised.
If the city of New Orleans spent, say, $10,000 in preparation for taking over the offered building, should the city get its $10,000 back... or should it get the entire building (presumably worth much more)? I don't know any of the details about this building deal, but simple equity tells me BellSouth shouldn't be liable for more than the city lost, if anything, in reliance on their promise.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice to anyone.
Major premise: Passing off bloggers' (or anyone else's) work as one's own is unprofessional, often illegal, and plain bad. Granted.
Minor premise: Bloggers and other non-professionals are way, way, way more commonly guilty of this than professional journalists are, especially those from reputable sources, i.e. old-school print journalism.
I once was a newspaper reporter myself, strictly local, quite small-time, and I guaran-damn-tee you I found my stuff (or more accurately, my employer's stuff) ripped off by bloggers and other folks online, messageboards and what have you, all the time, approximately [infinity] more than I stole material, which of course I never did.
Non-professionals just don't have the ethics background that keeps the vast majority of mainstream reporters from going anywhere near plagiarism. Yes, it's much more obvious when people with a megaphone do it and yes, those folks are getting paid for it while amateurs (at least usually) are not, but let's not kid ourselves.
Professionals with their heads screwed on straight just don't do this, which is why "press scandals" are not only rare but highly visible. Non-professionals, no matter their influence on the news culture and competitive pressure on mainstream media, are far more prone to plagiarism.
How about we nominate a Blog Plagiarist of the Year too?
1) The terms of Lexmark's contract - those "prebate" terms on the outside of the box - actually preclude only remanufacturing by anyone other than Lexmark (according to the court's analysis of Lexmark's brief). That's what "you agree to return the used cartridge only to Lexmark" means. Other uses, like filling it up oneself, may or may not be forbidden by that contract language. Generally, the Uniform Commercial Code interprets ambiguities in the consumer's favor, but YMMV.
2) Enforceablity of the contract is predicated on the ability of a patent-holder to legally restrict secondary uses by contract. That's Mallinckrodt, the Fed. Circuit decision the EFF urged the court to ignore. Lexmark's remedy for breach of the terms on the box lies in contract, not in patent infringement.
3) As much as I don't like this kind of sales strategy, I'm not sure why folks think buyers shouldn't be restricted to the terms they can read on the box. Those terms are an agreement between Lexmark and the buyer, and if the buyer doesn't like them, s/he doesn't have to buy. That's what freedom to/of contract is all about - don't like their terms, don't buy Lexmark products. Without any antitrust considerations - which I'm not aware of here - where is the rationale for telling Lexmark what it can and cannot offer in its contract terms?