From the text of the decision, this was the telco's argument:
Bridgewater's statutory claims focus on two provisions in Minn.Stat. 475.52, subd. 1. First, Bridgewater contends that Monticello did not have the statutory authority to issue the bonds because the Fiber Project is not a “utility or other public convenience from which a revenue is or may be derived.” Minn.Stat. 475.52, subd. 1. Second, Bridgewater asserts that Monticello intends to improperly apply the bond proceeds to pay current expenses, which is explicitly prohibited by the statute. Interpretation of these statutory provisions is an issue of first impression in Minnesota.
I can't really tell the difference between 160k and 320k in my car. The difference might be detectable on my crappy computer speakers, but it's slight. But in with my real speaker systems (either Vifa or Morel speakers, and Sunfire electronics), the difference is very noticeable. Most people simply aren't listening on systems that are technologically capable of producing the quality you would want to preserve by either using 320k+ or even lossless.
Headphones might be another story. I don't do enough listening to really say for certain, but my experience is that on even so-so headphones, I can tell the difference between crappy mp3s and good ones. But if we're essentially talking about people using their included ipod headphones, and using them to listen WAY too loud, I can totally see how there isn't much difference between the really bad files and even so-so ones.
This is precisely my a lot of my music for DJing purposes is just plain old 128k -- in a big room with speakers designed primarily for loudness, the quality of the source becomes nearly irrelevant.
...from the company that makes a point of discontinuing every decent product they've ever made. Examples include: the Minimus speaker (mine are 25 years old and work great), the Linaeum tweeter, the Optimus CD-3400 portable CD player, and the original analog SPL meter.
If 90% of the people in your apartment complex are growing their own pot and you're part of the 10% that is not should you lose your right to not have the police kick down your door without a warrant?
Yes. You should. To do otherwise would allow illegal activities to go on simply by keeping at least one law-abiding person on the premises (i.e., children).
The harder part is identifying the source of the plagiarism. For undergraduate papers, even the harder part is trivial.
Wouldn't simply requiring authors to cite their sources solve this problem? Yes, it's a pain to cite -- but any form of serious writing should, and usually does, require it. I'm not talking about strictly following BlueBook legal citation rules, but something more than a "list of authorities used".
I'm originally from one of those smaller states that supposedly has a disproportionate amount of power compared to it's size. And I hate the electoral college.
First, as to the whole "people pay attention to it" argument, I certainly haven't seen that. Did anyone pay attention the last couple elections -- were, what, 35 states clearly going one way or another anyways, so they only paid attention to the so-called "swing states." Now, that may give some states extra pull when they are close, but when a state like ND, Wyoming, and Montana aren't -- they are essentially ignored.
Second, and this is the most important reason in my mind, it discourages people from voting. On many occasions, I have heard people mention how it was pointless for a liberal to vote in ND, or alternatively, for a conservative to vote in Minnesota.
KENT BROCKMAN
With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal government has snapped into action. We go live now via satellite to the floor of the United States congress.
SPEAKER
Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of--
CONGRESSMAN
Wait a second, I want to tack on a rider to that bill - $30 million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts.
SPEAKER
All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?
FLOOR
Boo!
SPEAKER
Bill defeated.
KENT BROCKMAN
I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work.
Extremely similar specs to my HTPC, except I went with the 5400 and the 8800GT. I just used a ton of fans running slowly. It's not "silent", but it's quieter than the DVR from my cable company.
That's because you don't just "learn" what we do. We go to a ridiculously intensive school for three years, study another couple months full-time for the bar, and then start learning how to actually be a lawyer. It's pretty easy to google "why can't I connect wirelessly" and get an answer. It's a lot harder to get a quick answer to "how do I defend myself in a custody action."
The best analogy I've heard is this, from a judge. "If my car was running, and me -- knowing nothing about cars -- decided to start taking it apart and fixing it, I'd probably make it worse. And you would think it's crazy that I didn't hire a mechanic and that it's my own fault for messing it up. But then people come in on matters far more important than their cars -- custody matters, criminal stuff, etc... -- and try to be their own mechanics. And then they blame the legal system when they mess it up."
I get it, lawyers are expensive. But so are plumbers and electricians and mechanics and programmers. Maybe a little more, sure. But this whole "$500/hr" stuff isn't what most people are paying, unless you're a large company insistent on hiring only ivy league grads at 1000 person firms. It's realistically a forth of that amount at smaller firms. And lawyers also have 7 years of school to pay for.
I work in a state courthouse. Here, Windows is set up force new passwords every so often and of ridiculous complexity (numbers + letters + symbols + sanskrit, or something of that nature). So what we have is a situation where 50% of the computers here have little post-it on them with the user's passwords. It does far more harm than good.
It isn't negative campaigning to point out the party, and its President, you are running against has completely sucked for 8 years.
It is if the person you are accusing of being "just like Bush" is the most independent minded Republican Senator (at least among those with some real pull in the Senate).
In general, there are three factions: the liberals (Stevens, Breyer, Souter, Ginsberg), the conservatives (Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito), and Kennedy.
Charles Whitebread refers to this court as the "Kennedy Court" because he votes with the majority on most decisions. He is essentially the swing vote these days. There are some exceptions, but many, many cases are coming down to how Kennedy decides to vote.
In law school, we were specifically told to ignore cases from (1) Louisiana and (2) the 9th Circuit. As to whether they are overturned more often than other circuits, I have no opinion. That's just what we were taught. But I will say that one of the worst decisions I've ever read was a 9th circuit case, but then again all courts have some pretty crazy stuff if you look hard enough.
I would certainly want judge Kozinski presiding over my case. You could just stop there, actually. Kozinski is one of the most respected jurists in the country, and if I was putting together a list of 9 people to make up the supreme court, he would be on it.
How will giving COURTS more money lead to more laws and lawyers? I'm talking about things like having enough judges so that the current ones aren't overworked and thus have enough time to actually take a look at the things in front of them. As it is now, many things don't get even a fraction of the attention they really require.
I don't know any judges who are "happy" to let cases draw on forever. And certainly don't know any who award attorney fees in absence of very unreasonable conduct.
When neither party has money....the state just pays for it.
If I intended to be a law clerk indefinitely, then maybe I'd have a vested interest. But I don't, so my only interest is having a working judicial system.
This is a re-post from a comment I made the last time "cyber-bullying" came up on Slashdot:
I'm a law clerk in the state court system, and have been for a little over two years. When I first started, I never saw much of anything that dealt with online content. Now, I'd say that maybe 5-10% of the protective orders ("Harassment Restraining Orders" in my state) deal with students (mostly high school and college) interacting via My Space or Facebook. So I do believe that "cyber bullying" is happening, at least to some extent. Some of it is BS, like parents not approving of their underage daughter's racy pictures of herself and the much-too-old boyfriend, or an angry match.com breakup, or whatever.
Additionally, I don't believe we need any new laws to deal with this. At least I haven't personally seen a need yet. Generally, the existing harassment laws do just fine. They are already written broadly enough to cover "communications" via a number of methods. If someone communicates with you after you've told them you find their contact harassing, the law covers it, whether it's by phone, mail, in-person, or email. Special laws to cover the internet will only make it more difficult to do my job, and more importantly the job of the judges who ultimately make the decisions. And believe me, they are not well equipped to understand online material. Boiling it all down to "communications" is just easier. Court personal and prosecutors are already overworked in many areas, and complicating matters further will basically just mean that either other cases involving more traditional speech will have to be given a lower priority, or that none of it gets the attention it needs.
The one situation that's hard to handle is postings to other people's blogs that are unconnected to the recipient. Trying to analogize a blog posting is a bit difficult -- it's not like we've ever had much of a problem of people speaking bad of each other via physical billboards. But really, that's protected free speech, until it rises to the level of a treat. So essentially, the one situation a politician could conceivably attempt to control is basically impossible control due to that pesky constitution of ours (I know, politicians hate it).
Bottom line, leave the law alone. Stop grandstanding. And throw enough money at the judicial system to be able to spend enough time of each case, and give prosecutors the money to have enough people to pursue the cases that need the most attention. But I suppose it's a lot easier to "JUST THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!" by coming up with crazy laws, rather than simply funding courts.
I'm not typically an FPS guy, but I found the first half of Crysis to be one of the best games I've ever played. The found the second half extremely boring. Once the aliens show up, the game just wasn't the same. If Pyscho's story is supposed to involve "life" on the other side of the island, as the release calls it, I have to assume they are talking more about the aliens than the Koreans. Too bad.
First of all, unless you cherry-pick polls, there is no statistical evidence that Hillary (or some other candidate) would be more successful against McCain. Nate Silver, one of the most respected sabrmetricians (translation -- he projects baseball stats) in the world seems to believe that Clinton has a better shot than Obama, despite being an Obama supporter. See http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
A few years ago I took a semester of law school at another school, just to get exposed to some intellectual property classes that weren't available at my own school, which is among the smallest in the country. It was a semester of difficult classes crammed into 6 weeks. It was terrible, even by law school standards. For the first 3 or 4 weeks, I was utterly and completely miserable.
I was renting a house for a couple months with a guy also going to school. One day, the sewer in the basement backs up badly. Feces on the floor badly. We call the plumber, of course. And for two hours, this poor guy is walking through the crap on the basement floor, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with the drain, before finally fishing used tampons out of the drain that were from the prior tenants. I felt really bad for the guy.
After that, I didn't complain too much. So what if I was reading for 12 hours a day, it was better than used-tampon-and-crap detail.
I can't imagine this will last long, as it's a clear violation of federal law. I work for a court, and we ALWAYS need to redact SSN from every order (unless it's just being disclosed to that specific person). It's against state law here, but also federal. From 42 U.S.C. 405(c)(2)(C)(viii):
Social security account numbers and related records that are obtained or maintained by authorized persons pursuant to any provision of law enacted on or after October 1, 1990, shall be confidential, and no authorized person shall disclose any such social security account number or related record.
So I really can't imagine the court can defend this in any way at all.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/archive/ctappub/0906/opa081928-0602.pdf
Headphones might be another story. I don't do enough listening to really say for certain, but my experience is that on even so-so headphones, I can tell the difference between crappy mp3s and good ones. But if we're essentially talking about people using their included ipod headphones, and using them to listen WAY too loud, I can totally see how there isn't much difference between the really bad files and even so-so ones.
This is precisely my a lot of my music for DJing purposes is just plain old 128k -- in a big room with speakers designed primarily for loudness, the quality of the source becomes nearly irrelevant.
...from the company that makes a point of discontinuing every decent product they've ever made. Examples include: the Minimus speaker (mine are 25 years old and work great), the Linaeum tweeter, the Optimus CD-3400 portable CD player, and the original analog SPL meter.
If 90% of the people in your apartment complex are growing their own pot and you're part of the 10% that is not should you lose your right to not have the police kick down your door without a warrant?
Yes. You should. To do otherwise would allow illegal activities to go on simply by keeping at least one law-abiding person on the premises (i.e., children).
The harder part is identifying the source of the plagiarism. For undergraduate papers, even the harder part is trivial.
Wouldn't simply requiring authors to cite their sources solve this problem? Yes, it's a pain to cite -- but any form of serious writing should, and usually does, require it. I'm not talking about strictly following BlueBook legal citation rules, but something more than a "list of authorities used".
Same here. I enjoyed it, while my wife decided the last 20 minutes would be a good time to go make some phone calls.
If you hate dogs - no.
First, as to the whole "people pay attention to it" argument, I certainly haven't seen that. Did anyone pay attention the last couple elections -- were, what, 35 states clearly going one way or another anyways, so they only paid attention to the so-called "swing states." Now, that may give some states extra pull when they are close, but when a state like ND, Wyoming, and Montana aren't -- they are essentially ignored.
Second, and this is the most important reason in my mind, it discourages people from voting. On many occasions, I have heard people mention how it was pointless for a liberal to vote in ND, or alternatively, for a conservative to vote in Minnesota.
SPEAKER Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of--
CONGRESSMAN Wait a second, I want to tack on a rider to that bill - $30 million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts.
SPEAKER All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?
FLOOR Boo!
SPEAKER Bill defeated.
KENT BROCKMAN I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work.
Extremely similar specs to my HTPC, except I went with the 5400 and the 8800GT. I just used a ton of fans running slowly. It's not "silent", but it's quieter than the DVR from my cable company.
The best analogy I've heard is this, from a judge. "If my car was running, and me -- knowing nothing about cars -- decided to start taking it apart and fixing it, I'd probably make it worse. And you would think it's crazy that I didn't hire a mechanic and that it's my own fault for messing it up. But then people come in on matters far more important than their cars -- custody matters, criminal stuff, etc... -- and try to be their own mechanics. And then they blame the legal system when they mess it up."
I get it, lawyers are expensive. But so are plumbers and electricians and mechanics and programmers. Maybe a little more, sure. But this whole "$500/hr" stuff isn't what most people are paying, unless you're a large company insistent on hiring only ivy league grads at 1000 person firms. It's realistically a forth of that amount at smaller firms. And lawyers also have 7 years of school to pay for.
I work in a state courthouse. Here, Windows is set up force new passwords every so often and of ridiculous complexity (numbers + letters + symbols + sanskrit, or something of that nature). So what we have is a situation where 50% of the computers here have little post-it on them with the user's passwords. It does far more harm than good.
You win. That's a great post.
Yeah, if only there were some sort of Cooperative Treaty about Patents that would grant substantively similar rights in all the signing countries.
You mean like the Patent Cooperation Treaty? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty
It isn't negative campaigning to point out the party, and its President, you are running against has completely sucked for 8 years.
It is if the person you are accusing of being "just like Bush" is the most independent minded Republican Senator (at least among those with some real pull in the Senate).
In general, there are three factions: the liberals (Stevens, Breyer, Souter, Ginsberg), the conservatives (Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito), and Kennedy. Charles Whitebread refers to this court as the "Kennedy Court" because he votes with the majority on most decisions. He is essentially the swing vote these days. There are some exceptions, but many, many cases are coming down to how Kennedy decides to vote.
Roe v. Wade was "arguably a stretch"? It was literally a decision pulled out of thin air!
In law school, we were specifically told to ignore cases from (1) Louisiana and (2) the 9th Circuit. As to whether they are overturned more often than other circuits, I have no opinion. That's just what we were taught. But I will say that one of the worst decisions I've ever read was a 9th circuit case, but then again all courts have some pretty crazy stuff if you look hard enough.
I don't know any judges who are "happy" to let cases draw on forever. And certainly don't know any who award attorney fees in absence of very unreasonable conduct.
When neither party has money....the state just pays for it.
If I intended to be a law clerk indefinitely, then maybe I'd have a vested interest. But I don't, so my only interest is having a working judicial system.
I'm a law clerk in the state court system, and have been for a little over two years. When I first started, I never saw much of anything that dealt with online content. Now, I'd say that maybe 5-10% of the protective orders ("Harassment Restraining Orders" in my state) deal with students (mostly high school and college) interacting via My Space or Facebook. So I do believe that "cyber bullying" is happening, at least to some extent. Some of it is BS, like parents not approving of their underage daughter's racy pictures of herself and the much-too-old boyfriend, or an angry match.com breakup, or whatever.
Additionally, I don't believe we need any new laws to deal with this. At least I haven't personally seen a need yet. Generally, the existing harassment laws do just fine. They are already written broadly enough to cover "communications" via a number of methods. If someone communicates with you after you've told them you find their contact harassing, the law covers it, whether it's by phone, mail, in-person, or email. Special laws to cover the internet will only make it more difficult to do my job, and more importantly the job of the judges who ultimately make the decisions. And believe me, they are not well equipped to understand online material. Boiling it all down to "communications" is just easier. Court personal and prosecutors are already overworked in many areas, and complicating matters further will basically just mean that either other cases involving more traditional speech will have to be given a lower priority, or that none of it gets the attention it needs.
The one situation that's hard to handle is postings to other people's blogs that are unconnected to the recipient. Trying to analogize a blog posting is a bit difficult -- it's not like we've ever had much of a problem of people speaking bad of each other via physical billboards. But really, that's protected free speech, until it rises to the level of a treat. So essentially, the one situation a politician could conceivably attempt to control is basically impossible control due to that pesky constitution of ours (I know, politicians hate it).
Bottom line, leave the law alone. Stop grandstanding. And throw enough money at the judicial system to be able to spend enough time of each case, and give prosecutors the money to have enough people to pursue the cases that need the most attention. But I suppose it's a lot easier to "JUST THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!" by coming up with crazy laws, rather than simply funding courts.
I'm not typically an FPS guy, but I found the first half of Crysis to be one of the best games I've ever played. The found the second half extremely boring. Once the aliens show up, the game just wasn't the same. If Pyscho's story is supposed to involve "life" on the other side of the island, as the release calls it, I have to assume they are talking more about the aliens than the Koreans. Too bad.
A few years ago I took a semester of law school at another school, just to get exposed to some intellectual property classes that weren't available at my own school, which is among the smallest in the country. It was a semester of difficult classes crammed into 6 weeks. It was terrible, even by law school standards. For the first 3 or 4 weeks, I was utterly and completely miserable.
I was renting a house for a couple months with a guy also going to school. One day, the sewer in the basement backs up badly. Feces on the floor badly. We call the plumber, of course. And for two hours, this poor guy is walking through the crap on the basement floor, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with the drain, before finally fishing used tampons out of the drain that were from the prior tenants. I felt really bad for the guy.
After that, I didn't complain too much. So what if I was reading for 12 hours a day, it was better than used-tampon-and-crap detail.
Social security account numbers and related records that are obtained or maintained by authorized persons pursuant to any provision of law enacted on or after October 1, 1990, shall be confidential, and no authorized person shall disclose any such social security account number or related record.
So I really can't imagine the court can defend this in any way at all.