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User: zymurgyboy

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  1. Re:Make mine writable.. on Flexible Electronic Paper · · Score: 1
    Yes. And have a way to transmit text from a computer wirelessly, coupled with some basic navigation software to turn pages and then you've got a deal.

    Especially if you could capture marginalia input from the stylus and do some versioning with the original. Then we'd approaching a realistic alternative to dead tree.

  2. Re:Same thing, but perhaps more lyrically put... on Implementing the Bureaucratic Black Arts? · · Score: 1

    Spot on, man.

  3. Same thing, but perhaps more lyrically put... on Implementing the Bureaucratic Black Arts? · · Score: 1
    You'll get further with a mea culpa than a Mother-may-I.

    Being clever and quick with the Latin can score you extra bonus points in some offices. Or at least differentiate you from the "my bad" crowd.

    For all ya'll out there in the my-bad crowd without at Latin dictionary close at hand, "mea culpa" very nearly translates to "my bad" -- hell it even sounds cool in substitution.

    Okay. I'll shut up now.

  4. Re:Exqueeze me? on U.S. Insists On Keeping Control Of Internet · · Score: 1

    Oops! VOIP. My mistake. But still. Huh?

  5. Re:Exqueeze me? on U.S. Insists On Keeping Control Of Internet · · Score: 1
    Yes, the Patriot Act is a PITA, but how many countries could you fly to where said VPN software is illegal to import to begin with, end of discussion, case closed, no review process at all?

    Anyway, where does the FBI come into the picture regarding what encrytion software you use? Honestly, this is news to me.

  6. Re:UN control of something important?! on U.S. Insists On Keeping Control Of Internet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What if a cowboy in the govt decides to switch off all traffic to China... I wouldn't worry about that. Some cowboy in the Chinese government is already seeing to it without our asking. :^P

  7. Re:Just when they get if finished.... on At Long Last, NeoOffice/J 1.1 Released · · Score: 1

    precisely why they've announced it now, I meant to say.

  8. Re:Just when they get if finished.... on At Long Last, NeoOffice/J 1.1 Released · · Score: 1
    Actually, I'd say that's precisely when they've announced it.

    You know Microsoft can't be happy about having a (commercial) OS competitor on x86 like Apple; how else would they view Apple shifting from PPC to x86 as anything other than a swipe at their market? Apologies in advance to GNU/Linux fanatics, but OSX is the first real threat to their desktop dominance in some time. MS business is built on the rock of desktop domination.

    So what do you think they'll probably do to swipe back? My guess is, kill the MBU.

    Apple has to know this is coming down the pike, so they're (wisely? time will tell) letting their current customer base know they have something in the works that is reasonably compatible with MS Office when MS takes their own Office suite away.

  9. Re:Nothing to see here, move along. on Aquarium Full of Oil For PC Cooling · · Score: 2, Funny

    Arrrrr. I don't know about that, matey. But if he be puttin' a pirated copy of Windows on there, he'll be all set for the boil he's deservin'.

  10. Re:WRONG on New Rules Proposed on Electronic Evidence · · Score: 1
    Expense is the main problem with handling e-mail, as you correctly state that there are a number of vendors and technologies to handle it. And you're also correct that there are no real alternatives to this process. I nearly always vend this type of work out, not so much because I want to or don't have the requisite software and knowhow, but the volumes is almost always more than I can cost effectively handle in-house (I'm a timekeeper, but IANAL; I'm a geek in their direct employ), much less devote the time to.

    The biggest problem I see on the expense end of it however, is the way the EDD vendors price their services. It creates significant problems for me selling the idea of electronic processing to case teams because I can't tell them, even roughly, how much it will cost! All but 1 or 2 are still soaking us on per image pricing rather than working out a fair per-gigabyte charge for the service. The problem with the latter approach when process someone's hard drive is this: you can't know how much data they will turn up during processing until it's done. You send off two 10 GB hard drives, for instance. One may come back having contained 1 GB worth of processed tiff images, the while the other comes back with 400 MB worth of tiffs. If you assume 1 MB per tiff (very high) and tiffs are priced at 5 cents apiece (generous), the first drive cost you ~$500 to process while the second cost you ~$20. I chose the numbers to make the math easy here so it makes the per-tiff EDD vendor look much (extremely?) less oenerous than they usually are. But it does illustrate the point: in this example you have a cost difference that you ranges on a factor of 25 from the low to the high end. In reality the low and high ends of the range are bigger numbers by a factor of about 100, subject to actual volume. Even if I can convince you, the lead attorney on my case team, that we should do this. You have to go back to our client and sell the idea to them. Not an easy thing to do when you have to explain that it could cost $2,000 or $50,000 and we really can't say which or where in the middle it will be with any level of confidence.

    I've seen better men than me get burned with this one.

    I wish one of the MBAs at one or two of the better EDD processing shops would get smart enough to convince their guys that they should find the sweet spot as soon as they can with respect to per-GB-to-be-processed pricing. The magic number is there and they'll make out like bandits on the "smaller" jobs, and lose some on the "big" ones. But that said, I can go to my case team and say, 10 GB will cost $20,000 to prcoess, lets say. Makes it easier for me to recommend an EDD vendor, easier to sell the concept and easier to get the client to buy into it as well -- saving billable time, and money. And guess what? I'd steer as much business as I could to those shops to the exclusion of the per tiff priced ones for that reason alone, all other factors and product quality being equal. Why? You guys (attorneys) hate surprises, in my experience. :) As for the audio stuff, my boss worked a big case back in the 90's that was the template for my comment on the problem of audio. Fortunately, I haven't seen one that was that instense on digial audio myself. If I ever do, I hope speach to text algorithms have matured enough to be implemented in useful software solutions when then time comes. Hopefully that was a fluke, but unfortunately we don't live in a world where you can just hope something like that doesn't happen and be caught unprepared.

  11. Re:WRONG on New Rules Proposed on Electronic Evidence · · Score: 1
    Native format production would certainly comply with the letter and spirit of the proposed rule changes. However, I think it might be equally feasible (and desirable) to produce in TIFF/PDF with an underlying (searchable) database containing all metadata. The message, I think, is that you have to preserve and produce the underlying metadata. How you do that (native form, database) is up to you to do (and, if necessary, you have to convince the court and the other side that you've been reasonable in complying).
    You are absolutely correct except for one thing. The feasibility bit. It is almost always more feasible to go the tiffing route with word processing files, photographs (a lot of which start out in the target format to begin with) and other types of electronic data that most closely approximate their paper analogues. That said, however, it is nearly impossible to get an acurate appoximation of a large relational database, certain CAD/CAM drawings and audio files (think voicemail here) to tiff and still have any meaningful resemblance to the original. And that's the problem with setting standards for this stuff: the devil is in the details. Audio files can be particularly tricky because this mode of communication has experienced the same increase in volume and velocity as other forms of electronic communication, yet it's even worse because there is no efficient way to use the new electronic reviewing tools to review them, most of the focus being on text processing and more recently the elucidation of relationships between documents based on characteristics and patterns peculiar to a particular collection of documents; Synthetics is a searching-technology example of this. Very cool, very powerful, and also very expensive. And also only useful with text-based electronic evidence. Cases that require review of a lot of audio are still more or less tied to handing a few first year lawyers a set of headphones and making them listen to every bit of every voicemail and transcribing it, which is arguably even more expensive depending on the size of the collection in question.

    I think they're leaning toward native because it allows for more freedom to accomodate the things like I mentioned above (that can't be "frozen" effectively) without creating undue burden on the party that has to produce them. And processing them is very expensive, for a large volume of materials, it's even more expensive to print them to paper than to tiff. Native format review done right can be done a little cheaper perhaps, and sometimes it is the only way.

    The proposed revisions don't by any means remove the static-image/database-of-metadata model as an option, as best as I can tell, however. Take a look at the proposed revision for 37(a). It states clearly:

    Unless the parties agree or the court otherwise orders (emphasis mine) ... a party who produces documents for inspection shall produce them as they are kept in the usual course of business.
    In the case of e-mail, parties will almost always agree to produce them in a static format, often for a particular date range, because it's just about completely impractical to review them natively due to the large number of duplicates; SPAM; the general signal to noise ratio inherent to e-mail; and a host of other reasons, not least of which being the messaging platform in question which often makes native review by a third party impractical and expensive if not impossible. And this, of course, says nothing of backups from the mail server.

    Great response, BTW. :)

  12. Re:Destroying evidence? on New Rules Proposed on Electronic Evidence · · Score: 1
    This would only be the case once litigation is initiated, however. The communications aren't protected until they have some potential to become evidence. It wouldn't against the law for a company, or an individual for that matter, have a policy which formatted the storage media with ones and zeros for all of their systems every evening if they wanted to.

    According to the proposed 37(f) this would be just fine and you would not be destroying evidence (and this is the key word to watch here). I'll leave it up to you to decide how practical such a rentention policy would be for anyone, let alone a large company with several thousand employees at multiple sites.

  13. Re:1 step forward, 1 step back? on New Rules Proposed on Electronic Evidence · · Score: 1
    Short retention would basically force The Man to have some manners, as just showing up with a van full of goons and confiscating everything won't do them much good. If they want data on someone, they'll have to have a proper order that said data on said someone over a certain period be kept.
    Spot on, my friend. And to expand on that thought, this is why solid document management and retention policies are so important. Lack of awareness of the legal risks; and the fact they're so difficult to construct in a way that isn't seen as a hindrance to the biz ops folks, are the two principal reasons that the vast majority of businesses don't have them. Of the ones that do, I'd guess they're not internally enforced about as often as they are.

    Dumb, from a business standpoint. Especially if your business is something on the regulatory fringe.

  14. Re:Not Entirely Bad on New Rules Proposed on Electronic Evidence · · Score: 1
    Yes, but that would come from Congress and would not be embedded in the Fed. Rules of Civ. Proc. by the committee which maintains them.

  15. Re:WRONG on New Rules Proposed on Electronic Evidence · · Score: 3, Insightful
    To expand a bit: if your looking for a corporate consiracy, look to lobbying and legislation and how they are related. If there is to be a double standard, it will be found in the laws passed by Congress.

    To say it would be embedded into the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure would be sort of like blaming a programming language or its compiler for viruses that are written using it.

  16. WRONG on New Rules Proposed on Electronic Evidence · · Score: 4, Informative
    Wistleblowing and copyright infrigement are not issues specifically covered by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

    These rules only cover "standards", if you will, for how evidence is collected in the discovery process; how it is traded back and forth (produced) between plaintiff and defendent counsel; rules for deposing witnesses; and most importantly, in this case, standards for how the production materials are formatted. That is what is being addressed here.

    Currently the Rules of Civil (and Criminal for that matter) Procedure are designed to govern how cases are litigated in a paper world. Electronic evidence (and a virtual lack of standards for it) have created a host of problems for this antiquated process that is by orders of magnitude more difficult to deal with than was ever previously enountered in the paper world. Whereas before, when someone got sued their paper files would get taken. The files were static objects. Maybe a few people would get a copy of a particular document and it was much easier to determine who the recipients were. Now that more material is traded back and forth through e-mail and other means, this happens on a much faster pace, it's much easier to spray copies around to a variety of recipients and much harder to keep track of who had what and when they had it.

    Also, electronic communications will keep several revisions of a document which may have been through away and not retained in the paper world. This frequently happens without the custodian's knowledge more often than not, unless a very deliberate attempt to implement, maintain and enforce a document management and retention policy. Indeed, the electronic communications revolution has made the proverbial smoking guns much more numerous than in the past by it's very nature.

    Volume and velocity of communication is only one part of the problem. File formats are just as big a piece of the puzzle. Word vs. Word Perfect documents being an example. If electronic documents are not properly handled you can easily be accused of spoliation of evidence, with or without any malintent. By simply converting a WordPerfect document to Word format, it can change pagination, formatting, and destroy metadata that the recipient wasn't even aware existed. Having "exact" copies, traceable back to their source (chain of custody) of a document as it was produced to you "in the normal course of business (to use the vernacular)" is extremely important if you intend to use all or part of it as evidence. This is (on of) a lawyer's worst nightmares.

    These are just a few of the problems relating to the federal rules and electronic documents. Outside of the Sedona Conference, these have largely been unaddressed up until very recently. It looks like the Rules of Civil Procedure are going to standardize on production of documents in native format. One school of thought has been to take the native documents and print them to a static format for production purposes (such as tiff, pdf, jpg). Looks like their shying away from that approach and leaning toward the "native format" position both have their advantages and potential pitfalls, some of which I outlined above.

    Anyway, in response to your post and in summary, you shouldn't read so much into Microsoft having an opinion here. Their opinion on the matter isn't out of line with most other businesses in this regard, nor is it necessarily bad for the little guy either. This is a double edged sword and it is as sharp on one side as it is on the other. If anyone will "win" out of this, it will be trial lawyers, in the sense that you will need to make sure you have counsel that is accutely aware of the electronic discovery universe and how to take advantage of it while making sure you don't get cut.

    This is simply a badly needed revision of the rules that will make it more fair for plaintiffs and defendants alike. I wouldn't anything more into it than that.

  17. Re:It will never see the light of market shelves . on The Cure for Cancer Might be: HIV · · Score: 3, Informative
    This isn't using the virus in the same a way a vaccine does, which is to ilicit a response to unmodified, killed virus by your immune system.

    This genes that cause immunosuppression in unmodified HIV have been removed in this case and replaced with something else that sepcifically targets the cancer cells themselves irrespective of your natural immune reponse.

    When they prefect the "targeting" bit with cell receptor proteins, I'm wondering what the next step will be. Maybe have the vector modify the genes in the cancer cell to stop producing the homones that cause unrestricted tumor growth? Or perhaps hijack the cancer cell to produce something like the chemicals used in a chemotherapy regimin within your own body; perhaps in smaller, less toxic doses that naturally taper down as the cancer cell count abates? Who knows?

  18. Re:Must Read on Geeks in Management? · · Score: 1
    Sorry. My report who catches the oh-so important distinctions like spelling mistakes and improper word substitutions, like report for rapport, is taking a break. Thanks for subbing as my secretary in the meantime. ;-)

    Pay more attention to the big picture and, maybe someday, you can have a secretary to fix your typos too.

  19. Re:Must Read on Geeks in Management? · · Score: 1
    I haven't read this, but the title hints at one of the best skills a good manager should cultivate: office politics and good report with your staff and your peers are extremely important to succeeding.

    One thing I've noticed that my geek-manager does very well is recognizing that there is value in almost every type of employee. Some people are clock punchers; the advantage this type of person offers is dependability. You can count on steady, consistent work from them. On the converse, they will probably resist putting in extra time and effort for you. Fine, get what you can from them. Some people are ambitious and agressive (me). Maybe they hate punching a clock and feel constrained by it (me again). So maybe you let them have some extra freedom with their schedule because you know they will put in a lot of extra effort, intensity and time in trade. They will gladly put in the extra effort you need sometimes as consideration.

    In short, there is room for every type of worker in the workplace. Try to find ways to make them all as happy as possible to best exploit their individual strengths. It's all about working with what you've got. In the case of a manager, you've also got the traits of people below you at your disposal, in addition to your individual ones.

  20. Re:Light hand? on Michael Powell to Leave FCC · · Score: 1
    Maybe. Maybe not.

    I'd be mourning his stepping down right along with you if he'd not been so draconian in regulating morally correct (as he and his party tend to think) broadcasting content. If he'd simply let Janet's boobies flop where they may and Howard spew what he will, I'd be inclined to pronounce him as close to perfect as we'd likely get in an FCC Chairman.

    As it is, he's just another paper doll cutout from the GOP.

  21. Light hand? on Michael Powell to Leave FCC · · Score: 1
    Can someone explain to me how one would have a regulatory 'light hand' while still collecting 'some of the largest indecency fines against broadcasters?'

    Maybe it's just me, but these two statements seem to be more than a little incompatible with one another.

  22. Re:Too Bad, I was looking fwd to Tivo w/ cable tun on Has TiVo's Fate Been Sealed? · · Score: 1
    Interest you mentioned MythTV. I was thinking the same thing and started googling for info on someone having hacked a Tivo and running Myth on it.

    Didn't see anything (though I didn't try very hard) but one or two mailing list postings about if it was done already or not. I saw one speculating it would be difficult, perhaps, due to the low clockspeed ppc CPU Tivo uses and the 16 MB RAM.

    I'm wondering if we won't see a lot more work for Myth on ppc in the near future.

    The killer thing with Tivo imho is the interface and the remote. The underlying code for the interface would be a great addition to MythTV.

    I'd bet you're right though, they'll go bankrupt and someone (Comcast? Microsoft?) will probably buy up their assets for the trademark and shelve it... or worse, put in more DRM and market it under the Tivo trade name. I don't know which would be worse.

  23. Too Bad, I was looking fwd to Tivo w/ cable tuner on Has TiVo's Fate Been Sealed? · · Score: 1
    This will probably arrive far too late to save them if it ever makes it market anyway, at this point.

    Even if it does, they still would have the problem of selling it in any meaningful volume. They'd basically have the same problems marketing something with the cable tuner thrown in as they have now without it.

    Oh well, back to getting a MythTV box together.

    Since they're screwed anyway, I wonder if they'll just say fuggit and let you move whatever you want to onto and off of the Tivo box while they're in their death throws. It'd be a nice way for them to say goodbye to their loyal customer base while giving the content guys the bird on the way down.

  24. What does Darwin say will happen to newspapers... on Future of Internet News? · · Score: 1
    Duh. The same thing Darwin says about anything else. It will adapt or die out. In the case of newspapers, radio, and TV news that would translate to, how do they embrace the new medium?

    The really interesting question isn't so much how, but which ones embrace it, and how many of them will embrace it embrace it in time, and to what extent?

  25. Re:Danger-Sensitive on Wireless Bluetooth Sunglasses · · Score: 1

    Of course, this all begs the question, why would you need bluetooth to do it?