What most posters fail to recognize is that tax credits and federal subsidies are part of virtually all new energy projects. Wind? Solar? Batteries? Biomass? Energy storage? Nuclear? All receive numerous subsidies. The Production Tax Credit, or PTC, available to most "green" generation resources, is absolutely critical to making these resources economic. Without the PTC, wind and solar would cost consumers substantially more -- much further above the 2-8 cent per kilowatt-hour premium over conventional coal and gas generation.
And forget about the "subsidies" available to oil and gas, including military build up, nominal fees for access to public land, etc. My only point is that people need to can the outrage that GM is subsidizing the Volt. We do it every day for public policy reasons, and frankly, there's nothing wrong with that.
And lastly, one personnel note about the cost of new alternatively fueled vehicles, including the Prius. No matter how high gas prices go, it is rarely going to make purely economic sense to buy a hybrid/electric car. Not only do they sell for approximately a 20 percent premium, but there's also an added risk factor of purchasing a relatively new concept vehicle without the decades of experience that we've had with other cars. People focusing on this miss the point.
I bought my car because I love it and wanted to be part of making the world a better place. It's cool and the most technologically advanced mass production car on the road. It drives well, and still makes me happy when I cruise to a stoplight and the engine shuts off. This is about love; not dollars and cents.
(1) A business operating under a license issued by the government;
(2) The business offers to provide non-discriminatory service to the public; and
(3) The service provided is considered a "public convenience and necessity".
According to Wikipedia (my Black's is at home):
"A common carrier must further demonstrate to the regulator that it is "fit, willing and able" to provide those services for which it is granted authority. Common carriers typically transport persons or goods according to defined and published routes, time schedules and rate tables upon the approval of regulators."
Common carrier is also often used in the telecom sector to describe a similar service, whereby the cell phone company (for example) offers you access to the publicly owned radio spectrum according to a rate schedule.
In short -- nothing about Yelp relates in any way to common carrier status.
Please don't use technical terms you don't understand in posts without doing some research first. I don't go around flining technical jargon about compiling techniques, why do people insist on trying to use (or should I say misuse) tecnical legal terms???
The Guild may actually have the more "just" position. Authors, with the exception of that rare 1 percent of best sellers, are not particularly well compensated. They do it because they love the profession and have some uncomfortable compulsion that makes them write, despite a average hourly salary measure in pennies.
Currently, a mid-level author has several payment streams potentially -- one from the books themselves and one from audio recordings. The Kindle threatens to eliminate one of those payment streams. Will the world really be better off if writers get paid less than they already are?
I think the Guild is doing exactly what any membership organization should do -- advocate for its members.
... than techies trying to play lawyer are lawyers who dismiss the contributions of their technical staff.
For the record IAAL (though not your lawyer) working in house at a company. Our "techies" are engineers, builders, power system analysts, traders, etc. Another word for these people is "clients." The legal department exists to further the interest of the company and enable our techies to do business. Sure, criminal prosecutions are different than commercial contracts, etc., but the principle is the same -- the lawyer exists to aid his client in getting the best possible deal. I think the difference in outlook often results from the fact that criminal defendants tend not to be those in society best equipped to aid in their own defense, but good attorneys do their best to bring their clients along.
If fact, the best thing about being a lawyer is helping your clients execute our common goals. Really, lawyers really provide the same service as good tech support -- except we help clients navigate the twisted corridors of the law instead of technology or computer code.
The judges in the small county I used to work in (Charles County, MD) were notoriously tough on cocaine dealers. The neighboring jurisdiction was so overwhemled with drugs that drug dealers in that county were typically given much lighter sentences. The disparity was so great that smart dealers refused to deal in Charles County. Instead, they would arrange deals next to the border without actually ever crossing into Charles Co.
So when the Charles County Sheriff's Office wanted to mount a major drug sting, they moved the "Welcome to Charles County" sign back a hundred feet or so, and would arrange deals just across the border. We put away a lot of bad people for a long time. Brilliant.
Got my G1 in the mail the other day. Snazzy interface, good basic functionality, easy to use. Very stylish.
Battery life doesn't seem to be stellar, but the great aps and easy installation make up for it.
Love the smooth keyboard -- which includes a number bar!
The integrated GPS is kick ass.
The only downside is that the network is a little spotty -- but I knew that when I got it.
Prior to the G1, the only options were to continue pining for an Iphone to replace my Blackberry or pay the termination fee with my existing carrier and then switch. Now I'm glad I made the switch and didn't blow the money on terminating my existing T-mobile service.
That's why I stated that ideally, it should boot in the background. But even the ability to do basic work and then do a full boot on my own time (meeting, whatever) would be beneficial. Clearly: a crappy implementation will not lure anyone. But if done well? I can see this being a major draw.
I suspect you've never worked in a law firm or another business the bills on a minute-to-minute basis. When I was with the law firm, every minute you billed during the day was a minute you did not have to bill at night. It's a devilish way to live, but it's not uncommon. In short: I billed every second I was at work because I wanted to get home before midnight. (Hence why I left.)
I am probably the least techincal person on/. But I like geeky girls, so I keep up on the news. I know a lot of you are saying "big deal" or "it's been done before" -- but I respectfully disagree.
This would make me upgrade. I think it would make a lot of businesses upgrade. Especially if it would allow you to write or check email or even browse as the full functionality is loading in the background.
To give you a sense of why I think business would love this: Imagine a law firm with 300 lawyers. Those lawyers probably wastes on average of between 1 to 2 minutes each morning booting Windows.* (Since there are no known lawfirms that use Macs or Linux, it's a moot point whether other systems already do this.)
300 Lawyers * 2 minutes = 600 minutes or 10 hours per day of wasted legal time.
At a low hourly rate of $200 per hour, that is $2,000 per day in lost revenues. Given that a license costs, what -- $100 dollars per attorney? It would pay for itself in.... 15 days...? (Did I do that right?)
* And note that for me, boot up time probably cost me far more than 2 minutes per day. You sit down at the computer to work, sit while it boots, get distracted, and come back 10 minutes later. I know it's silly -- but when you are in a profession where every six increment is billed, this adds up.
So only good (i.e., skillfully done) parodies or satire should be protected? Who exactly makes that decision? Sure, this kid's writing sucks -- should that entitle him/her to less constitutional protection?
Yes and no. Coal plants are actually less size-dependant than you might think. The technologies tend to be similar, and even most 1,000+ MW coal plants are really just a series of 300-800 MW units within a shared space. As the article says:
In an initial three-year testing program, the Schwarze Pumpe pilot plant is expected to assess how components function together and exactly what proportion of carbon dioxide can actually be separated. Using the information gained, Vattenfall plans to scale up to a 300-to-500-megawatt demonstration plant by 2015 and to 1,000-megawatt commercial plants after 2020.
So they recognize what you are saying and have an actual timeline for addressing the issue.
Lastly, I just want to point out that coal plants are rather like vintage cars. Just as a do it yourself mechanics find working on an older car easier than working on a new computer car.
All these posts about farting planets are very amusing, but should be moderated "funny," not informative.
Companies in the United States currently have billions of cubic feet of natural gas and other gases into long-term underground storage facilities. In fact, anyone familiar with the working end of the natural gas business will be happy to spend hours explaining how it works. The Department of Energy -- http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/ngcapacity/ngcapacity.pdf has some info on the practice.
Put simply: gas underground moves very, very slowly. The diffusion rate can be measured, and while some gas will inevitably escape, the amount lost can be measured very precisely (and accurately).
Unless we as a society are willing to suffer blackouts, coal and other fossil fuel power plants will be around for years. Heck, even Al Gore says a minimum of 10 years, and I personally (as an energy industry guy) think it's going to be a lot longer than that.
If you accept that there is a man-made climate crisis coming, then storage of CO2 is an excellent short term fix to reducing emissions as we move away from a carbon-based economy. Whether you think of this as "short term" storage or "long-term" storage depends on your outlook. Is 100 years long or short? Seen from a geological timeline, it's laughably short. Looked at as a means of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere starting today -- it's a great first step.
This article fails to address anything meaningful. It has no facts, no helpful statistics, and no meaningful analysis. The real questions are:
1. What are the touch screen statistics in the United States? What share does Apple hold domestically?
2. Is there some reason why Apple is not competing in the international market? Is Apple having their lunch eaten by companies that are "household names" in Asia, or is the product inferrior? What is Apple's penetration in those markets over the past year?
3. How do these numbers change if were to include things like Black Berrys and other "smart" phone without touch screens?
4. Why are 80 percent of touch screen phones marketed in Asia? Why aren't the touch screens being created for the Asian market showing up here? I find it hard to believe that ease of displaying Asian fonts is the only reason. Is there some lack of American infrastructure? Lack of interest from American consumers?
As someone who loves bleeding edge technology, I'm frustrated by the lack of options in the US and find the whole international marketing strategy wonderfully interesting. But this article is a slow boat of fail because it lacks any analysis or insight.
I get a little tired of hearing about how the price has to drop orders of magnitude before SSD is viable. Shop around a little people!
I ended up buying a refurb Dell laptop for around $1000 with a 64 gig SSD. Was it the latest and greatest? Nope. But it was about $150/200 more than a similarly priced computer with a traditional drive (which of course, was larger). Since the only significant problems I've ever had with my two prior Dell laptops (admittedly a small sample) involved the hard drive, going with the SSD (especially when you include the "cool" factors -- both temperature and nerd-ism) was an easy decision.
But the point is that as SSDs become more prevalent, they become available at cheaper prices. I'm sure that as the Intel drives are rolled out, the "obsolete" drives currently on the market will continue to fall in price and become available to bottom-dwelling cheap-o-s like me who may not be able to justify $1000, but can rationalize $200 without a whole lot of difficulty.
My 2002 Prius probably cost me more than a comparable non-hybrid car would have. But I love my hybrid -- and the reasons have nothing to do with economics and everything with being a nerd.
1. I drive the most advanced and highly engineered car on the road today (well, other than other hybrids). The engineering in my Prius is far more advanced than anything BMW or Mercedes throws into their cars.
2. I can drive silently on electric power only. Do you have any idea how cool that is? The freak'n car shuts off at traffic lights! If I go gently on the gas, I can drive 30/40 MPH on electric only and the car is SILENT!!! So freak'n cool. I've been dreaming of electric cars since I was a kid -- and I now have one (sorta)!
3. I feel good about having supported a fledgling environmentally beneficial technology with my dollars. My purchasing decision in 2002 played a part in revolutionizing the car culture in this country and the world.
4. Nerdy chicks dig Priuses.
5. I drive a damned reliable and cheap to operate automobile that I enjoy driving.
In short -- economics was largely irrelevant to my decision. Instead of buying a sports car (also generally an economically irrational decision), I decided to go the hybrid route. Actually, when I analyzed purchasing the car, I conservatively assumed that I would get 60,000 miles from the car before it started falling apart or incurred expensive repairs. I also assumed that the car would have no re-sale value, as I expected the technology would be largely obsolete by the time I went to sell it. Even with these "worst-case" scenarios, I bought the car because it was worth it to me to be part of the revolution.
Of course, I'm now well over 60,000 miles and have had no troubles, but that's not really the point, is it?
The point is that there is no legal difference between (1) the scenario where one person takes each of the laws, strips the formatting, and creates their own on-line data base and (2) the scenario where 1,000 people each take a single law and copy it into an on-line database. Since there is no copyright in the laws themselves, anyone can copy any number of the laws without violating copyright. Thus, your Fair Use analysis is irrelevant and unnecessary.
The State's point is (or at least should be) that anyone is free to copy the laws and create their own data base. However, the State is not required to provide easily formatted electronic copies of the laws, or automatic notification of updates. Without paying for the State's "copyrighted" service, you are stuck doing the work yourself.
Moreover, the scenario you posit is actually the worst possible scenario for the public. What you propose would be worthless to any serious user of laws, since no user of the voluntary database could be assured that the database was complete or accurate. Nothing would be more damaging to a legal case or research paper than quoting an out-of-date or just plain wrong law.
I think you're slightly mis-applying the Fair Use Doctrine. Fair Use essentially covers copyright violations that the government has said are permitted. That's very different than whether the material is copyright-able at all. Here, the question seems to be whether the compilation of laws produced by the State is subject to copyright. There is no question that you can use the actual text of the laws, since it's not the law that's covered; instead, it's the compilation that's covered.
There are some serious misunderstandings of what is going on here. As discussed below, the law is clear that there is no legal right to copyright the text of a law. However, an entity can copyright the presentation and organization of those laws. As I understand what is actually happening here (notwithstanding the boneheaded and ignorant quote from the State of California spokesperson):
1. The State of California provides selected vendors with up-to-date and easy-to-reproduce electronic versions of State laws in exchange for a payment.
2. The vendor then formats and compiles these laws, and includes them in its proprietary database. Lexis-Nexis, the vendor in this case, also provides the public with free access to a limited version of its database, while providing enhanced access through a pay service.
3. In exchange for the payment, the State of California agrees not to provide the same service it provides to Lexis, Westlaw, etc. for free.
What the legal gadfly here is really protesting is the sale by the State of California of copies of its laws that are in a usable form. Anyone is free to comb the public records maintained by the State Legislature and compile its own California Code. These documents are all publicly available and posted as soon as they are passed by the Legislature. What the Legislature provides, however, is not easy to read and not organized in a particularly sensible manner. The State essentially provides the service of compiling these laws and sells that compilation to Lexis. It is this compilation that the State is claiming a copyright on -- not the text of the laws themselves.
In the most famous Supreme Court case on this topic, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), the Justices held that no one can hold a copyright in a particular phone number. However, a company can collect tens of thousands of phone numbers, organize them alphabetically, and then claim a copyright in the finished product (i.e., the phone book). As the court in Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress International, Inc. describes the holding of the Feist case and subspequent precedent:
The statute excludes from
copyright protection ideas, procedures, processes, systems methods
of operation, or information in the public domain. . . . If an
idea is susceptible to only one form of expression, the merger
doctrine applies and Sec. 102(b) excludes the expression from the
Copyright Act. As the Supreme Court has explained it, this
"idea/expression dichotomy strike[s] a definitional balance between
the First Amendment and the Copyright Act by permitting free
communication of facts while still protecting an author's
expression."
What the author of the TFA did get right is that there is no right to copyright the text of particular laws. The court in Veeck did an excellent job describing the history of attempts to copyright laws, so I simply quote it below:
Excluding "the law" from the purview of the copyright
statutes dates back to this nation's earliest period. In 1834, the
Supreme Court interpreted the first federal copyright laws and
unanimously held that "no reporter has or can have any copyright in
the written opinions delivered by this Court. .." Wheaton v.
Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591, 668 (1834). The case arose when one
of the Court's official reporters was asserting copyright
protection for his annotated compilations of Supreme Court
opinions. The Court distinguished between the reporter's
individual work and the Justices' opinions. The Court's rejection
of copyright for judicial opinions paralleled the principle --
recognized by attorneys for both parties -- that "[s]tatutes were
never copyrighted."(3) Based on the acknowledged and incontestable
analogy with legislative acts, Wheaton held unanimously that "the
law" in the form of judicial opinions may not be copyrighted.
I completely disagree with your assertion that a company would not self-report. As a compliance officer with a major international corp (albeit in a different field), we are often faced with the difficult question of whether to self-report a potential violation. We are generally faced with three options when a potential violation arises:
1. Self-report the violation, fix the problem/install appropriate controls, get the "credit" for active compliance, take the medicine and move on.
2. Document the potential violation internally, fix the problem/install the appropriate controls, establish the paper record documenting the potential violation, but explaining why it is arguably not a violation or that there is no affirmative duty to self-report.
3. Actively attempt to conceal the violation or ignore a clear legal requirement to self-report.
Pop quiz! Which of these three "options" could lead to massive fines by the appropriate governmental regulator, share-holder lawsuits, top managers being fired and even the destruction of your company?
Anybody who thinks a potential release of information could not bite you in the ass needs to imagine the type of risk/reward analysis the company goes through. I can easily envision the following scenario. Company loses critical personal information. Company actively hides the loss and/or actively ignores legal obligation to self-report. The thief attempts to use the stolen credit card numbers/whatever. Thief is caught. Thief tells police where he acquired the information. Police investigate the breach. Internal emails/IMs reveal that the company knew about the breach but did nothing. Company faces multiple class action lawsuits from: (1) the people harmed by the breach of their personal information; and (2) shareholders who should have been informed in the quarterly SEC-required disclosures that the Company faced a potential liability.
Now some fly-by-night company might reach a different cost-benefit analysis. But any large company should immediately recognize that the potential harm of trying to cover something like this up. When you're talking about a bank or large medical company? Would you as CEO or internal compliance officer risk millions or even billions on something that is so likely to become discovered? Even if the chances are 10,000-to-1 against the breach ever coming to light? Frankly, the rewards are simply not worth the risk.
HVDC transmission lines remain economical, in terms of electrical losses, to a distance of about 4,000-6,000 miles. The longest currently operating singe transmission lines in the world are around 1,200 miles. Losses are not zero, but for the most part are relatively negligible.
"Economical" is a relative term. The type of DC lines you are discussing cost a lot of money. Realistic estimates are in the range of $1 to $2 million per mile -- not including the years-long battles that accompany the siting of any major transmission facilities.
Again, not suggesting that it's a bad idea -- but a 1,000 mile transmission line would cost in the billions and we (as energy consumers) need to be prepared to see these costs reflected in our electric rates.
But all of these comments on the legitimacy of global warming/cooling/climate change all ignore one very simple, inescapable fact: Most "carbon-neutral" energy forms can be generated locally. Windmills use the wind in your area. Solar panels use the sunlight from your roof. This is also true for geothermal, ocean-wave, and bio-fueled energy. All can be generated locally, with local resources.
Au contraire. You are failing to distinguish between utility-scale and non-utility scale generation. Distributed generation, micro grids, etc. are all fine ideas -- but the renewable component simply does not produce the amount of electricity, on a reliable basis, necessary to meet electric demand.
In fact, the major problem with renewables (other than their intermittent nature) is that large-scale wind farms and solar generation facilities are located in the middle of nowhere. Getting that power to load (i.e., users of electricity) is hugely exprensive and a real engineering challenge. Don't forget that our electric system in this country is still relatively primative and was designed to by integrated utilities to serve their own load in carefuly defined geographic areas. The system was not designed to transmit power hundreds of miles across the systems of multiple utilities. It's not as simple as just flipping a switch.
According to the primary wind energy trade association, the top give states in terms of wind capacity are: (1) North Dakota, (2) Texas (predominantly rural west Texas), (3) Kansas, (4) South Dakota, and (5) Montana (followed by such densely populated states as Nebraska, Wyoming, and Oklahoma). Even AWEA states that wind can only be used to provide 20 percent of the electricity we need -- and that ignores the need to have back-up generation on the days the wind does not blow.
Two major initiatives -- one in Texas and one in California -- give some sense of the location problem. The Texas energy regulators "CREZ" program is planning to spend over $6 billion to build upgrades necessary to build new transmisison lines to get wind to market. This is because the wind in Texas is largely located in the western positions of the state, while demand is predominantly to the east. This $6 billion is money that will eventually be paid by Texas consumers in the form of higher electricity prices.
The California problem is similar. California is requesting regulatory permission to spend billion in upgrades to the transmission system to interconnect (i.e., hook up a generator to the transmission system) what they call in California, Locationally Constrained Resources. These include most of the major wind and large-scale solar resources in the state. The California Public Utility Commission has a nice summary of the program. In California, the generators pay the initial costs of interconnection; however, these costs are then socialized to all energy users in California over 5 years. Again, the ultimate cost to California consumers is billions of dollars. Look at the large-scale solar projects scheduled to be built by OptiSolar for PG&E -- they are largely in the middle of nowhere.
Please not that I am NOT arguing that this is a bad investment or that it should not be done. But switching to renewables is going to be a long and economically painful process. People have to understand that no existing renewable resource, or even combination of resources, is reliable enough to supply the enormous amounts of power we consumer every day. Even if we built enough wind and solar *capacity* (i.e., theoretical ability to generate power) to power the entire nation, we would need to maintain as backup enough coal/nuclear/hydropower/natural gas to kic
Let's not ignore the circumstances here -- the Governor has directed this move as a political stunt in an attempt to force the Democratic legislature to agree to his proposed budget. Harming every day California State workers by lowering their salaries to minimum wage is a cheap trick and a disgraceful attempt to win political points.
Suppose replacing salaries is a trivial programming task. Would you accept a job to change everyone's salary to minimum wage? Including yourself? What the State Controller is doing is in the best tradition of civil disobediance. He is an elected official answering to over 12 million California votes.
He believes he has been issued a direct order by another elected official that he believes is illegal. Rather than trigger a constitutional crisis by outright refusing to follow the order, he's taken the very principle stand that it is impossible *cough* to enter these changes in a timely manner. Lowering salaries may not quite be the equivalent of committing a war crime -- but I don't see the "just following orders" excuse as valid. The Controller's sole constitutional reason for being is to manage the finances of the State, including the payroll system.
Like government or not -- you do not improve government services by vindictively striking out at rank and file workers. The governor may not suffer if he doesn't receive a weekly paycheck, but I guarantee you that lots of others will. That's why what the Controller is doing is laudable -- even if it stretches credulity on the programming end.
With respect, I disagree. Law firms, particularly "prestigious" corporate firms, are notoriously risk-averse and likely would not hire someone who had "achieved" net notoriety, no matter how smart or otherwise qualified. I would assume that most potential hires are vetted at the least through a google search, if not a more detailed Lexis investigation.
If you were a blue chip firm, would you take the risk of hiring one of these women? Imagine your multi-million dollar client does a search on your new associate's name -- even just looking for phone number -- and comes up with a sordid sex story instead. Wow.... there's a real risk that you have just damaged the relationship with that client. Just as one example -- look at the Department of Justice's search on potential attorney hires. Now the DOJ was illegally considering political affiliation, not net fame, but the principle is the same: defamatory net stories would likely have prohibited these women from being considered.
That big firms are risk averse is hardly surprising. In fact, risk-aversion/paranoia is what -- in theory anyway -- is what makes an $x00 an hour lawyer worth paying for.
Note: this is also why I left a wanna-be big firm after a couple years. Who wants to work in an environment like that? But certaintly these women have the right to experience the hell of Big Firm life for themselves, and should not have had their careers permanently damaged because of a couple of idiots decided to slander them for fun.
Slashdot Mirror
What most posters fail to recognize is that tax credits and federal subsidies are part of virtually all new energy projects. Wind? Solar? Batteries? Biomass? Energy storage? Nuclear? All receive numerous subsidies. The Production Tax Credit, or PTC, available to most "green" generation resources, is absolutely critical to making these resources economic. Without the PTC, wind and solar would cost consumers substantially more -- much further above the 2-8 cent per kilowatt-hour premium over conventional coal and gas generation.
And forget about the "subsidies" available to oil and gas, including military build up, nominal fees for access to public land, etc. My only point is that people need to can the outrage that GM is subsidizing the Volt. We do it every day for public policy reasons, and frankly, there's nothing wrong with that.
And lastly, one personnel note about the cost of new alternatively fueled vehicles, including the Prius. No matter how high gas prices go, it is rarely going to make purely economic sense to buy a hybrid/electric car. Not only do they sell for approximately a 20 percent premium, but there's also an added risk factor of purchasing a relatively new concept vehicle without the decades of experience that we've had with other cars. People focusing on this miss the point.
I bought my car because I love it and wanted to be part of making the world a better place. It's cool and the most technologically advanced mass production car on the road. It drives well, and still makes me happy when I cruise to a stoplight and the engine shuts off. This is about love; not dollars and cents.
The basic elements of common carrier status are:
(1) A business operating under a license issued by the government;
(2) The business offers to provide non-discriminatory service to the public; and
(3) The service provided is considered a "public convenience and necessity".
According to Wikipedia (my Black's is at home):
"A common carrier must further demonstrate to the regulator that it is "fit, willing and able" to provide those services for which it is granted authority. Common carriers typically transport persons or goods according to defined and published routes, time schedules and rate tables upon the approval of regulators."
Common carrier is also often used in the telecom sector to describe a similar service, whereby the cell phone company (for example) offers you access to the publicly owned radio spectrum according to a rate schedule.
In short -- nothing about Yelp relates in any way to common carrier status.
Please don't use technical terms you don't understand in posts without doing some research first. I don't go around flining technical jargon about compiling techniques, why do people insist on trying to use (or should I say misuse) tecnical legal terms???
The Guild may actually have the more "just" position. Authors, with the exception of that rare 1 percent of best sellers, are not particularly well compensated. They do it because they love the profession and have some uncomfortable compulsion that makes them write, despite a average hourly salary measure in pennies.
Currently, a mid-level author has several payment streams potentially -- one from the books themselves and one from audio recordings. The Kindle threatens to eliminate one of those payment streams. Will the world really be better off if writers get paid less than they already are?
I think the Guild is doing exactly what any membership organization should do -- advocate for its members.
... than techies trying to play lawyer are lawyers who dismiss the contributions of their technical staff.
For the record IAAL (though not your lawyer) working in house at a company. Our "techies" are engineers, builders, power system analysts, traders, etc. Another word for these people is "clients." The legal department exists to further the interest of the company and enable our techies to do business. Sure, criminal prosecutions are different than commercial contracts, etc., but the principle is the same -- the lawyer exists to aid his client in getting the best possible deal. I think the difference in outlook often results from the fact that criminal defendants tend not to be those in society best equipped to aid in their own defense, but good attorneys do their best to bring their clients along.
If fact, the best thing about being a lawyer is helping your clients execute our common goals. Really, lawyers really provide the same service as good tech support -- except we help clients navigate the twisted corridors of the law instead of technology or computer code.
Sorry if it wasn't clear: the jurisdictional boundaries remained unchanged.
Normal:
Other County ---->Drug Deals -----> Welcome to Charles County sign/jurisdictional boundary
Sting:
Other County ---->jurisdictional boundary -----> Drug Deals ------>Welcome to Charles County sign.
The jurisdictional boundary is what controls -- the sign is irrelevant.
One of my favorite law stories ever:
The judges in the small county I used to work in (Charles County, MD) were notoriously tough on cocaine dealers. The neighboring jurisdiction was so overwhemled with drugs that drug dealers in that county were typically given much lighter sentences. The disparity was so great that smart dealers refused to deal in Charles County. Instead, they would arrange deals next to the border without actually ever crossing into Charles Co.
So when the Charles County Sheriff's Office wanted to mount a major drug sting, they moved the "Welcome to Charles County" sign back a hundred feet or so, and would arrange deals just across the border. We put away a lot of bad people for a long time. Brilliant.
Um... Yeah. I have no problem with this.
Battery life doesn't seem to be stellar, but the great aps and easy installation make up for it.
Love the smooth keyboard -- which includes a number bar!
The integrated GPS is kick ass.
The only downside is that the network is a little spotty -- but I knew that when I got it.
Prior to the G1, the only options were to continue pining for an Iphone to replace my Blackberry or pay the termination fee with my existing carrier and then switch. Now I'm glad I made the switch and didn't blow the money on terminating my existing T-mobile service.
That's why I stated that ideally, it should boot in the background. But even the ability to do basic work and then do a full boot on my own time (meeting, whatever) would be beneficial. Clearly: a crappy implementation will not lure anyone. But if done well? I can see this being a major draw.
I suspect you've never worked in a law firm or another business the bills on a minute-to-minute basis. When I was with the law firm, every minute you billed during the day was a minute you did not have to bill at night. It's a devilish way to live, but it's not uncommon. In short: I billed every second I was at work because I wanted to get home before midnight. (Hence why I left.)
I am probably the least techincal person on /. But I like geeky girls, so I keep up on the news. I know a lot of you are saying "big deal" or "it's been done before" -- but I respectfully disagree.
.... 15 days...? (Did I do that right?)
This would make me upgrade. I think it would make a lot of businesses upgrade. Especially if it would allow you to write or check email or even browse as the full functionality is loading in the background.
To give you a sense of why I think business would love this: Imagine a law firm with 300 lawyers. Those lawyers probably wastes on average of between 1 to 2 minutes each morning booting Windows.* (Since there are no known lawfirms that use Macs or Linux, it's a moot point whether other systems already do this.)
300 Lawyers * 2 minutes = 600 minutes or 10 hours per day of wasted legal time.
At a low hourly rate of $200 per hour, that is $2,000 per day in lost revenues. Given that a license costs, what -- $100 dollars per attorney? It would pay for itself in
* And note that for me, boot up time probably cost me far more than 2 minutes per day. You sit down at the computer to work, sit while it boots, get distracted, and come back 10 minutes later. I know it's silly -- but when you are in a profession where every six increment is billed, this adds up.
So only good (i.e., skillfully done) parodies or satire should be protected? Who exactly makes that decision? Sure, this kid's writing sucks -- should that entitle him/her to less constitutional protection?
So they recognize what you are saying and have an actual timeline for addressing the issue.
Lastly, I just want to point out that coal plants are rather like vintage cars. Just as a do it yourself mechanics find working on an older car easier than working on a new computer car.
All these posts about farting planets are very amusing, but should be moderated "funny," not informative.
Companies in the United States currently have billions of cubic feet of natural gas and other gases into long-term underground storage facilities. In fact, anyone familiar with the working end of the natural gas business will be happy to spend hours explaining how it works. The Department of Energy -- http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/ngcapacity/ngcapacity.pdf has some info on the practice.
Put simply: gas underground moves very, very slowly. The diffusion rate can be measured, and while some gas will inevitably escape, the amount lost can be measured very precisely (and accurately).
Unless we as a society are willing to suffer blackouts, coal and other fossil fuel power plants will be around for years. Heck, even Al Gore says a minimum of 10 years, and I personally (as an energy industry guy) think it's going to be a lot longer than that.
If you accept that there is a man-made climate crisis coming, then storage of CO2 is an excellent short term fix to reducing emissions as we move away from a carbon-based economy. Whether you think of this as "short term" storage or "long-term" storage depends on your outlook. Is 100 years long or short? Seen from a geological timeline, it's laughably short. Looked at as a means of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere starting today -- it's a great first step.
This article fails to address anything meaningful. It has no facts, no helpful statistics, and no meaningful analysis. The real questions are:
1. What are the touch screen statistics in the United States? What share does Apple hold domestically?
2. Is there some reason why Apple is not competing in the international market? Is Apple having their lunch eaten by companies that are "household names" in Asia, or is the product inferrior? What is Apple's penetration in those markets over the past year?
3. How do these numbers change if were to include things like Black Berrys and other "smart" phone without touch screens?
4. Why are 80 percent of touch screen phones marketed in Asia? Why aren't the touch screens being created for the Asian market showing up here? I find it hard to believe that ease of displaying Asian fonts is the only reason. Is there some lack of American infrastructure? Lack of interest from American consumers?
As someone who loves bleeding edge technology, I'm frustrated by the lack of options in the US and find the whole international marketing strategy wonderfully interesting. But this article is a slow boat of fail because it lacks any analysis or insight.
I get a little tired of hearing about how the price has to drop orders of magnitude before SSD is viable. Shop around a little people!
I ended up buying a refurb Dell laptop for around $1000 with a 64 gig SSD. Was it the latest and greatest? Nope. But it was about $150/200 more than a similarly priced computer with a traditional drive (which of course, was larger). Since the only significant problems I've ever had with my two prior Dell laptops (admittedly a small sample) involved the hard drive, going with the SSD (especially when you include the "cool" factors -- both temperature and nerd-ism) was an easy decision.
But the point is that as SSDs become more prevalent, they become available at cheaper prices. I'm sure that as the Intel drives are rolled out, the "obsolete" drives currently on the market will continue to fall in price and become available to bottom-dwelling cheap-o-s like me who may not be able to justify $1000, but can rationalize $200 without a whole lot of difficulty.
My 2002 Prius probably cost me more than a comparable non-hybrid car would have. But I love my hybrid -- and the reasons have nothing to do with economics and everything with being a nerd.
1. I drive the most advanced and highly engineered car on the road today (well, other than other hybrids). The engineering in my Prius is far more advanced than anything BMW or Mercedes throws into their cars.
2. I can drive silently on electric power only. Do you have any idea how cool that is? The freak'n car shuts off at traffic lights! If I go gently on the gas, I can drive 30/40 MPH on electric only and the car is SILENT!!! So freak'n cool. I've been dreaming of electric cars since I was a kid -- and I now have one (sorta)!
3. I feel good about having supported a fledgling environmentally beneficial technology with my dollars. My purchasing decision in 2002 played a part in revolutionizing the car culture in this country and the world.
4. Nerdy chicks dig Priuses.
5. I drive a damned reliable and cheap to operate automobile that I enjoy driving.
In short -- economics was largely irrelevant to my decision. Instead of buying a sports car (also generally an economically irrational decision), I decided to go the hybrid route. Actually, when I analyzed purchasing the car, I conservatively assumed that I would get 60,000 miles from the car before it started falling apart or incurred expensive repairs. I also assumed that the car would have no re-sale value, as I expected the technology would be largely obsolete by the time I went to sell it. Even with these "worst-case" scenarios, I bought the car because it was worth it to me to be part of the revolution.
Of course, I'm now well over 60,000 miles and have had no troubles, but that's not really the point, is it?
Please, leave the insults at the door.
The point is that there is no legal difference between (1) the scenario where one person takes each of the laws, strips the formatting, and creates their own on-line data base and (2) the scenario where 1,000 people each take a single law and copy it into an on-line database. Since there is no copyright in the laws themselves, anyone can copy any number of the laws without violating copyright. Thus, your Fair Use analysis is irrelevant and unnecessary.
The State's point is (or at least should be) that anyone is free to copy the laws and create their own data base. However, the State is not required to provide easily formatted electronic copies of the laws, or automatic notification of updates. Without paying for the State's "copyrighted" service, you are stuck doing the work yourself.
Moreover, the scenario you posit is actually the worst possible scenario for the public. What you propose would be worthless to any serious user of laws, since no user of the voluntary database could be assured that the database was complete or accurate. Nothing would be more damaging to a legal case or research paper than quoting an out-of-date or just plain wrong law.
I think you're slightly mis-applying the Fair Use Doctrine. Fair Use essentially covers copyright violations that the government has said are permitted. That's very different than whether the material is copyright-able at all. Here, the question seems to be whether the compilation of laws produced by the State is subject to copyright. There is no question that you can use the actual text of the laws, since it's not the law that's covered; instead, it's the compilation that's covered.
You are correct! I misremembered. The principal and legal standards are correct though.
1. The State of California provides selected vendors with up-to-date and easy-to-reproduce electronic versions of State laws in exchange for a payment.
2. The vendor then formats and compiles these laws, and includes them in its proprietary database. Lexis-Nexis, the vendor in this case, also provides the public with free access to a limited version of its database, while providing enhanced access through a pay service.
3. In exchange for the payment, the State of California agrees not to provide the same service it provides to Lexis, Westlaw, etc. for free.
What the legal gadfly here is really protesting is the sale by the State of California of copies of its laws that are in a usable form. Anyone is free to comb the public records maintained by the State Legislature and compile its own California Code. These documents are all publicly available and posted as soon as they are passed by the Legislature. What the Legislature provides, however, is not easy to read and not organized in a particularly sensible manner. The State essentially provides the service of compiling these laws and sells that compilation to Lexis. It is this compilation that the State is claiming a copyright on -- not the text of the laws themselves.
In the most famous Supreme Court case on this topic, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), the Justices held that no one can hold a copyright in a particular phone number. However, a company can collect tens of thousands of phone numbers, organize them alphabetically, and then claim a copyright in the finished product (i.e., the phone book). As the court in Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress International, Inc. describes the holding of the Feist case and subspequent precedent:
What the author of the TFA did get right is that there is no right to copyright the text of particular laws. The court in Veeck did an excellent job describing the history of attempts to copyright laws, so I simply quote it below:
I completely disagree with your assertion that a company would not self-report. As a compliance officer with a major international corp (albeit in a different field), we are often faced with the difficult question of whether to self-report a potential violation. We are generally faced with three options when a potential violation arises:
1. Self-report the violation, fix the problem/install appropriate controls, get the "credit" for active compliance, take the medicine and move on.
2. Document the potential violation internally, fix the problem/install the appropriate controls, establish the paper record documenting the potential violation, but explaining why it is arguably not a violation or that there is no affirmative duty to self-report.
3. Actively attempt to conceal the violation or ignore a clear legal requirement to self-report.
Pop quiz! Which of these three "options" could lead to massive fines by the appropriate governmental regulator, share-holder lawsuits, top managers being fired and even the destruction of your company?
Anybody who thinks a potential release of information could not bite you in the ass needs to imagine the type of risk/reward analysis the company goes through. I can easily envision the following scenario. Company loses critical personal information. Company actively hides the loss and/or actively ignores legal obligation to self-report. The thief attempts to use the stolen credit card numbers/whatever. Thief is caught. Thief tells police where he acquired the information. Police investigate the breach. Internal emails/IMs reveal that the company knew about the breach but did nothing. Company faces multiple class action lawsuits from: (1) the people harmed by the breach of their personal information; and (2) shareholders who should have been informed in the quarterly SEC-required disclosures that the Company faced a potential liability.
Now some fly-by-night company might reach a different cost-benefit analysis. But any large company should immediately recognize that the potential harm of trying to cover something like this up. When you're talking about a bank or large medical company? Would you as CEO or internal compliance officer risk millions or even billions on something that is so likely to become discovered? Even if the chances are 10,000-to-1 against the breach ever coming to light? Frankly, the rewards are simply not worth the risk.
"Economical" is a relative term. The type of DC lines you are discussing cost a lot of money. Realistic estimates are in the range of $1 to $2 million per mile -- not including the years-long battles that accompany the siting of any major transmission facilities.
Again, not suggesting that it's a bad idea -- but a 1,000 mile transmission line would cost in the billions and we (as energy consumers) need to be prepared to see these costs reflected in our electric rates.
Au contraire. You are failing to distinguish between utility-scale and non-utility scale generation. Distributed generation, micro grids, etc. are all fine ideas -- but the renewable component simply does not produce the amount of electricity, on a reliable basis, necessary to meet electric demand.
In fact, the major problem with renewables (other than their intermittent nature) is that large-scale wind farms and solar generation facilities are located in the middle of nowhere. Getting that power to load (i.e., users of electricity) is hugely exprensive and a real engineering challenge. Don't forget that our electric system in this country is still relatively primative and was designed to by integrated utilities to serve their own load in carefuly defined geographic areas. The system was not designed to transmit power hundreds of miles across the systems of multiple utilities. It's not as simple as just flipping a switch.
According to the primary wind energy trade association, the top give states in terms of wind capacity are: (1) North Dakota, (2) Texas (predominantly rural west Texas), (3) Kansas, (4) South Dakota, and (5) Montana (followed by such densely populated states as Nebraska, Wyoming, and Oklahoma). Even AWEA states that wind can only be used to provide 20 percent of the electricity we need -- and that ignores the need to have back-up generation on the days the wind does not blow.
Two major initiatives -- one in Texas and one in California -- give some sense of the location problem. The Texas energy regulators "CREZ" program is planning to spend over $6 billion to build upgrades necessary to build new transmisison lines to get wind to market. This is because the wind in Texas is largely located in the western positions of the state, while demand is predominantly to the east. This $6 billion is money that will eventually be paid by Texas consumers in the form of higher electricity prices.
The California problem is similar. California is requesting regulatory permission to spend billion in upgrades to the transmission system to interconnect (i.e., hook up a generator to the transmission system) what they call in California, Locationally Constrained Resources. These include most of the major wind and large-scale solar resources in the state. The California Public Utility Commission has a nice summary of the program. In California, the generators pay the initial costs of interconnection; however, these costs are then socialized to all energy users in California over 5 years. Again, the ultimate cost to California consumers is billions of dollars. Look at the large-scale solar projects scheduled to be built by OptiSolar for PG&E -- they are largely in the middle of nowhere.
Please not that I am NOT arguing that this is a bad investment or that it should not be done. But switching to renewables is going to be a long and economically painful process. People have to understand that no existing renewable resource, or even combination of resources, is reliable enough to supply the enormous amounts of power we consumer every day. Even if we built enough wind and solar *capacity* (i.e., theoretical ability to generate power) to power the entire nation, we would need to maintain as backup enough coal/nuclear/hydropower/natural gas to kic
Let's not ignore the circumstances here -- the Governor has directed this move as a political stunt in an attempt to force the Democratic legislature to agree to his proposed budget. Harming every day California State workers by lowering their salaries to minimum wage is a cheap trick and a disgraceful attempt to win political points.
Suppose replacing salaries is a trivial programming task. Would you accept a job to change everyone's salary to minimum wage? Including yourself? What the State Controller is doing is in the best tradition of civil disobediance. He is an elected official answering to over 12 million California votes.
He believes he has been issued a direct order by another elected official that he believes is illegal. Rather than trigger a constitutional crisis by outright refusing to follow the order, he's taken the very principle stand that it is impossible *cough* to enter these changes in a timely manner. Lowering salaries may not quite be the equivalent of committing a war crime -- but I don't see the "just following orders" excuse as valid. The Controller's sole constitutional reason for being is to manage the finances of the State, including the payroll system.
Like government or not -- you do not improve government services by vindictively striking out at rank and file workers. The governor may not suffer if he doesn't receive a weekly paycheck, but I guarantee you that lots of others will. That's why what the Controller is doing is laudable -- even if it stretches credulity on the programming end.
With respect, I disagree. Law firms, particularly "prestigious" corporate firms, are notoriously risk-averse and likely would not hire someone who had "achieved" net notoriety, no matter how smart or otherwise qualified. I would assume that most potential hires are vetted at the least through a google search, if not a more detailed Lexis investigation.
If you were a blue chip firm, would you take the risk of hiring one of these women? Imagine your multi-million dollar client does a search on your new associate's name -- even just looking for phone number -- and comes up with a sordid sex story instead. Wow.... there's a real risk that you have just damaged the relationship with that client. Just as one example -- look at the Department of Justice's search on potential attorney hires. Now the DOJ was illegally considering political affiliation, not net fame, but the principle is the same: defamatory net stories would likely have prohibited these women from being considered.
That big firms are risk averse is hardly surprising. In fact, risk-aversion/paranoia is what -- in theory anyway -- is what makes an $x00 an hour lawyer worth paying for.
Note: this is also why I left a wanna-be big firm after a couple years. Who wants to work in an environment like that? But certaintly these women have the right to experience the hell of Big Firm life for themselves, and should not have had their careers permanently damaged because of a couple of idiots decided to slander them for fun.