"InfoWorld's Galen Gruman sifts through the 'doubleplus ungood' of this year's CTIA and Mobile World Congress to spell out 'Big Brother' mobile carriers' true designs for IT and smartphone users."
This sentence does a good job of informing the reader that article in question is an insightful and objective look at new mobile telecom strategies.
I wish I had mod points for this post. Too many on slashdot rage against the system without actually knowing the first thing about it, just vaguely that there are patents and they describe things in some fashion and they are bad.
"current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device"
Really? Never? Just off the top of my head, I could envision a button that put the device in "pointer" mode, maybe with scroll buttons where appropriate, and then used the movement of your finger on the touchscreen as either 1:1 or some kind of relative movement of the pointer. There are probably issues with this approach, yes, but it took me seconds to cobble together. Saying that something is impossible as a matter of user interface is silly. You can always change the UI in some way to make it possible, or even good.
You are correct, and most courts act this way on difficult questions. The judges read the briefs and the trial transcripts (or have their clerks read them, really), figure out what they think the answer should be, then go into oral argument usually looking to solidify the position they've decided upon. Often this takes the form of, as you said, hammering on the side they favor to flesh out whatever theory they're currently working out in their heads. You'd be surprised, a lot of answers that seem "bad" have a nugget of a good legal theory, or at least something that brings parts of the theory together.
Of course, harassing attorneys with questions you know they can't answer sufficiently or forcing them to admit to something that makes them uncomfortable is also fun.
Haha, really? I am self-employed. I have the options for . . . two different insurance networks in my area (one of the largest cities in the country). Both are so expensive, because as an individual I cannot get onto a group plan, so as to be infeasible to carry. There is no competing low-cost plan that will let me on. Where is my choice?
Fortunately, my spouse is employed at a large company, and is therefore given entry into the pearly gates of a group plan, which I am covered under. That employer was able to survey the vast field of roughly three or four possible providers, only two of which (the two with the largest presence in our area) were really viable choices. HR then chose a provider for everyone in the company, and selected which plans (two of a dozen or so) which they would allow its employees to select.
So, let's look at the choices involved. I had the choice between two plans that were impossible to afford, due to the way the insurance industry has organized itself (treating large-group insurance as a separate pool from individual or small-group). There's no meaningful choice when neither choice is feasible.
My spouse did not have any choice as to which provider the company offered, or any say in the selection process. The same goes for deciding which particular plans would be available. The choice was essentially from 2 options, presented by the employer, out of a universe of (a rough estimate) 40 or so plans. That's essentially the choice, picking between two options presented to you by your employer, without any real say in the process. In our experience, the limited options they give are usually just between one plan and another, more expensive plan with better coverage. Again, the employee has no say in what the baseline (the lower of the offered plans) is, no real say in what the more premium plans are. This is like sitting down to a full meal and being told that the only thing you have control over is what dressing you get on your salad. Yay, there's choice! But it's superficial and pretty much meaningless.
The only real "choice" involved is the "choice" to essentially ditch your comfortable employment for the uncertain prospect of getting a new job with better insurance. That requires you to first find another, similar job that will provide something roughly on par with the income you were earning before. This employer, for this to be any sort of real choice, should be somewhere where it would be easy to move. And, finally, before even employment, you would have to extract the exact details of the (again, limited) insurance options the employer has decided to make available for you, which may or may not be available before you begin your employment. What wonderful and free choice we all have!
This isn't even getting into how much of our earning power is destroyed by the crippling and rising price of insurance. But hey, it's easy to wave your hands, shout "free choices" and pretend that everything is a-ok.
This is why I'm so excited for the N900. I'm sure the base install has some proprietary stuff, but given the fact that it's linux, and the amount of control you apparently have on the device through nokia's flavor (maemo), it seems to me that you really wouldn't have to worry about this kind of difficulty.
My experience (and the experience of friends of mine who are prosecutors or PDs) is that the main thing you're looking for in a potential juror is indications that they will actually stay awake through the entire proceeding, and pay attention. And you can't always fill a box with people you think will.
People have some really bizarre misconceptions about how our legal system works.
It's not really a concern or a problem. If you're relying upon a holding or an order from a court, your opponent is going to go and get their own copy of that order (sure, maybe they go to RECAP). They will notice that what you said doesn't match up with the official record and tell the judge. Heck, when you file a brief relying on the order, you're going to get stopped by the judge anyway because (at least in my experience), the judge is going to ignore everything except your overall argument regarding that opinion/order, and then just go and read the opinion/order himself (off PACER, since it doesn't cost the judge anything). At best, you didn't include any of the lying bits. At worst (say the local rules required you to attach the case to your filing), you're essentially lying to the court. Judges aren't big fans of this. Lawyers and judges are (generally) not idiots. The possibility of this scheme actually working is so incredibly remote that you'd have to be nuts to try it.
There's one critical thing that a lot of people are missing here, and that's that this isn't a question of who has the documents, per se, but what can be done with those documents.
Some people are saying that if you hand your documents to a third party, it's the same, because they still need a subpoena. The problem is that they CAN get it with a subpoena from the third party. If you had kept them to yourselves, then (in some cases) they wouldn't. They could be protected by the attorney-client priviledge. It's not just a question of physical security, it's a question of confidentiality, and once you voluntarily surrender that, it's gone. And that nice document your client wrote you explaining what REALLY happened is no longer just a letter to an attorney, but an admission against interest. If the client does it, that's stupid. If an attorney does it, that's malpractice. Leave aside any objections about how dumb it is for such a document to exist. The fact that it could, and that your policy would result in a disaster of that scale, is enough of a cautionary tale to dissuade someone from taking the risk.
Really, sharing the information with google (you're surrendering confidentiality by agreeing to let them look at all), you're probably committing malpractice. This is a really, really serious deal.
I've actually done some HIPAA compliance work, and while the rules are slightly more loose, I seriously doubt that the doctor and google are going to be collaborating on a treatment plan, or that google is supervising the doctor's work. The same problems remain.
Those groups don't have the right to look at the data, or your consent to keep it. Google, in this case, does.
Put it this way: it's not a breach of confidentiality for someone to break into your car and steal your briefcase. It is if you tell someone to go out to your car and grab you a document from your briefcase.
My opinion is that this was the sorriest excuse for a summary I've seen in a long time. I think that was pretty clear. If he wanted to comment on it, he can submit the story with the facts and post comments like everyone else.
Although apparently I'm wrong there, and I was a troll!
Thanks for the mini-editorial and half-baked legal theorizing in the summary. I look forward to the scintillating and insightful conversation this invitation to discuss will bring!
(Especially the OMG MAH FREEDOMS replies sure to follow this comment, despite the fact I took neither 'side.')
Thank God that we live in an enlightened society that doesn't give copyright protection to software! Just think of the horrors that would happen if rights-holders demanded compliance with various licenses, and used lawsuits as a threat to gain that compliance!
Part of the problem with/. and the legal community is that there are a lot of professors that agree or are sympathetic to the prevailing viewpoint, so they get thrust up into the limelight. To complicate things, most people here are engineers or other technology-oriented people, so their experience and memories of professors are people who showed us circuit diagrams and explained the difference between RISC and CISC processors. We're used to professors giving dry facts, so we trust them to essentially give "the truth."
That's not really what you get with law professors. Few professors are deluded as to what the law is, but since they don't actually practice law in most cases, their personal views can sometimes cloud their judgment.
As an example, there are three ways states handle accomplice liability, a less, moderate and more strict approach. Academics adore the strict approach. The problem is, you can count the number of states that adhere to this approach on one hand. After sticking it in a lawnmower.
But instead of plainly laying out who does what, the preeminent criminal law textbook gives overviews of the two approaches that essentially represent the entire country, and then goes much more in-depth into what the author refers to as "the better view."
Is this professor disconnected from reality? No. He just thinks he knows what the law should be. Lots of professors are like that, to varying degrees, and it's unavoidable to some extent. But it's a good lesson to take away; always take anything on any contentious issue a law professor says with a healthy dose of salt.
First, think about the actual copying being done. Sure, using a p2p client you are downloading one copy of the song. But chances are, you are seeding to many, many individual copies of the same song, sometimes as many as thousands over the course of a download.
Second, damages are generous in copyright cases by design. Plaintiffs can recover treble damages. They're also eligible for special damages, which cover the victor's court costs, attorney's fees, and punitive damages. There are certain fields of law where enforcement is difficult and litigation cumbersome and expensive, so the courts are willing to heap large damages to keep rights holders from being dissuaded from bringing a strong claim (treble damages) and to try hard to dissuade people from infringing in the first place (punitive damages).
Third, you're looking at copyright wrong. Wal*Mart did buy the initial CD. But Wal*Mart didn't pay for the rights for all the people who downloaded the songs off the defendant. The defendant didn't, either. It's not a "well they wouldn't have made a sale" argument, or a "what was their actual cost" argument. This isn't an action for unjust enrichment, it's an action stating that a copyright holder's rights have been infringed. Lost profits and costs feed into the consideration, but they're not nearly central.
Most applications don't use the full range of features with any toolkit, and generally use a small, shared subset of features. Why is there no uniform abstraction layer for, say, Qt and GTK, a library that takes genericized commands and then implements them in whatever environment the app is built for? If you needed something only available in one toolkit, you could include those separately, which would lead to a nice segregation between genericized and toolkit-specific stuff in your code. You'd be able to cut down substantially on code because instead of having separate functions and objects for each toolkit, you just have one that works with all.
Amusingly, BG2 works perfectly in the 7 beta. I even have it running with Baldur's Gate Trilogy without any problems. I agree that 7's compatibility with anything non-vista is horribly awful, but BG2 thankfully works.
Back when I did that sort of thing, I sold myself as "Software Engineer: Web Specialist," which I thought nicely encapsulated the skill set to create and code productive websites, if not particularly beautiful ones.
Amicus briefs aren't relevant at this point. Also, the rules for the district court are at issue, not the supreme court. Unless they're going straight to the supreme court, which would be quite interesting!
Slashdot Mirror
"InfoWorld's Galen Gruman sifts through the 'doubleplus ungood' of this year's CTIA and Mobile World Congress to spell out 'Big Brother' mobile carriers' true designs for IT and smartphone users."
This sentence does a good job of informing the reader that article in question is an insightful and objective look at new mobile telecom strategies.
I wish I had mod points for this post. Too many on slashdot rage against the system without actually knowing the first thing about it, just vaguely that there are patents and they describe things in some fashion and they are bad.
This is true, the fictional movie Gattaca conclusively proved that collection of genetic data leads to a hellish dystopia.
You know, I have an N900 and I did not know about that. Yet another little awesome thing the phone does.
"current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device"
Really? Never? Just off the top of my head, I could envision a button that put the device in "pointer" mode, maybe with scroll buttons where appropriate, and then used the movement of your finger on the touchscreen as either 1:1 or some kind of relative movement of the pointer. There are probably issues with this approach, yes, but it took me seconds to cobble together. Saying that something is impossible as a matter of user interface is silly. You can always change the UI in some way to make it possible, or even good.
A good antenna and HTPC will get you good mileage, especially now that MythTV 0.22 is out. It's a fantastic release.
You are correct, and most courts act this way on difficult questions. The judges read the briefs and the trial transcripts (or have their clerks read them, really), figure out what they think the answer should be, then go into oral argument usually looking to solidify the position they've decided upon. Often this takes the form of, as you said, hammering on the side they favor to flesh out whatever theory they're currently working out in their heads. You'd be surprised, a lot of answers that seem "bad" have a nugget of a good legal theory, or at least something that brings parts of the theory together.
Of course, harassing attorneys with questions you know they can't answer sufficiently or forcing them to admit to something that makes them uncomfortable is also fun.
Haha, really? I am self-employed. I have the options for . . . two different insurance networks in my area (one of the largest cities in the country). Both are so expensive, because as an individual I cannot get onto a group plan, so as to be infeasible to carry. There is no competing low-cost plan that will let me on. Where is my choice?
Fortunately, my spouse is employed at a large company, and is therefore given entry into the pearly gates of a group plan, which I am covered under. That employer was able to survey the vast field of roughly three or four possible providers, only two of which (the two with the largest presence in our area) were really viable choices. HR then chose a provider for everyone in the company, and selected which plans (two of a dozen or so) which they would allow its employees to select.
So, let's look at the choices involved. I had the choice between two plans that were impossible to afford, due to the way the insurance industry has organized itself (treating large-group insurance as a separate pool from individual or small-group). There's no meaningful choice when neither choice is feasible.
My spouse did not have any choice as to which provider the company offered, or any say in the selection process. The same goes for deciding which particular plans would be available. The choice was essentially from 2 options, presented by the employer, out of a universe of (a rough estimate) 40 or so plans. That's essentially the choice, picking between two options presented to you by your employer, without any real say in the process. In our experience, the limited options they give are usually just between one plan and another, more expensive plan with better coverage. Again, the employee has no say in what the baseline (the lower of the offered plans) is, no real say in what the more premium plans are. This is like sitting down to a full meal and being told that the only thing you have control over is what dressing you get on your salad. Yay, there's choice! But it's superficial and pretty much meaningless.
The only real "choice" involved is the "choice" to essentially ditch your comfortable employment for the uncertain prospect of getting a new job with better insurance. That requires you to first find another, similar job that will provide something roughly on par with the income you were earning before. This employer, for this to be any sort of real choice, should be somewhere where it would be easy to move. And, finally, before even employment, you would have to extract the exact details of the (again, limited) insurance options the employer has decided to make available for you, which may or may not be available before you begin your employment. What wonderful and free choice we all have!
This isn't even getting into how much of our earning power is destroyed by the crippling and rising price of insurance. But hey, it's easy to wave your hands, shout "free choices" and pretend that everything is a-ok.
Red-light cameras and related issues are Official Things For Nerds To Rage About.
Virtual Machines are boring because they don't allow for enough posturing/internet lawyering.
This is why I'm so excited for the N900. I'm sure the base install has some proprietary stuff, but given the fact that it's linux, and the amount of control you apparently have on the device through nokia's flavor (maemo), it seems to me that you really wouldn't have to worry about this kind of difficulty.
Google a giant company, not your BFF.
Film at 11.
Widely known? Really?
My experience (and the experience of friends of mine who are prosecutors or PDs) is that the main thing you're looking for in a potential juror is indications that they will actually stay awake through the entire proceeding, and pay attention. And you can't always fill a box with people you think will.
People have some really bizarre misconceptions about how our legal system works.
It's not really a concern or a problem. If you're relying upon a holding or an order from a court, your opponent is going to go and get their own copy of that order (sure, maybe they go to RECAP). They will notice that what you said doesn't match up with the official record and tell the judge. Heck, when you file a brief relying on the order, you're going to get stopped by the judge anyway because (at least in my experience), the judge is going to ignore everything except your overall argument regarding that opinion/order, and then just go and read the opinion/order himself (off PACER, since it doesn't cost the judge anything). At best, you didn't include any of the lying bits. At worst (say the local rules required you to attach the case to your filing), you're essentially lying to the court. Judges aren't big fans of this. Lawyers and judges are (generally) not idiots. The possibility of this scheme actually working is so incredibly remote that you'd have to be nuts to try it.
There's one critical thing that a lot of people are missing here, and that's that this isn't a question of who has the documents, per se, but what can be done with those documents.
Some people are saying that if you hand your documents to a third party, it's the same, because they still need a subpoena. The problem is that they CAN get it with a subpoena from the third party. If you had kept them to yourselves, then (in some cases) they wouldn't. They could be protected by the attorney-client priviledge. It's not just a question of physical security, it's a question of confidentiality, and once you voluntarily surrender that, it's gone. And that nice document your client wrote you explaining what REALLY happened is no longer just a letter to an attorney, but an admission against interest. If the client does it, that's stupid. If an attorney does it, that's malpractice. Leave aside any objections about how dumb it is for such a document to exist. The fact that it could, and that your policy would result in a disaster of that scale, is enough of a cautionary tale to dissuade someone from taking the risk.
Really, sharing the information with google (you're surrendering confidentiality by agreeing to let them look at all), you're probably committing malpractice. This is a really, really serious deal.
I've actually done some HIPAA compliance work, and while the rules are slightly more loose, I seriously doubt that the doctor and google are going to be collaborating on a treatment plan, or that google is supervising the doctor's work. The same problems remain.
Those groups don't have the right to look at the data, or your consent to keep it. Google, in this case, does.
Put it this way: it's not a breach of confidentiality for someone to break into your car and steal your briefcase. It is if you tell someone to go out to your car and grab you a document from your briefcase.
My opinion is that this was the sorriest excuse for a summary I've seen in a long time. I think that was pretty clear. If he wanted to comment on it, he can submit the story with the facts and post comments like everyone else.
Although apparently I'm wrong there, and I was a troll!
Thanks for the mini-editorial and half-baked legal theorizing in the summary. I look forward to the scintillating and insightful conversation this invitation to discuss will bring!
(Especially the OMG MAH FREEDOMS replies sure to follow this comment, despite the fact I took neither 'side.')
Thank God that we live in an enlightened society that doesn't give copyright protection to software! Just think of the horrors that would happen if rights-holders demanded compliance with various licenses, and used lawsuits as a threat to gain that compliance!
Part of the problem with /. and the legal community is that there are a lot of professors that agree or are sympathetic to the prevailing viewpoint, so they get thrust up into the limelight. To complicate things, most people here are engineers or other technology-oriented people, so their experience and memories of professors are people who showed us circuit diagrams and explained the difference between RISC and CISC processors. We're used to professors giving dry facts, so we trust them to essentially give "the truth."
That's not really what you get with law professors. Few professors are deluded as to what the law is, but since they don't actually practice law in most cases, their personal views can sometimes cloud their judgment.
As an example, there are three ways states handle accomplice liability, a less, moderate and more strict approach. Academics adore the strict approach. The problem is, you can count the number of states that adhere to this approach on one hand. After sticking it in a lawnmower.
But instead of plainly laying out who does what, the preeminent criminal law textbook gives overviews of the two approaches that essentially represent the entire country, and then goes much more in-depth into what the author refers to as "the better view."
Is this professor disconnected from reality? No. He just thinks he knows what the law should be. Lots of professors are like that, to varying degrees, and it's unavoidable to some extent. But it's a good lesson to take away; always take anything on any contentious issue a law professor says with a healthy dose of salt.
Costs are where most people get tripped up.
First, think about the actual copying being done. Sure, using a p2p client you are downloading one copy of the song. But chances are, you are seeding to many, many individual copies of the same song, sometimes as many as thousands over the course of a download.
Second, damages are generous in copyright cases by design. Plaintiffs can recover treble damages. They're also eligible for special damages, which cover the victor's court costs, attorney's fees, and punitive damages. There are certain fields of law where enforcement is difficult and litigation cumbersome and expensive, so the courts are willing to heap large damages to keep rights holders from being dissuaded from bringing a strong claim (treble damages) and to try hard to dissuade people from infringing in the first place (punitive damages).
Third, you're looking at copyright wrong. Wal*Mart did buy the initial CD. But Wal*Mart didn't pay for the rights for all the people who downloaded the songs off the defendant. The defendant didn't, either. It's not a "well they wouldn't have made a sale" argument, or a "what was their actual cost" argument. This isn't an action for unjust enrichment, it's an action stating that a copyright holder's rights have been infringed. Lost profits and costs feed into the consideration, but they're not nearly central.
Most applications don't use the full range of features with any toolkit, and generally use a small, shared subset of features. Why is there no uniform abstraction layer for, say, Qt and GTK, a library that takes genericized commands and then implements them in whatever environment the app is built for? If you needed something only available in one toolkit, you could include those separately, which would lead to a nice segregation between genericized and toolkit-specific stuff in your code. You'd be able to cut down substantially on code because instead of having separate functions and objects for each toolkit, you just have one that works with all.
Amusingly, BG2 works perfectly in the 7 beta. I even have it running with Baldur's Gate Trilogy without any problems. I agree that 7's compatibility with anything non-vista is horribly awful, but BG2 thankfully works.
Back when I did that sort of thing, I sold myself as "Software Engineer: Web Specialist," which I thought nicely encapsulated the skill set to create and code productive websites, if not particularly beautiful ones.
No, you seem to be correct. At that point, however, he seems to be trying his case on the internet, which is just as reprehensible.
I am, however, still filled with shame that I missed that.
Amicus briefs aren't relevant at this point. Also, the rules for the district court are at issue, not the supreme court. Unless they're going straight to the supreme court, which would be quite interesting!