I just noticed this, but does anyone else think it's a little ironic for a site like Slashdot to use what appears to be a Microsoft controller as the icon for the Games section?
I should have been clearer: court costs are distinct from attorney's fees, which tend to be significantly larger. Court costs may be assigned to the loser, but each side pays its own legal fees.
The American legal system functions under what is unimaginatively called "The American Rule", under which each party pays its own legal fees and costs regardless of the outcome. Causing your opponant to incur legal costs is not grounds for legal action. There is no direct way for IBM or any defendant to recover legal expenses. They may indirectly do so by filing a counter-claim alleging violations of contract or law, but the term "legal extortion" that is being thrown around by many slashdotters is not, in fact, illegal.
The situation is different in Europe, where the losing party pays for all legal costs for both them and the other party. Lest everyone think that this is clearly superior, it does tend to discourage litigation, as if you bring a suit and lose, you really lose.
When a plaintiff files suit in court, it does not necessarily need to have all of the evidence it needs to win. This is the purpose of the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
If a plaintiff believes it has been wronged but the information necessary to sufficiently prove their case is somehow privileged, there is no way for them to possess that information as evidence without discovery. That's why it's called "discovery". Plaintiffs frequently believe that internal documents or sworn testimony of the defendant will prove their case, but without discovery, they will never be able to read those documents or obtain that testimony.
In this case, the RIAA needs access to defendant's computer to prove its case. It has no such access without a subpoena, which it cannot obtain without a lawsuit. Plaintiff has filed that lawsuit and is now asking the court for permission to obtain the evidence needed to prove it.
I would be very surprised if the court denied their motion.
It's gonna be finders keepers with the LaGrange points. Those who wish to get them should get while the getting is good. I'd much rather the US take control of them than China, who seems to be the only other power with something like the capability.
Do I entirely trust the US government to be altruistic? No, not really. But I'd rather them be in control than the Chinese, Indians, or Russians. If you had to pick - and you probably do - which would you go for? That's really the question here.
All this really means is that they're independently wealthy, i.e., their investment income is sufficient to pay for their lives. Yeah, they are sitting on a pretty sweet pile of Google stock, but even a little diversification would keep them in the black for life. Not only do they not need a salary, they don't need to work a single day for the rest of their lives.
They're still paying income, FCIA, Mediplan taxes, just not on their Google salaries. So yeah, it's a stunt.
Look, as long as the Patriot Act remains largely untested in court, the Justice Dept. would be incredibly stupid not to milk it for all they can. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing will be eventually overturned, but Congress passed the law, so now we've got to deal with it. Dealing with it will probably take the Courts striking down enough provisions that they send it back to Congress for a rewrite. This will probably take several years. Till then, it's a process. So far, it's a process that still seems to work. Give it time.
I know this. I was just trying to avert the idea that the health care system in India is comperable to the healthcare system in America. It isn't. India certainly has top-flight physicians and hospitals, but the level of public health is, on average, significantly lower than it is in the US.
You misunderstood me entirely. I never once said that they didn't pay for malpractice insurance, I said that they stopped accepting payment from third parties such as Medicare/Medicaid. This is not a subtle distinction. Pay attention.
Here's an article on the kind of thing I'm talking about: physicians refusing to accept third party payment, decreasing their patient load, and making more money.
Here's one on the shitty reimbursement rates of Medicare/Medicaid and private insurance.
I'm currently in a pre-med track myself. By the time I'm finished medical school, I'll owe about $250k for my education. If that isn't an artifical constraint on the supply of physicians, I don't know what is.
India is also the place where the locals bring their own sharps to the hospital to avoid contamination from inadequately sterilized second-hand needles. They've also got a really major AIDS problem.
But this isn't too far from reality. There was a group of cardiologists who decided to totally refuse any kind of third-party payment. No Medicare/Medicaid, HMOs, or even health insurance. If you wanted service, you paid for it, in cash, at the time of service. Their patient volume, as might be expected, fell by about three-quarters. Their income doubled.
Why? Because the government only pays about 30 cents on the dollar. This means that HMOs and health insurance companies pay a few cents less than that. So if the hospital bills for $200k, they're unlikely to get more than, say, $70k, which is only a little more than the total cost in India. If the hospital knows a procedure is going to cost $10, they'll bill for $30, because that's the only way they can cover their costs.
Governmental intervention in healthcare has shafted the very people it was designed to help: the poor. If you don't have health insurance and aren't eligible for Medicare/Medicaid, you're screwed, because while the government and major health insurance corporations can force providers to take a bath on two thirds of their costs ("Oh," says Uncle Sam, "Don't like what we're paying? Turn down a single patient and you can't treat Medicare/Medicaid patients for years!"), you can't.
Want to cut down on the spiraling cost of healthcare? Start paying what it costs rather than having bean counters in Minnisota who have never been to medical school and never treated a patient in their life determine, without any first-hand experience, what your surgery is supposed to cost.
Do we really want to encourage everyone in an entire city to take part in a single network which seems almost inherently insecure? I can't imagine they'd use any kind of WEP, as that would defeat the purpose of having a city-wide network. I know I feel a lot safer behind my router's firewall than I ever do warchalking.
There are two primary reasons that are holding back major corporations from opening their goods to hackign. The first is liability, the second is money.
Concerning liability, companies are rightly paralyzed with fear that they could be held responsible for making a product that can be modified to do illegal and/or unpleasant things. Take, for example, the TiVo situation. Just because they took out the ad-skipping feature by default, doesn't mean that they cannot theoretically be held responsible for allowing their product to be hacked in such a way to put the feature back in. And hacking cars is even more legally dangerous. In short: while corporations ensure that their goods meet the requirements of current legal code, there is no way to ensure that a hacked product will still be in compliance. It is highly likely that corporations can be held liable for this.
Second: corporations exist to make money. The reason that most companies don't want their product to be hacked is that they don't want you to find that feature for yourself, they want to find it first and sell it to you. If you add a feature they didn't sell you, they lose. There is a way around this, fortunately, and Apple has already taken it. Simply reserve the right to include and market any hacks that consumers come up with. But finding the hacks that would have market value is hard enough: finding the hacks with market value that are legal is even harder.
I am strongly opposed to the idea of regulating software for the general market. Even though certain things like power, water, and transportation may need some kind of regulation, the price we pay for uniformity is inefficiency, bloat, and increased cost. Regulation tends to involve tax advantages for companies in compliance, which tends to stifle innovation by advantaging the status quo.
However, I am not entirely opposed to regulating software for government use. This makes a lot of sense to me, actually. If you want to get the government contract, you should have to meet certain standards, especially security standards. A business could do this, so there's no reason the government couldn't. The possible advantages would be an optional but well recognized standard that companies could meet if they wanted but are capable of declining if they so choose. I do think a open-source clause could be a good thing.
The drawback here is that powerful (read "rich") parties would probably be able to write the regulations so that they are biased towards particular kinds of software, if not particular brands. They could also probably prevent an OSS clause from being adopted, if not actually requiring close source.
Any time we experiment with giving the government more control over anything, we need to be very careful. Governments do not relinquish their powers. They always and only expand them. Regulating software, even in a limited capacity, sounds to me a lot like the proverbial foot in the door.
I don't want to believe this, but I do anyway
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd really like to think that the people running our state wouldn't sink to this level. But the USA Patriot Act kind of disabused me of that notion. I'm offering donations for anyone who can make a device that will disable all RFID tags within a 50 foot radius.
We're talking about searching the content of images here. I don't care who does it: if they can pull that off, it'll be huge, especially if it's done by analyzing the image itself, and not extra data tacked on to the file. I've heard of some other attempts to do this, but the one's I've seen haven't worked very well.
An issue though: currently, sticking things in an image file is a pretty good way to prevent spiders and other simple AI-ish algorthims from grepping information like email addresses off web pages and signing up for things like Hotmail. If this image-searching idea works as well as MSFT hopes, that could change.
I'd read the article in question, but it seems that even CNN cannot resist the slashdot effect.
This is just another case of an existing power structure being threatened by new technological and social realities, and, being unwilling to evolve, reacting with force. This has never, ever worked, except in cases of actual armed revolution, when the governing forces actually have the upper hand. But trying to prevent social change through jailing/fining people has never been an effective deterrent. What are they going to do, throw 20% of the country in jail? I don't think so.
Given the fact that the vast majority of hospitals aren't profitable anyway, this doesn't seem to be too much of an issue. If the government decides it wants to regulate this - like it's decided it wants to regulate just about everything else having to do with healthcare - then cost is all of a sudden no object.
Furthermore, hospitals are in the business of regularly buying sizable quantities of high-tech electronics that have no conceivable use outside their walls. If anyone decided to go after this market, it would be in a low-quantity high-margin mindset, not high-quantity low-margin.
Card's essay might be useful for someone who hasn't been paying attention to the discussion for the past five years, but other than that it's really nothing new. Others have said more and said it better.
Still, it's nice to see a content creator saying these things.
It's called separation of powers, and it's what makes the Federal government work at all. Congress is a legislative body. They make law. But laws as such have absolutely no effect on you or anyone else. When you get charged in court for "breaking the law," they don't cite you for violation of House or Senate legislation, they cite you for violation of US Legal Code. The FCC, like the EPA, SEC, and other agencies in the Executive branch, is a regulatory body. They make legal code. The FCC regulates (e.g. writes legal code concerning) communications in accordance with laws passed by Congress and the directives of the President. They write the legal code that is the concrete interpretation of abstract legislation. This is what they were trying to do. There is no Congressional law that says that you can/can't own more than one radio/TV station in a single town, and such a law would probably be unconstitutional.
Take a high school physics course next time.
They've always hated the fact that free media means that people won't listen to them. Now they're taking this change to get back at the media moguls for decades of doing good business. Read Clay Shirky's article on media regulation. The basic thesis: Diverse. Free. Equal. Pick two. Frankly, I'd much rather free diversity with no equality than controlled diversity.
If the numbers that the telemarketing industry is throwing about are even half right, this could end our current economic recovery. Telemarketers alledge that they create several billion dollars in sales every year, several billion dollars that will go up in smoke in October. That plus a huge boost in unemployed (and otherwise unemployable) persons is a very bad thing. Be careful what you wish for.
My college requires Tech Services staff to register all computers manually, and before they do that they scan for viruses. If you've got a laptop you take it to them and they deal with it. Desktops are a little harder, as they have to come to you, but it happens. The end result is a slower setup time, but a more secure network.
It sounds to me like your problem is that you didn't really privatize. True privatization occurs when a previously government run entity is spun off as a private corporation with no ownership by the state. There are still regulations that must be followed, but a "State Owned Enterprise" isn't a move towards a capitalist economy, it's a move towards a fascist economy. NZ seems to have engaged in nothing more than a semantical change. Make the corporations truly private and see what happens.
Slashdot Mirror
I just noticed this, but does anyone else think it's a little ironic for a site like Slashdot to use what appears to be a Microsoft controller as the icon for the Games section?
I should have been clearer: court costs are distinct from attorney's fees, which tend to be significantly larger. Court costs may be assigned to the loser, but each side pays its own legal fees.
The American legal system functions under what is unimaginatively called "The American Rule", under which each party pays its own legal fees and costs regardless of the outcome. Causing your opponant to incur legal costs is not grounds for legal action. There is no direct way for IBM or any defendant to recover legal expenses. They may indirectly do so by filing a counter-claim alleging violations of contract or law, but the term "legal extortion" that is being thrown around by many slashdotters is not, in fact, illegal.
The situation is different in Europe, where the losing party pays for all legal costs for both them and the other party. Lest everyone think that this is clearly superior, it does tend to discourage litigation, as if you bring a suit and lose, you really lose.
When a plaintiff files suit in court, it does not necessarily need to have all of the evidence it needs to win. This is the purpose of the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
If a plaintiff believes it has been wronged but the information necessary to sufficiently prove their case is somehow privileged, there is no way for them to possess that information as evidence without discovery. That's why it's called "discovery". Plaintiffs frequently believe that internal documents or sworn testimony of the defendant will prove their case, but without discovery, they will never be able to read those documents or obtain that testimony.
In this case, the RIAA needs access to defendant's computer to prove its case. It has no such access without a subpoena, which it cannot obtain without a lawsuit. Plaintiff has filed that lawsuit and is now asking the court for permission to obtain the evidence needed to prove it.
I would be very surprised if the court denied their motion.
...when you sell your next-gen, multi-million-shipping unit at a loss.
It's gonna be finders keepers with the LaGrange points. Those who wish to get them should get while the getting is good. I'd much rather the US take control of them than China, who seems to be the only other power with something like the capability.
Do I entirely trust the US government to be altruistic? No, not really. But I'd rather them be in control than the Chinese, Indians, or Russians. If you had to pick - and you probably do - which would you go for? That's really the question here.
All this really means is that they're independently wealthy, i.e., their investment income is sufficient to pay for their lives. Yeah, they are sitting on a pretty sweet pile of Google stock, but even a little diversification would keep them in the black for life. Not only do they not need a salary, they don't need to work a single day for the rest of their lives.
They're still paying income, FCIA, Mediplan taxes, just not on their Google salaries. So yeah, it's a stunt.
Look, as long as the Patriot Act remains largely untested in court, the Justice Dept. would be incredibly stupid not to milk it for all they can. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing will be eventually overturned, but Congress passed the law, so now we've got to deal with it. Dealing with it will probably take the Courts striking down enough provisions that they send it back to Congress for a rewrite. This will probably take several years. Till then, it's a process. So far, it's a process that still seems to work. Give it time.
I know this. I was just trying to avert the idea that the health care system in India is comperable to the healthcare system in America. It isn't. India certainly has top-flight physicians and hospitals, but the level of public health is, on average, significantly lower than it is in the US.
You misunderstood me entirely. I never once said that they didn't pay for malpractice insurance, I said that they stopped accepting payment from third parties such as Medicare/Medicaid. This is not a subtle distinction. Pay attention.
Here's an article on the kind of thing I'm talking about: physicians refusing to accept third party payment, decreasing their patient load, and making more money.
Here's one on the shitty reimbursement rates of Medicare/Medicaid and private insurance.
You don't understand insurance at all.
I'm currently in a pre-med track myself. By the time I'm finished medical school, I'll owe about $250k for my education. If that isn't an artifical constraint on the supply of physicians, I don't know what is.
India is also the place where the locals bring their own sharps to the hospital to avoid contamination from inadequately sterilized second-hand needles. They've also got a really major AIDS problem.
But this isn't too far from reality. There was a group of cardiologists who decided to totally refuse any kind of third-party payment. No Medicare/Medicaid, HMOs, or even health insurance. If you wanted service, you paid for it, in cash, at the time of service. Their patient volume, as might be expected, fell by about three-quarters. Their income doubled.
Why? Because the government only pays about 30 cents on the dollar. This means that HMOs and health insurance companies pay a few cents less than that. So if the hospital bills for $200k, they're unlikely to get more than, say, $70k, which is only a little more than the total cost in India. If the hospital knows a procedure is going to cost $10, they'll bill for $30, because that's the only way they can cover their costs.
Governmental intervention in healthcare has shafted the very people it was designed to help: the poor. If you don't have health insurance and aren't eligible for Medicare/Medicaid, you're screwed, because while the government and major health insurance corporations can force providers to take a bath on two thirds of their costs ("Oh," says Uncle Sam, "Don't like what we're paying? Turn down a single patient and you can't treat Medicare/Medicaid patients for years!"), you can't.
Want to cut down on the spiraling cost of healthcare? Start paying what it costs rather than having bean counters in Minnisota who have never been to medical school and never treated a patient in their life determine, without any first-hand experience, what your surgery is supposed to cost.
Talk about your massively insecure network...
Do we really want to encourage everyone in an entire city to take part in a single network which seems almost inherently insecure? I can't imagine they'd use any kind of WEP, as that would defeat the purpose of having a city-wide network. I know I feel a lot safer behind my router's firewall than I ever do warchalking.
There are two primary reasons that are holding back major corporations from opening their goods to hackign. The first is liability, the second is money.
Concerning liability, companies are rightly paralyzed with fear that they could be held responsible for making a product that can be modified to do illegal and/or unpleasant things. Take, for example, the TiVo situation. Just because they took out the ad-skipping feature by default, doesn't mean that they cannot theoretically be held responsible for allowing their product to be hacked in such a way to put the feature back in. And hacking cars is even more legally dangerous. In short: while corporations ensure that their goods meet the requirements of current legal code, there is no way to ensure that a hacked product will still be in compliance. It is highly likely that corporations can be held liable for this.
Second: corporations exist to make money. The reason that most companies don't want their product to be hacked is that they don't want you to find that feature for yourself, they want to find it first and sell it to you. If you add a feature they didn't sell you, they lose. There is a way around this, fortunately, and Apple has already taken it. Simply reserve the right to include and market any hacks that consumers come up with. But finding the hacks that would have market value is hard enough: finding the hacks with market value that are legal is even harder.
I am strongly opposed to the idea of regulating software for the general market. Even though certain things like power, water, and transportation may need some kind of regulation, the price we pay for uniformity is inefficiency, bloat, and increased cost. Regulation tends to involve tax advantages for companies in compliance, which tends to stifle innovation by advantaging the status quo.
However, I am not entirely opposed to regulating software for government use. This makes a lot of sense to me, actually. If you want to get the government contract, you should have to meet certain standards, especially security standards. A business could do this, so there's no reason the government couldn't. The possible advantages would be an optional but well recognized standard that companies could meet if they wanted but are capable of declining if they so choose. I do think a open-source clause could be a good thing.
The drawback here is that powerful (read "rich") parties would probably be able to write the regulations so that they are biased towards particular kinds of software, if not particular brands. They could also probably prevent an OSS clause from being adopted, if not actually requiring close source.
Any time we experiment with giving the government more control over anything, we need to be very careful. Governments do not relinquish their powers. They always and only expand them. Regulating software, even in a limited capacity, sounds to me a lot like the proverbial foot in the door.
I'd really like to think that the people running our state wouldn't sink to this level. But the USA Patriot Act kind of disabused me of that notion. I'm offering donations for anyone who can make a device that will disable all RFID tags within a 50 foot radius.
We're talking about searching the content of images here. I don't care who does it: if they can pull that off, it'll be huge, especially if it's done by analyzing the image itself, and not extra data tacked on to the file. I've heard of some other attempts to do this, but the one's I've seen haven't worked very well.
An issue though: currently, sticking things in an image file is a pretty good way to prevent spiders and other simple AI-ish algorthims from grepping information like email addresses off web pages and signing up for things like Hotmail. If this image-searching idea works as well as MSFT hopes, that could change.
I'd read the article in question, but it seems that even CNN cannot resist the slashdot effect.
This is just another case of an existing power structure being threatened by new technological and social realities, and, being unwilling to evolve, reacting with force. This has never, ever worked, except in cases of actual armed revolution, when the governing forces actually have the upper hand. But trying to prevent social change through jailing/fining people has never been an effective deterrent. What are they going to do, throw 20% of the country in jail? I don't think so.
Given the fact that the vast majority of hospitals aren't profitable anyway, this doesn't seem to be too much of an issue. If the government decides it wants to regulate this - like it's decided it wants to regulate just about everything else having to do with healthcare - then cost is all of a sudden no object. Furthermore, hospitals are in the business of regularly buying sizable quantities of high-tech electronics that have no conceivable use outside their walls. If anyone decided to go after this market, it would be in a low-quantity high-margin mindset, not high-quantity low-margin.
Card's essay might be useful for someone who hasn't been paying attention to the discussion for the past five years, but other than that it's really nothing new. Others have said more and said it better. Still, it's nice to see a content creator saying these things.
It's called separation of powers, and it's what makes the Federal government work at all. Congress is a legislative body. They make law. But laws as such have absolutely no effect on you or anyone else. When you get charged in court for "breaking the law," they don't cite you for violation of House or Senate legislation, they cite you for violation of US Legal Code. The FCC, like the EPA, SEC, and other agencies in the Executive branch, is a regulatory body. They make legal code. The FCC regulates (e.g. writes legal code concerning) communications in accordance with laws passed by Congress and the directives of the President. They write the legal code that is the concrete interpretation of abstract legislation. This is what they were trying to do. There is no Congressional law that says that you can/can't own more than one radio/TV station in a single town, and such a law would probably be unconstitutional. Take a high school physics course next time.
They've always hated the fact that free media means that people won't listen to them. Now they're taking this change to get back at the media moguls for decades of doing good business. Read Clay Shirky's article on media regulation. The basic thesis: Diverse. Free. Equal. Pick two. Frankly, I'd much rather free diversity with no equality than controlled diversity.
If the numbers that the telemarketing industry is throwing about are even half right, this could end our current economic recovery. Telemarketers alledge that they create several billion dollars in sales every year, several billion dollars that will go up in smoke in October. That plus a huge boost in unemployed (and otherwise unemployable) persons is a very bad thing. Be careful what you wish for.
My college requires Tech Services staff to register all computers manually, and before they do that they scan for viruses. If you've got a laptop you take it to them and they deal with it. Desktops are a little harder, as they have to come to you, but it happens. The end result is a slower setup time, but a more secure network.
It sounds to me like your problem is that you didn't really privatize. True privatization occurs when a previously government run entity is spun off as a private corporation with no ownership by the state. There are still regulations that must be followed, but a "State Owned Enterprise" isn't a move towards a capitalist economy, it's a move towards a fascist economy. NZ seems to have engaged in nothing more than a semantical change. Make the corporations truly private and see what happens.