There are people who use marijuana for medical reasons who can live a less painfull, and probably more productive life due to that. All negative effects you say?
Me:
There's nothing GOOD about alcohol or pot or other recreational drugs.
I never used the word "all." I did, however, explicitly use the word "recreational." Medical use is not recreational.
And incidentally, seriously: Stuff the insults up your ass. If you think they make you look cool or smart, they don't. Particularly when some closer reading of what somebody actually said render your insults moot to begin with. If you weren't such an ass about it, perhaps you would be taken more seriously. If you don't care about being taken seriously, then DON'T BOTHER POSTING. You're just wasting my time, and everybody else's.
Would you also extend that to people who get injured playing sports, skiing, driving a car, walking across the street, or making any other voluntary choice? Or only drugs?
An accident is an accident, that is why the word exists. All of your specific examples are examples of accidents. While you may get hurt skiing, there's no specific reason to believe that if you get on the slopes today, you're going to hurt yourself. There are plenty of people who ski all their lives and never have any serious injury (or any injury at all). Same with driving, and definitely with something like crossing the street.
Drug use is not an accident, nor are the effects of it unknown. You known if you light up a joint or get yourself drunk or ram yourself full of heroin that it is going to have certain effects on you, potentially including addiction and death. Even if it doesn't go that far, there WILL be some effect. If these negative effects mess up your life, I stop short of saying you deserve what you get but I certainly don't believe your fellow taxpayers should be forced to pay for your slack.
On the other hand, you mention bad investments or bad luck. Of course I have pity for somebody who, for example, is living paycheck to paycheck and suddenly has a massive heart attack that he can't pay for. I have sympathy for somebody who invests all of his money and loses it, though I question his financial decisions. I wouldn't mind some of my tax dollars being sent their way.
I simply hope we can agree there is a difference between bad luck, or making a risky decision that turns bad, and making a decision that is GOING to be bad; one that is going to be, at best, neutral in your life. There's nothing GOOD about alcohol or pot or other recreational drugs. And before anybody says "relaxation" or anything like that, requiring drugs to relax sounds awfully like an addiction to me and there's nothing good about that. I'm not sure you should go to jail if you make that choice, but frankly if you end up ruining your life because of it, don't expect me to support you.
I'm not the original poster, for the record, but... so what?
I think I write fairly well even on Internet forums, but if anybody thinks I would give the same amount of care to something I'm posting on/. versus a technical document I'm writing for a class or in the workplace, they're a bit nutty.
I admit, though, I am a bit suspicious of him as well. I'm taking a technical writing course right now, and while I know that by no means makes me an expert and I would certainly not be on the level of a professional technical writer, it sounds to me like the "technical documents" he's writing are long, winding paragraphs. If not, I fail to see how he could get away with dropping in lorum ipsum paragraphs.
If I tried to write like that for my course, I'm fairly certain I would receive a swift kick to the nads from my instructor. The one thing he has been harping on over and over again all semester is to break things up--headings, subheadings, bullets, etc; that users are not interested in reading every word on the page, only in locating the information they are looking for. Assuming he is worth his pay, that seems like the central concept in technical writing.
The stupid billionaire, almost always. Or at least that's how it has seemed to work thus far.
Re:That only bolsters the argument though
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Internet Only 1% Porn
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The important question is [. ..] whether federal legislation is needed to protect kids from porn when they are online.
The important question is whether or not children need to be protected from porn at all.
I ask this question seriously: Have there been any studies done that shows that exposure to pornographic images makes a child more likely to engage in sexual activity sooner, or makes them somehow less likely to use protection during intercourse? If not, it seems to me that this isn't about protecting children -- it's about protecting parents from uncomfortable discussions that, frankly, are part of their job as parents.
Personally I wish children were exposed to MORE porn and MORE sexual discussion. It seems to me that the US has become entirely too prudish about sex. It is a natural and necessary part of life and we should stop treating it as a depravity. Sex is what it is. If we, as a society, instill maturity and responsibility in our children, I believe the vast majority of the concern of sex is rendered moot.
The legal system through which we must rely for relief from injustice such as this is truly a quagmire as we can see in this case by Jacobsen, clearly the victim, being forced to pay legal fees to a corporation because of a technicality.
I don't consider making false charges in a court of law to be a technicality. In this case, it seems like a legitimate mistakes by a person who has probably legitimately been wronged, but I fail to see any reliable method of judging when it's a mistake and when it's somebody throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. I hope we can both agree that the latter is a waste of time and taxpayer money and should be punished.
That said, the problem appears to be with a poorly-written law. If you read their little summary page, you will see that the anti-SLAPP law was not intended to be used the way that it was. The fact that it could be is because of the vagueness politicians love to deal in. That vagueness is not an accident, either.
Jacobsen should be able to go into a court, tell the court what is happening to him, and the COURT should look at the situation and say, look, you are the victim here, this is what laws this asshole is guilty of
Personally I do not want my money being spent on that. These guys are using the time of judges, federal judges which I am helping to pay for. They're using the time of these judges to settle private disputes. Free-vs-closed dogma aside, the outcome of this case will not affect me. Chances are even if you view the issue as some important legal issue that needs to be addressed, the ruling will be constrained enough to have little effect. Precedent says that if the EXACT SAME case came up again, a ruling should go the same as it did previously; it leaves up to the individual judges whether or not the facts of the cases are different. In cases like this, they almost certainly are going to be.
Maybe that means public attorneys who we can go to for legal advice and to file the correct charges in court.
Another thing I don't particularly want to be paying for. Look, if you want to tie up judges to settle your private dispute, that's fine. That's what they're there for. But I do not think it is an unreasonable burden to place on litigants that they either invest some of their own resources into doing it or at least know what they're talking about before they get to court. Not to mention that there is no shortage of attorneys who will work on commission if they truly believe that you have a case. Why didn't he take advantage of that? I'm sorry this guy's mistakes turned out to break the law and make him liable for damages in the way of legal fees, but that's exactly what they did.
I feel for people who can't adequately defend themselves against the tremendous resources of big companies, I truly do. I'm just not sure it is sufficient justification to change the system such that I essentially pay if they can't. As I said before, regardless of the issues involved, this is essentially a dispute between two private entites. You'll notice it's JMRI vs. Asshat, not JMRI and the World vs. Asshat. The outcome effects me very little either way.
This Katzer guy is a cock, and I hope he loses and gets absolutely SLAMMED. I'm just not sure anything that has transpired so far is evidence of some systemic problem with the legal system, and even if it were, the solutions I've seen so far (both your post and from others, this topic and others) seem to leave a lot to be desired in my book.
1. You can (or at least could at one point) rearrange the search results by dragging them up and down - Future application on influencing the ranking on sites.
Although it seems somewhat ripe for abuse, I wonder: Will Google use this to customize your search results (assuming you're logged on)? IE, if I search for porn (hey, it's slashdot right?!) and want my favorite porn sites up top, and drag them there... if I search again next week, might they appear at the top?
That sort of thing might be useful, rather than (or in addition to) my dragging results around affecting global ranking issues. I often search for some things that are the same, either because I didn't know it would be useful again after the first time or because I simply don't want to bookmark it. I HATE having too many bookmarks! If they had a simple "revert to global rankings" (or whatever better terminology) button, it could allow you to see the real rankings again later.
Obviously this would require storing quite a bit of data, but if anybody can manage it without blinking it would be Google. Privacy implications? Sure, but they could either let you disable it or you simply don't have to log in to do your searching.
The response of slashdot to criticism is very predictable. Watch how my comment is modded down to oblivion.
You forgot about the part where if you say "go ahead and mod me down" or "I'll probably get modded down for this," you in fact get modded up. It's one of those Slashdot peculiarities.
That comment seems reasonable to me. Assuming the 2000 PCs sold was a fairly random sample (as opposed to, say, some guy selling them in the lobby of some Linux conference or something), and that none of them came with Windows (old or new) installed, only having 100 licenses purchases for that bundle almost certainly does point to piracy. An OS with around 90% desktop market share that only sells enough licenses to account for 5% of computers would be a colossal statistical anomaly without some explanation, and in this case piracy seems a reasonable one. It becomes less reasonable if they claimed that there were 1900 copies pirated because it fails to account for other OS choices that may have be used.
The real problem is with things like, "1700 copies of XP were pirated -- at $200 a copy, we've lost $340,000!!!" Because that's just bunk. Most of the people who pirated XP would never have paid for it, so it is not a lost sale.
That is what the music industry is doing. In fact they are worse, because I'm fairly certain they're going "1700 songs were pirated -- at $12 a CD..." despite the fact that there may be multiple songs on a CD downloaded, etc.
This is probably an accurate time estimate IF we're assuming the ballot has exactly one question you have to answer and only two options for that question.
With one candidate and issue, it's conceivable to count the votes in your head which significantly speeds up the process. Even if you write it down, just to avoid losing your place, it's extremely simple and easy to do and thus very fast.
With 10 or 20 or 30 issues, you definitely have to write things down and it's going to take time to jot it down regardless of how fast you might be able to visually process the ballot.
It gets even worse with any issue that is not a simple choice between two options; even the presidential elections, in many states, will have a third-party candidate on the ballot even if hardly anybody votes for them. Certainly many of the more local races/issues will. Now recording and counting the ballots becomes even harder. Imagine creating a table, spreadsheet or on paper, trying to track, say, 15 questions with anywhere between 2 and 5 choices per question. It's not hard, but it's going to get pretty messy pretty quick, and recording the votes is going to take substantially longer than your estimates. And we're just talking recording the votes, you'd need an additional step to go through and total them (if done with paper; I guess the spreadsheet could do it for you).
Does it take an unreasonably long time to count by hand? I don't know, but all in all your method of calculating the times is way off base for everything aside from the most simple one choice/two option ballot.
Wow. This is a fairly clever troll. Just enough to seem like you're actually involved in the discussion, but in fact you're just baiting readers into some unrelated anti-American rant. Clever!
Saddam was our ally during the cold war. He had WMD because we supplied them.
We supplied weapons to the Taliban during their long fight against Soviet occupation.
A lot of dictators were armed and trained by the United States.
That's what, 75% of your points? To every single one of them I say: SO WHAT?
They are excellent evidence that the US is poor at judging which of our current allies may be our enemies in the future. They do not in any way pertain to the topic of whether or not what we did to them later was justified. Does the fact that we gave weapons to Saddam mean he DIDN'T systematically torture, oppress and kill his own people and invade his neighbors? Did the fact that we supplied weapons to the Taliban mean that THEY didn't... well, that's going to be largely redundant isn't it? Does the fact that we may have supplied dictators give them a clean slate to do whatever they want to whomever they want thereafter without consequence?
I'll answer the questions for you: No. So take your trolling elsewhere, or at least reserve it for a topic where it has some place in the discussion. Supplying bad people to help us may be hypocritical, but it isn't bullying. And neither is smacking down those same people decades later if they deserve it. Not to mention the fact that the US, you know, has elections and stuff, and that we aren't one big government spanning decades with the exact same leaders with the exact same opinions, ruling under the exact same circumstances and conditions. But I guess that's part of what makes your trolling so clever. Kudos for that, sorry I caught you.
While I agree with some of what you are getting at, a few of your points are misplaced because they're separate issues. The whole "if you do it it's $200,000, if a corporation does it it's a million" spat are what I'm referring to specifically.
This is essentially as it should be. The compensatory damages--damages for actual harm--would likely be the exact same in the case of the person killing somebody with their car as it would be for the UPS driver. These are fairly easy to document and hard to make up. Ambulance ride, hospital stay before the person died, tests, funeral, etc etc. Where the big money starts coming down is in punitive damages, meant to punish the person for what they did and, hopefully, prevent it from happening again.
Are punitive damages way bigger against a corporation than an individual? Yes. Should they be? Yes. I'm a college student. It would take very little to crush me, financially speaking, for a long time. (Hell, my student loans will do a good job of that!) The whole "serious punishment" thing could be achieved against me fairly cheaply. Not only that, but if they tried to make some ridiculously high judgment against me they wouldn't get it. Much as I would like to believe otherwise, chances are I won't make millions of dollars in my lifetime; multi-million dollar judgments would be rather wasteful. On the other hand, would UPS really give a crap if they were hit with punitive damages of $10,000? Their lawyers would probably laugh their asses off, open up their wallets and pay it right on the spot. In fact it would probably cost UPS more to go to court and defend the suit than it would to just pay the money in the first place. The whole goal is to make the mistake expensive.
It kind of reminds me of that little "story" or whatever from Fight Club. I'm probably butchering it, but it went something like "if the rate of failure times the expected damages is less than the cost of the recall, we don't do the recall." The point of high punitive damages it to stop wrong behavior.
I do believe punitive damages get out of control in terms of the amount awarded and even in the logicality of who some of the suits are brought against (I don't think UPS should be sued simply because the driver was working for UPS at the time of the accident, for example), but that's a different topic for a different day. Assuming the suits are valid and show some sort of systemic problem that the justice system really ought to address, different judgments SHOULD be awarded against different respondents even with the same set of facts.
Another unrelated point --
-Pollution is evil if corporations do it, but if you're burning wood in your fireplace, and impacting my life much more, that's okay.
-- Well I think you're going to have trouble finding anybody who says that burning wood in a fireplace, whether done by an individual or corporation, is evil. But that said, the issue is scope. As an individual, the amount of damage I can do is fairly limited; the amount a corporation can do is relatively high. I'm not saying to let all individuals off the hook, but if you're going to start cracking down someplace, it seems to me that the worst offenders is a good place to do it.
That said, I also do not agree with your premise. A car manufacturing plant has certain pollution restrictions. The cars they produce have certain requirements in terms of exhaust and things like that. But that doesn't mean they bear sole responsibility: Every so often, at least in Illinois, we have to take our cars in for emissions testing. If there is a problem, it's not the manufacturer who bears the responsibility of fixing it. I'm sure there are other similar examples as well.
The whole toilet example must be going over my head, because I don't know of any significant group of people who have a problem with essentially contract emplo
The situation you pointed out is a problem, but it has nothing to do with "who controls the Internet." It's a legal issue, one of many examples where the laws have not really caught up to the times.
Let me slightly modify your example to show you how complicated it can get: Let's say Bob lives in Germany. His server is located in... oh, I don't know, the UK. Jill lives in the US.
Jill thinks Bob has (for example) libeled her on his website. Where was the crime committed? IE, which court is going to have jurisdiction? Germany, where Bob lives? The UK, where the material in question resides and where one could argue Bob "went" to transfer his material to the website? The US, where the person who is claiming a tort resides?
Imagine instead of the server being in the UK, it's in some country with extremely lax laws or even no laws at all regarding things like this. A free pass to do absolutely anything they want? Your example might not be fair, but neither is that.
The two most logical, workable choices would be either Germany or the US. In the US, we believe that our citizens should be able to petition the courts. The obvious problem with US jurisdiction in the case is that they are basically powerless to enforce their decision, unless Germany decides to help. German jurisdiction also makes sense, but it really is little better; it simply shifts the potentially heavy burden of the suit from Bob to Jill.
It has nothing to do with malice. Nothing to do with controlling the Internet. It's a simple case of different places having different laws, and nobody really knowing what to make of this new-fangled Internet-majig. I'm sure numerous/.ers will pour in with their immense legal wisdom (and of course a IANAL disclaimer), but contrary to their opinions, these really are not simple problems with simple solutions. These are issues of international politics and international law. If you think it's hard to get good decisions made within a country, boy, try lining 100 different countries up and asking them to agree on something.
And you never told us what happened with your case. Did you hire a lawyer and was the case dismissed afterward? Because if it was, it seems to me that the process worked alright.
who is really going to vote on that holiday that would not vote normally?
Presumably if he is advocating forcing people to vote, and giving the day off as a national holiday, he's supporting some kind of penalties for those who do not. I'm pretty sure that Australia, for example, hands out fines for those who do not vote.
Campaign promises are far too generic and non-specific to be legally argued about.
You're right (and that's deliberate), but I think you overlooked the more simple point: Who is to blame if a campaign promise does not come through? If Bush, hypothetically, had promised tax cuts but the House shot him down, did he break his campaign promise? Do we really punish people for failing at something only marginally within their control? It seems to me that trying to enforce something like this would make politicians say even LESS about what they stand for and what they think about issues than they do now, and that would make things worse rather than better.
this is about as low on most people's totem pole of political importance as gay marriage
If you do not think gay marriage is an important issue to people, talk to some Republican strategists. Many of them were crediting the gay marriage issue almost single-handedly for galvanizing their base to go vote, and winning them the 2004 election. Do you think it was accidental that Bush tried to push a gay marriage ban through as a Constitutional amendment--doomed to fail--just before the election?
You realize you are begging the question, right? The original post asks if you have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the street. You respond by saying that in order for them to intrude on your privacy on the street, they need a reason.
I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that people are generally not considered to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, there is no intrusion on privacy and there is subsequently no burden on law enforcement to show cause.
The other issues with the cameras aside, would you hold the same position about how police need cause to watch you if it was an actual police officer standing there instead of a camera? What's the difference, in terms of privacy?
1. Punishment -- To penalize the person for doing what they did.
2. Deterrent -- To give people a reason not to commit the crime in the first place. Goes largely with the above.
3. Protecting society -- As you mentioned, to get people off the streets because they're too dangerous to be there.
4. Rehabilitation -- To take criminals and reform them into "useful members of society." No comment on what that means.
Seems to me that 1 & 2 definitely are satisfied by a jail sentence. #4 may be as well, if one assumes that the fact he probably won't do what he did again to mean he is rehabilitated. You're right that #3 isn't really necessary in this case.
I don't think copyright infringement should be a criminal offense, but it is, and so long as it is, the punishment seems to make sense to me. It's not overly harsh, but it gets the job done. If you don't want it to be a criminal issue, you should be talking to your politicians and using your vote accordingly. Go organize some marches. Make some noise. If the majority of people truly feel as you feel, you'll get changes--not out of altruism or (necessarily) because the politicians agree with you, but because they want to keep their jobs. And if the majority does not agree with you... well, welcome to democracy.
Language is how the majority use it, not how scholars define it.
So I guess "loose" and "lose" are now synonymous..
I just really don't agree. I'm not the kind who generally goes off on people for misusing words as long as I can understand what they're trying to say, but at the same time, words have meanings. The fact that people have no idea how to properly use those words should not change what the words mean. It should just make us exceptionally sad at the state of affairs our communications skills are in.
Incidentally, this is coming from somebody who misused the phrase "begs the question" dozens of times in his life. The difference being, when it was pointed out to me (I forget if somebody said something or I just came across the correct usage one day), I actually made a mental note of it and I have used it properly since then. It wasn't hard. Neither, as my little joke intimated, is using "lose" and "loose" properly. It just takes a little conscious effort at first, and then it will become second nature.
Personally I think we should be getting people to do that rather than pandering to them and altering the meaning of words and phrases once we reach some ignorance threshold.
I had a similar problem earlier today and yesterday (though I don't use a Mac). I'm not prepared to say 100% that it was the cause, but at least so far, I have yet to have the freezing issue recur since disabling the official Google Toolbar extension. If you have that installed, you may want to try disabling it and seeing if you have any better luck.
I'll agree with you that Apple did nothing wrong if we are conditioning that upon the belief that what a company's subcontracters do is not the problem of the parent company. Yes, it was the subcontrator who messed up, if we're being technical.
But I can't agree with that. Apple should be expected to keep an eye on the work of their subcontracters. They even admitted as much by saying that they were disappointed that they did not catch the problem sooner.
Bringing it back more to the point, even if we can agree that Apple is 100% faultless, it still doesn't excuse the shot they took at Microsoft from being unprofessional. "It was our subcontracter's fault, this is how you fix it, it won't happen again" would have been sufficient. It would have been over and done with by now if they had said that. What did the shot at Microsoft add to the conversation other than controversy? Really, we're talking about one half of one sentence that they said; very little else is controversial in any way. They simply shouldn't have said it.
you better believe that if tires started randomly blowing out on cars, and there was an avenue of blame available, then Ford damn well would lay that blame firmly at the tire-manufacturers feet.
The problem is the situation you have laid out in the analogy completely absolves Ford of any responsibility. If tires randomly started to explode, yeah, Ford would blame the tire manufacturer -- and rightly so -- but the implication is Ford didn't do anything. It would be more like if on a selected percentage of cars, there was a jagged piece of metal hanging down near the tire that caused it to pop and explode at a random time, and then Ford tried to complain that the tires should have been made stronger to withstand the poke.
It may even be true -- it could be that the tires could be made stronger without any significant problems (including cost) and that the tire manufacaturers should have been doing it. Stepping away from the analogy, it's certainly true that Windows DOES present some pretty gaping security holes. But blaming somebody else for having a system that can be damaged by your mistake is unprofessional at best.
Slashdot Mirror
I never used the word "all." I did, however, explicitly use the word "recreational." Medical use is not recreational.
And incidentally, seriously: Stuff the insults up your ass. If you think they make you look cool or smart, they don't. Particularly when some closer reading of what somebody actually said render your insults moot to begin with. If you weren't such an ass about it, perhaps you would be taken more seriously. If you don't care about being taken seriously, then DON'T BOTHER POSTING. You're just wasting my time, and everybody else's.
Not the OP, but have some comments nonetheless.
An accident is an accident, that is why the word exists. All of your specific examples are examples of accidents. While you may get hurt skiing, there's no specific reason to believe that if you get on the slopes today, you're going to hurt yourself. There are plenty of people who ski all their lives and never have any serious injury (or any injury at all). Same with driving, and definitely with something like crossing the street.
Drug use is not an accident, nor are the effects of it unknown. You known if you light up a joint or get yourself drunk or ram yourself full of heroin that it is going to have certain effects on you, potentially including addiction and death. Even if it doesn't go that far, there WILL be some effect. If these negative effects mess up your life, I stop short of saying you deserve what you get but I certainly don't believe your fellow taxpayers should be forced to pay for your slack.
On the other hand, you mention bad investments or bad luck. Of course I have pity for somebody who, for example, is living paycheck to paycheck and suddenly has a massive heart attack that he can't pay for. I have sympathy for somebody who invests all of his money and loses it, though I question his financial decisions. I wouldn't mind some of my tax dollars being sent their way.
I simply hope we can agree there is a difference between bad luck, or making a risky decision that turns bad, and making a decision that is GOING to be bad; one that is going to be, at best, neutral in your life. There's nothing GOOD about alcohol or pot or other recreational drugs. And before anybody says "relaxation" or anything like that, requiring drugs to relax sounds awfully like an addiction to me and there's nothing good about that. I'm not sure you should go to jail if you make that choice, but frankly if you end up ruining your life because of it, don't expect me to support you.
Am I the only one who snickered at this?
Digg it!
I'm not the original poster, for the record, but... so what?
I think I write fairly well even on Internet forums, but if anybody thinks I would give the same amount of care to something I'm posting on /. versus a technical document I'm writing for a class or in the workplace, they're a bit nutty.
I admit, though, I am a bit suspicious of him as well. I'm taking a technical writing course right now, and while I know that by no means makes me an expert and I would certainly not be on the level of a professional technical writer, it sounds to me like the "technical documents" he's writing are long, winding paragraphs. If not, I fail to see how he could get away with dropping in lorum ipsum paragraphs.
If I tried to write like that for my course, I'm fairly certain I would receive a swift kick to the nads from my instructor. The one thing he has been harping on over and over again all semester is to break things up--headings, subheadings, bullets, etc; that users are not interested in reading every word on the page, only in locating the information they are looking for. Assuming he is worth his pay, that seems like the central concept in technical writing.
The stupid billionaire, almost always. Or at least that's how it has seemed to work thus far.
The important question is whether or not children need to be protected from porn at all.
I ask this question seriously: Have there been any studies done that shows that exposure to pornographic images makes a child more likely to engage in sexual activity sooner, or makes them somehow less likely to use protection during intercourse? If not, it seems to me that this isn't about protecting children -- it's about protecting parents from uncomfortable discussions that, frankly, are part of their job as parents.
Personally I wish children were exposed to MORE porn and MORE sexual discussion. It seems to me that the US has become entirely too prudish about sex. It is a natural and necessary part of life and we should stop treating it as a depravity. Sex is what it is. If we, as a society, instill maturity and responsibility in our children, I believe the vast majority of the concern of sex is rendered moot.
If that is the criteria for being modded a troll, then 90% of /. posts should be modded troll.
Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing... I wouldn't mind all "IANAL" posts disappearing all that much.
I don't consider making false charges in a court of law to be a technicality. In this case, it seems like a legitimate mistakes by a person who has probably legitimately been wronged, but I fail to see any reliable method of judging when it's a mistake and when it's somebody throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. I hope we can both agree that the latter is a waste of time and taxpayer money and should be punished.
That said, the problem appears to be with a poorly-written law. If you read their little summary page, you will see that the anti-SLAPP law was not intended to be used the way that it was. The fact that it could be is because of the vagueness politicians love to deal in. That vagueness is not an accident, either.
Personally I do not want my money being spent on that. These guys are using the time of judges, federal judges which I am helping to pay for. They're using the time of these judges to settle private disputes. Free-vs-closed dogma aside, the outcome of this case will not affect me. Chances are even if you view the issue as some important legal issue that needs to be addressed, the ruling will be constrained enough to have little effect. Precedent says that if the EXACT SAME case came up again, a ruling should go the same as it did previously; it leaves up to the individual judges whether or not the facts of the cases are different. In cases like this, they almost certainly are going to be.
Another thing I don't particularly want to be paying for. Look, if you want to tie up judges to settle your private dispute, that's fine. That's what they're there for. But I do not think it is an unreasonable burden to place on litigants that they either invest some of their own resources into doing it or at least know what they're talking about before they get to court. Not to mention that there is no shortage of attorneys who will work on commission if they truly believe that you have a case. Why didn't he take advantage of that? I'm sorry this guy's mistakes turned out to break the law and make him liable for damages in the way of legal fees, but that's exactly what they did.
I feel for people who can't adequately defend themselves against the tremendous resources of big companies, I truly do. I'm just not sure it is sufficient justification to change the system such that I essentially pay if they can't. As I said before, regardless of the issues involved, this is essentially a dispute between two private entites. You'll notice it's JMRI vs. Asshat, not JMRI and the World vs. Asshat. The outcome effects me very little either way.
This Katzer guy is a cock, and I hope he loses and gets absolutely SLAMMED. I'm just not sure anything that has transpired so far is evidence of some systemic problem with the legal system, and even if it were, the solutions I've seen so far (both your post and from others, this topic and others) seem to leave a lot to be desired in my book.
Although it seems somewhat ripe for abuse, I wonder: Will Google use this to customize your search results (assuming you're logged on)? IE, if I search for porn (hey, it's slashdot right?!) and want my favorite porn sites up top, and drag them there... if I search again next week, might they appear at the top?
That sort of thing might be useful, rather than (or in addition to) my dragging results around affecting global ranking issues. I often search for some things that are the same, either because I didn't know it would be useful again after the first time or because I simply don't want to bookmark it. I HATE having too many bookmarks! If they had a simple "revert to global rankings" (or whatever better terminology) button, it could allow you to see the real rankings again later.
Obviously this would require storing quite a bit of data, but if anybody can manage it without blinking it would be Google. Privacy implications? Sure, but they could either let you disable it or you simply don't have to log in to do your searching.
You forgot about the part where if you say "go ahead and mod me down" or "I'll probably get modded down for this," you in fact get modded up. It's one of those Slashdot peculiarities.
That comment seems reasonable to me. Assuming the 2000 PCs sold was a fairly random sample (as opposed to, say, some guy selling them in the lobby of some Linux conference or something), and that none of them came with Windows (old or new) installed, only having 100 licenses purchases for that bundle almost certainly does point to piracy. An OS with around 90% desktop market share that only sells enough licenses to account for 5% of computers would be a colossal statistical anomaly without some explanation, and in this case piracy seems a reasonable one. It becomes less reasonable if they claimed that there were 1900 copies pirated because it fails to account for other OS choices that may have be used.
The real problem is with things like, "1700 copies of XP were pirated -- at $200 a copy, we've lost $340,000!!!" Because that's just bunk. Most of the people who pirated XP would never have paid for it, so it is not a lost sale.
That is what the music industry is doing. In fact they are worse, because I'm fairly certain they're going "1700 songs were pirated -- at $12 a CD..." despite the fact that there may be multiple songs on a CD downloaded, etc.
This is probably an accurate time estimate IF we're assuming the ballot has exactly one question you have to answer and only two options for that question.
With one candidate and issue, it's conceivable to count the votes in your head which significantly speeds up the process. Even if you write it down, just to avoid losing your place, it's extremely simple and easy to do and thus very fast.
With 10 or 20 or 30 issues, you definitely have to write things down and it's going to take time to jot it down regardless of how fast you might be able to visually process the ballot.
It gets even worse with any issue that is not a simple choice between two options; even the presidential elections, in many states, will have a third-party candidate on the ballot even if hardly anybody votes for them. Certainly many of the more local races/issues will. Now recording and counting the ballots becomes even harder. Imagine creating a table, spreadsheet or on paper, trying to track, say, 15 questions with anywhere between 2 and 5 choices per question. It's not hard, but it's going to get pretty messy pretty quick, and recording the votes is going to take substantially longer than your estimates. And we're just talking recording the votes, you'd need an additional step to go through and total them (if done with paper; I guess the spreadsheet could do it for you).
Does it take an unreasonably long time to count by hand? I don't know, but all in all your method of calculating the times is way off base for everything aside from the most simple one choice/two option ballot.
Wow. This is a fairly clever troll. Just enough to seem like you're actually involved in the discussion, but in fact you're just baiting readers into some unrelated anti-American rant. Clever!
That's what, 75% of your points? To every single one of them I say: SO WHAT?
They are excellent evidence that the US is poor at judging which of our current allies may be our enemies in the future. They do not in any way pertain to the topic of whether or not what we did to them later was justified. Does the fact that we gave weapons to Saddam mean he DIDN'T systematically torture, oppress and kill his own people and invade his neighbors? Did the fact that we supplied weapons to the Taliban mean that THEY didn't... well, that's going to be largely redundant isn't it? Does the fact that we may have supplied dictators give them a clean slate to do whatever they want to whomever they want thereafter without consequence?
I'll answer the questions for you: No. So take your trolling elsewhere, or at least reserve it for a topic where it has some place in the discussion. Supplying bad people to help us may be hypocritical, but it isn't bullying. And neither is smacking down those same people decades later if they deserve it. Not to mention the fact that the US, you know, has elections and stuff, and that we aren't one big government spanning decades with the exact same leaders with the exact same opinions, ruling under the exact same circumstances and conditions. But I guess that's part of what makes your trolling so clever. Kudos for that, sorry I caught you.
While I agree with some of what you are getting at, a few of your points are misplaced because they're separate issues. The whole "if you do it it's $200,000, if a corporation does it it's a million" spat are what I'm referring to specifically.
This is essentially as it should be. The compensatory damages--damages for actual harm--would likely be the exact same in the case of the person killing somebody with their car as it would be for the UPS driver. These are fairly easy to document and hard to make up. Ambulance ride, hospital stay before the person died, tests, funeral, etc etc. Where the big money starts coming down is in punitive damages, meant to punish the person for what they did and, hopefully, prevent it from happening again.
Are punitive damages way bigger against a corporation than an individual? Yes. Should they be? Yes. I'm a college student. It would take very little to crush me, financially speaking, for a long time. (Hell, my student loans will do a good job of that!) The whole "serious punishment" thing could be achieved against me fairly cheaply. Not only that, but if they tried to make some ridiculously high judgment against me they wouldn't get it. Much as I would like to believe otherwise, chances are I won't make millions of dollars in my lifetime; multi-million dollar judgments would be rather wasteful. On the other hand, would UPS really give a crap if they were hit with punitive damages of $10,000? Their lawyers would probably laugh their asses off, open up their wallets and pay it right on the spot. In fact it would probably cost UPS more to go to court and defend the suit than it would to just pay the money in the first place. The whole goal is to make the mistake expensive.
It kind of reminds me of that little "story" or whatever from Fight Club. I'm probably butchering it, but it went something like "if the rate of failure times the expected damages is less than the cost of the recall, we don't do the recall." The point of high punitive damages it to stop wrong behavior.
I do believe punitive damages get out of control in terms of the amount awarded and even in the logicality of who some of the suits are brought against (I don't think UPS should be sued simply because the driver was working for UPS at the time of the accident, for example), but that's a different topic for a different day. Assuming the suits are valid and show some sort of systemic problem that the justice system really ought to address, different judgments SHOULD be awarded against different respondents even with the same set of facts.
Another unrelated point --
-- Well I think you're going to have trouble finding anybody who says that burning wood in a fireplace, whether done by an individual or corporation, is evil. But that said, the issue is scope. As an individual, the amount of damage I can do is fairly limited; the amount a corporation can do is relatively high. I'm not saying to let all individuals off the hook, but if you're going to start cracking down someplace, it seems to me that the worst offenders is a good place to do it.
That said, I also do not agree with your premise. A car manufacturing plant has certain pollution restrictions. The cars they produce have certain requirements in terms of exhaust and things like that. But that doesn't mean they bear sole responsibility: Every so often, at least in Illinois, we have to take our cars in for emissions testing. If there is a problem, it's not the manufacturer who bears the responsibility of fixing it. I'm sure there are other similar examples as well.
The whole toilet example must be going over my head, because I don't know of any significant group of people who have a problem with essentially contract emplo
The situation you pointed out is a problem, but it has nothing to do with "who controls the Internet." It's a legal issue, one of many examples where the laws have not really caught up to the times. Let me slightly modify your example to show you how complicated it can get: Let's say Bob lives in Germany. His server is located in... oh, I don't know, the UK. Jill lives in the US.
Jill thinks Bob has (for example) libeled her on his website. Where was the crime committed? IE, which court is going to have jurisdiction? Germany, where Bob lives? The UK, where the material in question resides and where one could argue Bob "went" to transfer his material to the website? The US, where the person who is claiming a tort resides?
Imagine instead of the server being in the UK, it's in some country with extremely lax laws or even no laws at all regarding things like this. A free pass to do absolutely anything they want? Your example might not be fair, but neither is that.
The two most logical, workable choices would be either Germany or the US. In the US, we believe that our citizens should be able to petition the courts. The obvious problem with US jurisdiction in the case is that they are basically powerless to enforce their decision, unless Germany decides to help. German jurisdiction also makes sense, but it really is little better; it simply shifts the potentially heavy burden of the suit from Bob to Jill.
It has nothing to do with malice. Nothing to do with controlling the Internet. It's a simple case of different places having different laws, and nobody really knowing what to make of this new-fangled Internet-majig. I'm sure numerous /.ers will pour in with their immense legal wisdom (and of course a IANAL disclaimer), but contrary to their opinions, these really are not simple problems with simple solutions. These are issues of international politics and international law. If you think it's hard to get good decisions made within a country, boy, try lining 100 different countries up and asking them to agree on something.
And you never told us what happened with your case. Did you hire a lawyer and was the case dismissed afterward? Because if it was, it seems to me that the process worked alright.
And why can't it mean "I'm trying to learn the game, but I don't want to start over every time I make a mistake?"
Presumably if he is advocating forcing people to vote, and giving the day off as a national holiday, he's supporting some kind of penalties for those who do not. I'm pretty sure that Australia, for example, hands out fines for those who do not vote.
You're right (and that's deliberate), but I think you overlooked the more simple point: Who is to blame if a campaign promise does not come through? If Bush, hypothetically, had promised tax cuts but the House shot him down, did he break his campaign promise? Do we really punish people for failing at something only marginally within their control? It seems to me that trying to enforce something like this would make politicians say even LESS about what they stand for and what they think about issues than they do now, and that would make things worse rather than better.
If you do not think gay marriage is an important issue to people, talk to some Republican strategists. Many of them were crediting the gay marriage issue almost single-handedly for galvanizing their base to go vote, and winning them the 2004 election. Do you think it was accidental that Bush tried to push a gay marriage ban through as a Constitutional amendment--doomed to fail--just before the election?
You realize you are begging the question, right? The original post asks if you have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the street. You respond by saying that in order for them to intrude on your privacy on the street, they need a reason.
I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that people are generally not considered to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, there is no intrusion on privacy and there is subsequently no burden on law enforcement to show cause.
The other issues with the cameras aside, would you hold the same position about how police need cause to watch you if it was an actual police officer standing there instead of a camera? What's the difference, in terms of privacy?
More than you imply.
Prison is for:
Seems to me that 1 & 2 definitely are satisfied by a jail sentence. #4 may be as well, if one assumes that the fact he probably won't do what he did again to mean he is rehabilitated. You're right that #3 isn't really necessary in this case.
I don't think copyright infringement should be a criminal offense, but it is, and so long as it is, the punishment seems to make sense to me. It's not overly harsh, but it gets the job done. If you don't want it to be a criminal issue, you should be talking to your politicians and using your vote accordingly. Go organize some marches. Make some noise. If the majority of people truly feel as you feel, you'll get changes--not out of altruism or (necessarily) because the politicians agree with you, but because they want to keep their jobs. And if the majority does not agree with you... well, welcome to democracy.
So I guess "loose" and "lose" are now synonymous..
I just really don't agree. I'm not the kind who generally goes off on people for misusing words as long as I can understand what they're trying to say, but at the same time, words have meanings. The fact that people have no idea how to properly use those words should not change what the words mean. It should just make us exceptionally sad at the state of affairs our communications skills are in.
Incidentally, this is coming from somebody who misused the phrase "begs the question" dozens of times in his life. The difference being, when it was pointed out to me (I forget if somebody said something or I just came across the correct usage one day), I actually made a mental note of it and I have used it properly since then. It wasn't hard. Neither, as my little joke intimated, is using "lose" and "loose" properly. It just takes a little conscious effort at first, and then it will become second nature.
Personally I think we should be getting people to do that rather than pandering to them and altering the meaning of words and phrases once we reach some ignorance threshold.
Do you have any extensions?
I had a similar problem earlier today and yesterday (though I don't use a Mac). I'm not prepared to say 100% that it was the cause, but at least so far, I have yet to have the freezing issue recur since disabling the official Google Toolbar extension. If you have that installed, you may want to try disabling it and seeing if you have any better luck.
I'll agree with you that Apple did nothing wrong if we are conditioning that upon the belief that what a company's subcontracters do is not the problem of the parent company. Yes, it was the subcontrator who messed up, if we're being technical.
But I can't agree with that. Apple should be expected to keep an eye on the work of their subcontracters. They even admitted as much by saying that they were disappointed that they did not catch the problem sooner.
Bringing it back more to the point, even if we can agree that Apple is 100% faultless, it still doesn't excuse the shot they took at Microsoft from being unprofessional. "It was our subcontracter's fault, this is how you fix it, it won't happen again" would have been sufficient. It would have been over and done with by now if they had said that. What did the shot at Microsoft add to the conversation other than controversy? Really, we're talking about one half of one sentence that they said; very little else is controversial in any way. They simply shouldn't have said it.
The problem is the situation you have laid out in the analogy completely absolves Ford of any responsibility. If tires randomly started to explode, yeah, Ford would blame the tire manufacturer -- and rightly so -- but the implication is Ford didn't do anything. It would be more like if on a selected percentage of cars, there was a jagged piece of metal hanging down near the tire that caused it to pop and explode at a random time, and then Ford tried to complain that the tires should have been made stronger to withstand the poke.
It may even be true -- it could be that the tires could be made stronger without any significant problems (including cost) and that the tire manufacaturers should have been doing it. Stepping away from the analogy, it's certainly true that Windows DOES present some pretty gaping security holes. But blaming somebody else for having a system that can be damaged by your mistake is unprofessional at best.