Overall, it was one of the most interesting class I've ever taken, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth.
Sounds like one of the most effective classes, as well. Anything that leaves an impression like that is what you are paying the big bucks for.
Not to belabor the point or to be utterly paranoid, but an additional, related area of inquiry might be the effect of media on people's memories and perceptions. While neither CNN nor Fox has the same effect as the North Korean POW camps (all joking aside here), they have some impact. Collective cultural messages bombarding people over the years matter tremendously.
While this wanders far afield from the original idea -- polygraphers, truth, and insurance claims (and even police investigating techniques), the common thread is truth and a means of getting at it through our respective layers of perception and culture. The eyes and ears of every person are not one-way devices for inputting data into the brain. They have an almost quantum effect on the brain, which is to say that by viewing (or "measuring"), the perception ("result") is changed. Nothing is neutral.
The advice you give about shutting up is pretty sound. It's too bad that most people are not ready for the kind of pressure that cops will exert on them.
I'm a lawyer, and I get nervous when the cops pull me over, and I know I don't have a kilo of cocaine in the trunk. They have a huge psychological advantage, and they are trained to exploit it. What course materials are you folks looking at? Has he used any police training materials?
1. Do you know why I stopped you? 2. We'll go easy on you if you just tell us what happened... 3. You don't ming if I look in your trunk, do you?
As far as the syllabus that you linked to, it looks like the classic "Did daddy touch you this way?" and then operator demonstrates with anatomically correct dolls. Kid goes "uh hunh."
The trick for adults is to shut the fuck up when a cop talks to them. Don't follow social rules about "filling silences" or "being nice". The cops are worse than telemarketers -- not only do they refuse to take "no" for an answer, they are frequently looking to arrest you for something. It's a lot worse than buying a subscription to a shitty magazine.
If questioned by a cop for anything you did not call them for (i.e. they are knocking and looking for you), here's the thing to do:
1. Say "I want to talk to my lawyer." 2. Shut your mouth. 3. Do not give them permission to do anything.
Scene: Microsoft HQ Present: Emporer Gates, DBallmer
Emporer Gates: Darth Ballmer, it has come to my attention that we do not possess 90% market share in certain aspects of our operation. Your performance diappoints me...
Emporer Gates: Our code causes only 50% of crashes, yet we control 95% of desktop computers...can you explain the ineffectiveness of our operation? Why are we lagging in this area?!?!?
Darth Balmer: Ook. [Hoooo...haaaaa...hoooo...haaaa]
Emporer Gates: Please put your army of flying monkey dark Jedi to work on this problem immediately. I expect results, Ballmer. You will not fail me in this, or you will be looking for bananas in the sodomy pits of the Hutts!
(1) Monkeyboy (2) Librarian (3) I'm aware that it should be "Ape-boy" if the Librarian is an Orangutan, but if you don't tell the Librarian, I won't. (4) Darth Vader breathing sound
Until we're individually sued whinging is all most of us can do.
A declaratory judgment should be available to residents of PA,at least. Other states may have analogous provisions under their respective rules of civil procedure. I have seriously considered filing one myself in order to have a court determine whether I may run my linux servers.
I suggest that your efforts to find out what SCO's response will be to your inquiry is worthy of a journal entry or two. Would you be interested in doing that to keep everyone up to date on this process? I am particularly interested about your "no NUMA, JFS & SMP options" angle. I was thinking the same thing.
Same with BSD. It changes over time, and each time there is a change, there is an opportunity for an enemy of OSS to claim that stolen IP was added into the OSS project.
You really have no idea what you're talking about with FreeBSD, do you? Changes over time? FreeBSD is not linux, where the code base flips over every few months.
You are missing the point. This is not a religious war over OS.
The current 4.x fbsd code base does not differ from the 2.x and 3.x trees (at least with respect to issues that SCO is claiming ownership over.).
But it changes over time. Which was my point. Any change to any OSS software is susceptible to the type of attack SCO is making.
Unless SCO is going to claim ownership of user-land tools or ports, the architecture of freebsd (vis-a-vis any SCO IP claim) is the same: completely non-infringing new code that we wrote when settling the lawsuit.
SCO may not be the BSD problem. Do you know for sure that not one iota of BSD code came from somewhere else? How can you be sure?
You're in a whole heapa trouble, linux boy.
Like I said before: this type of attack is something that all OSS could be confronted with in the future. SCO probably won't be the entity to go after BSD, but the model it has established could very well be used to threaten any OSS. As I mentioned before here it is:
1. OSS project develops nifty software 2. Competing commercial software checks OSS regularly to see if any proprietary code has been lifted into OSS project. 3. OSS distributors/contributors get sued for infringement. 4. Suit takes years to resolve. 5. FUD destroys willingness of risk-averse major companies from adopting/using OSS or contributing to its development (or associating with it in any way).
That is what is at stake here. Not whether BSD may be subject, today, to attack from SCO. This is not a linux issue. This is an OSS issue.
There are legal principles known as res judicata and joinder of claims. If SCO has new objections to FreeBSD, it should have raised them in the early 1990s in the original lawsuit.
You missed my point entirely. My point is not about the status of IP in current versions of OSS. My point is that any time a feature is added to an OSS project or any time a new OSS project is created, there will be questions about the heritage of IP added to it by OSS coders.
Openoffice? Maybe MS will cry that somehow some code related to its file formats was leaked into OOO. Some new kernel hardening code? Maybe a security vendor will claim that someone dumped that in from the vendor's codebase.
The "BSD is safe because of the ATT lawsuit" argument totally misses the point about modifications to OSS software. Something that was once safe at a moment in time is not necessarily safe going forward. Kernel 2.2 was fine. Kernel 2.4 is not. The difference is in what was added. Same with BSD. It changes over time, and each time there is a change, there is an opportunity for an enemy of OSS to claim that stolen IP was added into the OSS project.
Ignore the tree and look at the forest. This is the textbook example of how OSS will be attacked now and forever. OSS needs a better way to deal with this sort of attack to force opponents into showing their hands to prevent FUD from killing or impairing OSS projects.
Just call them and ask for information to be mailed to you. Don't give them your business address, of course. I suspect that people that call about licenses but who don't order them may end up as targets of RIAA-style lawsuits.
The problem here is that this is the model for attacked OSS now. Refuse to disclose the "stolen" IP , and claim that IP has been stolen. Wait years for the case to be cleared up in the courts, and by then, the next batch of proprietary software will have FUDded the OSS alternative into oblivion.
People are saying "hey -- just go to BSD". Guess what? That will come under attack, too, as it is developed. A different process for controlling what code goes into OSS and where it comes from may be needed, but that is what SCO and the proprietary software business wants -- they want it to be more difficult to develop software outside of the traditional code it and hide methods.
This suit has nothing to do with the linux kernel. It has everything to do with the entire OSS model. McBride as much as said that community developed software is the target here, referring to RMS in the same breath as the "OSS wants don't ask, don't tell when it comes to the source of code". Again, this is about OSS, not linux.
From my own limited experiences with the legal system, (My father involved in a complex dispute over the family farm, and a drawn out divorce) these things move at a speed akin to continental drift.
Come on, now. Let's be fair to continental drift, ok?
Dear Mr. "CmdrTaco" Malda and other Slashdot editors:
I appreciated the link in the story to the SCO. It is always best to get the story straight from the horse's mouth. Or, in the case of SCO, the other end of the horse. However, would it be too much trouble to put a "goatse.cx" disclaimer on further links to SCO's website? They are clearly too closely related for my comfort.
On another issue, I understand that there has been conversation regarding changing the SCO icon from it's current Mickey Mouse looking thing to something resembling the goatse.cx picture. I, for one, cast a whole-hearted "no" vote on that potential change. I think that the current Mickey Mouse looking icon accurately reflects the nature of SCO's enterprise and that the proposed alteration might be traumatic for the younger readers of this "family" website.
I'd be more interested in seeing a study in which half the group tried it on GNU/Linux,KDE first then on Windows, and the other half, vice versa. I've never heard from someone who has never used either operating system having new experiences with both of them.
I think that they should find a tribe of african bushmen who have never used computers, and test it out on them. While these bushmen are familiar with IBM databases (remember the ad with the clicking bushman?), they seem to have no familiarity with desktop computers, sort of like the mainframe guys most of us keep in the back room.
I expect that the bushmen (not buschmen -- those can be found in Appalachia watching NASCAR) will decide to worship the superior desktop environment, and thus, anthropologists and geeks alike will finally know which is the better desktop environment -- KDE or XP. Mac users, as usual, will be left out.
Community assent doesn't work. For example, say that the sign says instead "Peachy News! In Satan I trust!" and you begin to see the problems of community assent.
If I wanted to spice up the scenario from the virtually verbatim real-life scenario I gave you, I could also have added that the sign's neon shines in a neighbor's window and keeps the occupants awake at night and that there is a child on the block who responds to the flashing sign with epileptic seizures. Instead, I'll save that to suggest to my old state and local law professor for use on a final exam.
FWIW, I am all for things like binding arbitration (I'm representing a client at one of those this week). I also like mediation for certain things. There is a movement away from litigation in certain circumstances, but it doesn't always work.
Simplification is a nice idea, and there have been a number of areas where statutory law has been helped over the last fifty years by what amounts to a simplification movement:
1. Model uniform statutes 2. Codification of statutory law 3. "Plain language" consumer contract laws 4. Federalization of some areas of law 5. Modeling state rules of civil procedure to match federal rules more closely
Nevertheless, there are a lot of competing interests and sometimes it just isn't as easy to simplify things as it "should" be to some people. Still waters run deep. What looks simple on the surface rarely is as simple as it seems.
Laws are artificial constructs that don't have any inherent need to be complex, but are becoming more and more complex all the time. No effort whatsoever is going into making them more simple and easy to understand.
Au contraire. If you looked at statutes drafted fifty years ago, it would not be uncommon to find paragraphs that went on for an entire page. That does not happen anymore.
The problem is that there are many areas of the law that overlap. This is where things become complex, and I, for one, am not smart enough to figure out how to cut/solve that Gordian Knot.
Take the regulation of yard signs: Imagine a small electric sign in a yard. The sign says "Peachy News! Jesus is Lord!" Say that the building in the yard is a business with the name "Peachy News". There is a sign ordinance that states that business signs cannot exceed 2 square feet. The sign is 2.5 square feet. The sign is in an historical district and the sign was not approved by the HARB. The sign is neon, and this is not permitted under the local sign ordinance, unless the sign is under glass (and this one is not).
Please provide the analysis from both federal and state constitutional perspectives, as well as an analysis based on local zoning law, including any impact from federal legislation such as RFRA.
Simple, isn't it? Is there an inherent need to make yard sign regulation complex? No. Nevertheless, there are competing interests that must be weighed, and there is no easy way to do it. The only "easy" way is the arbitrary one, which is to say that some honcho decides what is ok and what isn't ok. Despite appearances to the contrary, that is exactly the opposite of what the legal system provides.
The problem with the law is not the law. It is the people who think, despite thte advice of counsel in most circumstances, that they are totally in the right and that their shit hath never smelled. Of course they have never done anything wrong, and if they could only tell their story to the judge, he would surely agree with them and make all this unpleasantness go away with just the wave of his hand.
A good recent example was the lawyer who argued that oversized tires on a speeding car could have fooled the computer that measures the cars speed, so that the computer's measure of 114 MPH was actually supposed to be 60 MPH. Hence, the defendant was going about 2.5 times the speed limit, not 4.5 times the limit.
Sometimes, you literally have nothing to argue, but your client is not in a position to settle, or s/he is unwilling to settle. You do what you can. Sometimes, you end up looking foolish.
The lawyer was obviously lying.
No, the expert witness would have been lying. The attorney does not testify. He can only argue the evidence placed before the tribunal by witnesses or documents.
Oh, you could say that he didn't know for sure that what he was saying was false...
Again, save the criticism for the expert witness, not the lawyer. The expert witness would have had to give the testimony.
Yeah, I feel sorry for the old lady who burned her crotch with hot coffee. But I'm sorry, 2 million (or was it 7 mil) is just outrageous. And yes, for those who want to point out that it was more than just the fact that the coffee was hot, I do understand a little more of the background.
She offered to settle the case before trial for $15,000. McDonald's told her to fuck off. Also, the jury award was reduced to about $300,000.00.
FWIW, the insurance companies and businesses in the US could not have bought more effective anti-lawsuit publicity than that case. I think that if they could find another one like, they'd gladly pay $300,000.00 and run the to bank giggling about thinking about how human bodies and lives are just a cost of doing business for them.
Ok. 202 minus 48 equals 154. Just for the literal-minded engineers that are out there, ready to pounce on my little lawyer ass in the/. shower. I guess that's what "Preview" is for. Instead, it looks like I get to "Submit".
1. Microsoft paid the $48 million to the lawyers, not the clients.
2. The clients received, in the aggregate, 202-48 million, or 150 million dollars.
3. The clients could not have pursued their claims vs. MSFT individually because it does not make economic sense.
4. My alternative solution for dealing with class-action fees is to do nothing. I think that the system worked reasonably well here.
5. The settlment needs court approval. Do you think that one of the questions that the judge might be asking is "What do you think that average harm per class member was?"
6. Do you have any idea what the average harm per class member was in dollar terms? If not, then why are you criticizing the result? You don't have the information necessary to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Overall, it was one of the most interesting class I've ever taken, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth.
Sounds like one of the most effective classes, as well. Anything that leaves an impression like that is what you are paying the big bucks for.
Not to belabor the point or to be utterly paranoid, but an additional, related area of inquiry might be the effect of media on people's memories and perceptions. While neither CNN nor Fox has the same effect as the North Korean POW camps (all joking aside here), they have some impact. Collective cultural messages bombarding people over the years matter tremendously.
While this wanders far afield from the original idea -- polygraphers, truth, and insurance claims (and even police investigating techniques), the common thread is truth and a means of getting at it through our respective layers of perception and culture. The eyes and ears of every person are not one-way devices for inputting data into the brain. They have an almost quantum effect on the brain, which is to say that by viewing (or "measuring"), the perception ("result") is changed. Nothing is neutral.
GF.
Currently been up for 17 days 14 hours.
You didn't mean for that to be funny, did you?
GF.
The advice you give about shutting up is pretty sound. It's too bad that most people are not ready for the kind of pressure that cops will exert on them.
I'm a lawyer, and I get nervous when the cops pull me over, and I know I don't have a kilo of cocaine in the trunk. They have a huge psychological advantage, and they are trained to exploit it. What course materials are you folks looking at? Has he used any police training materials?
GF.
Classic ones:
1. Do you know why I stopped you?
2. We'll go easy on you if you just tell us what happened...
3. You don't ming if I look in your trunk, do you?
As far as the syllabus that you linked to, it looks like the classic "Did daddy touch you this way?" and then operator demonstrates with anatomically correct dolls. Kid goes "uh hunh."
The trick for adults is to shut the fuck up when a cop talks to them. Don't follow social rules about "filling silences" or "being nice". The cops are worse than telemarketers -- not only do they refuse to take "no" for an answer, they are frequently looking to arrest you for something. It's a lot worse than buying a subscription to a shitty magazine.
If questioned by a cop for anything you did not call them for (i.e. they are knocking and looking for you), here's the thing to do:
1. Say "I want to talk to my lawyer."
2. Shut your mouth.
3. Do not give them permission to do anything.
GF.
Scene: Microsoft HQ
Present: Emporer Gates, DBallmer
Emporer Gates: Darth Ballmer, it has come to my attention that we do not possess 90% market share in certain aspects of our operation. Your performance diappoints me...
Darth Balmer: Ook.(1)(2)(3) [Hooo...haaa...hooo...haaa](4)
Emporer Gates: Our code causes only 50% of crashes, yet we control 95% of desktop computers...can you explain the ineffectiveness of our operation? Why are we lagging in this area?!?!?
Darth Balmer: Ook. [Hoooo...haaaaa...hoooo...haaaa]
Emporer Gates: Please put your army of flying monkey dark Jedi to work on this problem immediately. I expect results, Ballmer. You will not fail me in this, or you will be looking for bananas in the sodomy pits of the Hutts!
Darth Balmer: Ook! [Hoooo...haaaaa...hoooo...haaaa]
GF.
(1) Monkeyboy
(2) Librarian
(3) I'm aware that it should be "Ape-boy" if the Librarian is an Orangutan, but if you don't tell the Librarian, I won't.
(4) Darth Vader breathing sound
Insurance fraud is rife. They have to do something to try and stem the flow, so to speak.
Yes, insurance fraud is rife. The solution is that the insurance companies should stop committing it.
GF.
exploitation of black African minors
Uh...I thought that was R. Kelly.
GF.
He means a honky.
GF.
Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
Yes. The French are much more likely to smoke than Americans.
GF.
Until we're individually sued whinging is all most of us can do.
A declaratory judgment should be available to residents of PA,at least. Other states may have analogous provisions under their respective rules of civil procedure. I have seriously considered filing one myself in order to have a court determine whether I may run my linux servers.
GF.
AngryWhiteGuy:
I suggest that your efforts to find out what SCO's response will be to your inquiry is worthy of a journal entry or two. Would you be interested in doing that to keep everyone up to date on this process? I am particularly interested about your "no NUMA, JFS & SMP options" angle. I was thinking the same thing.
GF.
Same with BSD. It changes over time, and each time there is a change, there is an opportunity for an enemy of OSS to claim that stolen IP was added into the OSS project.
You really have no idea what you're talking about with FreeBSD, do you? Changes over time? FreeBSD is not linux, where the code base flips over every few months.
You are missing the point. This is not a religious war over OS.
The current 4.x fbsd code base does not differ from the 2.x and 3.x trees (at least with respect to issues that SCO is claiming ownership over.).
But it changes over time. Which was my point. Any change to any OSS software is susceptible to the type of attack SCO is making.
Unless SCO is going to claim ownership of user-land tools or ports, the architecture of freebsd (vis-a-vis any SCO IP claim) is the same: completely non-infringing new code that we wrote when settling the lawsuit.
SCO may not be the BSD problem. Do you know for sure that not one iota of BSD code came from somewhere else? How can you be sure?
You're in a whole heapa trouble, linux boy.
Like I said before: this type of attack is something that all OSS could be confronted with in the future. SCO probably won't be the entity to go after BSD, but the model it has established could very well be used to threaten any OSS. As I mentioned before here it is:
1. OSS project develops nifty software
2. Competing commercial software checks OSS regularly to see if any proprietary code has been lifted into OSS project.
3. OSS distributors/contributors get sued for infringement.
4. Suit takes years to resolve.
5. FUD destroys willingness of risk-averse major companies from adopting/using OSS or contributing to its development (or associating with it in any way).
That is what is at stake here. Not whether BSD may be subject, today, to attack from SCO. This is not a linux issue. This is an OSS issue.
GF.
There are legal principles known as res judicata and joinder of claims. If SCO has new objections to FreeBSD, it should have raised them in the early 1990s in the original lawsuit.
You missed my point entirely. My point is not about the status of IP in current versions of OSS. My point is that any time a feature is added to an OSS project or any time a new OSS project is created, there will be questions about the heritage of IP added to it by OSS coders.
Openoffice? Maybe MS will cry that somehow some code related to its file formats was leaked into OOO. Some new kernel hardening code? Maybe a security vendor will claim that someone dumped that in from the vendor's codebase.
The "BSD is safe because of the ATT lawsuit" argument totally misses the point about modifications to OSS software. Something that was once safe at a moment in time is not necessarily safe going forward. Kernel 2.2 was fine. Kernel 2.4 is not. The difference is in what was added. Same with BSD. It changes over time, and each time there is a change, there is an opportunity for an enemy of OSS to claim that stolen IP was added into the OSS project.
Ignore the tree and look at the forest. This is the textbook example of how OSS will be attacked now and forever. OSS needs a better way to deal with this sort of attack to force opponents into showing their hands to prevent FUD from killing or impairing OSS projects.
GF.
Just call them and ask for information to be mailed to you. Don't give them your business address, of course. I suspect that people that call about licenses but who don't order them may end up as targets of RIAA-style lawsuits.
GF.
Ok. Let's all go back to RH 6.2 and rewrite. Guh.
The problem here is that this is the model for attacked OSS now. Refuse to disclose the "stolen" IP , and claim that IP has been stolen. Wait years for the case to be cleared up in the courts, and by then, the next batch of proprietary software will have FUDded the OSS alternative into oblivion.
People are saying "hey -- just go to BSD". Guess what? That will come under attack, too, as it is developed. A different process for controlling what code goes into OSS and where it comes from may be needed, but that is what SCO and the proprietary software business wants -- they want it to be more difficult to develop software outside of the traditional code it and hide methods.
This suit has nothing to do with the linux kernel. It has everything to do with the entire OSS model. McBride as much as said that community developed software is the target here, referring to RMS in the same breath as the "OSS wants don't ask, don't tell when it comes to the source of code". Again, this is about OSS, not linux.
GF.
Hi Darl, you fascist, I run Linux on a dozen boxes. Please send me a bill that I will be happy to wipe my ass with and send back to you.
To BJH, my long-time freak:
Amen. Godspeed on your mission.
GF.
From my own limited experiences with the legal system, (My father involved in a complex dispute over the family farm, and a drawn out divorce) these things move at a speed akin to continental drift.
Come on, now. Let's be fair to continental drift, ok?
GF.
Dear Mr. "CmdrTaco" Malda and other Slashdot editors:
I appreciated the link in the story to the SCO. It is always best to get the story straight from the horse's mouth. Or, in the case of SCO, the other end of the horse. However, would it be too much trouble to put a "goatse.cx" disclaimer on further links to SCO's website? They are clearly too closely related for my comfort.
On another issue, I understand that there has been conversation regarding changing the SCO icon from it's current Mickey Mouse looking thing to something resembling the goatse.cx picture. I, for one, cast a whole-hearted "no" vote on that potential change. I think that the current Mickey Mouse looking icon accurately reflects the nature of SCO's enterprise and that the proposed alteration might be traumatic for the younger readers of this "family" website.
Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully,
guacamolefoo
A lawyer is as good as his case.
So true. Another good old chestnut is:
If you have the facts, pound the facts. If you have the law, pound the law. If you don't have either, pound the table.
GF.
I'd be more interested in seeing a study in which half the group tried it on GNU/Linux,KDE first then on Windows, and the other half, vice versa. I've never heard from someone who has never used either operating system having new experiences with both of them.
I think that they should find a tribe of african bushmen who have never used computers, and test it out on them. While these bushmen are familiar with IBM databases (remember the ad with the clicking bushman?), they seem to have no familiarity with desktop computers, sort of like the mainframe guys most of us keep in the back room.
I expect that the bushmen (not buschmen -- those can be found in Appalachia watching NASCAR) will decide to worship the superior desktop environment, and thus, anthropologists and geeks alike will finally know which is the better desktop environment -- KDE or XP. Mac users, as usual, will be left out.
GF.
Community assent doesn't work. For example, say that the sign says instead "Peachy News! In Satan I trust!" and you begin to see the problems of community assent.
If I wanted to spice up the scenario from the virtually verbatim real-life scenario I gave you, I could also have added that the sign's neon shines in a neighbor's window and keeps the occupants awake at night and that there is a child on the block who responds to the flashing sign with epileptic seizures. Instead, I'll save that to suggest to my old state and local law professor for use on a final exam.
FWIW, I am all for things like binding arbitration (I'm representing a client at one of those this week). I also like mediation for certain things. There is a movement away from litigation in certain circumstances, but it doesn't always work.
Simplification is a nice idea, and there have been a number of areas where statutory law has been helped over the last fifty years by what amounts to a simplification movement:
1. Model uniform statutes
2. Codification of statutory law
3. "Plain language" consumer contract laws
4. Federalization of some areas of law
5. Modeling state rules of civil procedure to match federal rules more closely
Nevertheless, there are a lot of competing interests and sometimes it just isn't as easy to simplify things as it "should" be to some people. Still waters run deep. What looks simple on the surface rarely is as simple as it seems.
GF.
Laws are artificial constructs that don't have any inherent need to be complex, but are becoming more and more complex all the time. No effort whatsoever is going into making them more simple and easy to understand.
Au contraire. If you looked at statutes drafted fifty years ago, it would not be uncommon to find paragraphs that went on for an entire page. That does not happen anymore.
The problem is that there are many areas of the law that overlap. This is where things become complex, and I, for one, am not smart enough to figure out how to cut/solve that Gordian Knot.
Take the regulation of yard signs:
Imagine a small electric sign in a yard. The sign says "Peachy News! Jesus is Lord!" Say that the building in the yard is a business with the name "Peachy News". There is a sign ordinance that states that business signs cannot exceed 2 square feet. The sign is 2.5 square feet. The sign is in an historical district and the sign was not approved by the HARB. The sign is neon, and this is not permitted under the local sign ordinance, unless the sign is under glass (and this one is not).
Please provide the analysis from both federal and state constitutional perspectives, as well as an analysis based on local zoning law, including any impact from federal legislation such as RFRA.
Simple, isn't it? Is there an inherent need to make yard sign regulation complex? No. Nevertheless, there are competing interests that must be weighed, and there is no easy way to do it. The only "easy" way is the arbitrary one, which is to say that some honcho decides what is ok and what isn't ok. Despite appearances to the contrary, that is exactly the opposite of what the legal system provides.
The problem with the law is not the law. It is the people who think, despite thte advice of counsel in most circumstances, that they are totally in the right and that their shit hath never smelled. Of course they have never done anything wrong, and if they could only tell their story to the judge, he would surely agree with them and make all this unpleasantness go away with just the wave of his hand.
Are you sensing any of my frustrations yet?
GF.
A good recent example was the lawyer who argued that oversized tires on a speeding car could have fooled the computer that measures the cars speed, so that the computer's measure of 114 MPH was actually supposed to be 60 MPH. Hence, the defendant was going about 2.5 times the speed limit, not 4.5 times the limit.
Sometimes, you literally have nothing to argue, but your client is not in a position to settle, or s/he is unwilling to settle. You do what you can. Sometimes, you end up looking foolish.
The lawyer was obviously lying.
No, the expert witness would have been lying. The attorney does not testify. He can only argue the evidence placed before the tribunal by witnesses or documents.
Oh, you could say that he didn't know for sure that what he was saying was false...
Again, save the criticism for the expert witness, not the lawyer. The expert witness would have had to give the testimony.
Yeah, I feel sorry for the old lady who burned her crotch with hot coffee. But I'm sorry, 2 million (or was it 7 mil) is just outrageous. And yes, for those who want to point out that it was more than just the fact that the coffee was hot, I do understand a little more of the background.
She offered to settle the case before trial for $15,000. McDonald's told her to fuck off. Also, the jury award was reduced to about $300,000.00.
FWIW, the insurance companies and businesses in the US could not have bought more effective anti-lawsuit publicity than that case. I think that if they could find another one like, they'd gladly pay $300,000.00 and run the to bank giggling about thinking about how human bodies and lives are just a cost of doing business for them.
GF.
Ok. 202 minus 48 equals 154. Just for the literal-minded engineers that are out there, ready to pounce on my little lawyer ass in the /. shower. I guess that's what "Preview" is for. Instead, it looks like I get to "Submit".
GF.
1. Microsoft paid the $48 million to the lawyers, not the clients.
2. The clients received, in the aggregate, 202-48 million, or 150 million dollars.
3. The clients could not have pursued their claims vs. MSFT individually because it does not make economic sense.
4. My alternative solution for dealing with class-action fees is to do nothing. I think that the system worked reasonably well here.
5. The settlment needs court approval. Do you think that one of the questions that the judge might be asking is "What do you think that average harm per class member was?"
6. Do you have any idea what the average harm per class member was in dollar terms? If not, then why are you criticizing the result? You don't have the information necessary to do so.
GF.