I'm not claiming that a country should be so arrogant as to never study the laws or rulings in another country, but that should be reserved for students and lawmakers, not judges.
Why should judges not study the law in other countries, too?
If identical cases are tried in two different countries, the second trial court would be foolish not to look at the reasoning and arguments in the other case. Looking at rulings in other countries that have similar legal structures and traditions is not unreasonable.
It's common sense. If the same arguments have already been tested in another court, then a judge can save a bit of time by not having to start completely from scratch.
Obviously, the foreign ruling has to be reviewed in light of local laws. Its reasoning also has to be reviewed--does the local court agree with the logic and consistency of the foreign ruling? Still, if a court has access to a well-reasoned, well-researched study of a legal issue it would be silly not to use it as a resource.
I would not expect a judge to say, "I'm making this ruling because its what a German court did in the same situation."
I would expect to hear, "The plaintiff has presented a German ruling that is precisely on point. Although the second and fifth parts of that decision are not relevant under U.S. law, a compelling argument can be made for such-and-such. Unless the defendant can make a convincing counterargument, I am inclined to agree with the reasoning put forth, as the U.S. Whatchamacallit Act creates a similar legal framework."
Unfortunately, court-imposed sanctions for any of the above tend to be very seldom imposed. Courts have generally been very lenient with respect to the conduct of lawyers in this regard, and the tiniest hint of a smidgen of an inkling of merit often is enough to get a lawyer off the hook.
Meanwhile, if the lawyers do refuse to carry out SCO's wishes with respect to new vexatious suits and abuses of process, then they might face trouble from their client in the form of accusations of legal malpractice. (Defending against such accusations takes time and money, even if the claims are groundless.) Not that I have much sympathy, but sometimes the lawyers are between a bit of a rock and a hard place.
I just realized how screwed up this world really is. A major police operation has been launch to find a CD. Aparantly all other crimes have been defeated.
Yeah, it's a good thing that the article noted the French police had stopped investigating all other crimes, because otherwise I'd have to accuse the parent of jumping to a conclusion.
To quote a sibling poster--perhaps they can investigate more than one crime at any given time.
Another sibling has noted that this disc represents years of work and thousands of dollars of effort--physically it's a fifty eurocent CD-R, but from a business standpoint it's worth quite a bit.
To add my own two cents...I notice whenever a NASA program is cancelled (or proposed) there appears a troll who will comment that NASA doesn't deserve funding because government should have other priorities (health research, education, and so forth). Space exploration, after all, should receive funding only after all the other problems have been solved. Staunch defenders of NASA will leap into the breach, arguing (rightly) that government can have multiple priorities and many projects. Similarly, I want police to solve murders, but that doesn't mean I don't want them to investigate theft, vandalism, or white-collar crimes.
Finally, my understanding is that the level of violent crime in France is quite a bit lower than the rate in the United States...not to be petty (well, maybe a little bit) but perhaps they really are running out of other crimes to investigate....
Given the intense level of debate, and the amount of heat as opposed to light from both sides of the evolution debate that ensued from the story...
My understanding is that the debate here revolves around a specific adaptation/evolution, that of walking erect. Speculation and debate are centered on the question of how bipedalism arose, not on whether evolution happened at all.
This is a reasonably productive scientific debate (by Slashdot standards, ahem) rather than the all-out flame-fest that a discussion over the idea of evolution itself would engender. Then again, I'm browsing at +3, so maybe all the Creationist flamebait has been modded down.
I think it is instinctive, not learned. I have been watching my nieces. (Emphasis added.)
And you don't think they have been watching you?
For ethical reasons, we can't have children raised by quadrupeds for the first year or so to test this theory one way or another--but I suspect it would be the only way to settle the 'Bipedal Locomotion: Nature vs. Nurture' debate.
You completely ignored payment processing and record keeping.
My bad; you're right.
Add ten minutes of employee time ($4) and a credit card processing fee ($2) to bring the total cost to $18.
Sveasoft is a company that ships and sells a lot of physical products already. It's not like they have to build a whole new billing and shipping infrastructure.
It costs many corporations more than $50 to process a single order.
I think the grandparent poster is right--any court would find that $50 is more than a reasonable person would conclude it costs to distribute a single CD. Break it down:
One CD-R. $1.
Five minutes to burn. $2, for someone paid $25/hr. (Spend a few hours and burn fifty discs.)
Mailer. $2.
Postage. $3. (Two-day delivery; $15 for overnight.)
Addressing mailer for each new order. $4, at ten minutes apiece.
With those generous estimates, that's $12 ($24 for overnight shipping). Add a few pennies for electricity and wear and tear on the hardware. The level of incompetence required to bring the cost anywhere close to $50 is unconscionable.
When I first started there (almost six years ago now) there were approximately even numbers of Windows and Mac machines. As happens over time these machines got out of date and had to be replaced, and the school has spent a lot of money buying replacements. What I'm bothered about is that when they did this they completely eliminated the Mac population, and by the time school starts again in September the only machines we will have will either be Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
Schools have finite dollars for training and maintenance. Macs are expensive to buy, and not everyone knows how to administer them.
For better or worse, people who know Windows and Windows networking are quite common and relatively inexpensive. Windows runs on commodity hardware.
Every new OS is another set of headaches and another pile of things to learn. Of course there's going to be a tendency towards monoculture--the overworked and underpaid admins don't want to have to manage two, or three, or four, or five (Win98, Win2K, WinXP, OSX, various Linuxen...) separate operating systems, and get them all to talk to each other where required.
They've settled on MS because they have admins that know it, they received a steep educational discount from MS, and face it--the most software runs under Windows...including the most popular stuff. For most of the staff and students, it's what they have on their home machine. Familiarity means fewer calls to the helpdesk, too.
Maybe if there's a computer science club or some such you could try to get them to roll out a prototype Linux network for demonstration purposes, but don't expect a school's administration to jump on the opportunity to increase the complexity of their network.
I usually "hear" viri in my head (two syllables: vie-rye), but if virii is the plural of virius, then I suppose virii would sound like radii: veer-ree-eye, no?
Quite. What you're hearing in your head is the correct pronunciation of the (less incorrect) version of the plural. Your subconscious has learned how to form pseudo-Latin plurals. The pronunciation with three syllables would be the appropriate way to say the (completely incorrect) 'virii'.
Of course, life would be simpler if people could just move on and use the (unquestionably correct) form, 'viruses'.
Actually, in general, being a budget-minded tax cutter IS being a bold visionary.
Actually, I would have thought that being budget-minded and not cutting taxes would be visionary and bold.
Democrats are reviled by Republicans for their 'tax and spend' ways. Republicans seem to be leading the charge for 'don't tax but still spend' as a method of government.
I wonder what would happen if someone actually raised taxes to the point where they covered government spending...but that's crazy talk. I mean, that's the sort of nonsense that Canadians get wrapped up in.
With no new taxes to pay for the war, the cost has to come from existing programs. an unfortunate reality.
My understanding of the U.S. Federal Budget is that the funding actually comes from massive deficit spending. In other words, the cost is borne by future programs (and taxpayers.)
The FAA and aviation community has made access to aviation too costly for most people. The cost of mandated repairs/upgrades/maintenance and the cost of licensing really is prohibitive and limits the market for aircraft.
Perhaps...but one could also say that the NHTSA/DOT have made access to driving too costly for many people. Cars would be significantly less expensive without mandated safety features like brakes, crash testing, firewalls.... The cost of mandated insurance/smog control/repairs is prohibitive and limits the market for automobiles.
Sometimes, you have to accept that maybe a particular hobby is beyond your financial means. The FAA will set standards for safety and licensing, and there will always be people who think those standards are too restrictive or too lax. The FAA tends to err on the side of caution, because poorly-built or maintained aircraft falling out of the sky when flown by idiots are generally accepted to be a Bad Thing.
I'm not sure that I ever want to see private flight be as accessible as driving. The only reason that flying is so safe relative to driving now is that there is a great deal of restriction on who can fly, and what. I don't want some idiot plowing into the side of my apartment building because he was talking on his cell phone.
That said, the new license class seems at first blush to be a good compromise.
Give it 4 or 5 years, and mobile phones on new generation networks will have high resolution image stabilised digital cameras and the ability to transmit this image in real time, already compressed, down multi-megabit networks.
You just need to look for the person with the backpack-sized battery....
Such a phone would video a movie from a pocket, and there would be no evidence, because it would be transmitted away.
But why would anyone want full-motion stabilized video of the inside of my pocket?
Well....that depends. Virii is not a valid English word, but since the singular word virus is not an original English word, but actually a borrowed Latin word, then the plural of the Latin word virus is actually virii.
Actually, that's incorrect Latin, too.
There are other pedants who will no doubt go into much more detail, but the 'correct' Latin plural would be viri or vira. 'Virii', if such a word existed, would be the plural form of 'virius'.
I would be seriously pissed off if I could only use their SMTP server.
Read the grandparent post again. It suggested that by default port 25 should be disabled, but that it could be restored on request from the user.
Quite frankly, this is sensible. Yes, it will inconvenience (very slightly) those among us who wish to run our own mail servers. But admit it--we're a very small fraction of most ISPs' user base.
Further, it's a small amount of hassle I'm willing to put up with, given the time and bandwidth it will save me in the future when I have less zombie-sent spam to deal with. If my ISP decided to charge me more money to enable port 25--then there would be a problem.
The bit about freedom, safety, and terrorism is decidedly uncalled for. You're just trying to push the usual Slashdot hot buttons--and unfortunately, it seems to have worked in this case.
In the event of a food poisoning lives are at risk, while in the case of an infected computer, the worst case is lost $$$.
Fair enough--but there are many situations where companies are required to disclose information that 'merely' represents risk of financial loss. Look at all the things that public corporations are required to disclose in their SEC filings, for instance. The liability from a potential class action lawsuit due to a corporate web site spreading malware to customers is definitely the sort of thing that ought to be 'on the books'.
Meanwhile, companies that make a good-faith effort to notify their users of potential security issues will have gone a long way towards protecting themselves from accusations of inaction and negligence--their liability risk should be correspondingly reduced.
Related to this is the fact that most traffic accidents happen "on the twenties." Human nature is a curious and seemingly very predictable thing.
For the sibling posts that don't understand what the parent is saying here, it's a tongue-in-cheek remark. Many news radio stations will deliver news, traffic, and/or weather reports at a consistent time after the hour. Presumably his local radio station gives traffic reports on the hours and at 20 and 40 minutes past--hence, 'on the twenties'.
In Toronto, the local AM radio news station (680 kHz) does traffic and weather 'on the ones'--at 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, and 51 minutes past the hour. (Actually, the reports are a little bit after that, since the station always plays an ad first.)
Similarly, his remark that most headlines occur at the top of the hour is equally facetious--he's just referring the practice of many radio stations to give a summary of the news headlines on the hour.
Boy is my face red. The obliquity of Earth (the 'tilt' angle of its axis of rotation) only varies a small amount--about 4 degrees, on a 41,000 year cycle. I assumed that Mars wasn't much worse...but it seems I'm terribly wrong.
Mars does experience much greater obliquity variations. The values usually cited are an oscillation between 15 and about 35 degrees, over a cycle of about 124,000 years.
Recent speculations have led to suspicions that on longer time scales, there may be even greater swings in obliquity, ranging from zero right up to 60 degrees. Jeffrey Kargel has speculated about what a Mars under these conditions would be like. Linked is a PDF of a brief paper on Mars' climate during periods of high obliquity.
Neat stuff. My apologies to the grandparent poster for unnecessary flamage.
Mars lacks a significant moon. Therefore people speculate that it could tilt all the way over on its side sometimes and have extreme seasons. Maybe even extreme enough to melt the carbon and water ices at the poles and permafrost.
Er, no.
Really, that's about all I can say. The axis of a planet's rotation doesn't spontaneously change. Mars has a whopping big angular momentum--planets are rather like big gyroscopes. The axis of rotation may precess, but the angle won't change appreciably.
No offense, but people who speculate that Mars can tip over--and I don't doubt that there are many such individuals on the 'net--are flat-out wrong.
I didn't get my paper this morning and was angry until I read this.
Why is that?
Why should you be upset if the guy who delivers your paper for pennies a day misses your house because he has the flu, but not upset because the team who collectively pull down a quarter million dollars a year to manage hardware screw up?
Why would you be sympathetic towards the 'poor schmuck' who failed to do proper testing or have a backup plan...but not the delivery guy who missed delivering a paper once in the last ten years?
Try it. You'll stand there staring at "PC LOAD LETTER" for hours until you give in and feed the printer some paper that meets the document's specifications.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should judges not study the law in other countries, too?
If identical cases are tried in two different countries, the second trial court would be foolish not to look at the reasoning and arguments in the other case. Looking at rulings in other countries that have similar legal structures and traditions is not unreasonable.
It's common sense. If the same arguments have already been tested in another court, then a judge can save a bit of time by not having to start completely from scratch.
Obviously, the foreign ruling has to be reviewed in light of local laws. Its reasoning also has to be reviewed--does the local court agree with the logic and consistency of the foreign ruling? Still, if a court has access to a well-reasoned, well-researched study of a legal issue it would be silly not to use it as a resource.
I would not expect a judge to say, "I'm making this ruling because its what a German court did in the same situation."
I would expect to hear, "The plaintiff has presented a German ruling that is precisely on point. Although the second and fifth parts of that decision are not relevant under U.S. law, a compelling argument can be made for such-and-such. Unless the defendant can make a convincing counterargument, I am inclined to agree with the reasoning put forth, as the U.S. Whatchamacallit Act creates a similar legal framework."
You're looking for the term barratry, or maybe vexatious litigation, or even abuse of process.
Unfortunately, court-imposed sanctions for any of the above tend to be very seldom imposed. Courts have generally been very lenient with respect to the conduct of lawyers in this regard, and the tiniest hint of a smidgen of an inkling of merit often is enough to get a lawyer off the hook.
Meanwhile, if the lawyers do refuse to carry out SCO's wishes with respect to new vexatious suits and abuses of process, then they might face trouble from their client in the form of accusations of legal malpractice. (Defending against such accusations takes time and money, even if the claims are groundless.) Not that I have much sympathy, but sometimes the lawyers are between a bit of a rock and a hard place.
The 1990s called. They want their observation back.
I like to think of starting with a stone substrate, and adding air to it.
Yeah, it's a good thing that the article noted the French police had stopped investigating all other crimes, because otherwise I'd have to accuse the parent of jumping to a conclusion.
To quote a sibling poster--perhaps they can investigate more than one crime at any given time.
Another sibling has noted that this disc represents years of work and thousands of dollars of effort--physically it's a fifty eurocent CD-R, but from a business standpoint it's worth quite a bit.
To add my own two cents...I notice whenever a NASA program is cancelled (or proposed) there appears a troll who will comment that NASA doesn't deserve funding because government should have other priorities (health research, education, and so forth). Space exploration, after all, should receive funding only after all the other problems have been solved. Staunch defenders of NASA will leap into the breach, arguing (rightly) that government can have multiple priorities and many projects. Similarly, I want police to solve murders, but that doesn't mean I don't want them to investigate theft, vandalism, or white-collar crimes.
Finally, my understanding is that the level of violent crime in France is quite a bit lower than the rate in the United States...not to be petty (well, maybe a little bit) but perhaps they really are running out of other crimes to investigate....
My understanding is that the debate here revolves around a specific adaptation/evolution, that of walking erect. Speculation and debate are centered on the question of how bipedalism arose, not on whether evolution happened at all.
This is a reasonably productive scientific debate (by Slashdot standards, ahem) rather than the all-out flame-fest that a discussion over the idea of evolution itself would engender. Then again, I'm browsing at +3, so maybe all the Creationist flamebait has been modded down.
And you don't think they have been watching you?
For ethical reasons, we can't have children raised by quadrupeds for the first year or so to test this theory one way or another--but I suspect it would be the only way to settle the 'Bipedal Locomotion: Nature vs. Nurture' debate.
My bad; you're right.
Add ten minutes of employee time ($4) and a credit card processing fee ($2) to bring the total cost to $18.
Sveasoft is a company that ships and sells a lot of physical products already. It's not like they have to build a whole new billing and shipping infrastructure.
Only in a well-ventilated area, and only after I saw him wash his hands very thoroughly.
I think the grandparent poster is right--any court would find that $50 is more than a reasonable person would conclude it costs to distribute a single CD. Break it down:
One CD-R. $1.
Five minutes to burn. $2, for someone paid $25/hr. (Spend a few hours and burn fifty discs.)
Mailer. $2.
Postage. $3. (Two-day delivery; $15 for overnight.)
Addressing mailer for each new order. $4, at ten minutes apiece.
With those generous estimates, that's $12 ($24 for overnight shipping). Add a few pennies for electricity and wear and tear on the hardware. The level of incompetence required to bring the cost anywhere close to $50 is unconscionable.
Schools have finite dollars for training and maintenance. Macs are expensive to buy, and not everyone knows how to administer them.
For better or worse, people who know Windows and Windows networking are quite common and relatively inexpensive. Windows runs on commodity hardware.
Every new OS is another set of headaches and another pile of things to learn. Of course there's going to be a tendency towards monoculture--the overworked and underpaid admins don't want to have to manage two, or three, or four, or five (Win98, Win2K, WinXP, OSX, various Linuxen...) separate operating systems, and get them all to talk to each other where required.
They've settled on MS because they have admins that know it, they received a steep educational discount from MS, and face it--the most software runs under Windows...including the most popular stuff. For most of the staff and students, it's what they have on their home machine. Familiarity means fewer calls to the helpdesk, too.
Maybe if there's a computer science club or some such you could try to get them to roll out a prototype Linux network for demonstration purposes, but don't expect a school's administration to jump on the opportunity to increase the complexity of their network.
Quite. What you're hearing in your head is the correct pronunciation of the (less incorrect) version of the plural. Your subconscious has learned how to form pseudo-Latin plurals. The pronunciation with three syllables would be the appropriate way to say the (completely incorrect) 'virii'.
Of course, life would be simpler if people could just move on and use the (unquestionably correct) form, 'viruses'.
Actually, I would have thought that being budget-minded and not cutting taxes would be visionary and bold.
Democrats are reviled by Republicans for their 'tax and spend' ways. Republicans seem to be leading the charge for 'don't tax but still spend' as a method of government.
I wonder what would happen if someone actually raised taxes to the point where they covered government spending...but that's crazy talk. I mean, that's the sort of nonsense that Canadians get wrapped up in.
My understanding of the U.S. Federal Budget is that the funding actually comes from massive deficit spending. In other words, the cost is borne by future programs (and taxpayers.)
Perhaps...but one could also say that the NHTSA/DOT have made access to driving too costly for many people. Cars would be significantly less expensive without mandated safety features like brakes, crash testing, firewalls.... The cost of mandated insurance/smog control/repairs is prohibitive and limits the market for automobiles.
Sometimes, you have to accept that maybe a particular hobby is beyond your financial means. The FAA will set standards for safety and licensing, and there will always be people who think those standards are too restrictive or too lax. The FAA tends to err on the side of caution, because poorly-built or maintained aircraft falling out of the sky when flown by idiots are generally accepted to be a Bad Thing.
I'm not sure that I ever want to see private flight be as accessible as driving. The only reason that flying is so safe relative to driving now is that there is a great deal of restriction on who can fly, and what. I don't want some idiot plowing into the side of my apartment building because he was talking on his cell phone.
That said, the new license class seems at first blush to be a good compromise.
You just need to look for the person with the backpack-sized battery....
Such a phone would video a movie from a pocket, and there would be no evidence, because it would be transmitted away.
But why would anyone want full-motion stabilized video of the inside of my pocket?
Actually, that's incorrect Latin, too.
There are other pedants who will no doubt go into much more detail, but the 'correct' Latin plural would be viri or vira. 'Virii', if such a word existed, would be the plural form of 'virius'.
Read the grandparent post again. It suggested that by default port 25 should be disabled, but that it could be restored on request from the user.
Quite frankly, this is sensible. Yes, it will inconvenience (very slightly) those among us who wish to run our own mail servers. But admit it--we're a very small fraction of most ISPs' user base.
Further, it's a small amount of hassle I'm willing to put up with, given the time and bandwidth it will save me in the future when I have less zombie-sent spam to deal with. If my ISP decided to charge me more money to enable port 25--then there would be a problem.
The bit about freedom, safety, and terrorism is decidedly uncalled for. You're just trying to push the usual Slashdot hot buttons--and unfortunately, it seems to have worked in this case.
Fair enough--but there are many situations where companies are required to disclose information that 'merely' represents risk of financial loss. Look at all the things that public corporations are required to disclose in their SEC filings, for instance. The liability from a potential class action lawsuit due to a corporate web site spreading malware to customers is definitely the sort of thing that ought to be 'on the books'.
Meanwhile, companies that make a good-faith effort to notify their users of potential security issues will have gone a long way towards protecting themselves from accusations of inaction and negligence--their liability risk should be correspondingly reduced.
For the sibling posts that don't understand what the parent is saying here, it's a tongue-in-cheek remark. Many news radio stations will deliver news, traffic, and/or weather reports at a consistent time after the hour. Presumably his local radio station gives traffic reports on the hours and at 20 and 40 minutes past--hence, 'on the twenties'.
In Toronto, the local AM radio news station (680 kHz) does traffic and weather 'on the ones'--at 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, and 51 minutes past the hour. (Actually, the reports are a little bit after that, since the station always plays an ad first.)
Similarly, his remark that most headlines occur at the top of the hour is equally facetious--he's just referring the practice of many radio stations to give a summary of the news headlines on the hour.
Mars does experience much greater obliquity variations. The values usually cited are an oscillation between 15 and about 35 degrees, over a cycle of about 124,000 years.
Recent speculations have led to suspicions that on longer time scales, there may be even greater swings in obliquity, ranging from zero right up to 60 degrees. Jeffrey Kargel has speculated about what a Mars under these conditions would be like. Linked is a PDF of a brief paper on Mars' climate during periods of high obliquity.
Neat stuff. My apologies to the grandparent poster for unnecessary flamage.
Er, no.
Really, that's about all I can say. The axis of a planet's rotation doesn't spontaneously change. Mars has a whopping big angular momentum--planets are rather like big gyroscopes. The axis of rotation may precess, but the angle won't change appreciably.
No offense, but people who speculate that Mars can tip over--and I don't doubt that there are many such individuals on the 'net--are flat-out wrong.
Why is that?
Why should you be upset if the guy who delivers your paper for pennies a day misses your house because he has the flu, but not upset because the team who collectively pull down a quarter million dollars a year to manage hardware screw up?
Why would you be sympathetic towards the 'poor schmuck' who failed to do proper testing or have a backup plan...but not the delivery guy who missed delivering a paper once in the last ten years?
Ah, I see you've met HP's new DRM initiative:
Digital
Reforestation
Management
"Never try to extort more than it would cost to have you killed."