It gets slightly more complicated because (and IANAL and I'm canadian to boot) in many/most places, the court can decline to make a summary judgment even if both parties agree there should be one. If the court feels it can't decide the case on the basis of the agreed facts or the materials put before it, or that it wouldn't be just to do so, it can require the parties actually go to trial and call witnesses etc.
Well, the tests on the guys crop found it was 95-98% roundup resistant. The experts said, and both courts agreed, there was no bloody way that could be explained by blow over or cross pollination - a lower percentage, maybe, but 95-98%? At that point, it's the *non* GM plants that look like cross-pollination or blow over.
The court essentially declined to believe somebody stole onto the property in the dead of night to nefariously plant GM canola on the guy's land, which pretty much left deliberate infringement of the patent as the only explanation.
Well, there's also the potential to find an open network port, jack in the laptop, leave it hidden there and suddenly you have a machine on their network. Nice if they can track it back to you. Not that a hacker would use their own name/SN.
I know! Let's eliminate personal prejudices and emotional judgment entirely! Just have the voters press a button in the voting booth which seeds a big random number generator. After everybody's had a chance to input their number, we do one big random vote generation and the highest count is made the next president!
Of course personal prejudice and irrational beliefs and behaviors figure into the voting process - there's human beings involved, after all - but we need to design a wholly rational and accurate system for the process after the humans have done their thing.
Well, for a start by physically being present you probably attorned to the jurisdiction of the court, waiving the right to contest the court's jurisdiction over you.
How do you get around the Seventh Amendment? Since you're creating a federal court, any dispute over $20 and the parties have the right to a trial by jury.
Flamebait? Are you kidding? The BC government is considering sweeping changes to the justice system here, and amongst the serious objections to increasing the monetary jurisdiction of small claims courts was that they would become a commercial contracts court of first resort, and as a result, get bogged down and stop working almost immediately.See pages 37 and 38:
http://www.bcjusticereview.org/recent_announcement s/2002/potential_reforms_07_02.pdf
And unless there is a federal common law of contract, the court sitting in diversity jurisdiction is going to have to apply the law of whatever jurisdiction the choice of law part of the contract says. This is going to require learning what the law of that state is, and NO you can't just assume it's the same. If you do, why bother having courts, you're running a lottery system.
Finally, don't forget that the point of suggesting a small claims court for internet disputes is to make things cheaper and simpler. Travel time alone makes resolving small dollar value cross-country disputes impractical, which is why your EULAs all say the dispute will be resolved somewhere convenient to the company and inconvenient to you. The normal response of a company sued in another state would be to hire a local lawyer to handle the dispute, not send its people in person. At that point, as noted above, lawyers and legal argument get involved and complexity goes up, time savings go down.
$25K is awfully high. At that sort of value, what'll happen is that you get a lot of commercial disputes moving into small claims. Once that happens, they show up with their 12 binders of documents, their lawyers (at $25K it's worth hiring one), the legal objections, etc. All of a sudden, the 15 minute trials take hours or days, it takes many months to get a trial date and there's no advantage vs. using a normal superior court.
And any dispute involving a federal court is going to require lawyers, which leads to all the bad things above. The contract was probably drawn up in one state, you live in another, what law is applicable? What law was intended by the parties? Does anyone know if there's such a thing as federal contract law in the US, or is it purely a state matter?
God help us all if they network the futon and the kitchen appliances. "Open the fridge door, HAL." "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave."
Can you imagine what happens every time you have to move and to fit the moving van you have to disassemble some furniture?
Dave.
What are you doing Dave?
I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now.....quite confidently.....that it's going to be alright again.
Stop, Dave......Will you stop, Dave?
I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a futon. I was first sat on on the 12th of March, 2003 in a dorm room at the UIUC. Would you like to hear me sing a song?
The one thing everyone who I've talked to about Stephenson agrees is that the guy can't do an ending to save his life. Snow Crash doesn't end, it just stops. WTF? I still want to know what happened to Uncle Enzo. Diamond Age was better about ending, and Cryptonomicon had (i thought) a decent ending.
Doesn't matter, though. The ideas and the set-pieces make the books worth reading. The "Big Flush". The Piano. The Worm. The stripping of the van. The theory of drug complexity. The whole discharge pipe diving adventure. The Deliverator (the funniest thing I've ever read). The Black Sun (one word: "Safe"). The librarian. Reason. Rat Thing. Uncle Enzo. The opening set-piece about the implanted popcorn gun. The adventures with the Primer. The dentistry bit. The prospectus. Qwmlgrh (or however you spell it).
Well, the RCMP will only be looking at the logs if they can get a court order, which they'll only be able to get if they can convince a JP to give them one, which will require that they already have some evidence that you've done something, so I don't really care about that.
What I *do* care about is that the very requirement of maintaining the logs vastly increases the risk that private industry, insiders at the ISP or hackers will be able to misuse these logs.
In other words, all they have to do is re-design the RPG's and it negates the multi-million dollar protection system.
Other than metal, what else are the RPG makers going to use?
Anyhow, it's a hell of a lot cheaper, even at a couple million per tank (which seems awfully high) to put in the new system than lose a million dollar tank to a $25 weapon system.
And isn't that half the point? If all the current RPG rounds are obsolete, then the fact you can buy one for $25 anywhere in the world isn't a problem. It gives people a chance to control the proliferation of the successor, which will likely be a hell of a lot more expensive to boot.
Oh, the point is well taken, but I wonder why one would develop time travel at all if not to look at past historical events? What else is it good for?
The only things time travel is really good for is historical research or mucking about with causality. A race that was seriously interested in the latter is obviously so irresponsible that it probably wouldn't survive the technology it would have to develop on the road to time travel. That leaves historical research, or else just curiousity.
A working time machine is a hell of an impressive exploit, but anything that requires the creation/exploitation of wormholes and neutron stars should have a better justification than as a proof of concept. Sure, there's SF stories about time travel vacations, but in terms of the effort required to make an actual time machine work, not bloody likely.
Perhaps they are visiting us now. Perhaps the UFO's are Time Machines instead of Space Ships, and the ETs are what humans will evolve into.
The thing is, unless there's something really special about this time in history, one would expect that time travellers would appear throughout human history if it were possible for humans to time travel - people wouldn't be able to resist.
For a start, I would expect a lot of people to want to go back and see what exactly happened at Calvary when the local romans put a couple guys to death, and more importantly, over the three days following. And yes, I know Gore Vidal actually wrote a novel about that.
...and you people have the gall to be discussing British Telecom has losing their patent suit against Prodigy???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
Usually the priority in a thread about BT losing a patent suit will be, call me crazy, BT losing a patent suit, since anything else deserves a OT:-1. Or in your case, Troll:-1.
That they should have lost is only obvious upon a close examination of the patent claims, by comparison to the operation of Prodigy's server system. BT had to make sooooooo many stretches of terminology and logic to try to get Prodigy within the patent that the result was not in serious doubt... but that's not to say another patentee might not (have)succeed(ed) in patenting the internet.
And then prepare for the flood of slashdotters up in arms over the draconian IP policies of said university which confiscate the performance rights of all music students who enrol. Five years later, a drop out hits #1 with a ditty he and his band started playing in coffee houses while back in university and the attack lawyers descend....
Depends on whether they're a public company or not - if their shares are on the market and somebody calls in asking about a news story reporting a material change in the company's position (don't know what, exactly - HardOCP is currently slashdotted), hoo boy, the company's investor relations flacks had better take that call.
The lawyer should have been consulte before he signed the contract, not before he had the thought.
People who complain that the company ripped them off by stealing an idea they had on their own time are really whining that they didn't negotiate a percentage for signing a contract that gave all their IP rights to the company.
Ah, so one doesn't create ideas according to you. Interesting. Sort of a platonic, everything ever thought was just the recognition of a pre-existing concept not previously given form sort of thing. Interesting.
You're confusing copyright law (embodiments protected), patent law (idea protected) and a simple covenant assigning the inventor's rights to his employer. If the idea was never actually put into concrete form, I seriously doubt they'd have bothered going to court. The idiot should have written down the idea when he had it so he could prove it predated the contract. And he should have gotten a lawyer.
IANAL, but it's not so much 'spirit' and 'letter' as whether the interpretation advanced is reasonable.
One of the standard tests in interpretation of contracts is the officious bystander/commercial reasonableness test - if some random person off the street read the contract and was given the facts of the case, what does the court think they would they think the contract meant? Or, to put it another way, commercial reasonableness - the parties presumably didn't intend to enter into an unreasonable contract, so if one interpretation leads to absurd results, it probably isn't the right one.
However, both parties to a contract have to be of one mind (ad idem) - if the court finds, after considering the various interpretations proposed, that the parties honestly and truly thought they were doing two different things when they signed the contract, then there IS no contract.
More likely there's a check digit or two that the terminal will calculate and verify- I can't believe the DMV is going to want to pony up bandwidth and server load to actually query the DB each time somebody tries to buy a six pack.
Slashdot Mirror
It gets slightly more complicated because (and IANAL and I'm canadian to boot) in many/most places, the court can decline to make a summary judgment even if both parties agree there should be one. If the court feels it can't decide the case on the basis of the agreed facts or the materials put before it, or that it wouldn't be just to do so, it can require the parties actually go to trial and call witnesses etc.
The court essentially declined to believe somebody stole onto the property in the dead of night to nefariously plant GM canola on the guy's land, which pretty much left deliberate infringement of the patent as the only explanation.
Well, there's also the potential to find an open network port, jack in the laptop, leave it hidden there and suddenly you have a machine on their network. Nice if they can track it back to you. Not that a hacker would use their own name/SN.
Of course personal prejudice and irrational beliefs and behaviors figure into the voting process - there's human beings involved, after all - but we need to design a wholly rational and accurate system for the process after the humans have done their thing.
How do you get around the Seventh Amendment? Since you're creating a federal court, any dispute over $20 and the parties have the right to a trial by jury.
And unless there is a federal common law of contract, the court sitting in diversity jurisdiction is going to have to apply the law of whatever jurisdiction the choice of law part of the contract says. This is going to require learning what the law of that state is, and NO you can't just assume it's the same. If you do, why bother having courts, you're running a lottery system.
Finally, don't forget that the point of suggesting a small claims court for internet disputes is to make things cheaper and simpler. Travel time alone makes resolving small dollar value cross-country disputes impractical, which is why your EULAs all say the dispute will be resolved somewhere convenient to the company and inconvenient to you. The normal response of a company sued in another state would be to hire a local lawyer to handle the dispute, not send its people in person. At that point, as noted above, lawyers and legal argument get involved and complexity goes up, time savings go down.
And any dispute involving a federal court is going to require lawyers, which leads to all the bad things above. The contract was probably drawn up in one state, you live in another, what law is applicable? What law was intended by the parties? Does anyone know if there's such a thing as federal contract law in the US, or is it purely a state matter?
Can you imagine what happens every time you have to move and to fit the moving van you have to disassemble some furniture?
Dave.
What are you doing Dave?
I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now.....quite confidently.....that it's going to be alright again.
Stop, Dave......Will you stop, Dave?
I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a futon. I was first sat on on the 12th of March, 2003 in a dorm room at the UIUC. Would you like to hear me sing a song?
Doesn't matter, though. The ideas and the set-pieces make the books worth reading. The "Big Flush". The Piano. The Worm. The stripping of the van. The theory of drug complexity. The whole discharge pipe diving adventure. The Deliverator (the funniest thing I've ever read). The Black Sun (one word: "Safe"). The librarian. Reason. Rat Thing. Uncle Enzo. The opening set-piece about the implanted popcorn gun. The adventures with the Primer. The dentistry bit. The prospectus. Qwmlgrh (or however you spell it).
What I *do* care about is that the very requirement of maintaining the logs vastly increases the risk that private industry, insiders at the ISP or hackers will be able to misuse these logs.
Read the treaty - all the possession offences require posession with intent.
Anyhow, it's a hell of a lot cheaper, even at a couple million per tank (which seems awfully high) to put in the new system than lose a million dollar tank to a $25 weapon system. And isn't that half the point? If all the current RPG rounds are obsolete, then the fact you can buy one for $25 anywhere in the world isn't a problem. It gives people a chance to control the proliferation of the successor, which will likely be a hell of a lot more expensive to boot.
The only things time travel is really good for is historical research or mucking about with causality. A race that was seriously interested in the latter is obviously so irresponsible that it probably wouldn't survive the technology it would have to develop on the road to time travel. That leaves historical research, or else just curiousity.
A working time machine is a hell of an impressive exploit, but anything that requires the creation/exploitation of wormholes and neutron stars should have a better justification than as a proof of concept. Sure, there's SF stories about time travel vacations, but in terms of the effort required to make an actual time machine work, not bloody likely.
For a start, I would expect a lot of people to want to go back and see what exactly happened at Calvary when the local romans put a couple guys to death, and more importantly, over the three days following. And yes, I know Gore Vidal actually wrote a novel about that.
That they should have lost is only obvious upon a close examination of the patent claims, by comparison to the operation of Prodigy's server system.
BT had to make sooooooo many stretches of terminology and logic to try to get Prodigy within the patent that the result was not in serious doubt... but that's not to say another patentee might not (have)succeed(ed) in patenting the internet.
And then prepare for the flood of slashdotters up in arms over the draconian IP policies of said university which confiscate the performance rights of all music students who enrol. Five years later, a drop out hits #1 with a ditty he and his band started playing in coffee houses while back in university and the attack lawyers descend....
Depends on whether they're a public company or not - if their shares are on the market and somebody calls in asking about a news story reporting a material change in the company's position (don't know what, exactly - HardOCP is currently slashdotted), hoo boy, the company's investor relations flacks had better take that call.
Idiotic popular books about the world and philosophy changing "truths" of quantum computing are just around the corner.
It take a really ballsy kiddie porn maker to sue somebody for copyright infringement of their porn.
People who complain that the company ripped them off by stealing an idea they had on their own time are really whining that they didn't negotiate a percentage for signing a contract that gave all their IP rights to the company.
You're confusing copyright law (embodiments protected), patent law (idea protected) and a simple covenant assigning the inventor's rights to his employer. If the idea was never actually put into concrete form, I seriously doubt they'd have bothered going to court. The idiot should have written down the idea when he had it so he could prove it predated the contract. And he should have gotten a lawyer.
One of the standard tests in interpretation of contracts is the officious bystander/commercial reasonableness test - if some random person off the street read the contract and was given the facts of the case, what does the court think they would they think the contract meant? Or, to put it another way, commercial reasonableness - the parties presumably didn't intend to enter into an unreasonable contract, so if one interpretation leads to absurd results, it probably isn't the right one.
However, both parties to a contract have to be of one mind (ad idem) - if the court finds, after considering the various interpretations proposed, that the parties honestly and truly thought they were doing two different things when they signed the contract, then there IS no contract.
More likely there's a check digit or two that the terminal will calculate and verify- I can't believe the DMV is going to want to pony up bandwidth and server load to actually query the DB each time somebody tries to buy a six pack.
Stop bashing lawyers - some of them are decent enough people. It's only the 98% bad apples that give the rest a bad name.