IANALY, because I have another 1.5 semesters and a bar exam to go. However, I still know a lot more about the law than you, which is why I know things like this was a VA Supreme Court case, not a trial.
Appeals don't work like your small claims cases (thank the gods). You have written briefs from the parties and any interested amici curiae, which is where your technical experts come in. The "trial" is oral arguments before the justices (not "judges") of the VASC, where the two parties have fifteen minutes to emphasize certain parts of their cases while the justices interrupt with questions as the mood strikes them. Typically, this is where the justices ask for further explanations of the arguments in the brief, generally about things that seem not to make sense or could use further clarification. Sometimes, justices will ask questions that draw better arguments out of a party, so as to convince other justices around to their way of thinking.
A justice would never ask, "Well, I'm going to rule this way; what do you think," because that's not the appropriate language for the Court; you're confusing a peer-to-peer relationship with one that is decidedly not. The attorneys for the parties aren't peers of the justices, and the amici aren't peers of the justices. Your role as party or amici is to provide the justice with the information the justice wants in order to come to a conclusion. However, justices will ask questions to get at facts they need, and a skilled lawyer will be able to figure out where a justice is headed from a question, and explain why that reasoning is good or bad.
It's all well and good to have a layman's critique of the system, but it would help if the layman wasn't basing his opinions on completely irrelevant experiences and actually knew something about the system he was critiquing. Hell, even a quick Wikipedia search would have prevented basic misunderstandings about the nature of the court: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Virginia
IANAL, because I have two more semesters of law school to complete. Before that, I was a computer science major.
Your mistake is that you are comparing legal code to software documentation. However, the more apt comparison is to compare legal code to software source code, at which point your analogy fails. While they aren't widely advertised, there are plenty of secondary sources (such as legal encyclopedias) out there that make law accessible to a layman.
I think you're projecting your own hackdom onto Lessig, or you simply saw "immunity hysteria" in the headline and forgot to read the rest of the article you linked.
Obama had to make a decision on a particular bill with a particular set of components. The FISA bill had good components (closing loopholes the Administration had used) and bad components (telecom immunity). As Lessig points out, this becomes a question of which is more important: fixing the law going forward, or punishing those who previously violated it. There was no "both" option. I don't know which way I would have voted if I were in the Senate, because I don't know enough about the substantive changes to FISA to make an informed decision. But I can recognize that there's an unavoidable weighing of preferences that must be performed, and you should as well.
To make the value judgment at work more clear (and more absurd) - imagine there was a bill that granted telecom immunity (bad), but also established a universal healthcare system, ended the war in Iraq, and gave everyone a pony if they wanted one (good). Wouldn't it seem a bit silly to say Obama was "for" telecom immunity, especially if he said "I hate this telecom immunity part, and I'll work to fix it, but ending the war and universal healthcare are too important... and also, ponies?"
Your initial argument was that Lessig "described the opposition to telecom immunity as 'leftist hysteria,'" and he did no such thing, or anything close to that (especially since he himself opposes telecom immunity, and doesn't consider himself hysterical). He complains that various and sundry progressives / liberals / leftists are throwing a fit without fully considering the impact of their preferred actions, and he's right.
Except that's not what your linked article says at all. Lessig is talking about the hysteria over Obama's reaction to the FISA bill.
For instance:
This is not an easy task. I don't know, for example, how I personally would have made the call. I certainly think immunity for telcos is wrong. I especially think it wrong to forgive campaign contributing telco companies for violating the law while sending soldiers to jail for violating the law. But I also think the FISA bill (excepting the immunity provision) was progress. So whether that progress was more important than the immunity is, I think, a hard question. And I can well understand those (including some friends) who weigh the two together, and come down as Obama did (voting in favor).
You are gaining an advantage by using a bot: your opportunity cost to play the game is lower.
A bot-less player has to invest a certain amount of a scarce resource into their character that a botted player does not. Thus, the botted player has an advantage.
Similarly, outsourcing certain functions (be they leveling or resource gathering) unfairly lowers the opportunity cost of the outsourcer.
So all those basketball players who break bones, sprain ligaments, tear muscles, or have various and sundry other medical problems related to their activity are morally flawed for wanting them to be covered by insurance?
Actually, it's specifically worded to help Google... before the DMCA, Google would have been liable for intellectual property suits for anything they provided. The "safe harbor" provisions were a step forward for service providers. If you want something specifically worded to screw Google, look at the claim that Viacom has against YouTube, claiming that it's unfair they have to use the DMCA takedown notices for each infringing video.
The process is a good one, and it removes the need to make a judgment about whether or not the material infringes from the hosting provider. If a copyright holder files a takedown notice, you take the thing down. If the user responsible wants to claim there's no violation, you put the thing back up. If you're *really* certain there's no violation as the service provider, you keep it up and brace for lawsuit.
In my experience, being a 2L at a top-ten law school, the reason you're closer to the median on final exams is BECAUSE you're dumping "as much black letter law onto the page as possible." That's what I tried to do my first year, and it didn't end well. This year, I've been focusing much more on analysis, and I did much better, grade-wise.
One need only look to the field of medicine to see how often scientists can lose perspective. Cases range from "Hey, I've got a great idea... let's cut out parts of people's brains!" to "Hey, I've got a great idea... let's give black people syphilis and watch them die!"
Don't let your lawyer-hate-hardon do your thinking for you.
Sadly, most Slashdotters seem to think it's more important to be anti-union (gotta keep that Libertarian cred, I guess) then take rational actions to benefit themselves.
I wasn't saying a coinflip was optimal in the sense of efficient outcomes; rather, someone in the original position, not knowing what place they would occupy in society, would favor a random distribution over the "the person with the most gets the most" distribution that is present in our society right now.
I can invent ridiculous comparisons too: should we cure a billionaire who does nothing but squander an inheritance that she did nothing to earn, or the poor college dropout who, if she lives, will get back into school, pursue a Ph.D. in physics, and come up with the Grand Unifying Theory? Absurd? Of course it is. We have no information to indicate that a rich person, on the basis of their wealth, is more deserving of medical care than an indigent person, and we similarly have no information to indicate that an indigent person is more deserving of care than a rich person.
Also... you neglect to consider the fact that the millionaire's money won't disappear when he dies, and a substantial portion of his assets would probably end up going to research on whatever disease he had. In such an event, his death might be more beneficial in the long run than the death of the homeless man.
Finally, I don't "want" to determine who lives based on a coinflip. I think our society is more than capable of distributing healthcare resources such that those decisions don't *have* to be made. For instance, we could save billions by cutting out private insurers, as they add cost to the system without any benefit that couldn't be provided under a single-payer system. That money could then be put to curing disease, rather than lining pockets. My point in bringing up the coinflip, if you recall, was that a person in the original position (therefore not knowing anything about what position they would occupy in society) might rationally favor such an outcome over the current system.
You've got an unstated assumption that you're not addressing: that scarce resources should be awarded to those with more resources. It's tempting to treat this as a given, since it's a premise of an unregulated market, but it's not a necessity.
If healthcare resources are so scarce that we are unable to effectively treat all members of society, then society must decide how to distribute those resources. As I stated above, it's not justice to award those scarce resources to only one class of people. In the original position, one would likely decide to allocate them either based on an attribute other than wealth, or more likely, allocate them in a random distribution (i.e., if there are two people with terminal cancer, and society can only afford to cure one of them, there's a coin flip).
I also wonder whether you've considered how much of that scarcity is based on scarcity of physical goods, labor, etc., and how much is artificial scarcity that could be changed by changing societal structure. For instance, if a pharmaceutical company can be compensated so that there is incentive to research new life-saving drugs, while amortizing the cost of said drugs over the whole population, rather than just on a small number of sufferers, it may no longer be the case that the sufferers are forced to compete for access to their medication.
Your analogy fails. Current healthcare for the indigent is more like, "We'll give you water. Go find food on your own. If you can't, too bad, sucks to be you."
If you're suggesting that it's in any way just for one's health outcome to be determined by their access to resources, I suggest that your definition of "justice" needs some work.
Maybe my eyes are just crap Now you've figured it out!
You do have one correct point:
*sometimes* the HDTV makes the SD signal look ever so slightly "worse" This is a problem with lots of upscaling. For instance, stretch a 320x240 video across a 1920x1200 display, and it looks like crap. Drop the resolution on the display down a bit, and the same video will look significantly better (though still noticeably fuzzy).
I do find it interesting that you can notice this difference (none of the rest of my family can, for instance), and yet can't seem to notice the much more significant difference between HD and SD.
I don't know what decision you're reading, but the order I'm reading seems to indicate that Judge White doesn't think that the Court has jurisdiction: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/baer_v_wikileaks/wikileaks102.pdf
From the founding of the federal courts, it has been unanimously held that "the courts of the United States have no jurisdiction of cases between aliens." Montalet v. Murray, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 46 (1807). The Ninth Circuit has adhered to this rule. "Diversity jurisdiction does not encompass foreign plaintiffs suing foreign defendants." Cheng v. Boeing Co., 708 F.2d 1406, 1412 (9th Cir. 1983). The presence of citizen defendants does not preserve jurisdiction as to the alien. Faysound Limited v. United Coconut Chemical, Inc., 878 F.2d 290, 294 (9th Cir. 1989) (citing Boeing, 708 F.2d at 1412). In order for the Court to exercise subject matter jurisdiction over this matter, complete diversity must be established under the original Complaint. See Owen Equipment & Erection Co. v. Kroger, 437 U.S. 365, 373 (1978). The Court is concerned that it may well lack subject matter jurisdiction over this matter in its entirety. 1 1) Although Plaintiffs pleaded jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. 1350 for a "civil action by an alien for a tort committed in violation of a treaty of the United States," the Complaint does not state a cause of action under any specific treaty, and counsel for Plaintiffs conceded that the Court does not maintain jurisdiction under this alternative ground. (See Compl., 2.) Additionally, while I don't remember much from Civil Procedure, I do recall that appearing in court to challenge personal jurisdiction doesn't grant the court personal jurisdiction.
Perhaps I'm just spoiled by my particular school, but I don't pay for Westlaw or LexisNexis. In fact, vendors from both companies routinely throw themselves at myself and my classmates to convince us to use their service.
Depends on how lawyered up that hotshot programmer is; game rules aren't subject to copyright, much like recipes. So long as said programmer was clever enough to avoid copying expressive elements, like mind flayers for example, WotC would have a lot of trouble getting a judgment against him.
Slashdot Mirror
VA could also appeal to the USSC, since the decision was based on an interpretation of the First Amendment.
The state can appeal to the USSC, since it's a state court applying federal law (the Constitution).
Whether or not the USSC will actually grant certiorari (hear the case) is another matter entirely.
IANALY, because I have another 1.5 semesters and a bar exam to go. However, I still know a lot more about the law than you, which is why I know things like this was a VA Supreme Court case, not a trial.
Appeals don't work like your small claims cases (thank the gods). You have written briefs from the parties and any interested amici curiae, which is where your technical experts come in. The "trial" is oral arguments before the justices (not "judges") of the VASC, where the two parties have fifteen minutes to emphasize certain parts of their cases while the justices interrupt with questions as the mood strikes them. Typically, this is where the justices ask for further explanations of the arguments in the brief, generally about things that seem not to make sense or could use further clarification. Sometimes, justices will ask questions that draw better arguments out of a party, so as to convince other justices around to their way of thinking.
A justice would never ask, "Well, I'm going to rule this way; what do you think," because that's not the appropriate language for the Court; you're confusing a peer-to-peer relationship with one that is decidedly not. The attorneys for the parties aren't peers of the justices, and the amici aren't peers of the justices. Your role as party or amici is to provide the justice with the information the justice wants in order to come to a conclusion. However, justices will ask questions to get at facts they need, and a skilled lawyer will be able to figure out where a justice is headed from a question, and explain why that reasoning is good or bad.
It's all well and good to have a layman's critique of the system, but it would help if the layman wasn't basing his opinions on completely irrelevant experiences and actually knew something about the system he was critiquing. Hell, even a quick Wikipedia search would have prevented basic misunderstandings about the nature of the court: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Virginia
IANAL, because I have two more semesters of law school to complete. Before that, I was a computer science major.
Your mistake is that you are comparing legal code to software documentation. However, the more apt comparison is to compare legal code to software source code, at which point your analogy fails. While they aren't widely advertised, there are plenty of secondary sources (such as legal encyclopedias) out there that make law accessible to a layman.
No it doesn't, which is why you wouldn't want it to be privately owned, a la a big apartment complex. It'd be a "mega-sized [condominium] building."
I think you're projecting your own hackdom onto Lessig, or you simply saw "immunity hysteria" in the headline and forgot to read the rest of the article you linked.
Obama had to make a decision on a particular bill with a particular set of components. The FISA bill had good components (closing loopholes the Administration had used) and bad components (telecom immunity). As Lessig points out, this becomes a question of which is more important: fixing the law going forward, or punishing those who previously violated it. There was no "both" option. I don't know which way I would have voted if I were in the Senate, because I don't know enough about the substantive changes to FISA to make an informed decision. But I can recognize that there's an unavoidable weighing of preferences that must be performed, and you should as well.
To make the value judgment at work more clear (and more absurd) - imagine there was a bill that granted telecom immunity (bad), but also established a universal healthcare system, ended the war in Iraq, and gave everyone a pony if they wanted one (good). Wouldn't it seem a bit silly to say Obama was "for" telecom immunity, especially if he said "I hate this telecom immunity part, and I'll work to fix it, but ending the war and universal healthcare are too important... and also, ponies?"
Your initial argument was that Lessig "described the opposition to telecom immunity as 'leftist hysteria,'" and he did no such thing, or anything close to that (especially since he himself opposes telecom immunity, and doesn't consider himself hysterical). He complains that various and sundry progressives / liberals / leftists are throwing a fit without fully considering the impact of their preferred actions, and he's right.
Except that's not what your linked article says at all. Lessig is talking about the hysteria over Obama's reaction to the FISA bill.
For instance:
You are gaining an advantage by using a bot: your opportunity cost to play the game is lower.
A bot-less player has to invest a certain amount of a scarce resource into their character that a botted player does not. Thus, the botted player has an advantage.
Similarly, outsourcing certain functions (be they leveling or resource gathering) unfairly lowers the opportunity cost of the outsourcer.
What right does Blizzard have?
The right against Tortious Interference.
So all those basketball players who break bones, sprain ligaments, tear muscles, or have various and sundry other medical problems related to their activity are morally flawed for wanting them to be covered by insurance?
Actually, it's specifically worded to help Google... before the DMCA, Google would have been liable for intellectual property suits for anything they provided. The "safe harbor" provisions were a step forward for service providers. If you want something specifically worded to screw Google, look at the claim that Viacom has against YouTube, claiming that it's unfair they have to use the DMCA takedown notices for each infringing video.
The process is a good one, and it removes the need to make a judgment about whether or not the material infringes from the hosting provider. If a copyright holder files a takedown notice, you take the thing down. If the user responsible wants to claim there's no violation, you put the thing back up. If you're *really* certain there's no violation as the service provider, you keep it up and brace for lawsuit.
In my experience, being a 2L at a top-ten law school, the reason you're closer to the median on final exams is BECAUSE you're dumping "as much black letter law onto the page as possible." That's what I tried to do my first year, and it didn't end well. This year, I've been focusing much more on analysis, and I did much better, grade-wise.
A conviction that carries a maximum sentence >= 1 year is a felony.
There is no part of the democratic world in which legislative advocacy, in of itself, is considered corruption.
Lawrence Lessig is a lobbyist too, you know.
One need only look to the field of medicine to see how often scientists can lose perspective. Cases range from "Hey, I've got a great idea... let's cut out parts of people's brains!" to "Hey, I've got a great idea... let's give black people syphilis and watch them die!"
Don't let your lawyer-hate-hardon do your thinking for you.
Sadly, most Slashdotters seem to think it's more important to be anti-union (gotta keep that Libertarian cred, I guess) then take rational actions to benefit themselves.
I wasn't saying a coinflip was optimal in the sense of efficient outcomes; rather, someone in the original position, not knowing what place they would occupy in society, would favor a random distribution over the "the person with the most gets the most" distribution that is present in our society right now.
I can invent ridiculous comparisons too: should we cure a billionaire who does nothing but squander an inheritance that she did nothing to earn, or the poor college dropout who, if she lives, will get back into school, pursue a Ph.D. in physics, and come up with the Grand Unifying Theory? Absurd? Of course it is. We have no information to indicate that a rich person, on the basis of their wealth, is more deserving of medical care than an indigent person, and we similarly have no information to indicate that an indigent person is more deserving of care than a rich person.
Also... you neglect to consider the fact that the millionaire's money won't disappear when he dies, and a substantial portion of his assets would probably end up going to research on whatever disease he had. In such an event, his death might be more beneficial in the long run than the death of the homeless man.
Finally, I don't "want" to determine who lives based on a coinflip. I think our society is more than capable of distributing healthcare resources such that those decisions don't *have* to be made. For instance, we could save billions by cutting out private insurers, as they add cost to the system without any benefit that couldn't be provided under a single-payer system. That money could then be put to curing disease, rather than lining pockets. My point in bringing up the coinflip, if you recall, was that a person in the original position (therefore not knowing anything about what position they would occupy in society) might rationally favor such an outcome over the current system.
You've got an unstated assumption that you're not addressing: that scarce resources should be awarded to those with more resources. It's tempting to treat this as a given, since it's a premise of an unregulated market, but it's not a necessity.
If healthcare resources are so scarce that we are unable to effectively treat all members of society, then society must decide how to distribute those resources. As I stated above, it's not justice to award those scarce resources to only one class of people. In the original position, one would likely decide to allocate them either based on an attribute other than wealth, or more likely, allocate them in a random distribution (i.e., if there are two people with terminal cancer, and society can only afford to cure one of them, there's a coin flip).
I also wonder whether you've considered how much of that scarcity is based on scarcity of physical goods, labor, etc., and how much is artificial scarcity that could be changed by changing societal structure. For instance, if a pharmaceutical company can be compensated so that there is incentive to research new life-saving drugs, while amortizing the cost of said drugs over the whole population, rather than just on a small number of sufferers, it may no longer be the case that the sufferers are forced to compete for access to their medication.
Your analogy fails. Current healthcare for the indigent is more like, "We'll give you water. Go find food on your own. If you can't, too bad, sucks to be you."
If you're suggesting that it's in any way just for one's health outcome to be determined by their access to resources, I suggest that your definition of "justice" needs some work.
You do have one correct point: *sometimes* the HDTV makes the SD signal look ever so slightly "worse" This is a problem with lots of upscaling. For instance, stretch a 320x240 video across a 1920x1200 display, and it looks like crap. Drop the resolution on the display down a bit, and the same video will look significantly better (though still noticeably fuzzy).
I do find it interesting that you can notice this difference (none of the rest of my family can, for instance), and yet can't seem to notice the much more significant difference between HD and SD.
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/baer_v_wikileaks/wikileaks102.pdf From the founding of the federal courts, it has been unanimously held that "the courts of
the United States have no jurisdiction of cases between aliens." Montalet v. Murray, 8 U.S. (4
Cranch) 46 (1807). The Ninth Circuit has adhered to this rule. "Diversity jurisdiction does not
encompass foreign plaintiffs suing foreign defendants." Cheng v. Boeing Co., 708 F.2d 1406,
1412 (9th Cir. 1983). The presence of citizen defendants does not preserve jurisdiction as to the
alien. Faysound Limited v. United Coconut Chemical, Inc., 878 F.2d 290, 294 (9th Cir. 1989)
(citing Boeing, 708 F.2d at 1412). In order for the Court to exercise subject matter jurisdiction
over this matter, complete diversity must be established under the original Complaint. See
Owen Equipment & Erection Co. v. Kroger, 437 U.S. 365, 373 (1978).
The Court is concerned that it may well lack subject matter jurisdiction over this matter
in its entirety. 1
1) Although Plaintiffs pleaded jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. 1350 for a "civil action
by an alien for a tort committed in violation of a treaty of the United States," the Complaint
does not state a cause of action under any specific treaty, and counsel for Plaintiffs conceded
that the Court does not maintain jurisdiction under this alternative ground. (See Compl.,
2.) Additionally, while I don't remember much from Civil Procedure, I do recall that appearing in court to challenge personal jurisdiction doesn't grant the court personal jurisdiction.
Yes, you could patent "waving goodbye" as a procedure to shut down a computer.
Of course, now you can't, because the idea's been published.
Perhaps I'm just spoiled by my particular school, but I don't pay for Westlaw or LexisNexis. In fact, vendors from both companies routinely throw themselves at myself and my classmates to convince us to use their service.
Depends on how lawyered up that hotshot programmer is; game rules aren't subject to copyright, much like recipes. So long as said programmer was clever enough to avoid copying expressive elements, like mind flayers for example, WotC would have a lot of trouble getting a judgment against him.