I absolutely agree with you. But if a cause of action were created and people started suing, a bunch of short-sighted slashdotters would begin screaming and crying about how overly litigious our society has become, while only today they wailed and moaned about how our rights are not being protected. Litigation is one of the crucial, crucial enforcement mechanisms of some of our most sacred rights, and I wish more people would realize this. There are frivolous suits, yes, but overall the effect safeguards much of what we hold dear in this society. I think you are 100% correct that there should be a citizen suit provision in HIPPA, and of course it's no surprise that companies stop caring about the law when there are no citizen suits and the administration decides not to enforce it.
So why doesn't your wife call for number 352 from the lobby, and then ask Mr. Smith how he is once he is out of the public waiting room? That way she could protect his privacy, not break the law, not be open to liability, AND treat him like a human. I don't think it's your wife's place to decide that Mr. Smith's comfort at the moment of being called out of the waiting room supersedes his right to medical privacy. Maybe nine out of ten -- or even 999 out of 1000 -- Mr. Smiths agree with your wife's decision, but we have privacy laws to protect the sometimes very small minority who really do want or need their privacy protected.
Unfortunately this is wrong. A three-manifold is LIKE a sphere but in four dimensions. A sphere is a three-dimensional object with a two dimensional surface. A three-manifold is a four-dimensional object with a three dimensional surface. I suppose one way to visualize it is by taking our (three-dimensional) universe and imagining that if you traveled far enough in any direction you'd eventually end up back where you started, just like if an ant started walking in a straight line on the (two-dimensional) surface of a sphere he'd eventually end up back where he started.
The Poincare Conjecture says that every three-manifold that meets some conditions (no holes cut from its surface, it's all one object, etc.) can be smoothly distorted (through a process called homeomorphism) into any other three-manifold.
This is NOT true of two-manifolds: while you can smoothly distort (homeomorph) a sphere into a cube, for example, you cannot smoothly distort a sphere into a donut. This is because of the way we define a smooth distortion: at some point in the transformation you'd need to open up a hole in the sphere to make it into a donut, which disrupts the smoothness of the distortion. It's like if the cube were made of flexible rubber, you could bend it into a sphere, but you couldn't turn it into a donut without a pair of scissors and some glue. (This is all very hand-wavy, I know, but it's the best I can do without getting all technical.)
I think the fines and restrictions are totally unnecessary and possibly unconstitutional, but I'm 100% in favor of the studies. We've heard enough about violent and sexual video games warping children and turning them into serial killers; let's shine some light on it. Ultimately it's an empirical question with an accessible truth value. I suspect we'll find that video games do not damage children in any statistically significant way, and I think that'll go a long way to deflating this particular political football. If I'm wrong, and it turns out that video games do damage children, then I'd be first in line to regulate their sale. Either way, we're better off knowing for sure.
"If the end result of tort were instead to directly force, by mandate of the court, the provider to fix the problem and provide evidence to the court that he's done so in such a way that the problem will stay fixed, then the entire process would likely be a lot less expensive and would probably provide much better results to boot."
I disagree, and so does most of the legal academy. Your plan will motivate the provider to provide the appearance of fixing the problem; the existing system aligns the provider's own self-interest with fixing the problem. And courts are far less competent to judge when a provider's services are safe than the provider itself is. Especially when the case is highly technical -- and even commonplace objects have far more highly technical theory behind them than i think most people imagine -- the case would devolve into a battle of the experts, which would increase the litigation costs for all parties (and certainly not decrease them as you claim!) and significantly diminish the odds of effecting any sort of positive change.
Incidentally, when you say that McDonald's should be liable for "any medical expenses that I had to pay for if said expenses are a significant fraction of my income or net worth," you seem to accept the philosophy behind compensatory damages while adopting an inconsistent implementation. How is it just or fair to refuse to pay for someone's medical expenses simply because they're not a significant fraction of their income or net worth? In that case, what's the person's motivation to sue and get the problem fixed? Why should it matter at all whether the victim is rich or poor? And why should pain and suffering or generally decreased quality of life not be recompensed? If you were forced to endure years of agony or the anguish of disability because of a corporation's callous disregard for your well-being, shouldn't they have to try to make it up to you, even the only available means for doing so were the imperfect substitute of financial compensation?
Your criticism that tort law "goes about it indirectly" seems misplaced. Empirically, companies do respond to financial incentives. McDonald's doesn't use spill-proof coffee lids because it wants to, it does it so it won't have to pay another large damages assessment. Elevator manufacturers don't include five independent layers of fail-safes for fun; they do it to avoid accidents and therefore liability. Every warning sign and safety device that makes our everyday lives safer than ever before exists at least in part because of the torts system.
Are there occasional miscarriages of justice? Of course. Sometimes innocent people have to pay out of pocket to defend against or settle frivolous litigation. It sucks, and no one except the crooked plaintiffs and their crooked lawyers likes it. But it sucks less than all of the known alternatives, so we keep the system. It is myopic in the extreme to accept these occasional occurrences as evidence sufficient to discredit the entire system, especially when the ill-thought alternative you offer would so clearly cause such widespread and devastating societal regression.
The concept of a wrongdoer making the victim whole -- compensating him for the harm he endured at the wrongdoer's hands -- dates back to the drafting of the book of Leviticus.
If McDonald's negligently feeds you a poisoned hamburger, should their damages be limited to the $4.15 you payed for your Big Mac Meal?
Right, and that's why one necessary component of a court system is that it can compel people to do things whether or not they want to do them. So Hayden presumably wouldn't have a choice -- or rather his choice set would look like {answer the question, keep mum and be held in contempt}. Ask Judith Miller how much fun that latter choice is.
"But I don't buy the distinction between 'us' and the people crossing."
You don't buy it? Then it seems to me that you either believe that citizens shouldn't have to follow the law or that the law should be changed. And in either case, your blusterings might better be directed at the legislative process rather than the enforcement process.
The problem with the Gestapo was not that they ran a tip line for citizens to turn one another in. The 911 emergency hotline is (in part) exactly that, and it's hardly controversial. If you see someone break a window or run someone over or commit murder, you call 911 and help the police catch the criminal, and you're a good citizen for doing so.
The problem with the Gestapo was that it used its tip lines to enforce vague and unjust laws. If we had a law that said that it was illegal to be Jewish, illegal to think seditious thoughts, or illegal to be a "bad citizen," that would make us like the Gestapo. And if we used a tip line to help enforce those laws, then it would make us more like the Gestapo to the extent that it promoted the enforcement of those (unjust or vague) laws.
I think the entire tip line analogy is inapt, because, as you admit, the cameras are turned outward rather than inward; they point to foreign countries and not citizens. I don't understand why you are so quick to dismiss this distinction. It seems to me that your logic argues just as heavily against the CIA monitoring foreign countries. Frankly you come off as more than a little hysterical and not very logical at all.
California does not enforce employee non-compete agreements as a matter of law. I've heard an interesting theory that this promotes greater workforce mobility and therefore the distribution of knowledge equilibrates to pareto efficiency more quickly, which can be quite valuable to an industry that advances as rapidly as information technology did during the late nineties.
Of course, it's possible that we still would have had a Silicon Valley without this legislative environment, but it may have progressed more slowly and it would not have been as likely to happen in California specifically.
A lot of comments seem to make a big deal out of the potential noisiness of the data. But if this thing can take ten snapshots per second, couldn't it take three shots in a third of a second and average the results to reduce noisiness without sacrificing resolution? I don't know much about photography, but it seems like this should be quite effective to me.
"Arguably, even the 15% or gamers who wouldn't play a game with ads wouldn't find out that there were ads in the game, or that the ads bothered them until after they bought the game. You think Best Buy's going to give a refund because someone doesn't like the graphics?"
That's why we have reviews. A movie theater or a restaurant won't give you a refund just because you didn't like their fare either, but success is still (roughly) correlated with quality in those industries.
Those of you who are not bothered by books and movies about it existing, yet are still claiming that the video game is inappropriate, should go drive off a cliff with any progeny of yours in the vehicle at the same time. You'll do the rest of us a favor by helping to clean the gene pool.
Jeez. That's a little extreme.
I think there is a legitimate distinction between video games and books/movies. Books and movies can be documentary or nonfiction in nature, whose purpose is to educate instead of entertain. Video games -- except for the ugly duckling "edutainment" genre -- exist purely to entertain.
It's the fact that people are deriving entertainment from such a tragedy so soon afterwards that fuels the criticism, I think, not that video games specifically are the medium. You'd see the same anger directed at a "Rambo: Columbine" movie. A lot of people were pretty upset about this latest 9/11 movie, for example, for probably the same reason.
Or at least that's a legitimate justification for the criticism. It may be that people associate video games with the glorification of violence, which probably isn't as legitimate a justification without looking at the specifics of the video game.
Re:I want the patent clusterfuck to get worse
on
Creative Sues Apple
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Corporations are the ones with enough resources to attract legislators' attention when they start to suffer, and corporations almost never get sued for copyright infringement. Patent infringement, on the other hand...
In fairness, the Third Reich was a hell of a lot more oppressive than the current Chinese government. It's not feasible to invade every country that violates its citizens' rights no matter how infrequently. So it isn't at all inconsistent to think that military intervention in Nazi Germany was a good idea but still think it's a bad idea for today's China.
I'd rather 100 people be thrown in prison for committing legitimate offenses such as violent crimes and even drug possession than even one for political speech.
So by that logic, wouldn't it be okay for US companies to sell gas chamber supplies to the Nazis? Surely there has to be some line drawn in the sand, and I'd say complicity in the violation of fundamental human rights is a damn good place to draw it.
As an aside, when did a profit motive become an *excuse* for committing heinous moral offenses?
This will work only until the first time you pay with a credit or debit card and use your loyalty card. Then your real name is forever attached to it for all your future and past purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
I absolutely agree with you. But if a cause of action were created and people started suing, a bunch of short-sighted slashdotters would begin screaming and crying about how overly litigious our society has become, while only today they wailed and moaned about how our rights are not being protected. Litigation is one of the crucial, crucial enforcement mechanisms of some of our most sacred rights, and I wish more people would realize this. There are frivolous suits, yes, but overall the effect safeguards much of what we hold dear in this society. I think you are 100% correct that there should be a citizen suit provision in HIPPA, and of course it's no surprise that companies stop caring about the law when there are no citizen suits and the administration decides not to enforce it.
So why doesn't your wife call for number 352 from the lobby, and then ask Mr. Smith how he is once he is out of the public waiting room? That way she could protect his privacy, not break the law, not be open to liability, AND treat him like a human. I don't think it's your wife's place to decide that Mr. Smith's comfort at the moment of being called out of the waiting room supersedes his right to medical privacy. Maybe nine out of ten -- or even 999 out of 1000 -- Mr. Smiths agree with your wife's decision, but we have privacy laws to protect the sometimes very small minority who really do want or need their privacy protected.
Unfortunately this is wrong. A three-manifold is LIKE a sphere but in four dimensions. A sphere is a three-dimensional object with a two dimensional surface. A three-manifold is a four-dimensional object with a three dimensional surface. I suppose one way to visualize it is by taking our (three-dimensional) universe and imagining that if you traveled far enough in any direction you'd eventually end up back where you started, just like if an ant started walking in a straight line on the (two-dimensional) surface of a sphere he'd eventually end up back where he started.
The Poincare Conjecture says that every three-manifold that meets some conditions (no holes cut from its surface, it's all one object, etc.) can be smoothly distorted (through a process called homeomorphism) into any other three-manifold.
This is NOT true of two-manifolds: while you can smoothly distort (homeomorph) a sphere into a cube, for example, you cannot smoothly distort a sphere into a donut. This is because of the way we define a smooth distortion: at some point in the transformation you'd need to open up a hole in the sphere to make it into a donut, which disrupts the smoothness of the distortion. It's like if the cube were made of flexible rubber, you could bend it into a sphere, but you couldn't turn it into a donut without a pair of scissors and some glue. (This is all very hand-wavy, I know, but it's the best I can do without getting all technical.)
I think the fines and restrictions are totally unnecessary and possibly unconstitutional, but I'm 100% in favor of the studies. We've heard enough about violent and sexual video games warping children and turning them into serial killers; let's shine some light on it. Ultimately it's an empirical question with an accessible truth value. I suspect we'll find that video games do not damage children in any statistically significant way, and I think that'll go a long way to deflating this particular political football. If I'm wrong, and it turns out that video games do damage children, then I'd be first in line to regulate their sale. Either way, we're better off knowing for sure.
If it makes you rest any easier, I've heard police officers and prosecutors use the term for at least ten years now.
I disagree, and so does most of the legal academy. Your plan will motivate the provider to provide the appearance of fixing the problem; the existing system aligns the provider's own self-interest with fixing the problem. And courts are far less competent to judge when a provider's services are safe than the provider itself is. Especially when the case is highly technical -- and even commonplace objects have far more highly technical theory behind them than i think most people imagine -- the case would devolve into a battle of the experts, which would increase the litigation costs for all parties (and certainly not decrease them as you claim!) and significantly diminish the odds of effecting any sort of positive change.
Incidentally, when you say that McDonald's should be liable for "any medical expenses that I had to pay for if said expenses are a significant fraction of my income or net worth," you seem to accept the philosophy behind compensatory damages while adopting an inconsistent implementation. How is it just or fair to refuse to pay for someone's medical expenses simply because they're not a significant fraction of their income or net worth? In that case, what's the person's motivation to sue and get the problem fixed? Why should it matter at all whether the victim is rich or poor? And why should pain and suffering or generally decreased quality of life not be recompensed? If you were forced to endure years of agony or the anguish of disability because of a corporation's callous disregard for your well-being, shouldn't they have to try to make it up to you, even the only available means for doing so were the imperfect substitute of financial compensation?
Your criticism that tort law "goes about it indirectly" seems misplaced. Empirically, companies do respond to financial incentives. McDonald's doesn't use spill-proof coffee lids because it wants to, it does it so it won't have to pay another large damages assessment. Elevator manufacturers don't include five independent layers of fail-safes for fun; they do it to avoid accidents and therefore liability. Every warning sign and safety device that makes our everyday lives safer than ever before exists at least in part because of the torts system.
Are there occasional miscarriages of justice? Of course. Sometimes innocent people have to pay out of pocket to defend against or settle frivolous litigation. It sucks, and no one except the crooked plaintiffs and their crooked lawyers likes it. But it sucks less than all of the known alternatives, so we keep the system. It is myopic in the extreme to accept these occasional occurrences as evidence sufficient to discredit the entire system, especially when the ill-thought alternative you offer would so clearly cause such widespread and devastating societal regression.
The concept of a wrongdoer making the victim whole -- compensating him for the harm he endured at the wrongdoer's hands -- dates back to the drafting of the book of Leviticus.
If McDonald's negligently feeds you a poisoned hamburger, should their damages be limited to the $4.15 you payed for your Big Mac Meal?
Right, and that's why one necessary component of a court system is that it can compel people to do things whether or not they want to do them. So Hayden presumably wouldn't have a choice -- or rather his choice set would look like {answer the question, keep mum and be held in contempt}. Ask Judith Miller how much fun that latter choice is.
"But I don't buy the distinction between 'us' and the people crossing."
You don't buy it? Then it seems to me that you either believe that citizens shouldn't have to follow the law or that the law should be changed. And in either case, your blusterings might better be directed at the legislative process rather than the enforcement process.
The problem with the Gestapo was not that they ran a tip line for citizens to turn one another in. The 911 emergency hotline is (in part) exactly that, and it's hardly controversial. If you see someone break a window or run someone over or commit murder, you call 911 and help the police catch the criminal, and you're a good citizen for doing so.
The problem with the Gestapo was that it used its tip lines to enforce vague and unjust laws. If we had a law that said that it was illegal to be Jewish, illegal to think seditious thoughts, or illegal to be a "bad citizen," that would make us like the Gestapo. And if we used a tip line to help enforce those laws, then it would make us more like the Gestapo to the extent that it promoted the enforcement of those (unjust or vague) laws.
I think the entire tip line analogy is inapt, because, as you admit, the cameras are turned outward rather than inward; they point to foreign countries and not citizens. I don't understand why you are so quick to dismiss this distinction. It seems to me that your logic argues just as heavily against the CIA monitoring foreign countries. Frankly you come off as more than a little hysterical and not very logical at all.
Well, at least the SCA wouldn't prevent you.
Note that GP asked who was the original CEO, not president.
California does not enforce employee non-compete agreements as a matter of law. I've heard an interesting theory that this promotes greater workforce mobility and therefore the distribution of knowledge equilibrates to pareto efficiency more quickly, which can be quite valuable to an industry that advances as rapidly as information technology did during the late nineties.
Of course, it's possible that we still would have had a Silicon Valley without this legislative environment, but it may have progressed more slowly and it would not have been as likely to happen in California specifically.
A lot of comments seem to make a big deal out of the potential noisiness of the data. But if this thing can take ten snapshots per second, couldn't it take three shots in a third of a second and average the results to reduce noisiness without sacrificing resolution? I don't know much about photography, but it seems like this should be quite effective to me.
"Arguably, even the 15% or gamers who wouldn't play a game with ads wouldn't find out that there were ads in the game, or that the ads bothered them until after they bought the game. You think Best Buy's going to give a refund because someone doesn't like the graphics?"
That's why we have reviews. A movie theater or a restaurant won't give you a refund just because you didn't like their fare either, but success is still (roughly) correlated with quality in those industries.
For what it's worth, I just ran the Acid2 test through Safari and it passed.
Jeez. That's a little extreme.
I think there is a legitimate distinction between video games and books/movies. Books and movies can be documentary or nonfiction in nature, whose purpose is to educate instead of entertain. Video games -- except for the ugly duckling "edutainment" genre -- exist purely to entertain.
It's the fact that people are deriving entertainment from such a tragedy so soon afterwards that fuels the criticism, I think, not that video games specifically are the medium. You'd see the same anger directed at a "Rambo: Columbine" movie. A lot of people were pretty upset about this latest 9/11 movie, for example, for probably the same reason.
Or at least that's a legitimate justification for the criticism. It may be that people associate video games with the glorification of violence, which probably isn't as legitimate a justification without looking at the specifics of the video game.
Corporations are the ones with enough resources to attract legislators' attention when they start to suffer, and corporations almost never get sued for copyright infringement. Patent infringement, on the other hand...
In fairness, the Third Reich was a hell of a lot more oppressive than the current Chinese government. It's not feasible to invade every country that violates its citizens' rights no matter how infrequently. So it isn't at all inconsistent to think that military intervention in Nazi Germany was a good idea but still think it's a bad idea for today's China.
I'd rather 100 people be thrown in prison for committing legitimate offenses such as violent crimes and even drug possession than even one for political speech.
So by that logic, wouldn't it be okay for US companies to sell gas chamber supplies to the Nazis? Surely there has to be some line drawn in the sand, and I'd say complicity in the violation of fundamental human rights is a damn good place to draw it. As an aside, when did a profit motive become an *excuse* for committing heinous moral offenses?
This will work only until the first time you pay with a credit or debit card and use your loyalty card. Then your real name is forever attached to it for all your future and past purchases.
Orange juice and apple cider. Both are delicious and healthy.
It's two different charges:
1) Acting negligently, and
2) intentionally inflicting emotional distress.
They are separate torts.
The really tragic thing about your post is it sounds like you're completely unaware that the Independents are a political party.
"Vote Independent," you say. Escape this tyranny of parties... by voting for a different party.