By the way, Texas just introduced by-the-mile insurance as an option. I think it should be mandatory.
If we just wanted to charge by the mile, without distinguishing busy times and roads from non-busy ones, all we'd really need is tamper-proof odometers. (Actually, they wouldn't need to be tamper-proof, just sufficiently tamper-resistant so that tampering could be detected.) Your car could, say, report your total miles every time you get gas. Big Brother (and his cousin Microsoft) could then know how much you drive, but not when or where.
Personally, I say it's worth the loss of liberty to do it full-scale, with satellite tracking. Remember, the IRS already knows lots and lots of details about you beyond your total income, and has the right to demand more if it wants it. I'm sure lots of people were uneasy about EZ-Pass and other electronic toll systems when they were first introduced, but they save so much time that many gave in. Traffic congestion is just a horrible waste, and the (insert ethnic/gender/age slow-driving stereotype here) should pay for making it worse!
A great idea, if people can accept it.
on
Every Road a Toll Road
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A column in the New York Times (you know the deal) proposes the same thing for this fine city. I think it's a great idea. A gas tax is far less efficient: it will over-encourage (economically) inefficient fuel efficiency improvements, and won't have other good properties, like encouraging people to seek out less-congested roads or travel at less-busy times.
There's a separate reason for distance-based charges: auto insurance. Every car on the road, especially a busy road, imposes a large externality on the others: even drunk drivers are mostly harmless even to themselves if they're lucky enough to stay off busy streets. (It takes two to tango in most accidents, in other words, even if one of them is more "at fault" legally or morally.) Charging for car insurance by the mile, rather than the year, would get more cars off the road and reduce accidents for all of us.
Absolutely. For those who haven't read it, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" is Ken Thompson's story of the greatest hack of all time: changing a compiler so that it not only created a backdoor whenever compiling login.c, but so that the modification persisted when the modified compiler was applied to the source of a standard C compiler. There's just no easy way to do without trusting anyone at all.
For heaven's sake, people, I beg of you: the Department of Justice is abbreviated DOJ (or DoJ, for the truly edgy). J.D. is what pompous types put after their names.
Uh, no, exactly wrong. A camera with 1 million color pixels, i.e., 1 million each of red, green, and blue, is referred to as "1 megapixel." A 3 megapixel camera has at least 9 million sensors, if you count the colors separately.
Does anyone have experience with a Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500DV, or a similar video card with (alleged) "TiVO-like functionality?" I'd love a solution that let me do whatever I wanted with recorded video, and which I was convinced wouldn't have network-unfriendly featuers like commercial skipping suddenly disappear, but only if the quality and interface were at least comparable to a real TiVO.
That's not right, in general. Except regarding a "matter of public concern," the plaintiff does not need to show that the statement was false. Rather, truth is an absolute defense: if the defendant can prove the statement was true, he escapes all liability. But the plaintiff can win not only if the defendant was not at fault, but even if the factfinder is unconvinced as to whether the published material was false at all.
The definition of "public concern" is obviously not simple, but there are relatively few cases governed by the negligence standard: most defamation involving non-public figures does not involve "public concern." The typical case that does is the private figure involved in some way with a story about a public figure.
Unfortunately, this kind of stupidity isn't confined to the tech world. In online news, even from reputable sources, I see financial people writing "million" where they mean "billion" or "trillion" so often, I've realized, that I've started subconsiously figuring out how many dollars they _must_ have meant, and ignoring the start of words ending with "illion." Ugh, ugh, ugh.
This, _and_ I don't get to watch Maria Bartiromo when I turn off the TV?
There's no "prosecution." There's a corrupt bunch of plaintiffs' lawyers, looking to find an excuse to collect $300 million or so for themselves while their supposed clients get nothing. MSFT is only too happy to accomodate.
Microsoft gets a cheap dismissal, the plaintiffs' lawyers are happy, the plaintiffs get nothing. If the judge has an ounce of sense, the settlement will be rejected.
Nonsense. It's much less profit-driven than many other companies. That's why they're wasting $1 billion on the X-Box over the next 4 years, and who knows how much on MSN and PocketPC.
If they were profit-driven, they'd sell Windows and Office, fire 90% of the R&D staff, get rid of the fantabuloso stock options, and put the revenue in the bank.
No, there is no such federal law. In fact, the federal courts held long ago that the Priveleges and Immunities clause of the Constitution does not apply to corporations because they're not "citizens."
They do have, e.g., rights against takings, but that's just to enforce the substantive rights of shareholders, really.
First, almost all contributions are limited to 50% of "contribution base" (or less, depending on the nature of the donee), which is AGI ignoring NOL carrybacks ; any excess can be carried forward.
Second, contributions are deductible only at basis, not fair market value, when the property was not a capital asset of the donor. Software isn't, to its producer, both because it's inventory and because it's "copyrights, literary, musical or artistic compositions, and letters or memoranda, or similar property," with basis determined by that of the producer.
Thus, you would get a deduction only for your basis in the software, i.e., your cost of producing that copy, nothing in the case of a naked license.
Note that it's different here anyway, since it isn't clear whether this is a charitable contribution, the equivalent of a non-deductible penalty, a tort payment, or what.
Don't trust me on this -- individual taxes are not my specialty.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
Possible and impossible goals
on
HDCP Break Proven
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There are some goals that technology can solve, without anyone doing any enforcement. If I can choose my cryptosystem and key length, I can, with very high confidence, hide the content of my private communications, no matter who is trying to break it, no matter how hard.
It's just that "content protection" is not one of those goals. If I have enough information to show a movie, I also have enough to re-show or rebroadcast it. No matter what the technology involved (assuming I have enough computing power).
Policy makers need to understand this distinction, let technology do its thing where possible, and don't expect it to do much of anything where it's not.
Interspousal immunity has nothing to do with priveleges. It's an ancient doctrine with no important force anywhere anymore.
There is a spousal testimony immunity (in many states), which, as you say, permits people not to testify against their spouses at the time of trial, on any subject. This has no equivalent in _any_ other common relationship: your doctor, lawyer, priest or sibling _can_ be forced to testify against you.
There is a second relevant privelege: "marital communications," i.e., confidential communications between spouses are priveleged, and cannot be admitted (over the objection of the party-spouse) even if the witness-spouse wants to testify. This is similar to what lawyers and psychologists get everywhere; doctors have a similar privelege only in a few states and Federal courts.
Finally, no state I know of has codified its law of priveleges. A minimal lawyer-client privelege is guaranteed by the 5th (and 14th) amendments; just about everything else is simply common law.
Absolutely not. Neither legal ethics nor any law (in a typical state) require lawyers, or anyone else, to reveal confidential communications (when they're not otherwise liable for the conduct).
Under the ABA's model rules, a lawyer is *permitted*, but not required, to reveal a client's confidences only when *necessary* to *prevent* a crime or fraud reasonably *certain* to cause death or serious bodily injury. (Until this year, the injury also had to be "imminent.") An ordinary robbery wouldn't qualify, and, in any case, a lawyer with his head on straight wouldn't voluntarily turn in his own client.
No, this is not the rule California applies to psychaitrists under _Tarasoff_. That shouldn't be surprising, since few rules of psychiatry apply to lawyers, and vice versa.
Now, of course, it would not be *priveleged*, but that affects only whether it can be kept out of evidence -- not whether the police can be told of it. (Simplifying there a touch.)
Bandwidth doesn't cost anything worth the trouble of counting. Something like 2.6% of available fiber optic capacity is being used now.
The costs are in tech support, which the kernel hackers don't call much; other human-intensive stuff like installs; and fixed costs like billing, that Granny J consumes just like everybody else.
If non-flat costs made economic sense, they would have chased flat billing from the market by now.
I used to think Limewire was great. Then I tried Morpheus.
There's no comparison. The FastTrack searches are much, much faster; downloads are faster and much, much more reliable, because you can simultaneously download different parts of the same file from different places. Transparently, of course.
It's not the same as with trademarks, but a copyright holder who does nothing to enforce it *will* lose the ability to enforce it under the doctrine of estoppel. This is all laid out clearly in, for example, 4 Nimmer and Nimmer, The Defense of Estoppel sec. 13.07: "...a holding out sufficient to raise an estoppel may be accomplished by silence and inaction."
Suing isn't the only way to avoid estoppel, but, then, in trademark law, it isn't the only way to prevent a mark from becoming generic. (Of course, estoppel claims are rarely successful.)
On an Athlon 1.2 running WinMe, the Mozilla 0.8 newsreader, like recent nightlies and Netscape 6, seems to run a little faster than Communicator 4.x most of the time, but frequently pauses for 10 seconds or more, which Communicator never does to me. This is unacceptable.
The short answer is, discovery is basically limitless. It can be a huge invasion into privacy, not to mention a huge cost; if it weren't for the fact that big corporations are the defendants in most serious lawsuits, we'd all be outraged that such a system exists. (Of course, it also makes our legal system much more effective, though more costly, than any other country's: it's basically impossible to prove lots of things without it.)
On the Fifth Amendment: note that it *does* protect you from testifying in a civil trial to things which could be used against you in a later criminal prosecution. But it does not generally protect physical evidence, like computer files, in criminal or civil court.
In detail:
Discovery begins with a lawyer for one side sending the other a written request. (In some federal courts, each side has to disclose certain things without being asked, too.) The recipient's lawyers can object on a variety of grounds -- e.g., that it involves trade secrets, personal secrets, priveleged information (like letters between a lawyer and client), that it is has no possible relation to the case. But lots of private things of essentially no legal relevance do get turned over for dozens of lawyers to pore over or laugh at. Hence the Paula Jones case.
Requests can be for information of a specific type (e.g., "all memos that relate to the pricing of vitamins"), or in a specific place (e.g., "the CEO's diary entries for last month"). In general, yes, the information is collected by the recipient's lawyers, but a request for all the files on a particular PC wouldn't be obviously objectionable.
Where a document might contain something legally important, but also private matters, it is possible for the judge to look it over and cut out whatever the other side shouldn't see.
In practice, in the big suits, discovery is a hopeless morass, and it would take far too long for a judge or magistrate to settle every disagreement, so the two sides make a kind of trade: you show us this, we'll show you that.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, Texas just introduced by-the-mile insurance as an option. I think it should be mandatory.
If we just wanted to charge by the mile, without distinguishing busy times and roads from non-busy ones, all we'd really need is tamper-proof odometers. (Actually, they wouldn't need to be tamper-proof, just sufficiently tamper-resistant so that tampering could be detected.) Your car could, say, report your total miles every time you get gas. Big Brother (and his cousin Microsoft) could then know how much you drive, but not when or where.
Personally, I say it's worth the loss of liberty to do it full-scale, with satellite tracking. Remember, the IRS already knows lots and lots of details about you beyond your total income, and has the right to demand more if it wants it. I'm sure lots of people were uneasy about EZ-Pass and other electronic toll systems when they were first introduced, but they save so much time that many gave in. Traffic congestion is just a horrible waste, and the (insert ethnic/gender/age slow-driving stereotype here) should pay for making it worse!
A column in the New York Times (you know the deal) proposes the same thing for this fine city. I think it's a great idea. A gas tax is far less efficient: it will over-encourage (economically) inefficient fuel efficiency improvements, and won't have other good properties, like encouraging people to seek out less-congested roads or travel at less-busy times.
There's a separate reason for distance-based charges: auto insurance. Every car on the road, especially a busy road, imposes a large externality on the others: even drunk drivers are mostly harmless even to themselves if they're lucky enough to stay off busy streets. (It takes two to tango in most accidents, in other words, even if one of them is more "at fault" legally or morally.) Charging for car insurance by the mile, rather than the year, would get more cars off the road and reduce accidents for all of us.
Long live corrective taxes!
Absolutely. For those who haven't read it, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" is Ken Thompson's story of the greatest hack of all time: changing a compiler so that it not only created a backdoor whenever compiling login.c, but so that the modification persisted when the modified compiler was applied to the source of a standard C compiler. There's just no easy way to do without trusting anyone at all.
Dude, it's not 1988 anymore. Haven't you heard? Disks are free now. To within a rounding error, anyway.
For heaven's sake, people, I beg of you: the Department of Justice is abbreviated DOJ (or DoJ, for the truly edgy). J.D. is what pompous types put after their names.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
Uh, no, exactly wrong. A camera with 1 million color pixels, i.e., 1 million each of red, green, and blue, is referred to as "1 megapixel." A 3 megapixel camera has at least 9 million sensors, if you count the colors separately.
Does anyone have experience with a Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500DV, or a similar video card with (alleged) "TiVO-like functionality?" I'd love a solution that let me do whatever I wanted with recorded video, and which I was convinced wouldn't have network-unfriendly featuers like commercial skipping suddenly disappear, but only if the quality and interface were at least comparable to a real TiVO.
Son, do we need to remind you exactly how little power one needs to factor primes?
That's not right, in general. Except regarding a "matter of public concern," the plaintiff does not need to show that the statement was false. Rather, truth is an absolute defense: if the defendant can prove the statement was true, he escapes all liability. But the plaintiff can win not only if the defendant was not at fault, but even if the factfinder is unconvinced as to whether the published material was false at all.
The definition of "public concern" is obviously not simple, but there are relatively few cases governed by the negligence standard: most defamation involving non-public figures does not involve "public concern." The typical case that does is the private figure involved in some way with a story about a public figure.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
Unfortunately, this kind of stupidity isn't confined to the tech world. In online news, even from reputable sources, I see financial people writing "million" where they mean "billion" or "trillion" so often, I've realized, that I've started subconsiously figuring out how many dollars they _must_ have meant, and ignoring the start of words ending with "illion." Ugh, ugh, ugh.
This, _and_ I don't get to watch Maria Bartiromo when I turn off the TV?
Oh, great! Now that there's a prize, professional poets'll start spamming us with sonnet verses just so they can reassemble them as poetry.
There's no "prosecution." There's a corrupt bunch of plaintiffs' lawyers, looking to find an excuse to collect $300 million or so for themselves while their supposed clients get nothing. MSFT is only too happy to accomodate.
Microsoft gets a cheap dismissal, the plaintiffs' lawyers are happy, the plaintiffs get nothing. If the judge has an ounce of sense, the settlement will be rejected.
IMHO, of course.
Nonsense. It's much less profit-driven than many other companies. That's why they're wasting $1 billion on the X-Box over the next 4 years, and who knows how much on MSN and PocketPC.
If they were profit-driven, they'd sell Windows and Office, fire 90% of the R&D staff, get rid of the fantabuloso stock options, and put the revenue in the bank.
No, there is no such federal law. In fact, the federal courts held long ago that the Priveleges and Immunities clause of the Constitution does not apply to corporations because they're not "citizens."
They do have, e.g., rights against takings, but that's just to enforce the substantive rights of shareholders, really.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
No.
First, almost all contributions are limited to 50% of "contribution base" (or less, depending on the nature of the donee), which is AGI ignoring NOL carrybacks ; any excess can be carried forward.
Second, contributions are deductible only at basis, not fair market value, when the property was not a capital asset of the donor. Software isn't, to its producer, both because it's inventory and because it's "copyrights, literary, musical or artistic compositions, and letters or memoranda, or similar property," with basis determined by that of the producer.
Thus, you would get a deduction only for your basis in the software, i.e., your cost of producing that copy, nothing in the case of a naked license.
Note that it's different here anyway, since it isn't clear whether this is a charitable contribution, the equivalent of a non-deductible penalty, a tort payment, or what.
Don't trust me on this -- individual taxes are not my specialty.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
There are some goals that technology can solve, without anyone doing any enforcement. If I can choose my cryptosystem and key length, I can, with very high confidence, hide the content of my private communications, no matter who is trying to break it, no matter how hard.
It's just that "content protection" is not one of those goals. If I have enough information to show a movie, I also have enough to re-show or rebroadcast it. No matter what the technology involved (assuming I have enough computing power).
Policy makers need to understand this distinction, let technology do its thing where possible, and don't expect it to do much of anything where it's not.
IMHO.
Interspousal immunity has nothing to do with priveleges. It's an ancient doctrine with no important force anywhere anymore.
There is a spousal testimony immunity (in many states), which, as you say, permits people not to testify against their spouses at the time of trial, on any subject. This has no equivalent in _any_ other common relationship: your doctor, lawyer, priest or sibling _can_ be forced to testify against you.
There is a second relevant privelege: "marital communications," i.e., confidential communications between spouses are priveleged, and cannot be admitted (over the objection of the party-spouse) even if the witness-spouse wants to testify. This is similar to what lawyers and psychologists get everywhere; doctors have a similar privelege only in a few states and Federal courts.
Finally, no state I know of has codified its law of priveleges. A minimal lawyer-client privelege is guaranteed by the 5th (and 14th) amendments; just about everything else is simply common law.
IAAL.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
Absolutely not. Neither legal ethics nor any law (in a typical state) require lawyers, or anyone else, to reveal confidential communications (when they're not otherwise liable for the conduct).
Under the ABA's model rules, a lawyer is *permitted*, but not required, to reveal a client's confidences only when *necessary* to *prevent* a crime or fraud reasonably *certain* to cause death or serious bodily injury. (Until this year, the injury also had to be "imminent.") An ordinary robbery wouldn't qualify, and, in any case, a lawyer with his head on straight wouldn't voluntarily turn in his own client.
No, this is not the rule California applies to psychaitrists under _Tarasoff_. That shouldn't be surprising, since few rules of psychiatry apply to lawyers, and vice versa.
Now, of course, it would not be *priveleged*, but that affects only whether it can be kept out of evidence -- not whether the police can be told of it. (Simplifying there a touch.)
Yes, IAAL.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
Get real.
Bandwidth doesn't cost anything worth the trouble of counting. Something like 2.6% of available fiber optic capacity is being used now.
The costs are in tech support, which the kernel hackers don't call much; other human-intensive stuff like installs; and fixed costs like billing, that Granny J consumes just like everybody else.
If non-flat costs made economic sense, they would have chased flat billing from the market by now.
I used to think Limewire was great. Then I tried Morpheus.
There's no comparison. The FastTrack searches are much, much faster; downloads are faster and much, much more reliable, because you can simultaneously download different parts of the same file from different places. Transparently, of course.
All transparently.
I beg of you: try it. You'll like it, I promise.
VA Hospital? VA Benefits?
BZZZT. Not wrong.
It's not the same as with trademarks, but a copyright holder who does nothing to enforce it *will* lose the ability to enforce it under the doctrine of estoppel. This is all laid out clearly in, for example, 4 Nimmer and Nimmer, The Defense of Estoppel sec. 13.07: "...a holding out sufficient to raise an estoppel may be accomplished by silence and inaction."
Suing isn't the only way to avoid estoppel, but, then, in trademark law, it isn't the only way to prevent a mark from becoming generic. (Of course, estoppel claims are rarely successful.)
Yes, IAAL.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
So you think *MSN* is a monopoly, and Microsoft is trying to extend that monopoly to a competitive *browser* market????
I think not.
The antitrust laws don't prohibit everything Microsoft does, no matter how mean, petty and stupid.
Lionel Hutts, J.D.
On an Athlon 1.2 running WinMe, the Mozilla 0.8 newsreader, like recent nightlies and Netscape 6, seems to run a little faster than Communicator 4.x most of the time, but frequently pauses for 10 seconds or more, which Communicator never does to me. This is unacceptable.
The short answer is, discovery is basically limitless. It can be a huge invasion into privacy, not to mention a huge cost; if it weren't for the fact that big corporations are the defendants in most serious lawsuits, we'd all be outraged that such a system exists. (Of course, it also makes our legal system much more effective, though more costly, than any other country's: it's basically impossible to prove lots of things without it.)
On the Fifth Amendment: note that it *does* protect you from testifying in a civil trial to things which could be used against you in a later criminal prosecution. But it does not generally protect physical evidence, like computer files, in criminal or civil court.
In detail:
Discovery begins with a lawyer for one side sending the other a written request. (In some federal courts, each side has to disclose certain things without being asked, too.) The recipient's lawyers can object on a variety of grounds -- e.g., that it involves trade secrets, personal secrets, priveleged information (like letters between a lawyer and client), that it is has no possible relation to the case. But lots of private things of essentially no legal relevance do get turned over for dozens of lawyers to pore over or laugh at. Hence the Paula Jones case.
Requests can be for information of a specific type (e.g., "all memos that relate to the pricing of vitamins"), or in a specific place (e.g., "the CEO's diary entries for last month"). In general, yes, the information is collected by the recipient's lawyers, but a request for all the files on a particular PC wouldn't be obviously objectionable.
Where a document might contain something legally important, but also private matters, it is possible for the judge to look it over and cut out whatever the other side shouldn't see.
In practice, in the big suits, discovery is a hopeless morass, and it would take far too long for a judge or magistrate to settle every disagreement, so the two sides make a kind of trade: you show us this, we'll show you that.