What are international legal standards? And are they standard between the US and China?
Yeah, while I'm very much against censorship, I'm not sure exactly how these activists expect a US court to apply nebulous 'international legal standards' to this situation. There are a few problems with that: 1) apparently since China doesn't accede to it, these standards aren't exactly standard. 2) what US law was broken - in US jurisdiction - exactly? 3) When did international opinion become codified in US law?
I imagine that by 2029 the price of gas will be so high that only the extremely wealthy will be able to afford plane travel.
Doubt it. First, there's a lot of oil - though the recovery process makes it somewhat more costly, the advent of recovery technology will mitigate that. Additionally, we've long had the technology to make liquid fuel from liquefaction of coal. The process would (in my estimate) cost $3 or so a gallon - meaning that it would be feasible now, except that OPEC would undercut it if they had to (as they did in the 80s). But if we run out of oil (and OPEC has nothing left to sell), we have a few hundred years of coal to power us.
So in the end, scarcity will not cause us to stop using fossil fuels soon. And like it or not, people will tolerate global warming before they accept going back to the 1800s in terms of transportation. So I have to disagree with you - plane travel is here, and will be here until or unless something better and faster comes along.
No freaking way is Congress going to abandon all US copyrights over online poker. But if it did happen, which it won't, that would certainly put the lie to all of your paranoid raving about the M$AA controlling the government, no?
OK. So either I get cheap-ass bootleg media, or legal online poker. Awesome!
For the tin-eared masses. The bar of quality for audio/music/telephony has never been lower. We now accept crap MP3 audio as "acceptable", stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable", and reduced/compressed bandwidth as "louder (hence better)". We are now getting spoon-fed the worst quality audio since wax recordings and the Western Electric "Noiseless" recording system of movies from the 30-40's. And like everything else around us that continues to suck worse and worse, we take it in stride, shrug and say "well, it sounds good enough, I guess."
Total apples/oranges comparison. We tolerate "crap" MP3 audio due to a quality/portability tradeoff. The dynamic range issue is a completely different animal - that doesn't provide any tradeoff to the consumer unless he likes constant, loud noise. Note also that this has shit all to do with analog/digital - even analog media have a dynamic range, and having the audio signal occupy a very small part of it will still make a recording sound like shit.
Additionally, I find a poorly mastered CD to be much more offensive than compressed audio. For one, I think one could probably demonstrate that poor mastering destroys more of the information in the audio signal than does compression. Additionally, the issue isn't just one of information loss (though that is important) - it's also listening fatigue, because the output ends up just being a constant barrage of noise.
Ultimately, I'm not an audiophile, but I can tell the difference between a decently-mastered track and a bad one even at 128 bit MP3 compression, and I don't have to try.
That's a good point, and one that's hard to work around. If you have the plaintiff pay for the respondent's attorney fees, you make it almost impossible for a small (as in less wealthy) plaintiff to risk suing a big (more wealthy) respondent - attorney fees and punitive damages meant to assuage them vary widely. One thing you don't want to do is stop valid lawsuits.
Totally agree - my specific idea is to make the standard of lawsuit 'frivolity' vary by field. And to me, anything that has the potential to suppress legitimate speech should be taken most seriously of all - so if you're suing to effectively silence criticism, and there's nothing more to it (like here), that would incur a stiff penalty. I definitely wouldn't apply that same standard to, say, contract disputes.
Perhaps very early in the process the judge can inform the plaintiff that he or she feels that punitive damages to the respondent would be warranted if the plaintiff continues with the claim but loses in court - this would be kind of a "point of no return"... "I think your lawsuit is bunk, but it's not such extreme bunk that I can throw it out. Instead, if you continue and lose, I'm going to make you pay for his attorney's fees - but if you back out now we'll just call it quits". I'm just pulling ideas out of a hat here, but you get the idea.
Actually, I quite like that. Doing it early (pre-trial) reduces expenses substantially, and tells the plaintiff he better up his game if he's going to proceed.
Oh, it's very specific - I believe that "crackpot" is a medical term that describes the original author quite well:)
Fantastic, I'll await the defendant's subpoena for skull X-rays.;)
A lot of people like to go and look at physical things before they buy them. And I am far happier throwing a large item in the bed of my truck and driving home with it than I would be paying someone with an expensive brown truck haul it to my house, a week after I ordered it without ever seeing the physical product.
No doubt, but that's getting pretty far afield from demonstrating that Wal-mart's sales practices are tantamount to total censorship, even in remote areas. You have to demonstrate that you can't access mail order, the internet, and can't get to a non-Walmart record store. And if that's the case for you, then I won't me opening any mail from you, Mr. Kaczinsky.;)
I doubt that's the case here - but the answer to "Can calling someone a 'classic crackpot' in the face of such incorrect data have any chance at making it to court, or even winning the suit?" is in my opinion, "Yes, and it can sometimes be valid". I mean after all, that's what the court is for, to sort that sort of thing out and determine what's a valid complaint and what's not.
Legal standards for libel vary widely, but one standard that I understand is often applied is that the statement must be proveably false. Is that proveably false?
Besides making distinctions between public and private figures, American courts also have ruled that various kinds of published information are generally immune from libel charges. For example, it is almost impossible for a writer to be found guilty of libel if the writing deals with opinions rather than facts. "Under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea," the Supreme Court said in a 1974 libel ruling.
Not long ago, the owner of a restaurant in New Orleans sued a food critic for writing unflattering things about his eating establishment. Too bad, the Louisiana Supreme Court told the restaurant owner, before sending him back to his kitchen empty-handed.
I'm not a lawyer - but to me, for the case against the book reviewer to get away from the above, they'd have to prove that the 'crackpot' slur is more than just an insult, but carries with it a specific (and false) allegation. There are two problems with that: 1) it's non-specific, and 2) it's true.;)
That said, I don't think the reviewer needs to get out his checkbook just yet:)
See, that's the problem - he does, even though the check he's writing is to his lawyer. That's why I think the courts should look harder at thinking about punitive damages against plaintiffs in cases that are clearly intended simply to stifle legitimate, protected speech.
In the US it seems rather common for people to actually have interest-carrying credit-card debt. Which asfar as I can understand must be an insane thing to do. If you're low on cash, paying 5-10 times the normal interest-rate is the *least* thing you need. So, I guess I just don't get it. Why would anyone ever be paying the insane interest-rates on a typical credit-card ?
You answered your own question: "To me, it appears credit-cards are designed to milk those who are stupid, or who are unable to control their urges sufficiently to do what is wise rather than what is smart." That's exactly it. There are certain kinds of people in the US (and elsewhere too, I'm sure) who feel entitled to have material things. They see it as a need. Additionally, parents tend to coddle their kids - and credit card companies know it, so they give thousands of dollars in credit to college kids, knowing that Mommy and Daddy will pay it off.
And it's not limited to credit card debt. There was a great article in the Washington Post written by a journalist who (with spouse) got into a bad adjustable-rate mortgage, having failed to consider the repercussions of rate increases. Justification? His/her parents had a nice comfy house at their age, and they deserved it. Amazing, huh? Apparently life owes us a nice house, fast car, and diamond rings. Ridiculous.
I'm the opposite. I bought a house with a nice fixed rate mortgage, and did my finances myself to determine what we could afford - and subtracted a fair amount to account for emergencies. I use a credit card that I pay off every month. They keep giving me a higher credit limit, I suppose in the hopes that I'll go crazy. Won't happen.
The downside is that by definition the noise you add has to be audible. Note that for a long time audio cassettes sold very well despite their awful noise characteristics, so this may be acceptable to all but the strictest of audiophiles.
True - but I'm guessing they have ways of messing with the texture so it doesn't produce clicks, pops, or anything that obvious. Essentially, this is a form of steganography - hiding information in a signal without it being noticeable. If it can be done with images, it should be possible with sound, as I believe humans are generally more attuned to visual noise than audio.
And this shows how ignorant you are. Try MapQuest again with their Web 2.0 interface and full satellite integration. Superior to Google, albeit non-original
What, do you work there, loser? I've seen it since, and it still sucks. UI blows. You're right about one thing, they're a knock off at this point.
Maps was initially less useful than, say, MapQuest due to poor directions. This was eventually improved upon, but now Google is fighting the first-impression syndrome.
I think that might depend on your particular experience - for me, Maps was a godsend from day 1 because I've had nothing but trouble with Mapquest. Additionally, their UI blew Mapquest out of the water. Add in the satellite imagery, local search, customizeability, and I haven't used Mapquest in years.
Various webmasters complaining that they were kicked out of the program for no discernible reason.
Just like everybody in prison will tell you they were innocent. There's probably a handful of honest webmasters out there who really got screwed, but I think the vast majority were playing games. The problem with advertisers is probably more legitimate, but I've yet to hear a good solution to click fraud - Google is most certainly trying.
Google eventually gave up and bought their competitor: YouTube. Which sent the message that Google Video was as much of a failure as everyone thought it was.
Well...it did suck.;) Google Video, for me, was their one total flop.
Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science.
I have a new meta-theory for these sorts of things: if your hypothesis sounds like the Chewbacca Defense, it's almost certainly bogus.
Some of my coworkers got it, but a couple of them didn't. The disturbing part was that they recognized the Cobol program, but were too young to recognize Rocky and Bullwinkle...
Whoa....that would mean that some college was teaching COBOL as recently as 10 years ago, I'd surmise, which should get their program de-accredited. Unless your coworkers were aliens.
According to the company's official blog, the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications.
Seems a little underwhelming - if they had a sanctioned Google Drive that I could connect to from Windows or Linux, anywhere in the world, that would be cool. FTP access would be nice. But to pay $20/year for 6 more gigs without any functionality I don't have now...nah.
Slashdot Mirror
knowing lawyers there's a clause that covers denies, for a time, the ability for Apple to sell, license, or otherwise profit by using another network.
Yeah...but what if they 'accidentally' make the thing easy to hack, which results in a quadupling of their sales? ;)
What are international legal standards? And are they standard between the US and China?
Yeah, while I'm very much against censorship, I'm not sure exactly how these activists expect a US court to apply nebulous 'international legal standards' to this situation. There are a few problems with that: 1) apparently since China doesn't accede to it, these standards aren't exactly standard. 2) what US law was broken - in US jurisdiction - exactly? 3) When did international opinion become codified in US law?
Well then, my compliments to kdawson for showing the way and doing some actual editing.
Today's weather forcast calls for airborne swine throughout the country, and a blizzard localized to Hell.
This sounds like a good case for breach of contract. Why has nobody sued?
RTFP (Read The Fine Print). ;)
I imagine that by 2029 the price of gas will be so high that only the extremely wealthy will be able to afford plane travel.
Doubt it. First, there's a lot of oil - though the recovery process makes it somewhat more costly, the advent of recovery technology will mitigate that. Additionally, we've long had the technology to make liquid fuel from liquefaction of coal. The process would (in my estimate) cost $3 or so a gallon - meaning that it would be feasible now, except that OPEC would undercut it if they had to (as they did in the 80s). But if we run out of oil (and OPEC has nothing left to sell), we have a few hundred years of coal to power us.
So in the end, scarcity will not cause us to stop using fossil fuels soon. And like it or not, people will tolerate global warming before they accept going back to the 1800s in terms of transportation. So I have to disagree with you - plane travel is here, and will be here until or unless something better and faster comes along.
No freaking way is Congress going to abandon all US copyrights over online poker. But if it did happen, which it won't, that would certainly put the lie to all of your paranoid raving about the M$AA controlling the government, no?
OK. So either I get cheap-ass bootleg media, or legal online poker. Awesome!
For the tin-eared masses. The bar of quality for audio/music/telephony has never been lower. We now accept crap MP3 audio as "acceptable", stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable", and reduced/compressed bandwidth as "louder (hence better)". We are now getting spoon-fed the worst quality audio since wax recordings and the Western Electric "Noiseless" recording system of movies from the 30-40's. And like everything else around us that continues to suck worse and worse, we take it in stride, shrug and say "well, it sounds good enough, I guess."
Total apples/oranges comparison. We tolerate "crap" MP3 audio due to a quality/portability tradeoff. The dynamic range issue is a completely different animal - that doesn't provide any tradeoff to the consumer unless he likes constant, loud noise. Note also that this has shit all to do with analog/digital - even analog media have a dynamic range, and having the audio signal occupy a very small part of it will still make a recording sound like shit.
Additionally, I find a poorly mastered CD to be much more offensive than compressed audio. For one, I think one could probably demonstrate that poor mastering destroys more of the information in the audio signal than does compression. Additionally, the issue isn't just one of information loss (though that is important) - it's also listening fatigue, because the output ends up just being a constant barrage of noise.
Ultimately, I'm not an audiophile, but I can tell the difference between a decently-mastered track and a bad one even at 128 bit MP3 compression, and I don't have to try.
In that case, should cars be recalled?
If the intended use of the car results in 3 broken bones per 150 cars, I'm pretty sure you'd see a recall.
That's a good point, and one that's hard to work around. If you have the plaintiff pay for the respondent's attorney fees, you make it almost impossible for a small (as in less wealthy) plaintiff to risk suing a big (more wealthy) respondent - attorney fees and punitive damages meant to assuage them vary widely. One thing you don't want to do is stop valid lawsuits.
Totally agree - my specific idea is to make the standard of lawsuit 'frivolity' vary by field. And to me, anything that has the potential to suppress legitimate speech should be taken most seriously of all - so if you're suing to effectively silence criticism, and there's nothing more to it (like here), that would incur a stiff penalty. I definitely wouldn't apply that same standard to, say, contract disputes.
Perhaps very early in the process the judge can inform the plaintiff that he or she feels that punitive damages to the respondent would be warranted if the plaintiff continues with the claim but loses in court - this would be kind of a "point of no return"... "I think your lawsuit is bunk, but it's not such extreme bunk that I can throw it out. Instead, if you continue and lose, I'm going to make you pay for his attorney's fees - but if you back out now we'll just call it quits". I'm just pulling ideas out of a hat here, but you get the idea.
Actually, I quite like that. Doing it early (pre-trial) reduces expenses substantially, and tells the plaintiff he better up his game if he's going to proceed.
Oh, it's very specific - I believe that "crackpot" is a medical term that describes the original author quite well :)
Fantastic, I'll await the defendant's subpoena for skull X-rays. ;)
A lot of people like to go and look at physical things before they buy them. And I am far happier throwing a large item in the bed of my truck and driving home with it than I would be paying someone with an expensive brown truck haul it to my house, a week after I ordered it without ever seeing the physical product.
No doubt, but that's getting pretty far afield from demonstrating that Wal-mart's sales practices are tantamount to total censorship, even in remote areas. You have to demonstrate that you can't access mail order, the internet, and can't get to a non-Walmart record store. And if that's the case for you, then I won't me opening any mail from you, Mr. Kaczinsky. ;)
I doubt that's the case here - but the answer to "Can calling someone a 'classic crackpot' in the face of such incorrect data have any chance at making it to court, or even winning the suit?" is in my opinion, "Yes, and it can sometimes be valid". I mean after all, that's what the court is for, to sort that sort of thing out and determine what's a valid complaint and what's not.
Legal standards for libel vary widely, but one standard that I understand is often applied is that the statement must be proveably false. Is that proveably false?
From http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/press/press0 8.htm:
I'm not a lawyer - but to me, for the case against the book reviewer to get away from the above, they'd have to prove that the 'crackpot' slur is more than just an insult, but carries with it a specific (and false) allegation. There are two problems with that: 1) it's non-specific, and 2) it's true. ;)
That said, I don't think the reviewer needs to get out his checkbook just yet :)
See, that's the problem - he does, even though the check he's writing is to his lawyer. That's why I think the courts should look harder at thinking about punitive damages against plaintiffs in cases that are clearly intended simply to stifle legitimate, protected speech.
Yeah, mod parent up... I think the grandparent post doesn't grasp how influential Wal*Mart can be in out there in the hinterlands.
Did Amazon.com go out of business and I missed it?
In the US it seems rather common for people to actually have interest-carrying credit-card debt. Which asfar as I can understand must be an insane thing to do. If you're low on cash, paying 5-10 times the normal interest-rate is the *least* thing you need. So, I guess I just don't get it. Why would anyone ever be paying the insane interest-rates on a typical credit-card ?
You answered your own question: "To me, it appears credit-cards are designed to milk those who are stupid, or who are unable to control their urges sufficiently to do what is wise rather than what is smart." That's exactly it. There are certain kinds of people in the US (and elsewhere too, I'm sure) who feel entitled to have material things. They see it as a need. Additionally, parents tend to coddle their kids - and credit card companies know it, so they give thousands of dollars in credit to college kids, knowing that Mommy and Daddy will pay it off.
And it's not limited to credit card debt. There was a great article in the Washington Post written by a journalist who (with spouse) got into a bad adjustable-rate mortgage, having failed to consider the repercussions of rate increases. Justification? His/her parents had a nice comfy house at their age, and they deserved it. Amazing, huh? Apparently life owes us a nice house, fast car, and diamond rings. Ridiculous.
I'm the opposite. I bought a house with a nice fixed rate mortgage, and did my finances myself to determine what we could afford - and subtracted a fair amount to account for emergencies. I use a credit card that I pay off every month. They keep giving me a higher credit limit, I suppose in the hopes that I'll go crazy. Won't happen.
The downside is that by definition the noise you add has to be audible. Note that for a long time audio cassettes sold very well despite their awful noise characteristics, so this may be acceptable to all but the strictest of audiophiles.
True - but I'm guessing they have ways of messing with the texture so it doesn't produce clicks, pops, or anything that obvious. Essentially, this is a form of steganography - hiding information in a signal without it being noticeable. If it can be done with images, it should be possible with sound, as I believe humans are generally more attuned to visual noise than audio.
then how does a photon, WHICH HAS VOLUME AND MASS, travel at the speed of light without having the same mass/energy as the whole of the universe?
Well, you've proven one theory of mine - any postulate typed in uppercase is guaranteed to be incorrect. ;)
Why-o-why? The same reason apple pretend that no-one uses open formats and containers like: FLAC, vorbis and matroska et al?
What do you mean, *pretend*?
This: "Firm's marketing group distributed press packets to employees containing newspaper and magazine articles under copyright "
...does not equal this: "Share a News Story With Coworkers, Pay a Fine"
Bang-up reporting as usual, kdawson. Do you possess even rudimentary reading comprehension skills?
So what? "Bob" in the mail room signed for it. What's that prove? The CEO can still claim he never got it.
I'm pretty sure the USPS lets you restrict the people who can sign for something when you send it. Of course, then they can just return to sender...
And this shows how ignorant you are. Try MapQuest again with their Web 2.0 interface and full satellite integration. Superior to Google, albeit non-original
What, do you work there, loser? I've seen it since, and it still sucks. UI blows. You're right about one thing, they're a knock off at this point.
Maps was initially less useful than, say, MapQuest due to poor directions. This was eventually improved upon, but now Google is fighting the first-impression syndrome.
I think that might depend on your particular experience - for me, Maps was a godsend from day 1 because I've had nothing but trouble with Mapquest. Additionally, their UI blew Mapquest out of the water. Add in the satellite imagery, local search, customizeability, and I haven't used Mapquest in years.
Various webmasters complaining that they were kicked out of the program for no discernible reason.
Just like everybody in prison will tell you they were innocent. There's probably a handful of honest webmasters out there who really got screwed, but I think the vast majority were playing games. The problem with advertisers is probably more legitimate, but I've yet to hear a good solution to click fraud - Google is most certainly trying.
Google eventually gave up and bought their competitor: YouTube. Which sent the message that Google Video was as much of a failure as everyone thought it was.
Well...it did suck. ;) Google Video, for me, was their one total flop.
Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science.
I have a new meta-theory for these sorts of things: if your hypothesis sounds like the Chewbacca Defense, it's almost certainly bogus.
Wow! Is that the opposite of self-documenting code or what?
Well...it doesn't *look* like Perl...
Some of my coworkers got it, but a couple of them didn't. The disturbing part was that they recognized the Cobol program, but were too young to recognize Rocky and Bullwinkle...
Whoa....that would mean that some college was teaching COBOL as recently as 10 years ago, I'd surmise, which should get their program de-accredited. Unless your coworkers were aliens.
I'm sure he only did that to ensure compatability with older members of the audience.
Then the joke should have been in COBOL.
According to the company's official blog, the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications.
Seems a little underwhelming - if they had a sanctioned Google Drive that I could connect to from Windows or Linux, anywhere in the world, that would be cool. FTP access would be nice. But to pay $20/year for 6 more gigs without any functionality I don't have now...nah.