Re:What frivolous lawsuits?
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The major lawsuit-related driver of medical costs is not frivolous suits. It is jackpot verdicts, where someone with no lasting harm or even short-term disability can be awarded tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive and other special damages. Because the number is big, jurors think that this sends the right message, and because a faceless insurance company will pay most or all of it, they're not afraid of the costs it will incur for the doctor. That's why tort reform usually tries to impose caps on damages, and that in turn is why courts usually throw the laws out (because the laws are seen as a legislative infringement on the judicial function).
You've got that backwards. Inability to "detect small but real and possibly important effects" is a problem inherent to trials with few data points, not of meta-analysis.
Problems with meta-analysis include studies that don't use the same definitions (labels) for the characteristics being studied; studies without enough overlap in the subgroups they examine; determining the acceptance criteria for hypotheses (especially if you are testing more than one hypothesis in the meta-analysis); confirmation bias (studies with negative results often don't get published); and probably some others that I, as a humble software engineer, don't know.
If you want an example of how haphazard grouping of results can hide effects that are pronounced when you look at the right subgroups, read up on Simpson's paradox.
Standard deviation and variance both characterize how widely distributed a sample is. When put on the spot (i.e. no reference materials allowed), could you explain the difference between the two without relying on the fact that one is the square root of the other? If not, is it really so unreasonable that a busy physician not want to recall and explain "standard deviation" to someone who may not have a good grip of the implicit context?
That error at least something that is debunked fairly often. It's harder to explain to most people (those without sufficient background in mathematics or statistics) that you're going to have results that falsely appear to be "statistically significant" if you repeat a random trial often enough. For example, you should expect to find a wrong p=0.05 result within 15 trials. For whatever reason, people hear jargon like "statistically significant" and forget the truism about a stopped clock.
A whole lot of context decides whether such a thing is a work for hire or not. I'm not a lawyer, much less one who is an expert in that area of law, so I'm not about to draw a bright line where there isn't one.
Copyright protects a particular form of expression. It doesn't protect the underlying idea. Even in broad copyright regimes, where you can copyright the particular contents of a phone book[1], copyright doesn't stop others from creating phone books that list names and numbers using the same method of ordering.
So you can use binary trees, lookaside caches, Bloom filters, or whatever other efficient algorithm you want -- copyright law won't stop you from using those algorithms. You just can't take CODE from one place to another. (If you think there's only one way to implement these algorithms, you're a worse programmer than you claim to be.)
[1]- That is one example of a database of facts. Under other copyright systems, putting objective facts in one set is not protected by copyright.
As a matter of US law, you are wrong. Copyright in a work for hire resides with the employer (or whomever the work was made for). See Circular 9 of the US Copyright Office. If an entire program is being developed as a contract piece, it *might* not qualify as a work for hire, but contracted software components and anything a normal employee writes within the scope of his employment are works for hire, and the people writing the checks own those works.
I don't know about the corresponding laws in other countries, but if you work in the US, you are woefully misinformed.
Absolutely. With this breakthrough technology, a cutting-edge new media purveyor can ensure that their reportage, opinions and commentary are easily accessible to the general public with a minimal delay. In today's fast-paced Internet, a few minutes' delay can make the difference between being on the breaking edge of news and being an Johnny-come-lately.
(To be more succinct, PuSH lets bloggers make sure they have the first post.)
The FSF also requires contributor agreements, and I would argue that the practical reason for this is the freedom to choose otherwise incompatible licenses in the future (such as migrating from GPLv2 -- not GPLv2-or-at-your-option-any-later-version -- to GPLv3). One common reason that the FSF says they want contributor agreements is to make it easier for them to pursue enforcement actions, but that should be available if they hold any copy rights in the work. They don't need to own all copy rights, but they require that as a condition of distributing the code anyway.
Setting aside all the arguments over whether it's a good idea to require contributor agreements, given that the FSF requires them, it's really hard for me to see how it constitutes any kind of "over-reach".
I, for one, welcome our new pony-mandating FTC overlords and our rainbow-mandating EPA overlords. Every American should have the government-granted right to upload pictures of their pony galloping under a rainbow at 100 Mbps speeds!
To be precise, multi-bit errors are *usually* detected. Any ECC scheme will accept faults that happen to convert stored data from one valid pattern (called a codeword in the literature) and another. They just trade off the likelihood of correctable, detectable-but-not-correctable and undetected faults (according to some model of what causes faults) versus the space and time overhead. The fault origin models are pretty good at matching what most servers see, and the standard ECC schemes are enormously valuable for long-running servers.
Most of the banned cold medicines don't contain steroids or performance enhancers. When your body metabolizes them, though, the resulting chemicals are the same as the metabolites of banned substances. Or sometimes they're just chemically similar enough to trigger the same tests as the metabolites of banned substances. A lot of the banned substances are not banned because they contain performance-enhancing substances, but because banning them is believed to reduce the rate of type I and type II errors.
Also, many of these tests do not have binary results. There's a continuum in blood concentrations for the substances being tested, and sometimes the test results are based on ratios between two chemicals. The tests are also not perfectly precise; they have measurement error. This all means that the line between positive and negative is somewhat arbitrarily drawn along a probability distribution, which is one reason they keep multiple samples.
By the definition you linked to, that's not enough to make a lawsuit a SLAPP. Illegally copying music is not "public participation". Neither is defending yourself in a lawsuit. This suit is certainly meant as an object lesson, and you and I (or everyone) may feel that the labels' zeal has exceeded the bounds of ethical practice of law, but neither of those make it a SLAPP.
Not all abusive or punitive lawsuits are SLAPPs. Read the Wikipedia article you linked -- the core of a SLAPP is using the legal system to stop or chill public criticism. What part of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's alleged tort qualifies as public participation or criticism?
The Constitution most certainly counts in civil cases. The Fifth Amendment doesn't -- it only addresses abuses in criminal cases. (Remember, most of the Bill of Rights were instituted to protect against over-reach by a central government, not protect against fellow citizens.) There are common-law protections against repeated trials in civil court, with penalties that can attach in cases of abuse.
I think the cause of action that you're looking for is "malicious prosecution" (as in prosecuting a lawsuit, not a crime). Civil law does have several doctrines of estoppel, at least one of which should apply if RIAA wants to re-argue the case. Hopefully the judge asks them to clarify the claims being made here so that the defendant doesn't have to waste her own counsel's time on the issue.
Trademark law is intended to protect consumers against confusion about, or misrepresentation of, the origin or endorsement of a product or service. Except for fanciful marks, trademark law tends to separate fields of endeavor, so that (for example) an arbitrary or suggestive trademark for film media does not clash with the same word used as an arbitrary or suggestive trademark for tax preparation services.
PKD's estate has a long row to hoe in arguing that consumers might confuse Dick's name for a kind of humanoid robot with Google's name for a kind of mobile phone. This is especially true because those who are familiar with the former are more likely to be well-informed about the provenance of, and who has (or hasn't) endorsed, the latter.
Also, I overlooked your last paragraph. According to Timothy Geithner and the OMB, the US Federal government had Fiscal Year 2009 receipts of $2.105 trillion and outlays of $3.522 trillion. That's a long way from tens of trillions of dollars -- the entire annual US Gross Domestic Product is only about $14 trillion.
Ponzi schemes are all "pay as you go" programs. They collapse because they eventually run out of new people and new input.
Also, the AC's numbers are based on long-term (I would guess 50- or 75-year) horizons, not a single year -- budget summaries look at single years. Social Security is fine this year because more money is coming in than going out. Within a decade, it will be the other way, and that's when things get hard: the government has been tapping into the Social Security trust fund for decades, and now it will have to pay that fund back.
An operating system may be too large and complicated for any one person to understand. A code of laws might also be that complicated.
A single bill, however, is most closely analogous to a patch -- or at most a patch series -- and no open source OS would accept a patch that no one claims to understand. Are you willing to run code on your computer by maintainers who accept that kind of patch? If not, why are you willing to live your entire life according to laws that are equally poorly understood and maintained?
Even beyond that, computer programs tend to be inherently less ambiguous and more deterministic than laws. These traits allow useful decomposition of programs into a hierarchy that allows a person to focus on single parts of the whole. Because laws lack those traits (and especially in the US where courts look at history and precedent), it is much harder to decompose laws into elements that one can analyze separately. This is compounded by legislatures being loath to revise even obviously outdated or buggy laws, which makes it hard to correct bugs in the law. (The Internet has many examples of dumb or silly laws; an obviously buggy one is the US federal law prohibiting compensation for bone marrow donations by classifying bone marrow as an organ.) On the whole, it is much more important for legislators to understand the whole of the law than it is for software developers to understand the whole of a program.
Voters are well-known to be rationally ignorant of their choices at the ballot box. Your argument is essentially that legislators should be rationally ignorant regarding the laws they vote on. Is that really what you want to encourage in law-makers?
Yay for living in Europe, where the spirit of the law still counts for something.
So, uh, what's the term of copyright in Europe? Last I heard, it was author's life plus 70 years, which is the same as the US. Europe decided to adopt that term five years before the US did. (I do know the US has a different--usually longer--term for works made for hire, but I haven't seen any indication that European copyright law recognizes that category.)
A lot of these netbooks don't have graphics cards at all -- they have frame buffers and graphics accelerators that are part of the same system-on-chip that contains the CPU. (That level of integration is one of the key reasons the hardware can be so cheap.) Your point stands -- if the only way to get decent graphics acceleration is through an NDA or closed-source libraries, its extensibility and maintainability are significantly impaired.
On the bright side, both TI's OMAP series of chips and Intel's Poulsbo design use the PowerVR SGX core, so if anyone cracks that nut it should yield benefits for a lot of end users.
More seriously, if you read the fine summary, you'd have the answer to your question. Your lame attempt at irrelevant pedantry betrays a more fundamental refusal to think or investigate what you're talking about. Do you complain that a "hot dog" is simply a canine with elevated temperature, and should not be used to name a kind of sausage? For this kind of discourse, "analog" is shorthand for computer-free and "digital" is shorthand for computer-based.
The people who care about audio latency generally aren't running on batteries (when did the whole world turn into unplugged laptops?). They didn't have to care about backwards compatibility because they used the only API that had ever existed on Linux (OSS). Most people don't need more than one app playing sound at a time; 80% of the time, I have zero apps playing sound, and 99% of the rest I only have one app that wants to play sound at a time.
Judging from your other comments, audio servers are a costly solution in search of a problem -- which was the direction I was originally going.
The point of my first sentence is that it's stupid to point at the PS3 or Airport Express and say "that's like PA's network support!" because they work quite differently. They send almost arbitrary audio files over the network; PA sends audio bit streams.
The point about ACLs is precisely that it should be centrally managed. If PulseAudio is applying its own policies independent of the other ACLs that get adjusted when I start a session, it's wrong.
So you have a buzzword compliant core. Are there any copies from application buffers to device buffers, or vice versa? How does it select output block sizes, for the kind of low-latency things that advocate_one is talking about? How does PA handle output stream mixing between applications? (Maybe it doesn't -- MPlayer on my machine is unable to open the audio device if I have a browser open that ever looked at a YouTube video. If it worked, that's a feature I would use a lot more than dynamically switching an audio stream between devices. It worked fine under ALSA.)
Slashdot Mirror
The major lawsuit-related driver of medical costs is not frivolous suits. It is jackpot verdicts, where someone with no lasting harm or even short-term disability can be awarded tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive and other special damages. Because the number is big, jurors think that this sends the right message, and because a faceless insurance company will pay most or all of it, they're not afraid of the costs it will incur for the doctor. That's why tort reform usually tries to impose caps on damages, and that in turn is why courts usually throw the laws out (because the laws are seen as a legislative infringement on the judicial function).
You've got that backwards. Inability to "detect small but real and possibly important effects" is a problem inherent to trials with few data points, not of meta-analysis.
Problems with meta-analysis include studies that don't use the same definitions (labels) for the characteristics being studied; studies without enough overlap in the subgroups they examine; determining the acceptance criteria for hypotheses (especially if you are testing more than one hypothesis in the meta-analysis); confirmation bias (studies with negative results often don't get published); and probably some others that I, as a humble software engineer, don't know.
If you want an example of how haphazard grouping of results can hide effects that are pronounced when you look at the right subgroups, read up on Simpson's paradox.
Standard deviation and variance both characterize how widely distributed a sample is. When put on the spot (i.e. no reference materials allowed), could you explain the difference between the two without relying on the fact that one is the square root of the other? If not, is it really so unreasonable that a busy physician not want to recall and explain "standard deviation" to someone who may not have a good grip of the implicit context?
That error at least something that is debunked fairly often. It's harder to explain to most people (those without sufficient background in mathematics or statistics) that you're going to have results that falsely appear to be "statistically significant" if you repeat a random trial often enough. For example, you should expect to find a wrong p=0.05 result within 15 trials. For whatever reason, people hear jargon like "statistically significant" and forget the truism about a stopped clock.
A whole lot of context decides whether such a thing is a work for hire or not. I'm not a lawyer, much less one who is an expert in that area of law, so I'm not about to draw a bright line where there isn't one.
Copyright protects a particular form of expression. It doesn't protect the underlying idea. Even in broad copyright regimes, where you can copyright the particular contents of a phone book[1], copyright doesn't stop others from creating phone books that list names and numbers using the same method of ordering.
So you can use binary trees, lookaside caches, Bloom filters, or whatever other efficient algorithm you want -- copyright law won't stop you from using those algorithms. You just can't take CODE from one place to another. (If you think there's only one way to implement these algorithms, you're a worse programmer than you claim to be.)
[1]- That is one example of a database of facts. Under other copyright systems, putting objective facts in one set is not protected by copyright.
As a matter of US law, you are wrong. Copyright in a work for hire resides with the employer (or whomever the work was made for). See Circular 9 of the US Copyright Office. If an entire program is being developed as a contract piece, it *might* not qualify as a work for hire, but contracted software components and anything a normal employee writes within the scope of his employment are works for hire, and the people writing the checks own those works.
I don't know about the corresponding laws in other countries, but if you work in the US, you are woefully misinformed.
Absolutely. With this breakthrough technology, a cutting-edge new media purveyor can ensure that their reportage, opinions and commentary are easily accessible to the general public with a minimal delay. In today's fast-paced Internet, a few minutes' delay can make the difference between being on the breaking edge of news and being an Johnny-come-lately.
(To be more succinct, PuSH lets bloggers make sure they have the first post.)
The FSF also requires contributor agreements, and I would argue that the practical reason for this is the freedom to choose otherwise incompatible licenses in the future (such as migrating from GPLv2 -- not GPLv2-or-at-your-option-any-later-version -- to GPLv3). One common reason that the FSF says they want contributor agreements is to make it easier for them to pursue enforcement actions, but that should be available if they hold any copy rights in the work. They don't need to own all copy rights, but they require that as a condition of distributing the code anyway.
Setting aside all the arguments over whether it's a good idea to require contributor agreements, given that the FSF requires them, it's really hard for me to see how it constitutes any kind of "over-reach".
I, for one, welcome our new pony-mandating FTC overlords and our rainbow-mandating EPA overlords. Every American should have the government-granted right to upload pictures of their pony galloping under a rainbow at 100 Mbps speeds!
To be precise, multi-bit errors are *usually* detected. Any ECC scheme will accept faults that happen to convert stored data from one valid pattern (called a codeword in the literature) and another. They just trade off the likelihood of correctable, detectable-but-not-correctable and undetected faults (according to some model of what causes faults) versus the space and time overhead. The fault origin models are pretty good at matching what most servers see, and the standard ECC schemes are enormously valuable for long-running servers.
Most of the banned cold medicines don't contain steroids or performance enhancers. When your body metabolizes them, though, the resulting chemicals are the same as the metabolites of banned substances. Or sometimes they're just chemically similar enough to trigger the same tests as the metabolites of banned substances. A lot of the banned substances are not banned because they contain performance-enhancing substances, but because banning them is believed to reduce the rate of type I and type II errors.
Also, many of these tests do not have binary results. There's a continuum in blood concentrations for the substances being tested, and sometimes the test results are based on ratios between two chemicals. The tests are also not perfectly precise; they have measurement error. This all means that the line between positive and negative is somewhat arbitrarily drawn along a probability distribution, which is one reason they keep multiple samples.
By the definition you linked to, that's not enough to make a lawsuit a SLAPP. Illegally copying music is not "public participation". Neither is defending yourself in a lawsuit. This suit is certainly meant as an object lesson, and you and I (or everyone) may feel that the labels' zeal has exceeded the bounds of ethical practice of law, but neither of those make it a SLAPP.
Not all abusive or punitive lawsuits are SLAPPs. Read the Wikipedia article you linked -- the core of a SLAPP is using the legal system to stop or chill public criticism. What part of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's alleged tort qualifies as public participation or criticism?
The Constitution most certainly counts in civil cases. The Fifth Amendment doesn't -- it only addresses abuses in criminal cases. (Remember, most of the Bill of Rights were instituted to protect against over-reach by a central government, not protect against fellow citizens.) There are common-law protections against repeated trials in civil court, with penalties that can attach in cases of abuse.
I think the cause of action that you're looking for is "malicious prosecution" (as in prosecuting a lawsuit, not a crime). Civil law does have several doctrines of estoppel, at least one of which should apply if RIAA wants to re-argue the case. Hopefully the judge asks them to clarify the claims being made here so that the defendant doesn't have to waste her own counsel's time on the issue.
Trademark law is intended to protect consumers against confusion about, or misrepresentation of, the origin or endorsement of a product or service. Except for fanciful marks, trademark law tends to separate fields of endeavor, so that (for example) an arbitrary or suggestive trademark for film media does not clash with the same word used as an arbitrary or suggestive trademark for tax preparation services.
PKD's estate has a long row to hoe in arguing that consumers might confuse Dick's name for a kind of humanoid robot with Google's name for a kind of mobile phone. This is especially true because those who are familiar with the former are more likely to be well-informed about the provenance of, and who has (or hasn't) endorsed, the latter.
Also, I overlooked your last paragraph. According to Timothy Geithner and the OMB, the US Federal government had Fiscal Year 2009 receipts of $2.105 trillion and outlays of $3.522 trillion. That's a long way from tens of trillions of dollars -- the entire annual US Gross Domestic Product is only about $14 trillion.
Ponzi schemes are all "pay as you go" programs. They collapse because they eventually run out of new people and new input.
Also, the AC's numbers are based on long-term (I would guess 50- or 75-year) horizons, not a single year -- budget summaries look at single years. Social Security is fine this year because more money is coming in than going out. Within a decade, it will be the other way, and that's when things get hard: the government has been tapping into the Social Security trust fund for decades, and now it will have to pay that fund back.
An operating system may be too large and complicated for any one person to understand. A code of laws might also be that complicated.
A single bill, however, is most closely analogous to a patch -- or at most a patch series -- and no open source OS would accept a patch that no one claims to understand. Are you willing to run code on your computer by maintainers who accept that kind of patch? If not, why are you willing to live your entire life according to laws that are equally poorly understood and maintained?
Even beyond that, computer programs tend to be inherently less ambiguous and more deterministic than laws. These traits allow useful decomposition of programs into a hierarchy that allows a person to focus on single parts of the whole. Because laws lack those traits (and especially in the US where courts look at history and precedent), it is much harder to decompose laws into elements that one can analyze separately. This is compounded by legislatures being loath to revise even obviously outdated or buggy laws, which makes it hard to correct bugs in the law. (The Internet has many examples of dumb or silly laws; an obviously buggy one is the US federal law prohibiting compensation for bone marrow donations by classifying bone marrow as an organ.) On the whole, it is much more important for legislators to understand the whole of the law than it is for software developers to understand the whole of a program.
Voters are well-known to be rationally ignorant of their choices at the ballot box. Your argument is essentially that legislators should be rationally ignorant regarding the laws they vote on. Is that really what you want to encourage in law-makers?
Yay for living in Europe, where the spirit of the law still counts for something.
So, uh, what's the term of copyright in Europe? Last I heard, it was author's life plus 70 years, which is the same as the US. Europe decided to adopt that term five years before the US did. (I do know the US has a different--usually longer--term for works made for hire, but I haven't seen any indication that European copyright law recognizes that category.)
A lot of these netbooks don't have graphics cards at all -- they have frame buffers and graphics accelerators that are part of the same system-on-chip that contains the CPU. (That level of integration is one of the key reasons the hardware can be so cheap.) Your point stands -- if the only way to get decent graphics acceleration is through an NDA or closed-source libraries, its extensibility and maintainability are significantly impaired.
On the bright side, both TI's OMAP series of chips and Intel's Poulsbo design use the PowerVR SGX core, so if anyone cracks that nut it should yield benefits for a lot of end users.
Right, analogue is the opposite of digitalis!
More seriously, if you read the fine summary, you'd have the answer to your question. Your lame attempt at irrelevant pedantry betrays a more fundamental refusal to think or investigate what you're talking about. Do you complain that a "hot dog" is simply a canine with elevated temperature, and should not be used to name a kind of sausage? For this kind of discourse, "analog" is shorthand for computer-free and "digital" is shorthand for computer-based.
The people who care about audio latency generally aren't running on batteries (when did the whole world turn into unplugged laptops?). They didn't have to care about backwards compatibility because they used the only API that had ever existed on Linux (OSS). Most people don't need more than one app playing sound at a time; 80% of the time, I have zero apps playing sound, and 99% of the rest I only have one app that wants to play sound at a time.
Judging from your other comments, audio servers are a costly solution in search of a problem -- which was the direction I was originally going.
The point of my first sentence is that it's stupid to point at the PS3 or Airport Express and say "that's like PA's network support!" because they work quite differently. They send almost arbitrary audio files over the network; PA sends audio bit streams.
The point about ACLs is precisely that it should be centrally managed. If PulseAudio is applying its own policies independent of the other ACLs that get adjusted when I start a session, it's wrong.
So you have a buzzword compliant core. Are there any copies from application buffers to device buffers, or vice versa? How does it select output block sizes, for the kind of low-latency things that advocate_one is talking about? How does PA handle output stream mixing between applications? (Maybe it doesn't -- MPlayer on my machine is unable to open the audio device if I have a browser open that ever looked at a YouTube video. If it worked, that's a feature I would use a lot more than dynamically switching an audio stream between devices. It worked fine under ALSA.)