That's incorrect. You can do manual recording without the service, at least on the 3 year old 2020 unit I've got. And in my typical bad timing, I just ordered a new one which is currently in transit...
But this doesn't help in the case of a nuisance suit where a small guy, representing himself with no legal fees, sues another small guy who has to hire a lawyer either because he's required (small business) or just doesn't understand the law well enough to represent himself. That's the position I'm in right now.
But what about my case where the plaintiff is pro se (representing himself)? His cost is negligible in a nuisance case where I'm paying a lot for an attorney. Under your proposal, he wouldn't have to reimburse me for anything if he lost....
I'm probably in the minority here, but not only do I have over 20G of audio (about 450 discs), it's all paid for. I have to pick and choose what part of my music collection gets loaded onto my iPod.
And anytime I hear someone say that a particular size of storage is more than anyone could ever need, I laugh. People say that sort of thing all the time, and a year later it's really ridiculous. Our use for space grows as fast as the technology expands.
We certainly need some changes to the U.S. legal system, but I don't know what it should be.
I'm a defendant in another lawsuit which has been mentioned on/. recently (I'll avoid mentioning the case to not attract the attention of the agressive plaintiff). I've learned a lot in the 18 months that this case has dragged on. What they taught me in high school government class has very little to do with the realities of the legal system. You can sue anyone for anything, whether there is merit to the case or not. Even if the suit is completely bogus, it is likely to cost so much to defend that many people settle anyway. When the guy suing me filed a second similar suit, I was tempted to defend myself (the legal term is "pro se"), cribing from materials my lawyers produced in the first suit. But since it's actually my one-peson web programming business (which is incorporated) being sued, I'm required to be represented by a lawyer.
My reaction to learning how all this works was to suggest that our system should be more like the British system, where the loser pays the legal fees. That would stop these nuisance suits. But it also effectively stops private indivuals from suing large corporations. It's not clear that this would be any better.
I guess I should read slashdot more often. Of course I immediately thought of Moira; I was the project leader on it from 1987-1992.
Moira is the configuration management system used by MIT Project Athena. It manages useraccounts, groups, mailing lists, filesystems, and other configuration data for a distributed system of 1000 systems and 20000 users. It features a relational database (originally Ingres, later ported to Oracle), and several network front ends. Originally, all of the front ends were character based, but we eventually made a couple of X-based graphical front ends too.
It was first published outside MIT in a paper in the Winter 1988 Usenix Association conference proceedings. The first X-based client, xregister, went into use in 1991 if I remember correctly.
You can check out the current version of Moira at http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/astaff/proje ct/moiradev/
Slashdot Mirror
That's incorrect. You can do manual recording without the service, at least on the 3 year old 2020 unit I've got. And in my typical bad timing, I just ordered a new one which is currently in transit...
-Mark
But this doesn't help in the case of a nuisance suit where a small guy, representing himself with no legal fees, sues another small guy who has to hire a lawyer either because he's required (small business) or just doesn't understand the law well enough to represent himself. That's the position I'm in right now.
But what about my case where the plaintiff is pro se (representing himself)? His cost is negligible in a nuisance case where I'm paying a lot for an attorney. Under your proposal, he wouldn't have to reimburse me for anything if he lost....
I'm probably in the minority here, but not only do I have over 20G of audio (about 450 discs), it's all paid for. I have to pick and choose what part of my music collection gets loaded onto my iPod.
And anytime I hear someone say that a particular size of storage is more than anyone could ever need, I laugh. People say that sort of thing all the time, and a year later it's really ridiculous. Our use for space grows as fast as the technology expands.
We certainly need some changes to the U.S. legal system, but I don't know what it should be.
/. recently (I'll avoid mentioning the case to not attract the attention of the agressive plaintiff). I've learned a lot in the 18 months that this case has dragged on. What they taught me in high school government class has very little to do with the realities of the legal system. You can sue anyone for anything, whether there is merit to the case or not. Even if the suit is completely bogus, it is likely to cost so much to defend that many people settle anyway. When the guy suing me filed a second similar suit, I was tempted to defend myself (the legal term is "pro se"), cribing from materials my lawyers produced in the first suit. But since it's actually my one-peson web programming business (which is incorporated) being sued, I'm required to be represented by a lawyer.
I'm a defendant in another lawsuit which has been mentioned on
My reaction to learning how all this works was to suggest that our system should be more like the British system, where the loser pays the legal fees. That would stop these nuisance suits. But it also effectively stops private indivuals from suing large corporations. It's not clear that this would be any better.
I guess I should read slashdot more often. Of course I immediately thought of Moira; I was the project leader on it from 1987-1992.
e ct/moiradev/
Moira is the configuration management system used by MIT Project Athena. It manages useraccounts, groups, mailing lists, filesystems, and other configuration data for a distributed system of 1000 systems and 20000 users. It features a relational database (originally Ingres, later ported to Oracle), and several network front ends. Originally, all of the front ends were character based, but we eventually made a couple of X-based graphical front ends too.
It was first published outside MIT in a paper in the Winter 1988 Usenix Association conference proceedings. The first X-based client, xregister, went into use in 1991 if I remember correctly.
You can check out the current version of Moira at http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/astaff/proj