There is a common myth that the high cost of health care is due to uncompensated obligatory emergency room care. Like many myths, it provides comfort to the general public, who are always looking for easy explanations for the complex problems of the world. But like all myths, it has the downside of being false.
Turning back to the first link: what was the percentage of uncompensated care in 1985, before the Act? 5.8% So as a result of the treatment mandate, the percentage of hospital's uncompensated care went up all of 0.1%. (From then to today; there was a spike up to 6.4% the year after the Act was passed).
Undoubtedly, uncompensated care is a problem. It's just a rather small problem. Far bigger is the lack of market forces that removes any incentives to inefficiency.
As a side matter; I'm very sorry to hear that about your wife -- there is definitely a significant need for improvement in the system for helping people with pre-existing conditions.
True, but that doesn't mean that (certain) food isn't more expensive than it otherwise would be, but for so much corn going to ethanol production. For example, as to corn itself, while the commodity price has dropped dramatically over the last year, it's still twice as high as it was in the early 2000's.
Moreover, the cost of corn is the primary cattle feed in the U.S. As a result, the price of beef largely tracks that of corn, and has likewise more than doubled since 2000.
The difference was that Zimmerman's statements were recorded. Federal Rule of Evidence 106 provides that: "If a party introduces all or part of a writing or recorded statement, an adverse party may require the introduction, at that time, of any other part — or any other writing or recorded statement — that in fairness ought to be considered at the same time." (I don't know the Florida rule, but most states' rules of evidence are similar to the FRE).
Generally, any statements made outside of court are inadmissible as hearsay when introduced for the purpose of proving the truth of the statement, unless a hearsay exception applies. Fed. R. Evid. 801 & 802. The largest exception is "statements of a party opponent," 801(d)(1)(2), by which a party can introduce any statements of the opposing side. Thus, Zimmerman's out-of-court statements, while hearsay, were nonetheless admissible pursuant to this exception. And because they were recorded, Fed. R. Evid. 106 allowed Zimmerman to demand the rest be introduced (presumably, I haven't actually seen what the basis for this was, or even if it was argued).
But on the other hand, whatever Zimmerman said unrecorded to officers at the scene would not be admissible if offered by himself, because no hearsay exception would apply.
Except, of course, that homosexuality involves loving relationships between people of the same gender, and cannibalism involves murder, so they're not really comparable at all.
We're not all murderers, you cannibophobe. All the people that I eat are already dead!
I respect your point about not letting the big-ego psychopaths running the show. I have this gut revenge reaction against the big-ego jerk (I won't quite call him a psychopath) that fired me on the basis of a B.S. reason. I think I might have fantasized about having a law where I could sue him for being the gigantic jerk that he was. But it was enough satisfaction to see him run that business straight into the ground with his ego-driven approach -- they went bankrupt about a year and a half after I got the boot. And I found another job -- in fact, not only did they not hold the firing against me (which I was certainly concerned about at the time, especially when they asked why I left the previous job), but the interviewer laughed and thought it was a great story.
That's how it should work: easy to hire, easy to fire, and let the job market sort it all out. Good managers know that treating people like crap isn't good for business.
The worst would be a situation like in certain parts of Europe, where it is so difficult to fire people that companies are equally reluctant to hire, and it becomes very difficult to expand a business without fear that contraction will be impossible. Yes, in some European countries it actually works (the beautiful land in which I am currently vacationing, zum Beispiel). But that has a lot to do with cultural factors that cannot simply be dictated by act of law. There is a big difference in Europe between the German/Scandinavian countries on the one hand, and all the others. And I fear that America would be more like the latter. Just think of how inefficient our legal system can be -- the thought of potentially having to fight out a yearslong legal battle every time you let someone go would be a disaster for business, even if the business was vindicated every single time.
If it works in your country, great! I hope you're in one of the more successful ones, rather than one of those with 20% unemployment. And even if not, I respect the sovereign right of your country to choose its own labor laws, regardless of what I might choose for my own. But in the same vein, I think you could give America a little more credit -- at-will employment (the legal term for this) is not exactly "anarchy." If the CEO had beat the man to death with a baseball bat, Untouchables-style, you might have a better case.
Finally, don't get me wrong (as I feel obligated to underline, lest I be discounted as some heartless libertarian -- or worse, Republican!): there are situations in which the power balance is so uneven, or the conduct so egregious, that regulation is justified. But firing a Creative Director of a large corporation for taking pictures is simply not one of them, nor should it be.
But why *should* we prevent "stunts like this"? I realize that it would hurt to be the guy that got fired, but so what? I've been fired before, and it sucked, but I got over it. What interest does the rest of the society have in making sure that AOL is a nice place to work? I would rather have a society where starting (and by extension, failing) a business is easier, such that there are more options for someone to jump from one company to the next. The fact is that most companies aren't like this; one can find better places to work, and a fluid business environment makes such options more likely to be available.
I suppose that it could matter in a society where someone has a significant amount (of time, money, pension shares, etc.) invested in a company, such that no other job could actually replace the job that was lost. But here? Let's face it, the guy who was fired probably will be better off, in the long term, having been kicked off the sinking ship that is AOL.
(And yes, yes; obviously there are some business practices that are so egregious, or some labor markets that are so unbalanced, that regulation is reasonable. I'm not arguing for *no* regulation -- just that we shouldn't regulate here).
Don't be silly. Your house, like all tangible property, is a scarce resource: if someone else is allowed to use it, its utility to you decreases. No such situation exists with intellectual property. To the contrary, intellectual property is a restriction on the use of own's own tangible property (or one's own body, in the case of, e.g., singing "Happy Birthday") but one that we as a society tolerate for a limited time as an incentive to produce.
Moreover, the indefinite ("fee simple") ownership of property has, at its core, nothing to do with issues of fairness or seeming "OK" -- it is a very practical way of ensuring that valuable property is maintained indefinitely. When you have a time-limited ownership of property (such as a 99-year lease), the market value of the property is consistently decreasing over time. This means that you have, over time, less incentive to maintain it. When you have indefinite ownership, its value does not decrease simply by the passage of time; thus you have incentive to maintain it so that you can sell it for higher value later in life.
I'm with you on a lot of those -- Back to the Future and the first Michael Keaton Batman are still among my favorites. But Star Trek? Seriously, you can't really believe that Star Trek IV, where they go back in time to save the whales, was such a stellar movie that puts today's to shame. The Star Trek movies after Wrath of Khan were just as bad as much of the drek that gets passed off today.
That would be the last place to start, as it would cost a fortune to replace all of the highway signs. Not only that, but also all of the mile markers, for which most states have every 1/10 of a mile. Moreover, contrary to what some people have implied, the numbers are generally not painted on, they're fabricated from other materials and overlaid. And for what? So we can convert the length of our commute into a multiple of our height, or something else of the sort? Yes, it's absolutely absurd that there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and I-don't-even-know-how-many yards in a mile (and yes, I've heard of Google/Wikipedia; but I just don't care). The truth is, I never need to convert inches into miles. You measure human-scale things in feet and inches, travelling distances in miles.
On the other hand, you know where we should start: volumetric measurements. I have frequently had a recipe that takes some number of teaspoons of a liquid, while having measuring cups measured in (naturally) cups, and nutritional information in ounces. Oh, and keep in mind that most tea spoons are significantly larger than a teaspoon. And then there's tablespoons, pints, quarts, gallons, barrels, and who knows what else. This is a lot harder to keep straight, and unlike miles to inches, sometimes you actually need to convert between these.
Add into the mix the problem that pints differ from place to place (either 16 or 20 oz), and "ounce" is both a volumetric measure and a weight measure. Obviously, if you have something that's clearly a solid or a liquid, it's clear which is which. But what about, say, frozen yogurt. When the self-serve froyo place sells by the ounce, and posts calories by the ounce, it would only be reasonable to think that these are the same ounces. It would also be wrong.
Moreover, in the case of volumetric measures, not only do you have a real problem, but an easier solution: most of the containers that hold liquids are disposable anyways, and constantly manufactured (i.e. food). All that would need to be done is to make containers that are metric-sized, and printed with metric labels, rather than Imperial. In fact, we're closer to that already. By law, all wine and distilled alcohol must be sold in one of several metric sizes (for distilled, it is 375 mL, 750 mL, 1L, 1.75 L, if I recall correctly). Soda is frequently sold in 2 L bottles.
Do that, let people see that metric actually saves time and hassle, and then go about changing other measurements. Weight would probably be the easiest to transition next, followed by lengths for things other than highway signs. (No one will care that they can't easily convert meters into miles, just as they don't care that they can't convert feet into miles). But please don't try to start with highway signs. Or bother with highway signs at all, for that matter. They are the death of metricfication in the US, and insistence on them is only counterproductive to the rest of your goals.
No. See Federal Rule of Evidence 408(a)(1) ("Evidence of the following is not admissible — on behalf of any party — either to prove or disprove the validity or amount of a disputed claim or to impeach by a prior inconsistent statement or a contradiction: furnishing, promising, or offering . . . a valuable consideration [i.e. money] in compromising or attempting to compromise the claim").
Good grief. Christianity does not believe that "magic" defines the world. Christianity has believed since ancient times that the world operates according to strict laws that are immutable, and it names the underlying, latent principle that runs throughout those laws "God." By understanding the workings of those laws, and understanding the world, one understands God. For this reason, what became known as "science" today was once known as "natural theology."
Certainly, many religions did believe that the world was run by magic. And when they converted to Christianity (though admittedly, and to our shame, not always in the most Christian manner), they took a step from understanding of the world as run by "magical" ghosts and demons, towards an understanding of one run in an ordered, logical manner.
Don't be a Christian if you don't want to be. But don't call me mentally retarded simply because you have a different organizing principle to your life. Having a Comp Sci Ph.D. and a Yale J.D., I'll put my mental capacities against yours any day of the week.
It's all well and good to talk about internet access being a "right" or a "public service," but please realize that simply because some government passes a law saying so, doesn't mean that wide-spread free internet access will come to pass. Take the example of my library: they are closed at times that someone might actually want to go, like in the evening after normal people from work, most of Sunday, and all major -- and most minor -- holidays. Their computer terminals seem to be something from the era of the IBM AT; and there are only 4 of them. The employees are surly and even aggressive, and don't care to be even the slightest bit helpful. And the entire building is decrepit and smells.
So I have the "right" to free information at a library (actually, I pay for it in taxes, but whatever), but the manifestation of that right is such that I don't actually want it. Yet we are expected to believe that, although our government can't run a library, despite having had hundreds of years to figure out, they're going to do a great job with modern and rapidly changing technologies. Call me pessimistic, but I don't see it happening.
The solution is to promote competition in Internet access: end the (government-created and propped-up) cable, phone, and wireless monopolies, and once there is a healthy market, let the market take care of lowering prices.
Recall that the U.S.S.R. declared food to be a basic human right, to be provided by the government. And who could argue with that, right? Yet the result was bread lines and empty shelves. In the U.S., we don't declare food to be a government-provided right, and yet we have so much food that our poor people are obese.
To preempt the flamers: no, I'm not arguing that the government should never have a role in assisting the poor (sometimes it should), or that companies are always good, or that the market is always perfect (they aren't; it's not). But I am extremely cautious in endorsing this as a good idea, for the above-stated reasons that have nothing to do with my own (non-existant) profit margins or political donations. So when others oppose it, please don't automatically ascribe such motives to them, either.
No; the character would continue to be protected by trademark rights. The name "Superman", the S logo, etc. are all indicators that a particular work that bears them originate from the "actual" owner of the marks; i.e., they are trademarks. And trademark is indefinite, so long as they continue in use. But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Superman movie, because this would undermine the "real"/canonical Superman line. Fans could not be sure that the movie that they were going to see was the "official" Superman; the protection of trademark is therefore important to provide information to the consumer.
Now, that said, I agree that copyright's derivative work protection should not continue to prevent similar stories, so long as there is no risk of customer confusion. If another studio wants to make a movie about "Superduperman," from the planet Argon, who flies around in his caped underwear while saving the world, they should have every right to do so -- even while the copyright for "Superman" still runs.
Let's cut straight to the point: the denial itself means nothing. To anyone. Not even to the parties in a future case, certainly not to other courts, not to the same court, not to anyone. It means zero. Zip. Zilch. It is as if the Supreme Court hadn't spoken. In fact, that's EXACTLY what it is -- the Supreme Court refusing to speak. The denial is no more persuasive than it is binding. It is nothing. A favorable denial of cert and $2.49 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
If you are trying to say that the denial of cert means that the Seventh Circuit decision is now binding in the Seventh Circuit -- yes, you are certainly correct. But the denial does not add or subtract to the weight of that precedent. It means nothing.
They do claim to be bound by precedent -- right up until the moment where they decide to overturn it. Essentially, to say that something is a "Supreme Court precedent" means two things: In addition to the more common meaning that it is binding on the lower courts, it also means that it can be cited back to the Supreme Court in a future case, as persuasive authority that one's interpretation of law is the correct one. "Non-precedential" decisions such as this cannot be cited back to the court (at least, not without a lecture from the court, as in the Carver case I cited above). While, ultimately, the Court can go any way it likes, it strongly prefers (as do all common law courts) to side with previous cases, than to overturn them. In fact, the courts will often jump through hoops to avoid explicitly overturning precedent, even when that's effectively what they're doing. Favorite strategies are saying that the case was "limited to its facts," or that the bar and the lower courts simply misunderstood for a century or so.
The optimist would say that the courts attempt to preserve the stability of the law; the cynic would say that they can't admit they were wrong. Take your pick...
No. You're misusing the words "precedential effect," or at least applying them to the wrong thing. The Seventh Circuit decision of course has precedential effect, and is binding on the district courts within that circuit, as well as other three-judge panels of the Seventh Circuit -- though NOT of the Seventh Circuit sitting as a whole ("en banc"), an admittedly rare circumstance. But this would be the same effect as if the losing party in the appeal never applied for certiorari, and if the Supreme Court never touched the issue -- the denial of certiorari, in and of itself, means NOTHING in terms of binding law for future cases. It is completely irrelevant, and if you attempted to cite the denial in court, you would get in response the same cite to Justice Holmes from 1923, probably along with an admonition that you've have 90 years to have figured this out.
Of course, the Seventh Circuit was ruling on this particular law. It does not mean that any analogous laws in states other than Illinois are automatically invalid, nor does it mean that Illinois could never pass a narrower law that would pass constitutional scrutiny.
Moreover, if you mean to say that the denial now binds the en banc Seventh Circuit to the decision rendered in this case, you're absolutely wrong.
As to whether it reduces the chances that the Supreme Court will hear the issue in the future: the only thing that decides which cert petitions are granted, is how 4 justices feel on the days that cert petitions are reviewed. You might be able to come up with some conditional probability of future acceptance given past denials, but it's not likely to be very clear one way or the other.
No, no, no. Not at all. The Supreme Court has been overwhelmingly clear that a refusal to grant certiorari (that is, a refusal to hear an appeal) has no precedentiary value *whatsoever.* But you're not the first to make that mistake. See, e.g., United States v. Carver, 260 U.S. 482, 490 (1923) ("The denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, as the bar has been told many times."), quoted in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 296 (1989).
If the Court wishes to express that a lower court case is a "non-case," as you put it, they will make what is known as a summary disposition.
You don't sue cars, you sue people. That old woman crossing the street can sue the driver of the car, not you. It is him who has been negligent by running her over, not you. Otherwise it'd be sort of like lending your brother your gun and then being liable for any damage he did with it.
And you can also sue the driver of the car for negligence in damaging your car.
It is true that you sue the driver of the car; however, in some states (e.g. New York) the owner of the car is "vicariously liable" for the negligence of any driver of that car who was driving with the owner's permission. This means that, so long as they can show that the driver was negligent, they do not need to show anything about the owner.
This is the same manner in which, for example, if you're run over by a negligent, red-light-running Pizza Hut delivery guy, Pizza Hut is automatically liable, no matter how careful they were in screening or training the guy (and if they were negligent there, that is ANOTHER basis for their liability, known as "negligent entrustment").
Now, the driver is liable to the owner for any judgment that the owner had to pay out ("indemnification"). And yes, the driver is separately liable to you for his own negligence in damaging your property. But as you pointed out, good luck getting anything from him.
The one saving grace is that, in many states, a valid insurance agreement, to indemnify the owner, allows (or even requires) the insurance company to immediately step in to deal with defending the lawsuit. So at least the owner won't personally have to find a lawyer and go to court. But good luck trying to find affordable insurance premiums after that.
So research paid for by the public got stolen and used to spin-off a company that's now being sold to Microsoft.
So how much of the purchase price will NYU and the US public see? Or will these blatant theft go un- noticed?
Actually, when I was a grad student at NYU in 2002, when Jeff started there, he wasn't paid or funded at all. He wasn't a student, and didn't even have an office. He was just there for fun.
From what I recall, Jeff made a decent amount of money right out of college in the dot-com boom (I think it was with CUSeeMe, an early teleconference software). After cashing that out just in time, he didn't need to work, from what I gathered, so he just was looking for a place to hang out around other interesting people doing graphics research. So he got in touch with one of the professors, and they let him hang out at what was then the "Center for Advanced Technologies" (since long defunct). All of his work was self-funded. Like I said, he didn't even have an office; he worked at the public terminals in the middle of the lab floor after everyone else left for the day.
Maybe that changed at some point later (I left after a year), but I suspect he probably brought in far more funding (or at least positive publicity) than he ever used.
2) Firefox will open a pdf or other document just by clicking on it. Chrome insists on downloading it and littering my Downloads directory with things I don't want to keep, besides requiring an extra step to open.
I actually have the exact *opposite* problem on Mac; Chrome will open PDFs natively in a tab, while Firefox wants me to open Preview. This was the primary reason I switched. If the Firefox developers added native PDF support on Mac, I'd consider switching back.
AC is absolutely right. Of course someone would make that pill, because it would completely wipe out all their competitors' market share, assuming that the price of that pill was less than the present value (including inconvenience) of taking the other pills over the length of the patent term.
And I'm not forced to buy their new pills; their old (no-longer-patented) ones work just fine for me. But they don't work well enough for some people, whereas the new ones may. So I'm quite happy to have given them their monopoly-inflated price (about $100/month) for the 3 years I was on it until the patent expired, because they've turned that around into making new drugs that help other people. More importantly, I appreciate that they've given me my life back, and hope for the future. For that, $100/month was a bargain.
Now, I don't deny that there can be problems where companies, or individuals therein, take actions that are fraudulent, exploitative or otherwise unethical. So of course, there should be some level of government oversight. But profit is exactly what motivates these companies to make new drugs. If a disease only affects a small number of people (as opposed to, perhaps, a wide-spread pandemic), governments don't have much motivation to produce drugs.
Suppose that you were a politician proposing to spend billions of dollars towards developing a drug for, let's say, those with schizophrenia, which are less than half a percent of the population. The drug may never pan out. And your opponent says that we should just throw those psychos in institutions, if not in prison (because we all know that that's really what they "deserve," and that their illness is just an "excuse") and spend that money on decent people instead. Which do you think would be more popular, and thus more likely to be implemented by a government? (Hint: one of these is exactly what has been done by governments for most of human history, and the other has never been done, at least on any large scale).
the idea of profiting from others' pain is so WRONG, I can't even get my head around why we allow such evil practices
Profit from other people's pain? The pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs I take every day, Merck and Pfizer, are profiting from RELIEVING my once-substantial, and now nearly non-existant pain. I am thankful every day that we have companies committed to such "evil" practices.
Unfortunately, HousingMaps doesn't work. If you compare the listings on HM vs those on CL, you will see that HM has only a small, and unclearly-defined, subset of those. In otherwords, it has a bug, and doesn't pull out all the listings. Moreover, it has very limited options for searching, and divides up filters by bizarre factors (for example, I can look for apartments under $750, or between $500 and $1000, but not under $1000.
Unlike PadMapper, which was a site that actually tried to maintain a useful product, HousingMaps appears to have been only a one-off project by some coder looking for something to do (and to be clear, I give him credit for offering it to the world, but it's not the same as an actively developed project).
This is a horrible action by Craigslist. If they don't want their site to be useful, that's fine. But the postings are the property of their posters, not of Craigslist. Presumably, the posters would be happy to have anyone in the world coming to those listings. It should be *their* intellectual property rights that are at issue, not those of the intermediary.
...they had already ballooned the deficit by trillions of dollars.
No, that's not quite correct; they had not (yet) ballooned the deficit (I assume you mean debt) by "trillions" of dollars (defined as two trillion or more). He said that to Paul O'Neil in December 2002:
In the last year of the Clinton administration (FY 2000) the debt was 5.6 trillion. At the end of the last fiscal year before that statement, (FY 2003, ending October 1, 2002) the debt was 6.7 trillion, which is an increase of just over a single trillion. By the end of FY 2004, it was 7.3 trillion, which is closer to "trillions" increased from the beginning of the Bush administration, but not quite there (an increase of 1.7 trillion).
If you did mean deficit, then the statement is even less true. The largest deficit under the Bush administration was for FY 2008 (because of the bailouts) at about 1.1 trillion.
However, from FY 2008 through the present (that is, the increase under Obama), the debt has gone up ~5.2 trillion dollars. That counts as "trillions." It also counts as almost a trillion dollars more than the increase in debt for the entire Bush presidency.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a common myth that the high cost of health care is due to uncompensated obligatory emergency room care. Like many myths, it provides comfort to the general public, who are always looking for easy explanations for the complex problems of the world. But like all myths, it has the downside of being false.
In particular, the percentage of a hospital's expenses spent on uncompensated care is about 6% (in 2011, 5.9%)
http://www.aha.org/content/13/1-2013-uncompensated-care-fs.pdf
The mandate to provide emergency care to all those that show up in the ER was part of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act
Turning back to the first link: what was the percentage of uncompensated care in 1985, before the Act? 5.8% So as a result of the treatment mandate, the percentage of hospital's uncompensated care went up all of 0.1%. (From then to today; there was a spike up to 6.4% the year after the Act was passed).
Undoubtedly, uncompensated care is a problem. It's just a rather small problem. Far bigger is the lack of market forces that removes any incentives to inefficiency.
As a side matter; I'm very sorry to hear that about your wife -- there is definitely a significant need for improvement in the system for helping people with pre-existing conditions.
True, but that doesn't mean that (certain) food isn't more expensive than it otherwise would be, but for so much corn going to ethanol production. For example, as to corn itself, while the commodity price has dropped dramatically over the last year, it's still twice as high as it was in the early 2000's.
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=corn&months=240
Moreover, the cost of corn is the primary cattle feed in the U.S. As a result, the price of beef largely tracks that of corn, and has likewise more than doubled since 2000.
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=beef&months=240
Here you go. :-)
The difference was that Zimmerman's statements were recorded. Federal Rule of Evidence 106 provides that: "If a party introduces all or part of a writing or recorded statement, an adverse party may require the introduction, at that time, of any other part — or any other writing or recorded statement — that in fairness ought to be considered at the same time." (I don't know the Florida rule, but most states' rules of evidence are similar to the FRE).
Generally, any statements made outside of court are inadmissible as hearsay when introduced for the purpose of proving the truth of the statement, unless a hearsay exception applies. Fed. R. Evid. 801 & 802. The largest exception is "statements of a party opponent," 801(d)(1)(2), by which a party can introduce any statements of the opposing side. Thus, Zimmerman's out-of-court statements, while hearsay, were nonetheless admissible pursuant to this exception. And because they were recorded, Fed. R. Evid. 106 allowed Zimmerman to demand the rest be introduced (presumably, I haven't actually seen what the basis for this was, or even if it was argued).
But on the other hand, whatever Zimmerman said unrecorded to officers at the scene would not be admissible if offered by himself, because no hearsay exception would apply.
Except, of course, that homosexuality involves loving relationships between people of the same gender, and cannibalism involves murder, so they're not really comparable at all.
We're not all murderers, you cannibophobe. All the people that I eat are already dead!
I respect your point about not letting the big-ego psychopaths running the show. I have this gut revenge reaction against the big-ego jerk (I won't quite call him a psychopath) that fired me on the basis of a B.S. reason. I think I might have fantasized about having a law where I could sue him for being the gigantic jerk that he was. But it was enough satisfaction to see him run that business straight into the ground with his ego-driven approach -- they went bankrupt about a year and a half after I got the boot. And I found another job -- in fact, not only did they not hold the firing against me (which I was certainly concerned about at the time, especially when they asked why I left the previous job), but the interviewer laughed and thought it was a great story.
That's how it should work: easy to hire, easy to fire, and let the job market sort it all out. Good managers know that treating people like crap isn't good for business.
The worst would be a situation like in certain parts of Europe, where it is so difficult to fire people that companies are equally reluctant to hire, and it becomes very difficult to expand a business without fear that contraction will be impossible. Yes, in some European countries it actually works (the beautiful land in which I am currently vacationing, zum Beispiel). But that has a lot to do with cultural factors that cannot simply be dictated by act of law. There is a big difference in Europe between the German/Scandinavian countries on the one hand, and all the others. And I fear that America would be more like the latter. Just think of how inefficient our legal system can be -- the thought of potentially having to fight out a yearslong legal battle every time you let someone go would be a disaster for business, even if the business was vindicated every single time.
If it works in your country, great! I hope you're in one of the more successful ones, rather than one of those with 20% unemployment. And even if not, I respect the sovereign right of your country to choose its own labor laws, regardless of what I might choose for my own. But in the same vein, I think you could give America a little more credit -- at-will employment (the legal term for this) is not exactly "anarchy." If the CEO had beat the man to death with a baseball bat, Untouchables-style, you might have a better case.
Finally, don't get me wrong (as I feel obligated to underline, lest I be discounted as some heartless libertarian -- or worse, Republican!): there are situations in which the power balance is so uneven, or the conduct so egregious, that regulation is justified. But firing a Creative Director of a large corporation for taking pictures is simply not one of them, nor should it be.
But why *should* we prevent "stunts like this"? I realize that it would hurt to be the guy that got fired, but so what? I've been fired before, and it sucked, but I got over it. What interest does the rest of the society have in making sure that AOL is a nice place to work? I would rather have a society where starting (and by extension, failing) a business is easier, such that there are more options for someone to jump from one company to the next. The fact is that most companies aren't like this; one can find better places to work, and a fluid business environment makes such options more likely to be available.
I suppose that it could matter in a society where someone has a significant amount (of time, money, pension shares, etc.) invested in a company, such that no other job could actually replace the job that was lost. But here? Let's face it, the guy who was fired probably will be better off, in the long term, having been kicked off the sinking ship that is AOL.
(And yes, yes; obviously there are some business practices that are so egregious, or some labor markets that are so unbalanced, that regulation is reasonable. I'm not arguing for *no* regulation -- just that we shouldn't regulate here).
Don't be silly. Your house, like all tangible property, is a scarce resource: if someone else is allowed to use it, its utility to you decreases. No such situation exists with intellectual property. To the contrary, intellectual property is a restriction on the use of own's own tangible property (or one's own body, in the case of, e.g., singing "Happy Birthday") but one that we as a society tolerate for a limited time as an incentive to produce.
Moreover, the indefinite ("fee simple") ownership of property has, at its core, nothing to do with issues of fairness or seeming "OK" -- it is a very practical way of ensuring that valuable property is maintained indefinitely. When you have a time-limited ownership of property (such as a 99-year lease), the market value of the property is consistently decreasing over time. This means that you have, over time, less incentive to maintain it. When you have indefinite ownership, its value does not decrease simply by the passage of time; thus you have incentive to maintain it so that you can sell it for higher value later in life.
I'm with you on a lot of those -- Back to the Future and the first Michael Keaton Batman are still among my favorites. But Star Trek? Seriously, you can't really believe that Star Trek IV, where they go back in time to save the whales, was such a stellar movie that puts today's to shame. The Star Trek movies after Wrath of Khan were just as bad as much of the drek that gets passed off today.
That would be the last place to start, as it would cost a fortune to replace all of the highway signs. Not only that, but also all of the mile markers, for which most states have every 1/10 of a mile. Moreover, contrary to what some people have implied, the numbers are generally not painted on, they're fabricated from other materials and overlaid. And for what? So we can convert the length of our commute into a multiple of our height, or something else of the sort? Yes, it's absolutely absurd that there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and I-don't-even-know-how-many yards in a mile (and yes, I've heard of Google/Wikipedia; but I just don't care). The truth is, I never need to convert inches into miles. You measure human-scale things in feet and inches, travelling distances in miles.
On the other hand, you know where we should start: volumetric measurements. I have frequently had a recipe that takes some number of teaspoons of a liquid, while having measuring cups measured in (naturally) cups, and nutritional information in ounces. Oh, and keep in mind that most tea spoons are significantly larger than a teaspoon. And then there's tablespoons, pints, quarts, gallons, barrels, and who knows what else. This is a lot harder to keep straight, and unlike miles to inches, sometimes you actually need to convert between these.
Add into the mix the problem that pints differ from place to place (either 16 or 20 oz), and "ounce" is both a volumetric measure and a weight measure. Obviously, if you have something that's clearly a solid or a liquid, it's clear which is which. But what about, say, frozen yogurt. When the self-serve froyo place sells by the ounce, and posts calories by the ounce, it would only be reasonable to think that these are the same ounces. It would also be wrong.
Moreover, in the case of volumetric measures, not only do you have a real problem, but an easier solution: most of the containers that hold liquids are disposable anyways, and constantly manufactured (i.e. food). All that would need to be done is to make containers that are metric-sized, and printed with metric labels, rather than Imperial. In fact, we're closer to that already. By law, all wine and distilled alcohol must be sold in one of several metric sizes (for distilled, it is 375 mL, 750 mL, 1L, 1.75 L, if I recall correctly). Soda is frequently sold in 2 L bottles.
Do that, let people see that metric actually saves time and hassle, and then go about changing other measurements. Weight would probably be the easiest to transition next, followed by lengths for things other than highway signs. (No one will care that they can't easily convert meters into miles, just as they don't care that they can't convert feet into miles). But please don't try to start with highway signs. Or bother with highway signs at all, for that matter. They are the death of metricfication in the US, and insistence on them is only counterproductive to the rest of your goals.
No. See Federal Rule of Evidence 408(a)(1) ("Evidence of the following is not admissible — on behalf of any party — either to prove or disprove the validity or amount of a disputed claim or to impeach by a prior inconsistent statement or a contradiction: furnishing, promising, or offering . . . a valuable consideration [i.e. money] in compromising or attempting to compromise the claim").
Good grief. Christianity does not believe that "magic" defines the world. Christianity has believed since ancient times that the world operates according to strict laws that are immutable, and it names the underlying, latent principle that runs throughout those laws "God." By understanding the workings of those laws, and understanding the world, one understands God. For this reason, what became known as "science" today was once known as "natural theology."
Certainly, many religions did believe that the world was run by magic. And when they converted to Christianity (though admittedly, and to our shame, not always in the most Christian manner), they took a step from understanding of the world as run by "magical" ghosts and demons, towards an understanding of one run in an ordered, logical manner.
Don't be a Christian if you don't want to be. But don't call me mentally retarded simply because you have a different organizing principle to your life. Having a Comp Sci Ph.D. and a Yale J.D., I'll put my mental capacities against yours any day of the week.
It's all well and good to talk about internet access being a "right" or a "public service," but please realize that simply because some government passes a law saying so, doesn't mean that wide-spread free internet access will come to pass. Take the example of my library: they are closed at times that someone might actually want to go, like in the evening after normal people from work, most of Sunday, and all major -- and most minor -- holidays. Their computer terminals seem to be something from the era of the IBM AT; and there are only 4 of them. The employees are surly and even aggressive, and don't care to be even the slightest bit helpful. And the entire building is decrepit and smells.
So I have the "right" to free information at a library (actually, I pay for it in taxes, but whatever), but the manifestation of that right is such that I don't actually want it. Yet we are expected to believe that, although our government can't run a library, despite having had hundreds of years to figure out, they're going to do a great job with modern and rapidly changing technologies. Call me pessimistic, but I don't see it happening.
The solution is to promote competition in Internet access: end the (government-created and propped-up) cable, phone, and wireless monopolies, and once there is a healthy market, let the market take care of lowering prices.
Recall that the U.S.S.R. declared food to be a basic human right, to be provided by the government. And who could argue with that, right? Yet the result was bread lines and empty shelves. In the U.S., we don't declare food to be a government-provided right, and yet we have so much food that our poor people are obese.
To preempt the flamers: no, I'm not arguing that the government should never have a role in assisting the poor (sometimes it should), or that companies are always good, or that the market is always perfect (they aren't; it's not). But I am extremely cautious in endorsing this as a good idea, for the above-stated reasons that have nothing to do with my own (non-existant) profit margins or political donations. So when others oppose it, please don't automatically ascribe such motives to them, either.
No; the character would continue to be protected by trademark rights. The name "Superman", the S logo, etc. are all indicators that a particular work that bears them originate from the "actual" owner of the marks; i.e., they are trademarks. And trademark is indefinite, so long as they continue in use. But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Superman movie, because this would undermine the "real"/canonical Superman line. Fans could not be sure that the movie that they were going to see was the "official" Superman; the protection of trademark is therefore important to provide information to the consumer.
Now, that said, I agree that copyright's derivative work protection should not continue to prevent similar stories, so long as there is no risk of customer confusion. If another studio wants to make a movie about "Superduperman," from the planet Argon, who flies around in his caped underwear while saving the world, they should have every right to do so -- even while the copyright for "Superman" still runs.
Let's cut straight to the point: the denial itself means nothing. To anyone. Not even to the parties in a future case, certainly not to other courts, not to the same court, not to anyone. It means zero. Zip. Zilch. It is as if the Supreme Court hadn't spoken. In fact, that's EXACTLY what it is -- the Supreme Court refusing to speak. The denial is no more persuasive than it is binding. It is nothing. A favorable denial of cert and $2.49 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
If you are trying to say that the denial of cert means that the Seventh Circuit decision is now binding in the Seventh Circuit -- yes, you are certainly correct. But the denial does not add or subtract to the weight of that precedent. It means nothing.
They do claim to be bound by precedent -- right up until the moment where they decide to overturn it. Essentially, to say that something is a "Supreme Court precedent" means two things: In addition to the more common meaning that it is binding on the lower courts, it also means that it can be cited back to the Supreme Court in a future case, as persuasive authority that one's interpretation of law is the correct one. "Non-precedential" decisions such as this cannot be cited back to the court (at least, not without a lecture from the court, as in the Carver case I cited above). While, ultimately, the Court can go any way it likes, it strongly prefers (as do all common law courts) to side with previous cases, than to overturn them. In fact, the courts will often jump through hoops to avoid explicitly overturning precedent, even when that's effectively what they're doing. Favorite strategies are saying that the case was "limited to its facts," or that the bar and the lower courts simply misunderstood for a century or so.
The optimist would say that the courts attempt to preserve the stability of the law; the cynic would say that they can't admit they were wrong. Take your pick...
No. You're misusing the words "precedential effect," or at least applying them to the wrong thing. The Seventh Circuit decision of course has precedential effect, and is binding on the district courts within that circuit, as well as other three-judge panels of the Seventh Circuit -- though NOT of the Seventh Circuit sitting as a whole ("en banc"), an admittedly rare circumstance. But this would be the same effect as if the losing party in the appeal never applied for certiorari, and if the Supreme Court never touched the issue -- the denial of certiorari, in and of itself, means NOTHING in terms of binding law for future cases. It is completely irrelevant, and if you attempted to cite the denial in court, you would get in response the same cite to Justice Holmes from 1923, probably along with an admonition that you've have 90 years to have figured this out.
Of course, the Seventh Circuit was ruling on this particular law. It does not mean that any analogous laws in states other than Illinois are automatically invalid, nor does it mean that Illinois could never pass a narrower law that would pass constitutional scrutiny.
Moreover, if you mean to say that the denial now binds the en banc Seventh Circuit to the decision rendered in this case, you're absolutely wrong.
As to whether it reduces the chances that the Supreme Court will hear the issue in the future: the only thing that decides which cert petitions are granted, is how 4 justices feel on the days that cert petitions are reviewed. You might be able to come up with some conditional probability of future acceptance given past denials, but it's not likely to be very clear one way or the other.
No, no, no. Not at all. The Supreme Court has been overwhelmingly clear that a refusal to grant certiorari (that is, a refusal to hear an appeal) has no precedentiary value *whatsoever.* But you're not the first to make that mistake. See, e.g., United States v. Carver, 260 U.S. 482, 490 (1923) ("The denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, as the bar has been told many times."), quoted in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 296 (1989).
If the Court wishes to express that a lower court case is a "non-case," as you put it, they will make what is known as a summary disposition.
You don't sue cars, you sue people. That old woman crossing the street can sue the driver of the car, not you. It is him who has been negligent by running her over, not you. Otherwise it'd be sort of like lending your brother your gun and then being liable for any damage he did with it.
And you can also sue the driver of the car for negligence in damaging your car.
It is true that you sue the driver of the car; however, in some states (e.g. New York) the owner of the car is "vicariously liable" for the negligence of any driver of that car who was driving with the owner's permission. This means that, so long as they can show that the driver was negligent, they do not need to show anything about the owner.
This is the same manner in which, for example, if you're run over by a negligent, red-light-running Pizza Hut delivery guy, Pizza Hut is automatically liable,
no matter how careful they were in screening or training the guy (and if they were negligent there, that is ANOTHER basis for their liability, known as "negligent entrustment").
Now, the driver is liable to the owner for any judgment that the owner had to pay out ("indemnification"). And yes, the driver is separately liable to you for his own negligence in damaging your property. But as you pointed out, good luck getting anything from him.
The one saving grace is that, in many states, a valid insurance agreement, to indemnify the owner, allows (or even requires) the insurance company to immediately step in to deal with defending the lawsuit. So at least the owner won't personally have to find a lawyer and go to court. But good luck trying to find affordable insurance premiums after that.
So research paid for by the public got stolen and used to spin-off a company that's now being sold to Microsoft.
So how much of the purchase price will NYU and the US public see? Or will these blatant theft go un- noticed?
Actually, when I was a grad student at NYU in 2002, when Jeff started there, he wasn't paid or funded at all. He wasn't a student, and didn't even have an office. He was just there for fun.
From what I recall, Jeff made a decent amount of money right out of college in the dot-com boom (I think it was with CUSeeMe, an early teleconference software). After cashing that out just in time, he didn't need to work, from what I gathered, so he just was looking for a place to hang out around other interesting people doing graphics research. So he got in touch with one of the professors, and they let him hang out at what was then the "Center for Advanced Technologies" (since long defunct). All of his work was self-funded. Like I said, he didn't even have an office; he worked at the public terminals in the middle of the lab floor after everyone else left for the day.
Maybe that changed at some point later (I left after a year), but I suspect he probably brought in far more funding (or at least positive publicity) than he ever used.
2) Firefox will open a pdf or other document just by clicking on it. Chrome insists on downloading it and littering my Downloads directory with things I don't want to keep, besides requiring an extra step to open.
I actually have the exact *opposite* problem on Mac; Chrome will open PDFs natively in a tab, while Firefox wants me to open Preview. This was the primary reason I switched. If the Firefox developers added native PDF support on Mac, I'd consider switching back.
AC is absolutely right. Of course someone would make that pill, because it would completely wipe out all their competitors' market share, assuming that the price of that pill was less than the present value (including inconvenience) of taking the other pills over the length of the patent term.
And I'm not forced to buy their new pills; their old (no-longer-patented) ones work just fine for me. But they don't work well enough for some people, whereas the new ones may. So I'm quite happy to have given them their monopoly-inflated price (about $100/month) for the 3 years I was on it until the patent expired, because they've turned that around into making new drugs that help other people. More importantly, I appreciate that they've given me my life back, and hope for the future. For that, $100/month was a bargain.
Now, I don't deny that there can be problems where companies, or individuals therein, take actions that are fraudulent, exploitative or otherwise unethical. So of course, there should be some level of government oversight. But profit is exactly what motivates these companies to make new drugs. If a disease only affects a small number of people (as opposed to, perhaps, a wide-spread pandemic), governments don't have much motivation to produce drugs.
Suppose that you were a politician proposing to spend billions of dollars towards developing a drug for, let's say, those with schizophrenia, which are less than half a percent of the population. The drug may never pan out. And your opponent says that we should just throw those psychos in institutions, if not in prison (because we all know that that's really what they "deserve," and that their illness is just an "excuse") and spend that money on decent people instead. Which do you think would be more popular, and thus more likely to be implemented by a government? (Hint: one of these is exactly what has been done by governments for most of human history, and the other has never been done, at least on any large scale).
the idea of profiting from others' pain is so WRONG, I can't even get my head around why we allow such evil practices
Profit from other people's pain? The pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs I take every day, Merck and Pfizer, are profiting from RELIEVING my once-substantial, and now nearly non-existant pain. I am thankful every day that we have companies committed to such "evil" practices.
Unfortunately, HousingMaps doesn't work. If you compare the listings on HM vs those on CL, you will see that HM has only a small, and unclearly-defined, subset of those. In otherwords, it has a bug, and doesn't pull out all the listings. Moreover, it has very limited options for searching, and divides up filters by bizarre factors (for example, I can look for apartments under $750, or between $500 and $1000, but not under $1000.
Unlike PadMapper, which was a site that actually tried to maintain a useful product, HousingMaps appears to have been only a one-off project by some coder looking for something to do (and to be clear, I give him credit for offering it to the world, but it's not the same as an actively developed project).
This is a horrible action by Craigslist. If they don't want their site to be useful, that's fine. But the postings are the property of their posters, not of Craigslist. Presumably, the posters would be happy to have anyone in the world coming to those listings. It should be *their* intellectual property rights that are at issue, not those of the intermediary.
...they had already ballooned the deficit by trillions of dollars.
No, that's not quite correct; they had not (yet) ballooned the deficit (I assume you mean debt) by "trillions" of dollars (defined as two trillion or more). He said that to Paul O'Neil in December 2002:
http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick_Cheney_Budget_+_Economy.htm
In the last year of the Clinton administration (FY 2000) the debt was 5.6 trillion. At the end of the last fiscal year before that statement, (FY 2003, ending October 1, 2002) the debt was 6.7 trillion, which is an increase of just over a single trillion. By the end of FY 2004, it was 7.3 trillion, which is closer to "trillions" increased from the beginning of the Bush administration, but not quite there (an increase of 1.7 trillion).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
If you did mean deficit, then the statement is even less true. The largest deficit under the Bush administration was for FY 2008 (because of the bailouts) at about 1.1 trillion.
However, from FY 2008 through the present (that is, the increase under Obama), the debt has gone up ~5.2 trillion dollars. That counts as "trillions." It also counts as almost a trillion dollars more than the increase in debt for the entire Bush presidency.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np