I thought that company's are regarded as persons under the laws of the US. As such, aren't they protected from self-incrimination? Are individual persons compelled to not destroy potential evidence of a crime they may have committed?
These rules apply to civil lawsuits (key word: "Plaintiff") not criminal ones. These are the kind of cases where someone is trying to recover some sort of loss due to their dealings with the defendant, and often the key evidence is in the defendant's possesion.
Regardless, for most civil suits, the defendants do indeed have to cough it up, even if the evidence hurts them, though thy might try to hide it among an avalance of other documents that "might also be of interest for the case".
It's not some case of rampant legislation and a bunch of "entrepreneurs" who want to make money off it, but rather a fairly backwards industry catching up a little and putting forth some long-needed standards. Only in the last few years have emails even been a regular part of discovery, and even then most courts handle them by printing them out and treating them as paper plus whatever metadata you can extract from the original mailbox*.
For the longest time in the legal world, just about everything was paper, and it more-or-less still is. The bottom line is that the courts have *finally* woken up to the concept that there are business documents out there that contain critical info for whatever case they're working, that have never seen paper, but should be part of the evidence. The cases mentioned in the article were ones where the court put the smack-down on companies that had all the appearance of hiding evidence behind lax retention policies.
Would you rather have a single national-level retention standard or up to 50 state-level ones?
* to be honest, there are a couple of advantages to doing this, such as there are already quite a few tools and practices built around paper evidence (either on paper or as an image of a page), and just converting files and emails to paper adds a time-and-cost barrier to manipulation.
My initial reaction to this story was the same as (great?) grandparent post: Why should the students attend lectures at all? In fact, I did not understand this mentality even before podcasts. There is this really old technology that deprecates lectures entirely, it is called the "book". Books are lectures you can read at any time for any reason.
Except that even a good book does not entirely deprecate a lecture. The teacher's goal is to get the knowledge to "sink in", and, unfortunately, this does not always happen with text. We all have a mode in which we comprehend and remember more completely than other modes. A good class/lecture will have visual, audio, and possibly tactile components to maximize the chance that every student will come away having learned the topic.
One option is to use chord-based keyboards, such as the Frogpad or others. That way, you can have fewer (and larger) keys but still be able to do most, if not all, of the same keys as a traditional keyboard.
Right on, Brother! That's exactly what I do, except that I've pretty much been able to escape the addiction of MMORPGs. That character is not a representation of me, but rather the thing I have to stare at for hours on end.
Assuming the most duped stories are the ones with the most comments, all that means is that there's a lot more people addicted to righteous indignation on these topics than on the more technical/deeper/niche/etc. topics.
The only thing advertising revenue explains is why they don't get killed.
Seriously, it's funny to watch all these people try to find a practical application for this invention that cannot already be done better and cheaper with pre-existing technology, in order to justify the research expense
That's not always the point in R&D. Now that we have this thing, it might make something completely unexpected possible (ask yourself, who would have thought of putting a camera in a cell phone when they came out in the early 1980's?) or better (child-proof CDs & DVDs? maybe...)
Research like this is the only way we get to have new toys in 20-30 years. Otherwise, it's just refinements on the same old stuff, and frankly, the current set of technologies are wasting too many resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Many companies subscribe to filtering services that already blacklist porn sites, simply for risk-reduction / lawsuit avoidance.
They were demonstrating the new one at the JPL open house last month. In addition, it will be much bigger (SUV-sized vs. ATV-sized).
These rules apply to civil lawsuits (key word: "Plaintiff") not criminal ones. These are the kind of cases where someone is trying to recover some sort of loss due to their dealings with the defendant, and often the key evidence is in the defendant's possesion.
Regardless, for most civil suits, the defendants do indeed have to cough it up, even if the evidence hurts them, though thy might try to hide it among an avalance of other documents that "might also be of interest for the case".
It's not some case of rampant legislation and a bunch of "entrepreneurs" who want to make money off it, but rather a fairly backwards industry catching up a little and putting forth some long-needed standards. Only in the last few years have emails even been a regular part of discovery, and even then most courts handle them by printing them out and treating them as paper plus whatever metadata you can extract from the original mailbox*.
For the longest time in the legal world, just about everything was paper, and it more-or-less still is. The bottom line is that the courts have *finally* woken up to the concept that there are business documents out there that contain critical info for whatever case they're working, that have never seen paper, but should be part of the evidence. The cases mentioned in the article were ones where the court put the smack-down on companies that had all the appearance of hiding evidence behind lax retention policies.
Would you rather have a single national-level retention standard or up to 50 state-level ones?
* to be honest, there are a couple of advantages to doing this, such as there are already quite a few tools and practices built around paper evidence (either on paper or as an image of a page), and just converting files and emails to paper adds a time-and-cost barrier to manipulation.
One option is to use chord-based keyboards, such as the Frogpad or others. That way, you can have fewer (and larger) keys but still be able to do most, if not all, of the same keys as a traditional keyboard.
Right on, Brother! That's exactly what I do, except that I've pretty much been able to escape the addiction of MMORPGs. That character is not a representation of me, but rather the thing I have to stare at for hours on end.
The only thing advertising revenue explains is why they don't get killed.
That's not always the point in R&D. Now that we have this thing, it might make something completely unexpected possible (ask yourself, who would have thought of putting a camera in a cell phone when they came out in the early 1980's?) or better (child-proof CDs & DVDs? maybe...)
Research like this is the only way we get to have new toys in 20-30 years. Otherwise, it's just refinements on the same old stuff, and frankly, the current set of technologies are wasting too many resources.
I see it as "Suspicion Of Authority", a fairly common meme in our modern society.
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IAAMOAC
Sadly enough, there is a brand of duct tape, complete with a fan club