Not to mention that the markup you pay is, in part, an act of buying insurance that the battery won't explode. It's not only less likely to explode, but also more likely to be recalled/repaired/replaced if an explosion danger exists.
IANALY, but you are on an interesting track. Products liability law in many jurisdictions in the US imposes liability if the plaintiff can show, among other things, that there was a reasonable alternative design. That is, a design that would have prevented the injury could have been built at the time that the original product was built and still been reasonable, so far as its utility and cost go.
So, if someone does get injured by an exploding laptop and can show that a harder case would have been a reasonable price to pay for the added safety, he can probably sue and recover for his crotchal injuries.
The system may be poorly designed, but at least it's objective. Both my sister and I got in trouble (to the extent that I was kicked out of class on more than one occasion) repeatedly for writing good papers in high school, because the teachers did not believe that any student of theirs could have produced that quality of work. As an experiment, my sister later copied a paper verbatim from the internet and did not receive any guff for it from a teacher who had accused her of plagiarism when she wrote her own work.
Turnitin.com is not necessarily a good solution, but it at least addresses the problem in an objective way rather than making a subjective judgment of the form "this paper is simply too good for high school, so it therefore must be plagiarized."
It's easy to distrust students who graduate secondary school without knowing that "a lot" is two words, that there's a difference between "there" and "their," that "would've" is the correct contraction of "would have," that "two-way" is a more appropriate way to write the term, that "you got to respect" is not a proper conjugation of "respect," or that contractions have apostrophes.
I don't think that checking papers against a database and submitting work that students have generated in it against their will is the solution to the problem, but there is clearly too much tolerance of minimal literacy in our schools. The solution is to make students defend their papers orally or in their exams. If you require a student to write a 10-page paper on Abraham Lincoln, ask him specific questions about his paper in class a week later. Anyone who puts in the effort to game that system is not going to be stopped by a database query, anyhow.
More importantly, freedom of speech does not allow you to just ignore lawsuits brought against you for defamation. The correct response if you are in the right is to defend yourself in court. If the lawsuit is truly meritless, there are provisions under US law that allow you to get monetary sanctions against the idiot who brought it.
Paying court-ordered judgments that are obtained against you is one of the legal requirements for people who do business in the jurisdictions where the judgments were obtained.
(I was going to list a line number with the error, but the fact that it was a syntax error is already more detail than most BASIC interpreters would have offered.)
They want to feel morally superior. That's why it's harder to legally own a gun in Montreal than almost anywhere in the U.S. but Canada has more school shootings per capita than the U.S. They are morally superior (in their own minds) because even owning the tool to commit such an atrocity is a crime. The Republicans are morally superior to the Democrats because the former support the constitutional right to keep and bear arms while the latter support the constitutional right to free speech; each picks its own parts of the Constitution to like and dislike. The British are morally superior to the U.S. because they outlawed possession of violent pornography and will therefore not have any more sex crime. Etc.
Try to think of a political move that cannot be rationalized as the embodiment of feelings of moral superiority. I am having a hard time naming one (including the two with which I agree the most: the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States of Amerca).
Actually, it happens all the time for all sorts of things. Have you ever been bumped off a flight at the airport? The flight voucher they give you is not just a friendly gesture - it is normally in settlement of any claims you may have against the airline as damages for your missed flight. There are even more frequent, smaller examples at work every day.
You're supposed to say you're an extremely wealthy, young medical doctor who is a cross between Brad Pitt and Doogie Hawser who makes $950,000 a year developing cures for third-world orphans. Then you get naked pictures of foolish but beautiful young women instead of lonesome, horny Slashdotters.
According to the MSJ here, it the suit was filed in May, 2006, and the motion was filed on August 9, 2006. Three months is not a lot of time to do discovery, but it's certainly enough for a diligent and well-paid legal team to get enough to avoid summary judgment.
Summary judgment is appropriate when there is (to quote nearly every summary judgment motion and order ever drafted) "no material fact in dispute." It's slightly different from a demurrer or, in modern parlance, motion to dismiss (typically called a "12(b)(6)" because of the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure by that number which provides for it), which is where every fact in the plaintiff's complaint is assumed to be true and still does not state a cause of action upon which relief can be granted.
In summary judgment, the court can look at affidavits filed by the parties, deposition testimony, interrogatories, and other evidence made available to it through the discovery process and determine whether any material fact is in dispute. A material fact is one that changes the outcome of the matter. For instance, the parties in a libel case may dispute whether the remark was printed in the New York Times or in New Yorker Magazine, but if all the evidence available shows that there is no dispute as to the truth of the remark, then where it printed is immaterial to the case. You can't just go claiming that there are disputed facts unless those disputed facts matter.
Summary judgment can, interestingly, be granted to either party in a lawsuit. The plaintiff can get summary judgment, too, although it is less common to see that happen. (Defense lawyers are paid to find material facts in dispute.)
Another note: the reason that summary judgment works is because judges make decisions of law and juries make decisions of fact. If there is no material fact in dispute, then there is no reason to bring a jury in to make factual decisions. The same thing can happen with stipulated facts (which happens a lot in business law cases, such as in bankruptcy court) - the parties agree on the facts but disagree on the law, and a judge makes a decision for them.
I hope that helps. As to the present case, it appears that the RIAA may have sat on its laurels waiting for the defendant to settle under an assumption that he would, and then were surprised by a motion for summary judgment. You don't need expedited discovery to beat an MSJ. What you do need is a diligent attorney who did discovery early and often rather than only at the last minute. There was nothing stopping the RIAA from taking depositions and sending interrogatories and requests for production to the plaintiff starting on the day that they filed suit. The fact that they didn't do that falls under the ODF rule - it's their own damn fault.
I can't fault you for this, because the story blurb got it wrong in the first place. You don't generate "megawatts per day." But assuming that the most sane disambiguation of the story blurb's numbers is correct (namely, that it burns 3,000 tons of garbage per day and generates 120 megawatts of power), it comes out to 96 AOL CDs per day to run a 60W bulb. Reducing the magnitudes a bit and simplifying, the story blurb claims 3,000 tons = 120 megawatt-days, or 6 pounds = 120 watt-days.
(96 AOL CDs / 1 day) x (0.5 oz. / 1 AOL CD) x (1 lb. / 16 oz.) x (120 watt-days / 6 lb.)
If Dr. Pulaski were the worst part of Trek (and she's not), that comment would almost make sense. That said, Diana Muldaur (who played the role) appeared in two Original Series episodes, so it's not like she was brought onto TNG just to annoy you. Regardless of your thoughts on her, Dr. Pulaski was only on the show for one season. Compare that with some of the B&B blunders and it really isn't that big of a deal.
Yep. And by golly, if I'm afraid to make a decision myself, I'm sure as heck not going to trust you to make any! Hence all the laws that prevent people from making decisions being advocated by people who are afraid of making decisions.
Having an employee who would try to repeatedly brute force your passwords qualifies as "anytime there is a good chance that someone who should not know it does know it."
It's not the legal profession or prison system. It's fear. In this case, it's the fear of actually punishing anyone. "He didn't mean it, we can slap him on his wrist and he won't do it again." is the mindset. It's so much easier to tell people "You can't think that, it's a crime!" than it is to tell them "You raped a little girl and now it's time to die."
See how easy that was? I had not heard it called a "block heater" often enough to think to check for such an article. The entire quality of Wikipedia is greater now as a result of (a) my knowing the history of the device and the pre-invention alternatives and (b) someone else knowing that the terms "block heater" and "headbolt heater" refer to the same device. If either (a) or (b) had not been the case, or if either one of us were not allowed to contribute because we lack some arbitrarily-specified credentials, the total information content and quality would be less.
The possibility of brute force is not an argument for changing passwords frequently, unless you catch someone trying to brute force it and change it to one they've already tried. Brute force relies on the statistical likelihood of guessing the password before the reason you want access goes away. Changing the password every 90 days has no bearing on the likelihood of it being guessed in a certain amount of time, unless what you change it to has a probability of being guessed of less than what it was by virtue of the brute force method employed.
The best thing to do is to change your password anytime there is a good chance that someone who should not know it does know it. That includes an employee leaving, evidence of an unauthorized access that could have been attained by having the password (possibly discovered by brute force or by other methods), theft of the business card you wrote it down on, etc. But it does not include the mere possibility that someone could guess it - changing the password has no real bearing on their chances of guessing correctly, unless it was something insanely simple before and changed to something reasonable.
The problem is that credentials are rarely relevant to the broad array of information Wikipedia covers. For instance, I wrote the article about the headbolt heater, which is the device that causes people from warmer climates to ask people from colder climates if their cars are electric (as its 3-prong 110-volt plug typically dangles a few inches out of the vehicle's grill), but I have no qualifications in the field of headbolt heaters outside the fact that I happened to know about them and find some good information about them. In another example, I am a law student and found an article or two that was written by a practicing attorney but needed some clarification.
In a purely credentials based system, I would likely not have been allowed to edit the work of a more experienced person in my own field. To allow otherwise would be to defeat the entire purpose of the credentials system, as an amateur hobbyist in any field would have to be allowed to edit the work of a seasoned professional, and that's essentially what already exists.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask Socrates if asking students questions is a waste of instructive time.
Not to mention that the markup you pay is, in part, an act of buying insurance that the battery won't explode. It's not only less likely to explode, but also more likely to be recalled/repaired/replaced if an explosion danger exists.
IANALY, but you are on an interesting track. Products liability law in many jurisdictions in the US imposes liability if the plaintiff can show, among other things, that there was a reasonable alternative design. That is, a design that would have prevented the injury could have been built at the time that the original product was built and still been reasonable, so far as its utility and cost go.
So, if someone does get injured by an exploding laptop and can show that a harder case would have been a reasonable price to pay for the added safety, he can probably sue and recover for his crotchal injuries.
The system may be poorly designed, but at least it's objective. Both my sister and I got in trouble (to the extent that I was kicked out of class on more than one occasion) repeatedly for writing good papers in high school, because the teachers did not believe that any student of theirs could have produced that quality of work. As an experiment, my sister later copied a paper verbatim from the internet and did not receive any guff for it from a teacher who had accused her of plagiarism when she wrote her own work.
Turnitin.com is not necessarily a good solution, but it at least addresses the problem in an objective way rather than making a subjective judgment of the form "this paper is simply too good for high school, so it therefore must be plagiarized."
It's easy to distrust students who graduate secondary school without knowing that "a lot" is two words, that there's a difference between "there" and "their," that "would've" is the correct contraction of "would have," that "two-way" is a more appropriate way to write the term, that "you got to respect" is not a proper conjugation of "respect," or that contractions have apostrophes.
I don't think that checking papers against a database and submitting work that students have generated in it against their will is the solution to the problem, but there is clearly too much tolerance of minimal literacy in our schools. The solution is to make students defend their papers orally or in their exams. If you require a student to write a 10-page paper on Abraham Lincoln, ask him specific questions about his paper in class a week later. Anyone who puts in the effort to game that system is not going to be stopped by a database query, anyhow.
I didn't know that the White Stripes even had more than two thousand new singles. They must be in the studio all the time.
I could care less. ;)
Shakespeare did not write in Old English, a language with predated Shakespeare and even Chaucer (who wrote in Middle English) by quite a few years.
More importantly, freedom of speech does not allow you to just ignore lawsuits brought against you for defamation. The correct response if you are in the right is to defend yourself in court. If the lawsuit is truly meritless, there are provisions under US law that allow you to get monetary sanctions against the idiot who brought it.
Paying court-ordered judgments that are obtained against you is one of the legal requirements for people who do business in the jurisdictions where the judgments were obtained.
Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a toilet?
:)
A: A lawyer can handle more than one asshole at a time.
To my knowledge, this joke is in the public domain.
SYNTAX ERROR
(I was going to list a line number with the error, but the fact that it was a syntax error is already more detail than most BASIC interpreters would have offered.)
They want to feel morally superior. That's why it's harder to legally own a gun in Montreal than almost anywhere in the U.S. but Canada has more school shootings per capita than the U.S. They are morally superior (in their own minds) because even owning the tool to commit such an atrocity is a crime. The Republicans are morally superior to the Democrats because the former support the constitutional right to keep and bear arms while the latter support the constitutional right to free speech; each picks its own parts of the Constitution to like and dislike. The British are morally superior to the U.S. because they outlawed possession of violent pornography and will therefore not have any more sex crime. Etc.
Try to think of a political move that cannot be rationalized as the embodiment of feelings of moral superiority. I am having a hard time naming one (including the two with which I agree the most: the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States of Amerca).
Actually, it happens all the time for all sorts of things. Have you ever been bumped off a flight at the airport? The flight voucher they give you is not just a friendly gesture - it is normally in settlement of any claims you may have against the airline as damages for your missed flight. There are even more frequent, smaller examples at work every day.
You're supposed to say you're an extremely wealthy, young medical doctor who is a cross between Brad Pitt and Doogie Hawser who makes $950,000 a year developing cures for third-world orphans. Then you get naked pictures of foolish but beautiful young women instead of lonesome, horny Slashdotters.
According to the MSJ here, it the suit was filed in May, 2006, and the motion was filed on August 9, 2006. Three months is not a lot of time to do discovery, but it's certainly enough for a diligent and well-paid legal team to get enough to avoid summary judgment.
IANALY.
Summary judgment is appropriate when there is (to quote nearly every summary judgment motion and order ever drafted) "no material fact in dispute." It's slightly different from a demurrer or, in modern parlance, motion to dismiss (typically called a "12(b)(6)" because of the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure by that number which provides for it), which is where every fact in the plaintiff's complaint is assumed to be true and still does not state a cause of action upon which relief can be granted.
In summary judgment, the court can look at affidavits filed by the parties, deposition testimony, interrogatories, and other evidence made available to it through the discovery process and determine whether any material fact is in dispute. A material fact is one that changes the outcome of the matter. For instance, the parties in a libel case may dispute whether the remark was printed in the New York Times or in New Yorker Magazine, but if all the evidence available shows that there is no dispute as to the truth of the remark, then where it printed is immaterial to the case. You can't just go claiming that there are disputed facts unless those disputed facts matter.
Summary judgment can, interestingly, be granted to either party in a lawsuit. The plaintiff can get summary judgment, too, although it is less common to see that happen. (Defense lawyers are paid to find material facts in dispute.)
Another note: the reason that summary judgment works is because judges make decisions of law and juries make decisions of fact. If there is no material fact in dispute, then there is no reason to bring a jury in to make factual decisions. The same thing can happen with stipulated facts (which happens a lot in business law cases, such as in bankruptcy court) - the parties agree on the facts but disagree on the law, and a judge makes a decision for them.
I hope that helps. As to the present case, it appears that the RIAA may have sat on its laurels waiting for the defendant to settle under an assumption that he would, and then were surprised by a motion for summary judgment. You don't need expedited discovery to beat an MSJ. What you do need is a diligent attorney who did discovery early and often rather than only at the last minute. There was nothing stopping the RIAA from taking depositions and sending interrogatories and requests for production to the plaintiff starting on the day that they filed suit. The fact that they didn't do that falls under the ODF rule - it's their own damn fault.
I can't fault you for this, because the story blurb got it wrong in the first place. You don't generate "megawatts per day." But assuming that the most sane disambiguation of the story blurb's numbers is correct (namely, that it burns 3,000 tons of garbage per day and generates 120 megawatts of power), it comes out to 96 AOL CDs per day to run a 60W bulb. Reducing the magnitudes a bit and simplifying, the story blurb claims 3,000 tons = 120 megawatt-days, or 6 pounds = 120 watt-days.
(96 AOL CDs / 1 day) x (0.5 oz. / 1 AOL CD) x (1 lb. / 16 oz.) x (120 watt-days / 6 lb.)
(96 x 0.5 x 120) / (16 x 6) watts = 60W
If Dr. Pulaski were the worst part of Trek (and she's not), that comment would almost make sense. That said, Diana Muldaur (who played the role) appeared in two Original Series episodes, so it's not like she was brought onto TNG just to annoy you. Regardless of your thoughts on her, Dr. Pulaski was only on the show for one season. Compare that with some of the B&B blunders and it really isn't that big of a deal.
Yep. And by golly, if I'm afraid to make a decision myself, I'm sure as heck not going to trust you to make any! Hence all the laws that prevent people from making decisions being advocated by people who are afraid of making decisions.
Having an employee who would try to repeatedly brute force your passwords qualifies as "anytime there is a good chance that someone who should not know it does know it."
It's not the legal profession or prison system. It's fear. In this case, it's the fear of actually punishing anyone. "He didn't mean it, we can slap him on his wrist and he won't do it again." is the mindset. It's so much easier to tell people "You can't think that, it's a crime!" than it is to tell them "You raped a little girl and now it's time to die."
See how easy that was? I had not heard it called a "block heater" often enough to think to check for such an article. The entire quality of Wikipedia is greater now as a result of (a) my knowing the history of the device and the pre-invention alternatives and (b) someone else knowing that the terms "block heater" and "headbolt heater" refer to the same device. If either (a) or (b) had not been the case, or if either one of us were not allowed to contribute because we lack some arbitrarily-specified credentials, the total information content and quality would be less.
The possibility of brute force is not an argument for changing passwords frequently, unless you catch someone trying to brute force it and change it to one they've already tried. Brute force relies on the statistical likelihood of guessing the password before the reason you want access goes away. Changing the password every 90 days has no bearing on the likelihood of it being guessed in a certain amount of time, unless what you change it to has a probability of being guessed of less than what it was by virtue of the brute force method employed.
The best thing to do is to change your password anytime there is a good chance that someone who should not know it does know it. That includes an employee leaving, evidence of an unauthorized access that could have been attained by having the password (possibly discovered by brute force or by other methods), theft of the business card you wrote it down on, etc. But it does not include the mere possibility that someone could guess it - changing the password has no real bearing on their chances of guessing correctly, unless it was something insanely simple before and changed to something reasonable.
The problem is that credentials are rarely relevant to the broad array of information Wikipedia covers. For instance, I wrote the article about the headbolt heater, which is the device that causes people from warmer climates to ask people from colder climates if their cars are electric (as its 3-prong 110-volt plug typically dangles a few inches out of the vehicle's grill), but I have no qualifications in the field of headbolt heaters outside the fact that I happened to know about them and find some good information about them. In another example, I am a law student and found an article or two that was written by a practicing attorney but needed some clarification.
In a purely credentials based system, I would likely not have been allowed to edit the work of a more experienced person in my own field. To allow otherwise would be to defeat the entire purpose of the credentials system, as an amateur hobbyist in any field would have to be allowed to edit the work of a seasoned professional, and that's essentially what already exists.