Except that the federal law in question provides that no website is considered either an 'author' or a 'publisher' of any 'information [the post] provided by another information content provider [the user]'. It then goes on to explicitly overrule any state/local laws that conflict with this.

Short version is, this law was intended to shield Internet companies for being passive conduits. It would be a terrible idea if, anytime anyone sent defamatory content through the mail, the victim could sue the Post Office, right?

The problem is, the wording was very broad. So now this company is covered by the liability shield (which provides more or less complete immunity from defamation laws of any kind) because it's user-generated content. But they're NOT a passive conduit, their business is apparently set up to actively solicit this type of arguably-libelous content.

So yeah, your suggestion is a good idea - it might be a good idea to tweak the CDA to strip the liability shield if the user wants something removed and the company refuses. But as written, that's not currently how the law works. Which is unfortunate.

A semester's worth of ab-psych and wikipedia do not a diagnosis make - but he quite likely has Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

He completely flew off the handle when the customer complained about being treated badly (Reacts to criticism with anger, shame, or humiliation), doesn't seem to care about or even really understand why the customer is pissed off (Obsessed with oneself and Lacks empathy and disregards the feelings of others) ... And finally, unrealistic fantasies of ... power speaks for itself, as does [exaggerates] own importance, achievements, and talents
.

"People who are overly narcissistic commonly feel rejected, humiliated and threatened when criticised. To protect themselves from these dangers, they often react with disdain, rage, and/or defiance to any slight criticism, real or imagined ... In cases where [the afflicted] feels a lack of admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation, he/she may also manifest a desire to be feared and to be notorious (narcissistic supply).

Although individuals with NPD are often ambitious and capable, the inability to tolerate setbacks, disagreements or criticism, along with lack of empathy, make it difficult for such individuals to work cooperatively with others or to maintain long-term professional achievements. With narcissistic personality disorder, the individual's self-perceived fantastic grandiosity, often coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically not commensurate with his or her real accomplishments.

The entire thing describes him almost to the letter.

A four billion dollar non-refundable breakup fee? Why would you want to pay such an enormous fee to abandon your buyout attempt ... and then close the buy out anyway?

The deal is dead, dead, dead as a doornail, done. AT&T would not be paying four billion dollars to one of its biggest competitors if it thought there was a snowball's chance in hell it could avoid doing so.

Republican ... Democrat ... Does it really matter? Neither party's mainstream will support this. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better example of a death panel, unless they were to actually rename this Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee to "death panel". As it is, "Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee" is already Orwellian enough.

Jury nullification is also a great way to enact tyranny of the majority. How many white people went to jail for lynching black people in the thirties? And then there's this case where it's kind of hard to avoid the implication that the jury thought it was okay to kill gays.

Jury nullification yes, can be used to fight oppression by the system, like the Fugitive Slave Law. But it's also great for trial-by-popularity-contest. The entire point of jury nullification is "screw the rules, I'm going to do what's 'right'". Sometimes that works, but jury nullification makes no distinction between good parts of the system, and bad parts.

Many parts of the system are there to protect the fair interests of justice. Juries can nullify them too. The rules over what evidence is admissible, for example - most juries aren't physically sequestered in a room with no phone and no internet the entire duration of the trial. They can easily search the internet for all kinds of half-baked "evidence". The judge is supposed to keep all that out of court, because it's unverified, or scientifically dubious, etc.

Jury nullification is an incredibly dangerous thing. It is not justice at all, because it is fundamentally capricious in nature. Justice is supposed to be the same for everybody.

WTF, slashdot? I never asked you - not once - to change the moderation system to moderate with one click. Now I can't mod this person up, and instead have to post this silly statement that they are, in fact, not Offtopic at all.

Standing is a very important issue. You need to have some kind of rules governing who's allowed to sue over what sorts of incidents. Basically, there should only ever be at most a single lawsuit covering any given topic. If there are ever two lawsuits in different courts over the exact same issue, and they issue conflicting rulings, what happens? The answer is "that must not ever happen".

Even small kids are good at causing trouble when this rule isn't in place - "well, Dad said no ... so I'm gonna go ask Mom".

In this case, Righthaven didn't actually control the copyrights; all they had was a 'right to sue'. So if that gives Righthaven standing, and the original copyright holder still has standing (because they still have these rights) ... then both companies could sue someone, over the same incident, in different courtrooms. And you are not allowed to do that.

"No imaginable military target", huh? Just because you say it doesn't make it true. A nuke would do a pretty severe amount of damage to just about any military installation. Anywhere a lot of military facilities were built close together is a good military target for a nuke. So is anywhere a large number of troops are massed.

It so happens that the last few war the US has been involved in have been against asymmetric guerilla opponents. Nukes are largely useless against relatively small groups of people hiding in plain sight. But that doesn't mean there's no military application for nukes. To the contrary - if it ever had come to nuclear war against the Russians, the Pentagon would have been one of the first places they blew up. That's a classic military target. For an enormous list of other military targets, see this list of US military bases.

They said as much in one of their blog posts where they tried (poorly) to explain why this was necessary. It's really quite simple: They don't want to be the next AOL.

Remember when AOL bought Time Warner? Yeah, that was craaazy, wasn't it? And where are they now? Plummeting like a rock from those amazing heights. They've been basically irrelevant for years now. So what happened?

They were a market leader, in a market being disrupted by new technology (broadband). They looked at the new technology, then looked at the river of gold they already had, and said "Hmm. If we switch to the new tech, our costs soar, and we cannibalize our existing money press." So they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: they played for short-term gain at the cost of long-term ruin.

AOL was one of the few ISPs large enough to take advantage of an opportunity that existed then. Before the business model solidified for cable and DSL, there was an opening for an ISP to partner with the cableco and telcos. Broadband would have been AOL and the infrastructure companies.

Instead, they went it alone. AOL's opportunity evaporated. They tried offering AOL-branded broadband far too late, and abandoned the experiment shortly. This doomed them to oblivion as an ISP.

Netflix really really wants to avoid repeating this mistake. As they noted in their blog post - companies make this mistake all too often. DVD by mail is doomed, and it has precisely the same weakness as DVD by rental store (which Netflix just chewed up and spit out): It will be out-competed by more efficient, superior technology. Streaming is going to destroy DVD by mail. It's cheaper and more convenient.

The entire Qwikster thing only makes sense if you assume Netflix planned to jettison Qwikster. It's easier to jettison a division if you've already separated out the dependencies. Why else would they have contemplated such a silly move?

As for why Netflix would want out of DVD-by-mail sooner rather than later -- They can get a lot of money for selling the business while it's still got a huge install base. If they wait until years after the erosion starts after they've already lost a third of the users, it will sell for a lot less.

This is an odd case that demonstrates why words in legal senses have complex convoluted meanings. To "pay" someone is not necessarily to give them money. To "pay" is to give another entity a thing of value in exchange for services or goods they have rendered you.

In this case, you pay the school cash money and in exchange they allow you to attend classes and receive credit and so on. But they also are giving you things that are valuable: Course credit. Course credit, and degrees, are essentially the university using their reputation to enhance yours. Anyone can learn the content that is covered by a course; people pay a University so they will run you through a process designed to officially recognize that you have learned the content.

So you do some work for the University, and in exchange, they give you course credit - a thing of value. Thus they are saying it is a work for hire, that they 'paid' you for your work ... just not in cash.

Replying to undo incorrect moderation. Screw you, new mod system! I used to have to click "OK" to confirm, and I liked it that way. It wasn't broken, why'd they break it?

Not a valid argument for or against patents? A special case all unto itself? Hardly. It is the perfect example of what patent protection is all about. Here we have innovation that would stand no chance of ever recouping the staggering initial investment costs, but for the protection granted by patents. All that other stuff you were talking about? That is the ancilliary crap that sprung up around it.

Sorry, but your argument is essentially "If you ignore all the reasons patents are a good idea, then you clearly see that patents suck!"

I feel compelled to make one slight correction to your post: Theldala Magee is not a rapist. She is an alleged rapist.

I read the article, and I couldn't find out whether Theldala denies the substance of the allegations - or merely disputes the terminology used to describe it. But essentially, what we have here appears to be a (s)he-said she-said. Amy Aklon claims certain things about the incident. If, in fact, it did happen the way that was described, then Theldala Magee is a rapist. If, however, it did not ... then it's possible that Amy is the one guilty of a crime: Defaming the character of the TSA agent in question.

Without knowing more details, it's impossible to say for sure. And honestly, since it is a my-word-against-yours situation ... Absent a confession from either party that "yeah, I did it" or "yeah, I made the whole thing up", it's quite likely no one will ever be able to say 100% for sure what happened.

Personally, in my opinion probably the story happened the way the blogger says. But we don't know that, as far as I see. Rushing to judgement can be very dangerous. Just ask the Duke Lacrosse Team.

The drug induces apoptosis in cells that are infected. In other words, if the cell has been infected, this drug tells it to commit suicide. All the virus has to do to circumvent this is change the cell so it ignores these commands.

The usual name for cells that ignore the safeguards that tell them to stop reproducing is cancer. We've already seen some viruses getting blamed for causing cancer - that's why the HPV vaccine is such a big deal. And unless I'm missing something here, this new therapy encourages viruses (known for extremely rapid evolution) to find ways to turn cells cancerous.

Not to say it isn't a great drug. Given a choice between curing (say) Ebola, at a risk of encouraging carcinogenic mutations ... and doing nothing ... the rational choice is probably curing Ebola. But I find it unsettling.

The war in Afghanistan is hadly "completely fucking useless". Osama Bin Laden killed thousands of civilian US citizens. The Taleban were being financially propped up by OBL, and they had given him free rein to do as he wished. Then when we sent our diplomats to talk to the Taleban about this, they stonewalled us and gave him shelter.

By almost any standard I have ever heard of, this is an act of war (on the part of the Afghan government). It's so clearly an act of war that if you were to take a course in the causes of war, 9/11 would be in the textbook.

I'm not at all saying that there weren't problems with that war. There were. It's going badly for us now because of these problems. But it furthered the national security interests of the United States to defeat the Taleban and get Bin Laden, dead or alive.

A sad fact of international politics is that you can't seem to be weak. If other nations think you're an easy mark, they'll try to get in on the action. Ask China how that worked out for them a hundred years ago, when every major European power repeatedly embarrassed them and demanded all kinds of humiliating special treatment afterwards. The US absolutely cannot be seen to do nothing in the face of something like 9/11.

Furthermore, your post implies a choice between invading Afghanistan, and investing in nuclear. But the US government is more than willing to spend money it doesn't have. There is no real either-or choice here. If the government were united behind alternative power, then it would happen, budget be damned. They simply aren't.