I think DeathElk meant that OP should have known better than to expect Slashdot to not contain irrational anti-apple guff, not that he was perpetrating it.

But these are opening weekend grosses....whatever

That evidence wouldn't be considered damning. It would be considered circumstantial at best, without the actual breathalyzer evidence.

Being a plaintiff in a case doesn't mean your entire life is up for review, especially if it's in nebulous ways like it is in this case, where the evidence includes "expectations of financial rewards" (whether or not you stand to profit from a civil suit should not enter into decisions about whether or not that is meritorious. Sometimes greedy people get wronged too) and a shirt with the word "cunt" on it (the assertion that wearing a shirt with an epithet on it means you allow people to apply that epithet to you is so flabbergastingly stupid that I am hoping the judge entertains this evidence for some reason unknown to me. The article makes it seem like the defense is claiming that it's okay for him to have called her "cunt" because one time, she wore a shirt with the word on it. As her work supervisor!? That's like saying it's okay to send out a memo entitled "Re: Niggers" and the play innocent because both your black employees listen to NWA).

While it may behoove the court to investigate potentially damning evidence, no such evidence is even being alleged to exist here. The defense allegations seem to be attempts to discredit her character, not her case, which is the biggest danger of these things. The court does not get access to your entire life to rule on the veracity of an otherwise well documented claim.

Yeah that's right, a 20 member class action lawsuit backed up by numerous complaints to the corporate headquarters prior to the suit is all to cover up for the fact that this one woman's supervisor didn't want to leave his wife and get her preggers. What judge in the world would think any of this shit is actually important in the face of the evidence already presented, but one looking for an arbitrary excuse to throw out the case?

While it is indeed up to the judge's ultimate discretion to decide what is and what is not relevant, in this case that discretion is wrong. So what if she said she loved her supervisor? That doesn't mean he gets to grope her at work. They could have been fucking like rabbits after hours but she still gets to draw any lines of consent she wants to, and if he didn't like it, well then he can just move on to the next class member: seems to be what he did anyway

That seems specious. Are you telling me not only that pirates constitute at least a plurality of theatergoers, but that they do so based on whether or not they could pirate leaked copies? Megaupload was never a big source of pre-release content, and even after that it was all bootlegs until a DVD rip was made

See, that also confuses me. Because piracy has always been something that affects MEDIA sales: not theater tickets. If anti-piracy organizations a have successfully finagled the dialogue so that the media acts like it is, that's a problem. The weakness the huge anti-piracy apparatus had was that their ad campaigns featuring teary eyed boom mike operators were clearly full of shit because pretty much everyone gets paid off out of the box office returns. Once the budget is covered, the rest of the money: dvd sales, merchandise, etc. gets paid to the studios, with perhaps some small amount paid on residuals (which don't pay any movie crew member's rent) and perhaps other perks (partial merchandising rights etc.) for high profile perfomers/directors. And so anti piracy advocacy has always been about the studios.

However, if there really is someone going around and claiming that box office returns are hurting because of piracy, that needs to be nipped in the bud. Piracy is a war on DVD sales, not on ticket sales. If there is a relationship, it needs to be sussed out thoroughly, before we get legislators to swallow the lie that ALL revenue streams are under threat because the hackers are breaking into our mainframes and stealing all our internets and posting the finished cut of the movie plus all DVD extras BEFORE THE SCRIPT IS EVEN WRITTEN.

Wait, if pirates are the biggest spenders, why would shutting down Megaupload make them into not-spenders? Because it made them into not-pirates? How does a correlation between pirates the demographic and spending habits correlate intuitively with piracy the activity and spending habits? This actually is pretty surprising.

Pretty much everything the defense "alleges" should have no bearing on the case (ex. "Sexually amorous communications with case members," a shirt with the word "CUNT" on it). Unless the Facebook contains the phrase "I am completely comfortable with the treatment I receive from my supervisor and in no way consider it a form of harassment" none of it should be admissible, and the judge should not even be investigating.

Also, if this is a troll it's a really good one, and you win, and you can stop now.

As a researcher in quantum mechanics, I can attest to the fact that everything you have said so far is either patently false, or has no basis in physical reality. You are confusing the photoelectric effect (a statement about the wave/particle duality of light due to the deBroglie relation) with an equation due to general relativity (a statement of the equivalence of mass and energy), which you state incorrectly (reducing your equation written as Et=mc^2*t^2 yields E=mct, which is false). The considerations of the time dependence of quantum mechanics are well understood, and do not involve "lumping energy" into a single point in time. The speed of light is not a time dependent quantity, nor does it imply that measurements cannot be taken instantaneous (see calculus, definition of the derivatice) and does not require "symmetrizing" in the form of multiplication by tim (which yields a distance, not an energy). It arises from differential equations describing the propagation of a wave through space, and changes in it result from increasing accuracy of experimental data (measurements of permittivity and permeability of free space, both quantities which are well defined for static and quasistatic phenomena). The equations relating these data to the speed of light are close to a century and a half old and have been valid for that entire period.

Finally, the interaction of photons with electrons is well documented: it is the physical basis for the absorption of visible light. If you have some other explanation, me and my colleagues would be very interested to hear it.

These are civil suits, not criminal cases. The insidious implication of this ruling is that there is likely to be evidence in someone's Facebook or email. that pertains to a sexual harassment case, sight unseen. This ruling seems to do nothing but pave the way for "fishing expeditions," as another commenter put it, on behalf of judges, who can then go "Oh, a smiley face at the end of a WORK RELATED email, looks like you were leading him on pretty hard."

If, on the other hand, the defense wishes to use the email records as a defense, and the plaintiff disputes the veracity of these records, I can see the judge ordering access to the records to check on their veracity. If the plaintiff fails to provide these, then toss the case out: I have no problem with that. However, requiring a priori access to a person's correspondence at the outset of a case for no reason than to provide a judge with evidence outside the context of the court seems downright unconscionable.

"Samsung copied Apple" may be a true statement, but it's not enough to take someone to court.

And, as is often the case in these hearings, you can't say someonecopied you if there are a million things they could have copied. Apple didn't invent the "small rectangular touch screen." Pocket PCs, tablets, Game Boys, PDAs, laptops, and books are all things which could be said to have influenced the design of the phone which predate Apple by forever. You insist that the only reason we think "obviously that's the only way you can make a smartphone" is because Apple did it first, I call bullshit: that IS the only way you can make a smart phone, aside from, say, the Sidekick or something else dumb. What do you propose instead, a VirtualBoy headset?

Are you being sarcastic, trolling, or on drugs? I can't tell, you see, because of my internet Asperger's

The point is if they aren't sorry, they should be. The court can't order them to feel sorry, but it can order them to act like it.

Um. No.

the temperatures over the summer being a prime example. If there were hotter climates in earth's history, they were long before we arrived, and mostly speculative in the first place. In recent human history, the climate is unprecedented.

And there are very sound theories which say that the null hypothesis is not an effective response to what may be an immediate threat. Would you invoke the "null hypothesis" to dismiss concerns about a ballistic missile heading your way? The consequences of too much caution here are completely outstripped by the consequences of too little.

God this is as stupid as it was when people first started this stupid rumor: why would you need to "hide the decline" of climate in recent years when we have reliable meteorological data as to that? The question is NOT whether or not climate has been getting warmer: it has. The question is whether or not this correlates with human activity. The "decline" refers to the fact that pattern of tree-ring growth used to determine historical climate diverges from the actual meteorological data hat we have collected. While tree rings indicate a decline, there is in fact, NOT a decline, as indicated by about every meteorological authority ever. If a person says that climate is NOT increasing, they are lying. If they say that climate is not increasing because of human activity, that is a little less crazy.

TL;DR the "Stick" part of the hockey stick graph is up for debate, NOT the blade