It's possible the entire concert doesn't occur, because the entire board of AEG is arrested for molesting children.

In fact, they should probably be arrested for that just to be safe. After all, they might do it.

So, does anyone want to join my preemptive class action lawsuit against every record company in the United States?

After all, certainly they're all going to release shitty albums in the future with only one good track on them, then conspire to fix prices and sell them at outrageous prices. That's completely certain to occur. After all, similar events have occurred in the past, and the record companies settled out of court for tens of millions of dollars.

We need an injunction to stop this in the future.

And triple damages under RICO, as well as attorney's fees. Fair's fair after all.

Yes, it's abuse of process, and it's a swindle on the taxpayers. While preemptive Doe suits are not per se frivolous, if one has some reason to believe that a specific unknown person is likely to harm one, they are not an excuse to treat the Article III federal courts as a sort of free mall cop at the taxpayer's expense.

Otherwise, any business, such as a mall, could simply file a preemptive lawsuit against Doe shoplifters, alleging that every store in the country gets shoplifted from at some point, so the state or the feds should step in and provide them free security. For that matter, any company about to release an album could file a Doe suit against a few hundred million Does, demanding an injunction against well, everyone in the United States. They could file a suit against everyone in the United States enjoining them from pirating albums they haven't even decided to release. After all, certainly they will release albums in the future.

This lawsuit is also unconstitutional. The Article III federal courts, as has been pointed out, only exist to decide actual cases or controversies, not imaginary ones. Then there's due process. Nobody has been served with this imaginary lawsuit. So the injunction is meaningless, since nobody had any notice of it. Then, the injunction also violates separation of powers. Article III courts aren't law enforcement, there to patrol for possible future violations of the law. They don't have jurisdiction to act as free mall cops for businesses who fear that some unknown person, in the future, will commit a shoplifting offense.

And to come back to the original point, it's an abuse of process: that is, the use of a lawsuit to obtain an improper collateral advantage. They're suing unknown people for precrime, in order to get free mall cop services from an Article III court, at the taxpayer's expense. Unfortunately, abuse of process is usually pursued by people on the other side, who allege their rights have been violated by the abuse of process. Since these crooks are only ripping off the taxpayer, nobody would have standing to challenge their thievery.

This lawsuit should be dismissed sua sponte (by the court on its own motion), with prejudice so that they can't even file it again in the future, as a sanction. The lawyers (and I'm using that term loosely) should be sanctioned under Rule 11 and reported to their state bar associations. Since we're talking about fantasyland here, they and their clients should also be slowly boiled in oil, while bootleggers videotape their thrashing and screaming for immediate distribution over the Internet via streaming video.

Since we're living in reality, they'll probably be given a profile in the ABA Journal for innovative new legal strategy, and make partner in record time.

Diskeeper has to comply with both laws, but it's up to the plaintiffs under which statute they wish to bring their suit. They could've even claimed that Diskeeper violated both FEHA and EEOC claims (or merely EEOC claims); but claiming violations under the EEOC would've permitted Diskeeper an opportunity to remove the case to Federal Court. There is no argument for removal to Federal Court where the only bring state claims.

The EEOC is not relevant here, as the Complaint cites California state causes of action only (which keeps the case in state court as opposed to federal court). California's FEHA statute is similar to the EEOC, with the exception that FEHA permits unlimited compensatory and punitive damages, whereas EEOC damages are capped.

A lot of publications have picked up this IBM press release, resulting in what must be some of the worst science reporting of the year. Modha and his colleagues at IBM have not simulated a mouse or rat brain. No one can do that at present; the wiring diagram isn't known at that level of detail.

What they did was simulate a huge, randomly-wired network of grossly simplified "neurons" on a supercomputer. The number of units was roughly comparable to the number of neurons in rat cortex, and the statistics of short vs. long-range connections (intra vs. inter-cluster connections) was vaguely suggestive of the organization of cortex, But they used single-compartment, integrate-and-fire neurons that are vastly simpler than real neurons, which do lots of nonlinear processing in their complex dendritic trees. So their network didn't actually compute anything at all. What it did, basically, was oscillate.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362627

Calling this a simulation of a severely brain-damaged baby rat being run through a blender while having an epileptic seizure would still imply far too much realism to this cartoon.

The Modha group's work is a useful step toward the long-term goal of eventually building large-scale simulations of cortical circuitry on a supercomputer. But to report that they've presently produced a simulation of "a mouse brain", as some of the news articles are saying, is ludicrous.

The amount of neuroscience that needs to be done, the number of people required, and the time and costs it will take to produce an accurate simulation of even a mouse brain are orders of magnitude larger than this modest $4.9 million research contract. I'm amazed that technology reporters can be so gullible.