It did no good, of course, but I wrote an e-mail to the State of Minnesota complaining about the Minnesota Revenue "Where's My Refund" site. I can't think of any legitimate reason for a site like this to use Silverlight (or Flash or any other plugin). Here was my message:

Do you offer a non-Silverlight version of the income tax refund status application? It does not seem to work with a recent stable version of Moonlight, though I have tried little to try to make it work.

Further, why would Silverlight be of any benefit for such a (relatively) simple application? I deal with ASP.NET for a living, and I can't imagine any serious consideration of Silverlight for a public application like this one. Unless there are some requirements of which I am unaware, a simple ASP.NET application would more than suffice (because your site is already .NET-based).

Of course, there is little that can be done now, but perhaps next year...

Here was the ridiculous response:

Good Morning, There is no other version offered at this time. I do not know why this version was chosen.

Thank you for using our website.

Regards,
<name omitted to protect the stupid>

<name omitted to protect the stupid, again, since it was here twice>
Minnesota Department of Revenue
Individual Income Tax Division

This was in 2010, and of course, the same application is still in place.

Along with your idea, perhaps all users above a certain Karma can mod those questions from a separate mod limit (maybe three points per question)? Just a thought.

I think grandparent means that the weakness is in not making it easy to figure out what each site is and how to use the sites. Moderation on the sites varies from friendly to pointlessly draconian (Programmers has gotten so bad that I won't participate anymore until there is a moderator election, and maybe not then if the same mods are re-elected), and there are lots of edge cases for and bickering about which types of questions belong on each site. The network has its weaknesses, which Jeff Atwood and others freely acknowledge. All that said, though, the whole network, and particularly StackOverflow, do form a good question/answer system for Google searching, which is one of their goals.

E-mail I got on April 28, 2011 from "Google Apps Team":

Hello,

We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. We want to let you know that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you.

As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. We honor our commitment to all existing customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for mydomain.com at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined us.

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

That statement is incorrect in regard to nearly all schools. The teachers' boss is nearly always the principal, who is (directly or by delegation to other administrators) responsible for evaluating the teachers, among all other boss-like duties.

And, actually, that's a huge part of the problem: PHBs are just as prevalent in schools as they are everywhere else. You point out that evaluating teachers is difficult, but when you add a complete moron doing the job, it becomes impossible. Very often, the problem with a school is at the top of the administrative structure.

Occasionally, someone with some experience is hired specifically to implement some of these "best practice" changes. That's the situation I'm in at present. But, agreed, it may not be the norm.

You can get 30 days of Prime free without buying anything anyway. Note the "Start Your One Month Free Trial" button on the right side of the page.

I'm not a lawyer either, but my understanding is that EPIC would have to appeal (to the relevant Court of Appeals -- I'm not sure what that is officially called for the D.C. Circuit) and lose before they could make a petition for certiorari, which is a petition to persuade the Supreme Court to hear their case. EPIC can't even appeal because they missed the deadline for doing so. That means they don't get to appeal to the Supreme Court either.

Maybe, but that has nothing to do with this case.

SCOTUS has already decided that the reason for which the trial court upheld the denial of EPIC's FOIA request is no longer valid. Unfortunately, the ruling did not come in time to help EPIC, whose attorneys apparently knew about the case before the Supreme Court but did not appeal EPIC's case in the allowed time for appeal.

See the linked decision.

Read the opinion linked from the summary. The basis of the ruling denying the motion for reconsideration was that it was untimely and filed after the deadline for appeal. EPIC had options to delay the ruling in their case pending the outcome of Milner v. Department of the Navy in the Supreme Court, and apparently, the attorneys for EPIC knew about that case. So, the underlying reason that EPIC lost initially was overturned by the Supreme Court, but because EPIC did not appeal within sixty days, they have no further relief. The relevant appellate court would dismiss the appeal as untimely, so it would never get to a petition for certiorari.

I am not a lawyer, but one characteristic of a valid contract is consideration. Each party to a contract must incur a legal detriment of some kind -- that is, each kind needs to give up something of value, and each party needs to receive something of value. I don't know that either example you give constitutes a valid contract because neither has consideration. Also, the first agreement was probably made by someone not of sound mind, and the second was made by a minor.

Pedantic enough yet?

As it applies to patents, though, if party A licenses a patent from party B, and the patent is later found to be invalid, and somehow no lawyer on either side thought to include any language on this situation (which means the parties should really find better lawyers), my guess is that the contract would be invalid due to lack of consideration. Of course, that's only a guess. If there are ongoing licensing fees, though, I would imagine party B would have a tough time collecting on any future fees.

Any lawyers are encouraged to correct what I have said here, as it is probably dangerously misinformative in some way.

I'd think it would be a little bit of a stretch from there to Eamon, but I get the point. Eamon is still around, by the way. Pretty fun stuff at the time.

Well, as TFA mentions, AffirmTrust apparently does this now, "coincidentally" starting on the day of the breach.

Another commenter mentioned CACert, which is great except that I don't want my users to have to install a certificate or bypass a warning to use my site.