The summary of this article is just wrong. The Supreme Court has not said that the issue is unclear - it has merely agreed to hear a case about whether a specific decision made by the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia conflicts with existing Supreme Court precedent.

To the extent that you can infer anything from the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari, it is equally likely to conclude that they took the case in order to slap down the D.C. Circuit's novel approach to the 4th Amendment.

The existing precedent, by the way, is that we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in our cars. As a result, it is not an "unreasonable" search or seizure to attach beepers or other devices to our cars in order to monitor our movements.

In fact, the judge in this case does an excellent job summarizing and applying the relevant case law. He points to a case from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (which is the relevant circuit for St. Louis) clearly stating that putting a tracker on a car and then later retreiving it is not a constitutionally prohibited search or seizure.

Agree or disagree on whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our cars - the judge in this case acted properly. It would have violated another constitutional right - the one to a speedy trial - if he had simply delayed the issuance of his opinion until after the Supreme Court issues its (entirely discretionary) opinion.

What a silly article.

Blackberry 10 is so much a better name than BBX. I mean, really - what the ****! That's a terrible name! Why would you engage in litigation over it? Maybe if they start losing more cases, they'll start doing better....

I can't tell whether you are serious or not.... Just as one example, building those wind farms is very expensive. Averaged over the expected life time of the turbines, it probably costs around 10 cents per watt - which, depending on where in the country you live - is probably more than you are paying now.

I won't even talk about the cost of transmission lines, distribution lines, or the price of backup power when the wind doesn't blow. They said nuclear would be too cheap to meter too... They were wrong. Nothing in this life is free, my friend.....

We are also paid to have a sense of humor about when we read /.....

But more to the point - do you really think burger flippers, on their feet 24/7, have more downtime than lawyers?!? Now that's funny.

I filled out the survey, but I will share my major concerns here as well. I use IE 7. My company mandates its use and locks things down fairly well. I am a lawyer interested in science and tech policy, but with no actual computer skills (i.e., I programmed a few lines of HTML in my youth, but that's about it).

Over the past few years, my user experience has gone into the gutter, with very few corresponding benefits. Boxes often overlap, and the whole site freezes on a regular basis. Most other sites are fine.

As a result, I show up less. Sure, I could read it on my home computer, but eh. What's the point if you can't sit on a conference call while reading?

Wait a second - people are faulting HP from diagnosing a problem and then (god forbid) taking time to put together a business plan and roll out the anouncement of said business plan?!? God forfend! No, instead they should continue on their pre-annointed course, never deviating, regardless of market conditions. (Iceberg dead-ahead? Pshaw. That's not what we decided three weeks ago!) Any major company-shaping (or company-shaking) decision + short-term loss in stock value = Law suit. My reasonably large company takes many bold positions/reinventions as the industry changes. Companies like mine get sued all the time. They are all frivolous (just like this one). They all allege massive insider conspiracies (just like this one). They allege you-made-a-decision-a-certified-moron-wouldn't-make (just like this one). The only news here is who is doing publicity for the law firm - they are apparently good at their job and maybe should be hired in the future. Otherwise, what a joke - carry on.

The entry/non-entry of Dr. King's speech into the public domain is a famous case in copyright circles - and in fact, was one reason the copyright laws were changed. It's a fascinating story.

First you need to realize that prior to 1976, unless you put a copyright mark on a document and properly registed it, it was presumed to be in the public domain as soon as it was made public. This led to a number of problems and disputes, and today is widely viewed as being overly punative to people who simply forget to put the mark on a document before releasing it. Today's copyright laws eliminate the "all or nothing" nature of the 1909 Act, and sensibly declare that copyright rests with the author, regardless of whether they properly marked it.

Second, there's an interesting history behind the I Have a Dream speech. While the factual accounts of exactly what happened differ, Dr. King and his associates apparently distributed advance copies of the speech without the copyright mark on them to a group of journalists. Recognizing that this was a serious error, others within Dr. King's circle reportedly re-collected each of the advance copies, and then redistributed them with the copyright mark hand written on the document. So there was a factual question as to whether the textual copy of the speech was put into the public domain or not registered with the copyright office correctly.

There was less dispute over the video and audio. As others have noted, Dr. King improvised/departed from the prepared text a number of times. So there was an argument that, even if Dr. King had lost the copyright on the original text (which is itself debatable), he maintained the copyright on the "performance" of the speach, and was thus entitled to a separate copyright (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_of_Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.,_Inc._v._CBS,_Inc.).

I also believe that the speech is freely licensed to anyone engaging in educational activities - so it's not quite as eggregious on the part of the family as many have suggested.

Let's stop conflating the whether an emissions market is mechanically sound from the politically-charged question of whether it is wise to have established an emissions market for carbon. Emissions markets are common and typically function well. There are established markets in the United States for SOx, NOx, Particulate Matter and other various pollutants emitted from large stationary sources (i.e., power plants, cement factories, etc).

These markets are an excellent way of determining the marginal cost of complying with a particular regulatory regime. I emphasize that last statement because that is what we are really asking is what is the marginal cost of complying with a particular set of rules? Emissions markets are very effective at determining that marginal price.

Of course, the function of the market says nothing about (i) the social utility of complying with the particular rules or (ii) whether the market will actually limit the non-desirable behavior regulators are attempting to stiffle. Whether the market is going to increase that social good depends on on your base-case assumptions. Is global climate change real? Is it exascerbated by CO2 emissions? What is your assumption of CO2 emissions today? What type of compliance regime is utilized to police participation in the market? How strong is the evidence that purchasing and retiring a ton of CO2 from the market actually leads to a ton of CO2 not being put ito the atmosphere?

Personally, I think the evidence suggests that global climate change is happening, and that it is highly likely that man-made emissions are driving the process. But regardless of whether you share my opinion of the science -- you should agree that an emissions exchange is an excellent way of setting the marginal price of complying with a specific set of rules. In short -- just because you are a climate change skeptic doesn't mean you should ignore the rules of economics as well as chemisty.

Wow. So much wrong. It's hard to know where to start. The output of a coal plant does not vary over the course of the day -- and no amount of smart meter activity is going to change this. Electric markets dispatch on a least-cost basis; that is, they turn on the cheapest power plants first, and the next most expensive next, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words in this case. Here you can find a typical dispatch stack -- with nuclear on the bottom, coal just above that, natural gas combined cycles above that, peaking natural gas turbines above that, and other technologies like fuel oil and karosene above that. http://www.treepower.org/outreach/stackdispatch.jpeg. (By the way, wind, hydro and solar would be down there by the nuclear, but don't change this analysis.)

The key point that the AC misses, is that the energy usage on any given day fluctuates between the high priced and low priced natural gas plants; in utility parlance, a natural gas unit is the "marginal unit" on the system. Every once and a rare while, the system will run out of natural gas, and have to move up the price stack and dispatch fuel oil -- but that is rare. Likewise, every once in a great while, load will be so low that coal dispatches are decreased.

In short: no amount of smart meter activity is going to decrease (or increase) the amount of power coming from a coal plant. That would imply that someone had an underutilized coal plant just sitting around.... Just doesn't work that way. (Even that ignores the fact that coal plants aren't designed to move up and down; doing so creates a host of technical problems with the plant.)

The second bit of moronity:

This is half true -- but has nothing to do with smart meters. Yes, the operator of the electric grid will fool with the voltage to avoid a cascading failure of the transmission system. Voltage stability, by law, is kept within extremely tight tolerances. During times of over- or under-generation, the voltage may flicker slightly. However, any serious deviation represents a threat to system reliability -- which is paramount to grid operators -- and is simply not allowed. Again, nothing to do with smart meters.