That's a lousy analogy because drunk driving is a criminal behavior. In many places it is illegal for an insurance company to write a policy that covers personal liability for criminal acts, but they frequently can cover extremely stupid acts of negligence or even (rarely) corporate liability for the crimes of individuals.

But that doesn't seem to be relevant in this case, since Zurich seems to be suing over finer points of coverage terms rather than over whether Sony was negligent in their sloppy security. Zurich is expert in the finer points of defining degrees and scopes of negligence and writing them into umbrella corporate liability insurance policies, so that seems an unlikely area for them to be litigating. The article says nothing about negligence, but it does imply that Zurich is looking to get a grey area settled over where security breach harm sits in the legal taxonomy of torts. They are claiming that their policy doesn't cover any of the claimed harm in the suits against Sony, and that if it does then Sony's other insurers are also on the hook.

Right, because a person cannot run a global conglomerate business doing billions of dollars of commerce daily with hundreds of millions of customers. If Sony was a person the underlying event could not have occurred.

More to the point you were trying to make and stipulating your dubious theory that this is about negligence... A business entity has more complicated liabilities and needs more complex insurance than an individual because it is made up of many people with non-homogeneous knowledge and motivations and distinct functions and responsibilities as part of the business. A corporation can sometimes be held liable for damage from intentional actions by low-level employees that were unforeseen, unpreventable, and in violation of corporate policy. That doesn't even have an analogy in an individual person. However, if a person is negligent in a way that contributes to harm to others, it can be a complicated process involving both fact and law to determine whether a particular insurance policy will cover that harm. For example, suppose that I had a swimming pool in my back yard that I let neighborhood kids use without any real supervision. One day the local bully comes by, pulls out the pump power line, tosses it in the pool, and starts pushing kids in. They all get scared out of their skulls and get minor shocks, maybe a lot of bruises, maybe even a few broken bones. I would get sued. If my homeowner's insurance had a specific rider covering harm to guests in my swimming pool, my insurance company would probably make some judgment as to whether to defend those suits or settle them, no matter how careless I was, and go after the bully on the other end. If my homeowner's policy didn't explicitly acknowledge the pool or explicitly excluded pool-related liability, I could have a problem much like the one Sony now has with Zurich.

The slimeballs who cracked Sony should be hoping for a Zurich win against Sony and subsequent wins in similar escape suits by the other insurers. Insurers have terrifying legal teams and a lot of law tilting the playing field in their favor. In many cases, the direct perpetrators of a harmful act can be pursued by an insurer to cover whatever the insurer paid on claims plus legal fees, while lacking the protections that a criminal defendant gets when being prosecuted by the government. Sony could go after them as well, but they probably would be as good at it.

No, it isn't. That is not what the suit is about at all. No reasonably intelligent adult reading the article would believe that it is.

Zurich's suit is actually about what constitutes "property damage" and other issues specific to the Zurich policy covering Sony, as well as the other insurance policies that Sony may have in place. Zurich is also suing Sony's other insurers as a second line of defense, so that even if the court decides that the policy written by Zurich includes coverage for the specific sorts of damages claimed by customers for a criminal security breach at the particular Sony unit in question. The article doesn't include filings, but it says nothing at all about Zurich claiming negligence. Zurich actually markets their coverage as handling the gaps between other sorts of more specific corporate liability insurance, and their policy may well have a much more forgiving standard for negligence than they want to fight over. For example, it might be that they explicitly insure the corporate entity against individual negligence below a particular level of the corporate bureaucracy, in which case they'd have to show that particular higher-ups at Sony knew that security was inadequate.

Based on the article, this looks more like Zurich is saying that online security breaches simply are not covered by their policy at all. They may be covering incidents like a Bravia power supply shorting out and burning down a house, but not covering the emotional trauma of having to abandon whatever value might exist in a Sony online account.

Not really.

1. The Revolution was primarily a response to the maze of taxes and trade rules that the British imposed on the American Colonies and their other overseas territories.
2. What we call "The" Constitution was a second try, after the Articles of Confederation proved that letting the States regulate their own commerce meant 13 little protectionist hells. The process leading to the writing of The Constitution started with a couple of small meetings trying to work out commercial conflicts between the states.
3. The Civil War was over slavery. Anyone who says otherwise is an imbecile or a liar. Slavery was an issue in 1860 because the Constitution had frozen the US in place for 2 decades in the middle of the most radical economic change in human history so that a transitional state became a static norm that evolved into a defensible position for the South. In 1787 slavery was dying out almost everywhere but had its strongest remnant in the race-based varieties of the New World. The US Constitution effectively stopped the process in the US South for 20 years, giving its beneficiaries time to bolster it socially and philosophically. Eventually the strain of sustaining a slave economy alongside (and arguably inside) a non-slave economy was untenable and the US had to unify its economy on one labor model. The most significant change in law between 1860 and 1870 was not the abolition of slavery by the legally questionable Emancipation Proclamation or even the legally sound 13th Amendment that banned slavery, it was the 14th amendment which nailed down federal supremacy, citizenship, due process rights, and equal protection rights.

That's awfully hyperbolic. It might even be called utter bullshit.

Apple has hundreds of millions of customers. They just got dinged for about 1 hour of their net earnings (or about 15 minutes of their gross revenue) to cover their liability in this case. It sucks that they have to bother, but they are arguably the juiciest target for such cases these days and it's costing them a tiny piece of their huge gushing flood of cash. Venue selection only really works for patent trolls suing very large companies like Apple, so if *YOU* want to be safe from patent trolls, *YOU* probably can be without even thinking about it. If you want to be Facebook or Apple, you might occasionally have to pay off the trolls in amounts that do not really amount to anything significant.

Well, let's start by staying factual: EDTX juries do not always find in favor of patent holders. They just lean that way more than most other places, and the docket is less clogged there (or at least it used to be... ) than in many other places.

But your comparison to a case against you in a state district court is radically different than the case at hand, and is tangential to your original suggestion about the scope of patent decisions. Patent cases have their own particularly well-defined (and relatively loose) venue rules based on personal jurisdiction, but they also are one of the types of cases where the district courts work under the "Federal Circuit" rather than subordinate to the various regional (numbered) appeals circuits. The underlying principle is that patents are part of the federal duty to regulate all of the interstate and international commerce of the US in a coherent fashion, and applying fact-based patent infringement rulings in the piecemeal way that issues of law sometimes get applied would encourage would-be infringers to try to game the system. Patent holders do sometimes fail to get their venue of choice (e.g. Pragmatus v. Facebook et al.) when it is clear that they are pure trolls and can't make an argument for infringements happening in the hands of a large fraction of all US residents. Getting a venue change doesn't protect a defendant from the outcome of a patent case applying to them in the whole of the US.

So, your question answers itself. Like it or not, Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries, they are parts of one country.

Making commercial law more uniform was a core aspect of the 3 radical overhauls of US national legal identity: the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Civil War. The period leading up to the Civil War with its dysfunctional legal treatment of slaves can be seen as a demonstration of the intrinsic problems with letting different jurisdictions define the scope of property differently, and that is essentially what a district-by-district application of patent law would look like, only with a more complex patchwork and less brutal stakes.

True, and in some circumstances a decision only applies to a specific judicial district. However, the sorts of cases where decisions only apply to a particular district or circuit are usually involving questions of law, rather than questions of fact. Questions of fact in civil cases such as patent cases are almost never subject to serious appeals. It would be unworkable to require plaintiffs to prove that a defendant violated a patent in each and every jurisdiction specifically.

Because the Eastern District of Texas has a history of being friendly to patent plaintiffs. I didn't mean "it does not matter" in the outcome, but rather that "it does not matter" as a legal jurisdictional issue. Venue challenges in cases like this are not quite "frivolous" by definition, but they are essentially hopeless. As long as the plaintiff is willing to buy a mailbox in a district, they can meet the FRCP basis for filing suit there and the defendant would need to show that the venue choice presents an actual hardship to challenge it.

No. Patent cases are Federal cases and it does not matter much in picking a specific Federal court venue whether a defendant that does business globally and is based in the US has any operations in a particular district. A plaintiff can justify the venue based on their convenience and the expertise of the court, since a company like Apple isn't really hampered by having to get lawyers to someplace like Lufkin TX to argue a case. For matters of clear Federal jurisdiction (i.e. not issues like state and local sales taxes) the Commerce Clause effectively overrides any gameds about where a company does business.

I believe we have a new Slashdotism...

Most definitely a teal quirk, along with the fact that much of the Apple-bashing comes with Android cheerleading (has anyone actually tried to use a Xoom?) There haven't been HP fanbois in a long time, so an HP article is doomed here to become a platform for Android v. iOS blather.

That is very much a variable between devices. To "root" my Samsung Moment I would need to set up a local Windows-on-bare-metal machine because they do something very wrong with USB. Some Moto devices have reportedly had ROM code to reverse unofficial mods.

The device makers and carriers are working hard to strangle Android's "openness" and succeeding.

False.

National currencies are backed by legal tender laws. People who owe taxes in the nation issuing a currency can pay those taxes with the legal tender currency and usually ONLY with that currency. Debts, sales, and many other forms of contract involving monetary payment are typically only enforceable in that nation as payable in the national currency. A government "backs" a currency by assuring that there are widely shared uses for that currency and that currency alone.

You misspelled "worse."

Not that inflating a currency to worthlessness is a good idea, but the fact that such a power is out there and could be used helps keep economies moving. If Pete Peterson, the Koch Brothers, Matty Moroun, and other holders of big piles of dollars could trust that those dollars would never lose value, they would have no incentive to put them to work in any way. At least now, those scumbags are shelling out to control the political system to maintain a deflationary (read: permanently depressed) economy and unavoidably pumping some of their dollars out in salaries for their shills.

Less cynical:
People with big piles of cash can put it in T-bills and brokered FDIC-insured deposits and actual big piles of cash and be sure of having the same number of dollars plus a tiny bit more next year, and their capital will be useless to the economy at large. If they are concerned that inflation will erode the value of their dollars, maybe they will put money into Aa-rated munies and corporate bonds, uninsured money market funds, and blue chip stocks, to get a little edge on inflation. A little more inflation, and some of them will make riskier investments that actually stand a chance of yielding returns well above inflation and as a handy side-benefit actually fund real economic expansion and creation of value. The bottom line: a "rock solid" currency is a disincentive to risk taking and real investment, while "soft" money encourages the idle rich to put their money to work for real.

Shorter:
People with money fear inflation, people with debt love it, people with crazy great ideas need it.

It is also an inherent and permanent problem. There's no rational incentive to pay for anything in BTC that can be paid for in inflatable currencies, except at times when BTC valuation is in a bubble, when there's no reason for vendors to accept BTC as payment at "market" exchange rates. Because BTC are mathematically destined to face deflation in the long run, there's a permanent bias towards saving them whenever one can spend inflation-prone money instead. A hoarding incentive built into the currency works against its adoption.

The worst aspect of BTC is that people like Amir Taaki are central to its promotion. People who may truly have a religious devotion to "Crypto-Anarchism" but are either themselves absurdly ignorant of basic economics or are engaged in conscious fraud of the ignorant. His response to the question about the advantages of BTC was a couple of edge case anecdotes about foreign exchange and online commerce and an unsupported assertion that BTC will mean lower fees. As a matter of objective fact, most people never have any need to send money in a foreign currency, and his PayPal tale of woe is deceptive: you don't need a PayPal account to give money to someone who accepts PayPal only, because you can treat PayPal like a normal credit card acceptance system rather than open an account with them. As for a card getting rejected, well, cards get rejected. The reasons a valid card might get rejected are not especially more diverse or likely than the reason a BTC transaction might fail. That response tells me that he's either a fool or a con man. Unfortunately, people like him who inspire distrust are easy to find in the BTC world. Look at the MtGox fiasco for examples.

If you think that hasn't been happening, you're either too young or not paying attention.

A lot of Marx's and Engels' economic analysis has been vindicated by the events of the past century, but their political ideas have been thoroughly shredded by the attempts to apply them in the real world. Communism won't work until people are much smarter, more ethical, and more consistently rational than people have ever actually been. It would also help a great deal if the people claiming to attempt to implement Communism were not so consistently megalomaniacal sociopaths. That track record argues for a fatal flaw in the ideology.

People have been saying that about Communism for a long time...

Bitcoin as an idea sucks because it incorporates features of a strain of economic delusion that worships the "hardness" of money. This does battle with centuries of macroeconomic theory and evidence, which demonstrates and explains the reality that a currency which holds its value (or worse, inherently gains in value over time like Bitcoin) will tend to move out of circulation wherever a weaker currency can be used. This means that BTC are doomed to be used for religious reasons (i.e. as an expression of devotion to St. Ayn) and in cases where using normal currencies is in some way difficult or risky. This is why the most prominent use of BTC is the drug trade. Since BTC will tend to get more valuable over time (even now!) people who have both BTC and inflatable money will lean towards their own best interest and tend to hoard the BTC while spending their "real" money. The only way vendors who accept both BTC and $ can get customers to pay in BTC is to contribute to the natural deflation by giving a relative discount for payment in BTC. That takes more religious devotion than just about any vendors have when it comes to their bottom lines.

Not so much, or at least not always.

For some phones (e.g. the Samsung Moment, released November 2009) you MUST have a real Windows machine (i.e. not even a VM ) to replace the manufacturer's deathgrip firmware. See, the "USB" port is shaped right and everything and often acts much like a real USB port, but when it comes to flashing the devices, well, it isn't. It's something that you need special drivers to talk to, and unless you want to go writing almost-USB drivers for some other system, you are stuck needing Windows running on bare metal. I sure wish I'd known that in 2009... It's not that I would have bought an iPhone (AT&T signal is zero where I am sitting) but it definitely would have made me more careful. Based on what I've read, Motorola and HTC have also worked to make it difficult to reflash their handsets. I'm not sure that there's a device running Android that is worth having once you eliminate the makers who have worked to close the mythical openness of Android.

I think that's what has essentially ruined any sort of advantage Android might have had over other platforms based on its "openness." It's a myth that come very close to fraud, missing only because the real evangelists of the myth are fanboys rather than anyone selling anything. It would be easier for me to jailbreak an iPhone than to flash my Moment with Android 2.2, even if I did have a Windows machine to do so with. For most users, a phone OS is not usefully "open" if their device manufacturer and carrier want it to be closed, as is the case for the biggest device manufacturers and all of the major US carriers. Making that worse, the resource demands of Android have increased so much with successive versions that I doubt it would even make sense to try 2.3. The same has not been true of iOS over the same period. The unfortunate reality is that people who bought the latest iOS devices in the second half of 2009 (i.e. iPhone 3GS and 3rd gen. Touch) are still able to run the latest iOS rather painlessly, whereas most people who bought Android devices during the same period are probably never going to see anything later than 2.1 in a form that is easy to install and even those who do get 2.2 will probably not be happy with what they get. It's enough to make me miss Palm...

There is a logical fallacy there.

It is entirely possible that you are working for the company I worked for from 2001-2008, which was the IT subsidiary of 2 different major EU-based multinationals during that period. We moved a lot of the IT operational support for the US branch of our parent and main customer to Brazil and Mexico during my tenure. All of that was done in a successful effort to reduce costs and as far as I know there have been no reversals of that "offshoring." However, the quality of service in all cases was ravaged by the offshoring and that was never considered a justification for reversing or even slowing the evacuation of US-based support to cheaper places. For a few years I thought this was a matter of ignorance, denial, or maybe even corrupt empire-building by managers who were on temporary US duty. However, on my way out (as I was tasked with handing my work to people in Mexico) I had a revelatory discussion with the bean-counters who drove the offshoring. It turns out that everyone in management on both the IT support side and the "business" side understood that offshoring was a deal to cut quality, and that this was not simply an unfortunate price of cost control but was to some degree a "handy side benefit." Offshoring support broke the costly feedback loop of better service always ratcheting up customer expectations of service quality. We in the US were well past the point of diminishing returns from service quality improvements, and management saw that the most effective and sustainable way to cut costs by accepting worse service was to break the relationship between support staff and their customers and to impair a redevelopment of such a relationship that would lead to another spiral of improving service quality and customer satisfaction in a reality where you get what you pay for. As the exec who was 'slumming' at a DR test during my last month put it, the business side and IT side US employees had conspired to make the shareholders in Germany pay for a four nines environment where he couldn't see how it made sense to pay for the third nine, which he was sure the team in Mexico would never offer. As harsh as such an assessment might be, it is sound business.