Comment Re:Now do USPS (Score 1) 66
Never going to happen. The junk mail lobby has too much influence in Congress, and Congress gets free use of the postal service for "constituent communications" (aka electioneering).
Never going to happen. The junk mail lobby has too much influence in Congress, and Congress gets free use of the postal service for "constituent communications" (aka electioneering).
There are a couple of things going on there. First of all, schools are really designed to teach kids en masse. If you had to teach ONE kid, you'd never set that kid up as we do, where a kid sits down and a teacher talks to them from the front of a room and, after that, gives the student a few minutes of individual attention. The classroom format is designed to maximize the amount of the teacher's time spent teaching while trying to maximize the aggregate learning of the class. But, that means that, for any particular kid, there's a fair bit of the class time when they're not learning at all or learning slower than they are capable of.
You can offset that, some, with differentiated instruction where you put the "smart" kids together -- there, the teacher can go at a faster pace, can provide more challenging work, and so on. But, it still has the same fundamental flaw -- you're optimizing for use of the teacher's time, not the student's.
The other thing is that schools, especially public schools, are bureaucracies that tend to be driven by centralized policy, not by individual decision making at that staff level. Part of that is necessity, but part of it is because administrators don't trust student-facing staff to make good decisions and are also hyper-concerned with liability when student X gets to do something when student Y doesn't. If X and Y are of different races, then there will be a claim that Y was denied BECAUSE of his/her race, even if the decision ultimately made sense for both X and Y.
Anybody who's looked up recipes online recently knows that they're being used mainly as a way to serve you ads. Before the recipe is a bunch of ad-ridden prose about the recipe itself, with some pictures. Then, at the bottom of the page is the recipe. Google was making the content more easily available, but destroying the ad revenue.
Gotta publish....
They're focusing on this sort of thing:
Betty Smith will give to her mother Gloria Smith (hereinafter "Gloria") one million dollars (the "Payment") on December 1st (the "Payment Date"). Gloria agrees to deposit the Payment at First National Bank (the "Bank") on the Payment Date.
And saying that you only do that in legal writing, not when you're telling a narrative story.
In a narrative story, you might say this:
Betty gave her mom $1M in December 1st. On that date, she deposited it at First National Bank.
There's ambiguity in the narrative story (who did the deposit -- Betty or her Mom?) In legal writing, you're trying to avoid that ambiguity even if you end up with long hard-to-read sentences. If you're telling a story, it's ok to have a little ambiguity and you trust that the reader will figure it out.
It's not surprising that non-lawyers start to use those mid-sentence definitions when they write legal documents -- they're trying to solve the same problem with ambiguity that the lawyers try. It's like saying "novice coders end up using variables just like experienced coders do."
According to the Article, it looks like it was a guy in Houston who got a bit under $291,000.
Not sure how much luck JPMorgan is going to have in the lawsuit department -- people who do this sort of thing aren't exactly the sort of people who are likely to just invest the money. Chances are it's mostly gone.
Note that the online terms are what govern CloudStrike's relationships with small businesses where the size of the business doesn't justify CloudStrike's negotiating a separate agreement. Bigger companies negotiate their own agreements. If you're in the legal department at, say, American Airlines, you don't say "Oh, your extremely one-sided terms of service are perfectly ok with us." Instead, you hand CloudStrike your 40-page agreement that is very one-sided in your favor. And then you spend a couple of months negotiating that agreement.
But, in the final agreement, there will be a section addressing liability. And, in general, CloudStrike is going to have standards of what they will agree to v. what they won't. CloudStrike just isn't going to agree to be responsible for all the harm suffered by its customers -- there's just no way they could buy enough insurance to cover all that risk and, if they did, the price of their product would go through the roof. So, they're going to say something like "Look, you can get your money back (or 3x your money back, or 5x your money back)" or "You can get back at most $5M" and they'll say "If you need more coverage than that, then you need to get your own insurance."
Uh. No. Section 230 says that Cox won't be treated as the publisher. That doesn't help it with the copyright issues, which are governed by Section 512 of the Copyright Act (the DMCA). Under Section 512, an ISP isn't liable for the activities of its users if it implements a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat infringers. The claims against Cox were that Cox didn't actually implement that policy, so that liability shield (the "DMCA Safe Harbor") didn't apply to it.
(1) GOODs have an obligation to be fit for their intended use. If they're not, then that's either a warranty question or a products liability question. SERVICES, on the other hand, are governed by contract. And, in Google's terms of service for Google maps, they specifically disclaim this sort of liability.
(2) In any case, the suit is in negligence, not products liability. And, there they run into a problem because North Carolina is a contributory negligence state. This means that if the driver could have avoided the accident by acting prudently, then *even if Google breached its duty of care* the driver can't collect.
(3) the "You were told about this multiple times" argument doesn't really go that far. Google can't change something just because it's gotten multiple reports. If it did, then you could easily see a group of teenage pranksters reporting things that just weren't true. And, it's not like they have somebody actually reviewing every image taken with Google Street view.
(4) One thing going against the driver is that it's been 9 years. If it really were the case that a reasonably prudent driver wouldn't have noticed, then you would have expected somebody else to have done the same thing in the previous 9 years.
In less than a century, computers will be making substantial progress on ... the overriding problem of war and peace. -- James Slagle