rarw

A privacy pledge, how cute! The problem with stuff like this is not knowing the third, fouth, and fifth party uses. Granted most user's don't read these disclosure and even more don't have the technical aspects of how this works. But even if you're ok with one big evil company have access to your inbox, allowing two just seems crazy. What happens when LinkedIn think of a cool way to use your emails from five years ago? By cool I of course mean horrifying.

Which is why I said "articles like this" and not "this article." Your quote is correct. My comment was on the general scope of anti-surveillance writing.

Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never address (1) the legitimate need for surveillance; (2) dangers of an internet (or other communications networks) which law enforcement or government cannot access at all; (3) the problems with arguing that government (or anyone for that matter) should be banned from collecting and reading data sent across the web.

I understand the concern. As someone who has advocated for stronger electronic privacy regulation, no one likes someone having the ability to look through their stuff. However, the answer is more likely a balance than a denunciation of all surveillance in any form. Surveillance with restriction is fine and probably a good thing. It helps prevent crime and can help catch criminals once crimes happen. Just as it's easy to argue that a government with information will misuse it, bad people with a closed communication network will use it to commit crime. Sure not everyone is going to plan a terrorist strike, or organize a gang online but some will. Is it worth enabling that kind of behavior?

Also what should and should not be private also has to do with where/when the information is collected. If the government were hacking into all of our computers and keeping back ups of our hard drives that's very different from collecting things that are sent on the internet. Legally there is currently a big debate about how to treat something that is taken from a stored medium - like a hard drive - vs one that is captured in transmission - like an email being sent. As it currently stands the government would have a hard time justifying accessing your computer remotely without a warrant but an easy time reading emails once they left your computer. Why? Because the sent email is akin to yelling something in a public place. Once it leaves your computer, it's not private while its being transmitted. If this sounds like a stupid distinction, that's because it is.

#1 bugs me the most. False urgency is the name of the game everywhere I've ever worked. From my experience it's a problem of how the company is structured. When everyone thinks what they are working on or assigning is top priority it's because (a) they really don't have a sense of what is actually important (b) managment is fragmented such that each person's individual most important task seems like a global most important task.

In a law firm, which is basicly 1000 separate practices trying to exist simultaneously, this happens all the time, usually because of option b. When a "team" is really a group of people who happen to be in the same place instead of a collaborative unit, what is imporant is up to each person. It's a bad way a run a business and totally messes with your employees.

You're right. The comment that you should buy stock with legal income and pay back a mortgage with the illegal income misses the point completely. Buying stock was just one example of how transfering illegaly acquired funds into something that increases in value does not protect your initial investment. Anything you do with illegal income would be seizable property.

Paying into a mortgage as the same effect. As you pay back a mortgage you acquire equity in the property. The government would then be able to seize your equity in the house, meaning they could sell the property and after paying back the remainder of the mortgage keep the difference.

I think the seizure of Silk Road absolutly had an impact on the value of BitCoins. The benefit of using BitCoins is that they provide a way to operate outside of traditional currency structures. Once BitCoins becomes something that can be seized, regulated, tracked, it becomes just like regular cash. That makes them a whole lot less valuable.

The more interesting question regarding this seizure is whether the FBI can compell the creators of BitCoin to assist in decrypting what they have just seized. For example, there are a number of statutes that require those operating communications networks maintain the ability for the governemnt to access them regardless of the encryption or other security features being used. I don't know the corresponding baking law as well but it would not surprise me if the same laws that require banks to comply with seizing fund, blocking wire transfers, and tracking where money goes in the course of a criminal investigation could kick in here.

Certainly something like this would have a big effect on the BitCoin market. I'm interested to see what happens in the future.

The current valuation is irrelivant. Federal seizure laws allow the government to seize any property, money or bitcoins included, that were used in or generated from some illegal activity.

If my illegal activity generates 1 bitcoin which, 2.5 years later is worth 10 bitcoins, all 10 bitcoins can be seized since they all originated from the original seizable piece of property.

Were this not the case and only the orignial result of an illegal transaction could be seized those running illegal operations would be able to profit from their crimes by simply converting one type of property into another that could increase in value. For example, if you sold 20,000,000 in drugs and purchased 20,000,000 in stock, it does not make sense that, once your property is seized, you can keep the increase in value between when you broke the law and when you got caught. This would make crime much more profitable which is the opposite goal of the seizure laws.

Turning one's passion into a job almost always has this result. Work is never as exciting as doing something for the sake of doing it because work always has a finite list of things that must be done even if you don't want to. It doesn't matter if you're a programmer or a rock star. The routine of having to do something you don't want to do, whether that be write tests or perform the same hit song every day for 20 years, sucks. The trick is to try and find a balance. Do the boring stuff to pay the bills but find/make time to work on something that you actually enjoy. Sure it's not exactly easy to do but once you get out of school/your parents house - that's life.

You could almost certainly find a away to pierce the corporate veil in this case so that's not really a concern.

Good luck finding a cheap patent attorney. All those admitted to the patent bar must have a technical background. That only raises the price.

Just wanted to note that there are frivolous litigation rules that allow for sanctions against the party bringing a bogus suit and allow the target of the suit to recover attorneys fees. It would be standard practice to include within the motion to dismiss a section also moving for these remedies. Thus it is likley that the cost to fight back against the troll would not have been 200k - with or without the pro bono.

Sure in some cases. Don't forget that patents cover a diverse array of innovations. What exactly is being infringed upon is not always that obvious.

Sure, there are always risks with litigation but in general it is not as unpredictable as outsiders think.

That's not really how things work. Not only is that sanctionable but extremely unethical and would result in diciplinary action if reported.

It actually happens all the time. The heightened pleading standard comes from two cases - Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937, 1953 (2009). As the Twombly court described it - The "[f]actual allegations must be enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative level, on the assumption that all the allegations in the complaint are true." What this ends up requiring is that the plaintiff state specific factual allegations as to what the defendant is actually doing wrong. This sounds like a pretty good idea but in many cases is much more difficult than you'd think. Usually the difficultly arises because the information that supports your complaint, i.e. what the defendant is doing wrong, is totally within their control. You, as a plaintiff bringing an action, do not have access to this information until discovery starts, which is only after the complaint and an answer have been filed.

Think of it this way. You have a patent. You're pretty sure, but not positive, someone is infringing on it. Without the ability to inspect the supposed infringer's facilities, how do you plead with particularity factual allegations sufficient to support an infringment claim? If the infringment is blatent, sure this is easy. But in more nuanced cases (I can't think of a technical exmaple) it is possible to end up in a siuation where actual infringment is occuring but because of an inability to access the right information there is not enough available to sufficiently plead a claim.

Probably not. Enforcing a patent is expensive (as most litigation is). If this law penalized trolls who filed worthless claims but rewarded those who were legitimately being infringed on then if anything it would make it less risky.

As a lawyer I'm always concerned about changes designed to make it harder to sue someone. You almost always end up with unintended consequences. Take for example the heightened pleading standard. This standard has been used with other case types in which the allegations are considered dangerous to one's reputation, like fraud or discrimination. In many situations, people with legitimate claims have been unable to overcome the heightened pleading standard, not because their claim is weak, but because the evidence required to plead the claim is difficult to come by.

Many of the changes suggested by the article can already be accomplished using existing procedural devices. The only provision I see as having any teeth is the one that deals with fee shifting. Fee shifting provisons are a big deal as recoving attorneys fees is very rare in the American legal system. Generally fee shifting provisions allow the winner to collect legal fees even if nominal damages (e.g. $1) are awarded. This greatly increases the risk of trolling since any loss, no matter how small, could equal hundreds or thousands (probably millions) of dollars in legal fees owed to the other side.

I think the point of the article is more that it's a problem when something that contains these drugs lables itself as a "natural supplement" when in fact it is not. The issue is not so much const control as it is deceptive marketing.

I applaud the writer for his approach to making his own hub for his team. However, this is not a real 1-1 swap. In terms of pure functionality this may be an even exchange; his own platform might meet his needs just as well as GitHub. Yet it lacks major benefit - the community/public aspect of that environment. Duplicating that factor would take too much time an effort when you could just pay 7 bucks a month for the same thing.

Sometimes, while its fun to reinvent things, it just makes more sense to use what's there.

Aside from fighting over whether Android is closed or not this is an interesting solution to dealing with the inconsistencies present in the Android universe. The freedom everyone wants to love that comes with a fully open source Android platform is, in reality, a real pain when you're trying to develop apps. There is at best a plurality of different operating system versions. Phone manufactureres spontaneously stop supporting devcies, only pushing out updates to the newest of the new. OS improvements are lost on those devices left behind until the users can afford a new device or reach the point where they can upgrade.

Unlike Apple, where the iOS landscape is 100% consistent (minus physical hardware variations) Android is a mess. Before going to town on Google for "closing" the operating system, let's at least look at the problem they are trying to solve and how this attempt - I'm not saying it's correct, or good - addresses those issues.

Poor guy. I wonder how many light bulbs he had to screw in before people learned his name.

Reverse Polish Notation - sounds like the punch line to a really bad math joke

That's gotta be the hackiest hack ever - write it on the outside. Genius.

Yea that or just some dude selling K2 out of his basement would have been fine by me

I'm not sure I agree with the authors argument that you don't need to use computers to be a computer scientist. Computer science, to be a bit recursive, is the science of solving problems with a computer. Much in the way a hammer is the tool by which a carpenter builds a chair (I know it takes more than one tool) the skill of programming is the tool by which the scientist implements their solution. In both cases, it's not possible to separate the theoretical aspects of the profession from the implementation so easily.

A computer scientist is a computer scientist because he/she uses the computer - i.e. programs it or comes up with a recipie others can follow in programming it - to solve a particular problem. If you never use the computer you become something else - mathematician, philosopher, etc. In the same way a carpenter who never builds a chair is probably not really a carpenter. Lumberjack? Architect? Engineer? All of these are possible. But in both cases the implementation of the idea is an important part of the job description.

I think the real difficulty (and what I suspect is bothering the author) is that saying "I program computers" is a gross oversimplification of the task at hand. People, probably unfairly, tend to focus on the end product as the basis of your job description. In many skilled professions, like computer science, that model is often inaccurate. Saying "I program computers" or "I make chairs" is deeply unsatisfying becuase it no where near encompases what you actually do and that sucks.

I don't even know how that argument makes any sense.

I love a good old does-the-4th-Amendment-cover-cell-phone-data debate. However, there's a lot of misinformation going on about the current state of ECPA (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act), what it covers and what it does not. Some brief points.

(1) A number of courts have outright rejected the argument that location information is covered by the pen register act simply because its shared with a third party service. This section of ECPA followed in the wake of Smith which found that since there was no expectation of privacy in your phone number (beacause after all it was listed in the phone book) there was no violation if your number, and the number you were calling were recorded. Where you are at any given moment involves a very different set of data. Many courts recognize this.

(2) In many cases the basic reasonable expectation of privacy analysis does not apply in these data oriented situations. ECPA's application is further complicated by the fact that how information is treated depends on whether it is retrieved from storage or captured while it is being transmitted. The 7th circuit recently addressed this issue and determined that it should not matter how you get someones digital information. However, that is not the law all over the country. In many cases whether this "dump" was received as a result of a file containing location data or recorded live as it came off the tower matters.

For those of you more interested on this subject I wrote a paper on this back when I was in law school http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1988546 and would be happy to discuss further

Am I the only one who was really excited until it turned out he was selling coffee?

I'm surprised Icahn is allowed to have a twitter. Regulators used to limit access to certain information sharing outlets for those in positions of influence, e.g. certain high level bank official could not have BBM (I know right) active on their Blackberries because of the risk of insider trading. When a tweet has the power to move the market it should probably be treated the same.