> Despite AWFUL national and international reporting on the Supreme court, their powers are actually quite limited. Their authority is restricted to interpretation of situations where written federal laws do not already exist.
This is pretty directly refuted by Dobbs. Roe v. Wade was not ambiguous and was a settled matter of constitutional law until the new court decided they didn't like it.
> This is pretty directly refuted by Dobbs. Roe v. Wade was not ambiguous and was a settled matter of constitutional law until the new court decided they didn't like it.
I don’t like the decision here as well for political reasons, but if you read the arguments the Supreme Court is just saying that abortion law is a state issue not a federal one. Which limits the power of the federal government. Which is good.
The part where women have to register their periods and have them tracked and might get arrested if they miss a cycle, or put in jail for buying contraceptives, or for googling the wrong things, or are forced to carry a dead fetus to term - which actually happened because in some states the ban on abortion is absolute, with fifteen states not even having exceptions for rape or incest - is not good. The part where doctors are afraid to perform procedures on pregnant women for fear of committing a felony? Not good. The part where Americans don't seem to care about the actual human cost of rights being taken away as long as it weakens the federal government is not good.
Looking at how Southern states seem to be competing to out-fascist each other right now, devolving everything to states' rights seems like a bad idea. If it were entirely left up to the states, half of them would be hunting gays for sport. Having common standards as a culture enshrined in law and a central government strong enough to protect and enforce those standards also seems good. It's weird that this isn't even up for debate where gun rights are concerned but bodily autonomy, rights to privacy and free speech are all up in the air.
There is no such thing as "settled" constitutional law for the Supreme Court. They are not bound by their own precedents and always have the authority to revisit prior decisions.
I don't like the results of the Dobbs decision either. But the root cause of the problem was always legislative, not judicial. When the legislature fails to make the laws clear, anything that ends up in front of the Supreme Court is going to be a toss-up. Tell your members of Congress to do better.
Thanks, this doesn't address what I said at all. What I said is that Dobbs refutes the idea that the Supreme Court's authority is limited to "interpreting situations where federal law does not already exist". There's no question that prior to Dobbs, Roe existed, was not ambiguous, and was the legally operative interpretation of the constitution.
What if I told you that the time and effort required to develop and deploy accurate tracking metrics for every employee's individual productivity and the negative externalities that would fall out of openly stratifying worker pay based on these minutiae (worker dissatisfaction, turnover, degraded performance, poor reputation among potential new hires) would outweigh the benefit your marginal increase in motivation and job satisfaction brings to your employer?
Say I have a fairly good idea how to make a #3 product in a category a #1 product in a category. But, my work life balance would suck for a couple of years and I would have to be more adversarial with others to get them to pull their weight and not waste time on bad ideas. Eventually, if it works, existing employees will benefit from growth and new ones will want to join a success story.
Or maybe I am mistaken and someone else is more capable of making the top product, in which case I might still get my own team out of growth. Let there be some meritocratic process and ability to assume responsibility for risks and reap the rewards. But if there is no potential reward, why should I suffer from overwork and inevitable interpersonal conflict when stuff needs to get done? Why should anyone? Eventually the whole product will be cancelled since it's not making headway and all of us will move to new gigs.
Who are you even responding to? No one's arguing the science, they're talking about the size of the settlement relative to the corporation's financials.
Does anyone actually think the trackpoint is superior to a modern trackpad like what apple is using? This seems like a fetish object with a vocal following.
If you are doing a lot of typing, why move your hand off the keys? Scrolling by holding the middle mouse button with your thumb and just slightly moving the TrackPoint is also a much a nicer experience thank scrolling with any touchpad. Using laptops with only touchpads is always an uncomfortable and inefficient experience to me.
Having more manufacturers of decent laptops with TrackPoints would be great instead of mostly just being beholding to Lenovo.
A tool that I use productively every day is not something I would describe as a "fetish object". I've put years of use into mice, trackpads, and pointing sticks, and I've found pointing sticks to be the most comfortable and efficient tool for me. There are other people who feel differently for any number of reasons, but TrackPoint users are entitled to their preferences just as other people are entitled to theirs. Nobody needs to prove that their preference is "superior" before they buy the product they want.
The only remaining laptop maker that puts a serious effort into implementing pointing sticks into their devices is Lenovo with their ThinkPad lines. Unfortunately, Lenovo has been making negative changes to ThinkPads over the years, such as soldering memory and reducing key travel. This opens up an opportunity for other laptop makers (such as System76) to claim the TrackPoint users who only are only buying ThinkPads because the TrackPoint makes up for the other disadvantages.
I have a laptop with both a trackpoint and a touchpad with physical buttons. I bought it specifically for those buttons, but that's another story. I never use a mouse except once every few years, if I have to try some game. Move and click does not work on a touchpad.
So, I attempted to learn to use the trackpoint but it's too difficult. My hands are already close to the touchpad and very far from the mouse, that's why I don't use a mouse anymore. The incremental benefit to switch from touchpad to trackpoint is very small IMHO. Moving from mouse to trackpoint is probably huge.
You can't really say one is "superior" or even objectively better. Apple's touchpads are <unspecified amount> better than others but I still hate them and would always use a trackpoint (if I can't have a mouse).
Some people swear that trackballs are better than a mouse, can you argue the mouse is superior? It's a question of preference and discussion on this level is kinda pointless.
I’ve used one a long time ago and I did like it. The fact that you don’t have to move your hands off the keyboard is it’s main selling point. Though I’ve adjusted to not having one.
At one point my work mouse had a track point instead of a scroll wheel. That was amazing. To be able to scroll around at different speeds.
To me it's a superior concept with an inferior execution. Perhaps because nobody else does it, so no competition or innovation, like Apple came out with a much better trackpad, were ahead a while, and now it seems mostly levelled.
Yes, the way consumers perceive your pricing matters. If you lose a key, you need to call a locksmith; it's rare that someone needs to buy a new apple laptop.
> whereby the defendant is forced to share code against their will.
This remedy of compelling a party to do something they agreed to do is called 'specific performance', and US courts only even consider doing this when real property (land) is involved.
For copyright infringement, generally what's available is injunctive relief preventing further infringement, disgorgement of profits, and statutory damages and attorneys fees as permitted by title 17. The injunction and disgorgement are the killers here that actually scare would-be infringers, and they mean that in most cases what you actually end up with is a settlement.
Which is why it would be nice for the Supreme Court to confirm GPL's enforceability. It hasn't been tested in courts, but it would be insanely powerful for the open source community to begin enforcing it.
It would extend the right to repair to the software that we write.
For what it's worth, the Federal Circuit, the Eleventh Circuit, and the Seventh Circuit have heard cases dealing with the GPL or some other open source license, and they all understood the big picture and were fine with it. (the cases are Planetary Motion v. Techsplosion, Wallace v. IBM, and Jacobsen v. Katzer).
> only even consider doing this when real property (land) is involved.
Courts force the sale of companies (etc) that don't involve real property. I think maybe they're reluctant and prefer monetary remedies but if what you say is correct that would neuter contracts pretty severely.
Specific performance is most common in real property disputes because land is inherently non-fungible. But in most US states a court can order it wherever it finds that monetary damages are inadequate to remedy a breach.
Exactly. This fantasy of forcing companies to release source code because of past use is just that: a fantasy.
Imagine if you pirated photoshop and the courts retroactively forced you to install Adobe spyware to comply with the license. Obviously the most the court could do is fine you or prevent further infringement.
It's no more fanciful than assessing exorbitant damages for distributing each copy made via BitTorrent. The courts were fine with letting that happen.
Just because the plaintiffs aren't operating billion dollar businesses doesn't make their infringement claims less valid. The terms of the GPL explicitly spell out Deere's obligations. If they ignore them it converts to plain old copyright infringement with damages due for every illegal copy made.
It's not as simple as that. What if it infeasible to remove the GPL code from your product and are unwilling to withdraw your product. It could be argued that compensation would be unacceptable, inadequate and impractical given hundreds of anonymous contributors writing software on an ideological, rather than financial basis. Why would being forced to share your code be taken off the table in that case? I could see the court finding that it would be the only equitable remedy.
Sure, but infeasible is decided by the business. Their choice is either to not distribute anymore (and potentially pay damages for past infringement) or distribute in line with the license.
You settle the individual lawsuit with the party that started it. For a work with multiple authors, that wouldn't prevent the other copyright holders from suing you. This is one of the reasons GPL projects make lawyers risk-averse...
Generally the way GPL has been in the courts, the suing party won't just take some money and walk away happy, they'll ask for the infringement to end (one way or the other). That would make other copyright holders happy too.
Whoever/whatever owns the copyright to the underlying work(s) would need to sue to get the ball rolling. Current statutory law doesn't directly address copyright ownership with respect to the kinds of collaboration we see in open source, but if there's a "main author" for the code base you would just need them in most cases.
The entirety of IP law. I don't have to think of non-competes as patents or a way of protecting trade secrets, because patents and trade secrets have their own separate (and quite potent) legal protections.
Those on the receiving end of SBF's generosity wouldn't want to send a message to future benefactors that their money won't actually get them what they want when the chips are down.
I mean, yes, sure, they wouldn't want to send that message, but they still have to motivate the future benefactors and not the past ones with what limited resources are available.
I assume you have had plenty of experience in life where people praise you for one thing, but reward you for another.
It seems like there have been a lot of mentions of SBF on HN.
Alex Mashinsky strikes me as an even less sympathetic character, who made some of the all time poorest aging comments prior to his downfall, like "either we're lying or the banks are lying", and yet I couldn't find a single thread with his name that had any comments on HN.
There were quite a few Celsius threads, but "Mashinsky" doesn't seem to have attracted interest.
I don't make up or subscribe to conspiracy theories, so I have no hypothesis to explain this, but it has long seemed inexplicable to me how some things get 700 comments here and others get zero without a difference that seems salient to me.
> It is better because arbitration agreements in a competitive employment market makes wages to be pushed higher or consumer prices to be pushed lower.
Prove it.
A very small fraction of civil cases are resolved by jury verdict. If the plaintiff's case has merit, the point is to get the other side to settle. You sound like a big markets guy. What could be more fair than the parties working out a settlement deal between themselves? No middleman or arbitrator needed.
Prove that competitive pressures reduce margins and unbound risk reduces investment? Sorry but you just have to understand how the world works: This is a natural consequence of people having multiple choices and picking the best one.
> What could be more fair than the parties working out a settlement deal between themselves?
What's more fair is, obviously, working out a settlement deal where the alternative is arbitration, instead of a jury. (Why are you teeing up such easy questions?)
> Prove that competitive pressures reduce margins and unbound risk reduces investment?
Prove that any of the mechanisms you're describing are in play, in the way you claim they are. I'm sure every question you read becomes very easy when you begin from the assumption that "this is how the world works".
Show me the law that permits juries to award arbitrary damages for employment disputes creating "unbounded risk", and show me that a jury has actually done it.
> What's more fair is, obviously, working out a settlement deal where the alternative is arbitration, instead of a jury.
Ah yes, the gold standard of due process, fairness, and impartiality, enshrined in our constitution, the arbitrator. You know it's fair because of how badly the employer wants it and the fact that states are trying to make these contractual provisions illegal.
The punitives in that case were capped; the law of the land is that punitive damages exceeding ten times compensatory damages are presumptively unconstitutional, and the judge in that case slashed the suggested punitives by like 90% to put them below said cap. I can assure you Tesla's legal team knew this and did not make personnel decisions under the assumption that they faced "unbounded risk".
This is pretty directly refuted by Dobbs. Roe v. Wade was not ambiguous and was a settled matter of constitutional law until the new court decided they didn't like it.