decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
One Walmart's Low Wages Could Cost Taxpayers $900,000 Per Year | 195 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
One more judge gets it
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 01 2013 @ 08:45 PM EDT

http://www.americanlawyer.com/dige stTAL.jsp?id=1202602565276&Tech_Companies_Defeat_Abstract_Acacia_Software_Pa tentLike this

-------------------
Steve Stites

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Deterrent to Windows 8?
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 01 2013 @ 10:31 PM EDT
I have to dual-boot Windows 7 and 8 (long story). Have Office 2010 on Win 7
partition. Won't run from Win 8 partition ("not presently
configured"). Looks like I gotta pay for a new license to run it in Win 8,
even though it's on the same machine.

Wonder if this applies to businesses as well. If so, seems like a huge deterrent
to Win 8 adoption for businesses to shell out for a new Office license for it.
Maybe an upgrade, rather than a dual boot, takes care of this?

Anyway, my Win 8 workaround is LibreOffice 4.0.3.3.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

For Students of The First Amendment
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 03:33 AM EDT
“[T]here were some shouts from the crowd, and people wanting [Luntz] to be taken off the record. So he asked any reporters to raise their hands, and there was only one reporter present, a staff reporter from the Daily Pennsylvanian, our school paper; he identified himself, and was asked if he would mind going off the record. He said absolutely not, and he turned off his recording device, and that’s about when I turned mine on.”
The New Yorker

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Just the name different
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 05:27 AM EDT
On reading this I was reminded that I had said much the same thing would happen, back in 2000 on OSOpinion.com, when Kelly McNeil was still in charge and it was still a going concern.

Amusing that Microsoft doesn't seem to have any traction in this field.

Wesley Parish

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

One Walmart's Low Wages Could Cost Taxpayers $900,000 Per Year
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 07:48 AM EDT
Walmart wages are so low that many of its workers rely on food stamps and other government aid programs to fulfill their basic needs, a reality that could cost taxpayers as much as $900,000 at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin, according to a [.PDF] study released by Congressional Democrats.

[...]

After accounting for the total number of Walmart stores and employees across the state and the per-person costs of BadgerCare, as the state’s health care program is known, the report's authors estimated that the cost of publicly funded health care comes to $251,706 per year for a 300-employee Supercenter.

The authors then added up the projected costs of other public-assistance programs available to families on BadgerCare, such as reduced-price school meals, Section 8 housing assistance, the earned income tax credit and energy assistance. Assuming all those workers avail themselves of those additional programs -- granted, an unlikely scenario -- the report extrapolates that the final tab would top $900,000.

Dave Jamieson and Saki Knafo, Huffington Post

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Apple, betrayed by its own law firm ?
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 08:24 AM EDT
When a company called FlatWorld Interactives LLC filed suit against Apple just over a year ago, it looked like a typical "patent troll" lawsuit against a tech company, brought by someone who no longer had much of a business beyond lawsuits.

Court documents unsealed this week have shown who's behind FlatWorld, and it's anything but typical. FlatWorld is partly owned by the named inventor on the patents, a Philadelphia design professor named Slavko Milekic. But 35 percent of the company has been quietly controlled by an attorney at one of Apple's own go-to law firms, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. E-mail logs show that the attorney, John McAleese, worked together with his wife and began planning a wide-ranging patent attack against Apple's touch-screen products in January 2007—just days after the iPhone was revealed to the world. 

Jennifer McAleese reached out to numerous "troll patent" companies, as she called them, convinced that she and Milekic had an "excellent position against Apple" if and when they chose to sue. She emailed top patent lawyers at Google and Nokia, competitors known to be in patent clashes with Apple.

The whole time, she was advised by her husband, a lawyer who had access to reams of confidential Apple data—but who says he never touched it. (Apple doesn't see it that way.) Together, the McAleeses created "an indirect and covert pipeline" of information pumped to to FlatWorld's attorneys, say Apple lawyers. Now Apple wants FlatWorld's law firm, Seattle-based Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, kicked off the case.

Joe Mullin, ars technica

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Graphene, strongest material in the world
Authored by: Gringo_ on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 11:34 AM EDT

Forget the old saw about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin...

In perfect crystalline form, graphene is so strong that it would take an elephant, placed on top of a pencil, to pierce through a sheet of graphene as thick as a piece of Saran Wrap.

It appears that for useful applications, processing graphene into sheets big enough to be useful is the problem. Now it seems scientists have found a way to remove large sheets of graphene deposited on a substrate without damaging it. Even though containing grain boundaries rather than being one big crystal lattice, it can be 90% as strong as though it were. Hello Space Elevator.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

First Evidence Of Other Universes
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 11:42 AM EDT
"Our cosmos was 'bruised' in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background"

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/421999/astronomers-find-first-evidence-of-o ther-universes/

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Journey to the Center of the Earth
Authored by: Gringo_ on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 11:48 AM EDT

Along with H. G. Well's "The Time Machine", Jules Verne’s "Journey to the Center of the Earth" were my favourite of all stories when I was a kid. Today we know the centre of the earth is not much like Jules Verne imagined it, but most of what we know about it is derived from seismic wave analyses, and we have an incomplete picture. For example, what causes the heat at the core?

With today’s technology, we can now probe Earth’s interior using neutrinos.

Researchers using a detector in Japan reported several years ago that they had counted neutrinos coming from Earth’s interior. But there was enough uncertainty in the measurement that these results didn’t get much attention.

The bulk of the neutrinos they measured came from manmade nuclear reactors in Japan, and the geo-neutrino signal was only a small fraction.

Last month, new results were released from a neutrino detector in Italy that had much less interference from above-ground reactors. Made from ultra-pure materials, the Italian detector is more sensitive to geo-neutrinos than its Japanese counterpart.

The results of these two detectors agree and indicate that the primary heat source in Earth’s interior is from radioactive decay of trace amounts of uranium and thorium.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

China e-waste basket of the world.
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 04:08 PM EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/30/world/asia/china-electronic- waste-e-waste/index. html

In one workshop, men sliced open sacks of these plastic chips, which they then poured into large vats of fluid. They then used shovels and their bare hands to stir this synthetic stew.

"We sell this plastic to Foxconn," one of the workers said, referring to a Taiwanese company that manufactures products for many global electronics companies, including Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

European Commission criminalize unregistered seeds and plants?
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 05:35 PM EDT
`A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to "grow, reproduce or trade" any vegetable seeds that have not been "tested, approved and accepted" by a new EU bureaucracy named the "EU Plant Variety Agency."' link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Justice Dept.’s showdown with Apple over e-book pricing is set to enter courtroom
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 06:40 PM EDT
The Justice Department filed suit against Apple and five book publishers in April 2012, accusing them of price fixing in an effort to outflank Amazon in the market for e-books. All five publishers have settled with the government, but Apple has forged on to trial.

Justice Dept.’s showdown with Apple over e-book pricing is set to enter courtroom

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Matt Taibbi - Why Didn't the SEC Catch Madoff? It Might Have Been Policy Not To
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 10:15 PM EDT
More and more embarrassing stories of keep leaking out of the SEC, which is beginning to look somehow worse than corrupt – it's hard to find the right language exactly, but "aggressively clueless" comes pretty close to summing up the atmosphere that seems to be ruling the country's top financial gendarmes.  

The most recent contribution to the broadening canvas of dysfunction and incompetence surrounding the SEC is a whistleblower complaint filed by 56-year-old Kathleen Furey, a senior lawyer who worked in the New York Regional Office (NYRO), the agency outpost with direct jurisdiction over Wall Street.

Furey's complaint is full of startling revelations about the SEC, but the most amazing of them is that Furey and the other 20-odd lawyers who worked in her unit at the NYRO were actually barred by a superior from bringing cases under two of the four main securities laws governing Wall Street, the Investment Advisors Act of 1940 and the Investment Company Act of 1940.

According to Furey, her group at the SEC's New York office, from a period stretching for over half a decade through December, 2008, did not as a matter of policy pursue cases against investment managers like Bernie Madoff. Furey says she was told flatly by her boss, Assistant Regional Director George Stepaniuk, that "We do not do IM cases."

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Scalia's dissent - Welcome to "tough luck" justice
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 03 2013 @ 01:06 AM EDT
William Blackstone, the 18th century English jurist whose thinking influenced the nation's founders and American law, famously said it's better that 10 guilty people go free than for one innocent person to suffer.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia begs to differ.

In a blistering dissent Tuesday in McQuiggin vs. Perkins, Scalia stakes out a stunning position that the court's three other conservatives join: State prisoners with evidence of actual innocence should not necessarily get their day in court.

Robyn E. Blumner, Tampa Bay Times

---

McQuiggin v. Perkins, SCOTUSblog

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )