Hear, hear. (In re Apollo Group, Inc. Securities Litigation (D. Ariz. 2008) via WSJ Law Blog; Bloomberg). Plaintiffs will appeal the trial court’s decision to throw out the $277 million verdict.
Archive for August, 2008
S.F. mayor: make food composting mandatory
Residents of San Francisco who fail to separate food scraps from general waste “would face fines of up to $1,000 and eventually could have their garbage service stopped”. Many other cities and jurisdictions in the U.S. have made recycling mandatory as to other waste categories, but apparently none has done so with food waste. (John Coté, “S.F. mayor proposes fines for unsorted trash”, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 1)(via Ed Morrissey).
Comcast P2P throttling, cont’d
In case you missed it, yesterday’s post on the disputes over bandwidth, cable speeds and BitTorrent has prompted an unusually rich discussion with contributions from many knowledgeable readers — I know I’ve learned a lot. Check it out here.
Pet rentals
Now banned in Boston, perhaps because of the risk that they might bring too much happiness to the humans involved. (WSJ, Newsweek, FindingDulcinea, Globe, Herald).
Regulating potato chip recipes
Readers will recall that acrylamide is a naturally occurring substance formed when many foods are browned or otherwise cooked and that (like countless other constituents of common foods) it appears to cause cancer in some animals at high dosages. California attorney general Jerry Brown has now reached a settlement with some large food companies that will require them to revise recipes for potato chips, French fries and other wares to reduce acrylamide content. Fun fact: one of the ways they may accomplish this goal is by artificially adding a chemical (OK, an enzyme) which works to neutralize acrylamide’s precursors. (Rosie Mestel, “Booster Shots” blog, L.A. Times, Aug. 4).
More: Bill Childs adds, “Oh, and the companies will pay California around $2.5 million.”
Reparations, after 701 years
A group claiming to be descended from the Knights Templar, which was suppressed in the year 1307 under orders from Pope Clement V, has “filed a lawsuit against Benedict XVI calling for him to recognise the seizure of assets worth 100 billion euros (£79 billion).” (Fiona Govan, “Knights Templar heirs in legal battle with the Pope”, Telegraph, Aug. 4; NewsHoggers, Aug. 4 (noting unlikelihood that claim of descent can be adequately demonstrated)).
In NYC: gun rights discussion at NYCLU Tues. evening
For readers in the New York City area: Tomorrow evening (Tues.) I’m going to be one of three persons discussing the Constitution’s Second Amendment, and the Supreme Court’s Heller decision recognizing that it protects an individual and not merely a “collective” right, at a monthly meeting of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Details here. Also offering their views will be NYCLU’s Arthur Eisenberg, a proponent of the collective-rights view, and Damon Root of Reason magazine, who discusses the event here. There will even be pizza and refreshments.
BitTorrent throttling and cable bandwidth lawsuits
Class action lawyers have sued Comcast for throttling users of the bandwidth-intensive P2P application BitTorrent, and the Federal Communications Commission by a 3-2 vote has declared the cable provider’s practice unlawful. (UPI, Aug. 3; Janko Roettgers, “The FCC Rules Against Comcast. Now What?”, NewTeeVee.com, Aug. 1). But Insight Communications CEO Michael Willner defends the general need for some practice of this sort (Jul. 28; via Class Action Blawg):
[A reader/commenter who has filed a class action suit against Comcast suggests] building whatever capacity needed to give consumers all they use. I’d love to do that but it’s a self defeating process for any ISP with relatively high upload speeds to do so.
Here’s why. My company is accountable to the nearly half million broadband customers on our network. But when we provide relatively high upload speeds (1 meg and better), Internet users all over the world are directed by their P2P software to come to us before they go to slower providers. Within a few days, we simply are unable to handle the load leaving unmanaged consequences to take over, slowing everyone on our network no matter what they are doing. We could add more and more capacity, but the cycle simply starts all over again, bringing even more people to our network for uploads. We never get to the point where we would be able to build enough upload capacity to accommodate everyone from New Zealand to New Brunswick.
So we really only have two choices: We can limit all of our customers’ upload speeds making our network far less attractive to the downloader in New Zealand. That is the net effect of what DSL does. Or we can allocate a disproportionately large amount of upload capacity to our heavy upload users, but limit it fairly.
On some possible technical fixes, see Iljitsch van Beijnum, “IETF: find more peer-to-peer bandwidth, but use it sparingly”, Ars Technica, Aug. 3.
Banning menthol cigarettes?
In a daring journalistic departure, yesterday’s New York Times “Style” section piece actually interviewed some people who use the product. (Mireya Navarro, “Take Away Their Menthols? Is That Cool?”, Aug. 3). The paper’s coverage a week ago, by contrast, hewed more strictly to the favored narrative of the “tobacco control” crowd, vilifying as corrupt black members of Congress not yet ready to jump on board in banning a product very popular with their constituents. (Stephanie Saul, “Blacks in Congress Split Over Menthol Cigarettes”, Jul. 25).