29 Jun 2010
Insurance Industry Already Finding Ways To Game New System

Betcha they don't try to weasel out of the part that makes us all buy insurance from them at inflated rates...

The insurance industry's attempt to weasel out of one of the few provisions of the new health care reform law that took effect immediately is a harbinger of what's to come.

(link) [Huffington Post]

21:09 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

The Public (Domain) Be Damned

Insanity.

Warning: this one is depressing if you believe in the public domain. You may recall that last year, a district court made a very important ruling on what appeared to be a minor part of copyright law. The "Golan" case asked a simple question: once something is officially in the public domain, can Congress pull it out and put it back under copyright? The situation came about because of (yet another) trade agreement that pulled certain foreign works out of the public domain. A district court had initially said that this move did not violate the law, but the appeals court sent it back, saying that the lower court had not analyzed the First Amendment issue, and whether this was a case where the inherent conflict between the First Amendment and copyright law went too far to the side of copyright by violating the "traditional contours of copyright law." Getting a second crack at this, the district court got it right -- and was the first court to point out that massively expanded copyright law can, in fact, violate the First Amendment.

(link) [TechDirt]

21:04 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who don't know and those who don't know they don't know ...

There are a zillion things I don’t know. And I know that I don’t know them. But what about the unknown unknowns? Are they like a scotoma, a blind spot in our field of vision that we are unaware of? I kept wondering if Rumsfeld’s real problem was with the unknown unknowns; or was it instead some variant of self-deception, thinking that you know something that you don’t know. A problem of hubris, not epistemology.

(link) [New York Times: Opinionator]

21:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link