It would be disingenuous of me to say I hate lawyers; I'm married to one after all. But shit like this, involving a class-action suit against Creative Labs over the advertised capacity of their MP3 players, convinces me that some lawyers deserve to be shot in the face:

According to the settlement agreement, the lead plaintiffs, who filed their federal lawsuit in California, alleged that Creative had misled consumers by exaggerating the capacity of its MP3 players. The fraud allegation hinged mainly on two different definitions of gigabyte. According to the decimal definition (the only one I knew until today), a gigabyte is 1 billion (10⁹) bytes. According to the binary definition, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (2³⁰) bytes. While Creative used the decimal definition in its advertising, the settlement says, "certain computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition." On those systems, a 20GB Creative Zen player would register as only 18.6GB or so, about 7 percent less than advertised.

Now it's true that hard drives use the decimal definition for a gigabyte when advertising their capacities. However, it's not "certain computer operating systems" that report hard drive capacity using the binary definition; it's all computer operating systems. Computer data is stored in binary format, so it can't report capacity in gigabytes using any other definition.

The rank stupidity of all this is that, whether you divide a hard drive's capacity by 1,000,000,000 or 1,037,741,824, it's still the same number of bytes. Only the divisor has changed. So Creative didn't exaggerate the capacity of their players at all; they simply failed to account for the fact that computers use the binary definition of a gigabyte. 20GB decimal = ~18.6GB binary. There's nothing misleading about this, except to consumers who are ignorant of how computers and data storage work. And I don't think Creative has an obligation to educate them; it just has to be truthful.

But in the hands of skilled trial lawyers, this inconsequential difference can be represented to a judge (who quite likely is also technologically ignorant) as a case of deceptive advertising, even fraud, and instead of wasting enormous time and money on defending themselves from this nonsense, Creative opted for a settlement. So if you own a Zen or other Creative MP3 player, you're entitled to buy a 1GB MP3 player at half-price, or 20% off any item ordered from Creative's online store.

For striking this courageous blow for consumers, the lawyers pocket $900,000. If it makes you feel better, in binary that would only be $878.9K.

Update: As ilcylic demonstrates in a comment below, an OS (Linux in this case) can report hard drive capacity in decimal format if it so chooses.  But given that volatile memory storage will always be reported in binary, I'm not sure that resolves the confusion issue.

Teen allowed to forgo chemotherapy

Good for him.  No one should be forced by a court to undergo medical treatment they don't want.  Even if the treatment this kid is pursuing amounts to little more than quackery, he and his parents should have the freedom to make that decision without nanny-state interference.  It's a no-brainer, right?

However, I think I might have found his parents neglectful anyway, solely for giving the poor kid a name that virtually guaranteed many years of ass-beatings at school: "Starchild Abraham Cherrix".

We haven't cracked double-digits in temperature along the Front Range, but it's been in the mid-30s up in the mountains.  Gotta love those temperature inversions.  I left early this morning to get a haircut, and it was -9°.  Now it's -2°.  It's downright balmy, I tell ya!

And the cold, combined with a natural gas shortage, resulted in rolling blackouts during the morning.  Screw the air quality; gimme those coal-fired power plants!  Better than freezing to death because your stupid furnace loses power.

From the blame-the-victim news desk: In Italy, it's no big deal if a girl is raped if she isn't a virgin.  This should come as no surprise considering the same court ruled that a woman could not have been raped because she was wearing skin-tight jeans.  How much longer before Italy follows Islam's lead and just starts stoning women for adultery?

So much for the greater social enlightenment of Europe.

Fraud-e Miller: Bode is now oh-for-three in his alpine skiing events at Torino after muffing a gate on the super-G, and he says medals aren't that important.  Fine, then why are you taking up space on the team, you fucking fraud?  Can we now stop caring about what this drunk-ass punk says or does?

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

From David Friedman's blog:

How to Sue the National Security Agency

In order to sue, you have to show that your phone was tapped. If you send a Freedom Of Information Act query to the NSA asking for a list, they will surely reply that they have good reason not to release the information, since they do not want terrorists to know whether or not they have been discovered.

As people from both the NSA and the FBI have made clear, not all of the leads generated by warrantless wiretaps panned out. Some turned out to be terrorists and are still being watched. Others turned out to have no connection with terrorism and have been crossed off the list. When you sent in your FOIA request, all you ask for are the names that have been crossed out.

The NSA might argue, somewhat less persuasively, that a list of everyone whose name has been crossed out will reveal too much about their procedures--how they are deciding whom to tap. If so, reduce your request. All you want are half--if they insist a quarter or a tenth--of the names crossed off. Surely the NSA can select them to obscure any pattern that the whole list might reveal.

Once you have names--at least one name will do--you can sue. If the court rules in your favor, you ask for the rest of the names. At that point you have established that the NSA is in violation of the law, with anyone responsible subject to criminal penalties, so hiding information in order to be able to continue the program should no longer be an issue.

The assumption here, of course, is that the NSA has violated FISA.  But it's highly unlikely that the government is going to prosecute one of its own agencies for any criminal violations.  However, FISA also allows for civil penalties—and civil suits do not need to be filed by the government.

Intriguing idea.

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

QandO has an interesting bit on Roe v. Wade, quoting Richard Cohen's column from the Washington Post:

Conservatives—and some liberals—have long argued that the right to an abortion ought to be regulated by states. They have a point. My guess is that the more populous states would legalize it, the smaller ones would not, and most women would be protected. The prospect of some women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer me—I'm pro-choice, I repeat—but it would relieve us all from having to defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.

For liberals, the trick is to untether abortion rights from Roe . The former can stand even if the latter falls. The difficulty of doing this is obvious. Roe has become so encrusted with precedent that not even the White House will say how Harriet Miers would vote on it, even though she is rigorously antiabortion and politically conservative. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument—but a bit of our soul as well.

This is a fairly compelling argument for overturning Roe v. Wade, and it has nothing to do with the morality of abortion (and I'd like to avoid that debate here).  There would obviously be tremendous opposition to such a decision, if for no other reason than it would force abortion-rights groups to take their battle to each of the 50 states rather than focus their resources on the Federal level.  But the end of Roe v. Wade would not be the end of abortion rights in this country.

Or would it?

Let's say that Roe v. Wade is overturned, and some states inevitably move to prohibit abortion.  This would likely lead to women traveling to other states to have the procedure done legally.

At that point, wouldn't abortion, as a commercial activity, fall under the purview of the Interstate Commerce Clause, thus allowing Congress to regulate it?

Before you answer, consider the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of women across state lines "for immoral purposes."  It was originally intended to combat the spread of prostitution, but the Supreme Court later expanded its meaning to include transporting women across state lines for any sexual activity deemed immoral, even if the women consented to the activity.

Although the Mann Act has long been criticized as an attempt to legislate morality and infringe on the states' rights to set their own age-of-consent laws, it remains on the books, with the justification that it regulates a form of interstate commerce.

While the Mann Act wouldn't apply to abortion, it's not a stretch to imagine that Congress could make it illegal for women to travel to another state for the express purpose of having an abortion, and that law, unlike the decision in Roe v. Wade, could stand up to judicial review, at least in a conservative court.  (And if you don't think this would happen, remember Raich.)

Is this really a better outcome than allowing Roe v. Wade to stand, despite its dubious constitutionality?

I'm not cross-posting this to libertarianism, because much bandwidth has already been consumed on the topic over there.  And this post is really for the non-libertarians in the audience anyway.  If you want to know why libertarians are such forceful proponents of property rights, the action of the Supreme Court today provides a compelling reason.

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