… a stipulation is an agreement made between opposing parties prior to a pending hearing or trial. For example, both parties might stipulate to certain facts, and therefore not have to argue those facts in court.

When Judge Norman Gillespie was a magistrate, and parties at a pretrial conference would start [...]]]> A quick reminder for laypeople in the audience.

… a stipulation is an agreement made between opposing parties prior to a pending hearing or trial. For example, both parties might stipulate to certain facts, and therefore not have to argue those facts in court.

When Judge Norman Gillespie was a magistrate, and parties at a pretrial conference would start arguing to him that the other side should be made to stipulate to a fact because it wasn’t disputed, he’d give them a perplexed look and say, “But it’s not a stipulation unless everybody agreed.”

On February 1st, the day the Mississippi Supreme Court took the pardons case, Attorney General Hood sent Judge Green a stipulation.  There were several odd things about the stipulation.

He doesn’t suggest anywhere in it that anyone else had agreed to it.  As far as I can tell, the first the other (purported stipulators?) heard about it was when he told the judge.

He seems to be using it to tell the judge (or the world) a list of people who he conceded had met the advertising requirement (hint to remaining parties:  I would certainly check and see if this effectively puts an end to the argument “They have to advertise every single day!”).  But in any event, I’d be curious if this seems as strange to others as it does to me.

I’m also curious where sending this fell in the chronology of that days events (that is, before or after the Supreme Court took the case?).

Here’s the documents.

You can check out Kingfish’s video here.

Watch about 8 minutes in when Judge Green asks about a warrant of arrest and [...]]]> It begins with the judge explaining that filing an entry of the appearance with the circuit clerk and emailing a copy to the court administrator does not suffice.  Not an auspicious beginning.

You can check out Kingfish’s video here.

Watch about 8 minutes in when Judge Green asks about a warrant of arrest and suggests she would find contempt of court for one of the pardonees.  She does then acknowledge that the individual should be served first, I suppose is a relief.

The article illustrates the storied history of Bob in American sports with several charts, although what came to my mind were baseball hall of [...]]]> Jon Bois writes on SB Nation that there are no longer atheletes named Bob– the only remaining example in major American sports is Bob Sanders of the San Diego Charges.

The article illustrates the storied history of Bob in American sports with several charts, although what came to my mind were baseball hall of famers Bob Gibson and Bob Feller (Does Bobby Doerr count?).  But the only active Bob today is Bob Sanders.

What happened, Bob?  Where did you go?

h/t RedCupRebellion Twitter feed.

The more time we spend finding directions on Google Maps, the more our minds may grow familiar with the officially documented outline of our city, rather than the one created through our own experiences. This idea receives support in a recent study published online late last month, ahead of [...]]]> From a New Yorker blog:

The more time we spend finding directions on Google Maps, the more our minds may grow familiar with the officially documented outline of our city, rather than the one created through our own experiences. This idea receives support in a recent study published online late last month, ahead of print, in the journal Psychological Science. A team of psychologists led by Julia Frankenstein of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, found evidence that we’re best oriented when facing north—just like a reliance on maps would suggest.

At least based on my own experience, this strikes me as wrong on several levels.  First, actual maps have always filled out my “internal” maps by allowing me to connect up pathways without actually having to use them.  My “experiential” map is filled out by man-made maps, not replaced by them.  The experiential maps are more intensely recalled.  Second, as a child, I was oriented toward north in the woods of the neighborhood where I grew up not by use of maps– I didn’t see a map of those woods till much later, and there weren’t maps that would have been any help with navigating for literally miles into them, anyhow– but rather because you need to be oriented to navigate.  If you walk into a new area and don’t have a orientation standard like “north,” you will get hopelessly lost.  But that didn’t come from a map.

Those participating in the blackout are [...]]]> On January 24th, the Senate will vote on SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act,”  Today– January 18th– Redit, Boing Boing, and a lot of other internet sites have joined in a 12 hour blackout warning folks that this legislation could, literally, destroy the internet as we know it.

Those participating in the blackout are saying:  Call your representatives and tell them you oppose it.

There’s an ongoing and increasingly desperate by pre-internet copyright holders to blame new technology on their failure to adapt to it. Anyone who has read about about these sort of technological changes– from sheet music to player pianos, from that to records, from records to radio, etc.– will know this story.

The major songwriter’s performance rights organization of the 20s and early thirties, ASCAP, demanded a set percentage of radio station revenues for the broadcasting of its songs (and refused to accept many black songwriters).  ASCAP thus effectively refused performance rights to its songs on radio, and a new organization– BMI (“Broadcast Music, Inc.) was formed that handled songwriters willing to have their music played on radio (and more willing to accept black composers).

That’s the kind of refusal to adapt I’m talking about.  The message to copyright holders is that the world has changed, and they need to adapt to it, not the other way around.

The best explanation I’ve seen about what’s wrong with SOPA is from Boing Boing.  Here’s what was said:

On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in “going dark” to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we’d have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren’t in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to say something reasonable like, “Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is the wrong way to fight it.”

But you know what? Screw that.

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don’t think that any amount of “piracy” justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s actions. Big Content haven’t just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the “fun” Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she’s experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place — as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

unauthorized use of a movable Louisiana

You read that right.  And, believe it or not, this legal topic has come up on my blog, back in the Fall of 2010, when I recounted the tale of a naked woman arrested in Covington, Louisiana for stealing [...]]]> Yes, someone came to my blog tonight searching for:

unauthorized use of a movable Louisiana

You read that right.  And, believe it or not, this legal topic has come up on my blog, back in the Fall of 2010, when I recounted the tale of a naked woman arrested in Covington, Louisiana for stealing a cab.  Among the charges:  unauthorized use of a movable.

I will say that running that search in Google does not seem to turn up my blog as one of the top hits.  At least when I run the search.

Radiolab is a public radio broadcast from New York; I learned about it from episodes of This American Life that the Radiolab folks produced.  It’s one of the podcast I automatically download.  They made the film, above.

and

@jstrevino I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.

(h/t to Sullivan for the 2nd one)