"Using the remarkably candid postings on craigslist, the Lawyers’ Committee can identify many targets to investigate. It can dispatch testers and collect damages from any landlord or owner who engages in discrimination....It can assemble a list of names to send to the Attorney General for prosecution. But given §230(c)(1) it cannot sue the messenger just because the message reveals a third party’s plan to engage in unlawful discrimination."What will be interesting, however, is to see what happens now in a very similar lawsuit involving Roommates.com that is currently being reviewed in a different Circuit. Hopefully the court there comes to a similar conclusion and we stop getting these types of incorrectly targeted lawsuits.
My pal Jason Weisberger and I were just discussing how distressing it can be when a familiar TV character is replaced with a different actor in the middle of a series. Of course, the two Darrins from Bewitched, Dick York and later Dick Sargent, immediately came to mind. I Googled for photos of the two and this beautiful illustration appeared.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Why would the Administration oppose a judicial determination of whether the companies already have immunity? There are at least three explanations:Of course, this is not nearly over yet. The Senate still needs to vote on legislation and the President would still need to approve it -- and he's made it clear that he'll veto any bill that doesn't include immunity. For all his complaints that not having a bill approved would make the US less safe, it would appear that it's his demand for retroactive immunity that is actually holding up the bill's passage. There is nothing in the current bill that makes the country any less safe. The only thing holding it up is a desire to brush aside questions about whether or not earlier activities broke the law.
First, the President knows that it was the Administration's incompetence in failing to follow the procedures in statute that prevented immunity from being conveyed -- that's one possibility. They simply didn't do it right.
Second, the Administration's legal argument that the surveillance requests were lawfully authorized was wrong; or [third,] public reports that the surveillance activities undertaken by the companies went far beyond anything about which any Member of Congress was notified, as is required by the law.
None of these alternatives is attractive but they clearly demonstrate why the Administration's insistence that Congress provide retroactive immunity has never been about national security or about concerns for the companies; it has always been about protecting the Administration."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Update on a series of previous posts here on BB about pro-Tibetan-independence protests in Lhasa: violence grew dramatically today. Snip from report issued today by the US-government-funded news agency RFA, which has correspondents on the ground in Tibet:
“We saw two dead at Ramoche temple, two in the garden, two at the Ganden printing house, and those Tibetans who went to take food to prisoners in Drapchi prison saw 26 Tibetans shot after they were brought in on a black vehicle,” one Tibetan witness said. “There could be about 80 dead, or more, but there is too much commotion here to give an exact number.”Link.“Several buildings owned by Chinese immigrants and Chinese Muslim immigrants were set on fire,” the witness said. “All those shops owned by Chinese were ransacked and burned. Tibetan shop owners were told to mark their shops with scarves.”
Another source said Ramoche monastery, which has about 110 resident monks, was badly damaged after Tibetans were found running in the area carrying photos of the Dalai Lama and shouting “Independence for Tibet.’”
Snip from a related report on AP, which references the RFA item:
At a demonstration outside the United Nations in New York, Psurbu Tsering of the Tibetan Association of New York and New Jersey said its members received phone calls from Tibet claiming 70 people had been killed and 1,000 arrested. The reports could not be verified.
Image: A man lies injured in the street during street protests today in the "Old Tibetan" neighborhood of Lhasa. (AP Photo)
Previously on BB:
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers have invented a device (via the Raw Feed) to remind hospital workers to wash their hands between patients. Bad hygiene is a serious problem in hospitals, because diseases can be spread from patient to patient. Unfortunately, doctors and nurses are often in a hurry and forget to wash up. The device tries to increase washing rates by installing infrared sensors over patient beds. When a health care worker comes near a patient, the system will try to detect whether the health care worker has washed his hands since seeing the last patient, and beeps if he has not. It's a clever idea, but it seems to have a few problems. For one thing, it sounds like it only detects when a worker has disinfected using special alcohol dispensers included with the system. A soap and water washing doesn't count, as far as the system is concerned. It also can't detect if a health care worker has gone near a patient but not touched him or her. The big problem such a system would face is having health care workers view it as an annoyance rather than an asset. If the system frequently beeped at them when they weren't doing anything wrong, they might start ignoring or even trying to disable it.
I think the key to making it work would be to make sure hospital workers view it as a helpful way to improve their own performance rather than a way of nagging them or penalizing them when they forget to wash their hands. Wearing the things would be irritating enough without having to worry about getting disciplined when the system made a mistake. One good approach might be to allow workers to disable the beeping feature, but continue collecting data about hand-washing rates. Even if the data weren't perfect, it would be good enough to collect data on hygiene rates in different parts of the hospital. Those parts that showed lower-than-average hygiene could receive additional training.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
