Seventh Circuit Review

There is a new publication out of Chicago-Kent College, the Seventh Circuit Review. For those of us lucky enough to call the Midwest home, this is manna from heaven. You can browse at the foregoing link, or download the complete first issue at this link.

Hat tip: Steve at Eminent Domain.

Spam again

Back in March, I wrote some code to cut down on the spam, and that worked out well for a while, but it's crept back up. The spammers have evidently found a way around it. So, it's time for new rules: one strike and three strike. One strike and you're out applies to anywhere outside of ARIN (North America) and RIPE (Europe): for each spam message, the entire /8 you post from will be banned. Three strikes and you're out applies to spam from IP addresses assigned to RIPE: three spam posts from within one /8 will result in that entire /8 being blocked.

I can easily foresee a very ghettoized internet arising if sysadmins in the civilized world - flustered by spam, viruses and hacking - start to ask the question of whether it continues to make sense to resist simply barring every IP address assigned to APNIC from accessing their servers.

Following a posessive apostrophe with an S

Apostrophe then s, says Andrew Hyman; according to David Lat, Justice Souter agrees ("Kansas's"), but Justice Thomas does not ("Kansas'"). Scalia, uncharacteristically, adopts a skeptical scrutiny balancing test ("it would seem that he believes the extra 's' should be omitted if the existing 's' is preceded by a hard consonant sound"), but I stick with the bright line rule on this: I'm with Justice Thomas on this one. Appending the final "s" has seemed redundant to me, literally as far back as I can recall (which is to say, pre-high school. I don't know if that means I wasn't paying attention in grammar class, or if I was paying attention but refused to learn a stupid rule (I was a wilful child, so either is likely) but I will continue to describe Roberts' opinion as it relates to Kansas' ban on such-and-such.

Plus, it never hurts to have the Chief Justice on your side: see FAIR v. Rumsfeld, 547 U.S. _ (2006), slip op. at 11 n.4, 14 ("The military recruiters’ speech is clearly Government speech"; "accommodating the military’s message does not affect the law schools’ speech"); Cuno v. DaimlerChrysler Corp., 547 U.S. _ (2006), slip op. at 4, 13 ("We have an obligation to assure ourselves of litigants’ standing under Article III"; "no issue regarding plaintiffs’ standing to bring it has been raised") (internal quotation marks omitted); Rapanos v. United States, 547 U.S. _ (Roberts, concurring), slip op. at 2 ("It is unfortunate that no opinion commands a majority ofthe Court on precisely how to read Congress’ limits on the reach of the Clean Water Act"); Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, 548 U.S. _ (2006), slip op. at 10, 15 ("Unless required to do so by the Convention itself,they argue, we cannot direct Oregon courts to exclude Sanchez-Llamas’ statements from his criminal trial"; "neither the Vienna Convention itself nor our precedents applying the exclusionary rule support suppression of Sanchez-Llamas’ statements to police").

Ma Bell is back on the road

DoJ's antitrust division has given the green light to AT&T to acquire Bell South.

Now, let me see if I get this right. In 1984, Ma Bell was broken up into seven Baby Bells, Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell and US West, because it couldn't survive antitrust scrutiny.

Southwestern Bell changed its name to SBC in 1995, acquired fellow baby bells Pacific Telesis and Ameritech, changed its name to AT&T last year, and now looks certain to acquire Bellsouth. Bell Atlantic bought Nynex in 1997 and GTE (the largest independent telco during Ma Bell's tenure, which had itself also bought the second largest independent, ConTel, in 1994) in 2000, before changing its name to Verizon. U.S. West was, let's put it politely, acquired by Qwest in 2000.

So in point of fact, twenty two years on, the seven Baby Bells spun off from one Ma Bell in '84, plus their two largest independent competitors, have now recombined into three corporations. To be sure, the industry has changed (from one perspective - the one that makes this funny and ironic - this looks like a return to the status quo ante, but the telecommunications market has changed radically in that time, and the antitrust calculation is performed in the context of the market competed in), but I think it's not entirely unfair to say: Elwood - we're getting the band back together!