Twitter Libel suit dismissed...and thus more attorneys are now out of work.

The defendant in the case had tweeted "Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment is bad for you?  Horizon realty thinks its ok."  Before analyzing the legal side of this, let me demonstrate how this phrase should have been correctly tweeted.  The correct way to tweet this would be to say "WSSIAMAWB4U?  Horreal sayOK"

20 cheese points to the comment that comes up with a better way to tweet it.  I will be the sole judge of what is "better" and yes of course I am biased. 

Now onto the legal side of things.

First remember that this was the company that reportedly said they would sue first and ask questions later.  Never a good PR move.  According to FindLaw, the court ruled that the plaintiff, Horizon Group, could not form all of the elements of libel.  

The elements are:
1.  The comment be made about the plaintiff specifically.  The court ruled that Hroizon was not able to prove this because the word "Horizon" was too vague.
2.  The comment must be false and defammatory.  The court found that Horizon was not able to prove that the statement was false, because the defendant may very well have been lving in a moldy apartment.
3.  The comment must be published.  This element was met because it was tweeted.
4.  The plaintiff must show actual damage.  It is unlikely, according to the article that Horizon would have been able to prove the damage element.

Therefore, the court dismissed.  And good for them.  Afterall, if you can't bitch and gripe via Twitter, then why sign up for it to begin with?  (I know I know there are many good things about Twitter like checking on BFC tweets...if I ever updated it). 

        

Pretty cool stuff!

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So Conan, the comedian, not the barbarian, is getting paid $33+ million to leave the Tonight Show. Charlie Weis was paid $18 million to leave Notre Dame, the Indiana football team, not the Catholic church. And how much did that guy get paid to leave Disney?  Wasn't it in the hundreds of millions? (Squirky should know). How in the hell do you land a gig like that?  When I was talking to the person at career services I should have listed that as a career goal. << MORE >>

But what is it? << MORE >>

You can't make this shit up. Now the global warming cranks want to block out the sun and other idiotic ideas to stop global warming. But if global warming is man-made why block the sun?  I'm reminded of a Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns had a similar idea. << MORE >>

Of course, this sort of thing happens in Arkansas all the time...if you get my drift... << MORE >>

"Speculation was increasing today that the display was the result of an embarrassing failed test launch of a jinxed new Russian missile," reports the Daily Mail.

"The Bulava missile was test-fired from the Dmitry Donskoi submarine in the White Sea early on Wednesday but failed at the third stage, say newspapers in Moscow today."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1234430/Mystery-spiral-blue-light-display-hovers-Norway.html#ixzz0ZK9C96Wq
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From MattBors.com



HT: LRC Blog << MORE >>

"In the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels, border towns in Mexico have turned into halls of mirrors where no one knows who is on which side or what chance remark could get you murdered," writes Philip Caputo in the Atlantic.  "Some 14,000 people have been killed in that time—the worst carnage since the Mexican Revolution—and part of the country is effectively under martial law. Is this evidence of a creeping coup by the military?"

Read the full article here. << MORE >>

Don't protest universal health care in this country, you'll get your ass kicked.  But at least your assailants will get a slap on the wrist in St. Louis.  Union thugs scare me! << MORE >>

So there have been some emails exchanged about how evidence of climate change has been misrepresented or completely suppressed.  I can guarantee you that if these emails were stolen from "big oil" or one of the other various boogeyman industries and if the subject was how they were suppressing the effects of fossil fuels on the environment, there'd be all sorts of fecal matter all over all the fans in all of the governments and college campi around the world.  Alas, since the opposite is true, the Washington Post, New York Times, et al. dismiss the exchange as having been taken out of context and claim that the gravest sin is the attempted manipulation of peer reviews.  Oh, is that all?  Only attempting to manipulate the process by which your peers determine if your claims (which world leaders are clinging to desperately in an effort to control as much of the lives of their citizenry as possible) are total garbage or legitimate scientific fact.  That sounds like jury tampering.  Really if this idea of Global Warming were so air-tight, then who cares about Peer Reviews?  Shouldn't the "truth" persuade people?  Not carefully manipulated and massaged data?  Seriously, no one should be signing any treaties until everyone's cards are on the table.  And probably not then, either. << MORE >>

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Remember when we had some really bad hurricane seasons a few years ago, and people like Al Gore and other nut-jobs claimed it was caused by man-made global warming?  Well, according to Florida State University, one of the leading institutions in Hurricane tracking, this season's global tropical cyclone activity is at a 30 year low, and the Atlantic storm activity is at its lowest in 12 years.  Once again the terrified nut-job's looney theories fall short of being proven, because either global warming has nothing to do with hurricane activity, or there is no global warming.  Either way the nut-jobs are wrong. 

"ORANGE lights spotted in the night sky over Derby have sparked reports of UFOs," reports the Derby Telegraph.    "Derby Telegraph readers have told how they saw the mysterious lights above their homes.  Neither East Midlands Airport or the Ministry of Defence have been able to explain the reports.  Aleister Willis, of Wye Street, Alvaston, said he thought the lights were part of a bigger object."

Read the full article here.

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I personally think it looks too real to be a ghost, but the group claims that noone was in the building at the time the photo was taken.

The "moon rock" was given to a former Dutch Prime Minister during a goodwill tour by the three Apollo-11 astronauts shortly after their 1969 moon mission.  According to the BBC, when the Prime Minister died, the rock was put on display at the Amsterdam museum, but tests have proved it is not really a moon rock at all, but rather a piece of petrified wood.  U.S. officials cannot explain what happened. 

This revelation will certainly fuel the "fake moon landing" conspiracy theorists. 

Read the BBC article here.<< MORE >>

"An armada of robots may one day fly above the mountain tops of Saturn's moon Titan, cross its vast dunes and sail in its liquid lakes," reports Science Daily.  "Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today."

"'The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we've ever tasted,' said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. 'We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time.'"

Yeah I seem to remember this type of "innovation" didn't work out so well for the people of Caprica. 

Read the full article here.

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"Ayn Rand has drifted in and out of favor, but she may be more relevant today than ever before," says Gov. Mark Sanford.

"The biggest decision of the economic recovery will be made in the next six months, and Barack Obama will have almost nothing to do with it," Politico is reporting.  "Forget the debate over TARP, and never mind the questions about a second stimulus. This decision is about when to pull out $1 trillion that’s propping up the U.S. banking system. And it will be Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his Fed colleagues who make the call." << MORE >>

"The facts and figures presented by CBS's Steve Kroft were disturbing as were the details concerning how shysters bilk the system for an estimated $60 billion a year," writes Noel Sheppard.  See for yourself here.