Slashdot Mirror

A very good article on reported and actual crimes statistics including assault and rape with data for both genders. http://clubtroppo.com.au/2015/...

I realise you're making a joke, but a few years back I proposed something like that.

Of course, in my experience, if I have a flash of brilliant insight, somebody else had it years ago. So YMMV.

1. There's an enormous amount of existing code. Look at how much Slashdot talks about COBOL, which is around 50 years old. In common law countries (eg Britain, the USA and Australia), the law has code nearly a millennium old, written in a variety of languages.

2. Corner cases. There are lots of these. Much like software, they are usually discovered in "maintenance mode"; ie after the law is passed. As time goes on, legal draftsmen begin to include lots of standard boilerplate, which will only rarely actually be applied.

3. Legal draftsmen. Never heard of these? Who do you think actually sits down and writes the law? It's not the politicians. They give drafting instructions, which are translated into legalese.

Expecting politicians to read and comprehend legalese is a bit like expecting businessmen to read and comprehend assembler. It will never, ever happen. The idea of "plain english" law is a lot like "automatic programming". A total pipedream that will never happen.

The law is a semi-structured language. You can think of it as a distributed rule system created by a mix of engineered modules (Acts of Congress / Parliament) and reverse engineering.

The reverse engineered parts are case law. Lawyers feed in black-box test cases, then carefully record what the CPU (the judges) output. Over time they map out what the law "is". The reason legalese repeats the same phrases over and over again is because they have been proved, in court, to have specific and reliable semantics. "It ain't broke", so to speak.

I personally think there's enormous scope for borrowing software engineering practice and tools for legal drafting, but it's no panacea. I even used to think that we could treat legalese as a kind of assembler and develop a higher level language that "compiles down" to it. But it doesn't solve the problem, just moves it around.

Laws are flawed and problematic because they deal with humans. Humans who are complex and motivated and intelligent. No purely rule-based system will ever completely tame human ingenuity, just as no code will ever fully describe all subject domains.

Disclaimer: I used to be a law student, until I came to my senses.

As it happens, I agreed with you before we met.

Most newspapers lose money on the cover price. The real money is in classifieds and advertising.

What is killing newspapers is not competitive sources of content, it is competitive ways to place classifieds and display advertising.

Disclaimer: I used to work for a small Newscorp newspaper in the classifieds department.

As I have pointed out here and elsewhere, newspapers do not make their money from selling copies; they make it on classifieds and advertising.

All the stuff about bloggers being better than journalists, or journalists being better than bloggers, is a total sideshow. It's about money.

It's more subtle than the headline or TFA makes out:

Lies, Damned Lies, and National Security

Intercepting Communications - now and then

That second link is a Senator's blog, by the way.

First I rang my local member, who referred me to Julia Gillard's office (she made the original idiotic statements). Her office referred me to the Attorney-General's office, as that's where it's coming from.

The nice functionary I spoke to there said it's a media beatup. Under Australian law it's illegal to intercept the communications of a third party without a warrant. There was some wondering about whether passing emails through a virus scan qualified as warrantless interception.

Rather than going through some court case about to settle the matter, it was felt that it would be easier just to amend the Telecommunications Interception Act instead.

So that's it. There's actually no story here at all. Though it did provoke me to write an angry rant before I started doing what the journalists should have done in the first place - check the facts.

A lot of disputes in the old wild west arose from open ranges, where "anyone" could graze. In practice it led to nasty disputes and illegal attempts to fence off ranges. I reckon it might be amenable to economic approaches.