There really is. There's no way for the market to support paying someone with a noisy baby to leave a theater, even though said transaction is to everyone's benefit... non-governmental market failure. Absent regulation, there would be no Linux, because Intel and AMD would only sell chips that could only run MS products (or no MS products would run).
Want to know why cell phone services are expensive here? Because if you start your own cell phone company, the FCC puts you in jail.
As a libertarian, shouldn't private ownership of the spectrum agree with your philosophy? I mean, it's a limited resource and all. It's like saying "You know why Armani bags are so expensive here? Because if you try to make your own the [some governemnt agency] puts you in jail" or "You know why fruit is so expensive here? Because if you go to a farm and try to pick it yourself, the police puts you in jail." Obviously you can buy an orchard, or the Armani name, or even a chunk of the spectrum. But it's not a free-for-all.
Or do you fall in the "I'm libertarian as long as I can see it, but once I cannot I develop cognitive dissonance" camp? If so, you have a lot of company.
Some sort of self-sustaining lubricant producing plant, mood lighting, and all the latest porn transmitted from Earth. Give the women a Sybian or some equivalent shit too.
Only on Slashdot would someone trying to use sex to stave off boredom, in a mixed gender pool, suggest everyone be given masterbatory aides.
And only on Slashdot would it be modded insightful.
If there are market failures, the prices aren't properly set to account for the conditions that cause the failures
Market failures occur when there is no free-market mechanism for engaging in mutually benfical transactions, or for achieving an efficent state. Natural monoplies, public goods, and situations with externalities all produce market failures.
Example clearly not government caused; there is no way to pay a slow person in front of you in airport security to go the back of the line, transaction costs eat up any reward.
[The FDIC's] existence allows patrons of banks to not diversify and not do due diligence on their banks. The banks feel OK taking large risks because if they don't pan out the FDIC will be there to bail out their customers. Moral hazard.
The FDIC forces patrons to diversify. It prevents every customer from doing a long-term forcast on a banks soluability (something wall street whiffed on recently, is Joe Shemo expected to do better).As for allowing banks to take huge risks, that point is crazy. By the time the FDIC steps in, the bank is bankrupt. I never heard of a banker worrying about their customers in the case where they were already out of a job, their bank was shuttered, etc. etc. In other words, a bank corporation has to fail for the FDIC to matter, and bank executives don't care about what happens when a bank fails... there are no more shareholders.
Throwing "moral hazard" out there on every level of government intervention isn't a brilliant argument. In fact, the FDIC exists to create the moral hazard, depositing money in banks. As stated, the only people insured are the depositors, and a banking system is necessary for a first world economy. So, the moral hazard here is good.
[The USPS is] bankrupt too. They're asking Congress for another $6B gift.
They're asking for some of the money back they gave Congress in the 90's when planning for just such a contingency.
Usually after creating market conditions that created them in the first place. See the railroads, Standard Oil, etc.
Railroads are textbook natural monopolies. Standard Oil grew powerful without government intervention. Microsoft didn't need government assistence. What creation of market conditions are you refering to, insufficent regulation?
Who's forced to work at WalMart?
People who cannot get better jobs... who wants to work at WalMart?
Neither are perfect. One is subject to massive corruption and positive-feedback loops (e.g. Corporate control of Government), one is self-limiting.
You're missing my point. A mixture of the two is best. I cannot even figure out whether your non-self-limiting option is supposed to refer to pure capitalism or pure communism. Reading it, it seems to talk more about capitalism (after all, in capitalism you have things like companies gettting the police to beat workers). But then your point baout communism doesn't make much sense.
If Freedom has no value, than all kinds of utilitarian arguments can be made
You cannot try to divide it into freedom on one side, and none on the other. There are different freedoms on each side. I don't think that the "freedom" to do whatever I want with my money is the most important freedom. I prefer speech, privacy, etc.
First, the FDIC does so well because it's almost never used. The second banks start failing, the FDIC will go broke.
Follow the news? The FDIC has been snapping up banks left and right and is doing quite well.
The USPS is losing billions of dollars yearly, just like any other government run institution, and would have gone under years ago if it were not for your tax dollars propping them up, keeping private companies from competing.
Bullshit. The USPS was making tons of money in the late 90's. Accounting rules force them to be unable to save their profits, so it looks as though they are losing money when really they are buring through an earlier surplus. The reason they made so much money in the late 90's? Because they planned ahead and knew they were going to have to run a defict to upgrade their services. Come back when you take both years intou accound.
THen you ridiculously compare a doctor to the USPS. Compare like to like. It's usually easier for me to ship via USPS than FedEx... USPS picks it up. And costs less than one percent as much. And FedEx's scales are dirty as well.
Personally, I don't want my doctors office looking like the post office
That same doctor probably already treats people under Medicare. Package delivery is by design impersonal. I want efficency; drop of package and money, don't think about it anymore.
What about market failures. The insurance industry is always rife with them, for instance flood insurance, or, as you point out, health insurance. The FDIC (another insurance system) is even heralded by conservatives as the most successful government run program in existence.
The USPS can take any random sheet of paper across the country to a specific person for less than the price of a coke, with door-to-door service.
The federal government also does well busting up trusts.
But you're clearly right, free-markets* always** exist*** and work****
* Enjoy your cheap tainted meat!
** Microsoft is clearly on it's last legs.
*** Recall the horrors of the "company store"? WalMart would love to pay it's employees in WalMart script.
**** Remember when a poorly regulated free market destroyed the US economy? It was last year. See also, 1987.
Government control is bad, unregulated markets are bad. I don't understand how anyone can believe that free-markets are always the answer any more than people believe government is always the answer. At least the religious right has a history of dogmatically believing in things that evidence has disproved. Why so many libertarian FSM-touting people persist on this board, I'll never understand. Pure capitalism imploded before pure communism did. The countries that are currently doing well have a mixture of capitalism and socialism, a little heavier on the socialism than the US. But obviously, we must push to one extreme!
Polarizing glasses look like sunglasses (they cut out ~50% of the light to each eye). Therefore, some people would have thought "cheap sunglasses". But darkening the visual light you can see, so that you can pick up more details/be more comfortable is only one purpose of sunglasses. A more important purpose is to protect your eyes from UV light, of which sunglasses block far more than 50%.
Hence the warning not to wear them outside.
Afterthought, wearing them outside would also cause your pupils to dialate somewhat (less visible light) rendering them more vulnerable to UV while making you feel less vulnerable.
This award reeks of political calculation. He was in office for less than two weeks and got nominated? WTF?
George W. Bush was also nominated after being in office after twoish weeks. And again subsequently.
It doesn't seem that unusual for a US president (or former president) to get nominated even if there's no chance that he is worth winning. And I suppose trying to establish a nuke-free world falls under the "peace conferences" section of their charter.
Still, they should have waited until he, I don't know, did something about it.
hey will tell you that making robots do anything is hard. Making robots do something with surreptitiously poisoned programming would be even harder
Only at a specific level. Making a robot walk with bipedal motion is hard. MAking a robot able to turn a camera image into a representation of the world around it is hard.
Pathfinding (using A*, for instance) is solved, but not necessarily cheap. It's only hard because of the previous two subgoals
Deciding where to go is not hard at all.
So in other words, if you have (for example) a killer robot that shoot people without a US flag on their sleeve, and protects other people, you had to solve a lot of hard problems. Replacing the US flag with a Chinese one is not hard though.
Penalties include up to $11,000 in fines per violation. Note to self: require a payment of at least $12,000 to endorse a product in my blog.
IIRC, fines are not tax deductable. The government is going to expect you to declare that on your taxes. So, expect to lose money when you made $1,000 and are taxed for $12,000.
Usually failure to locate reverse results in nothing happening or possibly engaging 4th from a stand still which is likely to stall the engine rather than move the car.
That is not so bad, as I pointed out. The larger problem is when you think you are upshifting and end up in reverse. Or, to a lesser degree, think you are in second switching to first, and are in reality in first, switching to reverse.
I want it to at least briefly describe the program and what it does.
I suppose it never occured to me to run a program not knowing what it did. And certainly, as a dev, it wouldn't occur to me to add that to "about". That's what goes under F1/Help.
I don't care if the program I'm using is v7.6 build 9584 or v7.7 build 1232, I just care that it works.
Okay then, I recommend you click on a menu item that does something. I want to know what files my program it's using. The copyright spells out what OSS components are used. I need to know the build number to report a bug.
If all you care about is that it works, you want the about to read "Hey, this software works!" ?
As long as the pedals and the steering wheels are in the same position everything else pretty much goes, everybody can still use the car.
Never driven a stick I assume. The position of the rear gear refers to how you have to translate/rotate (yes, even that decision is not standard) the stick so that it goes into reverse. Get it wrong and the car will go forward instead. Even worse is getting into reverse accidentally.
The controls for the wipers and lights are also pretty standard, and the gauges and their approximate location too.
That's the kind of glossing over the details that make it hard for me to switch to Linux.
Speaking of "About", why is it that this option doesn't tell you anything about the program, but gives you some useless copyright information instead?
When I went to about, I got a version and build numbers, absolute paths to files it was using, and information on the copyright. What else should be in there?
Punishing these people is a start but the reality is we need to do a better job of educating consumers. As long as there are suckers there will be people trying to scam them.
That's backwards. You have to punish them, because it's impossible to fully educate customers (well, absent destroying capitalism and keeping transactions to simple barter).
Imagine that there are one million people, all equally intelligent and educated, and all equally hard working. Now imagine that each of them executes 10,000 equal-sized purchases and 10,000 equal-sized sales a year. That means that each person can devote 1/20,000 of their intellect to detecting a scam, but the scam artist can devote 10,000/20,000 of their intellect to generating one.
It's similar to the "steal a penny from everyone" scam. And it's a reason why we need class-action suits and government intervention. Because if my bank steals a dollar from me, they may lose my business, but it'll never be worth me suing them to get a dollar back. So, we need to aggregate the attention/motivation of those ripped off a little bit to punish the bank.
In fact with the bank, they have many people devoted to earning fees, so it's unlikely a single person could keep up with all the intracices the bank can think about.
First off, I notice you cannot come up with how a sexual history is relevent to a charge of rape. It seems difficult to make a case for it, so I understand your hesitance.
Secondly, you seem to think that filing an affifavit is in any way different from testifying on the stand to the matter. Of course it is "evidence" in the same way that getting called to the stand and stating you are innocent is "evidence". In both cases you have a clear and compelling reason to lie, and the jury can weigh how much they believe you in determining your innocence.
Thirdly, you seem to not understand the concept of an affirmative defense. Although I am not 100% sure, it seems like claiming an alledged rape was consentual would be analogous to claiming self-defense. In that case, you admit the facts, while disputing the legality. As such, you no longer have the same standard for innocence, as the prosecutor has a smaller burden of proof.
so in the rape scenario, the victim's past history is clearly relevant to the present allegation
How? Literally how would it impact your judgement? I think that your response will indicate why it is a verboten topic.
Even if it did lead to more truth (which it seems impossible to me that it would), you would have to weigh the accuracy against the chilling effect.
The bottom line is that NO always means NO, even for a practised sex-worker, but the prosecution must prove that he/she did say NO, in the circumstances where consent was likely, (jury of peers)
Nonsense, consent is an affirmative action, not negative one. That is, the person has to have said "YES" not refrained from saying "NO". As such, it seems consent is an affirmative defense, which shifts the onus of proof somewhat.
The woman is always right stuff is nonsense.
No one came close to claiming that.
What is needed is common sense not more guess work.
Common sense is guess work, albeit lazy guesswork. It's a standard set of guesses. Not that that is bad, guessing is important in life. But I fail to see the distinction you are trying to make.
simply trying to control them is antithetical to the system of justice. The most important thing is that juries decide.
I'd say the most important thing is the right to refute/address any facts that are used to try to imprison me. But, to paraphrase the old song "You say Seventh amendment, I say Sixth amendment, let's call the both of them important."
Evidence siezed illegally is admissible once the person who siezed it has finished paying their (income-adjusted) $50k fine or serving a full year in prison?
Ah, but there's the right to a speedy trial. So, the trial will have to be completed and jepordy attached before the evidence can be used.
Besides, a community/rich victim could easily pony up the fine.
One, some questions may be verboten because they are somehow misleading, or because the evidence they talk about must be avoided. For instance, it is against the rules to ask a rape victim about his sexual past because its deemed largely immaterial and misleading (there's also the chilling effect this has on victim's coming forward). Evidence collected illegally cannot be used, even a murder weapon with the defendent's fingerprints on it.
The solution to that seems to be to allow the jurors to write questions up, that are then shown to both advocates. Then the appropriate attorney can ask the witness if its a permissable question; since they know the answer will be of interest to a juror, they will have a powerful motive to do so.
Two, the ability to rebut/refute testimony, as well as add more details to move beyond a point. The jury could ask if the defendent in a murder had ever shot someone, get a "yes" and the defense attorney would need to be present to make the witness then go on to say it was in self-defense.
This seems solvable by requiring the questions to take place in open court, or even get folded in with the list to the attorney's idea.
And it's not the competing and contradictory biases of the DA and defense council that are an issue, it's where their biases/ignorance overlap, especially of the sophistication of the jury and knowledge of the evidence, that issues arise.
No wait, that is what the attorneys are doing and I expect news bans and Google bans are lawyers attempting to protect their income streams.
I have a huge problem with secret evidence that is used to convict (or acquit). The reason is that there is no chance to point out flaws in the argumentation/facts. While I have no issue with you believing whatever misunderstood facts or falsehoods you pull off the internet in your individual life, I would want the opportunity to correct the record if you're using that to try me.
And that's even leaving aside concepts such as disregarding evidence due to police misconduct.
You see, the whole idea of "law" was supposed to be for a code to bind a society together by making every member capable of some action affecting others to follow a simple set of clear rules, which, again by definition, were to be simple enough to be memorized in entirety by everyone. That is why Hammurabi had the thing carved in stone and placed at public squares, so that "ignorance of the law" was not an excuse for breaking it.
And then the Greeks added professional advocates (choosen for oratorical skill). And the Romans added professional lawyers. Why? Because the law is more complex than any codification of it. If I shoot someone, is it a crime? Well, it depends on a lot of factors, some obvious: was the gun legally purchased; did I have the right to carry it; was I in fear of my life? But even those answers aren't complete. Suppose I had no fear of my life (for the purposes of this conversation, assume that's a requirement for self-defense in my state.) You would say that my shooting was unlawful. But, new twist, he was hiding behind a target in a target range. Wait, additional twist, I knew he was there. Oh, yet another twist, it was part of a magic act and he knew I was going to shoot at him, but there was an equipment failure that made it unsafe.
If you can write a law that handles all those possibilities and all other imagined ones, you'd make an excellent programmer and an even better legislator.
You see, the whole idea of "law" was supposed to be for a code to bind a society together by making every member capable of some action affecting others to follow a simple set of clear rules, which, again by definition, were to be simple enough to be memorized in entirety by everyone.
I think that's where you made your first mistake. I don't know why the actions have to affect another (except that you're a libertarian). I don't know why they would have to be memorized by anyone, let alone everyone. Or why they would even have to be exhaustive.
The purpose of law is to provide a non-violent way of resolving disputes between parites. Period.
We try to make the laws "better" by making actions have predictable consequences, because predictable consequences are a good thing. We even try to make the law create more precitable consequences then the absence of law has, i.e. we not only try to make the effects of the law upon us predictable, but we also try to use the law to counterbalance randomess in our society, such as defaulting on an agreement.
We even try to make the law align with our moral code, so that we are not penalized for doing moral actions or forced to do immoral actions.
But those benefits follow once we accept a need for law.
if over some period Virgos (Virgoes ?) had half as many accidents as those born under other astrological signs, would you expect insurance companies to incorporate that into their pricing models?
Of course not... it's less risk/less income. Now if Virgos had twice as many accidents as those born under other astrological signs, then it would be incorporated immediately.
Correlation is necessary, but not sufficient, for causation. Therefore, if you want to eliminate causations, and can afford to error in that direction, eliminating correlations is a good way to do so. Especially since it is so difficult to prove causation.
"Correlation is not causation" does not mean all correlations can be mindlessly discarded.
Sorry to respond to myself... but "You pass the 87% likelihood that there will be at least one pair (assuming equal birthdates over the last 80 years and equal gender ratios) at 58,438 people in a zip code." is a mistake.
SHould be: You pass the 87% likelihood that there will be at most one pair (assuming equal birthdates over the last 80 years and equal gender ratios) at 58,438 people in a zip code.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tom Clancy reference the GP refers to uses a computer to automatically change the words. So I suppose their's prior art there as well.
There really is. There's no way for the market to support paying someone with a noisy baby to leave a theater, even though said transaction is to everyone's benefit... non-governmental market failure. Absent regulation, there would be no Linux, because Intel and AMD would only sell chips that could only run MS products (or no MS products would run).
As a libertarian, shouldn't private ownership of the spectrum agree with your philosophy? I mean, it's a limited resource and all. It's like saying "You know why Armani bags are so expensive here? Because if you try to make your own the [some governemnt agency] puts you in jail" or "You know why fruit is so expensive here? Because if you go to a farm and try to pick it yourself, the police puts you in jail." Obviously you can buy an orchard, or the Armani name, or even a chunk of the spectrum. But it's not a free-for-all.
Or do you fall in the "I'm libertarian as long as I can see it, but once I cannot I develop cognitive dissonance" camp? If so, you have a lot of company.
Only on Slashdot would someone trying to use sex to stave off boredom, in a mixed gender pool, suggest everyone be given masterbatory aides.
And only on Slashdot would it be modded insightful.
Market failures occur when there is no free-market mechanism for engaging in mutually benfical transactions, or for achieving an efficent state. Natural monoplies, public goods, and situations with externalities all produce market failures.
Example clearly not government caused; there is no way to pay a slow person in front of you in airport security to go the back of the line, transaction costs eat up any reward.
The FDIC forces patrons to diversify. It prevents every customer from doing a long-term forcast on a banks soluability (something wall street whiffed on recently, is Joe Shemo expected to do better).As for allowing banks to take huge risks, that point is crazy. By the time the FDIC steps in, the bank is bankrupt. I never heard of a banker worrying about their customers in the case where they were already out of a job, their bank was shuttered, etc. etc. In other words, a bank corporation has to fail for the FDIC to matter, and bank executives don't care about what happens when a bank fails... there are no more shareholders.
Throwing "moral hazard" out there on every level of government intervention isn't a brilliant argument. In fact, the FDIC exists to create the moral hazard, depositing money in banks. As stated, the only people insured are the depositors, and a banking system is necessary for a first world economy. So, the moral hazard here is good.
They're asking for some of the money back they gave Congress in the 90's when planning for just such a contingency.
Railroads are textbook natural monopolies. Standard Oil grew powerful without government intervention. Microsoft didn't need government assistence. What creation of market conditions are you refering to, insufficent regulation?
People who cannot get better jobs... who wants to work at WalMart?
You're missing my point. A mixture of the two is best. I cannot even figure out whether your non-self-limiting option is supposed to refer to pure capitalism or pure communism. Reading it, it seems to talk more about capitalism (after all, in capitalism you have things like companies gettting the police to beat workers). But then your point baout communism doesn't make much sense.
You cannot try to divide it into freedom on one side, and none on the other. There are different freedoms on each side. I don't think that the "freedom" to do whatever I want with my money is the most important freedom. I prefer speech, privacy, etc.
Follow the news? The FDIC has been snapping up banks left and right and is doing quite well.
Bullshit. The USPS was making tons of money in the late 90's. Accounting rules force them to be unable to save their profits, so it looks as though they are losing money when really they are buring through an earlier surplus. The reason they made so much money in the late 90's? Because they planned ahead and knew they were going to have to run a defict to upgrade their services. Come back when you take both years intou accound.
THen you ridiculously compare a doctor to the USPS. Compare like to like. It's usually easier for me to ship via USPS than FedEx... USPS picks it up. And costs less than one percent as much. And FedEx's scales are dirty as well.
That same doctor probably already treats people under Medicare. Package delivery is by design impersonal. I want efficency; drop of package and money, don't think about it anymore.
What about market failures. The insurance industry is always rife with them, for instance flood insurance, or, as you point out, health insurance. The FDIC (another insurance system) is even heralded by conservatives as the most successful government run program in existence.
The USPS can take any random sheet of paper across the country to a specific person for less than the price of a coke, with door-to-door service.
The federal government also does well busting up trusts.
But you're clearly right, free-markets* always** exist*** and work****
* Enjoy your cheap tainted meat!
** Microsoft is clearly on it's last legs.
*** Recall the horrors of the "company store"? WalMart would love to pay it's employees in WalMart script.
**** Remember when a poorly regulated free market destroyed the US economy? It was last year. See also, 1987.
Government control is bad, unregulated markets are bad. I don't understand how anyone can believe that free-markets are always the answer any more than people believe government is always the answer. At least the religious right has a history of dogmatically believing in things that evidence has disproved. Why so many libertarian FSM-touting people persist on this board, I'll never understand. Pure capitalism imploded before pure communism did. The countries that are currently doing well have a mixture of capitalism and socialism, a little heavier on the socialism than the US. But obviously, we must push to one extreme!
Polarizing glasses look like sunglasses (they cut out ~50% of the light to each eye). Therefore, some people would have thought "cheap sunglasses". But darkening the visual light you can see, so that you can pick up more details/be more comfortable is only one purpose of sunglasses. A more important purpose is to protect your eyes from UV light, of which sunglasses block far more than 50%.
Hence the warning not to wear them outside.
Afterthought, wearing them outside would also cause your pupils to dialate somewhat (less visible light) rendering them more vulnerable to UV while making you feel less vulnerable.
George W. Bush was also nominated after being in office after twoish weeks. And again subsequently.
It doesn't seem that unusual for a US president (or former president) to get nominated even if there's no chance that he is worth winning. And I suppose trying to establish a nuke-free world falls under the "peace conferences" section of their charter.
Still, they should have waited until he, I don't know, did something about it.
Only at a specific level. Making a robot walk with bipedal motion is hard. MAking a robot able to turn a camera image into a representation of the world around it is hard.
Pathfinding (using A*, for instance) is solved, but not necessarily cheap. It's only hard because of the previous two subgoals
Deciding where to go is not hard at all.
So in other words, if you have (for example) a killer robot that shoot people without a US flag on their sleeve, and protects other people, you had to solve a lot of hard problems. Replacing the US flag with a Chinese one is not hard though.
IIRC, fines are not tax deductable. The government is going to expect you to declare that on your taxes. So, expect to lose money when you made $1,000 and are taxed for $12,000.
That is not so bad, as I pointed out. The larger problem is when you think you are upshifting and end up in reverse. Or, to a lesser degree, think you are in second switching to first, and are in reality in first, switching to reverse.
I suppose it never occured to me to run a program not knowing what it did. And certainly, as a dev, it wouldn't occur to me to add that to "about". That's what goes under F1/Help.
Okay then, I recommend you click on a menu item that does something. I want to know what files my program it's using. The copyright spells out what OSS components are used. I need to know the build number to report a bug.
If all you care about is that it works, you want the about to read "Hey, this software works!" ?
Never driven a stick I assume. The position of the rear gear refers to how you have to translate/rotate (yes, even that decision is not standard) the stick so that it goes into reverse. Get it wrong and the car will go forward instead. Even worse is getting into reverse accidentally.
The controls for the wipers and lights are also pretty standard, and the gauges and their approximate location too.
That's the kind of glossing over the details that make it hard for me to switch to Linux.
When I went to about, I got a version and build numbers, absolute paths to files it was using, and information on the copyright. What else should be in there?
That's backwards. You have to punish them, because it's impossible to fully educate customers (well, absent destroying capitalism and keeping transactions to simple barter).
Imagine that there are one million people, all equally intelligent and educated, and all equally hard working. Now imagine that each of them executes 10,000 equal-sized purchases and 10,000 equal-sized sales a year. That means that each person can devote 1/20,000 of their intellect to detecting a scam, but the scam artist can devote 10,000/20,000 of their intellect to generating one.
It's similar to the "steal a penny from everyone" scam. And it's a reason why we need class-action suits and government intervention. Because if my bank steals a dollar from me, they may lose my business, but it'll never be worth me suing them to get a dollar back. So, we need to aggregate the attention/motivation of those ripped off a little bit to punish the bank.
In fact with the bank, they have many people devoted to earning fees, so it's unlikely a single person could keep up with all the intracices the bank can think about.
First off, I notice you cannot come up with how a sexual history is relevent to a charge of rape. It seems difficult to make a case for it, so I understand your hesitance.
Secondly, you seem to think that filing an affifavit is in any way different from testifying on the stand to the matter. Of course it is "evidence" in the same way that getting called to the stand and stating you are innocent is "evidence". In both cases you have a clear and compelling reason to lie, and the jury can weigh how much they believe you in determining your innocence.
Thirdly, you seem to not understand the concept of an affirmative defense. Although I am not 100% sure, it seems like claiming an alledged rape was consentual would be analogous to claiming self-defense. In that case, you admit the facts, while disputing the legality. As such, you no longer have the same standard for innocence, as the prosecutor has a smaller burden of proof.
How? Literally how would it impact your judgement? I think that your response will indicate why it is a verboten topic.
Even if it did lead to more truth (which it seems impossible to me that it would), you would have to weigh the accuracy against the chilling effect.
Nonsense, consent is an affirmative action, not negative one. That is, the person has to have said "YES" not refrained from saying "NO". As such, it seems consent is an affirmative defense, which shifts the onus of proof somewhat.
No one came close to claiming that.
Common sense is guess work, albeit lazy guesswork. It's a standard set of guesses. Not that that is bad, guessing is important in life. But I fail to see the distinction you are trying to make.
I'd say the most important thing is the right to refute/address any facts that are used to try to imprison me. But, to paraphrase the old song "You say Seventh amendment, I say Sixth amendment, let's call the both of them important."
Ah, but there's the right to a speedy trial. So, the trial will have to be completed and jepordy attached before the evidence can be used.
Besides, a community/rich victim could easily pony up the fine.
I like the concept, but there are a few issues.
One, some questions may be verboten because they are somehow misleading, or because the evidence they talk about must be avoided. For instance, it is against the rules to ask a rape victim about his sexual past because its deemed largely immaterial and misleading (there's also the chilling effect this has on victim's coming forward). Evidence collected illegally cannot be used, even a murder weapon with the defendent's fingerprints on it.
The solution to that seems to be to allow the jurors to write questions up, that are then shown to both advocates. Then the appropriate attorney can ask the witness if its a permissable question; since they know the answer will be of interest to a juror, they will have a powerful motive to do so.
Two, the ability to rebut/refute testimony, as well as add more details to move beyond a point. The jury could ask if the defendent in a murder had ever shot someone, get a "yes" and the defense attorney would need to be present to make the witness then go on to say it was in self-defense.
This seems solvable by requiring the questions to take place in open court, or even get folded in with the list to the attorney's idea.
And it's not the competing and contradictory biases of the DA and defense council that are an issue, it's where their biases/ignorance overlap, especially of the sophistication of the jury and knowledge of the evidence, that issues arise.
I have a huge problem with secret evidence that is used to convict (or acquit). The reason is that there is no chance to point out flaws in the argumentation/facts. While I have no issue with you believing whatever misunderstood facts or falsehoods you pull off the internet in your individual life, I would want the opportunity to correct the record if you're using that to try me.
And that's even leaving aside concepts such as disregarding evidence due to police misconduct.
And then the Greeks added professional advocates (choosen for oratorical skill). And the Romans added professional lawyers. Why? Because the law is more complex than any codification of it. If I shoot someone, is it a crime? Well, it depends on a lot of factors, some obvious: was the gun legally purchased; did I have the right to carry it; was I in fear of my life? But even those answers aren't complete. Suppose I had no fear of my life (for the purposes of this conversation, assume that's a requirement for self-defense in my state.) You would say that my shooting was unlawful. But, new twist, he was hiding behind a target in a target range. Wait, additional twist, I knew he was there. Oh, yet another twist, it was part of a magic act and he knew I was going to shoot at him, but there was an equipment failure that made it unsafe.
If you can write a law that handles all those possibilities and all other imagined ones, you'd make an excellent programmer and an even better legislator.
I think that's where you made your first mistake. I don't know why the actions have to affect another (except that you're a libertarian). I don't know why they would have to be memorized by anyone, let alone everyone. Or why they would even have to be exhaustive.
The purpose of law is to provide a non-violent way of resolving disputes between parites. Period.
We try to make the laws "better" by making actions have predictable consequences, because predictable consequences are a good thing. We even try to make the law create more precitable consequences then the absence of law has, i.e. we not only try to make the effects of the law upon us predictable, but we also try to use the law to counterbalance randomess in our society, such as defaulting on an agreement.
We even try to make the law align with our moral code, so that we are not penalized for doing moral actions or forced to do immoral actions.
But those benefits follow once we accept a need for law.
Of course not... it's less risk/less income. Now if Virgos had twice as many accidents as those born under other astrological signs, then it would be incorporated immediately.
Correlation is necessary, but not sufficient, for causation. Therefore, if you want to eliminate causations, and can afford to error in that direction, eliminating correlations is a good way to do so. Especially since it is so difficult to prove causation.
"Correlation is not causation" does not mean all correlations can be mindlessly discarded.
Sorry to respond to myself... but "You pass the 87% likelihood that there will be at least one pair (assuming equal birthdates over the last 80 years and equal gender ratios) at 58,438 people in a zip code." is a mistake.
SHould be: You pass the 87% likelihood that there will be at most one pair (assuming equal birthdates over the last 80 years and equal gender ratios) at 58,438 people in a zip code.