Well at least I'm reaching someone. It just drives me crazy when something bad happens "legally" and everyone jumps on the "lawyers are scumbags" bandwagon. Like I've mentioned elsewhere, I have friends that are lawyers. I was friends with them before they went to law school and then got jobs and they really aren't any different than they used to be. They are able to see both sides of an argument better, but they aren't the money-grubbing slime that everyone thinks lawyers are. Again, like I've said elsewhere, there are going to be scumbag lawyers like there are scumbag doctors and scumbag taxi drivers. Those people just exist. But they're not all like that. Christ, do people think the EFF's lawyers are scumbags too? What about IBM's given the whole SCO thing?
Well I'm glad for your sake that it wasn't a deranged crack head. But I also don't know where you live. Maybe that scenario isn't realistic for you and you made the right choice. But for me, I'd rather the "One life ended" not be mine. I mean I'm not going to go all Charles Bronson on somebody, but I'd still have no reservations about shooting someone in my house. But like I said to another poster, I don't own a gun because scenarios like the one we're discussing don't outweigh a kid getting a hold of a gun, or accidently shooting my fiancee, etc. I'm speaking simply from the standpoint of "If you come into my house, expect an ass-whooping first and questions second"
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't have a gun. Nor do I actually want one because the disadvantages of having a gun in the house. But I do own weapons. And I do believe in my right to defend my home and potentially my life. Now would I sneak up behind a burgular and slit his throat if I didn't see a weapon? No. But I sure as hell would put a knife to his throat until the cops got there. If I did see a weapon, I can't honestly tell you what I would do. But I'm not willing to bet my life on the chance that it might be one of the "good" burglars. Like I said to the other guy, I can see and respect your opinion. But it isn't mine.
Clearly a simpler system is needed if we are going to get out from under the weight of the influence of all the damned lawyers who are busy turning this into a nation of litigation to maintain job security.
Lawyers don't have jobs without clients. See the other post in this thread about the girl "being pushed" down the stairs.
As for my arrogant mindset, my apologies for not being able to discern your lucid understanding of the fallacies of the legal system from your six sentence post which amounted to "All lawyers suck. They made the system of precedent, which makes things hard to understand". My arrogance only stems from that 99% of the/. community has no understanding of the legal system or how it is supposed to work. If you truly fall into that other 1%, my apologies for not knowing it. But your initial post looks like the other 99%, especially considering I have friends that are lawyers and they are not the monsters that you and everyone else make them out to be.
The law on the books says one thing, but a judge once decided that it didn't apply and now precedent says something else.
Nine times out of ten, the judge doesn't say the law doesn't apply, she says "this is how the law works given these circumstances". Look at the segway example I gave. They take an existing law and they don't turn it on it's head. They explain how the law should be applied given a certain amount of facts.
Alternatively, the law books themselves should be annotated to show every case which effectively changes each statute.
How often does this get updated? Every day? What about federal courts? Do they have to update the statutes from the decisions of the dozens and dozens of circuit and district courts every day? What happens when an circuit court reverses the decision made by a district court? What about when the reversed decision was the basis of a decision made this morning? Cases are reported, they are electronically catalogued and easily seqarchable. To try and change the statutes themselves for every possible set of facts on a frequent basis is insanity. That being said, statutes do change. Periodically they are changed to include segways or hoverbikes or whatever. It just can't happen every day, or every week, or even every month. It would be ridiculously impratical.
Lastly, Precedent does not cause an avoidance of responsibility. When a courts decisions are published, a judge takes responsibiity for what was decided, even if it was just to affirm a previous decision. Precedent causes predicibility and stability. Did you even read my post?
Honestly, because he probably is a scumbag. And dumb. Frivoulous lawsuits exist. That's why rule 11 exists. It was created in response to them. If I were your parents lawyers, I'd probably bring it up. There are going to be scumbag lawyers, just like there are scumbag doctors, and scumbag taxi drivers. The point I'm trying to make is that lawyers are not A) all bad like everyone seems to think and B) the only problem. Scumbag lawyers are only part of the problem. Bad laws (Congress), Bad Citizens (the girl in your parents case), and a lot of other bad people are involved.
The fact that thanks to the strict anti-gun laws, it is incredibly hard to get a firearm here in Britain
OK, to be fair, I was referring to here in the US. I won't contend the point with you in matters of the UK.
So, in other words, a human life to you is worth less than your property?
When they're in my house, how do I know they're not going to kill me and rape my wife? Should I politely ask them? In an abstract sense, no, of course human life is more important. But when it's 2 AM and dark and some stranger is in my house, possibly armed, and I don't know what they are going to do, I honestly would shoot first and ask questions later. Sorry. It's survival to me. I understand and respect that you may feel different.
The problem with suing someone over a frivolous lawsuit is that the lawyer is not held accountable,
You have no clue what you are talking about. The lawyer invests signifigant time into filing and preparing for a lawsuit. If the lawyer didn't honestly think that the client had a valid claim, that time could be spent working for a client that did. And the lawyer IS held accountable. It's called "Rule 11" and it's there to sanction lawyers that file frivilous law suits.
They should not be necessary at all, but the law is not the law! Precedent is the law
The fact that you challenge this shows you know nothing about how the law works. The law is made up of statutes AND precedent. Precedent is used to guide the law so the similar cases are not decided differently. The way it works now: X gets hit by a car driven by Y. Y is found guilty of, say, manslughter for whatever reason. Four years later K gets hit by a car driven by L with a very similar fact pattern. The courts can look at the previous case and say "Yes the original court made the right decision and we apply it to this one". If they didn't, everytime this accident happened, the court would have to go through a lengthy process of looking at the statute, making assumptions because the statutes never cover every case, and in the end, two similar cases could be decided completely differently becuase the judges were different. Removing precedent would make deterrment impossible because you'd never be able to predict what the court will decide e.g. "If I kill this person, what will happen?" as opposed to "If I kill this person, I'll probably go to prison for life". On top of that, precedent helps determine how the law should work when dealing with facts that were never envisioned at the time the statute was created. Example: A sign says "no vehicles in the park". A person gets fined for riding a segway in the park. Should they be fined? Segways weren't around when the statute was made. Well, what has the court decided in the past? Cars were not allowed in one case but bikes were in another. Motorized scooters were in a third. Therefore, the segway is ok and the person shouldn't have been fined. Precedent is what makes the courts semi-predictable. Not as predictable as people bashing lawyers on slashdot, but semi-predictable.
I'm not saying lawyers are angels, and that more of these cases shouldn't be turned away, but don't challenge something you obviously don't understand.
And you are basing this on.....? If they are armed, and I fire a warning shot in the air, guess where their warning shot is going: in my gut. If they're in my house, trying to steal my stuff, I do have the GD right to plug 'em. If I didn't, more people would probably be stealing since a potential deterrent is no longer there (i.e. getting shot). I mean, I'm liberal, but please, don't go spouting off about burglar's rights.
Higher FPS means it can just handle more stuff happening on the screen at once. I don't need super whopping detail to start, I just need the game to not turn into a slideshow when 5 grenades explode around me at the same time. A video card that generates higher FPS means instead of 5 grenades it can handle 7, or 9, or 11 ad nauseum. Once it can handle a good amount of "stuff" on the screen, bump the resolution up a little or add more detail and we're back to only handling 7 grenades. Is this acceptable? Personal preference. Tweak up or down, lather, rinse, repeat.
psxndc
Have you even tried VS.NET??
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 2, Informative
VS.NET is a billion times better than VS6. VS.NET and C# are the only thing that made me say "Well, maybe MS products aren't all that bad". Seriously, check it out. VS.NET is pretty damn cool.
Finally, I don't *hate* lawyers, but there are lawyers I detest
Understandably. There are going to be sleezy lawyers, doctors, construction workers, salespeople, anything. I've met my fair share of lawyers that I despised. My gripe is with the blanket "All lawyers are bad" that permeates slashdot and the US as a whole.
To correct a couple things: See the post in this thread that only 39% of congress are lawyers. That still leaves 61% that aren't. Judges are all lawyers as far as I know. I'd be really surprised if there was a judge that wasn't one. And lawyers don't go to clients preaching IP. Clients come to lawyers because the client thinks they have something potentially worth protecting. As for the USPTO, what does money have to do with it. Because attorney's make more money per year, a PTO investigator shouldn't do his job?
Out of curiosity, how many lawyers do you know? I know two personally (one IP, one corporate) and seeing my friends be lawyers has definitely changed my perspective. It's a lot easier to hate something you don't understand.
OK, here's a hypothetical for you: A drug dealer, one that everyone in the neighborhood knows is responsible for the addiction and subsequent death of three eleven year olds, is shot in a drive-by. Is the doctor morally obligated to save his life? If he does, won' the dealer go kill the people that did the drive-by and potentially some bystanders. What if he continued selling dope to kids? Everyone has to make moral decisions in everything they do. I once told a client that I wouldn't write a spam-bot for them because spamming their customers was a really bad idea. But then on other projects, the client had a really good business case for direct e-mail marketing their customers (not spam, it was truly an opt-in mechanism). I think you'd be hard pressed to find a job that people rarely have to make moral decisions. Should a librarian stock a book that outlines the propaganda of the Nazis? It has historical signifigance, but it could also spread the Nazi message to a new generation. I could go on and on.
The Miranda rights are not a "loophole", they are there to inform someone who may not know their rights, of those rights. Not everyone knows they have the right to remain silent. Most people start saying "I didn't do it! I was [at Bob's]". Well if it turns out you panicked and you just said the first name that came to mind and you weren't in fact at Bob's, then you look a lot guiltier in court, even if you aren't. Secondly, confessing you did it has a whole mess of implications: did you do it under duress, what state of mind were you in, etc? I wish I could tell you exactly what the purpose of Miranda rights are, but I'm too lazy right now to google for it. The rights themselves are there to protect the individual and let them know explicitly what rights they are entitled to.
And "common sense" to you is probably not common sense to a lot of people. In fact, I find that people with real common sense are pretty uncommon.
The technology plays to the same market (IT) but individuals in that market should be intelligent enough to tell the difference.
Well, that's what the court will have to decide. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that is the question: Is a lay-person, even one in the field, going to get them confused?
As for Tibco, I have heard of them. I don't know much about them, but I've heard of them. If I had seen their product ad or whatever for "Rendezvous", the first thing I would think would be Apple's technology. I would of course look into it and realize they weren't the same thing, but my initial reaction would be that they have a Rendezvous-enabled app since more and more things (printers, chat clients, etc) are being relased as Rendezvous-aware.
"Coincidentally", they are also the only ones to really understand the system.
Actually, there has been a movement in most US law school's over the last decade to make legal writing a little more "plain" so that everyone can understand it.
I understand what you're saying, and I think the intention is correct, but I don't entirely agree with it. Criminal and civil matters are quite different. I personally could never defend someone that is a "known killer". But the system has been set up to (ideally) avoid abuses. The example you gave, Miranda rights, are a part of that system and everyone is entitled to them: killers, fraudulent CEOS, and people that shoplift. That being said, I DOUBT a lawyer that defended and freed a known killer because their Miranda rights weren't read has a clear conscience. What they did was correct in the eyes of the law, but they know it is still "wrong". But this is where your statement of the profession being warped comes into play. It doesn't seem right that a lawyer would help free a murderer.
There are two sides of every coin. For every lawyer that is defending something they don't believe in, there is a lawyer that fully believes in their client's side. For every known murderer that is freed, there could be an innocent person that is jailed. The system isn't perfect, but it is designed to make everyone equal. If people do not do their jobs, like in your example a cop not reading an offender their rights, the system breaks down.
True, lawyers are not "innocent", but "kill all lawyers" makes them out to be _the_ problem, not part of it. Why not say "kill all that cause frivilousness"?
As for saying "no" to ridiculous lawsuits, patents, etc. it _is_ done, probably moreso than most think. Secondly, it is not always in an individual lawyer's ability to do so. If a lawfirm partner says "ClientX, who is a very valuable client, has 23 valid IP patents and 1 so-so patent. But someone is infringing on the so-so one. Go get them Associate-Boy" it's not like the associate can say "Sorry Mr. Partner-Man, no can do". They could, but it would be like an IT person in an all Windows shop saying "We must switch over to Linux because Windows is Non-free". There is moral merit to the argument, but it doesn't make business sense and it's not really the whipping boy's decision to make.
Again, I don't absolve all lawyers of guilt in the matter, but I want people to recognize and point fingers at the other parts of the problem
I hate that phrase. First, lawyers don't create laws; Legislators/Congress(wo)men do (and judges interpret them). Secondly, lawyers' clients are the ones that hold the patents, not the lawyers. Thirdly, the USPTO (or the european equivalent in this case) is the one granting the patents. Lawyers are the middle-(wo)men in all this. Removing the lawyers won't solve the problem.
Sorry but I see people saying this all over slashdot. I think it's an unjustified statement that people like to throw out there when legislators make bad laws, judges interpret the law incorrectly, or the PTO grants patent they shouldn't have.
Anyone can be a patent agent. There is a separate patent-bar that just about anyone can take. You don't even need to go to law school or have passed the state bar exam.
The issue is "causing consumer confusion". I can't give out paper towels and call them "Kleenex". The fact that I am distributing a product that has a similar function with the same name is what is damaging to the company since when people see "Kleenex", they think of the product "Kleenex-brand tissues", even though a paper towel is clearly not a tissue.
Tibco actually probably has a case here. I'm not saying it's right, but a messaging application and a network protocol are probably close enough to cause confusion or at least be enough to look into. Using my previous example, I could start a record store called "Kleenex Records" and probably get away with it since Kleenex-brand tissues and Kleenex Records are different enough markets/products that it shouldn't cause consumer confusion. I'd still get sued by the makers of Kleenex-brand tissues, but I'd probably have a stronger case than Apple.
While this whole thing is cool, what pisses me off is that the interns are developing the bots. When I interned with IBM back in the summer of '97, they had me converting text manuals from DocBook to SGML for IBM Japan. The script they had to do it needed a lot of tweaking and guess who got to be the tweaker/tester? Blech. I wish I had heard on the first day "Well, Patrick, this isn't going to be a fun summer I'm afraid. We need you to write a bot for Quake II. Probably not as fun as scrolling through invalid SGML and making corrections, but hey, we can't all be rock stars". Bah
Or that they can make more money off of unemployment than they can by working at McDonald's, which is pretty f'ed up. By sitting on my ass, I could make more money than someone that busts their ass over a hot stove for 8 hours? That ain't right. It just ain't right.
4? Just 4? How did you even find out about slashdot, marketing-guy? I have 7 behind me, and this is just my work collection. I have about the same at home. I tell ya, geeks these days. In my day, we had EVERY nutshell book, multiple copies and multiple versions. You didn't know if it was 2nd edition or 1st. That's the way it was and we liked it. We _loved_ it!
Slashdot Mirror
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Lawyers don't have jobs without clients. See the other post in this thread about the girl "being pushed" down the stairs.
As for my arrogant mindset, my apologies for not being able to discern your lucid understanding of the fallacies of the legal system from your six sentence post which amounted to "All lawyers suck. They made the system of precedent, which makes things hard to understand". My arrogance only stems from that 99% of the /. community has no understanding of the legal system or how it is supposed to work. If you truly fall into that other 1%, my apologies for not knowing it. But your initial post looks like the other 99%, especially considering I have friends that are lawyers and they are not the monsters that you and everyone else make them out to be.
psxndc
Nine times out of ten, the judge doesn't say the law doesn't apply, she says "this is how the law works given these circumstances". Look at the segway example I gave. They take an existing law and they don't turn it on it's head. They explain how the law should be applied given a certain amount of facts.
Alternatively, the law books themselves should be annotated to show every case which effectively changes each statute.
How often does this get updated? Every day? What about federal courts? Do they have to update the statutes from the decisions of the dozens and dozens of circuit and district courts every day? What happens when an circuit court reverses the decision made by a district court? What about when the reversed decision was the basis of a decision made this morning? Cases are reported, they are electronically catalogued and easily seqarchable. To try and change the statutes themselves for every possible set of facts on a frequent basis is insanity. That being said, statutes do change. Periodically they are changed to include segways or hoverbikes or whatever. It just can't happen every day, or every week, or even every month. It would be ridiculously impratical.
Lastly, Precedent does not cause an avoidance of responsibility. When a courts decisions are published, a judge takes responsibiity for what was decided, even if it was just to affirm a previous decision. Precedent causes predicibility and stability. Did you even read my post?
psxndc
Honestly, because he probably is a scumbag. And dumb. Frivoulous lawsuits exist. That's why rule 11 exists. It was created in response to them. If I were your parents lawyers, I'd probably bring it up. There are going to be scumbag lawyers, just like there are scumbag doctors, and scumbag taxi drivers. The point I'm trying to make is that lawyers are not A) all bad like everyone seems to think and B) the only problem. Scumbag lawyers are only part of the problem. Bad laws (Congress), Bad Citizens (the girl in your parents case), and a lot of other bad people are involved.
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OK, to be fair, I was referring to here in the US. I won't contend the point with you in matters of the UK.
So, in other words, a human life to you is worth less than your property?
When they're in my house, how do I know they're not going to kill me and rape my wife? Should I politely ask them? In an abstract sense, no, of course human life is more important. But when it's 2 AM and dark and some stranger is in my house, possibly armed, and I don't know what they are going to do, I honestly would shoot first and ask questions later. Sorry. It's survival to me. I understand and respect that you may feel different.
psxndc
You have no clue what you are talking about. The lawyer invests signifigant time into filing and preparing for a lawsuit. If the lawyer didn't honestly think that the client had a valid claim, that time could be spent working for a client that did. And the lawyer IS held accountable. It's called "Rule 11" and it's there to sanction lawyers that file frivilous law suits.
They should not be necessary at all, but the law is not the law! Precedent is the law
The fact that you challenge this shows you know nothing about how the law works. The law is made up of statutes AND precedent. Precedent is used to guide the law so the similar cases are not decided differently. The way it works now: X gets hit by a car driven by Y. Y is found guilty of, say, manslughter for whatever reason. Four years later K gets hit by a car driven by L with a very similar fact pattern. The courts can look at the previous case and say "Yes the original court made the right decision and we apply it to this one". If they didn't, everytime this accident happened, the court would have to go through a lengthy process of looking at the statute, making assumptions because the statutes never cover every case, and in the end, two similar cases could be decided completely differently becuase the judges were different. Removing precedent would make deterrment impossible because you'd never be able to predict what the court will decide e.g. "If I kill this person, what will happen?" as opposed to "If I kill this person, I'll probably go to prison for life". On top of that, precedent helps determine how the law should work when dealing with facts that were never envisioned at the time the statute was created. Example: A sign says "no vehicles in the park". A person gets fined for riding a segway in the park. Should they be fined? Segways weren't around when the statute was made. Well, what has the court decided in the past? Cars were not allowed in one case but bikes were in another. Motorized scooters were in a third. Therefore, the segway is ok and the person shouldn't have been fined. Precedent is what makes the courts semi-predictable. Not as predictable as people bashing lawyers on slashdot, but semi-predictable.
I'm not saying lawyers are angels, and that more of these cases shouldn't be turned away, but don't challenge something you obviously don't understand.
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And you are basing this on.....? If they are armed, and I fire a warning shot in the air, guess where their warning shot is going: in my gut. If they're in my house, trying to steal my stuff, I do have the GD right to plug 'em. If I didn't, more people would probably be stealing since a potential deterrent is no longer there (i.e. getting shot). I mean, I'm liberal, but please, don't go spouting off about burglar's rights.
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Strange to watch because I used to work with one of the guys (Tom Herman), but a good documentary nonetheless.
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Understandably. There are going to be sleezy lawyers, doctors, construction workers, salespeople, anything. I've met my fair share of lawyers that I despised. My gripe is with the blanket "All lawyers are bad" that permeates slashdot and the US as a whole.
psxndc
Out of curiosity, how many lawyers do you know? I know two personally (one IP, one corporate) and seeing my friends be lawyers has definitely changed my perspective. It's a lot easier to hate something you don't understand.
psxndc
The Miranda rights are not a "loophole", they are there to inform someone who may not know their rights, of those rights. Not everyone knows they have the right to remain silent. Most people start saying "I didn't do it! I was [at Bob's]". Well if it turns out you panicked and you just said the first name that came to mind and you weren't in fact at Bob's, then you look a lot guiltier in court, even if you aren't. Secondly, confessing you did it has a whole mess of implications: did you do it under duress, what state of mind were you in, etc? I wish I could tell you exactly what the purpose of Miranda rights are, but I'm too lazy right now to google for it. The rights themselves are there to protect the individual and let them know explicitly what rights they are entitled to.
And "common sense" to you is probably not common sense to a lot of people. In fact, I find that people with real common sense are pretty uncommon.
psxndc
Well, that's what the court will have to decide. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that is the question: Is a lay-person, even one in the field, going to get them confused?
As for Tibco, I have heard of them. I don't know much about them, but I've heard of them. If I had seen their product ad or whatever for "Rendezvous", the first thing I would think would be Apple's technology. I would of course look into it and realize they weren't the same thing, but my initial reaction would be that they have a Rendezvous-enabled app since more and more things (printers, chat clients, etc) are being relased as Rendezvous-aware.
psxndc
Actually, there has been a movement in most US law school's over the last decade to make legal writing a little more "plain" so that everyone can understand it.
There are two sides of every coin. For every lawyer that is defending something they don't believe in, there is a lawyer that fully believes in their client's side. For every known murderer that is freed, there could be an innocent person that is jailed. The system isn't perfect, but it is designed to make everyone equal. If people do not do their jobs, like in your example a cop not reading an offender their rights, the system breaks down.
psxndc
As for saying "no" to ridiculous lawsuits, patents, etc. it _is_ done, probably moreso than most think. Secondly, it is not always in an individual lawyer's ability to do so. If a lawfirm partner says "ClientX, who is a very valuable client, has 23 valid IP patents and 1 so-so patent. But someone is infringing on the so-so one. Go get them Associate-Boy" it's not like the associate can say "Sorry Mr. Partner-Man, no can do". They could, but it would be like an IT person in an all Windows shop saying "We must switch over to Linux because Windows is Non-free". There is moral merit to the argument, but it doesn't make business sense and it's not really the whipping boy's decision to make.
Again, I don't absolve all lawyers of guilt in the matter, but I want people to recognize and point fingers at the other parts of the problem
psxndc
I hate that phrase. First, lawyers don't create laws; Legislators/Congress(wo)men do (and judges interpret them). Secondly, lawyers' clients are the ones that hold the patents, not the lawyers. Thirdly, the USPTO (or the european equivalent in this case) is the one granting the patents. Lawyers are the middle-(wo)men in all this. Removing the lawyers won't solve the problem.
Sorry but I see people saying this all over slashdot. I think it's an unjustified statement that people like to throw out there when legislators make bad laws, judges interpret the law incorrectly, or the PTO grants patent they shouldn't have.
Anyone can be a patent agent. There is a separate patent-bar that just about anyone can take. You don't even need to go to law school or have passed the state bar exam.
psxndc
Tibco actually probably has a case here. I'm not saying it's right, but a messaging application and a network protocol are probably close enough to cause confusion or at least be enough to look into. Using my previous example, I could start a record store called "Kleenex Records" and probably get away with it since Kleenex-brand tissues and Kleenex Records are different enough markets/products that it shouldn't cause consumer confusion. I'd still get sued by the makers of Kleenex-brand tissues, but I'd probably have a stronger case than Apple.
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