I am an attorney. I try jury cases, civil litigation these days, but I worked for a short stint as a prosecutor. I have selected many jurors.
I can tell you first off that most attorneys do NOT want engineers on their juries. The reason is not at all that we don't want critical thinkers. Rather, it's because most engineers are a lot more like Hans Reiser than they would like to admit. Engineers have a tendency to glorify logic to the point that they ignore common sense. The law, and particularly criminal law, is not a science. No one can conclusively proove that a person committed a crime in the same way that a mathematician can prove his theorums. Engineers also tend to be arrogant, and tend to believe that they know more than everyone else about everything. I ought to know, my brother is one. And so the fear is that engineers will have a marked tendency to consider the evidence in an unfair way, to ignore what the lawyers say about the evidence, and to bully everyone else in the jury room into a point of view that does not give due credit to all of the circumstances and the evidence.
Take Reiser's case. The man is so obviously guilty it reeks. An Engineer might say, well they haven't even proved that she's dead. But somehow we are supposed to believe that she left a car full of groveries on the side of the road, failed to show up to her best friend's house, and left her kids in the hands of a man that she hates so that she could fly away to Russia? That's ridiculous. A lawyer would say that you don't have to prove something as absolutely true, but only beyond a *reasonable* doubt. It isn't reasonable to believe that this woman left her car, her groceries, her friends, and her kids to fly off to Russia, where nobody has heard from her since.
Think about it, if the prosecution had to have a body every time they tried someone for murder, than any murderer who found a good enough hiding spot for the body would get off. That may be scientifically sound, but it's not justice.
Now take the fact that they found Nina's blood in Reiser's house, and on his sleeping bag. He removed his car seat from his car, and flooded the compartment to try to wash it, and left an inch of water in there. Then he claims he was sleeping in his car. Is there any other reasonable explanation than that this car was used to transport a body? Sure, you can come up with other explanations, but none of them are *reasonable* The books on murder, the suspicious behavior, etc., are just icing on the cake.
But the reality is that a good attorney might have had a chance to get Reiser off, despite his glaring guilt. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a damn high burden to meet, and often times a good lawyer can inject enough uncertainty into a case to keep the jury from reaching that threshhold. But when Reiser took the stand, he basically removed all chance of that happening. He apparently gave some completely ridiculous explanations to some very important questions, like why in gods name would anyone use a hose to wash out their car and then leave an inch of standing water in there, when that is where they sleep. So basically, Reiser made what could have been reasonable doubts sound completely unreasonable. And that is why he was convicted, and not because of his arrogance or disdain towards humanity (although I'm sure that didn't help him either).
Which is precisely as it should be, because why should the US be involved in a purely European/Asian war that did not concern them? If the Europeans and Asians can't get along with one another, why is that our problem? Until of course they attack us... then all bets are off.
And why exactly should American lives, American money, and American resources be spent to protect the human rights of non-Americans when there is no compelling interest to the American people? That, sir, would be a horrific mismanagement of American assets by the government elected by the American people to manage those assets.
The US shines in the human rights category for two reasons: 1) It protects the rights of its own people, which is something China does not do. In fact, China oppresses it's own people. 2) America has a pretty good (not perfect) track record in defending human rights in its dealings with other countries (i.e. in WWII we didn't indiscriminately slaughter the Germans like the Soviets did, we rebuit their country and provided a stable government during the rebuilding process).
Just because a corp folds up doesn't mean there is no one left to sue. A corp doesn't just disappear into thin air when someone wants to "pull the plug." The corporation has assets, and those assets have to get distributed to somebody, and that process takes time. A corporation with no assets is in serious danger of losing the liability shield (meaning people can go after the individual shareholders and/or corporate officers). Also, any liability insurance policies in place when the corporation was operating would still be accessible to claimants.
At the very least, this corp is out of business and won't be making insecure web sites anymore, which is a good thing. With any luck, a smart customer will attach what's left of the assets so that nobody walks away with all the money scott free.
What's the cost per mile for the fuel? It seems to me that the practical consideration that makes or breaks any technology for oil replacement is the cost per mile of the fuel. What ever that cost is, it's got to come pretty close to gasoline if anyone expects a majority of people to make the switch.
I suspect with all the research into ethanol, and the availability of dual fuel ethanal/gas cars, ethanol will get there first. I have certainly read/heard of crunchy rich enviromental types who already use ethanol just to get the look-at-me-i'm-not-polluting holier-than-thou feeling. Is suspect as ethanol gets cheaper, that population will grow, funding more research and better delivery infrastructure. It seems as if it should work similarly to consumer goods where the early adopters pay the premium for new technology and eventually the price drops and then the rest of the population jumps on the bandwagon.
I think the important take-away here is that our Intellectual Property laws are really messed up. The Red cross (chartered or not) has been using that symbol long before J&J), so it seems kind of broken that J&J gets to tell the Red cross what they can do with it just because they weren't on the ball enough to have registered it first.
Actually, the law is not as messed up as you might think. Pretend you're a company, and you want to come up with a trademark to sell your stuff. You come up with 3 or 4 different ideas, but of course you don't want to infringe on someone else's trademark or else you might get sued (and of course there's a public interest thing involved in not having multiple companies using the same symbols - it gets downright confusing). So the best way to solve the problem is to have a registered trademark database that you can search to make sure the trademark is not taken. How is a company supposed to know when a trademark is taken if the company using it didn't register it? Should the company be expected to scour the country looking for prior usage of a trademark?
Now I don't know all the facts here, but it looks to me like Johnson and Johnson either sat on their trademark without enforcing it for a LONG time, or they picked a trademark that they knew was not unique despite it not being in the trademark database. In either case, shame on them, and they will lose the case. But of course there could be facts here that we all don't know so it's important not to prejudge the case. For instance, if this is about selling products for profit, rather than the identity of a charity, this might be a completely different ballgame.
I think it is certainly a mistake to assume that trademark law is screwed up just because greedy company A is suing good charity B because of a trademark issue. You don't know who is on the wrong side of the law yet. Just because a charity does good things does not mean it can't violate the law, and just because a company is out for profit doesn't mean that it is evil and using the law as a tool of oppression.
Geeze quit your bitching. If you hate the editors so much stop visiting slashdot or at least stop posting about it so the rest of us don't have to hear your constant whining. Obviously the spelling errors and dupes aren't as important as you think otherwise why do you keep coming back.
Have you ever found yourself telling someone, "yeah, I liked that song before everyone else thought it was cool." I can see this model encouraging people to explore and download and try new stuff so that later on, when the price goes up, they can brag about how they downloaded it first, for free, before it was selling for $5 a pop.
It also might open the door for more quality indies to actually make money. People might be turned off by high prices of what the RIAA cartel marketing is pushing, and go for the cheaper indie stuff. Then again, I am probably being too optimistic, as most teenagers will pay any price for "cool"
What really kills me about this is the fact that my tax dollars funded these raids. So I'm paying for FBI agents to kick in people's doors and, OMG! stop them from breaking copyright law!
I think I'd rather the President repurpose the FBI copyright squad to fighting terror, thank you very much. I think the RIAA and company should have to pay for their own enforcement efforts.
Didn't Digg try this censorship thing once in response to a DCMA takedown request? I recall that it didn't seem to work very well.
The web is too decentralized, too anonymous, and too inexpensive a medium to censor. The government may be able to take down individuals, or individual web sites, but the information can't be surpressed for long. No government can silence the millions of voices with the power to make themselves heard.
And I hope this notion strikes fear down to the very core of the politicians, bureaucrats, and anyone else in positions of authority who would rather we the people not have this power.
My god, that's almost as boring as writing code...
Re:They did not go up in price, the dollar went do
on
$60 Games Are Here To Stay
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you watch the trends in currency exchange, you'll notice that the dollar has been losing roughly 10% per year to the euro and pound.
This is all well and good, but it doesn't measure inflation. Inflation is measured by how much the dollar buys in goods and services, not by how much it buys in other people's currency. The euro, etc. is also subject to inflation/deflation, and the currency market is also influenced by other pressures (i.e. our national debt, price of oil, the wars we are engaged in, etc). You're basically introducing a set of entirely new variables when you try to measure one currency against another.
The parent poster is correct. The only people who gain from deflation are people with lots of money piled up. Anyone with debt actually does well with modest inflation - you pay down the debt with money that is worth less than the money you originally got from the lender. Of course, you don't want runaway inflation, like Argentina, but there's no evidence of that such a thing is anywhere in our near future.
The Fed actually does a surprisingly good job at regulating our economy, and I'm shocked that a government agency can actually be that effective. Consider, we've had no economic depression since the 1930's, and aside from the Carter stagflation debacle of the 70's, no real sustained economic downturns.
This represents an extraordinarilly expensive solution to a non-existent problem. We already have access to cheap, clean, and reliable power production facilities right here on Earth. It's called nuclear power.
An executive order is precisely the right term. It is an order issued by the executive, ie the president, to a member of the executive branch. There's nothing about the term "executive order" except for the misperceptions of the people and/or the press that implies it is a law that citizens generally have to follow.
An attorney's perspective: I have no doubt that at some point the US Supreme court will examine this order and declare that it violates the 5th amendment.
As others have pointed out, an executive order is not a law, it is merely a directive to an agency of the executive branch. The President has the right to tell the Treasury Department, which is a part of the executive branch, to do whatever he believes is consistent with the Constitution and the law. But the Supreme Court ultimately gets to decide if what the executive branch does is consistent with the Constitution.
The Fifth Amendment provides, "No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Due process is pretty straightforward - its some means or method for an accused person to dispute the charges. It doesn't have to be via a judge and jury, and can be something as simple as a committee appeal process. But, before the government, ie the President or the Treasury Dept, can seize a citizen's assets, they have to provide that citizen due process. I see nowhere in this executive order where it accords a citizen due process before his assets are seized. It appears to be blatantly unconstitutional.
Here's how it will happen: the treasury department will seize someone's assets, that someone will get an attorney and sue the US government, the case will go to the supreme court, and the supreme court will strike down the executive order.
Keep in mind the 5th amendment doesn't apply to non-citizens living outside the United States, but it might arguably be applied to non-citizens with assets here. Remeber, the 5th amendement says, "No person" not "No citizen". Constitutional rights have been afforded to legal aliens residing in the United States by the Supreme Court before. I'm not sure the Supreme Court would extend those rights to people who don't live here and don't have assets here, though, because that would be a matter of foreign policy beyond the purview of the Supreme Court, arguably.
Slashdot Mirror
I am an attorney. I try jury cases, civil litigation these days, but I worked for a short stint as a prosecutor. I have selected many jurors.
I can tell you first off that most attorneys do NOT want engineers on their juries. The reason is not at all that we don't want critical thinkers. Rather, it's because most engineers are a lot more like Hans Reiser than they would like to admit. Engineers have a tendency to glorify logic to the point that they ignore common sense. The law, and particularly criminal law, is not a science. No one can conclusively proove that a person committed a crime in the same way that a mathematician can prove his theorums. Engineers also tend to be arrogant, and tend to believe that they know more than everyone else about everything. I ought to know, my brother is one. And so the fear is that engineers will have a marked tendency to consider the evidence in an unfair way, to ignore what the lawyers say about the evidence, and to bully everyone else in the jury room into a point of view that does not give due credit to all of the circumstances and the evidence.
Take Reiser's case. The man is so obviously guilty it reeks. An Engineer might say, well they haven't even proved that she's dead. But somehow we are supposed to believe that she left a car full of groveries on the side of the road, failed to show up to her best friend's house, and left her kids in the hands of a man that she hates so that she could fly away to Russia? That's ridiculous. A lawyer would say that you don't have to prove something as absolutely true, but only beyond a *reasonable* doubt. It isn't reasonable to believe that this woman left her car, her groceries, her friends, and her kids to fly off to Russia, where nobody has heard from her since.
Think about it, if the prosecution had to have a body every time they tried someone for murder, than any murderer who found a good enough hiding spot for the body would get off. That may be scientifically sound, but it's not justice.
Now take the fact that they found Nina's blood in Reiser's house, and on his sleeping bag. He removed his car seat from his car, and flooded the compartment to try to wash it, and left an inch of water in there. Then he claims he was sleeping in his car. Is there any other reasonable explanation than that this car was used to transport a body? Sure, you can come up with other explanations, but none of them are *reasonable* The books on murder, the suspicious behavior, etc., are just icing on the cake.
But the reality is that a good attorney might have had a chance to get Reiser off, despite his glaring guilt. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a damn high burden to meet, and often times a good lawyer can inject enough uncertainty into a case to keep the jury from reaching that threshhold. But when Reiser took the stand, he basically removed all chance of that happening. He apparently gave some completely ridiculous explanations to some very important questions, like why in gods name would anyone use a hose to wash out their car and then leave an inch of standing water in there, when that is where they sleep. So basically, Reiser made what could have been reasonable doubts sound completely unreasonable. And that is why he was convicted, and not because of his arrogance or disdain towards humanity (although I'm sure that didn't help him either).
...all made in Taiwan!
Which is precisely as it should be, because why should the US be involved in a purely European/Asian war that did not concern them? If the Europeans and Asians can't get along with one another, why is that our problem? Until of course they attack us... then all bets are off.
And why exactly should American lives, American money, and American resources be spent to protect the human rights of non-Americans when there is no compelling interest to the American people? That, sir, would be a horrific mismanagement of American assets by the government elected by the American people to manage those assets.
The US shines in the human rights category for two reasons: 1) It protects the rights of its own people, which is something China does not do. In fact, China oppresses it's own people. 2) America has a pretty good (not perfect) track record in defending human rights in its dealings with other countries (i.e. in WWII we didn't indiscriminately slaughter the Germans like the Soviets did, we rebuit their country and provided a stable government during the rebuilding process).
Just because a corp folds up doesn't mean there is no one left to sue. A corp doesn't just disappear into thin air when someone wants to "pull the plug." The corporation has assets, and those assets have to get distributed to somebody, and that process takes time. A corporation with no assets is in serious danger of losing the liability shield (meaning people can go after the individual shareholders and/or corporate officers). Also, any liability insurance policies in place when the corporation was operating would still be accessible to claimants.
At the very least, this corp is out of business and won't be making insecure web sites anymore, which is a good thing. With any luck, a smart customer will attach what's left of the assets so that nobody walks away with all the money scott free.
You have any data to back up those facts or should we just take the word of an anonymous coward?
Well yay for BMW and the girl scouts too, then.
What's the cost per mile for the fuel? It seems to me that the practical consideration that makes or breaks any technology for oil replacement is the cost per mile of the fuel. What ever that cost is, it's got to come pretty close to gasoline if anyone expects a majority of people to make the switch.
I suspect with all the research into ethanol, and the availability of dual fuel ethanal/gas cars, ethanol will get there first. I have certainly read/heard of crunchy rich enviromental types who already use ethanol just to get the look-at-me-i'm-not-polluting holier-than-thou feeling. Is suspect as ethanol gets cheaper, that population will grow, funding more research and better delivery infrastructure. It seems as if it should work similarly to consumer goods where the early adopters pay the premium for new technology and eventually the price drops and then the rest of the population jumps on the bandwagon.
Yay for hydrogen and nasa though.
I think the important take-away here is that our Intellectual Property laws are really messed up. The Red cross (chartered or not) has been using that symbol long before J&J), so it seems kind of broken that J&J gets to tell the Red cross what they can do with it just because they weren't on the ball enough to have registered it first.
Actually, the law is not as messed up as you might think. Pretend you're a company, and you want to come up with a trademark to sell your stuff. You come up with 3 or 4 different ideas, but of course you don't want to infringe on someone else's trademark or else you might get sued (and of course there's a public interest thing involved in not having multiple companies using the same symbols - it gets downright confusing). So the best way to solve the problem is to have a registered trademark database that you can search to make sure the trademark is not taken. How is a company supposed to know when a trademark is taken if the company using it didn't register it? Should the company be expected to scour the country looking for prior usage of a trademark?
Now I don't know all the facts here, but it looks to me like Johnson and Johnson either sat on their trademark without enforcing it for a LONG time, or they picked a trademark that they knew was not unique despite it not being in the trademark database. In either case, shame on them, and they will lose the case. But of course there could be facts here that we all don't know so it's important not to prejudge the case. For instance, if this is about selling products for profit, rather than the identity of a charity, this might be a completely different ballgame.
I think it is certainly a mistake to assume that trademark law is screwed up just because greedy company A is suing good charity B because of a trademark issue. You don't know who is on the wrong side of the law yet. Just because a charity does good things does not mean it can't violate the law, and just because a company is out for profit doesn't mean that it is evil and using the law as a tool of oppression.
Geeze quit your bitching. If you hate the editors so much stop visiting slashdot or at least stop posting about it so the rest of us don't have to hear your constant whining. Obviously the spelling errors and dupes aren't as important as you think otherwise why do you keep coming back.
Have you ever found yourself telling someone, "yeah, I liked that song before everyone else thought it was cool." I can see this model encouraging people to explore and download and try new stuff so that later on, when the price goes up, they can brag about how they downloaded it first, for free, before it was selling for $5 a pop.
It also might open the door for more quality indies to actually make money. People might be turned off by high prices of what the RIAA cartel marketing is pushing, and go for the cheaper indie stuff. Then again, I am probably being too optimistic, as most teenagers will pay any price for "cool"
What really kills me about this is the fact that my tax dollars funded these raids. So I'm paying for FBI agents to kick in people's doors and, OMG! stop them from breaking copyright law! I think I'd rather the President repurpose the FBI copyright squad to fighting terror, thank you very much. I think the RIAA and company should have to pay for their own enforcement efforts.
Didn't Digg try this censorship thing once in response to a DCMA takedown request? I recall that it didn't seem to work very well.
The web is too decentralized, too anonymous, and too inexpensive a medium to censor. The government may be able to take down individuals, or individual web sites, but the information can't be surpressed for long. No government can silence the millions of voices with the power to make themselves heard.
And I hope this notion strikes fear down to the very core of the politicians, bureaucrats, and anyone else in positions of authority who would rather we the people not have this power.
Great feature! Can't imagine what could possibly go wrong...
My god, that's almost as boring as writing code...
If you watch the trends in currency exchange, you'll notice that the dollar has been losing roughly 10% per year to the euro and pound.
This is all well and good, but it doesn't measure inflation. Inflation is measured by how much the dollar buys in goods and services, not by how much it buys in other people's currency. The euro, etc. is also subject to inflation/deflation, and the currency market is also influenced by other pressures (i.e. our national debt, price of oil, the wars we are engaged in, etc). You're basically introducing a set of entirely new variables when you try to measure one currency against another.
The parent poster is correct. The only people who gain from deflation are people with lots of money piled up. Anyone with debt actually does well with modest inflation - you pay down the debt with money that is worth less than the money you originally got from the lender. Of course, you don't want runaway inflation, like Argentina, but there's no evidence of that such a thing is anywhere in our near future.
The Fed actually does a surprisingly good job at regulating our economy, and I'm shocked that a government agency can actually be that effective. Consider, we've had no economic depression since the 1930's, and aside from the Carter stagflation debacle of the 70's, no real sustained economic downturns.
This represents an extraordinarilly expensive solution to a non-existent problem. We already have access to cheap, clean, and reliable power production facilities right here on Earth. It's called nuclear power.
An executive order is precisely the right term. It is an order issued by the executive, ie the president, to a member of the executive branch. There's nothing about the term "executive order" except for the misperceptions of the people and/or the press that implies it is a law that citizens generally have to follow.
An attorney's perspective: I have no doubt that at some point the US Supreme court will examine this order and declare that it violates the 5th amendment.
...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Due process is pretty straightforward - its some means or method for an accused person to dispute the charges. It doesn't have to be via a judge and jury, and can be something as simple as a committee appeal process. But, before the government, ie the President or the Treasury Dept, can seize a citizen's assets, they have to provide that citizen due process. I see nowhere in this executive order where it accords a citizen due process before his assets are seized. It appears to be blatantly unconstitutional.
As others have pointed out, an executive order is not a law, it is merely a directive to an agency of the executive branch. The President has the right to tell the Treasury Department, which is a part of the executive branch, to do whatever he believes is consistent with the Constitution and the law. But the Supreme Court ultimately gets to decide if what the executive branch does is consistent with the Constitution.
The Fifth Amendment provides, "No person shall
Here's how it will happen: the treasury department will seize someone's assets, that someone will get an attorney and sue the US government, the case will go to the supreme court, and the supreme court will strike down the executive order.
Keep in mind the 5th amendment doesn't apply to non-citizens living outside the United States, but it might arguably be applied to non-citizens with assets here. Remeber, the 5th amendement says, "No person" not "No citizen". Constitutional rights have been afforded to legal aliens residing in the United States by the Supreme Court before. I'm not sure the Supreme Court would extend those rights to people who don't live here and don't have assets here, though, because that would be a matter of foreign policy beyond the purview of the Supreme Court, arguably.