Or, perhaps Alice knows that the search of Bob's possessions will reveal a crime* Alice committed (that is unrelated to what they're after Bob for). Under current law she can't plead the Fifth (because Bob's offense doesn't relate to her), but being forced to testify *does* incriminate her (because her crime will come to light)
Or, what may be happening in this case: The prosecution can make a case against Bob, but not Alice. They charge Bob, compel Alice to testify, hoping that enough details come to light that they can later make the case against Alice.
1. "If witnesses are allowed the option of not testifying, all a criminal needs to do to avoid conviction is convince the witnesses not to testify. I'll leave it up to you to think of ways he could do that (many of which, if not testifying is an option, would be perfectly legal)." I don't think this makes sense. Just because it's legal to do X does not mean it's legal to intimidate someone into doing X. It's legal for Bob to give you his wallet but not legal for you to coerce him into doing it.
Sure it does. I'm Mr. Moneypants. I commit a crime in front of a witness (that doesn't directly affect you - you were just a bystander). I send my lawyer/accountant/flunky to the witness and say "hey, here's a check for ten million bucks in exchange for you not testifying." How many people in the US are going to turn that down, particularly if they're not emotionally attached to the crime?
2. All your points about the difficulty of prosecuting a case without third-party witnesses, are correct, however I addressed this in the article -- this is basically an argument that if you had to choose between compelling testimony from a defendant and compelling testimony from third-party witnesses, you would choose testimony from third-party witnesses just because there are often more of them, and no hope of getting a conviction otherwise.
However, since you don't actually have to choose between the two, my question is: Is there a principled argument, from first principles about rights of the state vs. rights of the individual, as to why we should be allowed to require answers from third party witnesses but not defendants? If we require answers from third party witnesses because those answers are valuable, why can't we require answers from the defendant if they might be valuable too?
Well, here's a difference: there is a cost to the defendant if they're forced to testify (self-incrimination). What is the equivalent cost to the witness?
And a more interesting question - what happens if the witness is forced to the stand and declines to take the oath? Can the government force you to take the oath under duress?
Maybe because there are no worthwhile Wii U games compared to the 3DS?
This.
The Wii U is fine as a console (yes, yes, it doesn't have a gazillion pixels or whatever), and there are some great examples of what you can do with the tablet-screen. There's just no damned games for the thing.
Not quite. They are obligated to pay you for the time that you work. That is all. If you give two weeks notice, and they walk you out the door and ask you not to come back, they are not obligated to pay for the rest of that time. Otherwise people would give 5 years notice when they think they are about to be fired.
Not in my corner of the world - the notice is limited to the legally-required amount (two weeks) unless specified to be more in the employment contract, but if I give notice and they walk me out the door that day, I still get paid for that time. It's actually not that uncommon, particularly in management and sales (areas where they don't want you making decisions for the last couple weeks).
Here's the thing to remember - if you're on salary, you are not paid by the hour. And odds are your employer didn't write specific hours into your contract, because they always want to squeeze extra hours out of you for free. (Or to be more charitable, to have some flexibility.)
The last time I had a boss try the "expected hours" line on me (which if memory serves was after staying multiple hours late over several days, and then coming in a half-hour later the next day), I simply suggested that if he was concerned that I wasn't at work enough, we should change my employment to hourly. I'll punch in and punch out (for lunch and breaks too!), and in a month we'll see who's coming out ahead.
1 If I'm the hiring person and you don't give your current employer notice then I'll assume that you are a snake and will do the same to me later, regardless of whether I would need knowledge transition at that point. You're talking a professional (knowledge) position here, right?
On the other hand, most jobs I've got (knowledge or otherwise) want you ASAP - if you can get out of your old job sooner all the better for them.
On a more practical note, I've seen people get punted the day they gave notice (in one case, for "business confidentiality reasons", in the other because the employee had vacation pre-booked and the company preferred to get them off the benefits sooner rather than later). Modern corporations have made it quite clear that their loyalty to employees is on a day-to-day basis. (Small companies are a different kettle of fish.)
2 How sure are you that you won't ever want the old job as a reference? I've been surprised at how well some older references have worked for me.
Can you even get a job as a reference anymore? Last I checked corps wouldn't give a reference (beyond "confirm dates of employment"). (And again, working for Real People instead of Paper People changes your mileage.)
There's no way that'll happen "for real", but if that's not part of the next Red Nose (or whatever that charity they do shorts for every year), something is Terribly Wrong with the universe.
When I would explain that "separate but equal" only applies to physical objects, they would say that they wanted to be "married", not unionized. So I ask them was stopping them from putting on white dresses, saying vows, exchanging rings, smearing cake on each other's faces, throwing a party and telling everyone they know that they are married? What difference does it make what the government called it?
I would answer this by asking the reverse - why is it so important that existing married couples stay "married"? No reason why man and wife can't go do the dresses and vows and whatnot and get a civil union rather than "married". Why don't they?
Or a related example - two people can live together, own property and businesses together, have and raise children together, and stick together through thick and thin for 25 or 40 years... but they're still considered to be "living in sin" because they're not "married".
The label has power - and you know it, because you end with "telling everyone they know that they are married". Except they're not.
Even Obama, the "grassroots" candidate, got about 70% of his money from "large individual contributions". (And before the haters start a-hatin', Romney clocked 80% of his cash from big sugar daddies, so he got nothing to talk about.)
Are you really, with a straight face, tell me that if Microsoft or Google (Obama donors #2 and 3 respectively) call up for a meeting, Obama's not going to take their call? (And anyone want to guess why all those bankers backed Romney?)
It's cute that you think politics and campaign donations work that way, but they really don't. For one thing, most donations don't come from "rich people" or even "corporations", they come from non-profits, unions, and other non-corporate lobbies.
My local billionaire would disagree with you - he (I'm sorry, him and 16 of his friends and family) contributed several hundred thousand dollars (or, $30,000 *each*) in the last election.
It's no great mystery how this works. The first priority of a politician is to make their voters happy, the second priority to make their donors happy, and doing the right thing has the lowest priority. Since most voters actually don't care about most decisions either way, usually the donors come off best in the end.
I'll agree on the low priority right thing, but it's rare to see a politician who will side with a voter over a donor IMO.
No, but politicians approve those laws. And they approve those laws because voters reelect them even though they do.
It's cute that you think that politicians worry about voters more than six months before re-election. It doesn't take a lot of economics to see where a politician's loyalties must, by definition, lie.
I live in a medium-sized city in Canada. About a million people, nothing big. To make a run for city council here costs $50-60 thousand dollars. (More if you want to be mayor). That's roughly a year's salary at a pretty good job. Since most people can't afford to spend a year's salary at the shot of winning an election, you get people to donate to you. And the rich people who can afford to throw thousands of dollars at you... expect you to do certain things.
Scale up to provincial/state or federal elections, and everything becomes more expensive. (Mother Jones says it can cost half a million dollars for your first Senate race). Do you know anyone who can put a dent in half a million dollars who *doesn't* want some quo to go with the quid pro?
Politicians can be as popular as they want to be - without the money they won't win. Which means that the people who supply the money are far more influential than the voters.
That's like saying that the 4th doesn't apply if you rent rather than own your home.
Sadly, the courts are kinda leaning that way. There's also been a few cases where cops will patrol the hallways of your apartment building and then use whatever "evidence" they find in the "public space" and then bust down your door.
The erosion of morality on Congress Hill did not start with Obama, it started way back during Clinton's administration
Sorry, young man, but you've not lived through much history, nor read much of it. Google McCarthy, Chicago Seven, J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate. This shit has been going on forever.
And the point of the article is that technology makes it cheaper and more efficient to do the shit, which makes it more and more tempting.
Scroll up a bit and look at Shamrock again, and think about what would be involved there - even if they had the manpower to read every telegram that came in, it's hit-and-miss as to whether the right connection gets made at the time. And it's a safe bet that they weren't storing all those telegrams afterwards (just imagine the storage costs!). Fast forward to today: you can get the computer to do your first-pass reads of email (the modern telegram), and storage is cheap enough that you can store everything (whether you think it's important or not), because once you have a lead or suspicion you can search the entire back-history to see what you might have missed.
Some sites have java script that disables context menus (right mouse button) and other things that I don't want. That's why I want to be able to control what my browser does and turn java script off if that gives me a better user experience.
My response when I hit a site that does stupid things with my UI is to close the tab and never go back.
Ok, so I built a road between two adjacent communities. What stops someone else from doing the same with a slightly different route, or heck, right alongside my road? I'm genuinely curious.
The fact that if I built my road first, it's logical that I also built the cross-connections to other roads and towns. So how do you propose to build your second road alongside mine without crossing or connecting to it
This isn't a hard scenario to imagine - look at any random chunk of road in your neighborhood, imagine the roads are privately owned (by folks hostile enough to you that you're trying to build your own), and for the sake of argument, give yourself infinite money - enough to buy whatever lands and right-of-ways you need, but not enough to buy out the Evil Roadowner you're competing with.
Now, where do you propose to run your Alternate Road System?
Although I notice you didn't answer the question - you say you'll work for free on a comic book. So, no objections to someone else treating you like an employee in every other fashion (hours of work, dress code, targets to meet), and keeping all the benefit from your work? You'll just do it out of the goodness of your heart? (Or maybe just for a nice letter from me gushing about how gullible,er, hard-working you were)
Its kinda like those jackassses years back, that worked at MS as contractors (signed contracts and all), then, came back and sued MS for not getting employee benefits.
I don't remember the details so well, but wasn't part of that problem that MS wasn't treating them like contractors? (i.e. they were treating them like employees until it was payday, at which point they magically turned back into contractors?)
As a potential intern I am free to accept or decline any offer.
True, but you're glossing over the detail of "we want you to have experience before we hire you".
So now it's not a question of taking a half-assed donut, it's being *forced* to take a half-ass donut as a prerequisite for *maybe* getting a better donut later. (But of course, no guarantees!)
I suppose you could decline the offer - just like you can decline to eat or have a place to live.
The part I'm really missing is if everybody wanted a paid internship why would anybody accept an unpaid one?
That's easy - just ask yourself the reverse question. Why would anyone offer a paid internship when you can get away with offering an unpaid one instead?
Read through the earlier comments - the folks who got paid internships are generally in industries where they're *required* to do a paid internship (either because the degree or their industry association required it). Thus, companies can't get away with offering unpaid ones because they can't even call it "work experience" - it doesn't count.
All this ruling does is extend the logic across the board.
I also switched to Tiny Tiny RSS and purchased the app for my phone in order to support the developer. I don't miss Google Reader at all.
I tried TT and it couldn't fetch half my feeds ("initialization error") and got the dates wrong by as much as 4 days on some of the feeds it managed to fetch. I started looking through the support forum to see what I needed to do to fix it and saw the abusive nature of Fox's (the main/only developer) posts and decided that I would not have any luck getting these issues fixed and gave up on it. I'm on The Old Reader for now.
I get the initialization error a lot, but the feeds still show up. (Apparently they just like to be grumpy about all the mal-formed RSS feeds).
The big selling feature for me was that it's self-hosted, so I never have to worry about migrating again.
annnnnnnnnnnnnnd thats why its getting made. not because of its grand artistry or whatever the f**** excuses people use.
Also, because everyone wants to see the Battle Room.
There's plenty of interesting elements and themes in Ender's Game, but I'm under no illusions that why it's being made, and why it's being made *now* is that they finally figured out how to show the Battle Room in a (presumably) non-lame way.
As for Mr. Card's views, I would paraphrase a quote from another - "Card is a wonderful author, just a really second-rate human being".
I wonder if the folks calling for a boycott are also going to boycott Star Wars and Indiana Jones now, because Harrison Ford has sullied himself...
Also, there's some simple BizMath at work - sales and marketing people bring in customers (and thus, are a net positive to the bottom line). Everyone else, while "necessary", doesn't, are are thus net negatives to the bottom line. That's why it's engineering and admin and warehouse folks who are the first on the chopping block when management needs to hit their bonus numbers.
Well, you'd want something that preferrably doesn't need an assisiting person all the time.
If by "all the time" you mean "four measures before the song starts"... seems way simpler to have the next person tap them in (or squeeze or whatever they sort out) than to haul in a bunch of extra hardware.
Plenty of precedent too - it's fairly common to turn pages for fellow orchestra members when they're busy in a solo or more complicated part.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, perhaps Alice knows that the search of Bob's possessions will reveal a crime* Alice committed (that is unrelated to what they're after Bob for). Under current law she can't plead the Fifth (because Bob's offense doesn't relate to her), but being forced to testify *does* incriminate her (because her crime will come to light)
Or, what may be happening in this case: The prosecution can make a case against Bob, but not Alice. They charge Bob, compel Alice to testify, hoping that enough details come to light that they can later make the case against Alice.
1. "If witnesses are allowed the option of not testifying, all a criminal needs to do to avoid conviction is convince the witnesses not to testify. I'll leave it up to you to think of ways he could do that (many of which, if not testifying is an option, would be perfectly legal)." I don't think this makes sense. Just because it's legal to do X does not mean it's legal to intimidate someone into doing X. It's legal for Bob to give you his wallet but not legal for you to coerce him into doing it.
Sure it does. I'm Mr. Moneypants. I commit a crime in front of a witness (that doesn't directly affect you - you were just a bystander). I send my lawyer/accountant/flunky to the witness and say "hey, here's a check for ten million bucks in exchange for you not testifying." How many people in the US are going to turn that down, particularly if they're not emotionally attached to the crime?
2. All your points about the difficulty of prosecuting a case without third-party witnesses, are correct, however I addressed this in the article -- this is basically an argument that if you had to choose between compelling testimony from a defendant and compelling testimony from third-party witnesses, you would choose testimony from third-party witnesses just because there are often more of them, and no hope of getting a conviction otherwise. However, since you don't actually have to choose between the two, my question is: Is there a principled argument, from first principles about rights of the state vs. rights of the individual, as to why we should be allowed to require answers from third party witnesses but not defendants? If we require answers from third party witnesses because those answers are valuable, why can't we require answers from the defendant if they might be valuable too?
Well, here's a difference: there is a cost to the defendant if they're forced to testify (self-incrimination). What is the equivalent cost to the witness?
And a more interesting question - what happens if the witness is forced to the stand and declines to take the oath? Can the government force you to take the oath under duress?
Maybe because there are no worthwhile Wii U games compared to the 3DS?
This.
The Wii U is fine as a console (yes, yes, it doesn't have a gazillion pixels or whatever), and there are some great examples of what you can do with the tablet-screen. There's just no damned games for the thing.
Not quite. They are obligated to pay you for the time that you work. That is all. If you give two weeks notice, and they walk you out the door and ask you not to come back, they are not obligated to pay for the rest of that time. Otherwise people would give 5 years notice when they think they are about to be fired.
Not in my corner of the world - the notice is limited to the legally-required amount (two weeks) unless specified to be more in the employment contract, but if I give notice and they walk me out the door that day, I still get paid for that time. It's actually not that uncommon, particularly in management and sales (areas where they don't want you making decisions for the last couple weeks).
If only to have mod points...
Here's the thing to remember - if you're on salary, you are not paid by the hour. And odds are your employer didn't write specific hours into your contract, because they always want to squeeze extra hours out of you for free. (Or to be more charitable, to have some flexibility.)
The last time I had a boss try the "expected hours" line on me (which if memory serves was after staying multiple hours late over several days, and then coming in a half-hour later the next day), I simply suggested that if he was concerned that I wasn't at work enough, we should change my employment to hourly. I'll punch in and punch out (for lunch and breaks too!), and in a month we'll see who's coming out ahead.
Subject never came up again.
1 If I'm the hiring person and you don't give your current employer notice then I'll assume that you are a snake and will do the same to me later, regardless of whether I would need knowledge transition at that point. You're talking a professional (knowledge) position here, right?
On the other hand, most jobs I've got (knowledge or otherwise) want you ASAP - if you can get out of your old job sooner all the better for them.
On a more practical note, I've seen people get punted the day they gave notice (in one case, for "business confidentiality reasons", in the other because the employee had vacation pre-booked and the company preferred to get them off the benefits sooner rather than later). Modern corporations have made it quite clear that their loyalty to employees is on a day-to-day basis. (Small companies are a different kettle of fish.)
2 How sure are you that you won't ever want the old job as a reference? I've been surprised at how well some older references have worked for me.
Can you even get a job as a reference anymore? Last I checked corps wouldn't give a reference (beyond "confirm dates of employment"). (And again, working for Real People instead of Paper People changes your mileage.)
There's no way that'll happen "for real", but if that's not part of the next Red Nose (or whatever that charity they do shorts for every year), something is Terribly Wrong with the universe.
I have no idea if there is a term for multiple men and multiple women that is more specific than polygamy.
Fun at parties?
When I would explain that "separate but equal" only applies to physical objects, they would say that they wanted to be "married", not unionized. So I ask them was stopping them from putting on white dresses, saying vows, exchanging rings, smearing cake on each other's faces, throwing a party and telling everyone they know that they are married? What difference does it make what the government called it?
I would answer this by asking the reverse - why is it so important that existing married couples stay "married"? No reason why man and wife can't go do the dresses and vows and whatnot and get a civil union rather than "married". Why don't they?
Or a related example - two people can live together, own property and businesses together, have and raise children together, and stick together through thick and thin for 25 or 40 years... but they're still considered to be "living in sin" because they're not "married".
The label has power - and you know it, because you end with "telling everyone they know that they are married". Except they're not.
Sure thing - here's the 2012 US election data.
Even Obama, the "grassroots" candidate, got about 70% of his money from "large individual contributions". (And before the haters start a-hatin', Romney clocked 80% of his cash from big sugar daddies, so he got nothing to talk about.)
Are you really, with a straight face, tell me that if Microsoft or Google (Obama donors #2 and 3 respectively) call up for a meeting, Obama's not going to take their call? (And anyone want to guess why all those bankers backed Romney?)
It's cute that you think politics and campaign donations work that way, but they really don't. For one thing, most donations don't come from "rich people" or even "corporations", they come from non-profits, unions, and other non-corporate lobbies.
My local billionaire would disagree with you - he (I'm sorry, him and 16 of his friends and family) contributed several hundred thousand dollars (or, $30,000 *each*) in the last election.
I'll agree on the low priority right thing, but it's rare to see a politician who will side with a voter over a donor IMO.
No, but politicians approve those laws. And they approve those laws because voters reelect them even though they do.
It's cute that you think that politicians worry about voters more than six months before re-election. It doesn't take a lot of economics to see where a politician's loyalties must, by definition, lie.
I live in a medium-sized city in Canada. About a million people, nothing big. To make a run for city council here costs $50-60 thousand dollars. (More if you want to be mayor). That's roughly a year's salary at a pretty good job. Since most people can't afford to spend a year's salary at the shot of winning an election, you get people to donate to you. And the rich people who can afford to throw thousands of dollars at you... expect you to do certain things.
Scale up to provincial/state or federal elections, and everything becomes more expensive. (Mother Jones says it can cost half a million dollars for your first Senate race). Do you know anyone who can put a dent in half a million dollars who *doesn't* want some quo to go with the quid pro?
Politicians can be as popular as they want to be - without the money they won't win. Which means that the people who supply the money are far more influential than the voters.
That's like saying that the 4th doesn't apply if you rent rather than own your home.
Sadly, the courts are kinda leaning that way. There's also been a few cases where cops will patrol the hallways of your apartment building and then use whatever "evidence" they find in the "public space" and then bust down your door.
Or that's what they WANT you to think that they want you to think.
The erosion of morality on Congress Hill did not start with Obama, it started way back during Clinton's administration
Sorry, young man, but you've not lived through much history, nor read much of it. Google McCarthy, Chicago Seven, J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate. This shit has been going on forever.
And the point of the article is that technology makes it cheaper and more efficient to do the shit, which makes it more and more tempting.
Scroll up a bit and look at Shamrock again, and think about what would be involved there - even if they had the manpower to read every telegram that came in, it's hit-and-miss as to whether the right connection gets made at the time. And it's a safe bet that they weren't storing all those telegrams afterwards (just imagine the storage costs!). Fast forward to today: you can get the computer to do your first-pass reads of email (the modern telegram), and storage is cheap enough that you can store everything (whether you think it's important or not), because once you have a lead or suspicion you can search the entire back-history to see what you might have missed.
Some sites have java script that disables context menus (right mouse button) and other things that I don't want. That's why I want to be able to control what my browser does and turn java script off if that gives me a better user experience.
My response when I hit a site that does stupid things with my UI is to close the tab and never go back.
Ok, so I built a road between two adjacent communities. What stops someone else from doing the same with a slightly different route, or heck, right alongside my road? I'm genuinely curious.
The fact that if I built my road first, it's logical that I also built the cross-connections to other roads and towns. So how do you propose to build your second road alongside mine without crossing or connecting to it
This isn't a hard scenario to imagine - look at any random chunk of road in your neighborhood, imagine the roads are privately owned (by folks hostile enough to you that you're trying to build your own), and for the sake of argument, give yourself infinite money - enough to buy whatever lands and right-of-ways you need, but not enough to buy out the Evil Roadowner you're competing with.
Now, where do you propose to run your Alternate Road System?
Although I notice you didn't answer the question - you say you'll work for free on a comic book. So, no objections to someone else treating you like an employee in every other fashion (hours of work, dress code, targets to meet), and keeping all the benefit from your work? You'll just do it out of the goodness of your heart? (Or maybe just for a nice letter from me gushing about how gullible,er, hard-working you were)
Its kinda like those jackassses years back, that worked at MS as contractors (signed contracts and all), then, came back and sued MS for not getting employee benefits.
I don't remember the details so well, but wasn't part of that problem that MS wasn't treating them like contractors? (i.e. they were treating them like employees until it was payday, at which point they magically turned back into contractors?)
As a potential intern I am free to accept or decline any offer.
True, but you're glossing over the detail of "we want you to have experience before we hire you".
So now it's not a question of taking a half-assed donut, it's being *forced* to take a half-ass donut as a prerequisite for *maybe* getting a better donut later. (But of course, no guarantees!)
I suppose you could decline the offer - just like you can decline to eat or have a place to live.
The part I'm really missing is if everybody wanted a paid internship why would anybody accept an unpaid one?
That's easy - just ask yourself the reverse question. Why would anyone offer a paid internship when you can get away with offering an unpaid one instead?
Read through the earlier comments - the folks who got paid internships are generally in industries where they're *required* to do a paid internship (either because the degree or their industry association required it). Thus, companies can't get away with offering unpaid ones because they can't even call it "work experience" - it doesn't count.
All this ruling does is extend the logic across the board.
I also switched to Tiny Tiny RSS and purchased the app for my phone in order to support the developer. I don't miss Google Reader at all.
I tried TT and it couldn't fetch half my feeds ("initialization error") and got the dates wrong by as much as 4 days on some of the feeds it managed to fetch. I started looking through the support forum to see what I needed to do to fix it and saw the abusive nature of Fox's (the main/only developer) posts and decided that I would not have any luck getting these issues fixed and gave up on it. I'm on The Old Reader for now.
I get the initialization error a lot, but the feeds still show up. (Apparently they just like to be grumpy about all the mal-formed RSS feeds).
The big selling feature for me was that it's self-hosted, so I never have to worry about migrating again.
annnnnnnnnnnnnnd thats why its getting made. not because of its grand artistry or whatever the f**** excuses people use.
Also, because everyone wants to see the Battle Room.
There's plenty of interesting elements and themes in Ender's Game, but I'm under no illusions that why it's being made, and why it's being made *now* is that they finally figured out how to show the Battle Room in a (presumably) non-lame way.
As for Mr. Card's views, I would paraphrase a quote from another - "Card is a wonderful author, just a really second-rate human being".
I wonder if the folks calling for a boycott are also going to boycott Star Wars and Indiana Jones now, because Harrison Ford has sullied himself...
Also, there's some simple BizMath at work - sales and marketing people bring in customers (and thus, are a net positive to the bottom line). Everyone else, while "necessary", doesn't, are are thus net negatives to the bottom line. That's why it's engineering and admin and warehouse folks who are the first on the chopping block when management needs to hit their bonus numbers.
Well, you'd want something that preferrably doesn't need an assisiting person all the time.
If by "all the time" you mean "four measures before the song starts"... seems way simpler to have the next person tap them in (or squeeze or whatever they sort out) than to haul in a bunch of extra hardware.
Plenty of precedent too - it's fairly common to turn pages for fellow orchestra members when they're busy in a solo or more complicated part.