Well it's not like the high earners automatically benefit NYU. A lot of those high earners rack up a huge amount of loans. And I think a lot of schools use law and business schools to subsidize other departments, which I think is shady as hell.
Of course, where NYU DOES gets its money from attracting a tremendous number of wealthy, white, suburban kids who want to live the "New York lifestyle." The kinds of kids who get plenty of money from their parents for living expenses but still dress like street people and play their guitar (badly) in the subway for spare change while they major in studio art or film.
No, you misunderstand. Microsoft was charged, convicted, and punished for their actions. The punishment was severely inadequate for the crime, but as long as Microsoft follows it (and yes, I am aware they have been skirting the edge of it for a while), they are protected by double jeopardy/res judicata.
No, it's not besides the point. It's the ENTIRE point. There is nothing wrong with supporting a cause you believe in, but in this case they're supporting causes they don't care about beyond the potential payout. You really see a moral equivalence there?
... this differs from the way the ACLU backs certain cases how exactly?
In every single possible way imaginable? The ACLU a) is actually the law firm in many cases, so it's not benefitting from winning a case it is not involved in, b) is a non-profit that doesn't file lawsuits with money the main goal, c) frequently wins cases where neither its client nor it actually make any money. How are the ACLU and this company similar exactly?
That's not a problem with the courts and/or legislative branch, that's a problem with the executive branch. And while I'm sure kickbacks happen, I think it would take a lot more than bribing one FDA employee to get something approved.
Once upon a time, our elected official were people who had built their own businesses
No, once upon a time our elected officials were wealthy children of privilege, former military officers, and guess what, lawyers (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln). You know when we had an influx of small businesspeople? During the "Republican revolution" of the 90's, when a bunch of rural, extreme right-wing small businessmen suddenly came into power. They tried to destroy the environment, take off all restraints on corporate greed, and tried to cripple the federal government, before falling out of power themselves due to their rampant corruption.
Today, our electees are basically all lawyers - and we have an economy in meltdown, archaic business efforts are kept around, and even subsidized because it buys votes, and we have a financial system where one can do better with destruction rather than construction.
Our electees are not all lawyers. A good percentage have law degrees, but it's certainly not anywhere near "all." And they are, indeed, ELECTEES. They were elected to office by the people, and it's not up to you to criticize. Besides which, non-lawyers tend to write horrible laws. They're not good at it.
The economic meltdown was not caused by legislators having law degrees, it was caused by unrestrained greed and deregulation of financial institutions. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a major cause of the financial meltdown. Gramm was an economist. Leach and Bliley were small businessmen. None were lawyers. Maybe we needed MORE lawyers in Congress, huh?
You're still leaving room for way too many exceptions that the law as written is severely deficient. A doctor re-breaks someone's nose to reset it so it will heal better. He or she just committed a crime. What constitutes a break? A hairline fracture? What if a doctor does a bone biopsy on the bone in the nose?
What if I punch you but I'm not intending to break your nose? Is the intent required to break the nose, or just throw the punch? Boxers would really want to know that.
It's interesting that after the US helps rebuild a country, we give it a better constitution and legal system than what we have. This is how it should be, but it's obvious that we should backport the best of the new legal systems to our own.
I reject the idea that the Civil Law system is "better" than the Common Law. I note that Common Law countries tend to, and have always tended to, have better economies than Civil Law ones.
I am going by American law, which is 99% of what is attacked here; generally you have a first section in each law that describes the intent behind the law.
1. abolish legally binding precedent. The accepted interpretation of a law should be a consensus among the legal community, not a decision of one moron 150 years ago.
Precedent changes frequently, and is generally a consensus decision arrived at as judges look at how other judges ruled. And there are few, if any, precedents that were established 150 years ago, and any that are tend to be re-affirmed by a new look at the law periodically.
2. Hire someone competent to rewrite the laws, aiming for clarity and precision.
As an initial matter, clarity and precision are tradeoffs. The easier the law is to read, the less precise it is. And practically, rewriting laws would be a logistical nightmare. Rewriting laws means re-passing laws, and to do that to every law in the book would take countless years to make sure the new laws aren't introducing new loopholes. Do you have an example of a law that you feel is too vague? Because I've read a lot of statutes, and in general they tend to be fairly clear.
3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch.
Alright, you are way off-base on this, changes to the law are always incorporated into the text. In fact, laws that amend statutes tend to even specify what section are modified and how they are. For example, look at Section 3this short bill.
3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone.
Pretty much already done. I don't know of any state that doesn't have a searchable index of its statutes.
4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation.
Well the problem with that is people shouldn't be allowed to violate the law simply because they're doing it on the internet. If someone is committing fraud, then they're committing fraud, just because they're doing it via e-mail doesn't mean they should escape liability.
5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Lawsuits are always supposed to be judged on merit. Unfortunately not all of them are, but this isn't because of some failure of the law, it's part of the human equation, and you're not going to fix that. As for qualifications I am also not sure what you mean; lawyers need to meet certain minimal qualifications, but after that their arguments are judged, not their background. An Ivy League law grad is in the same position as a fourth-tier law grad if they've both passed the bar.
Myself, I think laws should have something akin to the preamble section in the GPL - a short paragraph which explains in clear English exactly what the law hopes (and doesn't hope) to achieve - in order to aid understanding the spirit.
Would you have voted for BHO if you knew he was going to make a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court who is pro-RIAA and that under BHO's administration we'd see Google, Apple come under major Antitrust scrutiny (but not Microsoft)? What are your thoughts?
Yes, yes I would. For one thing, in the world of things that truly matter, the RIAA is way down on the list. And as someone else pointed out, one pro-RIAA ruling during a judicial lifetime doesn't mean that much. As for the monopoly thing, if Google and Apple are breaking the law, they should be treated accordingly. Microsoft was already convicted of being a monopoly, and they were punishment. The punishment was completely inadequate and driven by right-wing free-market fanatics in the Bush government, but in the end that was the punishment that was levied. Unless Microsoft is doing something new that is anti-competitive, they are safe.
Remember, the majority of posters here are childless and slightly paranoid. There is nothing wrong with being able to track your 5 year old unobtrusively.
I am seriously arguing that a child's right to privacy shouldn't be dismissed offhand. In particular cases, sure, it's debatable.
Sure it's debatable. The dismissal is coming mainly from the other side of the argument, by people who react to ANY attempt to even look after their kids with screams about nanny states and toughening up kids.
Privacy here is too vague a subject to be useful. I wouldn't argue that a child has the right to be alone or with friends without parental interference. However, I do think adults are not intruding on this right when they always know where the child is geographically.
Yes, any of the 400+ subway stations. I don't see why you think it'd be hard since it's the exact same method I use nowadays. Go look at subway map in station, find a route, note what to take, check for any service notices, get on subway, double check map in subway for stop to get off on, repeat till home. If the route looks particularly confusing then you can always ask someone for help. Worst case is that you waste some time backtracking if you get on the wrong train.
I am a born and bred New Yorker, and I can assure you there are many areas in the city that are not served by a subway. What you described is fine for a high school student or older, but no, I don't expect a 6th grader to be able to have complete command of the public transportation system and the ability to completely understand the MTA's oftentimes cryptic service notes.
Don't forget about the one who thinks only "fully-cogent... adults" deserve any rights. He's lost quite a bit of perspective too.
Children have less of certain rights than an adult, but more of others. They do not have the right of complete freedom of movement without monitoring. Are you seriously arguing that a 6 year old has the right to go somewhere without the knowledge of their parents?
I finished high school in the last decade and I find these things ridiculous but then again I grew up in a large city. If you couldn't make your way home from any subway station by middle school then something was wrong.
ANY subway station? Your city couldn't have been that large then.
Weird, my iphone can easily go 3 or 4 days without charging if I put it on the Edge network (and I can still get 2-3 days on 3G if I don't use any special features beyond occasionally checking mail).
Slashdot Mirror
But yeah, your stereotype is pretty accurate anyway :P I'm what they would call an outlier I suppose?
See if I saw you next to those metropolitan hipsters, I would assume you were the local and all of them were from out of the city.
Well it's not like the high earners automatically benefit NYU. A lot of those high earners rack up a huge amount of loans. And I think a lot of schools use law and business schools to subsidize other departments, which I think is shady as hell.
Of course, where NYU DOES gets its money from attracting a tremendous number of wealthy, white, suburban kids who want to live the "New York lifestyle." The kinds of kids who get plenty of money from their parents for living expenses but still dress like street people and play their guitar (badly) in the subway for spare change while they major in studio art or film.
No, you misunderstand. Microsoft was charged, convicted, and punished for their actions. The punishment was severely inadequate for the crime, but as long as Microsoft follows it (and yes, I am aware they have been skirting the edge of it for a while), they are protected by double jeopardy/res judicata.
No, it's not besides the point. It's the ENTIRE point. There is nothing wrong with supporting a cause you believe in, but in this case they're supporting causes they don't care about beyond the potential payout. You really see a moral equivalence there?
... this differs from the way the ACLU backs certain cases how exactly?
In every single possible way imaginable? The ACLU a) is actually the law firm in many cases, so it's not benefitting from winning a case it is not involved in, b) is a non-profit that doesn't file lawsuits with money the main goal, c) frequently wins cases where neither its client nor it actually make any money. How are the ACLU and this company similar exactly?
As far as I can tell there are no legal ethics and lawyers always act in their self interest, NOT in the interests of their client.
Well maybe during your sophomore year you'll gain a slightly fuller understanding of the world, and revise your opinion accordingly.
That's not a problem with the courts and/or legislative branch, that's a problem with the executive branch. And while I'm sure kickbacks happen, I think it would take a lot more than bribing one FDA employee to get something approved.
Once upon a time, our elected official were people who had built their own businesses
No, once upon a time our elected officials were wealthy children of privilege, former military officers, and guess what, lawyers (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln). You know when we had an influx of small businesspeople? During the "Republican revolution" of the 90's, when a bunch of rural, extreme right-wing small businessmen suddenly came into power. They tried to destroy the environment, take off all restraints on corporate greed, and tried to cripple the federal government, before falling out of power themselves due to their rampant corruption.
Today, our electees are basically all lawyers - and we have an economy in meltdown, archaic business efforts are kept around, and even subsidized because it buys votes, and we have a financial system where one can do better with destruction rather than construction.
Our electees are not all lawyers. A good percentage have law degrees, but it's certainly not anywhere near "all." And they are, indeed, ELECTEES. They were elected to office by the people, and it's not up to you to criticize. Besides which, non-lawyers tend to write horrible laws. They're not good at it.
The economic meltdown was not caused by legislators having law degrees, it was caused by unrestrained greed and deregulation of financial institutions. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a major cause of the financial meltdown. Gramm was an economist. Leach and Bliley were small businessmen. None were lawyers. Maybe we needed MORE lawyers in Congress, huh?
intentionally breaking someone's nose is illegal.
You're still leaving room for way too many exceptions that the law as written is severely deficient. A doctor re-breaks someone's nose to reset it so it will heal better. He or she just committed a crime. What constitutes a break? A hairline fracture? What if a doctor does a bone biopsy on the bone in the nose?
What if I punch you but I'm not intending to break your nose? Is the intent required to break the nose, or just throw the punch? Boxers would really want to know that.
It's interesting that after the US helps rebuild a country, we give it a better constitution and legal system than what we have. This is how it should be, but it's obvious that we should backport the best of the new legal systems to our own.
I reject the idea that the Civil Law system is "better" than the Common Law. I note that Common Law countries tend to, and have always tended to, have better economies than Civil Law ones.
I am going by American law, which is 99% of what is attacked here; generally you have a first section in each law that describes the intent behind the law.
1. abolish legally binding precedent. The accepted interpretation of a law should be a consensus among the legal community, not a decision of one moron 150 years ago.
Precedent changes frequently, and is generally a consensus decision arrived at as judges look at how other judges ruled. And there are few, if any, precedents that were established 150 years ago, and any that are tend to be re-affirmed by a new look at the law periodically.
2. Hire someone competent to rewrite the laws, aiming for clarity and precision.
As an initial matter, clarity and precision are tradeoffs. The easier the law is to read, the less precise it is. And practically, rewriting laws would be a logistical nightmare. Rewriting laws means re-passing laws, and to do that to every law in the book would take countless years to make sure the new laws aren't introducing new loopholes. Do you have an example of a law that you feel is too vague? Because I've read a lot of statutes, and in general they tend to be fairly clear.
3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch.
Alright, you are way off-base on this, changes to the law are always incorporated into the text. In fact, laws that amend statutes tend to even specify what section are modified and how they are. For example, look at Section 3this short bill.
3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone.
Pretty much already done. I don't know of any state that doesn't have a searchable index of its statutes.
4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation.
Well the problem with that is people shouldn't be allowed to violate the law simply because they're doing it on the internet. If someone is committing fraud, then they're committing fraud, just because they're doing it via e-mail doesn't mean they should escape liability.
5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Lawsuits are always supposed to be judged on merit. Unfortunately not all of them are, but this isn't because of some failure of the law, it's part of the human equation, and you're not going to fix that. As for qualifications I am also not sure what you mean; lawyers need to meet certain minimal qualifications, but after that their arguments are judged, not their background. An Ivy League law grad is in the same position as a fourth-tier law grad if they've both passed the bar.
IMHO, the courts and legislature are being quite careless about that currently.
Do you have any concrete examples of this?
Myself, I think laws should have something akin to the preamble section in the GPL - a short paragraph which explains in clear English exactly what the law hopes (and doesn't hope) to achieve - in order to aid understanding the spirit.
They generally do.
The contention is that there were no statistics. Can you link to some?
You want a link. To no statistics.
Would you have voted for BHO if you knew he was going to make a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court who is pro-RIAA and that under BHO's administration we'd see Google, Apple come under major Antitrust scrutiny (but not Microsoft)? What are your thoughts?
Yes, yes I would. For one thing, in the world of things that truly matter, the RIAA is way down on the list. And as someone else pointed out, one pro-RIAA ruling during a judicial lifetime doesn't mean that much. As for the monopoly thing, if Google and Apple are breaking the law, they should be treated accordingly. Microsoft was already convicted of being a monopoly, and they were punishment. The punishment was completely inadequate and driven by right-wing free-market fanatics in the Bush government, but in the end that was the punishment that was levied. Unless Microsoft is doing something new that is anti-competitive, they are safe.
Remember, the majority of posters here are childless and slightly paranoid. There is nothing wrong with being able to track your 5 year old unobtrusively.
I am seriously arguing that a child's right to privacy shouldn't be dismissed offhand. In particular cases, sure, it's debatable.
Sure it's debatable. The dismissal is coming mainly from the other side of the argument, by people who react to ANY attempt to even look after their kids with screams about nanny states and toughening up kids.
Privacy here is too vague a subject to be useful. I wouldn't argue that a child has the right to be alone or with friends without parental interference. However, I do think adults are not intruding on this right when they always know where the child is geographically.
Yes, any of the 400+ subway stations. I don't see why you think it'd be hard since it's the exact same method I use nowadays. Go look at subway map in station, find a route, note what to take, check for any service notices, get on subway, double check map in subway for stop to get off on, repeat till home. If the route looks particularly confusing then you can always ask someone for help. Worst case is that you waste some time backtracking if you get on the wrong train.
I am a born and bred New Yorker, and I can assure you there are many areas in the city that are not served by a subway. What you described is fine for a high school student or older, but no, I don't expect a 6th grader to be able to have complete command of the public transportation system and the ability to completely understand the MTA's oftentimes cryptic service notes.
Don't forget about the one who thinks only "fully-cogent ... adults" deserve any rights. He's lost quite a bit of perspective too.
Children have less of certain rights than an adult, but more of others. They do not have the right of complete freedom of movement without monitoring. Are you seriously arguing that a 6 year old has the right to go somewhere without the knowledge of their parents?
I finished high school in the last decade and I find these things ridiculous but then again I grew up in a large city. If you couldn't make your way home from any subway station by middle school then something was wrong.
ANY subway station? Your city couldn't have been that large then.
then it makes perfect sense to focus all your energies on making sure it doesn't happen to you.
Wow, strawman. ALL your energies? Putting a GPS tracker on your kid really doesn't require THAT much energy, you know.
Weird, my iphone can easily go 3 or 4 days without charging if I put it on the Edge network (and I can still get 2-3 days on 3G if I don't use any special features beyond occasionally checking mail).
Is it legal to change the terms? Do they count as a contract in the legal sense?
It might make it not a contract, but the only relief you'd be able to get out of that is you could quit their service without paying a penalty fee.
I'm sure Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglin, Larry Rosen, and even NYCL would be glad to hear that.
As would Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Gandhi.