It depends on where you are. Defamation law varies wildly around the world - that's one reason why in Dow Jones v Gutnick, Dow Jones wanted New York defamation law to apply, but Gutnick wanted Victorian defamation law to apply - the New York law is much better for them.
In some places, truth is an absolute defence to a defamation action. In other places, it's not a defence at all.
There should be a system (perhaps there is, and someone can point me to it) whereby an individual can ask for a case to be reviewed before even talking to a lawyer.
The High Court of Australia (equivalent to the US Supreme Court) has just introduced something like this for appeals. When an appeal is filed with the High Court, they will now get just the appellant and their lawyers to put whatever arguments they have, and if the arguments have no chance of success whatsoever then they dismiss the appeal without even bothering the respondent with it.
With other courts, they usually have some procedures for dealing with vexatious litigants (litigants who have repeatedly brought actions without a basis in either law or fact). If a person is declared a vexatious litigant, they can't commence an action without the leave of the court, and in such circumstances the court will prevent the action from commencing at all if it's plainly bogus.
Microsoft employees use Google for their searches 66% of the time, but MSN Search only 20% of the time
Nah. Microsoft employees use MSN search 99% of the time and Google 1% of the time. It's just that MSN search almost never finds anything useful so they don't click on the web sites found, hence nothing shows up in RefererLog files.
Experieced C++ programmers writing java on the side, is the problem in many slow java programs
You are of course referring to knowledge rather than skills. Knowledge of the libraries is a very different thing to mastery of skills and techniques.
A good C or C++ programmer has skills in memory management and knowledge of low-level stuff that Java insulates the programmer from. Because the Java programmer is insulated from these things, they simply do not acquire the skills (techniques) that are necessary to produce good C and C++ code. These things don't matter much in interactive code, but for high performance with large amounts of data and intensive processing requirements, they are essential.
If you take a Java application that is running into memory problems, the typical Java programmer response is "add more memory", because they don't really know how to manage memory better, and because there are some overheads of the JVM's memory management structure that really limit the ability of the programmer to manage memory better (absent a strategy of taking things low-level with large byte arrays, at which point it ceases looking much like Java).
But adding more memory only gets you as far as the address space limit on whatever platform you are using. If you need higher capacity, you need to go for something that is closer to the hardware, like C and C++. Quite simply, you can fit more within the available resources.
If you can't produce an application with very large data and processing requirements in C or C++ that exceeds the performance of its Java counterpart, it is only because you don't have the skills to do so.
I find that Java and C programs written by the same average programmer will tend to have the same performance.
There's your problem. You're using the same "average" programmer to do both.
First problem: an average programmer has no business using C or C++. They should stay in an environment that coddles them, as Java does (so does VB).
Second problem: A programmer who uses Java 90% of the time simply will not have the skills to write efficient C or C++, although they will probably know techniques to make the most efficient possible Java.
For typical GUI front-ends, Java and C or C++ may appear indistinguishable, but for the places where performance matters - huge memory use and huge processing requirements - C and C++ stomp all over Java.
Take a top C or C++ programmer against a top Java programmer, implementing the same thing, and the C or C++ programmer will produce faster and more memory efficient code every time.
If the law hasn't decided that the company's business is illegal, why would they have the right to freeze the its assets?
The order allowing this is called a Mareva injunction, and it is available when the plaintiff demonstrates a significant chance that the defendant will move assets out of the jurisdiction to avoid having to pay any judgement against them.
>You ought to have to pass a test to be a legislator, judge,
yes. it's called an election
Actually, an election is quite an appalling test if you're trying to find the person who will be best at the job. Imagine getting some random person off the street and asking them to interview candidates for a tech job. "This person thinks tha' InterWeb is called tha' Internet. How dumb is that?". Are you certain that if you were the best candidate for the job, you would be able to convince somebody who is entirely ignorant of your field that this is the case? What about when you're up against a slick con-man who knows how to convince the ignorant person of anything they like?
That is what elections are like. The average person has no idea what skills are required to be a good legislator, or a good judge. Most have no idea of the terminology involved, and have no real way of evaluating the skills of the candidate. However, the average person is likely to be taken by a slick con-man running for office.
Elections are not about choosing the best qualified candidate, they are about being able to throw out somebody who has proven themselves to be a bad candidate.
The truth is, when faced with a field of entirely new candidates for a public office, you are probably just choosing the con artist who takes you in most effectively.
[If you don't like paying tax] You can leave the country at any time.
If you're a US citizen, and you earn more than around $US70,000 (it may be more than that now), you have to pay US income tax (virtually) no matter where in the world you live.
Lawyer anyone? I'm quite curious about this one...
It would be pretty hard for them to say there was a contract in law, however:
If he intentionally misleads (ie. deceives) somebody, then he would be open to an action in deceit, which would put him in no better position than if the contract were binding. That would clearly be the case here. Courts are not kind people who set out to deceive and then say the person deceived should have been more careful.
If a court were to decide that his actions constituted a representation to the company that he did agree (possible in these circumstances), it might estop him from denying the agreement. If it does, what will happen is the Court will order that he strike anything that says "there's no agreement, I didn't sign" from his pleadings and will refuse to hear or accept evidence to that effect. The result is that it will treat the agreement as valid and enforceable.
Setting out to deliberately trick people for personal advantage (or to the detriment of those tricked) is rarely without adverse legal consequences.
Granted, $9.75m is a nice price to have... don't think I'd be too quick to say no myself.
On the other hand, as chief of that organisation he was in a fiduciary position. As a fiduciary, equity says he cannot take a payment from outside the organisation in return for making decisions affecting the organisation. Under the rules of equity, it doesn't matter that the payment may have been filtered through the organisation.
The duty is owed to the organisation and to its members, and unless and until the members have ratified his taking of the payment, the organisation is entitled to demand that it be paid back into its funds.
So with the little we know, it looks like Ed may owe CCIA $9.75million.
Suburbs have green space (ignore NIMBY syndrome for right now), but cities are all built up and I firmly believe that building such a system in a large city would be prohibitively expensive.
Once you have proven the concept, the tracks would take space on existing roads. If the system is working, the traffic on paved roads will be reduced significantly so that you won't need 6 lane highways in the cities anymore.
I think SkyTran is a better system than the one linked in the article though. They also seem to explain a lot of the stuff better.
you are specifically instructed as a juror that the 5th amendment can not be construed to imply guilt. It would defeat the point of the 5th amendment if you did that.
It is way more complicated than that. Even if it weren't, your point is not relevant.
The question in the criminal trial is not whether the (non-accused) person giving the evidence is guilty, it is whether the evidence has been presented to find the accused guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The fact that the person giving evidence took the 5th cannot be used to imply their guilt, but it does deprive the court of the evidence needed to judge the value of other evidence. That clearly leaves the evidence in doubt. It is not that it was made weaker by the refusal to testify, but that it was not given adequate strength by favourable testimony.
Even the fact that the accused didn't testify will have this result. If they do have testify as to their innocence, then as long as they don't screw up (which is an extreme risk in testifying in your own trial since any slip-up is more damning because it comes from your own mouth), they will provide more evidence in their favour than if they do not testify.
The difference may seem to be one of semantics, but it is a difference well understood by lawyers. It's a bitch for judges to try to explain it to juries though.
The beyond reasonable doubt standard does tend to favour the accused anywhere the evidence is weak or lacks support - but of course it's meant to do that.
Really hard to find memory leak in the code (only happens when there's >5 simultaneous users so you can't single step it)...Stated that there was no way we could beat the deadline without some software to help us.
Are you seriously trying to tell us you couldn't find, install and use free libraries designed to identify the source of memory leaks within two days? Hell, you should be able to write a simple memory allocator that keeps a stack backtrace showing point of allocation and dumps the heap to a log file at appropriate times within that window.
Your post advocates a _____ approach to fighting spam.
Leave the poor misguided fools alone. Seriously, if they're putting in the effort to do this anyway, just let them try. They can even start demanding HashCash if they want - and it's their problem when the rest of us just decide it's not worth the additional effort to send them email.
Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
There is one foolproof approach to ensure you never, ever receive another spam email again. Shut down your mail server and stop using email. Or insist senders provide HashCash tokens - it amounts to the same thing.
Al Gore signing the treaty for US has no more weight than it would if I, TykeClone, signed the treaty
Again, not true. Al Gore was an official in the US government (not to be confused with Congress, which is a different thing). As long as he had authority from Clinton to sign it at the time (and there is no doubt that he would have had such authority at the time), it is signed by the United States.
This is fairly basic international law, although being international law, it's something a person is unlikely to be familiar with unless they are a diplomat or a lawyer trained in international law.
Not to argue, but it doesn't count unless it's ratified by the Senate - so the US isn't a signatory.
That's not correct. The US is a signatory, but it is not a party. There are two steps for most treaties - signing and ratification. You can be a signatory without having ratified, but you are not bound by the treaty until you do ratify.
Likewise, Australia has signed Kyoto, but has not ratified. There are a lot of confused people going around saying that Australia should sign Kyoto, but that part's already done.
The United States and Australia (led by the Bush-sycophant John Howard), are the only developed nations not to have ratified, but they have both signed.
Why sign something you know won't be ratified?...
To publicly lend it your support. To persuade people and businesses to take steps on their own, even if it won't be legislated for. To show everyone that no matter what the rest of the government thinks, *you* consider it important.
I'm sorry, I seem to have missed the story where we were told Bush wasn't President any more.
Slashdot Mirror
You kept using IRC into the late 90s? By then the IRC kiddies must have been calling you "Gramps".
The fund set up for Joey McNicol's defence will most likely come to the party. This is exactly the sort of thing the fund was set up for.
It depends on where you are. Defamation law varies wildly around the world - that's one reason why in Dow Jones v Gutnick, Dow Jones wanted New York defamation law to apply, but Gutnick wanted Victorian defamation law to apply - the New York law is much better for them.
In some places, truth is an absolute defence to a defamation action. In other places, it's not a defence at all.
The High Court of Australia (equivalent to the US Supreme Court) has just introduced something like this for appeals. When an appeal is filed with the High Court, they will now get just the appellant and their lawyers to put whatever arguments they have, and if the arguments have no chance of success whatsoever then they dismiss the appeal without even bothering the respondent with it.
With other courts, they usually have some procedures for dealing with vexatious litigants (litigants who have repeatedly brought actions without a basis in either law or fact). If a person is declared a vexatious litigant, they can't commence an action without the leave of the court, and in such circumstances the court will prevent the action from commencing at all if it's plainly bogus.
Well I for one am in favour of mandatory castration for all Monsanto executives so we can ensure that their seed is never planted anywhere.
Nah. Microsoft employees use MSN search 99% of the time and Google 1% of the time. It's just that MSN search almost never finds anything useful so they don't click on the web sites found, hence nothing shows up in RefererLog files.
We began this interview via email, but later had to finish by telephone after Richard Stallman fell and broke his arm.
See - real programmers don't drink coffee. Real programmers drink beer! Lots of beer!
Yeah, those scorching days in Canada. Damned annoying when the dry-ice melts.
You are of course referring to knowledge rather than skills. Knowledge of the libraries is a very different thing to mastery of skills and techniques.
A good C or C++ programmer has skills in memory management and knowledge of low-level stuff that Java insulates the programmer from. Because the Java programmer is insulated from these things, they simply do not acquire the skills (techniques) that are necessary to produce good C and C++ code. These things don't matter much in interactive code, but for high performance with large amounts of data and intensive processing requirements, they are essential.
If you take a Java application that is running into memory problems, the typical Java programmer response is "add more memory", because they don't really know how to manage memory better, and because there are some overheads of the JVM's memory management structure that really limit the ability of the programmer to manage memory better (absent a strategy of taking things low-level with large byte arrays, at which point it ceases looking much like Java).
But adding more memory only gets you as far as the address space limit on whatever platform you are using. If you need higher capacity, you need to go for something that is closer to the hardware, like C and C++. Quite simply, you can fit more within the available resources.
If you can't produce an application with very large data and processing requirements in C or C++ that exceeds the performance of its Java counterpart, it is only because you don't have the skills to do so.
You are sadly, sadly deluded.
Well-written C will actually outperform well-written C++.
There's your problem. You're using the same "average" programmer to do both.
First problem: an average programmer has no business using C or C++. They should stay in an environment that coddles them, as Java does (so does VB).
Second problem: A programmer who uses Java 90% of the time simply will not have the skills to write efficient C or C++, although they will probably know techniques to make the most efficient possible Java.
For typical GUI front-ends, Java and C or C++ may appear indistinguishable, but for the places where performance matters - huge memory use and huge processing requirements - C and C++ stomp all over Java.
Take a top C or C++ programmer against a top Java programmer, implementing the same thing, and the C or C++ programmer will produce faster and more memory efficient code every time.
The order allowing this is called a Mareva injunction, and it is available when the plaintiff demonstrates a significant chance that the defendant will move assets out of the jurisdiction to avoid having to pay any judgement against them.
yes. it's called an election
Actually, an election is quite an appalling test if you're trying to find the person who will be best at the job. Imagine getting some random person off the street and asking them to interview candidates for a tech job. "This person thinks tha' InterWeb is called tha' Internet. How dumb is that?". Are you certain that if you were the best candidate for the job, you would be able to convince somebody who is entirely ignorant of your field that this is the case? What about when you're up against a slick con-man who knows how to convince the ignorant person of anything they like?
That is what elections are like. The average person has no idea what skills are required to be a good legislator, or a good judge. Most have no idea of the terminology involved, and have no real way of evaluating the skills of the candidate. However, the average person is likely to be taken by a slick con-man running for office.
Elections are not about choosing the best qualified candidate, they are about being able to throw out somebody who has proven themselves to be a bad candidate.
The truth is, when faced with a field of entirely new candidates for a public office, you are probably just choosing the con artist who takes you in most effectively.
If you're a US citizen, and you earn more than around $US70,000 (it may be more than that now), you have to pay US income tax (virtually) no matter where in the world you live.
Please tell me you haven't actually attempted this? :-)
People are telling me to attempt this all the time.
It would be pretty hard for them to say there was a contract in law, however:
Setting out to deliberately trick people for personal advantage (or to the detriment of those tricked) is rarely without adverse legal consequences.
(I am an academic lawyer, not a practicing one).
On the other hand, as chief of that organisation he was in a fiduciary position. As a fiduciary, equity says he cannot take a payment from outside the organisation in return for making decisions affecting the organisation. Under the rules of equity, it doesn't matter that the payment may have been filtered through the organisation.
The duty is owed to the organisation and to its members, and unless and until the members have ratified his taking of the payment, the organisation is entitled to demand that it be paid back into its funds.
So with the little we know, it looks like Ed may owe CCIA $9.75million.
Once you have proven the concept, the tracks would take space on existing roads. If the system is working, the traffic on paved roads will be reduced significantly so that you won't need 6 lane highways in the cities anymore.
I think SkyTran is a better system than the one linked in the article though. They also seem to explain a lot of the stuff better.
It is way more complicated than that. Even if it weren't, your point is not relevant.
The question in the criminal trial is not whether the (non-accused) person giving the evidence is guilty, it is whether the evidence has been presented to find the accused guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The fact that the person giving evidence took the 5th cannot be used to imply their guilt, but it does deprive the court of the evidence needed to judge the value of other evidence. That clearly leaves the evidence in doubt. It is not that it was made weaker by the refusal to testify, but that it was not given adequate strength by favourable testimony.
Even the fact that the accused didn't testify will have this result. If they do have testify as to their innocence, then as long as they don't screw up (which is an extreme risk in testifying in your own trial since any slip-up is more damning because it comes from your own mouth), they will provide more evidence in their favour than if they do not testify.
The difference may seem to be one of semantics, but it is a difference well understood by lawyers. It's a bitch for judges to try to explain it to juries though.
The beyond reasonable doubt standard does tend to favour the accused anywhere the evidence is weak or lacks support - but of course it's meant to do that.
Are you seriously trying to tell us you couldn't find, install and use free libraries designed to identify the source of memory leaks within two days? Hell, you should be able to write a simple memory allocator that keeps a stack backtrace showing point of allocation and dumps the heap to a log file at appropriate times within that window.
Leave the poor misguided fools alone. Seriously, if they're putting in the effort to do this anyway, just let them try. They can even start demanding HashCash if they want - and it's their problem when the rest of us just decide it's not worth the additional effort to send them email.
Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
There is one foolproof approach to ensure you never, ever receive another spam email again. Shut down your mail server and stop using email. Or insist senders provide HashCash tokens - it amounts to the same thing.
Again, not true. Al Gore was an official in the US government (not to be confused with Congress, which is a different thing). As long as he had authority from Clinton to sign it at the time (and there is no doubt that he would have had such authority at the time), it is signed by the United States.
This is fairly basic international law, although being international law, it's something a person is unlikely to be familiar with unless they are a diplomat or a lawyer trained in international law.
That's not correct. The US is a signatory, but it is not a party. There are two steps for most treaties - signing and ratification. You can be a signatory without having ratified, but you are not bound by the treaty until you do ratify.
Likewise, Australia has signed Kyoto, but has not ratified. There are a lot of confused people going around saying that Australia should sign Kyoto, but that part's already done.
The United States and Australia (led by the Bush-sycophant John Howard), are the only developed nations not to have ratified, but they have both signed.
I'm sorry, I seem to have missed the story where we were told Bush wasn't President any more.
I'd settle for him destroying just one job. His own.