Which bible do they use when people take an oath in court?
Virtually no jurisdictions still require one to swear on a Bible. In the federal courts, a witness is required to swear or affirm that they will tell the truth, and no reference to God is made.
What god is responsible for "acts of God"?
This is a term of art chiefly used in insurance contracts. It means nothing more than, roughly, "utterly unpredictable catastrophe". The term isn't used or given legal recognition by the government.
I've clerked for a federal magistrate, and written several orders granting or denying summary judgment, and I found the order extremely surprising. Microsoft was moving for summary judgment, which is a basically a legal determination that it is so obvious that Microsoft will win that the case shouldn't even bother to proceed. As makes sense, the burden of proof is on Microsoft to have a really good reason for claiming this, and the court should be reluctant to grant it.
Generally speaking, any irregularity should make the court even more reluctant to grant summary judgment. The judge here granted summary judgment even after acknowledging that Microsoft was too late to file - and mocked the plaintiffs for objecting at all! I would expect that Hyperphrase is going to be filing their appeal to the district judge in the very near future.
The judge is forgiving Microsoft for filing late, and is basically telling Hyperphrase to stop being a pain in the ass.
Deadlines exist for a reason. If there weren't definite rules for when and in what order things needed to happen in litigation, the courts would be much more inefficient, and people in court would be denied their constitutional right to due process. Yeah, it's funny that Microsoft filed five minutes late - but there's a big difference between some prisoner struggling to represent himself who files five minutes late, and an enormous multinational corporation with gigantic legal resources doing the same thing. A wink and a nod is inappropriate here.
A professor told me that he once mentioned to his class that something or other didn't matter in the long run, because in a few billion years the sun was going to go nova and devour the Earth.
A girl in the front row began sobbing hysterically.
"What's wrong?" asked the professor. "It's in like four billion years!"
The girl stopped crying, relieved, and brightened. "Oh! I thought you said four *million* years!"
Any day now Bruce Sterling should be along to write a snarky editorial on how he predicted all this stuff years ago, and no one listened to his infinite wisdom...
If only we'd build rocket ships out of bamboo, the future would be now!
Most people don't want a challenge, they want to sit back and relax. Brightly-colored fantasy like Tolkien is just more soothing than the unknown future you have to construct for yourself.
It's kind of amazing, historically speaking, that it's now possible to make the assertion that one is a more mature and stable individual because one reads Sci-Fi. The shades of a thousand pulp writers gasp in astonishment.
Let's try standing that assertion on its head:
Most people don't want to think about philosophy and human nature, they want to sit back, relax, and think about rocket ships. Brightly-colored science fiction like Asimov and Robinson is just more soothing than the unknown present you have to figure out for yourself.
Everything in the arts has been pronounced dead: theatre, the poem, the novel, the symphony, photography, paintings etc.
Theatre, the poem, the symphony, and paintings are dead. Those art forms are in the "sucking mud" stage that science fiction writing is in now - latter-day nonnovators who are hoping to get paid to produce vague imitations of what was "cutting edge" fifty years or more previously.
Keep in mind that NASA was not putting men in space as they developed the shuttle. The last Apollo astronaut launched in 1972 and the first shuttle launch occured in 1981.
My point is, we would never ever have landed on the Moon if it were not for Robert A Heinlein--not opinion: provable fact
I would be very surprised to know that it was possible to prove this "fact". Is he mentioned in the Congressional debates for funding NACA, the precursor to NASA?
I find the rantings of people who think that technology and science are all about material things and 'useless junk' to be a really disturbing form of reactionary conservative. They don't want a future, and think we're incapable of building one that works unless we somehow radically change human nature to not be as ugly as they think it is.
Technology and science didn't change human nature when they invented agriculture, bronze, glass, the windmill, gunpowder, the Davy lamp, the zeppelin, or the liquid-crystal display. Thousands of years later, it would still not surprise any of us to hear that somewhere nearby a man had beaten another man to death with a rock.
Human nature has never changed, and never will change, no matter how many toys we have to play with. A single human's behavior might. That is the lesson that religion teaches. But people who believe that technology and science are all too often applied to "material things and useless junk" note that the last hundred years has seen staggering advances in technology, and an almost unmitigated collapse in social institutions.
The way to combat this outsourcing problem is well known--they're called unions and I'm not talking about a C overlapping data structure here. If IT people can't or won't unionize, then... yeah, we're screwed.
Hell yeah! Auto workers and steel workers have very strong unions. That's why no automobile or steel-producing work has ever gone overseas!
I image that nearly everyone experiences this frustration with movies, regardless of their area of expertise though.
It's about the same for historians, yeah. Braveheart... didn't happen that way. Gladiator actually succeeded in getting most of the important things wrong, and some of the unimportant ones right. Amistad was fanciful PC garbage. The recent TNT movie of Caesar was slightly less accurate than Xena's version of the same events. Etc., etc.
It's kind of exhilarating when watching a movie to get to the point where they completely jump off the deep end, historically speaking... it's like the Tolkien fan watching The Two Towers, getting to the completely-invented part where Frodo and Sam are taken into Gondor, and thinking My God, I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen next...
Seriously, though, through most of history toys have been teaching tools, not mere playthings - girls had dolls to learn how to take care of children, etc. So a high-tech toy is more appropriate for today's children than an "old fashioned doll"
Because heaven knows children don't exist anymore and nobody needs to take care of them.
I wounder how the semi-recent falls on US stock markets has been showen in the Media in Russia.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a 14-month high of 9412.66 today.
or the bankruptchy of several States,
No State is bankrupt. Some have serious budget deficits, but a State would only be bankrupt if, after liquidating its property, it still couldn't cover its shortfall. No State is anywhere even vaguely near this.
or the grounding of the US shuttle program
Nobody is suggesting that the shuttles are grounded because the American government can't pay to run them. It's obvious to everyone that they've been grounded for safety reasons.
No inflation, ever, 'cause the total supply of money is completely static.
That isn't actually true - there's a smaller island near Yap where the special coins were periodically quarried and rafted back to Yap.
Incidentally, Milton Friedman tells the story of how when Yap was part of the German possessions in the Pacific, the German colonial government once tried to force the Yap Islanders to assist in building infrastructure improvements on their island. The islanders weren't really terribly interested.
So the colonial government drove around the island, and painted black crosses on many of the largest stones, signifying that the government had assessed them as a fine. Since these stones were now "off-limits" and removed from the money supply, the Yap economy suffered sudden, massive deflation. The panicked islanders, faced with a collapse of their economy, hurriedly agreed to help construct the required roads. Whereupon the Germans drove around and erased the crosses, enriching the islanders once more.
Thank God they didn't name it SpaceShipZero. The distance to ZeroWing would be just to small.
That, and we don't mind if they take off every SpaceShipZero for great justice, it's just that we don't want the pilot to have no chance to survive make his time.
This cold dead universe assumes that there will be no intelligent intervention. I am not talking about a mythical 'god' at all but more about advanced civilizations.
Because it makes so much more sense to hypothesize "advanced alien civilizations" than "a mythical 'god'".
Beer is a venomous slop, which looks and smells like moldering bread. It consists largely of a poisonous chemical, which affects the body by interfering with neurotransmitters which drive the functioning of the nervous system. Its primary physical effect is to cause the nervous system to malfunction, causing disorientation and cognitive impairment. It frequently cases brain and liver damage after enough use. Its users are frequently stupid enough to continue imbibing until the body, recognizing that it is being poisoned, tries desperately to remain alive by expelling the contents of the stomach.
Slashdot Mirror
Virtually no jurisdictions still require one to swear on a Bible. In the federal courts, a witness is required to swear or affirm that they will tell the truth, and no reference to God is made.
What god is responsible for "acts of God"?
This is a term of art chiefly used in insurance contracts. It means nothing more than, roughly, "utterly unpredictable catastrophe". The term isn't used or given legal recognition by the government.
Generally speaking, any irregularity should make the court even more reluctant to grant summary judgment. The judge here granted summary judgment even after acknowledging that Microsoft was too late to file - and mocked the plaintiffs for objecting at all! I would expect that Hyperphrase is going to be filing their appeal to the district judge in the very near future.
The judge is forgiving Microsoft for filing late, and is basically telling Hyperphrase to stop being a pain in the ass.
Deadlines exist for a reason. If there weren't definite rules for when and in what order things needed to happen in litigation, the courts would be much more inefficient, and people in court would be denied their constitutional right to due process. Yeah, it's funny that Microsoft filed five minutes late - but there's a big difference between some prisoner struggling to represent himself who files five minutes late, and an enormous multinational corporation with gigantic legal resources doing the same thing. A wink and a nod is inappropriate here.
Actually, the federal courts are moving to electronic filing, which renders the particular time of day irrelevant.
When they're rooted, they know it. All the ports are open.
You know, because nothing like "Survivor" or musical "Idol" shows has ever been successful in Britain.
A professor told me that he once mentioned to his class that something or other didn't matter in the long run, because in a few billion years the sun was going to go nova and devour the Earth.
A girl in the front row began sobbing hysterically.
"What's wrong?" asked the professor. "It's in like four billion years!"
The girl stopped crying, relieved, and brightened. "Oh! I thought you said four *million* years!"
If only we'd build rocket ships out of bamboo, the future would be now!
It's kind of amazing, historically speaking, that it's now possible to make the assertion that one is a more mature and stable individual because one reads Sci-Fi. The shades of a thousand pulp writers gasp in astonishment.
Let's try standing that assertion on its head:
Most people don't want to think about philosophy and human nature, they want to sit back, relax, and think about rocket ships. Brightly-colored science fiction like Asimov and Robinson is just more soothing than the unknown present you have to figure out for yourself.
Theatre, the poem, the symphony, and paintings are dead. Those art forms are in the "sucking mud" stage that science fiction writing is in now - latter-day nonnovators who are hoping to get paid to produce vague imitations of what was "cutting edge" fifty years or more previously.
You're forgetting Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz.
I would be very surprised to know that it was possible to prove this "fact". Is he mentioned in the Congressional debates for funding NACA, the precursor to NASA?
Technology and science didn't change human nature when they invented agriculture, bronze, glass, the windmill, gunpowder, the Davy lamp, the zeppelin, or the liquid-crystal display. Thousands of years later, it would still not surprise any of us to hear that somewhere nearby a man had beaten another man to death with a rock.
Human nature has never changed, and never will change, no matter how many toys we have to play with. A single human's behavior might. That is the lesson that religion teaches. But people who believe that technology and science are all too often applied to "material things and useless junk" note that the last hundred years has seen staggering advances in technology, and an almost unmitigated collapse in social institutions.
That is correct. It costs $200 to take the GMAT!
But the payoff is huge! The average starting salary for a graduate in my MBA program is about $75,000.
The heroes are beautiful people who say "floccinaucinauphilification" (and I sure hope I didn't spell that correctly from memory)
It's "floccinauccinihilipilification", you insensitive clod!
Hell yeah! Auto workers and steel workers have very strong unions. That's why no automobile or steel-producing work has ever gone overseas!
It's about the same for historians, yeah. Braveheart... didn't happen that way. Gladiator actually succeeded in getting most of the important things wrong, and some of the unimportant ones right. Amistad was fanciful PC garbage. The recent TNT movie of Caesar was slightly less accurate than Xena's version of the same events. Etc., etc.
It's kind of exhilarating when watching a movie to get to the point where they completely jump off the deep end, historically speaking... it's like the Tolkien fan watching The Two Towers, getting to the completely-invented part where Frodo and Sam are taken into Gondor, and thinking My God, I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen next...
Because heaven knows children don't exist anymore and nobody needs to take care of them.
The BBC is reporting this? Wow, from the title, i would have thought that it would come from one of these fine sources.
Er, it's a little mean to the Weekly World News to compare them to the BBC.
I wounder how the semi-recent falls on US stock markets has been showen in the Media in Russia.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a 14-month high of 9412.66 today.
or the bankruptchy of several States,
No State is bankrupt. Some have serious budget deficits, but a State would only be bankrupt if, after liquidating its property, it still couldn't cover its shortfall. No State is anywhere even vaguely near this.
or the grounding of the US shuttle program
Nobody is suggesting that the shuttles are grounded because the American government can't pay to run them. It's obvious to everyone that they've been grounded for safety reasons.
ASA
"Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"
>>kids trying to look k33l
Did you mean l33t or k3wl?
People who misuse leetspeak should be k33lh4ul3d.
No inflation, ever, 'cause the total supply of money is completely static.
That isn't actually true - there's a smaller island near Yap where the special coins were periodically quarried and rafted back to Yap.
Incidentally, Milton Friedman tells the story of how when Yap was part of the German possessions in the Pacific, the German colonial government once tried to force the Yap Islanders to assist in building infrastructure improvements on their island. The islanders weren't really terribly interested.
So the colonial government drove around the island, and painted black crosses on many of the largest stones, signifying that the government had assessed them as a fine. Since these stones were now "off-limits" and removed from the money supply, the Yap economy suffered sudden, massive deflation. The panicked islanders, faced with a collapse of their economy, hurriedly agreed to help construct the required roads. Whereupon the Germans drove around and erased the crosses, enriching the islanders once more.
Thank God they didn't name it SpaceShipZero. The distance to ZeroWing would be just to small.
That, and we don't mind if they take off every SpaceShipZero for great justice, it's just that we don't want the pilot to have no chance to survive make his time.
This cold dead universe assumes that there will be no intelligent intervention. I am not talking about a mythical 'god' at all but more about advanced civilizations.
Because it makes so much more sense to hypothesize "advanced alien civilizations" than "a mythical 'god'".
Beer is good, beer is great. We all know it
Beer is a venomous slop, which looks and smells like moldering bread. It consists largely of a poisonous chemical, which affects the body by interfering with neurotransmitters which drive the functioning of the nervous system. Its primary physical effect is to cause the nervous system to malfunction, causing disorientation and cognitive impairment. It frequently cases brain and liver damage after enough use. Its users are frequently stupid enough to continue imbibing until the body, recognizing that it is being poisoned, tries desperately to remain alive by expelling the contents of the stomach.
Enjoy.