Our group was recently informed "the simple act of shutting down PCs at night can save a company with 10,000 PCs over $260,000 a year". We kicked around the idea.
That's an alleged savings of $26/year/computer, or about $0.09/day.
Assuming it takes 10 minutes daily to turn a computer on, wait for boot, and fiddle with getting everything back up to where it was*, we're looking at something vaguely around $6.00 spent just to recover from "the simple act of shutting down [an employee's] PC at night".
So turning off the computer at night costs roughly 64 times as much as leaving the durn thing on.
(* - I've got 20 windows open right now, and half of them took considerable time to get to where they are now as I'm debugging something.)
I can't take seriously the private citizen who stands for such a proposition.
The Founding Fathers did: they privately owned, or relied on private ownership of, cannons, rockets, and battleships - the most extreme armaments of the time, and which the then-government didn't want them to have. RPGs and F22s aren't that much beyond those, really.
The second amendment is far less clear than most people understand it to be. Read United States v. Miller and District of Columbia v. Heller in their entirety to get some idea of the subtleties that are involved.
It is completely clear - which is exactly what causes cognitive dissonance in those who don't want it to say what it plainly does.
I've studied Miller carefully. The presiding judge just wanted the case to go away, because he was under pressure from the feds to uphold the recently-passed NFA law. That the defendant & his lawyer did not show up in court made it difficult to address the case properly, and a pretense was concocted to toss the case back to a lower court, where the issue died (following the defendant's lead). (It was deemed unclear whether the item in question fit a particular category, which had to be resolved before determining whether the category could be, for all practical purposes, banned.)
I've studied Heller carefully. There are many subtleties in there, mostly because the court didn't want to get caught up in tangents, and because adressing those tangents would have led to obvious conclusions (which are strongly hinted at, like legalizing M16s) which part of the court, government and public would have nervous breakdowns if clearly upheld. (It was deemed clear that Mr. Heller's request for a _permit_ should be granted; he did not challenge whether the requirement of a permit was lawful.)
The issue is complicated only to those who try to impress their opinion on a contrary enumeration of a right.
I don't see where you're getting this "monopoly" reasoning from. It's not like there's a DeBeers of computer games, and EA doesn't have a monopoly on games just because nobody else can make/sell EA games.
Infinite supply does not translate to infinite demand. Infinite supply does not mean $0 price. Supply happens, even if infinite, only because someone expects to create it.
Yes, it IS development time that is sold. For most products, development time is merely a tiny fraction of the final price. Only difference with digitally-distributed indy games is that development time becomes a majority of the price; it's still part of the cost of making supply happen at all.
Supply and demand work together to set the price. As another noted, there is more to the "supply" of video game than making innumerable copies at vanishingly small cost, there is the development effort. By claiming "infinite supply" you forget there would be zero supply if the price is $0/copy, because at "free" there is no incentive to create the game in the first place. There is NOT an infinite supply of programmers willing to go without food/housing/etc. just to create a game. The supply won't appear at all if there isn't sufficient expected demand willing to pay $X/copy for the supply.
Any economic theory that concludes "supply and demand doesn't apply" doesn't understand the situation sufficiently. Go look up "capital investment".
Supply and demand is an economic law. Arguing that prices should be higher than the market will bear, in an attempt to re-write that law, is foolish.
I recall a little "indie" game company that released, with little advertising, a mindless shoot-em-up by giving away much of the game and selling the full package cheaply. They made a good game, didn't charge much, and did well by it. 17 years later you can _still_ buy Wolfenstein 3D.
Needs PAID critics - and PAID developers
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are some things that simply won't be corrected out of love of the subject. Heck, some of those things won't even be found (and reported).
What a successful software company does that can ONLY be done by PAYING people is persuade people to analyze & create requirements, code, test, and fix ALL of the system. Yeah, the OSS community does most of it pretty well, but they simply won't do it as pervasively or as rigorously as needed unless motivated to, which usually comes in the form of being PAID (to wit: be able to eat).
This is why corporations pay managers: people who are responsible for figuring out what all actually needs to be done, paying other people to get it done, and confirming that it actually has been done. Managers are paid critics who are on the hook for following thru on their criticism. Much of the success of Linux comes precisely from companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat, IBM, Mozilla, and others who actually do pay people to get those annoying unpopular little things right.
In contrast, we end up with the situation that keeps driving me away from Linux: stuff that I need to work just doesn't, and nobody has sufficient motivation to announce the problem, and nobody has sufficient motivation to fix the problem even if known. So instead, I go to someplace like Apple & friends, who - being PAID - are fanatical about making every little thing right (ok, they make mistakes too, but are more motivated to find & fix the little things).
Hence the ultimate failing of "free software": like it or not, money motivates people to do necessary but unpopular jobs, including finding & fixing software flaws.
Apparently the v2.0 hardware _does_ have mic & bluetooth support (requires v3.0 software to activate the BT), but not the v1.0 hardware (what I have now).
I too would love to see Skype run on a Touch. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no audio input hardware (no Bluetooth support, no suitably wired plug).
So the geeky question is: what would be required to run Skype on an iPod Touch? I can see building a plug that would enable a Bluetooth headset for it. The final step then would be persuading Skype to support such a hack (er, 3rd-party product).
Note that the device has three 1.5' leads stretched around my innards. My cardiologist has warned against being too close (whatever that entails) to electric motors/generators, speakers, and other relatively large electromagnetic sources. Specifically he warned against - cradling a phone on my left shoulder - doing car maintenance with the engine running - chainsaws - music headphones too close to wired areas (like in left shirt pocket) - and other "you get the idea" moving magnetic fields within range
Last time a major TEOTWAWKI event was looming (Y2K), I described the threat to my father in great detail. His response: [shrug] "I'll throw another log on the fire and go back to my book." True enough, my folks' lives are pervaded by self-sufficiency, including extensive wood heat, well water and homegrown food. Society shuts down, they just spend a few minutes adjusting and carry on.
But... you wouldn't guess that at a glance. They have elegantly integrated the survivalist mindset with modern conveniences, enjoying everything technology has to offer without worries of what to do if the grid shuts down indefinitely. Everything has a low-tech backup, preparations for self-sufficiency are ongoing and already in use.
You can live a "survivalist" lifestyle, and still be fully "wired". The two ways of life are not diametrically opposed.
As a cyborg (literally, if technically) I have to wonder what such a solar electrical storm would do to implanted electronic medical devices, such as my pacemaker. Any knowledgeable insights? If this shuts down, I'm history in seconds.
Yes, I said "free". For those interested in getting an education from MIT in any course/degree offered, go to MIT OpenCourseWare for full free access to all material needed to learn whatever the school has to offer.
Certification and faculty attention, however, is kinda pricy.
What happens when nobody wants to do the unglamorous, low paying work?
Exactly. There are some parts of the code which are downright ugly, hard to write/fix, unpopular to even discuss, and when implemented will only be seen by a tiny percentage of users - but without which (esp. when accumulated with other unpopular stuff) the software will only compete as an also-ran.
This is the problem with Linux and other OSS projects: in a complex system, every user will run across something which is in this "unpopular" category. Sure the user is allegedly welcome to contribute a fix, but frankly the reason s/he has your software is to USE it, not to FIX it. Personally, I find the installers unbearable: yeah they work fine for popular software, but all to many packages don't install in a usable manner, and I have other things to do than fix someone else's project (pardon my alleged hubris, but my time is worth more than that).
Apple (and most other companies) succeeds because someone, paid for their responsibility, identifies that some unpopular and unrecognized tasks must be done. They make sure that the whole project is completed and up to par, even when most other participants don't know some obscure part exists and took great effort to make work.
How are co-workers supposed to vote "yeah, he did a good job" when practically nobody is aware of what he did? especially when it's some complex obscurity that would ultimately make-or-break the project? Who's going to do something unglamorous, knowing they won't get paid even a fair low fee? Fairly compensating talent is not a popularity contest; knowing the value of work done is.
If not for minimum wage, how much would YOU pay your janitor?
And yet, many big name companies are able to stream HD quality video over the internet
Sure - because they buffer the content on your end, and you don't notice the lag between frame sent and frame displayed. Additionally, the content is pre-rendered. Netflix's "Instant" option sure looks instant to me, because when I click "play" I overlook the few seconds of buffer loading while I settle into a comfy chair, and that's not even considering the additional delay of render time.
It's not a matter of getting HD images to you. It's a matter of getting HD images constructed and delivered and displayed within about 1/30th of a second of you pressing a button. Big urban bandwidth & lag is fine for delivering HD video, but not this-split-second gaming images. There's a big difference between direct CPU-to-GPU-to-display lag vs. CPU-to-ISP-to-renderfarm-to-ISP-to-CPU-to-display lag, as in orders of magnitude.
Because you are reliant on something which must be paid for (somehow) and/or you can't own. Stallman's view, nutty or not, is that you should be able to function ENTIRELY on free software - which a non-free JavaScript "app" by definition isn't. From his perspective, it's an insidious "slippery slope" undercutting of the free (speech AND beer) software paradigm: it's so easy to get caught in the "[shrug] so what? I didn't have to pay, and I don't have to keep a copy because I just go to the site to run it again" trap, risking reliance on something controlled by someone else.
1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter.
A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters... aka 813 petabytes. The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours... or about 2Pbits/sec. Now THAT'S bandwidth!
I'm serious. Kodak went thru the same process. Focused on selling physical high-volume goods (photo film & paper), they viewed the customer as the store buying stuff in volume - not the individual actually using the product. As a result, when digital photography started catching on, the manufacturer was faced with threats of retail stores dropping their products entirely. You see, the standard drug-store film-processing model required the end user to enter the retail store three times (buy film, drop off film, pick up prints), thus encouraging additional "well, while I'm here..." purchases resulting from the walk-in photo-processing model. Digital photography trashes that model: no longer must the end user come into the store so often... which upsets the retailer, who then tells Kodak et al "don't go digital or we'll drop your products entirely". Thing is, by considering retailer = customer, the manufacturer doesn't see that the end user is going to go digital anyway and sales of film will eventually evaporate. Scared of losing the "customer" (i.e.: retailer), the manufacturer fails to serve the "real customer" (i.e.: end user), and isn't ready to handle the transition when it finally hits.
Same problem with music. Big labels see the retail stores as the customers, who complain "if you go to digital distribution we won't have anything to sell, so stifle that MP3 stuff or we'll stop selling your product" - not seeing that the end user is, en masse, going all-digital-download. You're not the RIAA's customer, the retail store is.
Just as deconstructing matter leads us to the very wierd principles of quantum mechanics, perhaps deconstructing free will leads us to some comparably wierd principles. In both cases, what we accept as standard properties look nothing like what's really going on.
If Apple did not exist, you would find it necessary to invent it - just so you could complain about it. Kinda like the evangelical athiests I know, who spend more time talking about God than any devout believers.
It's not your decision as a juror to decide what laws apply to the case, or what evidence should be presented.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse." "Anything you say [or do] can and will be used against you in a court of law."...except when on a jury? where suddenly I am to have no access to law or fact save only those hand-picked by those who may have ulterior motives? WTF?
I've studied enough law to know that when someone says "X is illegal", there is usually an unmentioned exception. I also know that the judicial system is designed for "may the best argument win", not determination of legal truth and application of moral consequences. I also know that most people are guilty of something, ensuring that all can be controlled (paging Ayn Rand), and want a jury to have the ability to say "enough - set him free".
The defendant's liberty, and perhaps life, is on the line. That defendant could be you or I - let us hope our juries have the wisdom to discover factual truths and judge the law, rather than merely consent to whatever facilitates the prosecutor's political career or the judge's tee time.
Nothing outside the courtroom should influence your decision in court.
Except that I come into the courtroom with 41 years of real-world experience & education which may or may not be approved by the judge, which may include direct knowledge of relevant laws, and which does include the knowledge that some judges will stifle relevant facts which may throw the case. As a juror, I am not merely a pawn in the game, I am (and intend to remain as relevant) an informed intelligent citizen who holds a 1/12th stake in soveriegnty over the case at hand. Not only are the facts presented up for evaluation by the jury, but the law itself and even the judge are subject to the jury (save only for plainly egregious verdicts). The defendant's freedom, and perhaps life, is at stake - as juror, I owe him more than meek submittal to a judge's biased orders and lawyer's incompetence or ulterior motives. To the officers of the court (attorneys included), the defendant is expendible; the jury should not concur.
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Our group was recently informed "the simple act of shutting down PCs at night can save a company with 10,000 PCs over $260,000 a year". We kicked around the idea.
That's an alleged savings of $26/year/computer, or about $0.09/day.
Assuming it takes 10 minutes daily to turn a computer on, wait for boot, and fiddle with getting everything back up to where it was*, we're looking at something vaguely around $6.00 spent just to recover from "the simple act of shutting down [an employee's] PC at night".
So turning off the computer at night costs roughly 64 times as much as leaving the durn thing on.
(* - I've got 20 windows open right now, and half of them took considerable time to get to where they are now as I'm debugging something.)
I can't take seriously the private citizen who stands for such a proposition.
The Founding Fathers did: they privately owned, or relied on private ownership of, cannons, rockets, and battleships - the most extreme armaments of the time, and which the then-government didn't want them to have. RPGs and F22s aren't that much beyond those, really.
The second amendment is far less clear than most people understand it to be. Read United States v. Miller and District of Columbia v. Heller in their entirety to get some idea of the subtleties that are involved.
It is completely clear - which is exactly what causes cognitive dissonance in those who don't want it to say what it plainly does.
I've studied Miller carefully. The presiding judge just wanted the case to go away, because he was under pressure from the feds to uphold the recently-passed NFA law. That the defendant & his lawyer did not show up in court made it difficult to address the case properly, and a pretense was concocted to toss the case back to a lower court, where the issue died (following the defendant's lead). (It was deemed unclear whether the item in question fit a particular category, which had to be resolved before determining whether the category could be, for all practical purposes, banned.)
I've studied Heller carefully. There are many subtleties in there, mostly because the court didn't want to get caught up in tangents, and because adressing those tangents would have led to obvious conclusions (which are strongly hinted at, like legalizing M16s) which part of the court, government and public would have nervous breakdowns if clearly upheld. (It was deemed clear that Mr. Heller's request for a _permit_ should be granted; he did not challenge whether the requirement of a permit was lawful.)
The issue is complicated only to those who try to impress their opinion on a contrary enumeration of a right.
I don't see where you're getting this "monopoly" reasoning from. It's not like there's a DeBeers of computer games, and EA doesn't have a monopoly on games just because nobody else can make/sell EA games.
Infinite supply does not translate to infinite demand.
Infinite supply does not mean $0 price.
Supply happens, even if infinite, only because someone expects to create it.
Yes, it IS development time that is sold. For most products, development time is merely a tiny fraction of the final price. Only difference with digitally-distributed indy games is that development time becomes a majority of the price; it's still part of the cost of making supply happen at all.
Supply and demand work together to set the price. As another noted, there is more to the "supply" of video game than making innumerable copies at vanishingly small cost, there is the development effort. By claiming "infinite supply" you forget there would be zero supply if the price is $0/copy, because at "free" there is no incentive to create the game in the first place. There is NOT an infinite supply of programmers willing to go without food/housing/etc. just to create a game. The supply won't appear at all if there isn't sufficient expected demand willing to pay $X/copy for the supply.
Any economic theory that concludes "supply and demand doesn't apply" doesn't understand the situation sufficiently. Go look up "capital investment".
Supply and demand is an economic law. Arguing that prices should be higher than the market will bear, in an attempt to re-write that law, is foolish.
I recall a little "indie" game company that released, with little advertising, a mindless shoot-em-up by giving away much of the game and selling the full package cheaply. They made a good game, didn't charge much, and did well by it. 17 years later you can _still_ buy Wolfenstein 3D.
There are some things that simply won't be corrected out of love of the subject. Heck, some of those things won't even be found (and reported).
What a successful software company does that can ONLY be done by PAYING people is persuade people to analyze & create requirements, code, test, and fix ALL of the system. Yeah, the OSS community does most of it pretty well, but they simply won't do it as pervasively or as rigorously as needed unless motivated to, which usually comes in the form of being PAID (to wit: be able to eat).
This is why corporations pay managers: people who are responsible for figuring out what all actually needs to be done, paying other people to get it done, and confirming that it actually has been done. Managers are paid critics who are on the hook for following thru on their criticism. Much of the success of Linux comes precisely from companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat, IBM, Mozilla, and others who actually do pay people to get those annoying unpopular little things right.
In contrast, we end up with the situation that keeps driving me away from Linux: stuff that I need to work just doesn't, and nobody has sufficient motivation to announce the problem, and nobody has sufficient motivation to fix the problem even if known. So instead, I go to someplace like Apple & friends, who - being PAID - are fanatical about making every little thing right (ok, they make mistakes too, but are more motivated to find & fix the little things).
Hence the ultimate failing of "free software": like it or not, money motivates people to do necessary but unpopular jobs, including finding & fixing software flaws.
So when can I buy a copy of Spore with the assurance it does NOT have SecuROM onboard?
What you don't understand is that EA's DRM was screwing up computers of people who DID pay!
Late fall. Rumor is Apple may introduce a 10" iPod Touch, which for most purposes is a touchscreen netbook.
Apparently the v2.0 hardware _does_ have mic & bluetooth support (requires v3.0 software to activate the BT), but not the v1.0 hardware (what I have now).
I too would love to see Skype run on a Touch. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no audio input hardware (no Bluetooth support, no suitably wired plug).
So the geeky question is: what would be required to run Skype on an iPod Touch? I can see building a plug that would enable a Bluetooth headset for it. The final step then would be persuading Skype to support such a hack (er, 3rd-party product).
Note that the device has three 1.5' leads stretched around my innards. My cardiologist has warned against being too close (whatever that entails) to electric motors/generators, speakers, and other relatively large electromagnetic sources. Specifically he warned against
- cradling a phone on my left shoulder
- doing car maintenance with the engine running
- chainsaws
- music headphones too close to wired areas (like in left shirt pocket)
- and other "you get the idea" moving magnetic fields within range
Last time a major TEOTWAWKI event was looming (Y2K), I described the threat to my father in great detail. His response: [shrug] "I'll throw another log on the fire and go back to my book." True enough, my folks' lives are pervaded by self-sufficiency, including extensive wood heat, well water and homegrown food. Society shuts down, they just spend a few minutes adjusting and carry on.
But ... you wouldn't guess that at a glance. They have elegantly integrated the survivalist mindset with modern conveniences, enjoying everything technology has to offer without worries of what to do if the grid shuts down indefinitely. Everything has a low-tech backup, preparations for self-sufficiency are ongoing and already in use.
You can live a "survivalist" lifestyle, and still be fully "wired". The two ways of life are not diametrically opposed.
As a cyborg (literally, if technically) I have to wonder what such a solar electrical storm would do to implanted electronic medical devices, such as my pacemaker. Any knowledgeable insights? If this shuts down, I'm history in seconds.
One word: LIBRARY.
Yes, I said "free". For those interested in getting an education from MIT in any course/degree offered, go to MIT OpenCourseWare for full free access to all material needed to learn whatever the school has to offer.
Certification and faculty attention, however, is kinda pricy.
You're not a father, are you?
No, you're an Anonymous Coward.
What happens when nobody wants to do the unglamorous, low paying work?
Exactly. There are some parts of the code which are downright ugly, hard to write/fix, unpopular to even discuss, and when implemented will only be seen by a tiny percentage of users - but without which (esp. when accumulated with other unpopular stuff) the software will only compete as an also-ran.
This is the problem with Linux and other OSS projects: in a complex system, every user will run across something which is in this "unpopular" category. Sure the user is allegedly welcome to contribute a fix, but frankly the reason s/he has your software is to USE it, not to FIX it. Personally, I find the installers unbearable: yeah they work fine for popular software, but all to many packages don't install in a usable manner, and I have other things to do than fix someone else's project (pardon my alleged hubris, but my time is worth more than that).
Apple (and most other companies) succeeds because someone, paid for their responsibility, identifies that some unpopular and unrecognized tasks must be done. They make sure that the whole project is completed and up to par, even when most other participants don't know some obscure part exists and took great effort to make work.
How are co-workers supposed to vote "yeah, he did a good job" when practically nobody is aware of what he did? especially when it's some complex obscurity that would ultimately make-or-break the project? Who's going to do something unglamorous, knowing they won't get paid even a fair low fee? Fairly compensating talent is not a popularity contest; knowing the value of work done is.
If not for minimum wage, how much would YOU pay your janitor?
And yet, many big name companies are able to stream HD quality video over the internet
Sure - because they buffer the content on your end, and you don't notice the lag between frame sent and frame displayed. Additionally, the content is pre-rendered. Netflix's "Instant" option sure looks instant to me, because when I click "play" I overlook the few seconds of buffer loading while I settle into a comfy chair, and that's not even considering the additional delay of render time.
It's not a matter of getting HD images to you. It's a matter of getting HD images constructed and delivered and displayed within about 1/30th of a second of you pressing a button. Big urban bandwidth & lag is fine for delivering HD video, but not this-split-second gaming images. There's a big difference between direct CPU-to-GPU-to-display lag vs. CPU-to-ISP-to-renderfarm-to-ISP-to-CPU-to-display lag, as in orders of magnitude.
Because you are reliant on something which must be paid for (somehow) and/or you can't own. Stallman's view, nutty or not, is that you should be able to function ENTIRELY on free software - which a non-free JavaScript "app" by definition isn't. From his perspective, it's an insidious "slippery slope" undercutting of the free (speech AND beer) software paradigm: it's so easy to get caught in the "[shrug] so what? I didn't have to pay, and I don't have to keep a copy because I just go to the site to run it again" trap, risking reliance on something controlled by someone else.
1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter.
A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes. ... or about 2Pbits/sec.
The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours
Now THAT'S bandwidth!
...the retail store is.
I'm serious. Kodak went thru the same process. Focused on selling physical high-volume goods (photo film & paper), they viewed the customer as the store buying stuff in volume - not the individual actually using the product. As a result, when digital photography started catching on, the manufacturer was faced with threats of retail stores dropping their products entirely. You see, the standard drug-store film-processing model required the end user to enter the retail store three times (buy film, drop off film, pick up prints), thus encouraging additional "well, while I'm here..." purchases resulting from the walk-in photo-processing model. Digital photography trashes that model: no longer must the end user come into the store so often ... which upsets the retailer, who then tells Kodak et al "don't go digital or we'll drop your products entirely". Thing is, by considering retailer = customer, the manufacturer doesn't see that the end user is going to go digital anyway and sales of film will eventually evaporate. Scared of losing the "customer" (i.e.: retailer), the manufacturer fails to serve the "real customer" (i.e.: end user), and isn't ready to handle the transition when it finally hits.
Same problem with music. Big labels see the retail stores as the customers, who complain "if you go to digital distribution we won't have anything to sell, so stifle that MP3 stuff or we'll stop selling your product" - not seeing that the end user is, en masse, going all-digital-download. You're not the RIAA's customer, the retail store is.
Just as deconstructing matter leads us to the very wierd principles of quantum mechanics, perhaps deconstructing free will leads us to some comparably wierd principles. In both cases, what we accept as standard properties look nothing like what's really going on.
If Apple did not exist, you would find it necessary to invent it - just so you could complain about it. Kinda like the evangelical athiests I know, who spend more time talking about God than any devout believers.
It's not your decision as a juror to decide what laws apply to the case, or what evidence should be presented.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse." ...except when on a jury? where suddenly I am to have no access to law or fact save only those hand-picked by those who may have ulterior motives? WTF?
"Anything you say [or do] can and will be used against you in a court of law."
I've studied enough law to know that when someone says "X is illegal", there is usually an unmentioned exception. I also know that the judicial system is designed for "may the best argument win", not determination of legal truth and application of moral consequences. I also know that most people are guilty of something, ensuring that all can be controlled (paging Ayn Rand), and want a jury to have the ability to say "enough - set him free".
The defendant's liberty, and perhaps life, is on the line. That defendant could be you or I - let us hope our juries have the wisdom to discover factual truths and judge the law, rather than merely consent to whatever facilitates the prosecutor's political career or the judge's tee time.
Nothing outside the courtroom should influence your decision in court.
Except that I come into the courtroom with 41 years of real-world experience & education which may or may not be approved by the judge, which may include direct knowledge of relevant laws, and which does include the knowledge that some judges will stifle relevant facts which may throw the case. As a juror, I am not merely a pawn in the game, I am (and intend to remain as relevant) an informed intelligent citizen who holds a 1/12th stake in soveriegnty over the case at hand. Not only are the facts presented up for evaluation by the jury, but the law itself and even the judge are subject to the jury (save only for plainly egregious verdicts). The defendant's freedom, and perhaps life, is at stake - as juror, I owe him more than meek submittal to a judge's biased orders and lawyer's incompetence or ulterior motives. To the officers of the court (attorneys included), the defendant is expendible; the jury should not concur.