A possibility. I've noticed that more expensive bathroom fixtures lately seem to be water-repellent in an interesting way--water forms into tiny sphere-like bits (we might call them "drops") and moves along the surfaces rather than adhering to the surface and sort of sliding down it.
Law Clerks write the decisions, but a good judge decides what the decision will be. In SCOTUS, the judges get bench briefs from their clerks before oral argument, plus briefs from either side. Then they retire after the case is argued and go around the table, with the least senior justice speaking first and giving his impression of the case / comments / where he'll come out. It goes in order of reverse seniority so that the senior justice speaks last in order to get the benefit of hearing everyone else first. Then they have clerks write opinions based on their decision. Occasionally there is a realignment after reading the opinions that are drafted.
This. For doing paperwork in coordination with other people both at your business and other businesses, you do not want to be wasting time--you want to be using a solution that works. Microsoft puts hundreds of millions into office development. If it's just me, for personal use, sure, maybe I'd use something else (although despite rumors of stability, I have never had OpenOffice work stably and conveniently), But if it's a hundred people in my office, forty of whom are making 120K+/yr? And they have to coordinate their documents with those of people at other offices? You pay for the industry standard unless something else creates a massive competitive edge. The sheer retraining costs of new employees who came in would exceed the costs you pay for the industry standard software.
There are plenty of things I would do differently if I were designing MS Office, and the price is high--but the product is also pretty good.
There are trace amounts of cocaine on a huge percentage of US Currency (a percentage that gets higher as you get closer to DC). I wonder about false positives from illicit substances that were not, in fact, used by the scanned individual.
On a side-note, I don't recall any Trek episodes about tricorder false positives... (except for deliberate ones)
I wouldn't. I'd tell my lawyer to prepare his largest vault and stand my ground. There are times when suing is the right course of action.
There are times when *threatening to sue* is the proper course of action. There are fewer cases where filing a complaint (i.e. initializing a lawsuit) is a proper course of action. It is much, much rarer for suing and going to trial to be the proper course of action.
Lawsuits take years, cost major time and money--usually even if you win, though then it is a net gain--and the outcome is not assured. Settlement is usually (though not always) the rational choice, unless the other side is being irrational or is poorly advised.
So Time Warner NY failed to implement the national emergency system that we use in the event of an *inbound ICBM attack*? When it had been announced for weeks in advance?
Better does not always mean more expensive. You can save a lot of money by not allowing a local PD, for example, to retire at a percentage of their final year where that final year includes ridiculous amounts of overtime hours. You can then use that money to improve other services.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
We've been in two wars with nations which are not world powers.
It is not criminal activity if it is legalized. That's what legalized means. It is not conspiracy if it is not a crime. There are certainly things like bribery which are legal--but actually walking up to a Senator and saying "I'll give you ten grand for your vote" is still illegal.
Apparently, everybody is supposed to love and support Israel. At least if you are a US politician.
Yes. U.S. Politicians aren't "everyone," but you are generally supposed to support Israel if you are one, because you lose a lot of support at home if you do not--there are a lot of American Jews who feel strongly about it, sometimes rationally and sometimes irrationally. Even if you don't get them to vote against you, you will lose their participation in votes for you and in fund-raising for you and in media-coverage for you, all of which hurts. You can take a stand against Israel, but it has to be very carefully done. Or else you need to not need re-election.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
The F-22 is a better aircraft at blowing other planes out of the sky.
I would be very impressed if it could do this from its hangar, because AFAIK the damned things are STILL grounded.
The F-22 program was scrapped because it was very expensive and not necessary--nobody else in the world came close.
The F-22 program was grounded because we don't need it at the moment--yes, there are safety issues they couldn't resolve, but if we actually really needed them to fly a mission, to hell with the grounding order, we'd order them to fly even though the safety risk is too high for the ROI that we get given present mission parameters.
You must live in a different captalist system than I do. The company I'm working for right now (even in this economy) is laying out far more money for me than they pay their own permanent workers. This is because of my specific industry knowledge and technical skills. They're paying me based on my merit.
They are paying you based on your merit in one particular area. Not based on your overall merit. They would not pay mother Theresa to do your job.
This guy would fare no better in a meritocracy. Someone needs to choose the meritorious. And if it's not the market (voting with one's money is far more accurate measure of merit than one-man-one-vote), it falls to a nameless administrator to make that determination.
On the contrary, it seems like you are positing not that he would fare no better in a meritocracy, but that a meritocracy cannot exist because merit cannot be determined objectively.
The system we have, of course, is far from meritorious because much depends on luck and on characteristics that we would not consider meritorious (or that we would not consider to outweigh considerations tending against a claim of merit). We might say, for example, that a child molester has less merit than almost anyone, and his role in society or prison should be determined accordingly--but one child molester will be caught where another will go free. It might be (and often-is) that a job is given due to nepotism or connections when the having of those connections is not a prerequisite for the job, despite the presence of other better-suited candidates--an event that turns in part on the luck of who you run into at an alumni meeting or supermarket.
You realize that there are many people who can't meet loans because they've lost their jobs?
Also, there was *a lot* of fraud in the no-income-verification home loans. Not just by borrowers, but by mortgage brokers who knew the system and intentionally gamed it, representing to banks that borrowers had income X and representing to borrowers that documents Y covered the loan they had discussed and just to sign them.
> Were you 16? Then you were either an idiot or a coward.
Many people who live with abusers don't fight back because it's what they're used to, or--yes--because they've been conditioned to be afraid of the attacker, or because the abused is someone they care about, or for other reasons. Calling them names for it is really incredibly cruel.
There are millions of people in the country conditioned not to fight back against abusers. They are not all idiots and cowards. Most of them are just in situations that are untenable to them that they don't know how to get out of. Sometimes they're afraid to leave because they think someone will kill them. Sometimes they think they love the person who abuses them, either from Stockholm syndrome or from behavior in the period when they are not being abused. Sometimes they don't know where to go for help because their abuser is from a powerful family that runs the local cops or court. Sometimes they're afraid that if they go for help, their kids will get taken away from them, or will be hurt by their abuser. Sometimes they don't have the money to make it on their own. There are many reasons people don't leave.
Child abuse should not be defined by "real physical harm" though. You can mentally scar a child in ways that cause no real physical harm and tou can torture a person without leaving a mark.
Actually, I'm surprised they can't toll the statute of limitations to when they first discover it. In the alternative, a longer statute of limitations might be appropriate.
And he is a judge, so he has the spectre of other punishments--losing elections or being disciplined by the bar. He probably won't get more than a slap on the wrist from the bar (if it were something he were actively doing, he might have more serious consequences).
It depends on the children. Children raised with or without corporal punishment come out fine, and others raised with or without come out horribly.
There are times when it becomes really the best thing to do, but that's very rare. My grandmother actually had the cops tell her to beat one of her children after he constantly was running out into traffic no matter how much he was non-corporally punished. Cops couldn't tell a parent that today--but he never ran in the street again, and quite possibly it saved his life.
If someone is going to administer corporal punishment, normally it's expected that the father in the household will do it--at least with every family I've known about it being used in.
That being said, by the time someone is sixteen, corporal punishment is really not relevant. This was a teenager who clearly had a lot of stuff--if they felt that strongly that what she had done was wrong, they could have just taken away that stuff, or had a long conversation, or generally grounded her.
I am also curious whether this was actually a blackmail case--whether she released the video in retaliation for his cutting of support, as he said, or whether she had actually threatened to release it if he didn't continue to support her.
United States v. Jones will be argued in the Supreme Court this week, on whether warrantless tracking of a drug dealer by putting a GPS tracker on his car requires a warrant on the fourth Amendment.
An idiot would think that we were arguing that case in the Supreme Court to defend drug dealers. Maybe the guy actually arguing it is--but the reason that we are considering it as a society, the reason we care about these things, is because of the risk of it being done to innocent people. The risk of government tracking everyone as part of its standard law enforcement duties. (I'm not saying NSA doesn't do that now, but law enforcement doesn't usually.) There should be some limit on the power of the people acting for the state--Something that at least requires a police officer to say "there is probable cause to search this person and here's why..."
Actually, there are several bases for property rights. The classic Lockean property rights were based on the idea of having earned the right to possess the fruits of your labor. That is not a market-based theory, but it certainly has a lot of popular appeal.
First possession is another. Accretion is another. Laws defaulting property rights to the state which lowers transaction costs is another (and is the most efficient--suggesting we should have open sharing and some kind of society-based remuneration for artists based on the number of downloads they receive, since that would eliminate all the transaction costs we spend on DRM and copyright enforcement, not to mention the transaction costs associated with having a situation where "to a first approximation, every computer user is a felon.").
Slashdot Mirror
A possibility. I've noticed that more expensive bathroom fixtures lately seem to be water-repellent in an interesting way--water forms into tiny sphere-like bits (we might call them "drops") and moves along the surfaces rather than adhering to the surface and sort of sliding down it.
Yes, comparing it to the eight others' votes in the same case does seem to be cheating...
Ideal indepedence among justices does also not mean no covariance. The law itself creates covariance.
Law Clerks write the decisions, but a good judge decides what the decision will be. In SCOTUS, the judges get bench briefs from their clerks before oral argument, plus briefs from either side. Then they retire after the case is argued and go around the table, with the least senior justice speaking first and giving his impression of the case / comments / where he'll come out. It goes in order of reverse seniority so that the senior justice speaks last in order to get the benefit of hearing everyone else first. Then they have clerks write opinions based on their decision. Occasionally there is a realignment after reading the opinions that are drafted.
This. For doing paperwork in coordination with other people both at your business and other businesses, you do not want to be wasting time--you want to be using a solution that works. Microsoft puts hundreds of millions into office development. If it's just me, for personal use, sure, maybe I'd use something else (although despite rumors of stability, I have never had OpenOffice work stably and conveniently), But if it's a hundred people in my office, forty of whom are making 120K+/yr? And they have to coordinate their documents with those of people at other offices? You pay for the industry standard unless something else creates a massive competitive edge. The sheer retraining costs of new employees who came in would exceed the costs you pay for the industry standard software.
There are plenty of things I would do differently if I were designing MS Office, and the price is high--but the product is also pretty good.
There are trace amounts of cocaine on a huge percentage of US Currency (a percentage that gets higher as you get closer to DC). I wonder about false positives from illicit substances that were not, in fact, used by the scanned individual.
On a side-note, I don't recall any Trek episodes about tricorder false positives... (except for deliberate ones)
Yes; I meant threaten to sue with the help of an attorney.
I wouldn't. I'd tell my lawyer to prepare his largest vault and stand my ground. There are times when suing is the right course of action.
There are times when *threatening to sue* is the proper course of action. There are fewer cases where filing a complaint (i.e. initializing a lawsuit) is a proper course of action. It is much, much rarer for suing and going to trial to be the proper course of action.
Lawsuits take years, cost major time and money--usually even if you win, though then it is a net gain--and the outcome is not assured. Settlement is usually (though not always) the rational choice, unless the other side is being irrational or is poorly advised.
So Time Warner NY failed to implement the national emergency system that we use in the event of an *inbound ICBM attack*? When it had been announced for weeks in advance?
Curse their sudden but inevitable betrayal.
Better does not always mean more expensive. You can save a lot of money by not allowing a local PD, for example, to retire at a percentage of their final year where that final year includes ridiculous amounts of overtime hours. You can then use that money to improve other services.
We've been in two wars with nations which are not world powers.
It is not criminal activity if it is legalized. That's what legalized means. It is not conspiracy if it is not a crime. There are certainly things like bribery which are legal--but actually walking up to a Senator and saying "I'll give you ten grand for your vote" is still illegal.
Money laundering, bribery, and conspiracy are literally legalized in politics now.
Citation needed.
(Also, conspiracy to do what, exactly? Conspiracy to commit crime is a crime.)
Ah yes, since William the Conqueror invaded in 8000 B.C....
Apparently, everybody is supposed to love and support Israel. At least if you are a US politician.
Yes. U.S. Politicians aren't "everyone," but you are generally supposed to support Israel if you are one, because you lose a lot of support at home if you do not--there are a lot of American Jews who feel strongly about it, sometimes rationally and sometimes irrationally. Even if you don't get them to vote against you, you will lose their participation in votes for you and in fund-raising for you and in media-coverage for you, all of which hurts. You can take a stand against Israel, but it has to be very carefully done. Or else you need to not need re-election.
The F-22 is a better aircraft at blowing other planes out of the sky.
I would be very impressed if it could do this from its hangar, because AFAIK the damned things are STILL grounded.
The F-22 program was scrapped because it was very expensive and not necessary--nobody else in the world came close.
The F-22 program was grounded because we don't need it at the moment--yes, there are safety issues they couldn't resolve, but if we actually really needed them to fly a mission, to hell with the grounding order, we'd order them to fly even though the safety risk is too high for the ROI that we get given present mission parameters.
You must live in a different captalist system than I do. The company I'm working for right now (even in this economy) is laying out far more money for me than they pay their own permanent workers. This is because of my specific industry knowledge and technical skills. They're paying me based on my merit.
They are paying you based on your merit in one particular area. Not based on your overall merit. They would not pay mother Theresa to do your job.
This guy would fare no better in a meritocracy. Someone needs to choose the meritorious. And if it's not the market (voting with one's money is far more accurate measure of merit than one-man-one-vote), it falls to a nameless administrator to make that determination.
On the contrary, it seems like you are positing not that he would fare no better in a meritocracy, but that a meritocracy cannot exist because merit cannot be determined objectively.
The system we have, of course, is far from meritorious because much depends on luck and on characteristics that we would not consider meritorious (or that we would not consider to outweigh considerations tending against a claim of merit). We might say, for example, that a child molester has less merit than almost anyone, and his role in society or prison should be determined accordingly--but one child molester will be caught where another will go free. It might be (and often-is) that a job is given due to nepotism or connections when the having of those connections is not a prerequisite for the job, despite the presence of other better-suited candidates--an event that turns in part on the luck of who you run into at an alumni meeting or supermarket.
You realize that there are many people who can't meet loans because they've lost their jobs?
Also, there was *a lot* of fraud in the no-income-verification home loans. Not just by borrowers, but by mortgage brokers who knew the system and intentionally gamed it, representing to banks that borrowers had income X and representing to borrowers that documents Y covered the loan they had discussed and just to sign them.
> Were you 16? Then you were either an idiot or a coward.
Many people who live with abusers don't fight back because it's what they're used to, or--yes--because they've been conditioned to be afraid of the attacker, or because the abused is someone they care about, or for other reasons. Calling them names for it is really incredibly cruel.
There are millions of people in the country conditioned not to fight back against abusers. They are not all idiots and cowards. Most of them are just in situations that are untenable to them that they don't know how to get out of. Sometimes they're afraid to leave because they think someone will kill them. Sometimes they think they love the person who abuses them, either from Stockholm syndrome or from behavior in the period when they are not being abused. Sometimes they don't know where to go for help because their abuser is from a powerful family that runs the local cops or court. Sometimes they're afraid that if they go for help, their kids will get taken away from them, or will be hurt by their abuser. Sometimes they don't have the money to make it on their own. There are many reasons people don't leave.
Child abuse should not be defined by "real physical harm" though. You can mentally scar a child in ways that cause no real physical harm and tou can torture a person without leaving a mark.
Actually, I'm surprised they can't toll the statute of limitations to when they first discover it. In the alternative, a longer statute of limitations might be appropriate.
And he is a judge, so he has the spectre of other punishments--losing elections or being disciplined by the bar. He probably won't get more than a slap on the wrist from the bar (if it were something he were actively doing, he might have more serious consequences).
It depends on the children. Children raised with or without corporal punishment come out fine, and others raised with or without come out horribly.
There are times when it becomes really the best thing to do, but that's very rare. My grandmother actually had the cops tell her to beat one of her children after he constantly was running out into traffic no matter how much he was non-corporally punished. Cops couldn't tell a parent that today--but he never ran in the street again, and quite possibly it saved his life.
If someone is going to administer corporal punishment, normally it's expected that the father in the household will do it--at least with every family I've known about it being used in.
That being said, by the time someone is sixteen, corporal punishment is really not relevant. This was a teenager who clearly had a lot of stuff--if they felt that strongly that what she had done was wrong, they could have just taken away that stuff, or had a long conversation, or generally grounded her.
I am also curious whether this was actually a blackmail case--whether she released the video in retaliation for his cutting of support, as he said, or whether she had actually threatened to release it if he didn't continue to support her.
More likely he is beating lashing his daughter for violating the law. It is not necessarily a statement on whether the law is just.
United States v. Jones will be argued in the Supreme Court this week, on whether warrantless tracking of a drug dealer by putting a GPS tracker on his car requires a warrant on the fourth Amendment.
An idiot would think that we were arguing that case in the Supreme Court to defend drug dealers. Maybe the guy actually arguing it is--but the reason that we are considering it as a society, the reason we care about these things, is because of the risk of it being done to innocent people. The risk of government tracking everyone as part of its standard law enforcement duties. (I'm not saying NSA doesn't do that now, but law enforcement doesn't usually.) There should be some limit on the power of the people acting for the state--Something that at least requires a police officer to say "there is probable cause to search this person and here's why..."
Actually, there are several bases for property rights. The classic Lockean property rights were based on the idea of having earned the right to possess the fruits of your labor. That is not a market-based theory, but it certainly has a lot of popular appeal.
First possession is another. Accretion is another. Laws defaulting property rights to the state which lowers transaction costs is another (and is the most efficient--suggesting we should have open sharing and some kind of society-based remuneration for artists based on the number of downloads they receive, since that would eliminate all the transaction costs we spend on DRM and copyright enforcement, not to mention the transaction costs associated with having a situation where "to a first approximation, every computer user is a felon.").