"Illusionists have been alive to this phenomenon for years," said Professor Zhaoping
"Alive to this phenomenon" is precisely how an illusionist would want you to perceive the effects of their knowing how something really was. What a perfect idiom.
Of course it's up to the person specifying the XML dialect to make those tags and structure comprehensible by a normal person, but that's not the format's defect. Any format can be obfuscated by design or carelessness. XML is harder to do that in. And even the most basic tools that render XML data according to their embedded schema make most XML self-evident. And that's not cheating: even this post in English requires a reader app, as does all stored data.
Of course, my post was human readable, but since you can't even understand written English enough to stop making the spurious point that a human can make even a readable format unreadable, I don't expect you to accept that there is even such a thing as human readable.
Sorry you couldn't benefit from that simple insight no matter how easy to read I made it. Your loss.
Yo, XML is for fucking permanent storage, not your fucking tranitory C struct. Dumping your fucking C struct to your fucking computer will leave you fucking scratching your head in 5 years when you try to fucking decipher the fucking thing. Or you can use fucking XML and have a fucking clue later when you try to use that data on some other fucking platform where your other code won't fucking run and you don't want to fucking pore through the source to decipher the fucking one-off format you made to import Word data into that fucking program you never used again. Got it, fucker?
No, XML is indeed that wonderpill...because it's open and human readable, not some obfuscated binary format like.DOC
ASCII does not mean human-readable. Instead of an obfuscated binary format, XML documents end up in an obfuscated text format. --
"So wait, who protects the people from their government?" "Terrorists." "...oh." [ Reply to This | Parent ]
*
Re:Don't Adopt. Convert. (Score:2)
by Doc Ruby (173196) on Wed Feb 20, '08 01:26 PM (#22491236) Homepage Journal
And some humans are illiterate.
XML is human readable because it doesn't require a machine (or superhuman skills) to read its meaning. Its field names and structure are embedded in the data, not only in a decoder context. Of course it's up to the person specifying the XML dialect to make those tags and structure comprehensible by a normal person, but that's not the format's defect. Any format can be obfuscated by design or carelessness. XML is harder to do that in. And even the most basic tools that render XML data according to their embedded schema make most XML self-evident. And that's not cheating: even this post in English requires a reader app, as does all stored data.
--
Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't.
Maybe MS does now want to move away from their old proprietary formats into new open ones. But the old formats were built over decades without that goal.
If you read Spolsky's analysis linked from this Slashdot story summary, you'll see how the formats "evolved" ("devolved" more like) withing MS goals often dictated by their unique marketing position.
The summary also points out with links to why this release might not actually indicate MS is really releasing their formats to break with that past after all.
XML is human readable because it doesn't require a machine (or superhuman skills) to read its meaning. Its field names and structure are embedded in the data, not only in a decoder context. Of course it's up to the person specifying the XML dialect to make those tags and structure comprehensible by a normal person, but that's not the format's defect. Any format can be obfuscated by design or carelessness. XML is harder to do that in. And even the most basic tools that render XML data according to their embedded schema make most XML self-evident. And that's not cheating: even this post in English requires a reader app, as does all stored data.
No, XML is indeed that wonderpill. Not because it's some magic format, but because it's open and human readable, not some obfuscated binary format like.DOC . The apps doing the import will be open as well. And if they "die off" later, it's because no one is using them, so who cares? The rare need in the distant future for reading whatever does get left behind in those formats will be served for whichever archivist needs it by the more recent open converter apps that should still be archived somewhere, too.
But really we agree. That "standardized format" you prefer is XML. ODF is XML. That's what I'm talking about, and it seems what you're talking about, too.
I haven't seen _Michael Clayton_. But there is a small percentage of outliers in a huge amount of data that could be profiled by machine. Maybe it would cost a few hundred thousand dollars to profile that data into ratings as detailed and easy to understand as, say, the car profiles in the Kelly Blue Book. Business with them is worth $billions a year - bad decisions on who to do business with cost a lot more than that. And the ones harder to profile demand more examination anyway than just a batting average, so that's not a problem for the main list.
So I think this would be a good service to offer. There need to be more cases put on line - closer to all of them - to be really a representative directory. Even just finding which lawyers have experience in which kind of law in which jurisdictions, and their client list, would be a good start for asking them to defend their resume - once it exists. And if the government, or the Bar Association, doesn't publish this kind of rating free, there's still a pretty good business there to start up. It seems like a pretty good investment of maybe $100 before actually talking with a whole bunch of lawyers about their pitches. Which pitches should be a lot more honest when they can be checked in a public database.
Spolsky's advice explains that the format code is extremely bad code from the POV of a programmer picking it up to use starting now. Because it grew like a coral reef, starting so long ago that interoperability with anything else but the app's codebase at the time was not in the designs. And every new feature was thrown in as a special case, rather than any general purpose facility for kinds of features or future expansion. The Microsoft legacy that leverages every year's market position into expansion the next year.
But we're not Microsoft, and we don't have the requirements MS had when making these formats. So we should by no means perpetuate them. We should do now what MS never had reason to do: upgrade the code and drop the legacy stuff that makes most of the code such a burden, but doesn't do anything for the vast majority of users today (and tomorrow).
That's OK, because Microsoft has done that, too, already. The MS idea of "legacy to preserve" is based on MS marketing goals, which are not the same as actual user requirements. So that legacy preservation doesn't mean that, say, Office 2008 can read and write Word for Windows for Workgroups for Pen Computing files 100%. MS has dropped plenty of backwards compatibility for its own reasons. New people opening the format for modern (and future) use can do the same, but based on user requirements, not emphasis on product lines if that's not a real requirement.
So what's needed is just converters that use this code to convert to real open formats that can be maintained into the future. Not moving this code itself into apps for the rest of all time. Today we have a transition point before us which lets us finally turn our back on the old, closed formats with all their code complexity. We can write converters that can be used to get rid of those formats that benefited Microsoft more than anyone else. Convert them into XML. Then, after a while, instead of opening any Word or Excel formats, we'll be exchanging just XML, and occasionally reaching for the converter when an old file has to be used currently. MS will go with that flow, because that's what customers will pay for. Soon enough these old formats will be rare, and the converters will be rare, too.
Just don't perpetuate them, and Microsoft's selfish interests, by just embedding them into apps as "native" formats. Make them import by calling a module that can also just batch convert old files. We don't need this creepy old man following us around anymore.
I think it can be presented in a uniform fashion that can be compared across all lawyers in the DB. One query would be which party prevailed, the first order of magnitude of results. The next would be how many of the proposed remedies were ordered, and then how close any dollar remedies were to that requested.
The "batting average" doesn't have to be a simple percentage (or "per miles", which is what baseball uses). But it doesn't have to be some great mystery, either. Law firms use formulas internally for ranking, promotion and bonuses. And those hobgoblins are probably consistent enough at some level of abstraction that they can all, or mostly, be measured according to it.
Well, like any opening of info about a mysterious but important and valuable process, especially involving lawyers, it would have many results, some conflicting.
The main motivation for lawyers is a legally enforceable obligation to take cases that meet legal requirements of validity. Lawyers cannot just refuse cases they aren't certain to win, of the case is legally sound (eg. there's evidence they're right, there's less evidence they're wrong, there's precedent in law, they have standing to sue, it's not frivolous, etc). Of course, lawyers are indeed entitled to decline cases they have evidence and cause (precise terms in the law, not just purely subjective calls that could just equal "not certain to win easily") to believe will not win, even if the lawyer does a good job and the judge is fair and reasonable. If lawyers can be proven to have done that, in a suit over a complaint they just blew off a case (eg. they were too lazy or greedy to take), they can be disbarred or otherwise punished. And it does happen, even though it would be easy to believe no lawyer would do that to another lawyer in their little club. Lawyers love cases where they can stick it to other lawyers, especially when that action "cleans up the profession" so more people trust lawyers more and give them more power and money.
The other motivation is making money. Lawyers will typically get paid (by the hour, plus expenses like marking up their $25:hour receptionist and their local phonebills to $300:hour, plus their own time using those hours) whether they win or lose. Except in share of damages compensation cases, but their share of those makes it statistically advantageous to take any of those that are above 50% chance of winning, and even some that are well below in the chance that they might pay off.
And all this is actually part of the system. Lawyers are "officers of the court": they're required to protect the courts from excessive cases, not just the most frivolous ones, by working them out without litigation, and even just turning people down when it's more trouble to the legal system than it's really worth (but with an accounting for protecting people's rights and their client's best interest, except abusive self interest).
That's how the system is structured. There's enough complexity and judgement calls, including on the part of a slighted client who would be distracted by an extra suit against the slighting lawyer, and all the wobbliness of most potential clients not realizing how sensitive are lawyers to accusations they're just cherrypicking to avoid the least profitable cases. And they do get away with it quite a bit, though they're taking some heavy chances when they try.
But then consider the power of the info. Those batting averages are just one stat (not including arbitration or settling, or at least any ability to compare that to "what would have happened in trial"), but they are better than nothing. Today lawyers are as free to turn down "hard" cases, but they don't, and clients don't have the corresponding ability to skip "bad" lawyers, except purely anecdotally. There's a complex balance, and more info will usually shift it to work more often along the lines it says it will, without hidden cycles that protect the lawyers.
I know I want to know that number every time I ask a lawyer for advice. Having it might start some cycle to cook the numbers, but that's still probably better than not knowing at all.
That's OK. If they take my case, then I'll fit their stats. So the process would be what I'd already do: start with the best rated ones and find the first who'll take my case. If their batting average is too low, then I'll drop it.
Since all these cases are now up, is there enough data in there to finally make a directory of lawyers with batting averages, so I can check whether one is actually any good at my kind of case before I hire them?
I think we picked up on it, but I haven't seen a solution offered to defend from this type of attack.
What would work would be if the authoritative DNS record were held by a group of registrars, not just one, as I'll now detail. The registrant has a contract with each registrar in the group. That contract requires each one to poll the others and keep their record synced. Contracts among the registrars to "respect the vote" further enforce that sync. The registrant's contract also allows it to tell each and every registrar to drop one or all the rest from the group, and conversely to tell one to resign from the group. Then ensure the registrars are in different countries, some of whom are enemies of each other and won't respect each other's legal system (but optimally with some bridges among them, so none are totally isolated from the force of another's contract).
Then at the first sign of trouble with one registrar, trigger its resignation clause. That can be done in realtime with networks, winning the race with the much slower legal process in practically every country. The redundancy of the group will keep the "authoritative" record under control of the registrant, not the registrar. It's possible that a rogue registrar will advertise a redirected DNS to something wrong or null, but that will not stop most people, and is probably unlikely because other DNS operators will drop the rogue that's broadcasting false and contradictory records that are corrupting the integrity of the global DNS system - so they probably won't do it. By the time someone could force a registrar to go rogue, it would already be too late to matter, so that would deter trying.
It's worth noting that this defense system guards also against crooked registrars holding their authority hostage and jacking up prices, or just shutting down domain traffic to steal the name. It's been a long time coming, but patching this single failurepoint in the essential DNS system was inevitable. And now we're staring it in the face, the face of a Northern California judge. Creepy, but not the end of the world.
The site is blocked by stopping its DNS. So what's its IP#? If the site is still up, people can link to it by IP#, and pass around the story that way. Sure, if its IP# changes later, the links will be lost, but if it doesn't get its DNS back eventually it will be lost anyway. Linking to its IP# will help it survive to fight to get its DNS back.
The court has targeted WikiLeaks' DNS registrar, not WikiLeaks itself with this order. So WikiLeaks shouldn't have to depend on DNS while it defends itself.
China does have cheaper labor and equipment, but the labor pool is already experiencing heavy demand. Sure there are a lot of Chinese people, but only a small fraction of them have scientific education. It's already hard to find teams of programmers both competent to produce modern programming products (even with lots of competent, experienced management) and still much cheaper than their Euramerican counterparts (after extra management and other overhead costs are included).
The Chinese equipment is cheaper, but China's industry is relatively open and biased towards export, because it's more profitable than selling to domestically: their low wages work both ways. Investments in new tech equipment tend to be funded by foreigners, so there's a further bias towards exporting the gear.
And China's repressive government tends to drive away lots of people, especially those better educated who can make it elsewhere, and even more among those who get to leave to get educated. Plus the repression depends on keeping people ignorant and divided at home in order to perpetuate its power, so the full potential of China's people does not develop intellectually lest it threaten the regime. Sure there are lots of rich Chinese, but they mainly exploit China's economy and their political connections, not necessarily their own native intellect. It's worth noting that these dynamics are true in every country, but China starts out with much more repression and significantly further behind than its competitors like Europe/US/Australia/Japan. So its more likely to stay behind, or face a period where political upheaval distracts its industry from tech advance even if its "free thinker" class does push through to more freedom to think and live.
So China's advantages in building industry and making money also disadvantage truly new industries, both by blocking "mavericks" and by distracting them with profitable exports vs less advanced but less profitable domestic sales.
China's main advantage is its labor and environmental policies, as well as its simple scale and diversity of industrial growth and production, if not of innovation. The labor and environmental policies allow producers to abuse both labor and the environment, which has residual effects. Abused labor is retarded in its own growth in education and seeking innovation, so China's very bottom-heavy labor/management landscape means their middle class is relatively small, which means that source of innovations is relatively small. Real innovation in, say, nanotech doesn't require lots of industrial labor, but rather small groups of highly educated labor free to communicate globally. That kind of peopel are a risk to China's government, and therefore most of its rich people, so they're not as likely to get together as pure economics might allow.
China's environmental abuses might also keep them back, as they materialize into distractions (like epidemics, famine, drought, and other disasters) that redirect Chinese people's attention both away from innovation and towards reforming the government that allows it. But in the short run China's environment, like everywhere else China competes with used to be before they invested in turmoil and remedies, is the main donor to China's increased production, and can't defend itself by forcing the country to drag it into the new "golden age" too. Until nature does eventually make some of those demands, which can really set a country back.
China is dependent on foreign investment and markets. If foreigners want to protect ourselves from China's threats, we should use their dependence on us to force them to improve their labor, education and environmental standards to protect and improve their own assets the way most of us have done our own. The US forced "Most Favored Nation" ("MFN") trading partner status for China through our government in the 1990s on the basis that the move would make its market depend on US production, so we'd be positioned to demand reforms in Chinese government. Of course that was a lie,
Here in NYC, Prince routinely drives up in a limo to downtown record stores that sell bootlegs, grabs every CD with his name on it, storms up to the counter to rant at the nerds at the cash register, then stomps out of the store back into his limo.
The difference between the Internet and a LAN is that a LAN has a supervisor who can start this and get its messages, then intervene in the various ways I mentioned. And if something does go wrong, it's confined to the LAN. You might have also noticed that I never said this was a worm, but just a virus, but you're not getting the basic points I said. There's no point discussing this with you if you're going to discuss something else that I didn't describe.
Don't bother telling me some past employers. Not only is that some fallacious appeal to authority, but it would make them look bad.
Frankly, I find it hard to imagine people like that asking for excessive information except by accident, because I doubt they'd know what to do with it.
Getting more info than they can use has in no way stopped the FBI from requesting, and just grabbing without request, all kinds of info in the past 6 years.
If you still don't get that, it's obvious that you voted for Bush in 2004, even if you won't admit it.
You people don't even realize that you're completely obvious in what's wrong with the way you worship authority. You really should get to work on turning around your conceit that you can just keep on acting like "everyone else", and get closer to taking some responsibility for the way the FBI and Bush's other agencies have so demolished any basis for trusting what they say that we have to examine every word for evidence that it's true. Closer to apologizing for discrediting this country.
Slashdot Mirror
"Alive to this phenomenon" is precisely how an illusionist would want you to perceive the effects of their knowing how something really was. What a perfect idiom.
Of course it's up to the person specifying the XML dialect to make those tags and structure comprehensible by a normal person, but that's not the format's defect. Any format can be obfuscated by design or carelessness. XML is harder to do that in. And even the most basic tools that render XML data according to their embedded schema make most XML self-evident. And that's not cheating: even this post in English requires a reader app, as does all stored data.
Of course, my post was human readable, but since you can't even understand written English enough to stop making the spurious point that a human can make even a readable format unreadable, I don't expect you to accept that there is even such a thing as human readable.
Sorry you couldn't benefit from that simple insight no matter how easy to read I made it. Your loss.
Yo, XML is for fucking permanent storage, not your fucking tranitory C struct. Dumping your fucking C struct to your fucking computer will leave you fucking scratching your head in 5 years when you try to fucking decipher the fucking thing. Or you can use fucking XML and have a fucking clue later when you try to use that data on some other fucking platform where your other code won't fucking run and you don't want to fucking pore through the source to decipher the fucking one-off format you made to import Word data into that fucking program you never used again. Got it, fucker?
No, XML is indeed that wonderpill...because it's open and human readable, not some obfuscated binary format like
ASCII does not mean human-readable. Instead of an obfuscated binary format, XML documents end up in an obfuscated text format.
--
"So wait, who protects the people from their government?"
"Terrorists."
"...oh."
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
*
Re:Don't Adopt. Convert. (Score:2)
by Doc Ruby (173196) on Wed Feb 20, '08 01:26 PM (#22491236) Homepage Journal
And some humans are illiterate.
XML is human readable because it doesn't require a machine (or superhuman skills) to read its meaning. Its field names and structure are embedded in the data, not only in a decoder context. Of course it's up to the person specifying the XML dialect to make those tags and structure comprehensible by a normal person, but that's not the format's defect. Any format can be obfuscated by design or carelessness. XML is harder to do that in. And even the most basic tools that render XML data according to their embedded schema make most XML self-evident. And that's not cheating: even this post in English requires a reader app, as does all stored data.
--
--
make install -not war
Maybe MS does now want to move away from their old proprietary formats into new open ones. But the old formats were built over decades without that goal.
If you read Spolsky's analysis linked from this Slashdot story summary, you'll see how the formats "evolved" ("devolved" more like) withing MS goals often dictated by their unique marketing position.
The summary also points out with links to why this release might not actually indicate MS is really releasing their formats to break with that past after all.
And some humans are illiterate.
XML is human readable because it doesn't require a machine (or superhuman skills) to read its meaning. Its field names and structure are embedded in the data, not only in a decoder context. Of course it's up to the person specifying the XML dialect to make those tags and structure comprehensible by a normal person, but that's not the format's defect. Any format can be obfuscated by design or carelessness. XML is harder to do that in. And even the most basic tools that render XML data according to their embedded schema make most XML self-evident. And that's not cheating: even this post in English requires a reader app, as does all stored data.
No, XML is indeed that wonderpill. Not because it's some magic format, but because it's open and human readable, not some obfuscated binary format like .DOC . The apps doing the import will be open as well. And if they "die off" later, it's because no one is using them, so who cares? The rare need in the distant future for reading whatever does get left behind in those formats will be served for whichever archivist needs it by the more recent open converter apps that should still be archived somewhere, too.
But really we agree. That "standardized format" you prefer is XML. ODF is XML. That's what I'm talking about, and it seems what you're talking about, too.
I haven't seen _Michael Clayton_. But there is a small percentage of outliers in a huge amount of data that could be profiled by machine. Maybe it would cost a few hundred thousand dollars to profile that data into ratings as detailed and easy to understand as, say, the car profiles in the Kelly Blue Book. Business with them is worth $billions a year - bad decisions on who to do business with cost a lot more than that. And the ones harder to profile demand more examination anyway than just a batting average, so that's not a problem for the main list.
So I think this would be a good service to offer. There need to be more cases put on line - closer to all of them - to be really a representative directory. Even just finding which lawyers have experience in which kind of law in which jurisdictions, and their client list, would be a good start for asking them to defend their resume - once it exists. And if the government, or the Bar Association, doesn't publish this kind of rating free, there's still a pretty good business there to start up. It seems like a pretty good investment of maybe $100 before actually talking with a whole bunch of lawyers about their pitches. Which pitches should be a lot more honest when they can be checked in a public database.
Spolsky's advice explains that the format code is extremely bad code from the POV of a programmer picking it up to use starting now. Because it grew like a coral reef, starting so long ago that interoperability with anything else but the app's codebase at the time was not in the designs. And every new feature was thrown in as a special case, rather than any general purpose facility for kinds of features or future expansion. The Microsoft legacy that leverages every year's market position into expansion the next year.
But we're not Microsoft, and we don't have the requirements MS had when making these formats. So we should by no means perpetuate them. We should do now what MS never had reason to do: upgrade the code and drop the legacy stuff that makes most of the code such a burden, but doesn't do anything for the vast majority of users today (and tomorrow).
That's OK, because Microsoft has done that, too, already. The MS idea of "legacy to preserve" is based on MS marketing goals, which are not the same as actual user requirements. So that legacy preservation doesn't mean that, say, Office 2008 can read and write Word for Windows for Workgroups for Pen Computing files 100%. MS has dropped plenty of backwards compatibility for its own reasons. New people opening the format for modern (and future) use can do the same, but based on user requirements, not emphasis on product lines if that's not a real requirement.
So what's needed is just converters that use this code to convert to real open formats that can be maintained into the future. Not moving this code itself into apps for the rest of all time. Today we have a transition point before us which lets us finally turn our back on the old, closed formats with all their code complexity. We can write converters that can be used to get rid of those formats that benefited Microsoft more than anyone else. Convert them into XML. Then, after a while, instead of opening any Word or Excel formats, we'll be exchanging just XML, and occasionally reaching for the converter when an old file has to be used currently. MS will go with that flow, because that's what customers will pay for. Soon enough these old formats will be rare, and the converters will be rare, too.
Just don't perpetuate them, and Microsoft's selfish interests, by just embedding them into apps as "native" formats. Make them import by calling a module that can also just batch convert old files. We don't need this creepy old man following us around anymore.
I think it can be presented in a uniform fashion that can be compared across all lawyers in the DB. One query would be which party prevailed, the first order of magnitude of results. The next would be how many of the proposed remedies were ordered, and then how close any dollar remedies were to that requested.
The "batting average" doesn't have to be a simple percentage (or "per miles", which is what baseball uses). But it doesn't have to be some great mystery, either. Law firms use formulas internally for ranking, promotion and bonuses. And those hobgoblins are probably consistent enough at some level of abstraction that they can all, or mostly, be measured according to it.
Well, like any opening of info about a mysterious but important and valuable process, especially involving lawyers, it would have many results, some conflicting.
The main motivation for lawyers is a legally enforceable obligation to take cases that meet legal requirements of validity. Lawyers cannot just refuse cases they aren't certain to win, of the case is legally sound (eg. there's evidence they're right, there's less evidence they're wrong, there's precedent in law, they have standing to sue, it's not frivolous, etc). Of course, lawyers are indeed entitled to decline cases they have evidence and cause (precise terms in the law, not just purely subjective calls that could just equal "not certain to win easily") to believe will not win, even if the lawyer does a good job and the judge is fair and reasonable. If lawyers can be proven to have done that, in a suit over a complaint they just blew off a case (eg. they were too lazy or greedy to take), they can be disbarred or otherwise punished. And it does happen, even though it would be easy to believe no lawyer would do that to another lawyer in their little club. Lawyers love cases where they can stick it to other lawyers, especially when that action "cleans up the profession" so more people trust lawyers more and give them more power and money.
The other motivation is making money. Lawyers will typically get paid (by the hour, plus expenses like marking up their $25:hour receptionist and their local phonebills to $300:hour, plus their own time using those hours) whether they win or lose. Except in share of damages compensation cases, but their share of those makes it statistically advantageous to take any of those that are above 50% chance of winning, and even some that are well below in the chance that they might pay off.
And all this is actually part of the system. Lawyers are "officers of the court": they're required to protect the courts from excessive cases, not just the most frivolous ones, by working them out without litigation, and even just turning people down when it's more trouble to the legal system than it's really worth (but with an accounting for protecting people's rights and their client's best interest, except abusive self interest).
That's how the system is structured. There's enough complexity and judgement calls, including on the part of a slighted client who would be distracted by an extra suit against the slighting lawyer, and all the wobbliness of most potential clients not realizing how sensitive are lawyers to accusations they're just cherrypicking to avoid the least profitable cases. And they do get away with it quite a bit, though they're taking some heavy chances when they try.
But then consider the power of the info. Those batting averages are just one stat (not including arbitration or settling, or at least any ability to compare that to "what would have happened in trial"), but they are better than nothing. Today lawyers are as free to turn down "hard" cases, but they don't, and clients don't have the corresponding ability to skip "bad" lawyers, except purely anecdotally. There's a complex balance, and more info will usually shift it to work more often along the lines it says it will, without hidden cycles that protect the lawyers.
I know I want to know that number every time I ask a lawyer for advice. Having it might start some cycle to cook the numbers, but that's still probably better than not knowing at all.
That's OK. If they take my case, then I'll fit their stats. So the process would be what I'd already do: start with the best rated ones and find the first who'll take my case. If their batting average is too low, then I'll drop it.
Since all these cases are now up, is there enough data in there to finally make a directory of lawyers with batting averages , so I can check whether one is actually any good at my kind of case before I hire them?
I think we picked up on it, but I haven't seen a solution offered to defend from this type of attack.
What would work would be if the authoritative DNS record were held by a group of registrars, not just one, as I'll now detail. The registrant has a contract with each registrar in the group. That contract requires each one to poll the others and keep their record synced. Contracts among the registrars to "respect the vote" further enforce that sync. The registrant's contract also allows it to tell each and every registrar to drop one or all the rest from the group, and conversely to tell one to resign from the group. Then ensure the registrars are in different countries, some of whom are enemies of each other and won't respect each other's legal system (but optimally with some bridges among them, so none are totally isolated from the force of another's contract).
Then at the first sign of trouble with one registrar, trigger its resignation clause. That can be done in realtime with networks, winning the race with the much slower legal process in practically every country. The redundancy of the group will keep the "authoritative" record under control of the registrant, not the registrar. It's possible that a rogue registrar will advertise a redirected DNS to something wrong or null, but that will not stop most people, and is probably unlikely because other DNS operators will drop the rogue that's broadcasting false and contradictory records that are corrupting the integrity of the global DNS system - so they probably won't do it. By the time someone could force a registrar to go rogue, it would already be too late to matter, so that would deter trying.
It's worth noting that this defense system guards also against crooked registrars holding their authority hostage and jacking up prices, or just shutting down domain traffic to steal the name. It's been a long time coming, but patching this single failurepoint in the essential DNS system was inevitable. And now we're staring it in the face, the face of a Northern California judge. Creepy, but not the end of the world.
linked to wikileaks.jricher.com for your surfing pleasure
Since its site is still running, its own wiki explains the story of the current injunction attack.
WikiLeaks is also available at WikiLeaks.be, which Belgian DNS is not under the Califoria court's jurisdiction.
This court order has blocked the Wikileaks.org DNS. But the site is still up and running at its IP number, which is 88.80.13.160 .
Spread the word. DNS can be replaced, with some inconvenience, with manual labor.
The site is blocked by stopping its DNS. So what's its IP#? If the site is still up, people can link to it by IP#, and pass around the story that way. Sure, if its IP# changes later, the links will be lost, but if it doesn't get its DNS back eventually it will be lost anyway. Linking to its IP# will help it survive to fight to get its DNS back.
The court has targeted WikiLeaks' DNS registrar, not WikiLeaks itself with this order. So WikiLeaks shouldn't have to depend on DNS while it defends itself.
What's the IP#?
China does have cheaper labor and equipment, but the labor pool is already experiencing heavy demand. Sure there are a lot of Chinese people, but only a small fraction of them have scientific education. It's already hard to find teams of programmers both competent to produce modern programming products (even with lots of competent, experienced management) and still much cheaper than their Euramerican counterparts (after extra management and other overhead costs are included).
The Chinese equipment is cheaper, but China's industry is relatively open and biased towards export, because it's more profitable than selling to domestically: their low wages work both ways. Investments in new tech equipment tend to be funded by foreigners, so there's a further bias towards exporting the gear.
And China's repressive government tends to drive away lots of people, especially those better educated who can make it elsewhere, and even more among those who get to leave to get educated. Plus the repression depends on keeping people ignorant and divided at home in order to perpetuate its power, so the full potential of China's people does not develop intellectually lest it threaten the regime. Sure there are lots of rich Chinese, but they mainly exploit China's economy and their political connections, not necessarily their own native intellect. It's worth noting that these dynamics are true in every country, but China starts out with much more repression and significantly further behind than its competitors like Europe/US/Australia/Japan. So its more likely to stay behind, or face a period where political upheaval distracts its industry from tech advance even if its "free thinker" class does push through to more freedom to think and live.
So China's advantages in building industry and making money also disadvantage truly new industries, both by blocking "mavericks" and by distracting them with profitable exports vs less advanced but less profitable domestic sales.
China's main advantage is its labor and environmental policies, as well as its simple scale and diversity of industrial growth and production, if not of innovation. The labor and environmental policies allow producers to abuse both labor and the environment, which has residual effects. Abused labor is retarded in its own growth in education and seeking innovation, so China's very bottom-heavy labor/management landscape means their middle class is relatively small, which means that source of innovations is relatively small. Real innovation in, say, nanotech doesn't require lots of industrial labor, but rather small groups of highly educated labor free to communicate globally. That kind of peopel are a risk to China's government, and therefore most of its rich people, so they're not as likely to get together as pure economics might allow.
China's environmental abuses might also keep them back, as they materialize into distractions (like epidemics, famine, drought, and other disasters) that redirect Chinese people's attention both away from innovation and towards reforming the government that allows it. But in the short run China's environment, like everywhere else China competes with used to be before they invested in turmoil and remedies, is the main donor to China's increased production, and can't defend itself by forcing the country to drag it into the new "golden age" too. Until nature does eventually make some of those demands, which can really set a country back.
China is dependent on foreign investment and markets. If foreigners want to protect ourselves from China's threats, we should use their dependence on us to force them to improve their labor, education and environmental standards to protect and improve their own assets the way most of us have done our own. The US forced "Most Favored Nation" ("MFN") trading partner status for China through our government in the 1990s on the basis that the move would make its market depend on US production, so we'd be positioned to demand reforms in Chinese government. Of course that was a lie,
Here in NYC, Prince routinely drives up in a limo to downtown record stores that sell bootlegs, grabs every CD with his name on it, storms up to the counter to rant at the nerds at the cash register, then stomps out of the store back into his limo.
I wonder if he then sells them on eBay.
Anonymous psycho Coward blabbers about some "Internet messiah" that no one else mentioned. Film at 11.
The difference between the Internet and a LAN is that a LAN has a supervisor who can start this and get its messages, then intervene in the various ways I mentioned. And if something does go wrong, it's confined to the LAN. You might have also noticed that I never said this was a worm, but just a virus, but you're not getting the basic points I said. There's no point discussing this with you if you're going to discuss something else that I didn't describe.
Don't bother telling me some past employers. Not only is that some fallacious appeal to authority, but it would make them look bad.
Goodbye.
Getting more info than they can use has in no way stopped the FBI from requesting, and just grabbing without request, all kinds of info in the past 6 years.
If you still don't get that, it's obvious that you voted for Bush in 2004, even if you won't admit it.
You people don't even realize that you're completely obvious in what's wrong with the way you worship authority. You really should get to work on turning around your conceit that you can just keep on acting like "everyone else", and get closer to taking some responsibility for the way the FBI and Bush's other agencies have so demolished any basis for trusting what they say that we have to examine every word for evidence that it's true. Closer to apologizing for discrediting this country.
But of course you won't. Goodbye.