It's not so much unofficial: it's expressly incorporated into the preamble of the Statute of Westminster. Now, whether that's legally enforceable has never been tested.
As I remember it, all of that repetitive fine motor control musicians need is handled by the cerebellum at an unconscious or preconscious level once the necessary movements have been learnt (this is why practice is important). So yeah, there is division by delegation of many tasks, like you said, but I'm not sure how many pure "thinking" processes could be performed at any given time.
Since the output is the Answer to the Ultimate Question, it necessarily incorporates or encodes every possible output of every possible program, including the string "Hello World!".
The method for extracting the particular output desired is left as an exercise for the reader.
The grandparent is right that bullshit is no excuse for a lawyer when he or she knows that it is, in fact, bullshit. That said, most people, and most lawyers, have got better things to do than pursue some rogue practitioner for ethics breaches if the client behind the practitioner ends up just going away without costing the recipient too much. There's not much in it but a lot of work and maybe a bit of satisfaction at the end.
AAL? Excuse me, are you defending a gratitious lawsuit based upon... what seems to be a lost cause, but whatever? Are you trying to be serious right now? I'm just a stupid scandinavian, but in our neck of the woods the civil court would certainly fine you, and possibly disbar you for wasting their time. Bullshit is never an excuse.
No, my comments were based on "exposure to the practice of law", by which I meant real-world experience, and not the principles and rules of professional conduct and ethics, of which you may take it that I am aware.
You should disabuse yourself of the notion that the law is exempt from the usual and ordinary disjunction that exists between theory and practice; it will not assist you if you do someday find yourself involved in a legal dispute.
I'll stand as a citation for the GP's statement that "most lawyers' letters are bluffs" where "letters" means initial letters of demand, and yes, IAAL. I'm not aware of whether any relevant data has been collected on the point, but any significant exposure to the practice of law will confirm the truth of the proposition.
The difficulty with jurors accessing material outside of the evidence led in court is that the party against whom that material is used has no means of challenging or testing it, since (a) it's not been disclosed to anyone outside the jury room and (b) even if it were disclosed, who's available to be cross-examined on that material? Are you going to go out and drag the journalist, dictionary editor, Wikipedia contributor, blog author, etc into court after both sides have closed their cases? How are you even going to be able to identify or locate that person?
Jurors (and judges, in judge-only trials) are limited to considering only what has been formally admitted into evidence to ensure that basic procedural fairness applies to all the material used in the case. Further, the public would be prejudiced in their ability to assess the result of the trial if they didn't know about all the evidence themselves, which can't happen unless it is all led in open court.
This doesn't stop jurors from applying the general knowledge and "common sense" of the ordinary person to resolve conflicts in the evidence as directed by the judge and after hearing counsels' arguments on the point, but the rules of evidence in most jurisdictions also say that if a party doesn't challenge a piece of evidence then the court is obliged to accept that evidence.
Finally, your point about criminal histories is based on a half-truth: criminal history is admissible when an accused brings character into issue, e.g. by suggesting that a prosecution witness is lying. Otherwise, it's on the prosecution to prove that the person committed this particular offence (at least it is outside the US).
I tend to agree that trends in law tend to arise as a result of the interplay of many factors, both legal and non-legal in character. IIRC juries were still in charge of questions as to, e.g., standard of care back then, meaning that prevailing social attitudes about such things as risk vs cost had their part to play.
No it doesn't, because it's not the basis on which the fees are calculated. In fact, the local Law Society where I am enacted a professional rule a while ago to the effect that fees under no win, no fee arrangements couldn't exceed half of what the client ended up getting. This followed a rather embarrassing case where a firm charged more than the amount of the payout made to the client, claiming that since money had been paid out by the defendant the client had achieved a "win".
Contingency fee arrangement of the "no win, no fee" variety are not champertous, and have always been allowed in Queensland (my home jurisdiction) were champerty was not abolished as it was elsewhere in the Commonwealth. What is prohibited as champertous are fee arrangements under which lawyers' fees are calculated as a percentage of the final award in a proceeding. It's a fine line, but that's what comes out of the cases.
I'm not sure of the precise historical reasons for the abolition of these torts in New South Wales, but I note that they also create difficulties for types of litigation funding that are considered legitimate, e.g. funding by public interest groups or unions. IIRC, union lobbying was behind much of the Victorian Wrongs Act, which (in its original form) abolished maintenance and champerty in that State as well as making a whole load of other changes in relation to civil liability for negligence and personal injury.
Any reason why a transcription pool couldn't be used for everyday voice recognition? If coupled with an automated system so that anything with a high confidence of being properly recognized isn't passed on to the humans...
If the transcript needs to be certified correct by an authorised recording/reporting officer, as is often the case, then that can only be done by the transcriptionist or someone watching the process. It would certainly be easier on the typist to sit and watch the software while listening to the audio, which could be paused while recognition errors are corrected manually, but a human would still need to be involved in the process.
But the mouth-hood is new and wasn't present in the digital tape era? That's odd, although it could be that there's been an unrelated change in the relevant rules for recording trials and evidence that say that body language and other non-verbal communication now has to be recorded in case it's of interest to an appellate court.
Of course, I've no idea which court you've done jury duty in and probably wouldn't be familiar with its practice and procedure anyway. I've just worked in courts that use a system similar to the one I originally described.
For me, text entry isn't that important a feature for a tablet; the mobile nature of the device makes it an unlikely choice of platform to generate documents of any length or complexity. Rather, the benefit of a tablet is the ability to consume or peruse data wherever I want.
To that end, I'm more interested in tools for tagging, noting up and generally scribbling on content generated elsewhere. Right now, I'll print drafts of documents just so I can have the freedom of leaning back in my chair or getting up and walking around while I review them, or putting them next to whatever (hard copy) source material I was using to create them to do side-by-side comparisons. Out of desktops, laptops and netbooks, no device lets me do that, and the screens on PDAs and smartphones are too small.
A screen that can take both stylus and touch input would likely fit the bill, with a virtual keyboard on the rare occasions I'd need it. We already have devices that handle extensive text entry in the conditions where that activity is best done.
It's more likely that the audio was being uploaded to a centralised typing pool to be transcribed and that the finished transcript would itself be made available electronically. I'd be surprised if any jurisdiction was ready to trust the recording of its proceedings to voice recognition software.
I see from the article that one guy was charged and convicted with an attempt to download for following the link. I'm surprised this got up because of the entrapment issue, but I wouldn't be surprised if the charge was used to justify the raid after nothing else was found.
No. Entrapment is where the State gets you to do something illegal and then charges you for doing that thing. The goal here AIUI was just to get evidence so that search warrants could be obtained to investigate other possible offences.
Now, that's not to say there are issues here, particularly about:
using deception to get people to effectively admit that they're likely to do something bad and whether that infringes the right to silence or right against self-incrimination (in some jurisdictions it might);
whether the onus required to get a search warrant was actually satisfied (just because you click one link doesn't necessarily mean that it's likely you've clicked similar links in the past),
If what you get at the end is stable, efficient technology that solves a problem and solves it well, then yes, it's a good thing. Otherwise, it's just a curiosity, which is all very well from an R&D viewpoint, but it doesn't help me get my everyday work done.
The grandparent's point seems to be that the industry is doing what it's done many times before: adopting a particular novel technology as a universal solution. To use your analogy, it would be as if somebody came along and said, "Well, you've got microwaves now, so there's no need to produce all those old ovens, grills, cooktops, etc anymore." The microwave might be an elegant solution to the problem of simply heating food, but as a universal cooking solution it's pretty poor. So it is with AJAX, and with web "applications" generally.
I'm sorry, but how does the sole practice rule magically stop members of the Bar from dragging things out to jack up their brief fees? In any event, your argument suffers from the problem that barristers are almost always instructed by solicitors, who have the day-to-day carriage (and hence most of the control) of litigation.
The two major factors that put the English system (and those of most other former British colonies) above that of the US are:
Illegality of contingency fees. English lawyers cannot set their fees to be a share of any money award obtained.
Costs usually follow the event. Vexatious litigants have to face the fact that they will almost certainly have to pay the other side's legal costs when they (eventually) lose.
IAAL, and you're probably not quite right. In most (if not all) Australian jurisdictions a plaintiff can usually discontinue (not dismiss) an action it brought as of right up until trial, however the discontinuance gives the defendant the right to an award of its costs incurred to date.
A plaintiff who wishes to discontinue once the trial has commenced can usually only do so with the court's leave, as a plaintiff who discontinues still has the ability to re-commence (again, usually only with the court's leave) and in most cases justice will require, given the late stage of the proceedings, that the defendant be given the protection of a judgment as final resolution of the disputes that are the subjects of the proceedings.
In my home jurisdiction (Queensland) the rules are even more strict, and only allow the plaintiff to discontinue as of right up until being served with the defence of one of the defendants to the proceeding (rule 304(2) of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999).
You're also not quite right with your analogy to criminal procedure. A trial judge will not usually allow the prosecution to enter a nolle prosequi and take back the indictment prior to a jury verdict if its case falls apart at trial, since in such circumstances the accused should be given the protection of double jeopardy.
I'm not sure how the US Federal rules work, but there's no reason why there shouldn't be some restrictions on when a plaintiff can discontinue.
As a college professor who makes about 3x $24K a year before taxes and overhead, I have a hard time feeling he's anything but a leech who just sucked a host dry and then wandered away from the husk.
Yes, but, with respect, most of your "overhead" is paid for by the institution that employs you. The defendant's attorney has to pay for the lease on his office, power and heating bills, the wages of his support staff, etc. A law practice is a business and has to pay its bills just like any other business.
You also have to bear in mind that the $24K figure mentioned probably also contains disbursements and outlays (court filing fees, which are often quite horrendous; the charges the attorney had to pay for any investigations or searches that were done; and printing, photocopying and postage, which don't sound like much, but which add up given the amount of paper that litigation always generates) as well as the fees that the attorney takes home as his own.
As I said above, I assume that the majority of these things are just taken care of with respect to a college professor's position. I agree that $24K seems excessive given the current stage of proceedings, but only the defendant and her attorney know the full details of the way in which the matter has been conducted, and I think the reasons you've given in support of the contention that the attorney is a leech are bogus.
but Hiroshima and Nagasaki does in my opinion count as massacre and civilian
The decision to use nuclear weapons was made in the context of a defensive war where it was thought that the Japanese would fight to the last civilian rather than surrender. Whether the decision was right or wrong, it is nonetheless different from deciding to use a nuclear strike to impose control in the imperial sense.
so did Vietnam and Cambodia
True, although in the case of Vietnam it was necessary to engage in serious spin to sell the war to a populace already in a state of fear due to the Cold War, and Cambodia resulted from a state of utter social collapse. We're not fundamentally different from our ancestors, but our views have changed markedly so that we need to be seriously convinced on the necessity of mass organized violence.
Nor do I see any reason to believe that we were morally catching up during the dark ages.
We didn't: that was largely a product of the Reformation and the Renaissance. The Age of Discovery followed and was arguably a consequence of those prior events. I don't want to endorse the mediaeval Church, but consider the consequences if it hadn't existed to provide a centre of political stability and unity for the warring tribes of Europe in the Dark Ages. The Church simply filled the power vacuum that the fall of Rome left.
act like a warning sign or key to how you seem to think.
Well, the terms "warning sign", "key", and "seem" seem to act like warning signs or keys that indicate fuzzy thinking in this context, if you ask me.;p
Technology is a two edged sword. "No tech is dangerous in and of itself" and "all technology is dangerous", are both true statements.
True.
If you take those decisions and circumstances into account then, like with emergent properties, there won't be much substance left to those historical forces.
Yes, however, regardless of their actual substance, emergent phenomena, such as biological evolution and macro-economics, do seem to have an awful lot of influence on everyday affairs.
In fact, the observation I made can be considered from an evolutionary perspective. Societies sufficiently advanced morally and socially will be able to handle the technological advances with significantly dangerous consequences, societies that aren't will probably just blow themselves a few branches down the tech tree until they develop in other areas. Like I say, this isn't to suggest that we have fundamentally changed, we're biologically identical to our ancestors, and even ancient societies produced many significant enlightened individuals, but the average moral development of ancient societies in comparison to modern Western civilization is marked. This isn't something that can be considered by looking at the conduct of a few wars, you have to examine the prevailing attitudes towards those wars and the effect of the prevailing social norms on everyday conduct. Being killed while carrying on your everyday business in modern society is remarkable and causes considerable upset when it happens, but the same thing happening in ancient times was much more de rigeur.
I reacted to your original post because I found the way you seem to look at technology rather weird.
No, I just look at technology with an appreciation that there are very few technological solutions to sociological problems, and I was just making a casual observation in response to the OP's blanket statement that the mediaeval Catholic Church specifically and organized religion generally was responsible for all the evils of the world. And technological development isn't good or bad, it just has consequences.
...the most "enlightened" power today isn't precisely averse to some wanton killing of its own, now is it?
Rome publicly endorsed the massacre of civilian populations to quell unrest in foreign territories as official policy. If Bush II tried the same thing today, even in the present climate, he would be immediately impeached, and the countries of Western Europe would seriously think about whether they should start pointing their nuclear arsenals in the direction of the mainland United States. The difference in moral and political sensibilities between modern Westerners and their ancient counterparts cannot be overestimated.
Having access to knowledge and science could just as easily be what got at least some of us out of that unbridled savagery you speak of.
There are certainly a number of enabling technologies, for example the printing press, which promoted mass literacy and the education of the populace, thereby allowing government through sophisticated concepts such as the social contract and adherence to the rule of law rather than through crude threats and appeals to religion (i.e. "It is right to follow the king because God says so, and if you say otherwise you'll suffer a messy and painful death"). The printing press does not depend on the calculus. Modern artillery does.
Or do you think there ought to be an authority that keeps "dangerous" knowledge from the lay person? "Dangerous" as defined by that authority, naturally.
Where did I suggest anything like that? I was simply making an observation about the nature of scientific progress. On the basis of the above example, I might also say that we tend to invent the stabilizing technologies (like the press) before making significant advances in the direction of the destabilizing technologies (such as gunpowder and ballistics), which is a good thing. Of course the Church argued against it, but now you're conflating active political intervention in human progress with the operation of blind historical forces. I don't recall making any comment on the former, only about the latter.
And claiming "well, we don't know that it wouldn't have been destroyed by someone else in some other way anyway" is hardly adequate justification.
Well, it is, sort of. Recall that Archimedes was casually killed by a Roman solider without very good cause. It's arguable that Western civilization needed to progress to the point where it's scientists and scholars could get on with the job of discovery in relative peace and quiet, else it would quickly destroy itself with the new weapons that inevitably result from scientific advancement. Even the most "enlightened" powers of the Classical period practised genocide against their enemies and regarded it as a legitimate tool of statecraft: imagine what they would have done with modern weapons.
Humanity needed to grow up a bit before it could be trusted with dangerous knowledge, and the fact that its wise men and the products of their labours (such as the texts that are the subject of the article) were at high risk of destruction as a result of our then unbridled savagery was possibly a useful limiting factor on our scientific development.
It would help if you got your facts straight before spouting off telling us poor, ignorant Australians what to do. The first step would be to actually read your extract from TFA. Note the use of the plural form where it refers to "Departments of Education". It does this because Australia, too, has a federal system of government, and education is managed by the states. (Having said that, the Commonwealth, i.e. the federal government, has a lot of control over education funding as a result of its primary authority to impose taxes, and is currently trying to exert even more power by simultaneously politically emasculating the states' limited powers of taxation while at the same time tying funding to state services like health and education to federally mandated standards.)
It should also be noted just how much free market ideology and modern business management principles have permeated Australian bureaucracies. They still very much have the nature of a bureaucracy, but the penetration of modern, incentive-based management techniques can be seen just by looking at any given piece of correspondence from a senior officer of a government department: it's unlikely you'll get anything that hasn't been authored by a "Team Leader" of a particular "business unit". I haven't worked in an Australian government department, but from what I've heard they very much follow the modern corporate structure of independent sub-units competing against each other in terms of performance, efficiency, and use of resources.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so much unofficial: it's expressly incorporated into the preamble of the Statute of Westminster. Now, whether that's legally enforceable has never been tested.
As I remember it, all of that repetitive fine motor control musicians need is handled by the cerebellum at an unconscious or preconscious level once the necessary movements have been learnt (this is why practice is important). So yeah, there is division by delegation of many tasks, like you said, but I'm not sure how many pure "thinking" processes could be performed at any given time.
Since the output is the Answer to the Ultimate Question, it necessarily incorporates or encodes every possible output of every possible program, including the string "Hello World!".
The method for extracting the particular output desired is left as an exercise for the reader.
The grandparent is right that bullshit is no excuse for a lawyer when he or she knows that it is, in fact, bullshit. That said, most people, and most lawyers, have got better things to do than pursue some rogue practitioner for ethics breaches if the client behind the practitioner ends up just going away without costing the recipient too much. There's not much in it but a lot of work and maybe a bit of satisfaction at the end.
AAL? Excuse me, are you defending a gratitious lawsuit based upon... what seems to be a lost cause, but whatever? Are you trying to be serious right now? I'm just a stupid scandinavian, but in our neck of the woods the civil court would certainly fine you, and possibly disbar you for wasting their time. Bullshit is never an excuse.
No, my comments were based on "exposure to the practice of law", by which I meant real-world experience, and not the principles and rules of professional conduct and ethics, of which you may take it that I am aware.
You should disabuse yourself of the notion that the law is exempt from the usual and ordinary disjunction that exists between theory and practice; it will not assist you if you do someday find yourself involved in a legal dispute.
I'll stand as a citation for the GP's statement that "most lawyers' letters are bluffs" where "letters" means initial letters of demand, and yes, IAAL. I'm not aware of whether any relevant data has been collected on the point, but any significant exposure to the practice of law will confirm the truth of the proposition.
The difficulty with jurors accessing material outside of the evidence led in court is that the party against whom that material is used has no means of challenging or testing it, since (a) it's not been disclosed to anyone outside the jury room and (b) even if it were disclosed, who's available to be cross-examined on that material? Are you going to go out and drag the journalist, dictionary editor, Wikipedia contributor, blog author, etc into court after both sides have closed their cases? How are you even going to be able to identify or locate that person?
Jurors (and judges, in judge-only trials) are limited to considering only what has been formally admitted into evidence to ensure that basic procedural fairness applies to all the material used in the case. Further, the public would be prejudiced in their ability to assess the result of the trial if they didn't know about all the evidence themselves, which can't happen unless it is all led in open court.
This doesn't stop jurors from applying the general knowledge and "common sense" of the ordinary person to resolve conflicts in the evidence as directed by the judge and after hearing counsels' arguments on the point, but the rules of evidence in most jurisdictions also say that if a party doesn't challenge a piece of evidence then the court is obliged to accept that evidence.
Finally, your point about criminal histories is based on a half-truth: criminal history is admissible when an accused brings character into issue, e.g. by suggesting that a prosecution witness is lying. Otherwise, it's on the prosecution to prove that the person committed this particular offence (at least it is outside the US).
I tend to agree that trends in law tend to arise as a result of the interplay of many factors, both legal and non-legal in character. IIRC juries were still in charge of questions as to, e.g., standard of care back then, meaning that prevailing social attitudes about such things as risk vs cost had their part to play.
No it doesn't, because it's not the basis on which the fees are calculated. In fact, the local Law Society where I am enacted a professional rule a while ago to the effect that fees under no win, no fee arrangements couldn't exceed half of what the client ended up getting. This followed a rather embarrassing case where a firm charged more than the amount of the payout made to the client, claiming that since money had been paid out by the defendant the client had achieved a "win".
Contingency fee arrangement of the "no win, no fee" variety are not champertous, and have always been allowed in Queensland (my home jurisdiction) were champerty was not abolished as it was elsewhere in the Commonwealth. What is prohibited as champertous are fee arrangements under which lawyers' fees are calculated as a percentage of the final award in a proceeding. It's a fine line, but that's what comes out of the cases.
I'm not sure of the precise historical reasons for the abolition of these torts in New South Wales, but I note that they also create difficulties for types of litigation funding that are considered legitimate, e.g. funding by public interest groups or unions. IIRC, union lobbying was behind much of the Victorian Wrongs Act, which (in its original form) abolished maintenance and champerty in that State as well as making a whole load of other changes in relation to civil liability for negligence and personal injury.
Any reason why a transcription pool couldn't be used for everyday voice recognition? If coupled with an automated system so that anything with a high confidence of being properly recognized isn't passed on to the humans...
If the transcript needs to be certified correct by an authorised recording/reporting officer, as is often the case, then that can only be done by the transcriptionist or someone watching the process. It would certainly be easier on the typist to sit and watch the software while listening to the audio, which could be paused while recognition errors are corrected manually, but a human would still need to be involved in the process.
But the mouth-hood is new and wasn't present in the digital tape era? That's odd, although it could be that there's been an unrelated change in the relevant rules for recording trials and evidence that say that body language and other non-verbal communication now has to be recorded in case it's of interest to an appellate court.
Of course, I've no idea which court you've done jury duty in and probably wouldn't be familiar with its practice and procedure anyway. I've just worked in courts that use a system similar to the one I originally described.
For me, text entry isn't that important a feature for a tablet; the mobile nature of the device makes it an unlikely choice of platform to generate documents of any length or complexity. Rather, the benefit of a tablet is the ability to consume or peruse data wherever I want.
To that end, I'm more interested in tools for tagging, noting up and generally scribbling on content generated elsewhere. Right now, I'll print drafts of documents just so I can have the freedom of leaning back in my chair or getting up and walking around while I review them, or putting them next to whatever (hard copy) source material I was using to create them to do side-by-side comparisons. Out of desktops, laptops and netbooks, no device lets me do that, and the screens on PDAs and smartphones are too small.
A screen that can take both stylus and touch input would likely fit the bill, with a virtual keyboard on the rare occasions I'd need it. We already have devices that handle extensive text entry in the conditions where that activity is best done.
It's more likely that the audio was being uploaded to a centralised typing pool to be transcribed and that the finished transcript would itself be made available electronically. I'd be surprised if any jurisdiction was ready to trust the recording of its proceedings to voice recognition software.
I see from the article that one guy was charged and convicted with an attempt to download for following the link. I'm surprised this got up because of the entrapment issue, but I wouldn't be surprised if the charge was used to justify the raid after nothing else was found.
No. Entrapment is where the State gets you to do something illegal and then charges you for doing that thing. The goal here AIUI was just to get evidence so that search warrants could be obtained to investigate other possible offences.
Now, that's not to say there are issues here, particularly about:
but I don't think it's entrapment.
What is the position with respect to telephone conversations, which also involve a relay of data between individual components in a network?
If what you get at the end is stable, efficient technology that solves a problem and solves it well, then yes, it's a good thing. Otherwise, it's just a curiosity, which is all very well from an R&D viewpoint, but it doesn't help me get my everyday work done.
The grandparent's point seems to be that the industry is doing what it's done many times before: adopting a particular novel technology as a universal solution. To use your analogy, it would be as if somebody came along and said, "Well, you've got microwaves now, so there's no need to produce all those old ovens, grills, cooktops, etc anymore." The microwave might be an elegant solution to the problem of simply heating food, but as a universal cooking solution it's pretty poor. So it is with AJAX, and with web "applications" generally.
I'm sorry, but how does the sole practice rule magically stop members of the Bar from dragging things out to jack up their brief fees? In any event, your argument suffers from the problem that barristers are almost always instructed by solicitors, who have the day-to-day carriage (and hence most of the control) of litigation.
The two major factors that put the English system (and those of most other former British colonies) above that of the US are:
IAAL, and you're probably not quite right. In most (if not all) Australian jurisdictions a plaintiff can usually discontinue (not dismiss) an action it brought as of right up until trial, however the discontinuance gives the defendant the right to an award of its costs incurred to date.
A plaintiff who wishes to discontinue once the trial has commenced can usually only do so with the court's leave, as a plaintiff who discontinues still has the ability to re-commence (again, usually only with the court's leave) and in most cases justice will require, given the late stage of the proceedings, that the defendant be given the protection of a judgment as final resolution of the disputes that are the subjects of the proceedings.
In my home jurisdiction (Queensland) the rules are even more strict, and only allow the plaintiff to discontinue as of right up until being served with the defence of one of the defendants to the proceeding (rule 304(2) of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999 ).
You're also not quite right with your analogy to criminal procedure. A trial judge will not usually allow the prosecution to enter a nolle prosequi and take back the indictment prior to a jury verdict if its case falls apart at trial, since in such circumstances the accused should be given the protection of double jeopardy.
I'm not sure how the US Federal rules work, but there's no reason why there shouldn't be some restrictions on when a plaintiff can discontinue.
As a college professor who makes about 3x $24K a year before taxes and overhead, I have a hard time feeling he's anything but a leech who just sucked a host dry and then wandered away from the husk.
Yes, but, with respect, most of your "overhead" is paid for by the institution that employs you. The defendant's attorney has to pay for the lease on his office, power and heating bills, the wages of his support staff, etc. A law practice is a business and has to pay its bills just like any other business.
You also have to bear in mind that the $24K figure mentioned probably also contains disbursements and outlays (court filing fees, which are often quite horrendous; the charges the attorney had to pay for any investigations or searches that were done; and printing, photocopying and postage, which don't sound like much, but which add up given the amount of paper that litigation always generates) as well as the fees that the attorney takes home as his own.
As I said above, I assume that the majority of these things are just taken care of with respect to a college professor's position. I agree that $24K seems excessive given the current stage of proceedings, but only the defendant and her attorney know the full details of the way in which the matter has been conducted, and I think the reasons you've given in support of the contention that the attorney is a leech are bogus.
but Hiroshima and Nagasaki does in my opinion count as massacre and civilian
The decision to use nuclear weapons was made in the context of a defensive war where it was thought that the Japanese would fight to the last civilian rather than surrender. Whether the decision was right or wrong, it is nonetheless different from deciding to use a nuclear strike to impose control in the imperial sense.
so did Vietnam and Cambodia
True, although in the case of Vietnam it was necessary to engage in serious spin to sell the war to a populace already in a state of fear due to the Cold War, and Cambodia resulted from a state of utter social collapse. We're not fundamentally different from our ancestors, but our views have changed markedly so that we need to be seriously convinced on the necessity of mass organized violence.
Nor do I see any reason to believe that we were morally catching up during the dark ages.
We didn't: that was largely a product of the Reformation and the Renaissance. The Age of Discovery followed and was arguably a consequence of those prior events. I don't want to endorse the mediaeval Church, but consider the consequences if it hadn't existed to provide a centre of political stability and unity for the warring tribes of Europe in the Dark Ages. The Church simply filled the power vacuum that the fall of Rome left.
act like a warning sign or key to how you seem to think.
Well, the terms "warning sign", "key", and "seem" seem to act like warning signs or keys that indicate fuzzy thinking in this context, if you ask me. ;p
Technology is a two edged sword. "No tech is dangerous in and of itself" and "all technology is dangerous", are both true statements.
True.
If you take those decisions and circumstances into account then, like with emergent properties, there won't be much substance left to those historical forces.
Yes, however, regardless of their actual substance, emergent phenomena, such as biological evolution and macro-economics, do seem to have an awful lot of influence on everyday affairs.
In fact, the observation I made can be considered from an evolutionary perspective. Societies sufficiently advanced morally and socially will be able to handle the technological advances with significantly dangerous consequences, societies that aren't will probably just blow themselves a few branches down the tech tree until they develop in other areas. Like I say, this isn't to suggest that we have fundamentally changed, we're biologically identical to our ancestors, and even ancient societies produced many significant enlightened individuals, but the average moral development of ancient societies in comparison to modern Western civilization is marked. This isn't something that can be considered by looking at the conduct of a few wars, you have to examine the prevailing attitudes towards those wars and the effect of the prevailing social norms on everyday conduct. Being killed while carrying on your everyday business in modern society is remarkable and causes considerable upset when it happens, but the same thing happening in ancient times was much more de rigeur.
I reacted to your original post because I found the way you seem to look at technology rather weird.
No, I just look at technology with an appreciation that there are very few technological solutions to sociological problems, and I was just making a casual observation in response to the OP's blanket statement that the mediaeval Catholic Church specifically and organized religion generally was responsible for all the evils of the world. And technological development isn't good or bad, it just has consequences.
Rome publicly endorsed the massacre of civilian populations to quell unrest in foreign territories as official policy. If Bush II tried the same thing today, even in the present climate, he would be immediately impeached, and the countries of Western Europe would seriously think about whether they should start pointing their nuclear arsenals in the direction of the mainland United States. The difference in moral and political sensibilities between modern Westerners and their ancient counterparts cannot be overestimated.
Having access to knowledge and science could just as easily be what got at least some of us out of that unbridled savagery you speak of.
There are certainly a number of enabling technologies, for example the printing press, which promoted mass literacy and the education of the populace, thereby allowing government through sophisticated concepts such as the social contract and adherence to the rule of law rather than through crude threats and appeals to religion (i.e. "It is right to follow the king because God says so, and if you say otherwise you'll suffer a messy and painful death"). The printing press does not depend on the calculus. Modern artillery does.
Or do you think there ought to be an authority that keeps "dangerous" knowledge from the lay person? "Dangerous" as defined by that authority, naturally.
Where did I suggest anything like that? I was simply making an observation about the nature of scientific progress. On the basis of the above example, I might also say that we tend to invent the stabilizing technologies (like the press) before making significant advances in the direction of the destabilizing technologies (such as gunpowder and ballistics), which is a good thing. Of course the Church argued against it, but now you're conflating active political intervention in human progress with the operation of blind historical forces. I don't recall making any comment on the former, only about the latter.
Well, it is, sort of. Recall that Archimedes was casually killed by a Roman solider without very good cause. It's arguable that Western civilization needed to progress to the point where it's scientists and scholars could get on with the job of discovery in relative peace and quiet, else it would quickly destroy itself with the new weapons that inevitably result from scientific advancement. Even the most "enlightened" powers of the Classical period practised genocide against their enemies and regarded it as a legitimate tool of statecraft: imagine what they would have done with modern weapons.
Humanity needed to grow up a bit before it could be trusted with dangerous knowledge, and the fact that its wise men and the products of their labours (such as the texts that are the subject of the article) were at high risk of destruction as a result of our then unbridled savagery was possibly a useful limiting factor on our scientific development.
It would help if you got your facts straight before spouting off telling us poor, ignorant Australians what to do. The first step would be to actually read your extract from TFA. Note the use of the plural form where it refers to "Departments of Education". It does this because Australia, too, has a federal system of government, and education is managed by the states. (Having said that, the Commonwealth, i.e. the federal government, has a lot of control over education funding as a result of its primary authority to impose taxes, and is currently trying to exert even more power by simultaneously politically emasculating the states' limited powers of taxation while at the same time tying funding to state services like health and education to federally mandated standards.)
It should also be noted just how much free market ideology and modern business management principles have permeated Australian bureaucracies. They still very much have the nature of a bureaucracy, but the penetration of modern, incentive-based management techniques can be seen just by looking at any given piece of correspondence from a senior officer of a government department: it's unlikely you'll get anything that hasn't been authored by a "Team Leader" of a particular "business unit". I haven't worked in an Australian government department, but from what I've heard they very much follow the modern corporate structure of independent sub-units competing against each other in terms of performance, efficiency, and use of resources.