Curiously, a senior lawyer I work with just told me yesterday that the first rule of litigation was: Show up. He was advising me of this rule in light of the other side having just broken it. (We're hoping that not showing up will precipitate a breaking of the first rule you've shared, so they're not entirely incongruous.;) )
This isn't really a forum non conveniens issue, it's just a plain personal jurisdiction question.
You're absolutely right; the test I took from Rudder was jurisdictional. I noticed that after I had hit "submit". They are neatly intertwined, so I beg your indulgence (and indeed, it is worth noting that equivalent principles to prevent "long-arm" jurisdiction seen by using forum non conveniens in Canada is in many of the US states created by the in personam jurisdictional test arising out of the 14th Amendment).
Actually, the question is, does Facebook do business in Canada, or does it merely do business with Canadians? If it is the former, it must follow Canadian law when doing business in Canada. If it is the latter, Canadian law does not apply. Or to put it another way, does Facebook have a physical presence in Canada? While physical presence is one of the factors in a forum non conveniens motion, it is not determinative. In Rudder v. Microsoft Corp., 1999 CanLII 14923 (ON S.C.), a Canadian court held that because the EULA required the dispute to be resolved in Washington, Canadian courts were precluded from hearing it. The other factors the Canadian courts (at least in Ontario) consider, per Rudder v. Microsoft, are as follows:
[20] The factors to consider may be paraphrased as follows: (1) in which jurisdiction is the evidence on issues of fact situated, and the effect of that on the convenience and expense of trial in either jurisdiction; (2) whether the law of the foreign country applies and its differences from the domestic law in any respect; (3) the strength of the jurisdictional connections of the parties; (4) whether the defendants desire to enforce the forum selection clause is genuine or merely an attempt to obtain a procedural advantage; (5) whether the plaintiffs will suffer prejudice by bringing their claim in a foreign court because they will be
(a) deprived of security for the claim; or
(b) be unable to enforce any judgment obtained; or
(c) be faced with a time-bar not applicable in the domestic court; or
(d) unlikely to receive a fair trial.
Also,
If Facebook does not have a physical presence in Canada, exactly how will Canada enforce this law on them, should Canada rule that it does apply? I am pretty sure that the current U.S. Supreme Court would not rule in Canada's favor on this, considering that they still seem to support the ruling that state's cannot enforce their laws on businesses located in other states that do business with residents of said state (sales tax). To be clear, SCOTUS has no extraterritorial jurisdiction over whether a Canadian court can hear this case; that decision is left completely to the Canadian court. US courts do have exclusive powers over enforcement within their own territory, which enforcement is exercised through the doctrine of comity.
Re:Stalled window bug dealt with yet?
on
Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm sure they'd appreciate it, though, if no-one spammed this bug. It's closed for valid (or at least not-invalid) technical/philosophical reasons- threads are evil (you can find links supporting that assertion from the bug's comments). You can also follow it to its successor meta-bug: Bug 384323 - UI responsiveness - core/platform - meta bug and its quasi-sister: Bug 91351 - UI/App responsiveness issues.
The science of the Matrix was pretty laughable, I mean the machines are smart enough to build human farms, but too dumb to use satellites to capture solar power. A lot of stuff didn't add up. I always took it as a sign of a pre-existing 'peace treaty' between man and machine that permitted the humans to subsist as batteries with some cerebral stimulation. Otherwise, why would the machines not just use cattle or any other biomass that (a) doesn't occasionally reject 'the program' and lead rebellions against them, and (b) is more energy efficient? I find that it is the mysteries of the Matrix's genealogy that make it interesting science fiction.
Are you seriously complaining about the fact that 3rd party tools don't give you WYSIWYG support for triggers, something that you can control entirely by simply writing a query? No. I'm complaining about the fact that, for example, phpMySql requires you to type the following to view the triggers on your database:
SELECT TRIGGER_NAME, EVENT_MANIPULATION, EVENT_OBJECT_TABLE, ACTION_STATEMENT
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TRIGGERS
WHERE TRIGGER_SCHEMA='dbname';
Let alone, ALTER/UPDATE statements.
Alternatively, here's what I do in phpPgAdmin: click Table, click Triggers. There's a list. I can edit it by clicking on a specific trigger. phpMySql has no such interface to triggers, and every view, creation and edit must be done by manually typing in the SQL (but, based on the tone of your reply, I'm sure you knew that). Maybe you have time for that, and it's not a big concern (on what terms do you get paid?). For any serious database development, it strikes me as a grotesque waste of time.
I mean, seriously, the CREATE TRIGGER statement is not rocket science. Nobody implied that it was. However, complex trigger statements are what beget the necessity of being able to edit them handily- something that I would imagine you couldn't do with a WYSIWYG (exactly what would a WYSIWYG TRIGGER editor do, anyway?). Wasting 15-20 minutes typing the SELECT/CREATE/ALTER TRIGGERS statement in another editor and then running a blanket update over the whole SQL database strikes me as fundamentally wrong, especially where there is a trivial and effective interface in phpPgAdmin.
Besides, creating them programatically is just better business. I can keep a db_setup_triggers.sql in source control and make it part of automatic builds. Who ever suggested or implied that you wouldn't create them programatically? Please, feel free to describe how else you would do it.
MySQL is far from perfect. But to criticize it for THIS? I think you're fundamentally confused about what I was criticizing, meaning you either did not take the time to read my comments, are ignorant of MySql/phpMySql, and/or didn't take the time to think about either before you started ranting. If that be the case and you are fundamentally confused, you've contributed little if anything to the discussion, sounded condescending, acted presumptuously, and been indignant about something that does not even exist (a criticism about the lack of a TRIGGER WYSIWYG, the very suggestion of which reeks of ignorance). If indeed that is the case, next time you consider writing something, perhaps you could do us all a favour and not.
I'm very happy to concur. I just tried to put triggers on MySQL databases, admittedly a relatively new feature for the little database that could, and it was a nightmare to manage them. phpMySql didn't have any interface to it, nor did any of the other tools for Mac OS X (which I'm using primarily). I'm not averse to the command line, but there are times when it's just nicer to have a visual interface. I've switched over to PostgreSQL, and its' web-management tool phpPgAdmin allows me to quickly view and edit triggers and many other nuances to my heart's content. Further, the documentation answered all of my questions in very short order.
I'm sincerely impressed with what PostgreSQL has done. I hope they continue working, and hope they are never picked clean by those who "don't get it", ala. what appears to be happening to MySQL.
Great reference. For those not inclined to click the link...
[The plaintiff, Arkell, was the subject of an article relating to illicit payments and so sued the defendant magazine Pressdram. The] magazine had ample evidence to back up the article. Arkell's lawyers wrote a letter in which, unusually, they said: "Our client's attitude to damages will depend on the nature of your reply". The response consisted, in part, of the following: "We would be interested to know what your client's attitude to damages would be if the nature of our reply were as follows: Fuck off".
This study, while ostensibly demonstrating that free will may not exist based on empirical evidence, is not an exhaustive examination of all choices an individual makes. Perhaps a certain subset of our choices are not predetermined, and these choices constitute what we commonly accept as "free will". That leaves the complimentary set of choices as predestined. For example, in a repressed situation or when under duress, there are strong physiological forces which determine the outcome of our choice. Chemicals and the need to survive trump enlightened decisions. In the absence of repression or duress, the choice is made "freely", or at least of physiological stimuli that interfere with our higher order of consciousness.
It is my personal belief that the higher the number of free choices an individual has in life and the greater the meaning those choices have in significance to the individual, the closer that persons life is to a maximization of the person's spiritual potential. I believe we have a limited number of discrete free-will choices, and that these choices manifest themselves only in the absence of a physiological forces which work against them. I also believe that there is a correlation between the freedom to make choices and the maximization of an individual's spiritual (as opposed to carnal) existence, which has an intrinsic value.
For that reason, I conjecture that the purpose of society ought to be to maximize free will. I believe a society that maximizes each individual's free will (insofar as it does not infringe on others' free will) is a transcendent society, an enlightened society.
A caveat, while having thought about it, I'm pretty naive about the topic, and curious about thoughts you may have, or philosophers who have contemplated this.
When a technology service becomes ubiquitous and homogenous and - importantly - ceases being innovative, it runs the risk of becoming a candidate for conversion into a public utility. Or, alternatively, a commodity. Accord, from Commodification,
While in economic terms, commodification is closely related to and often follows from the stage when a market changes from one of monopolistic competition to one of perfect competition, a product essentially becomes a commodity when the repeated changes- because of competition-outplay themselves. It is essentially called a performance oversupply- which means that the market is performance saturated and any differentiation, even when being offered, is more than what the market demands. Commodification can be the desired outcome of an entity in the market, or it can be an unintentional outcome that no party actively sought to achieve.
I personally believe a commodification of operating systems is what we will see happen, eventually. With any luck, those operating systems will be 'Debian free'.
Please provide some evidence that probability of rape/stalking/abuse are related to attractiveness. From my experience, the relationship just is not there. I took it as trite, but here: Causes of Rape: "Warren Farrell... [noted] that (male-female) rape statistics show young and sexually attractive females are raped far more often than older, less sexually attractive females."
What exactly and how broad are your experiences that differ, that would make you a credible authority to refute this?
But whatever the costs, the presence of a huge plastic surgery industry suggests that the cost is outweighed by the benefit.
That assumes cognizant and rational understanding of cause-and-effect at the time of getting plastic surgery, in oft superficial consumers that consider plastic surgery a way to spend money to make their life "better".
Do you have any literature for that? I don't see how that is an evolutionary stable strategy. Pretty sure I recall that from pre-internet publications, though it circulates to the top, from time to time. The only reference could find offhand is Is acne really a disease?: a theory of acne as an evolutionarily significant, high-order psychoneuroimmune interaction timed to cortical development with a crucial role in mate choice. Medical Hypotheses, Volume 62, Issue 3, Pages 462-469, which is only a summary and merely alludes to my conjecture. You can always drop by a medical library to check it out and post a summary, here.:) I'd like to find a solid reference for it, but alas, the internet has failed me on this one.
Attractive people are treated better from a young age and, knowingly or unknowingly, they leverage this asset to get what they want. All beautiful women who have been stalked, abused, or raped because they are physically attractive, may beg to differ. Also, not being taken seriously because you're a "barbie doll" is a less-than-subtle discrimination permeating Western society. Attractiveness, like all things, has good and bad points. It is fallacious to say it is an asset without costs.
You may be interested in reading about the "evolutionarily deceptive" teenage years, where soon-to-be-ugly people appear attractive to seduce a mate, and soon-to-be-beautiful people repel mates so as to avoid the wrong one.
The trick, then, is to use steganography to hide transmissions of secret information in such a way that their very existance is plausibly deniable. A hard problem, also.
A server over http appears the wrong tool for this job. It's subject to a variety of forms of denial of service. Freenet, or another distributed database, that shares the load and precludes a single point of failure, would be a better option.
Let's not forget that this would widen the gap between the representation that the rich and the poor get even more. If I sue Tylenol because they filled my children's tylenol bottle with crack and wood alcohol, they can just throw 30 lawyers on the case and laugh their asses off. If they lose, their only additional cost would be my lawyer (likely a small percentage of the cost of settlement or their own lawyers); everything else would be the same as before attorney fees were regularly awarded. However, if I lost due to some technicality, I would have to pay for 31 lawyers in what was a legitimate case to begin with.
Let me start with: I'm a lawyer (and specifically, a civil litigator) in an adverse costs awarding jurisdiction (Ontario, Canada) and New York State, which has very limited use of adverse cost awards. Let me second with I'm on a horrific battery of anti-cold drugs, so this might not be very coherent or thorough.
The argument that you pay the balance of the fees for a defendant's representation when you lose is a straw man argument. The bulk of legal representation is sound advice, and actual courtroom time is unlikely in most cases, and a judgment is exceptionally rare. In my limited but professional experience, I have studied cost awards in some detail, as issues about them come up regularly in Ontario. Foremost, I've noticed that a risk of adverse cost awards does not decrease the likelihood of individuals bringing a lawsuit for a couple of reasons. They are:
1. Adverse cost awards can reduce the cost of litigation by encouraging settlement prior to trial. If going to a courtroom means potentially paying an adverse cost award, there is a greater incentive to resolve the dispute in advance of that. This promotes ADR (alternative dispute resolution), especially mediation. The vast, vast, vast majority of litigation is settled prior to trial.
2. Plaintiffs are often judgment proof (viz. unable to pay an adverse cost award). In this respect, ironically, the extremely poor with lawyers retained on a contingency agreement are better defended against adverse cost awards than the middle class.
3. Courts often prescribe costs on the standard of reasonableness. In Canada, a legal technicality typically gives rise to "a novel point of law", where the courts have for practical and philosophical reasons deemed it unfair to award adverse costs. Hence, if you lose on a legal technicality, you only pay your own legal fees. Some might say that costs are a way for the court to say "this person had a legitimate claim and you should have settled" or "your claim is frivolous and you've wasted these other people's time", but where you bring a new point to clarification, the waiving cost awards is a relief rewarded as all future litigants have the benefit of this clarification.
4. Litigation is generally black and white over liability, but gray on damages (a gross overgeneralization, but bear with me). If liability is clear, and your claim is legitimate as a plaintiff, then adverse cost awards generally only penalize the plaintiff for errant behaviour (such as unreasonable pie-in-the-sky/lottery-ticket expectations), or the defendant at partial indemnity (say 40% of the plaintiff's legal fees) for failing to settle before trial, or substantial indemnity (say 80% of the plaintiff's legal fees) where the defendant has demonstrated unwieldy behaviour (such as starving impoverished plaintiffs).
5. Costs are often discretionary. A judge or master can use costs to deter deviance, penalize bad behaviour, and compensate for losses arising from the acts of other parties. In effect, it becomes a mechanism for the court to impose fairness. However, being discretionary, without complex regulations dealing with a plethora of cases and a diligent educating of the judiciary, it has the potential to be inconsistent as between judges.
6. The legal fees charged in Canada are only a percentage (either, generally, 40% or 80%, depending on the reason the costs are being awar
Presumably the article is alluding to Shor's Alorithm, which is a a method to factorize integers which uses quantum computation to yield a worst-case complexity significantly better than any existing deterministic methods.
If that's the case, it's probably worthwhile to discuss Pollard's Rho algorithm, which has a poorly understood worst-case complexity (as a Monte Carlo method), but has a potential average case complexity that is comparable to the quantum.
In short, this is an important advance in automorphic forms, but it is so technical that it doesn't belong on SlashDot. In my extremely limited experience, I have noticed that brilliance is often reflected by the ability to simply explain a complex idea. One of the interesting benefits of Slashdot is that often there is someone reading who either has seen a brilliant reduction of a complex problem to a simple explanation, or alternatively has sufficient experience in the area to reduce it to a simple concept. YMMV.:)
I imagine this will take twice as long to resolve as the SCO litigation, unless the RIAA lawyers weasel out of it. I hope she is well supported, financially. A few comments that may be interesting for someone.:)
It may be difficult to enforce judgment against the "Big 4" directly. If I understand it correctly, the RIAA operates as a separate entity from them, and unless it is shown that the corporate veil can be pierced. This is typically difficult, though I imagine there is a smoking gun somewhere in the RIAA-Big 4 correspondence that shows that the RIAA is a front.
Class actions are much more difficult to get a judgment on than regular actions. In general (and in essence), for a Judge to feel comfortable ruling on the class, they must be convinced that the issues particular to individuals in the class are not more difficult to figure out than that of the issues in common. The standard typically ranges from "a class action is the best way to resolve the common issues" to "a class action is the best way to resolve the dispute". The latter is significantly more difficult to prove - the Court must be satisfied that the issues specific to each individual do not outweigh the overall issues the members of the putative class have in common (and there is no way cheaper-than-individual-litigation to resolve these individual issues). That's a mouthful, but class actions inherently balance the rights of many people who do not have legal counsel against a defendant with a substantial interest.
The court will also want a very clear and well defined class of people. Because the judgment of the court may preclude people from bringing future actions against the RIAA, there is typically a requirement of notice to the members of the class. This notice typically includes instructions on how to opt out of the class proceeding so that you can bring your own action (for mandatory opt-in jurisdictions; some are optional opt-out). If you fail to opt out within a specified time period, you may be bound to the judgment. In this case, the class is pretty trivial - people who have been wrongly sued.
That leads to an interesting point: Will the members of the class are people who have been wrongly sued, or those who have been wrongly sued and where the RIAA has already lost.
This action is a minefield for nuanced issues, like the above and others. I wish counsel the best. You can rest assured that if the Big 4 defendants perceive any exposure, they are dumping their excess resources into a legal defence.
The idea of Wikipedia - a freely available online encyclopedia that anyone can edit - I believe is better if it is impartial and independent. It becomes encumbered, compromised, by advertising incentives. There is added value in advertisement free - vis-à-vis Consumer Reports.
The question is: Why is Wikipedia so expensive to maintain? If it is bandwidth and servers, is the HTTP client/server model the answer? Is there an efficient model to share Wikipedia entries peer to peer? Or perhaps share costs between Universities or other institutions that act in the public interest?
Additionally, if Wikipedia does go to a peer to peer model, can it integrate projects like FreeNet to ensure that the information remains free and accessible.
If you think the complaints about edits, arbitrariness, capriciousness and bias with Wikipedia are bad now, wait until it commercializes. In my (limited) experience, this will change the paradigm of its management. Wikipedia will cease to be a gift to humanity. It will be owned.
For their lawsuit to succeed, it has to be premised that something untrue was said that hurt them.
It appears that itneed not have been intentional. This quick excerpt from a case, citing the Supreme Court of Canada (since the US hasn't gotten their case law online yet): The necessary elements of the tort of defamation are well established. In addition to the obvious need for a defamatory statement, it is an essential element of the cause of action that the defamatory statement be published and then read or heard by a third person (Arnott v. College of Physicians and Surgeons of Sask.), [1954] S.C.R. 538 at 565).
You are completely correct that the truth is an absolute defence to the tort of defamation.
I recall the bug to have each docshell (window / tab) render in its own thread being submitted about eight years ago (here. There are a number of policy reasons rebutting threads, including one of the comments on the above-linked bug, here:
> Ok, point taken about threads being means to an end, although I said > 'threading' rather than 'the use of threads'; I guess I should have said > 'concurrency in operation of the browser'.
Ok, that is better but still abstract. The way to proceed, at least in bugzilla, is from symptoms to causes.
So the new bug 384115 can have comments naming bugs that might block it, in the sense that they are bugs to-do with UI starvation or other symptoms that we believe can be fixed by taking advantage of hardware parallelism where it exists.
Other bugs that involve starvation or suboptimal scheduling of ideally concurrent operations may not want or need parallelism, and they may be real bugs -- they just don't need to block bug 384115. We could have another metabug (there may be one already) blocked by these, or all, "responsiveness" or "scheduling" bugs.
> > - Tabs may reference one another's variables including DOMs using window.open, > > and any pair of communicating tabs must serialize all of their scripts to > > uphold the run-to-completion execution model that is part of the browser JS > > standard. > > To the extent that they reference each other's variables, then yeah, they > should serialize, but this is rare AFAICT,
It doesn't matter how rare it is. The problem is not solved by saying how often it happens. Consider:
Window A:
i = 1
document.write(i)
i = 2
Window B:
w = window.open("", "A")
w.i = 3
The two windows race to load. What is written in A by the document.write call? It must be 1, not 3 (and not 2, of course).
If you try to multithread the two windows (which could be tabs, iframes, frames in frameset, or top-level windows), you'll have to join the threads somehow when B executes window.open, before it returns the reference to A that's assigned to w. But if you make B wait for A's script to complete, you will leave B vulnerable to having its currently-running script's invariants violated by script in another window C that calls window.open("", "B") and messes with mutable state reachable via the returned ref to B.
What's more, if A opens B while running, and B opens A, you could have a deadlock. It could be fixed by making one script lose and be preempted by the other, possibly involving invariants varying due to the winner mutating the loser's variables. Such a rule would be an incompatible change to the de-facto standard execution model.
Note that windows may load sequences of documents, some of which run scripts that address other windows (and so join with their threads) while others do not address any other windows.
So while scripts from different (unrelated, cf. document.domain) domains may not address one anothers' variables, a window might in the future load a doc from the same domain as another window. So you cannot assign windows to threads _a priori_ based only on current document domains.
Windows are addressed by name, and even an unnamed window may be given a name after it has been created (and so referenced by script from another window).
> and done on purpose when it's done,
That's irrelevant too, because the APIs do not require cooperating windows to declare their intentions up front. Note that the *windows*, not documents that may or may not be presently loaded in them, must join or leave "threads" in order to preserve run-to-completion.
> AFAIK, plus the main issue that concurrency or use of threads (say per tab) > w
Slashdot Mirror
Curiously, a senior lawyer I work with just told me yesterday that the first rule of litigation was: Show up. He was advising me of this rule in light of the other side having just broken it. (We're hoping that not showing up will precipitate a breaking of the first rule you've shared, so they're not entirely incongruous. ;) )
This isn't really a forum non conveniens issue, it's just a plain personal jurisdiction question.
You're absolutely right; the test I took from Rudder was jurisdictional. I noticed that after I had hit "submit". They are neatly intertwined, so I beg your indulgence (and indeed, it is worth noting that equivalent principles to prevent "long-arm" jurisdiction seen by using forum non conveniens in Canada is in many of the US states created by the in personam jurisdictional test arising out of the 14th Amendment).
Assuming a Canadian court and a foreign court both have jurisdiction over the matter, the test for forum non conveniens motion to stay a proceeding in Canada comes from the Supreme Court of Canada in Amchem Products Incorporated v. British Columbia (Workers' Compensation Board), 1993 CanLII 124 (S.C.C.): "Under this test the court must determine whether there is another forum that is clearly more appropriate".
Also, If Facebook does not have a physical presence in Canada, exactly how will Canada enforce this law on them, should Canada rule that it does apply? I am pretty sure that the current U.S. Supreme Court would not rule in Canada's favor on this, considering that they still seem to support the ruling that state's cannot enforce their laws on businesses located in other states that do business with residents of said state (sales tax). To be clear, SCOTUS has no extraterritorial jurisdiction over whether a Canadian court can hear this case; that decision is left completely to the Canadian court. US courts do have exclusive powers over enforcement within their own territory, which enforcement is exercised through the doctrine of comity.
A bug similar (if not identical) to the complaint here, was filed back in May of 2000: Bug 40848 (thread) - each docshell should run on its own thread (one thread per frame).
I'm sure they'd appreciate it, though, if no-one spammed this bug. It's closed for valid (or at least not-invalid) technical/philosophical reasons- threads are evil (you can find links supporting that assertion from the bug's comments). You can also follow it to its successor meta-bug: Bug 384323 - UI responsiveness - core/platform - meta bug and its quasi-sister: Bug 91351 - UI/App responsiveness issues.
A fairly sage quote I remember from somewhere is:
The intelligence of a committee is equal to the intelligence of the dumbest member of the committee divided by the number of people on it.
Alternatively, here's what I do in phpPgAdmin: click Table, click Triggers. There's a list. I can edit it by clicking on a specific trigger. phpMySql has no such interface to triggers, and every view, creation and edit must be done by manually typing in the SQL (but, based on the tone of your reply, I'm sure you knew that). Maybe you have time for that, and it's not a big concern (on what terms do you get paid?). For any serious database development, it strikes me as a grotesque waste of time. I mean, seriously, the CREATE TRIGGER statement is not rocket science. Nobody implied that it was. However, complex trigger statements are what beget the necessity of being able to edit them handily- something that I would imagine you couldn't do with a WYSIWYG (exactly what would a WYSIWYG TRIGGER editor do, anyway?). Wasting 15-20 minutes typing the SELECT/CREATE/ALTER TRIGGERS statement in another editor and then running a blanket update over the whole SQL database strikes me as fundamentally wrong, especially where there is a trivial and effective interface in phpPgAdmin. Besides, creating them programatically is just better business. I can keep a db_setup_triggers.sql in source control and make it part of automatic builds. Who ever suggested or implied that you wouldn't create them programatically? Please, feel free to describe how else you would do it. MySQL is far from perfect. But to criticize it for THIS? I think you're fundamentally confused about what I was criticizing, meaning you either did not take the time to read my comments, are ignorant of MySql/phpMySql, and/or didn't take the time to think about either before you started ranting. If that be the case and you are fundamentally confused, you've contributed little if anything to the discussion, sounded condescending, acted presumptuously, and been indignant about something that does not even exist (a criticism about the lack of a TRIGGER WYSIWYG, the very suggestion of which reeks of ignorance). If indeed that is the case, next time you consider writing something, perhaps you could do us all a favour and not.
I'm very happy to concur. I just tried to put triggers on MySQL databases, admittedly a relatively new feature for the little database that could, and it was a nightmare to manage them. phpMySql didn't have any interface to it, nor did any of the other tools for Mac OS X (which I'm using primarily). I'm not averse to the command line, but there are times when it's just nicer to have a visual interface. I've switched over to PostgreSQL, and its' web-management tool phpPgAdmin allows me to quickly view and edit triggers and many other nuances to my heart's content. Further, the documentation answered all of my questions in very short order.
I'm sincerely impressed with what PostgreSQL has done. I hope they continue working, and hope they are never picked clean by those who "don't get it", ala. what appears to be happening to MySQL.
This study, while ostensibly demonstrating that free will may not exist based on empirical evidence, is not an exhaustive examination of all choices an individual makes. Perhaps a certain subset of our choices are not predetermined, and these choices constitute what we commonly accept as "free will". That leaves the complimentary set of choices as predestined. For example, in a repressed situation or when under duress, there are strong physiological forces which determine the outcome of our choice. Chemicals and the need to survive trump enlightened decisions. In the absence of repression or duress, the choice is made "freely", or at least of physiological stimuli that interfere with our higher order of consciousness.
It is my personal belief that the higher the number of free choices an individual has in life and the greater the meaning those choices have in significance to the individual, the closer that persons life is to a maximization of the person's spiritual potential. I believe we have a limited number of discrete free-will choices, and that these choices manifest themselves only in the absence of a physiological forces which work against them. I also believe that there is a correlation between the freedom to make choices and the maximization of an individual's spiritual (as opposed to carnal) existence, which has an intrinsic value.
For that reason, I conjecture that the purpose of society ought to be to maximize free will. I believe a society that maximizes each individual's free will (insofar as it does not infringe on others' free will) is a transcendent society, an enlightened society.
A caveat, while having thought about it, I'm pretty naive about the topic, and curious about thoughts you may have, or philosophers who have contemplated this.
could use some boosting ... say, Martin Logans.
I personally believe a commodification of operating systems is what we will see happen, eventually. With any luck, those operating systems will be 'Debian free'.
What exactly and how broad are your experiences that differ, that would make you a credible authority to refute this? But whatever the costs, the presence of a huge plastic surgery industry suggests that the cost is outweighed by the benefit. That assumes cognizant and rational understanding of cause-and-effect at the time of getting plastic surgery, in oft superficial consumers that consider plastic surgery a way to spend money to make their life "better". Do you have any literature for that? I don't see how that is an evolutionary stable strategy. Pretty sure I recall that from pre-internet publications, though it circulates to the top, from time to time. The only reference could find offhand is Is acne really a disease?: a theory of acne as an evolutionarily significant, high-order psychoneuroimmune interaction timed to cortical development with a crucial role in mate choice. Medical Hypotheses, Volume 62, Issue 3, Pages 462-469, which is only a summary and merely alludes to my conjecture. You can always drop by a medical library to check it out and post a summary, here.
You may be interested in reading about the "evolutionarily deceptive" teenage years, where soon-to-be-ugly people appear attractive to seduce a mate, and soon-to-be-beautiful people repel mates so as to avoid the wrong one.
The trick, then, is to use steganography to hide transmissions of secret information in such a way that their very existance is plausibly deniable. A hard problem, also.
A server over http appears the wrong tool for this job. It's subject to a variety of forms of denial of service. Freenet, or another distributed database, that shares the load and precludes a single point of failure, would be a better option.
Let's not forget that this would widen the gap between the representation that the rich and the poor get even more. If I sue Tylenol because they filled my children's tylenol bottle with crack and wood alcohol, they can just throw 30 lawyers on the case and laugh their asses off. If they lose, their only additional cost would be my lawyer (likely a small percentage of the cost of settlement or their own lawyers); everything else would be the same as before attorney fees were regularly awarded. However, if I lost due to some technicality, I would have to pay for 31 lawyers in what was a legitimate case to begin with.
Let me start with: I'm a lawyer (and specifically, a civil litigator) in an adverse costs awarding jurisdiction (Ontario, Canada) and New York State, which has very limited use of adverse cost awards. Let me second with I'm on a horrific battery of anti-cold drugs, so this might not be very coherent or thorough.
The argument that you pay the balance of the fees for a defendant's representation when you lose is a straw man argument. The bulk of legal representation is sound advice, and actual courtroom time is unlikely in most cases, and a judgment is exceptionally rare. In my limited but professional experience, I have studied cost awards in some detail, as issues about them come up regularly in Ontario. Foremost, I've noticed that a risk of adverse cost awards does not decrease the likelihood of individuals bringing a lawsuit for a couple of reasons. They are:
1. Adverse cost awards can reduce the cost of litigation by encouraging settlement prior to trial. If going to a courtroom means potentially paying an adverse cost award, there is a greater incentive to resolve the dispute in advance of that. This promotes ADR (alternative dispute resolution), especially mediation. The vast, vast, vast majority of litigation is settled prior to trial.
2. Plaintiffs are often judgment proof (viz. unable to pay an adverse cost award). In this respect, ironically, the extremely poor with lawyers retained on a contingency agreement are better defended against adverse cost awards than the middle class.
3. Courts often prescribe costs on the standard of reasonableness. In Canada, a legal technicality typically gives rise to "a novel point of law", where the courts have for practical and philosophical reasons deemed it unfair to award adverse costs. Hence, if you lose on a legal technicality, you only pay your own legal fees. Some might say that costs are a way for the court to say "this person had a legitimate claim and you should have settled" or "your claim is frivolous and you've wasted these other people's time", but where you bring a new point to clarification, the waiving cost awards is a relief rewarded as all future litigants have the benefit of this clarification.
4. Litigation is generally black and white over liability, but gray on damages (a gross overgeneralization, but bear with me). If liability is clear, and your claim is legitimate as a plaintiff, then adverse cost awards generally only penalize the plaintiff for errant behaviour (such as unreasonable pie-in-the-sky/lottery-ticket expectations), or the defendant at partial indemnity (say 40% of the plaintiff's legal fees) for failing to settle before trial, or substantial indemnity (say 80% of the plaintiff's legal fees) where the defendant has demonstrated unwieldy behaviour (such as starving impoverished plaintiffs).
5. Costs are often discretionary. A judge or master can use costs to deter deviance, penalize bad behaviour, and compensate for losses arising from the acts of other parties. In effect, it becomes a mechanism for the court to impose fairness. However, being discretionary, without complex regulations dealing with a plethora of cases and a diligent educating of the judiciary, it has the potential to be inconsistent as between judges.
6. The legal fees charged in Canada are only a percentage (either, generally, 40% or 80%, depending on the reason the costs are being awar
Presumably the article is alluding to Shor's Alorithm, which is a a method to factorize integers which uses quantum computation to yield a worst-case complexity significantly better than any existing deterministic methods.
If that's the case, it's probably worthwhile to discuss Pollard's Rho algorithm, which has a poorly understood worst-case complexity (as a Monte Carlo method), but has a potential average case complexity that is comparable to the quantum.
I imagine this will take twice as long to resolve as the SCO litigation, unless the RIAA lawyers weasel out of it. I hope she is well supported, financially. A few comments that may be interesting for someone. :)
It may be difficult to enforce judgment against the "Big 4" directly. If I understand it correctly, the RIAA operates as a separate entity from them, and unless it is shown that the corporate veil can be pierced. This is typically difficult, though I imagine there is a smoking gun somewhere in the RIAA-Big 4 correspondence that shows that the RIAA is a front.
Class actions are much more difficult to get a judgment on than regular actions. In general (and in essence), for a Judge to feel comfortable ruling on the class, they must be convinced that the issues particular to individuals in the class are not more difficult to figure out than that of the issues in common. The standard typically ranges from "a class action is the best way to resolve the common issues" to "a class action is the best way to resolve the dispute". The latter is significantly more difficult to prove - the Court must be satisfied that the issues specific to each individual do not outweigh the overall issues the members of the putative class have in common (and there is no way cheaper-than-individual-litigation to resolve these individual issues). That's a mouthful, but class actions inherently balance the rights of many people who do not have legal counsel against a defendant with a substantial interest.
The court will also want a very clear and well defined class of people. Because the judgment of the court may preclude people from bringing future actions against the RIAA, there is typically a requirement of notice to the members of the class. This notice typically includes instructions on how to opt out of the class proceeding so that you can bring your own action (for mandatory opt-in jurisdictions; some are optional opt-out). If you fail to opt out within a specified time period, you may be bound to the judgment. In this case, the class is pretty trivial - people who have been wrongly sued.
That leads to an interesting point: Will the members of the class are people who have been wrongly sued, or those who have been wrongly sued and where the RIAA has already lost.
This action is a minefield for nuanced issues, like the above and others. I wish counsel the best. You can rest assured that if the Big 4 defendants perceive any exposure, they are dumping their excess resources into a legal defence.
The idea of Wikipedia - a freely available online encyclopedia that anyone can edit - I believe is better if it is impartial and independent. It becomes encumbered, compromised, by advertising incentives. There is added value in advertisement free - vis-à-vis Consumer Reports.
The question is: Why is Wikipedia so expensive to maintain? If it is bandwidth and servers, is the HTTP client/server model the answer? Is there an efficient model to share Wikipedia entries peer to peer? Or perhaps share costs between Universities or other institutions that act in the public interest?
Additionally, if Wikipedia does go to a peer to peer model, can it integrate projects like FreeNet to ensure that the information remains free and accessible.
If you think the complaints about edits, arbitrariness, capriciousness and bias with Wikipedia are bad now, wait until it commercializes. In my (limited) experience, this will change the paradigm of its management. Wikipedia will cease to be a gift to humanity. It will be owned.
Contrary to first glance, this story has nothing to do with programming or the cell processor. /me moves on.
For their lawsuit to succeed, it has to be premised that something untrue was said that hurt them.
It appears that itneed not have been intentional. This quick excerpt from a case, citing the Supreme Court of Canada (since the US hasn't gotten their case law online yet): The necessary elements of the tort of defamation are well established. In addition to the obvious need for a defamatory statement, it is an essential element of the cause of action that the defamatory statement be published and then read or heard by a third person (Arnott v. College of Physicians and Surgeons of Sask.), [1954] S.C.R. 538 at 565).
You are completely correct that the truth is an absolute defence to the tort of defamation.
> Ok, point taken about threads being means to an end, although I said
> 'threading' rather than 'the use of threads'; I guess I should have said
> 'concurrency in operation of the browser'.
Ok, that is better but still abstract. The way to proceed, at least in
bugzilla, is from symptoms to causes.
So the new bug 384115 can have comments naming bugs that might block it, in the
sense that they are bugs to-do with UI starvation or other symptoms that we
believe can be fixed by taking advantage of hardware parallelism where it
exists.
Other bugs that involve starvation or suboptimal scheduling of ideally
concurrent operations may not want or need parallelism, and they may be real
bugs -- they just don't need to block bug 384115. We could have another metabug
(there may be one already) blocked by these, or all, "responsiveness" or
"scheduling" bugs.
> > - Tabs may reference one another's variables including DOMs using window.open,
> > and any pair of communicating tabs must serialize all of their scripts to
> > uphold the run-to-completion execution model that is part of the browser JS
> > standard.
>
> To the extent that they reference each other's variables, then yeah, they
> should serialize, but this is rare AFAICT,
It doesn't matter how rare it is. The problem is not solved by saying how often
it happens. Consider:
Window A:
i = 1
document.write(i)
i = 2
Window B:
w = window.open("", "A")
w.i = 3
The two windows race to load. What is written in A by the document.write call?
It must be 1, not 3 (and not 2, of course).
If you try to multithread the two windows (which could be tabs, iframes, frames
in frameset, or top-level windows), you'll have to join the threads somehow
when B executes window.open, before it returns the reference to A that's
assigned to w. But if you make B wait for A's script to complete, you will
leave B vulnerable to having its currently-running script's invariants violated
by script in another window C that calls window.open("", "B") and messes with
mutable state reachable via the returned ref to B.
What's more, if A opens B while running, and B opens A, you could have a
deadlock. It could be fixed by making one script lose and be preempted by the
other, possibly involving invariants varying due to the winner mutating the
loser's variables. Such a rule would be an incompatible change to the de-facto
standard execution model.
Note that windows may load sequences of documents, some of which run scripts
that address other windows (and so join with their threads) while others do not
address any other windows.
So while scripts from different (unrelated, cf. document.domain) domains may
not address one anothers' variables, a window might in the future load a doc
from the same domain as another window. So you cannot assign windows to threads
_a priori_ based only on current document domains.
Windows are addressed by name, and even an unnamed window may be given a name
after it has been created (and so referenced by script from another window).
> and done on purpose when it's done,
That's irrelevant too, because the APIs do not require cooperating windows to
declare their intentions up front. Note that the *windows*, not documents that
may or may not be presently loaded in them, must join or leave "threads" in
order to preserve run-to-completion.
> AFAIK, plus the main issue that concurrency or use of threads (say per tab)
> w