And there are 200 years of quotes and cases since then showing that juries are best off determining that the law is being properly applied, not what the law should be.
Remember, again, the jury can convict wrongfully as easily as it can acquit wrongfully. And a wrongful conviction is a far worse thing than a rightful conviction on a law that should be changed. You've got a chance that an upper court will agree the law is too broad or conflicts with the Constitution. But if it doesn't, and there's a jury standing behind the findings of fact, and there were no procedural errors in the case, then the upper courts will resoundingly affirm the conviction.
And remember that with enough money you can present a case to convince a jury to do almost anything. But an instruction from a judge to apply the law as it's written helps ensure that the law applies to the rich as well as the poor.
I'd be the one shooting the people who were trying to make Sharia the law of the land. So your strawman is moot.
Our system allows you an equal voice in making things legal or illegal. Once that's done, your attempt to make your voice equal to 1/12th of the population is not in keeping with the Constitution.
And, as I said, that shit goes both ways. If judges instructed juries that they had the right to nullify the law, then judges would do so in cases where the law said to let the nigger go. Hint: that has happened. Juries can be lynch mobs as easily as they can be revolutionaries.
Having the decision made for the reasons stated in the law and the transcript is the right thing to do. Having the decision made by 12 random dopes in a back room is the opposite of that. That they get to determine if the law fits the case is enough. If there are questions of the validity of the law, it's up to the defendant then to bring that up to the level of courts that are capable of determining it.
While it's not possible to stop it, it's also an unethical abuse of the power of the jury, and the court system assiduously warns against it. The reason being that it goes both ways, since juries that ignore the law can nullify the rights of the defendant as easily as they can nullify the law.
And, while jury deliberations are nominally secret the first thing that happens after a trial is that the jury, the judge, and the counsel for both sides get together to informally discuss the conduct of the trial. Jurors ask questions about missing evidence (last time I served there were maybe 20 exhibits but the exhibit numbering on them went from single to triple digits), evidence that has more information than the lawyers were pointing out (generally means that both sides stipulated that the thing, while possibly very interesting, was irrelevant to the case itself), and strange turns in procedure. And the officers of the court ask about the jury's thoughts. It's all quite jovial, and in all the cases I've been on there was no reason for anyone to hesitate to be open about everything. In the case where a jury decides to nullify the law, it's probably different, but would you trust 11 other people not to feel like they should brag that they deliberately stuck it to the man?
>If we're bound by the idea that if it is a "law" that it is legal, then we end up with the Senator Palpatine style "I will make it legal"
The law was made by representatives elected by the people. Until the constitution says there's a Senator Palpatine who has the power to make something legal on his own, that's not a good analogy.
Juries are bound to follow the law. They get to decide if the facts in the case fit the law. They don't get to decide not to convict even though the facts fit the law. Their value is that they are citizens, not sinecured magistrates who have the physical power to write down that the facts fit the case when they don't, or to color the facts in a way that a dozen average people would find untrue. The jury system guarantees that at least 12 citizens will be witnesses to the trial, are the focus of the presentation of evidence, and will validate its outcome as a true application of the law.
If you think the law is wrong, it's your job to get it changed before it gets to court by electing people who represent you and petitioning them for changes to the law. It's the court's job to apply it as it's written (in a statute or a past judgment), and it's an apellate courts' job to deal with situations where one of the parties to the case thinks the process did not get followed properly or the law inappropriately conflicts with another law (up to and including the constitution).
Um, that's pretty much what happens before you get to trial.
The precedents are there, and the lawyers compare the case to them, and try to get the other side to settle based on the results of the case being used as a precedent, because if the precedent is correct the court is almost 100% certain to do exactly that.
It's not strictly a relational database. More like content-addressable memory.
First, because the system is based on history, not logic. It was invented before logic was, and it has to complete its task even in a total absence of logic. If the lawyers choose to introduce logic, then that's their strategic choice. Generally one will, and the other won't.
Second, because the trial changes as it goes on, and argument is fluid. Information from one part of one person's testimony can drastically alter how other witnesses testify, and whether they even do testify.
Third, because questioning witnesses elicits more honest responses than prepared statements do, and watching someone answer a tough question elicits more information than the words in the answer gives.
Fourth, because part of the purpose of the trial is presenting the case to the community. Both to give the community closure and to keep the government's pointy end open to scrutiny. Merely adjudicating the facts of the case is something any king can do from the bathroom.
They'd be tossed into a lower-priority queue. Every time my higher-priority process wanted the CPU, it would get it. The only time those lower-priority processes would get the CPU is when my process didn't want it. It wouldn't matter how many of those there are, because I don't have to wait in line behind all of them, I just have to wait until the one currently using the CPU pends.
That's what priority was invented for. This thing about group scheduling looks like a combination of time-slicing built on top of a single-priority queue. But since the problem is that things don't seem to operate smoothly it's a priority problem, not a synchronization problem, so time-slicing is the wrong solution and prioritization is the right solution.
"But it gets worse, as others have pointed out. When you have a site that may host some infringing content but also has non-infringing content that qualifies as protected speech, now what do you do?"
I agree that's the gaping hole this law puts in due process.
Cost too. Otherwise each of these would have simply been specified to be 10 times the size it is. But cost and purpose come into play, so the total capability of the system gets limited.
That said, 100,000 smartphones would cost about $40 million. Which isn't unreasonable. And it would indeed outperform all of these machines on LINPACK tasks. If I were selling smartphones, I'd be putting that in my ad copy today.
All that is needed to obtain a warrant to arrest you and search your house is for a cop under oath to state his evidence to judge. And the evidence can include merely the cop's observations. If the judge finds probable cause, the warrant is issued.*
Your door will then be broken off its hinges, your house will be trashed, your arms will be chicken-winged up to your ears, and you will be incarcerated, potentially for years, before you are given a trial.
* - and if the cop perceives probable cause that you are committing or are about to commit a crime, he can act without getting a warrant. Your house is usually not involved in this because he can't see you committing a crime when the door is closed and the blinds are drawn, but if he saw you throwing bottles at people from your window your door is going to be splintered, you are going to be trussed up and frisked, and by the time the CSIs get there a warrant will be in someone's hands.
And your youtube example is inept. The language of the law states that it applies if the only purpose of the site is the commission of counterfeit theft.
Of course, the problem with all this is that investigators will get these warrants by pointing out the infringing material without also ensuring that the rest of the site is offensive. I doubt that will happen to Youtube, but lesser known file-sharers that don't aggressively prevent posting of copyright materials are going to find their domain name no longer resolves (or they lose US web traffic, can't collect credit-card charges from the US, and can't get US-based adserver content, if they're outside the US). They'll be offline until they can prove to the court that they didn't do anything wrong.
He's not saying that their freedom to speak is to be taken away if they steal, he's saying that free speech is not a defense for theft. In that, he's correct. And by "means" he doesn't mean their economic condition, he means the way in which they commit the theft.
Regardless, this aphorism he leads with is no excuse for a law that risks the prosecution of innocent people.
It wouldn't be a hack in user space if it were built into the shell.
It seems to be creating a file in a group registry that tells the kernel that your shell, which is interactive, is a group. What that means I don't know, but I'm sure it's something that can be built right into the shell, which can manage that for you. The code that does something useful with a group once it's identified is clearly already part of the kernel, and runs better than the kernel hack that's proposed.
Building it into the shell means that (a) you don't have to build it into your shell configuration scripts, where it can easily be omitted and the fu lost forever for users who lose fu; and (b) you can better handle situations where the shell and its children get killed.
I'd be pretty pissed off if I hadn't cheated, studied hard enough to get the D I needed to pass, but got an F because the curve was blown out by the cheaters.
I still wouldn't have learned the material, but it would cost me months and money to make up the course, and that sort of thing can cascade to lost opportunities that can turn a life the wrong way.
I wonder if the prof's plea bargain indemnifies the cheaters against lawsuits from people who fall into this gap.
The professor holds some of the blame for being lazy about testing.
You can't cheat if you're in a locked room with a test that nobody has ever seen before.
Professors who give take-home tests and reuse old tests are facilitating cheating.
This professor's plea-bargain takers will be attending an ethics course to remind them that they should do the right thing even if nobody is watching. He should take it as well, because if that many people can cheat, he's not constructing a resilient test to protect the curve for people who don't cheat.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know there's no bias to slashdot other than the preponderance of its readers, right?
Take your ritalin, Garth.
No, he misspelled Legislature.
How they got there is irrelevant.
And there are 200 years of quotes and cases since then showing that juries are best off determining that the law is being properly applied, not what the law should be.
Remember, again, the jury can convict wrongfully as easily as it can acquit wrongfully. And a wrongful conviction is a far worse thing than a rightful conviction on a law that should be changed. You've got a chance that an upper court will agree the law is too broad or conflicts with the Constitution. But if it doesn't, and there's a jury standing behind the findings of fact, and there were no procedural errors in the case, then the upper courts will resoundingly affirm the conviction.
And remember that with enough money you can present a case to convince a jury to do almost anything. But an instruction from a judge to apply the law as it's written helps ensure that the law applies to the rich as well as the poor.
I'd be the one shooting the people who were trying to make Sharia the law of the land. So your strawman is moot.
Our system allows you an equal voice in making things legal or illegal. Once that's done, your attempt to make your voice equal to 1/12th of the population is not in keeping with the Constitution.
And, as I said, that shit goes both ways. If judges instructed juries that they had the right to nullify the law, then judges would do so in cases where the law said to let the nigger go. Hint: that has happened. Juries can be lynch mobs as easily as they can be revolutionaries.
Having the decision made for the reasons stated in the law and the transcript is the right thing to do. Having the decision made by 12 random dopes in a back room is the opposite of that. That they get to determine if the law fits the case is enough. If there are questions of the validity of the law, it's up to the defendant then to bring that up to the level of courts that are capable of determining it.
So, uh, what's the consequence of gay marriage?
While it's not possible to stop it, it's also an unethical abuse of the power of the jury, and the court system assiduously warns against it. The reason being that it goes both ways, since juries that ignore the law can nullify the rights of the defendant as easily as they can nullify the law.
And, while jury deliberations are nominally secret the first thing that happens after a trial is that the jury, the judge, and the counsel for both sides get together to informally discuss the conduct of the trial. Jurors ask questions about missing evidence (last time I served there were maybe 20 exhibits but the exhibit numbering on them went from single to triple digits), evidence that has more information than the lawyers were pointing out (generally means that both sides stipulated that the thing, while possibly very interesting, was irrelevant to the case itself), and strange turns in procedure. And the officers of the court ask about the jury's thoughts. It's all quite jovial, and in all the cases I've been on there was no reason for anyone to hesitate to be open about everything. In the case where a jury decides to nullify the law, it's probably different, but would you trust 11 other people not to feel like they should brag that they deliberately stuck it to the man?
But it did. Right after tens of thousands of customers got fucked by it and shareholders lost $300 million in equity.
Now it's all better.
Of course they prioritized the situations with the most impact to them.
What's wrong with that?
However, selling computers with an enhanced probability of failure at the same price as if they didn't have that is fraud.
And "reassurances that no data loss would occur when a PC failed" is just gob-smackingly stupid fraud.
>If we're bound by the idea that if it is a "law" that it is legal, then we end up with the Senator Palpatine style "I will make it legal"
The law was made by representatives elected by the people. Until the constitution says there's a Senator Palpatine who has the power to make something legal on his own, that's not a good analogy.
Juries are bound to follow the law. They get to decide if the facts in the case fit the law. They don't get to decide not to convict even though the facts fit the law. Their value is that they are citizens, not sinecured magistrates who have the physical power to write down that the facts fit the case when they don't, or to color the facts in a way that a dozen average people would find untrue. The jury system guarantees that at least 12 citizens will be witnesses to the trial, are the focus of the presentation of evidence, and will validate its outcome as a true application of the law.
If you think the law is wrong, it's your job to get it changed before it gets to court by electing people who represent you and petitioning them for changes to the law. It's the court's job to apply it as it's written (in a statute or a past judgment), and it's an apellate courts' job to deal with situations where one of the parties to the case thinks the process did not get followed properly or the law inappropriately conflicts with another law (up to and including the constitution).
Um, that's pretty much what happens before you get to trial.
The precedents are there, and the lawyers compare the case to them, and try to get the other side to settle based on the results of the case being used as a precedent, because if the precedent is correct the court is almost 100% certain to do exactly that.
It's not strictly a relational database. More like content-addressable memory.
First, because the system is based on history, not logic. It was invented before logic was, and it has to complete its task even in a total absence of logic. If the lawyers choose to introduce logic, then that's their strategic choice. Generally one will, and the other won't.
Second, because the trial changes as it goes on, and argument is fluid. Information from one part of one person's testimony can drastically alter how other witnesses testify, and whether they even do testify.
Third, because questioning witnesses elicits more honest responses than prepared statements do, and watching someone answer a tough question elicits more information than the words in the answer gives.
Fourth, because part of the purpose of the trial is presenting the case to the community. Both to give the community closure and to keep the government's pointy end open to scrutiny. Merely adjudicating the facts of the case is something any king can do from the bathroom.
Take a look at the code for one sometime.
See all those #ifdefs?
Probably not, since you have your head shoved so far up your ass.
They'd be tossed into a lower-priority queue. Every time my higher-priority process wanted the CPU, it would get it. The only time those lower-priority processes would get the CPU is when my process didn't want it. It wouldn't matter how many of those there are, because I don't have to wait in line behind all of them, I just have to wait until the one currently using the CPU pends.
That's what priority was invented for. This thing about group scheduling looks like a combination of time-slicing built on top of a single-priority queue. But since the problem is that things don't seem to operate smoothly it's a priority problem, not a synchronization problem, so time-slicing is the wrong solution and prioritization is the right solution.
"But it gets worse, as others have pointed out. When you have a site that may host some infringing content but also has non-infringing content that qualifies as protected speech, now what do you do?"
I agree that's the gaping hole this law puts in due process.
Cost too. Otherwise each of these would have simply been specified to be 10 times the size it is. But cost and purpose come into play, so the total capability of the system gets limited.
That said, 100,000 smartphones would cost about $40 million. Which isn't unreasonable. And it would indeed outperform all of these machines on LINPACK tasks. If I were selling smartphones, I'd be putting that in my ad copy today.
Um, your argument is inept.
All that is needed to obtain a warrant to arrest you and search your house is for a cop under oath to state his evidence to judge. And the evidence can include merely the cop's observations. If the judge finds probable cause, the warrant is issued.*
Your door will then be broken off its hinges, your house will be trashed, your arms will be chicken-winged up to your ears, and you will be incarcerated, potentially for years, before you are given a trial.
* - and if the cop perceives probable cause that you are committing or are about to commit a crime, he can act without getting a warrant. Your house is usually not involved in this because he can't see you committing a crime when the door is closed and the blinds are drawn, but if he saw you throwing bottles at people from your window your door is going to be splintered, you are going to be trussed up and frisked, and by the time the CSIs get there a warrant will be in someone's hands.
And your youtube example is inept. The language of the law states that it applies if the only purpose of the site is the commission of counterfeit theft.
Of course, the problem with all this is that investigators will get these warrants by pointing out the infringing material without also ensuring that the rest of the site is offensive. I doubt that will happen to Youtube, but lesser known file-sharers that don't aggressively prevent posting of copyright materials are going to find their domain name no longer resolves (or they lose US web traffic, can't collect credit-card charges from the US, and can't get US-based adserver content, if they're outside the US). They'll be offline until they can prove to the court that they didn't do anything wrong.
He's not saying that their freedom to speak is to be taken away if they steal, he's saying that free speech is not a defense for theft. In that, he's correct. And by "means" he doesn't mean their economic condition, he means the way in which they commit the theft.
Regardless, this aphorism he leads with is no excuse for a law that risks the prosecution of innocent people.
I still use csh(1), you insensitive clod!
They don't make the kind of tape that makes that work any more.
So you could have got the exact same performance improvement in this test by doing
"nice make -j64 whatever"
and making the make program and all its little boggies stay out of the way of your X server...
You can only put a try on the 22nd catch.
It wouldn't be a hack in user space if it were built into the shell.
It seems to be creating a file in a group registry that tells the kernel that your shell, which is interactive, is a group. What that means I don't know, but I'm sure it's something that can be built right into the shell, which can manage that for you. The code that does something useful with a group once it's identified is clearly already part of the kernel, and runs better than the kernel hack that's proposed.
Building it into the shell means that (a) you don't have to build it into your shell configuration scripts, where it can easily be omitted and the fu lost forever for users who lose fu; and (b) you can better handle situations where the shell and its children get killed.
Okay, I thought of an exception.
I'd be pretty pissed off if I hadn't cheated, studied hard enough to get the D I needed to pass, but got an F because the curve was blown out by the cheaters.
I still wouldn't have learned the material, but it would cost me months and money to make up the course, and that sort of thing can cascade to lost opportunities that can turn a life the wrong way.
I wonder if the prof's plea bargain indemnifies the cheaters against lawsuits from people who fall into this gap.
The professor holds some of the blame for being lazy about testing.
You can't cheat if you're in a locked room with a test that nobody has ever seen before.
Professors who give take-home tests and reuse old tests are facilitating cheating.
This professor's plea-bargain takers will be attending an ethics course to remind them that they should do the right thing even if nobody is watching. He should take it as well, because if that many people can cheat, he's not constructing a resilient test to protect the curve for people who don't cheat.
Why?
You learned it. That's what you paid for.