First of all, note that what happened in this specific case can happen in the US too in civil matters: A magistrates decisions can generally be overturned by a district judge.
The difference lies in criminal matters only.
Even so, in criminal matters, the ability of an appeals court to refer a case back to a lower court is VERY restricted - generally it would apply to misapplications of the law where the appeals court decides to direct the lower court rather than make a full judgement itself.
In any case, in most European countries, double jeopardy refers to the governments general inability to start a new case against you on the basis of the same crime.
In other words, nothing stops either part from appealing a case to the highest available court, as long as the appeals are properly made within the (very limited) time windows allowed. Those appeals are considered parts of the same case.
Generally, the number of courts involved is small, and there is no opportunity from endlessly requesting retrials. In the UK it's generally "worst case" Magistrates, Crown court, High court OR Court of Appeals (not both) and (rarely) finally House of Lords at the discretion of whichever court made the last judgement. Furthermore, each step up in the system generally restricts the grounds of appeal and what you can appeal and to what court.
A superior court (all courts except the Magistrates and Crown court UNLESS it's a jury trial in which case the Crown court is also a superior court) is unlikely to hear the facts of a case again, for instance. It will be more likely to hear questions of law only.
Also, in the UK a magistrates will in serious cases (like murder etc.) only decide practical matters like bail and refer a case directly to the Crown Court, and a defendant can also demand a jury, in which case the case will be moved straight to the Crown Court.
So in practice, you can "skip a step". In practice, however, as in this case most people who have the choice choose to be tried before a magistrates first, because even though it leaves the Crown Prosecution Service (equivalent to the US DA's) one more appeals opportunity, it also leaves the defendant with one more appeals opportunity.
The fact that nobody pays attention to the issues you mention should be a clear indicator that most people don't care about those features. Even so, none of the products using ODF as default storage supports them, leaving plenty of room for adding specifications later.
If Microsofts wants to support ODF, and needs more features, all they'd have to do is propose extensions and present a well founded argument for why they should be allowed. They haven't.
In essence, Microsoft likes to whine about this, because it serves their purpose to keep ODF adoption rates down, but they show no interest in doing anything about it.
I hear that the British government are setting up contingency plans to dispose of around 300,000 bodies, as a worst-case scenario: that's about one twentieth of the population.
The UK has 60 million inhabitants, not 6 million... So it's 0.5%, not 5%.
It's a pretty long stretch to say that it is ineffective based on a 50% death rate in a sample of 8 patients. You don't know how many of those patients would have died without Tamiflu for starters.
And if you bother to read the articles you've linked, you'll find that in the case of the UK, how to handle burials is being discussed in addition to Tamiflu and vaccines as a precautionary measure - you really don't want to risk a situation where a large number of people die and you can't deal with the bodies and end up getting diseases like typhoid, cholera and dysentery adding to the death toll...
The UN is the sum of its member states, nothing more, nothing less. What the UN is good at or bad at mainly reflects that too.
The problem is that the alternatives are worse: You could dissolve it, of course, but then you would remove a useful organ for peaceful cooperation. You could strengthen it, but that would mean for nations to hand over part of their sovereignty to a body where their enemies and rivals have power too. As it stands, the UN is largely what it can be - it has power where most countries agree, and it has none where there is widespread controversy.
Judging the UN with unrealistic expectations is pointless. Judge its actions on the basis that it is an organisation comitted to bringing together nations regardless of their forms of governments, and regardless if they are oppressive dictatorships. In light of the huge differences between the member states it's a wonder the UN manages to accomplish anything at all.
If Microsoft was a niche player, or even a large but not dominant player, this would not have been an issue.
However in the US, and many other places, it is actually illegal for someone who holds a monopoly in one market to use that dominant position as leverage to grow their market position in another.
The fact that Microsoft has a near monopoly on desktop OS's means that they ARE held to different standards by the courts, and they will face legal risks with everything they do to Windows that might disadvantage someone competing with them in a different market.
It's that way for a reason - a monopoly controlled economy almost inevitably results in higher costs to consumers than one with proper competition.
Except that you can't raise the worlds IQ. You can raise the worlds collective or average intelligence, but IQ specifically is measured as a deviation from the mean, where 100 is the mean.
Actually the blog post happened to be posted to the Google Research blog, but it doesn't say anything about it being limited to Google Research, and points to a generic Google job page... But even in a research environment a lot of the work is "grunt work". If they ship everything like that out, then yes, hiring above the mean could make sense, but if so it's downright misleading to make a big point about it if what it really means is "we hire above the mean in this very specialised little department which depends on lots of support from others".
I assume the point of the poster you replied to is that you shouldn't always hire the best people. Many jobs require little skill, and hiring top skilled people and assigning them gruntwork achieves two things: You pay more than you have to, and those people are likely to leave.
Hiring above the mean makes sense for jobs where a better employee means a potentially higher return for the company - it does not make sense for positions where a better employee means higher costs and no higher return and higher turnover.
In fact, for a large number of positions, it makes sense to look for the weakest candidate that can do the job satisfactorily within reasonable margins, assuming you get a chance to hire them at a matching salary, because such candidates are more likely to have a possible career ladder (and so be more likely to stay) and/or are more likely to stay because it's harder for them to move elsewhere, and are likely to be cheaper than the alternatives.
Even if you're looking purely at developer jobs, if you keep hiring above the mean, it means eventually you'll have people with PhD's and umpteen years experience doing routine maintenance programming for trivial, non-critical systems that you could have safely handed to some intern.
I did actually once work in a company where the director of engineering was shocked to find I could "decrypt" their base64 encoded internal customer id's (knowing the id would allow anyone who held it to set up 30-way conferencing calls to anywhere in the world and leave it hanging - the dumbasses also didn't think about the fact that the id's were allocated in sequence and your own id was visible in the url's when you logged in, so they were trivial to guess anyway)
Which is a pointless argument. In a paper based encyclopedia this matters because there will be limited space and the "important" people and subjects needs to be covered. In Wikipedia it doesn't - if people care enough to write it, they will. If people care enough to look someone up, then it belongs there. The only real reason to be restrictive is for common names where the amount of disambiguation might get too large.
I could forgive them if these fish eel things are swimming all over sub saharan africa but then I would have to say what the hell have they been doing all this time?
The "news" here is that Nature is publishing an article about them - they're well known and have been for ages.
Do you believe that we aren't surrounded by invisible pink unicorns? If not, why?
To many of us, the two questions are equally ridiculous. As long as there are no observations to support either of those ideas, and no clear hypothesis one can make falsifiable predictions from neither deserves any serious consideration.
Really? Care to elaborate? Are you saying that what they allegedly did - none of which have been proven in a court of law - is worse than anything else - like murdering and raping children - for which people do get a proper trial, and that there is no chance that the military have imprisoned the wrong people?
Your premise seems to be that because these people have been imprisoned, they are guilty, but without a trial we have no way of knowing why they are there and whether or not someone had a political agenda or other reasons for putting them there, or simply did shoddy work.
Without offering these people a fair trial, you are no better than what you think they are.
They've learned from the best when it comes to unfair trade practices - does that come as a surprise? The US has been at the forefront of economic protectionism and anti-competitive behaviour designed to give advantages to US companies for the last century at least.
Re:another important thing about Google
on
Google's DNA
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Most CEO's don't own $12B worth of shares in the company they run, or anywhere near that. And in fact when you look at CEO's that DO own a significant chunk of the companies they own, it is pretty common for their salaries to be tiny. Google is certainly not doing anything new in that respect.
Branson has also achieved something even more remarkable: He's managed to keep the Virgin brand trusted and respected despite the fact that a large percentage of the businesses using the brand aren't owned or controlled by Virgin Group any more - he keeps selling off companies on a regular basis as they "grow up" or in order to finance new ventures, and has still managed to ensure none of the new owners have damaged the brand.
Doesn't matter if they remove it. IANAL, but if they put a large number of peoples content (as opposed to small snippets which can be defensible) on a CD and distribute it without verifying either that the copyrightholder has granted a license for it to be used that way, or contacting the copyrightholder to get a license, it is a clear case of copyright infringement and there's no way they'd be able to get a judge to believe it wasn't willful.
The combination of willful copyright infringement and a profit motive == mandatory fines and a high chance of prison.
Unless these guys are very careful about not violating anyones copyright it only takes one party in a case like this to care enough, and they're bankrupt. Perhaps they are, but if so, the idea of the "internet on a harddisk" is far away from the reality of it (as if it wasn't anyway)
No matter. If I'm wrong, nobody loses anything. If I'm right, you lose for eternity. I can't wait to see the stupid look on your faces then. Maybe you can ask a professor to forgive you or something. Or maybe you can sit at the edge of Darwin's grave and ask him.
This is called Pascals wager, and it's flawed for a long list of reasons:
You assume that you believe in the right God. What if the muslims are right? The Jews? The Mormons? Latter day saints? Hindus? Or perhaps you should have believe in the Norse gods, or the gods of some alien race we don't even know about.
You assume that if there is a God that this God has is true to its word, and isn't a sadist bastard kid who decided to to have some fun with that cool new "make your own universe" kit he bought at the corner.
You assume that whichever deity you end up in front of will treat you better than someone who doesn't believe (whether or not it's the "right" deity). For what you know being an atheist might be safer - you have no way of correctly estimating the odds of pissing off a deity based on belief in the wrong deity vs. pissing it off based on not believing.
You assume that whatever "paradise" you assume you might end up in will actually be _your_ idea of something that is better that whatever the alternative might be.
In other words, you're trying to rationalise your belief based on assumptions that you have no basis at all for making.
Personally I take the view that if I'm wrong (I'm an atheist) and I find myself in front of some deity after I die and that deity is unable to accept me for what I am, then that deity is a fascist bastard and certainly isn't worthy of being worshipped - there's no way I am going to be bribed into behaving a certain way to appease some hypothetical oppressive sadist being. I live my life the way I do because I believe it is the right way to live, not looking for rewards.
That said, the problem - since the beginning - with Evolution is that fanatics have tried to use it as evidence that there is no God. ID is a social manifestation of Newton's Third Law, where the fanatics on the other side are trying to prove there is.
I can honestly say that I've never discussed religion with anyone who claimed evolution was evidence that there is no God. I'm an atheist myself, and I don't see evolution that way.
HOWEVER, an understanding of evolution for many lessens their belief in god, because it is yet another explanation that lessens the need for the ultimate "catch all" explanation for "unsolved" mysteries, and as such it's an important fight for many of those that strongly believe.
That doesn't preclude the possibility that someone can put together a coherent, testable, falsifiable theory of intelligent design.
I'm an atheist, but I'd welcome anyone who'd do that. Of course personally I'm confident that any study into the viability of a theory like that would crash and burn. Exactly because of that I think the scientific establishment ought to encourage the ID nuts to submit papers on their "theory" since they insist they're so scientific.
I doubt anyone would take the bait, though, since the ID nuts are very aware that their strength is sowing doubt about science that most people don't understand - the moment they start submitting any research for peer reviews their arguments against peer reviewed science goes poof out the window, and any failure to present credible arguments will cause a barrage of attacks against them.
At the moment they are tough to attack because their "theory" is nebulous at best and any attack is met with a barrage of "we're not saying X, we're saying Y" or the opposite because they are not a homogenous group.
ID does not in any way claim that evolution did not happen, only that it may be the method through which an intelligent entity created us.
Repeat that as many times as you'd like, but fact is a significant part of intelligent design proponents use intelligent design specifically as a tool to try to spread doubt about the validity of the theory of evolution.
Trying to pretend otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest. Which are you?
You're on the completely wrong track. If you focus entirely on providing just the basics, you will fail. A country that cares about nothing but providing food, shelter, clothing and health will see it's economy collapse and it's workforce increasingly consist of people too uneducated to bring in substantial foreign investments or to be able to set up competitive businesses to boost export revenues. Once you start down that spiral, it's self-reinforcing.
I also notice that you obviously do have access to a computer, and the time to post on Slashdot. What gives you the right of speaking on behalf of all of those that don't have that luxury about what their needs are?
And your idea about the US tax system is completely far out there. Most people in the US pay far more than 21% once you've added up federal income tax, state income taxes (for the states that have them), and local taxes (including property taxes etc.). For most working people in the US the total direct tax burden will add up to more like 25%-30% unless they're on extremely low salaries or live in extremely low tax areas.
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Even so, in criminal matters, the ability of an appeals court to refer a case back to a lower court is VERY restricted - generally it would apply to misapplications of the law where the appeals court decides to direct the lower court rather than make a full judgement itself.
In any case, in most European countries, double jeopardy refers to the governments general inability to start a new case against you on the basis of the same crime.
In other words, nothing stops either part from appealing a case to the highest available court, as long as the appeals are properly made within the (very limited) time windows allowed. Those appeals are considered parts of the same case.
Generally, the number of courts involved is small, and there is no opportunity from endlessly requesting retrials. In the UK it's generally "worst case" Magistrates, Crown court, High court OR Court of Appeals (not both) and (rarely) finally House of Lords at the discretion of whichever court made the last judgement. Furthermore, each step up in the system generally restricts the grounds of appeal and what you can appeal and to what court.
A superior court (all courts except the Magistrates and Crown court UNLESS it's a jury trial in which case the Crown court is also a superior court) is unlikely to hear the facts of a case again, for instance. It will be more likely to hear questions of law only.
Also, in the UK a magistrates will in serious cases (like murder etc.) only decide practical matters like bail and refer a case directly to the Crown Court, and a defendant can also demand a jury, in which case the case will be moved straight to the Crown Court.
So in practice, you can "skip a step". In practice, however, as in this case most people who have the choice choose to be tried before a magistrates first, because even though it leaves the Crown Prosecution Service (equivalent to the US DA's) one more appeals opportunity, it also leaves the defendant with one more appeals opportunity.
If Microsofts wants to support ODF, and needs more features, all they'd have to do is propose extensions and present a well founded argument for why they should be allowed. They haven't.
In essence, Microsoft likes to whine about this, because it serves their purpose to keep ODF adoption rates down, but they show no interest in doing anything about it.
The UK has 60 million inhabitants, not 6 million... So it's 0.5%, not 5%.
And if you bother to read the articles you've linked, you'll find that in the case of the UK, how to handle burials is being discussed in addition to Tamiflu and vaccines as a precautionary measure - you really don't want to risk a situation where a large number of people die and you can't deal with the bodies and end up getting diseases like typhoid, cholera and dysentery adding to the death toll...
The problem is that the alternatives are worse: You could dissolve it, of course, but then you would remove a useful organ for peaceful cooperation. You could strengthen it, but that would mean for nations to hand over part of their sovereignty to a body where their enemies and rivals have power too. As it stands, the UN is largely what it can be - it has power where most countries agree, and it has none where there is widespread controversy.
Judging the UN with unrealistic expectations is pointless. Judge its actions on the basis that it is an organisation comitted to bringing together nations regardless of their forms of governments, and regardless if they are oppressive dictatorships. In light of the huge differences between the member states it's a wonder the UN manages to accomplish anything at all.
If Microsoft was a niche player, or even a large but not dominant player, this would not have been an issue.
However in the US, and many other places, it is actually illegal for someone who holds a monopoly in one market to use that dominant position as leverage to grow their market position in another.
The fact that Microsoft has a near monopoly on desktop OS's means that they ARE held to different standards by the courts, and they will face legal risks with everything they do to Windows that might disadvantage someone competing with them in a different market.
It's that way for a reason - a monopoly controlled economy almost inevitably results in higher costs to consumers than one with proper competition.
Except that you can't raise the worlds IQ. You can raise the worlds collective or average intelligence, but IQ specifically is measured as a deviation from the mean, where 100 is the mean.
Hiring above the mean makes sense for jobs where a better employee means a potentially higher return for the company - it does not make sense for positions where a better employee means higher costs and no higher return and higher turnover.
In fact, for a large number of positions, it makes sense to look for the weakest candidate that can do the job satisfactorily within reasonable margins, assuming you get a chance to hire them at a matching salary, because such candidates are more likely to have a possible career ladder (and so be more likely to stay) and/or are more likely to stay because it's harder for them to move elsewhere, and are likely to be cheaper than the alternatives.
Even if you're looking purely at developer jobs, if you keep hiring above the mean, it means eventually you'll have people with PhD's and umpteen years experience doing routine maintenance programming for trivial, non-critical systems that you could have safely handed to some intern.
You conveniently ignore the fact that "byte" is NOT a SI unit, and hence the prefix definitions for the metric system has no relevance.
I did actually once work in a company where the director of engineering was shocked to find I could "decrypt" their base64 encoded internal customer id's (knowing the id would allow anyone who held it to set up 30-way conferencing calls to anywhere in the world and leave it hanging - the dumbasses also didn't think about the fact that the id's were allocated in sequence and your own id was visible in the url's when you logged in, so they were trivial to guess anyway)
Which is a pointless argument. In a paper based encyclopedia this matters because there will be limited space and the "important" people and subjects needs to be covered. In Wikipedia it doesn't - if people care enough to write it, they will. If people care enough to look someone up, then it belongs there. The only real reason to be restrictive is for common names where the amount of disambiguation might get too large.
The "news" here is that Nature is publishing an article about them - they're well known and have been for ages.
To many of us, the two questions are equally ridiculous. As long as there are no observations to support either of those ideas, and no clear hypothesis one can make falsifiable predictions from neither deserves any serious consideration.
Your premise seems to be that because these people have been imprisoned, they are guilty, but without a trial we have no way of knowing why they are there and whether or not someone had a political agenda or other reasons for putting them there, or simply did shoddy work.
Without offering these people a fair trial, you are no better than what you think they are.
They've learned from the best when it comes to unfair trade practices - does that come as a surprise? The US has been at the forefront of economic protectionism and anti-competitive behaviour designed to give advantages to US companies for the last century at least.
Most CEO's don't own $12B worth of shares in the company they run, or anywhere near that. And in fact when you look at CEO's that DO own a significant chunk of the companies they own, it is pretty common for their salaries to be tiny. Google is certainly not doing anything new in that respect.
The combination of willful copyright infringement and a profit motive == mandatory fines and a high chance of prison.
Unless these guys are very careful about not violating anyones copyright it only takes one party in a case like this to care enough, and they're bankrupt. Perhaps they are, but if so, the idea of the "internet on a harddisk" is far away from the reality of it (as if it wasn't anyway)
This is called Pascals wager, and it's flawed for a long list of reasons:
In other words, you're trying to rationalise your belief based on assumptions that you have no basis at all for making.
Personally I take the view that if I'm wrong (I'm an atheist) and I find myself in front of some deity after I die and that deity is unable to accept me for what I am, then that deity is a fascist bastard and certainly isn't worthy of being worshipped - there's no way I am going to be bribed into behaving a certain way to appease some hypothetical oppressive sadist being. I live my life the way I do because I believe it is the right way to live, not looking for rewards.
I can honestly say that I've never discussed religion with anyone who claimed evolution was evidence that there is no God. I'm an atheist myself, and I don't see evolution that way.
HOWEVER, an understanding of evolution for many lessens their belief in god, because it is yet another explanation that lessens the need for the ultimate "catch all" explanation for "unsolved" mysteries, and as such it's an important fight for many of those that strongly believe.
I'm an atheist, but I'd welcome anyone who'd do that. Of course personally I'm confident that any study into the viability of a theory like that would crash and burn. Exactly because of that I think the scientific establishment ought to encourage the ID nuts to submit papers on their "theory" since they insist they're so scientific.
I doubt anyone would take the bait, though, since the ID nuts are very aware that their strength is sowing doubt about science that most people don't understand - the moment they start submitting any research for peer reviews their arguments against peer reviewed science goes poof out the window, and any failure to present credible arguments will cause a barrage of attacks against them.
At the moment they are tough to attack because their "theory" is nebulous at best and any attack is met with a barrage of "we're not saying X, we're saying Y" or the opposite because they are not a homogenous group.
Repeat that as many times as you'd like, but fact is a significant part of intelligent design proponents use intelligent design specifically as a tool to try to spread doubt about the validity of the theory of evolution.
Trying to pretend otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest. Which are you?
I also notice that you obviously do have access to a computer, and the time to post on Slashdot. What gives you the right of speaking on behalf of all of those that don't have that luxury about what their needs are?
And your idea about the US tax system is completely far out there. Most people in the US pay far more than 21% once you've added up federal income tax, state income taxes (for the states that have them), and local taxes (including property taxes etc.). For most working people in the US the total direct tax burden will add up to more like 25%-30% unless they're on extremely low salaries or live in extremely low tax areas.
Who elected you spokesperson of a couple of billion people?