It's time somebody went back to their high school civics course...
"You ever hear the U.S. Supreme court, or a state supreme court, or the federal Circuit Court of *Appeals*, or a state appellate court? These are all appellate courts and there for *both* sides if either side doesn't feel it got a fair shake."
No, they're only there for the defendant. An appeal counts as a new trial. On top of that, the US Supreme Court is only the highest court in federal matters and/or matters explicitly allowed by Article III and not forbidden by the Eleventh Amendment.
"If you're talking about double jeopardy, it only applies if a government actor tries to retry someone for the same criminal act after already going through the entire appeals process."
nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb
It doesn't matter if the suspect is acquitted in the lowliest state court, the US Constitution explicitly states the way state and/or federal prosecutors can sit on it and rotate.
"but since the State and the Federal government both have sovreignty over you, then you are subject to separate prosecution by both governments."
Of course, this can only happen if the feds have jurisdiction over the crime, and federal jurisdiction is seriously curtailed (or at least it was...) by the constitution. For example, the only reason the feds were able to try Ernest Avants for murder after he was acquitted in Mississippi almost 40 years ago is because the murder took place in a national forest.
" In Europe you can't buy the judge or impress the jury to get the verdict you wanted."
In Norway, judges are appointed by the king. In the US federal government, they're appointed by the president with the consent of the "states." Not much difference between the two, but I think I prefer the system with some sort of official oversight, especially when the one appointing judges is also the one in charge of law enforcement.
In the US federal government, every citizen has the constitutionally guaranteed right to a trial by a jury of their peers, and they get to haggle with the prosecutor to make the fairest jury possible. There are no jury trials in Norway, with everything decided by the judge. I guess it's just a silly English concept, but again I'd rather go with the side that has oversight, going again back to the way the judge and prosecutor are (at least nominally) working for the same person.
In the United States, once acquitted, the person cannot be tried again for the same crime. Protection from double jeopardy is another legal concept foreign to Norway.
"Old but sane legal system."
Just about any way you cut it, the US legal system is older than Norway's. Denmark more or less gave Norway to Sweden in 1814, and only really became an independent country in 1905. The US federal legal system has been in continuous operation since at least 1789.
"They would rather skim page after page to find what they are looking for."
I've been using computers since I was 5 or so, and I'm sorry but I find flipping through a book both faster and easier than going through a long document.
Sure, a computer can find all the instances of a particular word in a document than I can, but what if I'm looking for something more? Suppose I'm looking for a concept for which there are multiple ways the author could have expressed it? Should I get a thesaurus and look up each and every similie I can find, or should I just flip to the back and peruse the index?
On top of that, the listings in the index are often better than those you'd find using electronic methods. More often than not I'm looking for a topic, not every instance of a word.
You can't get distracted by other interesting topics while trying to weed your way through a long computer file.
You can't stick your finger in a computer file and come back to it later.
Paper doesn't require batteries and is more often than not lighter than the lightest notebook PC.
"It's also cool to have enormous filing cabinets and binders that hold documentation that is never referenced instead of storing it all on an archival CD-ROM."
Am I to understand that you're volunteering to go through my filing cabinets and convert everything to PDFs for me?
Besides, there are always computer file format issues, even among text editors. "I'll just open this README file in Notepad... Whoops, they're not using the right CR character, I better go to the command line and enter EDIT instead."
"and anything that makes other manufacturers look bad will help them gain marketshare."
I don't care if Dell printers are God's gift to inkjets, it's going to take more than that to make up for those crappy Conexant winmodems in my eyes...
"Plus, you get alot of extra strips of paper with the perforated tracks, which you can use to make nests for some of the local fauna!"
I find they're very good for building a fire. Of course, I found this out mostly because the printer in question was kept in a cold basement with only a cast-iron wood stove for heat...
"I mean seriously, why do people cling to such an outdated technology? When it comes to documents why not just print to PDF and email it?"
Because PayPal both costs more money and takes more time than putting $0.37 postage on an envelope with a personal check inside of it.
Because PDFs make lousy shipping labels.
Because the easiest way I can think of to ensure nobody has a digital copy of my signature is to not digitize it to begin with.
Because distributing a shared key via e-mail defeats the purpose.
Because, while signed e-mail requires you to dig up a hopefully trustworthy key host, Certified Mail is Certified Mail.
Because e-mail just doesn't have the same feel of importance that regular mail does. Especially when writing to elected officials.
And last, but not least: Because those IBIs used as postage just look so damn cool. I swear, PC Postage is pretty much the main reason I even have a printer these days...
"If people in America started demanding Bush hold an election tommorrow would it make him a dictator to say 'wait till the next scheduled elections'?"
Bush hasn't pushed through a constitutional amendment lengthening his own term. Perhaps there wouldn't be a need for a referendum if elections were next held according to the original schedule.
"Bush was pretty delighted at the replacement of the elected president with a dictator."
In Chavez' case, it's a very, very fine line between the two. I feel there's something inherently wrong with extending your own term limits. And then there's the way he's been handling strike leaders lately...
Re:# of exceptions it takes to disprove a rule?
on
Half Mast
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· Score: 2, Funny
"For some people, 2 + 2 = 22"
So people who forget to declare 2 to be a number instead of a string are considered crazy?
""You cannot take a national market like this and have 51 jurisdictions make a study and come up with any pattern that will drive consistency in the industry," Seidenberg said."
Personally, I'd rather see "competitiveness" rather than "consistency." Consistency doesn't do a damn thing for me when the standard is set as low as it is. If the states want to massage their own lines in order to make their markets more competitive and more attractive to businesses considering setting up shop, more power to them.
"Seidenberg predicted that the FCC - as it has twice before - would lose again when the courts ultimately rule on the new policies."
So... um... in other words, they'll strike down the victory Verizon got in the DSL market? Cool!
Or is Verizon crying about having to go to the various states to beg for their monopoly rights? If so, I hope the courts recall the Tenth Amendment.
"then someone like SBC will come along, offer the government entity a nice short-term payout to manage the loops for them in exchange for exclusive service rights, and freedom to set fees, much like cable tv "franchises" are."
Hence the legislation I mentioned requiring that such contractors are not allowed to offer services on said wires for the duration fo the contract. And the government wouldn't be able to give them exclusive service rights to begin with because they are ultimately not the customers.
"Somehow, the RBOCs, or what is left of them, need to be forcibly split into services and network companies. Like split WAY apart."
Past experience with the split between local and long-distance shows that such a split won't last more more than 30 years tops.
"I'm all for deregulation, but not unless the entire thing is deregulated"
Not feasable. Only government has the power of eminent domain, the ability to require property owners to sell in order to better the condition of the area. What you're calling for would either mean that nobody gets to run any lines anywhere, or everybody gets to run lines everywhere. Allowing only one line to be run is a compromise between the right to own property and the right to have access to a competitive market.
"it must be possible for new companies to lay their own copper or run their own wireless WAN's without government regulating what lines can go where"
Then where, praytell, will all these wires be run? If I'm getting telephone service off of Wire A, why should I let Wire B run a line through my yard? The only way your suggestion would work would be to force property owners to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry with a twisted pair access to privately-owned areas. And you call yourself a libertarian?
"Don't do a California-style partial deregulation in which some parties are forced out of business due to the government's stepping on some necks but not others."
The recent lawsuits and evidence against price-fixing power companies during that time suggests that the laws in and of themselves weren't the only cause of the problem.
"If the government suddenly owned all the copper and ran all the DSL lines, we'd be stuck with lowest-common-denominator access."
You're confusing phsycal lines with service. The idea is to give control of the last-mile loops to the state or local governments, who in turn allow any service provider of your choice to provide services to you across that loop. The idea is to give government control of the roads, not the trucks that drive on them.
Instead of giving the RBOCs de facto ownership of the local loops, the state and/or local governments should own them and delegate actual construction to the lowest bidders and maintenance should be taken care of by year-to-year service contracts. Legislation should be in place to ensure that no business that obtains either a construction or maintenance contract can also offer services on those loops in order to prevent the conflicts of interest we have today. Problem solved.
"while Uncle Sam reaches into my wallet for some extra cash to subsidize access for people unwilling to pay the cost of it."
Something, coinsidentally, that hasn't happened with the USPS for a few decades now. Not that that is really a fitting analogy or anything...
"Fuck them: I did well in school and work hard and should get something extra for that. DSL IS NOT A RIGHT!"
Sheesh, talk about your knee-jerk reactions. DSL isn't a right, but lines capable of providing DSL service is a necessity in this day and age. I shouldn't be getting electricity for free, but I as a tax-payer should have power lines connected to my house so that I can buy electricity. This is one of the roles of government.
"12 weeks to Mars. And -- last time I looked -- Mars was somewhere."
Except that Pioneer 10 didn't go anywhere near Mars on its mission to Jupiter and Saturn. Mars was ~3.5 AU away, practically on the other side of the sun when Pioneer passed through its orbit.
"EchoStar and Bell should have gone with the guys that worked on that satellite..."
Apples and oranges. More like apples and rocks. First off, your metaphor breaks down as soon as you describe Pioneer 10 as a "satellite." It is most definately not a satellite.
Communications satellites are put into earth-orbit with more transponders than you'd care to shake a stick at, its intention being to relay as many communications signals as it can back and forth between ground-based stations. Pioneer was built with one transmitter to beam back periodic signals.
Communications satellites aren't built to last much longer than a few years to begin with. There is no reason to design one to last more than a dozen years or so when communications technology will outstrip the capabilities of the satellite in that time, requiring a replacement. It took Pioneer over a year just to get anywhere.
Communications satellites are only 8.5 light-minutes or so from the sun, so there isn't any reason to put a more durable or expensive power supply on them beyond solar panels and batteries for night-time operation. Jupiter alone is more than four times that distance away, and the technology limitations of the time required a (much) more durable atomic solution.
Geostationary satellites have to deal with those pesky laws of physics that dictate that they will always eventually fall out of orbit. Sure, they don't have to deal with atomspheric drag like LEO objects, but momentum transfer is still an issue. Pioneer isn't a satellite in the remotest sense of the word: It's obviously beyond escape velocity for our solar system, which means it will never come back.
"Pioneer went through the asteroid belt"
Lay off the Star Wars. Mass density in that region isn't anywhere near what Hollywood thinks it is. Space debris in earth orbit poses a far greater hazard than passing through the main asteroid belt.
"Can't we build reliable satellites of yesteryear?"
The true "satellites of yesteryear" aren't there any more. Try and find three US satellites still in earth orbit that were launched before, say, 1985.
Now, if you want to talk about space probes, why would we build another Pioneer or even a Voyager when we could build another Magellan or Galileo?
"Interestingly enough, the students approached the spammers about this scheme and not vice-versa."
Let's see... For just enough to cover the cost of the average ISP, these students are opening themselves up to litigation from the university for violating their network policies (could be considered cracking), state anti-spam laws, and federal anti-junk-fax laws? I can see two possibilities:
They're art majors
They're ivy-league law majors
I mean, come on! If these are supposed to be college students, I fear for our future. Heck, drinking yourself to alchohol poisoning is smarter than that.
Writing at times can be, but reading is an interaction between the reader and the author. Simply because the relationship between the two can seem one-sided doesn't mean that one of the two participants isn't needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Would that be Private Memory Allocation?
"You ever hear the U.S. Supreme court, or a state supreme court, or the federal Circuit Court of *Appeals*, or a state appellate court? These are all appellate courts and there for *both* sides if either side doesn't feel it got a fair shake."
No, they're only there for the defendant. An appeal counts as a new trial. On top of that, the US Supreme Court is only the highest court in federal matters and/or matters explicitly allowed by Article III and not forbidden by the Eleventh Amendment.
"If you're talking about double jeopardy, it only applies if a government actor tries to retry someone for the same criminal act after already going through the entire appeals process." It doesn't matter if the suspect is acquitted in the lowliest state court, the US Constitution explicitly states the way state and/or federal prosecutors can sit on it and rotate.
"but since the State and the Federal government both have sovreignty over you, then you are subject to separate prosecution by both governments."
Of course, this can only happen if the feds have jurisdiction over the crime, and federal jurisdiction is seriously curtailed (or at least it was...) by the constitution. For example, the only reason the feds were able to try Ernest Avants for murder after he was acquitted in Mississippi almost 40 years ago is because the murder took place in a national forest.
" In Europe you can't buy the judge or impress the jury to get the verdict you wanted."
In Norway, judges are appointed by the king. In the US federal government, they're appointed by the president with the consent of the "states." Not much difference between the two, but I think I prefer the system with some sort of official oversight, especially when the one appointing judges is also the one in charge of law enforcement.
In the US federal government, every citizen has the constitutionally guaranteed right to a trial by a jury of their peers, and they get to haggle with the prosecutor to make the fairest jury possible. There are no jury trials in Norway, with everything decided by the judge. I guess it's just a silly English concept, but again I'd rather go with the side that has oversight, going again back to the way the judge and prosecutor are (at least nominally) working for the same person.
In the United States, once acquitted, the person cannot be tried again for the same crime. Protection from double jeopardy is another legal concept foreign to Norway.
"Old but sane legal system."
Just about any way you cut it, the US legal system is older than Norway's. Denmark more or less gave Norway to Sweden in 1814, and only really became an independent country in 1905. The US federal legal system has been in continuous operation since at least 1789.
"They would rather skim page after page to find what they are looking for."
I've been using computers since I was 5 or so, and I'm sorry but I find flipping through a book both faster and easier than going through a long document.
Sure, a computer can find all the instances of a particular word in a document than I can, but what if I'm looking for something more? Suppose I'm looking for a concept for which there are multiple ways the author could have expressed it? Should I get a thesaurus and look up each and every similie I can find, or should I just flip to the back and peruse the index?
On top of that, the listings in the index are often better than those you'd find using electronic methods. More often than not I'm looking for a topic, not every instance of a word.
You can't get distracted by other interesting topics while trying to weed your way through a long computer file.
You can't stick your finger in a computer file and come back to it later.
Paper doesn't require batteries and is more often than not lighter than the lightest notebook PC.
"It's also cool to have enormous filing cabinets and binders that hold documentation that is never referenced instead of storing it all on an archival CD-ROM."
Am I to understand that you're volunteering to go through my filing cabinets and convert everything to PDFs for me?
Besides, there are always computer file format issues, even among text editors. "I'll just open this README file in Notepad... Whoops, they're not using the right CR character, I better go to the command line and enter EDIT instead."
"and anything that makes other manufacturers look bad will help them gain marketshare."
I don't care if Dell printers are God's gift to inkjets, it's going to take more than that to make up for those crappy Conexant winmodems in my eyes...
"Plus, you get alot of extra strips of paper with the perforated tracks, which you can use to make nests for some of the local fauna!"
I find they're very good for building a fire. Of course, I found this out mostly because the printer in question was kept in a cold basement with only a cast-iron wood stove for heat...
"If people in America started demanding Bush hold an election tommorrow would it make him a dictator to say 'wait till the next scheduled elections'?"
Bush hasn't pushed through a constitutional amendment lengthening his own term. Perhaps there wouldn't be a need for a referendum if elections were next held according to the original schedule.
"Bush was pretty delighted at the replacement of the elected president with a dictator."
In Chavez' case, it's a very, very fine line between the two. I feel there's something inherently wrong with extending your own term limits. And then there's the way he's been handling strike leaders lately...
"For some people, 2 + 2 = 22"
So people who forget to declare 2 to be a number instead of a string are considered crazy?
"Why do we have things like Columbine nowadays when these things were unheard of 30 years ago?"
Because it took them that long to figure out that the gun could be pointed at somebody other than themselves.
""You cannot take a national market like this and have 51 jurisdictions make a study and come up with any pattern that will drive consistency in the industry," Seidenberg said."
Personally, I'd rather see "competitiveness" rather than "consistency." Consistency doesn't do a damn thing for me when the standard is set as low as it is. If the states want to massage their own lines in order to make their markets more competitive and more attractive to businesses considering setting up shop, more power to them.
"Seidenberg predicted that the FCC - as it has twice before - would lose again when the courts ultimately rule on the new policies."
So... um... in other words, they'll strike down the victory Verizon got in the DSL market? Cool!
Or is Verizon crying about having to go to the various states to beg for their monopoly rights? If so, I hope the courts recall the Tenth Amendment.
"But can it get past the telephone answering machine I use to screen my calls, at the caller's expense?"
How do you convince them to pay for your local telephone service as well? If they're able to call you, you're obviously paying that particular bill...
"then someone like SBC will come along, offer the government entity a nice short-term payout to manage the loops for them in exchange for exclusive service rights, and freedom to set fees, much like cable tv "franchises" are."
Hence the legislation I mentioned requiring that such contractors are not allowed to offer services on said wires for the duration fo the contract. And the government wouldn't be able to give them exclusive service rights to begin with because they are ultimately not the customers.
"Somehow, the RBOCs, or what is left of them, need to be forcibly split into services and network companies. Like split WAY apart."
Past experience with the split between local and long-distance shows that such a split won't last more more than 30 years tops.
"Now I'm going to get calls from "President Bush""
I got enough of those during election season last year. Apparently he needed my help or something.
"I'm all for deregulation, but not unless the entire thing is deregulated"
Not feasable. Only government has the power of eminent domain, the ability to require property owners to sell in order to better the condition of the area. What you're calling for would either mean that nobody gets to run any lines anywhere, or everybody gets to run lines everywhere. Allowing only one line to be run is a compromise between the right to own property and the right to have access to a competitive market.
"it must be possible for new companies to lay their own copper or run their own wireless WAN's without government regulating what lines can go where"
Then where, praytell, will all these wires be run? If I'm getting telephone service off of Wire A, why should I let Wire B run a line through my yard? The only way your suggestion would work would be to force property owners to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry with a twisted pair access to privately-owned areas. And you call yourself a libertarian?
"Don't do a California-style partial deregulation in which some parties are forced out of business due to the government's stepping on some necks but not others."
The recent lawsuits and evidence against price-fixing power companies during that time suggests that the laws in and of themselves weren't the only cause of the problem.
"If the government suddenly owned all the copper and ran all the DSL lines, we'd be stuck with lowest-common-denominator access."
You're confusing phsycal lines with service. The idea is to give control of the last-mile loops to the state or local governments, who in turn allow any service provider of your choice to provide services to you across that loop. The idea is to give government control of the roads, not the trucks that drive on them.
Instead of giving the RBOCs de facto ownership of the local loops, the state and/or local governments should own them and delegate actual construction to the lowest bidders and maintenance should be taken care of by year-to-year service contracts. Legislation should be in place to ensure that no business that obtains either a construction or maintenance contract can also offer services on those loops in order to prevent the conflicts of interest we have today. Problem solved.
"while Uncle Sam reaches into my wallet for some extra cash to subsidize access for people unwilling to pay the cost of it."
Something, coinsidentally, that hasn't happened with the USPS for a few decades now. Not that that is really a fitting analogy or anything...
"Fuck them: I did well in school and work hard and should get something extra for that. DSL IS NOT A RIGHT!"
Sheesh, talk about your knee-jerk reactions. DSL isn't a right, but lines capable of providing DSL service is a necessity in this day and age. I shouldn't be getting electricity for free, but I as a tax-payer should have power lines connected to my house so that I can buy electricity. This is one of the roles of government.
"12 weeks to Mars. And -- last time I looked -- Mars was somewhere."
Except that Pioneer 10 didn't go anywhere near Mars on its mission to Jupiter and Saturn. Mars was ~3.5 AU away, practically on the other side of the sun when Pioneer passed through its orbit.
"Because you can ruin them before you even knew what happened."
Which reminds me: You have a bicycle helmet. Use it.
"EchoStar and Bell should have gone with the guys that worked on that satellite..."
Apples and oranges. More like apples and rocks. First off, your metaphor breaks down as soon as you describe Pioneer 10 as a "satellite." It is most definately not a satellite.
Communications satellites are put into earth-orbit with more transponders than you'd care to shake a stick at, its intention being to relay as many communications signals as it can back and forth between ground-based stations. Pioneer was built with one transmitter to beam back periodic signals.
Communications satellites aren't built to last much longer than a few years to begin with. There is no reason to design one to last more than a dozen years or so when communications technology will outstrip the capabilities of the satellite in that time, requiring a replacement. It took Pioneer over a year just to get anywhere.
Communications satellites are only 8.5 light-minutes or so from the sun, so there isn't any reason to put a more durable or expensive power supply on them beyond solar panels and batteries for night-time operation. Jupiter alone is more than four times that distance away, and the technology limitations of the time required a (much) more durable atomic solution.
Geostationary satellites have to deal with those pesky laws of physics that dictate that they will always eventually fall out of orbit. Sure, they don't have to deal with atomspheric drag like LEO objects, but momentum transfer is still an issue. Pioneer isn't a satellite in the remotest sense of the word: It's obviously beyond escape velocity for our solar system, which means it will never come back.
"Pioneer went through the asteroid belt"
Lay off the Star Wars. Mass density in that region isn't anywhere near what Hollywood thinks it is. Space debris in earth orbit poses a far greater hazard than passing through the main asteroid belt.
"Can't we build reliable satellites of yesteryear?"
The true "satellites of yesteryear" aren't there any more. Try and find three US satellites still in earth orbit that were launched before, say, 1985.
Now, if you want to talk about space probes, why would we build another Pioneer or even a Voyager when we could build another Magellan or Galileo?
Let's see... For just enough to cover the cost of the average ISP, these students are opening themselves up to litigation from the university for violating their network policies (could be considered cracking), state anti-spam laws, and federal anti-junk-fax laws? I can see two possibilities:
- They're art majors
- They're ivy-league law majors
I mean, come on! If these are supposed to be college students, I fear for our future. Heck, drinking yourself to alchohol poisoning is smarter than that."For example, Thermos is a noun but it used to be a trademark of the Aladdin corporation."
Who, in turn, were sued by Shahrazad violating one of her trademarks...
Smurfy!
"All reading is mental masturbation."
Writing at times can be, but reading is an interaction between the reader and the author. Simply because the relationship between the two can seem one-sided doesn't mean that one of the two participants isn't needed.
"they just respawn like you would in an FPS."
I would hope the Prime Intellect would be smart enough to make sure they don't respawn near campers...