Yeah, judges and politicians are lawyers generally as well.
What I oppose, is the abiity of the rich to purchase a better lawyer to represent THIER PERSON.
Companies, States, and Freedoms need proxies to speak for them. I'm not opposed to proxies speaking on behalf of abstractions. I am opposed to the rich buying themselves an unequal slice of the justice pie.
or conversely the poor getting a thiner slice.
The business of lawyering is not present in all historic systems. Socrates had to answer for himself. Like a draft which takes rich and poor alike - self representation has a more egalitarian appeal for me. Aditionally, we would tailor our laws to be more understandable if it were necessary for them to be understood.
Experiences. Right now I'm defending myself after being arrested for picking up litter.
Our state, like most counts Street Spam as illegal litter, but the local sheriff - who won his election on $10,000 worth of street spam thinks otherwise - so he arrested my on a law from 2 centuries ago - knowing its litter, but hoping i would plead out rather than pony up for a lawyer or risk a half year in jail for picking up litter.
Local DA has 600 cases per session, and only ever gets to the cases that plead.
- Pro Bono - I like the idea of service taxes. I think we should all contribute to this country in work rather than money because work cannot be expatriated like jobs and money.
Are you suggesting in that one week, we have reversed the state of affairs in which the rich get a different level of justice than the poor? That's great news - i hadn't realized. Be sure the minorities released from death row on the basis of DNA tests know that we've fixed the system.
Doctors don't make medicine more expensive (Lawyers do) Librarians don't make books more expensive. Programmers don't make software more expensive - they make it more available. Lawyers do not make justiice more available - they make it more elite - less abailable, more expensive, and more likely to produce positive outcome for rich clients.
Life is complicated. OK - and we have a great country because we have a bteer system of justice than the rest of the world - if you're a lawyer and you're looking for cudos - that's it. That said, The justice system is good, the lawyers are the least good part, and the role of lawyers is to tilt the table for the rich - that should be criticised.
"Vehicles in the park" easy: adopt a legal dictionary - use it when you write the law, and use the same one when you interpret it. If there is a disagreement about the definition of bike - you give the benefit of the doubt to the non-moving party.
Derived from the "Law of the Kings"
That's right - there is a difference between the "Rule" of law, and the "Rule" of a person, be it a king, czar, priest. If the King decides to adopt a system of "law" this is an excellent choice. But Laws predate the English King. Presumably they predate the Ten Commandments since Moses didn't need to explain the meaning to the jews. A Rigid system of law is fair, which the rule of a king, absent such a system is capricious. Laws can exists in combination with Presidents, kings, directors, the question really is which of the two prevail in a conflict. If the King can render a unique judgement in a given case, than the law is merely a decoration of monarchy, but if the king is prevented by the law, or more important, if the army is likely to consult the law before carrying out an order, then we have the rule of law. In practice, most systems of law are executed as systems of human authority with checks and balances.
A lawyer, like a priest, is a person tasked with explaining a forign tongue - a job rendered unecessisary by translators and school teachers. A literate society with access to translation has much less dependance of priests.
The counter prosecuter's job is to defend the constitution - or the public's interest in a system of rights and immunities and should balance the efforts of the DA to provide a 1:1 ratio of crimes to people in prison without too much concern with who did what.
The purpose of the CP is to compliment a system of justic in which every person is judged by an even playing field. If the state spends a dollar accusing, the CP should spend a dollar showing why the state may be trampling rights. No one should go to prison or not based substantially on the size of their purse, with respect to the size of the state's purse.
The fact that I cannot understand the tax code - for example - if my wife were from Mexico and we sent support to her family - that would be deductable, hoowever; she is from Kiev, and as such the support we provide is not deductable. I don't understand how that and the fourteenth amendment can exist inside the same legal system.
- Is no reason to justify making the rest of my life incomprehensible.
Law = equality. Law is the alternative to the rule of Kings, tyrants, dictators, overlords, knights, fiefs, sherrifs, priests, prophets, judges, and in so many words - "men".
"men" tend to favor some at the expense of others and use the capricious and arbitrary natuure of ruling by continuim - or in short "making up the rules as they go."
Law - on the other hand is the idea that the rules are written in the language of the people and they are only held to answer for rules which are published prior to the actions taken. It is in a word - intended to make every person an equal.
Lawyers - as a practice - enable a government to create overly complicated rules - which in the end eroode the purpose of the law - which is that people are entitled to be informed of the rules before being held to answer for their failure to keep them.
Lawyers inform only the people who can afford their service, and they defend (generally) those in porportion to their ability to pay. One reason we watch celebrity justice is because we know that with enough money, the guilty rich will be treated better than the innocent poor.
So in the final analysis, the lawyers role in the justice system is to improve the odds that poor black men will be put to death for crimes committed by rich white guys.
Kind of like punishing the dog if someone farts.
Until the system treats rich and poor, black and white "exactly and precisely" the same - it is more accurate to say that the legal system is an institution for upholding classism than to point to the rare and elegant exceptions - such as thurgood marshall and a few pro-bono cases - and say that it is otherwise.
I'm not opposed to lawyers assisting their clients - but I am very much opposed to a legal system which is built for the benefit of lawyers and treats them as a priveledged class. Lawyers should be treated like interpreters - there for that purpose, but otherwise ignored.
The Counter-prosecuter. It is a public defender, but not a personal defender. The counter-prosecutor would be elected and approved by the legislator, and would be made up of constitutional types like the ACLU who would argue in every case for the Constitution.
"The people" he might say "Have a vested interest in protecting the right of free speech - in this case, the prosecutor has arrested a man for walking on a flag - but the Constitution intends to protect the act of opposing government - even when it is distasteful and unpopular - I recommend the court dismiss this case as protected speech etc . . . "
Or as in your example "Your honor, the defendant has a verified alabi, and it is not in the interest of justice for us to put a man to death when there is any lingering doubt as to his guilt - if we do, there will come a day when we are wrong, and the result will be a declining willingness to punish criminals."
As it is - we the public rely to heavily on a few rich people to excersize the rights in the Constitution.
IRS people are people with secure government jobs, bennies, healthcare etc who are involved in taking money away from people whose job, or the profitable part of it anyway, has been exported to guatemala, their healthcare costs are staggering, and they have decided to put off having kids until the economy improves.
Meanwhile IRS employees can pretty much do as they like without concern for the problems caused by the government they nurse from.
Without "Lawyers" as a special breed and a distict language, The business of sorting out who is right and wrong would by necessity be conducted, not in latin, but in the same language as the people, who by all reckoning, are charged with understanding the law in the first place.
The purpose of law is to create equality.
The purpose of lawyers is to create priveledge for rich people.
Lawyers are an anathima to the law.
In criminal cases, the interest of freedom should be representated by an independant counter-prosector. The defendant should speak for himself or not as he chooses. But every defendant should have the same counter-prosecutor.
Counting, at least in low numbers, seems to be intrinsic to most higher mammals
Let's suggest that counting low numbers isn't even "counting" as in a scaler system of indexing elements in a potentially unlimited set, but rather a limited extension of pattern matching.
Pattern matching, as an intrisic function, will yield some similarities to counting at the low end, but quickly erodes into approximation.
Actual counting however yields the same degree of dissonence when one fails to balance the checkbook by a penny, whether there are two or two million pennies in the account.
In some respects, literal counting can be an impediment to understanding expressions of large quantities.
Perhaps we are educating kids who can exhibit the symtoms of counting, but in reality have no better understanding of the concept of numbers than do these hottentots.
Most Americans it is said, can understand the value of money up to a few hundred thousand dollars, but are largely overwhelmed by discussions of the federal budget. An 8 Billion dollar expenditure or a trillion dollars of debt is probably well outside the point at which they simple drop the number into the "many" bucket.
In other words, even in this culture, we have a limited grasp of numbers as an infinite scaler system.
We tend to have experiences with numbers, $1 buys an icecream, $1,000 buys a cheap car, $100,000 buys a house - Beyond that however, we have very little idea of the value of money, or the actual meaning of those numbers.
I would be curious to see how well the hottentots could approximate large values.
If they can stay within range of large numbers, that would be evidence that size as a subjective scaler value is present, while an atomic system of measurement is not.
I would suggest this to be the interesting discovery. That between gross approximation, and uncomprehended counting lies the balance of effectively understanding the relationship between two quantities.
Counting is not one the many experiencies which the human species is hard-wired to recognize and associate with representative tokens.
It is a cultural experience and not a human experience. Even elemental counting requires discovery and preservation of knowledge to be present in a culture.
It would be interesting to find other concepts which we take for granted - which are learned - and it suggests that other species which live in cultures without some concepts could be "civilized" meaning that concepts could be persisted into their culture by the effort of educating a minority of their members.
I would counter that the complexity of their experience and not their language dictates the limits of their short term conceptualization.
Language in all probability follows experience. After a commet appears in the sky, a community of interconnected communicators will solidify around the most effective utterance for the thing and readily make the association.
The argument here however is that experience can be staring you in the face - such as your five kids, and yet the absence of a scalar system of numbers makes it impossible to count.
Fair enough, but Five kids could also be counted as log(1.34) which would make it easier to determine the square root, and the absence of logarithms in the laymens vocabulary makes it challenging for him to follow along as we demonstrate a superior form of counting.
I think this proves that some Hottentots have developed a method of survival which is not heavily dependant on rigid system of counting. And further they don't recognize our system of counting.
Counting it seems is not a fundamental experience.
Presumably, language forms around survival requirements, and where an abstratction has not impressed itself into the survival of a culture, there will be no words and no conception.
Isn't the computer running the space shuttle built around one of those physical disk memory systems?
So this super computer will be used in part to emulate the computer running on the space shuttle - probably one of the oldest designs still in regular use.
So little memory the launch, orbit, and descent programs cannot be loaded simultaneously.
I believe that solving the complex problems of social groups - perhaps only now feasible by scaleable communication technology - is the next frontier.
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine was a failure; the idea however leads us to the computer.
The fact that social organizations have failed should make us cautious, but not completely closed. Anarchies have failed worse, and some blend of government seems to be better than none at all.
I propose that some system to inform the allocation of R&D could yeild marked improvments. Obviously the complete dictation would yield catastrophy - I think now we have some kind of cross pressure - and the question of how much is enought is appropriate.
My point however - dealing withthe subect of better understanding the market in order to avoid unproductive volatility is that some early warning system which alerts investors, not to minor overlaps and competition, but to cumulative industrial insanity.
In other words, the laying of more dark fiber than it would take to connect every person to one other person 24/7 with phone, video, and an interactive 3d game simultaneously. At some point - the system has to say - ok fiber is good - but ain't no way it's that good.
Moreover, we need industrial self-regulation which can protect the industry from giving itself a bad reputation by being overly redundant - some redundancy is good - but too much causes investors to lose money - which causes the entire industry to lose the economic support which comes from sane investments in beneficial technology.
To be honest - this is the root of the difference between a command economy and capitalism.
Karl Marx himself descried competition as an evil depriving the working man of the fruits of his labour.
I come to bury Marx and not to praise . ..
But in fairness to a deep and inquisitive mind - the issue deserves more than an ad hominem dirge.
We are approaching the point at which much of our costs are absorbed by gross ineffeciencies - Government, transportation, and Medical costs are all grossly inflated by ineffeciency (efforts which have no bearing on goods and services consumed)
As something of a libertarian idealists who respects Marx more for his insight into the flaws of capitalism than for the solution he proposed, It bears to be said that we could do better than the hyper redundant R&D which a "proprietary" market creates.
I'm not hoping for an overhaul, just some function which allows investors to better understand how much competition their company of choice is likely to have at maturity.
For example, if the telecom industry projects need for 1 million terrabytes per second global throughput in the next 5 years, and the field of competators schedules to bury cable for 10 times that amount - the investors ar entitled to know.
An investor-elected commitee with access to company secrets might help the industry make better decisions.
For example, we are working on a software - if we knew someone else was solving this problem - we could decide to eiether invest in their effort, rather than start our own, or decide the market is big enough for the two of us. Perhaps the guiding commitee couldsay - This company has an advantage on this technology, but the other has a novel feature X. perhaps the novel feature could be better developed while the general technology is pursued by the other firm.
Perhaps this is a way of suggesting that if the industry has better communication, and fewer Sherman laws, it might better protect investors - at some risk to consumers - but not overwhelming risk.
The softening of compettion, and the emergence of sharing ideas and respecting individual contributions could lead to reduced costs, better products, and higher returns on investment.
Open Source has some of this effect - but lacks a compensation model - really need to work on that.
They only come out ahead - if the investment in the infrastructure is covered by the friction; competition suggests this to be a risk not so far removed from the market itself.
someone always has to do worse for anyone to do better than the market - the market and the economy is just the sum of the actions of participants, participants cannot move against the market as they, in sum, are the market.
Here you have quite adequately restated the problem; However, at the rsik of attempting to contribute to a topic growth weary of overcontemplation,
Proposed:
That the solution sought is not to permit the whole to move against the market - but to increase the effeciency of the market.
The Effeciency is the amount of value created by the act of corporation relative to the costs in overhead.
In theory, if we all buy into a well, we can dig deeper and get water which as individuals in out of reach.
The cost, is that our individual contributions may be wiped out by unforseen market forces.
For example, We invest in a mutual fund - the mutual fund invests in several drilling companies, and they and 12 other companies all reach water on the same day - we get our water, but not at the theoretical savings possible under an ideal transaction.
The difference in effeciency between an ideal market, and a real market is available as a net gain to all participants if it can be better attained.
I would suggest as a solution, a blend of Short term patents, a market for command economy directives, and a method of evaluating the relative worth of proprietary ideas.
Briefly as applied:
In 1980, about a hundred companies were working on hard disk technology. Some had good ideas, which they kept to themselves. they were all working on parallel projects, which as a result, muted the effeciency of the investment generally, and actually harmed the entire sector, because the result was less than optimal return on investment.
If companies with good ideas, were able to register them for short-term secret protection, and have them evaluated by trusted confidants elected by investors to look at all the competing ideas, and render an early "Command Market Directive" in other words - decide which company has the right to continue research.
In return, the companies with inferior technology can get early warning that they should spend their investors money on research in which they have a core competancy and protect the investors from blind parallel risk.
Companies would not be "forced" to heed the ruling of the common investors group, but investors would be warned, and this would have much the same effect.
Note however, that this solution has little to do with guessing the next days numbers, but rather by opening up the secret doors of publicly traded companies, and warning investors about high rates of overlapping aims.
We laid down too much dark fiber - for much the same reason, and those companies, and the wealth they represent were lost - not because of bad decisions, but because of current spending for access to an oversaturated future market.
The point again - is that the IS room to improve the market and it has little to do with understanding chaos, and more to do with understanding why large companies continue large investments in losing propositions.
Right - as long as the government emplementation actually costs less than private emplementation.
The trouble is that it is much more expensive to PAY for WiFi than it is to install it.
In other words, other overhead of billing and collecting the money exceeds the cost of service - that is generally a good time for government to provide a service.
there is another argument for ubiquitous serviec.
Trash collection - when private - everybody has a choice either to pay for pickup - or (find some other way to get rid of trash) The truth of course, is that in the end, even people who don't pay for trash pickup - do get rid of their trash - usually be "borrowing" someone elses service.
So when "borrowing" is likily and everyone needs, it - or benefits from it - its a good idea.
An argument could be made that most cities provide ubiquitous communication anyway - for their police and fire units - and that using a shareable protocol - for everyone would cost less anyway.
Most police units have networked computers in them - so cities are in fact solving this problem already.
I would beg to differ. Sure there are some entrants - but there is not IMHO a great deal of variety in features or form factor. My suffeciently portable Audiovox/Verizon camera phone has the guts to do navigation, mp3, voice recording - but it does none of that. Models with features are too large.
mp3 is an obvious feature, but personal communications should be extended - to near network applications, such as for use in meetings, voice conferances, and local data exchange.
If I'm in an airport, why shouldn't my bluetooth phone display departure gates and delays?
If i'm in court - why not scroll the transcription in real time?
why not bus stops that beacon the bus schedule?
In short - there is a world of information wanting to be real-time and personal. Creating large electronic displays everywhere is expensive and obnoxious - whereas bluetooth (WLAN) beacons can be very cheap and environmentally friendly.
So I suggest the PDA/Phone market has a great distance to go before realizing its potential.
The weakness of products now is largely a problem of vision, and permitting the industry to define its own features - for some services - we need a technology czar who will define the service - open the protocal, and set standards - it could be that free market economies only do SOME things better - say industry - but other things - such as ubiquitous connectivity very poorly.
Music Data on CD is arguably NOT a computer program.
While I could be wrong - and would love to be corrected IANACDE -
The burn marks on a (music) cd are more analagous to ridges on a turntable.
Generally they express a sequence of numbers from 2 to 9 which are used to incrementally shift the output signal.
Importantly - I believe you can restructure the data using a phase-locked loop, and a few other analog components, and in short - because there is no compression of data - there is not explicit requirement for purely mathematical operations.
It may well be that we have emulated the analog reader in most cases today - but at the time the format was created - I believe it to be a high-frequency, index modulated signal - a thing substantially different from an MP3 which clearly is a set of instructions intended to run on a computing device known as an MP3 decompressor.
But I most agree with the final analysis which is that consumers want to control the WHEN of the thing - everything else is symantics and metaphors.
Part of which is why I don't recommend sitting idly by.
What would be the dangers of very short patents provisions in the GPL.
For example - where it says - changes must be published at the moment of redistribution - it could say changes must be published within three years.
I'm not suggesting idea patents - only implementation rights for a Vert-Short-Time - enough to create value for the creator while still supporting the group. It that blend of groupthink - and individual need.
Can we at least consider the benefit of watching this violation - rather than jumping down their throat?
his price is reasonable - and pretty high value for $49. that money will go to future improvments - not to creating the second richest a**hole in the world.
Why not preserve the right to future enforcement while supporting people who add value and need to get paid - in order to quit their day job.
Stallman needs to find a happy medium. The idea of a short term GPL patent - say three years on a product like this might be enough motivation to create revenue without stagnating development.
There's really nothing to say to this except that it is a remarkably excellent point made simply enough.
I have suggested that taxes need to shift FROM production to consumption - so that imported goods are taxed the same as local goods.
I'm not sure that adding taxes to the production side helps us compete in the world market - but I generally agree that we would do better to protect our labor pool from the lowest and least environmentally friendly - civil rights concience bidder.
AIK
Re:Open mouth, insert paranoid foot
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I would suggest that cheating involves getting to the front of the race by some route or means other than sheer force of personal intellect and a life free from intrusion.
"memorizing" openings invented by great minds other than your own is akin to playing Bethoven's fifth - it's really great stuff - but it aint' YOUR stuff.
Think of tic-tac-toe. I know all the openings - I know all the responses - and there isn't any fun left in the game. Admittedly my chess has not matured to that point - but in some circles it has pretty nearly - and I believe this is the fun he's talking about.
Apparently he has got himself a world-class attitude problem. - I feel sorry - seems mostly harmless in spite of his vitriol.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, judges and politicians are lawyers generally as well.
What I oppose, is the abiity of the rich to purchase a better lawyer to represent THIER PERSON.
Companies, States, and Freedoms need proxies to speak for them. I'm not opposed to proxies speaking on behalf of abstractions. I am opposed to the rich buying themselves an unequal slice of the justice pie.
or conversely the poor getting a thiner slice.
The business of lawyering is not present in all historic systems. Socrates had to answer for himself. Like a draft which takes rich and poor alike - self representation has a more egalitarian appeal for me. Aditionally, we would tailor our laws to be more understandable if it were necessary for them to be understood.
AIK
In Reverse Order,
Experiences.
Right now I'm defending myself after being arrested for picking up litter.
Our state, like most counts Street Spam as illegal litter, but the local sheriff - who won his election on $10,000 worth of street spam thinks otherwise - so he arrested my on a law from 2 centuries ago - knowing its litter, but hoping i would plead out rather than pony up for a lawyer or risk a half year in jail for picking up litter.
Local DA has 600 cases per session, and only ever gets to the cases that plead.
- Pro Bono - I like the idea of service taxes. I think we should all contribute to this country in work rather than money because work cannot be expatriated like jobs and money.
Are you suggesting in that one week, we have reversed the state of affairs in which the rich get a different level of justice than the poor? That's great news - i hadn't realized. Be sure the minorities released from death row on the basis of DNA tests know that we've fixed the system.
Doctors don't make medicine more expensive (Lawyers do)
Librarians don't make books more expensive.
Programmers don't make software more expensive - they make it more available.
Lawyers do not make justiice more available - they make it more elite - less abailable, more expensive, and more likely to produce positive outcome for rich clients.
Life is complicated.
OK - and we have a great country because we have a bteer system of justice than the rest of the world - if you're a lawyer and you're looking for cudos - that's it. That said, The justice system is good, the lawyers are the least good part, and the role of lawyers is to tilt the table for the rich - that should be criticised.
"Vehicles in the park"
easy: adopt a legal dictionary - use it when you write the law, and use the same one when you interpret it. If there is a disagreement about the definition of bike - you give the benefit of the doubt to the non-moving party.
Derived from the "Law of the Kings"
That's right - there is a difference between the "Rule" of law, and the "Rule" of a person, be it a king, czar, priest. If the King decides to adopt a system of "law" this is an excellent choice. But Laws predate the English King. Presumably they predate the Ten Commandments since Moses didn't need to explain the meaning to the jews. A Rigid system of law is fair, which the rule of a king, absent such a system is capricious. Laws can exists in combination with Presidents, kings, directors, the question really is which of the two prevail in a conflict. If the King can render a unique judgement in a given case, than the law is merely a decoration of monarchy, but if the king is prevented by the law, or more important, if the army is likely to consult the law before carrying out an order, then we have the rule of law. In practice, most systems of law are executed as systems of human authority with checks and balances.
AIK
A lawyer, like a priest, is a person tasked with explaining a forign tongue - a job rendered unecessisary by translators and school teachers. A literate society with access to translation has much less dependance of priests.
The counter prosecuter's job is to defend the constitution - or the public's interest in a system of rights and immunities and should balance the efforts of the DA to provide a 1:1 ratio of crimes to people in prison without too much concern with who did what.
The purpose of the CP is to compliment a system of justic in which every person is judged by an even playing field. If the state spends a dollar accusing, the CP should spend a dollar showing why the state may be trampling rights. No one should go to prison or not based substantially on the size of their purse, with respect to the size of the state's purse.
AIK
The fact that I cannot understand the tax code - for example - if my wife were from Mexico and we sent support to her family - that would be deductable, hoowever; she is from Kiev, and as such the support we provide is not deductable. I don't understand how that and the fourteenth amendment can exist inside the same legal system.
- Is no reason to justify making the rest of my life incomprehensible.
Law = equality.
Law is the alternative to the rule of Kings, tyrants, dictators, overlords, knights, fiefs, sherrifs, priests, prophets, judges, and in so many words - "men".
"men" tend to favor some at the expense of others and use the capricious and arbitrary natuure of ruling by continuim - or in short "making up the rules as they go."
Law - on the other hand is the idea that the rules are written in the language of the people and they are only held to answer for rules which are published prior to the actions taken. It is in a word - intended to make every person an equal.
Lawyers - as a practice - enable a government to create overly complicated rules - which in the end eroode the purpose of the law - which is that people are entitled to be informed of the rules before being held to answer for their failure to keep them.
Lawyers inform only the people who can afford their service, and they defend (generally) those in porportion to their ability to pay. One reason we watch celebrity justice is because we know that with enough money, the guilty rich will be treated better than the innocent poor.
So in the final analysis, the lawyers role in the justice system is to improve the odds that poor black men will be put to death for crimes committed by rich white guys.
Kind of like punishing the dog if someone farts.
Until the system treats rich and poor, black and white "exactly and precisely" the same - it is more accurate to say that the legal system is an institution for upholding classism than to point to the rare and elegant exceptions - such as thurgood marshall and a few pro-bono cases - and say that it is otherwise.
I'm not opposed to lawyers assisting their clients - but I am very much opposed to a legal system which is built for the benefit of lawyers and treats them as a priveledged class. Lawyers should be treated like interpreters - there for that purpose, but otherwise ignored.
The Counter-prosecuter. It is a public defender, but not a personal defender. The counter-prosecutor would be elected and approved by the legislator, and would be made up of constitutional types like the ACLU who would argue in every case for the Constitution.
"The people" he might say "Have a vested interest in protecting the right of free speech - in this case, the prosecutor has arrested a man for walking on a flag - but the Constitution intends to protect the act of opposing government - even when it is distasteful and unpopular - I recommend the court dismiss this case as protected speech etc . . . "
Or as in your example "Your honor, the defendant has a verified alabi, and it is not in the interest of justice for us to put a man to death when there is any lingering doubt as to his guilt - if we do, there will come a day when we are wrong, and the result will be a declining willingness to punish criminals."
As it is - we the public rely to heavily on a few rich people to excersize the rights in the Constitution.
AIK
IRS people are people with secure government jobs, bennies, healthcare etc who are involved in taking money away from people whose job, or the profitable part of it anyway, has been exported to guatemala, their healthcare costs are staggering, and they have decided to put off having kids until the economy improves.
Meanwhile IRS employees can pretty much do as they like without concern for the problems caused by the government they nurse from.
AIK
You own Damn self perhaps.
Without "Lawyers" as a special breed and a distict language, The business of sorting out who is right and wrong would by necessity be conducted, not in latin, but in the same language as the people, who by all reckoning, are charged with understanding the law in the first place.
The purpose of law is to create equality.
The purpose of lawyers is to create priveledge for rich people.
Lawyers are an anathima to the law.
In criminal cases, the interest of freedom should be representated by an independant counter-prosector. The defendant should speak for himself or not as he chooses. But every defendant should have the same counter-prosecutor.
AIK
Counting, at least in low numbers, seems to be intrinsic to most higher mammals
Let's suggest that counting low numbers isn't even "counting" as in a scaler system of indexing elements in a potentially unlimited set, but rather a limited extension of pattern matching.
Pattern matching, as an intrisic function, will yield some similarities to counting at the low end, but quickly erodes into approximation.
Actual counting however yields the same degree of dissonence when one fails to balance the checkbook by a penny, whether there are two or two million pennies in the account.
In some respects, literal counting can be an impediment to understanding expressions of large quantities.
Perhaps we are educating kids who can exhibit the symtoms of counting, but in reality have no better understanding of the concept of numbers than do these hottentots.
Most Americans it is said, can understand the value of money up to a few hundred thousand dollars, but are largely overwhelmed by discussions of the federal budget. An 8 Billion dollar expenditure or a trillion dollars of debt is probably well outside the point at which they simple drop the number into the "many" bucket.
In other words, even in this culture, we have a limited grasp of numbers as an infinite scaler system.
We tend to have experiences with numbers, $1 buys an icecream, $1,000 buys a cheap car, $100,000 buys a house - Beyond that however, we have very little idea of the value of money, or the actual meaning of those numbers.
I would be curious to see how well the hottentots could approximate large values.
If they can stay within range of large numbers, that would be evidence that size as a subjective scaler value is present, while an atomic system of measurement is not.
I would suggest this to be the interesting discovery. That between gross approximation, and uncomprehended counting lies the balance of effectively understanding the relationship between two quantities.
AIK
Counting is not one the many experiencies which the human species is hard-wired to recognize and associate with representative tokens.
It is a cultural experience and not a human experience. Even elemental counting requires discovery and preservation of knowledge to be present in a culture.
It would be interesting to find other concepts which we take for granted - which are learned - and it suggests that other species which live in cultures without some concepts could be "civilized" meaning that concepts could be persisted into their culture by the effort of educating a minority of their members.
AIK
I would counter that the complexity of their experience and not their language dictates the limits of their short term conceptualization.
Language in all probability follows experience. After a commet appears in the sky, a community of interconnected communicators will solidify around the most effective utterance for the thing and readily make the association.
The argument here however is that experience can be staring you in the face - such as your five kids, and yet the absence of a scalar system of numbers makes it impossible to count.
Fair enough, but Five kids could also be counted as log(1.34) which would make it easier to determine the square root, and the absence of logarithms in the laymens vocabulary makes it challenging for him to follow along as we demonstrate a superior form of counting.
I think this proves that some Hottentots have developed a method of survival which is not heavily dependant on rigid system of counting. And further they don't recognize our system of counting.
Counting it seems is not a fundamental experience.
Presumably, language forms around survival requirements, and where an abstratction has not impressed itself into the survival of a culture, there will be no words and no conception.
AIK
Isn't the computer running the space shuttle built around one of those physical disk memory systems?
So this super computer will be used in part to emulate the computer running on the space shuttle - probably one of the oldest designs still in regular use.
So little memory the launch, orbit, and descent programs cannot be loaded simultaneously.
Who you kidding? Us? Or yourself?
I believe that solving the complex problems of social groups - perhaps only now feasible by scaleable communication technology - is the next frontier.
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine was a failure; the idea however leads us to the computer.
The fact that social organizations have failed should make us cautious, but not completely closed. Anarchies have failed worse, and some blend of government seems to be better than none at all.
I propose that some system to inform the allocation of R&D could yeild marked improvments. Obviously the complete dictation would yield catastrophy - I think now we have some kind of cross pressure - and the question of how much is enought is appropriate.
AIK
Right - your point is empirically true.
My point however - dealing withthe subect of better understanding the market in order to avoid unproductive volatility is that some early warning system which alerts investors, not to minor overlaps and competition, but to cumulative industrial insanity.
In other words, the laying of more dark fiber than it would take to connect every person to one other person 24/7 with phone, video, and an interactive 3d game simultaneously. At some point - the system has to say - ok fiber is good - but ain't no way it's that good.
Moreover, we need industrial self-regulation which can protect the industry from giving itself a bad reputation by being overly redundant - some redundancy is good - but too much causes investors to lose money - which causes the entire industry to lose the economic support which comes from sane investments in beneficial technology.
AIK
A considered reply.
.
To be honest - this is the root of the difference between a command economy and capitalism.
Karl Marx himself descried competition as an evil depriving the working man of the fruits of his labour.
I come to bury Marx and not to praise . .
But in fairness to a deep and inquisitive mind - the issue deserves more than an ad hominem dirge.
We are approaching the point at which much of our costs are absorbed by gross ineffeciencies - Government, transportation, and Medical costs are all grossly inflated by ineffeciency (efforts which have no bearing on goods and services consumed)
As something of a libertarian idealists who respects Marx more for his insight into the flaws of capitalism than for the solution he proposed, It bears to be said that we could do better than the hyper redundant R&D which a "proprietary" market creates.
I'm not hoping for an overhaul, just some function which allows investors to better understand how much competition their company of choice is likely to have at maturity.
For example, if the telecom industry projects need for 1 million terrabytes per second global throughput in the next 5 years, and the field of competators schedules to bury cable for 10 times that amount - the investors ar entitled to know.
An investor-elected commitee with access to company secrets might help the industry make better decisions.
For example, we are working on a software - if we knew someone else was solving this problem - we could decide to eiether invest in their effort, rather than start our own, or decide the market is big enough for the two of us. Perhaps the guiding commitee couldsay - This company has an advantage on this technology, but the other has a novel feature X. perhaps the novel feature could be better developed while the general technology is pursued by the other firm.
Perhaps this is a way of suggesting that if the industry has better communication, and fewer Sherman laws, it might better protect investors - at some risk to consumers - but not overwhelming risk.
The softening of compettion, and the emergence of sharing ideas and respecting individual contributions could lead to reduced costs, better products, and higher returns on investment.
Open Source has some of this effect - but lacks a compensation model - really need to work on that.
AIK
I want to reiterate the question - who the hell modded this crap up? - can't we know?
How about removing their mods entirely and giving me my own version of slashdot with the ignorant modders filtered out?
If Slashdot allowed individuals to censor modders - it would not be infected by bored morons.
AIK
They only come out ahead - if the investment in the infrastructure is covered by the friction; competition suggests this to be a risk not so far removed from the market itself.
someone always has to do worse for anyone to do better than the market - the market and the economy is just the sum of the actions of participants, participants cannot move against the market as they, in sum, are the market.
Here you have quite adequately restated the problem; However, at the rsik of attempting to contribute to a topic growth weary of overcontemplation,
Proposed:
That the solution sought is not to permit the whole to move against the market - but to increase the effeciency of the market.
The Effeciency is the amount of value created by the act of corporation relative to the costs in overhead.
In theory, if we all buy into a well, we can dig deeper and get water which as individuals in out of reach.
The cost, is that our individual contributions may be wiped out by unforseen market forces.
For example, We invest in a mutual fund - the mutual fund invests in several drilling companies, and they and 12 other companies all reach water on the same day - we get our water, but not at the theoretical savings possible under an ideal transaction.
The difference in effeciency between an ideal market, and a real market is available as a net gain to all participants if it can be better attained.
I would suggest as a solution, a blend of Short term patents, a market for command economy directives, and a method of evaluating the relative worth of proprietary ideas.
Briefly as applied:
In 1980, about a hundred companies were working on hard disk technology. Some had good ideas, which they kept to themselves. they were all working on parallel projects, which as a result, muted the effeciency of the investment generally, and actually harmed the entire sector, because the result was less than optimal return on investment.
If companies with good ideas, were able to register them for short-term secret protection, and have them evaluated by trusted confidants elected by investors to look at all the competing ideas, and render an early "Command Market Directive" in other words - decide which company has the right to continue research.
In return, the companies with inferior technology can get early warning that they should spend their investors money on research in which they have a core competancy and protect the investors from blind parallel risk.
Companies would not be "forced" to heed the ruling of the common investors group, but investors would be warned, and this would have much the same effect.
Note however, that this solution has little to do with guessing the next days numbers, but rather by opening up the secret doors of publicly traded companies, and warning investors about high rates of overlapping aims.
We laid down too much dark fiber - for much the same reason, and those companies, and the wealth they represent were lost - not because of bad decisions, but because of current spending for access to an oversaturated future market.
The point again - is that the IS room to improve the market and it has little to do with understanding chaos, and more to do with understanding why large companies continue large investments in losing propositions.
AIK
Right - as long as the government emplementation actually costs less than private emplementation.
The trouble is that it is much more expensive to PAY for WiFi than it is to install it.
In other words, other overhead of billing and collecting the money exceeds the cost of service - that is generally a good time for government to provide a service.
there is another argument for ubiquitous serviec.
Trash collection - when private - everybody has a choice either to pay for pickup - or (find some other way to get rid of trash) The truth of course, is that in the end, even people who don't pay for trash pickup - do get rid of their trash - usually be "borrowing" someone elses service.
So when "borrowing" is likily and everyone needs, it - or benefits from it - its a good idea.
An argument could be made that most cities provide ubiquitous communication anyway - for their police and fire units - and that using a shareable protocol - for everyone would cost less anyway.
Most police units have networked computers in them - so cities are in fact solving this problem already.
AIK
The PDA/cell phone market is already saturated
I would beg to differ. Sure there are some entrants - but there is not IMHO a great deal of variety in features or form factor.
My suffeciently portable Audiovox/Verizon camera phone has the guts to do navigation, mp3, voice recording - but it does none of that.
Models with features are too large.
mp3 is an obvious feature, but personal communications should be extended - to near network applications, such as for use in meetings, voice conferances, and local data exchange.
If I'm in an airport, why shouldn't my bluetooth phone display departure gates and delays?
If i'm in court - why not scroll the transcription in real time?
why not bus stops that beacon the bus schedule?
In short - there is a world of information wanting to be real-time and personal. Creating large electronic displays everywhere is expensive and obnoxious - whereas bluetooth (WLAN) beacons can be very cheap and environmentally friendly.
So I suggest the PDA/Phone market has a great distance to go before realizing its potential.
The weakness of products now is largely a problem of vision, and permitting the industry to define its own features - for some services - we need a technology czar who will define the service - open the protocal, and set standards - it could be that free market economies only do SOME things better - say industry - but other things - such as ubiquitous connectivity very poorly.
(Do I get extra points for rambling?)
AIK
just to be fair . . .
Music Data on CD is arguably NOT a computer program.
While I could be wrong - and would love to be corrected IANACDE -
The burn marks on a (music) cd are more analagous to ridges on a turntable.
Generally they express a sequence of numbers from 2 to 9 which are used to incrementally shift the output signal.
Importantly - I believe you can restructure the data using a phase-locked loop, and a few other analog components, and in short - because there is no compression of data - there is not explicit requirement for purely mathematical operations.
It may well be that we have emulated the analog reader in most cases today - but at the time the format was created - I believe it to be a high-frequency, index modulated signal - a thing substantially different from an MP3 which clearly is a set of instructions intended to run on a computing device known as an MP3 decompressor.
But I most agree with the final analysis which is that consumers want to control the WHEN of the thing - everything else is symantics and metaphors.
AIK
Part of which is why I don't recommend sitting idly by.
What would be the dangers of very short patents provisions in the GPL.
For example - where it says - changes must be published at the moment of redistribution - it could say changes must be published within three years.
I'm not suggesting idea patents - only implementation rights for a Vert-Short-Time - enough to create value for the creator while still supporting the group. It that blend of groupthink - and individual need.
AIK
Given that the sveasoft is in clear violation.
Can we at least consider the benefit of watching this violation - rather than jumping down their throat?
his price is reasonable - and pretty high value for $49. that money will go to future improvments - not to creating the second richest a**hole in the world.
Why not preserve the right to future enforcement while supporting people who add value and need to get paid - in order to quit their day job.
Stallman needs to find a happy medium. The idea of a short term GPL patent - say three years on a product like this might be enough motivation to create revenue without stagnating development.
My suggestion
AIK
May I suggest that a "computer program" is a series of instructions used to manipulate a computer,
and depending on what the meaning of is - is -
MP3 is a series of instructions for manipulating an electronic computational system.
The fact that they cannot be understood by anything other than a computer supports the idea that MP3 is information in the form of a computer program.
But - I don't really care - since I prefer CSPAN to Metallica anyway.
AIK
Watching CSPAN - I remember an author discuss what he called "occidentalism" a particularly "arab" malady
pointing out that the phillipines and many other nations have large concentrations of muslims, but do not engage in this form anti-modernity.
he suggested we can narrow the terrorist field to arab muslims especially saudis and egyptians.
He could be wrong - and I'm not an expert - but it bears mentioning.
AIK
There's really nothing to say to this except that it is a remarkably excellent point made simply enough.
I have suggested that taxes need to shift FROM production to consumption - so that imported goods are taxed the same as local goods.
I'm not sure that adding taxes to the production side helps us compete in the world market - but I generally agree that we would do better to protect our labor pool from the lowest and least environmentally friendly - civil rights concience bidder.
AIK
I would suggest that cheating involves getting to the front of the race by some route or means other than sheer force of personal intellect and a life free from intrusion.
"memorizing" openings invented by great minds other than your own is akin to playing Bethoven's fifth - it's really great stuff - but it aint' YOUR stuff.
Think of tic-tac-toe. I know all the openings - I know all the responses - and there isn't any fun left in the game. Admittedly my chess has not matured to that point - but in some circles it has pretty nearly - and I believe this is the fun he's talking about.
Apparently he has got himself a world-class attitude problem. - I feel sorry - seems mostly harmless in spite of his vitriol.
AIK