Actually, you could argue everything is not out of happenstance but physics and chaos theory. Our understanding is continually "evolving."
As for coincidences, like the size of the Moon and Sun, you can find any number of them looking around you. Humans happen to like coincidences. But what might seem unique could be the result of ignorance or lacking imagination: we just don't know of other examples. Also, things that are similar are only so for a brief time. The orbits of the Earth and Moon have changed over time. The Moon used to be much closer to its planet, and is gradually drifting away. The year used to be much longer: the Earth has accelerated as it has drawn closer to the Sun.
Well, it doesn't jog -my- memory (little does these days), but I Google'd your clue. It looks like you're right, though none of the sources are worth citing (can't anyone spell any more? the trekkies make slashdot look immaculate). One clever observation is that both races name their ships after birds.
Most of the trek speculation about Romulans and Klingons centers on the Klingon transformation from the lightly soiled guys of TOS and the ridged monsters exemplified by Worf. Some speculate the smooth foreheads were the result of Kligon/Romulan interbreeding, later after Romulan betrayal driven out of the species.
A search for "klingon engineer" brings up a moderate amount of stuff, mostly citing Voyager's half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres. Several others are mentioned. In the current Enterprise ("Sleeping Dogs") there was an Officer Bu'kah on the bird of prey rescued from being crushed in a planet's atmosphere. There was also a female Klingon scientist is one of the TNG's. There is no end to further speculation.
In Voyager, they threw in a sensitive engineer from the Harogen (phonetic).
Then there are the Ferengi. They probably just bought it, for a good price.
I was in school at Cornell several years ago (1995?) when there was a total-but-not eclipse -- and annular solar eclipse. The one I saw was not quite like that of the link, but it was a very strange event. For several minutes, it was like daylight but not quite; the light was gray and there were bizarre shadows and diffraction effectcs.
So not all solar eclipses are alike. It interests me that the Moon and Sun are so similar is apparent (angular) size. The Moon is unique in the solar system for its enormous one-quarter size relative to its planet.
The link has a 1992 photo and numerous tips and links re eclipses generally.
(1) Wrong on sovereign immunity, it's probably been pointed out already. The U.S. does have a fundamental immunity, as do the states, but can choose to waive it and often as. A notable example is the federal tort claims act (FTCA). Also, it should be obvious that the government has to obey the Constitution, which includes the Bill of Rights.
(2) Doesn't this analysis imply that the adolescent cretins who just have to put porn in a kiddie area to prove their gonads are perversely the heros who prove the futility of censorship? Or are they the real problem? If criminals are the problem, is the solution to abolish or write no more of the criminal statutes?
No.
A professor told me that children are "the Achilles heel of liberalism." That is, they're not just miniature adults and the same rules and needs as adults do not apply. With my children I will earnestly censor what they are exposed to until they are old enough to understand. However "paternalistic" that may sound, there is always an age that is too young for sex and violence if the kid is going to sleep through the night. It's a shame so many people have no respect for children's intellectual growth. I don't think they rank much above pedophiles.
The Supreme Court has recognized this dichotomy between kids and adults in various rulings. A famous one concered the radio broadcast of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine by a station affiliated with Pacifica. The basic rule hammered out was that Carlin's comedy was clearly protected speech, but that it was reasonable to confine is to later hours when kids were less likely to stumble upon it. As one Justice wrote, we would otherwise all be condemned to material fit only for children. (Whether the day/night accommodation works is another question, but you get the idea -- there's a time and place for different stuff.)
(3) Heh-heh: Censorship, for lack of a better word, is good. Censorship is right. Censorship works. Censorship clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Thank you! I knew it sounded like a condiment. He's snubbed on the character list at the Star Trek City, although he did recur a fair number of times. As did that Vorta creep (OK, redundant) Weyun we all wanted to kill.
The number of Star Trek fan sites, and the work the evidently went into them, is frightening.
Oops -- Tora was not "killed by Garak" the tailor; she was killed by what's-his-face, you know the bad Cardassian who later becomes a grudging good guy when he realizes the Founders are going to exterminate his people.
DS9 was the only show that had genuine pathos, a sense of deep tragedy. The moment I'm thinking of at the moment is when Gul Dukat's illegimate daughther Tora is killed as a traitor by Garak. (It was so rare in the other series for someone to get killed whose name you knew or cared about.)
In another episode, the essential crew (ever notice how all the most valuable people go on all the dangerous away missions) tried to salvage a crashed Dominion warship and are besieged by the Jem'Hadar (I had to check these spelling, BTW -- see startrek.com). One of the crewman is wounded and dies slowly! This was one of the few times the essential nastiness of dying in war was explored. Most often, Star Trek was very hygenic about these things, even vaporizing the corpse.
DS9 was generally more character-centered, both individuals and entire civilizations such as Ferengi, Klingons, the Jem'Hadar/Founders symbiosis, Bajoran, and so on. Voyager was the polar opposite, dominated by technobabble -- I think even the writers call it that, it's inserted after the script is written, which should give a sense of its irrelevance.
The real world doesn't have a plot arc, and I'm not sure a long-running series should either, though it does need continuity. DS9 was mostly about struggling to exist in a hostile crossroads of the galaxy. If you want predictable plot arc, again you have Voyager. No I didn't hate V'ger, but it has good episodes whereas DS9 was a good series.
One bit of analysis I would like to throw out is that it is disturbing that the captain the Trek people choose to snub, it's the only black captain and really the best and most powerful black actor in the entire franchise. (Let me explain that Uhura is wonderful but given little to say or do until the movies -- and Travis (Enterprise) has so far (non) developed like Uhura; Tuvok is a sterile bore who made Spock look like a rabid Klingon; Geordi, well, admit he got on our nerves; and I'm not quite sure whether to count Worf, though it goes without saying he's a cool dude, at least I would never criticize him to his face:) I don't mean to suggest or exclude any racial prejudice, but that decision was plainly stupid; Avery Brooks was one the most talented actors they ever had, on a par with Patrick Stewart who, when given good material, really shone.
Incidentally, was it ever adequately explained how Klingon technology evolved in a society where they kill each other over social slights?
True story -- I remember a report a dozen years ago of a person who took in her buggy Macintosh SE. It was full of cockroaches, eggs and everything. I have no idea how that could happen, or what the owner's concept of hygeine was. Maybe she left too many muffins sitting on top to warm.
When I was an active pilot flying in or near thunderstorms, I used to tune the ADB receiver (a low radio frequency directional device, bracketing the AM radio band) to an unoccupied channel and listen to the discharges. The rhythm (random?) of the static was hypnotic -- sometimes long silences, sometimes clusters, nearer discharges being much louder. I imagine one could pick up signals 100+ miles away. The ADB arrow would franticly try to track the most recent or powerful discharge. (It was said that when the arrow was pointing in all directions, you were in trouble -- sane pilots are very wary of thunderstorms).
I imagine meteors would sound similar? Will recordings be posted?
President Bush's popularity has improved and stayed high after the attacks. Many of the moves taken so far, such as the hastily-enacted Patriot Act, are complex laws with stringent provisions. I don't have a broad grasp of them, and I doubt most people do -- right now it's just dry paper. Popular opinion will start to change, however, as these laws are put into practice and the idiotic consequences are publicized. An example was the detention of the three Muslim medical students on the word of an eavesdropper that they were planning to blow things up (there were many problems there, including the illegality of the stop).
I do have faith that things will come full circle. Interestingly, the President is now being criticized by Democrats for his inattention to terrorism, so preoccupied he is with Iraq.
I read the article on "photographing" electreons and although I can appreciate the need for a short exposure, how exactly does this work? I though the wavelength of light was enormous relative in atomic terms.
Actually, I think the film rolls were captured in midair by aircraft. Ground (water) pickup was a fallback.
It may sound low-tech, but to me a lot harder than what we have now with a plain old digital camera and radio transmitter. Imagine all the moving parts, all the things that could go wrong.
The part I find least credible is your idea that the government could make a mistake. What's the old line about the great advance of technology being the ability to magnify a little typo into a staggering error?
Sorry to hear of your identity crisis. Before now, I've never heard of people getting duplicate SSN's. OK, I'll revise what I wrote: the SSN is intended to be a unique arbitrary identifier (or is it arbitrary? is something coded into those numbers? hmm).
Then there was a McDonald's one too -- I remember the picture of the restaurant sign and stubborn Mr. MacDonald (I can't quite remember whether he used the "a" or find a reference online). It's somewhere in the the Chicago Tribune archives, probably about 1996-7.
Yes -- but now the "certain area" of many formeely small or local businesses can be national or international. The internet is partly to blame (and to credit -- this erasure of borders is a good thing in many ways, albeit not for restaurants), as anyone can do business anywhere and thus maintain a "presence" everywhere, plus "globalization," whatever that is exactly. So you get a lot of businesses stepping on each other's toes.
I doubt the people who originally drew up trademark law envisioned all this. But the more immediate problem is big guy v. little guy. If your trade in "specific type of business in a specific area," someone else can't trademark and usurp you, although they may limit your effort to expand. So if the facts related re the restaurant are accurate, the latecomer Olympic people had no claim, but their superior financial and legal resources may have made that irrelevant. On the merits, it is also hard to imagine consumers would be confused as to the separate identities of the two entities, or that the restaurant would "dilute" the mark of the Olympics, and so on. On the other hand, maybe the restaurant simply thought it could get away with a name change and lost.
And so it goes. These things pop up a million times. I'm still learning this stuff. A resource you might enjoy is The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which addresses trademark and much more with a free speech focus.
But there are about a million lawyers in thed U.S., working (constructively) in every field imaginable to ban private practice would be to socialize the country overnight. Some might think that I good idea, but not me; though I appreciate our gov't I don't think they have the competence to run something like that. Law enforcement and air traffic control (to a much lesser extent) are uniquely gov't functions not suited for private mgmt, mostly because of the hazards to human life and liberty.
It *would* be nice to reduce the advantage a client had was raw wealth, but that begs the question of the other 6,000 advantages of wealth.
Also, it is a misperception that most or all lawyers are involved in litigation. Only about 5% see the inside of a courtroom. And to cap their income would simply drive the brightest to other fields in a jiffy -- it's just a business after all, and if I can make $5 as a grocer or $100 as a mechanic, I'm not going to be a grocer.
BTW, I'm speaking as a former gov't lawyer, and possible future gov't lawyer. I took the lower pay (about 50%) in exchange for the better hours and work I found interesting, gratifying, and educational. I'm sure the gov't already is the largest single legal employer. But I don't expect everyone to make these choices, especially friends whose loan repayments for college+law school were well over $1,000 a month; and as I suggested, all of them had other career options to choose over law. Like most people, lawyers do their jobs primarily to pay the bills.
Wish I could be there! He and I used to talk about how the institutions are different, I guess you'd call it "culture." Both have very smart people, but their outlook and the school's attitude are a light-year apart, though the schools are physically only a mile or so apart.
Also, I've wondered how the CS depts might be different.
A modest proposal? Wasn't that about eating babies?:-) I do know it was Swift at his most satirical.
Nationalize the lawyers? Don't you mean enslave? Effectively every lawyer would be forced to sign on with a monopolistic gov't. Actually, the far greater problem is however much you might do to equalize access to lawyers, you would do nothing to equalize the skill of individual lawyers. They are all quite different -- think baseball players. You have the stars, the average, and Little League.
I totally agree with your sentiment, and would like to see more efficient resolution of genuine disputes, and quicker disposal of illegitimate ones. Arbitration sure sounded good at the outset, but has in some cases become a mechanism to screw the little guy. That's why many corporations will have a non-negotiable arbitration clause in their contract, requiring you to arbitrate any dispute in a particular jurisdiction subject to particular rules, at their convenience. Often the right of appeal is foreclosed.
There is nothing like the cynicism taught at law school.
The flat fee tax defenders -- why couldn't the IRS simply decide to run them into the ground? They certainly have the resources. Seriously, a problem with deals like flat fee may be that in many cases the lawyers are skimming the best cases, in effect overcharging their clients for easy wins. Some of the big heavily-advertised personal injury firms do this.
...if you're a Yank like me, you already have a unique and arbitrary numerical identifier -- your social security number. Yes, no "Jr." allowed, indeed I believe you cannot tell heredity from the SSN alone.
Just be glad they haven't barcoded it into your forehead for airport security -- yet.
It's not widely known, but the FTC does excellent consumer protection work.
I worked on a (for a court) regarding those TV ads that promised you could buy a Corvette at government auction for $10 or get a credit card regardless of your credit history. The FTC involvement was important because it took an incredible amout of work to nail the slimeoid who ran the schemes -- he just kept repackaging them. He finally ended up in jail, unusual for this sort of low-grade fraud, but a last resort after he scoffed at every other penalty.
A shame about the restaurant. Its tragedy ironically illustrates the value of trademarks. Without its identity, it died.
Whatever people think of trademark law, a perhaps greater threat is dumb judges. I used to work for an appellate court, and while most the trial judges were very good, the ones who weren't, really weren't. The whole idea of elected judges in Chicago really freaked me out -- I'm a lawyer, and I had no idea who to vote for. People would change their names to sound like the real McCoy, and other dirty tricks. Many voters simply chose names they liked -- an Irish surname was a big bonus IIRC.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you could argue everything is not out of happenstance but physics and chaos theory. Our understanding is continually "evolving."
As for coincidences, like the size of the Moon and Sun, you can find any number of them looking around you. Humans happen to like coincidences. But what might seem unique could be the result of ignorance or lacking imagination: we just don't know of other examples. Also, things that are similar are only so for a brief time. The orbits of the Earth and Moon have changed over time. The Moon used to be much closer to its planet, and is gradually drifting away. The year used to be much longer: the Earth has accelerated as it has drawn closer to the Sun.
Stay tuned, we're learning faster and faster.
Well, it doesn't jog -my- memory (little does these days), but I Google'd your clue. It looks like you're right, though none of the sources are worth citing (can't anyone spell any more? the trekkies make slashdot look immaculate). One clever observation is that both races name their ships after birds.
Most of the trek speculation about Romulans and Klingons centers on the Klingon transformation from the lightly soiled guys of TOS and the ridged monsters exemplified by Worf. Some speculate the smooth foreheads were the result of Kligon/Romulan interbreeding, later after Romulan betrayal driven out of the species.
A search for "klingon engineer" brings up a moderate amount of stuff, mostly citing Voyager's half-Klingon B'Elanna Torres. Several others are mentioned. In the current Enterprise ("Sleeping Dogs") there was an Officer Bu'kah on the bird of prey rescued from being crushed in a planet's atmosphere. There was also a female Klingon scientist is one of the TNG's. There is no end to further speculation.
In Voyager, they threw in a sensitive engineer from the Harogen (phonetic).
Then there are the Ferengi. They probably just bought it, for a good price.
I was in school at Cornell several years ago (1995?) when there was a total-but-not eclipse -- and annular solar eclipse. The one I saw was not quite like that of the link, but it was a very strange event. For several minutes, it was like daylight but not quite; the light was gray and there were bizarre shadows and diffraction effectcs.
So not all solar eclipses are alike. It interests me that the Moon and Sun are so similar is apparent (angular) size. The Moon is unique in the solar system for its enormous one-quarter size relative to its planet.
The link has a 1992 photo and numerous tips and links re eclipses generally.
(1) Wrong on sovereign immunity, it's probably been pointed out already. The U.S. does have a fundamental immunity, as do the states, but can choose to waive it and often as. A notable example is the federal tort claims act (FTCA). Also, it should be obvious that the government has to obey the Constitution, which includes the Bill of Rights.
(2) Doesn't this analysis imply that the adolescent cretins who just have to put porn in a kiddie area to prove their gonads are perversely the heros who prove the futility of censorship? Or are they the real problem? If criminals are the problem, is the solution to abolish or write no more of the criminal statutes?
No.
A professor told me that children are "the Achilles heel of liberalism." That is, they're not just miniature adults and the same rules and needs as adults do not apply. With my children I will earnestly censor what they are exposed to until they are old enough to understand. However "paternalistic" that may sound, there is always an age that is too young for sex and violence if the kid is going to sleep through the night. It's a shame so many people have no respect for children's intellectual growth. I don't think they rank much above pedophiles.
The Supreme Court has recognized this dichotomy between kids and adults in various rulings. A famous one concered the radio broadcast of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine by a station affiliated with Pacifica. The basic rule hammered out was that Carlin's comedy was clearly protected speech, but that it was reasonable to confine is to later hours when kids were less likely to stumble upon it. As one Justice wrote, we would otherwise all be condemned to material fit only for children. (Whether the day/night accommodation works is another question, but you get the idea -- there's a time and place for different stuff.)
(3) Heh-heh: Censorship, for lack of a better word, is good. Censorship is right. Censorship works. Censorship clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
(I hope the reference is clear.)
What you have to realize is that Slashdot isn't a service.
... it's a disservice?
So
Hey, I'm cool with that, given how much time I've been wasting, er, spending here.
No, wait, arghhhh&^*#@ [transmission terminated] [account deleted]
Thank you! I knew it sounded like a condiment. He's snubbed on the character list at the Star Trek City, although he did recur a fair number of times. As did that Vorta creep (OK, redundant) Weyun we all wanted to kill.
The number of Star Trek fan sites, and the work the evidently went into them, is frightening.
heh-heh
Oops -- Tora was not "killed by Garak" the tailor; she was killed by what's-his-face, you know the bad Cardassian who later becomes a grudging good guy when he realizes the Founders are going to exterminate his people.
Just trying to head off a correction for my typo!
DS9 was the only show that had genuine pathos, a sense of deep tragedy. The moment I'm thinking of at the moment is when Gul Dukat's illegimate daughther Tora is killed as a traitor by Garak. (It was so rare in the other series for someone to get killed whose name you knew or cared about.)
:) I don't mean to suggest or exclude any racial prejudice, but that decision was plainly stupid; Avery Brooks was one the most talented actors they ever had, on a par with Patrick Stewart who, when given good material, really shone.
In another episode, the essential crew (ever notice how all the most valuable people go on all the dangerous away missions) tried to salvage a crashed Dominion warship and are besieged by the Jem'Hadar (I had to check these spelling, BTW -- see startrek.com). One of the crewman is wounded and dies slowly! This was one of the few times the essential nastiness of dying in war was explored. Most often, Star Trek was very hygenic about these things, even vaporizing the corpse.
DS9 was generally more character-centered, both individuals and entire civilizations such as Ferengi, Klingons, the Jem'Hadar/Founders symbiosis, Bajoran, and so on. Voyager was the polar opposite, dominated by technobabble -- I think even the writers call it that, it's inserted after the script is written, which should give a sense of its irrelevance.
The real world doesn't have a plot arc, and I'm not sure a long-running series should either, though it does need continuity. DS9 was mostly about struggling to exist in a hostile crossroads of the galaxy. If you want predictable plot arc, again you have Voyager. No I didn't hate V'ger, but it has good episodes whereas DS9 was a good series.
One bit of analysis I would like to throw out is that it is disturbing that the captain the Trek people choose to snub, it's the only black captain and really the best and most powerful black actor in the entire franchise. (Let me explain that Uhura is wonderful but given little to say or do until the movies -- and Travis (Enterprise) has so far (non) developed like Uhura; Tuvok is a sterile bore who made Spock look like a rabid Klingon; Geordi, well, admit he got on our nerves; and I'm not quite sure whether to count Worf, though it goes without saying he's a cool dude, at least I would never criticize him to his face
Incidentally, was it ever adequately explained how Klingon technology evolved in a society where they kill each other over social slights?
Read up.
True story -- I remember a report a dozen years ago of a person who took in her buggy Macintosh SE. It was full of cockroaches, eggs and everything. I have no idea how that could happen, or what the owner's concept of hygeine was. Maybe she left too many muffins sitting on top to warm.
Yep, there are authenticated reports of people who pick up AM radio stations on their fillings (UL?). With my luck it would be disco.
When I was an active pilot flying in or near thunderstorms, I used to tune the ADB receiver (a low radio frequency directional device, bracketing the AM radio band) to an unoccupied channel and listen to the discharges. The rhythm (random?) of the static was hypnotic -- sometimes long silences, sometimes clusters, nearer discharges being much louder. I imagine one could pick up signals 100+ miles away. The ADB arrow would franticly try to track the most recent or powerful discharge. (It was said that when the arrow was pointing in all directions, you were in trouble -- sane pilots are very wary of thunderstorms).
I imagine meteors would sound similar? Will recordings be posted?
President Bush's popularity has improved and stayed high after the attacks. Many of the moves taken so far, such as the hastily-enacted Patriot Act, are complex laws with stringent provisions. I don't have a broad grasp of them, and I doubt most people do -- right now it's just dry paper. Popular opinion will start to change, however, as these laws are put into practice and the idiotic consequences are publicized. An example was the detention of the three Muslim medical students on the word of an eavesdropper that they were planning to blow things up (there were many problems there, including the illegality of the stop).
I do have faith that things will come full circle. Interestingly, the President is now being criticized by Democrats for his inattention to terrorism, so preoccupied he is with Iraq.
I read the article on "photographing" electreons and although I can appreciate the need for a short exposure, how exactly does this work? I though the wavelength of light was enormous relative in atomic terms.
Actually, I think the film rolls were captured in midair by aircraft. Ground (water) pickup was a fallback.
It may sound low-tech, but to me a lot harder than what we have now with a plain old digital camera and radio transmitter. Imagine all the moving parts, all the things that could go wrong.
4000 CLONES?!? My God. Do you live near Roswell?
The part I find least credible is your idea that the government could make a mistake. What's the old line about the great advance of technology being the ability to magnify a little typo into a staggering error?
Sorry to hear of your identity crisis. Before now, I've never heard of people getting duplicate SSN's. OK, I'll revise what I wrote: the SSN is intended to be a unique arbitrary identifier (or is it arbitrary? is something coded into those numbers? hmm).
Then there was a McDonald's one too -- I remember the picture of the restaurant sign and stubborn Mr. MacDonald (I can't quite remember whether he used the "a" or find a reference online). It's somewhere in the the Chicago Tribune archives, probably about 1996-7.
Yes -- but now the "certain area" of many formeely small or local businesses can be national or international. The internet is partly to blame (and to credit -- this erasure of borders is a good thing in many ways, albeit not for restaurants), as anyone can do business anywhere and thus maintain a "presence" everywhere, plus "globalization," whatever that is exactly. So you get a lot of businesses stepping on each other's toes.
I doubt the people who originally drew up trademark law envisioned all this. But the more immediate problem is big guy v. little guy. If your trade in "specific type of business in a specific area," someone else can't trademark and usurp you, although they may limit your effort to expand. So if the facts related re the restaurant are accurate, the latecomer Olympic people had no claim, but their superior financial and legal resources may have made that irrelevant. On the merits, it is also hard to imagine consumers would be confused as to the separate identities of the two entities, or that the restaurant would "dilute" the mark of the Olympics, and so on. On the other hand, maybe the restaurant simply thought it could get away with a name change and lost.
And so it goes. These things pop up a million times. I'm still learning this stuff. A resource you might enjoy is The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which addresses trademark and much more with a free speech focus.
Enslave -- I was exaggerating of course. :)
But there are about a million lawyers in thed U.S., working (constructively) in every field imaginable to ban private practice would be to socialize the country overnight. Some might think that I good idea, but not me; though I appreciate our gov't I don't think they have the competence to run something like that. Law enforcement and air traffic control (to a much lesser extent) are uniquely gov't functions not suited for private mgmt, mostly because of the hazards to human life and liberty.
It *would* be nice to reduce the advantage a client had was raw wealth, but that begs the question of the other 6,000 advantages of wealth.
Also, it is a misperception that most or all lawyers are involved in litigation. Only about 5% see the inside of a courtroom. And to cap their income would simply drive the brightest to other fields in a jiffy -- it's just a business after all, and if I can make $5 as a grocer or $100 as a mechanic, I'm not going to be a grocer.
BTW, I'm speaking as a former gov't lawyer, and possible future gov't lawyer. I took the lower pay (about 50%) in exchange for the better hours and work I found interesting, gratifying, and educational. I'm sure the gov't already is the largest single legal employer. But I don't expect everyone to make these choices, especially friends whose loan repayments for college+law school were well over $1,000 a month; and as I suggested, all of them had other career options to choose over law. Like most people, lawyers do their jobs primarily to pay the bills.
Wish I could be there! He and I used to talk about how the institutions are different, I guess you'd call it "culture." Both have very smart people, but their outlook and the school's attitude are a light-year apart, though the schools are physically only a mile or so apart.
Also, I've wondered how the CS depts might be different.
A modest proposal? Wasn't that about eating babies? :-) I do know it was Swift at his most satirical.
Nationalize the lawyers? Don't you mean enslave? Effectively every lawyer would be forced to sign on with a monopolistic gov't. Actually, the far greater problem is however much you might do to equalize access to lawyers, you would do nothing to equalize the skill of individual lawyers. They are all quite different -- think baseball players. You have the stars, the average, and Little League.
I totally agree with your sentiment, and would like to see more efficient resolution of genuine disputes, and quicker disposal of illegitimate ones. Arbitration sure sounded good at the outset, but has in some cases become a mechanism to screw the little guy. That's why many corporations will have a non-negotiable arbitration clause in their contract, requiring you to arbitrate any dispute in a particular jurisdiction subject to particular rules, at their convenience. Often the right of appeal is foreclosed.
There is nothing like the cynicism taught at law school.
The flat fee tax defenders -- why couldn't the IRS simply decide to run them into the ground? They certainly have the resources. Seriously, a problem with deals like flat fee may be that in many cases the lawyers are skimming the best cases, in effect overcharging their clients for easy wins. Some of the big heavily-advertised personal injury firms do this.
...if you're a Yank like me, you already have a unique and arbitrary numerical identifier -- your social security number. Yes, no "Jr." allowed, indeed I believe you cannot tell heredity from the SSN alone.
Just be glad they haven't barcoded it into your forehead for airport security -- yet.
It's not widely known, but the FTC does excellent consumer protection work.
I worked on a (for a court) regarding those TV ads that promised you could buy a Corvette at government auction for $10 or get a credit card regardless of your credit history. The FTC involvement was important because it took an incredible amout of work to nail the slimeoid who ran the schemes -- he just kept repackaging them. He finally ended up in jail, unusual for this sort of low-grade fraud, but a last resort after he scoffed at every other penalty.
Sound like a spammer?
Donald should have sued them for defamation.
A shame about the restaurant. Its tragedy ironically illustrates the value of trademarks. Without its identity, it died.
Whatever people think of trademark law, a perhaps greater threat is dumb judges. I used to work for an appellate court, and while most the trial judges were very good, the ones who weren't, really weren't. The whole idea of elected judges in Chicago really freaked me out -- I'm a lawyer, and I had no idea who to vote for. People would change their names to sound like the real McCoy, and other dirty tricks. Many voters simply chose names they liked -- an Irish surname was a big bonus IIRC.