Many thanks for a fascinating insight into the judicial set-up. Every time I get fed up with the masses of content-free posts on Slashdot, someone like you pops up and makes it all worthwhile!
In view of which, it seems churlish to criticise your maths, but your conclusions seem overstated:
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals is almost evenly split between Republican appointees and Democratic appointees. This means that on their three-judge appellate panels, the odds are only one in eight that three Republican appointees or three Democratic appointees will sit together.
Despite the overwhelming odds against them possessing united political backgrounds, they hand down unanimous decisions 97% of the time.
While it's true that (under those conditions) the odds of 3 Republicans is 1 in 8, ditto the odds of 3 Democrats, that makes the odds of 3 the same (of either breed) 1 in 4. Which isn't really 'overwhelming' odds against, is it?
Still, none of this contradicts your main points, of course. And even where the odds of a cross-party panel are 'only' 3 in 4, the huge proportion of unanimous results is still very telling. (It'd also be interesting to see how many of the 3% of non-unanimous results are cross-party.)
Here in the UK, of course, judges aren't generally seen as political. Doddery old fools who last had a new thought in 1962 and have no idea who the Beatles are, certainly; but not political. M'lud.:)
One thing I've yet to hear about is how the existing Internet infrastructure can cope with large amount of VOIP traffic. Anyone know about this?
In particular, how does existing telephony traffic compare to existing Internet traffic? There are an awful lot of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) calls being made, and putting a decent proportion of them onto the Internet will presumably take a significant bandwidth. But how significant? Are we talking about double the amount of Internet traffic? Or will it just be the equivalent of another couple of spam emails each...
If it is significant, then it strikes me that the real cost of VOIP isn't on its users, or even on their ISPs, but on the whole of the Internet infrastructure. In other words, we all pay -- in reduced bandwidth and increased latency, and/or in higher ISP charges. Which sounds like a tragedy-of-the-commons situation...
Well, duh... Of course it is. That's what 'too much' means! If it were a good idea, it wouldn't be 'too much', would it?!
Now, if you'd said something like 'it's easy to overdose on just about anything', or 'many substances have a harmful dose which is surprisingly low', then that would have been meaningful and interesting.
(For example, I believe that for paracetamol, only 2 or 3 times the recommended dose can be harmful or even life-threatening. And drinking a gallon of water in a short space of time is supposed to be very dangerous -- the sodium imbalance can lead to convulsions, coma, and death.)
remember that "loser pays" just introduces other unfairnesses when the poor can't sue the rich.
What unfairnesses?
Here in the UK, for example, the judge will award costs at his/her discretion. Usually this means that the loser will have to pay both sides' costs, so people tend to sue based on how confident they are of winning, rather than how much richer they are.
Indeed. If someone else hasn't done so already, probably a good idea to link to the Political Compass web site, which adds a whole new dimension (literally!) to the way you might think about politics.
I know that classifying, labelling, and pigeonholing is the way we humans think, but politics is a complex area and it deserves far more thought than just a simple red-blue choice.
Even an oversimplified left-right line, though, is worth examining more closely. For example, the 'centre' position seems to vary considerably; here in Europe, we tend to consider both US political parties to be quite right-wing. (I wonder if there's any correlation between that and our press, which in general seems a little more ready to criticise TPTB...)
iTunes has CDDB support. And on the Mac version at least, you can set it up to use an external encoder such as lame; dunno if you can on the Windows version. Depending on how fussy you are, you might find you need to review the tags anyway -- exactly how you handle compilations, classical works, soundtracks, multi-disc sets, &c may well vary from whoever entered it on CDDB.
Personally, I'd thoroughly recommend you use lame for the encoding, whether you do it manually of via one of the many packages which support it. Personally, I use the options which hydrogenaudio recommended (-V 5 --athaa-sensitivity 1), which tends to give bitrates around 128kbps but quality within spitting distance of 2nd-gen formats like AAC.
Personally, I tend to think of 'em as 'free of cost' and 'free of restrictions'. (That's an oversimplification, but I think it gets the main points.)
You could call the first one 'cost-free' or 'gratis' or 'no-charge' or 'zero-price' or something, and the second one 'unrestricted' or 'unhindered' or 'unbound' or 'unlimited' or 'independent' or even 'liberated' perhaps.
You won't often find me quoting ESR, but here he says something particularly relevant:
"We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway)."
And it's true IME too.
I'm not really worried by the fact that many people these days weren't taught English very well. I wasn't taught it very well, and have had to discover many things myself and make my own corrections. School isn't the be-all and end-all of learning.
No, what really distresses me is that other people don't care -- they simply don't see it as important. Slashdotters who are perfectly happy spotting single-symbol mistakes in source code, shell commands, or whatever, and deride those who use the wrong words for technical concepts, simply don't apply the same standards to English.
And I have no idea why this should be. Do people care less about communicating with humans than they do with computers? Do they assume that people will always be able to understand their meaning? (I can tell you from experience that that's not true! It often doesn't take more than a couple of mistakes before you're having to guess between several contradictory meanings.) Do they care so little that they're genuinely unable to see their mistakes, or to use a spelling checker (which, while limited and hardly a full solution, is still a useful tool)?
For myself, I naturally apply the same sort of precision to human language as I do to computer language. (I even tend to use the same style where possible.) I care about expressing myself correctly and well; I'm going to the effort of typing or writing -- I want people to be able to understand the results!
I could go on at length about particular mistakes ('rediculous' is one which particularly irritates me: it always makes me wonder whether things would be worse if they were 'greeniculous' or 'blueiculous'), but I'm sure plenty of others will get mentioned. I could also go on about economies of scale (if a thousand people are reading something, it makes much more sense for the writer to take a bit longer fixing it than for every single reader to puzzle over it). But what I really what to know is why people don't care about English? And how can we get them to care? Once people care, then the rest will take care of itself. People will either learn to spot their own problems, or will accept constructive criticism without lashing out and using hateful terms like 'grammar Nazi'...
Er, yeah, coz every single police officer involved would otherwise be out there immediately catching murderers and arsonists, wouldn't they?
And it would be wrong to catch fraudsters while there's even a single murderer out there, wouldn't it? And of course the huge amounts of money that go into trials such as the SCO one are just as wrong. All the lawyers involved should be out there catching murderers. It makes sense.
Stupid idea? Hmmm. I don't know about your country, but our version of that here in the UK works very well indeed, thank you. After registering with them a few years ago, I get only a couple of cold calls a year -- and while the last caller (a small local business) hadn't heard of TPS, they sounded very interested and I expect they're now complying.
In fact, apart from that, the only cold calls I seem to get are from the USA...
Raises an interesting question, though. If the modder didn't know the quote, then chances are that some other readers don't either. And how many readers must not know the quote for the message to count as a troll?
Up until recently I was running 10.2, and I never found a way to tab onto buttons and other components (except in certain circumstances like sheets). I thought that that was updated in 10.4, but it may have been in 10.3.
True. Aqua scores very high on general consistency, intuitiveness, and predictability, but keyboard operation still needs a bit of work. Though Tiger seems to have improved things a bit; you can now tab to most controls, rather than just text fields, for example. And of course there have always been function keypresses for accessing the menu bar, dock, &c.
I find Windows (at work) annoys me more on a day-to-day basis; I'm always getting confused trying to move the cursor to the start or end of a text field, for example. (Easy on OS X: just press up or down!) Especially given that Dell have seen fit to change the traditional layout and put the page up/down keys at the top/middle of the group of 3 rather than at the middle/bottom...
Oh, come on... I know I shouldn't respond to trolls, but they're scarcely comparable.
vi is excellent at what it does -- editing plain text. I use it a lot; it's great for source code, and for complex editing tasks, with powerful features that I miss everywhere else. It's also very lean and efficient, available on practically every platform, and runs fine over terminal connections.
But it's hardly a replacement for TextEdit: it's not WYSIWYG, it has no support for fonts or other effects, it can't read or write WP and rich text files, it has no spelling checker, printing, clipboard support, and doesn't integrate with other GUI apps (e.g. menus and mouse).
...who thinks that the lame space opera, fantasy, and horror peddled on TV under the 'sci-fi' banner is all science fiction is about.
Which is rubbish. There is tons of science fiction out there that obeys the laws of physics in as far as we know them (or at least, as they were known at the time of writing) -- some of it more than a century old, some of it current, and an awful lot in between. Most is in book form, but there are a few good examples in movies and other media. As has been pointed out, Arthur C. Clarke and others have created new uses for technology in their books which later became reality. And writers from Wells to Asimov, Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Benford, Geoff Landis, and tons more have all written perfectly logical, intelligent stories using real science.
There is also a large crop of material which is logical, intelligent, and based on science, but which posits some change or other in the laws of physics, often in order to investigate those laws more imaginatively. You might call this 'speculative fiction', and if it's done well I don't consider it any less worthy than strictly-conforming stories. In fact, sometimes this can teach you even more about the universe we live in.
And yes, there's a lot of mindless pap which clearly doesn't understand enough physics to tell what's possible or not, and doesn't care either way. (Sturgeon's Law applies!) But please don't think that's all there is to SF. If it's the only sort that makes it to your TV screen, then that says more about programme-makers than about SF.
Quite frankly, I'd assume that the high-ups in the US military saw the general public as little more than a hindrance to their objectives; at best, viewed in a patronising, paternalistic manner.
I'd like to think that was very wrong, but I can't bring myself to. For some reason, I keep thinking of the high-ups as a very patronising, sarcastic and self-satisfied Jack Nicholson, saying "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you said thank you, and went on your way."
You don't speak for all AppleWorks owners. My WP needs are modest, but AppleWorks always felt like a struggle: ugly, slow, awkward, and a pain to use. Since upgrading to a TextEdit that opens Word documents, and installing AbiWord, I haven't used AppleWorks once.
I think this is missing the point. If the supposed 'benefits' of ID cards are trumpeted enough, people will be happy (or at least, not sufficiently unhappy) to pay it because they'll think they're gaining security, convenience, and freedom. We need to make people understand that while they may get a little short-term convenience, they're not getting much in the way of security, and are actively losing freedom. How do we explain that?
I'm deeply disturbed by these steps down the slippery slope to a police state. But abstract worries aren't going to persuade Joe Public: he or she tends to think in terms of simple, recogniseable examples, and right now I can't think of any.
So come one, folks, let's try to come up with some! Instead of discussing the abstract here, let's put together some nice, simple scenarios which will show the possible consequences of ID cards, and illustrate the danger in no uncertain terms. (Or if we can't think of any at all, then maybe our fears aren't so justified?)
Slashdot Mirror
In view of which, it seems churlish to criticise your maths, but your conclusions seem overstated:
While it's true that (under those conditions) the odds of 3 Republicans is 1 in 8, ditto the odds of 3 Democrats, that makes the odds of 3 the same (of either breed) 1 in 4. Which isn't really 'overwhelming' odds against, is it?
Still, none of this contradicts your main points, of course. And even where the odds of a cross-party panel are 'only' 3 in 4, the huge proportion of unanimous results is still very telling. (It'd also be interesting to see how many of the 3% of non-unanimous results are cross-party.)
Here in the UK, of course, judges aren't generally seen as political. Doddery old fools who last had a new thought in 1962 and have no idea who the Beatles are, certainly; but not political. M'lud. :)
In particular, how does existing telephony traffic compare to existing Internet traffic? There are an awful lot of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) calls being made, and putting a decent proportion of them onto the Internet will presumably take a significant bandwidth. But how significant? Are we talking about double the amount of Internet traffic? Or will it just be the equivalent of another couple of spam emails each...
If it is significant, then it strikes me that the real cost of VOIP isn't on its users, or even on their ISPs, but on the whole of the Internet infrastructure. In other words, we all pay -- in reduced bandwidth and increased latency, and/or in higher ISP charges. Which sounds like a tragedy-of-the-commons situation...
Well, duh... Of course it is. That's what 'too much' means! If it were a good idea, it wouldn't be 'too much', would it?!
Now, if you'd said something like 'it's easy to overdose on just about anything', or 'many substances have a harmful dose which is surprisingly low', then that would have been meaningful and interesting.
(For example, I believe that for paracetamol, only 2 or 3 times the recommended dose can be harmful or even life-threatening. And drinking a gallon of water in a short space of time is supposed to be very dangerous -- the sodium imbalance can lead to convulsions, coma, and death.)
What unfairnesses?
Here in the UK, for example, the judge will award costs at his /her discretion. Usually this means that the loser will have to pay both sides' costs, so people tend to sue based on how confident they are of winning, rather than how much richer they are.
Just like we should hate and deride all computer programmers just coz some of them behave like bastards and write viruses.
I know that classifying, labelling, and pigeonholing is the way we humans think, but politics is a complex area and it deserves far more thought than just a simple red-blue choice.
Even an oversimplified left-right line, though, is worth examining more closely. For example, the 'centre' position seems to vary considerably; here in Europe, we tend to consider both US political parties to be quite right-wing. (I wonder if there's any correlation between that and our press, which in general seems a little more ready to criticise TPTB...)
Personally, I'd thoroughly recommend you use lame for the encoding, whether you do it manually of via one of the many packages which support it. Personally, I use the options which hydrogenaudio recommended (-V 5 --athaa-sensitivity 1), which tends to give bitrates around 128kbps but quality within spitting distance of 2nd-gen formats like AAC.
You could call the first one 'cost-free' or 'gratis' or 'no-charge' or 'zero-price' or something, and the second one 'unrestricted' or 'unhindered' or 'unbound' or 'unlimited' or 'independent' or even 'liberated' perhaps.
And it's true IME too.
I'm not really worried by the fact that many people these days weren't taught English very well. I wasn't taught it very well, and have had to discover many things myself and make my own corrections. School isn't the be-all and end-all of learning.
No, what really distresses me is that other people don't care -- they simply don't see it as important. Slashdotters who are perfectly happy spotting single-symbol mistakes in source code, shell commands, or whatever, and deride those who use the wrong words for technical concepts, simply don't apply the same standards to English.
And I have no idea why this should be. Do people care less about communicating with humans than they do with computers? Do they assume that people will always be able to understand their meaning? (I can tell you from experience that that's not true! It often doesn't take more than a couple of mistakes before you're having to guess between several contradictory meanings.) Do they care so little that they're genuinely unable to see their mistakes, or to use a spelling checker (which, while limited and hardly a full solution, is still a useful tool)?
For myself, I naturally apply the same sort of precision to human language as I do to computer language. (I even tend to use the same style where possible.) I care about expressing myself correctly and well; I'm going to the effort of typing or writing -- I want people to be able to understand the results!
I could go on at length about particular mistakes ('rediculous' is one which particularly irritates me: it always makes me wonder whether things would be worse if they were 'greeniculous' or 'blueiculous'), but I'm sure plenty of others will get mentioned. I could also go on about economies of scale (if a thousand people are reading something, it makes much more sense for the writer to take a bit longer fixing it than for every single reader to puzzle over it). But what I really what to know is why people don't care about English? And how can we get them to care? Once people care, then the rest will take care of itself. People will either learn to spot their own problems, or will accept constructive criticism without lashing out and using hateful terms like 'grammar Nazi'...
And it would be wrong to catch fraudsters while there's even a single murderer out there, wouldn't it? And of course the huge amounts of money that go into trials such as the SCO one are just as wrong. All the lawyers involved should be out there catching murderers. It makes sense.
I'm not holding my breath.
In fact, apart from that, the only cold calls I seem to get are from the USA...
I find Windows (at work) annoys me more on a day-to-day basis; I'm always getting confused trying to move the cursor to the start or end of a text field, for example. (Easy on OS X: just press up or down!) Especially given that Dell have seen fit to change the traditional layout and put the page up/down keys at the top/middle of the group of 3 rather than at the middle/bottom...
vi is excellent at what it does -- editing plain text. I use it a lot; it's great for source code, and for complex editing tasks, with powerful features that I miss everywhere else. It's also very lean and efficient, available on practically every platform, and runs fine over terminal connections.
But it's hardly a replacement for TextEdit: it's not WYSIWYG, it has no support for fonts or other effects, it can't read or write WP and rich text files, it has no spelling checker, printing, clipboard support, and doesn't integrate with other GUI apps (e.g. menus and mouse).
Horses for courses.
Which is rubbish. There is tons of science fiction out there that obeys the laws of physics in as far as we know them (or at least, as they were known at the time of writing) -- some of it more than a century old, some of it current, and an awful lot in between. Most is in book form, but there are a few good examples in movies and other media. As has been pointed out, Arthur C. Clarke and others have created new uses for technology in their books which later became reality. And writers from Wells to Asimov, Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Benford, Geoff Landis, and tons more have all written perfectly logical, intelligent stories using real science.
There is also a large crop of material which is logical, intelligent, and based on science, but which posits some change or other in the laws of physics, often in order to investigate those laws more imaginatively. You might call this 'speculative fiction', and if it's done well I don't consider it any less worthy than strictly-conforming stories. In fact, sometimes this can teach you even more about the universe we live in.
And yes, there's a lot of mindless pap which clearly doesn't understand enough physics to tell what's possible or not, and doesn't care either way. (Sturgeon's Law applies!) But please don't think that's all there is to SF. If it's the only sort that makes it to your TV screen, then that says more about programme-makers than about SF.
I'd like to think that was very wrong, but I can't bring myself to. For some reason, I keep thinking of the high-ups as a very patronising, sarcastic and self-satisfied Jack Nicholson, saying "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you said thank you, and went on your way."
What, you mean it covers the rest of the US as well???
So come one, folks, let's try to come up with some! Instead of discussing the abstract here, let's put together some nice, simple scenarios which will show the possible consequences of ID cards, and illustrate the danger in no uncertain terms. (Or if we can't think of any at all, then maybe our fears aren't so justified?)