The "cab rank rule" has the minor caveat that lawyers don't take on clients who cannot afford their fees. Whether you get justice or not depends on whether you can afford a newly qualified, inexperienced lawyer who hasn't got into a big firm, or a large firm who can put a team of maybe 20 experienced lawyers on your case, with so much muscle that they can intimidate the judge and the jury. In complex issues like IP and competition law, which is being made up as it goes along, the small guy is at an immense disadvantage.
If you doubt this, consider. The average income of barristers (attorneys) in the UK is around $50k per annum. The income of the big guys is up to $5000000.
You might think this was against the interests of clients. But if you're a multinational, by paying the big lawyers so much, still peanuts to you, you effectively make them unaffordable by the smaller competition. You buy them, but in a way that it looks as if they haven't been bought.
At what point does the performance of computers become "adequate"?
Once a technology becomes mature, a slow rate of improvement becomes acceptable. Reliability gets fixed, design improves, niche markets get filled. Internal combustion engines, houses, aircraft, ships, bridges, for all of these the lack of a Moores Law isn't a "problem".
Perhaps if Moore's Law finally packs in for computers, we can all stop chasing progress and concentrate on things like social implications, human factors, and software that does something useful.
What makes the omission worse is that Turing was at Princeton for a while, and it may have been while there that he saw how electronics could be used to build logic circuits. Don't only leave out Bletchley's chief genius, folks, leave out the one who had a Transatlantic dimension.
I'm now awaiting the next Hollywood Bible epic - in which a sympathetic group of GIs rescue the Israelites from Egypt (no Moses, of course. Too Jewish.)
Governments and organisations now seem to be obsessed with people-free electronic solutions to everything. They are failing to address two root questions: Why are there so many criminals, and why is it so easy to steal things from shops, banks etc.?
Shops are terrified that if their doors aren't always open and the goods available to be picked up, people won't buy anything. They use psychology to try and get people to pick up things they didn't originally want. They try to remove as many as possible of the visual reminders that you are going to have to pay for this- which is why they love credit cards for even small purchases, because it's not like spending real money. But exposing everything like that lowers the threshold for theft. If you're supposed not to be conscious that this is going to cost you, the concept of ownership becomes less and less meaningful.
They also try and take people out of the system until there is no-one around to watch the shoplifters.
Effectively they are working to find a margin between cutting staff costs and unacceptable losses from theft, based on a business model that isn't human in scale.
As Gerhard Schroeder remarked recently, if the EU is to mean anything to its citizens it must become a less technocratic society. Blasphemy on/. perhaps, but needs debating.
In Europe, of course, we've spent the last 20 years developing highly efficient clean Diesels, and the French have put a fair bit of effort into biodiesel (modified plant oil) which is renewable. Growing sunflowers is easier than deep mining, I believe.
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If you doubt this, consider. The average income of barristers (attorneys) in the UK is around $50k per annum. The income of the big guys is up to $5000000.
You might think this was against the interests of clients. But if you're a multinational, by paying the big lawyers so much, still peanuts to you, you effectively make them unaffordable by the smaller competition. You buy them, but in a way that it looks as if they haven't been bought.
At what point does the performance of computers become "adequate"? Once a technology becomes mature, a slow rate of improvement becomes acceptable. Reliability gets fixed, design improves, niche markets get filled. Internal combustion engines, houses, aircraft, ships, bridges, for all of these the lack of a Moores Law isn't a "problem". Perhaps if Moore's Law finally packs in for computers, we can all stop chasing progress and concentrate on things like social implications, human factors, and software that does something useful.
What makes the omission worse is that Turing was at Princeton for a while, and it may have been while there that he saw how electronics could be used to build logic circuits. Don't only leave out Bletchley's chief genius, folks, leave out the one who had a Transatlantic dimension. I'm now awaiting the next Hollywood Bible epic - in which a sympathetic group of GIs rescue the Israelites from Egypt (no Moses, of course. Too Jewish.)
Governments and organisations now seem to be obsessed with people-free electronic solutions to everything. They are failing to address two root questions: Why are there so many criminals, and why is it so easy to steal things from shops, banks etc.? Shops are terrified that if their doors aren't always open and the goods available to be picked up, people won't buy anything. They use psychology to try and get people to pick up things they didn't originally want. They try to remove as many as possible of the visual reminders that you are going to have to pay for this- which is why they love credit cards for even small purchases, because it's not like spending real money. But exposing everything like that lowers the threshold for theft. If you're supposed not to be conscious that this is going to cost you, the concept of ownership becomes less and less meaningful. They also try and take people out of the system until there is no-one around to watch the shoplifters. Effectively they are working to find a margin between cutting staff costs and unacceptable losses from theft, based on a business model that isn't human in scale. As Gerhard Schroeder remarked recently, if the EU is to mean anything to its citizens it must become a less technocratic society. Blasphemy on /. perhaps, but needs debating.
In Europe, of course, we've spent the last 20 years developing highly efficient clean Diesels, and the French have put a fair bit of effort into biodiesel (modified plant oil) which is renewable. Growing sunflowers is easier than deep mining, I believe.