Today, computers are cheap, and writing software is expensive. Read the Silver Anniversary edition of the Mythical Man-Month; it has an essay in which Brooks says that shrink-wrap software is the closest thing he's seen to a silver bullet. It's far, far less expensive for a business to get computers and software packages than to get computers and get their own software written. Moreover, the suppliers of the canned software often have much greater domain knowledge than their customers.
In 1965, computers were really expensive, and the software was simpler. Businesses were already doing everything the software was expected to do, and so the cost of getting a computer and software customized to the business was not much higher than the cost of getting a computer and off-the-shelf software. It's a little before my time, but I can't imagine those packages selling all that well.
The problem is that your mind contains a number of conflicting and inconsistent ideas, so when people point them out to you you say "well, I'm certainly not thinking that". Well, "that" is what your other views imply.
If you can point out specifics, I'd be very interested. So far, you're very good at throwing out accusations of muddy thinking, and really lacking on the details. In this specific case, I was arguing for treating people as individuals, and you accused me of treating them like interchangeable cogs. I'd be very interested in the specific logical chain of reasoning that gets from one to the other.
You have no idea what is "relevant" to running any particular business, and neither do you or the government. If I want to work surrounded by gay white males, that should be my business, not yours.
In specific, no, I don't know what's relevant. In general, what's relevance is the ability to get the job done, work with others, and contribute value to the employer. There are very few cases where race, gender, gender preference, and other such things matter.
Well, and I'm saying that a private employer should have the right to take that [discriminatory] view of their employees
And I'm disagreeing. I'm claiming that hiring an individual should depend on that individual and what the individual can contribute to the company, not class membership.
There are rules that we have established that employers must follow. I think we agree on banning fraud, wage theft, and other dishonest and larcenous activities. I'm saying that we have a right, as a society, to establish more rules a business must abide by. You seem to have an ideological view of how businesses should be regulated, whereas I'm going for maximum benefit to people in general and thinking regulation should be based on that. (I don't mean maximum immediate benefit, or any such thing, and I do know that "benefit" is ill-defined, and the consequences of actions really hard to figure.)
It's the company and the investors who need to live with the consequences.
It's everybody on the planet who needs to live with the consequences. It's profitable for the investors to ignore how much harm the company does to others, but we (most of us, anyway), still want protection from pollution.
Civil lawsuits work differently from criminal. A civil lawsuit is two parties having a dispute that one takes to the court to settle, and the rule for deciding is the preponderance of the evidence. A criminal lawsuit is a government claiming that a certain person is a criminal, and the rule for deciding is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. One is a dispute between equals, and one is an attempt to prove guilt.
And the real issue, as it pertains to the subject at hand, is that if judges are allowed to force someone to volunteer information against themselves under threat of decade+ jail time, you run wholly afoul of the 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments.
Neither the fifth nor sixth apply here, this being a civil case, not criminal. The eighth doesn't apply, as jailing is the usual punishment for contempt of court, and it's not normally considered cruel. The legal theory behind imprisonment for contempt is that the person jailed can get out of jail at any time by cooperating with the court.
For civil suits to be worth doing, there has to be a discovery process, and there has to be a way to award money. If it's legal to toss off the flimsiest of lies to dodge these, then the courts are powerless.
Add to this that it's completely possible for a person to honestly not know/remember a passcode and you've got a recipe for completely unconstitutional situations that are impossible for the victims to get out of.
Particularly in a criminal case, if you don't know a passcode you say so, since that would be confessing to having a link to the phone, which is presumably part of evidence. The Fifth protects you. It's the job of the prosecution to establish that the phone is yours, and you know the passcode. If there's some halfway plausible reason you don't know it, you say so. Chadwick made it clear he was blowing the court off.
The jurisprudence question here is whether a defendant is required to divulge information that may lead to evidence of guilt, when the divulging itself doesn't provide evidence of guilt. I'm not real happy about the court order, myself.
The bank is more able to loan money. The bank is required to keep a certain proportion of its issued loans as actual assets. Suppose the bank has lent up to its limit, and I pay off my mortgage. The bank can then lend the previous value of my mortgage without acquiring more assets.
However, I've never signed a mortgage agreement that said I couldn't pay principal back early. At one point, I sold a house, and paid the mortgage off with the proceeds. I can also pay more principal early to shorten the loan.
This isn't a fishing expedition. The prosecution has established probable cause that there's information related to extortion on the phones, and has the warrant.
- If you provide a PIN you verify that the device is yours, and performing that action could then be classified as evidence.
That's been settled definitively in the US courts. If they can't prove it's yours, you don't have to unlock it. That would be requiring you to demonstrate something that could be evidence against you, as opposed to allowing the prosecution to see something that might be evidence.
If you lived in an earlier time, you'd have a notebook with things you wanted to remember written down in it. That would be "papers" for the purpose of the Fourth Amendment, and you could not be required to hand them over without a warrant. It wouldn't matter legally if you considered them part of your self or not; they'd be protected under most circumstances but not all.
If you're going to argue that the law is literal, you need literal quotes.
There is no law that gives you the right to remain silent. If you think otherwise, please provide a reference.
There are laws that give you the right to remain silent in some situations, such as when the police are asking you questions, but that's literally not what you said.
Read your cite. Chadwick made lame excuses, and continued to insist that he didn't have the money when investigators tracked down a million of it in the US in Chadwick's name. He apparently did not provide any evidence supporting his preposterous claim. The judge had very strong evidence that Chadwick was lying, and acted accordingly.
The evidence that Chadwick was lying would have passed a criminal test of proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The courts have held that I can be legally required to tell authorities my name. My name is not incriminating. The fact that I can unlock my phone is not incriminating. (The fact that I can unlock another phone might be.)
The Constitution is not razor-sharp on this issue. You cannot be compelled to be a witness against yourself. There are many things you can say without being a witness against yourself, and you're not protected from legal compulsion to say them by the Fifth. The First doesn't apply here, since the court would doubtless be satisfied by the defendants unlocking their phones.
The fact that a phone is in my pocket, or on my desk, doesn't necessarily show it's mine. It could have been planted on me, or I might have picked it up and not had a chance to try to return it yet.
In a criminal case, they should have more than reasonable proof. They should have proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The problem I have with this is that it makes the idea of "rights" legally nebulous, and we need them pretty definite for legal proceedings. I know I have a legal right to not incriminate myself because it is laid out in black and white in the highest law of the land. The Declaration of Independence says I have a God-given right to liberty. How far does that go?
The prosecutor may draw any desired conclusion. The jurors are supposed to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, and there may be an alternative reason for destruction of evidence. Suppose I'm on trial for murder, and I manage to wipe some files. If I can come up with a plausible explanation, there's still likely to be doubt.
In a civil case, if the defendant destroys or fails to produce evidence, the plaintiff can proceed with the assumption that the evidence showed what the plaintiff wanted it to show. If the blackmailers were being sued, the court could assume any wiped files would have been proof of blackmail, but this is a criminal court.
You can be legally required to speak truthfully when it does not incriminate you. This means that the court already knows you know the passcode. If there's any question whether you know the passcode, and the phone might be linked to a crime, then unlocking the phone shows that the phone is linked to you, and that's self-incrimination.
"Tell us where the bodies are" is legal only if it can be established that the defendant does, for some reason, know where they are. This is not normally the case before conviction. Otherwise, the defendant being able to locate the bodies is relevant evidence in itself, and so telling the police would be self-incrimination. Similarly, if you're shown a phone that might be connected with a crime, whether you can unlock it is relevant evidence, and so the defendant is legally allowed to refuse. This phone was known to belong to the defendant.
The rights of the accused are limited. In particular, the accused need not admit any capability that would suggest the accused committed a crime. The accused, in this case, is required to do something the court knows the accused can do.
I'm sure the defendants would be allowed to unlock their phones themselves, without revealing the password. It's happened before. There's no need for speech or sharing information.
I've seen enough male-to-female mansplaining going on to think it a useful neologism. It's a specific form of condescension, and is often found by itself without other forms.
I don't want to randomize team selection. We've got some highly effective teams, each with deep subject knowledge, and they all work together well. I've been in semi-random teams here, and I much prefer the current system.
My personal experience is limited, but I've found that my female colleagues to be much like my male ones. When I was working with very good people, the women were as good as the men. When I was working in dysfunctional shops, the women there were still as good as the men there, but it was a much lower bar. I haven't seen one of your As in decades.
Why aren't girls as interested? That's something I'd like to know. So far, I've read a whole lot of unsupported claims about the difference, but nothing of substance.
I know that some girls get discouraged early because of social factors. I don't know how many.
Human society is incredibly complex, and it's really difficult to figure whether group disparities are social or genetic. What I do know is that there have been different sex ratios in various fields from what we've got now, and so I have absolutely no confidence that we've gotten it right. I have heard a lot of things about social pressures, so I believe they're still strong. I can also go not too far into the past and find people claiming that X group is inherently less good in fields that we now see members of X being very successful in. I can read Slashdot and find people claiming that various groups are inherently less good in various fields. In this discussion, I've seen claims that women aren't overall as suited for STEM jobs but are better at conflict resolution, and I consider them as unfounded as (say) Patton's assertion that black soldiers couldn't think fast enough to be good in mobile warfare.
What I want is for everybody be able to use their potential to the full, regardless of whatever group they're classified into. I distrust generalizations, because as a general rule I've found them to be inaccurate. When there's a gender disparity, I want to know why.
I was peripherally involved in the extracurricular math at my son's middle school, and the math people contained a lot of boys and a lot of girls, boys in the majority but not overwhelmingly so.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, computers are cheap, and writing software is expensive. Read the Silver Anniversary edition of the Mythical Man-Month; it has an essay in which Brooks says that shrink-wrap software is the closest thing he's seen to a silver bullet. It's far, far less expensive for a business to get computers and software packages than to get computers and get their own software written. Moreover, the suppliers of the canned software often have much greater domain knowledge than their customers.
In 1965, computers were really expensive, and the software was simpler. Businesses were already doing everything the software was expected to do, and so the cost of getting a computer and software customized to the business was not much higher than the cost of getting a computer and off-the-shelf software. It's a little before my time, but I can't imagine those packages selling all that well.
If you can point out specifics, I'd be very interested. So far, you're very good at throwing out accusations of muddy thinking, and really lacking on the details. In this specific case, I was arguing for treating people as individuals, and you accused me of treating them like interchangeable cogs. I'd be very interested in the specific logical chain of reasoning that gets from one to the other.
In specific, no, I don't know what's relevant. In general, what's relevance is the ability to get the job done, work with others, and contribute value to the employer. There are very few cases where race, gender, gender preference, and other such things matter.
And I'm disagreeing. I'm claiming that hiring an individual should depend on that individual and what the individual can contribute to the company, not class membership.
There are rules that we have established that employers must follow. I think we agree on banning fraud, wage theft, and other dishonest and larcenous activities. I'm saying that we have a right, as a society, to establish more rules a business must abide by. You seem to have an ideological view of how businesses should be regulated, whereas I'm going for maximum benefit to people in general and thinking regulation should be based on that. (I don't mean maximum immediate benefit, or any such thing, and I do know that "benefit" is ill-defined, and the consequences of actions really hard to figure.)
It's everybody on the planet who needs to live with the consequences. It's profitable for the investors to ignore how much harm the company does to others, but we (most of us, anyway), still want protection from pollution.
Civil lawsuits work differently from criminal. A civil lawsuit is two parties having a dispute that one takes to the court to settle, and the rule for deciding is the preponderance of the evidence. A criminal lawsuit is a government claiming that a certain person is a criminal, and the rule for deciding is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. One is a dispute between equals, and one is an attempt to prove guilt.
Neither the fifth nor sixth apply here, this being a civil case, not criminal. The eighth doesn't apply, as jailing is the usual punishment for contempt of court, and it's not normally considered cruel. The legal theory behind imprisonment for contempt is that the person jailed can get out of jail at any time by cooperating with the court.
For civil suits to be worth doing, there has to be a discovery process, and there has to be a way to award money. If it's legal to toss off the flimsiest of lies to dodge these, then the courts are powerless.
Particularly in a criminal case, if you don't know a passcode you say so, since that would be confessing to having a link to the phone, which is presumably part of evidence. The Fifth protects you. It's the job of the prosecution to establish that the phone is yours, and you know the passcode. If there's some halfway plausible reason you don't know it, you say so. Chadwick made it clear he was blowing the court off.
The jurisprudence question here is whether a defendant is required to divulge information that may lead to evidence of guilt, when the divulging itself doesn't provide evidence of guilt. I'm not real happy about the court order, myself.
The bank is more able to loan money. The bank is required to keep a certain proportion of its issued loans as actual assets. Suppose the bank has lent up to its limit, and I pay off my mortgage. The bank can then lend the previous value of my mortgage without acquiring more assets.
However, I've never signed a mortgage agreement that said I couldn't pay principal back early. At one point, I sold a house, and paid the mortgage off with the proceeds. I can also pay more principal early to shorten the loan.
This isn't a fishing expedition. The prosecution has established probable cause that there's information related to extortion on the phones, and has the warrant.
That's been settled definitively in the US courts. If they can't prove it's yours, you don't have to unlock it. That would be requiring you to demonstrate something that could be evidence against you, as opposed to allowing the prosecution to see something that might be evidence.
If you lived in an earlier time, you'd have a notebook with things you wanted to remember written down in it. That would be "papers" for the purpose of the Fourth Amendment, and you could not be required to hand them over without a warrant. It wouldn't matter legally if you considered them part of your self or not; they'd be protected under most circumstances but not all.
If you're going to argue that the law is literal, you need literal quotes.
There is no law that gives you the right to remain silent. If you think otherwise, please provide a reference.
There are laws that give you the right to remain silent in some situations, such as when the police are asking you questions, but that's literally not what you said.
Read your cite. Chadwick made lame excuses, and continued to insist that he didn't have the money when investigators tracked down a million of it in the US in Chadwick's name. He apparently did not provide any evidence supporting his preposterous claim. The judge had very strong evidence that Chadwick was lying, and acted accordingly.
The evidence that Chadwick was lying would have passed a criminal test of proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The courts have held that I can be legally required to tell authorities my name. My name is not incriminating. The fact that I can unlock my phone is not incriminating. (The fact that I can unlock another phone might be.)
The Constitution is not razor-sharp on this issue. You cannot be compelled to be a witness against yourself. There are many things you can say without being a witness against yourself, and you're not protected from legal compulsion to say them by the Fifth. The First doesn't apply here, since the court would doubtless be satisfied by the defendants unlocking their phones.
The fact that a phone is in my pocket, or on my desk, doesn't necessarily show it's mine. It could have been planted on me, or I might have picked it up and not had a chance to try to return it yet.
In a criminal case, they should have more than reasonable proof. They should have proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The problem I have with this is that it makes the idea of "rights" legally nebulous, and we need them pretty definite for legal proceedings. I know I have a legal right to not incriminate myself because it is laid out in black and white in the highest law of the land. The Declaration of Independence says I have a God-given right to liberty. How far does that go?
The prosecutor may draw any desired conclusion. The jurors are supposed to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, and there may be an alternative reason for destruction of evidence. Suppose I'm on trial for murder, and I manage to wipe some files. If I can come up with a plausible explanation, there's still likely to be doubt.
In a civil case, if the defendant destroys or fails to produce evidence, the plaintiff can proceed with the assumption that the evidence showed what the plaintiff wanted it to show. If the blackmailers were being sued, the court could assume any wiped files would have been proof of blackmail, but this is a criminal court.
You can be legally required to speak truthfully when it does not incriminate you. This means that the court already knows you know the passcode. If there's any question whether you know the passcode, and the phone might be linked to a crime, then unlocking the phone shows that the phone is linked to you, and that's self-incrimination.
"Tell us where the bodies are" is legal only if it can be established that the defendant does, for some reason, know where they are. This is not normally the case before conviction. Otherwise, the defendant being able to locate the bodies is relevant evidence in itself, and so telling the police would be self-incrimination. Similarly, if you're shown a phone that might be connected with a crime, whether you can unlock it is relevant evidence, and so the defendant is legally allowed to refuse. This phone was known to belong to the defendant.
The rights of the accused are limited. In particular, the accused need not admit any capability that would suggest the accused committed a crime. The accused, in this case, is required to do something the court knows the accused can do.
I'm sure the defendants would be allowed to unlock their phones themselves, without revealing the password. It's happened before. There's no need for speech or sharing information.
I've seen enough male-to-female mansplaining going on to think it a useful neologism. It's a specific form of condescension, and is often found by itself without other forms.
I don't want to randomize team selection. We've got some highly effective teams, each with deep subject knowledge, and they all work together well. I've been in semi-random teams here, and I much prefer the current system.
My personal experience is limited, but I've found that my female colleagues to be much like my male ones. When I was working with very good people, the women were as good as the men. When I was working in dysfunctional shops, the women there were still as good as the men there, but it was a much lower bar. I haven't seen one of your As in decades.
Why aren't girls as interested? That's something I'd like to know. So far, I've read a whole lot of unsupported claims about the difference, but nothing of substance.
I know that some girls get discouraged early because of social factors. I don't know how many.
Human society is incredibly complex, and it's really difficult to figure whether group disparities are social or genetic. What I do know is that there have been different sex ratios in various fields from what we've got now, and so I have absolutely no confidence that we've gotten it right. I have heard a lot of things about social pressures, so I believe they're still strong. I can also go not too far into the past and find people claiming that X group is inherently less good in fields that we now see members of X being very successful in. I can read Slashdot and find people claiming that various groups are inherently less good in various fields. In this discussion, I've seen claims that women aren't overall as suited for STEM jobs but are better at conflict resolution, and I consider them as unfounded as (say) Patton's assertion that black soldiers couldn't think fast enough to be good in mobile warfare.
What I want is for everybody be able to use their potential to the full, regardless of whatever group they're classified into. I distrust generalizations, because as a general rule I've found them to be inaccurate. When there's a gender disparity, I want to know why.
I was peripherally involved in the extracurricular math at my son's middle school, and the math people contained a lot of boys and a lot of girls, boys in the majority but not overwhelmingly so.