But hey, if you think we should believe everything the government or people in the government says at face value and never question it, I guess you got a point.
Do you find that this sort of sarcastic, straw man form of arguing works for you? Do you have people responding "well, I guess I have been pretty silly about this..."
Do you mean it's not unsatisfactory evidence for Dick Cheney to say Iraq had WMDs to support Bush's claim we need to go to war with them?
The obvious difference between Iraqi WMDs and Obama's birth on the date and at the place claimed is that the latter had a wide variety of independent supporting evidence. By itself, an appointee or official asserting something is insufficient; when it's in concert with a bunch of other evidence, I take it as another data point.
are you saying those claims are wrong?
No, because I didn't bother looking at the content beyond verifying that it was about people arguing that the long form birth certificate is a forgery. My point was that the release of the long form certificate hasn't settled it--there are still a wide variety of birthers claiming that it's undemonstrated that Obama is a natural born citizen. I also haven't gone digging for the original fuel requisition forms from NASA for the Apollo rockets to prove that they did, in fact, go to the moon. At a certain point, it's plainly irrational to doubt, because the justifications for doubting have gone far beyond the justifications for accepting as reasonably proven.
So let's be clear: It's unsatisfactory for the head of the Department of Health to personally vouch for the validity of the Certificate of Live Birth and the underlying records because the serial number was blacked out, but on the long form the un-blacked out serial number is sufficient even though it's not directly verifiable, only inferentially valid because it seems to fall somewhere in the correct sequence? Since we have no actual access to the bank of long form certificates, how do you know that the serial number doesn't belong to someone else?
Why don't you post a couple links to those spun conspiracies you are talking about.
However, for those of us grounded by facts and empirical evidence, it doesn't seem out of place to ask someone to provide proof of their claims.
If you were really grounded by facts and empirical evidence, you would have been satisfied with the Certificate of Live Birth released in 2008. That's the paperwork Obama received when he approached the Hawaii Department of Health and said "give me my birth certificate"--as would anyone asking for their birth certificate in Hawaii. For those of us actually grounded by facts and empirical evidence, that was sufficient to prove he was born in Hawaii, especially in conjunction with the birth announcements placed in the newspapers by the hospital when he was born, and the (unusual) public statement by the person in charge of the department of health that he had personally verified that the original long form certificate existed and was in good order. That certificate of live birth is sufficient proof of citizenship that the State Department accepts it as proof and will issue a passport based on it.
After that, anyone left still demanding to see the long form was demonstrably irrational or mendacious. Everyone who actually cared about the facts was satisfied--such as the Clinton campaign. Everyone else demanded to see the long form, and, surprise surprise, was not satisfied by it--they're now busily spinning conspiracy theories about how it was forged. Again, demonstrably irrational.
You can't refute an insider who doesn't exist. The same "journalist" (Ulsterman) claiming to have an insider is also a birther--though curiously, his insider didn't warn him that the long form birth certificate was going to be released.
creationism isn't allowed because it's religious. I'm so confused.
Why are you confused? You said it yourself: creationism is religious, which means it's not scientific, which means it's not a scientific theory, no matter how much creationists try to dress it up as one.
You demonstrate my point for me: legalities about war are window dressing with little practical effect on whether the U.S. goes to war, or finishes it. They're a post facto fig leaf to the decision.
I'm asserting that, as a practical matter, the legalities surrounding war are niceties bearing little relation to how wars start, are fought, and ended.
For decades, Rand analysts spun rosy scenarios about "winnable" nuclear wars where their carefully plotted, game-theoretic scenarios outlined steps like a chess game's that resulted in the USSR capitulating without the U.S. being a smoking ruin. In hindsight, such scenarios seem laughably naive. Why do they seem more plausible when we're talking about China in the future?
They're using the JVM; they're not aiming at compatibility with the SDK, or being able to run Java code, or run Ceylon code in a J2EE container. That makes the job a lot more manageable.
It's like sitting down and saying, "given the JVM, what should Java have been like?"
I've never been addicted; I've known alcoholics and coke addicts. I've seen their absurdly destructive behaviour that they knew was absurdly destructive. These were otherwise successful people who were not obviously weak-willed.
If Ceglia can produce copies of the emails from independent third parties like Harvard's email logs from 7 years ago, that's pretty good proof. As a felon already convicted of fraud, Ceglia has zero credibility, but if Harvard produced identical copies and said "these came from our archives in 2003", then the burden of proof is on Zuck that Harvard is either lying or somehow insecure in its logs.
Yes, it was my job. It was a civil dispute between my employer and a company that had previously had a deal to manufacture our products in another country. The deal broke down over money, and we spent several years suing each other to recover losses. At the end of the day, we both agreed to walk away because our lawyers were telling us that the legal aspects had been fully explored, and shoddy bookkeeping on both sides made a judgement in our favour unlikely.
If I was on the jury, I'd have no problem believing beyond a reasonable doubt that she was dead and Hans murdered her. Police found her vehicle, her cell phone, her wallet, and her passport. Either she fled her life with literally nothing (her bank account showed normal activity until her disappearance, and then nothing), abandoning the children that everyone said she was devoted to, or she was kidnapped or murdered. Coupled with Reiser doing an excellent job looking like a murderer, including testifying on his own behalf to offer absurd explanations for incriminating evidence, it seems like a no brainer to me.
Judicial process allows for discretion, but there is neither motivation nor punishment to not abuse discretion.
Because by definition, exercising discretion is not something punishable. If it was, it wouldn't be discretion. If I say "you can choose A, B, or C", and then when you choose B I say "wrong", then you weren't able to choose B, were you? You were only able to choose A or C.
It's a predictable response to some decision by a judge that upsets people to remove the judge's discretion to decide something, but that has its own problems, the most obvious example of which is mandatory sentences. I recall a case in Florida in the 90s where a mildly retarded teenager killed his little sister while showing her WWF wrestling moves. Plainly it wasn't murder or even manslaughter--the teen had no idea he was doing anything dangerous. The judge cried as he read out the sentence he had to apply thanks to mandatory sentencing guidelines: life in a maximum security prison.
TLDR: Pursuit of justice is a lie.
Your cynicism is far scarier than my belief that the legal system isn't 100% broken, and a far worse guide. As I told another poster above, I've been through this process, and found it comprehensible the entire time. Results were generally predictable and informed our strategy. We neither won nor lost. Expert guidance from our lawyers was always useful, and at the end, we didn't feel like the legal system had failed us.
No, I think the law is non-deterministic in general. It always involves people at every stage making decisions and judgements, because you can't reduce human affairs to a set of rules. Sometimes that means the policeman violates your rights; sometimes it means you thinking the policeman violated your rights because you don't understand what your rights are in practical terms. Like I said, I've been through the process. I've seen how messy it seems.
What I reject is your suggestion that it's little more than money and bias that decides things. In every case I've looked at, it's not been hard to trace the logic of the sequence and understand what was happening at each point where human action met legal rule met procedural constraint. There are notable examples of people gaming the system and acting in ways that are crude and venal and self-interested, but those examples seem omnipresent only because we don't tend to hear about the mass of legal actions where the process grinds out its eventual conclusion for good or bad, and rarely to everyone's agreement that the outcome was just.
If you have a better suggestion for how to do it, I'm all ears.
what hope do you have of getting the desired outcome in your petty little case?
The legal system does not exist to provide you with your desired outcome. It's not a computer where the right inputs get the right outputs. It exists to resolve disputes according to the law as written and the body of previous judgements that are applicable. And, pretty much by definition, where a trial proceeds through appeals, it's because the existing body of law and precedent do not provide a clear rule on who's right and who's wrong, and so the process works to generate a final ruling.
Unless you can find someone with extremely deep pockets to back you, you just lose and pay whatever penalty gets dished out.
The legal system is not a market where money purchases you the desired outcome. SCO is proof enough of that.
I'm not claiming the legal system is perfect, or invulnerable to bias or the effect of money on cases. But this idea you seem to have that the legal system is simply corrupt is just... tremendously illustrative, perhaps, about how the hacker mindset deals badly with non-deterministic systems.
I've been through legal issues that took years and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I've read up on cases where I heard the verdict and thought "WTF?" In both cases, when I got down to the details, I could understand how the result was achieved. I didn't necessarily agree with it, but I could understand how the legal issues were resolved by people participating in the process and making decisions along the way that were generally comprehensible at the moment.
Judges are allowed to make up the interpretations of rules as they go. It's called setting precedent.
Setting precedent only happens when the judge is ruling on something not covered either by existing law or prior precedent. They don't get to just make shit up. And if they do, there's several layers of appeals courts that routinely revisit and overturn the rulings of judges.
"Hacking" a system is only possible when it always follows its own rules.
The legal system does follow its own rules, which allow for a degree of discretion among all participants to judge and act for themselves because it fundamentally recognizes that human affairs can't be reduced to something as a logical as a processor design.
So I guess that's it. Hackers have trouble dealing with the legal system because they can't handle the apparent ambiguity of the process and the results.
Or that the legal realities don't match up so well to the fevered dreams of hackers everywhere.
I actually have trouble understanding why hackers just completely lose their shit when the law is involved. It's an interesting and complex system that any real hacker should relish understanding and, well, hacking. Instead we get trite bullshit like "the judge was biased".
The Hans Reiser threads here were epic with complete mental shutdowns on the part of/. commenters. I actually argued with a linux kernel dev who refused to accept the verdict even after Reiser led the police to the body, because he couldn't understand how a guilty verdict was reached in the trial. He actually said "the investigation was flawed, and couldn't logically produce Reiser as a suspect, therefore the trial was flawed and the guilty verdict wrong."
Slashdot Mirror
Do you find that this sort of sarcastic, straw man form of arguing works for you? Do you have people responding "well, I guess I have been pretty silly about this..."
The obvious difference between Iraqi WMDs and Obama's birth on the date and at the place claimed is that the latter had a wide variety of independent supporting evidence. By itself, an appointee or official asserting something is insufficient; when it's in concert with a bunch of other evidence, I take it as another data point.
No, because I didn't bother looking at the content beyond verifying that it was about people arguing that the long form birth certificate is a forgery. My point was that the release of the long form certificate hasn't settled it--there are still a wide variety of birthers claiming that it's undemonstrated that Obama is a natural born citizen. I also haven't gone digging for the original fuel requisition forms from NASA for the Apollo rockets to prove that they did, in fact, go to the moon. At a certain point, it's plainly irrational to doubt, because the justifications for doubting have gone far beyond the justifications for accepting as reasonably proven.
So let's be clear: It's unsatisfactory for the head of the Department of Health to personally vouch for the validity of the Certificate of Live Birth and the underlying records because the serial number was blacked out, but on the long form the un-blacked out serial number is sufficient even though it's not directly verifiable, only inferentially valid because it seems to fall somewhere in the correct sequence? Since we have no actual access to the bank of long form certificates, how do you know that the serial number doesn't belong to someone else?
Here's the google results for "long form birth certificate forgery": http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=long+form+birth+certificate+forgery (967,000 results). Your google finger sucks.
If you were really grounded by facts and empirical evidence, you would have been satisfied with the Certificate of Live Birth released in 2008. That's the paperwork Obama received when he approached the Hawaii Department of Health and said "give me my birth certificate"--as would anyone asking for their birth certificate in Hawaii. For those of us actually grounded by facts and empirical evidence, that was sufficient to prove he was born in Hawaii, especially in conjunction with the birth announcements placed in the newspapers by the hospital when he was born, and the (unusual) public statement by the person in charge of the department of health that he had personally verified that the original long form certificate existed and was in good order. That certificate of live birth is sufficient proof of citizenship that the State Department accepts it as proof and will issue a passport based on it.
After that, anyone left still demanding to see the long form was demonstrably irrational or mendacious. Everyone who actually cared about the facts was satisfied--such as the Clinton campaign. Everyone else demanded to see the long form, and, surprise surprise, was not satisfied by it--they're now busily spinning conspiracy theories about how it was forged. Again, demonstrably irrational.
You can't refute an insider who doesn't exist. The same "journalist" (Ulsterman) claiming to have an insider is also a birther--though curiously, his insider didn't warn him that the long form birth certificate was going to be released.
creationism isn't allowed because it's religious. I'm so confused.
Why are you confused? You said it yourself: creationism is religious, which means it's not scientific, which means it's not a scientific theory, no matter how much creationists try to dress it up as one.
You demonstrate my point for me: legalities about war are window dressing with little practical effect on whether the U.S. goes to war, or finishes it. They're a post facto fig leaf to the decision.
I'm asserting that, as a practical matter, the legalities surrounding war are niceties bearing little relation to how wars start, are fought, and ended.
What does "legally" have to do with "war"?
That's your opinion. Is it China's?
For decades, Rand analysts spun rosy scenarios about "winnable" nuclear wars where their carefully plotted, game-theoretic scenarios outlined steps like a chess game's that resulted in the USSR capitulating without the U.S. being a smoking ruin. In hindsight, such scenarios seem laughably naive. Why do they seem more plausible when we're talking about China in the future?
And what does the U.S. do when China, about to be pulverized conventionally, launches its nukes?
Besides glow, I mean.
So your point is that Batman should have just murdered the guards to save the inmates the trouble?
Exactly. This is why everyone should be well-educated generally, not just in whatever narrow field they choose.
You have a bunch of interesting and worthwhile points to make, and they're lost under the layer of abusive shit you painted on top of them.
They're using the JVM; they're not aiming at compatibility with the SDK, or being able to run Java code, or run Ceylon code in a J2EE container. That makes the job a lot more manageable.
It's like sitting down and saying, "given the JVM, what should Java have been like?"
I've never been addicted; I've known alcoholics and coke addicts. I've seen their absurdly destructive behaviour that they knew was absurdly destructive. These were otherwise successful people who were not obviously weak-willed.
Have you ever been addicted to something? Heroin? Painkillers? Cocaine? Any actual experience of addiction?
If Ceglia can produce copies of the emails from independent third parties like Harvard's email logs from 7 years ago, that's pretty good proof. As a felon already convicted of fraud, Ceglia has zero credibility, but if Harvard produced identical copies and said "these came from our archives in 2003", then the burden of proof is on Zuck that Harvard is either lying or somehow insecure in its logs.
Thank you for stopping, because I threw up in my mouth a little when you referred to addiction as a "voluntary misery".
Yes, it was my job. It was a civil dispute between my employer and a company that had previously had a deal to manufacture our products in another country. The deal broke down over money, and we spent several years suing each other to recover losses. At the end of the day, we both agreed to walk away because our lawyers were telling us that the legal aspects had been fully explored, and shoddy bookkeeping on both sides made a judgement in our favour unlikely.
If I was on the jury, I'd have no problem believing beyond a reasonable doubt that she was dead and Hans murdered her. Police found her vehicle, her cell phone, her wallet, and her passport. Either she fled her life with literally nothing (her bank account showed normal activity until her disappearance, and then nothing), abandoning the children that everyone said she was devoted to, or she was kidnapped or murdered. Coupled with Reiser doing an excellent job looking like a murderer, including testifying on his own behalf to offer absurd explanations for incriminating evidence, it seems like a no brainer to me.
You're right, I do believe what I said.
Because by definition, exercising discretion is not something punishable. If it was, it wouldn't be discretion. If I say "you can choose A, B, or C", and then when you choose B I say "wrong", then you weren't able to choose B, were you? You were only able to choose A or C.
It's a predictable response to some decision by a judge that upsets people to remove the judge's discretion to decide something, but that has its own problems, the most obvious example of which is mandatory sentences. I recall a case in Florida in the 90s where a mildly retarded teenager killed his little sister while showing her WWF wrestling moves. Plainly it wasn't murder or even manslaughter--the teen had no idea he was doing anything dangerous. The judge cried as he read out the sentence he had to apply thanks to mandatory sentencing guidelines: life in a maximum security prison.
Your cynicism is far scarier than my belief that the legal system isn't 100% broken, and a far worse guide. As I told another poster above, I've been through this process, and found it comprehensible the entire time. Results were generally predictable and informed our strategy. We neither won nor lost. Expert guidance from our lawyers was always useful, and at the end, we didn't feel like the legal system had failed us.
No, I think the law is non-deterministic in general. It always involves people at every stage making decisions and judgements, because you can't reduce human affairs to a set of rules. Sometimes that means the policeman violates your rights; sometimes it means you thinking the policeman violated your rights because you don't understand what your rights are in practical terms. Like I said, I've been through the process. I've seen how messy it seems.
What I reject is your suggestion that it's little more than money and bias that decides things. In every case I've looked at, it's not been hard to trace the logic of the sequence and understand what was happening at each point where human action met legal rule met procedural constraint. There are notable examples of people gaming the system and acting in ways that are crude and venal and self-interested, but those examples seem omnipresent only because we don't tend to hear about the mass of legal actions where the process grinds out its eventual conclusion for good or bad, and rarely to everyone's agreement that the outcome was just.
If you have a better suggestion for how to do it, I'm all ears.
The legal system does not exist to provide you with your desired outcome. It's not a computer where the right inputs get the right outputs. It exists to resolve disputes according to the law as written and the body of previous judgements that are applicable. And, pretty much by definition, where a trial proceeds through appeals, it's because the existing body of law and precedent do not provide a clear rule on who's right and who's wrong, and so the process works to generate a final ruling.
The legal system is not a market where money purchases you the desired outcome. SCO is proof enough of that.
I'm not claiming the legal system is perfect, or invulnerable to bias or the effect of money on cases. But this idea you seem to have that the legal system is simply corrupt is just... tremendously illustrative, perhaps, about how the hacker mindset deals badly with non-deterministic systems.
I've been through legal issues that took years and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I've read up on cases where I heard the verdict and thought "WTF?" In both cases, when I got down to the details, I could understand how the result was achieved. I didn't necessarily agree with it, but I could understand how the legal issues were resolved by people participating in the process and making decisions along the way that were generally comprehensible at the moment.
Setting precedent only happens when the judge is ruling on something not covered either by existing law or prior precedent. They don't get to just make shit up. And if they do, there's several layers of appeals courts that routinely revisit and overturn the rulings of judges.
The legal system does follow its own rules, which allow for a degree of discretion among all participants to judge and act for themselves because it fundamentally recognizes that human affairs can't be reduced to something as a logical as a processor design.
So I guess that's it. Hackers have trouble dealing with the legal system because they can't handle the apparent ambiguity of the process and the results.
suggesting that the judge was biased
Or that the legal realities don't match up so well to the fevered dreams of hackers everywhere.
I actually have trouble understanding why hackers just completely lose their shit when the law is involved. It's an interesting and complex system that any real hacker should relish understanding and, well, hacking. Instead we get trite bullshit like "the judge was biased".
The Hans Reiser threads here were epic with complete mental shutdowns on the part of /. commenters. I actually argued with a linux kernel dev who refused to accept the verdict even after Reiser led the police to the body, because he couldn't understand how a guilty verdict was reached in the trial. He actually said "the investigation was flawed, and couldn't logically produce Reiser as a suspect, therefore the trial was flawed and the guilty verdict wrong."