One of the changes I have noticed over many years of using English is that the better sounding more poetic words have dropped out of usage. "A well-lit room", "her face lit up" were standard usage. Nowadays everyone says "lighted" and it grates on my ears.
Same with "spelled" vs "spelt". Sometimes the softer "t" simply sounds better than the harder "d".
Japanese does this too. "Sa-n" is three, "hyaku" is hundred, but three hundred is "sambyaku" simply because it sounds better and is easier to say.
I imagine every language does it in one way or another.
Anyone who pays the slightest attention to harmonious sounds can pick these changes up as a matter of course.
This can only mean that you are deaf to the pleasures of spoken languages.
False positives, laboratory fuckups and actual cheating are all much more likely than a French conspiracy against Landis on the basis of him being an American.
Yes but... a conspiracy to cover up spawned by embarrassment at having their incompetency brought to the public's attention is entirely believable, and I have no doubt that his being American was a large part of the embarrassment, in part because Americans were not that popular and in part because Americans expect more justice than was available.
The French legal system is Napoleonic. I'm sure wikipedia has lots to say about it, but their judges are investigators of some sort in addition to being judges.
Yes, 3/4 of the samples showed nothing, 1/4 showed something. Sounds to me like a really crappy test to be that inconsistent. 75% of your evidence says innocent, so you take the 25% which says guilty. Makes all the sense in the world to people with a grudge who want evidence to match their preconceived notions of who to blame. With others who want to use evidence to find the guilty, not so much.
Sure there is. There's the USADA finding synthetic testosterone in 4 out of 7 'B' samples, while Landis' coterie of lawyers wailed how unfair it was to run the synthetic tests on his B samples when his other A samples had shown clean. That's like complaining that the cops found weed in your glove compartment when you hadn't left any lying out on the dash.
No, it's complaining that if the tests are so shoddy and/or temperamental that they only find something in half of one sample, and none in the other, ie 3/4 of the samples show nothing, you must believe the 1/4 which show something.
If a jury votes 9-3 for acquittal, you must believe the 3 for guilty.
I followed it closely at the time, but have forgotten the details by now. I'm sure google would be my friend. However, Landis' main complaint was that the lab results were poorly handled, poorly tracked, and altogether lacking a real chain of ownership to show they were even his samples. Furthermore, IIRC, the surprisingly high results for that day were incompatible with samples taken before and after. The kind of doping they accused him of would have left traces in the blood for some time afterwards, long enough for later tests to have shown something, which they didn't. And the samples they used were the backup samples, because they had lost the primary samples.
It smelled pretty bad from what I remember. It didn't mean he hadn't done it, but no court would ever have accepted their evidence, and to strip someone of a Tour de France championship because of it was pretty outrageous. IIRC he had also beaten the French favorite and the French have never taken much to foreigners who do that, especially Americans.
OTOH, I undoubtedly have forgotten a lot of the details, and I just don't care to look them up -- I mainly remember how shoddy their case was, how much it seemed like petty officials running amuck, and especially taking revenge for their gross carelessness and incompetence being shown to the world by some uppity bicycle rider. After all, everyone knows that the true purpose of any bicycle race is the glory of the promoters, not the racers.
I will back that up with my own story of a weaker DoS. The year was one of 1970-72, I do not know which. UC Berkeley had two CDC 6400s, A was normal, B was used for an experimental time sharing system and thus had an optional-at-extra-cost instruction, Exchange Jump, which swapped context. I had been toying with a Fortran program and gotten tired of it, so decided to finish it off in a burst of glory. It began execution in some obscure subroutine instead of MAIN, never called MAIN, and as it ground away at its nominal task, it gradually modified an innocent instruction into an Exchange Jump. But sadly, once it finally had modified it to the Exchange Jump opcode, there was no context, just a pointer to 0, and it farked the entire machine.
Now I wasn't truly anti-social. I had in fact written on the card deck that it was only to be run on machine A, not B. Unbeknownst to me, that Exchange Jump instruction was also used by diagnostic programs, and the tech was too lazy to disable it after each visit, just left it enabled at all times, so my Fortran program crashed the machine.
It wasn't much of a DoS, I will admit. The OS, CALIDOSCOPE (Cal Improved Design On SCOPE (Supervisory Control Of Program Execution)), could only handle 6 batch jobs at once at most, so that's the worst it could do. But I did get called in to the admin's office, who sighed and gave me that "What are we going to do with you?" look. He knew I wasn't malicious, but he had to warn me to not do it again.
First intelligent response yet. They used to put pipe railings around gun tubs in the old navy to prevent guns from being aimed at own ship. You could do the same thing here so it couldn't have windows or sky behind the target. of course, someone could leave a beer bottle in the yard...
Travel time is instantaneous for all practical purposes. If you think you need the distance to know what to shoot and what not to shoot, that's only half the problem. The real problem is what about the parts of the laser beam that aren't intercepted by the mosquito? I realize lasers do gradually expand, but not enough to avoid zapping the people nearby.
Toyota, having achieved their goal of becoming the world's largest car company, appealed their win to the court of public opinion by recalling millions of vehicles. There was no hope of becoming larger than themselves, so the only downside was possibly becoming smaller. "We need this appeal to keep our name in the public spotlight," unexplained an anonymous spokesman.
They say 50K connections, potentially up to 500K. No competitor will pay attention to such small numbers, especially as they are certain to skim the cream of cheaply connectable homes.
There had been 17 -- but some overlord deleted the others before anyone got a chance to see them. These three escaped censorship because they had already been seen.
My point about that movie was not who had that special knowledge, in this case the attorney. Rather, what if a juror has that special knowledge? What if it's nothing as arcane as in that movie, what if it's general knowledge about what time a store opens every day because the juror works across the street?
The point is that there are a zillion things jurors know which will affect how they see witnesses. Jurors can't and shouldn't be expected to leave that general knowledge at home. If I were on a jury and the definition of a specific word came up, not a legal term mind you, just an ordinary word, and I want to know what that word means, am I so helpless that I have to ask the judge what it means? Where do you draw the line on that helplessness? If I see a witness twitch in ways that remind me of other liars I have known, am I supposed to ask the judge about twitches?
EVERYTHING the jurors say or do is informed by their knowledge and opinions. If one juror says he doesn't like the way a witness spoke, that a witness looked uncomfortable, and the witness was a liar, are the other jurors supposed to ignore that? Are the attorneys and the judge supposed to intervene? If a juror says a witness lied because something is not physical possible because that IS the juror's day job and he knows all about it, are the other jurors supposed to tell him to shut up?
The idea that jurors are supposed to leave their personal knowledge outside the jury box is ridiculous.
That's easy. The jury is expected to sit there mute and obedient, which is ridiculous. They have brains. They see things the lawyers and judge don't. Get them directly involved. Let them raise their hand to ask questions -- not just "Can he speak louder" or even "I don't understand that word", but real questions. Let them interrupt testimony, the lawyers, even the judge, by raising their hand or pushing a button to turn on a light.
In have heard there are some places where jurors are allowed to ask questions, but I don't know much about it.
Third, you do not have the right to nullify a trial, it is illegal to do so.
You said jury nullification is illegal in the US. It isn't. Judges may disallow lawyers telling the jury they have the right, but it is legal. Here, from the wikipedia link.
A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.[33] In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify.[34] In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction that "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification."[35] In 1997, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b).[36] The Supreme Court has not recently confronted the issue of jury nullification.
I know about the artificial separation of judges deciding law and jurors deciding fact, but forget that for a moment.
Jurors are presumably supposed to use their judgment to decide the facts -- are the witnesses trustworthy, is their testimony full of inconsistencies, how do different witness's testimonies stack up against each other...
But all this REQUIRES that jurors use their own knowledge to some extent. If a witness says something that is obviously wrong to a car mechanic but not an ice cream clerk, that mechanic darned well better tell the other jurors why he thinks the witness is lying. Jurors are expected to NOT drop their real-world knowledge at the door. (I am particularly thinking of My Cousin Vinny, where only a car fanatic would know vital clues about the tire tracks and what kind of car could have made them.)
Now how is this different from a juror who knows just enough to be wary of something and looks it up (NOT during the trial, but at home, or even during deliberations)? It's all fine and dandy to say that is up to the opposing lawyer to handle, that jurors are not police or investigators, but that is word games. If I knew something before the trial, I am expected to use that knowledge to uncover bad testimony. But if I acquire that knowledge during the trial, I am supposed to pretend I don't know that a witness is lying?
Maybe a case can be made for looking up a witness's past history, but even then I don't think so. If I knew a witness personally before the trial, knew he had a history of lying, knew he hated the defendant or was jealous of him or was in love with him, whatever kind of influence you can think of, that is part of my knowledge and part of how I decide what is true and what is false. Even if the only reputation they have is from always appearing in newspapers under unsavory conditions, I am not expected to forget all that when evaluating their testimony. And yes, I am ignoring the idea that prior criminal history is not supposed to be part of a defendant's current trial, but I also think that is bunk -- if some guy has been to jail a half dozen times for beating people up, that sure as heck is significant.
This all stems from olden times when jurors had no way of looking things up, and very little need. But the world is more complicated now, people know more and get around more, and I'd rather be tried by jurors who knew how to look up things for themselves rather than sit around like stupified monkeys.
But not with infrared heat detectors. There's probably things a methane sniffer could pick up too, not to mention the acoustic detectors listening for stubborn mules and stubborn pack drivers arguing with each other.
Yes, he's the guy that first created a CAR version of LINux. Since it was crash proof, he was making a snarky remark about Windows which was misconstrued.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the changes I have noticed over many years of using English is that the better sounding more poetic words have dropped out of usage. "A well-lit room", "her face lit up" were standard usage. Nowadays everyone says "lighted" and it grates on my ears.
Same with "spelled" vs "spelt". Sometimes the softer "t" simply sounds better than the harder "d".
Japanese does this too. "Sa-n" is three, "hyaku" is hundred, but three hundred is "sambyaku" simply because it sounds better and is easier to say.
I imagine every language does it in one way or another.
Anyone who pays the slightest attention to harmonious sounds can pick these changes up as a matter of course.
This can only mean that you are deaf to the pleasures of spoken languages.
False positives, laboratory fuckups and actual cheating are all much more likely than a French conspiracy against Landis on the basis of him being an American.
Yes but ... a conspiracy to cover up spawned by embarrassment at having their incompetency brought to the public's attention is entirely believable, and I have no doubt that his being American was a large part of the embarrassment, in part because Americans were not that popular and in part because Americans expect more justice than was available.
The French legal system is Napoleonic. I'm sure wikipedia has lots to say about it, but their judges are investigators of some sort in addition to being judges.
works.
Yes, 3/4 of the samples showed nothing, 1/4 showed something. Sounds to me like a really crappy test to be that inconsistent. 75% of your evidence says innocent, so you take the 25% which says guilty. Makes all the sense in the world to people with a grudge who want evidence to match their preconceived notions of who to blame. With others who want to use evidence to find the guilty, not so much.
Sure there is. There's the USADA finding synthetic testosterone in 4 out of 7 'B' samples, while Landis' coterie of lawyers wailed how unfair it was to run the synthetic tests on his B samples when his other A samples had shown clean. That's like complaining that the cops found weed in your glove compartment when you hadn't left any lying out on the dash.
No, it's complaining that if the tests are so shoddy and/or temperamental that they only find something in half of one sample, and none in the other, ie 3/4 of the samples show nothing, you must believe the 1/4 which show something.
If a jury votes 9-3 for acquittal, you must believe the 3 for guilty.
I followed it closely at the time, but have forgotten the details by now. I'm sure google would be my friend. However, Landis' main complaint was that the lab results were poorly handled, poorly tracked, and altogether lacking a real chain of ownership to show they were even his samples. Furthermore, IIRC, the surprisingly high results for that day were incompatible with samples taken before and after. The kind of doping they accused him of would have left traces in the blood for some time afterwards, long enough for later tests to have shown something, which they didn't. And the samples they used were the backup samples, because they had lost the primary samples.
It smelled pretty bad from what I remember. It didn't mean he hadn't done it, but no court would ever have accepted their evidence, and to strip someone of a Tour de France championship because of it was pretty outrageous. IIRC he had also beaten the French favorite and the French have never taken much to foreigners who do that, especially Americans.
OTOH, I undoubtedly have forgotten a lot of the details, and I just don't care to look them up -- I mainly remember how shoddy their case was, how much it seemed like petty officials running amuck, and especially taking revenge for their gross carelessness and incompetence being shown to the world by some uppity bicycle rider. After all, everyone knows that the true purpose of any bicycle race is the glory of the promoters, not the racers.
No
I will back that up with my own story of a weaker DoS. The year was one of 1970-72, I do not know which. UC Berkeley had two CDC 6400s, A was normal, B was used for an experimental time sharing system and thus had an optional-at-extra-cost instruction, Exchange Jump, which swapped context. I had been toying with a Fortran program and gotten tired of it, so decided to finish it off in a burst of glory. It began execution in some obscure subroutine instead of MAIN, never called MAIN, and as it ground away at its nominal task, it gradually modified an innocent instruction into an Exchange Jump. But sadly, once it finally had modified it to the Exchange Jump opcode, there was no context, just a pointer to 0, and it farked the entire machine.
Now I wasn't truly anti-social. I had in fact written on the card deck that it was only to be run on machine A, not B. Unbeknownst to me, that Exchange Jump instruction was also used by diagnostic programs, and the tech was too lazy to disable it after each visit, just left it enabled at all times, so my Fortran program crashed the machine.
It wasn't much of a DoS, I will admit. The OS, CALIDOSCOPE (Cal Improved Design On SCOPE (Supervisory Control Of Program Execution)), could only handle 6 batch jobs at once at most, so that's the worst it could do. But I did get called in to the admin's office, who sighed and gave me that "What are we going to do with you?" look. He knew I wasn't malicious, but he had to warn me to not do it again.
First intelligent response yet. They used to put pipe railings around gun tubs in the old navy to prevent guns from being aimed at own ship. You could do the same thing here so it couldn't have windows or sky behind the target. of course, someone could leave a beer bottle in the yard ...
And a toilet plunger.
Travel time is instantaneous for all practical purposes. If you think you need the distance to know what to shoot and what not to shoot, that's only half the problem. The real problem is what about the parts of the laser beam that aren't intercepted by the mosquito? I realize lasers do gradually expand, but not enough to avoid zapping the people nearby.
... is going to throw a fit. A pissy hissy little fit. Good.
Toyota, having achieved their goal of becoming the world's largest car company, appealed their win to the court of public opinion by recalling millions of vehicles. There was no hope of becoming larger than themselves, so the only downside was possibly becoming smaller. "We need this appeal to keep our name in the public spotlight," unexplained an anonymous spokesman.
You do understand the concept of RTFA ... oh wait. I see.
They say 50K connections, potentially up to 500K. No competitor will pay attention to such small numbers, especially as they are certain to skim the cream of cheaply connectable homes.
Neal? Is that you?
Now that damned bunny's going to be walking up walls and across ceilings and walking and walking ... give LOLcat a run for his money.
There had been 17 -- but some overlord deleted the others before anyone got a chance to see them. These three escaped censorship because they had already been seen.
Go ahead -- prove me wrong!
My point about that movie was not who had that special knowledge, in this case the attorney. Rather, what if a juror has that special knowledge? What if it's nothing as arcane as in that movie, what if it's general knowledge about what time a store opens every day because the juror works across the street?
The point is that there are a zillion things jurors know which will affect how they see witnesses. Jurors can't and shouldn't be expected to leave that general knowledge at home. If I were on a jury and the definition of a specific word came up, not a legal term mind you, just an ordinary word, and I want to know what that word means, am I so helpless that I have to ask the judge what it means? Where do you draw the line on that helplessness? If I see a witness twitch in ways that remind me of other liars I have known, am I supposed to ask the judge about twitches?
EVERYTHING the jurors say or do is informed by their knowledge and opinions. If one juror says he doesn't like the way a witness spoke, that a witness looked uncomfortable, and the witness was a liar, are the other jurors supposed to ignore that? Are the attorneys and the judge supposed to intervene? If a juror says a witness lied because something is not physical possible because that IS the juror's day job and he knows all about it, are the other jurors supposed to tell him to shut up?
The idea that jurors are supposed to leave their personal knowledge outside the jury box is ridiculous.
That's easy. The jury is expected to sit there mute and obedient, which is ridiculous. They have brains. They see things the lawyers and judge don't. Get them directly involved. Let them raise their hand to ask questions -- not just "Can he speak louder" or even "I don't understand that word", but real questions. Let them interrupt testimony, the lawyers, even the judge, by raising their hand or pushing a button to turn on a light.
In have heard there are some places where jurors are allowed to ask questions, but I don't know much about it.
Darned tooting he read what you wrote -- did you?
Third, you do not have the right to nullify a trial, it is illegal to do so.
You said jury nullification is illegal in the US. It isn't. Judges may disallow lawyers telling the jury they have the right, but it is legal. Here, from the wikipedia link.
A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.[33] In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify.[34] In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction that "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification."[35] In 1997, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b).[36] The Supreme Court has not recently confronted the issue of jury nullification.
I know about the artificial separation of judges deciding law and jurors deciding fact, but forget that for a moment.
Jurors are presumably supposed to use their judgment to decide the facts -- are the witnesses trustworthy, is their testimony full of inconsistencies, how do different witness's testimonies stack up against each other ...
But all this REQUIRES that jurors use their own knowledge to some extent. If a witness says something that is obviously wrong to a car mechanic but not an ice cream clerk, that mechanic darned well better tell the other jurors why he thinks the witness is lying. Jurors are expected to NOT drop their real-world knowledge at the door. (I am particularly thinking of My Cousin Vinny, where only a car fanatic would know vital clues about the tire tracks and what kind of car could have made them.)
Now how is this different from a juror who knows just enough to be wary of something and looks it up (NOT during the trial, but at home, or even during deliberations)? It's all fine and dandy to say that is up to the opposing lawyer to handle, that jurors are not police or investigators, but that is word games. If I knew something before the trial, I am expected to use that knowledge to uncover bad testimony. But if I acquire that knowledge during the trial, I am supposed to pretend I don't know that a witness is lying?
Maybe a case can be made for looking up a witness's past history, but even then I don't think so. If I knew a witness personally before the trial, knew he had a history of lying, knew he hated the defendant or was jealous of him or was in love with him, whatever kind of influence you can think of, that is part of my knowledge and part of how I decide what is true and what is false. Even if the only reputation they have is from always appearing in newspapers under unsavory conditions, I am not expected to forget all that when evaluating their testimony. And yes, I am ignoring the idea that prior criminal history is not supposed to be part of a defendant's current trial, but I also think that is bunk -- if some guy has been to jail a half dozen times for beating people up, that sure as heck is significant.
This all stems from olden times when jurors had no way of looking things up, and very little need. But the world is more complicated now, people know more and get around more, and I'd rather be tried by jurors who knew how to look up things for themselves rather than sit around like stupified monkeys.
But not with infrared heat detectors. There's probably things a methane sniffer could pick up too, not to mention the acoustic detectors listening for stubborn mules and stubborn pack drivers arguing with each other.
Yes, he's the guy that first created a CAR version of LINux. Since it was crash proof, he was making a snarky remark about Windows which was misconstrued.