>Their plan (as admitted in interviews) was to withhold "evidence" to the last moment to prevent IBM >from preparing a good defence.
If they admitted this, (cite?), they have no chance of entering the evidence anyway. 11th hour evidence may find its way into a trial for a criminal defense, but not in a civil case. When the window closes on discovery, that's the end -- no more evidence is introduced, no more experts or witnesses are named, nothing -- unless both parties move to do so and the judge concurs.
>Why does the concept of contempt still exist in today's court system? >Can't judges rule on what is before them and put aside their emotions?
A contempt of court citation is not based on emotions. Contempt of court has to do with a party's disobedience of a court order or certain well-defined types of misconduct that interfere with the legal process. Such rules carry the force of law, and a contempt of court citation is, depending on the specific case, a claim of civil damage or a criminal accusation made by the court against an individual.
Courts have an inherent power to punish persons for contempt of their rules and orders, for disobedience of their process, and for disturbing them in their proceedings. The basis for this doctrine dates back as far as any of the founding principles of English Common Law.
>The cat decided that when it was time to leave, it wasn't time to leave, and got under there, dead >center out of reach.
There isn't a cat in the world that won't come out of hiding in order to get its mouth on a grisly piece of chicken or some tuna. Don't try to lure them with cat food or treats. Use a premium can of tuna meant for human consumption. This will never fail.
>If, say, someone had access to the Witness Protection Program files and decided to publish a list of > names and addresses (from memory), we should just let them and slap him on the wrist later?
Censoring the *press* helps nothing. The person who actually had access to this kind of information and released it should be punished -- put to death, in fact.
Letting that person go, and hiding the whole thing under cover of persecuting the press, does not solve the problem.
If anything, this hypothetical scenario *supports* the idea of a free press. If the government is unable or unwilling to go after its own trustees who leak classified information, it should *not* become a fallback option to persecute the press. Officials who leak classified information are not expressly protected in the spirit and letter of the very fabric that the system of laws is built from -- but freedom of the press *is* protected. So why should the original leaker be allowed to walk free, even continue working in government for instance, while the press is persecuted and censored?
>Well obviously you dont do your own work on cars.
Last week I sold what had been my eighth aircooled volkswagen. Believe me, I have done a *lot* of my own work on a *lot* of cars.
One thing I know is that if I were being accused of murder, and one of the bits of circumstantial evidence against me was a front seat missing from my car, I'd have an explanation as to where that seat might be found, and I'd try really, really hard to help you find it so you could see it wasn't saturated with the victim's blood, etc. If that was a life-or-death priority, I'm sure I would do my best to stop it being a mystery.
I imagine the police expect to find that car seat near wherever they find the victim's body. It is very, very hard to completely dispose of a human body without any trace whatsoever. The fact that they have not found it, leaves the question open as to whether the woman is actually dead. I certainly believe that it should be first shown that the victim is actually dead, before the M word is brought up. So far, she is simply missing. Maybe she was chained up somewhere, and starved to death because Hans was in jail, unable to release her or feed her; how's that for a macabre twist?
I expect they are sure she is *missing*, but why do they even suspect she is *dead?* That's the point where I have not been able to follow this case really.
Absent from the reports is an explanation of why the seat is missing, for example, where it might be found. Find the seat, find it free of blood and bone fragments. I think that should be a real priority of the defense. Are Honda interior parts serial number matched, by any chance?
Can they actually prosecute a homicide with no body? What would happen if he were convicted, and then Ms. Reiser shows up? How can you claim someone is guilty of murder before you have declared the victim is dead? Or if the victim is dead, has life insurance been collected, for instance? I really don't see how you can have "murder" without a body, remains of a body, or some specific claim as to how the body was disposed of.
On the other hand, I *can* see how you could justify holding such a suspect without bail, sort of. He should, at a minimum, explain where the seat from his Honda can be found. Seems like that might clear up a few things. (They locate that seat, find it isn't covered with blood and bone fragments or whatever they expect to find... That sort of thing would be pretty embarrassing to the prosecution, I'd guess.)
Of course, if I were a betting man, my money would not exactly be riding on Hans' innocence. The car seat bothers me a lot. (The State of California is required to presume his innocence, but I am not, unless I happen to get called on his jury...)
>Funny, my AKO account (which is provided by the US Army, a branch of the US Government) has the most ridiculous password policy I've ever seen.
And here I am looking at the RSA keyfob that authenticates me to the VPN for my private sector job. It's cheap, it's simple, and it totally removes this whole "weak password" idea from the equation.
"it's much better to educate people... since I work at a bank, I tell people when they choose their VPN password that we will hold them liable for all costs incurred if someone got hold of their password and stole money"
Doesn't that liability imply that your organization has some responsibility to come up with an authentication system that relies on something much stronger than mere "passwords?"
>I think telecommuting works better for small, regional level firms in that regard.
Definitely. When you are the fertilizer that grows the president's wallet, and they *realize* this directly, there is not much opportunity for nonsense to enter into the picture.
>The reason why the Enron boys should (and did) go to jail was to deter other people from doing the same thing.
More to the point, the reason *anyone* should go to jail is because society feels they should be subjected to confinement, isolation, bad food, and anal rape, as a consequence for what society has claimed is damage to them.
Whether it's for smoking a joint or defrauding thousands of people for billions of dollars, basically, the threat of anal rape is the bedrock of the justice system.
My home office is a hell of a lot nicer, neater, better equipped, has a better view, and is a more comfortable place to work than any corporate office i have ever been in.
My next job won't be telecommute and I don't care. I will still maintain this place.
When I was 100% telecommute I was always terrified I would be promoted and given responsibilities that required me to travel, or else, forced to relocate to a main office.
Re:It's nice for little things.
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Rails Recipes
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· Score: 1
>It's a fact that I know a guy who can program perfectly in x86 assembly, but did horribly in programming Visual Basic.
You know two, now. I can't cope with VB. I'm quite skilled in ASM, (not just x86.)
I didn't mean to imply that my opinion had any more weight than others. But I still have to say I was shocked to see what folks were doing with Rails -- not so much what they were doing, but the fact that they were getting results without much, if any, programming experience.
Re:It's nice for little things.
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 1
"Your post is full of the same kind of hype propaganda that completely surrounds Ruby on Rails. One reason I hate it so much: don't mislead people about what RoR is, it'll all bite you back so hard you won't have time to react."
Oh, it's *opinionated*, certainly.
It does NOT appreciate you trying to do anything but a Web2.0 app, with forward generation of a db schema on MySQL. It absolutely, positively despises you trying to use an existing db schema, or to interoperate with anything resembling a J2EE app.
However, if you are willing to play by its rules, it rewards the novice. I say "Rails", and not "RoR" and not "Ruby", because I consider "Rails" to be an entirely distinct idiom from Ruby. Ruby is a language for Computer Scientists, in the sense that ML, Lisp, and Prolog are.
Rails is something different. I don't like arguing about it though. There's not a developer who I would consider competent, who could not produce a webapp within, say, four hours of working through the first demo.
Re:It's nice for little things.
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 1
> Funny, Google engineer Cedric Beust has almost the exact opposite viewpoint.
I haven't met Cedric, and I'm not speaking from a "viewpoint."
I'm reporting something that I have personally *witnessed.*
It's not a theory or an opinion. It's a FACT. A *terrifying* development if you happen to be a webapp developer.
Re:Equivalent framework for Python
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
>This puts Ruby on Rails just out of my reach for a new project.
Here is the thing you should realize: There are people out there who have never written a line of code in any language, who have picked up Rails and put together a webapp on day one. Within a few hours of the first tutorial.
Lots of people who do graphics and layout, who have historically needed someone else to do the programming for them, seem to have discovered Rails -- and are using it rather successfully.
I have seen this phenomenon with my own eyes. Went to a Rails convention expecting to meet programmers. Hotel was filled with creative-graphics-types, business-development types, you name it. Sure, there were programmers, but shockingly large numbers of non-programmers who were simply using Rails to make their webapps. They find it liberating.
If you are a programmer who makes a living doing, say, Servlets and JSP work, this should scare you to death.
It does me.
Re:It's nice for little things.
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 1
>What is the big draw of ruby on rails
Simple: People who have in the past, been forced to fight with, or pay programmers, or use off-the-shelf webapp products, are simply doing it themselves. Rails enables this. While programmers are bitching amongnst themselves about whether Ruby is an inferior language, or whether Rails is an incomplete or inefficient framework, or whether it's going to "win" against Java and.NET, people who at one time would have had to hire those programmers, are doing their own webapps.
It's kind of funny, and kind of scary, to witness this.
Re:It's nice for little things.
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 1
Rails became popular by enabling folks in creative roles to simply take their ideas from concept to implementation without having to fight with a "programmer" to make it happen.
I have witnessed this, and it has made me very afraid.
I do not get the impression that many people understand what Rails (not necessarily Ruby), represents.
Programmers think in the context of adopting yet another platform. They miss the point. A technology like Rails threatens to make "programmers" obsolete, at least in certain segments of the killer-app domain that is "webapps."
It turns the relationship between the person doing presentation in the context of the business idea, and the IT guy and/or programmer, right on its head. People who were never able to write programs in, say, CGI, PHP, or servlets/JSP, are writing Rails apps without much difficulty.
I have *seen* this with my own eyes. And it has chilled my spine.
At the Rails conference in Chicago, back in August, the main thing that I took from there, was the fact that all those guys with their MacBooks and their high energy level and excitement about making webapps... were not necessarily programmers by trade.
Read that, and understand what I'm saying. People who, in the past, either got frustrated by the difficulties of programming webapps, or were prohibited by costs to hire a programmer to do what they wanted, are now finding it easy to simply create their webapps as part of their creative process. Rails enables this, and it is doing so rather effectively, for those who discover it. That's a pretty scary thing for a J2EE developer to witness.
Well, I certainly have never considered for one moment, profiting from the war effort. I simply cannot conceive of such a thing. Why is it even possible, let alone, tolerated by our society?
>Do you really expect to find engineers capable of designing a machine like that who will work for a subsistence wage?
If you expect me to believe that the nation is truly in jeapordy of being taken over by a foreign force, or that the way of life is truly in danger of being destroyed, one thing you should easily be able to produce is a populace willing to make any, and every sacrifice necessary -- their wages, whatever resources they have, their lives.
Without this, I have no basis to accept the necessity or the justification of the war.
How much cash do you imagine Rosie the Riviter actually got in her pay packet, anyway?
Go talk to someone who remembers rationing and get back to me about whether there is a precedent for acquisition of materials and labor at subsistence cost during wartime.
Anybody who pretends to be patriotic and supporting the war effort, while actually doing it as a means of making a profit, can go to hell. We don't need that kind of patriotism.
Slashdot Mirror
>Their plan (as admitted in interviews) was to withhold "evidence" to the last moment to prevent IBM
>from preparing a good defence.
If they admitted this, (cite?), they have no chance of entering the evidence anyway. 11th hour evidence may find its way into a trial for a criminal defense, but not in a civil case. When the window closes on discovery, that's the end -- no more evidence is introduced, no more experts or witnesses are named, nothing -- unless both parties move to do so and the judge concurs.
>Why does the concept of contempt still exist in today's court system?
>Can't judges rule on what is before them and put aside their emotions?
A contempt of court citation is not based on emotions. Contempt of court
has to do with a party's disobedience of a court order or certain well-defined types of misconduct that interfere with the legal process. Such rules carry the force of law, and a contempt of court citation is, depending on the specific case, a claim of civil damage or a criminal accusation made by the court against an individual.
Courts have an inherent power to punish persons for contempt of their rules and orders, for disobedience of their process, and for disturbing them in their proceedings. The basis for this doctrine dates back as far as any of the founding principles of English Common Law.
>The cat decided that when it was time to leave, it wasn't time to leave, and got under there, dead
>center out of reach.
There isn't a cat in the world that won't come out of hiding in order to get its mouth on a grisly piece of chicken or some tuna. Don't try to lure them with cat food or treats. Use a premium can of tuna meant for human consumption. This will never fail.
>If, say, someone had access to the Witness Protection Program files and decided to publish a list of
> names and addresses (from memory), we should just let them and slap him on the wrist later?
Censoring the *press* helps nothing. The person who actually had access to this kind of information and released it should be punished -- put to death, in fact.
Letting that person go, and hiding the whole thing under cover of persecuting the press, does not solve the problem.
If anything, this hypothetical scenario *supports* the idea of a free press. If the government is unable or unwilling to go after its own trustees who leak classified information, it should *not* become a fallback option to persecute the press. Officials who leak classified information are not expressly protected in the spirit and letter of the very fabric that the system of laws is built from -- but freedom of the press *is* protected. So why should the original leaker be allowed to walk free, even continue working in government for instance, while the press is persecuted and censored?
>Well obviously you dont do your own work on cars.
Last week I sold what had been my eighth aircooled volkswagen. Believe me, I have done a *lot* of my own work on a *lot* of cars.
One thing I know is that if I were being accused of murder, and one of the bits of circumstantial evidence against me was a front seat missing from my car, I'd have an explanation as to where that seat might be found, and I'd try really, really hard to help you find it so you could see it wasn't saturated with the victim's blood, etc. If that was a life-or-death priority, I'm sure I would do my best to stop it being a mystery.
I imagine the police expect to find that car seat near wherever they find the victim's body.
It is very, very hard to completely dispose of a human body without any trace whatsoever. The fact that they have not found it, leaves the question open as to whether the woman is actually dead. I certainly believe that it should be first shown that the victim is actually dead, before the M word is brought up. So far, she is simply missing. Maybe she was chained up somewhere, and starved to death because Hans was in jail, unable to release her or feed her; how's that for a macabre twist?
>If they're sure she's dead, then sure.
I expect they are sure she is *missing*, but why do they even suspect she is *dead?* That's the point where I have not been able to follow this case really.
Absent from the reports is an explanation of why the seat is missing, for example, where it might be found. Find the seat, find it free of blood and bone fragments. I think that should be a real priority of the defense. Are Honda interior parts serial number matched, by any chance?
>Faking her death... its not like she gets a life insurance check for that.
It is exactly like her *kids* do.
>Reiser may end up on death row
California does not *have* death row.
Can they actually prosecute a homicide with no body?
What would happen if he were convicted, and then Ms. Reiser shows up?
How can you claim someone is guilty of murder before you have declared the
victim is dead? Or if the victim is dead, has life insurance been collected, for instance?
I really don't see how you can have "murder" without a body, remains of a body, or some specific claim as to how the body was disposed of.
On the other hand, I *can* see how you could justify holding such a suspect without bail, sort of.
He should, at a minimum, explain where the seat from his Honda can be found. Seems like that might clear up a few things. (They locate that seat, find it isn't covered with blood and bone fragments or whatever they expect to find... That sort of thing would be pretty embarrassing to the prosecution, I'd guess.)
Of course, if I were a betting man, my money would not exactly be riding on Hans' innocence. The car seat bothers me a lot. (The State of California is required to presume his innocence, but I am not, unless I happen to get called on his jury...)
>Funny, my AKO account (which is provided by the US Army, a branch of the US Government) has the most ridiculous password policy I've ever seen.
And here I am looking at the RSA keyfob that authenticates me to the VPN for my private sector job. It's cheap, it's simple, and it totally removes this whole "weak password" idea from the equation.
"it's much better to educate people... since I work at a bank, I tell people when they choose their VPN password that we will hold them liable for all costs incurred if someone got hold of their password and stole money"
Doesn't that liability imply that your organization has some responsibility to come up with an authentication system that relies on something much stronger than mere "passwords?"
>I think telecommuting works better for small, regional level firms in that regard.
Definitely. When you are the fertilizer that grows the president's wallet, and they *realize* this directly,
there is not much opportunity for nonsense to enter into the picture.
>I often wonder how much of the company's profits are squandered on this crap. It has to be a significant portion.
Been there, and *have* seen the expense reports and budgets. Trust me, you do not want to know.
>The reason why the Enron boys should (and did) go to jail was to deter other people from doing the same thing.
More to the point, the reason *anyone* should go to jail is because society feels they should be subjected to confinement, isolation, bad food, and anal rape, as a consequence for what society has claimed is damage to them.
Whether it's for smoking a joint or defrauding thousands of people for billions of dollars, basically, the threat of anal rape is the bedrock of the justice system.
My home office is a hell of a lot nicer, neater, better equipped, has a better view, and is a more comfortable place to work than any corporate office i have ever been in.
My next job won't be telecommute and I don't care. I will still maintain this place.
When I was 100% telecommute I was always terrified I would be promoted and given responsibilities that required me to travel, or else, forced to relocate to a main office.
>It's a fact that I know a guy who can program perfectly in x86 assembly, but did horribly in programming Visual Basic.
You know two, now. I can't cope with VB. I'm quite skilled in ASM, (not just x86.)
I didn't mean to imply that my opinion had any more weight than others. But I still have to say I was shocked to see what folks were doing with Rails -- not so much what they were doing, but the fact that they were getting results without much, if any, programming experience.
"Your post is full of the same kind of hype propaganda that completely surrounds Ruby on Rails. One reason I hate it so much: don't mislead people about what RoR is, it'll all bite you back so hard you won't have time to react."
Oh, it's *opinionated*, certainly.
It does NOT appreciate you trying to do anything but a Web2.0 app, with forward generation of a db schema on MySQL. It absolutely, positively despises you trying to use an existing db schema, or to interoperate with anything resembling a J2EE app.
However, if you are willing to play by its rules, it rewards the novice. I say "Rails", and not "RoR" and not "Ruby", because I consider "Rails" to be an entirely distinct idiom from Ruby. Ruby is a language for Computer Scientists, in the sense that ML, Lisp, and Prolog are.
Rails is something different. I don't like arguing about it though. There's not a developer who I would consider competent, who could not produce a webapp within, say, four hours of working through the first demo.
> Funny, Google engineer Cedric Beust has almost the exact opposite viewpoint.
I haven't met Cedric, and I'm not speaking from a "viewpoint."
I'm reporting something that I have personally *witnessed.*
It's not a theory or an opinion. It's a FACT. A *terrifying* development if you happen to be a webapp developer.
>This puts Ruby on Rails just out of my reach for a new project.
Here is the thing you should realize: There are people out there who have never written a line of code in any language,
who have picked up Rails and put together a webapp on day one. Within a few hours of the first tutorial.
Lots of people who do graphics and layout, who have historically needed someone else to do the programming for them,
seem to have discovered Rails -- and are using it rather successfully.
I have seen this phenomenon with my own eyes. Went to a Rails convention expecting to meet programmers. Hotel was filled with creative-graphics-types, business-development types, you name it. Sure, there were programmers, but shockingly large numbers of non-programmers who were simply using Rails to make their webapps. They find it liberating.
If you are a programmer who makes a living doing, say, Servlets and JSP work, this should scare you to death.
It does me.
>What is the big draw of ruby on rails
.NET, people who at one time would have had to hire those programmers, are doing their own webapps.
Simple: People who have in the past, been forced to fight with, or pay programmers, or use off-the-shelf webapp products, are
simply doing it themselves. Rails enables this. While programmers are bitching amongnst themselves about whether Ruby is an inferior language, or whether Rails is an incomplete or inefficient framework, or whether it's going to "win" against Java and
It's kind of funny, and kind of scary, to witness this.
Rails became popular by enabling folks in creative roles to simply take their ideas from concept to implementation without having to fight with a "programmer" to make it happen.
I have witnessed this, and it has made me very afraid.
I do not get the impression that many people understand what Rails (not necessarily Ruby), represents.
Programmers think in the context of adopting yet another platform. They miss the point. A technology like Rails threatens to make "programmers" obsolete, at least in certain segments of the killer-app domain that is "webapps."
It turns the relationship between the person doing presentation in the context of the business idea, and the IT guy and/or programmer, right on its head. People who were never able to write programs in, say, CGI, PHP, or servlets/JSP, are writing Rails apps without much difficulty.
I have *seen* this with my own eyes. And it has chilled my spine.
At the Rails conference in Chicago, back in August, the main thing that I took from there, was the fact that all those guys with their MacBooks and their high energy level and excitement about making webapps... were not necessarily programmers by trade.
Read that, and understand what I'm saying. People who, in the past, either got frustrated by the difficulties of programming webapps, or were prohibited by costs to hire a programmer to do what they wanted, are now finding it easy to simply create their webapps as part of their creative process. Rails enables this, and it is doing so rather effectively, for those who discover it. That's a pretty scary thing for a J2EE developer to witness.
>I think fishbowl is volunteering!
Well, I certainly have never considered for one moment, profiting from the war effort. I simply cannot conceive of such a thing. Why is it even possible, let alone, tolerated by our society?
>Do you really expect to find engineers capable of designing a machine like that who will work for a subsistence wage?
If you expect me to believe that the nation is truly in jeapordy of being taken over by a foreign force, or that the way of life is truly in danger of being destroyed, one thing you should easily be able to produce is a populace willing to make any, and every sacrifice necessary -- their wages, whatever resources they have, their lives.
Without this, I have no basis to accept the necessity or the justification of the war.
How much cash do you imagine Rosie the Riviter actually got in her pay packet, anyway?
Go talk to someone who remembers rationing and get back to me about whether there is a precedent for acquisition of materials and labor at subsistence cost during wartime.
Anybody who pretends to be patriotic and supporting the war effort, while actually doing it as a means of making a profit, can go to hell. We don't need that kind of patriotism.