Hardly. I can find you a dozen people to say anything at all.
Ordinary citizens have the de-facto power to judge the law on its merits, not an explicit one. There's a reason why such judgment is in no way binding upon future cases (or even in some circumstances on that one.)
Any good jurist will tell you that a citizen's duty is to interpret the law, according to the facts. While they might claim otherwise, and in fact they might DO otherwise, they only have the 'right' to do so because a court will not punish them for doing so.
Ah. I suppose you're also one of those people who believe that the constitution (specifically the bill of rights) exists as a valid legal document, too.
Things were done badly back in the late 18th century. The constitution, and the bill of rights, is the worst example of this- a document that has no real meaning, cannot have any real meaning, and has always been given meaning by the courts. The fact that they choose to interpret it one way now as opposed to a different way then is not an expansion of their powers, nor is it a restriction of your rights; it is simply a re-interpretation thereof by an entity that has always been empowered to do so.
I suppose we should all be allowed to own slaves again? That, after all, was implicitly provided for in the original constitution and by the founders... but we've realized that's a terrible idea since then.
Fine. Would you rather have your broken bone set by one well-qualified surgeon on his own or twelve random guys off the street who are given advice by a surgeon?
Maybe you'd go that far for a broken wrist, but I certainly wouldn't, and I doubt most people would.
How about quadruple cardiac bypass surgery?
Do you trust your life to twelve random people just because they're supposed to be your 'peers', and do you claim that that somehow makes them any more accountable, competent, intelligent, and able than one person who was trained for the task and spends his or her days doing nothing but it?
Because I certainly don't. There's a saying, in the legal profession: An innocent man asks for a bench trial, and a guilty man asks for a jury.
Nullification at one time was thought of a person's last best defense against bad laws. This case is a perfect example of why we still need it, so that people can affect the outcome of such cases in a just and equitable manner, not merely in a way that lobbyists have paid politicians for.
Except this case was not ill-handled. The law was interpreted correctly, applied correctly, and created apparently correctly. The case was judged in a fair and equitable manner. Just because you don't like it is irrelevant. THIS is why courts and good lawyers hate juries.
Oh well, chalk it up to yet one more noble goal of our system that's gone down the drain. However, people need to know that in spite of anything the courts tell you, you do have the right of nullification. As a juror, you need to make decisions not only on the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law as well. As has already been pointed out, though, don't give any indication that you're smart to know that or you will be immediately dismissed.
You have such a de-facto right to acquit or not. You have no right, nor obligation, to make a decision based on the spirit of the law- such would entirely undermine how the law works. There is a good reason why the court system tosses our jurors who know about and are likely to practice jury nullification- because they're loose cannons that pervert the mechanisms of the courts.
Regardless of what you think, the entire basis for the rule of law is undermined by jury nullification. Jurisprudence depends on the fact that the law is above all, fair and relatively predictable. If you break the law, you will be punished for doing so. Juries are not supposed to go around deciding what laws exist, what they really mean, and how they mean it. That is the jobs for judges and the legislature.
Having annoyed citizens running around randomly nullifying cases because they feel like it undermines our entire justice system.
Discretion is important, agreed; but this is why we have judges. Would you rather your next broken bone be set by a single, well-qualified and experienced surgeon or twelve random guys picked off the street?
Jury trials may be a necessity in the system, although among jurists they are generally seen as a necessary evil. Jury nullification perverts not only the spirit of law, but the rule of it.
"We categorically reject the idea that, in a society committed to the rule of law, jury nullification is desirable or that courts may permit it to occur when it is within their authority to prevent. Accordingly, we conclude that a juror who intends to nullify the applicable law is no less subject to dismissal than is a juror who disregards the court's instructions due to an event or relationship that renders him biased or otherwise unable to render a fair and impartial verdict." U.S. v. Thomas.
The government can't punish you for returning an acquittal, regardless of the reasons for doing so (and they're reluctant to ask if they do at all); but they can certainly (and should) prevent you from sitting on the jury if they feel your impartiality will be threatened by your personal issues.
This really depends on your school. When I went to school, the school's IT department acted solely as our ISP- they restricted us to our bandwidth (10 GB/week when I was there a few years ago, 20 GB/week now), but beyond that, you were free to use as much of the pipe as you could drink from. (Admittedly, it was a 300 Mbps pipe shared between 2100 users, but the link to your jack was only 100 Mbps, so.) The other advantage, however, was that data on the University's internal network was entirely uncapped (and essentially unlimited in bandwidth; buildings were connected by 10 Gbps fibre links, and they had a 700 Mbps pipe to other educational networks) and so all the actual 'school' work you had to do you could do with no real trouble, even if the outgoing network pipe was totally saturated.
However, my point was not to blather on about infrastructure.
Some schools provide internet access as a privilege, and there, they have no obligation to support any use of the internet they don't want to. All the schools I've gone to have charged you for it, and acted solely as an ISP. They had no right, nor did they claim to, to restrict or limit your use of the bandwidth you had contractually paid for.
I know, for example, the University of Edinburgh at one point basically restricted you to port 80 through a Squid proxy, which would have made me enormously unhappy had I gone to school there. Luckily, I did not.
(Quite a bit of the time, I long for my school's internet connection. A 300 Mbps external internet pipe, a 10 Gbps internal network backbone, and an average of ~4 ms latency to the nearest sections of the internet cloud with an average maximum of 2 ms to anywhere on the school's internal network. I just wish they'd upgraded the in-room connections to gigabit before I'd left, although I realize it was a purposeful decision on their part- by leaving it at 100 Mbps, it was technically impossible for one person to saturate any of the network links.)
If you're a government and you need those suppies there yesterday, you probably have your own spacecraft (including in that sub-orbital spacecraft, like ICBMs, which could of course be used for delivery of things other than weapons) and high-speed fighter craft. Even as late as 1999, the US government had access to the SR71 Blackbird- Mach 3+ (and of course the inevitable speculation that the SR-71 was replaced by another plane of greater capacity).
Sure, getting stuff there quick is good. But it'd just not be economically feasible most of the time- and the very, very small portion of the time when it would isn't enough to fund the effort.
The system, as Microsoft sells it to you, regardless of what they do to it, will not kill anything. Other systems you link it up to may. Both of you agreed that Microsoft can change the system at will; hence, you must perform your due diligence when using that system (and linking it to other systems) to ensure that your actions do not cause harm to others.
I'm sure Microsoft would turn around and say "You bought it as-is, and knew that we told you we might do X, Y, and Z. The fact that X, Y, or Z broke something you were doing is not our fault- it's yours. You should have been more careful, since we told you we might have done X, Y, or Z."
If I sell you a car and inform you that when I service it, I may alter the sensitivity of the steering or brakes or accelerator and that you should keep an eye out for said, and you don't and kill somebody by accident, that's not really my fault. You were warned, and chose not to perform your due diligence.
You can't be entrapped in civil court. Entrapment is a statutory creation of criminal law. (Sorrells v. United States, although later supreme court precedent leads us to believe that rather than the statutory creation theory, they are moving more towards dealing with entrapment in a supervisory sense.)
You don't seem to understand that conventional policing spends much of its time chasing false ends, discounting evidence, looking into witnesses, and so on.
Even wardrivers can be tracked. It just takes a lot of hard police work, but it's much easier to find one guy with a blue panel van with Ohio plates as described by the spinster who happens to spend her time looking out the window than one guy somewhere on the internets.
Botnets can also be tracked.
Everything you do leaves a trail- everything. In some cases, that train is too hard to easily trace, but its tracability is related directly to how much effort you're willing to put into it.
Only a fool believes that he can have an effect without leaving an effect behind.
It's really a counterpoint to Newton's laws- Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every action you take leaves an action behind to be examined.
The Buran may have been cosmetically almost identical to the Space Shuttle, but functionally, the two couldn't have been more different.
Look at their feature sets, among other things- the Buran was designed later, had quite a few key design decisions made that increased its design effectiveness immensely, and, sadly, never really flew.
If the Soviets copied it, they did it by taking pictures of the outside and them using their imaginations to fill in what they thought the inside looked like.
But you have far more to go on than you did before (~100 PCs compared to ~100,000,000)- and that is where conventional policing steps in, because that's what it's designed for.
Ummm, what shortcut key drags something to the desktop?...I'll pass on that one, if you don't mind...
You could try Ctrl+C, Windows+D, Ctrl+V, and it should do what you want (the end two are self-explanatory, but Windows+D is the keyboard shortcut to return to the desktop.)
At the risk of going off-topic, you are incorrect with that statement. Everyone does things that go against their own set of morals. The proof is the feeling of guilt. If people were unable to act immorally, then there would be no sense of guilt.
I didn't say that. I said: "Generally, therefore, people do not participate in immoral acts." The point of the entire digression on morality is that morality is inherently relative because it depends on one's individual conceptions of nebulous concepts ('right' and 'wrong') and therefore asking whether something is immoral is like asking whether everybody likes blue cheese or cheddar. It doesn't work that way.
Although, what you are most likely leaning towards is the difference between morals and ethics. Given that ethics are loosely defined as a set of morals shared by a majority of a society, then, I would also care to submit that there are more internet users than online advertisers, and we as internet users do not mind blocking ads on the web, then the advertisers are attempting to hijack and redefine the ethics of an online community. And for that, they should be shot and pissed on, or a similar punishment that most of us would not have a problem with.
Indeed. However, I think those punishments are exceedingly pointless. Why bother? Just continue to block the ads.
That they are providing you all of the bits, including the advertising ones. It is no more immoral to refuse to display them than it would be to simply cover them up with little bits of paper.
More importantly, this brings up a nastily annoying bug of mine:
Morality is simply motivation based on a sense of right or wrong.
Something is moral, therefore, if you do it believe it to be right, and immoral if you do it believe it to be wrong. Generally, therefore, people do not participate in immoral acts.
I am quite certain that most (>90%) if not all of the population who performs ad-blocking, therefore, considers it quite moral.
It's a Linux.com article- a Linux company, telling you how great Linux is and not giving any details. It's what I'd be referring to if I was in his place.
And their hardware innards are extremely expensive for the relative quality of the hardware. For example, the smartphone I have is a MDA Pro- a 640x480 screen, 128 MB of RAM, 620 Mhz processor, wifi, bluetooth, 3G, dual video cameras fore and aft... Palm has nothing on that.
If you're going to buy a Windows Mobile phone, you generally go with HTC, in my experience.
At least for the people I work with, the answer is that the Palp is too simple, and somewhat as importantly, too expensive for the innards. The iPhone suffers the latter problem, although I have never used one, so I have no idea about it's relative simplicity.
At least everywhere I've worked, Palm devices are dropped in favor of Windows Mobile because the latter are apparently easier to write applications for (I've never written one so don't know), especially complicated applications with hardware hooks. Simple is good, I am told, but if I'm going to carry something that big around in my pocket I want it to be as useful as I can make it- and that's where Windows Mobile works.
My personal phone has(had, a new battery is on order for it) excellent battery life, between 8-20 hours of talk/audio/work time; terrible phone quality, terrible one-handed usability, and mediocre application availability. But I found it far more valuable than a Treo or a Blackberry; for what appeared to be equivalent bulkiness, the machine I had in my pocket could perform the functions of any ultraportable laptop. Screen real-estate and keyboard quality were both critical for this, as was networking capability and desktop interoperability.
I suppose that just goes to show you, then, that it really depends what your enterprise users do with their smartphones.:p
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. I can find you a dozen people to say anything at all.
Ordinary citizens have the de-facto power to judge the law on its merits, not an explicit one. There's a reason why such judgment is in no way binding upon future cases (or even in some circumstances on that one.)
Any good jurist will tell you that a citizen's duty is to interpret the law, according to the facts. While they might claim otherwise, and in fact they might DO otherwise, they only have the 'right' to do so because a court will not punish them for doing so.
Ah. I suppose you're also one of those people who believe that the constitution (specifically the bill of rights) exists as a valid legal document, too.
Things were done badly back in the late 18th century. The constitution, and the bill of rights, is the worst example of this- a document that has no real meaning, cannot have any real meaning, and has always been given meaning by the courts. The fact that they choose to interpret it one way now as opposed to a different way then is not an expansion of their powers, nor is it a restriction of your rights; it is simply a re-interpretation thereof by an entity that has always been empowered to do so.
I suppose we should all be allowed to own slaves again? That, after all, was implicitly provided for in the original constitution and by the founders... but we've realized that's a terrible idea since then.
Fine. Would you rather have your broken bone set by one well-qualified surgeon on his own or twelve random guys off the street who are given advice by a surgeon?
Maybe you'd go that far for a broken wrist, but I certainly wouldn't, and I doubt most people would.
How about quadruple cardiac bypass surgery?
Do you trust your life to twelve random people just because they're supposed to be your 'peers', and do you claim that that somehow makes them any more accountable, competent, intelligent, and able than one person who was trained for the task and spends his or her days doing nothing but it?
Because I certainly don't. There's a saying, in the legal profession: An innocent man asks for a bench trial, and a guilty man asks for a jury.
The long and short answer is: Times change. we do not live in the United States of the 1780s. We should not act like it.
Except this case was not ill-handled. The law was interpreted correctly, applied correctly, and created apparently correctly. The case was judged in a fair and equitable manner. Just because you don't like it is irrelevant. THIS is why courts and good lawyers hate juries.
You have such a de-facto right to acquit or not. You have no right, nor obligation, to make a decision based on the spirit of the law- such would entirely undermine how the law works. There is a good reason why the court system tosses our jurors who know about and are likely to practice jury nullification- because they're loose cannons that pervert the mechanisms of the courts.
Regardless of what you think, the entire basis for the rule of law is undermined by jury nullification. Jurisprudence depends on the fact that the law is above all, fair and relatively predictable. If you break the law, you will be punished for doing so. Juries are not supposed to go around deciding what laws exist, what they really mean, and how they mean it. That is the jobs for judges and the legislature.
Having annoyed citizens running around randomly nullifying cases because they feel like it undermines our entire justice system.
Discretion is important, agreed; but this is why we have judges. Would you rather your next broken bone be set by a single, well-qualified and experienced surgeon or twelve random guys picked off the street?
Jury trials may be a necessity in the system, although among jurists they are generally seen as a necessary evil. Jury nullification perverts not only the spirit of law, but the rule of it.
As well it should.
"We categorically reject the idea that, in a society committed to the rule of law, jury nullification is desirable or that courts may permit it to occur when it is within their authority to prevent. Accordingly, we conclude that a juror who intends to nullify the applicable law is no less subject to dismissal than is a juror who disregards the court's instructions due to an event or relationship that renders him biased or otherwise unable to render a fair and impartial verdict." U.S. v. Thomas.
The government can't punish you for returning an acquittal, regardless of the reasons for doing so (and they're reluctant to ask if they do at all); but they can certainly (and should) prevent you from sitting on the jury if they feel your impartiality will be threatened by your personal issues.
This really depends on your school. When I went to school, the school's IT department acted solely as our ISP- they restricted us to our bandwidth (10 GB/week when I was there a few years ago, 20 GB/week now), but beyond that, you were free to use as much of the pipe as you could drink from. (Admittedly, it was a 300 Mbps pipe shared between 2100 users, but the link to your jack was only 100 Mbps, so.) The other advantage, however, was that data on the University's internal network was entirely uncapped (and essentially unlimited in bandwidth; buildings were connected by 10 Gbps fibre links, and they had a 700 Mbps pipe to other educational networks) and so all the actual 'school' work you had to do you could do with no real trouble, even if the outgoing network pipe was totally saturated.
However, my point was not to blather on about infrastructure.
Some schools provide internet access as a privilege, and there, they have no obligation to support any use of the internet they don't want to. All the schools I've gone to have charged you for it, and acted solely as an ISP. They had no right, nor did they claim to, to restrict or limit your use of the bandwidth you had contractually paid for.
I know, for example, the University of Edinburgh at one point basically restricted you to port 80 through a Squid proxy, which would have made me enormously unhappy had I gone to school there. Luckily, I did not.
(Quite a bit of the time, I long for my school's internet connection. A 300 Mbps external internet pipe, a 10 Gbps internal network backbone, and an average of ~4 ms latency to the nearest sections of the internet cloud with an average maximum of 2 ms to anywhere on the school's internal network. I just wish they'd upgraded the in-room connections to gigabit before I'd left, although I realize it was a purposeful decision on their part- by leaving it at 100 Mbps, it was technically impossible for one person to saturate any of the network links.)
If you're a government and you need those suppies there yesterday, you probably have your own spacecraft (including in that sub-orbital spacecraft, like ICBMs, which could of course be used for delivery of things other than weapons) and high-speed fighter craft. Even as late as 1999, the US government had access to the SR71 Blackbird- Mach 3+ (and of course the inevitable speculation that the SR-71 was replaced by another plane of greater capacity).
Sure, getting stuff there quick is good. But it'd just not be economically feasible most of the time- and the very, very small portion of the time when it would isn't enough to fund the effort.
Would you be willing to pay 2.5 million dollars for 2.4 hour delivery, compared to 250 dollars for 24 hour delivery?
That's why Fedex isn't buying spacecraft.
That's not what I said. Learn to read.
The system, as Microsoft sells it to you, regardless of what they do to it, will not kill anything. Other systems you link it up to may. Both of you agreed that Microsoft can change the system at will; hence, you must perform your due diligence when using that system (and linking it to other systems) to ensure that your actions do not cause harm to others.
I'm sure Microsoft would turn around and say "You bought it as-is, and knew that we told you we might do X, Y, and Z. The fact that X, Y, or Z broke something you were doing is not our fault- it's yours. You should have been more careful, since we told you we might have done X, Y, or Z."
If I sell you a car and inform you that when I service it, I may alter the sensitivity of the steering or brakes or accelerator and that you should keep an eye out for said, and you don't and kill somebody by accident, that's not really my fault. You were warned, and chose not to perform your due diligence.
You can't be entrapped in civil court. Entrapment is a statutory creation of criminal law. (Sorrells v. United States, although later supreme court precedent leads us to believe that rather than the statutory creation theory, they are moving more towards dealing with entrapment in a supervisory sense.)
Actually, the link between 'heresy' and 'hearsay' is interesting to speculate on...
So basically, you ended up agreeing with my premise, which was narrowing down the field of possible targets is a good thing and a productive one.
Glad we're agreed.
You don't seem to understand that conventional policing spends much of its time chasing false ends, discounting evidence, looking into witnesses, and so on.
Even wardrivers can be tracked. It just takes a lot of hard police work, but it's much easier to find one guy with a blue panel van with Ohio plates as described by the spinster who happens to spend her time looking out the window than one guy somewhere on the internets.
Botnets can also be tracked.
Everything you do leaves a trail- everything. In some cases, that train is too hard to easily trace, but its tracability is related directly to how much effort you're willing to put into it.
Only a fool believes that he can have an effect without leaving an effect behind.
It's really a counterpoint to Newton's laws- Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every action you take leaves an action behind to be examined.
The Buran may have been cosmetically almost identical to the Space Shuttle, but functionally, the two couldn't have been more different.
Look at their feature sets, among other things- the Buran was designed later, had quite a few key design decisions made that increased its design effectiveness immensely, and, sadly, never really flew.
If the Soviets copied it, they did it by taking pictures of the outside and them using their imaginations to fill in what they thought the inside looked like.
But you have far more to go on than you did before (~100 PCs compared to ~100,000,000)- and that is where conventional policing steps in, because that's what it's designed for.
You could try Ctrl+C, Windows+D, Ctrl+V, and it should do what you want (the end two are self-explanatory, but Windows+D is the keyboard shortcut to return to the desktop.)
I didn't say that. I said: "Generally, therefore, people do not participate in immoral acts." The point of the entire digression on morality is that morality is inherently relative because it depends on one's individual conceptions of nebulous concepts ('right' and 'wrong') and therefore asking whether something is immoral is like asking whether everybody likes blue cheese or cheddar. It doesn't work that way.
Indeed. However, I think those punishments are exceedingly pointless. Why bother? Just continue to block the ads.
Er... damn lack of previewing.
"Do it believing it to be right", and "do it believing it to be wrong".
That they are providing you all of the bits, including the advertising ones. It is no more immoral to refuse to display them than it would be to simply cover them up with little bits of paper.
More importantly, this brings up a nastily annoying bug of mine:
Morality is simply motivation based on a sense of right or wrong.
Something is moral, therefore, if you do it believe it to be right, and immoral if you do it believe it to be wrong. Generally, therefore, people do not participate in immoral acts.
I am quite certain that most (>90%) if not all of the population who performs ad-blocking, therefore, considers it quite moral.
It's a Linux.com article- a Linux company, telling you how great Linux is and not giving any details. It's what I'd be referring to if I was in his place.
And their hardware innards are extremely expensive for the relative quality of the hardware. For example, the smartphone I have is a MDA Pro- a 640x480 screen, 128 MB of RAM, 620 Mhz processor, wifi, bluetooth, 3G, dual video cameras fore and aft... Palm has nothing on that.
If you're going to buy a Windows Mobile phone, you generally go with HTC, in my experience.
At least for the people I work with, the answer is that the Palp is too simple, and somewhat as importantly, too expensive for the innards. The iPhone suffers the latter problem, although I have never used one, so I have no idea about it's relative simplicity.
:p
At least everywhere I've worked, Palm devices are dropped in favor of Windows Mobile because the latter are apparently easier to write applications for (I've never written one so don't know), especially complicated applications with hardware hooks. Simple is good, I am told, but if I'm going to carry something that big around in my pocket I want it to be as useful as I can make it- and that's where Windows Mobile works.
My personal phone has(had, a new battery is on order for it) excellent battery life, between 8-20 hours of talk/audio/work time; terrible phone quality, terrible one-handed usability, and mediocre application availability. But I found it far more valuable than a Treo or a Blackberry; for what appeared to be equivalent bulkiness, the machine I had in my pocket could perform the functions of any ultraportable laptop. Screen real-estate and keyboard quality were both critical for this, as was networking capability and desktop interoperability.
I suppose that just goes to show you, then, that it really depends what your enterprise users do with their smartphones.