"So what’s the right answer? Get rid of the Brilliant Jerk as fast as you possibly can"
First, the brilliant jerk isn't as brilliant as he or others think he is. Often, it is right after your superstar leaves that people covering his work find out about the shortcuts he took.
Second, his positive contribution will stay stead, but his negative contribution will grow proportionally to the size of your company and the number of people he works with.
Third, the longer he stays the bigger headache it will be to get rid of him.
Fourth, be sure he realy is a jerk and cannot be reasoned with.
What you say is perfectly reasonable, but actually the 'Brilliant Jerk' in the article is described as being brilliant. In fact, as far as I can see, he's only described as being brilliant - I'm not really sure where the 'jerk' part comes from at all. The author labels as a jerk the doctor who put more than anyone else into the startup, generated the most revenue and was always the first to help out the others, and why? Apparently because he said that there were things that the company shouldn't do.
The article seems to come from the position that the company should always get bigger and always take every opportunity, and that anyone who disagrees with that is a jerk. But every successful company I've worked for has turned down clients and chosen not to pursue opportunities because they recognised that sometimes the downside outweighed the advantages.
In short, there's nothing in the article that actually makes me think that the highly respected doctor is the one being unreasonable rather than the guy who writes articles calling people jerks for having the temerity to disagree with Cliff Oxford.
The problem here really is that people don't start capital-intensive businesses "all the time", and even if they did that isn't the real measure; the real question is whether people start successful and competitive capital-intensive businesses "all the time". Your example of airlines is particularly capital-intensive, and the pattern is entirely predictable: today's biggest airlines were largely formed from mergers of old airlines, rather than upstarts coming in; a few airlines carry a very high proportion of the total passengers; and if you go to (for example) JFK or Heathrow you'll struggle to find an unfamiliar airline. If you want to fly from Heathrow to Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin or Rome - all chosen because they are nearby and popular, so surely the most accessible to new entrants - you have in each case the choice of 2 well-established airlines. The same pattern is repeated across any number of industries where the costs of entry are high.
The barriers to entry for a taxi firm are clearly not on the scale of an airline. Here the barriers are tilted more towards the regulatory - licences are scarce and therefore expensive. There is clearly a degree of protectionism in this - a scarcity of licences does protect current drivers. On the other hand there are also valid concerns underlying the licencing model: taxi users are unusually vulnerable, either to price-inflation or physical attack. Regulation of taxi-drivers helps to make a taxi a safe way for women to get home at night as well as a safe way for tourists to travel without being taken advantage of. So does it achieve any of this?
Happily, to see a completely unregulated taxi system you don't have to go to Somalia; Russia and most of Eastern Europe operate on precisely this model, and do so in economies that are (mostly) capitalist and subject to the rule of law. A person wanting to take a taxi in Russia can simply position themselves on the edge of the road and beckon to the traffic. At some point someone will pull over - either a professional taxi driver or someone just accepting the occasional fare. It's best to negotiate the fare up-front, as this will limit the amount you will be overcharged. Tourists pay massively inflated fares and anyone is liable to be driven all around to justify a large and unexpected price increase. Other fairly common 'tricks' are simple crime (particularly against women) or driving way out of the city and extorting the passenger to drive them back.
Does this mean that regulation is always justified? Of course not. The point I am trying to make is simply that it is rather more nuanced than just "regulation is anti-competitive and therefore bad" or "regulation protects people so it's good". Regulating taxi-drivers brings social benefits in the shape of safety, reliability and a good reputation, for which we pay in decreased competition and therefore increased fares. Whether that trade-off is, on the whole, a good one or not is the question, but it is a rather more difficult one.
It's surely pretty tough to regulate taxi drivers if they are unlicensed. An example would be the difference between taxis and minicabs/private hire cars in many countries; both are regulated but taxis are far safer and more trustworthy, I suspect at least partly because the taxi driver wants to ensure he retains his licence.
If it's a strawman, what is the hint that you said you were sending them? What Kjella said boils down to that you want all the benefits of the sites you like to be provided to you for free. That seems to be the case - if not, what message are you trying to send by visiting sites that cost money to provide and then blocking the ads?
A much better strawman is your penultimate paragraph:
People will provide content. The internet existed before its "monetization".
I'm sure people will provide content and that the internet existed before it carried adverts. Frankly, though, that's pretty irrelevant. I don't want the 1990s internet, I want the 2012 internet, and I don't just want random peoples' blogs I want videos, music and professional journalism, and whether you like it or not those things cost money. It's good of you to recognise that YouTube differs "somewhat" from your website, but I don't think you realise quite how different it is. You can run a website for $10 a year as long as it doesn't do much and few people visit it. A popular website costs a little more. Estimates for YouTube's operating costs run to $700 million a year, including over $1m per month for bandwidth. You may be inclined to claim that that is a ludicrous overestimate - but it isn't. Since they recently floated, Facebook's financial statements are in the public domain. Their prospectus lists their total expenses for 2011 at almost $2 billion dollars, including $388 million spent on R&D. To put it mildly, using your $10 website as a baseline for the modern internet is ridiculous.
I'll be blunt: I don't want your website - I want YouTube, I want Slashdot, I want quality journalism, I want music. Providing those costs money which either means people have to pay or they have to show adverts. If your vision is to replace that with the sort of content that can be provided for $10/year - no thanks. Almost every website that's cheap to run is cheap because it's bad and because nobody cares.
It's worth bearing in mind that this case is from the UK, where the case is directed by the Crown Prosecution Service using evidence gathered by the Police. There is no equivalent to a District Attorney.
That's quite a conclusion to draw from this story. Unless I'm missing something there is no suggestion that Mr Butler was framed, and the jury found him innocent.
The article is far more nuanced - it raises questions over the manner in which forensic work has been privatised and split up, leading to a situation where untrained officers are required to determine what forensic evidence to look for and what tests to perform. That's a worrisome prospect but I can't see in it the slightest suggestion of your scenario.
The "reasonable doubt" standard of proof applies only to the prosecution. The defence does not have to prove anything, either beyond reasonable doubt or to any standard of proof whatsoever. They merely have to raise enough evidence to prevent the prosecution from proving their case beyond reasonable doubt. That being the case it's meaningless to talk about whether there is reasonable doubt as to whether the phone was in the owner's possession. That is simply never a relevant question. The question is whether, taking the case in its totality, the evidence is such that a jury could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty. If the evidence amounted to an inconclusive DNA match and phone records that did not place his phone at the place of the murder then the evidence would certainly not be sufficient. That is the case notwithstanding that none of the evidence is directly exculpatory. (I'm not saying that that was the totality of the evidence in this case; in fact, given that he was denied bail for 8 months, I suspect that there was both more evidence and some history of criminality. That is simply speculation however.)
Why didn't you just check? The GP had made it abundantly clear that you were wrong, and why; it would have been trivial to have simply look it up. "I think it's 35%, but I base that on no actual knowledge and refuse to check" is a fairly weak argument.
"Rape"? The case involves him failing to use a condom.
This is complete nonsense and is a myth that needs to die. This argument has been made twice in the UK courts. Twice the courts have rejected it and found that the allegations would amount to rape in the UK.
The UK Magistrates' Court ruled that:
...what is alleged here is that Mr Assange “deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state”. In this country that would amount to rape.
The appeal to the High Court resulted in agreement with this:
It is clear that the allegation is that he had sexual intercourse with her when she was not in a position to consent and so he could not have had any reasonable belief that she did.
Whatever the other issues here the suggestion that he is accused only of some minor crime that would not be rape in the UK is a complete falsehood, as has been repeatedly explained by the courts and the press. It's time to let go of it.
'I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,' says author Evan Carroll of the problems created for one's heirs with digital content
I can think of a situation, and I think it's probably pretty common: the family doesn't have access at the moment, know the extent of the collection or really expect to have it. I don't know anyone who shares their digital media in the way physical possessions are shared. If family members have access it's by giving them a copy, which will be outside the supplier's control; otherwise the media is all personal. There's no shared pool of possessions in the same way that family members might shares their physical library or CD collection.
Of course that standard already exists in criminal law.
The question in criminal law is whether the jury is satisfied, beyond reasonable doubt, that the defendant committed the offence. If the witness testimony is sufficiently strong and there is a plausible reason for the scientific evidence seeming to contradict it the jury could perfectly well be satisfied.
I don't know enough about drug testing to know what the scientific evidence would be, but I can imagine a scenario in which a dozen well-known and trustworthy people testify that they saw X athlete using proscribed drugs. The athlete passed his drug tests but an expert explains that the tests can be fooled using masking agents, and the witness testimony suggests that this was used. On that hypothetical evidence a jury could perfectly well convict despite the scientific evidence seeming to suggest innocence.
Interesting. So in addition to the 100% chance that I won't allow some doctor to penetrate me with a sharp, pointy object, there's also a 5%-20% chance that penetration won't result in anything more than having it in me for a few seconds before it squirts out a couple ccs of juice and he pulls it out--which more affects the rest of the population, sans the people that aren't opposed to the penetration but don't want strange people squirting fluids inside of them.
I know, they all say it's just a little prick, but it hurt so much the first time I never let anyone stick another one in me again.
You need to look at it on a more general level. Say the vaccine is 80% effective and everyone is vaccinated. There is a 20% chance that your particular vaccine won't provoke any immune response. However the immunisation scheme as a whole will still protect you through herd immunity. You still therefore enjoy very good protection.
This, however, only works if the vast majority of people accept that benefiting from vaccinations outweighs the discomfort or inconvenience of them. If large numbers of people forego the vaccination herd immunity fails and the vaccine really is only 80% effective.
"Squatter's claim" is a construct of society - a right of occupation gained by occupation. If you reject society you cannot assert any such claim.
You can live outside society if you travel to part of the world where civil society has broken down and find somewhere out-of-the-way to live. You will have no right to live there - rights are a construct of a modern legal system - so you may find yourself thrown out and forced to find somewhere else if someone more powerful wants your house or property.
Flying seeming like boarding a flying bus is a good thing and a sign of progress.
When things are new and undeveloped they seem unfamiliar and slightly scary; this makes them seem special. When they start seeming boring and banal that's a sign that the technology and process have matured to the point that it's no longer a big deal. It might seem a shame that flying has lost its "magic", but that's the price you pay for easy, safe air-travel.
ALSO: How can a judge enact a punishment that is double that proscribed by law? This looks like a stupid decision just waiting to be overturned by an appeals court.
They clearly can't, and the summary and article are both pretty clear. The sentence was for conspiracy to defraud, and was only half the maximum. There is a separate offence with a maximum sentence of 2 years. There is an irony in calling something a "stupid decision" when the real problem is simply that you haven't taken the time to understand the summary or article.
With a government the corporations may not exist, but the large companies and rich owners would still be in charge and writing the laws that make us all victims to their whims.
You clearly don't understand anarcho-capitalism. There would be only one law: Keep your hands off other people and their property without their permission.
For this to work you either need a definition of "keep your hands off", "people" and "property" that is hugely expansive and complex, or you need a lot more laws. Let me give you a few examples:
-Everyone wants McDonalds hamburgers and Nike shoes, so Wendy's rebrands all its restaurants as McDonalds and copies their menu, and Adidas makes Nike-branded shoes. Do McD and Nike have any redress? (i.e. does "property" include intellectual property?) -That's too much effort so Wendy's has a new plan: they put up billboards and run ads in newspapers purporting to be written by an independent testing group, claiming that brain matter was found in McDonalds hamburgers and that they could cause CJD. Does McDonalds have any redress? -Things still aren't going well for Wendy's, so they start construction on a hundred new restaurants. The restaurants are all finished, signed off and the final payment is due - but Wendy's refuse to pay. Do the builders have any redress? (If they do you need a system of contract law) -People still prefer McDonalds, even when there's a brand new Wendy's right next door! There's an easy fix for that: some large, directional speakers and a powerful smoke machine make the neighbouring restaurant unusable. Does McDonalds have any redress? (Currently this would fall under the law of nuisance) Etc etc...
You probable could fold all these examples under the "one rule", but only by introducing such a complicated system of addenda and definitions that it would be just as complex and far-reaching as it is now, and that would leave plenty of room for lobbying and tactical redrafting. It's worth bearing in mind that the law is complicated for a reason - life and business are complicated.
In 2000 the WHO ranked healthcare systems and the US came 15th in quality despite being the most expensive per capita. The countries that beat it were largely ones with taxpayer-funded 'socialized' healthcare systems. Which I will repeat, for the sake of clarity, provided (according to the WHO) better healthcare for less money.
I'm not sure anyone disagrees that it would be wrong for a government to seek to maximize tax revenue at the expense of its citizens. The dispute is over the "expense" part. Those who support higher taxes do so because they believe that it is beneficial to the citizens of a country to increase Government revenue in order, for example, to provide improved services, invest in infrastructure or provide a social safety-net. The Government, in a sense, is the people; any argument that seeks to define taxation as a wealth transfer from the people to the Government must, I think, be overly reductionist.
The simple answer to your question is yes, there are IT jobs that keep you active. That's probably not going to be much use to you, though, since you won't find an entry-level IT job that keeps you on the move and has any real career progression.
The reason is skill development. Keeping moving is almost completely antithetical to developing solid IT skills. Becoming good at anything involving computers or IT involves spending years working with them and developing for them, and that inevitably means remaining still for long periods of time. As a result, except perhaps in very rare cases, jobs in IT that keep you moving must, necessarily, be at the end of the relevant 'career ladder', since they afford relatively little opportunity to enhance your skills.
As other posters have pointed out, you can stay active outside your job. If that's not enough for you then my personal feeling would be that you need to look outside IT.
I can start by correcting a few misconceptions. In the UK it's not only some police that aren't armed: the vast majority aren't armed. Outside of airports, some train stations and places like the Houses of Parliament it's incredibly rare to see police carrying firearms. And this isn't a top-down decision: the majority of British people don't want the police to be armed, and the majority of police officers don't want to carry firearms. That has consistently been the case since the first police force was created in England.
I don't want to get into the necessary-to-protect-yourself-from-baddies argument: that has been debated endlessly on Slashdot and isn't really relevant to the point I was making, since the post I was replying to was clearly talking about protection from Government: "With an armed populace the government fears the people. This is freedom." It comes down, I think, to this: are you really saying that the UK - and the majority of Western Europe - are not free because the people here aren't armed? It's easy to make vague references to draconian laws - I mentioned tabloid scaremongering to try to avoid having to get into a discussion of the reality behind the sensationalism. I think, though, that it would be very hard to make an argument that the people of Western Europe live under a variety of oppressive regimes - and that is the argument that you have to make if you seriously believe that an armed civilian population is necessary to maintain a free state.
That's hardly using my own argument against me - I don't think guns have anything to do with freedom. If I am oppressed it will be by unfair laws or the unreasonable actions of corporations. Those will affect me whether I have a piece of metal in my hand or not. You can't shoot the institutions of society.
What exactly do you consider guns to be a necessary tool for, and who needs them? I don't believe that gun ownership by civilians is necessary to maintain a free society. I'm from the UK, and have lived and travelled all over Europe. The place I've lived with the highest rate of gun ownership was Russia; it's also the only place I saw thousands of troops deployed to put down a Gay Pride march. In the UK I hope never to meet anyone who carries a gun, but - despite some tabloid scaremongering - there is a liberal, free and democratic society.
I just noticed that you're the person I was replying to, so I would add to my previous reply - I notice that you don't address the substance of what I wrote. Well done for pointing out the amusing slip in my writing, but how do you explain the fact that gun ownership around the world does not correlate at all well with free and open society?
How do you get 50,000 armed civilians together and what do you do once you've assembled them?
Even assuming you could organise the protest, long before your 50,000 have grouped together the protest will have been ruled unlawful and your protesters ordered to disperse. What then? Do you disobey the order, and use force to get past the police and national guard who are deployed to stop you? You may be right that the army wouldn't fire on a peaceful protest, but anyone who reads the news knows that they won't hesitate to kill armed rioters who are threatening their safety.
And if you did get your group together, what then? As long as they're peaceful your protesters are just another protest, and hardly the biggest that has achieved nothing. If they're not peaceful, that's not protest - it's civil war. Everyone you have a grudge with will be evacuated. Many of the protesters would be killed, probably along with a great many innocent people that you endangered. Once your movement had been eliminated whatever you had campaigned for would be twice as far away from reality as before.
Your gun does not give you any political power. You cannot change the path of the country, or the Government, using it, and it doesn't matter if all your friends are armed as well and think alike. That's a good thing - the alternative would be rule by the strongest.
The second amendment can put fear in government when they know their neighbors, bakery and every other place they go can easily shoot them if they do anything to bad.
This is pure idiocy.
A Government isn't a person. You can't shoot it to make it go away. Say Congress passes a controversial law. The Federal Government issues guidance and regulations. The courts, interpreting that law and the regulations, confiscate your possessions; the police come to your house to enforce that order by confiscating your possessions. That is a far more direct, personal and obvious example than most oppressive laws - so tell me: who do you shoot? The police? The judge? Members of congress? Senators? The civil servants who wrote the regulations? The President?
There isn't one person you can shoot to make a bad law go away. If you could shoot your way to political change people would be doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
The article has it right
"So what’s the right answer? Get rid of the Brilliant Jerk as fast as you possibly can"
First, the brilliant jerk isn't as brilliant as he or others think he is. Often, it is right after your superstar leaves that people covering his work find out about the shortcuts he took.
Second, his positive contribution will stay stead, but his negative contribution will grow proportionally to the size of your company and the number of people he works with.
Third, the longer he stays the bigger headache it will be to get rid of him.
Fourth, be sure he realy is a jerk and cannot be reasoned with.
What you say is perfectly reasonable, but actually the 'Brilliant Jerk' in the article is described as being brilliant. In fact, as far as I can see, he's only described as being brilliant - I'm not really sure where the 'jerk' part comes from at all. The author labels as a jerk the doctor who put more than anyone else into the startup, generated the most revenue and was always the first to help out the others, and why? Apparently because he said that there were things that the company shouldn't do.
The article seems to come from the position that the company should always get bigger and always take every opportunity, and that anyone who disagrees with that is a jerk. But every successful company I've worked for has turned down clients and chosen not to pursue opportunities because they recognised that sometimes the downside outweighed the advantages.
In short, there's nothing in the article that actually makes me think that the highly respected doctor is the one being unreasonable rather than the guy who writes articles calling people jerks for having the temerity to disagree with Cliff Oxford.
We're talking about lightbulbs here
No you aren't. The person you were originally replying to clearly wasn't talking about lightbulbs, and you explicitly started talking about heat pumps.
The problem here really is that people don't start capital-intensive businesses "all the time", and even if they did that isn't the real measure; the real question is whether people start successful and competitive capital-intensive businesses "all the time". Your example of airlines is particularly capital-intensive, and the pattern is entirely predictable: today's biggest airlines were largely formed from mergers of old airlines, rather than upstarts coming in; a few airlines carry a very high proportion of the total passengers; and if you go to (for example) JFK or Heathrow you'll struggle to find an unfamiliar airline. If you want to fly from Heathrow to Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin or Rome - all chosen because they are nearby and popular, so surely the most accessible to new entrants - you have in each case the choice of 2 well-established airlines. The same pattern is repeated across any number of industries where the costs of entry are high.
The barriers to entry for a taxi firm are clearly not on the scale of an airline. Here the barriers are tilted more towards the regulatory - licences are scarce and therefore expensive. There is clearly a degree of protectionism in this - a scarcity of licences does protect current drivers. On the other hand there are also valid concerns underlying the licencing model: taxi users are unusually vulnerable, either to price-inflation or physical attack. Regulation of taxi-drivers helps to make a taxi a safe way for women to get home at night as well as a safe way for tourists to travel without being taken advantage of. So does it achieve any of this?
Happily, to see a completely unregulated taxi system you don't have to go to Somalia; Russia and most of Eastern Europe operate on precisely this model, and do so in economies that are (mostly) capitalist and subject to the rule of law. A person wanting to take a taxi in Russia can simply position themselves on the edge of the road and beckon to the traffic. At some point someone will pull over - either a professional taxi driver or someone just accepting the occasional fare. It's best to negotiate the fare up-front, as this will limit the amount you will be overcharged. Tourists pay massively inflated fares and anyone is liable to be driven all around to justify a large and unexpected price increase. Other fairly common 'tricks' are simple crime (particularly against women) or driving way out of the city and extorting the passenger to drive them back.
Does this mean that regulation is always justified? Of course not. The point I am trying to make is simply that it is rather more nuanced than just "regulation is anti-competitive and therefore bad" or "regulation protects people so it's good". Regulating taxi-drivers brings social benefits in the shape of safety, reliability and a good reputation, for which we pay in decreased competition and therefore increased fares. Whether that trade-off is, on the whole, a good one or not is the question, but it is a rather more difficult one.
It's surely pretty tough to regulate taxi drivers if they are unlicensed. An example would be the difference between taxis and minicabs/private hire cars in many countries; both are regulated but taxis are far safer and more trustworthy, I suspect at least partly because the taxi driver wants to ensure he retains his licence.
If it's a strawman, what is the hint that you said you were sending them? What Kjella said boils down to that you want all the benefits of the sites you like to be provided to you for free. That seems to be the case - if not, what message are you trying to send by visiting sites that cost money to provide and then blocking the ads?
A much better strawman is your penultimate paragraph:
People will provide content. The internet existed before its "monetization".
I'm sure people will provide content and that the internet existed before it carried adverts. Frankly, though, that's pretty irrelevant. I don't want the 1990s internet, I want the 2012 internet, and I don't just want random peoples' blogs I want videos, music and professional journalism, and whether you like it or not those things cost money.
It's good of you to recognise that YouTube differs "somewhat" from your website, but I don't think you realise quite how different it is. You can run a website for $10 a year as long as it doesn't do much and few people visit it. A popular website costs a little more. Estimates for YouTube's operating costs run to $700 million a year, including over $1m per month for bandwidth.
You may be inclined to claim that that is a ludicrous overestimate - but it isn't. Since they recently floated, Facebook's financial statements are in the public domain. Their prospectus lists their total expenses for 2011 at almost $2 billion dollars, including $388 million spent on R&D. To put it mildly, using your $10 website as a baseline for the modern internet is ridiculous.
I'll be blunt: I don't want your website - I want YouTube, I want Slashdot, I want quality journalism, I want music. Providing those costs money which either means people have to pay or they have to show adverts. If your vision is to replace that with the sort of content that can be provided for $10/year - no thanks. Almost every website that's cheap to run is cheap because it's bad and because nobody cares.
It's worth bearing in mind that this case is from the UK, where the case is directed by the Crown Prosecution Service using evidence gathered by the Police. There is no equivalent to a District Attorney.
That's quite a conclusion to draw from this story. Unless I'm missing something there is no suggestion that Mr Butler was framed, and the jury found him innocent.
The article is far more nuanced - it raises questions over the manner in which forensic work has been privatised and split up, leading to a situation where untrained officers are required to determine what forensic evidence to look for and what tests to perform. That's a worrisome prospect but I can't see in it the slightest suggestion of your scenario.
The "reasonable doubt" standard of proof applies only to the prosecution. The defence does not have to prove anything, either beyond reasonable doubt or to any standard of proof whatsoever. They merely have to raise enough evidence to prevent the prosecution from proving their case beyond reasonable doubt.
That being the case it's meaningless to talk about whether there is reasonable doubt as to whether the phone was in the owner's possession. That is simply never a relevant question. The question is whether, taking the case in its totality, the evidence is such that a jury could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty. If the evidence amounted to an inconclusive DNA match and phone records that did not place his phone at the place of the murder then the evidence would certainly not be sufficient. That is the case notwithstanding that none of the evidence is directly exculpatory.
(I'm not saying that that was the totality of the evidence in this case; in fact, given that he was denied bail for 8 months, I suspect that there was both more evidence and some history of criminality. That is simply speculation however.)
Why didn't you just check? The GP had made it abundantly clear that you were wrong, and why; it would have been trivial to have simply look it up. "I think it's 35%, but I base that on no actual knowledge and refuse to check" is a fairly weak argument.
"Rape"? The case involves him failing to use a condom.
This is complete nonsense and is a myth that needs to die. This argument has been made twice in the UK courts. Twice the courts have rejected it and found that the allegations would amount to rape in the UK.
The UK Magistrates' Court ruled that:
...what is alleged here is that Mr Assange “deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state”. In this country that would amount to rape.
The appeal to the High Court resulted in agreement with this:
It is clear that the allegation is that he had sexual intercourse with her when she was not in a position to consent and so he could not have had any reasonable belief that she did.
Whatever the other issues here the suggestion that he is accused only of some minor crime that would not be rape in the UK is a complete falsehood, as has been repeatedly explained by the courts and the press. It's time to let go of it.
'I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,' says author Evan Carroll of the problems created for one's heirs with digital content
I can think of a situation, and I think it's probably pretty common: the family doesn't have access at the moment, know the extent of the collection or really expect to have it. I don't know anyone who shares their digital media in the way physical possessions are shared. If family members have access it's by giving them a copy, which will be outside the supplier's control; otherwise the media is all personal. There's no shared pool of possessions in the same way that family members might shares their physical library or CD collection.
Of course that standard already exists in criminal law.
The question in criminal law is whether the jury is satisfied, beyond reasonable doubt, that the defendant committed the offence. If the witness testimony is sufficiently strong and there is a plausible reason for the scientific evidence seeming to contradict it the jury could perfectly well be satisfied.
I don't know enough about drug testing to know what the scientific evidence would be, but I can imagine a scenario in which a dozen well-known and trustworthy people testify that they saw X athlete using proscribed drugs. The athlete passed his drug tests but an expert explains that the tests can be fooled using masking agents, and the witness testimony suggests that this was used. On that hypothetical evidence a jury could perfectly well convict despite the scientific evidence seeming to suggest innocence.
Interesting. So in addition to the 100% chance that I won't allow some doctor to penetrate me with a sharp, pointy object, there's also a 5%-20% chance that penetration won't result in anything more than having it in me for a few seconds before it squirts out a couple ccs of juice and he pulls it out--which more affects the rest of the population, sans the people that aren't opposed to the penetration but don't want strange people squirting fluids inside of them.
I know, they all say it's just a little prick, but it hurt so much the first time I never let anyone stick another one in me again.
You need to look at it on a more general level.
Say the vaccine is 80% effective and everyone is vaccinated. There is a 20% chance that your particular vaccine won't provoke any immune response. However the immunisation scheme as a whole will still protect you through herd immunity. You still therefore enjoy very good protection.
This, however, only works if the vast majority of people accept that benefiting from vaccinations outweighs the discomfort or inconvenience of them. If large numbers of people forego the vaccination herd immunity fails and the vaccine really is only 80% effective.
"Squatter's claim" is a construct of society - a right of occupation gained by occupation. If you reject society you cannot assert any such claim.
You can live outside society if you travel to part of the world where civil society has broken down and find somewhere out-of-the-way to live. You will have no right to live there - rights are a construct of a modern legal system - so you may find yourself thrown out and forced to find somewhere else if someone more powerful wants your house or property.
Flying seeming like boarding a flying bus is a good thing and a sign of progress.
When things are new and undeveloped they seem unfamiliar and slightly scary; this makes them seem special. When they start seeming boring and banal that's a sign that the technology and process have matured to the point that it's no longer a big deal. It might seem a shame that flying has lost its "magic", but that's the price you pay for easy, safe air-travel.
ALSO: How can a judge enact a punishment that is double that proscribed by law? This looks like a stupid decision just waiting to be overturned by an appeals court.
They clearly can't, and the summary and article are both pretty clear. The sentence was for conspiracy to defraud, and was only half the maximum. There is a separate offence with a maximum sentence of 2 years.
There is an irony in calling something a "stupid decision" when the real problem is simply that you haven't taken the time to understand the summary or article.
With a government the corporations may not exist, but the large companies and rich owners would still be in charge and writing the laws that make us all victims to their whims.
You clearly don't understand anarcho-capitalism. There would be only one law: Keep your hands off other people and their property without their permission.
For this to work you either need a definition of "keep your hands off", "people" and "property" that is hugely expansive and complex, or you need a lot more laws. Let me give you a few examples:
-Everyone wants McDonalds hamburgers and Nike shoes, so Wendy's rebrands all its restaurants as McDonalds and copies their menu, and Adidas makes Nike-branded shoes. Do McD and Nike have any redress? (i.e. does "property" include intellectual property?)
-That's too much effort so Wendy's has a new plan: they put up billboards and run ads in newspapers purporting to be written by an independent testing group, claiming that brain matter was found in McDonalds hamburgers and that they could cause CJD. Does McDonalds have any redress?
-Things still aren't going well for Wendy's, so they start construction on a hundred new restaurants. The restaurants are all finished, signed off and the final payment is due - but Wendy's refuse to pay. Do the builders have any redress? (If they do you need a system of contract law)
-People still prefer McDonalds, even when there's a brand new Wendy's right next door! There's an easy fix for that: some large, directional speakers and a powerful smoke machine make the neighbouring restaurant unusable. Does McDonalds have any redress? (Currently this would fall under the law of nuisance)
Etc etc...
You probable could fold all these examples under the "one rule", but only by introducing such a complicated system of addenda and definitions that it would be just as complex and far-reaching as it is now, and that would leave plenty of room for lobbying and tactical redrafting. It's worth bearing in mind that the law is complicated for a reason - life and business are complicated.
In 2000 the WHO ranked healthcare systems and the US came 15th in quality despite being the most expensive per capita. The countries that beat it were largely ones with taxpayer-funded 'socialized' healthcare systems. Which I will repeat, for the sake of clarity, provided (according to the WHO) better healthcare for less money.
I'm not sure anyone disagrees that it would be wrong for a government to seek to maximize tax revenue at the expense of its citizens. The dispute is over the "expense" part. Those who support higher taxes do so because they believe that it is beneficial to the citizens of a country to increase Government revenue in order, for example, to provide improved services, invest in infrastructure or provide a social safety-net. The Government, in a sense, is the people; any argument that seeks to define taxation as a wealth transfer from the people to the Government must, I think, be overly reductionist.
The simple answer to your question is yes, there are IT jobs that keep you active. That's probably not going to be much use to you, though, since you won't find an entry-level IT job that keeps you on the move and has any real career progression.
The reason is skill development. Keeping moving is almost completely antithetical to developing solid IT skills. Becoming good at anything involving computers or IT involves spending years working with them and developing for them, and that inevitably means remaining still for long periods of time.
As a result, except perhaps in very rare cases, jobs in IT that keep you moving must, necessarily, be at the end of the relevant 'career ladder', since they afford relatively little opportunity to enhance your skills.
As other posters have pointed out, you can stay active outside your job. If that's not enough for you then my personal feeling would be that you need to look outside IT.
I can start by correcting a few misconceptions. In the UK it's not only some police that aren't armed: the vast majority aren't armed. Outside of airports, some train stations and places like the Houses of Parliament it's incredibly rare to see police carrying firearms. And this isn't a top-down decision: the majority of British people don't want the police to be armed, and the majority of police officers don't want to carry firearms. That has consistently been the case since the first police force was created in England.
I don't want to get into the necessary-to-protect-yourself-from-baddies argument: that has been debated endlessly on Slashdot and isn't really relevant to the point I was making, since the post I was replying to was clearly talking about protection from Government: "With an armed populace the government fears the people. This is freedom."
It comes down, I think, to this: are you really saying that the UK - and the majority of Western Europe - are not free because the people here aren't armed? It's easy to make vague references to draconian laws - I mentioned tabloid scaremongering to try to avoid having to get into a discussion of the reality behind the sensationalism. I think, though, that it would be very hard to make an argument that the people of Western Europe live under a variety of oppressive regimes - and that is the argument that you have to make if you seriously believe that an armed civilian population is necessary to maintain a free state.
That's hardly using my own argument against me - I don't think guns have anything to do with freedom. If I am oppressed it will be by unfair laws or the unreasonable actions of corporations. Those will affect me whether I have a piece of metal in my hand or not. You can't shoot the institutions of society.
What exactly do you consider guns to be a necessary tool for, and who needs them? I don't believe that gun ownership by civilians is necessary to maintain a free society. I'm from the UK, and have lived and travelled all over Europe. The place I've lived with the highest rate of gun ownership was Russia; it's also the only place I saw thousands of troops deployed to put down a Gay Pride march. In the UK I hope never to meet anyone who carries a gun, but - despite some tabloid scaremongering - there is a liberal, free and democratic society.
I just noticed that you're the person I was replying to, so I would add to my previous reply - I notice that you don't address the substance of what I wrote. Well done for pointing out the amusing slip in my writing, but how do you explain the fact that gun ownership around the world does not correlate at all well with free and open society?
How do you get 50,000 armed civilians together and what do you do once you've assembled them?
Even assuming you could organise the protest, long before your 50,000 have grouped together the protest will have been ruled unlawful and your protesters ordered to disperse. What then? Do you disobey the order, and use force to get past the police and national guard who are deployed to stop you? You may be right that the army wouldn't fire on a peaceful protest, but anyone who reads the news knows that they won't hesitate to kill armed rioters who are threatening their safety.
And if you did get your group together, what then? As long as they're peaceful your protesters are just another protest, and hardly the biggest that has achieved nothing. If they're not peaceful, that's not protest - it's civil war. Everyone you have a grudge with will be evacuated. Many of the protesters would be killed, probably along with a great many innocent people that you endangered. Once your movement had been eliminated whatever you had campaigned for would be twice as far away from reality as before.
Your gun does not give you any political power. You cannot change the path of the country, or the Government, using it, and it doesn't matter if all your friends are armed as well and think alike. That's a good thing - the alternative would be rule by the strongest.
The second amendment can put fear in government when they know their neighbors, bakery and every other place they go can easily shoot them if they do anything to bad.
This is pure idiocy.
A Government isn't a person. You can't shoot it to make it go away.
Say Congress passes a controversial law. The Federal Government issues guidance and regulations. The courts, interpreting that law and the regulations, confiscate your possessions; the police come to your house to enforce that order by confiscating your possessions. That is a far more direct, personal and obvious example than most oppressive laws - so tell me: who do you shoot?
The police?
The judge?
Members of congress?
Senators?
The civil servants who wrote the regulations?
The President?
There isn't one person you can shoot to make a bad law go away. If you could shoot your way to political change people would be doing it.