English is a proper noun and adjective. "English syntax" would be the appropriate capitalization. Regardless, where's the guy with the sig line to the effect of "I'll pay for a subscription to Slashdot as soon as it goes one day without a duplicate story or spelling/grammatical error on the front page."?
Just a nitpick - "assault weapon" is a made-up term. People use that word to classify guns and ban them by comparison to "assault rifles", which are an actual type of gun. Assault rifles are fully-automatic, and there are severe restrictions on those in the US. Only one incident has ever occurred where a crime was committed with a legally-owned machinegun in the US. The "assault weapons" you hear about only look nasty. The assault weapon ban that expires today in the US banned cosmetic features only - our idiot lawmakers know very little about guns, but don't have a problem telling you what kind you should be able to own.
In Australia, it is next to impossible to legally own a gun, in the general sense. Specific kinds of guns are okay if you have a good reason to own one. I much prefer to be trusted as a law-abiding citizen. Innocent until proven guilty.
The military would see a lot of mutinees if they were ordered to turn the Blackhawks on large number of US citizens on American soil.
And you haven't read the second amendment or other documentation from the time it was written well enough if you think it has anything to do with the states forming militias. At least you're better off than John Kerry, who somehow found the word 'hunting' in the Constitution.
"I've handled all different kinds of guns and I've gone out and I've shot - I've shot birds and deer and you name it," Kerry said Friday night during a rally in Allentown, Pa. "And I believe in the Second Amendment. But I'll tell you this - I have never thought about going hunting with an assault weapon, with a weapon of war."
And in Australia, where guns are also almost impossible to legally own, criminals that can't get guns have been resorting to swords (which some Aussies want banned now) or crossbows (as per the story about a man's life being saved by his cell phone).
As to a fight against an oppressive government, look at the communist nations that prohibit their citizens from owning guns, versus oppressive nations where citizens can own guns. The USA won its war for independence because its people owned guns and turned them against the oppressors.
Do you have any evidence to back up your side of the issue?
This is the best advice. Get a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with any kind of scattering round (rock salt if you just want it to sting, 4-shot if you want it to hurt, and 00-buck if you want it to maim; bean bags and slugs are both bad for different reasons, but the common reason that you'll miss with them both).
Many people recommend a pistol or a semi-auto carbine, but a pump action shotgun is the best because you are less likely to miss in the high-stress scenario of a home invasion. Regardless, be sure to practice with whatever gun you get.
A pump-action shotgun also has a deterring effect. When you cycle the action to load your first shot, the invader will hear it. If they're innocent, they'll yell out "Gramma, don't shoot!" If a criminal advances on you after hearing that sound, it's either because he's too stupid to be a threat or too combat-hardened to be scared.
To all the idiots spouting off anti-gun propoganda: shut the fuck up. You have no idea what you're talking about and are just afraid of law-abiding citizens having guns. In your perfect world, only the police and criminals have guns. Guess what? When only the police and criminals have guns, one of those two groups is going to rule, so you're left with either a police state or a criminal state. Take your pick, Soviet Russia.
This is a state law thing. In North Dakota, you have the right to defend your home using force, even without warning the trespasser if the time to warn him would result in more damage than just shooting him. In California, I'm sure you have different laws, because you can actually be sued by a wheelchair-bound burglar for not providing a ramp to get upstairs to your jewels.
What is not legal anywhere is a passive defense - spring guns, tripwires, and so forth intended to cause harm. These things can't "reasonably believe" that the house is in danger, and that's the typical requirement for defense of real property.
Don't listen too carefully to the parent comment - he's an IP lawyer in California, the state I refused to even go to law school in because the laws are so idiotic.
Perhaps. Since I'm having trouble getting up to speed on Emacs myself, though, I have my doubts. One of my biggest problems is that it craps all over - #blah# and blah~ and so forth dumped wherever it feels like. I want to be the only one putting files anywhere outside of/tmp (my vimrc puts.swp files there, even). That, and there are other issues that slow me down compared to vi, mostly paradigmatic things that I just need to work on. I'm already light years ahead of where I was 3 months ago, just using Emacs occasionally. I even used it exclusively in a class the other day for my notes (I use DokuWiki and unison to synchronize the flat files on my laptop to my web server).
I like Konqueror, and this makes it a million times better, but the interface still sucks. Ctrl-W to close a tab works on all but the last tab. I like the Mozilla way much better. There are other gripes I have with it, but most of them are of similar form: Mozilla does something better.
Even I have trouble getting used to using Emacs. I come from a vi background, but all the same...I don't want to hire a secretary who is more of a Lisp hacker than I am!;) LyX is good as a word processor, but I don't know how it holds up to custom LaTeX styles. I don't believe it does well at all, though I would hope to be wrong here.
I want to find time to check into Debian-Lex, but I don't have high hopes that it implements anything that I couldn't find elsewhere, which means it will fall short and just be a very well-organized failed effort.:| (I'm an optimist in theory.;)
I made the erroneous assumption that you were in the USA. With memos, what I was getting as is that each law firm is essentially its own "jurisdiction" in terms of formatting rules. I think the analogy is appropriate on an informal level.
I suppose a directory tree would make more sense than a one-document-with-multiple-ifthen's system, if you want to go international with the idea (which is definitely wise since the only two people interested are in vastly separated nations).
As to the typist problem, what do you think there are for possible solutions? It'd be error-prone to convert from any other format, except for a custom XML format or something of the sort, and an editor for that would have to be custom, as well, unless you want to teach Emacs to a typist.;)
The reason I grouped by document and then by jurisdiction is that it would make adding a jurisdiction to a document type easier - in essence, for jurisdictions that are procedurally similar enough, I see the jurisdiction as acting like a stylesheet. I can anticipate that logic being turned against me - why not just apply the "6th Circuit" stylesheet to all documents?
The reason is that having one template per document with a stylesheet selector for jurisdiction seems to fall more in line with LaTeX practices. "a4", "letter", "12pt", and so on are options for the "article" class, not vice versa.
I think this decision turns on whether the documents within a jurisdiction are more similar to each other than the documents of any particular purpose are between jurisdictions. It's far too early for me to determine that off the top of my head - let me know your thoughts.
One more thought - the documents a particular person will use will change style based on more than jurisdiction, and jurisdictions overlap within one man's office. For example, a "memo" would have to be customized per firm in the larger firms, and for a given case, it's more likely that you'll change the jurisdiction setting for a particular document than change the document type - meaning that jurisdiction is a finer-grained control level than document type. (For example, your prayer for relief will never become a retainer letter, but it may be filed in more than one court.)
Of course, most of this is of a truly cosmetic nature - but why sacrifice vanity unncecessarily?:) The most important thing is simply using TeX in your practice. TeX creates more attractive, more readable output than any word processer I've seen. Of course, you're not likely to have a typist capable of doing it all in TeX, but that could be solved in a number of ways. Then again, I'm also unlikely to find a typist better than myself...;)
Call it "LawTeX". Same pronunciation as LaTeX is the only drawback.
I think the key is collaboration. One form will not vary vastly from one jurisdiction to another, and oftentimes will only need minor modifications. The geek community can probably help make this even better...
Then, with the basic templates, it would be easy to add jurisdictions and contribute them back to a central repository. I submit that there is at least one TeXable attorney in each Circuit who could contribute templates for that Circuit, and probably the same applies to many Districts and states.
I'm more likely to use OpenOffice.org than WordPerfect. I've never been a WordPerfect person. Indeed, I grew up on XyWrite. I'm still more likely to tweak TeX into a per-use tool than I am to use WordPerfect. Word doesn't bother me as much but it's still rough. One of the roughest things I've ever done was convert a law firm's forms from XyWrite to Word.
I've been looking for LaTeX templates for court and other legal documents. If you can keep me informed of this, I'd appreciate it greatly. IANALY, but when I earn my IAAL I'd rather not deal with MS or other word processor inconsistencies. I want a nice predictable:
It shouldn't be too much to ask, but I can't do it all myself right now because I don't even have clue 1 where I'll be taking the bar, much less what that jurisdiction's rules for document formatting are.:)
Utterly useless, in short. There's nothing out there yet, in part because everyone who makes good law office management software is smart enough to turn a profit by selling it to law offices. Just like we have no equivalent of PeopleSoft, we have nothing like Time Matters for lawyers. These are some of the major application areas that free software hasn't even bothered with.
Another thing I would like to see is a collection of TeX or LaTeX styles/forms for use in law practice. Nothing there, either, aside from a pleading template or two from a German comp.text.tex user.
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English is a proper noun and adjective. "English syntax" would be the appropriate capitalization. Regardless, where's the guy with the sig line to the effect of "I'll pay for a subscription to Slashdot as soon as it goes one day without a duplicate story or spelling/grammatical error on the front page."?
Just a nitpick - "assault weapon" is a made-up term. People use that word to classify guns and ban them by comparison to "assault rifles", which are an actual type of gun. Assault rifles are fully-automatic, and there are severe restrictions on those in the US. Only one incident has ever occurred where a crime was committed with a legally-owned machinegun in the US. The "assault weapons" you hear about only look nasty. The assault weapon ban that expires today in the US banned cosmetic features only - our idiot lawmakers know very little about guns, but don't have a problem telling you what kind you should be able to own.
In Australia, it is next to impossible to legally own a gun, in the general sense. Specific kinds of guns are okay if you have a good reason to own one. I much prefer to be trusted as a law-abiding citizen. Innocent until proven guilty.
And you haven't read the second amendment or other documentation from the time it was written well enough if you think it has anything to do with the states forming militias. At least you're better off than John Kerry, who somehow found the word 'hunting' in the Constitution.
According to the UN, England has the highest crime rate in the world. England, where it's all but impossible to legally own a gun.
And in Australia, where guns are also almost impossible to legally own, criminals that can't get guns have been resorting to swords (which some Aussies want banned now) or crossbows (as per the story about a man's life being saved by his cell phone).
As to a fight against an oppressive government, look at the communist nations that prohibit their citizens from owning guns, versus oppressive nations where citizens can own guns. The USA won its war for independence because its people owned guns and turned them against the oppressors.
Do you have any evidence to back up your side of the issue?
Do you have any evidence that that is anywhere near statistically accurate?
This is the best advice. Get a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with any kind of scattering round (rock salt if you just want it to sting, 4-shot if you want it to hurt, and 00-buck if you want it to maim; bean bags and slugs are both bad for different reasons, but the common reason that you'll miss with them both).
Many people recommend a pistol or a semi-auto carbine, but a pump action shotgun is the best because you are less likely to miss in the high-stress scenario of a home invasion. Regardless, be sure to practice with whatever gun you get.
A pump-action shotgun also has a deterring effect. When you cycle the action to load your first shot, the invader will hear it. If they're innocent, they'll yell out "Gramma, don't shoot!" If a criminal advances on you after hearing that sound, it's either because he's too stupid to be a threat or too combat-hardened to be scared.
To all the idiots spouting off anti-gun propoganda: shut the fuck up. You have no idea what you're talking about and are just afraid of law-abiding citizens having guns. In your perfect world, only the police and criminals have guns. Guess what? When only the police and criminals have guns, one of those two groups is going to rule, so you're left with either a police state or a criminal state. Take your pick, Soviet Russia.
This is a state law thing. In North Dakota, you have the right to defend your home using force, even without warning the trespasser if the time to warn him would result in more damage than just shooting him. In California, I'm sure you have different laws, because you can actually be sued by a wheelchair-bound burglar for not providing a ramp to get upstairs to your jewels.
What is not legal anywhere is a passive defense - spring guns, tripwires, and so forth intended to cause harm. These things can't "reasonably believe" that the house is in danger, and that's the typical requirement for defense of real property.
Don't listen too carefully to the parent comment - he's an IP lawyer in California, the state I refused to even go to law school in because the laws are so idiotic.
Perhaps. Since I'm having trouble getting up to speed on Emacs myself, though, I have my doubts. One of my biggest problems is that it craps all over - #blah# and blah~ and so forth dumped wherever it feels like. I want to be the only one putting files anywhere outside of /tmp (my vimrc puts .swp files there, even). That, and there are other issues that slow me down compared to vi, mostly paradigmatic things that I just need to work on. I'm already light years ahead of where I was 3 months ago, just using Emacs occasionally. I even used it exclusively in a class the other day for my notes (I use DokuWiki and unison to synchronize the flat files on my laptop to my web server).
But Ctrl-Q doesn't close the app, just the window. I don't want Konqueror as a whole to die.
You are technically correct...the best kind of correct.
I know it's intentional. That's why I posted here instead of on the bug list. It's still obnoxious as hell, so I'll have to stick with Firefox.
You broke it, now I'll never know if I can just reboot, update my packages, and have Geckonqueror or not.
I like Konqueror, and this makes it a million times better, but the interface still sucks. Ctrl-W to close a tab works on all but the last tab. I like the Mozilla way much better. There are other gripes I have with it, but most of them are of similar form: Mozilla does something better.
I'm waiting for IE's rendering engine to be ported, possibly with some help from Wine.
So here's what you do...find all the adult items on eBay that only take Paypal, win all of 'em, and refuse to pay.
Even I have trouble getting used to using Emacs. I come from a vi background, but all the same...I don't want to hire a secretary who is more of a Lisp hacker than I am! ;) LyX is good as a word processor, but I don't know how it holds up to custom LaTeX styles. I don't believe it does well at all, though I would hope to be wrong here.
:| (I'm an optimist in theory. ;)
I want to find time to check into Debian-Lex, but I don't have high hopes that it implements anything that I couldn't find elsewhere, which means it will fall short and just be a very well-organized failed effort.
I made the erroneous assumption that you were in the USA. With memos, what I was getting as is that each law firm is essentially its own "jurisdiction" in terms of formatting rules. I think the analogy is appropriate on an informal level.
;)
I suppose a directory tree would make more sense than a one-document-with-multiple-ifthen's system, if you want to go international with the idea (which is definitely wise since the only two people interested are in vastly separated nations).
As to the typist problem, what do you think there are for possible solutions? It'd be error-prone to convert from any other format, except for a custom XML format or something of the sort, and an editor for that would have to be custom, as well, unless you want to teach Emacs to a typist.
I respectfully dissent. :P
:) The most important thing is simply using TeX in your practice. TeX creates more attractive, more readable output than any word processer I've seen. Of course, you're not likely to have a typist capable of doing it all in TeX, but that could be solved in a number of ways. Then again, I'm also unlikely to find a typist better than myself... ;)
The reason I grouped by document and then by jurisdiction is that it would make adding a jurisdiction to a document type easier - in essence, for jurisdictions that are procedurally similar enough, I see the jurisdiction as acting like a stylesheet. I can anticipate that logic being turned against me - why not just apply the "6th Circuit" stylesheet to all documents?
The reason is that having one template per document with a stylesheet selector for jurisdiction seems to fall more in line with LaTeX practices. "a4", "letter", "12pt", and so on are options for the "article" class, not vice versa.
I think this decision turns on whether the documents within a jurisdiction are more similar to each other than the documents of any particular purpose are between jurisdictions. It's far too early for me to determine that off the top of my head - let me know your thoughts.
One more thought - the documents a particular person will use will change style based on more than jurisdiction, and jurisdictions overlap within one man's office. For example, a "memo" would have to be customized per firm in the larger firms, and for a given case, it's more likely that you'll change the jurisdiction setting for a particular document than change the document type - meaning that jurisdiction is a finer-grained control level than document type. (For example, your prayer for relief will never become a retainer letter, but it may be filed in more than one court.)
Of course, most of this is of a truly cosmetic nature - but why sacrifice vanity unncecessarily?
I think the key is collaboration. One form will not vary vastly from one jurisdiction to another, and oftentimes will only need minor modifications. The geek community can probably help make this even better...Then, with the basic templates, it would be easy to add jurisdictions and contribute them back to a central repository. I submit that there is at least one TeXable attorney in each Circuit who could contribute templates for that Circuit, and probably the same applies to many Districts and states.
I'm more likely to use OpenOffice.org than WordPerfect. I've never been a WordPerfect person. Indeed, I grew up on XyWrite. I'm still more likely to tweak TeX into a per-use tool than I am to use WordPerfect. Word doesn't bother me as much but it's still rough. One of the roughest things I've ever done was convert a law firm's forms from XyWrite to Word.
At least they were in ordinal sequence this time! :)
I've been looking for LaTeX templates for court and other legal documents. If you can keep me informed of this, I'd appreciate it greatly. IANALY, but when I earn my IAAL I'd rather not deal with MS or other word processor inconsistencies. I want a nice predictable:
...
...
:)
\documentclass{12b6motion}
\plaintiff{...}
\begin{document}
\end{document}
It shouldn't be too much to ask, but I can't do it all myself right now because I don't even have clue 1 where I'll be taking the bar, much less what that jurisdiction's rules for document formatting are.
If you don't already know who Levar Burton and Leonard Nimoy are, you:
A) Shouldn't be on Slashdot
iii) Aren't qualified to talk about any Trek, because you missed the only two good series in the franchise
Enterprise is a great show. They just need to divorce the Star Trek name from it. Great sci-fi, but it doesn't belong anywhere in the Trek timeline.
It's not that at all. It's that they don't think it'd be fair to bill you for the time it takes to enter the billing for those activities.
Utterly useless, in short. There's nothing out there yet, in part because everyone who makes good law office management software is smart enough to turn a profit by selling it to law offices. Just like we have no equivalent of PeopleSoft, we have nothing like Time Matters for lawyers. These are some of the major application areas that free software hasn't even bothered with.
Another thing I would like to see is a collection of TeX or LaTeX styles/forms for use in law practice. Nothing there, either, aside from a pleading template or two from a German comp.text.tex user.
Why informative? The suggestion here is not only poorly made, but rejected in the original submission.