In my state, and likely in many others, we have an "implied consent" law. What it says is that you implicitly consent, by signing your name to your driving license, to a breath alcohol test whenever you are stopped for a traffic violation. It also says that, if you revoke your implied consent by refusing a breath test, you automatically lose your license as an administrative matter between you and the department of transportation. Even if you are acquitted of the DUI, you have to take the DOT to court to get your license back, because you broke your agreement in getting it.
We also, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, don't convict you of DUI based on a breath test. The breath test (an SD-2 Breathalyzer machine in most cases) just gives enough evidence to take you in and do a blood draw. This avoids the source code problem, among others, by using well-known, old-fashioned, and I believe published lab methods to measure your blood alcohol content.
Of course, the SD-2 can be used to convict you of being a minor in consumption of alcohol, which makes sense because, whereas the DUI law punishes 0.08% or higher and an inaccurate measurement by the SD-2 can make or break the case, an MIC punishes anything greater than 0%, so an inaccurate measurement only matters if it finds alcohol where there is none, which is vastly less probable than inaccurately measuring the amount of alcohol where there is some.
Lawyers and judges not only cite sources, but are strongly encouraged to do so very precisely to an extent that other professions never do. This is both as a matter of professionalism and as a matter of getting your point across. It is more credible to read a sentence and see that it is cited to a specific paragraph in each of five different sources, with a relevant quote from two of them in parentheses, than it is to read a sentence and just see an author's name and a year after it. Making your points in a succinct, reasoned, and credible manner is how you win a legal argument. And that's probably why the APA citation format is less precise: If you don't convince someone your psychology term paper is right, nobody loses their money or freedom.
Legal arguments can be difficult to read if you lack the background. For instance, a legal brief about discretionary immunity to a lawsuit might not make much sense if you are not aware of what immunity means in that context or if you don't know that the way to avoid a jury ever hearing a case about an injury is to convince the judge that this mysterious "duty" thing is missing. But, given only a basic background, any properly-written legal memorandum or brief will be easy to read, with short sentences and well-organized paragraphs, not using obscure words.
By contrast, legal agreements are hard to read because the lawyers who write them spend the entire time trying to think of what loophole they might have missed and how to plug it. It borders on irony that their efforts to be absolutely clear in exactly what every term of the agreement means (and thereby preventing other lawyers from saying they mean something else) result in the agreement as a whole being nearly impossible to comprehend in its entirety at any one moment. The sickening part is that a brief is written for a more legally educated audience than a contract, since the person against whom the contract will be enforced is likely not to be an attorney or judge, and if a person can't understand a contract then he has a slightly better chance of getting out of it.
Breath tests are not the only tests used. Some states don't even permit you to use evidence of a breath test to convict a person of DUI. You have to draw blood. Of course, the breath test is still a pretty big stick to be hit with: It gives the police probable cause to arrest you and do the blood test, and declining to take a breath test will get your license automatically revoked. I don't know the Minnesota rules on using breath test results in court, and I haven't read this decision so I don't know if you can use refusal to provide source code to attack probable cause.
Someone working for the Chinese government breaks into a US government computer and steals terabytes of data for Chinese government intelligence analysts to analyze. The US government, knowing either that it is fallible or that it must at least pretend to its people to be fallible from time to time, eventually makes the breach public and it is published in the news, which every citizen has a right to publish if he wants to do that.
Someone working for the US government breaks into a Chinese government computer and steals terabytes of information for US government intelligence analysts to analyze. The US government doesn't tell anyone for the next 30 years because doing so would substantially diminish both future access to intelligence and the validity of currently possessed intelligence (not just from China). The Chinese government knows about the breach but never admits it to its people, who wouldn't have a right to publish the story or even speak about it, anyhow.
Hi. Literature Nazi* to the rescue, here! The improbability drive's figures are always given in terms of "X to 1 against" where X is greater than 1. While you are correct about probabilities, the figure above was an improbability. Also, 0 is not "nigh impossible" - it is the definition of impossible. Easy mistake, I know.
I had actually pictured the Obamas on Air Force One on the way to England...
Michelle: So, Mr. President, did you remember to pack the first-edition Walden that I wrapped for the Queen and put on your desk this morning?
Barack:He removes his iPod earbuds, and we hear the music softly before he presses 'pause' on the iPod resting on his lap. I'm sorry, honey, what were you saying?
Michelle: I was just checking to be sure you remembered the gift for the Queen. You know what happened last time.
Barack:.......
Michelle: Barack?
Barack: I... hm. He picks up the iPod and examines it. Do you think that Her Majesty likes Earth Wind and Fire?
You are likely incorrect. This is an asset purchase, and it appears that all debts and other liabilities of SGI are being retained in the surviving SGI corporation with no assets other than the $25M in cash. That's the reality, regardless of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy will just allow SGI to pay off its $500M or so in debts with $25M in cash.
There are several ways for one company to take over another one. Among the more common:
Purchase all shares of target and make it a subsidiary; you can purchase the shares with cash, with shares of your own company, or even with bonds
Merge one company into the other - the particular direction of the merger can be a strategic matter
Purchase substantially all the assets of the other company and leave it as a hollow shell with nothing but cash and liabilities
Each of these has its advantages and its disadvantages. When a company has $25M in assets and $500M in liabilities, though, you are generally going to want to acquire the assets and not the corporation itself.
Balance is, indeed, the key to a fulfilling life. If you spent 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, working a job you don't truly love, or even one you do, you're unbalanced. If you spend 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, doing recreational drugs, the same applies. Find a balance that works for you and lets you keep your life balanced to the end, whether you die at 29 or 92. I have mine and could die having led a fulfilling life in the next hour or in the next century.
The commonly held perception that people become more bearable to be around as they age is actually selection bias at work. Annoying 20-year-olds are everywhere and won't leave you alone. By 40, the real assholes hate everyone else so much that they do leave people alone, making the people who were tolerable to be around from the start appear more numerous.
Try this little experiment to see how it works. On Saturday, take a checker set and dump the pieces into a pile on your table. Look at it and answer the question "Are checker pieces more black on Saturday or are they about even with the red pieces?" On Sunday, take out all the red pieces and hide them from yourself, then look at the pile and answer the question "Do checker pieces become more black as they age?"
Putting balls under tables is actually a useful parenting technique. It conditions children to be aware of their surroundings. Similarly, walking around the CS lab beating undergraduate students with a yardstick every time you see bad code or even badly-formatted code conditions them to stop writing it.
At any rate, age means nothing. Age is a number that may have some correlation with maturity, but we all know that correlation is not causation. Age just gives you more opportunities to develop maturity. Most people don't actually use those opportunities, though, and are exactly as mature at 35 as they were at 18, give or take a few things people say "Oh, he's really mellowed out over the years." about.
And that's why people wake up one day and ask Slashdot what to do about having pissed their 20's away. And the right answer is simple: Grow up fast and put together a plan not to piss your 30's away. Asking Slashdot for advice to help assemble your plan is a good start, but follow through on it. Call that Plan A.
Then, come up with another plan, for if Plan A doesn't work out. Plan for not having enough for tuition at any given point during school. Plan for not doing well enough in school to justify continuing. Plan for the job market sucking when you graduate. You cannot possibly identify every contingency in advance, but if you are able to plan for those contingencies that have a reasonable chance of happening then you will not only have contingency plans in case they come to be, but you will also feel more confident going forward with Plan A. Or you won't, and you will revise Plan A until it is comfortable to you.
Failure to plan works for some people, but if the question is "How can I keep from pissing my 30's away, too?" you are going to want to know what you're getting into before you commit to 4 years of it. That's half your 30's right there, and the difference between getting a CS degree or spending four years getting high in your friend's apartment is that one of them is guaranteed to piss away the time, while the other just has a chance of doing it if you don't go about it right.
You are mistaken, but only slightly. Some state and even municipal governments have.gov domain names, many others have domains of the form blah.st.us where st is the state's two-letter postal abbreviation. And then some federal programs manage not to be in.gov. It's a hodgepodge.
You guys have 6 years to come up with the technology to install a hover conversion on my Delorean. I've been waiting for a long time already, so don't fail me.
Slashdot Mirror
In my state, and likely in many others, we have an "implied consent" law. What it says is that you implicitly consent, by signing your name to your driving license, to a breath alcohol test whenever you are stopped for a traffic violation. It also says that, if you revoke your implied consent by refusing a breath test, you automatically lose your license as an administrative matter between you and the department of transportation. Even if you are acquitted of the DUI, you have to take the DOT to court to get your license back, because you broke your agreement in getting it.
We also, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, don't convict you of DUI based on a breath test. The breath test (an SD-2 Breathalyzer machine in most cases) just gives enough evidence to take you in and do a blood draw. This avoids the source code problem, among others, by using well-known, old-fashioned, and I believe published lab methods to measure your blood alcohol content.
Of course, the SD-2 can be used to convict you of being a minor in consumption of alcohol, which makes sense because, whereas the DUI law punishes 0.08% or higher and an inaccurate measurement by the SD-2 can make or break the case, an MIC punishes anything greater than 0%, so an inaccurate measurement only matters if it finds alcohol where there is none, which is vastly less probable than inaccurately measuring the amount of alcohol where there is some.
Lawyers and judges not only cite sources, but are strongly encouraged to do so very precisely to an extent that other professions never do. This is both as a matter of professionalism and as a matter of getting your point across. It is more credible to read a sentence and see that it is cited to a specific paragraph in each of five different sources, with a relevant quote from two of them in parentheses, than it is to read a sentence and just see an author's name and a year after it. Making your points in a succinct, reasoned, and credible manner is how you win a legal argument. And that's probably why the APA citation format is less precise: If you don't convince someone your psychology term paper is right, nobody loses their money or freedom.
Legal arguments can be difficult to read if you lack the background. For instance, a legal brief about discretionary immunity to a lawsuit might not make much sense if you are not aware of what immunity means in that context or if you don't know that the way to avoid a jury ever hearing a case about an injury is to convince the judge that this mysterious "duty" thing is missing. But, given only a basic background, any properly-written legal memorandum or brief will be easy to read, with short sentences and well-organized paragraphs, not using obscure words.
By contrast, legal agreements are hard to read because the lawyers who write them spend the entire time trying to think of what loophole they might have missed and how to plug it. It borders on irony that their efforts to be absolutely clear in exactly what every term of the agreement means (and thereby preventing other lawyers from saying they mean something else) result in the agreement as a whole being nearly impossible to comprehend in its entirety at any one moment. The sickening part is that a brief is written for a more legally educated audience than a contract, since the person against whom the contract will be enforced is likely not to be an attorney or judge, and if a person can't understand a contract then he has a slightly better chance of getting out of it.
Breath tests are not the only tests used. Some states don't even permit you to use evidence of a breath test to convict a person of DUI. You have to draw blood. Of course, the breath test is still a pretty big stick to be hit with: It gives the police probable cause to arrest you and do the blood test, and declining to take a breath test will get your license automatically revoked. I don't know the Minnesota rules on using breath test results in court, and I haven't read this decision so I don't know if you can use refusal to provide source code to attack probable cause.
There is no such thing as an objectively out-of-line joke. There are only subjectively offended responses to jokes.
I have, for most of my natural years, wanted a Celebrity Jeopardy contestant to be able to respond correctly with "Who am I?"
I attribute it more to this:
Someone working for the Chinese government breaks into a US government computer and steals terabytes of data for Chinese government intelligence analysts to analyze. The US government, knowing either that it is fallible or that it must at least pretend to its people to be fallible from time to time, eventually makes the breach public and it is published in the news, which every citizen has a right to publish if he wants to do that.
Someone working for the US government breaks into a Chinese government computer and steals terabytes of information for US government intelligence analysts to analyze. The US government doesn't tell anyone for the next 30 years because doing so would substantially diminish both future access to intelligence and the validity of currently possessed intelligence (not just from China). The Chinese government knows about the breach but never admits it to its people, who wouldn't have a right to publish the story or even speak about it, anyhow.
10 a.m. is a fake time that was invented by fast-food chains to use as an excuse for not putting sausage on a damn biscuit when I need it most.
Offer not valid where Lisp is sold.
At least there's room for all of them inside a Klein bottle!
I stated the general case. It applies equally to positive and negative zero. Of course, neither of those is equal to zero.
Only a mathematician would put an uncountably infinite number of things into a bag.
0 != 0 for sufficiently non-zero values of 0.
That's fair enough. But they're still not "nigh impossible." They're just too precise.
I hope you know where your towel is.
Hi. Literature Nazi* to the rescue, here! The improbability drive's figures are always given in terms of "X to 1 against" where X is greater than 1. While you are correct about probabilities, the figure above was an improbability. Also, 0 is not "nigh impossible" - it is the definition of impossible. Easy mistake, I know.
* - Possibly also Nazi-Nazi.
I had actually pictured the Obamas on Air Force One on the way to England...
.......
... hm. He picks up the iPod and examines it. Do you think that Her Majesty likes Earth Wind and Fire?
Michelle: So, Mr. President, did you remember to pack the first-edition Walden that I wrapped for the Queen and put on your desk this morning?
Barack: He removes his iPod earbuds, and we hear the music softly before he presses 'pause' on the iPod resting on his lap. I'm sorry, honey, what were you saying?
Michelle: I was just checking to be sure you remembered the gift for the Queen. You know what happened last time.
Barack:
Michelle: Barack?
Barack: I
You are likely incorrect. This is an asset purchase, and it appears that all debts and other liabilities of SGI are being retained in the surviving SGI corporation with no assets other than the $25M in cash. That's the reality, regardless of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy will just allow SGI to pay off its $500M or so in debts with $25M in cash.
Each of these has its advantages and its disadvantages. When a company has $25M in assets and $500M in liabilities, though, you are generally going to want to acquire the assets and not the corporation itself.
Balance is, indeed, the key to a fulfilling life. If you spent 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, working a job you don't truly love, or even one you do, you're unbalanced. If you spend 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, doing recreational drugs, the same applies. Find a balance that works for you and lets you keep your life balanced to the end, whether you die at 29 or 92. I have mine and could die having led a fulfilling life in the next hour or in the next century.
The commonly held perception that people become more bearable to be around as they age is actually selection bias at work. Annoying 20-year-olds are everywhere and won't leave you alone. By 40, the real assholes hate everyone else so much that they do leave people alone, making the people who were tolerable to be around from the start appear more numerous.
Try this little experiment to see how it works. On Saturday, take a checker set and dump the pieces into a pile on your table. Look at it and answer the question "Are checker pieces more black on Saturday or are they about even with the red pieces?" On Sunday, take out all the red pieces and hide them from yourself, then look at the pile and answer the question "Do checker pieces become more black as they age?"
Putting balls under tables is actually a useful parenting technique. It conditions children to be aware of their surroundings. Similarly, walking around the CS lab beating undergraduate students with a yardstick every time you see bad code or even badly-formatted code conditions them to stop writing it.
At any rate, age means nothing. Age is a number that may have some correlation with maturity, but we all know that correlation is not causation. Age just gives you more opportunities to develop maturity. Most people don't actually use those opportunities, though, and are exactly as mature at 35 as they were at 18, give or take a few things people say "Oh, he's really mellowed out over the years." about.
And that's why people wake up one day and ask Slashdot what to do about having pissed their 20's away. And the right answer is simple: Grow up fast and put together a plan not to piss your 30's away. Asking Slashdot for advice to help assemble your plan is a good start, but follow through on it. Call that Plan A.
Then, come up with another plan, for if Plan A doesn't work out. Plan for not having enough for tuition at any given point during school. Plan for not doing well enough in school to justify continuing. Plan for the job market sucking when you graduate. You cannot possibly identify every contingency in advance, but if you are able to plan for those contingencies that have a reasonable chance of happening then you will not only have contingency plans in case they come to be, but you will also feel more confident going forward with Plan A. Or you won't, and you will revise Plan A until it is comfortable to you.
Failure to plan works for some people, but if the question is "How can I keep from pissing my 30's away, too?" you are going to want to know what you're getting into before you commit to 4 years of it. That's half your 30's right there, and the difference between getting a CS degree or spending four years getting high in your friend's apartment is that one of them is guaranteed to piss away the time, while the other just has a chance of doing it if you don't go about it right.
You are mistaken, but only slightly. Some state and even municipal governments have .gov domain names, many others have domains of the form blah.st.us where st is the state's two-letter postal abbreviation. And then some federal programs manage not to be in .gov. It's a hodgepodge.
You guys have 6 years to come up with the technology to install a hover conversion on my Delorean. I've been waiting for a long time already, so don't fail me.
Agreed.
That may be part of the cause. But the root cause boils down to them all being stupider than the average driver.