It all goes back to the fact that the defense, prosecution and judge want to mold the mind of the jury. The judge can't stand the idea that the jury might want to research what other judges say the law means, what the legal code actually says in raw text, what happened, etc. The judge, and in many ways, the prosecution and defense all fight to be the power behind the throne (the jury).
I can think of many cases off the top of my head where a jury SHOULD be prejudiced, irrespective of what the judge says. If a juror finds out that an "expert witness" has a history of sending people to prison on testimony that sounds like pure equine ejectus, they should regard the man as a pathological liar. Just look up "Stephen Hayne bit mark evidence" on Google for a really good, sleazy example (my all time favorite, though is the "forensics expert" who calculated by the angle of a gun shot wound that it took two shooters holding the same gun to pull it off).
Either they are too lax (or laxly enforced) or they basically turn buyers into the modern equivalent to sharecroppers with regard to their property rights in the goods they buy. What we need is a global system that treats copyrighted goods like physical goods, and enforces the norms of physical goods on them. The government's only role should be to create enough artificial scarcity so that the goods can be sold.
The idea that corporations that bowl over the largest nation states is our future has always seemed strange to me. Multinationals are really just a legal fiction that exists simultaneously in multiple countries. At any time, a political system can create problems that will effectively bring that multinational to its knees.
I think the future for big business is identical, only a little further out, to that of big government: replacement by small, agile businesses. Big business exists mainly because of big government and cooperation between the same. I think we're going to see a future in which each major country may trade for some tech products, but you'll see conditions begin to favor agile, much smaller businesses that can efficiently produce most important things at home.
And what's he going to do if someone gets a bug up their ass and turns gnash into a standalone player/app for the iphone? Will he still be using the "proprietary" card then? The way I see it, the only open part of the iPhone itself is the compiler...
Most people still believe that just because you can legally do something, doesn't mean you should. When businesses do every sneaky, duplitious thing they can to make a buck, they push that natural tendency toward expecting civility and something resembling high-mindedness in civilized people straight into the Socialist camp.
As a Capitalist, that really offends me. If businesses want to be treated laissez faire then they damn well better learn to make society not feel like they're a bunch of crooks who care so little about the common good that if regulators aren't going Big Brother on them every nanosecond they'll steal everything that isn't nailed down and cheat everyone who isn't paying 110% attention to every detail of their lives.
The fight to truly codify what fair use is into law will be hard enough. It doesn't need the network neutrality anchor around its neck. The two are unrelated issues. It's possible to have a very non-neutral network with regard to what protocols can be used at what times and still have fair use legally protected; it's possible to have an entirely neutral network and have no legal right to fair use.
I am actually more of a social conservative than most of these groups, and I fully support legalizing and taxing this. If you want people to be responsible, they have to have freedom. It's just that simple. A society where people don't engage in victimless crimes because the state is putting a gun to their head isn't a more moral society, it's just one where we pretend that everything is hunky dory.
The FCC didn't have the statutory authority to enforce network neutrality. Congress never authorized it. Do you really want the courts siding with the FCC on a precedent that could give federal agencies a de jure resumption to write regulatory laws without congressional delegation?
You know when people talk about saving democracy and all that crap?
That's precisely what the federal courts did by bitch-slapping a federal agency that claimed regulatory powers well outside the scope of its congressional mandate.
Each religion blasphemes the deities of the others, even in subtle ways. Muslims blaspheme Jesus Christ by denying his divinity to Christians. Christians blaspheme Yaweh in the eyes of the Jews by calling Jesus his son. Both blaspheme Allah in the eyes of the Muslim by most of their beliefs about Mohamed and their religious texts.
You also have to be careful of how the terms are defined. Most of the scenarios used for that rape stat back in the less PC 80s aren't legally rape **TODAY**! I've often wondered how many "lost sales" are actually things like someone buy a single copy of a CD and sharing it with their immediate family.
Saying that Apple's relatively small marketshare should immunize it from the same standard is like saying that a street thug who murders 1 person should be treated with kid gloves because they don't have an army willing to commit genocide. Either a behavior is illegal because it's wrong or it's illegal because we want to be hypocritical busybodies.
Any self-serving statistic which sounds too big for the group that it's associated with is false. 40% losses from piracy? Unrealistic. 25% of all American women have been raped? Not even close (there'd be more rape victims than all other crimes in most jurisdictions then).
"It was Microsoft's operating system." Oh, right, I forgot, under modern antitrust laws you're allowed to be a total anti-competitive asshole until you become the 800lb gorilla. Part of me is hoping that Adobe wins and takes Apple to the cleaners because I don't buy the hypocrisy here that Apple should be able to get away with behavior that would have launched an online World War 3 if done by Microsoft.
The title should have read: Google is big and scary because a government might serve a warrant on it!
Yeah, imagine that, a government might serve a f#$%ing warrant or something equivalent on Google in compliance with its legal code, which Google can find out about in advance of moving to the country or leave if it gets too onerous.
What is different here is that the USA PATRIOT Act still works within our legal system; China didn't even bother working within its own legal system. The day that the NSA starts extrajudicially attacking Google for Australian labor emails is the day there is a real comparison...
The barriers in the developing world are not things like poverty and disease; those are the symptoms. It's social problems like corruption, over-bearing governments, aristocrats with no sense of noblesse oblige to the common man, inefficient and ineffective legal systems and other things which make the development of those societies to western standards exceedingly difficult.
In Britain, libel laws don't have any presumption of innocence — any statement made is assumed to be false unless you prove it's true.
Any false and misleading statement made should then be actionable. If you want to sue Singh for questioning chiropracty's scientific validity, then if and when it is proved conclusively to have no scientific value, every single chiropractor should be civilly liable, even criminally liable, for telling the public that it is valid.
Why did a 9 year old girl have contact with someone with a "sexually charged username?" I don't recall Google Buzz automatically setting me up with every Tom, Dick and Harry that was in my address book (which itself seems to be generated by the contact info of the people you knowingly contact)...
Would it be too much to ask of them to make the explanation for the story be that humans spent the last 10-15 years reverse engineering their technology and now understand it enough to make a weapons that can penetrate their shields and destroy their ships?
I read TFA and saw that a private company called "Science Applications International Corp." was running the project.
So, why is that people are blaming the government when it is the private sector that is wasting all this money?
SAIC, you might recall, was the group in charge of Virtual Case File for the FBI, one of the biggest failures in government IT in this country in over a decade. Their reputation as colossal fuckups precedes them and is at the point where it's a wonder that anyone still does business with them...
They taste a lot better most of the time than stuff that is good for you without qualification. That keeps your brain cookin with pleasure-inducing chemistry.
The one thing about these foods that I don't agree with is that the poor need to eat them because they can't afford food that is good for them. That's a load of rubbish. My wife has been able to buy enough good, canned vegetables like beans, chickpeas and corn to feed a family of four for at least a week for $50. You can do a lot with those staples if you try.
One of my fears here is that Firefox will be hit as hard by IE 9 as Netscape was with IE 4. Mozilla seems largely oblivious to how ambitious IE 9 is. A hardware-accelerated, multi-process, significantly more standards-compliant browser that supports H.264 out of the box would be just the thing for Microsoft to potentially stop Mozilla dead in its tracks on Firefox adoption.
Their Wikipedia entry implies that they actually do a decent bit of R&D themselves. I wouldn't call a company that does R&D and licenses the heck out of its work "King of the Patent Trolls." Of course, that assumes that the Wikipedia entry is accurate and all that. I can handle a company making money off of pure R&D. What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.
Put aside the fact that De Icaza is now eating his own words about the patent issue and look at the issue itself. Microsoft simply has not accepted how things have begun to change. Developers rarely need them the way that they used to need them in the business space. Most large enterprise apps can now be entirely built in Java, Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP for the backend and JavaScript with a toolkit like jQuery or ExtJs for the front end. There is not a single need for Microsoft in that whole space.
Microsoft needs to realize that developers have options now and their threats are empty. Most developers would laugh at their attempts to control things now and simply say "have fun with that" as they switch to some pure open source approach or one built around a hybrid of open and closed source from various projects and vendors.
They complain about advertising revenues while they are serving up ads that contain malware. To someone who hates ads to begin with, that's like saying "we know you don't enjoy crawling over broken glass, so how about crawling over glass mixed with AIDS-infected blood and barbed wire?"
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It all goes back to the fact that the defense, prosecution and judge want to mold the mind of the jury. The judge can't stand the idea that the jury might want to research what other judges say the law means, what the legal code actually says in raw text, what happened, etc. The judge, and in many ways, the prosecution and defense all fight to be the power behind the throne (the jury).
I can think of many cases off the top of my head where a jury SHOULD be prejudiced, irrespective of what the judge says. If a juror finds out that an "expert witness" has a history of sending people to prison on testimony that sounds like pure equine ejectus, they should regard the man as a pathological liar. Just look up "Stephen Hayne bit mark evidence" on Google for a really good, sleazy example (my all time favorite, though is the "forensics expert" who calculated by the angle of a gun shot wound that it took two shooters holding the same gun to pull it off).
Either they are too lax (or laxly enforced) or they basically turn buyers into the modern equivalent to sharecroppers with regard to their property rights in the goods they buy. What we need is a global system that treats copyrighted goods like physical goods, and enforces the norms of physical goods on them. The government's only role should be to create enough artificial scarcity so that the goods can be sold.
The idea that corporations that bowl over the largest nation states is our future has always seemed strange to me. Multinationals are really just a legal fiction that exists simultaneously in multiple countries. At any time, a political system can create problems that will effectively bring that multinational to its knees.
I think the future for big business is identical, only a little further out, to that of big government: replacement by small, agile businesses. Big business exists mainly because of big government and cooperation between the same. I think we're going to see a future in which each major country may trade for some tech products, but you'll see conditions begin to favor agile, much smaller businesses that can efficiently produce most important things at home.
What I said is that if someone makes an open source implementation available, how is he going to use the proprietary software club to beat Flash.
And what's he going to do if someone gets a bug up their ass and turns gnash into a standalone player/app for the iphone? Will he still be using the "proprietary" card then? The way I see it, the only open part of the iPhone itself is the compiler...
Most people still believe that just because you can legally do something, doesn't mean you should. When businesses do every sneaky, duplitious thing they can to make a buck, they push that natural tendency toward expecting civility and something resembling high-mindedness in civilized people straight into the Socialist camp.
As a Capitalist, that really offends me. If businesses want to be treated laissez faire then they damn well better learn to make society not feel like they're a bunch of crooks who care so little about the common good that if regulators aren't going Big Brother on them every nanosecond they'll steal everything that isn't nailed down and cheat everyone who isn't paying 110% attention to every detail of their lives.
The fight to truly codify what fair use is into law will be hard enough. It doesn't need the network neutrality anchor around its neck. The two are unrelated issues. It's possible to have a very non-neutral network with regard to what protocols can be used at what times and still have fair use legally protected; it's possible to have an entirely neutral network and have no legal right to fair use.
I am actually more of a social conservative than most of these groups, and I fully support legalizing and taxing this. If you want people to be responsible, they have to have freedom. It's just that simple. A society where people don't engage in victimless crimes because the state is putting a gun to their head isn't a more moral society, it's just one where we pretend that everything is hunky dory.
The FCC didn't have the statutory authority to enforce network neutrality. Congress never authorized it. Do you really want the courts siding with the FCC on a precedent that could give federal agencies a de jure resumption to write regulatory laws without congressional delegation?
You know when people talk about saving democracy and all that crap?
That's precisely what the federal courts did by bitch-slapping a federal agency that claimed regulatory powers well outside the scope of its congressional mandate.
Each religion blasphemes the deities of the others, even in subtle ways. Muslims blaspheme Jesus Christ by denying his divinity to Christians. Christians blaspheme Yaweh in the eyes of the Jews by calling Jesus his son. Both blaspheme Allah in the eyes of the Muslim by most of their beliefs about Mohamed and their religious texts.
You also have to be careful of how the terms are defined. Most of the scenarios used for that rape stat back in the less PC 80s aren't legally rape **TODAY**! I've often wondered how many "lost sales" are actually things like someone buy a single copy of a CD and sharing it with their immediate family.
Saying that Apple's relatively small marketshare should immunize it from the same standard is like saying that a street thug who murders 1 person should be treated with kid gloves because they don't have an army willing to commit genocide. Either a behavior is illegal because it's wrong or it's illegal because we want to be hypocritical busybodies.
Any self-serving statistic which sounds too big for the group that it's associated with is false. 40% losses from piracy? Unrealistic. 25% of all American women have been raped? Not even close (there'd be more rape victims than all other crimes in most jurisdictions then).
"It was Microsoft's operating system." Oh, right, I forgot, under modern antitrust laws you're allowed to be a total anti-competitive asshole until you become the 800lb gorilla. Part of me is hoping that Adobe wins and takes Apple to the cleaners because I don't buy the hypocrisy here that Apple should be able to get away with behavior that would have launched an online World War 3 if done by Microsoft.
The title should have read: Google is big and scary because a government might serve a warrant on it!
Yeah, imagine that, a government might serve a f#$%ing warrant or something equivalent on Google in compliance with its legal code, which Google can find out about in advance of moving to the country or leave if it gets too onerous.
What is different here is that the USA PATRIOT Act still works within our legal system; China didn't even bother working within its own legal system. The day that the NSA starts extrajudicially attacking Google for Australian labor emails is the day there is a real comparison...
The barriers in the developing world are not things like poverty and disease; those are the symptoms. It's social problems like corruption, over-bearing governments, aristocrats with no sense of noblesse oblige to the common man, inefficient and ineffective legal systems and other things which make the development of those societies to western standards exceedingly difficult.
Any false and misleading statement made should then be actionable. If you want to sue Singh for questioning chiropracty's scientific validity, then if and when it is proved conclusively to have no scientific value, every single chiropractor should be civilly liable, even criminally liable, for telling the public that it is valid.
Why did a 9 year old girl have contact with someone with a "sexually charged username?" I don't recall Google Buzz automatically setting me up with every Tom, Dick and Harry that was in my address book (which itself seems to be generated by the contact info of the people you knowingly contact)...
Would it be too much to ask of them to make the explanation for the story be that humans spent the last 10-15 years reverse engineering their technology and now understand it enough to make a weapons that can penetrate their shields and destroy their ships?
SAIC, you might recall, was the group in charge of Virtual Case File for the FBI, one of the biggest failures in government IT in this country in over a decade. Their reputation as colossal fuckups precedes them and is at the point where it's a wonder that anyone still does business with them...
They taste a lot better most of the time than stuff that is good for you without qualification. That keeps your brain cookin with pleasure-inducing chemistry.
The one thing about these foods that I don't agree with is that the poor need to eat them because they can't afford food that is good for them. That's a load of rubbish. My wife has been able to buy enough good, canned vegetables like beans, chickpeas and corn to feed a family of four for at least a week for $50. You can do a lot with those staples if you try.
One of my fears here is that Firefox will be hit as hard by IE 9 as Netscape was with IE 4. Mozilla seems largely oblivious to how ambitious IE 9 is. A hardware-accelerated, multi-process, significantly more standards-compliant browser that supports H.264 out of the box would be just the thing for Microsoft to potentially stop Mozilla dead in its tracks on Firefox adoption.
Their Wikipedia entry implies that they actually do a decent bit of R&D themselves. I wouldn't call a company that does R&D and licenses the heck out of its work "King of the Patent Trolls." Of course, that assumes that the Wikipedia entry is accurate and all that. I can handle a company making money off of pure R&D. What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.
Put aside the fact that De Icaza is now eating his own words about the patent issue and look at the issue itself. Microsoft simply has not accepted how things have begun to change. Developers rarely need them the way that they used to need them in the business space. Most large enterprise apps can now be entirely built in Java, Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP for the backend and JavaScript with a toolkit like jQuery or ExtJs for the front end. There is not a single need for Microsoft in that whole space.
Microsoft needs to realize that developers have options now and their threats are empty. Most developers would laugh at their attempts to control things now and simply say "have fun with that" as they switch to some pure open source approach or one built around a hybrid of open and closed source from various projects and vendors.
They complain about advertising revenues while they are serving up ads that contain malware. To someone who hates ads to begin with, that's like saying "we know you don't enjoy crawling over broken glass, so how about crawling over glass mixed with AIDS-infected blood and barbed wire?"