That must be why the labor unions want to get rid of them.
EFCA doesn't get rid of secret ballot elections, nor does it remove the right of workers to choose secret ballot elections.
Nor, it should be noted, are secret ballots considered anything like a universal norm in the except in elections by the public for public office or on public issues.
Not picking on you personally but most suggestions here just show that the authors have not taken the time to understand how hand counted paper operates. It's number one priority is trust. What "problem" are we fixing by using a counting machine?
The suggestion here was taking as outside the scope of the debate whether one wanted electronic tabulation. But there are efficiencies that can be realized, using the mechanism I outline in GP (which is by no means original!), without sacrificing the reliability that comes with handcounting.
Further, in the broader sense, there are a number of other election methods besides those currently popular in the US that are possible that are not going to be practical for large elections with complete manual counting as the norm (rather than an exception in cases where there are irregularities in the random verification); since a more sophisticated basic method is probably essential to retain candidate-centered elections but eliminate the features of poor representation, duopoly, and incumbent advantage, getting the basic processes of electronic elections down opens up useful avenues that are otherwise closed.
...and a receipt would also mean that people in positions of authority could force you to vote a certain way.
Only if you could keep the reciept. Which would be the wrong way to do things, both for that reason and for the ability to validate the tabulation of the election results, since then detecting errors would requiring getting all the voters to come and turn in their ballots to compare to the tallied results. What you want to do is have the receipt -- or, more accurately, hardcopy ballot -- printed in the booth, have it reveiwed by the voter, and (assuming it is correct -- exception handling is necessary if it is not) the voter places it in a ballot box before leaving the precinct, just like they would a ballot in a non-machine election.
Then, when the automated count is complete, you do a manual tabulation of the hardcopy ballots from random (actually random, not arbitrarily-chosen by officials) selection of precincts, and if there are substantial discrepancies (an objective standard must exist to judge this), a complete recount is done based on the hardcopy ballots.
Why isn't this being considered as the solution? There are other major OSes have implemented basic atomic transactions in their filesystems successfully, why not Linux?
Who says Linux isn't heading that way? Most existing transactional filesystems that I know of have license issues for inclusion in the Linux kernel, though I think Btrfs is both transactional and currently supported in the kernel, though not yet production-ready and stable.
Is writing a new file, and then renaming it over an existing file really a 'typical workload'???
Its a fairly typical way of trying to acheive something loosely approximating transactional behavior with respect to updates to the file in question without relying on transactional file system semantics.
Short version: "We're sorry we changed something that worked and everyone was used to, but hey -- it's compliant with a standard." If this were Microsoft, we'd give them a healthy helping of humble pie
If Microsoft simultaneously sacrificed backwards compatibility and correctly implemented a standard, we'd probably be left completely speechless.
I'm a hobbyist, and I don't program system level stuff, essentially, at all anymore, but way back when I did do C programming on Linux (~10 years ago), ISTR that this (from Ts'o in TFA) was advice you couldn't go anywhere without getting hit repeatedly over the head with:
if an application wants to ensure that data have actually been written to disk, it must call the the function fsync() before closing the file.
Is this really something that is often missed in serious applications?
Accelerators and Web Slices both sound like they are big gaping security holes waiting to be exploited.
From what I've seen other places, they don't seem to be, though the description in the excerpt of TFA in the summary is completely misleading and useless. "Accelerators" don't autonomously pull content from arbitrary external sites into your current page the way the description suggests, they are a way for developers to specify web services to be be invoked via a menu when the user selects content and then chooses to invoke an action with that content. Web Slices are a way to turn a web page (or a portion of a web page) into a subscribable feed.
The loose description on the summary page make them sound like gaping security holes, but that description seems inaccurate. I'd be interested, though, in hearing security concerns grounded in what they actually do, since both of them seem generally useful features.
because it gives the impression that free software is created in the same way as traditional proprietary code, working towards a predetermined end-point according to a top-down plan.
Um, free software can be developed that way; and, on the other side, proprietary software can be developed in a more flexible manner. Licensing model and development methodology are two distinct axis of variation between software projects, a particular choice on one does not always correspond to a particular choice on the other.
Trial-by-jury is a constitutionally protected right
True in criminal cases, and in many federal civil cases, otherwise, not.
which means that we need to look to the common-law to determine what that means
False. "X is a constitutionally protected right" does not imply "we need to look to the common-law to determine what X means". In the case of jury trial, the only Constitutional mandate to look to the common law is in the review of facts tried by jury (Amendment VII). The common law, of course, is one source looked to for meanings of terms in the Constitution (particularly the original text and the Bill of Rights), but is not on its own dispositive; context and interaction with other terms in the Constitution is also relevant, as other other factors.
In so much as legislatures and judges have arrogated the common-law meaning, they've breached their legal authority.
The essential evolution in the United States limiting the jury to the role of trier of fact except for the unquestioned power (and debatable right) of nullification (which is generally understood as limited to criminal cases and, one should note, is not, even there, the same as being the ultimate arbiter of law, since it can operate in only one direction from the law as articulated by the judge) is essential to protecting other Constitutional rights of those before the court, as, even moreso, is the limitation of the jury to acting on material subject to confrontation in court, even when the jury is assumed to have an inherent right to nullification.
However, might a better solution be to have the parties present their arguments (as is currently done). Then the jury will elect a foreman who will moderate an inquiry where the jury can question the parties and any witnesses. After the inquiry the parties would be able to make an abbreviated statement. Further inquirys might come up during deliberation much as juries currently request the readback of testimony and clarifications from the judge/etc.
Juries can already, in some cases, direct requests for information to the parties through the judge (as any such inquiry does involve issues of law as to its appropriateness, the judge does act as a filter.) I certainly don't see any fundamental problem with this being a more generally-available option. What is problematic is independent investigation which brings material into the decision that is neither filtered for legal appropriateness (such as violation of rights of the parties in presenting the evidence, which is particularly an issue, and one of Constitutional character, in criminal trials) nor subject to rebuttal by the parties, which is what is producing the "internet-related" mistrials currently happening.
I thought original sin was a catholic idea. Granted, catholics outnumber other christians in most places, but it still warrants pointing out that they are not representative in this regard.
Original sin as a Christian doctrine predates the formation of most distinct separate sects -- it may be "catholic" in the sense of "universal", but it isn't a distinctly Catholic idea; it is found in most strains of Christianity (though not in all groups that are or call themselves "Christian"). OTOH, the evolution over time of the precise understanding of original sin differs between different groups within Christianity. Wikipedia's article on original sin is a fairly decent starting point.
At some point, PC became synonymous with Microsoft Windows.
PC became largely synonymous with "something running one of Microsoft's current set of operating system offerings" at about the time IBM licensed MS-DOS as PC-DOS and distribtued it as the standard OS for the IBM PC, and it was cemented when the Mac became the main hardware competitor to the PC and its clones, and so comparisons tended to be PC vs. Mac whether or not they were hardware comparisons, OS comparisons, or, comparisons of the combination of hardware and OS and available application software.
And what is "fair" is totally stacked against the state, and in favor of the defendant.
Actually, its stacked in favor of the side with the most resources to throw at the case.
In criminal cases, that's almost invariably the government. In cases with ultra-rich defendants, it may be the defendant, but while those may be a large portion of the cases that get media attention (the rest being cases with particularly sympathetic or celebrity victims), its a negligible portion of all criminal cases.
And, of course, most civil cases don't involve the government at all except that they play out in the court system, they parties are private entities. So its really a vanishingly small fraction of cases where the government is both involved at all and the party with a structure disadvantage.
What's the point of this? The judge already instructs jurors not to discuss the trial or do any research. How is "don not discuss the trial" any different from "do not discuss the trial on the internet"?
Its not.
Discussing it on the internet just makes you more likely to get caught breaking the rules (hence, the rise in mistrials occasioned by the internet and social media), since the parties to a case are more likely to find your tweet and bring it to the attention of the judge than they are to find the conversation you had with your coworkers around the watercooler at work.
That is not entirely true. Jury nullification occurs when a jury makes a decision on a point of law (i.e., that the law itself should not be enforced).
That jury nullification exists as a de facto power is a very different thing than whether or not it is proper. It certainly is the case that the jury can decide the fact questions presented to it on any basis it chooses, including improper ones. Its a bit more debatable whether jury nullification is proper, but in any case jury nullification is not a finding on what the law is, it is a finding that the law should not be applied at all and that the defendant should be let off notwithstanding the law.
Inasmuch as jury nullification is a desirable power of juries (whether or not technically a proper one), I would say that independent, out-of-court investigation, whose contents are not revealed completely to the parties, by jurors in support of it is equally problematic as such investigation in the jury's role as trier of fact, for the same reason: it brings arguments into the jury deliberations that have not been presented to the parties to the case and which the parties whose interests are harmed have no opportunity to rebut.
Yes, but look at the examples where potentially exonerating evidence comes to light after the fact (after the conviction) but the courts refuse or fail to act due to some technicality or other.
It seems to me that reveals a real, but completely unrelated, problem with the system that needs fixed.
Seems like this would be pretty simple to stop by a small rules change at the court house. Just ban cell phones and similar devices.
As TFA notes, many courts already do this, and it has little effect on the problem, which isn't particularly that people have portable internet devices with them during at the courthouse, but that they go home and research things relevant to the case on the internet, or go home and post information about the case and the jury deliberations to blogs, etc.
Short of sequestering all juries, there's not a lot you can do to pose a substantial barrier to that.
But on the other hands, judges aren't infallible even if they're honest, sometimes they make mistakes, don't understand things well enough themselves to make a truly informed assessment of potential facts, or in the worst scenarios are lazy, biased or even crooked.
Which is why we have an appellate system to deal with errors of law by judges, but which at the same time gives great deference to the jury's findings because they have a very narrow role which is limited to answering very questions of fact based on the evidence provided at trial. Whether that evidence was the correct evidence, whether the questions of fact posed to the jury are correct, etc., are all questions of law.
If you expand the jury's role, you invalidate much of the premise for the deference given to the jury's findings within that role.
Supposedly the legal system is there to "find the truth"
No, its not. Its to serve the law (hence the "legal" in "legal system"), which often doesn't put "finding the truth" ahead of protecting the rights of the parties.
Honestly, this is another "information wants to be free" issue. I can understand asking jurors to not Google about the specific people involved in the case, but to prevent them from looking up general information is absurd. If I was in a jury, I'd be very interested in the relevant case law.
The jury isn't the trier of law, that's the judge's job. The jury is the trier of fact. Any application of case law independently by a juror, wherever they derived the knowledge and however correct it is, would be misconduct. The jury is to determine the facts, not to apply their own understanding of the law. This is important, because the judge articulates and applies the law, and that articulation is subject to review on appeal. A silent, unexplained application of law by a juror (and, a fortiori, multiple of them by different jurors) cannot be effectively reviewed on appeal because no one knows what it is. The deference given to the juries decision on points of fact (it being overruled on appeal only if the evidence could not reasonably support the conclusion found) is entirely dependent on the premise that the jury is just following the instructions they are given and determining the facts in accordance with those.
That's not to say the rules couldn't be changed, but these aren't just peripheral rules -- to change the rules on what jurors can do upends a lot of the fundamental principles of the jury system. (And that's only dealing with the aspect of the trier of fact vs. trier of law role; then there is the whole question of how they perform the role of trier of fact, and the issue of excluded evidence, which often directly involves the Constitutional rights of the people in court, and Constitutional limits on powers of government.
It's the age of the Internet, you can't block people off from information any longer.
To an extent, the rise in mistrials is a result of it being easier to detect the kinds of violations that people engage in. It's a lot easier for a party to a case to find out and bring to a judge's attention juror misconduct that consists of or is announced in internet postings than when its just talked about around a watercooler.
I'm sure robotic cars will be highly controversial, and any accidents caused by technical failures will bring out the angry mobs with torches, but improving on the current rate of highway deaths per year seems like a pretty achievable target.
Simply reducing the need for individual transport would probably do that with less cost than deploying self-piloting individual transport.
It makes sense to me. In may last job transisiton, I was never "unemployed" in any real sense, but I did start the current job a week after my last day in my last job. My last job was less than 2 years, so for 1% or so of my time I was technically unemployed. It's the frictional cost of job transition, and unless no one is ever allowed to change employeres you'll always have some of that. Full employement by you're defnition is an appaling goal, because the only way to get there is you forbid people to ever change jobs!
This would only be true if it was impossible to change jobs without a break in employment, which it isn't: you can get a new job without ever being unemployed in between jobs.
But, anyway, "full employment" advocates never opposed true frictional unemployment, the difference is over inflation. And you can't have "beyond full employment" if "full employment" allows frictional unemployment but no other unemployment, since that would require more than 100% of all people who are not frictionally unemployed to be employed. "Beyond full employment" only makes sense (at least, in terms of common uses of the phrase "full employment") in terms of the redefinition of "full employment" to include not only frictional unemployment but a certain level of desirable other-than-frictional unemployment intended to avoid inflation.
That's because economist-bureaucrats have defined a certain level of unemployment as "full employment".
Specifically, in order to obscure the fact that they opposed the idea of actual full employment as a central bank/government policy objective, a political faction with different policy preferences that preferred inflation avoidance as a policy objective created the idea that the level of unemployment which best served their preferences relative to inflation was the "full employment" level.
This kind of doubletalk makes even less sense when talking about unemployment in a certain career field than it does when talking about the economy as a whole.
Itanium is WAYYYYYYYYY too expensive for a desktop and for most servers and, of course, uses an entirely different instruction set.
But is it fundamentally expensive, or is it expensive because, despite their original plan to eventually make it a mass market chip, Intel relegated it to an expensive niche when x86_64 became popular as a consumer chip before Itanium had its early kinks worked out and Intel cross-licensed x86_64 for mass market use instead?
I tend to think its the latter, not the former. If x86_64 became legally impossible, there'd be far less-expensive mass market Itanium chips from Intel within months.
Slashdot Mirror
EFCA doesn't get rid of secret ballot elections, nor does it remove the right of workers to choose secret ballot elections.
Nor, it should be noted, are secret ballots considered anything like a universal norm in the except in elections by the public for public office or on public issues.
The suggestion here was taking as outside the scope of the debate whether one wanted electronic tabulation. But there are efficiencies that can be realized, using the mechanism I outline in GP (which is by no means original!), without sacrificing the reliability that comes with handcounting.
Further, in the broader sense, there are a number of other election methods besides those currently popular in the US that are possible that are not going to be practical for large elections with complete manual counting as the norm (rather than an exception in cases where there are irregularities in the random verification); since a more sophisticated basic method is probably essential to retain candidate-centered elections but eliminate the features of poor representation, duopoly, and incumbent advantage, getting the basic processes of electronic elections down opens up useful avenues that are otherwise closed.
Only if you could keep the reciept. Which would be the wrong way to do things, both for that reason and for the ability to validate the tabulation of the election results, since then detecting errors would requiring getting all the voters to come and turn in their ballots to compare to the tallied results. What you want to do is have the receipt -- or, more accurately, hardcopy ballot -- printed in the booth, have it reveiwed by the voter, and (assuming it is correct -- exception handling is necessary if it is not) the voter places it in a ballot box before leaving the precinct, just like they would a ballot in a non-machine election.
Then, when the automated count is complete, you do a manual tabulation of the hardcopy ballots from random (actually random, not arbitrarily-chosen by officials) selection of precincts, and if there are substantial discrepancies (an objective standard must exist to judge this), a complete recount is done based on the hardcopy ballots.
Who says Linux isn't heading that way? Most existing transactional filesystems that I know of have license issues for inclusion in the Linux kernel, though I think Btrfs is both transactional and currently supported in the kernel, though not yet production-ready and stable.
Its a fairly typical way of trying to acheive something loosely approximating transactional behavior with respect to updates to the file in question without relying on transactional file system semantics.
If Microsoft simultaneously sacrificed backwards compatibility and correctly implemented a standard, we'd probably be left completely speechless.
I'm a hobbyist, and I don't program system level stuff, essentially, at all anymore, but way back when I did do C programming on Linux (~10 years ago), ISTR that this (from Ts'o in TFA) was advice you couldn't go anywhere without getting hit repeatedly over the head with:
Is this really something that is often missed in serious applications?
From what I've seen other places, they don't seem to be, though the description in the excerpt of TFA in the summary is completely misleading and useless. "Accelerators" don't autonomously pull content from arbitrary external sites into your current page the way the description suggests, they are a way for developers to specify web services to be be invoked via a menu when the user selects content and then chooses to invoke an action with that content. Web Slices are a way to turn a web page (or a portion of a web page) into a subscribable feed.
The loose description on the summary page make them sound like gaping security holes, but that description seems inaccurate. I'd be interested, though, in hearing security concerns grounded in what they actually do, since both of them seem generally useful features.
Um, free software can be developed that way; and, on the other side, proprietary software can be developed in a more flexible manner. Licensing model and development methodology are two distinct axis of variation between software projects, a particular choice on one does not always correspond to a particular choice on the other.
True in criminal cases, and in many federal civil cases, otherwise, not.
False. "X is a constitutionally protected right" does not imply "we need to look to the common-law to determine what X means". In the case of jury trial, the only Constitutional mandate to look to the common law is in the review of facts tried by jury (Amendment VII). The common law, of course, is one source looked to for meanings of terms in the Constitution (particularly the original text and the Bill of Rights), but is not on its own dispositive; context and interaction with other terms in the Constitution is also relevant, as other other factors.
The essential evolution in the United States limiting the jury to the role of trier of fact except for the unquestioned power (and debatable right) of nullification (which is generally understood as limited to criminal cases and, one should note, is not, even there, the same as being the ultimate arbiter of law, since it can operate in only one direction from the law as articulated by the judge) is essential to protecting other Constitutional rights of those before the court, as, even moreso, is the limitation of the jury to acting on material subject to confrontation in court, even when the jury is assumed to have an inherent right to nullification.
Juries can already, in some cases, direct requests for information to the parties through the judge (as any such inquiry does involve issues of law as to its appropriateness, the judge does act as a filter.) I certainly don't see any fundamental problem with this being a more generally-available option. What is problematic is independent investigation which brings material into the decision that is neither filtered for legal appropriateness (such as violation of rights of the parties in presenting the evidence, which is particularly an issue, and one of Constitutional character, in criminal trials) nor subject to rebuttal by the parties, which is what is producing the "internet-related" mistrials currently happening.
Original sin as a Christian doctrine predates the formation of most distinct separate sects -- it may be "catholic" in the sense of "universal", but it isn't a distinctly Catholic idea; it is found in most strains of Christianity (though not in all groups that are or call themselves "Christian"). OTOH, the evolution over time of the precise understanding of original sin differs between different groups within Christianity. Wikipedia's article on original sin is a fairly decent starting point.
Probably; that usually happens when someone posts a link to the internet on Slashdot. Someone really needs to update the server for the internet.
PC became largely synonymous with "something running one of Microsoft's current set of operating system offerings" at about the time IBM licensed MS-DOS as PC-DOS and distribtued it as the standard OS for the IBM PC, and it was cemented when the Mac became the main hardware competitor to the PC and its clones, and so comparisons tended to be PC vs. Mac whether or not they were hardware comparisons, OS comparisons, or, comparisons of the combination of hardware and OS and available application software.
Actually, its stacked in favor of the side with the most resources to throw at the case.
In criminal cases, that's almost invariably the government. In cases with ultra-rich defendants, it may be the defendant, but while those may be a large portion of the cases that get media attention (the rest being cases with particularly sympathetic or celebrity victims), its a negligible portion of all criminal cases.
And, of course, most civil cases don't involve the government at all except that they play out in the court system, they parties are private entities. So its really a vanishingly small fraction of cases where the government is both involved at all and the party with a structure disadvantage.
Its not.
Discussing it on the internet just makes you more likely to get caught breaking the rules (hence, the rise in mistrials occasioned by the internet and social media), since the parties to a case are more likely to find your tweet and bring it to the attention of the judge than they are to find the conversation you had with your coworkers around the watercooler at work.
That jury nullification exists as a de facto power is a very different thing than whether or not it is proper. It certainly is the case that the jury can decide the fact questions presented to it on any basis it chooses, including improper ones. Its a bit more debatable whether jury nullification is proper, but in any case jury nullification is not a finding on what the law is, it is a finding that the law should not be applied at all and that the defendant should be let off notwithstanding the law.
Inasmuch as jury nullification is a desirable power of juries (whether or not technically a proper one), I would say that independent, out-of-court investigation, whose contents are not revealed completely to the parties, by jurors in support of it is equally problematic as such investigation in the jury's role as trier of fact, for the same reason: it brings arguments into the jury deliberations that have not been presented to the parties to the case and which the parties whose interests are harmed have no opportunity to rebut.
It seems to me that reveals a real, but completely unrelated, problem with the system that needs fixed.
As TFA notes, many courts already do this, and it has little effect on the problem, which isn't particularly that people have portable internet devices with them during at the courthouse, but that they go home and research things relevant to the case on the internet, or go home and post information about the case and the jury deliberations to blogs, etc.
Short of sequestering all juries, there's not a lot you can do to pose a substantial barrier to that.
Which is why we have an appellate system to deal with errors of law by judges, but which at the same time gives great deference to the jury's findings because they have a very narrow role which is limited to answering very questions of fact based on the evidence provided at trial. Whether that evidence was the correct evidence, whether the questions of fact posed to the jury are correct, etc., are all questions of law.
If you expand the jury's role, you invalidate much of the premise for the deference given to the jury's findings within that role.
No, its not. Its to serve the law (hence the "legal" in "legal system"), which often doesn't put "finding the truth" ahead of protecting the rights of the parties.
The jury isn't the trier of law, that's the judge's job. The jury is the trier of fact. Any application of case law independently by a juror, wherever they derived the knowledge and however correct it is, would be misconduct. The jury is to determine the facts, not to apply their own understanding of the law. This is important, because the judge articulates and applies the law, and that articulation is subject to review on appeal. A silent, unexplained application of law by a juror (and, a fortiori, multiple of them by different jurors) cannot be effectively reviewed on appeal because no one knows what it is. The deference given to the juries decision on points of fact (it being overruled on appeal only if the evidence could not reasonably support the conclusion found) is entirely dependent on the premise that the jury is just following the instructions they are given and determining the facts in accordance with those.
That's not to say the rules couldn't be changed, but these aren't just peripheral rules -- to change the rules on what jurors can do upends a lot of the fundamental principles of the jury system. (And that's only dealing with the aspect of the trier of fact vs. trier of law role; then there is the whole question of how they perform the role of trier of fact, and the issue of excluded evidence, which often directly involves the Constitutional rights of the people in court, and Constitutional limits on powers of government.
To an extent, the rise in mistrials is a result of it being easier to detect the kinds of violations that people engage in. It's a lot easier for a party to a case to find out and bring to a judge's attention juror misconduct that consists of or is announced in internet postings than when its just talked about around a watercooler.
Simply reducing the need for individual transport would probably do that with less cost than deploying self-piloting individual transport.
This would only be true if it was impossible to change jobs without a break in employment, which it isn't: you can get a new job without ever being unemployed in between jobs.
But, anyway, "full employment" advocates never opposed true frictional unemployment, the difference is over inflation. And you can't have "beyond full employment" if "full employment" allows frictional unemployment but no other unemployment, since that would require more than 100% of all people who are not frictionally unemployed to be employed. "Beyond full employment" only makes sense (at least, in terms of common uses of the phrase "full employment") in terms of the redefinition of "full employment" to include not only frictional unemployment but a certain level of desirable other-than-frictional unemployment intended to avoid inflation.
Specifically, in order to obscure the fact that they opposed the idea of actual full employment as a central bank/government policy objective, a political faction with different policy preferences that preferred inflation avoidance as a policy objective created the idea that the level of unemployment which best served their preferences relative to inflation was the "full employment" level.
This kind of doubletalk makes even less sense when talking about unemployment in a certain career field than it does when talking about the economy as a whole.
But is it fundamentally expensive, or is it expensive because, despite their original plan to eventually make it a mass market chip, Intel relegated it to an expensive niche when x86_64 became popular as a consumer chip before Itanium had its early kinks worked out and Intel cross-licensed x86_64 for mass market use instead?
I tend to think its the latter, not the former. If x86_64 became legally impossible, there'd be far less-expensive mass market Itanium chips from Intel within months.