Just find the people from the Movie 2012 to help you figure out how to make the Neutrinos act like Microwaves, then you could totally make this experiment easy!... seriously... did anyone else need a friend to "dumb up" the science dialog for them?
I don't think the difference between justified and unjustified homicide is in itself complicated enough to require lawyers. The law is enormously more complicated than it needs to be mainly in that it has devolved into answering too many specifics, and not leaving enough responsibility for rationality in the hands of judges and juries.
So we should imprison some people because a judge/jury found their homicide unjustified, while the same person in front of a different judge/jury would have had their homicide found justified?
This could happen when two judges/juries have varying opinions about if protection of property can justify lethal force.
One aspect of "fairness" is equal application of the law to all individuals. And that a person should have the ability to know if their actions are legal/protected prior to actually performing them.
Applying a vague ambiguous law, which allows justification for homicide to be argued a priori every single time is prone to unfairly impact those who are not able to represent themselves well.
Certainly reality rules in your favor, the law IS too complicated for the layperson to use it.
In the ideal, however, the law would be simple and the tool of anyone who needed its protection.
While I agree that it is fundamentally an ideal; I think it is not possible for a legal system to be sufficiently comprehensive without devolving into the need for specialized individuals. Even the Jewish concept of Noatic Law for the gentiles is complicated enough to draw out the distinction between justified and unjustified homicide.
And, what about companies? Have the entire list of employees available to the courts. An employee is selected at random from that list (so you can't have a CEO that's a lawyer in disguise, unless you require that every employee of your company, all the way down to the janitorial staff, is a lawyer in disguise.)
You don't need the entire list. As lawyers have to pass the bar exam, and be registered in nearly every state in order to practice law. In all but two states, they also have to obtain a J.D. in order to even take the bar exam.
So, it would be sufficient for anyone attempting to represent a company in small claims to submit their education qualifications and bar status under penalty of perjury. It would take one stupid lawyer to put down that they did not meet this criteria when they did... it's pretty much an automatic ethics violation to lie to the court.
But again, even if a company is allowed to hire a lawyer for small claims, in WA state this is a maximum of 5,000. The corporation can hardly spend any time at all of the lawyers before racking up costs that pale compare to the maximum judgement.
However, WA state is also a state that allows for lax enforcement of procedure, and evidence rules during Small Claims Court.
Though she kept threatening me for not answering everything she asked such as where I work, company name, location, and hours that have NO RELEVANCE to my case.
Depositions typically allow for a wide range of questions that would not actually be admissible in direct court hearings (outside of California apparently). One of those things is relevance. They do not need to establish it in order to ask questions.
This is because depositions are usually made without a judge present, and so getting a ruling about if a particular question is permissible or not is unwieldy... I mean, having to call up a discovery commissioner or whatever every other question would be a total pain in the butt.
Plus, deposition as "hearsay" cannot always be brought into court on their own.
Of course, as you noted, sometimes you can simply refuse to answer a question under an objection under the rules of evidence, and the deposing lawyer is then forced to obtain either a resolution from a discovery commissioner, or suspend the deposition while they obtain a order to compel an answer. It's likely to piss off the lawyer, and make them look for more fun ways to make your life miserable, but there are cases where it might be the best option.
Like sacrificing your queen in chess... sometimes it might be the right thing to do, even though it's so unlikely to be the right thing that people will tell you definitively "it's never a good thing to do."
3) The defendant's attorney doesn't like what their client has done and is in fact helping me out.
I'm all for 'sticking it to the man', but the fact you're in appeals, and boasting on Slashdot that the opposing legal counsel is "helping you out"... I'm not sure is such a good thing.
I was thinking that too as I read it. Wouldn't it also be grounds for the person he is suing to request a mistrial, which would possibly result in overturning the original ruling?
It's highly unlikely that anything done now could create a mistrial, as the trial has already been concluded.
The appeals court could potentially return an order to the trial court to rehear the case, but that also is uncommon, and thus unlikely. The defendant would have to hire a different lawyer in order to make the claim that his first lawyer was either entirely incompetent (unlikely because they passed the bar) or they committed a gross violation of ethics (possible if they actually were assisting the other side, but would potentially be difficult to prove).
Very likely, the lawyer wasn't being well paid by the defendant, and was exerting the bare minimum of representation for their client.
I had an argument (a.k.a. flamewar) with a guy recently here on slashdot about the necessity of lawyers.
He seemed to simply reject the idea that the law was complicated enough to require a specialized caste of individuals. He kept arguing that a layperson should be able to accomplish legal work without resorting to a lawyer.
I appreciate your account so much, because it provides a good amount of evidence to back up my claim: the law is that complicated, and while a layperson could do it, they have to spend a lot of time and effort on the matter.
Cases are not as easy as walking in and talking to the judge.
We pay lawyers so well to do this stuff, because they have less ramp-up time than we do.
On another note, yeah, a lot of lawyers are pretty piss poor at representing their clients in court. I remember one judge berating a lawyer in a restraining order case for attempting to make an argument directly against the New York Times prior restraint precedent. I suppose you get what you pay for when you hire a budget lawyer?
Fine, but you have to break the news to that guy who can't accept change that he was incorrectly taught that there are 9 planets for his entire life. Now there are 13 (and counting).
Thinking about this... if Neil deGrass Tyson had been some hawt chick, I think people would have been less hostile to the idea.
"Well, if Vanna White says so..." (sorry, if she isn't the pinnacle of beauty anymore... she was when I established a lot of my memes about what boys desire.)
There was a study done some years ago where different groups were given tests to determine bias towards a given or accepted premise. Scientists where shown to be just as and in some cases more likely to fail a given puzzle due to reluctance to let go of a given premise and try another one. So we should be careful to equate "scientist" with "right." Facts are facts as we know them. That isn't to say they should be ignored either but skepticism is just as healthy where science is concerned as it is where religion, philosophy, politics, or anything else is. In fact, it's probably more important as science is the pursuit of the knowledge of what we see, hear, and smell.
However, certain scientific theories attain such credibility that to be more than initially skeptical of them is unreasonable, because they have been proven by so many different disparate experiments, that a widespread "fraud" to assert them is supremely unlikely.
Some of these are so obvious that no one would sanely argue them:
Objects with mass attract each other. The Earth is best modeled as orbiting the Sun. The crust of the Earth is composed of plates, whose interaction cause geological process.
Some of these are fought extensively for no good reason:
The Earth is some billion of years old. Systems that replicate with variation are subject to evolutionary change. Homeopathy has no possible natural mechanism.
This criticism also applies to theories that change slightly, but a huge paradigm shift has been scientifically ruled out.
Newtonian physics are technically "wrong", but we still use it, because it is a reasonably accurate model. Even when we did have a paradigm shift to relativistic physics, it did not make Newtonian physics "wrong", but rather just "inaccurate in some cases".
This argument that you present is exactly why the Smoking industry flooded the semi-scientific world with studies suggesting no correlation between smoking and cancer.
This is simply the ability of people to pollute an argument by making false claims while appearing as another.
Essentially, some people were committing fraud in the smoking and cancer correlation case.
We should not blame science for people abusing a process for their own political gain.
It's just that it is a dwarf planet now. A classifier. An adjective. I expect a retronym to arrive at some point when there are more dwarf planets than non-dwarf planets.
And how do you put a corporation in pound-me-in-the-butt prison?
The feds could pierce, find whoever in the company was responsible for the crime, and put him on trial.
You wouldn't be able to pierce the veil and hold a employee responsible, unless it was outside of the scope of their employment, which in this case is highly unlikely.
One could potentially pierce the veil to hold an individual officer responsible for setting up the policy, but the likelihood that an officer specifically directed the DMCA takedown to be filed is unlikely. Thus holding that officer for that specific count of perjury would fail... he simply set up the policy, and the employees followed the policy.
One could potentially charge the officers with a RICO violation though, for setting up a policy to file takedowns indiscriminately.
But in any case, the corporation would fight hard to resist the piercing, and they would still likely not spend enough to make it a deterrent to further violations.
Notices to hosting or search providers under 17 USC 512 are given under penalty of perjury. Perjury is a crime with a penalty of up to five years in pound-me-in-the-behind prison.
And how do you put a corporation in pound-me-in-the-butt prison?
Now, granted, there are also legal fines that can be put to them, but I doubt they will be in any range that would make them a deterrent for a mega-corp.
MS employees are still having the private jet weddings to the caribbean with ice fountains flowing with rum.
Wait, what? Which group did you work for?
Microsoft actually pays a little under average pay, and have stopped given stock offers for the most part. (And when they do, people typically sell it out, rather than hold it.)
Microsoft hasn't really been growing for a decade, while Apple has. The market capitalisation often reflects this, because people are more willing to buy shares in a growing company, expecting that their value will increase over the next few years. People only buy shares in a stable company based on the expected dividends. This means that Apple's stock price is likely to be more volatile than Microsofts and, as long as the continue to be perceived as growing, greater than the current 'real' value of the company.
When I worked at Microsoft, most people used their Employee Stock Purchase to put money away that purchased Microsoft stock at 90% of value. But since MSFT gains looked so poor, they then immediately sold said stock for an approximately 11% profit.
I did one further, I sold my MSFT and purchased Apple stock with it. In some ways, I was really getting AAPL at 90% of market value. Served me well, and it made me good money. Not to mention the nicety of vesting stock offers that gave me free stock, to be sold and converted to AAPL as well.
Actually, I do not believe that there's another life, but that's a bit off topic (wait, do we still have a topic here? don't answer, it was a rhetorycal question).
"See you in another life, brutha'" is a Lost reference.
I actually prefer the variant "vulcanism" because it shows the roots of the word going back to the god Vulcan. "Volcanism" just doesn't seem as poetic to me.
New Jersey. No extreme weather, no tornadoes, no earthquakes, no volcanos and if you live 20 miles inland, you don't even need to worry about tsunamis when La Palma finally breaks apart and falls into the ocean.
Our government is another story though... but that would be a man-made disaster.
I think the least dangerous place to live is in the Rio Grande valley, specifically near Albuquerque. The volcanoes are are all dead, the fault actually slips relatively well, resulting in little stress buildup, and thus low chance of earthquake.
You're at such a lack of risk for hurricanes and acclimate weather that if it snows or rains even a quarter inch, that people freak out like it is a disaster.
Tornadoes are rare, because elevation changes due to being in a valley. Hail is an occasional problem, though.
And to live in this nice geologically and weather safe location all one has to do is put up with a climate that makes it difficult for anything to live.
This isn't about "having the last word". Let me quote myself here:
No, you do not understand me just fine.
Let me clarify again: "I disagree with your opinion."
WHY DID YOU ARGUE AGAINST THIS?! The only reason that is apparent to me is simply to be antagonistic.
This was the perfect opportunity for you to say: "yeah, we're never going to agree. 'See you in another life, brutha.'" And then it's over.
Done. Poof. Finished. We both walk away.
If you want to give a parting statement, that doesn't reopen debate, then I'm fine letting you "have the last word". But you just don't seem to want to let go.
I'm ready to let go, anytime you are. We disagree. There is no reason or purpose to further debate.
Slashdot Mirror
Just find the people from the Movie 2012 to help you figure out how to make the Neutrinos act like Microwaves, then you could totally make this experiment easy! ... seriously... did anyone else need a friend to "dumb up" the science dialog for them?
Ahem... it's MAGIC sky daddy.
A "sky daddy" alone would just be silly!
Don't worry - my 32 out of 70 canceled your high score. And I don't care. Actually, go ahead and worry. Why should I give a crap.
The thing that confuses me the most, is that their results showed an average score of 51 out of 70... that is well better than half.
I mean, I consider myself highly empathetic and I scored only 49 of 70... what kind of saint-like individual do they expect people to be?
Ever notice how close the word empathy is to pathetic?
It's like they share a common root. Like passage and impasse.
I don't think the difference between justified and unjustified homicide is in itself complicated enough to require lawyers. The law is enormously more complicated than it needs to be mainly in that it has devolved into answering too many specifics, and not leaving enough responsibility for rationality in the hands of judges and juries.
So we should imprison some people because a judge/jury found their homicide unjustified, while the same person in front of a different judge/jury would have had their homicide found justified?
This could happen when two judges/juries have varying opinions about if protection of property can justify lethal force.
One aspect of "fairness" is equal application of the law to all individuals. And that a person should have the ability to know if their actions are legal/protected prior to actually performing them.
Applying a vague ambiguous law, which allows justification for homicide to be argued a priori every single time is prone to unfairly impact those who are not able to represent themselves well.
Certainly reality rules in your favor, the law IS too complicated for the layperson to use it.
In the ideal, however, the law would be simple and the tool of anyone who needed its protection.
While I agree that it is fundamentally an ideal; I think it is not possible for a legal system to be sufficiently comprehensive without devolving into the need for specialized individuals. Even the Jewish concept of Noatic Law for the gentiles is complicated enough to draw out the distinction between justified and unjustified homicide.
And, what about companies? Have the entire list of employees available to the courts. An employee is selected at random from that list (so you can't have a CEO that's a lawyer in disguise, unless you require that every employee of your company, all the way down to the janitorial staff, is a lawyer in disguise.)
You don't need the entire list. As lawyers have to pass the bar exam, and be registered in nearly every state in order to practice law. In all but two states, they also have to obtain a J.D. in order to even take the bar exam.
So, it would be sufficient for anyone attempting to represent a company in small claims to submit their education qualifications and bar status under penalty of perjury. It would take one stupid lawyer to put down that they did not meet this criteria when they did... it's pretty much an automatic ethics violation to lie to the court.
But again, even if a company is allowed to hire a lawyer for small claims, in WA state this is a maximum of 5,000. The corporation can hardly spend any time at all of the lawyers before racking up costs that pale compare to the maximum judgement.
However, WA state is also a state that allows for lax enforcement of procedure, and evidence rules during Small Claims Court.
Though she kept threatening me for not answering everything she asked such as where I work, company name, location, and hours that have NO RELEVANCE to my case.
Depositions typically allow for a wide range of questions that would not actually be admissible in direct court hearings (outside of California apparently). One of those things is relevance. They do not need to establish it in order to ask questions.
This is because depositions are usually made without a judge present, and so getting a ruling about if a particular question is permissible or not is unwieldy... I mean, having to call up a discovery commissioner or whatever every other question would be a total pain in the butt.
Plus, deposition as "hearsay" cannot always be brought into court on their own.
Of course, as you noted, sometimes you can simply refuse to answer a question under an objection under the rules of evidence, and the deposing lawyer is then forced to obtain either a resolution from a discovery commissioner, or suspend the deposition while they obtain a order to compel an answer. It's likely to piss off the lawyer, and make them look for more fun ways to make your life miserable, but there are cases where it might be the best option.
Like sacrificing your queen in chess... sometimes it might be the right thing to do, even though it's so unlikely to be the right thing that people will tell you definitively "it's never a good thing to do."
3) The defendant's attorney doesn't like what their client has done and is in fact helping me out.
I'm all for 'sticking it to the man', but the fact you're in appeals, and boasting on Slashdot that the opposing legal counsel is "helping you out"... I'm not sure is such a good thing.
I was thinking that too as I read it. Wouldn't it also be grounds for the person he is suing to request a mistrial, which would possibly result in overturning the original ruling?
It's highly unlikely that anything done now could create a mistrial, as the trial has already been concluded.
The appeals court could potentially return an order to the trial court to rehear the case, but that also is uncommon, and thus unlikely. The defendant would have to hire a different lawyer in order to make the claim that his first lawyer was either entirely incompetent (unlikely because they passed the bar) or they committed a gross violation of ethics (possible if they actually were assisting the other side, but would potentially be difficult to prove).
Very likely, the lawyer wasn't being well paid by the defendant, and was exerting the bare minimum of representation for their client.
I had an argument (a.k.a. flamewar) with a guy recently here on slashdot about the necessity of lawyers.
He seemed to simply reject the idea that the law was complicated enough to require a specialized caste of individuals. He kept arguing that a layperson should be able to accomplish legal work without resorting to a lawyer.
I appreciate your account so much, because it provides a good amount of evidence to back up my claim: the law is that complicated, and while a layperson could do it, they have to spend a lot of time and effort on the matter.
Cases are not as easy as walking in and talking to the judge.
We pay lawyers so well to do this stuff, because they have less ramp-up time than we do.
On another note, yeah, a lot of lawyers are pretty piss poor at representing their clients in court. I remember one judge berating a lawyer in a restraining order case for attempting to make an argument directly against the New York Times prior restraint precedent. I suppose you get what you pay for when you hire a budget lawyer?
Fine, but you have to break the news to that guy who can't accept change that he was incorrectly taught that there are 9 planets for his entire life. Now there are 13 (and counting).
Thinking about this... if Neil deGrass Tyson had been some hawt chick, I think people would have been less hostile to the idea.
"Well, if Vanna White says so..." (sorry, if she isn't the pinnacle of beauty anymore... she was when I established a lot of my memes about what boys desire.)
There was a study done some years ago where different groups were given tests to determine bias towards a given or accepted premise. Scientists where shown to be just as and in some cases more likely to fail a given puzzle due to reluctance to let go of a given premise and try another one. So we should be careful to equate "scientist" with "right." Facts are facts as we know them. That isn't to say they should be ignored either but skepticism is just as healthy where science is concerned as it is where religion, philosophy, politics, or anything else is. In fact, it's probably more important as science is the pursuit of the knowledge of what we see, hear, and smell.
However, certain scientific theories attain such credibility that to be more than initially skeptical of them is unreasonable, because they have been proven by so many different disparate experiments, that a widespread "fraud" to assert them is supremely unlikely.
Some of these are so obvious that no one would sanely argue them:
Objects with mass attract each other. The Earth is best modeled as orbiting the Sun. The crust of the Earth is composed of plates, whose interaction cause geological process.
Some of these are fought extensively for no good reason:
The Earth is some billion of years old. Systems that replicate with variation are subject to evolutionary change. Homeopathy has no possible natural mechanism.
This criticism also applies to theories that change slightly, but a huge paradigm shift has been scientifically ruled out.
Newtonian physics are technically "wrong", but we still use it, because it is a reasonably accurate model. Even when we did have a paradigm shift to relativistic physics, it did not make Newtonian physics "wrong", but rather just "inaccurate in some cases".
This argument that you present is exactly why the Smoking industry flooded the semi-scientific world with studies suggesting no correlation between smoking and cancer.
This is simply the ability of people to pollute an argument by making false claims while appearing as another.
Essentially, some people were committing fraud in the smoking and cancer correlation case.
We should not blame science for people abusing a process for their own political gain.
Pluto still is a planet.
It's just that it is a dwarf planet now. A classifier. An adjective. I expect a retronym to arrive at some point when there are more dwarf planets than non-dwarf planets.
And how do you put a corporation in pound-me-in-the-butt prison?
The feds could pierce, find whoever in the company was responsible for the crime, and put him on trial.
You wouldn't be able to pierce the veil and hold a employee responsible, unless it was outside of the scope of their employment, which in this case is highly unlikely.
One could potentially pierce the veil to hold an individual officer responsible for setting up the policy, but the likelihood that an officer specifically directed the DMCA takedown to be filed is unlikely. Thus holding that officer for that specific count of perjury would fail... he simply set up the policy, and the employees followed the policy.
One could potentially charge the officers with a RICO violation though, for setting up a policy to file takedowns indiscriminately.
But in any case, the corporation would fight hard to resist the piercing, and they would still likely not spend enough to make it a deterrent to further violations.
Notices to hosting or search providers under 17 USC 512 are given under penalty of perjury. Perjury is a crime with a penalty of up to five years in pound-me-in-the-behind prison.
And how do you put a corporation in pound-me-in-the-butt prison?
Now, granted, there are also legal fines that can be put to them, but I doubt they will be in any range that would make them a deterrent for a mega-corp.
Only if he gets a line and a left facing L piece.
Left-facing under which orientation?
MS employees are still having the private jet weddings to the caribbean with ice fountains flowing with rum.
Wait, what? Which group did you work for?
Microsoft actually pays a little under average pay, and have stopped given stock offers for the most part. (And when they do, people typically sell it out, rather than hold it.)
Microsoft hasn't really been growing for a decade, while Apple has. The market capitalisation often reflects this, because people are more willing to buy shares in a growing company, expecting that their value will increase over the next few years. People only buy shares in a stable company based on the expected dividends. This means that Apple's stock price is likely to be more volatile than Microsofts and, as long as the continue to be perceived as growing, greater than the current 'real' value of the company.
When I worked at Microsoft, most people used their Employee Stock Purchase to put money away that purchased Microsoft stock at 90% of value. But since MSFT gains looked so poor, they then immediately sold said stock for an approximately 11% profit.
I did one further, I sold my MSFT and purchased Apple stock with it. In some ways, I was really getting AAPL at 90% of market value. Served me well, and it made me good money. Not to mention the nicety of vesting stock offers that gave me free stock, to be sold and converted to AAPL as well.
Actually, I do not believe that there's another life, but that's a bit off topic (wait, do we still have a topic here? don't answer, it was a rhetorycal question).
"See you in another life, brutha'" is a Lost reference.
I actually prefer the variant "vulcanism" because it shows the roots of the word going back to the god Vulcan. "Volcanism" just doesn't seem as poetic to me.
No, I think you're just being Norcissistic.
I am not reopening debate. We disagree. There is no reason or purpose to further debate.
I'm ready to let go, anytime you are.
See you in another life, brutha'.
New Jersey. No extreme weather, no tornadoes, no earthquakes, no volcanos and if you live 20 miles inland, you don't even need to worry about tsunamis when La Palma finally breaks apart and falls into the ocean.
Our government is another story though... but that would be a man-made disaster.
You do have a risk of hurricanes.
I think the least dangerous place to live is in the Rio Grande valley, specifically near Albuquerque. The volcanoes are are all dead, the fault actually slips relatively well, resulting in little stress buildup, and thus low chance of earthquake.
You're at such a lack of risk for hurricanes and acclimate weather that if it snows or rains even a quarter inch, that people freak out like it is a disaster.
Tornadoes are rare, because elevation changes due to being in a valley. Hail is an occasional problem, though.
And to live in this nice geologically and weather safe location all one has to do is put up with a climate that makes it difficult for anything to live.
Stop reopening debate.
I'm ready to let go, anytime you are. We disagree. There is no reason or purpose to further debate.
See you in another life, brutha'.
This isn't about "having the last word". Let me quote myself here:
No, you do not understand me just fine.
Let me clarify again: "I disagree with your opinion."
WHY DID YOU ARGUE AGAINST THIS?! The only reason that is apparent to me is simply to be antagonistic.
This was the perfect opportunity for you to say: "yeah, we're never going to agree. 'See you in another life, brutha.'" And then it's over.
Done. Poof. Finished. We both walk away.
If you want to give a parting statement, that doesn't reopen debate, then I'm fine letting you "have the last word". But you just don't seem to want to let go.
I'm ready to let go, anytime you are. We disagree. There is no reason or purpose to further debate.
See you in another life, brutha'.