shasta

Isn't that mostly because of the legal process? When a guy is accused of rape, he's the one on trial. Mentioning his drug use might be excluded as prejudicial, even though the jury might find it relevant.

Of course it's not reasonable to conclude that he's telling the truth on the basis of her clothing. But my point is that it's also not reasonable to treat any mention of her clothing as off limits. It's just one piece of evidence.

If a woman is raped, and the guy claims it was consensual, do you think a woman should be able to point out that, "if I had any intention of sleeping with him I wouldn't have been wearing those underwear?" Or should that piece of evidence be excluded because clothing is never relevant?

Your claim is that P(consent | sexy clothes) = P(consent | not sexy clothes)? Seems counterintuitive. Do you have evidence to support this claim?

Is there really a big problem with acceptable/legal behavior not being agreed upon? Isn't the problem usually that the guy claims "it was consensual?" Similarly, when police consider what a woman was wearing, isn't usually in the context of figuring out who's story they believe? In other words, the police aren't thinking "well, she wore a sexy dress and followed him to his room and therefore deserved to get raped" but rather "well, she wore a sexy dress and followed him up to his room so maybe his claims that it was consensual are true." I get that you don't want police to blame the victim, but isn't it just as/more important that they correctly figure out who the victim is?

Is the analogy really that good? A pilot will never be called upon to engineer a plane. Lots of good "hackers" will get stuck if they have to design an algorithm.

Well, what did it do when you tried?

I think this is it. To be good at mathematics you need a considerable amount of time to sit and do mathematics. The only way someone is going to fund this as part of a job is if you're already a mathematician.

Patent lawyer or no, you're still more qualified than the average participant.

I'm not sure what criteria you're using to judge that the proposal would be worse for a less wealthy litigant. Surely the proposal would be better in cases where one side is clearly right? The cost of patent litigation is currently huge. The only way a non-wealthy litigant can participate is with lawyers on contingency. No?

But I suspect fixing the legal costs is only a part of the patent problem. My understanding is that cases like the OP regularly go to verdict and find for the troll.

Wow, a real patent lawyer in a patent law thread. You don't belong here, but I'll upvote whatever you have to write.

I have a comment and a question:

The comment. Summary judgement does not accomplish what I think sheepleherd was proposing. As you say, if you get a summary judgment against you, you go home. That means that a judge has to be convinced that there is definitely no case in order to issue one. What's needed, rather, is a speedy determination of who seems to be in the right. It should not be final but should determine who pays going forward.

The question. What do you see as the problem in cases like this? Or do you see a problem?

> I agree that the UBI should be flat, because anything else is equivalent to changing our tax brackets; and if we want to do that, we should just change our tax brackets.

This was such a dumb sentence in an otherwise interesting post.

I got mine down to 0.31xxx. I did about a hundred strokes and it never went over 0.48.

According to Google, the average human male foot is 26.3 cm, or 0.86 feet. So I suppose I am literally 7 feet fall.

Simpler still: "the autopsy showed poison, so put the spouse in prison."

This article seems to miss the role of theories in physical sciences. When we talk about 'cause' we understand that to mean that some chain of events, governed by the rules of physics, lead to the result. Yes, those rules of physics were arrived at largely as a result of observation of correlations, but no one is going to propose military coups leading orange harvests as a fundamental physical law on the basis of observed correlation.

"On the eve of publication, Bertrand Russel wrote to Frege and pointed out that Frege's logical system allowed statements that were ambiguous -- neither false nor true."

This makes it sound as though Russel showed the system to be incomplete, and the reference to Godel's theorem in the next paragraph reinforces the confusion. Russel instead showed the system to be inconsistent, which is much worse.

Maybe this isn't enough data points, but I just tested this and the elephant with the human brain just lies there on the ground.

It's almost as if "number of lines" isn't particularly meaningful.

That's impossible. Everyone here knows crunch mode doesn't work and you're most productive working 20 hours a week.

From what I just read, it doesn't even sound that deep. If you ask me whether a good act was "intentional", I'd assume you mean whether the good effect was the purpose of the act. But if you ask whether a bad act was "intentional", I'd assume you wanted to know whether the bad effect was known in advance. That is, there seems to be different connotations for "intention" in relation to good and bad intents.

> The reason is quite simple. As inequality gets more pronounced, a larger fraction of the population faces more stringent budget constraints, and the spectrum of possible economic interactions open to them narrows.

That's pretty simple, alright. Gee whiz. It's a good thing we have those abstruse theories from physics to tell us that people without money don't buy as much stuff.

I'm guessing this is a case of bad journalism -- anyone have a better layman's explanation?

That's a pretty simplistic explanation. There are lots of ways to mess up Lisp in an attempt to enable the style of meta-programming that Kernel supports. What distinguishes Kernel from these other approaches (many of which have been seriously considered in the past) is mostly what you're not able to do in Kernel. That is, the vau construct still allows encapsulation in a useful way. Kernel may have "more things first class" than Lisp, but that's not all that sets it apart.

Your last question is a good one. How can we set up checks and balances so that the surveillance apparatus cannot be misused? This is particularly important in our democracy, where the whims of the people might favor misusing it from time to time. I have ideas. Not that anyone's asking me.

I anticipated the word games, which is why I wrote "or at least the dystopian society that the term is intended to conjure."

I did not admit that most terrorism is in response to oppressive governments nor did I posit that there will be an increased number of attacks. Re-read what I wrote.

Hopefully you're right that terrorism will forever remain a "boogey man." I doubt it will. Unfortunately, if and when there is a major terrorist attack, all of the people saying what you're saying will have lost credibility and the chances of us ending up in a police state, at least for a period of time, will be quite high.

Look, I value my privacy too and I don't want to live in a police state, either. I don't think giving additional power over to our government at its current levels of incompetence and corruption is a good idea. But I think you (and I recognize that many/most of the people around here think the way you do) aren't being realistic about the threat of terrorism. Even if rates of terrorism are declining, I suspect they aren't going to be declining as quickly as the potential damage of terrorist attacks increases.

Regarding your question of the causes of terrorism, do you really believe that all terrorism is caused by government oppression or injustice? I doubt it. Even if it's the majority, there's always going to be plenty of unhappy people among the 7 billion on the planet. So I don't see you as having answered my challenge of imagining a stable secure society in a world where small groups can cause enormous damage. And I doubt that prevailing opinion will survive the first major terrorist attack that occurs. Note for your statistics: I'd count the number of major terrorist attacks to date as zero.

Fortunately, I also disagree with your assumption that a system of mass surveillance will necessarily result in a "police state" or at least the dystopian society that the term is intended to conjure.

At the moment, the concern with encryption seems to be encrypted communication rather than encryption as a means of securing personal data.

Eventually, though, as technology advances allow smaller groups of people to inflict larger amounts of damage with fewer specialized resources, how do you imagine that society could be kept secure without surveillance (or something even more invasive)? It seems clear to me that the side arguing for unlimited encryption in communications will ultimately be on the wrong side of the issue, even if backdooring the iPhone isn't a good idea.

I'm hoping that AlgorithmicTime is making a fine distinction about what is a "right", rather than suggesting the disabled shouldn't receive help.

Right, but "recite" was editorializing. That implies that the interviewer expected you to produce the answer from memory, as opposed to thinking about it. It's an easy question if you're familiar with moving window averages and know what the interviewer intends. If it was asked apropos of nothing, a request for context seems reasonable, though. It sounds like you probably had a bad interviewer. There seems to be no shortage of software interviewers lacking in "people skills."

I agree, but I suspect "recite" was editorializing by the parent.

or by 11.