In fact, why sell fiction books? It's all blasphemy anyway. We should devote our lives to studying the state-propaganda. If that's good enough for the state, it is good enough for us.
But what if the state-propaganda is a work of fiction?
Depends on the judge, but mostly no. I was a juror on case where that did happen. This was a civil case BTW. The rules were each juror could only ask one question per witness. The questions had to be written, then the judge looked them over. He would throw out any he didn't like. He then showed the remaining questions to both sides, and if either objected to a question, it was thrown out. Any remaining questions the judge asked the witness, then both sides had a chance to cross-examine.
The judge asked those that would stuck around after the trial was over if we think it helped us reach a decision. All of us said yes. The judge did mention he had tried this with a criminal trial and the verdict got thrown out because of it, so he could only do it for civil trials. I wish more judges would do this.
The investigation has already been done by the prosecution and defense.
In theory. I've heard of cases where neither side did a very good job. One such case I remember something about was a woman was accused of poisoning her infant son. She had a 10 minute unsupervised visit, during which she allegedly feed him ethylene glycol (AKA anti-freeze). The child was tested several days later by a hospital and found to have (IIRC) two teaspoons of it still in his system. She was convicted of attempted murder.
She finally got a good defense lawyer, who pointed out that the half-life of ethylene glycol in the human body is 4 hours (IIRC). He back calculated from the hospital's report and found that she would have had to feed him AT LEAST 40 gallons in those 10 minutes. She was quickly released. Turns out he had a rare genetic disorder which causes the body to produce ethylene glycol. Neither the prosecutor nor the initial defense attorney brought up this fact.
Second example: I was on patent infringement jury. The plaintiff claimed he showed information to another company under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), which the other company violated, and caused the plaintiff's company to go bankrupt. I was one of two jurors that didn't buy it. Thankfully we were given copies of the NDA and the bankruptcy papers. We (the jury) argued over this point for more than 30 minutes before the two of us realized that the others didn't look at the documents (our mistake). The date of the NDA was AFTER the bankruptcy filing. The defense never pointed this out. Once my fellow juror and I pointed this out to the rest of the jurors, the plaintiff's case collapsed.
God forbid a juror actually be familiar with the law...
Correct. Judges and, to a lesser extent, prosecutors like that. Makes it easier to bully a jury into delivering the verdict they want. Look up jury nullification if you doubt me.
Depends on your point of view. Almost everybody thinks (most of the time), that their business is more important than someone else's. The difference here is the judge has a great deal of power, and little oversight on their (mis)use of it, and you don't.
In my case, I had wrist pain after typing for more than 15 minutes. I switched keyboard layouts to Dvorak and the pain has been gone for a long time. The first week of the switch was murder, being reduced from around 40 wpm to hunt and peck, but I'm now back to touch typing.
The only problem is typing on a keyboard with a qwerty layout. I'm much slower and make many more mistakes than I did before the switch. Still, it's not hard to change the layout if the computer hasn't been locked down too much.
True, but plants doing the fixing are not distributed evenly around the earth. How many plants are in the Sahara fixing carbon?
Mars won't work for several reasons. First, from our point of view, Mars is already too cold. Second, unlike Earth, Mars has no oceans to help redistribute heat. This would change the equation dramatically. There is little atmosphere on Mars compared to Earth. This will also affect the equation. And for those thinking we could simply adjust our models to take those factors into account, take a look at the weather forecasts. We can't predict with any accuracy more than a few days out. What makes you think we can do years to decades out?
Finally, Mars is a lot further away than Earth is. The costs of even a minimal experiment would be prohibitive.
Having a right and the ability to enforce said right are two very different things. Kinda like the line from the Crow:
In this case, he won't win this fight. The best course of action at the point the FBI showed up is to hand it over.
Especially since 9% would only be the start. Once a tax exists people will always find ways to increase it.
How true. I remember reading (offline source) that when the income tax amendment was passed, it was promised that only the top 1% of earners would pay any tax. It's amazing how that number has grown over the years.
I hope this measure gets defeated. Introduce it and it will be there forever. According to the book I'm currently reading, Last Call, the income tax was imposed to offset the loss of liquor tax income from Prohibition. Well, Prohibition is long gone, but the income tax is still here.
Airbus may be able to make a plane like this. I doubt that they'll sell many to commercial airlines, due to liability concerns over people with acrophobia. There may be a niche market for sightseeing etc...
I don't know. It might be great for in-flight sales of alcohol and valium like drugs.
Unfortunately it's likely not. Evolution or God (your choice) rarely gives something for nothing. This gene is likely there for a reason. Disabling it will have some drawback, and it may not be an obvious connection.
I remember watching a show about genetics. They were talking about how humans have a genetic defect in a gene which governs the size of our jaw muscles. This defect means we bite with far less force than a chimp. But the show pointed out that a smaller jaw muscle, due to the physical attachments, allowed our skull to grow larger and with it our brain. Considering how well chimps are doing as compared to humans, I'd say the defect was actually a good thing.
Really sure I don't trust this. It's bad enough with all the mistakes doctors make now. Now add to it the possibility of service interruption (cut cables, DOS attacks). Then add what could happen if the computers involved become infected with malware. If the systems were isolated, then *maybe* they could be trusted, but in this case, they are not. Then factor in whether or not the doctor is licensed to operate in a particular country...
So you get around this by having a competent team standing by to take over. But in that case, there's very little potential benefit.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
