So then you tell the GP 'nice falsehood there' and then go on to succinctly prove the truth of his statement? There's some trenchant conservative logic right there.

Reply to remove incorrect moderation.

They already have this. It's called: Canada.

(:

Look, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that a judge should have no amicable ties to companies that have a vested interest in the outcome of various court cases that judge will hear, but the GP's post is not about that. The GP's post is about judges having a sufficient level of technical knowledge related to a case to be able to judge the technical merits of the arguments presented and hence to be able to understand fully the ramifications of the outcomes of his judgement. The GP's post is _not_ about a judge with this experience _because_ they worked at a company entrenched in the industry about which the technical knowledge is required.

Here are a couple of examples related to yours to help show the difference. If the Awesome Judge Alsup's experience in coding had been acquired at Microsoft (or perhaps Oracle) then the GP's comment and your post's statement would logically follow. Or, if you modify your example to be about a judge who is assigned a fracking case who then goes out and researches the technical details of fracking in order to reach a cogent conclusion not biased by the lawyers' pro/against castings, then you have an example that is very close to what Awesome Judge Alsup has done. Or perhaps if the judge's backyard hobby is fracking and then he is assigned a fracking case, though your example falls down there because many people code as a hobby (or at least can) and nobody fracks for fun.

I think your post is a good-natured misunderstanding, though one of your ancestor comments about you praising 'ignorance over knowledge' hits home pretty hard. As the OP states, judges having in-depth technical knowledge about their cases (or even any knowledge is better than none) is definitely a good thing. Also, as you state, judges having a vested interest in a certain outcome because of pre-existing industry ties is a bad thing. No, they are not related here.

Replying to remove wrong-click moderation.

Replying to remove incorrectly selected moderation. Apologies.

You are wrong:

AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript And XML

Asynchronous because the js call happens after the page has already beeen loaded and XML (ie XHTML) is what is returned from the call. Or rather, returned and inserted, if you want to be pedantic (which you obviously do.)

See a review of the previous experiments in this burgeoning field here. I can't believe more research hasn't been done on these kinds of possible accidents. I mean, how many people have to be stabbed before we sit up and demand that experiments are done to find out what happens to people when they're stabbed?

I chose to tag this 'itwasatrap'

(;