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bellaire

115 karma · joined January 12, 2011

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bellaire··on UBS Whistleblower Finds Himself in Federal Prison
Actually, privileges are exceptions to the rule, and they each have their own justifications. The rule as stated is fine, and any privilege must be specifically justified on its own.

Attorney-client privilege and psychiatric privilege exist for different reasons. Attorney privilege comes from the necessary functioning of the judicial system, as you pointed out. Psychiatric privilege, in the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, "serves the public interest, since the mental health of the Nation's citizenry, no less than its physical health, is a public good of transcendent importance"

What is the reason that a banking privilege should exist? What "public good" is being served by protecting private transactions that outweighs the harm done by evasion of tax laws or other regulations? That's a difficult question to answer, and simply saying "it's the same as other privileges" is not sufficient.

bellaire··on First-ever images of the entire Sun
How about the first sentence from the press release:

    "It's official: The sun is a sphere."
bellaire··on .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain
Agreed, and as above, 42 is in the valid range for the 'D' part of an A.B.C.D ipv4 address. If the number were larger than 255, there would be no issue.

How about 420? ... Okay, okay. 421 is prime.

bellaire··on Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?
Actually, Google denies that they do the same thing pretty emphatically. Basically, they claim that the same test in reverse would not work, because the data stream from their toolbar in a reversed test would not affect their algorithms in this manner.

But agreed that it seems like a very small nit to be magnified the way it has. Indeed, why they don't do this, and why we should care that Bing does, doesn't seem to be directly addressed other than by hand-wavery and PR speak about the research they've put into their algorithms and such.

bellaire··on App unveiled that checks for adults posing as children
Agreed. Now the kids who happen to spell correctly, use larger words and proper punctuation will be further isolated from everyone else. Hooray for reinforcing the status quo!
bellaire··on Why 3D doesn't work and never will.
Did you mean Clarke again, and not Douglas Adams? You've quoted Clarke's third law.
bellaire··on Wolfram Alpha's take on the Drake Equation
These are the values originally used by Drake et. al. when they proposed the equation in 1961. Many were outright guesses. Nevertheless, 50 years later, we still don't have much better guesses, but this may change soon for proportion of planets with stars (is probably higher) and stars with earthlikes (coming soon).
bellaire··on How to Identify a Good Perl Programmer
I'm thinking that's a good reason to contribute to some open source projects. Unless, of course, your employer prohibits you from doing so... in which case I has a sad for you. :(
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