Orly’s Dark Materials

leaving aside the hilarity of the headline considering the source:
Orly Taitz: If the Military Was Smarter

I was just reading something that seem relevant to Oily:

Uncanny valley

The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.
This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being

ps
should really check out the graph at wiki. pretty funny.

maybe 12 young boys wouldn’t be 6 feet under today

Um, Orly? Thirteen people were killed, three of whom were women, and many of whom were over fifty. Just, you know, FYI.

TJ

Mr. Sandy Oh n’exist plus.

/TJ

I would have tossed it for violating the line numbering rule, which they take seriously in that district.

regardless of how you feel about the “Kelo decision” this is sort of unbelievable:

Now, four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo’s land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.’s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut.

@blogenfreude: Since I’m neither a lawyer nor play one on TV…

You’ll notice as well that the filing suddenly reverts to proper spacing (and, I’ll presume, font) when it reaches the boilerplate at the end — as if she’s using a template that somebody else provided, but failed to follow instructions.

Am I also correct in presuming that boldface (or even italic) is verboten in the body of a filing?

And just out of geek curiosity: Is WordPerfect still the software of choice for filings?

@nojo:

no all caps? whats the fun in that?

@nojo: Depends on the court. Some still require WordPerfect, while some now require PDF (and may or may not build into their e-filing system a means of converting Word documents to PDF).

@nojo: Dim memories tell me that the line-numbering nonsense starting in state court (where a briefed a lot of stuff) and moved in the CA district courts (crazy Orly is, in fact, in federal district court). SFL would know better, but I remember what a pain in the ass it was to get everything to line up.

@blogenfreude: One of my partners is getting dicked around on a line numbering thing. I’m sure that’s just the sort of thing Martindale Hubble looks at in evaluating firms and lawyers. (RML = BV after about 15 years in practice.)

@blogenfreude: In CA, we do the line numbering stuff in the state and federal trial courts, but not the appellate courts. Go figure.

@Capt Howdy: That’s just collateral damage when the Supremes look the other way while local government does the nasty with the corporate world.

In other news, the state of Georgia wants me to give to the charitable donations campaign. I’m choosing Planned Parenthood. I want to fund abortions, especially retroactive ones. Not to mention the pill, condoms, and other goodies.

TJ: Another GOP candidate for statewide Cali office has problems with remembering to vote.

@nojo: A little italics or boldface is okay in a brief, but no more than one or two words. All-Caps verboten except in captions. Line numbering – it’s a bitch to line it up, my theory is that if the text is spaced the same amount as the numbers it’s okay. Also, MS Word is all I’ve ever used, because at least in federal court it’s all e-filing of PDFs. If you have a proposed order for the judge to sign, it’s submitted separately as a Word document.

@Dodgerblue: N.D.Cal. and E.D.Cal. will still take filings even if they don’t have the numbers down the side.

And there are a couple of federal district courts on the East Coast that I’ve done stuff in, that require in local or judge rules that all briefs be 14 point Times New Roman font.

@rptrcub: I want to fund abortions.

I want my tax dollars to pay for that.

@Cubbie, Pedonator: /searching for “like” button . . .

@Pedonator: I also want tax dollars to pay for witchcraft and lesbianism.

Hey thumper fuckwads, believe this

@SanFranLefty: @blogenfreude: @redmanlaw: RML, my specialty as a paralegal was appellate briefs. Before we even thought about replying to an opponent’s brief, I would comb it for infractions of the incredibly petty local rules. I had a “Motion to Strike Brief for Failure to Comply with Court Rules” template. I got tons of briefs stricken for violation of lines per page or size of font used in footnotes, thereby buying us more time to write our reply brief after we’d had a preview of their arguments. By the time I left the law world in 2000, 10th Circuit had gone to requiring 14 pt Garamond briefs, with prescribed total word count (determined by the “document properties” of the word processing program), with the lawyer required to sign an affidavit regarding the word count. All because the court got sick of lawyers trying to squeeze more material into briefs by shrinking fonts and other such tricks to get around page limits.

@Capt Howdy:

I’m interested to see if SC deals with this by making religious plates for all the other religions. Especially since if they made, say, a plate for Islam, it would seem likely to be a hate-crime magnet.

Although the “I DON’T believe” plate for the atheists would be funny…

@Capt Howdy: What a refreshing little ray of sunshine. My favorite part is this from the judge:

Whether motivated by sincerely held Christian beliefs or an effort to purchase political capital with religious coin, the result is the same.

@Mistress Cynica: The federal district of Arizona grudgingly accepted a complaint I filed in an environmental case although I signed it with the wrong color of ink. I had to fedex them a new signature page signed in the correct color, which was black if I recall correctly.

@Mistress Cynica: I bow down before paralegals as talented as you.