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Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

arstechnica.com

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Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#241

Post by bonyt »

crazygringo wrote: post #196

The problem doesn't even seem to be the dragon. The problem is you don't "watermark" court filings in the first place. That's generally not a thing. Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font. Unfortunately this stunt is functioning as free publicity for this firm, because it's getting written about...

> Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font.

For example, the Northern District of California rules require a 12-point standard proportional-width font, with no more than 28 lines per page 8½ inch by 11 inch white paper with numbered lines. This is their way of requiring double-spacing and enforcing the page limits[1].

BUT - The rules don't say anything about requiring the paper to be portrait rather than landscape. 28 lines on a landscape page would allow for a lot more text.

Alas, I'm not daring enough to try it, as the intent of the rule is clear, and I'm sure no judge would take kindly to it.

Some courts have moved to word count limits, requiring a certification of word count at the end with a lawyer's signature.

[1]: https://cand.uscourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/CAND_Civil_Loca... (Civ. L.R. 3-4(c)).

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#242

Post by tomhow »

archerx wrote: post #11
redwoodsec wrote: post #2

[flagged]

[flagged]

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#243

Post by pdabbadabba »

tehjoker wrote: post #224
lupusreal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a prisoner in America says they are being deprived of adaquate medical care, it's safe (for people generally, not the legal system) to assume it's true until proven otherwise. Maybe they're healthy and are complaining about nothing, but if they aren't healthy then it is almost certainly the case that their medical care is substandard if it exists at all.

It's crazy that people treat prisoner complaints from the American gulag as if everyone is just whining. We have some of the worst conditions in the developed world.

If you think I said that, I suggest you read my comment again.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#244

Post by neilv »

zzo38computer wrote: post #228
neilv wrote: post #51

I used to put a diagonal light gray huge "DRAFT" across pages of certain documents for which it was important that a working draft not be interpreted as final. What would've been a great use for the lawyer's dragon documents would be to clearly mark incomplete/unapproved drafts, for internal review only. Because, obviously, there was no way that you would accidentally submit a filing to the court with a huge purple c…

I also think the dragon could be used for such drafts like you describe, although that should not substitute for writing DRAFT on the document, but instead the dragon would be in addition to writing DRAFT on the document (perhaps in the header and/or footer, since the dragon means not room for that in the middle of the document). Both the DRAFT label and the dragon (or other pictures in the watermarks) would only be…

The Draft Dragon is impossible to ignore.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#245

Post by some_furry »

ben_w wrote: post #187
some_furry wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'all are wearing pants??

New boss: "Why are you wearing a dragon fursuit?" Candidate: "Dress for the job you want" Boss: "Hired! Welcome to Fort Knox"

If I showed up at a work event with a dragon fursuit, my boss would be like:

"Okay, what's the punchline?"

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#246

Post by lilyball »

pwdisswordfishd wrote: post #192
lilyball wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a trans therian, being a therian is kind of like being trans, except there's no cross-species HRT, and even fewer people will be willing to respect your identity. It is really hard to actually describe what this means, though. What's the actual distinction between "they so strongly identify with the animal" and "they are the animal, trapped in a human body"? Is it just the desire to tell us "ok but you kn…

Have you read "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by philosopher Thomas Nagel?

I have now! Thanks for the recommendation. Consciousness, the subjective experience of what it is like to be something, is very difficult to explain except insofar as there are similar shared experiences that one can make analogy to. I certainly agree with Nagel that entities in human bodies are not equipped to understand the subjective experience of someone whose primary means of sensing the world is through echolocation. This does make me wonder how many bat therians there are, though I would imagine the answer is more than zero.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#247

Post by lmm »

msla wrote: post #171
adolph wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a good spot for the link to @patio11's "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I get what he's doing, but some of these are not actionable: > People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points. So... what? What do I do with this? My program has to use something to represent text, and since I fail to be a large multinational consortium, I can't invent my own character set and expect it to work. Also: > Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly acc…

> So... what? What do I do with this? My program has to use something to represent text, and since I fail to be a large multinational consortium, I can't invent my own character set and expect it to work.

Maybe don't rush to remove your "legacy" encoding support because "everyone is using UTF-8"? Or at least check with some Japanese users with obscure names first.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#248

Post by andrelaszlo »

bandrami wrote: post #215
crazygringo wrote: post #196

The problem doesn't even seem to be the dragon. The problem is you don't "watermark" court filings in the first place. That's generally not a thing. Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font. Unfortunately this stunt is functioning as free publicity for this firm, because it's getting written about...

I used to sysadmin for a law firm that used watermarks for draft filings as they went through the internal workflow on the theory that nobody would be stupid enough to actually file something with a translucent toucan on it, so it would make accidentally filing a draft less likely.

Translucent Toucan... my highschool nickname.

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#249

Post by [deleted] »

OJFord wrote: post #145

Is there a term for this (bad) style of writing or linguistic device where you mention the thing ('purple dragon') in the title/first paragraph and then really force a synonym in the second? > Federal Magistrate Judge Ray Kent of the Western District of Michigan was unamused by a recent complaint (PDF) that prominently featured the aubergine wyrm . (Emphasis mine.)

[deleted]

Re: Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

#250

Post by jval43 »

msla wrote: post #171
adolph wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a good spot for the link to @patio11's "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I get what he's doing, but some of these are not actionable: > People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points. So... what? What do I do with this? My program has to use something to represent text, and since I fail to be a large multinational consortium, I can't invent my own character set and expect it to work. Also: > Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly acc…

>So... what? What do I do with this?

Try to understand these issues or rather how they could affect your business processes and software implementations down the line rather than dismissing them on a technical level.

You can store the Unicode representation just as you normally would. But what you don't do is assume that your Unicode representation is the only representation of the actual name.

More concretely, there are names that have multiple equally valid ways of writing them. You can probably expect that usually the same one is used, but you should absolutely not require this when building your business processes.

Even more concretely, as an example there are transliteration or simplification / shortening rules that allow people with otherwise strange or long names to buy an airline ticket. The actual, real name may not be any of the ones you have in your system. This matters e.g. when searching for someone or in customer support.

As for people without names (or unknown names), you should probably recognize that the handling might differ by country. E.g. records with "John Doe" in the US might have to be handled differently: analogous to "NULL != NULL" in SQL John Doe != John Doe. Or maybe even "Jane Doe == John Doe" in some cases. See also "Fnu Lu" (First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown) used in the US.

And although I don't have knowledge about all the countries in the world, it may very well be that this leads to situations where the "no name" has to be handled specially or at least understood to be a special case, completely differently from other cases.

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