"Party admission" (e.g. confession) is *not* hearsay. It is admissible in virtually every jurisdiction.
Only if you manage to escape. Technically, yes, a confession is an exception to the rule of "hearsay", but if you are at the trial all your counsel has to do is call you to the stand. In that case, your own deposition about your guilt is the primary source and the confession becomes hearsay. You can always (at least in any "civilized" court of law) recant your confession, you can say you were threatened. Of course, if you escape and are tried "in absentia" then it's a different thing. In that case perhaps the court will consider your confession as entirely truthful.
But I don't think you can ever be convicted on a confession alone, without any corroborating evidence. However, you *can* be convicted on first-hand testimony alone, without any physical evidence.
Let's say the police stopped you on a bridge, for any reason, and they saw a pack of some white powder on the back seat. They test it and find it's cocaine. As you are being handcuffed, you manage to grab the pack of powder and the test kit and throw everything out on the river. They never recover the cocaine or the test kit. They can convict you on the witnesses' testimony that you were carrying an illegal substance.
Now, let's say you had cocaine in your car and confess it to the police officer. Without you knowing it, someone had stolen the cocaine and the police never finds anything. I don't think you could be convicted on your confession alone, anywhere. It's a different thing, of course, if they catch someone with a pack of cocaine and he says he stole it form your car, but then it will be the other guy's testimony, not your confession, that will nail you.
There's no sales tax involved, and that's not "fair".
An interesting statement. So, you think it's only "fair" that everything should be taxed? One cold argue that a tax on brick and mortar stores pays all the services the state provides: a road to get to the store, police to watch the store, and... what else does the state provide? For the on-line stores? Would it be fair to make the internet sellers pay for the services only the brick and mortar stores need?
Okay, so the state provides schooling for the poor. But then, why do rich people pay income tax? Isn't that meant to redistribute wealth, to let the poor have the same opportunities the rich had?
Let's put is this way: taxes are never fair. They are an unavoidable evil. Robert Heinlein said it best, "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys." ("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Christ, they put those cameras in several years ago in the most high crime parts of Chicago. And you know what? They're still the most high crime parts of Chicago.
Any technology can be used effectively or not, it can be used for good or bad. Would you also say that they used armed officers in police cars with radios in the high crime parts of Chicago, so they should now use only unarmed cops on foot without radios in those areas?
If you want crime to drop, give people a decent education, a decent job, and decent opportunity not to join a gang.
That's a different dimension. You should do that *AND* have effective law enforcement.
And if you really want to increase enforcement, then stick a cop, not a camera, on every corner.
Why not a cop watching ten cameras, one on each corner? Less expense, same results. Or perhaps better results, depending on the cops. A cop watching video screens cannot shoot first and ask questions later.
IANAL, but having read a lot of Perry Mason stories I play being a lawyer on/.
In US law a witness can't say he heard someone say something. The person who spoke what the witness heard should be called as a witness instead.
That's because the speaker, not being under oath, wasn't necessarily telling the truth. In court, after having sworn to tell the truth, the person can be questioned on what was told.
The assertion that whatever you tell a cop can be used against you doesn't mean he can repeat what you said as a witness, but that he can use what you told him to make investigations about you.
If you tell a cop "I have a kilo of cocaine in the trunk" he can look and use the cocaine as evidence against you. If he finds nothing, he cannot arrest you and he cannot tell in court as a witness that you said that. However, suppose the cop stopped you because your brake light was broken, and you had cocaine in the trunk. If you keep quiet, he cannot look into the trunk to see if you are carrying something illegal there.
That's because the Fourth Ammendment to the US Constitution states that the police needs a "probable cause" to search your property. They cannot just go searching people's houses and cars at random. By telling the cop you have cocaine, you are giving him a probable cause to perform a reasonable search.
But again, what you told the cop cannot be used against you in court. If they later find out that the cocaine was put there by someone else, without your knowledge, and you were just joking when you told the cop you had cocaine, the most they can charge you is with obstructing justice because you cannot joke with cops who are performing their duty.
A common acronym you'll find in engineering and physics texts is EIRP, which stands for equivalent isotropic radiated power. This means you take the direction with the highest intensity of radiation and calculate what would be the total power if it was radiated with equal intensity in all directions.
This system of calculation is very convenient in communications engineering, because you buy amplifiers and antennas separately. Antennas which emit tighter beams are called "high gain", because using one such antenna allows you to use a smaller amplifier to get the same effect at one direction.
In microwaves it's very common to trade off the cost of a smaller antenna against the higher cost of a more powerful amplifier when designing a point to point link. When you calculate the needed signal intensity at the receiver, you represent the result as an EIRP and calculate the loss due to the signal spreading out to get the needed EIRP at the transmitter. Then you check out how much different antennas and amplifiers cost to get the cheapest combination that gives the needed EIRP.
Since radio astronomy uses basically the same formulas, it only stands to reason that astronomers would use the same terminology.
I want world peace just as much as anybody else, but I tried looking at the site in your sig and got stuck at some animation that doesn't show in my browser. Unless those people redo their site in a manner that's shown in any browser configuration without any hassle being necessary from the part of the reader, they won't get the wide attention they presumably want.
If you happen to have any contact with those people, please inform them that the "http" in "http://p5y.org" stands for "Hyper TEXT Transfer Protocol". Get it? "http" is a method for transferring TEXT, not video.
They are redistributing it to stockholders, which is exactly what a company should be doing.
But that's exactly why it's a Red Queen's Race. In spite of spending all that cash on dividends, they still are at more or less the same place where they started, compared to the other companies in the stock market.
What happens when their cash hoard ends, which is approximately right now (the link I posted before is two years old, they don't have those 29 billion anymore)? Investors won't keep stock on a company that isn't likely to distribute dividends in the future. When the cash pile ends, the dividends will stop, unless they develop some lucrative new product. Vista? Naah. Windows 7? Not likely.
I see what you mean. You are saying that Staffordshire is known for its Bull Terriers, Nepal is known for its Gurkhas, but it's not particularly fierce Sergeants that make Staffordshire known. I guess you're right.
If you notice MS has been following the same pattern as NASDAQ - yes down right now, but that is not because MS is failing it is because there is a tighter crunch in the market.
Considering they have spent tens of billions of dollars just to keep their market price from falling more, then I think one can say Microsoft is in deep trouble, considering the stock market alone.
Oh, and here I was believing that removing that battery was something difficult!
you can easily make a driver for them by filing down three points on a torx driver of the appropriate size
What's this "Torx" you mention? How does it taste? I think I've never heard of this stuff, I prefer Gatorade myself, but of course each to his own taste...
If you're not up for filing down a few points on a torx driver, you have no business fiddling around inside a laptop anyhow.
Last time I had a new battery in my Swatch the guy used a nickel to open the case. You say we need to file the point of a soft-drink can to change the battery in an Apple notebook? Sounds complicated...
Why does the court have to assume that people are innocent until proven otherwise?
Because it's the state against an individual. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a way to try to rebalance a situation that's rather unsymmetrical: a state organization with enormous means at its disposition is accusing one person. When the state investigates, they can put thousands of officers at the job. They have the power to go anywhere, interrogate anybody, investigate everything.
The accused is alone. No matter how rich he is, he runs the risk of going bankrupt if he tries to match the state in its investigations. And he could go to jail if found guilty. Therefore, it's only fair to give the defendant the benefit of doubt in court.
It's a different situation when it's a citizen against another. I have the right to form an opinion on whether someone is guilty or not without giving him all the leeway a court needs to give, and I have the right to tell my opinion to anybody who will listen. It's not as if my opinion could send anybody to jail.
Classified elements are excluded (even though they are well-known to astronomers), and even unclassified elements require registration for "national security reasons".
This is a kind of "negative proof" that's very difficult to disprove. How can one prove that a secret document does not exist somewhere? But there is a logical reason why it isn't in anyone's interest to keep some orbital debris secret.
Suppose some secret space junk is out there somewhere. What's the probability that a terrorist's missile is launched in an orbit that intercepts that junk's orbit? What's the probability that one of the several hundreds of commercial and scientific satellites intercept it? There's a *very* compelling argument that, even assuming with a 100% certainty that a terrorist will launch a missile in that orbit, a commercial or scientific satellite is much more likely to hit the debris.
It doesn't matter who hits the debris, anything will create thousands of new pieces of scrap that will endanger everything else, including all the military satellites. It only stands to logic that it's in everyone's interest to make public the orbital elements of every little piece of junk in orbit.
A few stories below, I read "The International Federation of Pornographic Industry (IFPI)", which, by the way, seems a quite appropriate description of said federation...
The data on the site that you linked to uses the "civilian" database of two-line GP elements, which is actually maintained by NASA but commonly referred to as the "NORAD two-line elements". This database does not contain anywhere near all of the elements tracked by various agencies and collected by the military.
I work for a company that operates satellites, so this is a subject which I can discuss at length.
The "two line elements" (TLEs) used by NORAD is a representation of the satellite orbit elements that result from imprecise observations. Normally a satellite's elements are derived from "ranging" measurements performed by the operator that are precise, in the case of commercial satellites, to an order of a few meters. The elements of scientific satellites, such as Lageos are much more precise.
Now, that's the result of a set of very precise measurements, the ranging that NORAD can do about debris is by radar, which is much less accurate. In the case of individual small parts of a broken satellite, it's very difficult to tell apart which is which, therefore one cannot correlate one measurement to the next.
You send a radar pulse, "beep", and get ten thousand echos. Send another pulse, "beep", ten thousand more echos. Which echo from the first pulse corresponds to which echo from the second pulse? Without knowing that you cannot calculate velocity. Until the larger parts of the debris field drift apart from each other, NORAD will not publish the TLEs for them, because they haven't been calculated yet.
Just to give you an idea of how imprecise the TLEs are, before the collision of these two satellites happened, the minimum distance between them, estimated from the TLEs, was 137 meters. And this also shows how extremely improbable this event was. Imagine that both satellites were something like one meter across, and when they passed randomly through a sphere 137 meters in radius, they happened to hit each other.
There's no sense in trying to keep secret data that anyone with binoculars can track. The military satellites, those that can read your licence plates, are so big and in low orbit that many people and organizations around the world keep track of them. You can find that data from independent sites in the internet and try to watch if you can spot them.
The NORAD tracking data on both active satellites and debris is listed here.
I think you are absolutely right. It seems that many people cannot understand how special the carbon atom is. They assume that our life being based on carbon wouldn't exclude life based on other atoms somewhere else.
Not true. There's a special, unique property in the carbon atom orbital structure that allows very complex structures. No other atom has that quality, unless some basic constants of the universe were changed. It's like comparing a set of Lego blocks with a box of marbles.
The same goes for temperature, to get life one needs a liquid solution that lets molecules interact. With a solid there's no interaction, with a gas the molecules don't stick together, so one needs a liquid for transporting the elements of life. If a planet is too cold or too hot life will not appear. These are some basic limits on the physics and chemistry that will allow for complex chemistry to gradually evolve.
And the funny thing is that we have both theory and experiment telling us that life isn't very common in the universe. We haven't found any sign of life in either Mars or Venus, which a hundred years ago many people thought would certainly have life. If planets like Venus and Mars, that are very close to the Earth in their characteristics, didn't create life, then one should assume that our position is very special.
"A soupy expanse of plastic waste... now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean" And exactly where is this million square miles? I've never seen it in any satellite photo
This is a report on that area, and what's exactly what they mean by this "garbage patch" thing. It's scary, and it makes sense.
mdcurry: The Pirate Bay: "We reserve the right to choose freely to whom we speak. We do not speak with assholes." #spectrial
It just proves that they aren't karmawhores and don't mind being modded "Troll" occasionally.
The fact is the media is more or less aligned with the idea of preserving copyrights, so they won't make too many friends among the mainstream media channels, anyhow.
why is there this preconception that linking to content that you know full well is illegal, is acceptable?
i'm yet to see a good defense for this. your an accessory to a crime if you knowingly aid it.
Do you mean that if someone I meet on the street asks me where the bank is and I tell them, if then they go and rob the bank I'm an accessory?
The real question is how could someone think it could be illegal to link to anything that's on the web? It's a *web*, for chrissake, a web is *meant* to have links! If a crime was committed it was the people who put the material there who committed it, not the one who put the links pointing to the material.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you manage to escape. Technically, yes, a confession is an exception to the rule of "hearsay", but if you are at the trial all your counsel has to do is call you to the stand. In that case, your own deposition about your guilt is the primary source and the confession becomes hearsay. You can always (at least in any "civilized" court of law) recant your confession, you can say you were threatened. Of course, if you escape and are tried "in absentia" then it's a different thing. In that case perhaps the court will consider your confession as entirely truthful.
But I don't think you can ever be convicted on a confession alone, without any corroborating evidence. However, you *can* be convicted on first-hand testimony alone, without any physical evidence.
Let's say the police stopped you on a bridge, for any reason, and they saw a pack of some white powder on the back seat. They test it and find it's cocaine. As you are being handcuffed, you manage to grab the pack of powder and the test kit and throw everything out on the river. They never recover the cocaine or the test kit. They can convict you on the witnesses' testimony that you were carrying an illegal substance.
Now, let's say you had cocaine in your car and confess it to the police officer. Without you knowing it, someone had stolen the cocaine and the police never finds anything. I don't think you could be convicted on your confession alone, anywhere. It's a different thing, of course, if they catch someone with a pack of cocaine and he says he stole it form your car, but then it will be the other guy's testimony, not your confession, that will nail you.
An interesting statement. So, you think it's only "fair" that everything should be taxed? One cold argue that a tax on brick and mortar stores pays all the services the state provides: a road to get to the store, police to watch the store, and... what else does the state provide? For the on-line stores? Would it be fair to make the internet sellers pay for the services only the brick and mortar stores need?
Okay, so the state provides schooling for the poor. But then, why do rich people pay income tax? Isn't that meant to redistribute wealth, to let the poor have the same opportunities the rich had?
Let's put is this way: taxes are never fair. They are an unavoidable evil. Robert Heinlein said it best, "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys." ("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Any technology can be used effectively or not, it can be used for good or bad. Would you also say that they used armed officers in police cars with radios in the high crime parts of Chicago, so they should now use only unarmed cops on foot without radios in those areas?
That's a different dimension. You should do that *AND* have effective law enforcement.
Why not a cop watching ten cameras, one on each corner? Less expense, same results. Or perhaps better results, depending on the cops. A cop watching video screens cannot shoot first and ask questions later.
IANAL, but having read a lot of Perry Mason stories I play being a lawyer on /.
In US law a witness can't say he heard someone say something. The person who spoke what the witness heard should be called as a witness instead.
That's because the speaker, not being under oath, wasn't necessarily telling the truth. In court, after having sworn to tell the truth, the person can be questioned on what was told.
The assertion that whatever you tell a cop can be used against you doesn't mean he can repeat what you said as a witness, but that he can use what you told him to make investigations about you.
If you tell a cop "I have a kilo of cocaine in the trunk" he can look and use the cocaine as evidence against you. If he finds nothing, he cannot arrest you and he cannot tell in court as a witness that you said that. However, suppose the cop stopped you because your brake light was broken, and you had cocaine in the trunk. If you keep quiet, he cannot look into the trunk to see if you are carrying something illegal there.
That's because the Fourth Ammendment to the US Constitution states that the police needs a "probable cause" to search your property. They cannot just go searching people's houses and cars at random. By telling the cop you have cocaine, you are giving him a probable cause to perform a reasonable search.
But again, what you told the cop cannot be used against you in court. If they later find out that the cocaine was put there by someone else, without your knowledge, and you were just joking when you told the cop you had cocaine, the most they can charge you is with obstructing justice because you cannot joke with cops who are performing their duty.
A common acronym you'll find in engineering and physics texts is EIRP, which stands for equivalent isotropic radiated power. This means you take the direction with the highest intensity of radiation and calculate what would be the total power if it was radiated with equal intensity in all directions.
This system of calculation is very convenient in communications engineering, because you buy amplifiers and antennas separately. Antennas which emit tighter beams are called "high gain", because using one such antenna allows you to use a smaller amplifier to get the same effect at one direction.
In microwaves it's very common to trade off the cost of a smaller antenna against the higher cost of a more powerful amplifier when designing a point to point link. When you calculate the needed signal intensity at the receiver, you represent the result as an EIRP and calculate the loss due to the signal spreading out to get the needed EIRP at the transmitter. Then you check out how much different antennas and amplifiers cost to get the cheapest combination that gives the needed EIRP.
Since radio astronomy uses basically the same formulas, it only stands to reason that astronomers would use the same terminology.
I want world peace just as much as anybody else, but I tried looking at the site in your sig and got stuck at some animation that doesn't show in my browser. Unless those people redo their site in a manner that's shown in any browser configuration without any hassle being necessary from the part of the reader, they won't get the wide attention they presumably want.
If you happen to have any contact with those people, please inform them that the "http" in "http://p5y.org" stands for "Hyper TEXT Transfer Protocol". Get it? "http" is a method for transferring TEXT, not video.
But that's exactly why it's a Red Queen's Race. In spite of spending all that cash on dividends, they still are at more or less the same place where they started, compared to the other companies in the stock market.
What happens when their cash hoard ends, which is approximately right now (the link I posted before is two years old, they don't have those 29 billion anymore)? Investors won't keep stock on a company that isn't likely to distribute dividends in the future. When the cash pile ends, the dividends will stop, unless they develop some lucrative new product. Vista? Naah. Windows 7? Not likely.
I see what you mean. You are saying that Staffordshire is known for its Bull Terriers, Nepal is known for its Gurkhas, but it's not particularly fierce Sergeants that make Staffordshire known. I guess you're right.
Actually, now that you mention it, it's quite the opposite. Even their police has given up and "is open to all ... gay ... , etc" Sergeants.
If they are looking for a company that hods a monopoly in advertising, they should look somewhere else
Considering they have spent tens of billions of dollars just to keep their market price from falling more, then I think one can say Microsoft is in deep trouble, considering the stock market alone.
I have no idea of who is this iris-n user, but obviously he or she has a black poodle.
How do you say "wooosh" in Spanish?
(BTW, tha write speling is Extremadura, well at least in Castellano Spanish it is)
Oh, and here I was believing that removing that battery was something difficult!
What's this "Torx" you mention? How does it taste? I think I've never heard of this stuff, I prefer Gatorade myself, but of course each to his own taste...
Last time I had a new battery in my Swatch the guy used a nickel to open the case. You say we need to file the point of a soft-drink can to change the battery in an Apple notebook? Sounds complicated...
Because it's the state against an individual. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a way to try to rebalance a situation that's rather unsymmetrical: a state organization with enormous means at its disposition is accusing one person. When the state investigates, they can put thousands of officers at the job. They have the power to go anywhere, interrogate anybody, investigate everything.
The accused is alone. No matter how rich he is, he runs the risk of going bankrupt if he tries to match the state in its investigations. And he could go to jail if found guilty. Therefore, it's only fair to give the defendant the benefit of doubt in court.
It's a different situation when it's a citizen against another. I have the right to form an opinion on whether someone is guilty or not without giving him all the leeway a court needs to give, and I have the right to tell my opinion to anybody who will listen. It's not as if my opinion could send anybody to jail.
This is a kind of "negative proof" that's very difficult to disprove. How can one prove that a secret document does not exist somewhere? But there is a logical reason why it isn't in anyone's interest to keep some orbital debris secret.
Suppose some secret space junk is out there somewhere. What's the probability that a terrorist's missile is launched in an orbit that intercepts that junk's orbit? What's the probability that one of the several hundreds of commercial and scientific satellites intercept it? There's a *very* compelling argument that, even assuming with a 100% certainty that a terrorist will launch a missile in that orbit, a commercial or scientific satellite is much more likely to hit the debris.
It doesn't matter who hits the debris, anything will create thousands of new pieces of scrap that will endanger everything else, including all the military satellites. It only stands to logic that it's in everyone's interest to make public the orbital elements of every little piece of junk in orbit.
A few stories below, I read "The International Federation of Pornographic Industry (IFPI)", which, by the way, seems a quite appropriate description of said federation...
I work for a company that operates satellites, so this is a subject which I can discuss at length.
The "two line elements" (TLEs) used by NORAD is a representation of the satellite orbit elements that result from imprecise observations. Normally a satellite's elements are derived from "ranging" measurements performed by the operator that are precise, in the case of commercial satellites, to an order of a few meters. The elements of scientific satellites, such as Lageos are much more precise.
Now, that's the result of a set of very precise measurements, the ranging that NORAD can do about debris is by radar, which is much less accurate. In the case of individual small parts of a broken satellite, it's very difficult to tell apart which is which, therefore one cannot correlate one measurement to the next.
You send a radar pulse, "beep", and get ten thousand echos. Send another pulse, "beep", ten thousand more echos. Which echo from the first pulse corresponds to which echo from the second pulse? Without knowing that you cannot calculate velocity. Until the larger parts of the debris field drift apart from each other, NORAD will not publish the TLEs for them, because they haven't been calculated yet.
Just to give you an idea of how imprecise the TLEs are, before the collision of these two satellites happened, the minimum distance between them, estimated from the TLEs, was 137 meters. And this also shows how extremely improbable this event was. Imagine that both satellites were something like one meter across, and when they passed randomly through a sphere 137 meters in radius, they happened to hit each other.
There's no sense in trying to keep secret data that anyone with binoculars can track. The military satellites, those that can read your licence plates, are so big and in low orbit that many people and organizations around the world keep track of them.
You can find that data from independent sites in the internet and try to watch if you can spot them.
The NORAD tracking data on both active satellites and debris is listed here.
I think you are absolutely right. It seems that many people cannot understand how special the carbon atom is. They assume that our life being based on carbon wouldn't exclude life based on other atoms somewhere else.
Not true. There's a special, unique property in the carbon atom orbital structure that allows very complex structures. No other atom has that quality, unless some basic constants of the universe were changed. It's like comparing a set of Lego blocks with a box of marbles.
The same goes for temperature, to get life one needs a liquid solution that lets molecules interact. With a solid there's no interaction, with a gas the molecules don't stick together, so one needs a liquid for transporting the elements of life. If a planet is too cold or too hot life will not appear. These are some basic limits on the physics and chemistry that will allow for complex chemistry to gradually evolve.
And the funny thing is that we have both theory and experiment telling us that life isn't very common in the universe. We haven't found any sign of life in either Mars or Venus, which a hundred years ago many people thought would certainly have life. If planets like Venus and Mars, that are very close to the Earth in their characteristics, didn't create life, then one should assume that our position is very special.
This is a report on that area, and what's exactly what they mean by this "garbage patch" thing. It's scary, and it makes sense.
It just proves that they aren't karmawhores and don't mind being modded "Troll" occasionally.
The fact is the media is more or less aligned with the idea of preserving copyrights, so they won't make too many friends among the mainstream media channels, anyhow.
Do you mean that if someone I meet on the street asks me where the bank is and I tell them, if then they go and rob the bank I'm an accessory?
The real question is how could someone think it could be illegal to link to anything that's on the web? It's a *web*, for chrissake, a web is *meant* to have links! If a crime was committed it was the people who put the material there who committed it, not the one who put the links pointing to the material.
Yes, I think you're right:
ls /var/log/*.log
/var/log/apport.log /var/log/kdm.log /var/log/scrollkeeper.log
/var/log/auth.log /var/log/kern.log /var/log/user.log
/var/log/bootstrap.log /var/log/lpr.log /var/log/uucp.log
/var/log/daemon.log /var/log/mail.log /var/log/wvdialconf.log
/var/log/dpkg.log /var/log/pycentral.log /var/log/Xorg.0.log
/var/log/fontconfig.log /var/log/rkhunter.log /var/log/Xorg.10.log
Who's asking anything?
And what will be the Unix time at December 21st, 2012 11:11 UTC?