Despite the abuses and errors in the system I think that the people at the top are being paid fairly because they're not just 'running the company', they're taking all of the risk as well. If something goes badly, typically your CEO gets fired. Rank and file employees are largely exempt from that kind of risk. And until you're willing to accept the risk that come inherently with the promise of wealth (by starting a business, investing your life savings in something, etc) then it is left to people who can handle taking risks. And when they succeed, we all benefit.
This is wrong in so many levels. Basically, the argument would run that regular workers don't make a lot because they settle for a salary or wages, i.e., guaranteed regular fixed-dollar payments that do not vary and are supposed to continue coming in even if the business isn't doing great. So CEOs, instead of this, settle for... $40 million salaries with a $80 million severance deals? Millions in free stock options that pay off if the stock rises, and cost nothing if the stock falls? Executive jets that the company pays for?
In what sense do the CEOs "take most of the risk," if most of the world's stock capitalization isn't owned by CEOs?
And if we all benefit from CEO's success, how come the inflation-adjusted income of Americans went down during the Bush years, while CEO pay went up?
If you invest $1000 in the stock market today, you'll have about $117,000 in 50 years. That assumes an average 11% annual return (which is a good assumption).
11% is too high an assumption. Try 10.5% at the high end, and 9% at the low end. And that's for 100% stock portfolios, which are extremely volatile and really not for most people. And you're assuming 50 years during which you don't use any of that money.
What does 'rich' mean/signify? 'Rich' people have lots of money, but they usually get that money through hard work, thrift, cleverness and taking risk (coupled with a bit of luck).
It is true that if you don't do the preparatory work, you won't be able to exploit lucky chances when they arrive, but you've got this stuff all backwards by relegating "luck" to a parenthetical item that barely makes the list. The American superrich, in general, were lucky to be born into wealthy families, which doesn't just mean that they had access to money, but also to the social networks available to the wealthy.
All this talk about "risk" is ideological. Basically, from the point of view of finance, "risk" is the possibility of financial loss, and it is measured in currency units. However, the reasoning utterly fails to take into account the marginal value of money, so that a billionaire who invests 25% of her billion in the stock market is taking more "risk" than a dude worth $100,000 who uses 75% to start his own business. Basically, risk ain't risky for the rich.
Say one in fifty men beat their wives. Is it too risky for my wife to stay with me, then?
What other information does she have about you, and what is the conditional probability of you beating her given that information?
As one adds more information about you to your wife's model, her probability assignments must be revised to account for that information. For example, if there are specific personality features in men such that men who lack them strongly tend not to beat their wives, and you clearly do not have those personality features, your wife would need to revise her estimate downwards that you might beat her.
Your rhetorical question only truly has effect if the only facts that your wife brought into the decision were that (a) you are a man, and (b) one in fifty men beat their wives. A woman that decided to marry a man knowing nothing else about him would not universally be judged to be acting very rationally.
In fact, you make the same mistake that the authors appear to in your logic.
No, it's not a mistake. It all comes down to the fact that there are two general types of interpretations of probability:
The frequency at which one of the possible outcomes happens in repeated instances of an event of a specified type. For example, the probability of heads in a coin toss.
The degree of belief that a cognitive agent assigns to a sentence. This degree of belief is related by the laws of probability to the degree of belief that an agent should assign to other sentences, in such a way that only some assignments are consistent (by a technical definition I won't go into here).
Basically, you're treating this as an argument about probability in the first sense, when it is really about probability in the second sense. The argument is that even if your formulas lead you to asssign a degree of confidence of.00000000000001 to the proposition that the LHC will not destroy the Earth, that means very little if we assign a degree of confidence of.000001 to the proposition that you are wrong.
The point now, which other posters in this thread have made in other ways, is that the frequency model for probability theory is not relevant here, because this situation is not like a coin toss. For the situation to be like a coin toss, we would have had to do something like run the LHC a gazillion times, and observe how many of those times it ended up destroying the Earth. Therefore, the probabilities must be interpreted as degree of belief, and the number produced by any formula must be tossed out if the probability of getting the formula wrong is bigger than that number.
It's this fallacious reasoning -- that if the theory is wrong, the probability of the event must be greater -- that make this article technically true, but useless.
The assumption you're making here is that the number is the "probability of the event." Again, it is not; it is the degree of belief warranted to a specific proposition, given some other information.
In terms of the animal kingdom, the concept of 'species' may easily be understood in terms of the concept of breeding. When two organisms cannot produce fertile offspring, they are separate species. This is a well defined barrier.
Um, no, it is not. One simple initial example to get the ball running: there are hybrids where the males are sterile, but the females are fecund; for example, hybrids of domestic cats with the African serval (the resulting hybrid is called a Savannah cat). Since a housecat and a serval can produce fertile offspring, your test fails to establish them as separate species. (Note that I was careful not to say that the fertile offspring proves that they are the same species, "If A then B" doesn't entail "If B, then A.")
Now, you may be thinking of ways of strengthening your definition against examples like this one, but that was only the starting point. The broader problem is that as you try to come up with more and more precise definitions of "species," all you will do is set yourself up for ever more elaborate examples of intermediate cases that either pose a problem for your definition, or just suggest that your definition makes arbitrary, unprincipled decisions about where the line should lie. (E.g., what if there are two types of organisms that produce infertile offspring 25% of the time? 12.5%? 7.25%? How low must the percentage get to prove a species barrier? Must that number be the same for every pair of organisms, or does it make sense to measure it differently for different pairs because of some fact about genetics? What about pairs of organisms that would produce fertile offspring often enough, but are reproductively isolated by geographical boundaries? Etc.)
The deeper point is that evolution doesn't care about "species"; it cares about populations whose members interbreed, and in the real world, such populations may easily have very vague boundaries, because "X can breed with Y" isn't a yes/no matter.
You're assuming that firmware must, of necessity, be for a single platform. This assumption is wrong; while different platforms do need different object code to some extent, it is otherwise good to use the same firmware code on many platforms.
Read up on Open Firmware and EFI. These are existing firmware standards that are used in more than one CPU platform. They go even further than that, actually, and make the firmware include a platform-independent bytecode interpreter, so that it is possible to write cross-platform binary device drivers or firmware extensions in general. The idea is that your device's firmware would come with simple platform-agnostic drivers that can be used during the bootstrap process. The OS can use those drivers provisionally until it loads more featureful, native code drivers.
From what I read, CoreBoot has a very different design philosophy from these firmware standards, and it's not trying to do anything that elaborate; but still, writing it in C allows the firmware to be much more easily ported to other platforms.
At which time, I, as the wiley "bad guy", press the button telling the camera to make the clicking noise when taking a picture. After the mean ol'cop has left, I press it again and resume taking illicit photos of manhole covers.... ohh.. look, that one has some bubble gum stuck in the lettering.
Um, you forgot the part where you firmly and politely tell the officer that you do not consent to any searches.
My state law specifically states that I have the right to defend myself, other people, and my property with a "reasonable" amount of force. And by damned, I would do exactly that. A punch in the nose is more than reasonable for a semester's worth of lecture notes.
The advice you're offering here is very bad. Somebody who follows it could land themselves with a battery conviction.
I don't know which state you live in, but you can be pretty sure of one thing: "reasonable force" will not in general be judged in terms of what was stolen (the lecture notes), but rather, in terms of what kind and amount of force the teacher was using, what alternatives were available to you to keep your stuff, and whether your actions escalated the situation further.
For example, suppose the teacher was blocking your way out of the room, and saying that she would not allow you to leave unless you handed over your notes to her. You refuse to do so, and insist that she let you out. If she insists in not letting you out, then the question is how much force do you need to use to exit the room. If a moderate push would do, then a punch on the nose would be quite excessive.
Another example: suppose you had had repeated opportunities to leave the room with your notes, but you stuck around calling the teacher a nazi bitch. At one point she blocks your way out, and slaps you, so you punch her. In this case, you would be in really deep shit with the law. Why? Because instead of walking out when you could, you participated in escalating the situation, both verbally and physically. You were not reasonably defending your property, because you had plenty of opportunities that you could and should have taken to avoid the violent outcome. (And yes, so did the teacher, and she could be in deep shit too by this point.)
So basically, the "semester's worth of lecture notes" that you cite as making your punch in the nose "more than reasonable" hardly factors into the determination of what is the appropriate level of force to deal with the situation. The sort of things that most factor into it are the kind that I mentioned.
If the teacher tried to physically grab my backpack from me and take my notes, I would indeed hit her if necessary to prevent it.
In this context, "I would hit her" is way too vague. Hit her how, and with how much force? How strong is your teacher, and how strong are you? All of this context is important, because the law may deem the notes less important than physical injury to the teacher, even if her attempt to take the notes from you is wrongful.
I still don't think you should let her take your notes away. You should try to find a way of getting out of that room with your notes, head straight to the principal's office, and complain that your teacher tried to take your notes away from you.
That is largely right, except for one detail: Red Hat is producing profits, but Sun recently posted a big loss, mostly due to a 1.45B impairment of goodwill charge. (In English: they revised their estimate of the value of some of the companies they've purchased, down 1.45B).
To answer the original thread poster's question: it's not how much you sell, it's how much your keep.
Dude, I'm just highlighting the group-think that pervades this site. It goes from the story submissions (both the selection of stories to submit, and the way the stories are described), the selection and comments by the editors, and the reception by the commenters.
However, the good old 'correlation doesn't imply causation' doesn't apply here.
Of course. It applies in the case where a study seems to show that video games make people more violent.
The reason is that these studies show a lack of correlation!
No, the authors of the studies say that the studies show a lack of correlation.
A lack of correlation is a very strong indicator that there is no causal relationship.
A lack of correlation, taken out of context, doesn't indicate anything, because the experiments may be measuring the wrong thing. We're talking about social science here; The objects of study (e.g., "violence") can often not be given any precise definition, and carefully defined proxies must be used (e.g., "violent crime statistics compiled by the FBI," or, for a truly bad one, "incidence of drunken killing sprees with nail guns"). You can easily and subtly fail to pick a correct proxy for a correlation that, for the sake of argument, we assumed to exist.
Why are we talking about "killing sprees"? When did "number of killing sprees" become the standard for judging video games' contribution (or lack thereof) to violence?
Um...I believe it because 99% of video game owners do not go on killing sprees.
But that is (a) a correlation, (b) doesn't demonstrate anything. Suppose that 99% of video game owners don't go on killing sprees, but 99% of killing spreeers own video games.
Yes, yes, "correlation doesn't imply causation," but the point is that "99% of video game owners don't go on killing sprees" is completely irrelevant to the hypotheses about video games and violence, in more than one way. ("Killing sprees"? What about just being more likely to hit somebody?)
Most of the counter-video game crowd cites purely anecdotal evidence (i.e. Johnny LOVED Street Fighter so he beat the hobo to death).
And most of the pro-video game crowd perform flawless experiments, right?
So this one has 6 more controlled studies going for it than those...
...and those studies are of course completely flawless... and there are no studies linking videogames to violence anyway... and the ones that exist are, of course, flawed... right?
Come on, folks, admit it. You only believe this study because it concludes what you want to conclude. If it concluded the opposite thing, you'd all be selectively trotting out that good old line, "correlation doesn't imply causation," and holding it up to standards that you won't hold this one up to. (Because, after all, what kind of evidence does imply causation? Don't all experiments, because of their own nature, demonstrate nothing more than correlation?)
I think that's what the military commissions were intended to do but SCOTUS apparently thought otherwise.
You should read the Boumediene majority opinion, even if only superficially. From memory: the military commissions (as amended?) incorporated elements that were the executive's answer to previous SCOTUS complaints that the government was not doing all it could to respect the detainees' rights.
Basically, the commissions had a process for the detainees to request review of their detention, but the process was flawed. The detainees didn't have legal counsel (they were aided/represented by a functionary that was answerable to the military, and there was no client/attorney confidentiality); they were not allowed to see all of the evidence that the military used to justify their detention; they were not allowed to challenge the truth of the evidence that was indeed shown to them; and they were not allowed to introduce new evidence on their own behalf.
I dunno how many of these would have actually been required if we accept the government's assertion that we are at war (which the court did not deny, but which I would certainly lay open to question). I do think the "we're at war" argument could be used in some cases to justify some of these procedures (something which is explicitly recognized in the Constitution by the suspension clause, which however has not been invoked). True prisoners of war can indeed be detained while hostilities continue, and information being so sensitive during a war, it may make sense to withhold some evidence against a detainee while the war is ongoing. Still, not providing detainees independent legal counsel answerable to them, and not allowing them to challenge or introduce evidence, that is clearly too much in my mind.
Digital, for example, doesn't degrade like film stock.
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. "Film" is simultaneously a medium and an encoding of information, while in this context, "digital" is only an encoding of information. The actual media in which you can store digital images does degrade.
The advantage of digital is that you can make bit-perfect copies and store them in many different kinds of media. The disadvantage of this regard is that the encoding doesn't degrade as gracefully; while film fades by becoming a fainter, less contrasting encoding of the same scene (i.e., gradual loss of information), when digital fails it can more easily become completely garbled.
When has the Constitution ever been held to apply to prisoners of war?
There is one Supreme Court case where you may argue that that happened. This case was decided in, um, 2008.
Do you really mean to tell me that all those German and Japanese POWs we captured could have petitioned for habeas corpus?
You should really read the Boumediene majority opinion, since it discusses the case of the German POWs quite clearly.
I think you're implicitly making a common but very crucial, subtle error here: the Constitution isn't a grant rights to the people of the United States; it is a set of restrictions on the powers of the government. The Constitution gives the federal government pretty broad powers to conduct the foreign affairs of the country, so there are much fewer restrictions on how the government can treat POWs abroad. This doesn't mean that there are no constitutional restrictions on the treatment of POWs.
In Boumediene, for example, the SCOTUS pointed out that detainees in the WWII German war trials were afforded the right to question the grounds for their detainment in an adversarial legal process, where they had legal counsel, could see and challenge the evidence that was used to justify their detainment, and could introduce new evidence in their behalf. Basically, those detainees were denied habeas hearings in the USA, but the government still respected the fundamental rights that habeas is supposed to prevent the government from infringing. This is one of the reasons that habeas was granted (as a one-time exception) to the Gitmo detainees; basically, the SCOTUS judged that, in the future, even if such detainees don't need to be given federal habeas, the government should respect their right to challenge their imprisonment in some way.
So, to answer your question: no, the German and Japanese POWs were not granted habeas hearings, but they were granted alternative procedures to allow them to exercise the same fundamental rights.
Slashdot Mirror
This is wrong in so many levels. Basically, the argument would run that regular workers don't make a lot because they settle for a salary or wages, i.e., guaranteed regular fixed-dollar payments that do not vary and are supposed to continue coming in even if the business isn't doing great. So CEOs, instead of this, settle for... $40 million salaries with a $80 million severance deals? Millions in free stock options that pay off if the stock rises, and cost nothing if the stock falls? Executive jets that the company pays for?
In what sense do the CEOs "take most of the risk," if most of the world's stock capitalization isn't owned by CEOs?
And if we all benefit from CEO's success, how come the inflation-adjusted income of Americans went down during the Bush years, while CEO pay went up?
11% is too high an assumption. Try 10.5% at the high end, and 9% at the low end. And that's for 100% stock portfolios, which are extremely volatile and really not for most people. And you're assuming 50 years during which you don't use any of that money.
It is true that if you don't do the preparatory work, you won't be able to exploit lucky chances when they arrive, but you've got this stuff all backwards by relegating "luck" to a parenthetical item that barely makes the list. The American superrich, in general, were lucky to be born into wealthy families, which doesn't just mean that they had access to money, but also to the social networks available to the wealthy.
All this talk about "risk" is ideological. Basically, from the point of view of finance, "risk" is the possibility of financial loss, and it is measured in currency units. However, the reasoning utterly fails to take into account the marginal value of money, so that a billionaire who invests 25% of her billion in the stock market is taking more "risk" than a dude worth $100,000 who uses 75% to start his own business. Basically, risk ain't risky for the rich.
Perhaps because he wants to work, as opposed to fuck around with computers in crassly unsupported configurations that might not work?
Try reading the following:
Here's one crucial thing that sums up my point: allele frequency can only be defined relative to a population, but population boundaries are vague.
What other information does she have about you, and what is the conditional probability of you beating her given that information?
As one adds more information about you to your wife's model, her probability assignments must be revised to account for that information. For example, if there are specific personality features in men such that men who lack them strongly tend not to beat their wives, and you clearly do not have those personality features, your wife would need to revise her estimate downwards that you might beat her.
Your rhetorical question only truly has effect if the only facts that your wife brought into the decision were that (a) you are a man, and (b) one in fifty men beat their wives. A woman that decided to marry a man knowing nothing else about him would not universally be judged to be acting very rationally.
No, it's not a mistake. It all comes down to the fact that there are two general types of interpretations of probability:
Basically, you're treating this as an argument about probability in the first sense, when it is really about probability in the second sense. The argument is that even if your formulas lead you to asssign a degree of confidence of .00000000000001 to the proposition that the LHC will not destroy the Earth, that means very little if we assign a degree of confidence of .000001 to the proposition that you are wrong.
The point now, which other posters in this thread have made in other ways, is that the frequency model for probability theory is not relevant here, because this situation is not like a coin toss. For the situation to be like a coin toss, we would have had to do something like run the LHC a gazillion times, and observe how many of those times it ended up destroying the Earth. Therefore, the probabilities must be interpreted as degree of belief, and the number produced by any formula must be tossed out if the probability of getting the formula wrong is bigger than that number.
The assumption you're making here is that the number is the "probability of the event." Again, it is not; it is the degree of belief warranted to a specific proposition, given some other information.
Um, no, it is not. One simple initial example to get the ball running: there are hybrids where the males are sterile, but the females are fecund; for example, hybrids of domestic cats with the African serval (the resulting hybrid is called a Savannah cat). Since a housecat and a serval can produce fertile offspring, your test fails to establish them as separate species. (Note that I was careful not to say that the fertile offspring proves that they are the same species, "If A then B" doesn't entail "If B, then A.")
Now, you may be thinking of ways of strengthening your definition against examples like this one, but that was only the starting point. The broader problem is that as you try to come up with more and more precise definitions of "species," all you will do is set yourself up for ever more elaborate examples of intermediate cases that either pose a problem for your definition, or just suggest that your definition makes arbitrary, unprincipled decisions about where the line should lie. (E.g., what if there are two types of organisms that produce infertile offspring 25% of the time? 12.5%? 7.25%? How low must the percentage get to prove a species barrier? Must that number be the same for every pair of organisms, or does it make sense to measure it differently for different pairs because of some fact about genetics? What about pairs of organisms that would produce fertile offspring often enough, but are reproductively isolated by geographical boundaries? Etc.)
The deeper point is that evolution doesn't care about "species"; it cares about populations whose members interbreed, and in the real world, such populations may easily have very vague boundaries, because "X can breed with Y" isn't a yes/no matter.
You're assuming that firmware must, of necessity, be for a single platform. This assumption is wrong; while different platforms do need different object code to some extent, it is otherwise good to use the same firmware code on many platforms.
Read up on Open Firmware and EFI. These are existing firmware standards that are used in more than one CPU platform. They go even further than that, actually, and make the firmware include a platform-independent bytecode interpreter, so that it is possible to write cross-platform binary device drivers or firmware extensions in general. The idea is that your device's firmware would come with simple platform-agnostic drivers that can be used during the bootstrap process. The OS can use those drivers provisionally until it loads more featureful, native code drivers.
From what I read, CoreBoot has a very different design philosophy from these firmware standards, and it's not trying to do anything that elaborate; but still, writing it in C allows the firmware to be much more easily ported to other platforms.
Um, you forgot the part where you firmly and politely tell the officer that you do not consent to any searches.
The White Wedding one is great, and so is this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV2g3MSDKtA.
The advice you're offering here is very bad. Somebody who follows it could land themselves with a battery conviction.
I don't know which state you live in, but you can be pretty sure of one thing: "reasonable force" will not in general be judged in terms of what was stolen (the lecture notes), but rather, in terms of what kind and amount of force the teacher was using, what alternatives were available to you to keep your stuff, and whether your actions escalated the situation further.
For example, suppose the teacher was blocking your way out of the room, and saying that she would not allow you to leave unless you handed over your notes to her. You refuse to do so, and insist that she let you out. If she insists in not letting you out, then the question is how much force do you need to use to exit the room. If a moderate push would do, then a punch on the nose would be quite excessive.
Another example: suppose you had had repeated opportunities to leave the room with your notes, but you stuck around calling the teacher a nazi bitch. At one point she blocks your way out, and slaps you, so you punch her. In this case, you would be in really deep shit with the law. Why? Because instead of walking out when you could, you participated in escalating the situation, both verbally and physically. You were not reasonably defending your property, because you had plenty of opportunities that you could and should have taken to avoid the violent outcome. (And yes, so did the teacher, and she could be in deep shit too by this point.)
So basically, the "semester's worth of lecture notes" that you cite as making your punch in the nose "more than reasonable" hardly factors into the determination of what is the appropriate level of force to deal with the situation. The sort of things that most factor into it are the kind that I mentioned.
In this context, "I would hit her" is way too vague. Hit her how, and with how much force? How strong is your teacher, and how strong are you? All of this context is important, because the law may deem the notes less important than physical injury to the teacher, even if her attempt to take the notes from you is wrongful.
I still don't think you should let her take your notes away. You should try to find a way of getting out of that room with your notes, head straight to the principal's office, and complain that your teacher tried to take your notes away from you.
That is largely right, except for one detail: Red Hat is producing profits, but Sun recently posted a big loss, mostly due to a 1.45B impairment of goodwill charge. (In English: they revised their estimate of the value of some of the companies they've purchased, down 1.45B).
To answer the original thread poster's question: it's not how much you sell, it's how much your keep.
I had a clever retort to that, but I completely forgot about it now that my wife is trying to get me to make her more pregnant...
Vicepresident, of course...
Dude, I'm just highlighting the group-think that pervades this site. It goes from the story submissions (both the selection of stories to submit, and the way the stories are described), the selection and comments by the editors, and the reception by the commenters.
I beg you to read the paragraph after the one you quote, and to think about it, before you endeavor to educate me.
Of course. It applies in the case where a study seems to show that video games make people more violent.
No, the authors of the studies say that the studies show a lack of correlation.
A lack of correlation, taken out of context, doesn't indicate anything, because the experiments may be measuring the wrong thing. We're talking about social science here; The objects of study (e.g., "violence") can often not be given any precise definition, and carefully defined proxies must be used (e.g., "violent crime statistics compiled by the FBI," or, for a truly bad one, "incidence of drunken killing sprees with nail guns"). You can easily and subtly fail to pick a correct proxy for a correlation that, for the sake of argument, we assumed to exist.
Why are we talking about "killing sprees"? When did "number of killing sprees" become the standard for judging video games' contribution (or lack thereof) to violence?
But that is (a) a correlation, (b) doesn't demonstrate anything. Suppose that 99% of video game owners don't go on killing sprees, but 99% of killing spreeers own video games.
Yes, yes, "correlation doesn't imply causation," but the point is that "99% of video game owners don't go on killing sprees" is completely irrelevant to the hypotheses about video games and violence, in more than one way. ("Killing sprees"? What about just being more likely to hit somebody?)
And most of the pro-video game crowd perform flawless experiments, right?
...and those studies are of course completely flawless... and there are no studies linking videogames to violence anyway... and the ones that exist are, of course, flawed... right?
Come on, folks, admit it. You only believe this study because it concludes what you want to conclude. If it concluded the opposite thing, you'd all be selectively trotting out that good old line, "correlation doesn't imply causation," and holding it up to standards that you won't hold this one up to. (Because, after all, what kind of evidence does imply causation? Don't all experiments, because of their own nature, demonstrate nothing more than correlation?)
You should read the Boumediene majority opinion, even if only superficially. From memory: the military commissions (as amended?) incorporated elements that were the executive's answer to previous SCOTUS complaints that the government was not doing all it could to respect the detainees' rights.
Basically, the commissions had a process for the detainees to request review of their detention, but the process was flawed. The detainees didn't have legal counsel (they were aided/represented by a functionary that was answerable to the military, and there was no client/attorney confidentiality); they were not allowed to see all of the evidence that the military used to justify their detention; they were not allowed to challenge the truth of the evidence that was indeed shown to them; and they were not allowed to introduce new evidence on their own behalf.
I dunno how many of these would have actually been required if we accept the government's assertion that we are at war (which the court did not deny, but which I would certainly lay open to question). I do think the "we're at war" argument could be used in some cases to justify some of these procedures (something which is explicitly recognized in the Constitution by the suspension clause, which however has not been invoked). True prisoners of war can indeed be detained while hostilities continue, and information being so sensitive during a war, it may make sense to withhold some evidence against a detainee while the war is ongoing. Still, not providing detainees independent legal counsel answerable to them, and not allowing them to challenge or introduce evidence, that is clearly too much in my mind.
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. "Film" is simultaneously a medium and an encoding of information, while in this context, "digital" is only an encoding of information. The actual media in which you can store digital images does degrade.
The advantage of digital is that you can make bit-perfect copies and store them in many different kinds of media. The disadvantage of this regard is that the encoding doesn't degrade as gracefully; while film fades by becoming a fainter, less contrasting encoding of the same scene (i.e., gradual loss of information), when digital fails it can more easily become completely garbled.
There is one Supreme Court case where you may argue that that happened. This case was decided in, um, 2008.
You should really read the Boumediene majority opinion, since it discusses the case of the German POWs quite clearly.
I think you're implicitly making a common but very crucial, subtle error here: the Constitution isn't a grant rights to the people of the United States; it is a set of restrictions on the powers of the government. The Constitution gives the federal government pretty broad powers to conduct the foreign affairs of the country, so there are much fewer restrictions on how the government can treat POWs abroad. This doesn't mean that there are no constitutional restrictions on the treatment of POWs.
In Boumediene, for example, the SCOTUS pointed out that detainees in the WWII German war trials were afforded the right to question the grounds for their detainment in an adversarial legal process, where they had legal counsel, could see and challenge the evidence that was used to justify their detainment, and could introduce new evidence in their behalf. Basically, those detainees were denied habeas hearings in the USA, but the government still respected the fundamental rights that habeas is supposed to prevent the government from infringing. This is one of the reasons that habeas was granted (as a one-time exception) to the Gitmo detainees; basically, the SCOTUS judged that, in the future, even if such detainees don't need to be given federal habeas, the government should respect their right to challenge their imprisonment in some way.
So, to answer your question: no, the German and Japanese POWs were not granted habeas hearings, but they were granted alternative procedures to allow them to exercise the same fundamental rights.