Eyewitness testimony also helps. If the defendant's DNA is one of several on the murder weapon, and a trustworthy eyewitness saw him at the scene, I think that puts you beyond a reasonable doubt even if either element on its own isn't enough to convict.
However, your average gangland murder *isn't* committed in the course of a felony, and is really hard to find eyewitnesses for, so the grandparent post is apropos. It's certainly something I worried about while in the jury box, but the prosecution focused on including the defendant, and made no attempt to exclude other suspects.
What I was surprised at was the unanimity of the jury in the case: *everyone* thought that while the defendant was probably a gangster, the prosecution didn't meet the burden of proof. The jury had everything from suburban housewives to college professors (me) to retired black civil servants to a young hispanic man with gold chains and obvious 'hood experience, and everybody came to the same conclusion with the same rationale. Deliberation took about half an hour, mostly because we wanted to finish our pizza before rendering a verdict.
----------------
PS: Derailing my own thread here, but did you just use "unbiased" and "Bayesian" in the same phrase? The whole *point* of Bayesian analysis is that the data is biased by your prior assumptions. In a good way, but still.
... in a case I was on the jury for. (Sorry for the bait-and-switch title, couldn't resist.)
This was a case of armed home invasion. The victim was a big bruiser of a man, a multiple convicted drug addict. The defendant was a scrawny young Cape Verdean guy. (Cape Verdean drug gangs are common in the area: this is important later.) The victim testified that, after buying drugs from the defendant, he got a series of enraged voicemails demanding the return of the defendant's cell phone. A few hours later, the defendant allegedly shows up at the victim's house with a gun and barges in yelling. A struggle ensued, a shot was fired into the floor, and the guy with the gun fled.
Evidence against the defendant included eyewitness testimony from the defendant, matching ammunition found at the defendant's house, and crucially a do-rag found at the scene of the scuffle. DNA tests matched the do-rag to a mixture of at least 3 people, including the defendant. The DNA mixing was probably due to really awful police work: a paper bag borrowed from the defendant's cupboard is not a proper evidence collection container.
As in TFA, mixed DNA dramatically affected the "probability of exclusion" statistics: the state's expert testified there was a 1 in 50 chance that a random man on the street would match the DNA on the do-rag. The odds that a random *black* man on the street would match were much higher, like 1 in 20; the defense pointed out that the odds that a random *Cape Verdean* would match would be much higher.
We've grown used DNA evidence saying things like, "not one other person on the planet could match this DNA", but in this case, the odds were good that the DNA evidence would match at least one other person sitting in the *courtroom*. The defense also took the unusual tactic of introducing the defendant's sister, who testified that her *other* brother looks very much like the defendant, and she said it was *his* voice on the enraged voicemails. What are the odds that the DNA matches the *brother* instead? Damned good.
Between the fact that the eye witness seemed shifty and unreliable and was probably on crack at the time of the incident, and the fact that all the physical evidence could just as well implicate the brother as the defendant, we couldn't rule out the possibility that the cops got the wrong guy, so we found him not guilty. If I had to take a bet, I'd say he did it, but I wouldn't bet his life on it.
Anyway. Moral of the story is: on cop shows and in the public awareness, DNA evidence is rock solid and incontrovertible. But in the real world, the statistics of DNA mixtures make things a whole lot less cut-and-dried.
The problem with family mental health issues like ADHD is that it's really, really easy to focus on individuals and anecdotes, and lose track of the big picture. The statistical tools that good economists bring to the table can cut through the emotional stories and point out biases and trends in the whole population.
With good data and good math, it's much harder to fool yourself. Economic statistics has brought some profound insights to many fields in social sciences and the humanities. Don't ignore someone with good ideas just because they lack "D. Psy." after their name.
I have got to tell you that the idea that the ADHD and ADD kids don't have an issue other than just being immature is insulting, a gross misunderstanding of the problem, and something kids with learning disabilities have had to fight with for years.
Case in point. Your emotional reaction to the subject matter has caused you to miss something important: the study never said that ADHD doesn't exist. It said that student age and grade level has caused a bias in diagnosis, so that *some* --- not all! --- ADHD diagnoses are probably in error. The statistics are almost incontrovertible: there is clearly a problem here. But that doesn't mean *you* personally are misdiagnosed.
As for "someone else blowing in it for you", if you're a sober passenger in a car with a convicted drunk driver, and you'd rather help them fake out the analyzer rather than taking the wheel yourself, you deserve to die in a car crash, and you deserve a manslaughter conviction if someone else dies.
Directory for each data set, labeled by date (20100815). Short README file inside each directory with description of the run. Big spreadsheet (or database, if you're fancy) with experimental parameters and core results, that can be sorted, reorganized, and graphed.
What I'm wondering is whether or not anything significant was actually copied. Was the private server just duplicating the game's protocol, or was the game world actually duplicated?
WoW private servers generally do duplicate the game world found in Blizzard's game. Much of the graphical data is stored client-side, but all data about where things are and what they're doing is on the server. Many of them try to keep their server software as up-to-date a copy as possible, though some will allow you to do things which are not allowed in the real game.
There is zero question that this copyright violation: it's as open-and-shut a case of copyright violation as if you stole a copy of a Hollywood blockbuster from a movie studio, duped it, and sold tickets to see it in your backyard.
it hasn't changed much since 2003 and yet oil prices in this economic "downturn" are double what they were in 2003.
I see the current low prices as a temporary downward "anti-bubble" in a rising trend that's been ongoing since 1998. Even if you discount the 2007-2008 peak as a fluke, inflation-adjusted prices have been doubling every 2-4 years for over a decade now.
I'd argue that while the player in question is clearly a moron, CCP did create the monster, when it decided to create rules allowing PLEX to be destroyed. There are plenty of other options: it could be looted by the attacking ship, or it could be set adrift as jetsam, to be collected by scavengers... someone with more familiarity with EVE could come up with other options, I'm sure.
But if a unit of PLEX is destroyed, someone, somewhere, has to crack open their credit card and pay CCP some more money to play the game. It's by no means clear whose pocket the money comes out of, but it's quite clear whose pocket it's going into.
Most hybrids are only a couple of years old, and will be on the road for at least another decade. At the moment, my Prius is an environmental statement and a fun engineering toy, but beginning around 2012-2013, I expect it to start looking like a very good investment.
The right headline for this article is, "CCP takes $1200 from subscriber."
I'm trying to imagine if Blizzard created a World of Warcraft monster that could eat your monthly subscription if it killed you. Players would be furious, and accuse Blizzard of stealing from them. By setting up the system so that PLEX can be destroyed, CCP is doing the same thing.
But in the cutthroat capitalism uber alles world of EVE, it's all part of the game.
This is just one isolated incident, but I assume ships carrying small quantities of PLEX get destroyed all the time. Can anyone estimate how much real money CCP earns from this?
Not in this case. By all accounts, Elon Musk didn't originally want to get into the rocket business. He wanted to be in the Mars colonization business, but quickly discovered that rockets were too damned expensive, so he decided to make his own.
For Musk, the marketing is a tool for achieving is vision, not the other way around.
You seem to believe that "fascism" means "no ownership of property". Quite the contrary: fascism is private ownership carried to such an extreme that the state itself becomes owned.
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
The tax you paid on the materials for your garage goes to the state, to ensure that you have a working highway and court system so you and the carpenter who built the garage can do business in peace and harmony.
The tax you pay on the garage every year afterwards goes to the city or county, to ensure that when the garage catches fire, there's a fire department to save the rest of your house and the neighborhood.
Stop looking at taxes as just "the Man wants my money", and look at what that money gives you.
Yes, but your society-saving moderates are a *product* of a mixed society. If you live in a homogenous world, going against the norm is much more difficult.
Or to put it another way: you only get a Breakfast Club if you lock the jock, the nerd, the princess, the delinquent, and the freak in the library together. If they can hang out with their own cliques, they never change.
When the country polarises in such an extent, perhaps it's time two new countries are formed consisting of the polarised groups.
You're just passing the problem one more step up the social ladder. You've averted a civil war, but created two hostile countries with nothing in common but resource conflicts and a huge hostile border, setting yourself up for a possible continental-scale international war. It's an India/Pakistan situation, but with more nukes.
Learning to deal with people you disagree with one-on-one rather than avoiding them really is the best option.
Setting the study results aside, I'm dubious at the idea that avoiding stress at the interpersonal level results in a more stable social network. I'd argue that it simply pushes the conflict up the social scale, making large-scale conflict more likely.
For instance, suppose I'm a liberal Democrat. I find it stressful to live in areas where I'm surrounded by conservative Republicans, so I tend to live in neighborhoods full of like-minded people. If everyone behaves this way, eventually the country polarizes into homogeneous districts, and I never have to get into lengthy bitter arguments about abortion or global warming or whatever.
Is this a recipe for a stable social network? No, it's a recipe for civil war!
We can take a useful analogy from materials science. Small-scale stress in materials is relieved by the formation of microfractures. These cracks tend to propagate, relieving more and more stress on the small scale, but eventually leading to total large-scale failure of the material. In contrast, if we heat the material up, forcing the molecules to interact with one another to recrystallize and eliminate small-scale dislocations, the material as a whole becomes annealed, and tends to bend rather than break.
Mac/Apple lovers are generally loyal to the bitter end, like devoted followers of most products and can look past most faults.
This is a "poisoning the well" argument. "Apple fans' opinions are invalid because they're all devoted followers who're blind to the faults of Apple stuff."
Did it ever occur to you that Apple lovers are Apple lovers for a *reason*? Take me for example. I used Macs in high school and college, but I've also spent years working on everything from DOS to Windows 7, from VMS to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. I used Linux as my primary home OS for years, and I still use it on my research computers.
But in the end, I went back to Mac for personal computing: nothing else matches it.
I've used every cell phone carrier and brand imaginable over the years, but nothing comes close to my iPhone.
People choose Apple products not because they're ignorant fanboys, who don't know what they're missing. I know what's out there, and that's *why* I picked Apple for my personal computing.
Oh, and on the topic: AT&T's service was spotty when iPhones first came out, but in the past year I've never had a dropped call or a stalled web page load. Ever.
Oh god dammit. Units failure, I'm off by a factor of 1000, and boiling water and high-temperature salt are actually about equal in terms of heat storage.
Slashdot Mirror
Eyewitness testimony also helps. If the defendant's DNA is one of several on the murder weapon, and a trustworthy eyewitness saw him at the scene, I think that puts you beyond a reasonable doubt even if either element on its own isn't enough to convict.
However, your average gangland murder *isn't* committed in the course of a felony, and is really hard to find eyewitnesses for, so the grandparent post is apropos. It's certainly something I worried about while in the jury box, but the prosecution focused on including the defendant, and made no attempt to exclude other suspects.
Whoops, typo. Victim's cupboard. They just grabbed the nearest handy container to dump the evidence in.
I guess the supermarket bagger kid didn't have any priors convictions, or he could be in jail right now...
I'm glad you think the way that you do.
What I was surprised at was the unanimity of the jury in the case: *everyone* thought that while the defendant was probably a gangster, the prosecution didn't meet the burden of proof. The jury had everything from suburban housewives to college professors (me) to retired black civil servants to a young hispanic man with gold chains and obvious 'hood experience, and everybody came to the same conclusion with the same rationale. Deliberation took about half an hour, mostly because we wanted to finish our pizza before rendering a verdict.
----------------
PS: Derailing my own thread here, but did you just use "unbiased" and "Bayesian" in the same phrase? The whole *point* of Bayesian analysis is that the data is biased by your prior assumptions. In a good way, but still.
... in a case I was on the jury for. (Sorry for the bait-and-switch title, couldn't resist.)
This was a case of armed home invasion. The victim was a big bruiser of a man, a multiple convicted drug addict. The defendant was a scrawny young Cape Verdean guy. (Cape Verdean drug gangs are common in the area: this is important later.) The victim testified that, after buying drugs from the defendant, he got a series of enraged voicemails demanding the return of the defendant's cell phone. A few hours later, the defendant allegedly shows up at the victim's house with a gun and barges in yelling. A struggle ensued, a shot was fired into the floor, and the guy with the gun fled.
Evidence against the defendant included eyewitness testimony from the defendant, matching ammunition found at the defendant's house, and crucially a do-rag found at the scene of the scuffle. DNA tests matched the do-rag to a mixture of at least 3 people, including the defendant. The DNA mixing was probably due to really awful police work: a paper bag borrowed from the defendant's cupboard is not a proper evidence collection container.
As in TFA, mixed DNA dramatically affected the "probability of exclusion" statistics: the state's expert testified there was a 1 in 50 chance that a random man on the street would match the DNA on the do-rag. The odds that a random *black* man on the street would match were much higher, like 1 in 20; the defense pointed out that the odds that a random *Cape Verdean* would match would be much higher.
We've grown used DNA evidence saying things like, "not one other person on the planet could match this DNA", but in this case, the odds were good that the DNA evidence would match at least one other person sitting in the *courtroom*. The defense also took the unusual tactic of introducing the defendant's sister, who testified that her *other* brother looks very much like the defendant, and she said it was *his* voice on the enraged voicemails. What are the odds that the DNA matches the *brother* instead? Damned good.
Between the fact that the eye witness seemed shifty and unreliable and was probably on crack at the time of the incident, and the fact that all the physical evidence could just as well implicate the brother as the defendant, we couldn't rule out the possibility that the cops got the wrong guy, so we found him not guilty. If I had to take a bet, I'd say he did it, but I wouldn't bet his life on it.
Anyway. Moral of the story is: on cop shows and in the public awareness, DNA evidence is rock solid and incontrovertible. But in the real world, the statistics of DNA mixtures make things a whole lot less cut-and-dried.
The problem with family mental health issues like ADHD is that it's really, really easy to focus on individuals and anecdotes, and lose track of the big picture. The statistical tools that good economists bring to the table can cut through the emotional stories and point out biases and trends in the whole population.
With good data and good math, it's much harder to fool yourself. Economic statistics has brought some profound insights to many fields in social sciences and the humanities. Don't ignore someone with good ideas just because they lack "D. Psy." after their name.
I have got to tell you that the idea that the ADHD and ADD kids don't have an issue other than just being immature is insulting, a gross misunderstanding of the problem, and something kids with learning disabilities have had to fight with for years.
Case in point. Your emotional reaction to the subject matter has caused you to miss something important: the study never said that ADHD doesn't exist. It said that student age and grade level has caused a bias in diagnosis, so that *some* --- not all! --- ADHD diagnoses are probably in error. The statistics are almost incontrovertible: there is clearly a problem here. But that doesn't mean *you* personally are misdiagnosed.
you'd still have to fake out the analyzer.
It's not faking if the actually sober actual driver blows in the device.
As for "someone else blowing in it for you", if you're a sober passenger in a car with a convicted drunk driver, and you'd rather help them fake out the analyzer rather than taking the wheel yourself, you deserve to die in a car crash, and you deserve a manslaughter conviction if someone else dies.
I'd tell you to die in a fire, but you probably will anyway. Just try not to take anybody with you, ok?
Here's what I do:
Directory for each data set, labeled by date (20100815).
Short README file inside each directory with description of the run.
Big spreadsheet (or database, if you're fancy) with experimental parameters and core results, that can be sorted, reorganized, and graphed.
What I'm wondering is whether or not anything significant was actually copied. Was the private server just duplicating the game's protocol, or was the game world actually duplicated?
WoW private servers generally do duplicate the game world found in Blizzard's game. Much of the graphical data is stored client-side, but all data about where things are and what they're doing is on the server. Many of them try to keep their server software as up-to-date a copy as possible, though some will allow you to do things which are not allowed in the real game.
There is zero question that this copyright violation: it's as open-and-shut a case of copyright violation as if you stole a copy of a Hollywood blockbuster from a movie studio, duped it, and sold tickets to see it in your backyard.
body {color:purple;}
it hasn't changed much since 2003
and yet oil prices in this economic "downturn" are double what they were in 2003.
I see the current low prices as a temporary downward "anti-bubble" in a rising trend that's been ongoing since 1998. Even if you discount the 2007-2008 peak as a fluke, inflation-adjusted prices have been doubling every 2-4 years for over a decade now.
But we shall see.
Do you have reasons to think oil prices will rise rapidly?
Right now, on the other side of the world, two billion people are simultaneously deciding they don't want to walk to work anymore.
I have a hunch that that might impact fuel prices.
Except that CCP didn't create the monster.
I'd argue that while the player in question is clearly a moron, CCP did create the monster, when it decided to create rules allowing PLEX to be destroyed. There are plenty of other options: it could be looted by the attacking ship, or it could be set adrift as jetsam, to be collected by scavengers... someone with more familiarity with EVE could come up with other options, I'm sure.
But if a unit of PLEX is destroyed, someone, somewhere, has to crack open their credit card and pay CCP some more money to play the game. It's by no means clear whose pocket the money comes out of, but it's quite clear whose pocket it's going into.
Most hybrids are only a couple of years old, and will be on the road for at least another decade. At the moment, my Prius is an environmental statement and a fun engineering toy, but beginning around 2012-2013, I expect it to start looking like a very good investment.
The right headline for this article is, "CCP takes $1200 from subscriber."
I'm trying to imagine if Blizzard created a World of Warcraft monster that could eat your monthly subscription if it killed you. Players would be furious, and accuse Blizzard of stealing from them. By setting up the system so that PLEX can be destroyed, CCP is doing the same thing.
But in the cutthroat capitalism uber alles world of EVE, it's all part of the game.
This is just one isolated incident, but I assume ships carrying small quantities of PLEX get destroyed all the time. Can anyone estimate how much real money CCP earns from this?
I'd say it's marketese.
Not in this case. By all accounts, Elon Musk didn't originally want to get into the rocket business. He wanted to be in the Mars colonization business, but quickly discovered that rockets were too damned expensive, so he decided to make his own.
For Musk, the marketing is a tool for achieving is vision, not the other way around.
You seem to believe that "fascism" means "no ownership of property". Quite the contrary: fascism is private ownership carried to such an extreme that the state itself becomes owned.
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
The tax you paid on the materials for your garage goes to the state, to ensure that you have a working highway and court system so you and the carpenter who built the garage can do business in peace and harmony.
The tax you pay on the garage every year afterwards goes to the city or county, to ensure that when the garage catches fire, there's a fire department to save the rest of your house and the neighborhood.
Stop looking at taxes as just "the Man wants my money", and look at what that money gives you.
Yes, but your society-saving moderates are a *product* of a mixed society. If you live in a homogenous world, going against the norm is much more difficult.
Or to put it another way: you only get a Breakfast Club if you lock the jock, the nerd, the princess, the delinquent, and the freak in the library together. If they can hang out with their own cliques, they never change.
When the country polarises in such an extent, perhaps it's time two new countries are formed consisting of the polarised groups.
You're just passing the problem one more step up the social ladder. You've averted a civil war, but created two hostile countries with nothing in common but resource conflicts and a huge hostile border, setting yourself up for a possible continental-scale international war. It's an India/Pakistan situation, but with more nukes.
Learning to deal with people you disagree with one-on-one rather than avoiding them really is the best option.
Setting the study results aside, I'm dubious at the idea that avoiding stress at the interpersonal level results in a more stable social network. I'd argue that it simply pushes the conflict up the social scale, making large-scale conflict more likely.
For instance, suppose I'm a liberal Democrat. I find it stressful to live in areas where I'm surrounded by conservative Republicans, so I tend to live in neighborhoods full of like-minded people. If everyone behaves this way, eventually the country polarizes into homogeneous districts, and I never have to get into lengthy bitter arguments about abortion or global warming or whatever.
Is this a recipe for a stable social network? No, it's a recipe for civil war!
We can take a useful analogy from materials science. Small-scale stress in materials is relieved by the formation of microfractures. These cracks tend to propagate, relieving more and more stress on the small scale, but eventually leading to total large-scale failure of the material. In contrast, if we heat the material up, forcing the molecules to interact with one another to recrystallize and eliminate small-scale dislocations, the material as a whole becomes annealed, and tends to bend rather than break.
Mac/Apple lovers are generally loyal to the bitter end, like devoted followers of most products and can look past most faults.
This is a "poisoning the well" argument. "Apple fans' opinions are invalid because they're all devoted followers who're blind to the faults of Apple stuff."
Did it ever occur to you that Apple lovers are Apple lovers for a *reason*? Take me for example. I used Macs in high school and college, but I've also spent years working on everything from DOS to Windows 7, from VMS to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. I used Linux as my primary home OS for years, and I still use it on my research computers.
But in the end, I went back to Mac for personal computing: nothing else matches it.
I've used every cell phone carrier and brand imaginable over the years, but nothing comes close to my iPhone.
People choose Apple products not because they're ignorant fanboys, who don't know what they're missing. I know what's out there, and that's *why* I picked Apple for my personal computing.
Oh, and on the topic: AT&T's service was spotty when iPhones first came out, but in the past year I've never had a dropped call or a stalled web page load. Ever.
And yet, millions of people play multiplayer online FPSes every day.
Massively multiplayer hit detection is a solved problem. It doesn't matter that you're shooting at spaceships rather than demomen and heavies.
Oh god dammit. Units failure, I'm off by a factor of 1000, and boiling water and high-temperature salt are actually about equal in terms of heat storage.
Mod parent down.