But... but... but... Apple is teh evilzz!!!!111!!!
But correct in this case. Of course, it's been the right thing to do since long before Apple started making iPods; they're just repeating the statement of best practices (that they've copied from elsewhere; in this case, not a problem at all).
No, the real problem in this case is to do with developers who insist on not acquiring a properly-signed certificate during development and testing (I've seen several different reasons for doing it, from being cheap-asses to "not wanting The Man to track me"). They just use a self-signed cert and turn off everything that tries to tell them that this is a spectacularly bad idea. It's not rocket science (unless you're dumb-smart enough to want to write your own SSL implementation from scratch), but it does require you to plan to do things right a little earlier.
In the UK and we get them. I usually say two words and hang up. One of the Words begins with Fuck, the other one begins with Off.
I just hang up. No amount of wanting to piss off the robocallers would justify me spending a second longer than the absolute minimum on them, and I feel no need to be polite to a robot either.
The French media (along with Murdock in the US) have to realise that this is just a configuration problem on their end.
Sure, it's a configuration problem on their end. They believe the problem is that their configuration is lacking in money but Google is getting lots for pointing to them (though I think on a per-link basis that's not as much as they'd hope). The real configuration problem though is that some part of the media have a sense of entitlement; if they could disable that in their config, they'd be far better off...
Not at all. This is an area where the UK is completely different to the US; the rights to what is below the surface of the land do not go with the rights to the surface of the land at all here. (This means that people are much more opposed to mining operations, fracking, etc.)
On the other hand, the award that you get for reporting your find properly is pretty good (though perhaps not as much as you'd get at a well-run auction). You don't get to keep the treasure, but you get financially compensated and the find can be displayed publicly in a suitable museum.
AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR and XNOR are still the 7 basic logic elements that make up all digital electronics and programming.
Actually, real digital circuit design uses rather more elements than that, some of which can't be derived from those ideal elements either. Even excluding the clock generator (a thoroughly analog component in its core) there's still some really strange things you can usefully do with transistors that just won't model as anything simpler; my favorite is the arbitrator, it determines which signal rose (or lowered) first and which is used to connect together parts of a chip that use a common power supply but unsynchronized clocks. Simplistic digital theory says it can never work, but in reality it's very effective (and it depends on the fact that transistors are analog devices with some quantum mechanical behavior for disambiguating in the tricky cases. Mad, fun, mad fun!)
Hydrogen can be cracked out of Methane in nearly unlimited quantities.
And if we ever do run short from that source, there's a mind-boggling amount available by splitting water; all it takes is a little acid and plenty of electricity. Right now, getting it from methane is much cheaper, but we're definitely not about to run short of hydrogen...
I've always wondered why, when an appellate court overrules a judge, there's no consequence for the judge. Simply put - if a judge is overturned 3 times, he obviously shouldn't be a judge any longer.
Because that's far too rigid. If the original case depended on a tricky point of an obscure law, it's quite possible for the trial judge to get it wrong in a subtle way. Or if there were two cases being brought at about the same time that tested a new law and two trials were decided in different directions based on different readings of the same law, that would require the superior court to describe which is actually correct. These are examples where counting them as "strikes against the judge" would be excessively harsh. OTOH, if a case is overturned because the trial judge took a bribe, giving them another two chances would be astoundingly lenient. Judicial malfeasance should be cracked down on extremely hard as soon as it is detected.
The case in TFA is between these extremes. The judge didn't commit a crime, but did get a substantive reprimand over misapplication of the rules for injunctive remedies.
Whether any of these parties can marshal the effort to escalate their victories to higher percentages (or offices) is not clear. But they might.
Unless everyone involved in those third parties or who might vote for them gives up because they won't get everything instantly, in which case it definitely won't happen. That's absolutely certain.
Getting real change isn't easy. Virtually nothing worthwhile is. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Just means you've gotta work for it.
you don't have to be a sociopathic libertarian to know that in the era of aging populations there will never be enough money for hc. The First World simply sweeps the problem under the rug with deficits.
The US's problems with healthcare spending were (and still are) entirely out of proportion with respect to everyone else's. When you're spending approximately double what anyone else is (as a proportion of GDP) and not getting particularly great outcomes for it, something's got to give. (I've also seen comments on slashdot which said that healthcare was being used to create effective indentured servitude; that's Just Plain Wrong if it is true.) Moving towards a universal healthcare system at least starts to align everyone's interests again, and encourage the use of healthcare solutions that reduce costs rather than increasing them.
The rising costs associated with an aging population are best addressed by requiring people to work longer; if the boomers were to retire at 70, there'd be much less of a problem as they'd be net paying in for much larger proportion of their lives. (OTOH, I can understand why this would be unpopular...)
It could have been even funnier if one of your colleagues marked it without realising before you saw it!
To be honest, I forget whether it was myself or one of my colleagues who first saw this paper. The plagiarism was really obvious; it was a truly incompetent hack job that cribbed without citation from quite a few important papers in the field, and the student didn't even bother to make the formatting styles consistent. The indentation and font changed between paragraphs. Anyone knowledgeable enough to mark the subject on which the paper was supposed to be would have given similar marks.
But the big fat zero for plagiarism would still beat the outright negative for the original parts of the paper, which managed to be wrong in every way I can conceive of, sufficiently so that I could be sure it was original. The depth of lack of understanding (let alone ability) was profound. Before you ask, the rest of the class had no real problems producing reasonable work. Heck, the other times we've run the course even students who failed it did far better than this one guy; he was that stand-out bad. Sometimes, you've got to just fail someone utterly for the good of everyone else.
Considered from now, many years later, I'd guess that the part I'm angriest about is that he made it onto the course at all. He was a total waste of my time, time that could have been spent helping other students who did work and did try to understand and would have benefited from a little more guidance. (The work some of them did was amazing, and made me proud to have had some hand in teaching them.)
I've been plagiarized once. This bitch had copied one of my articles I wrote in a Proceedings of a conference, with pictures and everything, and used it in an overview article. The worst part of it is that my professor didn't care about it. I'm still mad, and it happened 15 years ago.
I've had a student in a class plagiarize my own articles back at me. In retrospect it was both funny and sad, but at the time I was very exasperated that they could be that stupid. No, they didn't get a pass in the class. Nor did they get an opportunity to retake; their original work was even worse too, so much so that if they're reading here, I'd advise them to keep on plagiarizing instead of trying to have original thoughts.
I have no idea why a system with a nonzero probability of leaving people homeless and poor when they get old is considered to be better.
Because it stands to make a small number of people an absolutely astounding amount of money, and they're therefore prepared to spend a lot to persuade Congress and the regulators that the system we've actually got is a great idea against all fair evidence.
Mitt and Ann have said that they can't talk specifics, because that would give their critics a target.
But now, the main election campaign, is exactly the time for specifics, for criticism. By way of compensation, you get to be able to criticize the other candidate(s). Fair is fair.
Questioned about how [Ryan's] budget plan would work, he replied that they hadn't run the numbers on it.
Then it's not a budget plan, it's a collection of soundbites. Yes, the plan will be inaccurate — budget plans always are because of unpredictable events — but it's better with main finance to be able to say "this is what I think will happen, and here's why" than to go into an election with no idea at all.
Any government that operates the way a business does would execute the disabled at birth.
Much earlier, actually. Get those female workers back to their jobs instead of having them stop to mess around with bearing a child that you're going to eliminate. Being properly business-friendly means you have to have abortion allowed (even mandatory in some cases) until very late.
Also, you do NOT need calculus to program or be a software engineer. You do NOT need Dykstra. You do NOT need to know how to write a compiler.
Unless the problem domain that the software is being created to deal with does require those sorts of things. If you're doing physics modeling, you really do need calculus. If you're building a compiler (hey, someone's gotta do it!) then you'd better know about the theory behind it. (I've seen "compilers" done by people with no grounding; that's not an experience I wish to repeat.) Of course, that's also true if you're working with financial software, where knowing what is going on in finance calculations is really important, and I know from talking to people doing image processing that (mathematical) analysis is a super-useful skill there. There's lots of programming that doesn't need parallel systems theory, or deep knowledge of security, but I've always found them useful for what I do.
The short version: it all depends on what you're doing.
There is a place for highly trained CS experts and that is working on the large scale and challenging problems. It really is a waste of everyone's time to have them working on simple programs that can be adequately by people with far less training.
The other way of making use of those sorts of talents is to be working on small problems, but with very short timescales. Yes, the Indians might be cheaper per hour, but the local expert will give you a solution to your problem this week instead of in 6 months plus however long it took to negotiate the contract. That's a very important difference, and people who aren't on site will always find themselves at a disadvantage in that sense.
I think GP is referring to Java, where a Vector is a lot slower than an ArrayList, but is guaranteed to be threadsafe.
Except it isn't. It's guaranteed that the individual method calls are thread-safe, but not that any composite operation is. It's far better to manage that sort of thing yourself as that lets you put exactly the sorts of locks in that you require (and avoid the cost of locking where you don't need it, which is virtually everywhere in most code).
Perhaps a better example would have been this lie: 1/2 == 0 (or its more insidious cousin, 1/3.0, which starts a programmer out in life with a numerical error in addition to a type they did not actually want).
Your choices are to use a rational datatype (which is OK until you need transcendental functions, when you're stuck) or a mantissa+exponent datatype (of which the usual IEEE float or double are just examples) or an unbounded-precision type (numerically exceptionally complicated). For scientific and engineering applications, where you only really have a limited number of digits of accuracy in your input data anyway, the IEEE floating point number system is a really good choice, and it has the advantage of being commonly implemented in hardware. That's not suitable for all applications — finance usually works better with integral counts of small units — but then why would we expect the same things to be perfect everywhere? (Also, 1/2==0 is just a type error, if that's unexpected at all.)
The thing is, it is not all attributable to efficiencies (although diesel's higher compression ratios do help in that regard). Diesel averages much longer-chain hydrocarbons and thus has a higher ratio of higher-energy C-C bonds to lower energy C-H bonds per gallon, and thus has more energy per gallon. This also means more CO2 per gallon. So you can't really compare MPG between gas and diesel engines. Us nerds would prefer to see kilometers per kilojoule for a better comparison, but we probably won't.
The way you jump around between different units trying to prove your point is painful to see; there's no intellectual solidity to it and it makes you look shifty. Stop that! You'd be far better off thinking in terms of "dollars per mile"; cuts right through all the crap to what most people really care about. The only tricky thing about it is that fuel prices change over time, but the comparisons still mostly work if the relative ratios of costs stay similar. Similarly, if you're going to talk about CO2 emissions, the most sensible unit is probably average grams-of-CO2 (or converted equivalent) per unit distance, because the distances that people drive are relatively unaffected by what sort of fuel they use. Of course, using these measures might indicate that your prejudices are wrong and that perhaps you should reconsider. Or maybe not. Your arguments are so all over the place it is hard to say for sure; that's the main thing you've got to fix.
One real advantage of diesel though is its higher energy density; you definitely can go further between filling up (given that you can't have arbitrarily large fuel tanks on your car, whatever you put in them). For me, that means I only fill up once every two weeks or so when driving in the area near home, or once for a substantial (all-day) long-distance high-speed drive.
The lack of iPod control breaks a huge amount of functionality in things that aren't easily swapped out (ie, cars).
It's simple! All you have to do is switch your car to a new Apple-approved Lightning-enabled one! It's a cheap one-off alteration that will only cost a substantial multiple of the iPhone 5 cost, so get to it! After all, you wouldn't want to be seen without your iPhone. (Meanwhile, the lack of compatibility with your car is a safety feature that prevents you from getting lost while following driving directions from the new mapping app. Apple: always thinking of you.)
If you actually want the answer to this question, then it's "the courts of law"
More specifically, in the UK, a magistrate or a jury
Even more specifically, it's either a jury or a panel of three magistrates and the latter only for cases with a normal maximum penalty of 6 months imprisonment for adults, or 2 years for juveniles; jury trials are always presided over by a judge. (There's also a set of rules for how to deal with awkward cases around the boundary where the trial is held in magistrates courts and where a crown court handles sentencing. They're relatively rare though, being for cases where there's an unusual number of aggravating factors.)
Both... To get elected in America, you either need lots of $$$ or the backing of one of the two major political parties, hence $$$. The primary system in most states ensures that only candidates who can successfully pander to about 0.5% of the population (die hard party loyalists) ever make it on to the ballot for the general election. So it is often the case that you either need to be exceedingly ignorant, or a very good liar in order to get nominated.
Explain why a free association of individuals — a political party — should have to listen to anyone outside themselves to select a candidate from among their number to propose as a candidate for public office. I cannot see a reason for anyone other than party members to have a choice. The problem comes when a party feels able to put up a candidate that is not the best possible without the risk of some other group putting up a better candidate who will win instead. When you have that, you've got a one-party state in microcosm, and the loons and crooks take over. (Alas, sometimes you get a place where the nutjobs represent their constituents perfectly, but hey, that's democracy for you.)
Slashdot Mirror
But... but... but... Apple is teh evilzz!!!!111!!!
But correct in this case. Of course, it's been the right thing to do since long before Apple started making iPods; they're just repeating the statement of best practices (that they've copied from elsewhere; in this case, not a problem at all).
No, the real problem in this case is to do with developers who insist on not acquiring a properly-signed certificate during development and testing (I've seen several different reasons for doing it, from being cheap-asses to "not wanting The Man to track me"). They just use a self-signed cert and turn off everything that tries to tell them that this is a spectacularly bad idea. It's not rocket science (unless you're dumb-smart enough to want to write your own SSL implementation from scratch), but it does require you to plan to do things right a little earlier.
The obvious next step beyond randomly generated journal submissions is, of course, randomly generated Slashdot comments.
I dunno. I keep getting the feeling that literary criticism has worked that way for decades...
In the UK and we get them. I usually say two words and hang up. One of the Words begins with Fuck, the other one begins with Off.
I just hang up. No amount of wanting to piss off the robocallers would justify me spending a second longer than the absolute minimum on them, and I feel no need to be polite to a robot either.
The French media (along with Murdock in the US) have to realise that this is just a configuration problem on their end.
Sure, it's a configuration problem on their end. They believe the problem is that their configuration is lacking in money but Google is getting lots for pointing to them (though I think on a per-link basis that's not as much as they'd hope). The real configuration problem though is that some part of the media have a sense of entitlement; if they could disable that in their config, they'd be far better off...
Does the title deed not establish a right?
Not at all. This is an area where the UK is completely different to the US; the rights to what is below the surface of the land do not go with the rights to the surface of the land at all here. (This means that people are much more opposed to mining operations, fracking, etc.)
On the other hand, the award that you get for reporting your find properly is pretty good (though perhaps not as much as you'd get at a well-run auction). You don't get to keep the treasure, but you get financially compensated and the find can be displayed publicly in a suitable museum.
Because they TRIED the other way and the result is cab drivers who don't know their way around the city, costing people MORE money in longer trips.
In-car navigation systems stop working as soon as they cross the NYC city limits?
AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR and XNOR are still the 7 basic logic elements that make up all digital electronics and programming.
Actually, real digital circuit design uses rather more elements than that, some of which can't be derived from those ideal elements either. Even excluding the clock generator (a thoroughly analog component in its core) there's still some really strange things you can usefully do with transistors that just won't model as anything simpler; my favorite is the arbitrator, it determines which signal rose (or lowered) first and which is used to connect together parts of a chip that use a common power supply but unsynchronized clocks. Simplistic digital theory says it can never work, but in reality it's very effective (and it depends on the fact that transistors are analog devices with some quantum mechanical behavior for disambiguating in the tricky cases. Mad, fun, mad fun!)
Hydrogen can be cracked out of Methane in nearly unlimited quantities.
And if we ever do run short from that source, there's a mind-boggling amount available by splitting water; all it takes is a little acid and plenty of electricity. Right now, getting it from methane is much cheaper, but we're definitely not about to run short of hydrogen...
I've always wondered why, when an appellate court overrules a judge, there's no consequence for the judge. Simply put - if a judge is overturned 3 times, he obviously shouldn't be a judge any longer.
Because that's far too rigid. If the original case depended on a tricky point of an obscure law, it's quite possible for the trial judge to get it wrong in a subtle way. Or if there were two cases being brought at about the same time that tested a new law and two trials were decided in different directions based on different readings of the same law, that would require the superior court to describe which is actually correct. These are examples where counting them as "strikes against the judge" would be excessively harsh. OTOH, if a case is overturned because the trial judge took a bribe, giving them another two chances would be astoundingly lenient. Judicial malfeasance should be cracked down on extremely hard as soon as it is detected.
The case in TFA is between these extremes. The judge didn't commit a crime, but did get a substantive reprimand over misapplication of the rules for injunctive remedies.
Whether any of these parties can marshal the effort to escalate their victories to higher percentages (or offices) is not clear. But they might.
Unless everyone involved in those third parties or who might vote for them gives up because they won't get everything instantly, in which case it definitely won't happen. That's absolutely certain.
Getting real change isn't easy. Virtually nothing worthwhile is. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Just means you've gotta work for it.
you don't have to be a sociopathic libertarian to know that in the era of aging populations there will never be enough money for hc. The First World simply sweeps the problem under the rug with deficits.
The US's problems with healthcare spending were (and still are) entirely out of proportion with respect to everyone else's. When you're spending approximately double what anyone else is (as a proportion of GDP) and not getting particularly great outcomes for it, something's got to give. (I've also seen comments on slashdot which said that healthcare was being used to create effective indentured servitude; that's Just Plain Wrong if it is true.) Moving towards a universal healthcare system at least starts to align everyone's interests again, and encourage the use of healthcare solutions that reduce costs rather than increasing them.
The rising costs associated with an aging population are best addressed by requiring people to work longer; if the boomers were to retire at 70, there'd be much less of a problem as they'd be net paying in for much larger proportion of their lives. (OTOH, I can understand why this would be unpopular...)
It could have been even funnier if one of your colleagues marked it without realising before you saw it!
To be honest, I forget whether it was myself or one of my colleagues who first saw this paper. The plagiarism was really obvious; it was a truly incompetent hack job that cribbed without citation from quite a few important papers in the field, and the student didn't even bother to make the formatting styles consistent. The indentation and font changed between paragraphs. Anyone knowledgeable enough to mark the subject on which the paper was supposed to be would have given similar marks.
But the big fat zero for plagiarism would still beat the outright negative for the original parts of the paper, which managed to be wrong in every way I can conceive of, sufficiently so that I could be sure it was original. The depth of lack of understanding (let alone ability) was profound. Before you ask, the rest of the class had no real problems producing reasonable work. Heck, the other times we've run the course even students who failed it did far better than this one guy; he was that stand-out bad. Sometimes, you've got to just fail someone utterly for the good of everyone else.
Considered from now, many years later, I'd guess that the part I'm angriest about is that he made it onto the course at all. He was a total waste of my time, time that could have been spent helping other students who did work and did try to understand and would have benefited from a little more guidance. (The work some of them did was amazing, and made me proud to have had some hand in teaching them.)
The real reason for censoring such proposed laws would be if they were offensive. Do you guys feel offended by all this yet?
I've been plagiarized once. This bitch had copied one of my articles I wrote in a Proceedings of a conference, with pictures and everything, and used it in an overview article. The worst part of it is that my professor didn't care about it. I'm still mad, and it happened 15 years ago.
I've had a student in a class plagiarize my own articles back at me. In retrospect it was both funny and sad, but at the time I was very exasperated that they could be that stupid. No, they didn't get a pass in the class. Nor did they get an opportunity to retake; their original work was even worse too, so much so that if they're reading here, I'd advise them to keep on plagiarizing instead of trying to have original thoughts.
I have no idea why a system with a nonzero probability of leaving people homeless and poor when they get old is considered to be better.
Because it stands to make a small number of people an absolutely astounding amount of money, and they're therefore prepared to spend a lot to persuade Congress and the regulators that the system we've actually got is a great idea against all fair evidence.
Mitt and Ann have said that they can't talk specifics, because that would give their critics a target.
But now, the main election campaign, is exactly the time for specifics, for criticism. By way of compensation, you get to be able to criticize the other candidate(s). Fair is fair.
Questioned about how [Ryan's] budget plan would work, he replied that they hadn't run the numbers on it.
Then it's not a budget plan, it's a collection of soundbites. Yes, the plan will be inaccurate — budget plans always are because of unpredictable events — but it's better with main finance to be able to say "this is what I think will happen, and here's why" than to go into an election with no idea at all.
Any government that operates the way a business does would execute the disabled at birth.
Much earlier, actually. Get those female workers back to their jobs instead of having them stop to mess around with bearing a child that you're going to eliminate. Being properly business-friendly means you have to have abortion allowed (even mandatory in some cases) until very late.
Also, you do NOT need calculus to program or be a software engineer.
You do NOT need Dykstra.
You do NOT need to know how to write a compiler.
Unless the problem domain that the software is being created to deal with does require those sorts of things. If you're doing physics modeling, you really do need calculus. If you're building a compiler (hey, someone's gotta do it!) then you'd better know about the theory behind it. (I've seen "compilers" done by people with no grounding; that's not an experience I wish to repeat.) Of course, that's also true if you're working with financial software, where knowing what is going on in finance calculations is really important, and I know from talking to people doing image processing that (mathematical) analysis is a super-useful skill there. There's lots of programming that doesn't need parallel systems theory, or deep knowledge of security, but I've always found them useful for what I do.
The short version: it all depends on what you're doing.
There is a place for highly trained CS experts and that is working on the large scale and challenging problems. It really is a waste of everyone's time to have them working on simple programs that can be adequately by people with far less training.
The other way of making use of those sorts of talents is to be working on small problems, but with very short timescales. Yes, the Indians might be cheaper per hour, but the local expert will give you a solution to your problem this week instead of in 6 months plus however long it took to negotiate the contract. That's a very important difference, and people who aren't on site will always find themselves at a disadvantage in that sense.
I think GP is referring to Java, where a Vector is a lot slower than an ArrayList, but is guaranteed to be threadsafe.
Except it isn't. It's guaranteed that the individual method calls are thread-safe, but not that any composite operation is. It's far better to manage that sort of thing yourself as that lets you put exactly the sorts of locks in that you require (and avoid the cost of locking where you don't need it, which is virtually everywhere in most code).
Perhaps a better example would have been this lie: 1/2 == 0 (or its more insidious cousin, 1/3.0, which starts a programmer out in life with a numerical error in addition to a type they did not actually want).
Your choices are to use a rational datatype (which is OK until you need transcendental functions, when you're stuck) or a mantissa+exponent datatype (of which the usual IEEE float or double are just examples) or an unbounded-precision type (numerically exceptionally complicated). For scientific and engineering applications, where you only really have a limited number of digits of accuracy in your input data anyway, the IEEE floating point number system is a really good choice, and it has the advantage of being commonly implemented in hardware. That's not suitable for all applications — finance usually works better with integral counts of small units — but then why would we expect the same things to be perfect everywhere? (Also, 1/2==0 is just a type error, if that's unexpected at all.)
The thing is, it is not all attributable to efficiencies (although diesel's higher compression ratios do help in that regard). Diesel averages much longer-chain hydrocarbons and thus has a higher ratio of higher-energy C-C bonds to lower energy C-H bonds per gallon, and thus has more energy per gallon. This also means more CO2 per gallon. So you can't really compare MPG between gas and diesel engines. Us nerds would prefer to see kilometers per kilojoule for a better comparison, but we probably won't.
The way you jump around between different units trying to prove your point is painful to see; there's no intellectual solidity to it and it makes you look shifty. Stop that! You'd be far better off thinking in terms of "dollars per mile"; cuts right through all the crap to what most people really care about. The only tricky thing about it is that fuel prices change over time, but the comparisons still mostly work if the relative ratios of costs stay similar. Similarly, if you're going to talk about CO2 emissions, the most sensible unit is probably average grams-of-CO2 (or converted equivalent) per unit distance, because the distances that people drive are relatively unaffected by what sort of fuel they use. Of course, using these measures might indicate that your prejudices are wrong and that perhaps you should reconsider. Or maybe not. Your arguments are so all over the place it is hard to say for sure; that's the main thing you've got to fix.
One real advantage of diesel though is its higher energy density; you definitely can go further between filling up (given that you can't have arbitrarily large fuel tanks on your car, whatever you put in them). For me, that means I only fill up once every two weeks or so when driving in the area near home, or once for a substantial (all-day) long-distance high-speed drive.
The lack of iPod control breaks a huge amount of functionality in things that aren't easily swapped out (ie, cars).
It's simple! All you have to do is switch your car to a new Apple-approved Lightning-enabled one! It's a cheap one-off alteration that will only cost a substantial multiple of the iPhone 5 cost, so get to it! After all, you wouldn't want to be seen without your iPhone. (Meanwhile, the lack of compatibility with your car is a safety feature that prevents you from getting lost while following driving directions from the new mapping app. Apple: always thinking of you.)
If you actually want the answer to this question, then it's "the courts of law"
More specifically, in the UK, a magistrate or a jury
Even more specifically, it's either a jury or a panel of three magistrates and the latter only for cases with a normal maximum penalty of 6 months imprisonment for adults, or 2 years for juveniles; jury trials are always presided over by a judge. (There's also a set of rules for how to deal with awkward cases around the boundary where the trial is held in magistrates courts and where a crown court handles sentencing. They're relatively rare though, being for cases where there's an unusual number of aggravating factors.)
Both... To get elected in America, you either need lots of $$$ or the backing of one of the two major political parties, hence $$$. The primary system in most states ensures that only candidates who can successfully pander to about 0.5% of the population (die hard party loyalists) ever make it on to the ballot for the general election. So it is often the case that you either need to be exceedingly ignorant, or a very good liar in order to get nominated.
Explain why a free association of individuals — a political party — should have to listen to anyone outside themselves to select a candidate from among their number to propose as a candidate for public office. I cannot see a reason for anyone other than party members to have a choice. The problem comes when a party feels able to put up a candidate that is not the best possible without the risk of some other group putting up a better candidate who will win instead. When you have that, you've got a one-party state in microcosm, and the loons and crooks take over. (Alas, sometimes you get a place where the nutjobs represent their constituents perfectly, but hey, that's democracy for you.)