One of the essays Brian Leiter has in Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy is a survey of various predictive theories of jurisprudence. Referring to this overview in his entry on realism in legal philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he remarks that "The best social-scientific accounts of adjudication, for example, boast predictive success that is so feeble (better than coin-tosses, but not much!) that their explanatory models, with their implicit concepts of law, earn no epistemic credence."
Or, put another way, what we're looking for is not the sort of correlation that emerges from sheer chance given the constraints of the system. What we're looking for a correlation that is higher than what a coin flip would determine. And it seems that, presently, there is no predictive theory of law can do that with any significant degree of certainty.
Also, as I mentioned in a reply to someone else, looking only at the cases that go before SCOTUS is a bit misleading. One has to look at all the cases that SCOTUS considers hearing.
"It doesn't contradict the practical fact that judges are presumed to be bound by the principle of judicial restraint, they are taught the concept of judicial restraint in law school, and they consider themselves bound by the concept of judicial restraint."
Yet I've pointed out two judges, one a supreme court justice and the other an appellate court justice, that point blank say that, no, they don't consider themselves bound in that way. Rather than talking about what law students are taught in classrooms, what judges on the bench actually think seems far more pertinent to the question at hand.
You may not like the reasoning of Posner and Homes. (For that matter, I don't like it much either.) But what's interesting about their view is that it is the stated view of practicing judges. You can argue that such views are in the minority. (Probably not cogently, but an argument can certainly be made.) But, when it comes to brass tacks, and you look at the way that judges behave, I think Posner and Holmes describe the facts on the ground far better than the hypothetical situations covered in law school classes.
Now as to the $20 it costs to buy Posner's book, there is always the library. Posner is a fascinating author that brings up conundrums well worth considering even if you disagree with him. Alternatively, you could just use Google a bit to find things like a synopsis of a Lecture given by Posner where he details that the rise of the theory of judicial restraint was a relatively recent innovation (first clearly formulated in American jurisprudence in the late nineteenth century) and has largely come to be ignored.
You might like that link as it does give some space to the opposing view as the comments made by legal scholars after the lecture itself are described. But I think the comment made by Dean Kramer who mostly agreed with Posner is the most telling, "both sides still adhere to the doctrine of judicial restraint when it serves their ends: for examples, conservatives believe judges should be restrained in entitlement and civil rights cases, liberals tend to think judges should be restrained in economic matters." In other words, everyone believes in legal restraint when it suits their purposes and no one believes in it when it doesn't.
First, I don't think that the cases that the court votes to hear comprises the sum total of "coin flips." SCOTUS also votes on whether to hear cases. So the body of "coin flips" is far larger than 82.
Second, even were that not the case, there is still the fact that we're dealing with lawsuits that have been decided which have been appealed. So it isn't like 82 coin flips taken at random. It's the results of 82 coin flips taken from a particular pool of coin flips. So for the clusters of flips where all nine justices agreed to have meaning, you first have to control for the system biases that produced the cases over which the flips were made.
Moreover, there are a number of studies about empirical outcomes of judges' decisions. Admittedly, most do not focus on SCOTUS. But, so far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no study that has any predictive theory that is better than chance.
That's one interpretation. Some legal positivists acknowledge that judges have latitude to create law within the "penumbra." Most legal positivists, and all legal realists, argue that such a formulation doesn't go far enough.
Samuel Chase is an interesting attempt at a counter example of the limits of judges constructing law given that (a) it's entirely irrelevant because it doesn't deal with Congress impeaching a judge for constructing law but for being biased in the application of law and (b) impeachable offenses are basically whatever Congress decides are impeachable offenses. Congress could vote to impeach because a justice ate a ham salad sandwich if they wanted to.
Your reaction is pretty standard. You're like a kid that has first heard the words "Santa Claus isn't Real."
But, seriously, read what judges and legal scholars are writing about the law. Start with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s The Path of the Law and then go on to Richard Posner's How Judges Think.
"A judge doesn't "create" law. They interpret it."
You haven't read much in the way of legal theory, have you?
Outside of the most conservative legal theories, such as classical legal positivism and natural law theory, few legal scholars would object to the idea that judges create law. Some would say that judges should be careful not to give the appearance of creating law because such an appearance might lead the masses to object. But, for the most part, the dispute between various legal philosophies is not over whether or not judges create laws but the extent to which judges are justified in creating law.
Go back to the late 1800s and read Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s essay "The Path of the Law." You can find it online quite easily. In it he advances the most extreme version of a legal philosophy that thinks that judges create law. His view, legal positivism, is that law is nothing more than a prediction of how judges will rule. If you don't think something over 100 years old is still relevant, go read any of the essays or books by appellate court justice Richard Posner who advocates a very similar legal philosophy.
Scholars who oppose the theory of Holmes and Posner generally only oppose the extent to which they take the theory. They argue not that judges do not create law but the extent to which they create law is small and well circumscribed by legislation and precedent.
Where does the law state that judges are supposed to separate their own bias on the one hand from the facts at hand, legislation, etcetera on the other?
As early as the late nineteenth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was arguing that the law was nothing other than a prediction of how judges will rule and that legislation was nothing more than one input among others to what law is.
The idea that judges should exercise judicial restraint only follows from a specific ideology and its particular understanding of what law is. It has no foundation in legislation or in the US Constitution. The best legal foundation for that principle is the idea of common law which, in the present day, is disputable as a significant input to the law.
Now, not all legal ideologies are extreme as the legal realism of Holmes. But few entertain the idea that judges are necessarily bound by judicial restraint. The closest you'll find to something of that sort is the ideology of legal positivists like Joseph Raz and HLA Hart that hypothesize something along the lines of a "rule of recognition" and observe that judges ought to be somewhat conservative in order that the masses will continue to see the law as valid and binding.
Few legal theories accept legislation as written by legislators as anything more than an "input" to the law. The most extreme version is Legal Realism championed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Richard Posner. In their view, law is nothing other than a prediction of how judges will rule. To predict how judges will rule, you do have to take into consideration the law as written. This is why legislation is an "input" to the law rather than the law itself.
Determining how often, if at all, particular judges will use ideology as an "input" to the law, then, is little different from determining how particular judges will view precedent, etcetera.
Granted, most legal theories aren't as extreme or as blunt as Legal Realism. But virtually none outside of a the classical form of legal positivism take legislation as "the law."
Unlike Friedman and Milton (who actually agree on more macroeconomic issues than the disagree over), judges frequently have completely different ideas on what law is.
To mention just a few positions:
legal realism: law is nothing more than the prediction of how judges will rule (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Richard Posner, etc.)
classical legal positivism: law is nothing more than the commands of a sovereign (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill)
modern legal positivism: law is what emerges out of a professional legal class (legislators, judges, lawyers, police, etc.) which are accepted by the citizenry in general as the makers of the law (HLA Hart, Joseph Raz)
natural law: law is a human implementation of a transcendent moral code (Lon Fuller, John Finnis)
And that doesn't even get into the question of interpretations of how to interpret the law. The question of how to interpret the law can only be considered once one determines what it is that the law is.
So, yes, it is surprising that there is any sort of correlation. I've not looked at the Supreme Court level, but in general, the best "scientific" studies that have tried to find any patterns in legal rulings have successful prediction rates that are indistinguishable from chance.
From "The Path of the Law" in Harvard Law Review volume 10 (1897).
When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession. We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court. The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.
In other words, law is nothing more than a prediction of how judges will rule.
"If they are selling something at a loss then that probably means they are engaging in illegal anti-competitive behavior like dumping."
No such probabilities are implied by selling below cost in and of itself. If they were, every console maker save Nintendo would be in the dock for the first three to five years of production.
Dumping, unless I'm mistaken, requires intent to drive competitors out of business. Plenty of companies routinely sell low margin devices at below cost in order to make the brand as a whole more popular and, hence, more desirable. And, big ticket items, are often sold below cost for the prestige they bring. Unless a competitor can demonstrate harm because Sony sells some products below cost, there is no real case for dumping.
I think that is the correct interpretation. The key is that the statement occurs in the context of talking about Sony's four divisions that ALL make screens of one sort or the other (TV, computer, tablet, phone). So when he says that they lose money on each television that "we ALL make", he's referring to the fact that not leveraging R&D, fixed assets, etc., is costing them money.
That's kind of what I thought at first, but then I went back to re-read. Context is everything. Stringer is speaking about Sony's TV, tablet, computer, and mobile units. (The last of these will only happen when the Erickson acquisition is finalized.)
When he says "Every TV set we all make loses money" what he's referring to is the fact that (a) Sony is not leveraging R&D costs between its different units even though they are all making products that are identical in some ways and (b) Sony is running into additional marginal costs per unit manufactured because tablet, TV, phone, and computer users aren't using a single Sony manufactured screen but 4 different screens, one for each device.
A for-profit company needs to make money but they don't need to make money on every product. If people that buy Sony TVs are more likely to buy Sony blue ray players and/or PS3s, then Sony may very well be making money because they build TVs which they sell at a loss.
That said, as others have mentioned, Sony is probably referring to the loss of "potential money that they could be making" if they were using a different model on their TVs such as negotiating with Hulu and Netflix to embed clients if they get a small fraction of the subscription fees for new subscribers that sign up through the TV.
Actually, in context, it does have two disjointed meanings: 'universe' as in the product that Lego is discontinuing vs. 'universe' as in the aggregate of everything that is.
Not a great pun, mind you, but a pun nevertheless.
The computational cost of filling a 5, 7 or 10 inch screen for a mobile device with a photo-realistic image is far smaller than doing the same for a twenty foot tall movie screen.
Even if your mobile device gets plugged into an HDTV, it's still nowhere near the same problem that Hollywood faces creating output that will be shown in theaters with basketball court sized screens with the front row ten feet away.
Phillips: I showed him some first phase renders of the Initial beehive concepts and asked him his opinion in general about the idea.
Beekeeper: It is actually not a bad idea. It is kind of an existing product for beekeepers. It is a one hive system in a glass box and they use it for educational purposes. Also as a show element in markets and so on to promote their products and increase awareness for the bees and beekeeping. These are not suitable for honey production in a large scale. Neither sustainable on the long run due to the low mass of bees.
It may also help to understand the way in which Phillips is pushing ideas like this. They're an exploration of ideas more than attempts to bring products to market.
The Design Probe projects carried out by Philips Design are part of a wider Philips strategy aimed at improving the innovation hit rate. While it is not intended that design concepts coming out of the Probes program are translated to marketable solutions, insights gained from debate around the concepts feed into future innovation for the company.
On the one hand, the interface that one finds intuitive is the interface that one has already been trained to use. Once experienced with one interface, any new interface takes effort to learn and, on that level, is less intuitive.
That said, some interfaces just feel more natural for most people. There are some interfaces that I've tried over the years that, even before I was experienced with them, just felt natural. Examples include OS/2's Workplace Shell, the Window Maker window manager, and iOS (on the iPad).
There is that, but the social engineering element exists whether the automated system is in place or not. Say there is a manual lever that opens all jail cells at once in one prison and a fully automated computerized system in another. In the first prison, the guard on duty, gets the text message (or phone call, or signed order) and hits the lever, opening all the doors. In the second prison, the guard on duty, gets the text message (or phone call, or signed order) and clicks a button with a mouse, opening all the doors. The only way to eliminate social engineering from the equation is to eliminate any sort of manual override from the computerized system. And I can't imagine that anything might possibly go wrong with a prison with cells which no human agent can open.
But what the second system adds to the equation is that the fully automated computerized system is now also vulnerable to digital attacks whether they come through back doors hidden by the vendor, trojans spread either through sneakernet or the Internet, viruses, bugs, etcetera.
. . . the point, from a security perspective, is that if such things can happen because of machine or user error, then they can also be made to happen intentionally by an attacker. And, if it was machine error, that suggests than a would be attacker will be able to duplicate the error condition entirely computationally with no need for human interaction.
Unless you're talking about a single cell in a municipal jail in some small town somewhere, I'm highly dubious that any serious vendor is offering a SCADA system for jail cells on the order of $20k for installation and an annual support contract of $400.
One prisoner picking a lock or duplicating a key is not that large of a problem in most prisons.
The door to every cell at the same time while controls tell the guy in the guard booth that everything is fine is a problem in most prisons. The dangers presented by automation is some systems is orders of magnitude greater than the dangers presented by un-automated processes given the same level of effort by an attacker.
Or, alternatively, NASA has such a small budget because the real (and undisclosed) space budget goes to the top secret military space program rather than the mostly open civilian space program.
Unless the prosecutor decides to pursue first degree felony charges, the statute of limitations has indeed run out.
Ten Years: Injury to a child, elderly individual, or disabled individual punishable as a felony of the first degree under Section 22.04, Penal Code; Five Years: Injury to a child, elderly individual, or disabled individual that is not punishable as a felony of the first degree under Section 22.04, Penal Code;
Just like the end of Prohibition ended the hold that organized crime had cities like Chicago and New York?
The cartels have already made their money and amassed large amounts of capital. If they lose one source of income (the drug trade) they'll simply re-focus on other sources of income (kidnappings, protection rackets, etc.) and, thanks to the war on drugs, they'll have the resources to do it.
While drug policy is one of the few issues I happen to take a libertarian stance on, I think we need to go into the debate with our eyes wide open. Decriminalizing drugs may decrease drug related violence from the cartels, but we can expect a veritable explosion of violence in other areas as the cartels broaden the way that they make money. So, at least in the short term, things are likely to stay the same or even get worse on the violence front.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the essays Brian Leiter has in Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy is a survey of various predictive theories of jurisprudence. Referring to this overview in his entry on realism in legal philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he remarks that "The best social-scientific accounts of adjudication, for example, boast predictive success that is so feeble (better than coin-tosses, but not much!) that their explanatory models, with their implicit concepts of law, earn no epistemic credence."
Or, put another way, what we're looking for is not the sort of correlation that emerges from sheer chance given the constraints of the system. What we're looking for a correlation that is higher than what a coin flip would determine. And it seems that, presently, there is no predictive theory of law can do that with any significant degree of certainty.
Also, as I mentioned in a reply to someone else, looking only at the cases that go before SCOTUS is a bit misleading. One has to look at all the cases that SCOTUS considers hearing.
"It doesn't contradict the practical fact that judges are presumed to be bound by the principle of judicial restraint, they are taught the concept of judicial restraint in law school, and they consider themselves bound by the concept of judicial restraint."
Yet I've pointed out two judges, one a supreme court justice and the other an appellate court justice, that point blank say that, no, they don't consider themselves bound in that way. Rather than talking about what law students are taught in classrooms, what judges on the bench actually think seems far more pertinent to the question at hand.
You may not like the reasoning of Posner and Homes. (For that matter, I don't like it much either.) But what's interesting about their view is that it is the stated view of practicing judges. You can argue that such views are in the minority. (Probably not cogently, but an argument can certainly be made.) But, when it comes to brass tacks, and you look at the way that judges behave, I think Posner and Holmes describe the facts on the ground far better than the hypothetical situations covered in law school classes.
Now as to the $20 it costs to buy Posner's book, there is always the library. Posner is a fascinating author that brings up conundrums well worth considering even if you disagree with him. Alternatively, you could just use Google a bit to find things like a synopsis of a Lecture given by Posner where he details that the rise of the theory of judicial restraint was a relatively recent innovation (first clearly formulated in American jurisprudence in the late nineteenth century) and has largely come to be ignored.
You might like that link as it does give some space to the opposing view as the comments made by legal scholars after the lecture itself are described. But I think the comment made by Dean Kramer who mostly agreed with Posner is the most telling, "both sides still adhere to the doctrine of judicial restraint when it serves their ends: for examples, conservatives believe judges should be restrained in entitlement and civil rights cases, liberals tend to think judges should be restrained in economic matters." In other words, everyone believes in legal restraint when it suits their purposes and no one believes in it when it doesn't.
I can't quite buy your analogy.
First, I don't think that the cases that the court votes to hear comprises the sum total of "coin flips." SCOTUS also votes on whether to hear cases. So the body of "coin flips" is far larger than 82.
Second, even were that not the case, there is still the fact that we're dealing with lawsuits that have been decided which have been appealed. So it isn't like 82 coin flips taken at random. It's the results of 82 coin flips taken from a particular pool of coin flips. So for the clusters of flips where all nine justices agreed to have meaning, you first have to control for the system biases that produced the cases over which the flips were made.
Moreover, there are a number of studies about empirical outcomes of judges' decisions. Admittedly, most do not focus on SCOTUS. But, so far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no study that has any predictive theory that is better than chance.
That's one interpretation. Some legal positivists acknowledge that judges have latitude to create law within the "penumbra." Most legal positivists, and all legal realists, argue that such a formulation doesn't go far enough.
Samuel Chase is an interesting attempt at a counter example of the limits of judges constructing law given that (a) it's entirely irrelevant because it doesn't deal with Congress impeaching a judge for constructing law but for being biased in the application of law and (b) impeachable offenses are basically whatever Congress decides are impeachable offenses. Congress could vote to impeach because a justice ate a ham salad sandwich if they wanted to.
Your reaction is pretty standard. You're like a kid that has first heard the words "Santa Claus isn't Real."
But, seriously, read what judges and legal scholars are writing about the law. Start with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s The Path of the Law and then go on to Richard Posner's How Judges Think.
"A judge doesn't "create" law. They interpret it."
You haven't read much in the way of legal theory, have you?
Outside of the most conservative legal theories, such as classical legal positivism and natural law theory, few legal scholars would object to the idea that judges create law. Some would say that judges should be careful not to give the appearance of creating law because such an appearance might lead the masses to object. But, for the most part, the dispute between various legal philosophies is not over whether or not judges create laws but the extent to which judges are justified in creating law.
Go back to the late 1800s and read Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s essay "The Path of the Law." You can find it online quite easily. In it he advances the most extreme version of a legal philosophy that thinks that judges create law. His view, legal positivism, is that law is nothing more than a prediction of how judges will rule. If you don't think something over 100 years old is still relevant, go read any of the essays or books by appellate court justice Richard Posner who advocates a very similar legal philosophy.
Scholars who oppose the theory of Holmes and Posner generally only oppose the extent to which they take the theory. They argue not that judges do not create law but the extent to which they create law is small and well circumscribed by legislation and precedent.
Where does the law state that judges are supposed to separate their own bias on the one hand from the facts at hand, legislation, etcetera on the other?
As early as the late nineteenth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was arguing that the law was nothing other than a prediction of how judges will rule and that legislation was nothing more than one input among others to what law is.
The idea that judges should exercise judicial restraint only follows from a specific ideology and its particular understanding of what law is. It has no foundation in legislation or in the US Constitution. The best legal foundation for that principle is the idea of common law which, in the present day, is disputable as a significant input to the law.
Now, not all legal ideologies are extreme as the legal realism of Holmes. But few entertain the idea that judges are necessarily bound by judicial restraint. The closest you'll find to something of that sort is the ideology of legal positivists like Joseph Raz and HLA Hart that hypothesize something along the lines of a "rule of recognition" and observe that judges ought to be somewhat conservative in order that the masses will continue to see the law as valid and binding.
And what is the law?
Few legal theories accept legislation as written by legislators as anything more than an "input" to the law. The most extreme version is Legal Realism championed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Richard Posner. In their view, law is nothing other than a prediction of how judges will rule. To predict how judges will rule, you do have to take into consideration the law as written. This is why legislation is an "input" to the law rather than the law itself.
Determining how often, if at all, particular judges will use ideology as an "input" to the law, then, is little different from determining how particular judges will view precedent, etcetera.
Granted, most legal theories aren't as extreme or as blunt as Legal Realism. But virtually none outside of a the classical form of legal positivism take legislation as "the law."
Unlike Friedman and Milton (who actually agree on more macroeconomic issues than the disagree over), judges frequently have completely different ideas on what law is.
To mention just a few positions:
And that doesn't even get into the question of interpretations of how to interpret the law. The question of how to interpret the law can only be considered once one determines what it is that the law is.
So, yes, it is surprising that there is any sort of correlation. I've not looked at the Supreme Court level, but in general, the best "scientific" studies that have tried to find any patterns in legal rulings have successful prediction rates that are indistinguishable from chance.
From "The Path of the Law" in Harvard Law Review volume 10 (1897).
In other words, law is nothing more than a prediction of how judges will rule.
"If they are selling something at a loss then that probably means they are engaging in illegal anti-competitive behavior like dumping."
No such probabilities are implied by selling below cost in and of itself. If they were, every console maker save Nintendo would be in the dock for the first three to five years of production.
Dumping, unless I'm mistaken, requires intent to drive competitors out of business. Plenty of companies routinely sell low margin devices at below cost in order to make the brand as a whole more popular and, hence, more desirable. And, big ticket items, are often sold below cost for the prestige they bring. Unless a competitor can demonstrate harm because Sony sells some products below cost, there is no real case for dumping.
I think that is the correct interpretation. The key is that the statement occurs in the context of talking about Sony's four divisions that ALL make screens of one sort or the other (TV, computer, tablet, phone). So when he says that they lose money on each television that "we ALL make", he's referring to the fact that not leveraging R&D, fixed assets, etc., is costing them money.
That's kind of what I thought at first, but then I went back to re-read. Context is everything. Stringer is speaking about Sony's TV, tablet, computer, and mobile units. (The last of these will only happen when the Erickson acquisition is finalized.)
When he says "Every TV set we all make loses money" what he's referring to is the fact that (a) Sony is not leveraging R&D costs between its different units even though they are all making products that are identical in some ways and (b) Sony is running into additional marginal costs per unit manufactured because tablet, TV, phone, and computer users aren't using a single Sony manufactured screen but 4 different screens, one for each device.
A for-profit company needs to make money but they don't need to make money on every product. If people that buy Sony TVs are more likely to buy Sony blue ray players and/or PS3s, then Sony may very well be making money because they build TVs which they sell at a loss.
That said, as others have mentioned, Sony is probably referring to the loss of "potential money that they could be making" if they were using a different model on their TVs such as negotiating with Hulu and Netflix to embed clients if they get a small fraction of the subscription fees for new subscribers that sign up through the TV.
Actually, in context, it does have two disjointed meanings: 'universe' as in the product that Lego is discontinuing vs. 'universe' as in the aggregate of everything that is.
Not a great pun, mind you, but a pun nevertheless.
The computational cost of filling a 5, 7 or 10 inch screen for a mobile device with a photo-realistic image is far smaller than doing the same for a twenty foot tall movie screen.
Even if your mobile device gets plugged into an HDTV, it's still nowhere near the same problem that Hollywood faces creating output that will be shown in theaters with basketball court sized screens with the front row ten feet away.
In an interview with a beekeeper:
http://www.design.philips.com/shared/assets/design_assets/pdf/portfolio/qa_beehive.pdf
It may also help to understand the way in which Phillips is pushing ideas like this. They're an exploration of ideas more than attempts to bring products to market.
http://www.design.philips.com/about/design/designportfolio/design_futures/design_probes/index.page
On the one hand, the interface that one finds intuitive is the interface that one has already been trained to use. Once experienced with one interface, any new interface takes effort to learn and, on that level, is less intuitive.
That said, some interfaces just feel more natural for most people. There are some interfaces that I've tried over the years that, even before I was experienced with them, just felt natural. Examples include OS/2's Workplace Shell, the Window Maker window manager, and iOS (on the iPad).
There is that, but the social engineering element exists whether the automated system is in place or not. Say there is a manual lever that opens all jail cells at once in one prison and a fully automated computerized system in another. In the first prison, the guard on duty, gets the text message (or phone call, or signed order) and hits the lever, opening all the doors. In the second prison, the guard on duty, gets the text message (or phone call, or signed order) and clicks a button with a mouse, opening all the doors. The only way to eliminate social engineering from the equation is to eliminate any sort of manual override from the computerized system. And I can't imagine that anything might possibly go wrong with a prison with cells which no human agent can open.
But what the second system adds to the equation is that the fully automated computerized system is now also vulnerable to digital attacks whether they come through back doors hidden by the vendor, trojans spread either through sneakernet or the Internet, viruses, bugs, etcetera.
. . . the point, from a security perspective, is that if such things can happen because of machine or user error, then they can also be made to happen intentionally by an attacker. And, if it was machine error, that suggests than a would be attacker will be able to duplicate the error condition entirely computationally with no need for human interaction.
Unless you're talking about a single cell in a municipal jail in some small town somewhere, I'm highly dubious that any serious vendor is offering a SCADA system for jail cells on the order of $20k for installation and an annual support contract of $400.
One prisoner picking a lock or duplicating a key is not that large of a problem in most prisons.
The door to every cell at the same time while controls tell the guy in the guard booth that everything is fine is a problem in most prisons. The dangers presented by automation is some systems is orders of magnitude greater than the dangers presented by un-automated processes given the same level of effort by an attacker.
Or, alternatively, NASA has such a small budget because the real (and undisclosed) space budget goes to the top secret military space program rather than the mostly open civilian space program.
Did you read that link?
Unless the prosecutor decides to pursue first degree felony charges, the statute of limitations has indeed run out.
Just like the end of Prohibition ended the hold that organized crime had cities like Chicago and New York?
The cartels have already made their money and amassed large amounts of capital. If they lose one source of income (the drug trade) they'll simply re-focus on other sources of income (kidnappings, protection rackets, etc.) and, thanks to the war on drugs, they'll have the resources to do it.
While drug policy is one of the few issues I happen to take a libertarian stance on, I think we need to go into the debate with our eyes wide open. Decriminalizing drugs may decrease drug related violence from the cartels, but we can expect a veritable explosion of violence in other areas as the cartels broaden the way that they make money. So, at least in the short term, things are likely to stay the same or even get worse on the violence front.