I know I said in the past that I would buy one when Western Digital started making them
I know, I'm waiting for Boeing to start making automobiles. Toyotas just aren't reliable enough;p
Sorry, I just couldn't resist. I personally think you are better off with an Intel SSD, since intel has experience with chips. WD might know how to make a good spinning disk, but AFAIK they don't own a single chip fab.
I assumed that the post was a sarcastic critique of the decision to buy foreign-made parts for the new bridge. I was just pointing out that the most famous bridge in CA was also built outside of the local economy.
Jelly Bean? I can't even run full ICS! Samsung is closed-source on all the drivers for my "open" Android phone. You can install ICS, but you get no video acceleration or camera - and other quirks like the face sensor and the accelerometers not working properly (or at all). It's a fun geek toy, but honestly you could load not-quite-functioning Android even on the iPhone. (To be fair, that project seems to have stalled recently.)
I do not want the extra bit of theoretical safety if it means I have to give up gobs of freedom and control over my equipment to have it.
And I do not want your feeling of freedom over your equipment to come at the expense of thousands of lives. By the way, you already don't have complete freedom over your equipment. You are required to wear a safety belt. You are required to have working safety equipment. You must have safe tires and sufficient brakes. You even have your emissions regulated. These are all measures to improve the health and safety of the population at the expense of your freedom over your equipment.
Our system is fairly safe today
It is horrifyingly unsafe. More than 30,000 just in the US die every year! This is a huge improvement over the past, but it is an amazing death toll. We, as a society, would never tolerate such a death toll in any war... the Iraq war killed under 5000 Americans in 8 years. Meanwhile, over 250,000 died on the road.
It's common sense that hearing plays a large part in awareness.
I didn't say that cars should be completely sealed off from the environment, but it's not like an all-or-nothing principle applies here. I'd speculate that there is a threshold where soundproofing becomes unsafe... but without data I certainly wouldn't rip out all insulation. It should be a simple enough test to conduct. I suspect you really need to hear horns and sirens. I'm very suspicious of "common sense" when it applies to things hurtling at speeds way faster than our common sense evolved for. It's entirely possible that the lack of sound allows our brain to focus more - I have no idea without any study.
Ask anyone who drives professionally. They'll tell you that feedback is important.
You are talking about race cars. I've built a race car. It's totally different. Race cars operate at the limits of traction - it is important to feel the steering because you need to sense when the wheels are about to slip. If you are operating your road vehicle in those parameters, you need to turn in your license. Sure, there are emergency situations where some race training might help. But the vast majority of drivers have never felt their car start to slip and haven't had the luxury of track time to know what action to take when they do feel it. You have to spin out a whole bunch of times before you figure out how to counteract the slide. I'd say we are far better off with antilock brakes and traction control systems that take control away from an untrained driver. We could require all drivers to attend a race-style training, where they purposely put cars into uncontrolled situations. It would be expensive and probably give you marginal returns: most accidents are caused by distractions, excessive speeding, drunks, and aggressive driving - in that order. Rain (loss of traction) is 5th on the list, and yes, the course would probably help with that.
the solution the state uses for every trouble spot is to drop speed limits. they're financially motivated to do this,
Yes, in general, I agree that we don't have the right incentives in place for our governments. I think this is a more general problem than just roads... unfortunately we are too wrapped up in partisan politics to attack the problem.
LOL, I bet those people wish it was small claims court....
I could buy a class action like proceeding, preferably one where they automatically include the criminal court's findings before it even starts. By that time, the facts of the case have already been determined to a higher than necessary standard.
Yeah, that could actually work. And the cases that don't get picked up by the hungry lawyers probably don't have any potential for recovery, anyway.
The British did not try to reclaim the platform with force - he fired at a British buoy tender, which wisely retreated. The only two times the platform was stormed by force, it was privateers.
That's a great theory, except for two inconvenient facts: (a) Our army is all-volunteer. (b) Many poor people have little choice but to drive if they want to get to work.
I can't comment on your statistics, but generally, when 'studies' are published, they are insanely biased to push particular political agendas, so I take them with huge grains of salt.
We aren't talking about a centralized system - this article is about a distributed system.
We can't even automate our trains completely without catastrophic failures, so as far as safety goes, I still trust my situational awareness over that of a computer.
Trains are the safest transportation system we have today, so I'm not sure why you would use those as an example. In any case, almost all train accidents have been human in origin. Which makes sense, since most trains are controlled by humans. The automated train in DC had a big failure a few years ago - but that's the only big accident I can think of.
Risk is a fact of life.
Absolutely, but hurtling around at 75MPH in a piece of metal that we did not evolve to control is not a fact of life, and we can make sensible choices which reduce our risk of dying.
1. remove some of the sound insulation from the vehicles so that more road noise is let in. this will cause people to pay more attention to what's going on around them. 2. remove the cell towers along major highways. if cellphone performance is spotty enough, people just won't bother until they get where they're going. this is for the best. 3. have a license system that actually requires people to master basic driving skills and not just memorize a bunch of rules. 4. design the cars so that more feedback is given through the steering column and suspension. currently, the trend is the opposite.. 5. have speed limits that actually reflect the conditions of the road instead of the local municipalities' budget shortfalls. 6. actually fix the parts of the roads where the most accidents occur instead of reducing the speed limit. limiting speed only masks the issue.
We're getting a bit off-topic, but...
Do you have a study that shows 1 or 4 will actually work?
I think you are on to something with 2, though I suspect that the cell companies know whether you are on the road or not and could easily block calls if they find you are on the road.
3 seems reasonable, as does 5.
I don't think I understand 6. I'm all for improving roads if the cost-benefit is reasonable, but there's nothing wrong with keeping the speed limit lower (as you suggest in 5) if the conditions are too expensive to change.
The administration of the restitution would all come AFTER THE TRIAL IS OVER.
If you are talking restitution, I'm fine with that. Restitution is easy to calculate and was in fact done in this case. I suspect you meant to type compensation? In that case, it sounds like you are suggesting a purely administrative process to determine the amount of compensation. I think this deprives the convict of property without due process, and I do not think such a law would stand up to court scrutiny.
You can either have one judge one time sentence the defendant to restitution to the class that he wronged
Again, I'm assuming you meant "compensation".
One thing that might satisfy both of us is to automatically kick off a civil class action suit in cases where there are many victims. I still don't think there should be any significant amount of taxpayer money involved, and it might be very difficult to find lawyers who will take the case - the money is likely to never be recovered, after all.
Think about the math here: the guy sold 300 $575 parts that cost him some non-zero amount of money to manufacture and ship. At best, he made $17,100. The restitution then used the real part cost of over $700, so it was calculated at $210,000. I have no idea where that money went, but I suspect it doesn't exist, and probably renders our whole conversation moot:)
Meanwhile, I doubt a convicted felon serving time could appear in person for a few thousand small claims cases. How do you propose to deal with that?
I presume this is a solved problem. Many people are suing Bernie Madoff.
I have the opposite reaction. I think we are entirely too cavalier about the unbelievable human toll that our current reliance on human-guided cars takes. Tens of thousands die in the US every single year. Look at the way the country responds to something like war casualties at 1/10 the scale and ask if this situation makes any sense.
It's a fact that slowing down will always be correlated to safety. If cars creeped around at 1 MPH, almost no one would ever die. This technology will improve matters, no matter what is deemed "reasonable" or "appropriate".
By that measure, we can gain an order of magnitude in time efficiency by just setting all inmates free today.
That's different. I'm talking about the trial phase - where you are paying high-cost lawyers and investigators. Jail is nominally for convicted criminals and people too potentially dangerous to release on bail.
Errors afterward will be fewer since a single responsable party will be handling it rather than dozens of small claims court judges who learn about the whole debacle hours (at most) before rendering a decision.
Errors in civil courts don't put an entire criminal trial at risk on appeal.
The court fees paid for filing a small claim do not actually cover the costs, it's more like earnest money.
Yes, but court costs are fixed. You are paying for a judge and the support staff no matter which venue you use, criminal or civil. I'm talking about the cost of prosecution, defense, and investigations. Those are currently all borne by the plaintiff and defendant in civil court, and you are proposing shifting that to the taxpayers.
The judge then passes sentence which could include compensation.
You could certainly limit the compensation phase to a judge's prerogative.
Nonsense. The time overhead would be in the administration of the compensation once the sentence is rendered.
If you are going to make a criminal repay his victims, you sure as heck need to let him argue about the extent of the damages. Otherwise, you are simply stripping the convict of his current right to a civil trial. Restitution, as you point out, can sometimes closely resemble compensation - but it is much, much simpler to calculate, and only involves findings of fact during the criminal trial. You can't base compensation based on findings of fact alone, so you need to let the convict argue for the basis of compensation. This will require a lawyer.
This isn't about living the "little guy out to dry". The little guy was the victim of a scam - not a victim of the government. Are you really going to ask the government to repay every idiot who falls for a scam?
Time overhead after the trial is over is added to the total trial time. The point is you have people and other resources tied up longer on a case when they could be working on something else.
I see no reason at all it would be more error prone.
It adds complexity, which by definition will add errors unless you also do something to reduce the error rate.
When you balance the expense of thousands of civil cases (even small claims) against it, it's probably not more expensive.
Yes, but who bears the cost? Right now, the two parties. You are proposing that we shift this to the taxpayers.
I don't see why the payout would be lower unless the civil courts are overpaying.
Because in a criminal court you need a unanimous jury, whereas in civil courts you only need a majority.
Finally, what burden of defense? If compensation is ordered as part of the sentence, defense is over.
You need to provide a lawyer to the defendant if he cannot afford one. This is not the case in a civil court. The sentencing phase of the trial would get much more complicated, and so the people would need to pay for a defense lawyer for a much longer period of time than they do now.
Exactly my point. Restitution in fine - the criminal court judge uses the data that was collected anyway to include as part of the punishment. It is simple.
Compensation (what you are talking about) requires a lot more effort. You'd have to hire someone to track down all the victims, and to calculate the compensation due. This would all have to be done after the criminal trial (or else you risk spending the money for no reason), so it would delay sentencing. Sentencing would get more complicated - and with complexity comes more possibility for error and reversal on appeal. Sentencing would start to resemble a civil trial brought by the government, and so would require more work from the defense team as well. But since this is a criminal trial, you'd still have to get consensus from the jury, so the payouts would likely be less than at a civil trial. You'd also be on the hook for public defense, further driving costs up.
IMHO, this would give us a system that is: 1. Slower than the current criminal justice system. 2. More error-prone than the current criminal justice system. 3. More expensive that the current criminal justice system. 4. Lower payouts than the current civil court system. 5. Burden of paying for defense in compensation part of trial moves from the defendant to the people.
Sure, the benefit would be "automatic" compensation - but I don't think it would be worth it on balance.
By the way, restitution WAS paid out in this case. But it was $210,738, based not upon the number of victims but upon the number of airbags that were seized (300).
Restitution != compensation. Restitution is simple to calculate: how much did the defendant make while committing the crime. In the case of the airbags, if the defendant paid restitution it would be about $60, which wouldn't even cover the new inspection.
We did real work on computers slower than current low end smartphones less than 20 years ago.
Yeah, but it was different "real work" and it wasn't very efficient. For instance, CAD. Back then I could run a large-mesh (by today's standards) FEA on a part in about 4 hours on a very high-end HP unix workstation. Now, that same analysis would be done in a few seconds - so we run a much more thorough analysis and end up with a lighter, cheaper part, better part with a lot more iterations tested against it.
Data... a good digital oscilloscope 15 years ago would capture a fraction of the data that the same price point will capture today. Tools like MATLAB would hit serious memory issues with the data from 15 years ago in the few MB of RAM that PCs had available. Once you figured out a way to analyze the data on the limited hardware, it took a long time to chug through it all so you spent a lot of time breaking the tasks down into discrete parts so that debugging wasn't a complete nightmare. Modern instruments collect a staggering amount of data, and the comparatively limitless RAM in modern computers makes it much, much easier to run the data through MATLAB. The run time is also reduced to the point where I don't have to spend all that extra time optimizing. The visualizations in MATLAB are now interactive and render quickly, whereas something complex could take 45 minutes 15 or 20 years ago.
Software compilation. We used to have a SPARC on every programmer's desk, and they all were networked together so that builds could be distributed. Still, builds took hours. Often, we'd kick off a build overnight only to find the next morning that it hadn't been successful. There goes a day. Today, builds still take an hour or so - on a single machine. We don't even bother trying to distribute the jobs anymore, though the functionality is still there.
I understand that office programs and email were largely similar to the way they run on modern hardware - but that's not the only use of computers.
In that case, the cost is not worth it to society. You are talking about duplicating - not replacing - the infrastructure that is in place on the civil side. And presuming the government is acting as the victim's advocate, to make the process fair you would need a defense advocate. Then, as the victim's advocate, the government would need to do the same discovery that is currently required by you or your lawyers - which would of course mean hiring more lawyers and investigators. And these lawyers wouldn't be able to use hundreds of years of civil methodologies - they would need to adhere to criminal standards. It would be a staggering expansion of the criminal justice system.
I'm sorry, but I just can't get on board. If someone was not convicted by a unanimous jury, the victims would have no recourse. In the civil system, you only need a simple majority to win.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I said in the past that I would buy one when Western Digital started making them
I know, I'm waiting for Boeing to start making automobiles. Toyotas just aren't reliable enough ;p
Sorry, I just couldn't resist. I personally think you are better off with an Intel SSD, since intel has experience with chips. WD might know how to make a good spinning disk, but AFAIK they don't own a single chip fab.
Don't forget those blasted teenagers! Stay off my lawn!
I assumed that the post was a sarcastic critique of the decision to buy foreign-made parts for the new bridge. I was just pointing out that the most famous bridge in CA was also built outside of the local economy.
The Golden Gate Bridge was built in Pennsylvania. Not a foreign country, but the money was not exactly kept in the local economy.
Jelly Bean? I can't even run full ICS! Samsung is closed-source on all the drivers for my "open" Android phone. You can install ICS, but you get no video acceleration or camera - and other quirks like the face sensor and the accelerometers not working properly (or at all). It's a fun geek toy, but honestly you could load not-quite-functioning Android even on the iPhone. (To be fair, that project seems to have stalled recently.)
I do not want the extra bit of theoretical safety if it means I have to give up gobs of freedom and control over my equipment to have it.
And I do not want your feeling of freedom over your equipment to come at the expense of thousands of lives. By the way, you already don't have complete freedom over your equipment. You are required to wear a safety belt. You are required to have working safety equipment. You must have safe tires and sufficient brakes. You even have your emissions regulated. These are all measures to improve the health and safety of the population at the expense of your freedom over your equipment.
Our system is fairly safe today
It is horrifyingly unsafe. More than 30,000 just in the US die every year! This is a huge improvement over the past, but it is an amazing death toll. We, as a society, would never tolerate such a death toll in any war... the Iraq war killed under 5000 Americans in 8 years. Meanwhile, over 250,000 died on the road.
It's common sense that hearing plays a large part in awareness.
I didn't say that cars should be completely sealed off from the environment, but it's not like an all-or-nothing principle applies here. I'd speculate that there is a threshold where soundproofing becomes unsafe... but without data I certainly wouldn't rip out all insulation. It should be a simple enough test to conduct. I suspect you really need to hear horns and sirens. I'm very suspicious of "common sense" when it applies to things hurtling at speeds way faster than our common sense evolved for. It's entirely possible that the lack of sound allows our brain to focus more - I have no idea without any study.
Ask anyone who drives professionally. They'll tell you that feedback is important.
You are talking about race cars. I've built a race car. It's totally different. Race cars operate at the limits of traction - it is important to feel the steering because you need to sense when the wheels are about to slip. If you are operating your road vehicle in those parameters, you need to turn in your license. Sure, there are emergency situations where some race training might help. But the vast majority of drivers have never felt their car start to slip and haven't had the luxury of track time to know what action to take when they do feel it. You have to spin out a whole bunch of times before you figure out how to counteract the slide. I'd say we are far better off with antilock brakes and traction control systems that take control away from an untrained driver. We could require all drivers to attend a race-style training, where they purposely put cars into uncontrolled situations. It would be expensive and probably give you marginal returns: most accidents are caused by distractions, excessive speeding, drunks, and aggressive driving - in that order. Rain (loss of traction) is 5th on the list, and yes, the course would probably help with that.
the solution the state uses for every trouble spot is to drop speed limits. they're financially motivated to do this,
Yes, in general, I agree that we don't have the right incentives in place for our governments. I think this is a more general problem than just roads... unfortunately we are too wrapped up in partisan politics to attack the problem.
In small claims court?
LOL, I bet those people wish it was small claims court....
I could buy a class action like proceeding, preferably one where they automatically include the criminal court's findings before it even starts. By that time, the facts of the case have already been determined to a higher than necessary standard.
Yeah, that could actually work. And the cases that don't get picked up by the hungry lawyers probably don't have any potential for recovery, anyway.
The British did not try to reclaim the platform with force - he fired at a British buoy tender, which wisely retreated. The only two times the platform was stormed by force, it was privateers.
That's a great theory, except for two inconvenient facts:
(a) Our army is all-volunteer.
(b) Many poor people have little choice but to drive if they want to get to work.
I can't comment on your statistics, but generally, when 'studies' are published, they are insanely biased to push particular political agendas, so I take them with huge grains of salt.
I didn't quote any statistics? The only vague number I mentioned was automobile deaths, which aren't particularly controversial - you just count dead bodies. This Wikipedia article has them by year - in 2010 it was 32,885 deaths.
Centralized systems
We aren't talking about a centralized system - this article is about a distributed system.
We can't even automate our trains completely without catastrophic failures, so as far as safety goes, I still trust my situational awareness over that of a computer.
Trains are the safest transportation system we have today, so I'm not sure why you would use those as an example. In any case, almost all train accidents have been human in origin. Which makes sense, since most trains are controlled by humans. The automated train in DC had a big failure a few years ago - but that's the only big accident I can think of.
Risk is a fact of life.
Absolutely, but hurtling around at 75MPH in a piece of metal that we did not evolve to control is not a fact of life, and we can make sensible choices which reduce our risk of dying.
1. remove some of the sound insulation from the vehicles so that more road noise is let in. this will cause people to pay more attention to what's going on around them.
2. remove the cell towers along major highways. if cellphone performance is spotty enough, people just won't bother until they get where they're going. this is for the best.
3. have a license system that actually requires people to master basic driving skills and not just memorize a bunch of rules.
4. design the cars so that more feedback is given through the steering column and suspension. currently, the trend is the opposite..
5. have speed limits that actually reflect the conditions of the road instead of the local municipalities' budget shortfalls.
6. actually fix the parts of the roads where the most accidents occur instead of reducing the speed limit. limiting speed only masks the issue.
We're getting a bit off-topic, but...
Do you have a study that shows 1 or 4 will actually work?
I think you are on to something with 2, though I suspect that the cell companies know whether you are on the road or not and could easily block calls if they find you are on the road.
3 seems reasonable, as does 5.
I don't think I understand 6. I'm all for improving roads if the cost-benefit is reasonable, but there's nothing wrong with keeping the speed limit lower (as you suggest in 5) if the conditions are too expensive to change.
The administration of the restitution would all come AFTER THE TRIAL IS OVER.
If you are talking restitution, I'm fine with that. Restitution is easy to calculate and was in fact done in this case. I suspect you meant to type compensation? In that case, it sounds like you are suggesting a purely administrative process to determine the amount of compensation. I think this deprives the convict of property without due process, and I do not think such a law would stand up to court scrutiny.
You can either have one judge one time sentence the defendant to restitution to the class that he wronged
Again, I'm assuming you meant "compensation".
One thing that might satisfy both of us is to automatically kick off a civil class action suit in cases where there are many victims. I still don't think there should be any significant amount of taxpayer money involved, and it might be very difficult to find lawyers who will take the case - the money is likely to never be recovered, after all.
Think about the math here: the guy sold 300 $575 parts that cost him some non-zero amount of money to manufacture and ship. At best, he made $17,100. The restitution then used the real part cost of over $700, so it was calculated at $210,000. I have no idea where that money went, but I suspect it doesn't exist, and probably renders our whole conversation moot :)
Meanwhile, I doubt a convicted felon serving time could appear in person for a few thousand small claims cases. How do you propose to deal with that?
I presume this is a solved problem. Many people are suing Bernie Madoff.
Maybe Dr. Seuss was sicker than I previously thought?
I have the opposite reaction. I think we are entirely too cavalier about the unbelievable human toll that our current reliance on human-guided cars takes. Tens of thousands die in the US every single year. Look at the way the country responds to something like war casualties at 1/10 the scale and ask if this situation makes any sense.
It's a fact that slowing down will always be correlated to safety. If cars creeped around at 1 MPH, almost no one would ever die. This technology will improve matters, no matter what is deemed "reasonable" or "appropriate".
What privacy concerns are there about recording a public street?
By that measure, we can gain an order of magnitude in time efficiency by just setting all inmates free today.
That's different. I'm talking about the trial phase - where you are paying high-cost lawyers and investigators. Jail is nominally for convicted criminals and people too potentially dangerous to release on bail.
Errors afterward will be fewer since a single responsable party will be handling it rather than dozens of small claims court judges who learn about the whole debacle hours (at most) before rendering a decision.
Errors in civil courts don't put an entire criminal trial at risk on appeal.
The court fees paid for filing a small claim do not actually cover the costs, it's more like earnest money.
Yes, but court costs are fixed. You are paying for a judge and the support staff no matter which venue you use, criminal or civil. I'm talking about the cost of prosecution, defense, and investigations. Those are currently all borne by the plaintiff and defendant in civil court, and you are proposing shifting that to the taxpayers.
The judge then passes sentence which could include compensation.
You could certainly limit the compensation phase to a judge's prerogative.
Nonsense. The time overhead would be in the administration of the compensation once the sentence is rendered.
If you are going to make a criminal repay his victims, you sure as heck need to let him argue about the extent of the damages. Otherwise, you are simply stripping the convict of his current right to a civil trial. Restitution, as you point out, can sometimes closely resemble compensation - but it is much, much simpler to calculate, and only involves findings of fact during the criminal trial. You can't base compensation based on findings of fact alone, so you need to let the convict argue for the basis of compensation. This will require a lawyer.
This isn't about living the "little guy out to dry". The little guy was the victim of a scam - not a victim of the government. Are you really going to ask the government to repay every idiot who falls for a scam?
I see no reason for it to be slower.
Time overhead after the trial is over is added to the total trial time. The point is you have people and other resources tied up longer on a case when they could be working on something else.
I see no reason at all it would be more error prone.
It adds complexity, which by definition will add errors unless you also do something to reduce the error rate.
When you balance the expense of thousands of civil cases (even small claims) against it, it's probably not more expensive.
Yes, but who bears the cost? Right now, the two parties. You are proposing that we shift this to the taxpayers.
I don't see why the payout would be lower unless the civil courts are overpaying.
Because in a criminal court you need a unanimous jury, whereas in civil courts you only need a majority.
Finally, what burden of defense? If compensation is ordered as part of the sentence, defense is over.
You need to provide a lawyer to the defendant if he cannot afford one. This is not the case in a civil court. The sentencing phase of the trial would get much more complicated, and so the people would need to pay for a defense lawyer for a much longer period of time than they do now.
Exactly my point. Restitution in fine - the criminal court judge uses the data that was collected anyway to include as part of the punishment. It is simple.
Compensation (what you are talking about) requires a lot more effort. You'd have to hire someone to track down all the victims, and to calculate the compensation due. This would all have to be done after the criminal trial (or else you risk spending the money for no reason), so it would delay sentencing. Sentencing would get more complicated - and with complexity comes more possibility for error and reversal on appeal. Sentencing would start to resemble a civil trial brought by the government, and so would require more work from the defense team as well. But since this is a criminal trial, you'd still have to get consensus from the jury, so the payouts would likely be less than at a civil trial. You'd also be on the hook for public defense, further driving costs up.
IMHO, this would give us a system that is:
1. Slower than the current criminal justice system.
2. More error-prone than the current criminal justice system.
3. More expensive that the current criminal justice system.
4. Lower payouts than the current civil court system.
5. Burden of paying for defense in compensation part of trial moves from the defendant to the people.
Sure, the benefit would be "automatic" compensation - but I don't think it would be worth it on balance.
By the way, restitution WAS paid out in this case. But it was $210,738, based not upon the number of victims but upon the number of airbags that were seized (300).
Restitution != compensation. Restitution is simple to calculate: how much did the defendant make while committing the crime. In the case of the airbags, if the defendant paid restitution it would be about $60, which wouldn't even cover the new inspection.
We did real work on computers slower than current low end smartphones less than 20 years ago.
Yeah, but it was different "real work" and it wasn't very efficient. For instance, CAD. Back then I could run a large-mesh (by today's standards) FEA on a part in about 4 hours on a very high-end HP unix workstation. Now, that same analysis would be done in a few seconds - so we run a much more thorough analysis and end up with a lighter, cheaper part, better part with a lot more iterations tested against it.
Data... a good digital oscilloscope 15 years ago would capture a fraction of the data that the same price point will capture today. Tools like MATLAB would hit serious memory issues with the data from 15 years ago in the few MB of RAM that PCs had available. Once you figured out a way to analyze the data on the limited hardware, it took a long time to chug through it all so you spent a lot of time breaking the tasks down into discrete parts so that debugging wasn't a complete nightmare. Modern instruments collect a staggering amount of data, and the comparatively limitless RAM in modern computers makes it much, much easier to run the data through MATLAB. The run time is also reduced to the point where I don't have to spend all that extra time optimizing. The visualizations in MATLAB are now interactive and render quickly, whereas something complex could take 45 minutes 15 or 20 years ago.
Software compilation. We used to have a SPARC on every programmer's desk, and they all were networked together so that builds could be distributed. Still, builds took hours. Often, we'd kick off a build overnight only to find the next morning that it hadn't been successful. There goes a day. Today, builds still take an hour or so - on a single machine. We don't even bother trying to distribute the jobs anymore, though the functionality is still there.
I understand that office programs and email were largely similar to the way they run on modern hardware - but that's not the only use of computers.
Why would the WTO embargo you? Who would care if privateers steal all your stuff anyway?
In that case, the cost is not worth it to society. You are talking about duplicating - not replacing - the infrastructure that is in place on the civil side. And presuming the government is acting as the victim's advocate, to make the process fair you would need a defense advocate. Then, as the victim's advocate, the government would need to do the same discovery that is currently required by you or your lawyers - which would of course mean hiring more lawyers and investigators. And these lawyers wouldn't be able to use hundreds of years of civil methodologies - they would need to adhere to criminal standards. It would be a staggering expansion of the criminal justice system.
To date, with approval of said country.
I'm sorry, but I just can't get on board. If someone was not convicted by a unanimous jury, the victims would have no recourse. In the civil system, you only need a simple majority to win.