Err, hypocrisy and double standards of the highest order.
As you point out, killiing is also very illegal, not to mention immoral, and yet you do not see border agents confiscating copies of B-grade horror slasher movies or "Rambo III". Why is that? These movies pefrom the exact same function as the pervert's pictures: to induce pornographic pleasure by viewing despicable acts and to foster fantasies in the viewing audience (for some the fantasies of being the "good" guy detective or a "military macho hero" and some of being the chain-saw wielding murderer or a villain warlord).
In short, like great majority of "morality" laws, this is just another example of illogical, inconsistent, hypocritical behaviours by societies and therefore their "authorities".
The same is of course applicable to criminalizing drug use; stupidity, uselesness and utter counter-productiveness of which one can write whole volumes about.
And all of which is of course the result of people's inability to reconcile a mish-mash of religious dogmas, base animal instincts, and the results of industrial and scientific progress which altered the environment to the point where the evolution-dictated, hormone-driven wiring of people's brains is no longer able to cope.
All three easily solved via a security by-pass incentive in a form of a pistol to the head or a kidnapped lover/child/dog etc which will "get it" if you do not cooperate or some poison with time release and the antidote delivered upon your succesful authentication, etc and so on and on and on and on.
It depends how you define overselling. All ISPs oversell. The entire internet is oversold. It's the concept that makes it financially viable.
You mean "unjustifiablyy profitable" of course. The concept is very similar to that of an "insurance" company with just enough financial backing to cover 1% of its contracts and no backup. It "works" until some natural disaster leaves the owners running in the middle of the night to Dubai and all the people who bought the "insurance" shafted. A word "scam" describes the situation better. It is a form of gambling whereby the business owner makes insane profits on the assumption that the customers will not actually show up in significant numbers to demand what they paid for. A bet that works most of the time and fails spectacularly some of the time and that is when its victims realize they have been had.
If I have 100 customers who each have 5mbit connections, with average usage of 50mbit/s and peak usage of 75mbit/s, why should I (as an ISP) pay for 500mbit/s?
Because if your greedy bet comes up snake eyes they will then discover that you have conned them.
Overselling only becomes bad when you don't have enough bandwidth to handle peak loads. The internet and ISPs cannot function without overselling, and that includes TekSavvy.
Bullshit. What you mean is that if you sold only what you actually could deliver you would not have been able to make screaming ads in the vain of "Blazing fast Internet for $19.99! Free modems!", "Super-duper turbo downloads for $19.99 a month. 2x Faster then the competition!" etc and so on with the aim of grandmas and the computer illiterate who rarely use what they fully paid for being the backbone victims of your scam. The whole idea of "overselling" has nothing whatsoever to do with "functioning" and everything with con-artistry and greed. What would have been actually going on without it is one of the two scenarios: everyone having affordable and guaranteed 64kbit-512mbit/s links or (far more likely) the ISPs being forced to actually build the infrastructure to handle the 5-10 mbit/s end-point connections and making those affordable due to economies of scale. What unpunished "overselling" does is simply to allow the worst of all possible scenarios: a pretense of affordable 5-10 mbit/s user links with an actual performance of 64 kbit/s in the long run, follwing which the scam artists are forced to abuse the customers who actually want what was promised to them and their corporate PR departaments even succeeding in painting those customers as "abusers" causing "excessive loads" and similar crap. In short they do what all the thieves have done since times immemorial: accuse their victims of their own crimes.
1. Stop overselling. That costs money, so I don't think the ISPs will do that any time soon. Especially since they dug themselves into a nasty hole where they advertised more and more bandwidth and lower and lower prices, and they can't afford to actually deliver that to everyone. The only way to do that is to raise prices.
Actually, this is the only thing that they should be doing as "overselling" can, and should, be treated as what it is: a rampant case of criminal business fraud. I am quite dismayed that none of these companies are facing the prosecutors yet on charges of false advertising, bait-and-switch, fraud and other lovely items from the crook's menu. As things develop however this is becoming a more and more likely to occur as other prominent commercial entities are begining to suffer from this activity and are likely to begin to lobby the relevant regulators themselves.
In short, it is against the oldest and most firmly established principles of a society based on trade that what you sell is what you are claiming to sell. The entire marketplace operates based on the idea that sellers of crap will get penalized for doing so, no matter how flowery their sales pitch or how fine their fine-print. However in the case of the major ISPs their activities were up to now (unwisely in my view) protected by various governments based on an idea that copper/cable wiring has to be controlled for civic practicality reasons. So the governments, after some palms were greased, chose the worst of all possible choices: instead of municipality owned last mile conduits, they allowed protected monopolies to form to manage the last mile of copper, coax, fibre, whatever. And now we are paying for this.
Fortunately, as I said, the odds of these monopolies getting in serious trouble of criminal nature are increasing rapidly as their activities are pitting them more and more not only against consumers but also against other businesses, many also capable of greasing governmental cogs.
If you actually had one of those - and, indeed, any evidence at all that Nina was actually stabbed with it - Hans might very well be guilty.
But honestly I'm very interested in what appears to be a completely novel line of prosecutory reasoning - "in an alternate universe, where we have a bloody knife with Hans' prints and Nina's blood on it, he'd be guilty; therefore, in this universe where we have none of that, he's guilty too." Very interesting. Is that how it works in Canada?
Again, you arbitrarily decided that such a combination of items is sufficient (since you are naturally an ultimate authority on what is an what is not "reasonable") as opposed to the combination of evidence as available now. Of course this is purely arbitrary decision, based purely on an increasing probabilty of Hans being a murderer if such a body with a knife in its back is found, whereby you picked some levels of probability which "feel right" to you out of your ass and are now calling it "reasonable", as opposed to anything else not to your liking. But then of course there are other possibilities, such as someone trying to frame him by using a knife from his kitchen, the murderer having a DNA match with Hans and some other increasingly astronomically unlikely combinations of events. But never will you have absolute certainty and you will always decide what constitutes "beyond reasonable doubt" completely arbitrarily, which is precisely what the jury is doing now with the existing evidence, inducing these histerical fits of panicked paranoia in you, to my great amusement.
No, but such knowledge requires actually having it, and you've made it abundantly clear that you don't, like when you asserted that American criminal trials require nothing more than the preponderance of evidence, which is obviously false.
The words "preponderance of evidence" do not feature in any of my posts in this thread until this one and I did not assert any such thing. It is you who assumed that I was talking about that specific legalese term and it is you who tries now to turn your assumption into a flaming starwman. You did it because you failed (and still do fail) to realize that both "preponderance of evidence" and "beyond reasonable doubt" are vague, politics-motivated descriptions which do not have any precise definitions whatsoever and the idea was merely to impart some sort of relative grading whereby "beyond reasonable doubt" is (somehow, in an unquantified and unquantifiable way) stronger then "preponderance of evidence". Since neither of these have any objective, subject to scientific scrutiny definitions, the whole point is moot. I did not mention these terms (which are known to anyone in Canada who watched TV for longer then a week, never you mind anyone who actually read anything on the subject, since our TV is saturated with US crime and courtroom dramas) because neither of these sets of "criteria" is relevant. The decision is always arbitrarily made by the jurors and judges by their gut feelings and their private ideas as to what constitutes "preponderance of evidence" or "beyond reasonable doubt" and that's pretty much it, flowery language and lofty political orations notwithstanding.
You haven't presented any relevant statistical data.
You are not paying me any money to go digging all over the net for the articles and papers I read years ago. There is that thing called Google around. Use it.
Sure you have. You've implied it in ten different posts. The slightest argument that Hans might actually be innocent sends you literally off the rails. Prosaic explanations for the not-at-all-incriminating "evidence" earns your unmitigated scorn.
You are deranged. Quote any sentence from my posts in which I affirmatively stated that "Hans is guilty". All I ever did was to keep pointing it out to you that the
A car missing a seat has nothing to do with murder.... Cars get wet. It has nothing to do with murder.... Nobody's proven that it's Nina's blood...
Why stop here? Let's keep going:
Knife? Everybody has one of those in the kitchen!
A bloody knife? She cut herself while chopping carrots!
A body with a knife in a back with Hans' prints on it?Obviously he left them on the knife when he was chopping carrots and then she tripped, fell out of the 2nd story window, fell on a rake which sprung up hitting a garden gnome which flew into the kitchen window, bounced off a ladle which hit the knife rack launching the said knife into her back!
See, I can do your kind of "reasoning" too!
Of course any sane person would have noticed that all of the evidence items at Hans's trial mentioned together, while his ex-wife goes missing have a slightly different meaning then each of them separately happening to some random individuals at unrelated times. But that would require you to admit that probabilities are a key aspect of murder trials, something which is unlikely to come from a maniac who thinks that human society operates based on some set of involatile and unerringly testable absolutes.
Wikipedia references "proof beyond reasonable doubt"
And that "definition" fails to define "reasonable" by any objective means. In fact it goes in circles defining "reasonable" as something a "reasonable person" would think and so "reasonable" is what "reasonable people" do, who in turn are "resonable" because... what they think is "reasonable". Comedy gold!
It of course never crossed your mind that the term "reasonable" is legalese/politico-speak window-dressing for doofuses like you who are unable or unwilling to accept the fact that all of the murder trials in human history depended to large degree on probabilities, even those involving eye witnesses and bodies found. Hell, even modern DNA evidence is stated in terms of probabilites of another match!
... as you've made consistent factual errors...
Such as?
... attempted to speak authoritatively about the laws of a nation you don't even live in...
You cannot be that dense! Are you actually insinuating that such knowledge requires residence and is unavailable abroad?! This is hillarious!
... and have made it abundantly obvious that your deep personal enmity for all things Hans Reiser have already prejudiced you against him, to the point where unverifiable speculation about what people you don't even know - people whose names you don't even know - "would do" constitutes ironclad proof against him, absent body, weapon, or any physical evidence that there even was a crime, much less that Hans was involved
As I keep repeating, evidence does exist, Hans is the most likely perpetrator and his character only increases the odds. Is he guilty? The jury will decide that.
As to my "speculations" they were all either patently obvious observations or statistical data. You can call me "unreasonable", you can bang your head on the table as long as you want crying "Free Hans!" but the objects of these observations will not change, nor will the statistics reshuffle their tallies. You are simply out of luck on this one.
So your confidence beyond all doubt is hardly indicative; you're not a reasonable person.
See above. Also never did I indicate anything about "confidence beyond all doubt". It is you who keeps demanding absolutes such as "beyond all doubt", not me.
Sure, all the murderers who murder without leaving any trace at all get away scot-free.
Well, that's true. But then of course the question arises what is "defensible". Unless we are going for a circular argument, sooner or later we will dwelve into the domain of empiricism and as such we will quickly end up discussing probabilities, statistics and the like, which are all part of our everyday interactions with the physical Universe at most fundamental levels, even if we are normally not aware of it. We do construct convoluted models of the universe based on these statistical computations, some of them turning out very accurate (such as Physics) and some... well... not quite so (such as Economics).
In short, there are no "absolutes" available to us outside of the domain of mathematics. Everything else is a symphony of probabilities, some very very high, some very very low and the rest of them somhwere in between, particularly so when it comes to human behaviour. And as such we have no option but to deal in these probabilities. Since some find that idea extremely uncomfortable (particularly those who have a control freak personality) our civilization has come up with many ways to soothe their fits of hysterical panic. One such way is of course religion, which offers absolutes where there are none. Another is fanciful language, such as "beyond reasonable doubt" or "defensible". Whatever makes people comfortable. But down at the bottom nothing has changed by us pretending otherwise and we are forced, like it or not, to evaluate odds to make our decisions.
I for one volunteer you and your family to be amongst those people who croak painfully and horribly after a protracted radiation-induced illness. But I offer 0.001c extra in exchange. So its a done deal, right?
He is referring to this lawsuit by then-owner of Dr DOS, Caldera, which ended up being settled out of court, essentially acknowledging Microsoft's complicity to all but die-hard fanatical MS shills.
Well, actually he lost the referendum on extending his term and so as such, at least for now, has failed these tests of yours (neither full control of the government nor emergency power - btw no ongoing "emergency" has been declared in Venezuela). As it stands Chavez is no more a dictator then G.W.Bush. They are both arrogant "whaddayagonadoaboutit"-style politicians, constantly pushing their luck (probably the main reason they hate each other - too alike). One stuffs his supreme court with toadies and so does the other. One issues "signing statements" ment to ignore laws, the other pulls broadcast licenses of TV stations which annoy him (but still leaving a venerable cornucopia of other opposition stations, channels, papers etc). But both, at least so far, are quite restricted in the extent of havoc they can wreak. One major difference though: Chavez is immensely popular amongst the Venezuelan public (specially the poor indigenous majority) and bitterly opposed by the super-rich, while Bush's situation was never that rosy, having at most ~50% of the voting public voting for him in the elections.
What will happen with Hugo in the long run? Will he turn into a bona-fide dictator? Who knows. But for now he is just a populist president, not a dictator, no matter how desperate the Ferrari-riding classes get to paint him as such.
The simple truth is that you haven't offered one single piece of evidence for either the murder or Hans' involvement in it, and neither has the DA. Not one single piece of evidence - just nonsense speculations about what people you don't even know "would do."
Except torn-out car seats, wet floorboards, blood specks all over etc etc and so on, idiot.
No, it's not. "Most likely" means "preponderance of evidence", and while that's the evidentiary standard for civil trials, criminal convictions require a greater standard of evidence. Specifically, "proof beyond a reasonable doubt", which is a far stricter standard than simply "most likely." It's not sufficient to prove that Hans is "most likely" guilty (although even that's too strong a claim for what the evidence against him proves.)
Oh really? Define "resonable" then in terms which do not involve evaluation of probabilities, cretin.
More like, 90%...
You should run for office on that platform. I can just see it: "I will let 9 out of every 10 people convicted for murder free!!". I already sense the massive crowds gathering to demonstrate their support for you via hurling some bricks at high velocity towards your bone-filled head.
The ones I mentioned. The ones where you have an actual body, actual evidence of a murder, and an actual murder weapon with actual evidence tying it to Hans.
So no circumstantial evidence convictions for any crime then. 9 out of 10 criminals going free, soon to be 999 out of 1000 as they get better at hiding bodies. What an imbecile you are.
But the evidence against Hans doesn't even rise to "circumstantial."
Says Hans, his defense attorney and you. Quite luckily however, morons like you are not participating in the trial and as to the remaining two, no one is going to take them just on their word.
As for a "huge percentage", it's already the case that only 64% of murder investigations end in conviction, and that includes confessions and guilty pleas. So it should be abundantly obvious to you that "beyond a reasonable doubt" is already the legal standard at work in the United States.
The relationship between the percentage of convictions and the percentage of trials conducted based on circumstantial evidence is so far removed from this discussion that is not even funny. As to "beyond reasonable doubt", see above, I am awaiting your earth-shaking definition eagerly.
Because, God knows, Mexico is a dystopian security state. You're an idiot.
Did you actually know anyone who attempted to board a plane for Russia (or to anywhere in Europe) in Mexico? You keep insinuating these wild elaborate "escape" schemes which all require multiple evasions of multiple security arrangements in multiple countries and hinge on modes of transportation involving organized crime, no traceable airline tickets, no credit card use etc and so on to get accross that wee little pond between here and Russia. Ergo in a cargo of a slowboat or the like. Again the odds of this woman planning and executing such an elaborate escape sequence, sparing no expense and risking pretty much everything in order to do... what exactly?... are slim to none. The odds of an ex-husband jerk bashing his ex-wife over the head with something, stuffing her on the seat of his beater and dumping her somewhere are orders of magnitude higher, not even from the point of view of crime statistics but just from the point of view of difficulty of the respective schemes. And do not give me any bullshit about "embezzlement" because again, no one except for Hans (and apparently idiots like you) believes this crap for a second. He got sued by the very people who were supposedly "embezzling" from him and had to settle for $10,000 because he
Again, you claim knowledge that you couldn't possibly have without mental telepathy. The simple truth is that your speculations on what unspecified cops would do is completely irrelevant and is no basis to conclude anybody's guilt.
The facts are than Sean Sturgeon claims to be a killer many times over, and that hasn't been investigated at all. And it's just as likely that a zealous DA would want to railroad the suspect he has, rather than drop the charges mid-trial and start all over again.
I am getting tired of your stupid shtick wherein you speculate wildly and with no evidence whatsoever on why "crooked cops with an agenda" and "overzealous railroading DAs" are after poor, poor innocent Hans, following which you then try to sanctimoniously and pompously accuse me of "speculating" when I point out well known, obvious to pretty much anyone but you facts.
Also DAs and cops are in different organizations with often conflicting interests. In particular cops do not need a DA to direct them to investigate something and furthermore the cops responsible for serial murderers are a whole different bunch from those responsible for investigations of spousal homicide, the former likely to be the Feds, specially if the loon Sean claimed to murder residents of multiple states. You are grasping, desperately, at smaller and smaller straws by speculating more and more wildly (and then accusing me of it).
The odds, huh? Why don't you show your math on that, if you're talking about probability, now?
Of course. It was always about probabilities. All but a very rare few murder trials are about probabilities. What the fuck do you think the words "beyond reasonable doubt" stand for? What is "reasonable"? It is the code word for "most likely". I.e. that thing that the jurors deem to have happened with the highest probability. Absolute certainty is nearly never attainable in the courtroom. If you demand it, you might as well demand that 99.9% of criminals go free. Which is what I am starting to suspect your position is all about. Have you been convicted of some crime and are brimming with resentment for it? That would explain a lot.
Circular reasoning, then, if you're going to argue that it's the "best possible case" so long as you ignore all the better alternatives. Under these circumstances, you have no case at all.
What "better" alternatives? Do you know where the body is buried or have a video of her partying in Vladivostok? What the fuck are you talking about? Some hypothetical woulda-coulda-shoulda wherein no one is ever put on trial until they commit the crime on national TV, most likely. Again your thinly disguised desire to do away with nearly all of the crime convictions is striking.
There's no evidence she was murdered, and it's more likely that she was not.
You are just like that Sean dude, plain nuts. There are reams and reams of circumstantial evidence (yes that is valid evidence) that she was murdered and none to indicate that she left the country.
That's the obstacle you have to overcome before we get into any question of Hans' guilt.
As I pointed out before, your demands that every murder conviction was done with the requirement of a body and a murder weapon is insane and would lead to a vast majority of murderers getting away scot free.
Or we could stick with the standard we have - proof of guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
See above. You apparently have no clue what "reasonable" means.
... even happened, and you can't prove that the accused had anything to do with it, then yes, a "murderer" should go free - because he's clearly not a murderer, at least according to the law.
As it has been pointed to you multiple times a) there is evidence of a murder of Nina, b) ther
Not with serial murderers, that's for sure. Look, the cops love good PR because it translates into political favours and funding. Serial murderers provide excellent PR, far more so then some idiotic Linux nerd of whom the vast majority of the voters never heard and do not give a flying fuck. Therefore the cops would have wasted no time whatsoever to toss Hans' case out in order to get a serial murderer so that they can hog all the TV channels preening themselves in front of big boards with pictures of all the victims affixed to them. That is just a no-brainer. You are just so hang up on your "poor, poor Hans being persecuted by the whole planet" theme that you fail to see this rather obvious fact. Cops do not give a rat's ass about Hans and would trade him up for something bigger (specially a serial murderer) in a flash.
The fact that they did not do that is a good indication that there were no serial murders and the "SM enthusiast" is simply delusional, imagining things that never happened. To great disappointment of many a cop, I am sure.
The problem is that it's a pattern of other people, not of Hans Reiser, and therefore it's essentially irrelevant (and prejudicial, if this were a courtroom.) There's no basis for securing a conviction simply because the defendant may be like some other people, some of whom have committed murder. Again if you have evidence that isn't simply your speculations about Hans' state of mind, we're waiting for it.
That is like saying that only because a vast majority of men eat cheese that does not mean that Hans did. Sure, technically its true. Practically however it means that the odds of him doing so are very good. Now if you combine that with other circumstances (a bunch of cheese crumbs on his chin) you would probably be able to make a convincing case of him being guilty of eating that sole cheese sandwitch which disappeared from the room in which he and 10 other men were locked up. Statistical data does not constitute "proof" on its own. It is however a contributing factor which cannot be ignored.
Well, no, it's not. A stronger case would have an actual body, an actual murder weapon, and Hans' actual prints on it, for instance.
Err, that would no longer be "under the circumstances", circumstances which involve... a situation where one of prime objectives of Hans would be to get rid of the body and the weapon. Look, we could set a standard where the minimum requirements for murder conviction would be a body, murder weapon with prints on it, a full-motion video from 20 cameras of the actual event, a spy satellite pictures of the event in visual and IR images, a village full of first-hand witnesses, a cop present to arrest the perpetrator in the process of committing the act and a from-behind-a-grave testimony extracted by a shamaness with a ouija board. Extremely low possibility of errors... and no convictions ever.
In other words you want a successful disappearance of a body and a weapon to be a guaranteed walk-out-of-jail-free card for any murderer, just so that "poor Hans" can walk away from his "evil persecutors". That of course would establish a brisk market in various acids and incineration devices (purchase of which would be "circumstantial evidence" and thus not admissible according to you) and we would be all sooooo much better for it, no?
Well, of course there wouldn't be; that would defeat the whole purpose of setting Hans up for murder, now wouldn't it? Nonetheless there's ample evidence of her preparation for absconding to Russia; among other things, her efforts to obtain Russian citizenship for the children.
You crack me up. First your not so thinly disguised USA #1, USA #1, USA #1 superiority complex... it will probably shock you to know that a vast majority of peo
Right, but statistically that murder is almost always predicated by abuse
Untrue. A high portion of the murderers did indeed commit violent domestic abuse but a significant chunk of their population did not, their violent tendencies only came to the surface at the "revenge" stage, particularly following acrimonious child custody/property ownership battles. Some analysts I've read claim that there is also a strong contributing factor involving a decrease of the standard of living of the ex-boyfriend/husband after the divorce/separation coupled with a (as preceived by him) maintenance or increase of the standard of living of the ex-wife/girlfriend, for which situation he begins to blame her. Which is precisely what happened with Hans. Then there is the kids, who can be influenced by the parent with the majority of access time (usually her) against the other one, something which he will certainly observe since frequently kids must be delivered to him for some "shared" custody arrangements, and kids can behave rather cruelly in those cases giving all the indications of being sent to "do time" with the father etc. There is a very, very long list of such items which can push an unstable personality over the edge.
If anything Hans was probably abused by Nina. (That she basically dumped Hans for a hardcore SM enthusiast is suggestive, here.)
Again, this is Hans and his divorce attorney talking (in the pre-eliminary hearings). It is my impression that Hans sees Nina as having affairs with a lot of people. Nina's friends claim on the other hand that there was no affair at all and the whole thing is Hans' imagination. But assuming they are lying, if Nina was such a dominatrix, there would have been aplenty of public incidents prior to their divorce (i.e. him showing up bruised to work etc). As far as we can tell no physical (mental is quite a different matter) abuse was going on either way at the time. As to the "hardcore SM enthusiast" who "killed" 8 people one wonders who the eight were and why isnt he under arrest for that "crime". I am sure the police would have been more then pleased to nab a serial murderer and would have eagerly traded some washed-up Linux geek for one of those. The truth of course is that tongue wagging of some loon and the reality do not always align. Furthermore there might be some other wee difficulties such as for example him having an iron-clad alibi for the time of the Nina's disappearance or the "dead" people he "murdered" being alive, kicking and having a chuckle or two over beer with the cops sent to investigate their demise.
That's quite the fantasy you've concocted, but I don't see any reason to believe it has any basis in fact. You certainly don't provide any. I don't know much about Linux filesystems, but ReiserFS must really have pissed a lot of people off, judging by how much people like you are falling all over themselves to convict Hans Reiser of a murder that there's no evidence even happened.
That was not a "story" but an illustration of a common thought pattern amongst these ex-boyfriends, one which is readily available to anyone who bothers to read some publicly available case histories (I admit, morbid curiosity once led me to spend many hours into the late night reading the stuff). As to evidence of her murder it is as strong as one can reasonably expect under the circumstances. There is no record of her leaving the country (and we are talking post 9-11 DHS-infested world here). In order to do so unnoticed she would have to resort to some seriously dangerous manouvers involving organized crime connections. There is nothing in the record so far to suggest that she was capable of this. Not to mention the thing which I already pointed out: there was no financial (or any other) gain for her in this which would offset the many, many tactical downsides of such an action.
As to Hans "pissing people off", he did on many, many occasions demonstrat
Who said this had anything to do with money? You apparently need to look up some crime statistics. You would be probably shocked to find that a jerk ex-boyfriend/ex-husband is statistically, hands down, a #1 candidate for a murderer of a woman. Money? How about a "no good Russian bitch" daring to defy a boy genius who is famous for throwing tantrums when some kernel developer dared to defy him about a line of code or two? How "dared" she try to live a normal life when he was reduced to begging his mother for food? "Its all her fault!", "I made her and I will unmake the bitch!" etc and so on. The delusions abouth her "embezzling" stuff fit nicely in the process of constructing an internal self-justification. He "could not" have been responsible for all of these financial disasters, he is a genius after all, she must have done it! Her... and... and... and all those conspirators helping her!
Spurned love, his nasty personal traits, huge bruised ego, consequences of his other self-centered actions closing in on him, psychological stress, unwillingess/inability to accept responsibility, desperate search for scapegoats to blame to rescue his self-worth, paranoia, etc and so on, I am sure that every psychiatrist (or pretty much every police homicide detective on the planet) would be able to give you a complete list.
You mean to tell me that the company actually made money from sales, ever? Who were the paying customers then?! All these years Hans was famous for these things: a wacky filesystem, big mouth and no business acumen or plan whatsoever. Are you telling me that he somehow managed to organize a cabal of secret well-heeled customers showering him with cash to engage in constant flamewars on LKML, ostensibly as a part of an effort to develop a buggy, overcomplicated file system meant to deliver performance advantages of dubious nature, licensed in such a way so that it could be used freely by the general public? Was he funded by some sort of a filantropist gang?! Did they sell kabobs on the side to fund themselves, making millions?! That would be quite shocking news to anyone who ever heard of ReiserFS and Namesys.
Also as to "embezzlement" it would appear that the only persons who are making such claims are... Hans and his divorce attorney (who was "investigating" it - with no evidence to present at the time of questioning at the murder trial proceedings), not the prosecutor. And it involves... an alleged loan to Hans (Terror! Shock! Surprise! Who woulda have thunk Hans was borrowing money from people to prop-up that great profit center of his that was Namesys?! Never!).
... unless, of course, you wanted to live in the US prior to your disappearance to defraud your putative husband's company for all it was worth.
What?! The dude had nowhere near enough money to run the "business" to begin with, lived on hype and grandioso, megalomaniac pronouncements, had no customers to speak of, certainly none that could pay enough to make the thing profitable, spent whatever he could borrow and then went to live with his mother when the whole thing came crashing down on his head when the last credit line run out and the very last credit card bottomed out. The woman saw the thing coming a mile away and got a divorce before the shit hit the fan and now you blame her for her foresight! The fact that Hans is by all accounts a class A jerk had, I am sure, aided her decision making process immensely and by looks of things led to her presently residing a few feet underground in some woods.
"Defraud for all its worth?!" How in the world do you defraud a bankrupt business with no assets, no customers and an overdrawn bank account?! And all of that only by faking your own murder and setting all of the Western police agencies after your ass! Now that is a profitable scheme I would like to hear about!
and lets not forget Nina is a Russian rent-a-bride and probably only married Reiser to get the US visa.
Which of course makes no sense whatsoever as an accusation. At this point any attempts by her (if she were alive) to cross the borders of the US would set off all sorts of alarms in the DHS computers. Similarly, she is probably in the computers of other countries such as Canada and all the EU members as a "missing person" or "person of interest" or what not, which would also, at the least, set off alarms if she attempted to obtain a visa (for which, being a Russian, she must if she wants to travel there).
Ergo her mobility would be essentially reduced to Russia and a number of countries not in any way linked to Western police information networks.
All of the above rendering the whole scheme of "getting the US visa" utterly and completely useless.
Actually, no. The odds of a not-4 coming up must increase by some amount after you roll each new 4 in your "winning streak" because if they did not, the die would cease to have an equal probability of each of its sides coming up. An infinite sequence of 4s would prove conclusively, irrespective of any prior claims of probability distributions, that the die was a 1-sided one, with a number 4 being the only "side", assuring 1 in 1 chance of 4 coming up.
From another perspective, this test would also be satisfied even if the sequence was not infinite, but long enough that we could not practically observe another result, i.e. the die came up 4 for everone who ever rolled it, during the memory of all those who ever owned it and during our lifetime.
If mathematicians do claim otherwise, they might be correct within the confines of mathematics but their models then do not correspond to the Universe around us, which is actually quite a common occurence. Mathematics is very useful as a mechanism to construct models of the physical Universe, but we must always remember that these models are just that. Models. Their accuracy and predictive powers vary wildly. Taking Mathematics as some sort of Divine Truth which somehow unlocks all of the mysteries of the Universe solely on the word of mathematicians (who are sadly only too willing to oblige) amounts to joining a religious cult.
Sometimes I think Nobel was quite wise in specifically excluding Mathematics from the list of sciences for which his prize was to be awarded, reportedly after having been disguisted with the antics and wild claims of mathematicians when contrasted with his empirically gained knowledge (which then, after his death, led some mathematicians to spreading false rumours about one of theirs stealing his girlfriend and that being the source of his ire). Knowing some mathematicians personally, I am firmly with Alfred on that one.
Please also keep in mind that both Serbia and Iraq were equipped with Soviet equipment from the heyday of the Soviet "foreign aid" to its allies and satellite nations. That is stuff from, at the latest, late 70s or early 80s, and bulk of arms dating from the 60s. The Soviet doctrine relied on accumulation of best and most modern equipment in the hands of the Russian Red Army, followed by exports of 2nd rate stuff abroad, since the Soviet manufcaturing capabilities allowed only for a supply of the best (and thus most difficult to make) equipment in limited quantities.
That is why Iraq had next to no air defense capabilities and its most modern weapons were pitifully impotent against any of the recent generations of US aircraft. The actual missiles were capable of reaching the needed speed and altitude but their guidance systems were several leagues away from what was needed for them to track their targets.
Similarly in Serbia, vast bulk of AA equpment consisted of 60s era mechanically scanning radars (some of which we could see deployed in Belgrade when watching the TV feeds from that city).
Some speculate that the downing of the F117A was a matter of luck and clever use of an old missile because the NATO Air Command got cocky and sent the planes to their targets using a fixed air corridor which the Serbs were able to figure out. Some other theories claim that the Russians smuggled in one of their current systems to test it against an actual NATO target in combat. We will probably not get to know which is true.
So indeed, NATO and the US have not tested their combat prowess against an enemy capable of producing modern arms, such as Russia (and now China) are today and I think their "successes" against these defenseless (but pumped up on TV for public consumption) targets are getting to some people's heads causing their hubris to expand exponentially. Dangerously so.
Moore's law has always been about the number of transistors (despite clueless journalists getting it wrong, don't blame Moore's law for their faults), it *is* still holding, and, crucially, it *is* still producing exponential gains in the performance of GPUs, which again crucially *are* translating into exponential gains on real-world non-graphics problems.
No it is not. I keep telling you something you do not want to hear: the rate of increase of the number of transistors on a single slice of silicone is not equal to the rate of increase of general computational performance! The two have long, long since diverged.
Furthermore, GPUs, by their nature, are specialized devices meant for very specific types of computations, which sacrifice many of the traditional abilities of a general-purpose CPU in order to gain speed in those specialized areas. If that was not the case... they would have ceased to be GPUs!!! That is the whole point of a specialized piece of hardware.
Additionally, because GPUs deal with a specific type of computation involving large number of vertexes and texture operations which can be parallelized, an increase in the number of parallel pipelines of a GPU renders increases in computational performance. Which of course does not translate into gains in most other areas of general purpose computation.
GPUs are becoming more general-purpose all the time, while retaining the ability to translate more transistors into more performance.
Which is of course complete nonsense since such a trend would make them into general-purpose CPUs and would thus cripple any possible gains resulting from the necessary trade-offs I mentioned above.
The whole point of a GPU is specialization. That is where the performance advantages over a general-purpose CPU come from. Remove specialization and the gains evaporate.
Perhaps you would be interested to know that Intel is producing a GPU, due out in 2010 (engineering samples by the end of this year), whose major component is, guess what, general-purpose x86 processor cores with expanded vector units. By 2015 or so the distinction between GPUs and CPUs may be so blurry as to be irrelevant.
Which if it were what you are implying it is would result in a perfect circle of stupidity resulting in abandonment of all gains from specialization. Fortunately its just marketing babble. What you are confused about here is Intel's plan to roll the specialized GPU functions into yet another parallelized set of pipelines alongside a general-purpose CPU, i.e. more "cores" in one chip, except some of them with specialized GPU circuitry.
I was beginning to think *you* hadn't heard of it. Did you not notice that Folding@Home is in fact using Turing machines to simulate quantum phenomena? Randomness is trivially added to a Turing machine, producing a probabilistic Turing machine. With the simple addition of a hardware random number generator computers can simulate all the probabilistic quantum phenomena you want.
Right, and that is why the project is in dire straights because its results are consistently failing to correlate with real-life proteins. I actually had a talk with one of the people involved in the science of protein folding calculations and he indicated that all the serious research has all but abandoned computer simulations and is now proceeding by means of rapid, computer-controlled chemical experimentation. The reason? Insufficient representation of quantum phenomena (dealing with reactions with surrounding solvents) in the models results in their utter unreliability.
Using a random number generator is not the same as simulating quantum phenomena. It is a statistics based kludge which is used to estimate outcomes of quantum events. Not simulate them. Subsequently only models which do not depend on accuracy of representatio
No, we are talking about Phillipinos, Indians etc. shipped wholesale to wherever Haliburton is hired to do whatever dirty work for Washington or some other coporate fiefdoms. Callous use of labour from places with little or no worker protections and rampant poverty is one of the key hallmarks of Haliburton, one of the truly evil corporations on the planet. This is one of the major sticking points in Iraq, where Haliburton is heavily involved, whereby the local Iraqi workers were all given the shaft (in spite of 60+% unemployment rates) while Haliburton (and one of its - now spun off - divisions, KBR) shipped untold numbers of foreign nationals to do both menial and skilled work, housing them in horrid conditions to the point of riots, confined them involuntarily using mercenaries, etc and so on. Even US citizens are guaranteed no rights when in employ of Haliburton as several cases of rape of some employees by others which will never be prosecuted prove conclusively.
In short whenever "contractors" are mentioned in context of Haliburton and other companies like it, particularly its former division KBR, it means mostly denizens of under-developed countries sprinkled with a small number of silly people from USA, Canada and Europe who were greedy enough to skim over some of the rather startling points in their "contracts", such as total and irrevokable wavers from suing the company ever, for any reason, rape by its employees while its security guards look on, included.
Haliburton is what future historians will point to as a defining example of corporate feudalism which rapidly came from the shadows in which it used to shamefuly lurk in remote foreign locations into a full-fledged dominance in the USA in recent decades.
The fact that Dick Cheney is one of its ex directors should come as no surprise in the context of its deepest levels of involvement in all the evil machinations emanating from the White House.
These contracts employ a LOT of US citizens....many of them require the workers to be US citizens possibly with clearances. Those jobs are pretty much offshore-proof.
You gotta be kidding!
Haliburton for example has far more foreign workers and "contractors" on its payroll than US citizens. As a matter of fact since most of its employees are foreign the company recently decided to relocate its HQ to Dubai where it would be able to take full advantage of US "defense" spending while fully offshoring with no pesky downsides such as paying taxes. Corporatism has its advantages.
Most of the other companies on the list are in a similar position busily importing materials from China and the like.
The practical concerns of a vacuum tube computer of such scale are obvious; on the other hand the practical concerns of a transistor one are not at all. The problems are almost entirely of nano-fabrication; unlike the vacuum tube case, the resources required are not at all prohibitive.
You seem not to grasp the dimentions of complexity and connectivity in human brain, thus your silly insistence on some magical "nanofabrication" (yet another pipe-dream nowhere near practical application) solving all the problems. Squeezing gazillions of transistors into some box is only one tiny aspect of the problem, dealing primarily with reducing the size of any AI to manageable levels. All the major unsolved problems remain untouched even if such a thing is accomplished.
There may be insurmountable practical concerns we do not yet know, but for you to proclaim they exist is no more defensible than Kurzweil's position that they do not.
This is hogwash. All I am saying is that given the current state of affairs combined with history of the field (something you are desperately trying to pretend does not exist) renders Kurzweil's "prediction" of full-fledged AI (and that means consciousness - no weaseling out of this one) astronmically unlikely to come true in the time-frame he specified.
As I repeatedly pointed out, he (and you) are yet another in a long, long line of uncritical, hubris driven propagandists of "just around the corner" great scientific "breakthroughs", which - quite mysteriously - fail to materialize decade after decade despite of billions upon billions of dollars sunk into the research.
Turing machines *can* simulate quantum phenomena to any desired precision.
This pretty much ends any discussion with you on the subject. You should explain how are you planning to achieve this feat to the physicists of the world and collect your inevietable Nobel prize in the process, given the current state of knowledge of quantum phenomena whereby the running joke is that there are more theories of these processes then there are physicists involved. We do not have a clue what is going on at those levels, only wild guesses, never you mind "simulating" any of it.
Fuck, we can't properly simulate much more higher-level processes involving whole atoms and molecules for lack of computing power and understanding, or did you not hear of this project which attempts to harness the power of millions of home computers to attempt to simulate, in a matter of weeks and months folding of a single protein!
You are out of your mind if you think we have (or will have in 20 years) anything like the computing power or knowledge required to simulate 100 billion neurons. Forget 100 billion, in fact we can't properly simulate one cell in its entirety and the prospects look rather grim that we will be able to do this in many decades.
If you want to say that brains can't be simulated, you're going to have to do better than that. You need something like a "soul" that is completely inscrutable for it to be out of reach of Turing machines.
We do not know the nature of consciousness, therefore we do not know if it is an emergent property of certain complex systems such as those that can be simulated by Turing machines, or if it is somehow tied to the quantum phenomena and requires something "extra" to be present such as a particular arrangement of molecules in some way sensitive to certain quantum effects the nature of which we do not yet understand. This does not necessarily preculde a conscious AI from being constructed but it would render the problem orders of magnitude more complex.
And then there is of course the possibility that consciousness is somehow dependant on some hereto unknown extra-dimentional entanglements which would throw the whole thing into complete
Listen to yourself; you're making the same predictions as Kurzweil, just in the opposite direction. There's no physical law preventing a supercomputer with quadrillions of transistors.
Neither there is a "physcal law" preventing a computer made from quadrillions of vacuum-tubes...
What prevents such a pipe-dream from occuring however are practical concerns.
There's no physical law preventing such a computer from simulating a biological system such as the brain.
We do not know that for certain. We do not know if a traditional Turing machine, which all our computers are in effect, is capable of such activity. Some models of neuronal activity for example are positing possible influences of various quantum phenomena at synapse level. Furthermore, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is pretty much at the level of the Ancient Egyptians' understanding of astrophysics. More neuroscientists dig into the neural cell operations, more complex things get. And that does not even address the intercell connectivity mechanisms, dendrite and axon formation, etc and so on.
Your statements are merely opinionated predictions of our future nanotech fabrication capability, or lack thereof, in exactly the same vein as Kurzweil's, and with no more backing (somewhat less, I should say).
Kurzweil is just another in a long line of prognosticians who finds his desire for media exposure and satisfaction of his self-importance being well served by stroking our collective egos and by appeals to hubris.
I am merely pointing out that the obstacles are truly paramount when viewed from the level of our current knowledge and available computing power.
And while you rant about how people have been promising fusion for years, let me remind you that people have been predicting the end of Moore's law for years too, and so far they've been just as wrong.
I am not sure what are you referring to. Moore's "law" fizzled out nearly half a decade ago when all the CISC CPU makers run into the physical limitations of gigahertz range frequencies in very high density integrated circuits. They have been all groping around since then attempting to parallelize whatever can be parallelized in hopes of achieving something akin to their prior advances in performance, results of which are highly questionable from the point of view of the silly "law".
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Err, hypocrisy and double standards of the highest order.
As you point out, killiing is also very illegal, not to mention immoral, and yet you do not see border agents confiscating copies of B-grade horror slasher movies or "Rambo III". Why is that? These movies pefrom the exact same function as the pervert's pictures: to induce pornographic pleasure by viewing despicable acts and to foster fantasies in the viewing audience (for some the fantasies of being the "good" guy detective or a "military macho hero" and some of being the chain-saw wielding murderer or a villain warlord).
In short, like great majority of "morality" laws, this is just another example of illogical, inconsistent, hypocritical behaviours by societies and therefore their "authorities".
The same is of course applicable to criminalizing drug use; stupidity, uselesness and utter counter-productiveness of which one can write whole volumes about.
And all of which is of course the result of people's inability to reconcile a mish-mash of religious dogmas, base animal instincts, and the results of industrial and scientific progress which altered the environment to the point where the evolution-dictated, hormone-driven wiring of people's brains is no longer able to cope.
All three easily solved via a security by-pass incentive in a form of a pistol to the head or a kidnapped lover/child/dog etc which will "get it" if you do not cooperate or some poison with time release and the antidote delivered upon your succesful authentication, etc and so on and on and on and on.
"Ironclad security" does not exist.
You mean "unjustifiablyy profitable" of course. The concept is very similar to that of an "insurance" company with just enough financial backing to cover 1% of its contracts and no backup. It "works" until some natural disaster leaves the owners running in the middle of the night to Dubai and all the people who bought the "insurance" shafted. A word "scam" describes the situation better. It is a form of gambling whereby the business owner makes insane profits on the assumption that the customers will not actually show up in significant numbers to demand what they paid for. A bet that works most of the time and fails spectacularly some of the time and that is when its victims realize they have been had.
Because if your greedy bet comes up snake eyes they will then discover that you have conned them.
Bullshit. What you mean is that if you sold only what you actually could deliver you would not have been able to make screaming ads in the vain of "Blazing fast Internet for $19.99! Free modems!", "Super-duper turbo downloads for $19.99 a month. 2x Faster then the competition!" etc and so on with the aim of grandmas and the computer illiterate who rarely use what they fully paid for being the backbone victims of your scam. The whole idea of "overselling" has nothing whatsoever to do with "functioning" and everything with con-artistry and greed. What would have been actually going on without it is one of the two scenarios: everyone having affordable and guaranteed 64kbit-512mbit/s links or (far more likely) the ISPs being forced to actually build the infrastructure to handle the 5-10 mbit/s end-point connections and making those affordable due to economies of scale. What unpunished "overselling" does is simply to allow the worst of all possible scenarios: a pretense of affordable 5-10 mbit/s user links with an actual performance of 64 kbit/s in the long run, follwing which the scam artists are forced to abuse the customers who actually want what was promised to them and their corporate PR departaments even succeeding in painting those customers as "abusers" causing "excessive loads" and similar crap. In short they do what all the thieves have done since times immemorial: accuse their victims of their own crimes.
Actually, this is the only thing that they should be doing as "overselling" can, and should, be treated as what it is: a rampant case of criminal business fraud. I am quite dismayed that none of these companies are facing the prosecutors yet on charges of false advertising, bait-and-switch, fraud and other lovely items from the crook's menu. As things develop however this is becoming a more and more likely to occur as other prominent commercial entities are begining to suffer from this activity and are likely to begin to lobby the relevant regulators themselves.
In short, it is against the oldest and most firmly established principles of a society based on trade that what you sell is what you are claiming to sell. The entire marketplace operates based on the idea that sellers of crap will get penalized for doing so, no matter how flowery their sales pitch or how fine their fine-print. However in the case of the major ISPs their activities were up to now (unwisely in my view) protected by various governments based on an idea that copper/cable wiring has to be controlled for civic practicality reasons. So the governments, after some palms were greased, chose the worst of all possible choices: instead of municipality owned last mile conduits, they allowed protected monopolies to form to manage the last mile of copper, coax, fibre, whatever. And now we are paying for this.
Fortunately, as I said, the odds of these monopolies getting in serious trouble of criminal nature are increasing rapidly as their activities are pitting them more and more not only against consumers but also against other businesses, many also capable of greasing governmental cogs.
Again, you arbitrarily decided that such a combination of items is sufficient (since you are naturally an ultimate authority on what is an what is not "reasonable") as opposed to the combination of evidence as available now. Of course this is purely arbitrary decision, based purely on an increasing probabilty of Hans being a murderer if such a body with a knife in its back is found, whereby you picked some levels of probability which "feel right" to you out of your ass and are now calling it "reasonable", as opposed to anything else not to your liking. But then of course there are other possibilities, such as someone trying to frame him by using a knife from his kitchen, the murderer having a DNA match with Hans and some other increasingly astronomically unlikely combinations of events. But never will you have absolute certainty and you will always decide what constitutes "beyond reasonable doubt" completely arbitrarily, which is precisely what the jury is doing now with the existing evidence, inducing these histerical fits of panicked paranoia in you, to my great amusement.
The words "preponderance of evidence" do not feature in any of my posts in this thread until this one and I did not assert any such thing. It is you who assumed that I was talking about that specific legalese term and it is you who tries now to turn your assumption into a flaming starwman. You did it because you failed (and still do fail) to realize that both "preponderance of evidence" and "beyond reasonable doubt" are vague, politics-motivated descriptions which do not have any precise definitions whatsoever and the idea was merely to impart some sort of relative grading whereby "beyond reasonable doubt" is (somehow, in an unquantified and unquantifiable way) stronger then "preponderance of evidence". Since neither of these have any objective, subject to scientific scrutiny definitions, the whole point is moot. I did not mention these terms (which are known to anyone in Canada who watched TV for longer then a week, never you mind anyone who actually read anything on the subject, since our TV is saturated with US crime and courtroom dramas) because neither of these sets of "criteria" is relevant. The decision is always arbitrarily made by the jurors and judges by their gut feelings and their private ideas as to what constitutes "preponderance of evidence" or "beyond reasonable doubt" and that's pretty much it, flowery language and lofty political orations notwithstanding.
You are not paying me any money to go digging all over the net for the articles and papers I read years ago. There is that thing called Google around. Use it.
You are deranged. Quote any sentence from my posts in which I affirmatively stated that "Hans is guilty". All I ever did was to keep pointing it out to you that the
Why stop here? Let's keep going:
Knife? Everybody has one of those in the kitchen!
A bloody knife? She cut herself while chopping carrots!
A body with a knife in a back with Hans' prints on it? Obviously he left them on the knife when he was chopping carrots and then she tripped, fell out of the 2nd story window, fell on a rake which sprung up hitting a garden gnome which flew into the kitchen window, bounced off a ladle which hit the knife rack launching the said knife into her back!
See, I can do your kind of "reasoning" too!
Of course any sane person would have noticed that all of the evidence items at Hans's trial mentioned together, while his ex-wife goes missing have a slightly different meaning then each of them separately happening to some random individuals at unrelated times. But that would require you to admit that probabilities are a key aspect of murder trials, something which is unlikely to come from a maniac who thinks that human society operates based on some set of involatile and unerringly testable absolutes.
And that "definition" fails to define "reasonable" by any objective means. In fact it goes in circles defining "reasonable" as something a "reasonable person" would think and so "reasonable" is what "reasonable people" do, who in turn are "resonable" because ... what they think is "reasonable". Comedy gold!
It of course never crossed your mind that the term "reasonable" is legalese/politico-speak window-dressing for doofuses like you who are unable or unwilling to accept the fact that all of the murder trials in human history depended to large degree on probabilities, even those involving eye witnesses and bodies found. Hell, even modern DNA evidence is stated in terms of probabilites of another match!
Such as?
You cannot be that dense! Are you actually insinuating that such knowledge requires residence and is unavailable abroad?! This is hillarious!
As I keep repeating, evidence does exist, Hans is the most likely perpetrator and his character only increases the odds. Is he guilty? The jury will decide that.
As to my "speculations" they were all either patently obvious observations or statistical data. You can call me "unreasonable", you can bang your head on the table as long as you want crying "Free Hans!" but the objects of these observations will not change, nor will the statistics reshuffle their tallies. You are simply out of luck on this one.
See above. Also never did I indicate anything about "confidence beyond all doubt". It is you who keeps demanding absolutes such as "beyond all doubt", not me.
Since all the "traces" save a body wit
Well, that's true. But then of course the question arises what is "defensible". Unless we are going for a circular argument, sooner or later we will dwelve into the domain of empiricism and as such we will quickly end up discussing probabilities, statistics and the like, which are all part of our everyday interactions with the physical Universe at most fundamental levels, even if we are normally not aware of it. We do construct convoluted models of the universe based on these statistical computations, some of them turning out very accurate (such as Physics) and some ... well ... not quite so (such as Economics).
In short, there are no "absolutes" available to us outside of the domain of mathematics. Everything else is a symphony of probabilities, some very very high, some very very low and the rest of them somhwere in between, particularly so when it comes to human behaviour. And as such we have no option but to deal in these probabilities. Since some find that idea extremely uncomfortable (particularly those who have a control freak personality) our civilization has come up with many ways to soothe their fits of hysterical panic. One such way is of course religion, which offers absolutes where there are none. Another is fanciful language, such as "beyond reasonable doubt" or "defensible". Whatever makes people comfortable. But down at the bottom nothing has changed by us pretending otherwise and we are forced, like it or not, to evaluate odds to make our decisions.
I for one volunteer you and your family to be amongst those people who croak painfully and horribly after a protracted radiation-induced illness. But I offer 0.001c extra in exchange. So its a done deal, right?
He is referring to this lawsuit by then-owner of Dr DOS, Caldera, which ended up being settled out of court, essentially acknowledging Microsoft's complicity to all but die-hard fanatical MS shills.
Well, actually he lost the referendum on extending his term and so as such, at least for now, has failed these tests of yours (neither full control of the government nor emergency power - btw no ongoing "emergency" has been declared in Venezuela). As it stands Chavez is no more a dictator then G.W.Bush. They are both arrogant "whaddayagonadoaboutit"-style politicians, constantly pushing their luck (probably the main reason they hate each other - too alike). One stuffs his supreme court with toadies and so does the other. One issues "signing statements" ment to ignore laws, the other pulls broadcast licenses of TV stations which annoy him (but still leaving a venerable cornucopia of other opposition stations, channels, papers etc). But both, at least so far, are quite restricted in the extent of havoc they can wreak. One major difference though: Chavez is immensely popular amongst the Venezuelan public (specially the poor indigenous majority) and bitterly opposed by the super-rich, while Bush's situation was never that rosy, having at most ~50% of the voting public voting for him in the elections.
What will happen with Hugo in the long run? Will he turn into a bona-fide dictator? Who knows. But for now he is just a populist president, not a dictator, no matter how desperate the Ferrari-riding classes get to paint him as such.
Except torn-out car seats, wet floorboards, blood specks all over etc etc and so on, idiot.
Oh really? Define "resonable" then in terms which do not involve evaluation of probabilities, cretin.
You should run for office on that platform. I can just see it: "I will let 9 out of every 10 people convicted for murder free!!". I already sense the massive crowds gathering to demonstrate their support for you via hurling some bricks at high velocity towards your bone-filled head.
So no circumstantial evidence convictions for any crime then. 9 out of 10 criminals going free, soon to be 999 out of 1000 as they get better at hiding bodies. What an imbecile you are.
Says Hans, his defense attorney and you. Quite luckily however, morons like you are not participating in the trial and as to the remaining two, no one is going to take them just on their word.
The relationship between the percentage of convictions and the percentage of trials conducted based on circumstantial evidence is so far removed from this discussion that is not even funny. As to "beyond reasonable doubt", see above, I am awaiting your earth-shaking definition eagerly.
Did you actually know anyone who attempted to board a plane for Russia (or to anywhere in Europe) in Mexico? You keep insinuating these wild elaborate "escape" schemes which all require multiple evasions of multiple security arrangements in multiple countries and hinge on modes of transportation involving organized crime, no traceable airline tickets, no credit card use etc and so on to get accross that wee little pond between here and Russia. Ergo in a cargo of a slowboat or the like. Again the odds of this woman planning and executing such an elaborate escape sequence, sparing no expense and risking pretty much everything in order to do ... what exactly? ... are slim to none. The odds of an ex-husband jerk bashing his ex-wife over the head with something, stuffing her on the seat of his beater and dumping her somewhere are orders of magnitude higher, not even from the point of view of crime statistics but just from the point of view of difficulty of the respective schemes. And do not give me any bullshit about "embezzlement" because again, no one except for Hans (and apparently idiots like you) believes this crap for a second. He got sued by the very people who were supposedly "embezzling" from him and had to settle for $10,000 because he
I am getting tired of your stupid shtick wherein you speculate wildly and with no evidence whatsoever on why "crooked cops with an agenda" and "overzealous railroading DAs" are after poor, poor innocent Hans, following which you then try to sanctimoniously and pompously accuse me of "speculating" when I point out well known, obvious to pretty much anyone but you facts.
Also DAs and cops are in different organizations with often conflicting interests. In particular cops do not need a DA to direct them to investigate something and furthermore the cops responsible for serial murderers are a whole different bunch from those responsible for investigations of spousal homicide, the former likely to be the Feds, specially if the loon Sean claimed to murder residents of multiple states. You are grasping, desperately, at smaller and smaller straws by speculating more and more wildly (and then accusing me of it).
Of course. It was always about probabilities. All but a very rare few murder trials are about probabilities. What the fuck do you think the words "beyond reasonable doubt" stand for? What is "reasonable"? It is the code word for "most likely". I.e. that thing that the jurors deem to have happened with the highest probability. Absolute certainty is nearly never attainable in the courtroom. If you demand it, you might as well demand that 99.9% of criminals go free. Which is what I am starting to suspect your position is all about. Have you been convicted of some crime and are brimming with resentment for it? That would explain a lot.
What "better" alternatives? Do you know where the body is buried or have a video of her partying in Vladivostok? What the fuck are you talking about? Some hypothetical woulda-coulda-shoulda wherein no one is ever put on trial until they commit the crime on national TV, most likely. Again your thinly disguised desire to do away with nearly all of the crime convictions is striking.
You are just like that Sean dude, plain nuts. There are reams and reams of circumstantial evidence (yes that is valid evidence) that she was murdered and none to indicate that she left the country.
As I pointed out before, your demands that every murder conviction was done with the requirement of a body and a murder weapon is insane and would lead to a vast majority of murderers getting away scot free.
See above. You apparently have no clue what "reasonable" means.
As it has been pointed to you multiple times a) there is evidence of a murder of Nina, b) ther
Not with serial murderers, that's for sure. Look, the cops love good PR because it translates into political favours and funding. Serial murderers provide excellent PR, far more so then some idiotic Linux nerd of whom the vast majority of the voters never heard and do not give a flying fuck. Therefore the cops would have wasted no time whatsoever to toss Hans' case out in order to get a serial murderer so that they can hog all the TV channels preening themselves in front of big boards with pictures of all the victims affixed to them. That is just a no-brainer. You are just so hang up on your "poor, poor Hans being persecuted by the whole planet" theme that you fail to see this rather obvious fact. Cops do not give a rat's ass about Hans and would trade him up for something bigger (specially a serial murderer) in a flash.
The fact that they did not do that is a good indication that there were no serial murders and the "SM enthusiast" is simply delusional, imagining things that never happened. To great disappointment of many a cop, I am sure.
That is like saying that only because a vast majority of men eat cheese that does not mean that Hans did. Sure, technically its true. Practically however it means that the odds of him doing so are very good. Now if you combine that with other circumstances (a bunch of cheese crumbs on his chin) you would probably be able to make a convincing case of him being guilty of eating that sole cheese sandwitch which disappeared from the room in which he and 10 other men were locked up. Statistical data does not constitute "proof" on its own. It is however a contributing factor which cannot be ignored.
Err, that would no longer be "under the circumstances", circumstances which involve ... a situation where one of prime objectives of Hans would be to get rid of the body and the weapon. Look, we could set a standard where the minimum requirements for murder conviction would be a body, murder weapon with prints on it, a full-motion video from 20 cameras of the actual event, a spy satellite pictures of the event in visual and IR images, a village full of first-hand witnesses, a cop present to arrest the perpetrator in the process of committing the act and a from-behind-a-grave testimony extracted by a shamaness with a ouija board. Extremely low possibility of errors ... and no convictions ever.
In other words you want a successful disappearance of a body and a weapon to be a guaranteed walk-out-of-jail-free card for any murderer, just so that "poor Hans" can walk away from his "evil persecutors". That of course would establish a brisk market in various acids and incineration devices (purchase of which would be "circumstantial evidence" and thus not admissible according to you) and we would be all sooooo much better for it, no?
You crack me up. First your not so thinly disguised USA #1, USA #1, USA #1 superiority complex ... it will probably shock you to know that a vast majority of peo
Untrue. A high portion of the murderers did indeed commit violent domestic abuse but a significant chunk of their population did not, their violent tendencies only came to the surface at the "revenge" stage, particularly following acrimonious child custody/property ownership battles. Some analysts I've read claim that there is also a strong contributing factor involving a decrease of the standard of living of the ex-boyfriend/husband after the divorce/separation coupled with a (as preceived by him) maintenance or increase of the standard of living of the ex-wife/girlfriend, for which situation he begins to blame her. Which is precisely what happened with Hans. Then there is the kids, who can be influenced by the parent with the majority of access time (usually her) against the other one, something which he will certainly observe since frequently kids must be delivered to him for some "shared" custody arrangements, and kids can behave rather cruelly in those cases giving all the indications of being sent to "do time" with the father etc. There is a very, very long list of such items which can push an unstable personality over the edge.
Again, this is Hans and his divorce attorney talking (in the pre-eliminary hearings). It is my impression that Hans sees Nina as having affairs with a lot of people. Nina's friends claim on the other hand that there was no affair at all and the whole thing is Hans' imagination. But assuming they are lying, if Nina was such a dominatrix, there would have been aplenty of public incidents prior to their divorce (i.e. him showing up bruised to work etc). As far as we can tell no physical (mental is quite a different matter) abuse was going on either way at the time. As to the "hardcore SM enthusiast" who "killed" 8 people one wonders who the eight were and why isnt he under arrest for that "crime". I am sure the police would have been more then pleased to nab a serial murderer and would have eagerly traded some washed-up Linux geek for one of those. The truth of course is that tongue wagging of some loon and the reality do not always align. Furthermore there might be some other wee difficulties such as for example him having an iron-clad alibi for the time of the Nina's disappearance or the "dead" people he "murdered" being alive, kicking and having a chuckle or two over beer with the cops sent to investigate their demise.
That was not a "story" but an illustration of a common thought pattern amongst these ex-boyfriends, one which is readily available to anyone who bothers to read some publicly available case histories (I admit, morbid curiosity once led me to spend many hours into the late night reading the stuff). As to evidence of her murder it is as strong as one can reasonably expect under the circumstances. There is no record of her leaving the country (and we are talking post 9-11 DHS-infested world here). In order to do so unnoticed she would have to resort to some seriously dangerous manouvers involving organized crime connections. There is nothing in the record so far to suggest that she was capable of this. Not to mention the thing which I already pointed out: there was no financial (or any other) gain for her in this which would offset the many, many tactical downsides of such an action.
As to Hans "pissing people off", he did on many, many occasions demonstrat
Who said this had anything to do with money? You apparently need to look up some crime statistics. You would be probably shocked to find that a jerk ex-boyfriend/ex-husband is statistically, hands down, a #1 candidate for a murderer of a woman. Money? How about a "no good Russian bitch" daring to defy a boy genius who is famous for throwing tantrums when some kernel developer dared to defy him about a line of code or two? How "dared" she try to live a normal life when he was reduced to begging his mother for food? "Its all her fault!", "I made her and I will unmake the bitch!" etc and so on. The delusions abouth her "embezzling" stuff fit nicely in the process of constructing an internal self-justification. He "could not" have been responsible for all of these financial disasters, he is a genius after all, she must have done it! Her ... and ... and ... and all those conspirators helping her!
Spurned love, his nasty personal traits, huge bruised ego, consequences of his other self-centered actions closing in on him, psychological stress, unwillingess/inability to accept responsibility, desperate search for scapegoats to blame to rescue his self-worth, paranoia, etc and so on, I am sure that every psychiatrist (or pretty much every police homicide detective on the planet) would be able to give you a complete list.
You mean to tell me that the company actually made money from sales, ever? Who were the paying customers then?! All these years Hans was famous for these things: a wacky filesystem, big mouth and no business acumen or plan whatsoever. Are you telling me that he somehow managed to organize a cabal of secret well-heeled customers showering him with cash to engage in constant flamewars on LKML, ostensibly as a part of an effort to develop a buggy, overcomplicated file system meant to deliver performance advantages of dubious nature, licensed in such a way so that it could be used freely by the general public? Was he funded by some sort of a filantropist gang?! Did they sell kabobs on the side to fund themselves, making millions?! That would be quite shocking news to anyone who ever heard of ReiserFS and Namesys.
Also as to "embezzlement" it would appear that the only persons who are making such claims are ... Hans and his divorce attorney (who was "investigating" it - with no evidence to present at the time of questioning at the murder trial proceedings), not the prosecutor. And it involves ... an alleged loan to Hans (Terror! Shock! Surprise! Who woulda have thunk Hans was borrowing money from people to prop-up that great profit center of his that was Namesys?! Never!).
What?! The dude had nowhere near enough money to run the "business" to begin with, lived on hype and grandioso, megalomaniac pronouncements, had no customers to speak of, certainly none that could pay enough to make the thing profitable, spent whatever he could borrow and then went to live with his mother when the whole thing came crashing down on his head when the last credit line run out and the very last credit card bottomed out. The woman saw the thing coming a mile away and got a divorce before the shit hit the fan and now you blame her for her foresight! The fact that Hans is by all accounts a class A jerk had, I am sure, aided her decision making process immensely and by looks of things led to her presently residing a few feet underground in some woods.
"Defraud for all its worth?!" How in the world do you defraud a bankrupt business with no assets, no customers and an overdrawn bank account?! And all of that only by faking your own murder and setting all of the Western police agencies after your ass! Now that is a profitable scheme I would like to hear about!
Which of course makes no sense whatsoever as an accusation. At this point any attempts by her (if she were alive) to cross the borders of the US would set off all sorts of alarms in the DHS computers. Similarly, she is probably in the computers of other countries such as Canada and all the EU members as a "missing person" or "person of interest" or what not, which would also, at the least, set off alarms if she attempted to obtain a visa (for which, being a Russian, she must if she wants to travel there).
Ergo her mobility would be essentially reduced to Russia and a number of countries not in any way linked to Western police information networks.
All of the above rendering the whole scheme of "getting the US visa" utterly and completely useless.
Actually, no. The odds of a not-4 coming up must increase by some amount after you roll each new 4 in your "winning streak" because if they did not, the die would cease to have an equal probability of each of its sides coming up. An infinite sequence of 4s would prove conclusively, irrespective of any prior claims of probability distributions, that the die was a 1-sided one, with a number 4 being the only "side", assuring 1 in 1 chance of 4 coming up.
From another perspective, this test would also be satisfied even if the sequence was not infinite, but long enough that we could not practically observe another result, i.e. the die came up 4 for everone who ever rolled it, during the memory of all those who ever owned it and during our lifetime.
If mathematicians do claim otherwise, they might be correct within the confines of mathematics but their models then do not correspond to the Universe around us, which is actually quite a common occurence. Mathematics is very useful as a mechanism to construct models of the physical Universe, but we must always remember that these models are just that. Models. Their accuracy and predictive powers vary wildly. Taking Mathematics as some sort of Divine Truth which somehow unlocks all of the mysteries of the Universe solely on the word of mathematicians (who are sadly only too willing to oblige) amounts to joining a religious cult.
Sometimes I think Nobel was quite wise in specifically excluding Mathematics from the list of sciences for which his prize was to be awarded, reportedly after having been disguisted with the antics and wild claims of mathematicians when contrasted with his empirically gained knowledge (which then, after his death, led some mathematicians to spreading false rumours about one of theirs stealing his girlfriend and that being the source of his ire). Knowing some mathematicians personally, I am firmly with Alfred on that one.
Please also keep in mind that both Serbia and Iraq were equipped with Soviet equipment from the heyday of the Soviet "foreign aid" to its allies and satellite nations. That is stuff from, at the latest, late 70s or early 80s, and bulk of arms dating from the 60s. The Soviet doctrine relied on accumulation of best and most modern equipment in the hands of the Russian Red Army, followed by exports of 2nd rate stuff abroad, since the Soviet manufcaturing capabilities allowed only for a supply of the best (and thus most difficult to make) equipment in limited quantities.
That is why Iraq had next to no air defense capabilities and its most modern weapons were pitifully impotent against any of the recent generations of US aircraft. The actual missiles were capable of reaching the needed speed and altitude but their guidance systems were several leagues away from what was needed for them to track their targets.
Similarly in Serbia, vast bulk of AA equpment consisted of 60s era mechanically scanning radars (some of which we could see deployed in Belgrade when watching the TV feeds from that city).
Some speculate that the downing of the F117A was a matter of luck and clever use of an old missile because the NATO Air Command got cocky and sent the planes to their targets using a fixed air corridor which the Serbs were able to figure out. Some other theories claim that the Russians smuggled in one of their current systems to test it against an actual NATO target in combat. We will probably not get to know which is true.
So indeed, NATO and the US have not tested their combat prowess against an enemy capable of producing modern arms, such as Russia (and now China) are today and I think their "successes" against these defenseless (but pumped up on TV for public consumption) targets are getting to some people's heads causing their hubris to expand exponentially. Dangerously so.
No it is not. I keep telling you something you do not want to hear: the rate of increase of the number of transistors on a single slice of silicone is not equal to the rate of increase of general computational performance! The two have long, long since diverged.
Furthermore, GPUs, by their nature, are specialized devices meant for very specific types of computations, which sacrifice many of the traditional abilities of a general-purpose CPU in order to gain speed in those specialized areas. If that was not the case ... they would have ceased to be GPUs!!! That is the whole point of a specialized piece of hardware.
Additionally, because GPUs deal with a specific type of computation involving large number of vertexes and texture operations which can be parallelized, an increase in the number of parallel pipelines of a GPU renders increases in computational performance. Which of course does not translate into gains in most other areas of general purpose computation.
Which is of course complete nonsense since such a trend would make them into general-purpose CPUs and would thus cripple any possible gains resulting from the necessary trade-offs I mentioned above.
The whole point of a GPU is specialization. That is where the performance advantages over a general-purpose CPU come from. Remove specialization and the gains evaporate.
Which if it were what you are implying it is would result in a perfect circle of stupidity resulting in abandonment of all gains from specialization. Fortunately its just marketing babble. What you are confused about here is Intel's plan to roll the specialized GPU functions into yet another parallelized set of pipelines alongside a general-purpose CPU, i.e. more "cores" in one chip, except some of them with specialized GPU circuitry.
Right, and that is why the project is in dire straights because its results are consistently failing to correlate with real-life proteins. I actually had a talk with one of the people involved in the science of protein folding calculations and he indicated that all the serious research has all but abandoned computer simulations and is now proceeding by means of rapid, computer-controlled chemical experimentation. The reason? Insufficient representation of quantum phenomena (dealing with reactions with surrounding solvents) in the models results in their utter unreliability.
Using a random number generator is not the same as simulating quantum phenomena. It is a statistics based kludge which is used to estimate outcomes of quantum events. Not simulate them. Subsequently only models which do not depend on accuracy of representatio
No, we are talking about Phillipinos, Indians etc. shipped wholesale to wherever Haliburton is hired to do whatever dirty work for Washington or some other coporate fiefdoms. Callous use of labour from places with little or no worker protections and rampant poverty is one of the key hallmarks of Haliburton, one of the truly evil corporations on the planet. This is one of the major sticking points in Iraq, where Haliburton is heavily involved, whereby the local Iraqi workers were all given the shaft (in spite of 60+% unemployment rates) while Haliburton (and one of its - now spun off - divisions, KBR) shipped untold numbers of foreign nationals to do both menial and skilled work, housing them in horrid conditions to the point of riots, confined them involuntarily using mercenaries, etc and so on. Even US citizens are guaranteed no rights when in employ of Haliburton as several cases of rape of some employees by others which will never be prosecuted prove conclusively.
In short whenever "contractors" are mentioned in context of Haliburton and other companies like it, particularly its former division KBR, it means mostly denizens of under-developed countries sprinkled with a small number of silly people from USA, Canada and Europe who were greedy enough to skim over some of the rather startling points in their "contracts", such as total and irrevokable wavers from suing the company ever, for any reason, rape by its employees while its security guards look on, included.
Haliburton is what future historians will point to as a defining example of corporate feudalism which rapidly came from the shadows in which it used to shamefuly lurk in remote foreign locations into a full-fledged dominance in the USA in recent decades.
The fact that Dick Cheney is one of its ex directors should come as no surprise in the context of its deepest levels of involvement in all the evil machinations emanating from the White House.
You gotta be kidding!
Haliburton for example has far more foreign workers and "contractors" on its payroll than US citizens. As a matter of fact since most of its employees are foreign the company recently decided to relocate its HQ to Dubai where it would be able to take full advantage of US "defense" spending while fully offshoring with no pesky downsides such as paying taxes. Corporatism has its advantages.
Most of the other companies on the list are in a similar position busily importing materials from China and the like.
You seem not to grasp the dimentions of complexity and connectivity in human brain, thus your silly insistence on some magical "nanofabrication" (yet another pipe-dream nowhere near practical application) solving all the problems. Squeezing gazillions of transistors into some box is only one tiny aspect of the problem, dealing primarily with reducing the size of any AI to manageable levels. All the major unsolved problems remain untouched even if such a thing is accomplished.
This is hogwash. All I am saying is that given the current state of affairs combined with history of the field (something you are desperately trying to pretend does not exist) renders Kurzweil's "prediction" of full-fledged AI (and that means consciousness - no weaseling out of this one) astronmically unlikely to come true in the time-frame he specified.
As I repeatedly pointed out, he (and you) are yet another in a long, long line of uncritical, hubris driven propagandists of "just around the corner" great scientific "breakthroughs", which - quite mysteriously - fail to materialize decade after decade despite of billions upon billions of dollars sunk into the research.
This pretty much ends any discussion with you on the subject. You should explain how are you planning to achieve this feat to the physicists of the world and collect your inevietable Nobel prize in the process, given the current state of knowledge of quantum phenomena whereby the running joke is that there are more theories of these processes then there are physicists involved. We do not have a clue what is going on at those levels, only wild guesses, never you mind "simulating" any of it.
Fuck, we can't properly simulate much more higher-level processes involving whole atoms and molecules for lack of computing power and understanding, or did you not hear of this project which attempts to harness the power of millions of home computers to attempt to simulate, in a matter of weeks and months folding of a single protein!
You are out of your mind if you think we have (or will have in 20 years) anything like the computing power or knowledge required to simulate 100 billion neurons. Forget 100 billion, in fact we can't properly simulate one cell in its entirety and the prospects look rather grim that we will be able to do this in many decades.
We do not know the nature of consciousness, therefore we do not know if it is an emergent property of certain complex systems such as those that can be simulated by Turing machines, or if it is somehow tied to the quantum phenomena and requires something "extra" to be present such as a particular arrangement of molecules in some way sensitive to certain quantum effects the nature of which we do not yet understand. This does not necessarily preculde a conscious AI from being constructed but it would render the problem orders of magnitude more complex.
And then there is of course the possibility that consciousness is somehow dependant on some hereto unknown extra-dimentional entanglements which would throw the whole thing into complete
Neither there is a "physcal law" preventing a computer made from quadrillions of vacuum-tubes ...
What prevents such a pipe-dream from occuring however are practical concerns.
We do not know that for certain. We do not know if a traditional Turing machine, which all our computers are in effect, is capable of such activity. Some models of neuronal activity for example are positing possible influences of various quantum phenomena at synapse level. Furthermore, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is pretty much at the level of the Ancient Egyptians' understanding of astrophysics. More neuroscientists dig into the neural cell operations, more complex things get. And that does not even address the intercell connectivity mechanisms, dendrite and axon formation, etc and so on.
Kurzweil is just another in a long line of prognosticians who finds his desire for media exposure and satisfaction of his self-importance being well served by stroking our collective egos and by appeals to hubris.
I am merely pointing out that the obstacles are truly paramount when viewed from the level of our current knowledge and available computing power.
I am not sure what are you referring to. Moore's "law" fizzled out nearly half a decade ago when all the CISC CPU makers run into the physical limitations of gigahertz range frequencies in very high density integrated circuits. They have been all groping around since then attempting to parallelize whatever can be parallelized in hopes of achieving something akin to their prior advances in performance, results of which are highly questionable from the point of view of the silly "law".