Gee, an officer replied to a DV call of a man beating his wife, comes in and sees a woman with a black eye and a dude that smells of whiskey* -- do we really need a jury to decide that one?
That's a really crappy example by the way. You don't even have the woman claiming he did it. It could have been an accident and some nosey neighbor called the cops. Or her boyfriend was the one that hit her and the husband is drinking because she still likes the boyfriend more. Not saying that there couldn't be more to the story, but as you give it, it really is a crappy story and one that could very much be an example of exactly why it does need a jury to decide.
Real story from my life had the ex-wife that would stage fights so we could hear them in the other apartments by yelling 'please don't throw that me' and then throwing pots and pans against the walls. She also faked black eyes and scratches. These fights would even happen when he wasn't home. Even her strongest supporter had to admit something was up when she faked pregnancy and then miscarriage after getting 'beat up' and having to go the hospital, yet the entire assault, miscarriage and hospital episode was supposed to have taken place in the 30 minutes since we last saw her before she came bouncing in the door to give us the news.
Occupy should start the Nullify movement - E.G. if you are on a jury refuse to return a guilty verdict for victimless BS charges.
BS charges like for a white man killing a black man in the Deep South? In all those old movies where a bad guy says "No jury will convict me.", jury nullification is exactly what they're talking about. That leads to break down of rule of law, and from there it goes back to lynching and vigilante justice because of lack of trust in the legal system. It works both ways. Sure there are some things I wouldn't mind jury nulification being used on, but there are lots of other things that people will use it for if it becomes an accepted practice.
Hrrm. A microwave mirror would be a metal grid (much like you see in the windows of microwave ovens). I wonder if that would be sufficient enough to reflect back a effective beam.
Sounds less effective, most costly, and more dangerous then tear gas.
Tear gas is generally the wrong instrument anyway, because you not only tear gas the mob, but also the entire neighborhood. WTO riots in Seattle for example. They used tear gas on 20-40 people (if you took out the photographers and journalists, another 20-40 people) in the street on Capitol Hill. An hour later they had hundreds screaming angry people in the street and outside the Police Station who were upset about getting tear gassed while sitting in their own homes. Then there were the businesses that were open and running just fine but had to be shut down due to tear gas. They gasses out the entire Pike Place Market the next day and all the food there had to be destroyed because they covered it all with tear gas. A directional beam that didn't penetrate walls would have been much better solution. Although cops with de-escuation training who didn't feel they had to be judge, jury and punisher would have been even better.
It is still illegal in the US to grow "industrial" hemp because people and the government are to fucking stupid and scream "think of the children" every time even though it is not a drug.
Well, there's those who say that the drug was made illegal just to make industrial hemp made illegal because it was competing with early synthetics materials that had DuPont and other industrial backers. The entire anti-marijuana campaign was essentially just Hearst trying to protect his paper and synthetics investments.
Why are all my computer interfaces being transformed into children's toys?
Because to the vast number of users out there, the person at home, the secretary in an office, that's all computers are and need to be. I do desktop support and there are still plenty of users out there, young and old, who come in, click on the two or three icons they use to do work (usually all IE links these days but they don't understand what that means), and have no idea about the rest of the computer and don't want to have any idea about it. Literally, the Start menu is too much for them. Every day more and more people like that are getting computers and outnumbering more technical users even more.
Wow, that's amazing. If Japan wanted to surrender, it wouldn't have taken TWO atom bombs to make them do so.
Well, they wanted to surrender, but their ideal of surrendering was to return to 1938 borders (so they get to keep Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan) and forgetting that WW2 ever happened.
No kidding. The Japanese government didn't even surrender after Hiroshima.
And even after the second bomb, the warlords only surrendered because the Emperor told them to.
And even then they still managed to swing one exception to the Allies' demand for unconditional surrender.
Even after the Emperor said Japan would surrender, there were still warlords who sought to disobey, isolate him for "protection", and keep the war going. They did manage to take him prisoner, but could not find the surrender recording, and eventually their support failed and they had to give up.
Polls, at the time, showed 80% of respondents saying "yes" to "do we need healthcare reform?"
Trouble is, that "healthcare reform" could be increasing coverage of what we have, or getting rid of what people think is not really needed. I imagine that for many conservatives, reform is cutting off the people they see as the deadbeats of society. If my family is any indication, most would seem to think Medicaid and Welfare were completely cut, those people getting them would then go get jobs, improve our economy, and the saved money plus economic growth would solve the county's budget crisis.
I bet they just end up calling it the "iPad" just like they don't really have differentiations for Mac Books, Mac Book Pros, or Mac Pros. If people really care, they'll either take about system specs such as screen resolution like the previously mentioned or generation like iPods.
So how many of you have ever owned a little black book of contact information for friends, lovers and family? What year did this book cease to play a relevant role in your day to day life? Was it the year you got an Internet email account, joined freindster, myspace, or facebook, or bought your first featurephone? If I were a betting man I'd bet I could guess your age within 5 years based on you how you answer these questions.
Apple moved ALL of its manufacturing from the US to China under Steve Jobs leadership. They employ roughly 40,000 people in the US and 700,000 contractors in China.
Well, Apple moved all their assembling to China under Steve Job's leadership. Everybody's actual manufacturing of component parts has been moved to Taiwan, Japan, and Korean for decades now. Those three companies all make more money off each iPad sold than China and are the higher paying STEM jobs we are talking about here, but everybody seems fixated on China for some reason.
Well, let's face it, education is the third best thing for getting a job. Second best thing for getting a job is work experience. The number one best thing for getting a job is somebody already at the company that is in your reference list of your resume. They say college is about making connections and after getting out and into the real world, I'd say that is true. My first real jobs were at Adobe where one of my college friends worked because he could walk my resume to the guy doing the hiring and say "this is my friend". From there, coworkers that moved on pulled me with them and from there our manager that moved on to a better company pulled all of us with him. If I was to redo college, I know I'd really start looking around at internships and other ways of making friends in the industry I wanted to get into way before I actually graduated. That first job is the hardest to get but the quickest thing to getting it is having a reference that already works there to put in a good word for you (as well as letting you know the job exists to begin with).
People who "focus their lives in the urban centres" (centers in the USA, btw) are, by and large, some of the most spiritually and emotionally empty, uninformed sheep I have ever met in my life. I want to be as far away from them as possible when it becomes "untenable" to live there.
By amazing coincidence, I and my peers in the urban centers feel the exact same way about rural and suburbanite dwellers. Luckily for us, its looking like the rural and suburban areas will become "untenable" much sooner.
Mass transit is better suited to the higher population densities of European cities, much of the USA is too spread out.
We can only cover three quarters of the population economically, I guess we better not bother at all.
Part of the problem is not population density but urban layout - we have designed our cities for cars and not walking, cycling, and mass transit. The sooner we try to fix it the better.
You can't bike when its 40 below zero wind chill, or on snow and ice.
Yes you can. Many people do. They make bikes, clothes, and accessories for this purpose.
(and parts of the south are too hot.)
People manage to bike in third-world and developing countries in the tropics. Take a nice easy pace and it is no more strenuous than walking, and you create for yourself a nice breeze.
What he was really trying to say is that Americans are generally too fat and lazy to ride bicycles or walk rather than drive cars. Hell, even on/., I've had Americans claim that walking four blocks to a subway station, riding the subway, and then walking another four blocks to where they need to go was too much work. Personally, I'm American and I'd love a European style train system in the US. However, it seems that most of the US, just want their cars between convience and the idea that only poor people on welfare ride buses.
How do we know that there is an imbalance of matter and antimatter? Perhaps this is only the case locally in the observable universe? Is it at all possible that in the whole of the universe there is in fact no imbalance, and for some reason matter and antimatter formed "pockets" where one dominates the other, and we're just observing one of these pockets?
Basically, because we can demonstrate that the early universe was dense enough when all matter (normal and anti) was created that it would have been quite well mixed, and that local islands of one or the other would be highly improbable. Thus, even if it did manage to clump, we'd be seeing cosmological cases of anilation that we aren't detecting.
After the annihilation completed, we where left with 2% matter surplus, and that's what the universe today consists of.
Not quite. The early universe was very hot and all energy because anytime matter of anytime might be created it was turned back into energy. As the universe cooled and we had nucleogenesis and matter was created, it would collide with any antimatter and turn back into energy, only to reform into matter again as the universe cooled more. Given this process, any, even a very slight inequality would cause one type of matter to gain dominance very quickly at an early point of the universe where everything was still very dense and well mixed. So, even a.0001% surplus of matter in the first generation of nucleosynthesis would result in something like a.0002% in the second, and so forth till finally, only matter was left.
Imagine playing a game where you had a ton of pennies and flipped them all. For every pair of heads and tails, you re-flipped those two coins. However any left over coins without a pair, you left alone. With equal probablility, you'd end up with one or two coins left over which would then be paired up with the results of the next flip. However, if there was a slightly better chance of heads showing up, the number of unpaired coins that are heads would continue to grow with each round of pairing them up with the tails. Eventually, all coins would end up as heads and you'd stop flipping coins.
I wonder if other organizations are only just getting to Win 7, if Win 8 might become one of those releases that everyone bypasses since they just finished upgrading. That would likely hurt MIcrosoft.
As one of those guys who builds the corporate images that goes out to the desktops, I can tell you that yes, Windows 8 will be skipped, but no it won't hurt MS. We're just now getting around to looking at Win7 and expect to be able to start deploying it in a couple of months between testing with enterprise applications and workflows. Before all that, we had to wait years for vendors such as GE to sign off that their apps will work on Win7, not to mention things like getting FDA testing done for their healthcare apps. If Win 8 is actually any good and the vendors sign off on everything quickly, I could see us also moving on quickly. If it is bad, they'll probably hold off for Win9 (or the EOL of Win7 anyway) as we'll also be forced to. As for hurting MS, enterprise pays the same per seat for licensing to run Windows no matter what version we actually install. Our site has 5000 seats, they sell us license for 5000 copies of Win8 and the Office with the stipulation that we can downgrade if we want. They get to claim we upgraded to Win8 as well as the money, so they'll not be hurting. (Disclaimer: I do not really have anything to do with the licensing agreement, but this is how I understand it to work out.)
Yeah, the rich technologist Bill Gates who has blown his billions on malaria research, HIV/AIDS research, composting toilet technology, etc.
His billions or Warren Buffett's and other people's? The Bill Gates Foundation has spent billions. Besides the initial seed money of a couple of hundred million, I can't really find any record of the amount of his own money Bill has put into the Gates Foundation as well as the money that others have. If you have a link, I'd like it because I've been wondering how much exactly he has put in. Warren Buffett's donation of 1.5 billion is pretty well documented however.
arbitrage is fully compliant with the existing laws
in which case no need for arbitrage was necessary, really. but in context of sharia.. it's not fully compliant in any way nor would it's decisions be lawfully binding so..
So, essentially, you the People's Court (American TV show if you didn't know), which is the same concept, scary? People drop their civil lawsuits and enter into a contract to let somebody else decide the issue with the result being backed up by contract law. It's the same thing.
G+ fits my desire for social-networking perfectly:...
Not for me nor my friends. Until G+ integrates with my Gmail calendar so I can organize events, it's a non-starter. Even friends of mine who hate FB have had to go back to it because all social activity and events are being planned and have invitations from there. I'm sort of surprised that it didn't launch with that feature as they already include non Gmail emails into circles so even nonG+ people could be included to events and respond.
I'm not surprised that both Santorum and Romney would stoop to just about anything that they think might help them win; but I'm honestly baffled by this one: What color is the sky in the universe where Santorum, running on the theocracy platform, is hoping that he will achieve any useful effects by mobilizing democrats?
Democrats could be urged to vote for Santorum because he would be the less likely to win a national election if he becomes the candidate. The Economist has polls on the voting results between different candidates. Although the same number of people vote for either Romney or Santorum, an Democrats gain 2% more of the voters in a race against Santorum. (I know I have no urge to vote for Obama, but I will certainly vote against Santorum.) Meanwhile, even if Santorum knows he can't get the nomination, the stronger his stand, the more he can gain for the concession of dropping out of the race. Clinton got to be Secretary of the State due to a similar situation from the last election. Chances are, Santorum has his eyes on some other position or campaign plank he wants to get added to Romney's platform in order to drop out and play nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, an officer replied to a DV call of a man beating his wife, comes in and sees a woman with a black eye and a dude that smells of whiskey* -- do we really need a jury to decide that one?
That's a really crappy example by the way. You don't even have the woman claiming he did it. It could have been an accident and some nosey neighbor called the cops. Or her boyfriend was the one that hit her and the husband is drinking because she still likes the boyfriend more. Not saying that there couldn't be more to the story, but as you give it, it really is a crappy story and one that could very much be an example of exactly why it does need a jury to decide.
Real story from my life had the ex-wife that would stage fights so we could hear them in the other apartments by yelling 'please don't throw that me' and then throwing pots and pans against the walls. She also faked black eyes and scratches. These fights would even happen when he wasn't home. Even her strongest supporter had to admit something was up when she faked pregnancy and then miscarriage after getting 'beat up' and having to go the hospital, yet the entire assault, miscarriage and hospital episode was supposed to have taken place in the 30 minutes since we last saw her before she came bouncing in the door to give us the news.
Occupy should start the Nullify movement - E.G. if you are on a jury refuse to return a guilty verdict for victimless BS charges.
BS charges like for a white man killing a black man in the Deep South? In all those old movies where a bad guy says "No jury will convict me.", jury nullification is exactly what they're talking about. That leads to break down of rule of law, and from there it goes back to lynching and vigilante justice because of lack of trust in the legal system. It works both ways. Sure there are some things I wouldn't mind jury nulification being used on, but there are lots of other things that people will use it for if it becomes an accepted practice.
Hrrm. A microwave mirror would be a metal grid (much like you see in the windows of microwave ovens). I wonder if that would be sufficient enough to reflect back a effective beam.
Sounds less effective, most costly, and more dangerous then tear gas.
Tear gas is generally the wrong instrument anyway, because you not only tear gas the mob, but also the entire neighborhood. WTO riots in Seattle for example. They used tear gas on 20-40 people (if you took out the photographers and journalists, another 20-40 people) in the street on Capitol Hill. An hour later they had hundreds screaming angry people in the street and outside the Police Station who were upset about getting tear gassed while sitting in their own homes. Then there were the businesses that were open and running just fine but had to be shut down due to tear gas. They gasses out the entire Pike Place Market the next day and all the food there had to be destroyed because they covered it all with tear gas. A directional beam that didn't penetrate walls would have been much better solution. Although cops with de-escuation training who didn't feel they had to be judge, jury and punisher would have been even better.
It is still illegal in the US to grow "industrial" hemp because people and the government are to fucking stupid and scream "think of the children" every time even though it is not a drug.
Well, there's those who say that the drug was made illegal just to make industrial hemp made illegal because it was competing with early synthetics materials that had DuPont and other industrial backers. The entire anti-marijuana campaign was essentially just Hearst trying to protect his paper and synthetics investments.
Why are all my computer interfaces being transformed into children's toys?
Because to the vast number of users out there, the person at home, the secretary in an office, that's all computers are and need to be. I do desktop support and there are still plenty of users out there, young and old, who come in, click on the two or three icons they use to do work (usually all IE links these days but they don't understand what that means), and have no idea about the rest of the computer and don't want to have any idea about it. Literally, the Start menu is too much for them. Every day more and more people like that are getting computers and outnumbering more technical users even more.
Wow, that's amazing. If Japan wanted to surrender, it wouldn't have taken TWO atom bombs to make them do so.
Well, they wanted to surrender, but their ideal of surrendering was to return to 1938 borders (so they get to keep Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan) and forgetting that WW2 ever happened.
Tradition says the US was expecting to take a million casualties. Heaven knows how many they would have inflicted.
From Wikipedia:
During World War II, nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan. To the present date, total combined American military casualties of the sixty-five years following the end of World War II — including the Korean and Vietnam Wars — have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock.[3] There are so many in surplus that combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan are able to keep Purple Hearts on-hand for immediate award to wounded soldiers in the field.[3]
No kidding. The Japanese government didn't even surrender after Hiroshima.
And even after the second bomb, the warlords only surrendered because the Emperor told them to.
And even then they still managed to swing one exception to the Allies' demand for unconditional surrender.
Even after the Emperor said Japan would surrender, there were still warlords who sought to disobey, isolate him for "protection", and keep the war going. They did manage to take him prisoner, but could not find the surrender recording, and eventually their support failed and they had to give up.
Oh, please! No religion had suicide bombers - except Muslims.
WW2 era kamakazi pilots were not doubt the state mandated version of Shinto. At the time, Japan was a theocratic state.
Polls, at the time, showed 80% of respondents saying "yes" to "do we need healthcare reform?"
Trouble is, that "healthcare reform" could be increasing coverage of what we have, or getting rid of what people think is not really needed. I imagine that for many conservatives, reform is cutting off the people they see as the deadbeats of society. If my family is any indication, most would seem to think Medicaid and Welfare were completely cut, those people getting them would then go get jobs, improve our economy, and the saved money plus economic growth would solve the county's budget crisis.
So what is apple calling it?
I bet they just end up calling it the "iPad" just like they don't really have differentiations for Mac Books, Mac Book Pros, or Mac Pros. If people really care, they'll either take about system specs such as screen resolution like the previously mentioned or generation like iPods.
So how many of you have ever owned a little black book of contact information for friends, lovers and family? What year did this book cease to play a relevant role in your day to day life? Was it the year you got an Internet email account, joined freindster, myspace, or facebook, or bought your first featurephone? If I were a betting man I'd bet I could guess your age within 5 years based on you how you answer these questions.
The year I got a PDA (Palm III). How old am I?
Apple moved ALL of its manufacturing from the US to China under Steve Jobs leadership. They employ roughly 40,000 people in the US and 700,000 contractors in China.
Well, Apple moved all their assembling to China under Steve Job's leadership. Everybody's actual manufacturing of component parts has been moved to Taiwan, Japan, and Korean for decades now. Those three companies all make more money off each iPad sold than China and are the higher paying STEM jobs we are talking about here, but everybody seems fixated on China for some reason.
Well, let's face it, education is the third best thing for getting a job. Second best thing for getting a job is work experience. The number one best thing for getting a job is somebody already at the company that is in your reference list of your resume. They say college is about making connections and after getting out and into the real world, I'd say that is true. My first real jobs were at Adobe where one of my college friends worked because he could walk my resume to the guy doing the hiring and say "this is my friend". From there, coworkers that moved on pulled me with them and from there our manager that moved on to a better company pulled all of us with him. If I was to redo college, I know I'd really start looking around at internships and other ways of making friends in the industry I wanted to get into way before I actually graduated. That first job is the hardest to get but the quickest thing to getting it is having a reference that already works there to put in a good word for you (as well as letting you know the job exists to begin with).
People who "focus their lives in the urban centres" (centers in the USA, btw) are, by and large, some of the most spiritually and emotionally empty, uninformed sheep I have ever met in my life. I want to be as far away from them as possible when it becomes "untenable" to live there.
By amazing coincidence, I and my peers in the urban centers feel the exact same way about rural and suburbanite dwellers. Luckily for us, its looking like the rural and suburban areas will become "untenable" much sooner.
We can only cover three quarters of the population economically, I guess we better not bother at all.
Part of the problem is not population density but urban layout - we have designed our cities for cars and not walking, cycling, and mass transit. The sooner we try to fix it the better.
Yes you can. Many people do. They make bikes, clothes, and accessories for this purpose.
People manage to bike in third-world and developing countries in the tropics. Take a nice easy pace and it is no more strenuous than walking, and you create for yourself a nice breeze.
What he was really trying to say is that Americans are generally too fat and lazy to ride bicycles or walk rather than drive cars. Hell, even on /., I've had Americans claim that walking four blocks to a subway station, riding the subway, and then walking another four blocks to where they need to go was too much work. Personally, I'm American and I'd love a European style train system in the US. However, it seems that most of the US, just want their cars between convience and the idea that only poor people on welfare ride buses.
How do we know that there is an imbalance of matter and antimatter? Perhaps this is only the case locally in the observable universe? Is it at all possible that in the whole of the universe there is in fact no imbalance, and for some reason matter and antimatter formed "pockets" where one dominates the other, and we're just observing one of these pockets?
Basically, because we can demonstrate that the early universe was dense enough when all matter (normal and anti) was created that it would have been quite well mixed, and that local islands of one or the other would be highly improbable. Thus, even if it did manage to clump, we'd be seeing cosmological cases of anilation that we aren't detecting.
After the annihilation completed, we where left with 2% matter surplus, and that's what the universe today consists of.
Not quite. The early universe was very hot and all energy because anytime matter of anytime might be created it was turned back into energy. As the universe cooled and we had nucleogenesis and matter was created, it would collide with any antimatter and turn back into energy, only to reform into matter again as the universe cooled more. Given this process, any, even a very slight inequality would cause one type of matter to gain dominance very quickly at an early point of the universe where everything was still very dense and well mixed. So, even a .0001% surplus of matter in the first generation of nucleosynthesis would result in something like a .0002% in the second, and so forth till finally, only matter was left.
Imagine playing a game where you had a ton of pennies and flipped them all. For every pair of heads and tails, you re-flipped those two coins. However any left over coins without a pair, you left alone. With equal probablility, you'd end up with one or two coins left over which would then be paired up with the results of the next flip. However, if there was a slightly better chance of heads showing up, the number of unpaired coins that are heads would continue to grow with each round of pairing them up with the tails. Eventually, all coins would end up as heads and you'd stop flipping coins.
I wonder if other organizations are only just getting to Win 7, if Win 8 might become one of those releases that everyone bypasses since they just finished upgrading. That would likely hurt MIcrosoft.
As one of those guys who builds the corporate images that goes out to the desktops, I can tell you that yes, Windows 8 will be skipped, but no it won't hurt MS. We're just now getting around to looking at Win7 and expect to be able to start deploying it in a couple of months between testing with enterprise applications and workflows. Before all that, we had to wait years for vendors such as GE to sign off that their apps will work on Win7, not to mention things like getting FDA testing done for their healthcare apps. If Win 8 is actually any good and the vendors sign off on everything quickly, I could see us also moving on quickly. If it is bad, they'll probably hold off for Win9 (or the EOL of Win7 anyway) as we'll also be forced to. As for hurting MS, enterprise pays the same per seat for licensing to run Windows no matter what version we actually install. Our site has 5000 seats, they sell us license for 5000 copies of Win8 and the Office with the stipulation that we can downgrade if we want. They get to claim we upgraded to Win8 as well as the money, so they'll not be hurting. (Disclaimer: I do not really have anything to do with the licensing agreement, but this is how I understand it to work out.)
Yeah, the rich technologist Bill Gates who has blown his billions on malaria research, HIV/AIDS research, composting toilet technology, etc.
His billions or Warren Buffett's and other people's? The Bill Gates Foundation has spent billions. Besides the initial seed money of a couple of hundred million, I can't really find any record of the amount of his own money Bill has put into the Gates Foundation as well as the money that others have. If you have a link, I'd like it because I've been wondering how much exactly he has put in. Warren Buffett's donation of 1.5 billion is pretty well documented however.
arbitrage is fully compliant with the existing laws
in which case no need for arbitrage was necessary, really. but in context of sharia.. it's not fully compliant in any way nor would it's decisions be lawfully binding so..
So, essentially, you the People's Court (American TV show if you didn't know), which is the same concept, scary? People drop their civil lawsuits and enter into a contract to let somebody else decide the issue with the result being backed up by contract law. It's the same thing.
G+ fits my desire for social-networking perfectly:...
Not for me nor my friends. Until G+ integrates with my Gmail calendar so I can organize events, it's a non-starter. Even friends of mine who hate FB have had to go back to it because all social activity and events are being planned and have invitations from there. I'm sort of surprised that it didn't launch with that feature as they already include non Gmail emails into circles so even nonG+ people could be included to events and respond.
I'm not surprised that both Santorum and Romney would stoop to just about anything that they think might help them win; but I'm honestly baffled by this one: What color is the sky in the universe where Santorum, running on the theocracy platform, is hoping that he will achieve any useful effects by mobilizing democrats?
Democrats could be urged to vote for Santorum because he would be the less likely to win a national election if he becomes the candidate. The Economist has polls on the voting results between different candidates. Although the same number of people vote for either Romney or Santorum, an Democrats gain 2% more of the voters in a race against Santorum. (I know I have no urge to vote for Obama, but I will certainly vote against Santorum.) Meanwhile, even if Santorum knows he can't get the nomination, the stronger his stand, the more he can gain for the concession of dropping out of the race. Clinton got to be Secretary of the State due to a similar situation from the last election. Chances are, Santorum has his eyes on some other position or campaign plank he wants to get added to Romney's platform in order to drop out and play nice.
I usually don't recommend anything over 10-12MP unless you're going to be blowing up an image to poster-sized.
Well, unless you decide to crop. Then you can see your MP drop fairly quickly if you only want to print part of a photo.