It's not really important. Would be nice to know, but we just don't know and can't determine this, so it's not actually important because it's meaningless as evidence.
The physical evidence shows Trayvon with minimal injuries and George with severe injuries, so we can piece together from this that George was the one taking a beating and Trayvon was in control of the situation. That's far more important than who was screaming for help; it's particularly more important than bickering over a fantasy of who was screaming for help when we can't get anyone to agree on a firm stance on who's voice that is.
Sometimes evidence A doesn't matter. Sometimes it really, really doesn't matter--even if we can prove Trayvon was screaming for help, what do we do with this physical evidence that indicates that Trayvon was...... screaming for help while viciously, successfully pummeling someone to death with little to no effort?
Surprisingly, I can actually type more than you. I formulated the explanation on the fly.
For a while it was fashionable for people to accuse me of parrotting Wikipedia; never being able to find anything I was saying on Wikipedia eventually put a stop to that.
Ah. I thought a martyr could be someone who stood for a political or social cause as well. Someone who died for something, because they were just trying to do what they thought was right.
The evidence in the trial indicates that Martin doubled back and approached Zimmerman, which excludes the argument that Zimmerman confronted Martin.
Zimmerman had a permit to carry a firearm. There is no impetus for Zimmerman to disarm himself and leave his firearm unattended when he notices a suspicious person. Watch members do not possess police powers and thus do not carry weapons in their watch duties--unlike security guards who carry weapons because they're security guards; however, watch members are at all times normal citizens, they are not on-duty security, they are not an on-duty para-police force, and they are thus not legally or otherwise administratively required to not carry firearms which they would normally carry. Contrast that with working as a cashier at K-Mart, where your employer tells you NO FIREARMS and you leave your gun locked up at home. You're scheduled at K-Mart and you're on-duty or off-duty; but as a Neighborhood Watch member, you're at all times effectively watching for suspicious behavior, and so precluding the carry of firearms in all cases would preclude EVER carrying a firearm.
In other words: the argument involving neighborhood watch firearms policies effectively is an argument that Zimmerman should never have been allowed to carry a gun, ever, at any time on any day, simply because he was a neighborhood watch member. In this case, especially, since Zimmerman wasn't out actively patrolling and had only incidentally noticed Martin.
I walk through the ghetto at night. Some black guys yell at me sometimes, one of them said he was going to "go Trayvon on me". I was like, "What, like, you're going to try to break my head open on the concrete, and then get shot and die?" They all make funny faces and like... jerk... at you... they just thrust their whole upper body a half inch in your direction and snort or something, it's weird... but they're like scared kittens. They don't do shit.
Because Trayvon would have been a defendant in an assault case, and defendants lie. Whatever happened, Trayvon's best course of action would be to deny all aggression and claim that he was scared and was approached and threatened and attacked. If Trayvon picked up a tire iron, walked his ass up behind Zimmerman, and tried to brain him from behind viciously, his best course of action would be to tell the court he was hunted down and attacked and grabbed a tire iron that was in the bushes next to him and tried to use it to beat back his attacker.
"Amateur Cop" is a thing in the US. Zimmerman was part of a police-sponsored neighborhood watch program, in which people take it upon themselves to... well, watch the neighborhood. The opening of this whole thing is that he saw a guy that "looked suspicious" (for whatever reason), got out of his car, and followed at a distance. That's pretty normal.
The "At a distance" thing is important, and something a lot of people missed. Trayvon turned down a street and went south; Zimmerman passed that street heading east, watching to see where Trayvon was going while reporting to the dispatcher. What Zimmerman was not doing was following Trayvon down the road in the shadows, inching closer, trying to get a bead on the little black kid; everyone wants to perpetuate this "stalking an innocent teenager" thing anyway, but that's not what happened.
What happened after that is less understood. Somehow Trayvon got to his house (south), then came back 100 meters (north) and a confrontation occurred. This became a physical altercation, which ended with Zimmerman shooting Trayvon to death. The murder argument comes down to an argument over whether or not Zimmerman was being beaten to death (or reasonably believed he was being beaten to death)--this is why you keep hearing that Trayvon was "armed with concrete" and smashing Zimmerman's head into the sidewalk.
Zimmerman had a permit to carry a gun because he's a shitty fighter. If he wasn't such a useless lump of shit, maybe he could have fought back and controlled the situation. He's lucky Trayvon didn't just take his gun and shoot him to death with it. Non-US people might find the concept of regular citizens carrying guns a little displacing--it's not a thing people do in England, for example--but in the US, people actually carry guns in case they're attacked. Beyond that, shooting Trayvon to death is just the natural result of being in a situation where he thought he was gonna die--that is, the natural action is to try to not die, and the only capable way he could think of to not die was to kill Trayvon.
Everything between the confrontation and the death is unclear. Fortunately for Zimmerman (and the rest of us), because nothing here screams "violent premeditated or negligent homicide", the only rational thing to do is accept "self-defense" and move on. Unfortunately, people are not rational and start screaming for blood, trying to blame Zimmerman while dismissing the very real and strong possibility that he was, in fact, going to die if he didn't shoot Trayvon right there. So we have this mess.
I don't understand the "Civil Rights" involved. They say Trayvon's rights were violated. What rights? He was observed in public; if he wasn't doing anything bad, the police wouldn't have even been able to search him. He could have 20 pounds of cocaine and stolen jewelry on him, and the cops could show up like "we heard reports of a suspicious person," and he's like "Everything's alright here," and they're like "Can we search your bag?" "No." That's it. Nothing actually happening here? The cops don't even get to frisk you. Other people are entitled to observe you, the police are entitled to pass through the neighborhood and ask you if you're alright and whatever, but if you're not obviously committing a crime (even if you really ARE, but it's not visible and they have no probable cause to assume you're a criminal) then they can't do shit. You could have burglary tools and a bomb in your backpack and they can't even check it to make sure you just have school books (unless somebody reported seeing you using burglary tools to try to break into somewhere).
I guess the only civil right here might be the right to, you know, not get shot to death; and you immediately waive that right when you're in the process of murdering someone.
Has it occurred to you that a "criminal" is someone the state doesn't like? Oh, I'm sorry, flowers? Those little green bushes with the funny smelling flowers, you cannot grow them. To prison with you!
Actual laws aside, the courts slanting to "tough on crime" would put more people in jail because of a poor defense against shoddy prosecution. The prosecutors construct this plausible fantasy that doesn't align with reality, but the courts won't allow you to counter it with new and extremely solid evidence, so you're GUILTY! Never mind that the prosecution isn't operating in reality and you didn't actually commit the crime.
Our justice system isn't exactly "working" just because people are going to jail and we feel all warm and fuzzy about it. We want high accuracy, but prefer false negatives and will sacrifice a degree of accuracy if the false positives are too high. Lately, we've been aiming for turn-over and conviction, and justifying that we don't want any false negatives--people are all "tough on crime" and "don't want to let a bad man go" so it's okay if we execute some innocent men. That totally changes the dynamic.
Yes, that's called "escalation". I left the toilet seat up. She started bitching about it. I called her a cunt. She threw a shoe at me. I raped her brutally. Etc. Eventually a third party gets involved because one side did something so not cool it's suddenly mandatory that everyone else gets in your business.
It's mostly escalation. Microsoft has been trying to damage Android's marketability by making patent demands to everyone. Motorola is now attacking Microsoft in the same way. Nobody takes the high road.
The fact remains that the prosecution is there to convince the judge to place a person in jail for violation of the law. The judge is supposed to presume that person is innocent; therefor it is squarely the burden of the prosecution to prove guilt. This is called "Burden of Proof" and thus the judge should be placing a burden on the prosecution.
As the judge should be willfully placing a burden on one party to prove a fact and accepting from another party to only demonstrate that the prosecution hasn't provided sufficient proof of that fact--and specifically, not to show that the declaration of guilt made by the prosecution is actually wrong--this entire process is by nature biased toward the defense. The judge should be maintaining that bias, forcing the prosecution to squarely shoulder their own damn burden, and supporting the defense where reasonable even when it bends or breaks the technical rules of the court. Discovery rules, for example, are there so that you can't blind-side the other lawyer; but if the other lawyer is reasonably prepared for a type of evidence that is being replaced (expert witnesses) or can reasonably examine the evidence in a reasonable amount of time that the court can offer them during adjournment, then it is appropriate to allow introduction of new evidence that may prove catastrophic to the prosecution's case, as the prosecution should not be allowed to prove guilt based on a fantasy that has no grounding in the real world. This happens all the time.
It really is supposed to work that way. Look at the Zimmerman trial and you see a judge who needs to be executed for treason--the judge in that case put the defense in the hot seat and coddled the prosecution, which was completely and totally inappropriate. You are not guilty until you've shown your innocence.
I believe the judge is supposed to be a biased advocate for the defense. Why shouldn't the judge be lenient on criminals? People make mistakes, and the judge is supposed to determine appropriate punitive measures. Unremorseful violent serial rapist? 9 years in jail. Troubled college teen that let his emotions get out of hand at a party and did something he regrets? 6 months and he can live with his conscience. That's how it's supposed to be.
There are no criminals in court. Right now there are absolutely no criminals in trial; there are some in appeals, and that might not even hold water. You are presumably innocent until proven to the judgment of the court that you are guilty; the job of the judge is to make the prosecution sweat its ass and prove to the satisfaction of the court that the defendant is guilty. When the defense raises a point that debases the prosecution's case, the judge should be baring down on the prosecution to explain this shit in some way that makes actual sense or get the fuck out of his court with this bullshit railroad garbage. When the prosecution puts the defense in a bad spot, the judge should be waiting for an explanation from the defense--and if the defense can't render anything good enough, then oh well, I guess that means we have to accept what the prosecution is telling us.
The whole idea that judges are supposed to send people to jail is ludicrous. It's like people think if you get arrested and wind up in court you're guilty and going to jail. Do we have a Cardassian court system now?
Also important is these are expert witnesses who are testifying that the evidence was planted. They're computer hackers... now, you can make evidence look planted, or evidence look not-planted, on a computer. There's no real way to tell--people like to talk about position on drives or other IO subsystem statistical analysis to show that data "isn't physically where it goes" (it's on the wrong spot on the platter!!!), but that's all as hokey as arson myths passed as science used to execute people for murder.
Pull in your own expert witness and he'll say, "There's no way to know this was planted, and no evidence showing that this was really potentially planted; all of this is within standard variation." Then he'll collect his $5000 and go.
Junk rigging is a lot harder to sail than regular rigging, from what I've read. Regular rigging handles good, common winds much easier; but you can squeeze some extra out of junk rigging and you can handle certain less common conditions a good bit better than with more modern rigs.
This is essentially like saying that modern guitar amps let you do all kinds of DSP modeling with switches and knobs; but you can do a lot more by studying up on EE and taking a soldering iron to an old tube amp, if you want to build a few mildly complex circuits. There's a reason we have modern rigging. Not the same difference as a manual versus automatic transmission--same concept, but not the same magnitude. Driving a stick shift is an overnight skill; sailing a junk is a major skill that's going to take you a lot of time and experience to get up to a worthwhile level.
Modern sails are practical. They have practical superiority over junks, which have technical superiority. Practical superiority is important. Still, you have to consider: all of this just highlights the engineering challenges present in building and utilizing an efficient, effective, and practical sail boat. It's not a napkin duct taped to a popsicle stick.
Have you ever actually analyzed the engineering requirements for a good boat? Oh sure, rednecks love those power boats with a V10 Dodge Viper engine driving some screws by brute force in the most inefficient way possible; but have you ever actually looked at boats?
Let's put it this way: The Chinese Junk is the best boat ever made. It's harder to sail than a modern sail boat, but functionally superior when handled properly. It was the inspiration for sealed partitions--thousands of years ago you could sink a boat by holing it, and then the Europeans found out that the Chinese put a bunch of rooms in the boat and made it possible to seal them so you'd only take on so much water. They started storing rum in some of the partitions. The rigging on the sails allows for better agility and faster sailing in all winds--including directly into the wind.
Modern boats have surpassed the junk in some respects and trailed it in others. They're easier to sail and faster in some conditions; they're designed to hold level and sail more efficiently than old models, but these adaptations can go back to the junk easily (the main difference in a Junk vs a modern boat is its sail rigging); they're made of better materials that decrease drag and improve balance and handling, allowing for straighter and faster sailing and less risk of capsizing; and so on.
All in all, in thousands of years of engineering, we've managed to make some improvements and some trade-offs... very little in the way of actual advancement. Not only is it hard to engineer a ship that can sail and sail quickly, but it's hard to pilot one. It's hard to maintain one. You have to deal with wind going the wrong way and then you have to manipulate the sails to harness power from the wind and directly turn that into driving force--you're not turning a turbine, you're catching the wind going east and making the boat go northwest. It's not even as simple as cutting in and then turning and dropping out; the goal is to keep as much wind in your sails as possible--to pull in the full of the wind 100% of the time while sailing directly in the opposite direction from where the wind is trying to push you. Not very easy.
It's a huge, huge engineering problem. It's complex and these are fairly amazing machines. But by all means, go ahead and go out there with a few two-by-fours and some wax and a tarp and build yourself a top-tier sailboat, and see how quick you can cut across the harbor. Make sure the coast guard's there too; your mommy might need to come pick you up when your little boat sinks.
Why does a private club need to admit blacks and women?
If black people are so god damned poor they don't belong in a fucking rich man's golfing club. If they're rich, they can get together with their rich negro friends and start their own club where they go golfing with hot bikini black babes and ban all whitefolk from their little party. They can even make the ball black.
And women might have some business on the golf course if HP didn't collapse every time they hired a woman.
Mega uses an open-source java script thing, you can check the source. It's not free, but you can see the source.
TPM is supposed to cover this--if you can audit the TPM design and say that this model TPM is secure, and can guarantee that the TPM in there is of that model and not another model. We can narrow the threats down to hardware or software--an operating system service that manages keys, for example, and must be communicated with to act. That means that whoever wrote the service could be a bad guy--instead of DropBox and Mega supplying an encryption program that uses your keys, DropBox and Mega would access an API that says "Create a key" "Use key XXX to encrypt/decrypt this file" in a program supplied by someone else. DropBox and Mega couldn't be malicious after the fact: if they used that service for a key store, they couldn't one day transparently extract keys; and a second program could check the key store and verify that retrieved data is in fact stored with that key.
That all gets you down to a single vendor (hardware TPM or software service) who might be evil.
Yes, basically there's no way this security model works. Their promise is that they give you client side software (java script), the software does all the magic on your end, then gives them impenetrable black boxes. That's it.
Microsoft EFS promises that Windows doesn't upload your encryption keys to microsoft.com. Apple's encryption tools, same. PGP and GPG, same. We really really promise we don't send your private keys to home base, then add back doors to your computer and come snooping your filez.
The issue is that it's 'conceptually possible' for Ubuntu to ship a package in the base system that uploads your keys to Canonical's servers. I can give you a script that you run on RHEL and it'll show decrypted ssh, ssl, and gpg keys (if you've entered the password). I can put a package on your system and show that RHAT could put a modified gpg that logs all your shit and passwords and everything to their server. And so on.
This isn't a vulnerability. It's like saying it's conceptually possible for a thief to steal your car after you've put the key in the ignition.
It wasn't a subject change; it was a similar argument that argues that a system is complex, thus is unmeasurable. Statistics is in essence the science of measuring systems that are not directly measurable: it says, "We don't know how it works, we don't know why it works, but we know that things naturally vary in these ways and we know that if we take a big enough sample we see these variances so we can make these predictions in this way."
Your entire argument is that intelligence is not well understood, so it's not subject to statistical analysis. I posited that climate is not well understood, and so all this AGW stuff is just the same window-licking, helmet-wearing rhetoric as IQ as a measurement of a particular cognitive ability. (IQ is divided into g(c) and g(f), the ability to leverage and re-apply prior experience to similar problems and to create new methods for novel problems; and also counterbalanced by EQ, which measures social abilities rather than analytical abilities. It's rather complex, and calling IQ a measure of "brain power" is kind of daft.)
The whole of chemistry and atomic physics are also based mostly on statistics, as well as biology and other physical sciences. There is, in fact, quite a lot of not-directly-observable stuff going on that we accept as factual that holds roughly as much water as "IQ Points" but that we apply to critical applications every day. Prescription and OTC drugs and the help and harm they do are often based on statistics--the toxic effects are almost always statistical--ranging from "we know it impacts X and Y neurons and Z chemical transport and think that those impact..." all the way up to "we have no fucking clue, but it works."
Exercise works about the same as IQ too; and the idea that a person who exercises (or even smokes) is going to be more healthy than someone who doesn't is as patently absurd as the notion that someone who can cut through a well-developed IQ test cold and hit ~100 points or whatever is median is going to be roughly as smart as the average person.
I can only posit that you have some kind of useful skill or you have less trouble with "technology" than the vast number of idiots on this planet, and so place yourself above the stupid; but can't work out an IQ test very well, or have done targeted IQ test busting of cheap $5 IQ books, and have concluded that the whole concept is bunk because it doesn't reflect your self-image. This is supported with your continuous condescending of other people and of anything you don't understand, up to and including questioning peoples' intelligence or will and ability to think.
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The Holocaust never happened. I'm sure it sounded tough when you were running through it in your mind, though.
It's not really important. Would be nice to know, but we just don't know and can't determine this, so it's not actually important because it's meaningless as evidence.
The physical evidence shows Trayvon with minimal injuries and George with severe injuries, so we can piece together from this that George was the one taking a beating and Trayvon was in control of the situation. That's far more important than who was screaming for help; it's particularly more important than bickering over a fantasy of who was screaming for help when we can't get anyone to agree on a firm stance on who's voice that is.
Sometimes evidence A doesn't matter. Sometimes it really, really doesn't matter--even if we can prove Trayvon was screaming for help, what do we do with this physical evidence that indicates that Trayvon was ... ... screaming for help while viciously, successfully pummeling someone to death with little to no effort?
Surprisingly, I can actually type more than you. I formulated the explanation on the fly.
For a while it was fashionable for people to accuse me of parrotting Wikipedia; never being able to find anything I was saying on Wikipedia eventually put a stop to that.
Ah. I thought a martyr could be someone who stood for a political or social cause as well. Someone who died for something, because they were just trying to do what they thought was right.
The evidence in the trial indicates that Martin doubled back and approached Zimmerman, which excludes the argument that Zimmerman confronted Martin.
Zimmerman had a permit to carry a firearm. There is no impetus for Zimmerman to disarm himself and leave his firearm unattended when he notices a suspicious person. Watch members do not possess police powers and thus do not carry weapons in their watch duties--unlike security guards who carry weapons because they're security guards; however, watch members are at all times normal citizens, they are not on-duty security, they are not an on-duty para-police force, and they are thus not legally or otherwise administratively required to not carry firearms which they would normally carry. Contrast that with working as a cashier at K-Mart, where your employer tells you NO FIREARMS and you leave your gun locked up at home. You're scheduled at K-Mart and you're on-duty or off-duty; but as a Neighborhood Watch member, you're at all times effectively watching for suspicious behavior, and so precluding the carry of firearms in all cases would preclude EVER carrying a firearm.
In other words: the argument involving neighborhood watch firearms policies effectively is an argument that Zimmerman should never have been allowed to carry a gun, ever, at any time on any day, simply because he was a neighborhood watch member. In this case, especially, since Zimmerman wasn't out actively patrolling and had only incidentally noticed Martin.
A martyr is someone who dies for a noble cause, isn't it?
I walk through the ghetto at night. Some black guys yell at me sometimes, one of them said he was going to "go Trayvon on me". I was like, "What, like, you're going to try to break my head open on the concrete, and then get shot and die?" They all make funny faces and like... jerk... at you... they just thrust their whole upper body a half inch in your direction and snort or something, it's weird... but they're like scared kittens. They don't do shit.
Because Trayvon would have been a defendant in an assault case, and defendants lie. Whatever happened, Trayvon's best course of action would be to deny all aggression and claim that he was scared and was approached and threatened and attacked. If Trayvon picked up a tire iron, walked his ass up behind Zimmerman, and tried to brain him from behind viciously, his best course of action would be to tell the court he was hunted down and attacked and grabbed a tire iron that was in the bushes next to him and tried to use it to beat back his attacker.
He brought concrete. Trayvon could have easily won that fight.
"Amateur Cop" is a thing in the US. Zimmerman was part of a police-sponsored neighborhood watch program, in which people take it upon themselves to ... well, watch the neighborhood. The opening of this whole thing is that he saw a guy that "looked suspicious" (for whatever reason), got out of his car, and followed at a distance. That's pretty normal.
The "At a distance" thing is important, and something a lot of people missed. Trayvon turned down a street and went south; Zimmerman passed that street heading east, watching to see where Trayvon was going while reporting to the dispatcher. What Zimmerman was not doing was following Trayvon down the road in the shadows, inching closer, trying to get a bead on the little black kid; everyone wants to perpetuate this "stalking an innocent teenager" thing anyway, but that's not what happened.
What happened after that is less understood. Somehow Trayvon got to his house (south), then came back 100 meters (north) and a confrontation occurred. This became a physical altercation, which ended with Zimmerman shooting Trayvon to death. The murder argument comes down to an argument over whether or not Zimmerman was being beaten to death (or reasonably believed he was being beaten to death)--this is why you keep hearing that Trayvon was "armed with concrete" and smashing Zimmerman's head into the sidewalk.
Zimmerman had a permit to carry a gun because he's a shitty fighter. If he wasn't such a useless lump of shit, maybe he could have fought back and controlled the situation. He's lucky Trayvon didn't just take his gun and shoot him to death with it. Non-US people might find the concept of regular citizens carrying guns a little displacing--it's not a thing people do in England, for example--but in the US, people actually carry guns in case they're attacked. Beyond that, shooting Trayvon to death is just the natural result of being in a situation where he thought he was gonna die--that is, the natural action is to try to not die, and the only capable way he could think of to not die was to kill Trayvon.
Everything between the confrontation and the death is unclear. Fortunately for Zimmerman (and the rest of us), because nothing here screams "violent premeditated or negligent homicide", the only rational thing to do is accept "self-defense" and move on. Unfortunately, people are not rational and start screaming for blood, trying to blame Zimmerman while dismissing the very real and strong possibility that he was, in fact, going to die if he didn't shoot Trayvon right there. So we have this mess.
I don't understand the "Civil Rights" involved. They say Trayvon's rights were violated. What rights? He was observed in public; if he wasn't doing anything bad, the police wouldn't have even been able to search him. He could have 20 pounds of cocaine and stolen jewelry on him, and the cops could show up like "we heard reports of a suspicious person," and he's like "Everything's alright here," and they're like "Can we search your bag?" "No." That's it. Nothing actually happening here? The cops don't even get to frisk you. Other people are entitled to observe you, the police are entitled to pass through the neighborhood and ask you if you're alright and whatever, but if you're not obviously committing a crime (even if you really ARE, but it's not visible and they have no probable cause to assume you're a criminal) then they can't do shit. You could have burglary tools and a bomb in your backpack and they can't even check it to make sure you just have school books (unless somebody reported seeing you using burglary tools to try to break into somewhere).
I guess the only civil right here might be the right to, you know, not get shot to death; and you immediately waive that right when you're in the process of murdering someone.
Has it occurred to you that a "criminal" is someone the state doesn't like? Oh, I'm sorry, flowers? Those little green bushes with the funny smelling flowers, you cannot grow them. To prison with you!
Actual laws aside, the courts slanting to "tough on crime" would put more people in jail because of a poor defense against shoddy prosecution. The prosecutors construct this plausible fantasy that doesn't align with reality, but the courts won't allow you to counter it with new and extremely solid evidence, so you're GUILTY! Never mind that the prosecution isn't operating in reality and you didn't actually commit the crime.
Our justice system isn't exactly "working" just because people are going to jail and we feel all warm and fuzzy about it. We want high accuracy, but prefer false negatives and will sacrifice a degree of accuracy if the false positives are too high. Lately, we've been aiming for turn-over and conviction, and justifying that we don't want any false negatives--people are all "tough on crime" and "don't want to let a bad man go" so it's okay if we execute some innocent men. That totally changes the dynamic.
Yes, that's called "escalation". I left the toilet seat up. She started bitching about it. I called her a cunt. She threw a shoe at me. I raped her brutally. Etc. Eventually a third party gets involved because one side did something so not cool it's suddenly mandatory that everyone else gets in your business.
It's mostly escalation. Microsoft has been trying to damage Android's marketability by making patent demands to everyone. Motorola is now attacking Microsoft in the same way. Nobody takes the high road.
The fact remains that the prosecution is there to convince the judge to place a person in jail for violation of the law. The judge is supposed to presume that person is innocent; therefor it is squarely the burden of the prosecution to prove guilt. This is called "Burden of Proof" and thus the judge should be placing a burden on the prosecution.
As the judge should be willfully placing a burden on one party to prove a fact and accepting from another party to only demonstrate that the prosecution hasn't provided sufficient proof of that fact--and specifically, not to show that the declaration of guilt made by the prosecution is actually wrong--this entire process is by nature biased toward the defense. The judge should be maintaining that bias, forcing the prosecution to squarely shoulder their own damn burden, and supporting the defense where reasonable even when it bends or breaks the technical rules of the court. Discovery rules, for example, are there so that you can't blind-side the other lawyer; but if the other lawyer is reasonably prepared for a type of evidence that is being replaced (expert witnesses) or can reasonably examine the evidence in a reasonable amount of time that the court can offer them during adjournment, then it is appropriate to allow introduction of new evidence that may prove catastrophic to the prosecution's case, as the prosecution should not be allowed to prove guilt based on a fantasy that has no grounding in the real world. This happens all the time.
It really is supposed to work that way. Look at the Zimmerman trial and you see a judge who needs to be executed for treason--the judge in that case put the defense in the hot seat and coddled the prosecution, which was completely and totally inappropriate. You are not guilty until you've shown your innocence.
More people in jail per kapita than Russia.
More people in jail per kapita than North Korea.
More people in jail per kapita than Cuba.
Komrade!
I believe the judge is supposed to be a biased advocate for the defense. Why shouldn't the judge be lenient on criminals? People make mistakes, and the judge is supposed to determine appropriate punitive measures. Unremorseful violent serial rapist? 9 years in jail. Troubled college teen that let his emotions get out of hand at a party and did something he regrets? 6 months and he can live with his conscience. That's how it's supposed to be.
There are no criminals in court. Right now there are absolutely no criminals in trial; there are some in appeals, and that might not even hold water. You are presumably innocent until proven to the judgment of the court that you are guilty; the job of the judge is to make the prosecution sweat its ass and prove to the satisfaction of the court that the defendant is guilty. When the defense raises a point that debases the prosecution's case, the judge should be baring down on the prosecution to explain this shit in some way that makes actual sense or get the fuck out of his court with this bullshit railroad garbage. When the prosecution puts the defense in a bad spot, the judge should be waiting for an explanation from the defense--and if the defense can't render anything good enough, then oh well, I guess that means we have to accept what the prosecution is telling us.
The whole idea that judges are supposed to send people to jail is ludicrous. It's like people think if you get arrested and wind up in court you're guilty and going to jail. Do we have a Cardassian court system now?
Also important is these are expert witnesses who are testifying that the evidence was planted. They're computer hackers... now, you can make evidence look planted, or evidence look not-planted, on a computer. There's no real way to tell--people like to talk about position on drives or other IO subsystem statistical analysis to show that data "isn't physically where it goes" (it's on the wrong spot on the platter!!!), but that's all as hokey as arson myths passed as science used to execute people for murder.
Pull in your own expert witness and he'll say, "There's no way to know this was planted, and no evidence showing that this was really potentially planted; all of this is within standard variation." Then he'll collect his $5000 and go.
Junk rigging is a lot harder to sail than regular rigging, from what I've read. Regular rigging handles good, common winds much easier; but you can squeeze some extra out of junk rigging and you can handle certain less common conditions a good bit better than with more modern rigs.
This is essentially like saying that modern guitar amps let you do all kinds of DSP modeling with switches and knobs; but you can do a lot more by studying up on EE and taking a soldering iron to an old tube amp, if you want to build a few mildly complex circuits. There's a reason we have modern rigging. Not the same difference as a manual versus automatic transmission--same concept, but not the same magnitude. Driving a stick shift is an overnight skill; sailing a junk is a major skill that's going to take you a lot of time and experience to get up to a worthwhile level.
Modern sails are practical. They have practical superiority over junks, which have technical superiority. Practical superiority is important. Still, you have to consider: all of this just highlights the engineering challenges present in building and utilizing an efficient, effective, and practical sail boat. It's not a napkin duct taped to a popsicle stick.
Have you ever actually analyzed the engineering requirements for a good boat? Oh sure, rednecks love those power boats with a V10 Dodge Viper engine driving some screws by brute force in the most inefficient way possible; but have you ever actually looked at boats?
Let's put it this way: The Chinese Junk is the best boat ever made. It's harder to sail than a modern sail boat, but functionally superior when handled properly. It was the inspiration for sealed partitions--thousands of years ago you could sink a boat by holing it, and then the Europeans found out that the Chinese put a bunch of rooms in the boat and made it possible to seal them so you'd only take on so much water. They started storing rum in some of the partitions. The rigging on the sails allows for better agility and faster sailing in all winds--including directly into the wind.
Modern boats have surpassed the junk in some respects and trailed it in others. They're easier to sail and faster in some conditions; they're designed to hold level and sail more efficiently than old models, but these adaptations can go back to the junk easily (the main difference in a Junk vs a modern boat is its sail rigging); they're made of better materials that decrease drag and improve balance and handling, allowing for straighter and faster sailing and less risk of capsizing; and so on.
All in all, in thousands of years of engineering, we've managed to make some improvements and some trade-offs... very little in the way of actual advancement. Not only is it hard to engineer a ship that can sail and sail quickly, but it's hard to pilot one. It's hard to maintain one. You have to deal with wind going the wrong way and then you have to manipulate the sails to harness power from the wind and directly turn that into driving force--you're not turning a turbine, you're catching the wind going east and making the boat go northwest. It's not even as simple as cutting in and then turning and dropping out; the goal is to keep as much wind in your sails as possible--to pull in the full of the wind 100% of the time while sailing directly in the opposite direction from where the wind is trying to push you. Not very easy.
It's a huge, huge engineering problem. It's complex and these are fairly amazing machines. But by all means, go ahead and go out there with a few two-by-fours and some wax and a tarp and build yourself a top-tier sailboat, and see how quick you can cut across the harbor. Make sure the coast guard's there too; your mommy might need to come pick you up when your little boat sinks.
Why does a private club need to admit blacks and women?
If black people are so god damned poor they don't belong in a fucking rich man's golfing club. If they're rich, they can get together with their rich negro friends and start their own club where they go golfing with hot bikini black babes and ban all whitefolk from their little party. They can even make the ball black.
And women might have some business on the golf course if HP didn't collapse every time they hired a woman.
Mega uses an open-source java script thing, you can check the source. It's not free, but you can see the source.
TPM is supposed to cover this--if you can audit the TPM design and say that this model TPM is secure, and can guarantee that the TPM in there is of that model and not another model. We can narrow the threats down to hardware or software--an operating system service that manages keys, for example, and must be communicated with to act. That means that whoever wrote the service could be a bad guy--instead of DropBox and Mega supplying an encryption program that uses your keys, DropBox and Mega would access an API that says "Create a key" "Use key XXX to encrypt/decrypt this file" in a program supplied by someone else. DropBox and Mega couldn't be malicious after the fact: if they used that service for a key store, they couldn't one day transparently extract keys; and a second program could check the key store and verify that retrieved data is in fact stored with that key.
That all gets you down to a single vendor (hardware TPM or software service) who might be evil.
Yes, basically there's no way this security model works. Their promise is that they give you client side software (java script), the software does all the magic on your end, then gives them impenetrable black boxes. That's it.
Microsoft EFS promises that Windows doesn't upload your encryption keys to microsoft.com. Apple's encryption tools, same. PGP and GPG, same. We really really promise we don't send your private keys to home base, then add back doors to your computer and come snooping your filez.
The issue is that it's 'conceptually possible' for Ubuntu to ship a package in the base system that uploads your keys to Canonical's servers. I can give you a script that you run on RHEL and it'll show decrypted ssh, ssl, and gpg keys (if you've entered the password). I can put a package on your system and show that RHAT could put a modified gpg that logs all your shit and passwords and everything to their server. And so on.
This isn't a vulnerability. It's like saying it's conceptually possible for a thief to steal your car after you've put the key in the ignition.
I have no idea what this incoherent ranting is.
It wasn't a subject change; it was a similar argument that argues that a system is complex, thus is unmeasurable. Statistics is in essence the science of measuring systems that are not directly measurable: it says, "We don't know how it works, we don't know why it works, but we know that things naturally vary in these ways and we know that if we take a big enough sample we see these variances so we can make these predictions in this way."
Your entire argument is that intelligence is not well understood, so it's not subject to statistical analysis. I posited that climate is not well understood, and so all this AGW stuff is just the same window-licking, helmet-wearing rhetoric as IQ as a measurement of a particular cognitive ability. (IQ is divided into g(c) and g(f), the ability to leverage and re-apply prior experience to similar problems and to create new methods for novel problems; and also counterbalanced by EQ, which measures social abilities rather than analytical abilities. It's rather complex, and calling IQ a measure of "brain power" is kind of daft.)
The whole of chemistry and atomic physics are also based mostly on statistics, as well as biology and other physical sciences. There is, in fact, quite a lot of not-directly-observable stuff going on that we accept as factual that holds roughly as much water as "IQ Points" but that we apply to critical applications every day. Prescription and OTC drugs and the help and harm they do are often based on statistics--the toxic effects are almost always statistical--ranging from "we know it impacts X and Y neurons and Z chemical transport and think that those impact..." all the way up to "we have no fucking clue, but it works."
Exercise works about the same as IQ too; and the idea that a person who exercises (or even smokes) is going to be more healthy than someone who doesn't is as patently absurd as the notion that someone who can cut through a well-developed IQ test cold and hit ~100 points or whatever is median is going to be roughly as smart as the average person.
I can only posit that you have some kind of useful skill or you have less trouble with "technology" than the vast number of idiots on this planet, and so place yourself above the stupid; but can't work out an IQ test very well, or have done targeted IQ test busting of cheap $5 IQ books, and have concluded that the whole concept is bunk because it doesn't reflect your self-image. This is supported with your continuous condescending of other people and of anything you don't understand, up to and including questioning peoples' intelligence or will and ability to think.