Nope, cops wouild lose in that case
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Imagine several years from now, when most police departments have this system, and routinely record everything. Along comes a case like Rodney King, arrest is made, flashing lights, radio calls, etc... and the recorder wasn't running. Pretty damning evidence, I'd say. Th epublic will say so too, the lawsuits will be settled for bih chunks of change, and the bad cops will at the very least have to be a lot more careful and pick their rage times more carefully. They will either leave the force, or hold themselves in check on duty and beat up people off duty, in which case they will probably go to prison.
This is going to do wonders to get rid of corrupt cops.
How if you want to have fun when entering Australian customs, if they ask if you are a convicted felon, asnwer "Oh, is that still a requirement?". But be ready for no sense of humor and a quick return flight.
I love Sherlock Holmes, I can almost name the story for any quote, well almost... and I can understand amusing oneself trying to put the stories in chronologial order, figure out the named but unwritten mysteries, etc., but the Baker Street Irregulars take it so far as to be obsessed into thinking that inconsistencies are intentional by Watson to throw readers off the track, to postulate printer errors, etc. You've got to know where to draw the line.
The more features you put in a bill, the fancier they get, and that seems to me like more work to detect a counterfeit. How many stores actually have the time to spend even 15 seconds checking every $20 bill? Buy something for $41, pass 3 twenties, get $19 back... is the clerk really going to spend 45 seconds checking those bills? No way can they do that every time, all day, all year, and be any good at it.
Plus, changing them all the time, now there are several different kinds in circulation, more things to remember to look for.
I'd like to see a good study done of different bills and how much they are counterfeited. You'd have to make allowances for how desirable the different currrencies are. I am not convinced that all these doodads really do any good.
Back in 1970 or so, UC Berkeley had two CDC 6400s. One had an extra cost instruction used to make process swapping easier, and was used for an experimental timesharing system (which flopped miserably eventually). I had an old program I was fooling around with, FORTRAN, which self modified itself gradually to execute that missing instruction and die, and marked the card deck specifically to only run on machine "A" to avoid the instruction... it crashed the machine. Turns out the instruction was actually there, but the techs added in the missing wire to make their diagnostic code run, and had been to lazy to ever disconnect it again afterwards.
it's a never ending battle between the republican types (who hate government involvement) and the democratic types who want more centralized/governmental control.
Say again? You mean proponents of smaller govt like the current set of republicans, who seems to be doing their damnedest to overrule states wherever possible, and enlarging the federal government, and running the biggest deficits in history, just two years after a democrat produced the first budget surpuses in years?
Please, share the secrets of your time travel with us of the present.
I took the SAT in 1968 or 1969. You had to pay for tests in groups of three, there were 5 I wanted, so I threw in Math II just to get my money's worth. There were a bunch of questions I didn't answer, and one I took a wild guess at but remember very well. I asked my math teacher about it the next day, he showed me how to figure it out, and I had guessed wrong. Months later, I was called in to the counselor's office, I had gotten 800 (perfect) on Math II. I laughed and told him no way, he said way, I told him why, he asked them to double check, some time later they called me back in, said hand scoring had confirmed it.
Haven't had a lot of respect for SAT or tests in general every since. Maybe that's why I'm such a cynical bastard:-)
I've been programming since 1968, from vacuum tubes and punched cards to today, custom OSs, drivers, softare and hardware testing, web sites, networking, firmware, translators, and all sorts of jobs, some boring, most interesting, some exciting (like the one using a real gun, had to test with Michael Jackson playing real loud to drown out the shots:-). I was laid off in September when the company shifted direction to a Windows project which they planned to convert to Linux, but not yet, and I know next to nothing about Windows (in fact, that was why I got the original job years before). Haven't even had a response to any resume yet. Northern California, no where near the bay area, and I like that.
I do NOT attribute my dismal job search with age, I have never felt my age was a problem. I believe my problem right now is that I am a jack of many trades and master of only a few. I am a good employee, havbe always worked smart, not hard, 8-9 hour days, never had a job which expected 12 hour days, but I have no problem with them in emergencies and rushes, just not days on end for months and years. I have worked with people who routinely put in 12 hour days, and frankly, their code sucked hind tails.
I think it is a matter of so many programmers out there that companies can hire the best buzzword match, if it doesn't work out, fire them and try again. Or a new project comes along, one new skill required, fire the old buzzword match, find a new one. I have learned Java three times, always got the job done, but didn't use it again for several years, and it had changed enough in between to require partial relearning.
No. Police costs are not necessarily part of the prosecutor's budget. Police are supposed to be independent, neutral. Maybe the defendant would want to sue to count them as part of the prosecutor's case, maybe sometimes that would be justified, when the police are obviously biased. But 99% of the time, that is not the case.
Furthermore, I included some basic allowance, it is not a literal dollar for dollar match down to the penny. Maybe it would be a flat rate, $1000 or $10000, maybe it would be a percentage, with 10% or within a factor of two. Maybe it would vary by the type of lawsuit or criminal case.
The point, as I said elsewhere, is not perfection, but an improvement over the current system, where magacorp gets their way because they can afford to threaten an expensive lawsuit, one which will merely inconvenience them, but will bankrupt the defendant.
This doesn't help while the court case drags on. It does nothing to prevent megacorp from intimidating people who don't have th emoney in the first place.
It does even less when the public defender's budget allows one hour of consultation in a capital crime case.
From what I have read of consumer fraud cases, manufacturer defect cases, and so on, the big money to prosecute is required because the defense spends so much to cover up and obfuscate.
Let's take the recent example of Ford having some part of the engine controls in the wrong spot in the engine bay. The parts were in a hot spot, it would have cost them $4 each car to put the part in a better spot. Cars stalled and caught fire at freeway speeds and people were killed. The really damning evidence was an internal memo by Ford lawyers or accountants, comparing the $4 each car to design it right vs the likely amount they woul dhave lost in lawsuits.
Now suppose there have been hundreds of accidents, all from the same cause, a part in the wrong place, and Ford refuses to take any responsibility. You are the lawyer taking Ford to court, and they don't want to spend much on defending themselves, so you don't get the pre-trial discovery where you find this smoking gun memo. What do you do? What happens?
I submit the outcome would be the same, but quicker. You go to court, you show that there have been hundreds or thousands of failures, all the same, and you show the letters from Ford denying any fault. You bring in some car engineer as an expert witness who shows that moving the mounting and using one foot more electrical wiring would have cost $4 per car. Maybe you drive a car with thermometers in the two spots and show the huge difference in temperature.
Your case comes down to showing that any competent engineer would have designed the car right, but Ford decided to save $4 at risk of lives.
What is Ford's response? Not much. Remember, they have refused to spend much money at all, so they maybe have their own engineer try to show how it would have cost $100 per car. They try to deny that the failed part did in fact cause any accidents.
Me, I have faith that any reasonable jury could decide which cost estimate was right. A foot of wiring and longer bolts and 4 extra holes, maybe? Sounds like Ford is blowing smoke, they lose credibility right there. They claim a burned up ignition part in all those stalled vehicles and burned up vehicles was just coincidence? Riiiight. A short simple trial has much more chance of coming to the right conclusion than a long messy one which is mostly grandstanding obfuscation.
What it comes down to is balancing the obfuscation on each side. I firmly believe that almost all court cases are expensive because each side escalates in response to the other side, with ever more meaningless arguments which are only meant to confuse and obfuscate.
Maybe some cases would require massive investigation to uncover the smoking gun memos. But I think those smoking gun memoes are only necessary when the party has spent massively to cover up.
As for means testing -- no, it is too easy to get into the quagmires you suggest. Just keep it down to if you want to spend more money, you have to bet that much moeny up front by loaning it to the other fellow. And if they don't want to take that loan, then you had better have a simple clear case.
First clarification, yes, I do mean to include criminal cases as well as civil.
Second clarification, there would be some basic allowance. You are allowed to spend a certain amount more than the opposition, or what the opposition is willing to "borrow". I gave the figure of $1000, but just as a number. Maybe a percentage, maybe different amounts for different kinds of lawsuits and crimes.
What stirs me to include criminal cases is stories I have read, I believe concerning Mississippi, where the public defender's budget in capital cases was only $300. Just enough to meet the defendant and tell him to plea bargain. Only a complete idiot would consider that justice.
Amounts used by police are a tough one. Obviously basic police work doesn't count, that is not prosecution money, but there have also been cases of police picking a suspect early, then only looking for evidence to back that up, ignoring evidence to the contrary, and not looking for evidence to the contrary.
But remember, the main goal is not for perfection in the first attempt, merely something better as a next step.
Th eidea isn't perfect accounting, but to stop abuses like this and all the others where megacorp sues some poor shmuck who can't afford a defense. If megacorp shows upwith three lawyers, and you show up by yourself, it's pretty hard for them to claim they spent very little. I think it would be pretty easy to come within a factor of two on their costs, and all it would take is a high estimate to get them to open their books and prove otherwise.
If nothing else, make law firms publish their accounts. Look at all th ebilled time, expenses, etc, it better add up to what they claimed in court.
Or make it a disbarment penalty or triple damages if they lie about it, give some other attorney plenty of incentive to find liars. I thnk public interest lawyers would have a field day with that.
I'd like to see the legal system set up so that neither party can spend more than the other, with some minimum allowance. For instance, if the RIAA wants to sue a student, and the student doesn't want to spend more than $100, the RIAA can't spend more than that, plus some basic allowance, say $1000. If the RIAA wants to spend more, they have to get the student's permission to loan him the money, and if they lose, they don't get the money back.
Apply it to governments too, so a state can't send in the well paid DA and his staff to prosecute some illiterate scum bag for a capital offense, while the public defender is only budgeted for one hour of time.
(1)people should be studying for their MBA(2)'s and try hard to get football scholarships instead of wast(3)eing the(4)y're time trying to learn about the world.
With any copyrightable material, you never actually own it, you only own the media. The GPL difference is that you are allowed to redistribute the source, not just the media. It's the license that enables it. Just by being distributed, you are entitled to a copy of the source. The only question left is, do you have to turn the source back in once the rental period ends? No, because the GPL makes no such distinction. The very fact that you are allowed to redistribute the source makes it impossible to put a time limit on it.
Rotate the band 180 degrees, so the watch is on the inside of your wrist. I learned that trick in the navy, so it wouldn't be smashing into bulkheads and coamings. Easier to see, definitely easier to hear. In fact, you can pretend you are scratching your head and nobody can tell the difference unless you want to talk also.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine several years from now, when most police departments have this system, and routinely record everything. Along comes a case like Rodney King, arrest is made, flashing lights, radio calls, etc ... and the recorder wasn't running. Pretty damning evidence, I'd say. Th epublic will say so too, the lawsuits will be settled for bih chunks of change, and the bad cops will at the very least have to be a lot more careful and pick their rage times more carefully. They will either leave the force, or hold themselves in check on duty and beat up people off duty, in which case they will probably go to prison.
This is going to do wonders to get rid of corrupt cops.
How if you want to have fun when entering Australian customs, if they ask if you are a convicted felon, asnwer "Oh, is that still a requirement?". But be ready for no sense of humor and a quick return flight.
Remember, it's an ollllld joke.
I love Sherlock Holmes, I can almost name the story for any quote, well almost ... and I can understand amusing oneself trying to put the stories in chronologial order, figure out the named but unwritten mysteries, etc., but the Baker Street Irregulars take it so far as to be obsessed into thinking that inconsistencies are intentional by Watson to throw readers off the track, to postulate printer errors, etc. You've got to know where to draw the line.
Someday everyone will have fast connections. That isn't today.
The more features you put in a bill, the fancier they get, and that seems to me like more work to detect a counterfeit. How many stores actually have the time to spend even 15 seconds checking every $20 bill? Buy something for $41, pass 3 twenties, get $19 back ... is the clerk really going to spend 45 seconds checking those bills? No way can they do that every time, all day, all year, and be any good at it.
Plus, changing them all the time, now there are several different kinds in circulation, more things to remember to look for.
I'd like to see a good study done of different bills and how much they are counterfeited. You'd have to make allowances for how desirable the different currrencies are. I am not convinced that all these doodads really do any good.
Back in 1970 or so, UC Berkeley had two CDC 6400s. One had an extra cost instruction used to make process swapping easier, and was used for an experimental timesharing system (which flopped miserably eventually). I had an old program I was fooling around with, FORTRAN, which self modified itself gradually to execute that missing instruction and die, and marked the card deck specifically to only run on machine "A" to avoid the instruction ... it crashed the machine. Turns out the instruction was actually there, but the techs added in the missing wire to make their diagnostic code run, and had been to lazy to ever disconnect it again afterwards.
it's a never ending battle between the republican types (who hate government involvement) and the democratic types who want more centralized/governmental control.
Say again? You mean proponents of smaller govt like the current set of republicans, who seems to be doing their damnedest to overrule states wherever possible, and enlarging the federal government, and running the biggest deficits in history, just two years after a democrat produced the first budget surpuses in years?
Please, share the secrets of your time travel with us of the present.
Try looking at the picture next time. Even the text says so ... and the entire device just managed to squeeze inside.
Hilary Rosen of the MPAA, I believe, gave a speech lamenting libraries, of all things, because they loaned materials out without any payment required.
I believe the current estimates are 13.5 or 14 billion years, and have been for a couple of years.
the interview didn't do much to bolster my confidence in MySQL for mission-critical financial stuff. Educate me.
Cancel that financial adjective. You're thinking too narrowly.
I took the SAT in 1968 or 1969. You had to pay for tests in groups of three, there were 5 I wanted, so I threw in Math II just to get my money's worth. There were a bunch of questions I didn't answer, and one I took a wild guess at but remember very well. I asked my math teacher about it the next day, he showed me how to figure it out, and I had guessed wrong. Months later, I was called in to the counselor's office, I had gotten 800 (perfect) on Math II. I laughed and told him no way, he said way, I told him why, he asked them to double check, some time later they called me back in, said hand scoring had confirmed it.
:-)
Haven't had a lot of respect for SAT or tests in general every since. Maybe that's why I'm such a cynical bastard
I've been programming since 1968, from vacuum tubes and punched cards to today, custom OSs, drivers, softare and hardware testing, web sites, networking, firmware, translators, and all sorts of jobs, some boring, most interesting, some exciting (like the one using a real gun, had to test with Michael Jackson playing real loud to drown out the shots :-). I was laid off in September when the company shifted direction to a Windows project which they planned to convert to Linux, but not yet, and I know next to nothing about Windows (in fact, that was why I got the original job years before). Haven't even had a response to any resume yet. Northern California, no where near the bay area, and I like that.
I do NOT attribute my dismal job search with age, I have never felt my age was a problem. I believe my problem right now is that I am a jack of many trades and master of only a few. I am a good employee, havbe always worked smart, not hard, 8-9 hour days, never had a job which expected 12 hour days, but I have no problem with them in emergencies and rushes, just not days on end for months and years. I have worked with people who routinely put in 12 hour days, and frankly, their code sucked hind tails.
I think it is a matter of so many programmers out there that companies can hire the best buzzword match, if it doesn't work out, fire them and try again. Or a new project comes along, one new skill required, fire the old buzzword match, find a new one. I have learned Java three times, always got the job done, but didn't use it again for several years, and it had changed enough in between to require partial relearning.
But I do not think my age is a problem.
... you've gotten to the core of the problem. It's very appeeling .... it will be interesting to see what results stem from this research.
No. Police costs are not necessarily part of the prosecutor's budget. Police are supposed to be independent, neutral. Maybe the defendant would want to sue to count them as part of the prosecutor's case, maybe sometimes that would be justified, when the police are obviously biased. But 99% of the time, that is not the case.
Furthermore, I included some basic allowance, it is not a literal dollar for dollar match down to the penny. Maybe it would be a flat rate, $1000 or $10000, maybe it would be a percentage, with 10% or within a factor of two. Maybe it would vary by the type of lawsuit or criminal case.
The point, as I said elsewhere, is not perfection, but an improvement over the current system, where magacorp gets their way because they can afford to threaten an expensive lawsuit, one which will merely inconvenience them, but will bankrupt the defendant.
This doesn't help while the court case drags on. It does nothing to prevent megacorp from intimidating people who don't have th emoney in the first place.
It does even less when the public defender's budget allows one hour of consultation in a capital crime case.
From what I have read of consumer fraud cases, manufacturer defect cases, and so on, the big money to prosecute is required because the defense spends so much to cover up and obfuscate.
Let's take the recent example of Ford having some part of the engine controls in the wrong spot in the engine bay. The parts were in a hot spot, it would have cost them $4 each car to put the part in a better spot. Cars stalled and caught fire at freeway speeds and people were killed. The really damning evidence was an internal memo by Ford lawyers or accountants, comparing the $4 each car to design it right vs the likely amount they woul dhave lost in lawsuits.
Now suppose there have been hundreds of accidents, all from the same cause, a part in the wrong place, and Ford refuses to take any responsibility. You are the lawyer taking Ford to court, and they don't want to spend much on defending themselves, so you don't get the pre-trial discovery where you find this smoking gun memo. What do you do? What happens?
I submit the outcome would be the same, but quicker. You go to court, you show that there have been hundreds or thousands of failures, all the same, and you show the letters from Ford denying any fault. You bring in some car engineer as an expert witness who shows that moving the mounting and using one foot more electrical wiring would have cost $4 per car. Maybe you drive a car with thermometers in the two spots and show the huge difference in temperature.
Your case comes down to showing that any competent engineer would have designed the car right, but Ford decided to save $4 at risk of lives.
What is Ford's response? Not much. Remember, they have refused to spend much money at all, so they maybe have their own engineer try to show how it would have cost $100 per car. They try to deny that the failed part did in fact cause any accidents.
Me, I have faith that any reasonable jury could decide which cost estimate was right. A foot of wiring and longer bolts and 4 extra holes, maybe? Sounds like Ford is blowing smoke, they lose credibility right there. They claim a burned up ignition part in all those stalled vehicles and burned up vehicles was just coincidence? Riiiight. A short simple trial has much more chance of coming to the right conclusion than a long messy one which is mostly grandstanding obfuscation.
What it comes down to is balancing the obfuscation on each side. I firmly believe that almost all court cases are expensive because each side escalates in response to the other side, with ever more meaningless arguments which are only meant to confuse and obfuscate.
Maybe some cases would require massive investigation to uncover the smoking gun memos. But I think those smoking gun memoes are only necessary when the party has spent massively to cover up.
As for means testing -- no, it is too easy to get into the quagmires you suggest. Just keep it down to if you want to spend more money, you have to bet that much moeny up front by loaning it to the other fellow. And if they don't want to take that loan, then you had better have a simple clear case.
First clarification, yes, I do mean to include criminal cases as well as civil.
Second clarification, there would be some basic allowance. You are allowed to spend a certain amount more than the opposition, or what the opposition is willing to "borrow". I gave the figure of $1000, but just as a number. Maybe a percentage, maybe different amounts for different kinds of lawsuits and crimes.
What stirs me to include criminal cases is stories I have read, I believe concerning Mississippi, where the public defender's budget in capital cases was only $300. Just enough to meet the defendant and tell him to plea bargain. Only a complete idiot would consider that justice.
Amounts used by police are a tough one. Obviously basic police work doesn't count, that is not prosecution money, but there have also been cases of police picking a suspect early, then only looking for evidence to back that up, ignoring evidence to the contrary, and not looking for evidence to the contrary.
But remember, the main goal is not for perfection in the first attempt, merely something better as a next step.
Th eidea isn't perfect accounting, but to stop abuses like this and all the others where megacorp sues some poor shmuck who can't afford a defense. If megacorp shows upwith three lawyers, and you show up by yourself, it's pretty hard for them to claim they spent very little. I think it would be pretty easy to come within a factor of two on their costs, and all it would take is a high estimate to get them to open their books and prove otherwise.
If nothing else, make law firms publish their accounts. Look at all th ebilled time, expenses, etc, it better add up to what they claimed in court.
Or make it a disbarment penalty or triple damages if they lie about it, give some other attorney plenty of incentive to find liars. I thnk public interest lawyers would have a field day with that.
I'd like to see the legal system set up so that neither party can spend more than the other, with some minimum allowance. For instance, if the RIAA wants to sue a student, and the student doesn't want to spend more than $100, the RIAA can't spend more than that, plus some basic allowance, say $1000. If the RIAA wants to spend more, they have to get the student's permission to loan him the money, and if they lose, they don't get the money back.
Apply it to governments too, so a state can't send in the well paid DA and his staff to prosecute some illiterate scum bag for a capital offense, while the public defender is only budgeted for one hour of time.
And yes, I do know about snowballs and hell.
The Gartner link is registration required, but not the overview. There are TWO links ....
Here is their story
(1)people should be studying for their MBA(2)'s and try hard to get football scholarships instead of wast(3)eing the(4)y're time trying to learn about the world.
No kidding.
With any copyrightable material, you never actually own it, you only own the media. The GPL difference is that you are allowed to redistribute the source, not just the media. It's the license that enables it. Just by being distributed, you are entitled to a copy of the source. The only question left is, do you have to turn the source back in once the rental period ends? No, because the GPL makes no such distinction. The very fact that you are allowed to redistribute the source makes it impossible to put a time limit on it.
Rotate the band 180 degrees, so the watch is on the inside of your wrist. I learned that trick in the navy, so it wouldn't be smashing into bulkheads and coamings. Easier to see, definitely easier to hear. In fact, you can pretend you are scratching your head and nobody can tell the difference unless you want to talk also.